Posted on 04/25/2017 6:52:00 AM PDT by Kaslin
In “A Big Bang in a Little Room,” Zeeya Merali describes the consensus among science’s biggest brains: “The notion that a god made our universe is several rungs on the wackiness ladder above the idea that it was made by aliens.” Nevertheless, Merali describes herself as both a believer in God and the holder of an Ivy League Ph.D. in theoretical physics, so she asks a good question: If God desired to send us a message, how would He do it?
Thirty-two years ago Carl Sagan’s novel “Contact” included speculation about finding a code in the digits of pi, which starts out 3.14159 and keeps going forever -- but no one’s found it. Others said God might encode a message within the human genome -- but that would be useful only for creatures on this planet. Merali suggests a message embedded in background radiation, so any sufficiently advanced creatures anywhere in the universe could perceive it. (Astronomers learn about distant galaxies and galaxy clusters by mapping tiny radiation wrinkles.)
The time to engrave such a message in the sky would be at the moment of creation, Merali writes: “Think of it like drawing a smiley face in marker on a balloon straight out of the package. Blow up the balloon and the picture stretches with the rubber. In the same way, as the cosmos rapidly inflated, its creator’s message would shine out across the whole sky.” She says no one has found such a message thus far, thus disappointing those who believe in God.
No such message? With respect for Merali, who writes charmingly, I think she’s wrong, for three reasons.
First, we live on a Goldilocks “just right” planet within a Goldilocks universe. The “RTB Design Compendium” at reasons.org lists nearly 1,500 features of the universe and Earth that must fall within narrow ranges to allow for the possibility of life, and then advanced life. For example: We need a particular composition of the Earth’s core and atmosphere, a particular Earth axis tilt and rotation speed, particular capillary action and surface tension, and so on.
We exist because of things most of us know nothing about: cosmic ray protons, intergalactic hydrogen gas clouds, molecular hydrogen formed by supernova eruptions, etc. If one loose definition of miracle is “a highly improbable or extraordinary event,” look at the likelihood of simple bacteria being able to survive anywhere in the universe apart from divine action: 1 chance in 10 followed by 556 zeros. What about the likelihood of advanced life? One chance in 10 followed by 1,054 zeros.
In February’s Super Bowl the New England Patriots trailed by 25 points with 17 minutes and 7 seconds left in the game. They managed to tie the game and win it in overtime: Headlines proclaimed “a miracle comeback.” But what if the Patriots had trailed by 8,216 points and needed to score one touchdown (plus two extra points) in every one of those 1,027 seconds left in the game? That gives us a sense of the unlikeliness of our existence purely through material causes -- and we’d have to multiply that physical improbability/impossibility by about a trillion. (That’s why some atheistic scientists grab on to the wacky multiverse theory.)
The second proof of God’s existence: 20th-century theodicy. Decisions by three atheists -- Mao, Stalin, and Hitler -- led to 100 million deaths. Some people say that shows a merciful God does not exist, but we should flip the surmise: Atheism kills, and we’ve seen since the 1930s what happens when we worship human gods. (Yes, some “Christians” have also murdered, in smaller quantities, but they also claimed godlike status.) God warns us throughout the Bible that sin has consequences: Should we consider Him a liar because He tells the truth?
Why don’t we wake up every morning and realize our existence is miraculous? Maybe because so much noise surrounds us. But here’s a third reason to believe in God: I’ve met some men in their 20s whose thinking as teens was so destructive that it looked as if they would soon be dead, imprisoned, or traitorous. I was one of them. But “the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end” -- and the Bible tells me so.
God has sent a message, not in background radiation but in our existence, our history, and in what should be our daily reading.
Amen.
I never cease to be amazed by His obvious presence.
He also sent the prophets, and his one and only son.
Why? Because it shouldn't be visible, not like that. That image should be a fog or completely black, nothing in between. To see that amount of detail, that amount of fine structure, those beautiful delicate rotating pinwheels, to see galaxies billions of light years away across almost an entire universe is absurd. That mind-blowing image is impossible without a super-finely tuned matter density gradient and alpha opacity function that is absolutely perfect. It is more mathematically improbable than hitting the Power Ball Jackpot lottery five times in a row.
The UDF is one of the many wildly improbable aspects of the physical Universe. It is unique in that it does not fall prey to a rebuttal based on the Anthropic Principle. (I believe that AP is the last, desperate, refuge of the cornered atheist.)
See the YouTube video The Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3D by Deep Astronomy. Watch this video carefully. (Or just look out your window.)
At that time Jesus said, "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Mt 11:25
The time to engrave such a message in the sky would be at the moment of creation, Merali writes: “Think of it like drawing a smiley face in marker on a balloon straight out of the package. Blow up the balloon and the picture stretches with the rubber. In the same way, as the cosmos rapidly inflated, its creator’s message would shine out across the whole sky.” She says no one has found such a message thus far, thus disappointing those who believe in God.
There is no message hidden in DNA. The extreme complexity of DNA is the message. It’s far more complex than I am capable of understanding. It requires an extreme leap of faith to assume that this came about completely by millions of random events.
Idiots!!! Looking for a hidden message from God when creation is the message.
It isn’t an accident the ‘4th’ Commandment in His 10 Commandments has a ‘time’ factor-
Remember His Sabbath Day, to keep it holy.
Much like the 4th ‘dimension’ of ‘time’- (after the 3 space dimensions of length, width, height)
Psalm 19:1-4
The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.
Back as far as 600 B.C. the Greeks were trying to discover the one unifying principle and all they could come up with was water, air, fire and mathematics.
Playing devil’s advocate here..... however, Jesus gives me hope and strength.
re: Goldilocks zone, if the planets are expanding, wasn’t earth in venus’s orbit millions of years ago? And couldn’t mars have been in earth’s orbit millions of years ago?
Further, if the planets are expanding, couldn’t mars have gone through the whole life-cycle goldilocks thing millions of years ago like we are now?
So was I. Maybe not traitorous, but certainly dead or imprisoned. Finally got my sh*t together (somewhat) in my late 20s largely because I finally turned to God for help.
Thank you, Father. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Holy Spirit.
If you think that π or e is a "real" thing or are designations of real things, you are on the way to asserting real things that are immaterial. You can't weigh a ratio.
If you think that no one should teach religion in school (or that everyone should, or some should,) it seems to me that this "shouldness" is an immaterial thing over which people are prepared to fight.
These massless, dimensionless things seem to extert something resembling an attractive force. The seeds on a sunflower head seem to tend toward a distribution conforming to e. People generally, imperfectly and with exceptions, tend to attempt to conform themselves toward their idea of "should" and discuss and even change their idea after observation and thought.
So these massless, dimensionless, unmeasurable things have something sort of like power. You can't weigh a ratio; you can't tell the volume of justice. Yet scientists assert that we SHOULD listen to them, while fatcat politicians approximate the ratio of circumference to diameter more closely the fatter they get.
Clearly the sort of cause or power that ratios and justice have is different from the sort demonstrated by a stick on the head of an antifa bozo. So it's reasonable to say that God causes the κτίσις, the creation, in a manner different from that in which a cat causes your glass of bourbon to slide off the table.
The intent to punish and drive away the antifa bozo is a sort of cause we might call "higher" than the relationship between blow on the head and lacerations and contusions (and for the bozo, perhaps a sudden clarity of thought?)
Similarly the way God causes the creation may be different from and higher than the sort of cause scientists measure.
So, until a scientist can tell me how much my moral obligation to pay attention to him weighs, I won't pay attention to his disdain for a Divine cause.
Thank you. I'm here all week.
This is completely beautiful. Thank you for posting this times a million. A sure keeper.
Spot on!
God is God.
Accept God on faith. Accept science on evidence.
Oh sure there is, because you just know there has to be a word play (or several) involved. ;)
Like Washington "D.C.", because the abbreviation "DNA" is well-known and pronounced as its letters, it is written in Hebrew as it sounds in the English (DEE-EN-AY):
די־אן־איי
(See first sentence on the Hebrew wiki page.)
Numerically, that is 14 + 51 + 21 = 86 = Elohim (אלהים)
Additionally, the first two letters, the "DEE", reverse to yad, "hand".
Then the DEE + EN (= 65) permutes to Adonai (אדני).
And the AY = 21 = Ehyeh (אהיה), aka "I AM".
Talk about overkill, and that's just what appears from a cursory glance. This stuff is way more blatant than people might think.
God’s Fingerprints are Everywhere
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