The Case for a Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God (Case for ... Series)

by Lee Strobel

“So,” I said, “if our own Jupiter had a more elliptical orbit, the Earth wouldn’t be able to maintain as circular an orbit and have the steady temperature and predictable climate that come with that.”

“Our oceans and seas are salty,” I said. “How does Earth manage to regulate this?” “We have large, marshy areas along some coasts. Because these are shallow, water comes in from the ocean and evaporates quickly, leaving salt behind. So you get huge salt deposits accumulating on the continents, and the salt content of the ocean doesn’t get out of control.

“There’s a striking convergence of rare properties that allow people on Earth to witness perfect solar eclipses,” he said. “There’s no law of physics that would necessitate this. In fact, of the nine planets with their more than sixty-three moons in our solar system, the Earth’s surface is the best place where observers can witness a total solar eclipse, and that’s only possible for the ‘near-term’ future.

“not only do we inhabit a location in the Milky Way that’s fortuitously optimal for life, but our location also happens to provide us with the best overall platform for making a diverse range of discoveries for astronomers and cosmologists.

“We’re also in an excellent position to detect the cosmic background radiation, which is critically important because it helped us realize our universe had a beginning in the Big Bang.

Many scientists are concluding that intelligent life is, at minimum, far rarer than was once thought. In fact, it may very well be unique to Earth.

“However, what he didn’t realize was that pollen is one of the most useful tools we have in the scientific exploration of the past, in part, because it can be dated through Carbon 14. When we find pollen in lake sediments and ice cores, we can use it to gauge how old the layered deposits are and what the ancient climate was like. “Darwin only looked at pollen from a biological standpoint; when we look at the big picture, we see it has another use he never anticipated.

We are, by astronomical standards, a pampered, cossetted, cherished group of creatures;

an incredible, intricate, Lilliputian world where a typical cell takes ten million million atoms to build.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger that ‘the great projects of the living creation are not the products of chance and error. . . . [They] point to a creating Reason and show us a creating Intelligence, and they do so more luminously and radiantly today than ever before.’”

‘Prebiological natural selection is a contradiction in terms.’”

“When I show students the magnetic letters sticking to the metal chalkboard, I ask, ‘How did this word INFORMATION arise?’ The answer, of course, is intelligence that comes from outside the system. Neither chemistry nor physics arranged the letters this way. It was my choice. And in DNA, neither chemistry nor physics arranges the letters into the assembly instructions for proteins. Clearly, the cause comes from outside the system.”

“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle,

all scientists reason in a way that’s provisional.

Penfield risked the explanation that the patient had not only a physical brain that was stimulated to action but also a nonphysical reality that interacted with the brain.

Or it's just evidence of a modular arrangement within the brain, which most neuroscientists already accept

“What a thrill it is, then, to discover that the scientist, too, can legitimately believe in the existence of the spirit.”

"spirit" in the bible is NOT mind

If an injury to the brain causes a person to lose some aspects of his mind or personality, this doesn’t necessarily prove that the brain was the source of the mind. “All it shows is that the apparatus is damaged,”

As for the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments consistently teach that humans are “a hyphenate creature, a spirit/body dichotomy,”

[The Bible] makes it very clear that when the soul or spirit leaves the body, the body is dead and that if the spirit is somehow returned to the body, the whole person comes back to life.30 This duality is repeated in hundreds of places in the Bible31. . . . Indeed the formation of Adam as the first human being is expressly stated as the result of the animation of a body by a spirit, constituting it as a living soul.

Genesis 6:17 the breath/spirit provides animacy not mind

“The soul is the ego, the ‘I,’ or the self, and it contains our consciousness. It also animates our body.

“At least,” I observed, “that’s what the Bible teaches.”

‘Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.’

Psyche is not the same as pneuma

as far back as 1965, psychologist John Beloff wrote in The Humanist that the evidence of near-death experiences already indicates ‘a dualistic world where mind or spirit has an existence separate from the world of material things.’

They keep conflating mind/soul and spirit!

According to Penfield, ‘the patient thinks of himself as having an existence separate from his body.’

Consciousness Is dissociation of sense of self from physical being, like the earthworm that knows whether sensations on its body result from its own movement in the ground or another being acting on it.

‘There is no place . . . where electrical stimulation will cause a patient to believe or to decide.’47 That’s because those functions originate in the conscious self, not the brain.

“Another study showed a delay between the time an electric shock was applied to the skin, its reaching the cerebral cortex, and the self-conscious perception of it by the person.49 This suggests the self is more than just a machine that reacts to stimuli as it receives them.

We’d never find Mommy’s ego or her self. We would never say, “Finally, in this particular brain cell, there’s Mommy. There’s her ego, or self.” That’s because Mommy is a person, and persons are invisible. Mommy’s ego and her conscious life are invisible.

I am a soul, and I have a body.

This is really Neoplatonism. The biblical view of anthropology is a synthesis of body spirit and soul.

“What about animals — do they have souls or consciousness?” I asked. “Absolutely,” came his quick answer. “In several places the Bible uses the word ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ when discussing animals.

“The vain expectation that matter might someday account for mind . . . is like the alchemist’s dream of producing gold from lead.

the fossils are a discordant cacophony that cannot reasonably account for the monumental leaps Darwinism must make, for example, between fish and amphibians or amphibians and reptiles.

He doesn't seem to know about Tiktaalik

“The whole point of faith,” scoffed Michael Shermer, editor of The Skeptical Inquirer, “is to believe regardless of the evidence, which is the very antithesis of science.”25 However, that’s certainly not my understanding. I see faith as being a reasonable step in the same direction that the evidence is pointing.

His existence makes sense of many aspects of our knowledge and experience: the order and fruitfulness of the physical world; the multilayered character of reality; the almost universal human experiences of worship and hope; the phenomenon of Jesus Christ (including his resurrection).

“Religious knowledge is more demanding than scientific knowledge,” he said. “While it requires scrupulous attention to matters of truth, it also calls for the response of commitment to the truth discovered.”

According to McGrath, the Hebrew word for “truth” suggests “something which can be relied upon.” Thus, he said, truth is more than about simply being right. “It is about trustworthiness,” he explained. “It is a relational concept, pointing us to someone who is totally worthy of our trust.

Many have found that the awesome sight of the star-studded heavens evoke a sense of wonder, an awareness of transcendence, that is charged with spiritual significance.

But if we mistake the signpost for what is signposted, we will attach our hopes and longings to lesser goals, which cannot finally quench our thirst for meaning.