God Archives - Page 46 of 134 - DOES GOD EXIST? TODAY

August 9, 2022August 8, 2022

Watching Your Child Die Needlessly and Painfully

It has been more than a year since my son Tim died of COVID. A man who refused to wear a mask or get a vaccination gave him a disease that his weakened immune system could not handle. He died after a six-month battle in which he could not walk, feed himself, or speak clearly. Even though Tim was an adult, watching your child die needlessly and painfully is hard because life is not supposed to end that way.

Every time I see a news report about the death of a child, it reminds me of the pain caused by a careless or even vindictive act of another human being. However, sending your child to school healthy and happy never to come home is even harder. Having your child take their own life is harder yet.

We all cope with the death of a loved one in different ways. Jim Smith has produced a booklet that discusses the ten stages of grief. Those stages are: (1) Shock (2) Denial (3) Lamenting (4) Withdrawal (5) Frustration (6) Panic (7) Depression (8) Detachment (9) Adaptation (10) Reinvestment.

The stages do not necessarily come in that order, and we all have many questions with no answers to make the pain disappear. Guilt, anger, and blame are almost always involved when watching your child die. We may even blame God for our loss and wonder why a loving God would allow it. Unfortunately, atheists have used that as a club against believers.

When we think about what death means to atheists, it seems strange that it can destroy faith in God. I grew up in an atheist home with strongly atheistic parents who taught me that death was the ultimate tragedy. I was not allowed to go to a funeral or a memorial service, even as a teenager. My mother was furious when my girlfriend’s mother took me to a visitation for a classmate’s father. Seeing a dead man in a casket was a radical experience for me. Now, as a Christian, I am dealing with my son’s death. Although I miss him, his death is a blessing that has allowed me to move through the ten stages very rapidly.

Death for Christians is freedom from the evil of the world. My son no longer has to deal with his blindness or his struggles to breathe, walk, feed himself, or speak clearly. He is finally finished with the war between good and evil. Furthermore, his life still speaks to me and others as one full of purpose and meaning.

While watching your child die, it is difficult to understand how good can come from the senseless death or murder of an innocent person. However, the response of those left behind can bring meaning to the life we have lost. For Christians, death is a beginning, not an end.

For a free copy of Jim Smith’s booklet, contact us at jncdge@aol.com or our USPS mailing address: Does God Exist?, 1555 Echo Valley Drive, Niles MI 49120.

August 8, 2022August 7, 2022

Probability of a Life-Supporting Exoplanet

One of my favorite columnists is Bob Berman, who writes in Astronomy magazine. Mr, Berman is a science writer who doesn’t have an ax to grind and doesn’t stoop to ridicule or hostility toward Christianity or faith in general. In the September 2022 issue, he referred to recent articles hinting that astronomers have found exoplanets better suited for life than planet Earth and examines the probability of a life-supporting exoplanet.

Berman lists a few of Earth’s unusual features. He points out that a planet being at the proper distance from its star to allow liquid water to exist is not that difficult to achieve. If you get the appropriate distance from a fire, you can have just about any temperature you want. Five other cases that Berman mentions are not that easy.

They include…
1) …having a nearby moon that stabilizes the axial tilt over long periods.
2) …not having lethal surface radiation.
3) …not having overactive volcanoes.
4) …having atmospheric gases that are used and produced by living organisms.
5) …having the right temperature underground. On Earth, surface temperatures disappear at about six inches, and at 30 feet, temperatures don’t change no matter what happens at the surface.

These are only five of the unique qualities of our home planet. Each design feature appears reasonable, but the probability of a life-supporting exoplanet depends on more than a single feature. Many planets may have one or two of the required variables, but to sustain life, ALL of them must be in place. That means you would have to MULTIPLY the probability of each individual variable to find the odds for life, especially advanced life, to exist on a planet.

The bottom line is that the probability of a life-supporting exoplanet is vastly greater than the number of stars in the cosmos. This planet is unique because it was designed by God to sustain life. Wisdom’s words in Proverbs 8:22-36 eloquently describe the process that gave us this extraordinary planet. We need to thank God for what we have been given–and take care of it.

Reference: Bob Berman in Astronomy magazine, September 2022, page 12
See a list containing 47 variables that make Earth unique in “Evidence for Design in the Universe,” adapted from a paper titled “Limits for the Universe” by astronomer Hugh Ross. It’s available free under “charts” on our doesgodexist.org website at THIS LINK.

August 6, 2022August 4, 2022

Misunderstanding the Concept of Prayer

We often find both atheists and believers misunderstanding the concept of prayer. Atheists see prayer as a crutch and an exercise in futility. Madalyn O’Hair, the leading atheist in the late 1900’s, was fond of saying, “No god ever answered any prayer at any time, nor ever will.” Other atheists have said that a god who needs his ego fed by the constant praise of humans isn’t worth having. For many believers, prayer is a crutch to lean on when you are in trouble.

A friend of mine tells the story of being with a family when one of their members was dying. The dying man took his last breath, and then there was silence. One of the family members said, “So what do we do now?” Another said, “I guess we should pray.” To that, the first family member said, “Does anyone here know how to pray?” They were misunderstanding the concept of prayer.

Some religions view prayer as a payment to their concept of god. They see prayer as something their god commands as a price of membership or payment for blessings received. The Christian prayer, as presented in the Bible, is very different. There are multiple admonitions for Christians to pray, but it was never given as a command to all people.

The Christian concept of prayer is not to boost God’s ego or to inform Him about a situation. Instead, Matthew 6:8 tells us, “…your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” Jesus followed that statement with a model prayer acknowledging God’s power and glory, recognizing that everything we need comes from Him, and seeking His forgiveness as we forgive others.

Because prayer is integral to spiritual health, it is also a huge contributor to good mental health. Humans need to look to a higher power, which is part of most 12-step recovery programs. Passages like Matthew 7:7-8, Luke 11:9-10, and John 14:13-14 don’t promise physical comfort but spiritual results. James 4:2-7 makes it abundantly clear that prayer is not a selfish request for physical pleasure.

There are 85 original prayers in the Old Testament, and 60 of the psalms are prayers. When you look at who does the praying, why, and what the ultimate result of the prayer is, you don’t see self-seeking requests to an ego-driven god who needs praise to maintain his self-image. What you see is people realizing their dependence on the Creator and seeking a relationship with Him. Those who don’t see their prayers answered may be misunderstanding the concept of prayer.

August 5, 2022August 4, 2022

Never Stop Learning

Ty’Ann Brown writing in Guideposts magazine, made an excellent point about old age and learning. She writes, “Getting older does not automatically mean we are getting wiser. We have to work at it.” I can’t tell you how often I have heard someone with gray hair say, “I never heard that before,” in response to a concept I presented in a class or lecture. They sometimes make the statement with the idea that since they have never heard it before, it could not be accurate. It’s essential that we keep an open mind and never stop learning.

I share Ms. Brown’s view that learning never stops, and God does not want us to stop being students. When you read the life of Jesus Christ, you see that we should never stop learning. At age 12, Jesus sat in the temple, and the scholars were amazed as He was both asking and answering questions (Luke 2:46-47). In Matthew 8:5-10, Jesus came in contact with a centurion, and verse 10 tells us that “Jesus marveled” at his faith. The apostles were adults when Christ called them, but they learned from Him. Paul was a fully educated teacher when the Lord appeared to him, but he still had much to learn.

When Paul spoke with the Epicureans and Stoics in Acts 17:16-34, he was learning about their religious traditions. In Acts 15, we see the entire Church learning and growing in their understanding. The world was changing, and they had to learn how to evangelize a world in flux. We live in a changing world, but we still face the issues of feminism, racism, prejudice, and nationalism that Jesus dealt with in John 4. Luke 8:26-40 shows Christ dealing with mental and spiritual issues that Satan was using to keep people under his control.

We can no longer be satisfied with traditional answers as we face today’s new challenges. Never stop learning. Learn how to use a concordance and Bible dictionary for a careful word study of the scriptures. Realize that some more recent translations of the original language may offer valuable insights that we don’t get from our old familiar translations. (I am talking about Bible translations, not paraphrases.) Second Timothy 2:15 tells us, “Study to show yourself approved by God, a worker who doesn’t need to be ashamed, correctly teaching the word of truth.” That message is not just for the young preacher Timothy but for all of us as well.

Reference: “Back to School” by Ty’Ann Brown in Guideposts magazine, August 2022.

August 4, 2022August 3, 2022

World’s Strongest Pinching Force

If you were to guess the animal with the strongest bite, you might say lions or great white sharks. However, probably no one would suggest a crustacean known as the coconut crab (Birgus latro). Charles Darwin called this animal “monstrous,” and people who live in the South Pacific can tell amazing stories about the strength of this crab. However, it’s not the jaws but the claws of the coconut crab that have the world’s strongest pinching force.

The coconut crab is the largest arthropod on Earth. It can weigh more than nine pounds (4.1 kg) and grow to a width of three feet (1 m) from the tip of one leg to the other. Its claws are so powerful that they can exert a greater pinching force compared to its size than any other animal except alligators. The coconut crab is nocturnal and can use its claws to climb trees and even hang in one position for hours. They also use their claws, known as chelae, to defend against predators.

Other animals can’t break open a coconut, but coconut crabs can do that with their powerful chelae, making that food available to them. Although they are called coconut crabs and live on islands in the Indian and Pacific oceans where coconut palms grow, coconuts are not their primary food. Instead, they eat various fruits, nuts, seeds, the pith of fallen palm trees, carrion, and any organic matter they find on the ground. If they find something that interests them, they will grab it and carry it away, earning them the name “robber crabs.”

Some of the most important animals on Earth are those that cleanup waste. They include birds that eat carrion, insects that use dung in various ways, and many other life forms. Coconut crabs use the world’s strongest pinching force to process organic debris, so it will not cover Earth’s surface.

An area of the planet with trees that produce tough materials like coconuts would eventually become buried in debris without animals that clean up the mess. Coconut crabs are so efficient that they eat their own exoskeleton when they molt, leaving nothing to contaminate the environment. Coconut crabs are one example of the many animals that recycle organic material.

Reference: Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, and PLOS ONE

August 3, 2022August 2, 2022

Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit

Jesus began his Sermon on the Mount with the beatitude, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Phillip Yancey quoted a writer named Monika Hellwig in an article on the beatitudes. She listed the “advantages” of being poor, and Yancey suggested we take it one step further by applying those same statements to the rich. In our age of materialism, these are some ideas worth considering:

HELLWIG: The poor know they are in need of redemption.
YANCEY: The rich do not know they are in urgent need of redemption.
HELLWIG: The poor know not only their dependence on God and on powerful people but also their interdependence with one another.
YANCEY: The rich rest their security not on people, but on things.
HELLWIG: The poor have no exaggerated sense of their own importance and no exaggerated need of privacy.
YANCEY: The rich feel they are of great importance and strive to protect themselves from anything they think might threaten it.
HELLWIG: The poor expect little from competition and much from cooperation.
YANCEY: To the rich, it is a dog-eat-dog world – look after number 1.
HELLWIG: The poor can distinguish between necessities and luxuries.
YANCEY: To the rich, everything is a necessity.
HELLWIG: The poor can wait because they have acquired a kind of dogged patience born of acknowledged dependence,
YANCEY: The rich want it now.
HELLWIG: The fears of the poor are more realistic and less exaggerated because they already know that one can survive great suffering and want.
YANCEY: The rich go to pieces when hardship does come their way.
HELLWIG: When the poor have the gospel preached to them, it sounds like good news and not a threat or a scolding.
YANCEY: The rich hear the gospel as a threat and an attempt to put them on a guilt trip.
HELLWIG: The poor can respond to the call of the gospel with a certain abandonment and uncomplicated totality because they have so little to lose and are ready for anything.
YANCEY: The rich feel that they have everything to lose and nothing to gain.

In Matthew 19:23-24, we find Jesus saying, “It is hard for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven, and again I say to you it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.” When his disciples questioned this statement, Jesus went on to say, “Humanly speaking, it is impossible, but with God, all things are possible (verses 2-26).”

We can debate the whole question of who is rich and who is poor, but in comparison with most people on this planet, everyone in America is rich. Reading the things Hellwig listed, you probably realize that you struggle with some of them. Jesus didn’t say, “Blessed are the poor.” He said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Jesus is not concerned with our gross income but our attitude toward what God has blessed us with and how we use it.

August 2, 2022August 8, 2022

Greatest Daily Migration on Earth

One of the amazing facts about life on our planet is the way living things fill every niche of the environment. As science extends our knowledge of Earth’s remote regions, we find massive amounts of life with incredible diversity. We find the largest animal population on the Earth in biomass, the volume of the Earth occupied, and numbers of individuals in water deeper than sunlight can reach. The ocean depths make up 90% of Earth’s living space, and we now understand that living there are more than a million species that science has not named or described. Furthermore, they are part of the greatest daily migration on Earth.

Every day, ten billion tons of animals known as zooplankton move upward from as far as 3,000 feet below the surface. The zooplankton include copepods, salps, krill, and fish larvae. At only 1,000 feet down, the water is 20 degrees Fahrenheit colder than at the surface, and the pressure is 30 times as great. For a tiny fish larva, making a 1000-foot journey in about an hour would be like a human swimmer going 50 miles in that amount of time. These animals begin their ascent at sunset and stay near the surface until sunrise when they descend back to the cold dark below.

The purpose of this greatest daily migration on Earth is to eat and avoid being eaten. These zooplankton animals feed on phytoplankton, the microscopic aquatic plants that live in the top few hundred feet of water. Fish and squid feed on the zooplankton, which find protection at the great ocean depths. The first hint of this massive migration occurred in World War II when ships and submarines used sonar to sweep the ocean for enemy subs. They discovered that the seafloor seemed to be moving up and down, creating a deep “scattering layer” that reflected sonar signals. Now we have research tools to explore this layer, which turns out to be alive.

Science is just now beginning to understand the importance of the greatest daily migration on Earth. This huge mass of animal life, their excrement, and their remains sequester carbon in the very deep waters, making them rich in nutrients. Winds along the shores of continents push the surface water from the continental edges out into the open ocean. Their exit causes water to come up from ocean depths to the surface along the continent’s edges, bringing nutrients with it.

Our understanding of this mass migration is helping us to understand the carbon cycle, climate change, and many ecological issues. This greatest daily migration on Earth is a part of God’s creation. It reminds us of Proverbs 8:28-29, which says that Wisdom was there, “…when He established the clouds above and fixed securely the fountains of the deep, when He gave the sea its boundary so the waters would not overstep His command, and when He marked out the foundations of the earth” (NIV).

Reference: Scientific American, August 2022, pages 50 -67.

August 1, 2022July 31, 2022

The Atlantic Puffin and Life’s Adaptability

Environmentalists express concern that many species will become extinct because of the warming climate. For example, polar bears are having trouble finding food because of the disappearance of the ice islands they use for hunting. A bird species that many are concerned about is the Atlantic puffin. These birds had been hunted to the verge of extinction in the 1800s and are still endangered today.

The main diet of Atlantic puffins consists of hake and herring, which are cold-water fish. However, the change in temperature of the North Atlantic Ocean has caused these fish to no longer inhabit some waters where Atlantic puffins get their food. Because of that, there was concern that Atlantic puffins could become extinct.

The Audubon Society Magazine published an interesting report on a study of the Atlantic puffin’s diet by Will Kennerley. Kennerley discovered that the puffins had shifted the foods they eat and feed their chicks. The study showed that they are now eating 21 different fish species that researchers had never observed them eating before. This nutritional flexibility will help preserve Atlantic puffins, demonstrating that these birds are designed to adapt to a changing environment.

The question of how this principle will apply to other forms of life remains to be seen. A big question is whether this adaptability also applies to animals that eat plants since there are cases where plants are dying out in areas experiencing significant climate changes. However, there is less doom and gloom among people who see examples such as the adaptability of the Atlantic puffin. God’s design for living things makes it possible for life to endure even as the environment changes.

You can read more in the summer 2022 issue of Audubon Society Magazine (page 21) and online at THIS LINK.

July 30, 2022July 27, 2022

Wasps Are Essential for the Ecosystem

Wasps are essential for the ecosystem, but I have to admit that my experiences with wasps have been mostly negative. I am very allergic to their stings. My only positive experience with a wasp was when I was teaching a homeroom made up of kids who were in trouble with the school or the law — many of whom were wearing ankle bracelets. The night before the first day of school, I was stung over my left eye by a wasp, resulting in my eye being swollen shut and my face badly distorted. When I walked into my homeroom, there was dead silence until one gang leader said in a timid voice, “What does the other guy look like?”

Wasps have been called “nature’s pest controllers” by wasp expert Dr. Seirian Sumner. Wasps are carnivores who lay their eggs in the body of other insects, and the larvae consume the host after hatching. Wasps control aphids, white flies, cabbage loopers, and brown marmorated stink bugs, all of which are a problem for agriculture.

In addition to killing these crop problems, wasps are pollinators. Wasps pollinate 960 plant species, and 164 species depend entirely on wasps. For example, figs could not reproduce without wasps, and more than 1,000 tropical birds and mammals rely on figs for food. In addition, over 100 orchid species depend on wasps as pollinators. So, yes, wasps are essential for the ecosystem.

When you realize all the good that wasps do and understand that only 1.5% of wasp species sting humans, you have to recognize that wasps are a tool of God to enable us to have the food we eat and the flowers we love.

Reference: National Wildlife magazine, August/September 2022, pages 12-13.

If you want to learn more, there is a new book by Seirian Sumner titled Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps published by Harper Collins.

July 29, 2022July 27, 2022

Another Virus Is Spreading

Here we go again! Another virus is spreading and has begun to infect large numbers of people, and the LGBTQ community has borne the brunt of those infections. That data has led to hatred and polarization. This reminds us of the situation with AIDS in 1984 when over 7,700 people became infected with AIDS, and over 3,500 died. There was a great deal of finger pointing and some violence, as vividly displayed in the 2005 movie “Brokeback Mountain.”

On May 7, 2022, British health officials discovered the monkeypox virus and announced it occurred primarily in LGBTQ men. In July of 2022, infections have been found in 42 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. At this time, infections approach 1500, with California and Illinois having more than 100 cases and New York with more than 400. The virus spreads from person to person through direct contact with rash lesions or body fluids. Men having sex with men provide an easy pathway for the virus, so as another virus is spreading, some blame the LGBTQ community.

Those who delight in attacking Christianity have claimed that Christians are fueling hatred against the LGBTQ community, but that claim is simply incorrect. It is true that the Bible teaches us not to engage in sex outside of marriage, but it also tells us not to use alcohol or other substances harmful to the body. Christians are concerned about people doing things that hurt themselves or others. For Christians, the human body is the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 3:16 and 6:15-20; 2 Corinthians 6:14-18). Therefore, we urge everyone not to engage in destructive lifestyles, including the use of all recreational drugs and the practice of aberrant sexual activity.

We also oppose any violence against others. Anyone who abuses, brings harm to, or verbally condemns others is not following Christ’s teaching. Instead, he told us to love our enemies, go the second mile, and turn the other cheek. (See Matthew 5:38-48.)The teachings of Christ are unambiguous, but not everyone who claims to be a Christian follows them.

Another virus is spreading as people engage in the activities of the LGBTQ community, putting themselves and others at risk. There is no question about the wisdom of the Bible’s teaching about sexual conduct. But unfortunately, every alternative to God’s way has caused injury to the participants and others, and monkeypox is just one more evidence of that truth.

Reference: USA Today by Boris Q’va for July 18, 2022. SouthBendTribune.com