Daily Verse | Ezekiel 37:26
I will make a covenant of peace with them; it will be an everlasting covenant.

It’s Thursday and I want you to know that guy over there in the shades wants you to play pickleball with him.

Let’s take a break from the political world and the ongoing disaster that is the Biden administration, and look at the question of how we got here, with “we” meaning human beings. I don’t assume that all of you who read this blog believe in God or, conversely, that you all believe in the theory of evolution.

Frankly, I don’t know what you believe.

I suppose that for a lot of people, the question of where “life” came from, and specifically human life, might not even find its way to the forefront in their thinking. We just “are” and we muddle along as best we can. But lots of people wonder about it; even NASA is wondering if “life” once existed on Mars and, if so, how it got there.

I don’t dabble much in apologetics on this blog, which has a much tighter focus on politics, but it does have a relationship to what I write about. I believe that almost everything we see happening in our culture today is the result of an abandonment of the centrality of God — and, specifically, of Jesus Christ — by our society.

I say that this blog is an examination of the intersection of faith, culture and politics. If you read my brief “About” page, you’ll see that I believe that culture is a reflection of faith, and politics is a reflection of culture.

I follow Jesus Christ and come at life as an evangelical Christian. It’s from that perspective that I comment on national politics and American culture. If politics is downstream from culture (as Andrew Breitbart believed), then culture is downstream from faith. In fact, said Richard John Neuhaus, “Culture is the root of politics, and religion is the root of culture.”

So if culture reflects the faith (or lack thereof) in a society, then it’s important to understand the reasons for why a society either embraces or rejects faith. And that’s the connection to apologetics, which is not about saying, “sorry,” but about defending the Christian faith with reason, facts and logic.

Are there solid reasons to believe in the God of the Bible?

Biblically-grounded Christians believe that God created the whole universe ex nihilo, out of nothing, including human beings, as Genesis 1:27 testifies:

So God created mankind in his own image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them.

If true, that means there is a personal, powerful and creative Being who designed men and women and the environment they inhabit. Also, if true, it seems like we should expect to see evidence of design in the creation.

On the other hand, the secular alternative to the Creation narrative is that life spontaneously arose out of nothing. Life is the result of pure chance over billions of years with no Designer involved or even necessary.

One of the factors to consider as we try to determine whether the biblical account is truthful or whether the evolutionists are correct is the complexity of what we see around us. Is it rational or logical to think that the incredible intricacies and complexity we find in our world is the result of random mutations and impersonal chance over time? Or is it more rational to see that there must have been an intelligence behind the creation?

Mark Tapscott over at HillFaith.org posted an interesting link to an article in Quanta Magazine that discusses the complexity of just a single neuron. Three researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem trained an artificial neural network to imitate a biological neuron. They were shocked at their findings.

[The researchers] trained an artificial deep neural network to mimic the computations of a simulated biological neuron. They showed that a deep neural network requires between five and eight layers of interconnected “neurons” to represent the complexity of one single biological neuron.

Even the authors did not anticipate such complexity. “I thought it would be simpler and smaller,” said Beniaguev. He expected that three or four layers would be enough to capture the computations performed within the cell.

Like Tapscott, I’m no scientist and don’t pretend to be one. But I can read, and what this tells me is that the sheer complexity of a single neuron far surpasses what even some of our smartest scientists assumed about them.

Tapscott goes on to suggest that “one tentative conclusion suggested by the Quanta Magazine piece and the study it describes might be expressed with something like this: Greater complexity reduces the probability of a chance explanation for the existence of a single biological cell and increases the necessity for intelligent design as the explanation.“

Intelligent Design theory posits that there must be an intelligence behind all that we see, but does not specifically name the Christian God as that intelligence (although it’s inferred). The Intelligent Design movement is led by luminaries such as Michael J. Behe (Darwin’s Black Box) and William A. Dembski (The Design Revolution).

Tapscott goes on to quote retired mathematics lecturer Julie Hannah:

In general, there is a problem with the popular belief that infinity renders anything possible. For example, monkeys typing for an infinite length of time are supposed to eventually type out any given text, but if there are 50 keys, the probability of producing just one given five-letter word is

This is a tremendously low probability, and it decreases exponentially when letters are added. A computer program that simulated random typing once produced nineteen consecutive letters and characters that appear in a line of a Shakespearean play, but this result took 42,162,500,000 billion years to achieve!

In other words, the probability that such complexity as we see in our universe is the result of chance + time is essentially zero “in any operational sense.”

This is not just true about a single biological neuron, but about the universe as a whole. “The physicist Lee Smolin has calculated that the odds of life-compatible numbers coming up by chance is 1 in 10²²⁹.” That number is nearly incomprehensible (1 followed by 229 zeroes):

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Even in the face of odds like that, some people refuse to concede that it’s possible there’s a Designer. So they persist in their claims that they just haven’t discovered the incontrovertible evidence that is necessary to “prove” that the universe was formed by chance.

Back to my earlier questions: Is it rational or logical to think that the incredible intricacies and complexity we find in our world is the result of random mutations and impersonal chance over time? Or is it more rational to see that there must have been an intelligence behind the creation?

When we abandon reason and logic (one chance in 10²²⁹ means, for all intents and purposes, impossible) in favor of ideological presumptions (there is no god), we become untethered from fact and veer into conjecture. From there we begin to draw assumptions about the meaning of life that align with our worldview. If our existence is the result of random mutations and chance, then there is no god and no reason to adhere to biblical principles or consider them superior to any other set of life principles.

While over-simplified, that’s how we got to where we are today as a society and a culture. It’s the wholesale rejection of Jesus Christ at the center of our lives.

What do you think? Agree or disagree?