God Is Bored Series

4. Something is happening (Preview to a Vision week 4)

January 31, 2010

God is Bored

I find that from time to time I really love a good heist movie. It’s really fun to watch a movie with a brilliant robber who uses his mental prowess to successful rob a bank or something of the like. The problem is not all robbers are as brilliant as they might consider themselves to be. I read about one such robber and his story made me laugh. I believe this was the man’s first attempt at robbing a store and I sincerely hope he didn’t spend too much time planning it and here’s why: 1. His target was H&J leather and Firearms which is a gun shop that specializes in handguns. So he chose to rob at gun point a gun shop in a state where it is legal and many people do carry concealed firearms. 2. The shop was full of customers who were buying firearms. 3. To enter the shop our brilliant would be robber had to step around a marked police car that was parked at the front door. 4. Upon entering the store he saw a uniformed officer standing at the counter having coffee before work. This is the point in which most clever robbers would reconsider their plan and walk out. Not our robber who had more boldness then brains. He entered the store, saw the officer, announced that it was hold-up and then fired a few wild shots from his .22 target pistol into the air. The officer instinctively returned fire with his 9mm Glock and the store clerk with his .50 Desert Eagle. In addition there were several customers in the store who drew their firearms and show back. Paramedics pronounced him dead on the scene. They found 47 expended cartridges in the shop. An autopsy revealed 23 gunshot wounds from seven different weapons. I just wonder wouldn’t this man’s life be an argument against evolution? If Darwin’s theory is built around survival of the fittest, how did this man make it adulthood?

We reject the idea that man evolved by chance but believe that we were created by a personal, loving, and powerful God. But even still we sometimes fail to recognize just how powerful and how creative God is. The universe is ordered so specifically tuned so perfectly in a way that enables life to exist on earth. From the very ratio of cells in the universe to the location and distance of earth from the sun and the moon and our path and rotation in our solar system we see that if any of these things were changed even a little human life would not be possible. I want you to picture thousands of dials all set very specifically much like a sound board. The difference being if any of these dials were turned even a little life on earth would not be possible. The odds of just one dial being tuned by chance to enable life on earth is 1 in 10 to the 53rd power. That’s just one dial. Each of these thousands of different dials are tuned perfectly to enable human life on earth. If just one of those dials shifted ever so slightly it would destroy the possibility for human existence all together.

That number is pretty abstract though so imagine this: cover the entire North American continent with dimes and stack those dimes all the way up to the moon which is about 239,000 miles. Then imagine there were one hundred billion continents the same size as North America and pile dimes on them from here to the moon. North America is approximately 9,450,000 square miles. Take that times a hundred billion and cover it in dimes. Then stack those dimes 239,000 miles high. Then imagine you painted one dime blue and you randomly tossed that one blue dime into the pile of dimes. Then you blindfolded a friend and had him pick one dime. Do that 100 times each time mixing up the dimes and inserting the blue dime randomly. The odds he will pick out the blue dime 100 times in a row would actually be greater than the odds of just one of these dials being tuned in such a way to enable the existence of human life.

Let’s look at it differently. A few years ago I had the opportunity to go to Rome. While we were there one of the places we visited was St. Peter’s Basilica. This is one of the most beautiful buildings in existence. The entire interior is made of gold and marble and this is said to be the resting place of St. Peter. There are ornate designs and statues carved all over. It is a truly wonderful thing to see. What impressed me more than the Basilica itself though was the courtyard. It’s called the square even though its really more of a circle. This incredible courtyard contains 284 columns that run four rows deep, two on either side. Each of these columns stands around 43 feet tall and about 10 feet wide. These two sides to the square form a perfect ellipse so perfect that if you stand on one of two places you can look across this half circle of enormous columns running two rows deep on each side and you will only see one row. The exterior of this Basilica is built so symmetrically that from a single spot and entire half circle of columns are hidden. I remember just standing there in awe thinking to myself how brilliant the architect who designed this had to be. When you look at a beautiful painting you think an artist must have painted this. When you look at a great computer you think there must be a Steven Jobs. Yet for whatever reason when we look at a world far more complex than any of these buildings or man made things people don’t want to see a designer even when it is so obvious there was a design. We try to convince ourselves all of this happened by chance.