Believing God

I had heard many times that Beth Moore's "Believing God" was an incredible Bible study. I'm just starting it this summer with a group of ladies, and - wow! - what I heard is right. I don't want to just believe that God exists. I want to believe that He is who He says He is - and He's so much bigger than anything I can imagine. "Believing God" is a great reminder of that. In last night's 'homework,' I related to what Beth said regarding belief:

I'd like to set the record straight: the last thing I'm trying to encourage a thinking person to do is to surrender to a life of nothing but stark, blind faith. The reason I don't believe that aliens live on Mars is that we've never seen evidence to suggest they do. If we had evidence, I'd be far more inclined to believe, even if I never saw them with my own eyes. More importantly, I wouldn't encourage anyone to believe in a God of heaven if we had no evidence to support that He exists as the Bible says He does. Beloved, the reason I teach belief in God is that, again and again, I have found Him to be astoundingly believable.

In the same way, I have found God to be astoundingly believable, over and over again. Perhaps as a 'baby' Christian my faith was not one where the reality of my experience met with my beliefs yet. But God is gracing me by taking me down a new path. I've only been a few steps, but I know I want to keep going. It started several years ago, with prayers answered through strangely 'coincidental' circumstances. Since then, there have been some flat-out miracles. And my idea of what a prayer relationship could be was turned upside down last summer when I raised a question in prayer and actually heard an answer (that made me jump right up from where I was). There's no denying He exists. He's crashed through and graced me with experiencing Him in a new way.

Beyond experiencing God, I love that God's word stands up to scrutiny. Further in the study, Beth hits on this:

While the waves of godless intellectualism rise and fall and the trends set the tides, you and I are better off watching from the nearest solid Rock. To be sure, believers should seek to be well educated about current events and intellectual trends, but we need not feel quite so responsible to defend God. I have a tremendous respect for theological apologists, and their arguments strengthen my faith, but most of us are not called to prove unbelievers intellectually wrong...

The Bible opens with the words "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." In the remarkable and reader-friendly book The Source, authors John Clayton and Nils Jansma make one of many cases for creationism by the gross improbability of planet Earth's possessing all of the necessary conditions to support life by chance. They explain how probabilities are figured, using the example of a deck of cards. The chances of drawing a specified card from a shuffled deck are obviously 1 in 52. If the card is reinserted into the deck and the deck is reshuffled, the chances of randomly choosing the same card becomes 1/52 x 1/52, or 1 in 2,704. Applying the same kind of math probability, Clayton and Jansma offer the following "Estimated Odds of Selected Variables Vital to an Earth-like Planet Occurring by Chance."

Being in the right kind of galaxy... 1 in 100
Being in the right place in the galaxy... 1 in 150
Having the right kind of star... 1 in 1,000
Being the right distance from the star... 1 in 10
Having the proper planetary mass... 1 in 10
Having the proper planetary spin... 1 in 10
Having the proper planetary tilt... 1 in 10
Having comet-sweeping planets... 1 in 40
Not being near a black hole... 1 in 250
Having a large solitary moon... 1 in 10
Possessing a magnetic field capable of shielding... 1 in 10

Total odds... 1 in 150,000,000,000,000,000

I like the way Clayton brings his point home: "If I offered you a billion dollars (tax free) to jump out of an airplane at 10,000 feet without a parachute, with the proviso that you had to live to collect it, would you accept the offer? Not if you were in your right mind. Obviously, the odds of survival are much too small for any rational person to accept. Yet the odds of there being an 'accidental' planet hospitable for life using only the few parameters we have considered are 15 billion times less likely than surviving a free-fall from an airplane."

Incidentally, John Clayton is a scientist and a former second-generation atheist who "came to believe in God while attempting to prove that the Bible contradicts known scientific facts. Instead of disproving the Bible, he found it to be absolutely reliable."

What amazes me is that the probability shown is simply for 'setting the stage.' I shudder to think of the complexity of life 'randomly occurring' on this planet so coincidentally suited for it.