Two Sides of the Same Coin?

So I want this second of my blogs to serve as a fun activity to get you in the mindset of what's in store when you start to read my book. Okay, so imagine you're lying in bed and you get this sudden desire for a cold glass of water. Your throat is parched which is enough to make a nice, cold glass of water sound really appealing right about now, so you slip on your house shoes and groggily make your way down the stairs only for something on the den floor to catch your eye. It's a pile of saw dust or so it seems. So in an effort to be tidy, you simply sweep it up, dump it in the trash, and continue on your quest for that cup of cold water. The next day, you decide to watch the evening news, but you realize you left the remote on top of the television, so you make your way over to retrieve it, only to discover another pile of saw dust in the same place, oh and wait, another little pile on top of the TV. You look at it and think, "What in the world? I just cleaned this up yesterday." These two piles mind you are close to the fireplace and underneath a partially opened ceiling that suffered from some water damage and is waiting to be repaired by your handyman. You just assume once again that it's a pile of sawdust caused by "something," but what is that something? Perhaps the wind blew through the fireplace knocking some loose dust out of place. Or maybe someone upstairs walked in a certain area that juggled that same sawdust loose, but what's the likelihood of those piles forming in the same place every night? What would you say happened or is happening? What keeps causing the sawdust to appear in the very same spots around the same time each morning, or did it happen in the night? After all, you swept it up before you went to bed only to discover it was there again the next morning. Go ahead...take your guess.

Now, I'm privy to exactly what happened because this is a scenario that took place in my home. We had some water damage from a leaky faucet upstairs, and between the pipes being repaired and the drywall being put back in place, this pesky little problem surfaced. I'm not going to reveal the answer in this blog. You'll have to stay tuned for a future post to find out what happened, but this my friends is the very same type of thinking that goes on when it comes to discussions about origins and other events that we were not around to witness. We see that something obviously took place...that's the easy part, but what caused it? When something happens once without us knowing how, we make a series of assumptions as to what could have taken place based on what we know. That's viewing life out of a set of filters, or operating by what's called a worldview so-to-speak. How can anyone ever really prove what happened when no one was actually there to see it? Oh I'd love to reveal the answer to the scenario I provided above, but it will have to wait for now.

Now transfer this mode of thinking to the origin of life and the universe. There are so many compelling arguments out there that sometimes it's hard to surmise what and who you should believe. Though it can be seriously upsetting to a lot of people, and you may even be branded as a lunatic for believing it, the Bible makes some claims about what happened in the beginning, who was involved, and how it took place. It also makes a lot of other claims, but before you can even get to those, there is one major premise you are asked to accept right from the start. The Bible claims that in the beginning God made the heavens and the earth. Stop right there. If you are going to believe any other account that will follow in the Bible, you must first accept the premise that there was a being called God and that He was present in the beginning and responsible for what was to follow, for it says that He "created the heavens and the Earth." He declares ownership. He stakes claim in the whole of the matter, and not just in Genesis, but throughout several passages of Scripture. You must then understand the nature of God for everything else to make sense, which makes miracles not so far-fetched after all (Don't worry...I discuss this in chapter 3 of my book).

I find it pretty interesting as I go about my research to see how so many people can view the same thing so many different ways, like the geologic column for instance. It is definitely a record of life on Earth, but how did it form? That's where the differences of opinion come in because no one can argue that the rock record doesn't exist. The same mounds of evidence lie before each of us, but the only thing that differs is how we each choose to interpret them. One buzz word you will often find when it comes to debates about the origin of life, the universe, etc. which I mentioned briefly in one of the paragraphs above, is the term worldview. Worldviews are said to "color" how we see the world around us, and our individual worldviews are shaped by our life experiences. When, where, and how you were reared has a lot to do with it, and so they provide the set of lenses that filter what you see in the world. The same set of facts can lie in front of two people, but they may not necessarily "see" or interpret what they see the same way. If you can't understand the concept, think of it this way. Think of the role sunglasses play, well maybe not so much their role, but actually what happens when you put them on - I ended this sentence with a preposition...I can hear my English professor shouting a big "No, no!!!" but for the sake of argument, just go with me on this one! Sunglasses have lenses that are tinted, colored, however you want to describe it, and when you put them over your eyes, they color what you "see" from that point on, so that the same sky may "look" blue to one person, yellowish-orange to another, or maybe even some shade of violet depending on the color of the lenses they are wearing. Ultimately keep in mind though that the sky actually does have a color (at least from our vantage point) that is independent of the color you might actually be seeing at that moment thanks to those sunglasses. I hope you get the point I'm trying to make.

At any rate, I'll wrap up the blog for now, but I hope you take away the concept that things happen and have happened in our world that sometimes come with an explanation and sometimes do not. One of the most asked questions of all times is how did everything begin and the Bible doesn't just make an attempt to answer that - no, it emphatically proceeds to state how that happened and who was responsible for it - well that and countless other things that will bring so much purpose and meaning to life if you begin to accept, understand, and embrace it!