In the Beginning

* DIFFICULT QUESTIONS

* Where did I come from?

How many parents here have had the experience of a child asking someone the profound question,

SLIDE 1 IMAGE: Child looking up

“Where did I come from?”

In my experience, answering this question goes something like this:

Child: “Papa, where did I come from?”

Me: “Son, you came from mummy and daddy.”

Child: “Where did you come from?”

Me: “I came from my mummy and daddy.”

Child: “Where did they come from?”

Me: “Sonny, do you want to know where everyone came from?”

Child: “Yes!”

Me: “A very looooong time ago our God from Heaven made our first parents.”

Child: “Hmmm, OK... and where did God come from?”

If this last question is not hard enough,

in recent times our son has been asking even more profound questions...

SLIDE 2 IMAGE: Jesus in a stable: https://bit.ly/3PE8cDG

Like recently, when he saw a picture of Jesus in a stable and asked:

“Papa, if Jesus was a baby,

how did he make the animals?”

* Profound questions abound

Children are not the only ones asking profound questions.

The majority, if not all of humanity, at one point or another end up reflecting on the biggest (seeming) unanswered question:

SLIDE 3 WORDS: How did life begin?

How did life begin?

Discuss people’s ideas about...

The late Freeman John Dyson, an English-American theoretical physicist and mathematician known for his works in quantum field theory, astrophysics, random matrices, mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, condensed matter physics, nuclear physics, and engineering e (in other words – a really smart guy), once wrote that:

The origin of life is the deepest mystery in the whole of science. Many books and learned papers have been written about it, but it remains a mystery. There is an enormous gap between the simplest living cell and the most complicated naturally occurring mixture of nonliving chemicals. We have no idea when and how and where this gap was crossed. We only know that it was crossed somehow, either on Earth or on Mars or in some other place from which the ancestors of life on Earth might have come. – Physicist and mathematician Freeman J. Dyson, A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe, p. 104.

He basically said that, no one knows how life began, that the origin of life remains a mystery, ~~but hinted that life of earth must have come from Mars or another place in the universe.~~

Was he right or wrong with his conclusions?

Sadly, it appears that he must have spent too much time looking through microscopes and telescopes, instead of looking into the true source of truth!

So what do people do when they can’t find answers?

If you ask scientists, they may have theories, but not one scientist has ever proven (scientifically) anything conclusive about the actual origins of life. f

SLIDE 4 IMAGE: Watch and World – https://bit.ly/3oBZ6M0

Have you heard of the watchmaker argument for the origin of life?

The watchmaker argument, as formulated by the old British Christian apologist William Paley (1743-1805) in his book Natural Theology g , he writes h :

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone. I wouldn’t think much of that. I wouldn’t wonder, “Well, who put that stone there, and where did it come from?” It’s just a stone. But if I were to continue across the heath and come across a watch, then I would be intrigued. I would pick it up, look at it, and pop the back off the watch. Inside I would see the bushings and the gears in quite an arrangement. – Paraphrased from Chapter 1 of Natural Theology, and further reworded from The Watchmaker article from the following note.”

“Paley makes the point that everything would have to be in a precise arrangement in order for the watch to work. In order for the watch to tell the exact time, it must be well-designed. A watch, Paley concludes, points us to a watchmaker.” i

“The point that Paley was trying to make is that a watch implies a watchmaker, and that the world is like a watch, in that the world implies a worldmaker.” j

“Paley’s argument has had quite a legacy. In the 1820s a young student named Charles Darwin read Paley’s Natural Theology. Darwin would later record in his autobiography that he found Paley’s reasoning and argument compelling, and that he held to an intelligent designer because of Paley. But later, sadly, Darwin would move away from that position, and change his mind.” k

The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote,

“The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. ... Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.” -- Charles Darwin l

“If this was all you knew about Darwin’s findings, you might think that his findings rule out the existence of a Creator.” m

“Millions of people have come to that conclusion.” n

“But actually, if you read on, Darwin’s theory of evolution doesn’t do that at all. It says,:” o

“...all living things have much in common, in their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their cellular structure, and their laws of growth and reproduction... Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one form existing from the beginning of time (primordial), into which life was first breathed by the Creator.” -- Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 484.

“Life was first breathed by the Creator”

Darwin said it!

It has been over 163 years since Darwin wrote this [in 1859], and since, many continue running to and fro, with knowledge increasing in all schools of thought and sciences, yet the knowledge of the absolute truth of our true origin and the world around us is rapidly dissapearing!

Presently, according to Wikipedia:

“Most experts agree that all life today evolved by common descent from a single primitive lifeform. It is not known how this early life form evolved, but scientists think it was a natural process which happened about 3.9 billion years ago.” -- Origin of Life, Wikipedia. p