“Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear? Do you not remember?” Mark 8:18
I have never really been an audiobook listener as I enjoy sitting, holding a book, and visually taking in the words. But this past year I found myself on the road for long stretches of time, so picked up an audiobook by a favorite secular writer of mine. He has written mostly biographical travel books, but he also wrote an informational book about the scientific world from the beginning of time.
As I was listening to it, I was again struck by the realization that those who do not believe in God as designer and creator cannot or will not see His hand at work regardless of the evidence. Listen to how close this author comes to admitting that a supreme being had to be involved but stops just short of giving God credit. Whether this is because of his own personal beliefs or because he is trying to keep his book strictly within the scientific realm, I don’t know. But below are a few excerpts from his book followed by a parallel verse from the Bible.
“We live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t all together know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformist with physical laws whose properties we don’t totally understand.” (Disc 3, Segment 2)
(“He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name.” Psalm 147:4)
“There is only one place, an inconspicuous outpost of the Milky Way called Earth, that will sustain you…. It appears that if you wish to have a planet suitable for life, you have to be just awfully lucky, and the more advanced the life, the luckier you have to be.” (Disc 3, Segment 10)
(“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:1)
“The food chain is thus hopelessly top-heavy but somehow it works. Remarkably no one knows how.”
(“Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” Matthew 6:26)
“All of this is a very roundabout way of making the point that we know very little about earth’s biggest system. But as you shall see, once we start talking about life, there is a great deal we don’t know, not least how it got going in the first place…."
(“'For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the LORD.” Isaiah 55:8)
“Despite half a century of further study, we are no nearer to synthesizing life today than we were in 1953, and much further away from thinking we can….
("Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, …. Jeremiah 1:5)
“No one really knows but there may be as many as a million types of protein in the human body and each one is a little miracle. By all the laws of probability, proteins shouldn’t exist….
“The chances of a 1,055 sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are frankly nil….
“It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake, but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life…. (All of the above are from Disc 4, Segment 2)
(“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone—“ Job 38:4-6)
Let us have eyes to see and ears to hear.
Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything. Random House: 2003. Audiobook
I have never really been an audiobook listener as I enjoy sitting, holding a book, and visually taking in the words. But this past year I found myself on the road for long stretches of time, so picked up an audiobook by a favorite secular writer of mine. He has written mostly biographical travel books, but he also wrote an informational book about the scientific world from the beginning of time.
As I was listening to it, I was again struck by the realization that those who do not believe in God as designer and creator cannot or will not see His hand at work regardless of the evidence. Listen to how close this author comes to admitting that a supreme being had to be involved but stops just short of giving God credit. Whether this is because of his own personal beliefs or because he is trying to keep his book strictly within the scientific realm, I don’t know. But below are a few excerpts from his book followed by a parallel verse from the Bible.
“We live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t all together know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformist with physical laws whose properties we don’t totally understand.” (Disc 3, Segment 2)
(“He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name.” Psalm 147:4)
“There is only one place, an inconspicuous outpost of the Milky Way called Earth, that will sustain you…. It appears that if you wish to have a planet suitable for life, you have to be just awfully lucky, and the more advanced the life, the luckier you have to be.” (Disc 3, Segment 10)
(“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:1)
“The food chain is thus hopelessly top-heavy but somehow it works. Remarkably no one knows how.”
(“Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” Matthew 6:26)
“All of this is a very roundabout way of making the point that we know very little about earth’s biggest system. But as you shall see, once we start talking about life, there is a great deal we don’t know, not least how it got going in the first place…."
(“'For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the LORD.” Isaiah 55:8)
“Despite half a century of further study, we are no nearer to synthesizing life today than we were in 1953, and much further away from thinking we can….
("Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, …. Jeremiah 1:5)
“No one really knows but there may be as many as a million types of protein in the human body and each one is a little miracle. By all the laws of probability, proteins shouldn’t exist….
“The chances of a 1,055 sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are frankly nil….
“It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake, but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life…. (All of the above are from Disc 4, Segment 2)
(“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone—“ Job 38:4-6)
Let us have eyes to see and ears to hear.
Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything. Random House: 2003. Audiobook
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