2/5/20 - Worlds Apart - 5 - Evidence and Love

February 5th, 2020
by Ian Bonthron

We’re in the final week of our series on science and faith called Worlds Apart. This week, we’re talking about our attitudes when we might have disagreements with people and some evidence for why we would say God created the world!

Scripture: 2 TIMOTHY 2:24-26
Main Point: You can disagree, but you must always show true love.

Quotes, Thoughts, and Links from the Lesson

Are there problems in the fossil record?

Richard Dawkins - “Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours.” The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution”
Is it possible that fossils could be formed quickly, instead of them being formed over thousands of years? What do these fossils below show us?

Credit - fossil-fish.jpg

Credit - a1f7ad0a-f65f-54b7-a1d0-2c800a7914f1.image.jpg

Credit - DxLk8l1WwAAj1h4.jpg

Doesn’t carbon dating show us how old the fossil and sediment layers are?

T Save-Soderbergh and I.U. Olsson speaking about how they use Carbon Dating - “If a C-14 date supports our theories, we put it in the main text. If it does not entirely contradict them, we put it in a footnote. And if it is completely out of date we just drop it. Few archaeologists who have concerned themselves with absolute chronology are innocent of having sometimes applied this method. . .” C-14 Dating and Egyptian chronology in Radiocarbon Variation and Absolute Chronology, Procceedings of the Twelfth Nobel Symposium, New York, 1970 Link

What do we do with the Universe being so finely tuned?

Sandra Faber - Examples of such “fine-tuning” abound. Tweak the charge on an electron, for instance, or change the strength of the gravitational force or the strong nuclear force just a smidgen, and the universe would look very different, and likely be lifeless. The challenge for physicists is explaining why such physical parameters are what they are.
This challenge became even tougher in the late 1990s when astronomers discovered dark energy, the little-understood energy thought to be driving the accelerating expansion of our universe. All attempts to use known laws of physics to calculate the expected value of this energy lead to answers that are 10 120 times too high, causing some to label it the worst prediction in physics.
“The great mystery is not why there is dark energy. The great mystery is why there is so little of it,” said Leonard Susskind of Stanford University, at a 2007 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “The fact that we are just on the knife edge of existence, [that] if dark energy were very much bigger we wouldn’t be here, that’s the mystery.”… That night in Hawaii, Faber declared that there were only two possible explanations for fine-tuning. “One is that there is a God and that God made it that way,” she said. But for Faber, an atheist, divine intervention is not the answer. “The only other approach that makes any sense is to argue that there really is an infinite, or a very big, ensemble of universes out there and we are in one,” she said. Link

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

Share a story about an argument or debate you had over something that wasn’t really that important.
Why do we tend to get caught up in those types of arguments and debates?
What are some “Science” and “Faith” things people tend to argue about that aren’t super important?
What are some ways you could have listened better in that conversation?
Why does our passage in 2 Timothy 2:25-26 share that patience is important, even when we are being ridiculed?
Have you ever seen someone change their mind because someone was patient with them? Share some details
What is one thing you have learned from this series?
What is a question you still have about faith and science co-existing?
How did you apply what you learned last week and who did you tell? (From the lesson / I will statement)
What is your “I Will” statement this week? (In one sentence, What will you do with what you’ve learned today: “I will _________”) Please write them down to refer to them the following week.
Who can you tell what you learned?