I obviously need to visit this forum more often. Without a doubt, this has been the best thread I have read anywhere on this site. I love it. I hope this thread keeps going for when I get breaks from my job at Microsoft (winking at acolyte).
I also grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home in the heart of America. I think those homes and organizations are victims of a lot of characiturizations by people who really don't know them. Kiwi, my wife is from Korea - I met her when I lived there. Having associated with many Korean Christians, I can assure you that looking forward to the rapture and thinking the 70'th week (tribulation) is yet to come is not restricted to America.
But my point in writing has nothing to do with a disagreement, and much more to do with identifying with what I read here from several of the members (even you, Steve
). I don't see any boredom from thinking that God created the universe, and I have had many times of deep, soul searching doubt in ths area. But in the end, my concept of God is one of an infinite God. That doesn't make anything boring because there is no limit to what I can explore or what is to be learned. I know people with a much narrower view of God than I have, but when I think about that, they are trying to understand just as I am, and that is their current position of understanding. If we are honest, we have to admit that it is incredibly difficult to know much about God (has anyone here ever sat down and had a face to face conversation with God?).
I've had a lot of times of doubt because there are so many different viewpoints, most coming with the most honest of intents and sincerity of pursuits. So it is impossible for me to think that my viewpoint is the only one that is valid. But the diversity had me spending a long time questioning how anyone could know for sure. That really bothered me.
One poetic line from a piece of prose stuck with me, and is what finally settled it for me. I don't remember where I read it, but it had to do with seeing evidence of God in creation. The author wrote about walking on the beach and seeing a heart with someone's initials being scratched in the sand. All along the beach, he could see the evidence of the waves and the way it shaped the sand. In the initials, he saw evidence of intelligence. It wasn't that it was more beautiful than the other things on the beach, but it was more that this was just not possible without a motivation other than what normally motivated the sands on the beach.
That was the starting point - writing in the sand. And that moved into other things I saw, and then into the formation of life itself. In particular, I thought about this with DNA. Basically, I saw the amino acids that form DNA as letters of an alphabet. (Maybe I heard that analogy as well, I don't remember where I heard it if I did). As I thought about that, then with that alphabet, sentences (genes) and paragraphs (Chromosomes) were written and constructed into both an instruction manual, and a historical account. Instructions because the chromosomes contained the instructions on how the organism was to be constructed, and a historical account because written into those pages within the nuclei of all of my cells is an account of my Native American and my European heritage, and in those of my children was that combined with the asian heritage given to them by their mother. My adopted son has a similar set of instructions with a much different historical account of his blood lineage. It is all there.
It relates to the writing in the sand because just as the writing in the sand represented something besides the way the sand was normally motivated, that is not the normal way that molecules are motivated, at least not without an intelligence behind them. The DNA speaks stronger to me of an intelligence behind my existence than anything else I've ever considered. I don't expect it to have the same meaning to anyone else because our paths and current positions on this earth are so different, but to me, the DNA was the writing in the sand.
From that point, my ponderings progressed to things like how sexual reproduction could have developed - again, it seems that there is handwriting there because from the simlest of life, there just is no normal motivation to split a single class of organizms into two genders both of which are absolutely necessary for the continuation of the species - it had to develop at exactly the same rate with both genders or else the species would have ceased to exist. Everything from the shape and size of the sex organs to the parallel meiosis to the response to pheramones is absolutely essential to work together if it is to be functional. I don't see the issue as complexity so much as I see it as just the writing in the sand.
I don't see science or engineering to be in conflict with faith at all. In the sense that I see it, science is the discovery of creation. If God is infinite, then there is no end of what science can discover, and no end of what I have the chance to learn. So, to put it plainly, science is a study of "how He did it" for me. ("He" is a convenient term - not a term to imply that I think God has a certain set of sexual capabilities). It seems to me that we are given intelligence, and if everything else was done by design, then we are expected to use our intelligence. Since we are not given all the answers, we are cetainly allowed by any intelligent creator to question and explore.
So after that journey through doubt and how that turned out, I am a Christian. You probably would not define me as fundamentalist (I don't define myself that way anymore). I attend church with my wife. They don't speak for me (don't try to). I don't agree with everyone there any more than I agree with everyone here or everyone in the supermarket, but I go there with them because of common interests. And I thoroughly enjoy the church where I go. I'm sure my image of God is different from many who attend with me, but since I have to admit that I have never met Him face to face, then I also have to expect that, and respect that.
And I have very thoroughly enjoyed reading this thread. I'm very glad that you guys decided to post here. And Steve, even though we disagree very often on this forum, I am also very glad you posted here.