Noah is an electrical engineering at UTD. I met him at a party of a mutual friend and was impressed with his intelligence and strong stance on Christianity. I decided to interview him on his stances and allow him to address some of the issues raised in the previous interview. The result is lengthy but interesting and I believe worth taking the time to read.

1. America seems to be slowly heading toward a religious landscape similar to that of current western Europe. Why do you think that is?

First off, I don’t really know enough about the other religious groups in America to say much about them, but I’ll do my best to answer as a Christian. I think we (speaking of all people calling themselves “Christian” in America) have kind of dropped the ball on some things, and I promise I’m not trying to sound judgmental here. I’m just making a fair observation based on the people I’ve met in my short life. I think most nonreligious folks in America don’t have a huge problem with Jesus. Most of the time, their problem is with His followers. Some of us have retreated and tried to stay separate from everyone else, hoping to avoid the “bad influence” of the world. Some of us have taken to Bible-thumping and made ourselves moral Nazis, walking around and telling people off for their sins (which are evidently so much greater than ours). Some of us are actually fine upstanding people, living life and shining our light the way God intended His people to live, but those are getting harder to find these days.

I think what I’m getting at here is that we’ve forgotten to show how relevant Jesus is to people today in America. People develop their understanding of the person of Christ by interacting with His church, and that means we are responsible for putting forth the correct image of Him. I fear that we have given the impression that Christianity is bogged down with dusty old prejudices, outdated rules, and ignorant assumptions, and consequently have misrepresented the dynamic, active, and powerful God that is behind it. I think that subsequently, and understandably, a lot of people have just kind of checked out , taking a placid, disillusioned stance on religion in general.

2. What are your thoughts on evolutionary theory? Do you see any problems with it? What about theistic evolution?
I think it has been demonstrated throughout the ages that nature is dynamic and vibrant and able to steer its own course within certain boundaries. However, I remain unconvinced of many of the premises of current evolutionary theory. For example, I wouldn’t trust it enough to build a philosophy based on it. I’m no expert in biology, but from what I understand, we’re really extending ourselves a long way to be making assertions based on homologous genetics and fossil records. As far as attempting to surmise the origins of human life (or any life, or even matter), I think we’re making quite a long shot as things stand. That being said, I want to be clear that I don’t personally have it out for anyone that chooses to believe in evolution. However, I urge any inquisitive mind to consider that alternative explanations are plausible, and I think a scientist should be willing to consider anything for the discovery of truth. Also, I think it’s fair to point out that while science can provide us a very precise perspective on how our world works, it doesn’t explain it entirely. As long as humans exist, we will still be forced to extend our faith into something in order to have a working worldview.
I believe the Genesis account of creation, that God created everything in six days, including humans in His image (meaning that we share some of His traits). I believe the above because I believe the Bible (more on that later), not because I think that “we Christians have better science and it’s already proven our God”, or anything like that. Please note that the Bible is generally not a scientific book, although it has some eerily perceptive commentary and gives an excellent basis for human scientific progress. I believe that my God is the most high, sovereign, holy, infinite God, and all else the Bible claims Him to be. I also believe that He didn’t just make our world and step back; He stepped into it in the person of Jesus Christ. Only through Christ can the original connection between God and mankind be restored to its proper state.
As far as theistic evolution goes, I’m not real sure why it has gained so much momentum, except that it appears to make peace between two extremes. Honestly, it doesn’t seem to be logically consistent with evolution and Christian theology proper. It seems to be born out of a misunderstanding of God and His Word. If God is Who He says He is (I know that’s a stretch for some, but bear with me), then His Word is actually as unchangeable and mighty as it claims to be. Why couldn’t He have created everything in six days? Also, if we interpret the Genesis account (a book written in a historical narrative form) as purely allegorical, couldn’t the whole Bible be read as “allegorical”? And if the Bible is really so flimsy as that, it’s just another book like every other, why even bother with it? By no means have I covered every scenario there, and certainly an almighty God can create a universe however He pleases, but I will leave this question with one last thought. The Genesis account doesn’t tell us precisely HOW (scientifically speaking) God created things after matter had been called into existence. What if our research in these genetic trees is simply discovering the order of creation? Certainly what looks like the work of billions of years of adaptation to us could have been derived by God’s voice over the course of a few days, and we would be none the wiser looking back on it.

3. Your position defies the commonly accepted scientific evidence for evolution that concludes that the fossil record shows increasing complexity over time. Do you have a problem with radiometric dating? What about claims that multiple radiometric methods have produced consistent results?

Let me preface this by admitting that I am by no means an expert in this field. I’m an engineer for goodness sake, I only care about which wires I need to plug in to get my robot to turn on. There are hundreds of men VASTLY more intelligent than me that stand on either side of this argument, and I can’t pretend to play in the big kid sandbox when all I have is a figurative plastic spade. In the little bit of reading I’ve done on radiometric dating, it’s become evident to me that there are many evolutionist and creationist scientists that accept the results, and also a good number that don’t. Although we’re making the best estimates we can with the tools we have, it’s important to remember that radioactivity dating, and other methods of dating, are at best educated guesses, albeit guesses that often agree with one another because they are calibrated with one another. In the same way that we can’t know for sure that Noah built an ark, we can’t know for sure that our dating methods are actually consistent with our history.

That’s about all I can honestly say, there are definitely better people to give you a more detailed spiel on radiometric dating. I see the issue of evolution and creation as a carefully disguised disagreement of faiths, rather than a disagreement between science and religion. If the Bible is really the truth that it claims to be, then legitimate studies of our earth will not contradict its truth. It may contradict our understanding of its truth, but that just means it’s time to revise our understanding, not throw the Book out the window. In the event that we somehow proved the process of carbon dating and discovered that the earth was very old, I certainly wouldn’t throw away my Christian faith based only on that, the testimony to the Bible’s truth is too strong to ignore.

4. What do you think are some of the biggest reasons that point to the existence of God, that anybody would be hard pressed to ignore?

The first one that comes to mind is His creation. It doesn’t take a scientist to recognize that our earth is beautiful, and almost unfathomably complex. The very fact that nature has the ability to cope with itself is a marvel. If you ever really want to have your mind blown, talk to a neurologist, or really any biologist of any kind. Even the most fundamental building blocks of life, things like DNA and amino acids, are in themselves mind boggling in their elegance and intricacy. To me (and apparently many others), the degree of brilliance and ingenuity shown by life forms suggests that a sort of Architect must exist and that it must be an extraordinarily creative being. Secondly, although a component of the first category, is mankind. I list mankind as an evidence of God’s reality because of our nature. We have consciousness. We can reason and laugh and argue and hate. We have the capacity to ask, “Why do I exist?” We also have the desire to find a satisfactory answer. Further, every human being has some sense of “fairness” or “decency” in him or her. Moral standards vary widely across the world (although I suggest they may be very similar at the core), but every self-aware human being has some sort of inner expectation of how he or she ought to be treated. Simply the existence of a transcendent law implies that an arbitrator has to exist for the law to exist.

In the book of Romans, Paul writes specifically that God has clearly demonstrated Himself through creation so that humans are without excuse (Romans 1:20-22). Speaking of the Bible, that is the last bit of evidence I will list here. I submit that the Bible is the authoritative Word of God, and that is actually a very substantiated claim. The Bible has probably been scrutinized more than any other historical document, and is still widely accepted as a soundly preserved and reliable historical document. I won’t go into a detailed description here about the evidences that support the Bible’s reliability, but I would love to tell you more about this sometime, since I feel that it’s extremely important.

5. Have you ever experienced periods of doubt in your religious beliefs? If so, how did you resolve that conflict?

h, definitely, it’s all part of being willing to open-mindedly search your faith. Dealing with doubt is the flipside of having faith, not the opposite of it. I go to the University of Texas at Dallas, where a person’s entire worth is measured between 2.0 and 4.0. Being one of the few Christians in the honors college isn’t easy, and I constantly hear attacks of one sort or another on religion of any kind, from all different angles. When I find myself doubting things about God or the Bible or anything related, I do a little research and/or consideration on the issue to see if it even holds water. Many times, research helps me see if there’s a legitimate need to change my conceptions about something. If nothing else, research helps me discover what the facts about my beliefs really are.

Now, most importantly, it isn’t only the research that reassures me of my faith in Christ. There’s a thing called the “Testimony of the Holy Spirit”. Because I’m a believer in Jesus Christ, God’s Spirit lives in me and testifies to the authenticity of my Christianity (Romans 8:16-17). It reminds me of my salvation like a receipt reminds one of a purchase – it represents something that is bought and paid for (Ephesians 1:13-14). It also works in me, affecting my actions and helping me grow to be a better person, the person God intended me to be. No one can see the inward testimony except me, but the outward change in my life is undeniable to any person that knows me well (Galatians 5:16-26, Ephesians 4:17-24, Philippians 3:17-21, Colossians 3:5-17, Titus 3:3-7, 1 John 2:3-6). And I’m not bragging on my own righteousness or anything like that. I’m saying that God is responsible for the change, not me. The Bible isn’t just a motivational book that inspires me to live better. It’s God’s work in me, and my submission to Him, that produces these changes (Philippians 2:12-13). Turns out it’s not just me seeing these effects either. Millions upon millions of my fellow believers across the globe have also experienced the same changes and have the same testimony in them.

6. Science lately has seemed to support the idea that much of our actions are motivated by our hormones and brain structure. For example higher prenatal testosterone levels are associated with more aggressiveness/risk taking and damage to certain parts of the brain can result in an inability to feel sympathy for others. Where does that leave room for the soul?

Turns out I’m one of those guys that has a lot of free floating testosterone, and I’m told that makes me excessively horny and angry… I’m definitely horny, I guarantee you that one, but I don’t know about angry all the time. Anyway, let me preface my answer by telling you a little about myself. When I graduated high school in 2006, I became extremely depressed. Didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, didn’t have the gumption to pursue anything, got a job I hated at Wendy’s, moved with my family across town. Everything was changing all at once on me. The depression grew worse and worse until my parents decided to take me to a neurologist – a capital fellow by the name of Dr. Frank Minirth. He looked at my psychological profile and almost instantly knew the problem. He told me that if we took a CT scan of my brain, the front end would light up like a Christmas tree. “Basically, your problem is that you’re brilliant.” Turns out my frontal cortex is too powerful for the rest of my brain to handle, causing it to go into “panic” mode on an almost daily basis.

In other words, I constantly live life with a feeling of stress, paranoia, or sadness. He put me on a VERY small dose of antidepressants (SSRIs) to help kick start me in dealing with my issues. Problem was, the antidepressants made me feel stupid, and they kind of froze my emotions so that I felt like Christian Bale in Equilibrium (awesome movie, by the way). When I discovered I could no longer write music, that was it, I dropped the meds cold turkey (don’t recommend that, but it worked for me). I made a conscious decision to live with my problem and find a way to function. I would rather be crazy than unmusical with memory lapses. And here I am, third year of college and so eccentric I scare people, but making it. When the problems arise, I just remember that I don’t have to be a slave to my feelings or impulses and choose to focus on the tasks at hand instead. Many days it’s hard to do that, but all I do is put one foot in front of the other.
I say all that to tell you that I don’t think our actions are necessarily DETERMINED by our brain structure or our chemicals, hormones, genetics, etc. I think that humans have the capacity to choose in spite of all that. Although our propensities are largely determined by the type of person we are (our brains, our chemical makeup, things like that), we still have a responsibility to choose a course of action for ourselves. As another thought, we have found ways to model thoughts as electromagnetic impulses (you’ve probably heard about this), but we can’t determine what causes those thoughts. Humans have a will to choose a course of action or to change their minds on something.

That certainly leaves a lot of room for a soul. There are other hints of “soul” in humans, too. We are all born with a sense of fairness or justice that appeals to a transcending law, we have a conviction to search and find meaning and truth in our lives, we all want to be loved (we can feel alone), we have many desires that aren’t purely selfish, we are born with knowledge that God exists and frequently fight over it (don’t believe me? Go read youtube video comments, He gets some serious press). These things alone suggest to me that there’s something more than physical about the human.

7. Evolutionary theorists have responded to the natural law of man by theorizing that moral sensibilities came about over time in humanity as a survival instinct. What is your response to this criticism?

This has never made sense to me. Many evolutionary theorists also hold that matter is all that exists (excluding a supernatural or metaphysical), in fact they would have to in order to be making this argument. If that is so, then humans are a biological part of an infinite continuum of cause and effect, and our actions are determined as a superposition sum of our biology and surroundings. In a system where only natural process exists, our choices are determined entirely by conditions that we may or may not recognize, and consequently there’s no reason to make explanation for morality of any kind. On an extra philosophical note, the epistemic implications of a closed system of matter are very depressing, to the point where we can’t even know that we don’t know anything. You might ask, what about the evolutionist that believes something beyond just nature exists? Well, if one believes in a supernatural something, there’s really no necessity to explain morality as a purely physical phenomenon, is there? Why so reluctant to believe that God created man in His own image?

8. In my interview with my friend David, he mentioned the idea of conservation of momentum as evidence for the non existence of the supernatural. Do you have a response to this?

Yeah, I’ve actually heard some things very similar to that before. Sounds like David might be becoming a naturalist – someone that believes matter is all that exists. Please correct me if I need clarification, I might have misunderstood, but what I gathered is that he believes every effect is the result of a cause (or many causes that may or may not be known); thus, if the “supernatural” (anything not physical) were to intervene it would disrupt the laws of physics as we observe them. However, I would like to point out that we cannot believe both the above AND contend that humans have a will to choose their course of action. That option simply isn’t logically open to us. If Conservation of Momentum cannot be applied to all observable reality, then clearly there is still room for supernatural/metaphysical involvement, and for human free will. I’m not saying that anything metaphysical has to exist, just that this leaves room for it.

If Conservation of Momentum CAN explain all reality, including human behavior, our actions are merely a product of stimuli, and we are entirely determined by the system we live in. For humans to be able to rise above the causes and make a distinct choice would require that humans somehow be different from the rest of matter. We would have to have something it does not, something that can defy the tide of causes and produce its own effect. I would classify that as supernatural because it doesn’t appear to be physically quantifiable (as of yet). I know this next comment is going to sound cliche, but another problem that comes to mind is the problem of origins. If a metaphysical force did not cause matter to exist in the beginning, what did?
I also seem to recall David talking about the metaphysical acting upon the physical, thus violating the laws of physics. Colossians 1:16-17 tells us that God sustains all things – I’d imagine that includes the laws of our physical world. I believe that Jesus violated those laws numerous times, and that indeed it still happens on a regular basis throughout the world today. There are a ton of recorded instances in the Bible where Jesus, and other men of God, did things that are arguably impossible without supernatural basis (John 20:30-31). Surely not all of these were mistranslated or misquoted. And even if those accounts are horribly mistaken, look at the testimony set forth by missionaries today. Sadly, we don’t get to hear about a lot of the things that Christians observe during foreign missions. I have some close family friends that have been missionaries in the past or are currently missionaries now to the far parts of the world. They’ve told me about experiences that make the hair stand up on my neck. For example, in some of the more remote places of the world, shamanism still has a strong hold over people. Fallen angels, or demons, as we usually call them, give the power to miraculously heal sicknesses and injuries (and do much darker things), forcing missionaries to prove that their God is greater before people will even think about following Jesus.

I’ve even heard of churches in South America that require a man to perform an honest to goodness resurrection (not a resuscitation, an actual death-to-life resurrection) before he can be an elder in the church, because the witch doctors can do pretty much anything else. I have a really close friend you could probably talk to more about these things, let me know if you want me to hook you up (it’d probably have to be via email or Skype or something, he’s in Aussie right now). In any case, I hope that I’ve at least provided sufficient food for thought. The supernatural is something I think we can’t ignore at this point, unless we have a good reason to disbelieve the mountain of evidence before us.

9. What would you say to people who have moral objections to Christianity’s stance on homosexuality?\

Well, I promise (again) I’m not trying to sound judgmental here, but I think we Christians have largely dropped the ball on dealing with homosexuality, and I’m thinking specifically of the American scene here. The simple fact is that we believe homosexuality is a sin, it’s listed clearly in the Bible alongside other sins. Unfortunately, it looks to me like we’ve demonized homosexuality as the ultimate sin when that is certainly not the case, and consequently shunned an entire group of people that would benefit far better from our acceptance. Just look at who Jesus spent His time with – thieves, liars, tax collectors (oh heavens no!), prostitutes…basically anybody He could’ve hung out with to piss off the “religious” folks of the day. Jesus was fond of pointing out that self-righteous folks already have their own righteousness, why would they need His (Matthew 9:12-13)?

The fact that homosexuality is a sin certainly doesn’t mean we have any reason to hate homosexuals – it SHOULD mean we have all the more reason to love them and bring them into our community. The change comes AFTER that. We shame our Lord when we take His standard for living and slap it on others that don’t follow or worship Him. We can’t expect people to live up to our standard until they’ve met the Person that gives it, and decided on giving over to Him. And how will they ever meet Him if all they ever see from us is condemnation? All people should be encouraged to come to Jesus as they are. Once they’ve come, they don’t stay that way.

10. Is there anything else you would like to say?

In closing, I’d like to encourage everyone that has read this blog to believe whatever they want to believe. The purpose of this interview (at least on my end) was to give everyone an answer as to why I’m a Christian, not to make you all believe as I do. I’ve chosen to walk this walk because I feel that it’s a very consistent, rationally defensible, fulfilling system of belief. It’s not just religious jargon or a manmade system, it has a legitimate claim to divine origin. And in the very worst case, if I’m completely and utterly wrong about everything, and Jesus wasn’t really God, and God doesn’t even exist, then certainly I’m living the most fulfilling and satisfying life that any wrong guy ever lived. God gives us more significance than anything in this world can, because He has created people in His image. He made us able to create, to love, to reason, to choose, to feel, to be uniquely different from one another, to be clever, to be artistic, and to show ingenuity in our world. He motivates me to be the best I can be at everything I do, because I know that He made me with a purpose and a future in mind (Jeremiah 29:11). He gives me joy and hope in this life. Joy, because even though life only gets tougher as I get older, I know that God will never leave my side (Hebrews 13:5). Hope, because His thoughts about me outnumber the grains of sand on the seashore (Psalm 139), and He takes care of me every day of my life. He protects me and leads me through life like a guiding light (Psalm 119:105, Psalm 32:8).

Time and time again, I’ve prayed for help, and He has answered. And not only will I testify to this, millions upon millions of others claim the same faith, and our number grows daily. Followers of God have been villainized and slaughtered countless times dating back to before Jesus ever appeared, but still the Word of a Savior for mankind has been passed on. The earliest Christians, people who knew Jesus personally, were savagely persecuted and pressed to deny what they professed about Jesus, and their certainty was so great that they rather chose death. Voltaire predicted that within 100 years of his death Christianity would have died out entirely, and within fifty years of his death, Geneva Bible Society was printing Bibles in his home.

Everyone knows there are a lot of posers out there, and many more that misunderstand the real core of Christianity, but the “god” they proclaim is one of their own making, not the real deal. I strongly urge any curious soul to search the Scriptures and find the real One they contain. He isn’t a rigid, cold-hearted God of rules and cosmic killjoyness. He isn’t a pansy piece of fluff that gives everyone a latte and tells them to feel good about life all the time. He isn’t a giant Santa Claus that vends health and wealth if you just pray hard enough and send in your handkerchief with money. He’s real, personal, approachable, He has made Himself available to us through Jesus Christ, and He has made Himself discoverable through His creation and His Word.