HOW MANY FINGERS POINT TO GOD
On the hand of probability, we now have five fingers pointing to God.
Last year I inherited an opportunity. My four children were all grown. Our home consisted of my husband, myself, and our two dogs. Last year my husband deployed. For half a year, it was me and the dogs.
Having more time on my hands than I knew what to do with, I decided to do something positive. I decided to go to church and embed myself in a positive community (I know, not all churches are positive, but we found one after moving to Pennsylvania three and a half years ago that was awesome!). I also began to read a book my husband bought me. A book that challenged my entire worldview.
About six months before he deployed, we were driving back from seeing our youngest son a few states over, where he was stationed (he followed in my husband’s footsteps and joined the Air Force). We were looking for a good podcast since we had three hours to go. I happened across an interview of orthopedic spine surgeon Dr. Mary Neal.
Dr. Neal shared openly about a river kayaking trip she took to Mexico. As she was kayaking rapid waters, she was forced to go down a waterfall. The fall pinned her beneath the water, trapped. 30 min was the time she was trapped and she shared that by that time they switch from rescue mode to body retrieval.
She shared that as she was dying, she said to herself, “God’s will be done.” All of a sudden, she recalls feeling more alive than she had ever felt. She proceeded to have a full blown near-death experience, or NDE.
I’m going to be honest. I had only seen NDEs in movies where people go through a tunnel and figured it was just the brain dreaming, etc. Mary was in a unique position. She knew all about neurology and biology as a surgeon. She knew that to experience anything, including a dream, meant that there had to be oxygen and brainwaves. Both are absent during actual death.
She also, as a brain surgeon, had a lot to lose by going public. The majority of people in the medical community equate the brain with our consciousness and anything “supernatural” or that doesn’t fit in the paradigm of materialism is poo-poo’d. I noted her bravery. I also noted that the things she described were pretty outstanding.
Fast forward to my husband buying me a book on NDE’s before he left after he saw how fascinated I was.
I haven’t always believed there was more to life than meets the eye. I was an atheist for years. Then I had a few experiences I couldn’t discount. One of which was a miraculous event that defied probability more than three times. That direct experience opened my mind to there being not only more to life than meets the eye, but also a higher intelligence that intervenes and cares. As Shakespeare put it when he wrote Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
The book my husband bought ended up changing my entire spiritual outlook on truth, purpose, and life. It was written by John Burke, an engineer with a skeptical mindset who was searching for the truth. He was an agnostic who had never been convinced either way whether we were indeed created or we were the result of random, unguided mutations. I immediately felt solidarity with his level of skepticism.
One of my favorite quotes since my twenties was by Thomas Mann, “The best thing about a true skeptic is that they consider all possibilities.” So after the direct experience I had, agnosticism and theism were natural avenues I explored. I am such a skeptic that I began to search for the truth. I literally didn’t and don’t, to this day, care what the truth of all that is. What I care about is finding the actual truth in reality and setting aside what I want to be true.
One truth I’ve come to know and embrace is that reality will never bend to our beliefs. But our experience of reality will bend to our beliefs, and that reality trips a lot of people up on their quest for the truth.
But, I digress. Let’s get back to John Burke. John’s entire life trajectory was transformed by NDEs. He shared that when his father was dying, he came across one of the first books published on NDE research by Raymond Moody. John also shared how he thought, ‘Well, this could be the evidence I have been looking for.’
John found so much medically documented evidence for life after death that he gave up engineering, became a pastor, and is currently a prominent NDE researcher. John has studied thousands of NDEs. I read through Imagine Heaven within a week and then immediately purchased Imagine the God of Heaven.
What I love about John’s approach is that he never lost his skepticism. In order for an NDE report to be valid, it must be validated. In other words, there must be medical evidence that can be verified and is documented. People making up an NDE story to make a spiritual point, doesn’t count. As a pure-hearted skeptic, I appreciate this.
His work led me on a journey I never imagined. I never knew that any scientific, medical and mathematical proof of “God” existed. When I began asking the bigger questions about God and religion as a teenager, I didn’t find much evidence.
What I did find at the time were some truly fascinating philosophies, but the world is full of mental masturbation (I don’t say this lightly. It is a problem that keeps people spinning away from truth), so those couldn’t quench the skeptic in me, and I landed on atheism. It was a safer bet in my mind to minimize factors that could be way bigger than me and couldn’t be physically measured.
I will take you on my half-year journey filled with mind-boggling discoveries and truths that are not as hidden as I once thought. Truth is hidden to the exact same degree that we carry an internal bias. Remove the bias, and many truths become obvious.
The one thing I’m truly grateful for in my search for the truth of why we are here and who we are is the same thing that was my biggest frustration. When I was young, after seeing a slideshow from my teacher about her trip to India and some Buddhist temples, I wondered, ‘Which religion is the true religion? They can’t all be true, yet they all claim to be true.’ My mom, bless her heart, who didn’t know how to answer the deeper questions, answered, “Whichever one you believe.” I knew that couldn’t be true, so my quest began when I was a youngin in the second grade.
Before we dive, I offer a consideration that reality is not as simple as we wish. I’m reminded of a short story I came across (I’m paraphrasing):
One day a brain surgeon was chatting with an astronaut. The astronaut admitted, “You know I’ve been to space and back and I’ve never seen God.” The surgeon reflected for a bit and then realized, “You know I’ve done hundreds of brain surgeries, and I’ve never seen a thought.”
While my husband was gone for half a year, my thirst for truth and heart of skepticism (I only trusted medically, scientifically validated sources, especially if they were of mainstream science) came to life! I would pore through new documentation and locate new sources each night.
I discovered five fingers of truth pointing to intelligent design. The evidence of new discoveries is so strong that in 2016 a convention called “New Trends in Evolutionary Biology” was held in London by one of the highest-regarded scientific societies, called the Royal Society, to try to rework a theory of how we arrived here, since Darwin’s theory of evolution was no longer able to answer the full question. (Darwin lived in a time when genetics, epigenetics and cellular cytology were not yet known.)
According to Darwin himself (1859), in his well-known scientific contribution to the theory of evolution, The Origin of Species, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” It turns out cellular complexity has not only been discovered, but it is also so complex that even materialistic atheists marvel.
1. Cellular Complexity –
Do complex organisms that could not physically be formed by slight and successive modifications exist? All around us.
Look at the extreme complexity of the eye, imaginal discs, a blood clot, the spinal cord, the flagellar motor within the cell, epigenetics. The discovery of layers upon layers of cellular complexity, sophisticated engineering, contingency codes within codes within the cell, and the vast levels of epigenetic factors have all led to the return of a super intellect or intelligent designer. Small adaptations are well documented, as in the cold virus from season to season. However, mutations in complex systems usually disintegrate into something unhelpful, not perfection of high-caliber engineering.
Scientists trying to prove evolution in a lab noted that it was doable to delete code (remove cohesive information) with a mutation, but adding new cohesive information (producing new outputs) requires exact protein sequencing.7
Why are these findings mind-blowing? Steve Laufmann sums it up, “We can’t oxygenate ourselves unless six systems are in full operation. But each of these systems are made of cells and those cells require oxygen which none of them can get unless all the systems are in place.” In other words, if you go to build a massive bridge over a river, the step-by-step process required to produce the end result can’t happen by accidentally throwing stones long enough, even over millions and millions of years. This just isn’t probable or possible without a builder. Complex codes always have a coder.
Another fact to consider is the information pathways embedded within us. There is no evidential path to explain how the codes within our DNA and epigenomes (DNA methylation, histone modification and cellular differentiation) can occur from chemical reactions. Chemical reactions don’t create codes. Dr. Stephen Meyers simplifies the conundrum by noting that if we see a turtle up on top of fence post, we know the turtle didn’t get there by itself. It literally can’t. Someone had to put it there for the possibility to exist because probability won’t allow for it.
There are thousands of turtles on the fence post being discovered globally. Too many to not realize we are, in fact, now face-to-face scientifically with a superintelligence capable of engineering feats that blow our technologies out of the water.
An atheist asked a rabbi, “How do you know God exists?” The rabbi asked back, “What are the odds that if I spill this jar of ink that it will spill onto the paper as a beautiful poem?” The agnostic replied, “None.” Intelligence is required for coherence.
The sources outlining the evidence include:
Darwin’s Doubt - HERE
Epigenetics and the Architect - HERE
The Origin of Information – video HERE
The Return of the God Hypothesis - HERE
The Story of Everything - HERE
Signature in the Cell - HERE
Uncommon Knowledge Evidence - HERE
2. Fine Tuning –
It turns out the Solar System and universe are so perfectly tuned for life that it defies probability by a long shot, or hyper exponentially. From the strength of gravity to the mass of a single particle. Everything is calibrated with such staggering precision that even a fractional deviation would have made stars, chemistry, or life itself impossible. “If the rate of expansion, one second after the Big Bang, had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size.” – The Universe Designed
The sources of evidence include:
The Story of Everything - HERE
Universe Designed - Documentary HERE
Dr. Jay Richards – Interview HERE / The Privileged Planet book HERE
Uncommon Knowledge on Origin - HERE
The Physics Discovery - HERE
Why Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” Got it Wrong – video HERE
3. Consciousness –
Medically verified deaths, where people come back to life and report what they experience, are on the rise. When reports of people’s experiences included information they should not know and is evidentially corroborated, even the hardest skeptics and atheists had to take pause and begin formal research. Consciousness has now been proven and medically documented to not be housed in the brain alone and to survive beyond the body’s death. This has occurred to the point that it is now documented in prominent medical journals in mainstream science.
“Being a scientist, you don’t run away from things you don’t understand. You run towards them to try to understand them.” – Dr. Bruce Greyson, MD
The sources of evidence include:
After Death – Documentary of verified NDEs HERE
Is the Soul Real? Neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor Explores the Evidence - HERE
John Burke, Imagine Heaven – compilation of research HERE
John Burke – Pilot Dies, podcast HERE
NDE Evidence – National Library of Medicine - HERE
NDE Evidence - Dr. Bruce Greyson - HERE
Rethinking Death, Parnia Labs at NYU - HERE
What Happens When We Die? University of Chicago - HERE
Before we proceed and examine the last two fingers pointing to God, I have a strong caveat worth consideration.
After the discovery of an intelligent designer and proof that our consciousness or spirit, lives beyond the physical, I had to ask the question… If God exists and created life as we know it, then which religion got it right and what is the evidence?
The answer to this question astounded me. I discovered that no religion is of God. Religion is a man-made concept. However, there is a truth about God, God’s spirit, and God’s outreach to elevate our lives and to love us.
I discovered through my six months of research that the teachings of Jesus presented the closest explanation to the truth of life, our reality, and our life experience. I was NOT expecting to find this. I expected the new age explanation that everything is “light and love” to be the truest. In fact, new age teachings had the most illusions and less truth due to fantasizing.
It also became apparent that the non-religious “Christians” have gotten the closest to the truth. They consider themselves disciples of the teachings of Christ, non-denominational, versus religious box-checkers who Jesus himself warned against multiple times.
In other words, God wants a personal relationship with each of us and not for us to make any religion our god.
Jesus came as a bridge. Sadly – I mean, I was really literally devastated and shocked to learn – people who have NDEs didn’t all go to heaven. When we disregard or deny God, not only are we denying a part of ourselves, but we are also denying our source.
When anyone denies God, God responds, “as you wish”. God will never force anyone to have a relationship. So, when Jesus teaches us that he came to save and he provided the way, there is a good reason. Being saved from the absence of God, which is also an absence from love (and is not a good place to be), is the most important journey your soul will ever take.
Let’s explore further the proof that Jesus came as the bridge to God.Jesus provides The Way. He also provides us all with the antidote of healing and hope in a hurting world filled with injustice, division, deception, and evil.
4. Shroud of Turin –
Now touted as the first photograph ever found, before any technology existed. However, it is a photographic negative instead of a photographic positive.
New scientific examination has discovered the Shroud of Turin is a game changer in evidential proof that something not of this world occurred with this cloth.
Dr. Jeremiah Johnston shares in his book, The Jesus Discoveries, “Paolo Di Lazzaro and his team at ENEA Labs in Rome spent five years trying to answer what formed the image on the Shroud.” Everything had been ruled out.
He continues, “They concluded it would take a burst of 34,000 billion watts of radiant energy delivered in one 40-billionth of a second to create the image. No one has that technology. No one.” And that was without it burning up and this was 2,000 years ago.
The sources of evidence include:
The Jesus Discoveries: 10 Historic Finds that Bring Us Face to Face With Jesus, by Jeremiah J. Johnston, PdD - HERE
Shroud of Turin – Physical Evidence – podcast videoHERE
TEDx Via Della Conciliazione – The Shroud Examined HERE
5. Historical Evidence –
So if Jesus’s resurrection was indicated and defied probability. What then is the evidence of Jesus’s life and death beyond what is captured in the Bible? Afterall, the bible would carry a bias. What evidence lies beyond? It turns out a lot.
Furthermore, many atheists and agnostics have began investigations with the goal of disproving Jesus. What they found was that there is ample evidence. J. Warner Wallace is one of them. He is a nationally recognized cold-case homicide detective. Also, Lee Strobel, a Yale Law graduate and seasoned journalist, spent two years as an atheist researching evidence. He is now one of the highest-regarded Christian apologists.
The sources of evidence include:
Case Closed: A Detective Investigates the Resurrection by J. Warner Wallace HERE
Cold Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels, by J. Warner Wallace HERE
Forensic Faith - by J. Warner Wallace HERE
Lee Strobel books - HERE
The Case for Christ - HERE
The Case for Heaven, by Lee Strobel - HERE
Universe Designed - Documentary HERE
The Hand of Probability –
All of the evidence has one unifying factor. All evidence defies probability.
It stands to reason that if something defies probability once, it could be a coincidence. But if probability is being blown out of the water in hundreds and thousands of ways, then it is time to set aside our bias and interpretations and look at the truth, plain and clear.
From the shroud that still resists scientific replication, to the near-death accounts that echo across cultures and centuries, from the epigenetic switches that let a single cell become a heart or a hand, to the physics so finely tuned it seems threaded on a needle's edge, mystery keeps showing up exactly where certainty should reign. Each of these, on its own, could be dismissed as coincidence, but together they demonstrate one truth. The formula to locate God will always defy probability.
The sources of evidence include:
