Randomness is Not a Scientific Explanation
Randomness can never be a scientific explanation, since we can never know that something is random. At best, saying something is random is shorthand for “we don’t know.” So, when scientists state the origin of something in our universe is random, they do not know the origin.
It is common in the sciences to claim aspects of our universe are random:
- In evolution, mutations are random.
- In quantum physics, the wave collapse is random.
- In biology, much of the genome is random.
- In business theory, organizational ecologists state new ideas are random.
There is a general idea that everything new has its origins in randomness. This is because within our current philosophy of science, the two fundamental causes in our universe boil down to randomness and necessity. Since necessity never creates anything new, then by process of elimination the source of newness must be randomness. Similar to how the ancient Greeks believed the universe originated from chaos.
You Might also like
-
UMC Bishops Request 2026 General Conference as Hundreds More Churches Disaffiliate
The 2026 General Conference would focus on re-establishing connection within the United Methodist Church, lamenting, healing and recasting the mission and vision for the mainline denomination after years of strife over the ordination and marriage of its LGBTQ members, according to a press release published Monday (May 8) on the Council of Bishops’ website.
CHICAGO (RNS) — United Methodist bishops have proposed a five-day meeting of the denomination’s global decision-making body, the General Conference, in May 2026.
The announcement comes at the end of the Council of Bishops’ spring meeting last week in Chicago and a weekend that saw hundreds of United Methodist churches in the United States leave the denomination.
The 2026 General Conference would focus on re-establishing connection within the United Methodist Church, lamenting, healing and recasting the mission and vision for the mainline denomination after years of strife over the ordination and marriage of its LGBTQ members, according to a press release published Monday (May 8) on the Council of Bishops’ website.
Delegates to the General Conference also would consider a more regional governance structure to better support the remaining denomination, which currently numbers about 30,000 U.S. churches.
“I admit to you I’m eager to get past all this. I want us to stop talking about disaffiliations,” Bishop Thomas Bickerton, president of the Council of Bishops, said during the bishops’ meeting, which ran April 30 to May 5.
“I’m worried genuinely that we’ve spent more time on those that are leaving than focusing our energy on those who are staying.”
Delegates to the 2020 General Conference meeting had been expected to consider a proposal to split the denomination over its disagreement on sexuality and help create a new, theologically conservative denomination called the Global Methodist Church. That would allow the United Methodist Church to change language in its Book of Discipline that bars same-sex marriages and LGBTQ clergy.
Read More
Related Posts: -
Who Is the LORD? | Exodus 5
Although our justification before God was completed entirely, once for all, upon the cross of Christ, our final deliverance from sin is just as much of a process as Israel’s exodus. We are being sanctified in Christ each day, so we need the gospel just as much today as we did whenever we first believed. Indeed, we will often find that the deeper the gospel penetrates our hearts, the harder our sinful flesh fight back. Or we find that during times of pain and affliction how easy is it to return to the entrenched paths of sin for “comfort,” just as the Israelites first brought their complaint to Pharaoh.
As last, here in the fifth chapter of Exodus, we find the first confrontation between Moses and Pharaoh. Through all of his faults and fears, Moses returned to Egypt with his brother Aaron and told the elders of Israel all that God had spoken to him. In response, they believed what Moses had said and worshiped the LORD. Now, with the support of his people behind him, the prophet of God is ready to speak directly to the king of Egypt.
Thus Says the Lord // Verses 1-3
Afterward Moses and Aaron went and said to Pharaoh… After receiving the support of the elders of Israel, Moses and Aaron were clearly not interested in wasting time. How exactly they were able to get a standing before the king of Egypt so quickly is not mentioned here, but I would assume that the gravitas of these two messengers of the Most High would have convinced Pharaoh’s servants that their message was an important matter to attend to.
In this initial dialogue with Pharaoh, which we should remember was happening between Aaron and the mouth of Pharaoh while Moses and Pharaoh watched the proceedings and perhaps whispered in the ear of their ‘prophet,’ Moses and Aaron speak twice. Their initial pronouncement is a direct demand, coming from the very mouth of the Great I Am: Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, “Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.” Then after Pharaoh dismisses the words of the Almighty, the prophets speak again: The God of the Hebrews has met with us. Please let us go a three days’ journey into the wilderness that we may sacrifice to the LORD our God, lest he fall upon us with pestilence or with the sword.
Many have noted the shift in tone between their first and second statements, for the first is an authoritative demand from God while the second appears to be a polite request from Moses and Aaron. We should remember, however, that God explicitly commanded Moses to speak the words of their second statement back in 3:18. Therefore, it is not as if Moses and Aaron were cowering down after meeting the initial opposition of Pharaoh. Indeed, as we noted before, the LORD is apparently giving Pharaoh this simple request merely to let the Israelites go a three-days’ journey in order to display the hardness of the king’s heart. It is to reveal that Pharaoh would not even let the Hebrews go temporarily. Thus, it is not as if things would have been any different if the LORD had offered a compromise to Pharaoh.
As dismissive as Pharaoh’s response is, let us draw this bit of encouragement: success in evangelism is not measured by the response of the receiver but by the faithfulness of the herald. Moses and Aaron were faithful in their mission to proclaim God’s Word, even though we have already been told that Pharaoh would not listen. Nevertheless, God intended to pile up His warnings to Pharaoh so that Pharaoh would be that much more worthy of judgment. Although we should pray mightily for the salvation of everyone around us, we would do well to remember that God’s mercy and judgment are the same today. Although we are to proclaim the gospel to everyone, only some will be believe, and the others will have heaped greater judgment upon themselves for having also rejected God’s mercy and grace.The final phrase of their proclamation is an interesting one: lest he fall upon us with pestilence or with the sword. I do not think that we should read this as Moses and Aaron speaking of God’s judgment solely upon the Israelites; instead, it seems that they were still speaking of themselves as belonging to the nation of Egypt, which goes right along with this initial request to sacrifice in the wilderness and then return. Again, let us stress that the LORD is giving Pharaoh the great mercy of warning him of the coming judgment. Thankfully, this is how God almost always operates. He gives opportunity after opportunity for repentance before finally bringing down the sword of His justice and wrath. This will become incredibly clear as each of the plagues reveals the stubbornness of Pharaoh to be more and more worthy of God’s judgment.
Before discussing Pharoah’s responses, Philip Ryken makes an excellent point on how Christians might learn from the statements of Moses and Aaron:
This dialogue is a model for bold Christian witness. Moses and Aaron began by telling Pharaoh exactly what he had to do. But they also took the time to explain who was making this demand and why and what would happen if it wasn’t met. The God of Israel was demanding freedom for his people. He was making this demand so that he could be glorified in their worship, and if his demand was not met, he would respond with swift and terrible justice.
Christians ought to adopt a similar strategy in presenting the good news about Jesus Christ. The gospel is first of all a demand in which God commands sinners to repent and believe in his Son. But that demand requires some explanation. To repent is to be sorry for sin and turn away from it. To believe in God’s Son is to trust in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ as the full payment for one’s sin. Christians also need to be prepared to explain why God makes this demand. Very simply, it is because those who refuse to come to Christ will be lost in their sins and will suffer the eternal punishment of God’s wrath. If you are not a Christian, consider yourself warned! Like Pharaoh, you have heard what God demands, as well as the consequences of refusing him.[1]
Pharaoh’s initial response to Moses and Aaron declaring, “Thus says the LORD…” is a perfect insight into the heart of this prideful monarch: Who is the LORD, that I should obey his voice and let Israel go? I do not know the LORD, and moreover, I will not let Israel go.Let us take a moment, however, to walk in Pharaoh’s shoes. Imagine the audacity of these demands from the perspective of Pharaoh. He believed himself to be a son of the gods, a god-man, both human and divine. And before him were two representatives from a nation of slaves, speaking on behalf of their God, a God who had let them endure slavery for four hundred years. Pharaoh’s response is, therefore, cold and honest, and as a self-proclaimed deity, he directed his skepticism and hostility directly at the God who had sent Moses and Aaron.
We see that skepticism and hostility in Pharaoh’s first question: who is the LORD, that I should obey his voice and let Israel go? Pharaoh’s ignorance of the LORD was willful. Like all sinners until God intervenes, his skepticism of the LORD was directly tied to his refusal to obey God’s commands. Indeed, notice that Pharaoh’s response is essentially to say that he does not recognize the LORD as God but even if he did, he would not obey him. Citing Ryken again, he points out that Pharaoh’s answer reveals a pattern of unbelief among unbelievers in general:
Unbelief is partly an intellectual problem: the unbeliever does not know the Lord’s name. It is partly a spiritual problem: the unbeliever refuses to obey the Lord’s will. But often it is also a social problem: the unbeliever does not care for the Lord’s people.[2]
This is an important point to make because too often we treat most unbelief as purely intellectual, as if there were no other factors to consider. Paul, however, teaches us that all people know God as the Creator and the Lawgiver, and those who claim otherwise “suppress the truth” (Romans 1:18). While intellectual problems certainly do factor into unbelief, they are very rarely the primary problem once the heart of the matter is reached.
We can also use Pharaoh’s skeptic response to the command of the LORD to push back against the commonly held modern notion of skepticism as virtuous. Of course, as secularism increasingly uncovers itself to be just as religious as any other religion, that notion is somewhat going out of fashion. Yet it continues to hang on, nonetheless. While a certain degree of skepticism is necessary for scientific inquiry,[3] skepticism as a worldview is path to nihilism. C. S. Lewis wrote of this danger, saying:
But you cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.[4]Skepticism itself is not a virtue. Like the scoffer of Psalms and Proverbs, the perpetual skeptic sees through everything until he makes himself blind, unable to see at all.
Read More
-
B.B. Warfield on “Antichrist”
According to Warfield, Antichrist then is not so much a person, but any heresy denying the incarnation (and by implication, the Trinity). To deny that Jesus is God in flesh is to do the work of Antichrist. This applied to the proto-Gnostics of John’s day and certainly to the Arians in the centuries which followed.
One of the most thought provoking discussions of “Antichrist” comes from B.B. Warfield. In one of his last essays written for publication before his death in February of 1921, Warfield addressed the matter of the biblical use of the term “Antichrist” as found in John’s epistles. The Lion of Princeton acknowledges that there is a broader use of the term (the so-called theological use, i.e., “the Antichrist”), which he describes as a composite photograph made up of John’s “antichrist” (found in his epistles), Paul’s “man of lawlessness” (2 Thessalonians 2:1-12), and the beast and false prophet from the Book of Revelation (chapter 13). Warfield finds the evidence for such a composite photograph of an Antichrist far from compelling.
In this essay (re-printed in B.B. Warfield, “Antichrist” in Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol. 1, ed John E. Meeter (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1980), Warfield addresses John’s use of the term “Antichrist” in his epistles. Warfield asks and answers the question, “to what does John refer when he speaks of Antichrist?”
Warfield begins with an important qualification—the context for John’s warning about this foe.We read of Antichrist nowhere in the New Testament except in certain passages of the Epistles of John (1 John ii. 18, 22; iv. 3; 2 John 7). What is taught in these passages constitutes the whole New Testament doctrine of Antichrist. It is common it is true, to connect with this doctrine what is said by our Lord of false christs and false prophets; by Paul of the Man of Sin; by the Apocalypse of the Beasts which come up out of the deep and the sea. The warrant for labeling the composite photograph thus obtained with the name of Antichrist is not very apparent . . . .The name of Antichrist occurs in connection with none of them, except that presented in the passages of the Epistles of John already indicated; and both the name and the figure denoted by it, to all appearance, occur there first in extant literature.[1]
Warfield’s point is an important one and rarely considered. There is a specific biblical usage of the term Antichrist as found in John’s epistles, the only place where the word appears in Scripture. Warfield contends that this evidence ought to be considered quite apart from Paul’s “man of lawlessness” and John’s beast and false prophet.
When seen in this light, it is clear that Antichrist was already a source of controversy in the apostolic church. John does not identity a specific individual who warned of a coming Antichrist, but he does allude to false teaching then present in the churches of Asia Minor. Says Warfield…
Read More
Related Posts: