Thinking, Religion Don't Mix: Study

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I think there is truth in the report. Atheists and agnostics do tend to be quite logical thinkers and although sometimes hostile to religion, they often enjoy the subject as it gives them an opportunity to exercise their need for debate. Religion does use philosophy and science and there are many great analytical thinkers in religious communities but there is a mindfulness in true religion which acknowledges truth as having many forms and expressions. Truth is not simply a collection of facts. Truth is a virtue which can be found in art, beauty, poetry, goodness, charity etc. These of course have been emphasised as virtuous, where as rational free thinking has been viewed with skepticism. The reason for this is partly due to the schisms which have divided people and caused much suffering. And I was one of the ones who got the ball question wrong.

Man didn't actually know there was a "beginning" to our universe until 1924. The Bible's first statement is "In the beginning....". The Bible says "the circle of the earth is suspended upon nothing" this statement is 4000 years old. Geneticists have not found how 4 life forms could have diverged from one source and do not know how they are connected, ostensibly by a singular ooze pool, a singular spontaneous eruption of life. The Bible has already  listed these 4 types of life...this comment in the New Testament is 2000 years old. Plate-tectonics is referred to in Genesis, Peleg was named after the event where God "cut" the continents.   Entropy was cited by Jesus over 2000 years ago. He said "heaven and earth shall pass away, but My word shall never pass away". Man's feeble understanding of entropy only came with the so-called age of enlightenment, thousands of years later. None of these issues can logically claim Jesus was a plagiarist. I might assert that it is the other way around. The collision of strings creating the universe? The Bible says it was the collision of God's vocal chords, for He spoke all matter into existence. No worthy God should be confined to do less. Why challenge His abilities reducing Him only to what we can understand, AKA mortality?   Since only early last century, we are pondering what it is that holds all things together, one name of it was gluon. Just recently, man decides it must be dark energy, dark matter or phantom matter/energy. But the Bible says that "by Him all things are held together". Yet the Bible said this at a time when no one was asking the question, pondered or conceived that adhesion was a problem or was going to be science's final question. Einsteins undulating space, flexible space and all other fabric analogies referring to space seem novel now, even ingenious until you read the ancient Biblical account: "God stretches forth the heavens as a curtain"....I say deposit that in the "been there done that" dept.   The Drake formula mistakenly includes all galaxies to calculate the odds of life. Fact is, only 1 in 10 galaxies can support carbon based life as we know it. And then, within this galaxy, there are only two filament strands where life is possible, totaling only 15 cubic light years volume for each strand. This greatly narrows the odds. There are at least 26 other constraints the Drake effort ignores, stacking, even slandering actual science for the true odds other life exists in the universe. This incoherency renders SETI a profound fashionable waste of time. It makes these pseudo scientists less reasonable that those of us who are devout.    The odds alone for 1000 amino acids to assemble creating DNA is 10 to the 243rd power. No evidence that a mutation benefiting the host has ever been found. That some "believers" ascribe adaption as a mutation ignores the coded change already within the gene. Genetic shuffling or creation is not a mutation but an amendment.   Galileo was a Christian and so was Newton. Even Einstein believed in God. Our founders who were deists didn't slander & ridicule God as men do today. They just professed not knowing Who He was.   One last thing to consider. For years we searched for black-holes by the mere belief that they existed. This pursuit was rational due to seeking for a reason for inexplicable properties effecting galactic physics. We had faith they existed. So, by faith, man searched. He now believes in black holes although he has never seen one. He only knows they exist, and where, because of their influence upon those things close to it. It is the same belief, the same faith, we exercise for God. You will know He exists by seeking those who are close to Him.     Science is only catching up and inadvertently acknowledging the things of God. A God who is really God, will not be insecure and will subject Himself to His creation. If He loves what He created, He will even die for it. He does so knowing He has the power of life over death. This is why Jesus was resurrected and we have chosen our date to honor that. Can you cite a better reason for a date benchmark?  Seek the God Who has displayed such power like you seek the black hole's, which is more powerful in physics than anything. Likewise, God is more powerful in spirit than anything.   Only the Bible gives us the source of the Jew. The Messiah was to come from them. The Messiah will return according to Biblical predictions.  The Jew's troubles and persecutions were all listed in Deuteronomy. The Jew returning to their land is an "end of days" event. This, among many other things,  has been fulfilled. The Bible can be trusted to predict what will happen and roughly when as we approach the end of days and what is referred to as the Day of the Lord. You would do well to shelve the worry about science's "solutions", that it can compete with spiritual things, and heed Biblical superiority regarding the destiny of man.   The discovery of the accelerating universe by Prof Saul Perlmutter 1995, supports a passage in the Bible. His discovery is incomprehensible, yet with this verse makes the most sense of any option known to date: "In Him we live, move and have our being"...all 'things" are attracted to Him. If you do not get this, likely you did fare well on the baseball and bat financial ledger quiz...ball .05 cents. What of those of us who flew through both concepts? "God uses the foolish things to confound the wise". Here's the real question to ask, if "thinking and religion don't mix", what is thinking?