Buying Into the Story

Yesterday I called my sis and we visited for awhile. Now, there’s nothing much unusual about that since telephones have been in service for well over a hundred years. What was unusual was that she was on a train parked at a station somewhere in Illinois and I had on the PC in front of me an aerial shot of the place where it was parked.

While visiting with her, I pointed out the water tower, the depot and museum. When she told me they were starting to move again, I told her that she should be starting a right curve, which she validated.

Additionally, since we were in the Wichita area and she had a Wichita cell phone, I dialed a local, seven digit number and her phone rang on a train in a small town in Illinois.

I don’t know how much awareness you have of the incredible technology that makes all of that possible. I don’t know either, but I have had electronics training (years ago), and have some dim, dark idea of the complexity of the systems that make things like cell phones and instantly available aerial photos available on demand.

The data packets that constituted my voice could easily have taken a route to Illinois via California or Canada. Those that made up my sister’s voice very well may have come to Wichita via an entirely different route, and those routes could have changed many, many times in the course of the five minute conversation. Fiber (optical), landline (copper wires), microwave, satellite…all those methods and more may have been involved in getting an ordinary phone call to and from where it was supposed to be.

Some years ago, the number 1,000,000,000,000,000 (I think that’s correct…One quadrillion) was given as the amount of bits per second that the human brain could process. An older number in the same article was given as ten sextillion bits of information. Whatever the number, it is incredibly high and belies a kind of design that fits it all inside a rather smallish mass of skin and bone, with corresponding connections and energy supply (blood). I don’t know but what we will eventually develop computers that will process faster or store more information. If we do, that’s OK. What matters is that this brain has been around for many, many thousands of years and there are some seven billion of them on the planet even now. Someone greater than these brains had to be the one who designed and built it.

This weekend we celebrate the foundational moment of the creation of Christianity. The moment when, we believe, the only Begotten of God conquered death and destruction and paved the way for all of us to do likewise through the power of the Living God. Fantastic as the Easter story sounds to ears not accustomed to it, it is even more fantastic to believe that our brains came into existence by chance and that we are products of an inanimate process which happened to end up with all that we see and know now.

I don’t know about you, but I’ll buy into the Jesus is risen story any day over the existence by chance story.