The Current Struggle

I don't get many newsletters in the mail but I did have two arrive on the same day this past week that both made reference to the West's struggle with Islam.
In the first newsletter, Ravi Zacharias warns that the West's inability to consider the potential impacts of Islam may result in the continuation of our way of life being 'theoretical'. Zacharias says:
"By the complete failure of the West to understand Islam and its secular prophets who evict Christianity from the academy, we are gambling away our own destiny. If this trend continues the survival of our cultural context will become 'merely academic'." - Ravi Zacharias, RZIM Volume 11 Fall 2007.
The second newsletter contains a piece written by former Navy pilot Stuart Witt who describes his experience on a flight which transported the body of American Marine Jared Landaker (pictured above) home to California. Lieutenant Landaker lost his life serving in Iraq. Click here to read Stuart Witt's narrative which was included in the Focus on the Family newsletter.

Rational Responders # 6 - Premise 1

The problem of the existence of complex organisms in a world where the natural tendency of things is from a state of order to disorder is noted in Ravi Zacharias' book The Shattered Visage:

"...how do biological systems climb the ladder of intricacy and order, while the natural world descends to entropy and disorder? Scientists have attempted to deal with this conundrum in their studies in dissipative structures, which show that biological organisms maintain their structure at the expense of the system, returning heat to the environment. However, as other scientists point out, this still does not explain nor answer the question of how it was that such highly ordered systems as living organisms could ever have come into existence in a world in which irreversible processes always tend to lead to an increase in entropy and thus, to disorder."

Zacharias then goes on to describe a seminar that he sat in under eminent theoretical physicist John Polkinghorne (a colleague of Stephen Hawking). Polkinghorne was "... commenting on the built-in factors within this universe, with particular reference to Quantum Theory, he said, with a grin, 'There is no free lunch. Somebody has to pay, and only God has the resources to put in what was needed to get what we've got.' " (Pages 41 and 44, Wolgemuth & Hyatt, Publishers, Inc., Brentwood, Tennessee, 1990.)

Only God has the resources to generate the level of complexity observable in the universe!