"Precision.........................................."

Lee Strobel is one of those people in modern-day religiosity whom I hold with a degree of caution. He has been a teaching pastor at two of America’s largest churches, worked as a contributing editor and columnist for “Outreach” magazine, and also once taught First Amendment Law at Roosevelt University. No doubt he is better known for the books he has authored, one of which I’m presently reading only because it was discovered in a discount store on sale for about three dollars. Its title establishes it as part of a trilogy of sorts, “The Case for Christ”, “The Case for Faith”, and this one, “The Case for a Creator”. At this point in my journey, so much has already been encountered as far as the Gospel being marketed, that my hesitancy to just accept another’s product on no more than a claim of conversion to Christianity is openly admitted; but that only means I approach such people with a realization that dollars are made all the time by simply printing what a certain segment of the society want to hear. That said, however, whatever the cause for this particular paperback, it seems to me that the incredible facts noted therein, those which refer to the “fine-tuning” of our universe, ought to convince anyone of “divine design” in the scheme of it all. If the Cosmological Constant (that which is keeping the entire shebang from either falling apart externally or collapsing inwardly) and gravity were changed as little as one part in one hundred million trillion to the sixth power (that is like removing one atom from it all), nothing would remain; if somehow the electromagnetic force were decreased by only fifty percent (that’s but one part in ten thousand billion to the fourth power), all atoms other than hydrogen would be destroyed and life, as we know, it could not exist; and those are but two of many recent discoveries that scientists, on either side of the argument, consider to be true. Do such revelations eliminate all questions? Of course not. If there really is an omniscient, all powerful deity who set all this in motion, any dyed-in-the-wool skeptic is going to ask “Where did he come from?”and “What makes us so sure that everything there is eternal should it indeed be our destiny after death?” My answer can be no more than: as we gain more and more knowledge about this mystery into which we are birthed, it appears to continually point us back to our Bible, giving even greater reason to believe the message therein. If some would shout “Faith!”, I would answer it all depends on that into which you invest it. We all have our totems. Rather than constructing them out of cement, in my opinion it’s better to allow Him to reshape them as we go…..