Fearfully & Wonderfully Made

“For You created my innermost parts;
You wove me in my mother’s womb.
I will give thanks to You, because I am awesomely and wonderfully made;
Wonderful are Your works,
And my soul knows it very well.”
– Psalms 139:13-14

It’s been said that if wombs had windows, abortion would be no more. Then we would be able to see with our own eyes what the Psalmist described above thousands of years ago. But ultrasonic imaging, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), and the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) have given us unprecedented windows into the status of the unborn human.
Today I want to highlight 2 sets of photos from Bruce Carlson’s 4th edition (2009) of “Human Embryology and Developmental Biology” textbook (pages 179-180). The lead photo above is an SEM photo of the hand (A) and foot (B) of an 8-week-old fetus. Notice the detail at only 8 weeks. That is obviously not “just a clump of cells” as abortion supporters would have you believe. The arrows point to the volar pads where epidermal ridges will start forming between 11 and 17 weeks. Oh boy… “epidermal ridges.” Well, you might know those better as … fingerprints! Yes, the fingerprint patterns that can uniquely identify you as an adult person are already discernible below the surface of the skin before the end of the first trimester. In fact, the other series of photos below, also taken with a Scanning Electron Microscope, are of the obvious loop pattern of the fingerprint of a 14-week-old fetus. The fingerprints will be visible on the surface of the skin by the end of the 5th month, but as you can see for yourself, the unique pattern is already formed far earlier.

Fingerprint patterns of a 14 week old fetusBut now the question for you, dear reader, is what will you do with this information? We cannot live in denial of what we now see so clearly. The case for the life of the unborn is similar to the case for American slaves in the 1860’s: pictures tell an undeniable story. There was a famous picture of an escaped slave, dubbed “Whipped Peter”, who escaped from a Louisiana plantation to a Union camp during the Civil War. He was photographed because of the severity of the beatings he had endured and the scarring that showed plainly the injustice of chattel slavery. That picture was reproduced and distributed to wake people up to the real horrors that had occurred. While it was easy to discuss the subject of slavery detached from the real effects of it, pictures like the one here brought the discussion home in all its gruesome messiness. Likewise, pictures have been vital for the pro-life cause from the beginning because it’s harder to whitewash the facts with euphemisms about “reproductive freedom” and “choice” when there’s a picture of a clearly dismembered human body in front of you. But now, it’s not just pictures of the effects of abortion that are available for any who dare to look at them. It’s pictures (and now video) of the baby in utero moving and kicking and sucking her thumb, doing many of the same things we love to see newborns do. The new “4D ultrasounds” are showing in unprecedented clarity and detail the humanity and personality of the unborn in real time.

While I have serious theological disagreements with the Roman Cartholic Church, Salvatore Joseph Cordileone, Archbishop of San Francisco, recently explained very succinctly why abortion is such an important issue – “Abortion is the axe laid to the roots of the tree of human rights: when our culture encourages the violation of life at its youngest and most vulnerable condition, other ethical norms cannot stand for long.”[1] So very true. Will you stand by while the tree of human rights is chopped down? Now that you know the truth, and have seen it with your own eyes via the wonders of modern technology, can you keep silent? I know I can’t, and I hope you won’t be able to either. 


[1] “Before I Formed You in the Womb I Knew You: A Pastoral Letter on the Human Dignity of the Unborn, Holy Communion, and Catholics in Public Life”, Salvatore Joseph Cordileone, May 1, 2021.

Yes and No

The Apostle Paul Explains the Faith to King Agrippa, his Sister Berenice, & Proconsul Festus – by Vasily Surikov, 1875

Have you ever said something to someone that was interpreted so completely differently than how you meant it that it just left you bewildered? I think it’s probably happened to all of us at some point, but maybe you’re finding it happening more often in the very polarized times we live in now (at least here in America where I write). Let’s work through a helpful solution to those frustrating misunderstandings today.

Continue reading Yes and No

Birth by Design

High-definition 3D ultrasound of 11 week old fetus in womb.
A 3D ultrasound of an 11-week-old fetus in the womb, on a Philips GlassVue machine.

Mother’s Day was just a few weeks ago here in the US, and I’d like to focus on the process that results in biological motherhood: pregnancy. Stephanie Grey talked on Biola’s Think Biblically podcast back in January and mentioned the pro-abortion objection that since a mother isn’t legally obligated to give a sick child one of her kidneys, a mother shouldn’t be obligated to give the unborn child her uterus. Stephanie’s response was extremely insightful and one that I think will resonate with technical-minded people in particular. Let’s work through that today.

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Does Modern Archaeology Disprove the Bible?

“Archaeology” by Karoly Ferenczy, 1896.

It was the trip of a lifetime.

We had enjoyed a gorgeous yet brutally hot day in Jerusalem and were now in the City of David located to the south of what is known as the Old City and the Temple Mount. Just to my right were the Kidron Valley and the Mount of Olives which sits to the east of the city. The Upper Room where Jesus and the disciples ate the Last Supper was a few hundred yards away up the hill to my left.

After leaving supper, Jesus’s group would have traveled from there to the Garden of Gethsemane, which is located somewhere on the Mount of Olives. Therefore, the most direct route would have taken them down the steep and rocky slope into the Kidron Valley just across from where I was standing. Only a hundred or so feet away, I saw some old stairs uncovered during the excavation of the City of David. These stairs were roughly dated to around the time of Christ and could have been used by the group to travel from the Upper Room to the garden on the night Jesus was betrayed.

The intersection of archeology and the Bible was the most fascinating and encouraging aspect of my trip to Israel – the land where the Bible comes alive. Our group visited many amazing sites while we were there. This site was underwhelming compared to many other locations; however, I was overwhelmed by the knowledge that Jesus may have walked those well-worn stairs. While there was nothing special about the ground or those stone steps, this place is where God and man came together—the natural and mundane met the supernatural.

Continue reading Does Modern Archaeology Disprove the Bible?

The Future of A Well-Designed Faith

Regrettably, after 4 1/2 years of new posts each week, circumstances have arisen that have made it more and more difficult to maintain that schedule. The rest of 2019 will likely be sporadic. I will continue trying to post when I can, and hope to bring some guest engineers on here, but the weekly writing by myself is not sustainable right now. This labor of love has been a 2nd half-time job for me on top of a very full-time engineering career. If you, dear reader, have been edified by anything I’ve written here, I thank God for that. If anything I’ve said has been in error, I take full responsibility, and ask your forgiveness. Since the posting schedule will most likely not be regular for the foreseeable future, if you would like to be notified when a new article is posted, you may subscribe by email on the website, like this page on Facebook, or follow it on Twitter. All accounts will  remain active. In the absence of new content, there are still, at this point, 244 previous posts that may be of interest. The list of tags and the search box on the site are probably the best way to find particular content. If there is a topic you’d like to see addressed that hasn’t been yet, please contact me and let me know your thoughts. I will try to address any requests.

Take care, people, and don’t be afraid to work through tough questions about Christianity. I assure you, the toughest question you have, the most worrisome doubt you have, the most devastating objection you have – God can handle them all.

Yours in Christ,
Jason
S.D.G.

Apologetics Leads to a Resilient Faith

Illustration from FEMA 277, the 1996 report on the OKC bombing

On April 19, 1995, a truck bomb was detonated in front of the Alfred P Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. While it was an incredibly powerful bomb that did extensive damage to hundreds of buildings in a 16-block radius, there is one primary reason for the devastating partial collapse of the Murrah building. The front of the building, where the bomb was detonated, used what’s called transfer girders on the 3rd floor to support the columns for the upper six floors. They worked great for creating a more open entrance with ground-floor columns spaced at twice the distance of the columns on the 8 stories above, but they also decreased the number of load paths available for supporting the weight of the floors above. Therefore, when the truck bomb was detonated right next to a ground-floor column, shattering it and shearing through the columns on each side of it, 8 of the 10 bays of the building’s north facade were now unsupported. From the 3rd floor up, taking away that much support would’ve required eliminating 7 columns, but at the first 2 levels, it only took the destruction of 3 columns. This was a painful reminder that part of making a resilient building that can survive disasters is having redundancy, the ability to safely redistribute loads through alternate paths in the event of the loss of one load path. It’s what a lot of us engineers like to call a “belt and suspenders” design. As a Christian engineer, I have to ask, is my belief in God such that one crisis of doubt will destroy it, or is it more robust than that? I think you know the answer, but let’s work through that today.

In reading atheists’ stories of their deconversions from the Christian faith they had grown up espousing, I am struck by how precarious their trust (or faith) seems to have been. Atheists like Bart Ehrman, Dan Barker, and Matt Dillahunty have told of surprisingly small things making shipwreck of their souls. Whether it’s built on a particular emotional experience, or the teachings of a particular church or pastor, or some very shallow understanding of the Bible, they seem to often have a belief structure resembling a house of cards. Frustration with the hiddenness of God, a personal encounter with suffering, inability to fathom their omniscient Creator’s reasons – and the cards come tumbling down. Yet Christianity is anything but a house of cards. The basic belief in God is not built on one make-or-break proposition. Rather, we have a strong cumulative case based on multiple lines of reasoning. Most well-known among these are the Cosmological Argument, the Design Argument, the Moral Argument, and the Ontological Argument, although arguments from consciousness, miracles, religious experiences, beauty, and reason [1], just to name a few, have also been developed over the years in support of the existence of God. Different people often find particular lines of reasoning among these especially persuasive, and others not so much, hence my use of the term “argument” rather than “proof”. Proof can be very subjective, as anyone that’s ever had to sit through jury deliberations can confirm. But what’s fascinating is how many different supports there are for rational belief in God. Of course, like the many columns in a building, no single argument supports the entire “structure” of belief in God, but all of these different lines of reasoning, taken together, interlock well to provide a formidable framework highly resistant to collapse. While skeptics often seem to enjoy sniping at the views of others, the significant challenge for the skeptic is formulating a worldview of their own that explains so much of the world around us as well as Christianity does.

“But”, one might say, “you’re doing a bait-and-switch between the case for generic theism and the case for Christianity! Christianity has all its eggs in one basket – the Bible. So much for your redundancy!” Here’s the thing: while the Bible is conveniently bound in a single volume now, the writings contained therein were the result of multiple witnesses writing independently at different times and places. Though all inspired by God, they are separate historical records. And everything described in the Bible that has ever been able to be compared against archaeological findings has confirmed the truthfulness of the Bible. In particular, Luke, Paul’s companion and the author of the gospel according to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, has been proven to be a historian accurate in even the most trivial details. So Christianity encompasses the general case for theism, with its strong philosophical support along several independent lines, as well as having strong historical attestation and archaeological support. In fact, I would say Christianity is the only system that answers so many questions coherently and is so well-grounded.

Now, for the Christian, our trust in Christ isn’t simply a matter of intellectual assent, but also a relationship with our living Creator. The Bible tells us that the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, dwells in each Christian, and testifies with our spirit that we are children of God [Ro 8:16]. This should be the single biggest contributor to an unshakeable faith, but we humans are often fickle creatures, prone to worry and doubt, falling far short of what God intends for us. To make matters worse, false religions have claimed similar certainty, such as the Mormon “burning in the bosom” that they genuinely believe to be authentic. Even though the existence of a counterfeit does nothing to refute the  existence of the true original, it can still cause us to doubt the Spirit’s testimony in our own hearts. But this is where knowing that these different lines of reasoning all converge on the God of the Bible is helpful. While we typically use these apologetics tools to demonstrate to non-Christians the reasonableness of belief in God and trust in Christ alone, they can also help us to remember the truth ourselves in times of doubtful struggle (or encourage a struggling Christian brother or sister). That gives us multiple supports to lean on when we are weakened by attacks, whether from circumstances without or doubts within. Hence, apologetics helps us to build a resilient faith [2].


[1] See The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (Blackwell, 1st edition, 2012) for several of these. See C.S. Lewis, Miracles (Macmillan, 2nd edition, 1960), for his argument from miracles, as well as Craig Keener’s massive 2-volume work on the subject. Also see Chapter 4 of Lewis’ Miracles for his argument from reason, and Ch. 6 in Blackwell for Victor Reppert’s detailed defense of Lewis’ argument from reason and response to objections. Pascal’s “anthropological argument“, presented in chapter 10 of Christian Apologetics, by Doug Groothuis, is another contribution with significant explanatory power.
[2] Though not specifically quoted, much of this last paragraph is inspired by the ever-insightful William Lane Craig, and his excellent book Reasonable Faith, 3rd Ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), pp. 43-51 .

The Destruction of Motherhood

Mother and Child, by Mary Cassatt, 1890

As we just celebrated Mother’s Day, I saw an interesting response to a pro-life Twitter thread. The pro-life tweet had pointed out that the baby had separate DNA and was not part of the mother’s body, and therefore was a separate life that needed to be respected. An abortion supporter agreed that the baby was indeed a separate body, but then proceeded to say that abortion was still acceptable because the baby’s body was dependent on the mother’s body. Did she have a valid point? Let’s work through that today.

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When Human Life Begins

Pro-life propaganda? Nope. Facial detail highlighted by an ultrasound manufacturer to show how good their equipment is.

I was recently involved in a strange Twitter debate with an abortion supporter who argued that the fetus was a part of the mother. I suppose this was based on the silly “my body, my choice” mantra, but it surprised me that someone would actually consider that slogan a serious reason, particularly in this age of increasing medical knowledge. But despite all evidence to the contrary, she insisted on believing that abortion was a matter of “healthcare” for the mother because the mother was the only individual involved since the fetus was a part of her body. Abortion supporters have even tried saying that the baby was part of the mother’s body because of the umbilical cord (which only connects the two together to provide nourishment to the baby’s separate body). Sadly, this level of scientific ignorance is rampant in our culture, so let’s see what medical experts have to say. And, as always, don’t just take my word for it; do the research for yourself. Now, let’s get to work.

Continue reading When Human Life Begins

Does Objective Truth Matter?

“What is Truth?” Christ and Pilate, by Nikolai Ge, 1890.

Does objective truth – and specifically objective moral truth – matter for Christians? In a survey of teenagers conducted by Barna Research on Feb 12, 2002, 83% of those teenagers said moral truth depends on the circumstances, and only 6% overall said moral truth is absolute. Of those who identified as born-again Christians, only 9% agreed that moral truth is unchanging and not relative to the situation. Those teenagers of 17 years ago are now the middle-aged backbone of our working society, as well as parents raising the next generation. But does that dim view of objective moral truth even matter in our time? Let’s work through that today.

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A Response to Serene Jones

Resurrection of Christ, by Carl Bloch, 1875

The NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently interviewed Serene Jones, President of Union Theological Seminary, in an op-ed entitled “Reverend, You Say the Virgin Birth Is ‘a Bizarre Claim’?” The responses, like the one referenced in his op-ed’s title, can only be described as bizarre to hear coming from someone claiming to be a Christian. But this is what is being held up as Christianity to a watching world in the pages of a major media outlet, so it warrants a response. I encourage you to click the link above to read the whole article for yourself. Then let’s work through some of the more glaring issues and see how this stacks up against actual Christianity.

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At the intersection of faith and design