Blog Post Title Three

““Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably
can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week.
There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car.

You have a schedule, a calendar, and a time for dinner or a
movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are
not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret
over passing birthdays. Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a
paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.” Mitch Albom, The Time Keeper

I experienced a lot of growing up in the Navy; my encounter with a real war, real killing became the major pivot point in my life. Our ship was stationed off the coast of Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin. Our location was secret and our assignment was to provide cover for our ground troops and to be prepared to rescue any of our Navy Pilots that may have gotten shot down.

I remember like yesterday, I was awakened around 2 AM by the blast of General Quarters.* As the Captain’s Talker my position was on the bridge. As his talker I was on sound powered telephones* ready to communicate with all departments in the ship. As we stood on the bridge* watching the bombs exploding on the horizon; hearing the pilot’s adrenaline pumped voices as they were taking on

ground fire; the realization that we were killing people, people just like me – young men with a girlfriend, moms & dads, aunts & uncles, children, my mind began to spin and my gut wrenched.

Death has a smell to me. As our Mk 42 5-inch/54 caliber gun mounts would fire off, the putrid smell of sulfur would fill the air around the bridge. Someone was dying. My guts would turn with the blast and smell. I wanted answers. The bombs and the screams drove me to seek out the why and the how.

Life.
Death.
Family.
Friends.
War.
Why?

My thoughts raced. I thought on life and why? The earth spins around the sun and there is a new day. Day after day. Time moves into time. What's the purpose? Is there one? In the mid 60's there was a song by Burt Bacharach entitled, What's it all about, Alfie? A couple of lines in the song:

Is it just for the moment we live?

Are we meant to take more than give?

Or are we meant to be kind?

And if only fools are kind, Alfie

Then I guess it's wise to be cruel

And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie
What will you lend on an old golden rule
As sure as I believe

There's a heaven above, Alfie

I know there's something much more.

So, What's it all about Alfie?

What is it all about? Have you ever asked that question? Why does life exist? How did life start in the first place and what is the purpose of life? It couldn’t be to just go to war and kill each other? In all of this mis-mash I asked myself what’s my purpose?

My head was spinning as I worried these questions like a dog worries a bone. They bothered me, they gnawed at me and they irritated me. I did not know the answers, yet I knew I had to begin to find the answers. They seem to have a sense of destiny in them, and they would take me into my inner core, a place I intentionally stayed away from.

I realized I avoided this kind of heavy thinking; yet somehow I knew my life had a purpose and my life mattered. As a young buck full of testosterone and an I don't care about anything attitude to life, to have these questions, deep and troubling, gnaw at my mind and gut was very disturbing.

During the next few weeks and months, other ques-
tions began to burrow their way into my mind and gut:

x Who am I - what is my personal identity? I mean I
knew my name, but really who am I?

x What defines me? “Not a heck of a lot,” was my
answer!

x What are my values? Do I have any?

x Fifty years from now, how do I want to be

remembered? I asked myself.

As these questions and thoughts kept peppering me I kept reaching for where and how do I begin to find the answers? Since I am a logical male type, I began logically:

1. Since I know I exist, Why do I exist?

2. What is my purpose?

3. What is the meaning and purpose of all life?

GGC: My journey in answering these questions evolved over several years and continues to unfold today. It is my desire for you to think heavy on these troubling questions, and my "Popi" hope is that you will be as equally restless in your search as I was.

I believe answering these questions orientates us to life, life choices, and our destiny. If there isn't any meaning to life then we should live as the old proverb says; "eat, drink and be merry for tomor- row we may die." Why not? If there is no destiny or purpose for my life then, by all means, one should "live it up" because that is all one has. It is a very narcissistic approach to life and 100's upon 100's of thousands live this way; with no tomorrow and only for themselves.

So I began.

I started with the fact and reality we live in a time/space world marked off by days, months, and years and all that we know has a beginning and an end. My logical conclusion was all life had to have a beginning.

As I thought more about this I realized the beginning is the crux of the whole matter! It is an interesting fact about us humans and our researchers, thinkers, philosophers, we too easily develop our conclusions from our point of where we are in the timeline of life and/or history.

Let me illustrate:

~God/Eternity Is Outside of our Time line~

My Beginning--------------~Me Now~--------------- My End

~God/Eternity Is Outside of our Time Line~

Obviously, we know that at some point, somehow life had its beginning and we also assume that most likely (given all of what we know - that we won’t live forever) there will be an end to our life. I began to reason this way: we all are at some point on this continuum present or past. Our own “circle” may be small or large depending on one’s experience and personal research. Within that circle is contained our point of reference to a larger truth and purpose, and this is fine if that is our only concern (life at the moment, or life right now, or life only as we see it). However, I believe there is a much larger issue at stake. In order to accurately discover the answer to why and put it in proper context, I must first resolve the issue of where did we (life and earth) come from in the first place? Earth is here, we’re here, so something happened or someone put this all into motion and for what reason? There had to be a beginning. At least that was my common-sense- down-to-earth-farm-boy conclusion.

I felt that there was a much larger perspective I needed to consider. I intentionally stepped out of my timeline to be on the outside of my circle of thinking. I needed to first resolve the issue of when and where did life and the earth come from?

Now here is where I jumped off the deep end. I was a simple ole farm boy who had only made it through the equivalent of a couple years of college, but thank- fully I was given a very logical mind and good common sense.

The first thing that intrigued me was the movement of our earth around the sun and the accuracy of the stars. Since I was in the Navy at this time I was always amazed when the Quartermaster* would use the Sextant* to accurately chart our course. We had all the electronic radar equipment and navigation equipment; however, periodically the Quartermaster would take a reading with the Sextant (our location verified by the reading of the horizon and the sun or stars). This is an amazing fact considering all of our sophisticated equipment today; that our fall back to navigation and time is the sun and stars due to their accuracy which never changes!

A quote from an article by, Leo Rogers, entitled, A Brief History of Time Measurement

“As the sun moves across the sky, shadows change in
direction and length, so a simple sundial can measure the length of a day. It was quickly noticed that the length of

the day varies at different times of the year. The reasons

for this difference were not discovered until after
astronomers accepted the fact that the earth travels

around the sun in an elliptic orbit, and that the earth's axis is tilted at about 26 degrees. This variation from a circular orbit leads to the Equation of Time which allows us to

work out the difference between 'clock' time and 'sundial
time'.”

Being at sea at night, gazing at the stars is a phenomenal experience. It was always an awe-inspiring moment for me to take in the vastness and the wonder of the heavens. My first conclusion in my search was that the heavens did declare something or someone far bigger than man to think up life as we know it and put it together.

I was getting a little queasy with this line of thinking because if I went down this road too far I felt like I may not like what I would discover.

I began to read more scientific studies and one that I came across was Stephen Hawking, and his article, The origin of the Universe*. (You can find it on his website, hawking.org.uk)

A few years before he passed, he stated there was no need for God because all the rules needed for the formation of the universe were already in existence. If I could have asked him I would have asked: “So, how did all the rules come into existence?”

Stephen, who by his peers was considered one of the most brilliant minds of today, concludes in this article (which includes many references to his work and study on this subject) “that science with all its minds and research still has not answered this question: Why we are here and how

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did we get here? He holds out the hope that "we (the scientific community) are making excellent progress and we are closer to solving this than ever."

Closer than ever to solving this? Really! What does “closer” really mean? Wouldn’t you think with all the great minds and science technology we would have this little sticky issue solved by now? Science continues to search and spend millions and millions of dollars (most of it our tax dollars - i.e. the satellite to Jupiter*) in searching for the answers on how it all began and how we came to exist, yet they still do not have the answer!

As I mentioned, the beginning is the crux of the matter and scientists know this and that's why they continue to search for what they know is an unanswered ques- tion. That road did not yield any satisfying answers. Over and over again the scientific community would describe in great detail (many ways over my head) what is already in existence. How it all got here is still a theory, one hypothesis after another, and the why is never touched.

I was intrigued by what was and is known as the Big Bang Theory (not the TV show). Yet to accept this theory would mean I would have to accept its counterpart, evolution. In the beginning, I was fairly ignorant of these concepts of creation, but I wanted to hear what was being said on each side.

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I discovered that if the Big Bang was the only truth of our beginning that the odds for all the matter and elements coming together to form the earth was nearly impossible to calculate, let alone happen.

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Several years ago, evolutionist Harold Morowitz of Yale, a professor of biology and natural philosophy at George Mason University estimated the probability of the formation of the smallest and simplest living organism to be one in 10,340,000,000! A few years following Morowitz’s calculations, the late, renowned evolutionist Carl Sagan made his own estimation of the chance that life could evolve on any given single planet: one in 102,000,000,000. These calculations were made before the last couple of decades which have revealed with even more clarity the complexity of life. These probability estimations for the formation of life, made by the evolutionists themselves, are so far beyond the limit for cosmic events by using the Single Law of Chance, that we have to give them credit for their huge amount of faith.

In my research, I came across several articles and videos (the videos came later in my study) that point out the delicate and intricate balance in all of creation, I fi- nally gave in to the inevitable, there had to be a De- signer a supreme Watch Maker. I concluded that the complexity upon which all life functions requires intelli- gence beyond any human to orchestrate.

The watchmaker analogy or watchmaker argument is a teleological argument, which by way of an analogy, states that the design of creation (like a watch) implies a designer. The analogy has played a prominent role in natural theology and the "argument for design," where it was used to support arguments for the existence of God and for the intelligent design of the universe. The most famous statement of the teleological argument using the watchmaker analogy was given by William Paley in his

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1802 book Natural Theology or Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity.

Here are a couple videos that detail out for us the incredible complexity of the creation of our body and the delicate balance that our earth is held in. (Note: When the evolution theory was born the complexity of what you will see here was not even on the radar of those who have and do and make their the assumption of evolution.)

Cell development:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-ldPgEfAHI

What if the earth stopped orbiting the sun?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQUdZGsbC0w

The delicate balance of life and the creation of earth is astounding. The preciseness of this incredible creation defies the human capacity to truly figure it out.

Growing up in a church/religious setting I was told about God and was expected to receive this information at face value. There was never a discussion, I could remember, where we asked and discussed these why and how questions.

I was troubled. I needed to know more.