Meeting of the Parliament
Meeting date: Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Official Report
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Time for Reflection
Good afternoon and welcome back. The first item of business this afternoon is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is Ian Stewart, a leader within Destiny Church, Edinburgh, and a solicitor in Edinburgh, and former leader of Destiny Church, Inverness.
Ian Stewart (Destiny Church, Edinburgh)
I am delighted to be here with you today and over the next four minutes I hope that I will be able to provide you with some evidence that will encourage you to see the importance of Christianity to yourselves and to the Scottish political debate.
I have come to the conclusion that the most helpful political thought that I can leave with you today is that of the significant likelihood of God’s existence. I am sure that the main reason why many people in Scotland are so uninterested in what God has to say about politics is that they do not really believe that he exists. After all, who cares about the opinion of someone who is not there?
So why do I say that there is a significant likelihood of God existing? Well, if there is no God, then the only things that really exist are the material world plus energy subject to certain fixed laws such as gravity. From such principles we can clearly plot the fixed orbit and motion of the planets.
However, when we look at the heart of biology what do we see? We see a code. Why is this a problem? It is because a code is something that by definition cannot be derived solely from the properties of physical chemistry; if it did, it would break down into predictable patterns. You see, the fact that a particular sequence represents a particular set of instructions is not a question of matter or energy—it is software; what it conveys is the expression of a non-material thought process.
If matter and energy have never been observed to produce a code in the present, why should we conclude that they were able to produce one in the past? It is estimated that the human brain has between 100 and 500 trillion synapses; without an intelligent agent one cannot even obtain a single protein.
So when people say that believing in God is stupid and there is no real basis for Christianity to have a voice in the Scottish political sphere, may I respectfully suggest that the opposite is closer to the bone? We put the elements together, supply energy and out comes a biological organism. In the modern world, can we really put up with that as an explanation? In our short time together, I hope you will agree that we cannot. Thank you.