Follow the Science
Follow the Science - Audio/Visual (@21:30)
For unto us a child is born; a son is given. And the government shall rest upon his shoulders. And his name shall be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. (Isaiah 9:6)
“Follow the science.” It’s a phrase with which we’re all familiar. Post-pandemic, we’ve discovered that some do, some don’t, and some do until the results don’t fit their narrative and then they don’t. But making sense of the phrase, “follow the science,” first requires an understanding of what science is. Webster defines science as a process for learning about the world – not merely an established body of knowledge to be consulted. Some areas of science, like Newtonian physics, might give the impression of finality, but that’s a little misleading. Even classical physics is still an approximation; over time we’ve been able to figure out tasks for which that approximation is adequate, like landing a rover on Mars – and those for which it isn’t, like GPS which might take you through a lake to get to Grandma’s house.
Statistics is the science of developing, or studying methods for collecting, analyzing, interpreting or presenting empirical data. During one of my stats classes in college, a fire started in one of the wastebaskets in the classroom. Fortunately, we had an aspiring physicist, chemist and a budding statistician in the class. Spotting the fire, the physicist immediately began calculating how much energy would have to be removed from the fire to stop its combustion. The fire burned as he calculated. The chemist, using a different scientific method, ran her computations on how much retardant would have to be applied to the fire to prevent oxidation and, thus, its spread. The fire grew. Fortunately, the statistician, with an entirely different scientific approach, began setting fire to all of the other trashcans in the classroom. “What are you doing?” the physicist and chemist shouted, to which the statistician calmly responded, “Well, to solve this problem, you obviously need to have a larger sample size.” Statistics. They say that figures lie, and liars figure, but what do I know; I was just trying to pass the class.
Statistical probability, or odds, however, can be useful, if not sometimes interesting. For instance, did you know that 2% of American voters thought Mitt Romney’s name was actually Mitten? Or, that 69% of children ages 2-5 can use a computer mouse, but 89% of these same kids can’t tie their own shoes? Less interesting, but perhaps more useful, is the fact that your odds of being struck by lightning are one in 7 x 10 to the 5th power, or 1 in 700,000. Fortunately, the odds of you actually being killed by that same bolt of lightning are much smaller, i.e., 2 x 10 to the 6th power, or 1 in 2,000,000. Of course, there’s the age-old question about the likelihood of your house being hit by a meteorite. I’m happy to report that the odds of that happening are 1.8 x 10 to the 14th power, or 1 in 1,800,000,000,000,000, as in quadrillion.
So, what if you were to follow the science as it relates to the statistical probability, or odds, that Jesus uniquely fulfilled the more than three hundred Biblical prophecies foretelling his birth, life, death and resurrection? Jesus said in John 5:39, “You study the Scriptures in detail because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me.” Apparently, Jesus was a statistician, and the Bible is full of prophecies about events that have either happened or will happen in the future. In Science Speaks, the late Dr. Peter Stoner looked at the statistical/mathematical probability that one man, Jesus Christ, could have fulfilled just 8 of the more than 300 prophecies about him in the Bible. In layman’s terms, Dr. Stoner concluded that the chances of Jesus fulfilling just 8 of the messianic prophecies equates to the probability of one in 10 – followed by 17 zeros, i.e., 1 x 1017, or 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000. That’s a lot of zeros, but you can call it a quintillion.
Given this pretty staggering number, and the time span between the writings of the Old Testament and the fulfillment by Christ in the New Testament, the prophecies were either given to the prophets by God, or the prophets simply wrote down what they dreamed up. But what are the odds that the prophets penned their predictions on a whim? Pretty slim, but here’s an example.
Let’s say you marked one of ten tickets and placed all ten tickets in a hat, thoroughly mixed them up and then asked a blindfolded person to draw one of the tickets out of the hat. His or her chances of getting the right ticket would be one in ten. Simple enough. But what if you took 1 x 1017, or a quintillion silver dollars and spread them out across the great state of Texas? Putting aside the fact that you’d be the next Bernard Arnault, or Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, or that you’d be arrested for littering, or more likely mugged, that many silver dollars would cover the entire state of Texas two feet deep. Now, mark one of them, spread the entire mass of silver dollars across the state and blindfold a man or woman with instructions that they can travel as far as they wish, in any direction, but they must pick the silver dollar that you marked. What chance would they have of finding it? The same chance that the prophets would have had of writing just eight prophecies and having them all come true in any one person, from their day to the present time, providing they wrote those prophecies using their own wisdom.
Suppose, however, that we add eight more prophecies to the list. The chance that one man would fulfill all sixteen is now, for you math scholars, 1 x 10 to the 28th power multiplied by 10 to the 17th power, or 1 in 10 to the 45th power. In other words, 10 with 45 zeros, i.e., a Quattuor-decillion. So, using our silver dollar example, but now melting them into a solid, silver ball, you would have a mass whose center would be earth and whose circumference would extend in all directions more than 30 times farther from the earth to the sun. Now, just to give you an idea of the kind of distance we’re talking about, pretend you were on a train that left the station on its journey to the sun at the same time the Declaration of Independence was signed. Traveling steadily at the rate of sixty miles per hour, day and night, you would have almost reached your destination by now. But remember that our ball of silver dollars extends thirty times the distance from the earth to the sun, and in all directions. So, imagine marking one of those silver dollars, thoroughly stirring it into this great big ball, blindfolding a man or woman and then telling them to pick the one silver dollar you had marked. What are the chances of that happening? Still skeptical?
Well, in an effort to extend this beyond all bounds of human comprehension, and if you’re still with me, what is the likelihood that Jesus fulfilled just 48 of the more than 300 prophecies concerning his birth, life, death and resurrection? It’s 1 in 10 to the 157th power. That’s a really large number, for which there is no name, and it represents an extremely small chance unless, of course, these prophecies were God-inspired. Unfortunately, we can’t use our silver dollar example anymore because a silver dollar, even when melted, is too big for the illustration; we need a much smaller object, and the smallest object of which we know is the electron. An electron is so small that it would take 2.5 x 10 to the 15th power electrons, or 2.5 quadrillion that if laid side by side, would make a line of electrons one inch long. So, if we were going to count the electrons in this line one inch long, and counted 250 electrons each minute, and counted day and night, it would take us 19,000,000 years to count just that one inch of a line of electrons.
So, let’s suppose that we are taking this number of electrons, marking one, thoroughly mixing it into the whole mass, then blindfolding a man or woman and letting them try to find the right electron. What chance is there that they could find it? And what kind of a pile would this number of electrons make? It would be an inconceivably large pile. For instance, the distance from our system of stars, or galaxy, to the next nearest galaxy is nearly 1,500,000 light-years away which is the distance that light travels in a million and a half years going 186,000 miles per second, or 671 million miles per hour.
That distance is so great that if every man, woman and child in the United States, all 332,403,650 of us (as of January 1, 2022), each had a library of 65,000 books, and you collected every book in all of these libraries and then started on this journey of 1,500,000 light-years, and decided to place one letter from one of the books on each mile, (i.e., if "the" was the first word in the first book, you would put "t" on the first mile, "h" on the second mile, and "e" on the third mile; then leave a mile blank without a letter and start the next word in the same manner, etc.), before you completed your journey you would use up every letter in every book in every one of the libraries and have to call the librarian for more.
Space, by some accounts, is supposed to extend in all directions to a distance, not of 1,500,000 light-years, but more than 4,000 times that far, or 6,000,000,000 light-years. So, going back to our electron example, extend them in all directions from the earth to a distance of six billion light-years. Have we used up our 10 to the 157th power of electrons? No. We would have made such a small dent in the mass that we wouldn’t even notice it. We could make this solid ball of electrons, extending in all directions, to the distance of six billion light-years 6 x 10 to the 28th power times. Exhausting, I know, but the fact is there aren’t that many electrons in the known universe. And that number is just for 48 of the more than 300 known Messianic prophecies that Jesus of Nazareth fulfilled. That’s not merely evidence, it’s proof of the Bible’s inspiration by God – proof so definite that the universe isn’t big enough to hold all the evidence.
No man could author the book we call the Bible without help. The Bible was written by Kings, Generals, shepherds and priests, over a period of 1,600 years in 3 languages, on 3 continents, comprising a total of 66 books. It was written mostly by authors who had never met, and who wrote about controversial subjects, yet all 66 books agree. In other words, you can stake your life on the Bible’s authenticity, authority and trustworthiness. And you can and should stake your eternal destiny on these prophecies as well because, sadly, the odds of you and me dying are 1 in 1 – statistically speaking.
Hey, but if you prefer, go small; set your odds at 1 in 4. Say that one man in four has been born in Bethlehem; that one in four of their children were taken to Egypt, to avoid slaughter; that one in four of these came back and made their home in Nazareth; that one in four of them was a carpenter; that one in four of those was betrayed for thirty pieces of silver; that one in four of these was crucified on a cross; that one in four of them were then buried in a rich man’s tomb; yes, even that one in four of those rose from the dead on the third day; and so on for all 300+ prophecies. But if you did, an even larger number would be obtained than 1 in 10 to the 157th power. The truth is that anyone who rejects Jesus Christ as the Son of Gold is rejecting a fact proven perhaps more absolutely than any other fact in the world.
So, maybe we should “follow the science” as we celebrate Jesus’ birth because some of the saddest words on earth are, “We don’t have room for you.” Jesus knew the sound of those words. He was still in Mary’s womb when the innkeeper said, “We don’t have room for you.” And when he hung on the cross, wasn’t that the message? “We don’t have room for you in this world.” Even today Jesus is given the same treatment, but he still goes from heart to heart asking if he can enter in. And every so often he’s welcomed; someone throws open the door of his or her mangy heart and invites him to stay. And to that person Jesus gives this promise: “In my Father’s house are many rooms.” (John 14:2) So if prophecy is prologue, then Jesus has promised to make room for us in his house when we make room for him in our hearts.
Merry Christmas,
Randy
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