About Us Dummies Finding God in Science

By Eugene VanKanegan

Ever hear the notion that Science and Religion are in two different worlds, and they have nothing to say about each other? Well, that's just pure BALONEY! Come with me on a journey through Science. We will have a fun time seeing God in Science, hopefully while not getting buried alive in technical details. Is there a more important question than "Does God exist?" This is a lighthearted journey through a seriously profound subject. I hope and pray that you will enjoy this tour. I'll be tickled pink to be your fearless dummy guide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781646701797

Book preview

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About Us Dummies Finding God in Science

Eugene M. VanKanegan

ISBN 978-1-64670-177-3 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64670-178-0 (Hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-64670-179-7 (Digital)

Copyright © 2019 Eugene M. VanKanegan

All rights reserved

First Edition

Scripture taken from the Holy Bible: New International Version®. NIV® Copyright© 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by Permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books, Inc.

11661 Hwy 707

Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

Table of Contents

A Brief Introduction

What Kind of Dummy You Are: The Flimsy Evidence

What Kind of Dummy I Am: The Firm Evidence

3.1 The Early Daze

3.2 Grade School Daze

3.3 High School Daze

3.4 University Daze

3.4.1 Calumet

3.4.2 Lafayette

3.5 Inventor Turned Loose

Sixty-Four Letters from Joe and a Last Postcard

Looking Around

5.1 The Search Outside

5.2 The Search Inside

The Journey Back: Finding God in Science

6.1 Through History

6.2 Our Geologic Event Chart

6.3 Through Anthropology

6.4 Through Evolution/Paleontology/Geology

6.5 Through Cosmology

Sum Zero—A Theory of Everything: How God Did It

The Journey Forward: Finding Science in God!

Glad We Are Dummies

Appendix A: Geologic Event Charts

Appendix B: Genesis Chapter One: The Book of Beginnings

Appendix C: Shirley Ann’s Zucchini Bread

About the Author

Printed in the United States of America

In memory of my mom, Minnie VanKanegan.

Having a dedication for this book had not even crossed my mind. But then Mom passed away recently, at the age of ninety-nine, and I thought about all her years of patience and hard work to raise, educate, and encourage her slow son. She was the best mother I could have ever hoped or prayed for. Without her, this book would never have happened.

Mom passed just as I was finishing this book. She never had a chance to read it. That was probably a good thing. I don’t think she would have approved. When I told stories of dumb things I had done, she would say, That’s not so! and some of my views of Science would probably have seemed like heresy to her.

Something I was too shy to say out loud, I love you, Mom. And I know you found God without this book. I’m happy.

Chapter 1

A Brief Introduction

I am a Dummy, and you my reader are a Dummy too. I have the evidence.

The huge advantage in our being dumb is our having an open mind; plenty of room for Science to show God to us. And Science showing God’s existence to us will benefit our lives forever in a way that will make us unashamed, even very bold and glad to be Believers.

Warnings:

This search for God will use Science as it is today, at its face value. Billions of years and Evolution will be searched.

This book is not skimmable. A couple of relatives have speed-read sections, coming up with wrong notions of what is written. It’s really not very complicated. Please read slowly. Let’s enjoy our time together.

Chapter 3 on What Kind of Dummy I Am was actually fun to write. It grew to be probably the goofiest autobiography you will ever come across. With so much material about my dumbness to draw from, it became kind of lengthy.

Being a Dummy, my spelling ability is atroshus (correct spelling atrocious, is that weird!). Fortunately for you, my wise publisher insisted on correcting my spelling mistakes to preserve some semblance of dignity.

I am a very slow reader and an even much slower writer, including my two-finger typing. So during the three years it took me to write this book for you, times have changed and history has moved on, but my message remains the same.

There is neither an index nor a bibliography at the back of this book. It is not intended to be a detailed scientific treatise. We will not have to dig very deeply to find God. The material used either comes from my head, or is common knowledge and can be verified on the internet, or I noted the source directly for a quote or a borrowed thought. Please use a bookmark to save the location of a thought you may want to return to later.

Did you notice in the chapter title that this introduction would be brief? Well, it is, right? The implications of these God-in-Science thoughts, however, stretch out from now through all of eternity.

Chapter 2

What Kind of Dummy You Are:

The Flimsy Evidence

You are probably even more interested in knowing why I think you are a dummy versus knowing what kind of a dummy I am, so let’s start right there, first thinking about in what way you are dumb and its advantage.

I know you would be considered to be dumb because you are reading this! That’s right. In contrast to you, the smart people are not the least bit interested in reading about any scientific evidence that there is a god. That’s because they already know for certain that THERE IS NO GOD. And reading about such supposed god-proof would simply be a waste of their time and even insulting to their intelligence. Their minds are generally quite closed on the subject.

Some of these smart people are called Atheists.

Let’s think like an Atheist for a moment. We Atheists know that the entire universe is composed only of things that we/Science can observe or detect. There is matter and there is energy; absolutely nothing more. The physical universe is all there is. Any consideration of a supernatural god spirit that created or runs the universe is silly at best and actually really dumb.

And we as Atheists know that a religious book, such as the Bible, is nothing more than a collection of myths and fairytales. To believe these stories are true is pure ignorance passed down from one generation to the next from ancient times. The enlightened thinkers of today, such as many folks in academia at our universities, and perhaps as many as half of all scientists, are smart enough to know that.

An interesting fellow Atheist, who you possibly know about, is Stephen Hawking who is both a scientist and an academian, a professor at the University of Cambridge. He’s the really smart man in a wheelchair. I’ve seen him called one of the world’s leading physicists and cosmologists (astrophysicists) and one of the world’s greatest minds, and he knows there is NO GOD. I’m sure we will run into Stephen in our search for a god. As Atheists, we are in excellent smart people company.

So you and I are dummies for even engaging in this God/Science consideration. You, my new dumb friend, can see that these smart people will not read any of this book. It will be thought of as worthless pseudoscience.

Furthermore, the Atheist will tell us that, since a nonphysical being such as a spiritual god can’t possibly exist, you and I can’t have a nonphysical spirit either. Any feeling we have of being more than a pile of atoms—a feeling of having a spirit with an individual character—is nothing more than a collection of neurological programming bits that are stored in the brain we inherited, grew, and still carry around with us. The Atheist will take away our notion of having an eternal spirit and keep us dumb forever, later to be stuck in the grave with no chance for an afterlife. Do you think when Science shows us that there is a spiritual god, we can have our own eternal spirits back? You bet.

While acknowledging some benefits, these smart people seem to believe any religion that is committed to a god is not only dumb to believe in but actually bad for society. Since religion is the cause of so much grief in our world, in everything from being the basis for savage wars to the condemnation of certain unacceptable behaviors or lifestyles, wouldn’t we be better off without it?

Consider a song that I think should be the Atheist’s theme song. The song is Imagine, a 1971 hit by John Lennon of the Beatles.

Imagine there’s no Heaven, It’s easy if you try, No Hell below us, Above us only sky, Imagine all the people living for today…

Imagine there’s no countries, It isn’t hard to do, Nothing to kill or die for, And no religion too, Imagine all the people living life in peace…

These smart people are throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Yes, some religious groups such as the current (AD 2017 ) terrorist group ISIS are bad to the bone. But others for example, such as Christianity, require you to love other people as you love yourself, treating others as you would want them to treat you. Even to the point of loving your enemies! The good that Christianity has done for civilization in the last two thousand years is way beyond awesome. And the Ten Commandments from the time of the Hebrew Moses 3,500 years ago have served well to make our society livable. To condemn all religion is not a smart thing to do, even if Science doesn’t prove a god exists, but it does as we will discover.

Our recent (AD 2016) US president, who is believed to be very smart, has warned us that some folks get bitter, they cling to their guns or religion…as a way to explain their frustrations. Yep, I get frustrated, or at least concerned, over many of the directions our society is taking, and it is in large part probably due to my religious belief system. He’s right. But I see no better alternative, and I will continue to cling to it. As far as my guns, they are purely decorative antiques hanging on the wall, and you will seldom find me clinging to them.

There is another version of the smart people who will not read this. They are called Agnostics. Whereas the Atheists can often get mean and harsh to any god-believing dummies, pushing to eradicate various traces of religion, Agnostics tend to be kinder.

As I understand it, an Agnostic believes that the existence of a god cannot be proven nor disproven. Other than being somewhat kinder, an Agnostic looks a whole lot similar to an Atheist from a religious Believer’s perspective. Neither one will acknowledge there is a god. And so, to a Christian, for example, both are destined for an eternity in a very nasty hellish environment, certainly without being with the god they would not even acknowledge.

My very good college and lifelong friend Joe was the kindest person my wife, Shirley, and I have ever known. I’ll tell you more about Joe later. As far as I can figure, from much written correspondence between us, Joe was an Agnostic. Many years ago, I mailed Joe a book, The Genesis Connection by John Wiester (Thomas Nelson, 1983), relating geologic Science to religion, and he mailed it right back to me, unread. Near the end of Joe’s life, I mailed him The Case for a Creator, a book by the lawyer-journalist, Lee Strobel (Zondervan, 2004). After a neighbor had discovered Joe’s dead body lying in the bathroom of Joe’s suburban Albuquerque house, Joe’s half brother found that book there, writing to me that it appeared to be unopened. No surprise to me. As an Agnostic, my friend Joe would not have wanted to read that second book either, nor this book I am writing. It is all pseudoscience. My good friend Joe was one of the smart people.

I was astounded to learn there is yet another kind of smart person who doesn’t want to spend time to consider a Science/God relationship; an Afraid Believer. I found one when I led a Fossil/Genesis presentation in a Bible Study. I shouldn’t have been astounded. I was like that kind of smart person before I met Joe. At least in my case, I grew up with the feeling that much of Science was at odds with religion, and that the comparison was best to avoid. There were no dinosaur toys at our house when I was a kid. I was pretty well convinced that geologic Science would not relate well to my deeply held faith in God and His Word, the Bible. I was Afraid. My good college friend Joe would snap me out of being that sort of fearful smart person—one who knows THERE IS A GOD with absolute certainty and wants no further discussion attempting to relate religion to Science, since Science with its concepts such as Evolution and billions of years must be wrong.

So that’s the kind of Dummy the smart people think you are for being interested in this discussion. I can see you are probably not an Atheist, not Agnostic, not Afraid, and fortunately I might add, not Apathetic. Unlike those four A friends, we have the wonderful advantage of being willing to look for God in Science.

Perhaps the evidence is not so flimsy after all. You are perfectly fit to go on this god-search Science journey with me, since I am your kind of dummy also. But you should be aware that my dumbness goes somewhat deeper, which makes life more difficult for me. It may well be fun and even somehow helpful to our Science/God consideration to look at the kind of dangerous dummy I am, where I’m coming from, before we go traveling together.

Chapter 3

What Kind of Dummy I Am:

The Firm Evidence

3.1 The Early Daze

I was born dumb in 1944. I couldn’t even find my way out. Throughout my adult life, the few times I heard my mom say that I was born breech, I thought she meant feet first. Then just a couple of weeks ago, my ninety-seven-year-old mother, who was a primary witness at the scene, said no; what she meant was that I came out butt first! Say what? I mean buttocks, posterior, gluteus maximus, heinie first? Is that even possible?

If so, then that explains why I could still fold both feet behind my head simultaneously, through my teen years and well into my twenties, a feat with which I amazed family and friends on the living room floor many times. They called me double-jointed. You will see how that contortive ability came in handy with a bully, later in my high school days. But I wonder now if my coming out so blue and starved of oxygen helps explain why I am so dumb. I have an extremely poor memory for certain kinds of things.

My interest in Science was already evident at age three. It was on the day before Mom and Dad had planned to go on our honeymoon to Niagara Falls (their honeymoon having been delayed due to the war) that I performed my first electrical experiment.

Finding a metal hairpin on the floor, I spread the two prongs apart and then carefully inserted each of the prongs into opposite slots of a 110-volt AC electrical wall socket in our kitchen. The experiment was highly successful in that my tiny little fingers were burnt to a crisp along the shape of the bent hairpin. It was a dumb thing to do, but hey, I was a little kid. After a doctor visit, we left on our honeymoon a day late, with my hand all wrapped up in a big white gauze bandage and holding out the car window a wooden windmill that my daddy had made for me. We were okay. I don’t remember the falls from that trip. I do recall the heartbreak of leaving my teddy bear Pinky behind in a tourist cabin in Canada. The wonderful cabin owner lady mailed it home to us, and I still have Pinky today. Missing one eye now.

Also, in those long-ago days before grade school, a couple of cousins and I would stay by my mom’s parent’s farm while our moms went to work cleaning houses in the city. Here was another lesson in Science; this time on human biology. About all I knew about girls then was from a nursery rhyme. It went, "Sugar and spice and everything nice, that’s what little girls are made of. Snips and snails