What is it that the salmon do that unequivocally proves the existence of the lord? I’m not trying to be a dick, just curious as to what the sign was for you.
Interested to hear more detail on this. What specifically about the salmon do you relate to God?
Also agree that Alaska is incredibly beautiful. And the tap water is second to none (weird, I know, but glacier water is unbeatable).
Being someone who strongly believes in science and who also does not believe that in any way it contradicts God's word or disproves the existence of God, here is my answer.
Someone referenced Roman's 1:20 appropriately. Here is what it says:
"For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse."
In a nut shell, what this passage says to me is the evidence of intelligent creation is all around us. And the more we understand the beauty and complexity of the universe we live in and how it works, the more we should come to understand His power and His hand in its creation. The more we learn as human beings about what God has done, the less of an excuse we have to doubt Him. Unfortunately, some people think the more we come to understand about His creation, the smarter it makes us and the less we need God to explain it.
If you had never seen a TV before and you found yourself in a room with a TV on the table in front of you and it played something that was broadcast live from halfway around the world, you would no doubt be in awe and who knows what you may believe. Is it magic?
If you had a toolset in that room and you spent days and weeks and years taking the TV apart piece by piece and reverse engineered exactly how the technology worked and could explain how all of those pieces and parts work together, would you be any less impressed? You would probably be pretty proud of yourself and the fact that YOU had figured it out. Your ego would be pretty big. You have disproved that that TV works on magic and YOU know the secret of how it all comes together and works. But now that you know how it was created and that it isnt "magic", have you disproven that someone created it or have you actually proven that it was created by a highly intelligent being, someone far more intelligent than you? How silly does it seem to think that the inventor of the TV has now been wiped from existence because someone figured out how he created his TV and how it works and it is not magic after all?
Unfortunately, some people think that if you can show that something isn't magic, and that if you open something up and find that their is a logical, ingenious order to the pieces and parts, that it somehow disproves the existence of a creator as well. Too many people think that we only need God if we can't explain something on our own. God is only needed for magic and somehow not capable of intelligent and logical creation.
And furthermore, does the fact that the inventor of the TV is not in the room make it reasonable to assume that all of those pieces came together in such a perfect way on their own? Does the inventors absence and your new understanding of how that TV works disprove for you that a highly intelligent being was ever involved at all in bringing those pieces together to begin with? Is it reasonable to hypothesize that because we can not see the inventor of the TV or talk to him, that there was a big explosion in the room from "something we dont yet understand" and that set everything in perfect motion to create the parts and pieces and assemble them into something as incredible as that TV? An incredible stroke of luck.
For me, that analogy and those questions analogize where non-believers go wrong with science. Many non believers think that if someone can figure out how things came together in nature and how they work that they have somehow disproved the existence of God at all. If you can break something down and explain how it works, you have shown it isnt magic and therefore you don't need God anymore. For them God is magic or nothing.
Understanding how something works and how it came to be (which is what science does) does not disprove that there is an amazing, unimaginably intelligent guiding force behind all of the creations we behold on a daily basis. There is a big difference in reverse engineering something and engineering it from nothing with nothing. As smart as we think we are when we figure out some small piece of some small thing within the vast universe, all we are doing is reverse engineering the works of an enormously more intelligent and powerful creator. Just as the man who figured out how that TV works did not disprove the fact that a highly intelligent man somewhere invented it, our science does not disprove the existence of God. In both cases what they speak to is how necessary and how intelligent and purposeful the creator behind the TV, or our universe, are.
There are a lot of ignorant Christian's out there who do a lot to make non-believers think that you cant believe in science and believe in God. Some Christian's are scared or intimidated by the science community and believe that their advances in knowledge somehow disproves what the bible says, when what they should be doing is embracing it and using it to better understand what the bible and God is really telling us. The bible is not flawed, I just think man is flawed in his interpretation and translation sometimes. I choose to learn from science and grow in my understanding of how remarkable God is, instead of hide from it while remaining ignorant.
If you are a Christian, I encourage you to embrace science and what it teaches us about God. Be open to changing what you believed yesterday if you have a better understanding based on something you learned today.
