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    Originality: Where Did I Come From?

    Guest Speaker | September 27, 2015

    Were you a cosmic accident or created by a living and loving God? This question has been asked for centuries by every religion on earth. Your origin matters because where you come from determines your purpose in life. Every religion asks the same three questions in relationship to your origin: why are you here, what went wrong, and how can you fix it? Since God is your creator, you have a purpose in life. You were created for the best type of freedom—living out God’s design for your life. In his message, Originality: Where Did I Come From, Sean McDowell, PhD talks about how Christianity and Darwinism differ in their origin stories and gives two pieces of scientific evidence in support of intelligent design.

    Message Action Plan

    Dear Saddleback Family, 

    Use the Message Action Plan below to help put the things you learned this weekend into practice. If you missed last weekend's message, click here to watch it online.

    Originality: Where Did I Come From?
    The Great Questions of Life – Part 1
    Sean McDowell, Ph.D.
    September 26-27, 2015

    If we want to know how we should live, and why we are here, we need to know where we came from.

    TRUE FREEDOM: Living according to God's design for your life.

    • Worldviews answer three questions:
      1. Origin: Why am I here?
      2. Predicament: What went wrong?
      3. Resolution: How do I fix it?
    • Christianity
      1. ORIGIN: Creation (Genesis 1:1)
      2. PREDICAMENT: Sin (Romans 3:23)
      3. RESOLUTION: Jesus (John 3:16)
    • Naturalistic Darwinism
      1. ORIGIN: Humans are accidents.
      2. PREDICAMENT: Evolution is a clumsy process.
      3. RESOLUTION: We must solve our own problems.

    "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge."                                                Psalm19:1-2(NIV)

    ACTION PLAN: Take time one evening this week to gaze into the night sky and meditate on Psalm 19. Consider what the natural world tells us about our creator God.

    Two examples of evidence for design:

    1. FINE TUNING:
      • FREEMAN DYSON: "As we look out into the universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked to our benefit, it almost seems as if the universe must in some sense have known that we were coming."
      • MARK WHORTON and HILL ROBERTS: "If the balance between gravity and the expansion rate were altered by one part in one million, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, there would be no galaxies, stars, planets, or life."
      • ROGER PENROSE: concluded that "if we combined all the laws that must be fine-tuned, we couldn't even write down that number in full, since it would require more zeroes than the number of elementary particles in the universe."
    2. BIOLOGY – DNA:
      • DAVID BALTIMORE: "Modern biology is a science of information."
      • BILL GATES: "DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we've ever created."
      • STEPHEN MEYER: "Whenever we find specified information and we know the causal story of how that information arose, we always find that it arose from an intelligent source."
      • ANTONY FLEW: "What I think the DNA material has done is show that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements together . . . The enormous complexity by which the results were achieved looks to me like the work of intelligence."

    ACTION PLAN: Offer a prayer of thanksgiving to God for the complex world we enjoy, remembering "what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived – the things God has prepared for those who love him." 1 Corinthians 2:9b (NIV)

    CONCLUSION:

    • Treat everyone with dignity.
    • You were designed to be in relationship with God and other people.
    ACTION PLAN: Write down these two conclusions and put it somewhere as a reminder for you. Allow these to impact how you approach your interactions with others.


    More from this series

    More from this series

    The Great Questions of Life
    September 27 - October 18, 2015
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