living Hope - born at 23 weeks gestation
By Loisann Fowler
As a pregnant mother at 23 weeks gestation I was completely asymptomatic when labor started. After giving me the drug to attempt to stop labor, it was determined by amniocentesis that there were at least 4 known bacteria in the amniotic fluid.
The baby was very sick and could not survive in the womb. In fact, the doctor told me the baby had a better chance at surviving outside the womb than within.
I was told that the likelihood of her surviving was very slim. The drug had only slightly slowed labor anyway; the baby wanted out. So pitocin was started and within a few minutes our 510 gram baby girl was born. That is 1 pound 2 ounces, and she was 11 inches long. A team of neonatologists and NICU nurses were ready in waiting.
However, before they rolled her away, the neonatologist asked me if I wanted to touch her. He wheeled her isolette beside my bed and I touched her little hairless head. Her arms moved toward her head and I placed my pinky finger on her delicate hand. To my amazement, she tightly wrapped her hand around my finger and squeezed. This was the beginning of Hope's incredible battle.
There were never any promises made by the staff, only the truth wrapped in patient love and professional wisdom. It was a long and rocky road of life and death moments. For four long months she grew inside of an isolette instead of my womb. No life saving measure was ignored. She was given the best of care. All of her organs were developed and operating at 23 weeks except the lungs. A ventilator breathed the breath of life for her while she grew in strength and size. And she survived! We took Hope home 4 months after the day she was born; a whopping 4 pounds.
Today, December 17 2004, she is a 7 year old preparing for Christmas; with all the joy and enthusiasm this brings. A petite 49 pounds, Hope is as strong as an ox. She has no fear. She jumps from any height, runs without inhibition, climbs to the highest point and loves to go 'faster' at anything that has momentum. She only has hearing in one ear, one leg grows slower than the other (for which she wears a lift on one shoe), and she wears glasses for extreme nearsightedness while having no peripheral vision due to surgery to save her sight. Hope has no inclination that any of these things are handicaps in any way. She loves to draw, sing, play the piano, put together puzzles, play games, jump into her older brothers' arms with reckless abandon and is rarely motionless. Often her last question before going to sleep is, "What's for breakfast?"
Without a doubt life begins at conception. Hope's life began at conception. Her entire family and everyone whom she has ever met rejoices that life was pursued upon her early arrival into this world. Hope is extremely generous and has a tender, sensitive heart toward others. The world would be missing a wonderful gift had her life not been prized.
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Above is a recent photo of Hope. Unfortunately many abortions are carried out at 23 weeks gestation (when Hope was born). This is very sad. If you are considering an abortion PLEASE think again. If you have had an abortion, please know that there is forgiveness in One Jesus Christ. But you have to get right with Him - click here to find out more
Theistic evolution - the pitfalls and perils of
Further to my article here where I describe how believing in evolution then butchering Genesis to comply with it insults the very character of God.
please read the following taken from here that furthers the difficulty in holding to such a worldview:
Theistic evolutionists say they believe in God while also believing in Darwinism. They maintain that God used evolution as His way of creating the world. But the whole point of Darwinism is that the process of mutation and natural selection is random and undirected! If they want to believe that God directed some form of evolution, theistic evolutionists would have to embrace some form of intelligent design, but they don’t, trying to distance themselves from that line of investigation so as to remain respectable Darwinists.
John G. West of the Discovery Institute was able to get a platform in the Washington Post to raise some of these issues:
The real sticking point is Darwin’s claim that all of life–human beings included–developed through a blind and undirected process of natural selection acting on random variations. In the words of late Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.”
There are ways to try to reconcile Darwinism’s undirected process with theism, but they involve throwing overboard some long-cherished beliefs about God.
The first idea to go is the belief that God directed the development of life toward specific ends. According to biologist Kenneth Miller, one of the most prominent proponents of “theistic” evolution, God did not plan the specific outcomes of evolution–including the development of human beings. Miller describes humans as “an afterthought, a minor detail, a happenstance in a history that might just as well have left us out.” While God knew that undirected evolution was so wonderful it would create some kind of creature capable of praising Him, that creature could have been “a big-brained dinosaur” or “a mollusk with exceptional mental capabilities” rather than us.
Seeking to lessen the discomfort such arguments pose for most religious believers, Francis Collins suggests that God “could” have known the specific outcomes of evolution beforehand even though He made evolution appear “a random and undirected process.” In other words, God is a cosmic trickster who misleads people into thinking that nature is blind and purposeless, even though it isn’t.
One need not be a religious fundamentalist to find such arguments less than satisfying. Indeed, one need not be religious at all. Media coverage notwithstanding, theistic evolution has been shunned by leading evolutionary biologists, 87 percent of whom deny the existence of God and 90 percent of whom reject the idea that evolution is directed toward an “ultimate purpose” according to a 2003 survey.
While theistic evolutionists are mired in the past trying to defend Darwin’s nineteenth-century mechanistic process, other scientists and scholars are suggesting that twenty-first century science is fast making Darwin obsolete. Experiments with bacteria, where evolution can be tested in real time, are showing just how little undirected processes like natural selection can actually accomplish. Experiments with protein sequences are revealing how astonishingly fine-tuned protein sequences must be to work at all. And the DNA inside each of us is disclosing massive amounts of genetic information that points to mind, not chance and necessity, as the ultimate source of biological innovations.
Such discoveries do not “prove” God’s existence, but they do provide tantalizing evidence that life was produced by an intelligent process rather than a mindless one, a finding that certainly has positive implications for faith.
The Roman Catholic Church, no less, seems to have embraced theistic evolution. Do Catholics account for these difficulties?
source: here
please read the following taken from here that furthers the difficulty in holding to such a worldview:
Theistic evolutionists say they believe in God while also believing in Darwinism. They maintain that God used evolution as His way of creating the world. But the whole point of Darwinism is that the process of mutation and natural selection is random and undirected! If they want to believe that God directed some form of evolution, theistic evolutionists would have to embrace some form of intelligent design, but they don’t, trying to distance themselves from that line of investigation so as to remain respectable Darwinists.
John G. West of the Discovery Institute was able to get a platform in the Washington Post to raise some of these issues:
The real sticking point is Darwin’s claim that all of life–human beings included–developed through a blind and undirected process of natural selection acting on random variations. In the words of late Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.”
There are ways to try to reconcile Darwinism’s undirected process with theism, but they involve throwing overboard some long-cherished beliefs about God.
The first idea to go is the belief that God directed the development of life toward specific ends. According to biologist Kenneth Miller, one of the most prominent proponents of “theistic” evolution, God did not plan the specific outcomes of evolution–including the development of human beings. Miller describes humans as “an afterthought, a minor detail, a happenstance in a history that might just as well have left us out.” While God knew that undirected evolution was so wonderful it would create some kind of creature capable of praising Him, that creature could have been “a big-brained dinosaur” or “a mollusk with exceptional mental capabilities” rather than us.
Seeking to lessen the discomfort such arguments pose for most religious believers, Francis Collins suggests that God “could” have known the specific outcomes of evolution beforehand even though He made evolution appear “a random and undirected process.” In other words, God is a cosmic trickster who misleads people into thinking that nature is blind and purposeless, even though it isn’t.
One need not be a religious fundamentalist to find such arguments less than satisfying. Indeed, one need not be religious at all. Media coverage notwithstanding, theistic evolution has been shunned by leading evolutionary biologists, 87 percent of whom deny the existence of God and 90 percent of whom reject the idea that evolution is directed toward an “ultimate purpose” according to a 2003 survey.
While theistic evolutionists are mired in the past trying to defend Darwin’s nineteenth-century mechanistic process, other scientists and scholars are suggesting that twenty-first century science is fast making Darwin obsolete. Experiments with bacteria, where evolution can be tested in real time, are showing just how little undirected processes like natural selection can actually accomplish. Experiments with protein sequences are revealing how astonishingly fine-tuned protein sequences must be to work at all. And the DNA inside each of us is disclosing massive amounts of genetic information that points to mind, not chance and necessity, as the ultimate source of biological innovations.
Such discoveries do not “prove” God’s existence, but they do provide tantalizing evidence that life was produced by an intelligent process rather than a mindless one, a finding that certainly has positive implications for faith.
The Roman Catholic Church, no less, seems to have embraced theistic evolution. Do Catholics account for these difficulties?
source: here
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