firechyld - Also, not only do Christians do what God tells us to do, as in, just because He tells us to do it, we also respect and promote much of the common norms and standards of right and wrong, including common sense and reason, and common social curtsies and moral notions as well. And more to the point, I strive to be Christlike, not because God tells to be so, but because I love Him and want to be like Him.
Many Christians live a moral and upright life prior to becoming a Christian, they opposed crime and gross immorality, they were a helpful and productive part of society, they even helped the little old lady across the street and made occasional financial contributions to local charities where it seems that they are really making an important difference. There are universally accepted rights and wrongs, and to a very large degree, unsaved people many times tend to honor and respect these unwritten standards. And a person can do that even after they become saved, so it need not always be that Christians act because they were told to act a certain way.
There is an apparently universal moral sentiment about fairness. If someone serves to swindle you, or betray your trust in order to rob you of what is yours, then almost without any exception, man reacts the same, they object on the grounds of fairness, that it is unfair to rob and swindle. Not convinced, ask any skeptic to go to work for a company that agrees with you to pay you so much per hour, and then when the time comes for payment, they swindle you out of your paycheck with some bogus reasoning that is totally unfair. What if you went to a doctor to have a legitimate operation, and instead of removing a cyst, they leave it in there and take out a kidney and say 70% of your small intestines to sell them in a black market organ theft ring. That would be wrong and it would not take a Christian to rightly convict such terrible behavior as being even criminal.
You might be tempted to call that animal instinct, the instinct for survival, and to some extent I agree, it is natural for beings to want to serve themselves with that which preserves their life and happiness, but there is no reasonable explanation for why beings seem preprogrammed with life protecting standards including moral standards of right and wrong. If we are all a product of something other than intelligent design, then the fact that life is surrounded with logically sound principles and standards and norms, is beyond the scope of coincidence. The incredible order and logical consistency in design is one of the strongest indicators for intelligence being behind all of life. In fact, when you simply consider microbiology, recent times have made significant end roads that point all the more strongly for intelligent design verses origins without intelligent design.
DNA is one of the coolest studies in biology, and at the cellular level, it is a science that is fabulously infused with pre-determined intelligent design. I mean think of it for a split second. A human being, even a partially formed baby in the mother's womb is a system that is far more complex than a Boeing 747, yet that little baby was ultimately formed from one single cell we call an egg from the mother, and one single sperm cell from the father, and then all you have to do is have proper implantation in the womb, add warmth and nutrients and in time, out comes a human being! Think of it. From a tiny tiny speck, on that single DNA strand, is the genetic blueprint of you. You went from being a microscopic dot with no form or comely design, almost pure information with some wonderful building blocks, and then that tiny thing self replicated into you. The complexity and order and design involved is simply staggering. And don't forget, it is not enough to know what is involved in order to make you, you must also execute every single instruction in the right order and have every function carried out correctly before the next function can proceed, it is an interdependent system with so many variables that it is way way waaaaay hideously complex. Intelligent design is the only reasonable response.
There simply is no reasonable view that says that humanity is any other product than from an intelligent design. God says that even if you do not have the law of God, like you never read nor heard about the bible for example, and yet you naturally do the things in the law, it becomes a law unto yourself showing itself as written on your heart. See God has created us with a profound understanding about Himself and His eternal attributes which include, right and wrong (i.e. fairness, rational sense, etc) even though most reject God in subversive unrighteousness. So even unsaved people have a really good idea how we should treat one another because we are created after the image of God on purpose, so we do not necessarily need the bible to teach us to not lie and steal, everyone has a God and good and bad awareness inside them, and it is always good to do good, and it is always bad to do evil.
If you get a chance, a must see video is "Unlocking the Mystery of Life", produced by Illustra media, "the scientific case for intelligent design". You can get it at Bob Enyart's website KGOV dot com, or any number of places. But it is HIGHLY recommended for the pure edutainment of it all. They do an outstanding job of explaining highly technical aspects of life, in common man's terms, and they show pictures too, smile, they use state of the art animations and take us into the inner workings of the cell to help us all visualize what is actually going on, and how excitingly intelligent the foundation of life really is at the cellular level. Of special note is a huge issue called, irreducible complexity. See, in any system that is fundamentally formed from chance or random events, you must get more and more simple, so that the not smart design principle, chance, can actually happen. But the exact opposite is what actually happens. At the most foundational and microscopic levels, biological systems are ridiculously complex, so much so that intelligent design is virtually demanded in order to even conceive how life began and continues. Useful function and the order of design just demolish the tierd notions of unintelligent design. I really and truely hope you get that video, one time it was on PBS and it is a top notch presentation, so it MIGHT be in local libraries, not sure. A star in this presentation is Michael Behe who is a best selling author and theoretician against Darwinian evolution. I can give you an example of irreducable complexity in just a few scant sentances if you would like a taste of the brunt of this hugely important issue. But I have written so much already. I hope this helps.
