BY SALPI EDGARIAN
Dr. Kenell Touryan was the honorary guest speaker at Crescenta Valley Armenian Apostolic Church on Sunday March 11. He was invited by the Educational Committee, who spoke on “God and the Cosmos: Chance, Necessity or Design?”
The program started with Norair Edgarian playing masterfully on the piano, two pieces from Anoush opera and Komitas Vartabed’s composition. Salpi Edgarian introduced Dr. Touryan to the audience, reading his biography and great achievements as a renowned scientist and Princeton graduate.
The anticipation of this event had attracted a lot of crowd from the Armenian community, to participate and hear the speaker’s perspective, based on his years of experience in the scientific field. The auditorium was filled to its full capacity with enthusiastic crowd, who were eagerly listening and admiring the breathtaking pictures taken by the Hubble telescope, as he was illustrating the short video played on “Fantastic Voyage.”
Dr. Kenell Touryan made clear that the purpose of his lecture was to educate us, that God and science do not contradict each other, but scientific findings affirm the intelligence of the designer behind the cosmos, all the galaxies and massive stars in the universe.
Dr. Touryan relayed to the audience that no matter how mankind has excelled in their knowledge of earth’s formation and all the stars, the universal laws governing them and all the mathematical calculations and formulas, scientists are still limited in figuring out all the facts behind the mysteries of the origin of life, earth and the other planets that have fascinated mankind for centuries.
One of the examples Dr. Touryan pointed out was that, even though a chimpanzee has only 6% difference to the human DNA formation, it does not mean that humans originally evolved from chimpanzee, but in reality it confirms the fact that God created man and animals from the dust of the earth, and to dust we will all return according to the Bible, with one exception, that God created man in His image and that’s why humans are unique, we can create things, speak, reason, rule, study, compose songs and play musical instruments and enjoy them all. Psalm 19 says, “Heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows His handiwork.”
Dr. Kenell Touryan also pointed out that close study of the moon and the sun, the size and exact proximity to our planet earth, are so meticulously calculated and measured that if the sun was closer than it is, we would have burned, and if it was further, we would have been frozen.
Human deductive reasoning leads us to believe that there is an intelligent designer behind all these scientific findings, and as believers we attribute that to the God of the Holy Bible as Hebrews 11:3 says, “By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.”
Those who continually challenge the Genesis claim of God creating earth in 6 days, and argue about not being reasonable to our human intellect, do not consider the fact that God is outside of our earthly time span. The creation of earth in 6 days, each day being 24 hours, is equivalent to billions of years with our gravitational force, that slows down the time, since the Bible says in 2 Peter 3:8, “But beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” For this reason, it is wrong to dismiss the testimony of the first 2 chapters of the book of Genesis regarding God’s creation, without first praying and asking God to reveal the Truth to us.
Dr. Touryan raised an important point as well, that even though the Bible contains scientific information, it is not a science book, but it is written merely by the love of God to restore man’s sinful heart back to Himself, through His Holy Spirit, which can happen by faith alone, as Jeremiah 31:33 declares God’s plan of establishing a new covenant with man, “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God and they shall be My people.” The new covenant was accomplished on the cross through Jesus Christ, as we read in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him, should not perish but have everlasting life.”
The concept of Big Bang theory causing the formation of earth, all the vast cosmos and all the rest of the planets in our galaxies, has originated from individuals who have chosen not to believe in God and credit Him for designing and bringing forth all things that is challenging to our limited human understanding and intellect.
Dr. Kenell Touryan mentioned that most of the scientific discoveries and mathematical formulas were revealed to mankind through strong believers in God, such as Newton, Einstein and Lord Kelvin. One of Albert Einstein’s statement has been, “Science without religion is lame, and religion without science is blind.”
The presentation ended with the audience having a chance to ask Dr. Touryan questions, and he answered them superbly based on his experiential knowledge of the scientific world, as well as searching the scriptures in the Bible since his youth. He received great compliments of applause and even some youth approached him in person, expressing to him how enlightened they were by this special presentation he gave.
Dr. Touryan with his wife lives in Indian Hills, Colorado. He has three married children and seven grandchildren.
The book that he has published “A Cord of Multiple strands” is available at amazon.com in the English version for $6.95, which has been translated from Armenian to Russian and Spanish as well. The Eastern Armenian version of this book is available at the Nor Gyank Printing in Yerevan, Armenia for 3000 Armenian Dram per copy. A new printing of this same Armenian version is currently under way and will be available to purchase in United States by May 2012. You may contact SalpiEdgarian@yahoo.com for update about the new printing.
Crescenta Valley Armenian Apostolic Church members express their deep gratitude and send their best wishes to Dr. Touryan and his family, for the dedication and loyalty of giving back his very best selflessly to the Armenian community all over the world, as a true Christian with joy and love, since he is fluent in several languages, without discrimination, wherever he is invited to speak.
“even though a chimpanzee has only 6% difference to the human DNA formation, it does not mean that humans originally evolved from chimpanzee, but in reality it confirms the fact that God created man and animals from the dust of the earth,”
Just to be clear, scientists do not claim we descended from chimpanzees, but chimpanzees and humans descended from common ancestors. I’m not sure if Dr. Touryan meant that or not. The evidence points to human and other great ape lineages diverging at different points in time.
Dr. Kenell Touryan mentioned during the lecture of how his scientific colleagues remind him of the claims that human molecular similarities show very clearly that chimpanzees are our closest living relatives, and so according to the evolution theory we must share an ancestor in common at some point in the past, but he stops them at that point saying, ” Excuse me, your relatives are chimpanzees, mine are angels, since the Bible says in Psalm 8:5 we are made a little lower than angels.”
i wonder if theres any science to explain a virgin birth…be a man of science or god, you cant be both
As I have mentioned in my article, you can be both a man of faith and science. The scientists who were responsible for major paradigm shifts in our understanding of nature and the cosmos have been men of science and faith, such as Copernicus (1473-1543) in Heliocentric, Tycho Brahe & Kepler (1571-1630) in Elliptic Orbits, Galileo Galile (1564-1642) in Evidence of Jupiter & its Orbits, Newton (1642-1727) in Classical Physics, Boyle (1627-1691) in Chemistry as Science, Faraday (1791-1867) in Electricity, Smalley (1943-2005) in Nanotechnology, and many more that I can list, but hope this suffices!