Crazy. Insane. Ignorant. These are all things that I have been called by people when they find out that I believe in God. I ignored those concerns for a long time, just told myself that I had to rely on faith and the hope that maybe I was believing in the right thing. But I got to a point where that just wasn’t good enough, I needed more if I was ever going to hope to grow in my faith. In this series of blog posts, we will investigate the claims made by christianity, and by non-believers to give us all some logical foundations we can base our faith on. In this first post, we will look at the arguments for and against God as creator of the universe.
According to many skeptics, science has undermined the need for God. But this could not be further from the truth! To the contrary, science gives us great reasons to believe that there is a God who created the entire universe, including each one of us. In fact, the more we discover about the natural world, the more we realize that Psalm 19:1-2 is true. “The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display his craftsmanship. Day after day they continue to speak; night after night they make him known. (NLT).” As Christians, we believe that God created everything in the world. On the other hand, the majority of atheists believe 2 main things – the first is that the universe was just an area of a bunch of elements and one day just became our world that we know. The second is that life started off as very small life forms and slowly added different features until we became what we are today.
How did the world come into existence?
As most people know, the scientific community has coalesced around the big bang theory as how the universe was created. Unfortunately, if you were to explore their supporting evidence, there is only guesses about what actually ahppened. One of their most important pieces of evidence came from an experiment conducted in 1953 by a man by the name of Stanley Miller. In this experiment, Miller took what scientists believed to be the elements/gases present on the earth before life and put them into flasks. He then pushed electricity through it to see if the building blocks of life would be created. These building blocks are called amino acids. He got anywhere from 5 to 23 amino acids. However, there were many issues with this experiment. The biggest was the supposed environment he created was nowhere close to how scientists now believe the earth was. They now believe that back then, the chemicals were much less friendly to life, so when the electricity was shot through, you know what they got? Cyanide! Not exactly friendly to life anymore… Plus, just because you get the building blocks to something, doesn’t mean it’s gonna build anything. I could throw some metal, tires, and an engine into a swimming pool, but it doesn’t mean a car is going to appear! Another big issue with this theory is as most scientists will admit it doesn’t actually show how the universe came into existence, just how our current universe looks the way it does.
What about our evolution?
So we’ve shown that maybe the idea that life just didn’t magically appear, but what about the other big belief of atheists? That we started as small life forms. And so there was this view that there would be middle points of humans when we evolved from monkeys to the humans we see today. And in 1891, they found something. They found the skullcap, femur and tooth of what they said was the middle ground. This was called the Java Man. Years later, the problems began to arise. The femur didn’t actually belong to the skull, it was from a different animal and upon testing the skull, it was reasoned to be just a regular human, with the size well within our standards today. Scientists have struggled to find the heaping mounds of evidence that we have some cave man grandfather with an ape-like head.
So what about supporting evidence for God?
There are also many arguments to actually support a creator. The first argument is the fine-tuning argument. Imagine you are hiking through the mountains and discover an abandoned cabin. As you enter it, you notice something unusual. The refrigerator is filled with your favourite foods, the cabin’s temperature is set to your liking, your favourite song is playing, and all your favourite books are sitting on the table. What conclusions would you draw? Since random chance could never bring so many factors together, you would rightly conclude that the cabin was prepared in advance with you in mind. Similarly, the laws of nature appear to be “prepared” with humans in mind.
In the 20th century, scientists discovered the existence of multiple physical laws that must each be just right for life to exist in the universe. These laws can be written as mathematical equations, and there are certain values in these equations that are fixed, which are known as constants. The values of these constants are so delicate that if they were off by the tiniest amount, life would not be possible in the universe. This is what is meant by the fine-tuning of the universe.
Let’s look at one example. We are all familiar with gravity: what goes up must come down. If the gravitational constant had been a little weaker, stars and planets never would have formed, and so life would be impossible. If it were slightly stronger, the entire universe would have collapsed into itself after the Big Bang. And the gravitational constant is just one of many constants that must be perfectly aligned to allow life in the universe.There are over 30 parameters that would need to be just right in order for us to be able to survive on earth. The universe is fine-tuned for life because a Divine Intellect designed it that way. God set the natural constants to permit life in his universe. In other words, the fine-tuning of the universe best points to the existence of a Fine-Tuner.
Now, let’s move from considering the universe as a whole to the microscopic level of DNA. We find design in this small realm, just as we did in the larger structures of the universe. When Darwin first proposed his theory of evolution, scientists completely underestimated the complexity of life. Every cell of our bodies is like a tiny factory with biological machinery following routines and commands to keep us functioning. Much of the information for programming this biological machinery comes from our DNA. Simply put, DNA is our genetic code, our biological operating system. And the DNA in a single cell contains enough information to fill eight thousand books. That’s a lot of information!
Here is the bottom line: whenever we see information, and we know how that information arose, we always trace it back to a mind. For example, if you saw, “John loves Mary” written in the sand, you wouldn’t think it came from the tides. You would know that it was written by a person. Social media posts come from social media users. Books come from authors. Texts come from texters.
Even the staunchest atheist has to admit that there is no natural explanation for the origin of information in DNA. And yet we know that information comes from a mind. Isn’t the existence of a designer the most reasonable explanation for the exquisite design we see in DNA? Simply put, the information in DNA points to the existence of an Author of life.
Now, these are just a few examples of how science actually points to a creator and not away from it. And this matters for how we view ourselves as part of God’s creation. In Psalm 8:3-4, King David reflects on the wonder of God’s concern for mankind in light of creation: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?” (ESV) Given the vastness and complexity of the universe, David is in awe that God even cares about mankind. And yet He does! David continues: “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” (Psalm 139:14 NIV). What does this all mean, then? You are not a grand cosmic accident, the result of blind evolutionary processes. God designed the universe with us in mind and created you with great care. Your life has value and purpose. The world we inhabit claims that our value comes from money, fame, influence, and appearance. But God has a different standard. Human value comes from the fact that we are made in the image of a perfectly good and all-knowing Creator. If you ever feel worthless, just look around you, at the mountains and trees, the stars in the sky. And remember what King David said: The God who created all this deeply cares about you. Now, I leave you with this question, what do you choose to believe? What seems more likely? That there is a God who loves you, and fine-tuned this universe for us? Or that everything is just random and we emerged from nothing?
If you are interested in learning more about this, you can find more information here:
-The Case For A Creator by Lee Strobel
-https://apologeticspress.org/category/creation-vs-evolution/
-https://apologeticscanada.com/
-The Battle for the Beginning by John MacArthur
