Designed For Life

Today we are continuing in our apologetics series on: “What do you believe?” We have been looking at the world and universe from a logical or philosophical perspective and about the evidence for the existence of a Creator God. We will be looking at two passages of Scriptures. One in Isaiah and the other in the Psalms. Let’s start by turning to Isaiah 44:24:

This is what the Lord says, He who is your Redeemer, and the One who formed you from the womb: “I, the Lord, am the Maker of all things, Stretching out the heavens by Myself, And spreading out the earth alone.

We have been talking about how the universe and life began which answered the question of our origin. Where did we come from? We not only talked about where we came from but why we even exist in the first place. What is our purpose for being on this earth?

Last week we talked about how finely tuned the universe and the earth is, making it possible to sustain complex life. When we talk about the universe being finely tuned, we mean that out of the 100 trillion possible outcomes for the beginning of the universe which are for the most part life-prohibitive, somehow our universe is able to sustain life as we know it. It’s like the Apollo 13 flight where so many things went wrong (including the O2 tanks exploding in their space module) and their lives were hanging by a thread. After aborting the mission and they were on the way back to earth, with a failed computer and navigation system, the astronauts had to reenter the earth’s atmosphere through such a narrow corridor that it could be compared to the width of a piece of paper. People around the globe were watching and praying for the astronauts’ safe return and it was a miracle they made it back alive.

This is just an example of a situation where it was necessary for every condition to be so exact for the astronauts’ survival. Even more so, the conditions necessary for life to exist as we know it is so narrow that the fact that we are here today is mind boggling. As Richard Dawkins put it, “however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead.”

In an interview with a physicist by the name of Leonard Susskin, he described our universe as so complex that we live on a knife's edge so if you would change the laws of physics in the slightest the world as we know it would not exist. Susskin asked the question: How is it even possible that we live on a planet that has the right temperature that liquid water can exist? What about the necessary preciseness of the gravitational pull, the precise distance of the earth to the sun, so that we don’t either burn up or freeze to death? When we speak about the fine tuning of the universe - there has to be a logical explanation for why it is this way. The question is: Why, given the infinite possibilities, does the universe take the exact shape that allows us to exist?

There could be three possibilities:

? Physical necessity

? Chance or

? Divine design

Is it by physical necessity? Sir Martin Reese, a cosmologist, said there is no natural explanation for the universe to exist in this form. In other words, there is no physical necessity for the universe to be the way it is. We could easily imagine a universe governed by other constants that would make life impossible.

Is it by chance? What is the likelihood of a universe supportive of life coming into existence by coincidence? Roger Penrose calculates the probability as 1x10 to the 10th to the 123 power. This number tells us that the “accidental" or "coincidental" creation of our universe is an impossibility.

This leads us to the last option, if this universe is not here by necessity, if it does not exist by chance, then there must have been a creative mind behind the design. As Nobel Laureate Arno Penzias, co-discoverer of the radiation afterglow, put it this way:

Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life. In the absence of an absurdly-improbable accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan.

Science is showing us, like at no other time in history, that this is a universe of incredible design and complexity. According to the Christian worldview, God is the ultimate reason we are alive on planet earth. Isaiah 44 tells us that God is the Maker of all things - He is the One who stretched out the heavens and spread out the earth Himself. Psalm 19 tells us that the heavens proclaim the glory of God and the expanse of heaven is declaring the work of His hands, His craftmanship. Day after day and night after night they speak and make Him known. Yet they speak without a sound or word, their voice isn’t heard yet their message in quiet evidence has gone out through all the earth, their words to all the world (1-4).