The Case for a Creator (2)
Scott Bayles, pastor
Blooming Grove Christian Church: 4/14/2013
I like the story of a little boy who was asked if he believed in God. He answered, “Well, yes I do.” When asked why, he said, “Well, I guess it just runs in the family.”
Not everyone’s story is like that, though.
When C.S. Lewis, who many of you may recognize as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, came to Oxford University he was an atheist. He had lost his mother at age nine and the rest of his life was spent in boarding schools. He had no use for God in his life and no faith whatsoever. But, while attending Oxford, he met a man who became his best friend—J.R.R. Tolkien. You know him as the author of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien, along with some other friends challenged Lewis to investigate the evidence for God’s existence and the Bible’s inspiration. So Lewis did. It was from that investigation and the encouragement of friends like Tolkien that Lewis moved from atheism to a deep Christian faith. He went on to become one of the most influential theologians and most successful Christian apologist of the twentieth century.
Unfortunately not everyone has a friend like J.R.R. Tolkien. An increasing number of people in America and around the world don't believe in God. As I mentioned last week, the Pew Research Center reports that more and more Americans, especially ages 18 to 25, identify themselves as non-religious, agnostics or atheists. That’s why it’s more important than ever for all of us to be able to able to articulate the reasons why our faith makes sense! Remember what the Bible says: “Always be ready to give a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you. However, do this with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15-16 HCSB).
Maybe you have a friend or family member that thinks science has proven there is no God. Or maybe there’s a co-worker who is always challenging or making fun or your faith. Or maybe you’re skeptical about God’s existence yourself. Maybe you’ve got some doubts of your own that creep in from time to time and you’ve been afraid to admit it.
Over the next few weeks—using philosophy, physics, history, personal experience, and a little common sense—I want to give you five good reasons to believe in God. I want you to think of these as a series of lights that, when lit, can illuminate the path to personal faith in God. They are:
1. The Light of Cosmology
2. The Light of Creation
3. The Light of Conscience
4. The Light of Christ
5. The Light of Conversion
Last week we focused on the light of cosmology. Cosmology, of course, is the study of the cosmos and it teaches us that the universe had a beginning. And, since everything that has a beginning has a cause, we know that the universe must have a Cause. Like the Bible says, “Every house is built by someone, but the builder of everything is God himself” (Hebrews 3:4 NCV). Based on our knowledge of cosmology, we can reasonably conclude that the Cause of the universe is a transcendent, timeless, spaceless, unimaginably powerful, personal Creator.
Picking up where we left off last week, let’s talk about the evidence, or the light, of Creation. The Bible makes this remarkable claim: “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (Romans 1:20 RSV). From the earliest times, philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle, wholly apart from the Bible, have concluded that God must exist, based on what they perceive in the things that have been made.
In other words, creation itself is evidence of a Creator.
This is what the Intelligent Design movement is all about. The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an Intelligent Designer, rather than random undirected processes. The classic illustration is the Watchmaker analogy. If you stumbled across a watch in a field, even if you had never seen a watch before, you could discern from its inner workings and intricate design, that there must be a watch-maker. Similar tell-tales signs of design are discernible all throughout the created world. Design necessitates a Designer and creation demands a Creator.
Because creation is so vast there are myriad examples of design in everything from micro-biology to the mass density of the universe. So I want to give you another logical argument based on the fine-tuning of universe. This fine-tuning argument will show that the existence of intelligent life anywhere in the cosmos depends on a Creator. Any additional design arguments based on the origin of life, irreducible complexity or biological information will simply layer on even more evidence for a Creator.
1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due either to chance or design.
2. The fine-tuning is not due to chance.
3. Therefore, it is due to design.
Let me first explain what fine-tuning is. Astronomers have been stunned by the discovery of how complex and delicate a balance of initial conditions must have been present in the Big Bang itself if the universe is to permit the existence of intelligent life anywhere at all in the cosmos. This delicate balance of initial conditions has come to be known as the “fine-tuning” of the universe for life. This fine-tuning includes certain constants within the laws of physics, like the force of gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the subatomic “weak” force. It also includes various arbitrary quantities, such as the ratio of protons to electrons in the universe, the expansion rate of the universe, the cosmological constant and many, many others.
Just one example of a finely tuned constant is the strong nuclear force (the force that holds atoms together). Stars "burn" by fusing hydrogen atoms together. When the two hydrogen atoms fuse, 0.7% of the mass of the hydrogen is converted into energy. If the amount of matter converted were slightly smaller—0.6% instead of 0.7%— a proton could not bond to a neutron, and the universe would consist only of hydrogen. With no heavy elements, there would be no rocky planets and no life. If the amount of matter converted were slightly larger—0.8%, fusion would happen so readily and rapidly that no hydrogen would have survived from the Big Bang. Again, there would be no solar systems and no life. The amount of mass converted into energy must be exactly 0.7%.
That’s just one example. There are literally dozens of these constants and quantities that are precisely balanced to allow chemistry to take place, stars to burn, galaxies to form. If any of these variables were altered by even a hairsbreadth, life could not exist anywhere in the universe. This is a well establish fact of science.
So the question is—could this fine-tuning be the result of random chance?
If you’ve ever tried to build a house of cards, you know that each card must be carefully and delicately balanced against the others if the house is going to stand. Any shaky hands, vibrations in the table, or a gust of air from a swinging door could cause the whole thing to collapse. One person who knows all about that is Bryan Berg.
Bryan has held the Guinness World Record for the Tallest House of Freestanding Playing Cards since 1992. He has since broken his own record more than ten times. In 2004 he set a new record for the largest house of cards by building a 15-foot replica of Cinderella’s Castle in Disney World using 156,000 playing cards.
The probability that the constants and quantities that make life possible in our universe could have been set in place by mere chance is so remote that you would have far better odds of taking 3,000 decks of cards, tossing them out of a second story window and expecting them to land with such precision and accuracy that they build Cinderella’s Castle on your front lawn!
The fine-tuning of the universe has been conservatively estimated to be one part in 1053 (that’s a 10 with 53 zeroes behind it). One physicist compared it to throwing a dart at the other side of the observable universe, twenty billion light-years away, and hitting bull’s-eye on a one-inch target blindfolded and dizzy. The universe is carefully and precisely fine-tuned for the existence of life with a complexity and delicacy that literally defies human comprehension.
Because the odds of a life-permitting universe like ours existing are so vanishingly infinitesimal, the fine-tuning of the universe must, therefore, be due to design. And, if it was designed, there must be a Designer.
Incredibly, many atheists—still unwilling to accept the obvious evidence for a Creator—have been forced to appeal to the concept of a multiverse. In this multiverse-hypothesis, it is suggested that our universe is just one of an infinite number of universes with completely random physical constants and quantities. Because, of course, the more universes there are, the more likely it is that one of them would be life-permitting and we just happen to be the lucky ones that hit the jackpot! While theories like this might make for good science fiction—it’s far from science fact. First of all, there’s no evidence whatsoever that a multiverse actually exists, especially one with an infinite number of other universes. In order to avoid the obvious evidence for a Creator, atheists would have to first prove that a multiverse exists, then prove that there are an infinite number of universes within it, then prove that those universes are not finely tuned like ours, but rather completely random in their physical constants and quantities.
It just goes to show you that some people, no matter how smart they are, can sometimes fail to see the obvious. That reminds me of a story about Sherlock Holmes.
Holmes and his assistant, Dr. Watson, are on a camping trip. At some time during the night Holmes wakes up, elbows his faithful friend and say, “Watson, look up and tell me what you see.”
Watson replies, “I see millions of stars.”
“What does that tell you?” asks Holmes.
Watson ponders for a minute, and then says, “Astronomically speaking, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, it tells me that Saturn is in Leo. Horologically, it appears to be approximately a quarter past three. Theologically, it’s evident that God is unimaginably powerful and we are small. Meteorologically, it seems we will have a beautiful day tomorrow.” Then after a pause, Watson says: “Well, Holmes, what does it tell you?”
“Watson, you idiot,” Holmes replies, “It means someone has stolen our tent!”
The truth is—the light of Creation gives us powerful evidence for God’s existence that ought to convince even the most stubborn skeptics. Once you’ve established that the fine tuning of the universe is due to design, then—like I said before—you can add additional layers of evidence from the origin of life, irreducible complexity, or biological information. Regarding the origin of life, for instance, Sir Fredrick Hoyle, the English astronomer and mathematician at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge who actually coined the term “Big Bang” Theory, once said, “The odds of even the simplest cell forming by chance are like believing that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard could assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”
At this point it takes more faith to be an atheist than it does to believe in a God who created life, the universe, and everything.
Let me share one last illustration with you that I first heard from Robin Collins—a doctor or both physics and philosophy. Imagine you’re on a manned spaceflight to Mars and when you land you immediately see this impressive architectural structure. Inside, you find twelve dials that control everything from oxygen levels, to temperature, to gravity and so on. The dials have a huge range of possible settings, but each of them has been carefully calibrated so that life is flourishing inside the structure. A barren wasteland outside, but inside it’s just like home. You’d undoubtedly conclude that some intelligent beings created this place. But more than that, you could reasonably assume they knew you were coming and prepared a place for you. That’s what God did for us.
The Bible says, “The God who made the whole world and everything in it is the Lord of the heavens and the earth… This God is the One who gives life, breath, and everything else to people” (Acts 17:24-25). Long before you were born on this planet, God made the universe livable.
Conclusion:
I want to encourage you to look for some examples of elegance and design in creation this week and maybe spark some spiritual conversations about those things. And, of course, I want to invite you to come back next week as we take another step on this path toward personal faith in God and explore the Light of Conscience.
Invitation:
In the meantime, the Bible tells us that God created the cosmos so that we would come to know him. The Bible says, “God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us” (Acts 17:27 NIV). If you’re seeking God today and you’d like to reach out for him and find him, I’d like to help. Please, come talk to me while we stand and sing.
