Note: this message incorporates a dramatic clip from the film Unlocking the Mystery of Life. The DVD or videotape may be obtained at www.illustramedia.org. Permission to show the clip may be obtained from Illustra Media, P.O. Box 2711, La Habra, CA 90623-2711. The phone number is 888-897-6026 or 714-994-4953. The email address is: info@illustramedia.com. I highly recommend using the clip to enhance your presentation.
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I could take you back to the very spot where I lost the last remnants of my faith in God when I was a teenager. It’s on the third floor, northwest classroom of Prospect High School in Mount Prospect, Illinois, where I learned in biology class about an experiment that had been conducted in the 1950s at the University of Chicago.
In his laboratory, Stanley Miller recreated the early atmosphere of the earth and shot electrical discharges through it to simulate lightning. Lo and behold, after a while some amino acids – the building blocks of life – collected at the bottom of the container.
The implications were instantly obvious to me: if it’s that simple for nonliving chemicals to turn into living matter by themselves, then God was out of a job! And that cemented my doubts into atheism for the first time.
Now, I know some Christians believe in the compatibility of Christianity and evolution. They suggest that perhaps God used evolutionary processes to create life. But as a student, I couldn’t understand that. Textbooks define evolution as being “random and undirected” and “without plan or purpose.” Listen to how one textbook put it: “By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of life processes superfluous.”
I thought, How could God direct an undirected process? How could there be a divine purpose behind a purposeless and random world? That didn’t make sense to me. And it doesn’t make sense to a lot of evolutionists. As one leading evolutionist said, Darwin’s “greatest accomplishment” was to show that “living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process, natural selection, without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent.”
As Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, who earned his doctorate in origin-of-life studies from Cambridge University, said: “Contemporary Darwinism does not envision a God-directed process of evolutionary change.”
In fact, a prominent evolutionist named William Provine of Cornell University, was blunt in spelling out the implications of Darwinism. If Darwinism is true, he said, then there are five inescapable conclusions:
1. There’s no evidence for God.
2. There’s no life after death.
3. There’s no absolute foundation for right and wrong.
4. There’s no ultimate meaning for life.
5. People don’t really have free will.
As Time magazine put it: “Charles Darwin didn’t want to murder God, as he once put it. But he did.”
And that was my conclusion – until years later, after I married an agnostic named Leslie and she became a Christian. I was challenged by the positive changes in her character and values to investigate where the evidence of science and history really pointed – toward or away from God. And what I found absolutely shocked me!
It turns out that most modern findings of contemporary science have established that science and faith are not at war – but that science, when done right, points powerfully toward the existence of a God who happens to match the description of the God of the Bible.
It was a stunning affirmation of what the Bible says about God in Colossians 1:16: “For everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible... everything got started in him and finds its purpose in him.” [The Message paraphrase]
What was it that changed my mind? How did a more in-depth study of science help lead me to God? That’s what I want to discuss today. In doing so, my goals are very simple. If you’re a Christian, I want you to walk away even more in awe of your Creator and even more confident that Psalm 102:25 is telling the truth when it says about God, “In the beginning, you laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands.”
Or if you’re a spiritual seeker, I’d like you to have the same response I did as I investigated this evidence – that Romans 1:20 is right when it says that “since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.”
So what were scientific facts that convinced me there’s a Creator? Well, there was both negative and positive evidence. First, the negative evidence against Darwinian evolution convinced me that purely naturalistic processes cannot reasonably account for the creation, development, and diversity of life. A lot has been written by scientists critiquing Darwinism in recent years, but I’ll just hit a few highlights.
For example, that 1953 origin-of-life experiment by Stanley Miller – the one that helped lead me into atheism – has now been thoroughly discredited. It turns out that Miller’s concept of what the early atmosphere of the primitive Earth was like has been supplanted by new evidence that it was actually quite different – and if you run the same experiment with a reproduction of the Earth’s actual environment, you don’t get the amino acids that Miller got.
In fact, all naturalistic theories have utterly failed to explain how non-living chemicals could have somehow assembled themselves into the first living cell. There aren’t just hurdles to explaining how life could have assembled by itself into the first living cell, but there are insurmountable barriers involving the origin of biological information that aren’t going to be resolved by more research and effort.
What’s more, the grandest claims of Darwinian evolution crumbled as I investigated further. There is no convincing evidence of the common origin of all life, as Darwin claimed. Of course, there’s such a phenomenon as “micro-evolution,” which is change within a kind of animal. That’s why we have 200 varieties of dogs. But science has failed over the last 150 years to substantiate Darwin’s claim of “macro-evolution,” which is that all creatures have a common ancestor and that natural selection acting on random variation can explain how fish became amphibians, which became reptiles, which became birds and mammals.
Instead, the fossil record has shown that the majority, if not all, of the world’s 40 phyla, the highest category in the animal kingdom, virtually sprang forth with unique new body plans, fully formed and without transitionary fossils preceding them. There’s absolutely no evidence of the gradual evolution that Darwin predicted. In fact, if you were to condense the entire history of the world into 24 hours, all of these life forms would have sprung up in a mere sixty seconds!
No wonder 100 scientists from a wide range of disciplines – with doctorates from Cambridge, Stanford, Cornell, Yale, Rutgers, Chicago, Princeton, Berkeley, Purdue, Duke, Michigan and Temple, including professors from Yale, MIT, Tulane, Rice, Emory, the University of California and elsewhere – took out a two-page ad and signed their names to what they called “a scientific dissent from Darwinism.” They announced, “We are skeptical of the claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life.” In other words, The emperor of evolution has no clothes.
I agreed. This is not faith versus science; this is science versus science. And I was forced to conclude that Darwinism would require a blind leap of faith that I was simply unwilling to make.
Not only did the negative evidence tear down Darwinism, but I also found there is a whole raft of positive evidence that has developed just over the past few decades from half a dozen branches of science that point powerfully toward the existence of a supernatural Creator. This is what has been so exciting! Let me spell out a few categories of the evidence that I discuss in my new book, The Case for a Creator.
First, there’s cosmology, which is the study of the origin of the universe. For centuries, scientists believed that the universe was eternal – it always existed. But thanks to dramatic new evidence that has been discovered over the last few decades, virtually all scientists are now convinced that the universe had a sudden beginning in a giant explosion full of light.
This has lead to one of the most powerful arguments for the existence of a Creator. The argument is simply this: First, whatever begins to exist has a cause. Isn’t that right? Can you think of anything that began to exist that doesn’t have a cause? No, whatever begins to exist has a cause.
Second, the universe began to exist. As Stephen Hawking said, virtually every scientist now concedes that the universe and time itself had a beginning at some point in the past.
The conclusion flows naturally from that: Therefore, the universe has a cause. What’s more, I demonstrate in my book that we can logically deduce from the scientific data that this Cause must be an uncaused, timeless, immaterial, personal being endowed with freedom of the will and enormous power – a good starting point for a description of the God of the Bible! Do you see how the beginning of the universe provides incredibly strong evidence for the existence of a Creator?
In fact, Arno Penzias, the Nobel-winning physicist who helped discover the evidence for the universe’s beginning, put it: “The best data we have (concerning the origin of the universe) are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, and the Bible as a whole.”
Think about that. The universe began with an explosion that included a shower of photons – which are light. Just as the Bible says in Genesis 1:3: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”
When I interviewed an expert on cosmology for my book, he said something very revealing: “What’s important to understand, Lee, is how reversed the situation is from, say a hundred years ago. It is now the atheist who has to maintain, by faith, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, that the universe did not have a beginning a finite time ago but is in some inexplicable way eternal after all. Now it’s the Christian who can stand confidently within biblical truth, knowing it’s in line with mainstream astrophysics and cosmology. It’s the atheist who feels very uncomfortable and marginalized today.”
So cosmology goes a long way toward establishing the existence of a Creator. And, by the way, before we move on, people often ask, “Okay, but then what created God?” And the answer is nobody did. The argument isn’t, “Whatever exists has a cause.” The argument is, “Whatever begins to exist has a cause.” God, by definition, is eternal. He never began to exist; He has always existed. In fact, before He created the universe, time didn’t exist. There was simply timelessness. But scientists are virtually unanimous in saying the universe did begin to exist – and therefore it needs a cause to explain it. That cause is the Creator.
The second category of evidence comes from physics. One of the most striking discoveries of modern science has been that the laws and constants of physics – the numbers that govern the operation of the universe – unexpectedly conspire in an extraordinary way to make the universe habitable for life. In other words, the universe is fine-tuned on a razor’s edge in a way that defies mere chance and which is better explained as the work of a Creator.
Let me give you a few examples. First, there’s the force of gravity, which is finely tuned to an incomprehensible degree so that life can exist. Let me illustrate it for you.
Imagine a ruler broken down in one-inch increments going all the way across the entire visible universe – billions of light years across. There would be trillions upon trillions of inches on that ruler. This plausibly represents the possible range for gravity; in other words, the setting for gravity could have been anywhere along that ruler. However, it happens to be situated in the exact right place so that life is possible.
Now, imagine you were to change the force of gravity by moving its setting just one inch compared to the entire width of the universe. Just that tiny change would be absolutely catastrophic – instantly, intelligent life would become impossible in the universe!
So the setting for the force of gravity just happens to be situated in the exact right fraction of an inch to make our universe capable of sustaining life. And that’s just one parameter that scientists have studied. One expert said there are more than thirty separate parameters that require precise calibration in order to produce a life-sustaining universe.
Another example is the so-called “cosmological constant,” which is the energy density of space. I know that sounds technical, but what you need to know is that this number has to be balanced on a razor’s edge in order for the universe to exist. If this number were large and positive, galaxies and stars could never have formed. If it were large and negative, the universe would have collapse.
However, scientists have determined that the cosmological constant is fine-tuned to one part in a hundred million billion billion billion billion billion.
That precision would be like going in a space ship way out in space and throwing a dart at the Earth and hitting a bull’s eye that’s one trillionth of a trillionth of an inch in diameter. That’s less than the width of a single atom!
That’s mind-boggling! If you just add together gravity and the cosmological constant, the fine-tuning would be to a precision of one part in a hundred million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. That would be the equivalent of one atom in the entire known universe!
I could go on and on. For example, the strong nuclear force binds the nuclei of atoms together. Now, if you were to decrease the strong nuclear force by one part in ten thousand billion billion billion billion, all we’d have in the universe would be hydrogen. No life would be possible.
Or consider this: unless the number of electrons is equivalent to the number of protons to an accuracy of just one part in a trillion trillion trillion, galaxies, stars, and planets never could have formed.
How can we conceptualize that? Well, one scientist used the example of a simple dime. What if we covered the entire North American continent with dimes 239,000 miles deep, which would extend all the way to the moon. Now pile dimes from here to the moon on a billion other continents the size of North America.
Now, paint one dime red and mix it into the billion piles of dimes and blindfold someone and have them choose just one dime. The odds he would pick the one dime are one in a trillion trillion trillion — and that gives you an idea how breathtaking it is to have just this one aspect of the universe so delicately balanced. And there are dozens and dozens of other examples like this.
As Dr. Vera Kistiakowski, professor emeritus of physics at MIT and former president of the Association of Women in Science, put it: “The exquisite order displayed by our scientific understanding of the physical world calls for the divine.”
The only way atheists have been able to avoid this conclusion has been to suggest that there are actually an infinite number of other universes, and if you randomly spin the dials of physics enough times in enough universes, you’re bound to get one where the conditions would be suitable for life – and we’ve hit the lucky lottery.
The problem with that is that there is absolutely no evidence that an infinite number of other universes exist! Besides, I talked to a physicist about this, and he said the existence of multiple universes would only provide further evidence of a Creator. Why?
He used his bread-making machine as an illustration. To make an edible loaf of bread, you need a well-designed machine with the right circuitry, the right heating element, the right timer, and so forth, and you have to add the right ingredients in the right order and the right proportions.
Now, he said, a universe is far more complicated than a loaf of bread. And if it takes a finely-tuned mechanism and the right ingredients to produce a loaf of bread, then it would require a finely-tuned mechanism and process to produce universes – and such a finely tuned mechanism requires a Creator.
Friends, the evidence of physics is so powerful that it was pivotal in turning a Harvard-educated, Georgetown professor named Patrick Glynn from atheism to belief in God. He said in his book God: The Evidence: “Today, the concrete data point strongly in the direction of the God hypothesis...Those who wish to oppose it have no testable theory to marshal, only speculations about unseen universes spun from fertile imaginations...Ironically, the picture of the universe given to us by the most advanced 20th century science is closer in spirit to the vision presented in the Book of Genesis than anything offered by science since Copernicus.”
The third category of scientific evidence is biochemistry. Charles Darwin said: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.
Biochemist Michael Behe of LeHigh University has demonstrated just that through his description of molecular machines he calls “irreducibly complex.”
He uses a mousetrap as an analogy. Basically, a mousetrap has five components – the base, metal hammer, spring, catch, and metal bar. All of these components must be present and in the right relationship to each other for the trap to work. If one of them is absent, then the trap doesn’t catch half as many mice; it catches zero.
Now, evolution can’t produce a mechanism like a mousetrap all at once – the odds too great. And you can’t produce it directly by numerous, successive, slight modifications, because the precursor system would be missing a part and therefore couldn’t function. There would be no reason for it to exist. And natural selection only chooses systems that are already working.
When we look at a mousetrap, we see obvious signs of an intelligent designer behind it. But what’s truly amazing is that when we go deeper into the biochemical realm, we see the same thing over and over in even more complex ways.
For example, consider a biological machine called the bacterial flagellum. This is a rotary propeller that enables bacteria to move through fluid. It has several interconnecting parts that must be present all at once for it to function. The flagellum’s motor is maybe 1/100,000ths of an inch. It can spin at 10,000 revolutions per minute, stop in a quarter turn, and spin the other direction at 10,000 RPMs. That’s a higher-revving engine than the high-tech Honda S2000 sports car! No wonder Howard Berg of Harvard University calls it the most efficient motor in the universe – it’s way beyond anything we can build with all of our technology.
Genetic studies have shown that between 30 and 35 proteins are needed to create a functional flagellum. Eliminate one of its parts and it doesn’t spin at 5,000 RMP – it doesn’t work at all. And Darwinists have not been able to come up with a single reasoned explanation for how it actually came about. And that’s just one of many examples Behe has found in the microscopic world.
When I interviewed Behe, he told me: “My conclusion can be summed up in a single word: design. I say that based on science. I believe that irreducibly complex systems are strong evidence of a purposeful, intentional design by an intelligent agent.”
Especially when we look at the fourth scientific development I want to discuss, and that’s DNA. Scientists not long ago completed mapping the entire human genome, which are the chemical instructions inside every cell that contain the blueprint for life.
I like the words of President Clinton when he announced this breakthrough. “Today,” he said, “we are leaning the language in which God created life.”
And DNA is quite literally that language. Inside every one of our body’s 100 trillion cells is a strand of DNA that would stretch six feet long if you were to uncoil it. And it’s encoded with a four-letter chemical alphabet that spells out the precise assembly instructions for all the thousands of different kinds of proteins from which our bodies are made.
In fact, DNA is the most efficient information storage system in the world. Get this: if you had one teaspoon of DNA – picture peanut butter – it could store all of the information needed to build all of the proteins for all of the one thousand million species of organisms that have ever lived – and still have room left over for all of the information in every book ever written!
How does DNA point toward God? Think about it this way: did any of you see the movie Contact? It was based on Carl Sagan’s book by the same name. In the movie, scientists are scanning the skies for signs of intelligent life in space. Their radiotelescopes only receive static — random sounds. It’s reasonable to assume there’s no intelligence behind that. But then one day they begin receiving a transmission of prime numbers, which divisible only by themselves and one.
The scientists reason that it’s too improbable that there would be a natural cause behind a string of numbers like that. This wasn’t merely unorganized static; it was information, a message with a content. And from that, they concluded there was an intelligent cause behind it. As Sagan himself once said, “The receipt of a single message from space” would be enough to know there’s an intelligence out there.
But what is DNA? It’s a message; it’s a language; it’s information with content. Just like English uses a 26-letter alphabet, DNA uses a four-letter chemical alphabet. In fact, inside every cell of the human body is as many words as you could find in 10,000 editions of the Sunday Chicago Tribune! It’s the specific, detailed, written instructions for how to build the human body. Where did it come from?
Friends, if a single message from space is enough for us to conclude there’s an intelligence behind it, then what about this vast amount of information contained in the DNA of every plant and animal?
Nature, by itself, can produce patterns, but it can’t produce information. If you walk on the beach and see ripples in the sand, you would reasonably conclude that pattern was left by the action of waves. But if you saw “John Loves Mary” and a heart with an arrow through it, you wouldn’t think the waves produced that. Why? Because it’s information — and whenever we see written information, whether it’s a newspaper or a novel or a computer program — we know there’s intelligence behind it. The same is true for DNA.
As King David wrote in Psalm 139: “For you [God] created my inmost being. You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”
And there’s plenty of evidence from 21st century science to know that full well. As one of the world’s leading experts on the molecular world, Dr. James Tour of Rice University, put it: “I stand in awe of God because of what He has done through His creation. Only a rookie who knows nothing about science would say science takes away from faith. If you really study science, it will bring you closer to God.”
In other words – science, when done right, points toward God. And more and more scientists are coming to that conclusion. In fact, let me close with a story about one of them.
His name is Dr. Dean Kenyon, and he was a professor of cell and molecular biology at San Francisco State College. He believed he had the answer of how life could have created itself, without any need for a Creator, and he and a co-author described their theory in this book – Biochemical Predestination.
Their idea was that the building blocks of life – amino acids – must have some sort of inherent chemical attraction that caused them to automatically organize themselves into the first living cell. Scientists were very excited about this concept.
But in the ensuing years, new scientific studies began to undermine this theory. In light of these developments, Dean Kenyon did something very unusual – he stood up at a public gathering of scientists and publicly repudiated the conclusions of his own textbook!
Then, as more and more evidence was discovered in recent years about how amino acids actually are assembled into proteins to create living creatures, Kenyon began to shift his opinion 180 degrees.
In fact, experts have now produced a computer animation to show how scientists now believe the information from DNA is used to assemble amino acids into proteins. I want to show you a clip from his documentary, which is called Unlocking the Mystery of Life, and which has been shown on several PBS stations.
What you’re going to see is how cells use the information from DNA to build amino acids into the thousands of different types of proteins from which our bodies are constructed. As you watch, ask yourself this question: does this look like something that’s the product of random chance – or does this system look like the product of an intelligent designer?
After you see this animation, then you will see Dr. Dean Kenyon offer his own conclusion about where the evidence of science points.
[At this point, show the dramatic computer animation, which is immediately followed by Dr. Kenyon’s conclusion that this process bears the unmistakable signs of an Intelligent Designer.]
Friends, Dr. Kenyon is right. The more scientists peer through telescopes into the cosmos and through microscopes into the complexities of the cell, the more they are concluding that the unmistakable fingerprints of a Creator are all over the universe
If you’re a Christian, then I hope you’ll celebrate the fact that the heavens really do declare the glory of the Lord. You can hold your hear up high – today, more than any other time in the history of the world, the evidence of science powerfully supports your belief in God.
If you’re a spiritual seeker, I hope your curiosity has been piqued enough to motivate you to do that I did – check out the evidence for yourself. That’s why I wrote The Case for a Creator – to help you in this investigation. Because the good news is not only that there’s a Creator, but that He loves you and that He’s inviting you into a personal relationship with Him, both now and forever.
