The Case For A Creator

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.