“The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven on the sons of men to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God. All have turned aside, they have together become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one.” – Psalm 14:1-3
“I cannot look at the universe as a result of blind chance.” – Charles Darwin *1
Does God exist?
This is an age-old question that has been debated for thousands of years. For those who are students of academia, this question can be presented from a variety of philosophical, theological or scientific arenas, yet the question of how this relates to the everyday “Joe” can be lost in the grandiloquence of the “educated”. My name is Andrew Smellie, and I serve as the Evangelist for the Washington DC International Christian Church. I graduated from pre-medical program at Cornell University with a Bachelors of Science degree in Human Biology and completed a Masters degree in Health Administration at Cornell before God called me into training for the ministry. Other the next few weeks I will provide logical, scientific and practical proof of the existence of God, the validity of the Bible and the debate between evolution, intelligent design and creationism.
It is my prayer that these articles will inspire the new college freshman (overwhelmed by the theory of “macro-evolution”) to the elderly cynic that may be too prideful and scared to admit their life was never ultimately in their control. While I have a science background, I do not claim to be an expert of these issues. My convictions – like yours – are based on my own conclusions from the evidence. My aim is to impart a spiritual and a scientific explanation for you to make an informed decision – the goal being that your faith will be increased and you will be able to share your faith more effectively with others who are most likely confused about these topics as well. For the purposes of this brief article, let’s examine four key evidences behind the existence of God in simple terms.
1) Evidence for the Existence of God: The origin of the universe – Cosmology
Cosmology is the study of the universe and how it began. It attempts to answer the questions, “Where the universe came from?” “Why does it exist?” Since it is a given that the universe exists, there are two possibilities which follow this reasoning. Either the universe has always existed or it has not. If it has always existed, then it was not created. If it has not always existed, then the universe was created. A thing cannot create itself. Physicists and philosophers call this the law of causality. Since the universe could not create itself (cause itself to exist), that would imply some sort of creator. The second law of Thermodynamics states that “For any spontaneous process in a closed system, entropy increases.” What does this mean in laymen’s terms? With the absence of “supernatural intervention”, the universe will run down completely. Order leads to disorder. For example, if you cleaned your room and then went in and out of it consistently, it would become more disorderly as time went on unless there is an outside effort made to clean it. To think that there was no Creator implies that disorder leads to order – that design came out of nothing – a direct contradiction to the 2nd law of Thermodynamics.
Astrophysical evidence points to an event otherwise known as the “Big Bang” 15 billion years ago, where it is believed that physical space, matter, energy and time were created in the universe. Fred Hoyle, an astronomer, explains that the Big Bang theory requires that the creation of the universe came from nothing. If you were to go back in time, you would reach a point in which, in Hoyle’s words, the universe was “shrunk down to nothing at all.” *2 Therefore, the Big Bang evidence requires that the universe began to exist and was created out of nothing, a conclusion that agrees with the beginning of creation by God in the Bible. Without a Creator, the universe is an accident, the planets are accidents, and human beings are accidents. Nothing is special or has any purpose. The evidence is clear that we are not accidents, but rather were planned and designed by a Creator.
2) Evidence for the Existence of God: The complex order in the universe
Looking at the above facts as well as other evidence, many scientists have come to the conclusion that the observable universe points to a Creator, known as the Anthropic Principle. The Anthropic Principle is the observation that the universe has all the necessary and narrowly defined characteristics to make human life possible. *3 When we look at the world around us, it would seem, at least at first glance, that the universe was somehow designed to support and nourish human life. It seems obviously clear that the laws of nature had been designed with the specific purpose of creating a universe which can support advanced life forms.
Stephen Hawking, a physicist, estimated that if the rate of the universe’s expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million (that’s not a typo), the universe would have re-collapsed into a hot fireball. *4 P. C. W. Davies has calculated that the odds against the initial conditions being suitable for later star formation (without which planets could not exist) is one followed by a thousand billion billion zeroes (not a typo either), at least.5 John Barrow and Frank Tipler estimate that a change in the strength of gravity or of the weak force by only one part in 10100 would have prevented a life-permitting universe. *6 Consider these facts about the Earth alone:
a) The perfect size of the Earth. The Earth’s size and corresponding gravity holds a thin layer of mostly nitrogen and oxygen gases, only extending about 50 miles above the Earth’s surface. If Earth were smaller, an atmosphere would be impossible, like the planet Mercury. If Earth were larger, its atmosphere would contain free hydrogen, like Jupiter. If the ration of carbon to oxygen had been slightly different than it is, none of us would have been here to breathe the air. Earth is the only known planet equipped with an atmosphere of the right mixture of gases to sustain plant, animal and human life.
b) The Earth’s distance from the Sun. The temperature swings we experience on Earth are roughly -30 degrees to +120 degrees. If the Earth were any further away from the sun, we would all freeze. Any closer and we would all burn up. Even a fractional variance in the Earth’s position to the sun would make like on Earth impossible. The earth remains this perfect distance from the sun while it rotates around the sun at a speed of nearly 67,000 mph. It is also rotating on its axis, allowing the entire surface of the Earth to be properly warmed and cooled every day.
The late Sir Fred Hoyle, a world-renowned astronomer, stated that the likelihood of a cell forming by chance is the same as a “tornado sweeping through a junk-yard and assembling a Boeing 747 from the material within.” *7 I always give an example of my cell phone when explaining the need for a Creator. I ask my friend who is questioning God’s existence, “If I were to take my cell phone, smash it into a thousand pieces, and put it in a brown paper bag and shake it vigorously, would it come back together in perfectly working order?” The answer is obvious. No.
3) Evidence for the Existence of God: Irreducible Complexity – Biochemistry
A system is irreducibly complex if it has a number of different parts that all work together to accomplish the task of the system, and if you were to remove one of the parts, the system would no longer work. One example of this would be a car. If you removed the battery, it would not work. There are also hundreds of other vital parts to make it work. Michael Behe, a renowned molecular biochemist and author of the book Darwin’s Black Box – and the champion of the concept of irreducible complexity – uses the example of the common hardware store mousetrap to explain this issue. “If you take away any of these parts – the spring or the holding bar or whatever – then it’s not like the mousetrap becomes half as efficient as it used to be. It doesn’t catch half as many mice. Instead it doesn’t catch any mice. It’s broken. It doesn’t work at all”. *8 According to Behe, a basic mousetrap doesn’t have any unnecessary parts you could take off and still achieve the same result. In scientific terms, when a machine can’t be simplified any further, it is said to have irreducible complexity. Why is this important? Behe states that “We’ve learned that the cell is actually run by irreducible complex micro machines. The existence of these machines challenges a test that Darwin himself provided.” *8
In his Origin of Species, Charles Darwin stated, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive, slight modifications, my theory (macro-evolution) would absolutely break down.” *9 In order for these “micro machines” within human cells to have developed over time, they must have achieved this one step at a time. In the case of a mousetrap, it would be like starting with just the platform, evolving over time into a platform with a hammer, then to a platform with a hammer and spring and so on. But Darwin’s theory of natural selection, or “survival of the fittest”, says that the best systems will work, therefore surviving and develop further. A mousetrap that is just a flat wooden platform doesn’t work, so according to natural selection, it wouldn’t develop further; it would become extinct. Like the mousetrap, molecular machines within cells are irreducibly complex. If their parts are not in the correct places, they will not work. Any incomplete molecular machines would die, one by one.
According to Behe, “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. No other theory succeeds; certainly not Darwinism.” *8 I agree.
God provides the best explanation for fully functioning biological organisms, systems, an subsystems that couldn’t come about through a gradual macro-evolutionary process, without totally ceasing to exist at lower, evolutionary levels. The alternative theory is that biological systems took huge, unseen leaps from simple to complex without any guided process or forward-looking instructions. From a one-celled ameba to a 100 trillion-celled human being? Cellular systems are much more complex than a mousetrap or a car. We’ll examine their amazing capacities in my final point.
4) Evidence for the Existence of God: Biological Storage of Information
The storage capacity of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is unbelievable. DNA is the carrier of genetic information for all complex organisms. DNA contains a four-letter chemical alphabet for all the proteins from which our bodies are made. No theory has come close to explaining how this information got into biological matter by natural means. However, if we were to find this kind of information in a book or computer code, we would know it had an intelligent source! Would a book or computer code write itself? The answer is obvious. The information in DNA points to an Intelligent Designer who created the genetic material with its protein-building instructions. Through the entire chain of DNA uses only six essential ingredients, the tiny chain is enormously long – often containing billions of parts. If you were to take the amount of DNA in a single human body, straighten it out, and lay it end to end, it would extend for 50 billion kilometers (from the Earth to beyond the solar system)! *10 Obviously the amount of complex information on a single strand is enormous.
When scientists announced that they had finally mapped the three billion codes of the human genome – a project that filled the equivalent of 75,490 pages of the New York Times – geneticist Francis S. Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, said DNA was “our own instruction book, previously known only to God.” *11 In the six feet of DNA tightly coiled inside every one of our body’s 100 trillion cells, it is amazing to see how the genetic information is provided to create all of the different proteins out of which our bodies are built. In fact, each one of the 30,000 genes that are embedded in our 23 pairs of chromosomes can yield as many as 20,500 different kinds of proteins. *12 The evidence is clear: if you can’t explain where the information comes from, you haven’t explained life, because it’s the information that makes the molecules into something that actually functions. George Sim Johnson stated, “Human DNA contains more organized information than the Encyclopedia Britannica. If the full text of the encyclopedia were to arrive in computer code from outer space, most people would regard this as proof of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. But when seen in nature, it is explained as the workings of random forces.” *13
So what is Your Decision?
If you don’t believe there is a God, you believe that nothing produces everything, non-life produces life, randomness produces fine-tuning, and chaos produces information. To be honest, it sounds like you need more faith to believe that there isn’t a God than to believe that there is a God! The decision is yours to make. Consider the following scripture and ask yourself the question, “If God did exist, would I want to know him?” Therein lies your answer. Examine the evidence and your heart in order to discover the truth.
“For 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.” – Romans 1:20
For those of you who are faithful disciples of Jesus, I pray that you will preach the Word and develop a conviction to be “prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason or the hope you have.” (1 Peter 3:15) If you are trying to make a decision about believing in God, I encourage you to seek God with all your heart through His Word. As Jesus states, “Seek and you will find.” Matthew 7:7
In His Service,
Andrew Smellie
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(1) Jaki, God and the Cosmologists, pp. 146-47. From Charles Darwin, letter to J.D. hooker (1870), in More Letters of Charles Darwin: A Record of His Work in a Series of Hitherto Unpublished Letters, ed. Francis Darwin and A.C. Seward, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1903), 1:321.
(2) Fred Hoyle, Astronomy and Cosmology (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1975), p. 658.
(3) Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator. P.45 (2004)
(4) Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), p. 123.
(5) P. C. W. Davies, Other Worlds (London: Dent, 1980), pp. 160-161, 168-169.
(6) John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
(7) Hoyle on evolution, Nature, 294(5837):105, November 12, 1981.
(8) Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator. P. 63. Interview with Michael Behe (2004).
(9) Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 6th ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 154.
(10) Dr. Lee Spetner, Not by Chance (Brooklyn, NY: The Judaica Press, Inc., 1998), p. 30.
(11) Quoted in Larry Witham, By Design (San Francisco: Encounter, 2003), 172.
(12) See Nancy Gibbs, “The Secret of Life,” Time, February 17, 2003
(13) George Sim Johnson, “Did Darwin Get It Right?” The Wall Street Journal, October 15, 1999.
