There’s an argument that many people make: that the natural world, and humanity’s existence in the Universe, point towards a divine creator that brought forth all of this into existence. To the best of our knowledge, Earth exists with a plethora of conditions that allowed for our existence, and does so in a way that no other world can match.
👉 Isaiah 45:12 “I am the one who made the earth and created people to live on it…”
We live in a particularly privileged place. We live on a planet that has all the right ingredients for life:
👉 In Acts 17:26 “From one man He made every nation of men, to inhabit the whole earth; and He determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their lands.
👉 We’re at the right distance from our Sun so that temperatures are conducive to life.
👉We have the right atmospheric pressure for liquid water at our surface.
👉We have the right ingredients — the right balance of heavy elements and organic molecules — for life to arise.
👉We have the right amount of water so that our world has both oceans and continents.
👉And life started on our world very early, sustained itself for our planet’s entire history, and gave rise to us: sentient, self-aware creatures.
If you look at the other worlds we know of, the difference is striking.
The claim that’s often made isn’t merely that Earth is unlikely; it’s that our planet, with the confluence of circumstances that gave rise to us, is statistically impossible, even given all the stars and galaxies in the Universe. The emergence of intelligent life is so outlandishly unexpected, given all the factors that needed to occur in just the right particular order, that our Universe must have been designed specifically to give rise to us. Otherwise, the argument goes, the odds of us coming to be would be so infinitesimally small that it’s unreasonable to believe it could have happened by chance.
This is a very compelling argument for many people, but it’s important to ask ourselves three questions to make sure we’re approaching this honestly. We’ll go through them one at a time, but here are the three, so we know what we’re getting into.
What are, scientifically, the conditions that we need for life to arise?
👉How rare or common are these conditions elsewhere in the Universe?
👉And finally, if we don’t find life in the places and under the conditions where we expect it, can that prove the existence of God?
👉These are all big questions, so let’s give them the care they deserve.
👉 In ◄ 1 Corinthians 14:33 “For God is not a God of disorder but of order –…”
The complex order in the universe. During the last 30 years or so, scientists have discovered that the existence of intelligent life depends upon a delicate and complex balance of initial conditions simply given in the Big Bang itself.
it was clear that the sun and moon had the same maker, as expressed, for instance, in the Bible. Like light bulbs from the same manufacturer’s mold, one is high wattage and the other is low wattage.
The absolute relative size of the sun and moon
So the sun and moon look the same size to our eyes. But are they the same size in reality? While ancients might have said yes, modern scientists realize that the sun is much larger.
What is the actual ratio of the size of the sun to the moon? 400 times by diameter! By volume, the sun is 1.3 million times larger! It’s like a pilates ball to a marble!
So it’s only an illusion that the sun and moon are the same size. What causes this illusion?
If you know math, the answer is obvious. The sun is 400 times farther from the Earth than the moon. Thus, they look the same to us.
Sounds like a simple explanation. The sun is 400 times wider than the moon, but it is also 400 times farther away. No mystery!
A remarkable coincidence:
But how did that happen? How did the moon get to be just the right distance from the Earth so that it looks the same size to us as the sun? There is no law in physics that requires a moon to have an inverse relationship between its size compared to its sun and the distance from its sun. Astronomers know of no other moon for which this is true, certainly not in our solar system.
Astronomers consider this fact to be “pure coincidence.”In other words, there is no logical or scientific explanation.
Can it be simple coincidence? Contemplate what is going on in a total eclipse. The sun, 92 million miles away, casts a conical quarter-million mile long shadow from the 2,000 mile wide moon that converges on a mere 60 to 70 mile pinpoint on the 8,000 mile wide Earth.
Let’s say I suspend a 100-foot-diamter orb in the air, and a mile away I suspended a basketball. You have the ability to float in the air, and I give you a baseball and ask you to place it just at the right distance so that when the orb is lit, it will cast a pinpoint shadow of the baseball on the basketball. Can you perform this feat? Only if the orb is lit. Like focusing a magnifying glass, you progressively move the baseball back or forth until the dot appears on the surface of the basketball.
But could you find the right distance if the light were off and you had no measuring tools? Even though you are intelligent and can understand the mathematics involved, your most intensive efforts to place the baseball at the right distance would fail. Yet scientists tell us that the moon got in the right place by mere chance!
👉 In Psalms 33:9 “For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.
The laws of nature do not apply only to earth. Our entire universe follows the same laws. And these laws never change.The Universe was govern by ordinances with God establish.
👉 In Job 38:33 “Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? Can you establish their rule on the earth?
Your coffee left on a counter will always become cool. Gravity remains steady, never random. The speed of light remains constant. The earth rotates in 24 hours. (This is so precise, we know the year we need to add a leap-second to our world clock, to keep it current.)
Doesn’t it seem strange that our universe is so orderly? Why is that?
Cosmologist Sean Carroll comments, “A law of physics is a pattern that nature obeys without exception.”
Scientists today take for granted the idea that the universe operates according to laws. All of science is based on what author James Trefil calls the principle of universality: “It says that the laws of nature we discover here and now in our laboratories are true everywhere in the universe and have been in force for all time.”
There’s more. As scientists record what they observe, most often they are not just using words and paragraphs. The laws of nature can be documented with numbers. They can be measured and computed in the language of mathematics.
The greatest scientists have been struck by how strange this is. There is no logical necessity for a universe that obeys rules, let alone one that abides by the rules of mathematics. The speed of light measures the same 186,000 miles per second, no matter if the light comes from a child’s flashlight or a star that’s galaxies away. Mathematically, there is an exact speed of light that doesn’t change.
Physicist Eugene Wigner confesses that the mathematical underpinning of nature “is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.” Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize winner for quantum electrodynamics, said, “Why nature is mathematical is a mystery…The fact that there are rules at all is a kind of miracle.”
This astonishment springs from the recognition that the universe doesn’t have to behave this way. It is easy to imagine a universe in which conditions change unpredictably from instant to instant, or even a universe in which things pop in and out of existence. Instead, scientists cling to their long-held faith in the fundamental rationality of the cosmos.
Is God Real? Photo of person writing math problems on a black chalkboard to illustrate that laws of physics are mathematical, pointing to God as designer.Physicist Paul C. Davies comments, “…to be a scientist, you had to have faith that the universe is governed by dependable, immutable, absolute, universal, mathematical laws of an unspecified origin. You’ve got to believe that these laws won’t fail, that we won’t wake up tomorrow to find heat flowing from cold to hot, or the speed of light changing by the hour. Over the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are? …The favorite reply is, ‘There is no reason they are what they are–they just are.'”
Even over time, these laws remain consistent. The same laws of nature we find on earth also govern a star billions of light years away. A recent study confirmed, “One of the most important numbers in physics, the proton-electron mass ratio, is the same in a galaxy six billion light years away as it is here on Earth, according to new research, laying to rest debate about whether the laws of nature vary in different places in the Universe.”
All of modern science rests in the belief that rational laws, exist in the universe. The main category of modern scientists who propelled exploration and discovery of these laws were men and women who believed in the existence of an all-powerful God. Why? They envisioned the universe to follow laws in keeping with the rationality and majesty of God the creator. Just as God is consistent, unchanging, there is a constant nature of science. They believed that God made the universe to operate lawfully, according to divine reason and with glorious beauty.
👉 In Isaiah 42:12 “I am the one who made the earth and created people to live on it. With my hands I stretched out the heavens. All the stars are at my command.
This is quite different from people who believed in multiple gods, each affecting the universe by their own whim or temperament. In polytheistic societies, the gods were inconsistent and unsearchable and nature was governed by gods who could not be known. The universe behaved, so they thought, in as much of a mystery as their gods, with little thought that it could be otherwise. The concept of a discoverable, intelligent, orderly universe that was rational and predictable simply was not in their worldview.
👉 In Romans 1:19-20 ” Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:
THE SCIENCE OF THE BIBLE 