In a letter to the Corinthian church, St Paul wrote that the gospel is open and revealed to everyone, except those who refuse to believe. He added that the “god of this age”, who of course is Satan, has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light. (2 Corinthians 4v4) . All too frequently these days, on the radio, TV and newspapers, when referring to Christian issues, the comment is made that religious believers are deluding themselves. These secular commentators who seem to pop up in the media with desperate frequency have been blinded to the light of Christ’s gospel. They cannot see it, understand it or comprehend it and are deluding themselves when they decry it.
One of the areas where to me it seems to me particularly bizarre that so many people reject the existence of God is if you look at His creative acts. To me in the same way you look at a watch and infer there was a watchmaker, you look at creation and infer there is a creator. There’s a story about Henry Ward Beecher the US congregational minister and political activist, who possessed a beautiful globe depicting the various constellations and stars of the heavens. Robert Ingersoll, an agnostic visited Beecher admired the globe and asked who made it. “Who made it” said Beecher satirically, “Why nobody made it, it just happened”. St Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome: “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 1v20). St Paul wrote this 2,000 years ago, and today with all the advances in science, we have a much greater knowledge and understanding of this planet in this incredible universe, which God created. A universe, which shows God to be a God of might, intelligence and intricate detail; a God of order and beauty; a God who controls powerful forces.
Because of the rapid advances in scientific knowledge in modern times, particularly in the new ways that things around us can be observed, measured and evaluated, scientists have discovered many other remarkable things. Taken alone they would just be considered quirks or oddities, but taken together- and there’s an awfully large number of them- they tell an awesome story. Here's just a few of the many examples of how this wonderful universe surely didn't haapen by chance but instead reveals to me that it was created by a creator God .
I don’t know if any of you have experienced a total eclipse of the sun, when the moon passes from our perspective exactly in front of the sun, blots it out to our eyes and it goes all dark. It appears to us that the sun and the moon are the same size, but they are not. The sun is around 400 times larger than the moon and the only reason they seem to be the same size is that the sun is 400 times further away from us. And there is a God ordained reason for the fact that the Sun and the Moon are the size and the distance away that they are for if this was not the case we would not exist or at best we’d live as scraps of amoeba or bacteria. The Sun itself is just the perfect size for life on Earth. It is also the perfect distance from our planet, as for life to occur, the sun needs to be not so near that the water in the oceans boils away and not so far that it freezes over. Earth is the only planet in the Solar System within that zone. If we were 5% closer to the Sun we would burn to a crisp in a runaway greenhouse effect. If we were a tad further away from the Sun, we would suffocate in a cloud of carbon dioxide. If the Moon was a little larger, our tides would swamp the earth. If it were a little smaller there would be no tides.
Moving outwards into the Solar System, we discover that Jupiter, the largest planet, is in just the right place to act as protector of Earth, by capturing asteroids and comets, which otherwise could threaten us and knock lumps out of us.
If the force of gravity that exists in this universe was pushed upwards a bit, the sun would have burned out faster, leaving not enough time for the Earth to have become formulated in its present form as perfect for life. Also if the relative masses of protons and neutrons were changed by a hair, stars like the sun would never have happened, since the hydrogen they eat would never exist.
The Big Bang, the massive explosion, which many scientists believe was the way in which the universe was created, is a statistical miracle. It has been that had the explosion differed in strength at the outset by only one part in 1 followed by 60 noughts, the universe including this planet on which we live would not exist. Also Stephen Hawking has calculated that, “if the density of the universe one second after the Big Bang had been greater by one part in a thousand billion, the universe would have recollapsed after 10 years. On the other hand, if the density of the universe at that time had been less by the same amount, the universe would have been essentially empty since it was about 10 years old.
Incidentally centuries before the telescope was invented and man realised that our home galaxy, the Milky Way, contains about 100 billion stars plus that there are another 100 billion galaxies each of 100 billion stars, the Bible told us in a number of different places that the number of stars was countless. When the Old Testament was written man reckoned the number of stars that existed to be the number of stars visible to the naked eye, which is around 1,500. Yet in the Book of Jeremiah 34 v 22 we see the Lord promise to Jeremiah “I will make the descendants of David my servant and the Levites who minister before me as countless as the stars of the sky and as measureless as the sand on the seashore”. How did Jeremiah know that the amount of stars was a countless amount comparable to the amount of grains of sand on the seashore?
Going back to my spiel, scientists have discovered how finely tuned the earth is in so many ways. The magnetic field is just right, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere is just right, the rate of rotation is just right, the size and properties of the Earth’s crust are just right. The list goes on and, in fact, scientists have come up with a list of twenty things that need to be just right and how, if any one of them was slightly different, life on Earth just would not exist.
Because of the rapid advances in scientific knowledge in modern times, particularly in the new ways that things around us can be observed, measured and evaluated, scientists have discovered many other remarkable things. Taken alone they would just be considered quirks or oddities, but taken together- and there’s an awfully large number of them- they tell an awesome story. Here's just a few of the many examples of how this wonderful universe surely didn't haapen by chance but instead reveals to me that it was created by a creator God .
I don’t know if any of you have experienced a total eclipse of the sun, when the moon passes from our perspective exactly in front of the sun, blots it out to our eyes and it goes all dark. It appears to us that the sun and the moon are the same size, but they are not. The sun is around 400 times larger than the moon and the only reason they seem to be the same size is that the sun is 400 times further away from us. And there is a God ordained reason for the fact that the Sun and the Moon are the size and the distance away that they are for if this was not the case we would not exist or at best we’d live as scraps of amoeba or bacteria. The Sun itself is just the perfect size for life on Earth. It is also the perfect distance from our planet, as for life to occur, the sun needs to be not so near that the water in the oceans boils away and not so far that it freezes over. Earth is the only planet in the Solar System within that zone. If we were 5% closer to the Sun we would burn to a crisp in a runaway greenhouse effect. If we were a tad further away from the Sun, we would suffocate in a cloud of carbon dioxide. If the Moon was a little larger, our tides would swamp the earth. If it were a little smaller there would be no tides.
Moving outwards into the Solar System, we discover that Jupiter, the largest planet, is in just the right place to act as protector of Earth, by capturing asteroids and comets, which otherwise could threaten us and knock lumps out of us.
If the force of gravity that exists in this universe was pushed upwards a bit, the sun would have burned out faster, leaving not enough time for the Earth to have become formulated in its present form as perfect for life. Also if the relative masses of protons and neutrons were changed by a hair, stars like the sun would never have happened, since the hydrogen they eat would never exist.
The Big Bang, the massive explosion, which many scientists believe was the way in which the universe was created, is a statistical miracle. It has been that had the explosion differed in strength at the outset by only one part in 1 followed by 60 noughts, the universe including this planet on which we live would not exist. Also Stephen Hawking has calculated that, “if the density of the universe one second after the Big Bang had been greater by one part in a thousand billion, the universe would have recollapsed after 10 years. On the other hand, if the density of the universe at that time had been less by the same amount, the universe would have been essentially empty since it was about 10 years old.
Incidentally centuries before the telescope was invented and man realised that our home galaxy, the Milky Way, contains about 100 billion stars plus that there are another 100 billion galaxies each of 100 billion stars, the Bible told us in a number of different places that the number of stars was countless. When the Old Testament was written man reckoned the number of stars that existed to be the number of stars visible to the naked eye, which is around 1,500. Yet in the Book of Jeremiah 34 v 22 we see the Lord promise to Jeremiah “I will make the descendants of David my servant and the Levites who minister before me as countless as the stars of the sky and as measureless as the sand on the seashore”. How did Jeremiah know that the amount of stars was a countless amount comparable to the amount of grains of sand on the seashore?
Going back to my spiel, scientists have discovered how finely tuned the earth is in so many ways. The magnetic field is just right, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere is just right, the rate of rotation is just right, the size and properties of the Earth’s crust are just right. The list goes on and, in fact, scientists have come up with a list of twenty things that need to be just right and how, if any one of them was slightly different, life on Earth just would not exist.
A few decades ago the American astronomer Carl Sagan summed up the then viewpoint of the majority of the scientific community’s beliefs about the place of the Earth in this universe. He said: “Our posterings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe are challenged by this point of pale light (upon our world). Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.” Today many scientists are reconsidering their views and are now starting to consider the possibility that the whole Universe seems to be constructed for one purpose only-to make life on Earth possible. For instance the agnostic British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle who died in 2001 reluctantly admitted in his later years that the universe appears to be delicately tuned for life: He wrote “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as the chemistry and biology (of the universe)… The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”
And its not just advances in our understanding of the universe. A solitary sperm and a single egg can fuse under any circumstances and can grow into 8lbs of human baby. All the information needed for learning to read, to write, pulling the curtains or playing the piano is in that first cell. As scientists have studied the human cell they have been astounded at the vast amount of information in the form of a language embedded in the DNA molecules contained within the cell. If you unwrapped all the DNA contained within the cells of an average human’s body, and laid it end to end, it would reach to the moon and back 8,000 times.
And its not just advances in our understanding of the universe. A solitary sperm and a single egg can fuse under any circumstances and can grow into 8lbs of human baby. All the information needed for learning to read, to write, pulling the curtains or playing the piano is in that first cell. As scientists have studied the human cell they have been astounded at the vast amount of information in the form of a language embedded in the DNA molecules contained within the cell. If you unwrapped all the DNA contained within the cells of an average human’s body, and laid it end to end, it would reach to the moon and back 8,000 times.
Several British newspapers reported just a few years ago how one of the world’s most renowned atheists, Sir Antony Flew, had recently renounced his atheism because of the compelling evidence of the DNA molecule. He had been persuaded by “the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved.”
From the orderly pattern of the enormous universe, the galaxies and our planet with its amazing creatures, to the equally wondrous and complex microcosm of the cell, the evidence shouts an unmistakable message that Christians are not deluded: We are the result of a Master Designer!
From the orderly pattern of the enormous universe, the galaxies and our planet with its amazing creatures, to the equally wondrous and complex microcosm of the cell, the evidence shouts an unmistakable message that Christians are not deluded: We are the result of a Master Designer!
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