The Case for a Creator (15 page)

“However, from a biblical point of view, there isn’t an expectation that nature would be perfect. The Bible says there has been decay or deterioration because evil entered the world and disrupted the original design. We’re not given all of the specifics on how this happened, but the biblical book of Romans affirms the natural world is groaning for its redemption, because something has gone wrong with the original creation.
²⁶
Based on the biblical account, we would expect to see both evidence of design in nature as well as evidence of deterioration or decay—which we do.”

It was time to move on, but I glanced down at the laptop computer in my briefcase. I had to admit that Meyer’s basic explanations about disteleology did make a lot of sense.

ROADMAP TO THE FUTURE

As we wrapped up our conversation, I felt a little like Meyer did when he attended the Dallas conference in 1985: enthused about the affirmative scientific case for God. So far, the evidence from the telescope to the microscope was pointing powerfully in the direction of a Creator—a circumstance I never would have dreamed possible back in my days as a student. I was left with an urgent desire to continue my investigation.

Still, I also was experiencing an underlying skepticism. Would the case for a Creator hold up when it was scrutinized more carefully and when I could cross-examine experts with all of the questions that plagued me? What fascinating new details would be supplied by those who have spent years studying the various categories of evidence that Meyer had described? Would his case emerge strengthened, weakened, or destroyed?

As a legal affairs journalist, I had seen a lot of trials where the prosecutor provided a persuasive overview of the evidence during his opening statement to the jury. But the judge always instructs the jury that the prosecutor’s words aren’t evidence. They’re merely a road map to help them process the subsequent testimony by witnesses.

In a sense, this is what Meyer had provided for me: an outline of the scientific evidence for theism. Now was the time for me to put experts in cosmology, physics, astronomy, microbiology, biological information, and consciousness to the test and see whether the case is as strong as Meyer claimed. My plan was to start at the literal beginning—the origin of the universe, which occurred in an explosion of energy so incomprehensibly powerful that its echo, in effect, is still being heard billions of years later.

I couldn’t wait to get started!

THE WRY SMILE OF GOD

I didn’t want to leave, however, without taking a few moments to ponder my impressions of Meyer. I especially liked his endearing blend of a professor’s academic depth combined with an advocate’s savvy and an enthusiast’s winsome earnestness. But while we had talked a lot about science, a bit about philosophy, and a little about theology, I realized we hadn’t delved into Meyer’s personal reflections. His journey from scientist to intelligent design advocate was fascinating to me, and I was curious about the state of Stephen Meyer’s spiritual life.

“Over the years as you’ve studied the scientific evidence that supports theism, how has this affected your faith?” I asked.

“It has strengthened it, no question,” he replied. “The trend is definitely toward more discoveries that point toward God, and that excites me. More and more people are going to find themselves open to God as a result of new findings that make theistic belief the best explanation for the evidence of nature.”

He stopped at that. It was a safe answer, but I could tell he was weighing whether he should risk more. I sensed he was the kind of person who would be more comfortable extolling the virtues of microbiology than opening up about something as personal as his own relationship with God. But as I sat quietly and listened, he was about to prove me wrong.

“One thing I haven’t told you about my spiritual journey,” he continued, “is that for a two-year period in my life, I was very attracted to Nietzsche’s version of existentialism. Nietzsche had a different objection than the ones we’ve been talking about. He asked,
Why should God rule and I serve?
This resonated with me. Why should a condition of my happiness be submission to the will of God? I sensed I couldn’t be happy without him; I knew my bad lifestyle only brought misery. So I ended up literally shaking my fist at God in a wheat field in Washington state.

“My point is that the intellectual rebellion the apostle Paul talks about is very true in my own life. Even in my Christian thinking today, I find a tendency to slide back into what Paul refers to as the natural mind. And here’s what the scientific evidence for God does for me: it realigns me. It helps me recognize that despite my natural tendency toward self-focus and self-absorption, I can’t ignore what God has accomplished in this world to let everyone know that he is real, that he is the Creator, and that we need to get right with him.

“I see this not only in cosmology and physics and biology, but also in the historical revelation of the Bible, principally in the revelation of Jesus Christ himself. He is
so
compelling! Einstein thought so. Napoleon thought so. This Nazarene captivated their attention, and he continues to captivate mine.

“I remember thinking at one point that if the Jesus of the Bible weren’t real, I would need to worship the person who created the character. Jesus is so beyond what I can comprehend! And the evidence for God in nature constantly challenges me to a deeper and fuller relationship with him. My study of the scientific evidence isn’t separate from my life as a Christian; it’s marbled throughout that experience.

“I remember when I first began teaching a college course on the evidence for God, I got flack from some people who claimed that these kinds of arguments can produce an idol of the mind or make science a god. I felt a little reticent for a while—but no longer. I’ve come to an even stronger conviction that this is evidence that God has used to reveal himself to us.

“I look at the stars in the night sky or reflect on the structure and information-bearing properties of the DNA molecule, and these are occasions for me to worship the Creator who brought them into existence. I think of the wry smile that might be on the lips of God as in the last few years all sorts of evidence for the reliability of the Bible and for his creation of the universe and life have come to light. I believe he has caused them to be unveiled in his providence and that he delights when we discover his fingerprints in the vastness of the universe, in the dusty relics of paleontology, and in the complexity of the cell.

“So exploring the scientific and historical evidence for God is not only a cognitive exercise, but it’s an act of worship for me. It’s a way of giving the Creator the credit and honor and glory that are due to him. To attribute creation to a mere natural process is a form of idolatry to which we’re all prone. I don’t judge my naturalistic colleagues for being prone to that. That’s how I’m constituted as well. All of us have a tendency to minimize God, to think and behave as if we weren’t really immersed in his creation and that we aren’t ourselves the product of his unimaginable creative power.

“Looking at the evidence—in nature and in Scripture—reminds me over and over again of who he is. And it reminds me of who I am too—someone in need of him.”

For Further Evidence

More Resources on This Topic

Dembski, William.
The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions about Intelligent Design
. Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2004.

McGrath, Alister.
Glimpsing the Face of God
. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans. 2002.

Meyer, Stephen C. “Evidence for Design in Physics and Biology.” In
Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe
, eds. Michael J. Behe, William A. Dembski, and Stephen C. Meyer. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1999.

——. “Modern Science and the Return of the God Hypothesis.” In
Science and Christianity: Four Views
, ed. Richard F. Carlson. Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2000.

Moreland, J. P.
Christianity and the Nature of Science
. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1989.

Witham, Larry.
By Design: Science and the Search for God
. San Francisco: Encounter, 2003.

5
THE EVIDENCE OF COSMOLOGY: BEGINNING WITH A BANG

Set aside the many competing explanations of the Big Bang; something made an entire cosmos out of nothing. It is this realization—that something transcendent started it all—which has hard-science types . . . using terms like ‘miracle.’

Journalist Gregg Easterbrook
¹

Perhaps the best argument . . . that the Big Bang supports theism is the obvious unease with which it is greeted by some atheist physicists. At times this has led to scientific ideas . . . being advanced with a tenacity which so exceeds their intrinsic worth that one can only suspect the operation of psychological forces lying very much deeper than the usual academic desire of a theorist to support his or her theory.

Astrophysicist C. J. Isham
²

M
y eyes scanned the magazines at the newsstand near my home. A beautiful woman graced
Glamour
. Sleek, high-performance cars streaked across the front of
Motor Trend
. And there on the cover of
Discover
magazine, sitting by itself, unadorned, floating in a sea of pure white background, was a simple red sphere. It was smaller than a tennis ball, tinier than a Titleist—just three quarters of an inch in diameter, not too much bigger than a marble.

As staggering as it seemed, it represented the actual size of the entire universe when it was just an infinitesimal fraction of one second old. Cried out the headline:
Where Did Everything Come From?
³

Thousands of years ago, the Hebrews believed they had the answer: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” opens the Bible.
⁴
Everything began, they claimed, with the primordial
fiat lux
—the voice of God commanding light into existence.
⁵
But is that a simplistic superstition or a divinely inspired insight? What do the cosmologists—scientists who devote their lives to studying the origin of the universe—have to say about the issue?

It seemed to me that the beginning of everything was a good place to start my investigation into whether the affirmative evidence of science points toward or away from a Creator. At the time, I wasn’t particularly interested in internal Christian debates over whether the world is young or old. The “when” wasn’t as important to me as the “how”—how do scientific models and theories explain the origin of all?
⁶

“In the beginning there was an explosion,” explained Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg in his book
The First Three Minutes
. “Not an explosion like those familiar on Earth, starting from a definite center and spreading out to engulf more and more of the circumambient air, but an explosion which occurred simultaneously everywhere, filling all space from the beginning with every particle of matter rushing apart from every other particle.”
⁷

Within the tiniest split second, the temperature hit a hundred thousand million degrees Centigrade. “This is much hotter than in the center of even the hottest star, so hot, in fact, that none of the components of ordinary matter, molecules, or atoms, or even the nuclei of atoms, could have held together,” he wrote.
⁸

The matter rushing apart, he explained, consisted of such elementary particles as negatively charged electrons, positively charged positrons, and neutrinos, which lack both electrical charge and mass. Interestingly, there were also photons: “The universe,” he said, “was filled with light.”
⁹

“In three minutes,” wrote Bill Bryson in
A Short History of Nearly Everything
, “ninety-eight percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe. It is a place of the most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful, too. And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.”
¹⁰

The most intriguing question is what caused the universe to suddenly spring into existence. For Bryson and many others, its mere presence somehow seems to explain itself. In a chapter called “How to Build a Universe,” he vaguely speculates on exotic theories about a “false vacuum,” or “scalar field,” or “vacuum energy”—some sort of “quality or thing” that may have “introduced a measure of instability into the nothingness that was” and thus sparked the Big Bang through which emerged the entire universe.

“It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing,” he said, “but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can.”
¹¹

Yet could there be another explanation that better accounts for the evidence? Might the mysterious causation be divine? Maybe Edward Milne was right when he capped his mathematical treatise on relativity by saying: “As to the first cause of the Universe . . . that is left for the reader to insert, but our picture is incomplete without Him.”
¹²