The Case for a Creator (47 page)

• The Evidence of Consciousness

Many scientists are concluding that the laws of chemistry and physics cannot explain our experience of consciousness. Professor J. P. Moreland defined consciousness as our introspection, sensations, thoughts, emotions, desires, beliefs, and free choices that make us alive and aware. The “soul” contains our consciousness and animates our body.

According to a researcher who showed that consciousness can continue after a person’s brain has stopped functioning, current scientific findings “would support the view that ‘mind,’ ‘consciousness,’ or the ‘soul’ is a separate entity from the brain.”

As Moreland said, “You can’t get something from nothing.” If the universe began with dead matter having no conscious, “how, then, do you get something totally different—consciousness, living, thinking, feeling, believing creatures—from materials that don’t have that?” But if everything started with the mind of God, he said, “we don’t have a problem with explaining the origin of our mind.”

Darwinist philosopher Michael Ruse candidly conceded that “no one, certainly not the Darwinian as such, seems to have any answer” to the consciousness issue. Nobel Prize–winning neurophysiologist John C. Eccles concluded from the evidence “that there is what we might call a supernatural origin of my unique self-conscious mind or my unique selfhood or soul.”

THE IDENTITY OF THE DESIGNER

As I reviewed the avalanche of information from my investigation, I found the evidence for an intelligent designer to be credible, cogent, and compelling. Actually, in my opinion the combination of the findings from cosmology and physics by themselves were sufficient to support the design hypothesis. All of the other data simply built an even more powerful cumulative case that ended up overwhelming my objections.

But who or what is this master Designer? Like playing a game of connect-the-dots, each one of the six scientific disciplines I investigated contributed clues to unmasking the identity of the Creator.

As Craig explained during our interview, the evidence of cosmology demonstrates that the cause of the universe must be an uncaused, beginningless, timeless, immaterial, personal being endowed with freedom of will and enormous power. In the area of physics, Collins established that the Creator is intelligent and has continued to be involved with his creation after the Big Bang.

The evidence of astronomy, showing that the Creator was incredibly precise in creating a livable habitat for the creatures he designed, logically implies that he has care and concern for them. Also, Gonzalez and Richards presented evidence that the Creator has built at least one purpose into his creatures—to explore the world he has designed, and therefore to perhaps discover him through it.

Not only do biochemistry and the existence of biological information affirm the Creator’s activity after the Big Bang, but they also show he’s incredibly creative. Evidence for consciousness, as Moreland said, helps establish that the Creator is rational, gives us a basis for understanding his omnipresence, and even suggests that life after death is credible.

This is not a picture of the god of deism, who supposedly formed the universe but then abandoned it. As Meyer explained in my first interview with him, the abundant evidence for the Creator’s continued activity in the universe after the initial creation event discredits deism as a credible possibility.

Pantheism, the idea that the Creator and universe are co-existent, also falls short of accounting for the evidence, because it cannot explain how the universe came into existence. After all, if the pantheistic god didn’t exist prior to the physical universe, then it would not be capable of bringing the universe into being.

Also, Craig explained how the scientific principle of Ockham’s razor shaves away the multiple gods of polytheism, leaving us with a single Creator. In addition, the personal nature of the Creator argues against the impersonal divine force that’s at the center of some New Age religions.

In contrast, however, the portrait of the Creator that emerges from the scientific data is uncannily consistent with the description of the God whose identity is spelled out in the pages of the Bible.

•
Creator?
“In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands.”
¹¹

•
Unique?
“You were shown these things so that you might know that the Lord is God; besides him there is no other.”
¹²

•
Uncaused and timeless?
“Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.”
¹³

•
Immaterial?
“God is spirit.”
¹⁴

•
Personal?
“I am God Almighty.”
¹⁵

•
Freedom of will?
“And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”
¹⁶

•
Intelligent and rational?
“How many are your works, O Lord! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.”
¹⁷

• Enormously powerful?
“The Lord is . . . great in power.”
¹⁸

•
Creative?
“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”
¹⁹

•
Caring?
“The earth is full of his unfailing love.”
²⁰

•
Omnipresent?
“The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you.”
²¹

•
Has given humankind purpose?
“For everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible, . . . everything got started in him and finds its purpose in him.”
²²

•
Provides for life after death?
“He will swallow up death forever.”
²³

As the apostle Paul wrote two millennia ago: “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 [that is, his creation], so that men are without excuse.”
²⁴

The question of whether these qualities might also describe the deities of any other world religions became moot once I added the evidence that I discovered through the study of ancient history and archaeology.

As I described in my book
The Case for Christ
—a summary of which is included as an appendix to this book—the convincing evidence establishes the essential reliability of the New Testament, demonstrates the fulfillment of ancient prophecies in the life of Jesus of Nazareth against all odds, and supports Jesus’ resurrection as being an actual event that occurred in time and space. Indeed, his return from the dead is an unprecedented and supernatural feat that authenticated his claim to being the one-and-only Son of God.

To me, the range, the variety, the depth, and the breathtaking persuasive power of the evidence from both science and history affirmed the credibility of Christianity to the degree that my doubts were simply washed away.

Unlike Darwinism, where my faith would have to swim upstream against the strong current of evidence flowing the other way, putting my trust in the God of the Bible was nothing less than the most rational and natural decision I could make. I was merely permitting the torrent of facts to carry me along to their most logical conclusion.

THE FUSION OF SCIENCE AND FAITH

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of misunderstanding about faith. Some believe faith actually contradicts facts. “The whole point of faith,” scoffed Michael Shermer, editor of
The Skeptical Inquirer
, “is to believe regardless of the evidence, which is the very antithesis of science.”
²⁵

However, that’s certainly not my understanding. I see faith as being a reasonable step in the same direction that the evidence is pointing. In other words, faith goes beyond merely acknowledging that the facts of science and history point toward God. It’s responding to those facts by investing trust in God—a step that’s fully warranted due to the supporting evidence.

Oxford’s Alister McGrath pointed out that all worldviews require faith. “The truth claims of atheism simply cannot be proved,” he said. “How do we know that there is no God? The simple fact of the matter is that atheism is a faith, which draws conclusions that go beyond the available evidence.”
²⁶

On the other hand, the available evidence from the latest scientific research is convincing more and more scientists that facts support faith as never before. “The age-old notion that there is more to existence than meets the eye suddenly looks like fresh thinking again,” said journalist Gregg Easterbrook. “We are entering the greatest era of science-religion fusion since the Enlightenment last attempted to reconcile the two.”
²⁷

To many people, including physicist Paul Davies, this is a shocking and unexpected development. “It may seem bizarre,” he said, “but in my opinion science offers a surer path to God than religion.”
²⁸

Added nanoscientist James Tour of Rice University: “Only a rookie who knows nothing about science would say science takes away from faith. If you really study science, it will bring you closer to God.”
²⁹
Astrophysicist and priest George Coyne put it this way: “Nothing we learn about the universe threatens our faith. It only enriches it.”
³⁰

For Polkinghorne, who achieved acclaim as a mathematical physicist at Cambridge before becoming a full-time minister, the same kind of thinking he uses in science has helped him draw life-changing conclusions about God:

No one has ever seen a quark, and we believe that no one ever will. They are so tightly bound to each other inside the protons and neutrons that nothing can make them break out on their own. Why, then, do I believe in these invisible quarks? . . . In summary, it’s because quarks make sense of a lot of direct physical evidence. . . . I wish to engage in a similar strategy with regard to the unseen reality of God. His existence makes sense of many aspects of our knowledge and experience: the order and fruitfulness of the physical world; the multilayered character of reality; the almost universal human experiences of worship and hope; the phenomenon of Jesus Christ (including his resurrection). I think that very similar thought processes are involved in both cases. I do not believe that I shift in some strange intellectual way when I move from science to religion. . . . In their search for truth, science and faith are intellectual cousins under the skin.”
³¹

He added, however, an important distinction. “Religious knowledge is more demanding than scientific knowledge,” he said. “While it requires scrupulous attention to matters of truth, it also calls for the response of commitment to the truth discovered.”
³²

According to McGrath, the Hebrew word for “truth” suggests “something which can be relied upon.” Thus, he said, truth is more than about simply being right. “It is about trustworthiness,” he explained. “It is a relational concept, pointing us to someone who is totally worthy of our trust. We are not being asked to know yet another fact but to enter into a relationship with the one who is able to sustain and comfort us.”
³³

The facts of science and history, then, can only take us so far. At some point, the truth demands a response. When we decide not merely to ponder the abstract concept of a designer but to embrace him as our own—to make him our “true God”—then we can meet him personally, relate to him daily, and spend eternity with him as he promises.

And that, as a young medical doctor and his wife learned, changes everything.

FROM SCIENCE TO GOD

No one was more surprised by the scientific evidence for God than the soft-spoken, silver-haired, seventy-seven-year-old physician who was sitting across from me in a booth at a Southern California restaurant.

His story, like the one Craig told me earlier about the Eastern European physicist who found God through cosmology, is yet another testimony to the power of science to point seekers toward God. However, it’s something else too—a road map for how you might want to proceed if you’re personally interested in seeing whether faith in God is warranted by the facts.

Viggo Olsen is a brilliant surgeon whose life was steeped in science. Graduating
cum laude
from medical school, he later became a diplomate of the American Board of Surgery and a fellow of the American College of Surgeons. In fact, his name has a whole raft of letters after it—M.S., M.D., Litt.D., D.H., F.A.C.S., F.I.C.S., and D.T.M.&H. He attributes his former spiritual skepticism to his knowledge of the scientific world.