Did everything happen just by accident or was it on purpose?
Cambridge biochemist Rupert Sheldrake, author of Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation, 2009, remarked in his TEDx Talk “The Science Delusion” at Whitechapel, January 12, 2013:
“As (ethnobotanist) Terence McKenna used to say, ‘Modern science is based on the principle, Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.’
And the one free miracle is the appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe, and all the laws that govern it, from nothing in a single instant.”
It takes faith for an atheist to believe that by chance nothingness produced everything in an instant; —
that unguided random accidents created all things, from the unimaginably complicated DNA molecule to all that is beautiful, including selfless love, a baby’s giggle, the masterpieces of Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Beethoven … and the intelligence to appreciate them.
What about fractals?
In geometry, these are intricate shapes made up of miniature renditions of that same shape, made up of even smaller versions, repeating in infinity, with each having very slight differentiations, so each is both the same yet unique.
Nobel Prize winning physicist Eugene Wigner wrote in “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” 1960:
“It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here … or the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind’s capacity to divine them.”
Wigner continued:
“The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.”
Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize winner in quantum electrodynamics, wrote in The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen–Scientist (NY: BasicBooks, 1998):
“Why nature is mathematical is a mystery … The fact that there are rules at all is a kind of miracle.”
Galileo Galilei stated:
“The laws of nature are written by the Hand of God in the language of mathematics.”
God created everything with rules. He is an eternal, perfect, all powerful, all-knowing Being, who is completely just, with order, laws, and rules.
If you do not believe in a God who created everything with rules, then you are left with believing all things came from nothing.
If all things came from nothing, then eventually all things will return to nothing, therefore your life is meaningless, just the result of millions of mindless mistakes.
C.S. Lewis stated in The Oxford Socratic Club, 1944:
“If … I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in Christianity, but I cannot even fit science.
If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry — in the long run — on the meaningless flux of atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.”
Oxford mathematician John C. Lennox wrote in God’s Undertaker – Has Science Buried God, 2007:
“Indeed, faith is a response to evidence, not rejoicing in the absence of evidence … The apostle Paul says what many pioneers of modern science believed — that nature itself is part of the evidence for the existence of God …
Adam Sandage, widely regarded as one of the fathers of modern astronomy … is in no doubt … ‘God to me … is the explanation for the miracle of existence – why there is something rather than nothing …’”
Lennox continues:
“To the majority of those who have reflected deeply and written about the origin and nature of the universe, it has seemed that it points beyond itself to a source which is non-physical and of great intelligence and power.”
Albert Einstein told William Hermanns in an interview:
“I observe the laws of nature … There are not laws without a lawgiver.”
Sir William Blackstone wrote in Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1768:
“When the Supreme Being formed the universe, and created matter out of nothing, He impressed certain principles upon that matter … certain laws of motion, to which all movable bodies must conform … not left to chance … but … guided by unerring rules laid down by the great Creator. ”
Eric Metaxas wrote in “Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God,” March 25, 2015:
“Today there are more than 200 known parameters necessary for a planet to support life — every single one of which must be perfectly met, or the whole thing falls apart …
The odds against life in the universe are simply astonishing. Yet here we are, not only existing, but talking about existing.
What can account for it? Can every one of those many parameters be perfect by accident?
At what point is it fair to admit that science suggests that we cannot be the result of random forces? …”
Metaxas continued:
“Doesn’t assuming that an intelligence created these perfect conditions require far less faith than believing that a life-sustaining Earth just happened to beat the inconceivable odds to come into being?
There’s more. The fine-tuning necessary for life to exist on a planet is nothing compared with the fine-tuning required for the universe to exist at all …”
Eric Metaxas concluded:
“The greatest miracle of all time, without any close seconds, is the universe. It is the miracle of all miracles, one that ineluctably points with the combined brightness of every star to something—or Someone— beyond itself.”
Sir Isaac Newton wrote in Principia, 1687:
“This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being …
Order and life in the universe could happen only by the willful reasoning of its original Creator, whom I call the ‘Lord God.’”
G.K. Chesterton wrote in The Everlasting Man, 1925:
“Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something.
Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else.
It is really far more logical to start by saying ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth’ even if you only mean ‘In the beginning some unthinkable power began some unthinkable process.’
For God is by its nature a name of mystery, and nobody ever supposed that man could imagine how a world was created any more than he could create one.”
In English poet William Cowper’s wrote:
“Nature is but a name for an effect, Whose cause is God.”
Danish poet Hans Christian Andersen put it this way:
“The whole world is a series of miracles, but we’re so used to them we call them ordinary things.”
Psalm 19:1: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.”
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Excerpted from William and Susie Federer’s book BELIEVE – An inspiring Devotional of Scriptures and Quotations
American Minute is a registered trademark of William J. Federer. Permission granted to forward, reprint, or duplicate.
This post originally appeared at https://americanminute.com/blogs/todays-american-minute/case-for-the-existence-of-god-by-william-j-federer