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School children today are routinely taught that we live in an expanding universe that is around 14 billion years old. This perspective is so widespread that it's strange to realize that it represented a dramatic upheaval in the fields of physics and astronomy about 100 years ago!
Just 150 years ago, the idea of evolution was popularized in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and, along with it, the underpinning of a fully secular explanation for the origin and diversity of life on earth. Subsequent developments in the fields of microbiology, genetics and biochemistry have been incorporated into the theory of evolution, but not without revealing an overwhelming degree of complexity and diversity that brings the viability of the theory itself into serious question.
Additionally, the modern academic reckoning of the age of the universe puts a hard limit on the amount of time available for the supposed natural processes of evolution to occur, and no well-established findings have explained this glaring discrepancy.
Taken altogether, the last 150 years of scientific discovery undeniably point to a Creator -- and not just any Creator! These advancements confirm certain biblical statements about God's creation of both the universe and the life we see.
However, this has not lessened objections and denial by secular thinkers, which has ironically resulted in ever-more outlandish and improbable explanations rooted not in scientific fact, but in philosophical approaches that deny even the possibility of a divine Creator!
In the ongoing struggle for sound science, why does it seem that the great minds of humanity today cannot come to terms with the existence of God?
Observation is a fundamental component of science. Once a phenomenon is observed, a hypothesis can be proposed and tested, data collected, models constructed and theories established. It's a tedious, rigorous and slow process -- yet simultaneously an exciting and enlightening one!
To observe, in the scientific sense, means to inspect or take note of details with the goal of identifying patterns and extrapolating rules that govern the behavior of a system. Human beings are hardwired for pattern recognition -- it's an integral part of how our brains make sense of the input from our eyes, ears and other senses on a daily basis, and is fundamental to how we break down and understand language. Our amazing capacity for abstract thought and reason, coupled with the aptitude for noticing patterns, gives us the ability to assemble knowledge and develop understanding of the natural world.
Yet there are clear limitations on our ability to observe. Therefore, one driving force in the advancement of science is the development of tools that augment our powers of perception. The telescope extended our power of sight so that we could make exciting observations about the universe that were previously unattainable, literally bringing new worlds to our attention. Likewise, the microscope enhanced what we can perceive on small scales to the cellular level and far beyond, even to the atomic level in modern times -- revealing new worlds in the metaphorical sense all around us!
And it certainly doesn't end with enhancements to our sight. We've developed tools that can perceive electro-magnetic waves, magnetic fields, seismic activity, heat signatures, the presence of various chemical compounds and much more!
The story of scientific advancement, therefore, is about not just thought and experimentation, but also the invention of new observational tools that serve up entirely new phenomena to investigate. For this reason, advances in technology frequently accompany, complement and stimulate advancements in science.
Researchers can certainly be forgiven for not noticing something imperceptible to them, as has often been the case in the history of science. The discovery that the universe is expanding is a striking example of how observation fails in the absence of the right instruments of measurement.
Until recent history, all available data supported the common assumption of a static universe, and the idea went largely unchallenged. Under the steady state universe model, space was thought to exist in a fixed state infinitely in all directions, with time likewise extending infinitely into both the future and the past. This concept of the universe fails on two critical and interrelated points that are now for the most part uncontested -- that space itself can either expand or contract and that the universe had a beginning point in time.
The static universe thus had great appeal to secular thinkers who wanted to exclude God from their concept of reality. According to their theory, the universe had no beginning and therefore required no Creator to begin it!
In 1915, Albert Einstein, perhaps the most renowned scientific figure in all history, introduced equations that upended the simpler Newtonian worldview that had prevailed for more than 200 years. However, he noticed a strange quirk: The universe did not seem to be static!
His equations appeared to show that space itself was expanding rather than sitting fixed in place. That conclusion flew in the face of conventional thought, and he was so opposed to the idea that in 1917 he famously added, solely to conform to the idea of a static universe, a "fudge factor" known as the cosmological constant to cancel out the calculated expansion completely and maintain a static nature in his description of the universe.
Over time Einstein's cosmological constant was investigated further. It's a beautiful example of what the scientific method can achieve when properly heeded, because suddenly people were asking a new question: If the universe were expanding, how could we tell?
Astronomer Edwin Hubble formulated a way to do so by observing the wavelengths of light from distant stars. In 1930, Hubble's analysis revealed that distant stars appeared redder than they should due to the Doppler effect, the property of physics that makes a car sound different to a stationary observer as it passes. Just as the sound waves are distorted based on the relative velocity, the degree of "red shift" of distant galaxies indicated they were moving away at increasing velocities based on their distance. Hubble's red shift is the cornerstone observational evidence confirming Einstein's theoretically predicted expanding universe.
With the expansion of the universe on solid ground, the next logical step was that this expansion must have started from some point -- now known to us as the Big Bang. At long last, modern science was brought back to a fundamental truth encoded in the very first verse of the Bible -- the universe had a beginning point in time. As stated in Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."
Through further experiments, measurements of the most distant visible light from stars and other factors, scientists have now estimated that the universe began about 14 billion years ago as a tiny, dense ball of concentrated energy that suddenly expanded, stretching out in every direction, changing and maturing until stars and planets were eventually formed.
The afterglow of this expansion, known as the cosmic microwave background, was observed by sensitive radio telescopes in 1964, and physicists have been hard at work ever since trying to piece together exactly how and why the Big Bang happened.
Before this pivotal shift in understanding, people never noticed that the universe was expanding. Not only did they lack the tools that could observe this expansion, but they also were so comfortable with the idea of a static universe that they felt no reason to attempt to verify it. Likewise, the constraints and limits of human observation, alongside a rejection of what Scripture reveals, contributed to the rise of the theory of evolution around 50 years before the debut of Einstein's general theory of relativity.
In 1859, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published, with its central thesis of evolution through natural selection. As Darwin traveled the Galapagos Islands, his critical insight was that the finches on each island had different characteristics based on available food sources and other factors unique to the island they resided on.
He realized that a few finches must have first come to the islands in some way, and that the diversity in the finch populations developed over time from those original birds. Thus the concept of natural selection was born, as he reasoned that the birds with the most advantageous traits for their particular environment thrived and passed on those traits.
However, Darwin didn't stop at simple natural selection and the adaptation of a creature to its environment, but made a rather extreme extrapolation. He proposed that all creatures might come from a few common ancestors or just one!
In an 1871 letter to Joseph Hooker, he disclosed his private thoughts for life's origin apart from a Creator God: "But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, -- light, heat, electricity, etc. present, that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes ..." (quoted by Monica Grady, Evidence, Andrew Bell, John Swenson-Wright, Karin Tybjerg, editors, 2008, p. 81).
This became the foundation for the idea of abiogenesis -- that in some "warm little pond," life spontaneously assembled from a dense mixture of just the right materials that arrived there at random. As you might have gathered from his words, Darwin himself was skeptical of the notion!
Darwin knew nothing about genetics. His method of gathering data was quite crude. He drew pictures of similar-looking birds until it dawned on him that creatures have some ability to adapt to their environment over generations.
Given that this was the quality of observational data available to him at the time, his proposition of tracing all species, including man, back to a single simple organism that sprang up in a "warm little pond" was utterly unwarranted. However, it took root in the minds of those who wished to find a material naturalist cause for the origin and development of life that leaves God out of the picture!
The Bible is not at all contrary to the principle of adaptation by natural selection that Darwin observed, which is known as micro evolution. The Genesis account states a truth that scientific evidence confirms -- that every life form, from plants to animals to man, reproduces "according to its kind" (Genesis 1:11). In other words, from that original small flock of finches that arrived in the Galapagos Islands came a diversity of different subtypes of finches -- but those finches always reproduced "according to their kind," never resulting in something that wasn't a bird!
On the other hand, the principle of macroevolution suggests that a simple organism like a bacteria can eventually become a completely different and more complex creature like a frog, bird, tiger or elephant after a sufficient number of generations. This is not only contrary to biblical teaching, but is also not supported by scientific observation or evidence whatsoever. Indeed, the idea was born from using the same type of crude visual comparison Darwin originally made, such as the classic progression of images that show an ape coming to walk upright as it evolved into man.
Today, nearly 160 years beyond On the Origin of Species, the prevailing secular scientific worldview pushes a narrative that clings to Darwin's unsupported suggestions of simple life beginning by chance in a warm little pond and eventually developing into human life by macroevolution.
The contributions of new fields of study, rather than being weighed evenly, were often interpreted through this lens. When looking at the contributions of genetics and biochemistry, one finds great discord between actual scientific observation and this atheistic agenda -- and the contradictions come fully to light when coupled with the understanding that the universe began 14 billion years ago.
If natural selection seems like a painfully obvious truth today, it's due to the overall increase in knowledge about the natural world. We now know many basic truths that Darwin didn't -- namely, that the different traits he saw in finches were genetically encoded in the DNA of the parent birds.
The field of genetics offered a mechanism that seemed to have the power to explain Darwin's enormous leap of faith toward macroevolution. Whereas Darwin suggested that all life forms shared common ancestors, the study of genetics eventually led to suggestions that random mutation in genes, through which hereditary traits are passed on, could sometimes cause small changes that, if advantageous, would be passed on by natural selection.
Without regard to practical reality, random mutation was married to natural selection as the engine of evolution. This was finally seen by many as a clearing of the final biological hurdle in explaining how life evolved and grew in complexity with no need for a Creator.
It tells a story that sounds believable on the surface -- but does it stand up to reason and available facts? Let's examine the evidence.
Biochemistry has revealed just how immensely complicated even simple life forms are -- that there really is no such thing as "simple" life! If evolution were true, it must take place not at the visual level, as Darwin noted the changes in finches' beaks over generations, but at the cellular and molecular levels.
As complex and diverse as life looks to the naked eye, it is many thousands of times more complex under a microscope. How did the finch's cells (or any living cells, for that matter) develop the ability to regulate the delicately balanced feedback mechanisms by which only certain molecules pass through cell membranes? Or the intracellular transport systems that carry molecules from cells in one part of the body to a specific destination in another?
These questions are far more fundamental than how finch ancestors developed a structure like a beak or the acute senses of taste and smell, and it turns out they are not any easier to answer. The difficulty comes down to the existence of irreducibly complex systems -- like little ready-made molecular machines that assemble themselves and perform tasks crucial to the cells in which they reside.
An irreducibly complex system is one that would fail to operate if any one of its multiple components were absent or not functional. Simple logic dictates that such a system cannot develop gradually through random mutations but must necessarily come together all at once in order to function at all.
Consider that a car will not function in the early stages of the assembly of its parts. And it still would not work even if the car were fully formed and functional in every way except that the wheels were square and wouldn't turn.
Notice further that we're not talking about a car without wheels, but with something already very close to wheels. The fact that it's close doesn't matter because the car is not functional. And when it comes to living creatures, functionality is critical to survival and would be necessary for passing new biological features on to successive generations in an evolutionary process.
Irreducibly complex biological systems must be formed together all at once, raising the bar for the "random mutation" hypothesis insurmountably high.
Random mutation is a very rare event. Out of the 3 billion base pairs of the human genome, only about one mutated base pair is expected in the transmission of genetic information from parents to a child. If we personalize this fact, you can imagine that each person has a single base pair mutation, much like picking a single number on a lottery ticket. In this analogy, the lottery ticket represents a specific gene with an advantageous function, and the numbers are base pairs of which the gene is composed.
Human genes can contain thousands or millions of base pairs each, but let's assume that an advantageous gene is only 2 base pairs away. While that sounds easy, the odds in this lottery are utterly absurd. The probability of getting a single correct mutation is 1 in 3 billion -- 10 times worse than the chance of winning most state lotteries! Since the entire human race of 7 billion people is playing, the reality is that a few people would get one of the two needed mutations in our fictitious genetic lottery after just one generation -- but it is almost certain that no one will ever get a winning ticket.
The probability of a future descendant gaining the other correct base pair is again 1 in a billion, but now only the few who have inherited one of the winning mutations are still playing, not the full human population. Ignoring population growth for the sake of simplicity, this means that it would take about one billion generations of human beings to get a single winner!
Since human generations are about 25 years long, even this extremely simplified case would take about 25 billion years. The reality is certainly much bleaker -- a genetic lottery ticket may well have dozens or hundreds of numbers to be matched, and dozens of genes may be involved in gaining a useful function.
The constraining factor is obviously time. Most scientists today consider the universe to be around 14 billion years old, as noted earlier, with the earth somewhat younger at about 4.5 billion years old. Most believe life on earth to have begun about 3.5 billion years ago in a "warm little pond." And this is where the mathematical probabilities further demonstrate the absurdity of Darwin's macroevolution proposition. As unimaginably long as 3.5 billion years is, it is still nowhere near enough time for the mechanisms proposed by evolution to successfully develop even a single irreducibly complex system!
However, there is yet more improbability in this story. Not only does macroevolution fail to explain how very simple life forms became very complex ones in the estimated time available, but it doesn't even touch the equally tricky issue of how those simple life forms first got their start!
The material naturalist explanations of life and the universe hinge on questions of origin. Exactly how did life develop from unorganized, lifeless chemicals?
Just decades before Darwin, the microbiologist Louis Pasteur conducted a series of experiments that struck down the long-standing fallacy of "spontaneous generation" -- the biological equivalent of the physicists' "something from nothing" dilemma. Spontaneous generation is a strong form of abiogenesis -- the idea that life can come into existence on its own from nonliving matter.
Yeast, for example, was thought to simply appear out of thin air since no one could see evidence of it until after it had grown. After all, in the absence of microscopes to show life existing at a scale not visible to the naked eye, this was how it seemed!
Pasteur showed that yeast would not grow in an uncontaminated, sealed container -- in other words, that life did not just come out of thin air, but that it must already be present for the yeast to "appear." He thus established the principle of biogenesis, which says that life can only come from preexisting life. This revolutionary discovery was the backdrop against which Darwin's work came, and is perhaps why Darwin himself was unwilling to seriously propose that life on earth originated from nonliving materials, having only speculated so in his private letter.
The principle of biogenesis stands in clear opposition to the idea that life arises from nonliving matter. Experiments since that time have universally affirmed biogenesis -- that life comes only from existing life.
This returns us yet again to the matter of observation, the lifeblood of science, where we find that the spontaneous generation of simple life forms from nonliving materials has never been observed -- and not for lack of trying!
The Miller-Urey Experiment in 1952 has at times been offered as evidence of abiogenesis -- life arising from nonliving matter. However, the reality falls utterly short of such a claim. The experiment began with a mixture like what Darwin suggested -- water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen swirled in a flask with sparks of electricity applied to simulate lightning.
Not a single life form was generated, yet the results have been heralded as evidence that life could spring from nothing. The only thing produced were some amino acids -- chemical compounds that are certainly essential for life and used by living organisms, but that in no way resemble a functional living organism that can self-replicate.
Furthermore, the limited success of this experiment was only after many failed experiments with slightly different balances of the chemical soup involved. In other words, they couldn't even produce these building blocks of life without designing a delicate and finely tuned environment!
So why is there a rush to jump to such a weakly supported conclusion as abiogenesis? In fact, when considering again the probabilities involved in the formation of a "simple" first life form capable of self-replicating, the numerous hurdles involved point to the inescapable conclusion that it would take far more time than the 14 billion years commonly accepted as the age of the universe, and even many times that.
This problem of origins is equally potent in physics. Just as the question of how life came from lifeless material has befuddled biologists, the question of how something came from nothing plagues physicists. Recall that the perspective-altering consequence of the Big Bang was that the universe had a beginning, which begs the question: If matter and the universe did not simply always exist, then how and why did they come into being? In other words, how can something come from nothing in the absence of any reason or cause?
Stephen Hawking, the recently deceased physicist regarded as the greatest scientific mind of our generation, wrote the following unsatisfying answer in his 2010 book The Grand Design:
"Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing ... Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God" (p. 180).
But there is no sense at all in such a statement, for it simply raises the question of why the law of gravity itself exists, where it came from, and why the universe seems tailor-made for life. And further, such laws have no creative power to generate something from nothing!
The apostle Paul left us his assessment of those who fail to recognize that there is a Creator: "[They] suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 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 1:18-20, New International Version).
Macroevolution and abiogenesis are just not true, and they do not represent good science. Neither phenomenon has ever been observed, and both are crippled by the inability to account for how life came to exist within the relatively short age of the universe.
Yet, in spite of the complete absence of evidence -- and even evidence to the contrary -- many have swallowed these unproven and mathematically impossible theories of abiogenesis and macroevolution, taking a huge leap of faith and ignoring the fact that they still have no explanation of why there is something rather than nothing . Paul went on to say that "as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind" (Romans 1:28).
On the other hand, what we can and do observe that are inextricably linked to life are irreducibly complex systems. These systems could not have come into existence by chance. They can only exist by the deliberate design and effort of supreme intelligence! When we observe the universe around us, we see that it not only permits and sustains human life, but it does so against all odds of random circumstance!
To chalk this up to blind chance is foolish. This is the work of "a master craftsman" (Proverbs 8:30), a Creator of supreme intelligence and power. Proverbs 8 describes how God established the created order by wisdom -- not by chance!
In figurative language, the quality of wisdom is here personified as speaking: "The Lord possessed me [wisdom] at the beginning of His way, before His works of old ... while as yet He had not made the earth or the fields, or the primal dust of the world. When He prepared the heavens, I [wisdom] was there, when He drew a circle on the face of the deep ... When He marked out the foundations of the earth" (verses 22-31).
And notice how God very clearly communicated many scientific truths to us thousands of years ago: "God the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread forth the earth and that which comes from it, who gives breath to the people on it, and spirit to those who walk on it" (Isaiah 42:5).
Did you catch that? God not only "created the heavens," but He "stretched them out" -- which precisely fits what scientists have discovered! And God didn't stop there, but created the earth as the perfect environment for human life. He demonstrated in His work the principle of biogenesis that Louis Pasteur proved regarding the physical world -- that life can only come from life. In God's description of this process, we see that man's life came not from the dust -- out of which man was formed -- but directly from God by His breath (Genesis 2:7).
As to God Himself, the Bible reveals that He, unlike the universe, is without beginning and therefore was not created by another. He simply exists and always has existed, just as scientists once taught that the universe did. Regarding His life, John 5:26 tells us that "the Father has life in Himself." Just as God's existence transcends that of the physical universe and gives rise to it, so also His life essence transcends that of all other life and is the source of all life that we see!
The God of the Bible designed all that man can observe, whether we look with the eye, the telescope or the microscope. We are all, as Paul put it in Romans 1:20, "without excuse," and the only way that one might deny God is by obstinately choosing to. By exercising our God-given powers of observation and rational thought, we can verify the truth of God's existence, power, wisdom and glory!
The unraveling of the universe's mysteries certainly did not end with Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble and the discovery of the Big Bang. It seems that the further scientists investigate the universe, the more evident it becomes that life as we know it could not exist in a universe that was even slightly different. This has come to be known as the "anthropic principle" -- the fact that the universe appears to be finely tuned to support human life.
The late physicist Stephen Hawking made a rather startling admission of this fact in his famous book A Brief History of Time: "The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron ... The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life" (1996, p. 129, emphasis added).
How do these "fundamental numbers" influence the universe's potential for life? For one, it's noted the strength of various physical forces determined the rate of expansion of the universe. If it had expanded too quickly, we would have a universe sparsely scattered with gases but no stars or planets -- and thus no life as we know it. If it expanded too slowly, the rate of formation of black holes would be much higher, again making the universe totally inhospitable.
Further, as stars burn hydrogen to produce light, nuclear fusion takes place to form carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, and all of the other elements that are essential to life as well as the foundations of a planet to host it. These fusion reactions intimately depend on the strength of the strong nuclear force -- another fundamental number -- and a small change in its value would mean that these reactions could not take place.
Scientists explain that these and many other physical constants -- hundreds of them, by some assessments -- all have to be set within very narrow ranges for this elaborate, ages-long process of planet formation to play out just the right way to provide a life-supporting environment.
We are then faced with the incredible number of ways that the universe could conceivably have formed that would not have supported the formation of stars and planets at all -- let alone complex life! According to physicist Paul Davies, "There is now broad agreement among physicists and cosmologists that the universe is in several respects 'fine-tuned' for life" ("How Bio-Friendly Is the Universe?" International Journal of Astrobiology, April 2003).
For those who still wish to deny the role of a Creator when faced with realities such as those described in the accompanying article, the idea of the "multiverse" has become the popular explanation.
Since the idea of life arising from non-living matter and the evolution of our planet's astounding variety of life from a common ancestor are mathematically impossible, the idea has recently arisen that we live in one of an infinite number of slightly different universes and that, in fact, new universes are popping into existence all the time so that anything that can happen does happen.
Not only does this idea make room for alternate universes with different physics, but also alternate universes with the same physics but where events just occur slightly differently -- universes where you got hired for a different job or didn't make the basketball team, for example. In this way, the mathematical probabilities that disprove the random development of a life-giving universe, abiogenesis, and macroevolution all cease to matter because there are infinite chances for it to happen!
Let's be clear that this is not a scientific theory, but a philosophical daydream! There are no experiments at all that have been or can be done to test it, which is ironically the same claim many make against God!
Where the ability to make observation is not present, we are no longer in the realm of science, and this is where the multiverse stands -- it is merely an intellectual idea with no observational evidence whatsoever. Its only appeal is that it makes it a little easier to pretend that the existence of God is not necessary. But further still, the multiverse fails to even approach the fundamental question of why there should be any universes at all, let alone an infinite number of them, and thus gives no resolution whatsoever to the "something from nothing" problem.
University of California, San Diego, physics professor Brian Keating summed it up well when he said: "The same scientists who reject God's existence due to a lack of evidence pin their hopes on a theory so all-inclusive and vague it can never be refuted. Those who believe God created the universe are intellectually honest enough to admit that they do so on the basis of faith" ("What's a Greater Leap of Faith: God or the Multiverse?" PragerU, April 23, 2018). However, I beg to differ on this last point: In fact, our human capacity for observation and reason lead us squarely to a rational belief in the Creator God!
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