I loved science growing up and I still do. Science and the Bible may seem at odds and cause controversy in our culture, but Science and the Bible are not enemies.
They are actually working in different realms in similar things in the quest for truth. Many people don’t realize that the early scientists who really launched out the scientific revolution were believers. People like Albert Magnus, who is the grandfather of geology, or Newton, who founded calculus, or Robert Bowl, who founded modern chemistry, or Copernicus, the astronomer, or Kepler, or Newton and Galileo, who launched a whole scientific revolution.
“If you really study science it will bring you closer to God” James Tour, professor at Rice University Department of Chemistry and Nanoscale Science. He holds seventeen US patents.
Here are some scientific discoveries that help bring us closer to God as we see his power, intelligence creativity all around us.
- The Universe Had a Beginning
The ancient Greeks believed that the universe was eternal. In science the “steady-state universe” theory proposed the universe has always existed.[i]
But this belief can no longer be supported by scientific evidence. Over the last fifty years, beginning with Albert Einstein, scientists have amassed an impressive amount of data that points to a startling conclusion: our universe had a beginning.
At a specific moment matter, space, energy, and time came into existence in a creative explosion known popularly as the Big Bang. Before the Big Bang there was simply nothing. A strange thought, isn’t it?
Though Mark Vuletic, along with a number of physicists, has argued for the presence of “virtual particles” that “come into existence in otherwise empty space for very brief periods of time,” the prevailing cosmological model maintains the theory that the Big Bang came out of nothing.[ii] At the same time, the predominant philosophical model holds that something cannot come from nothing.
If both theories are accepted as reliable, we are faced with almost unavoidable theistic implications. Who but an eternal, uncreated being who exists outside of time and space could have preceded and initiated the Big Bang? For those of us who accept Genesis to be true, the Big Bang came as no surprise.
- The Origin of Life
An increasing number of scientists are concluding that it’s just plain impossible for non-living chemicals to somehow have linked together and become organized into the first living cells.
Darwin theorized that life began with reactions in what he called a “warm pond of chemicals,” and this was easier to believe in Darwin’s day because back then there didn’t appear to be much of a big leap between non-living chemicals and the most basic one-cell organisms.
After all, when Darwin looked through a primitive microscope that only magnified 200 or 300 times, what he saw when he looked at a single-cell organism looked pretty uncomplicated, a glob of protoplasm with a dot in the middle. That’s why he called them simple one-cell organisms.
But today, thanks to advanced technology, we know that even the most basic one-cell organism is incredibly complex. In fact, a cell is more complicated than anything the greatest scientists and the smartest supercomputers can duplicate.
*Harold Franklin in the Way of the Cells says, “Single-cell organisms are high tech factories on a microscopic level, complete with artificial languages and decoding systems, with central memory banks that store and retrieve impressive amounts of information, with precision control systems that regulate the automatic assembly of components, with proofreading and quality control mechanisms that safeguard against errors, with assembly systems that use principles of prefabrication and modular construction, and a complete replication system that allows the organism to duplicate itself at astonishing speeds.”
All this is in ONE cell, a high tech factory. When you think about the billions of cells or FACTORIES working together in a body all interconnected doing digestion, reproduction, circulation, nervous, our bodies are more complex than the world’s largest city! In other words there is more going on in your body RIGHT NOW than in all the factories in the world!
And all this happens by blind chance? After all, blind chance is an incredibly inefficient way to accomplish anything complex.
Lee Strobel illustrates it like this: “I’ll take this Scrabble Game and start with 26 Scrabble tiles. Each tile has one letter of the alphabet on it. Just to demonstrate how random process, blind chance, is so terribly inefficient, if we were to mix up these tiles, how long do you think it would take us blindly to reach in and to spell the word “evolution?” Nine letters in that word.
First you go until you get an “e,” and then you put it back. The next one has to be a “v,” and you put it back. You mix it up, and the next one has to be an “o.” You have to spell it out that way. Picking one tile a minute, how long do you think it would take?
To spell just the nine-letter word “evolution” at one tile a minute by blind chance would take you 1,600,000 years. And if you wanted to, by blind chance, pick out the word “construction,” a twelve-letter word, at one tile a minute, it would take you a thousand million years, on the average, to do that. That is how terribly inefficient random process and blind chance is in accomplishing anything complex.
In a similar way, how long do you think it would take to randomly link together the building blocks of life?
Let’s go back to some basics of biology and remember that living cells are built with protein molecules, and protein molecules are built with hundreds of amino acid links. In all, there are 20 different kinds of amino acids, some of which are lethal.
*PICTURE OF PROTEIN MOLECULE –
So if we ignored the question of where the amino acids came from in the first place and we eliminated the deadly ones and we gave every possible opportunity for these amino acids to link up, how long do you think it would take for the hundreds of amino acids necessary to form one protein molecule to link together by random process?
Do you think it would take a long time? It would. In fact, the number is so astronomical that if I told you the number, we wouldn’t be able to grasp how big it is, so I have to use an analogy to let you know how long of a time it would take to form one protein molecule on the average by random process.
You start with an ant, and this ant is a very slow ant. It takes this ant 15 billion years to walk one inch. This is not a fast ant. It’s not a very strong ant, either, because this ant can only carry one atom at a time. You know how small an atom is. An atom is so small, it takes a million atoms lined up to equal the width of a human hair.
Now, here’s the question. Even going one inch in 15 billion years, carrying one atom at a time, how many atoms could that ant carry and how far could he carry them in the amount of time it would take, on the average, for one protein molecule to form by random process?
Well, even at that incredibly slow speed, that ant would be able to carry 600,000 trillion-trillion-trillion-trillion universes the size of our universe and carry them 30 billion light years in the amount of time, on the average, it would take for one protein molecule to form by random process.
That’s a really long time. And you know what? It doesn’t give us life. It just gives us one single, solitary, lonely non-living bachelor protein molecule, and it takes a 239 protein molecules of various kinds to come together again in the correct type, in the correct order to form a basic living cell.
That’s trillions of times longer than the longest estimate of the age of the Earth.”
It’s no wonder that Dr. George Wald, the Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist and professor emeritus at Harvard University, concluded that…
“It’s not just unlikely that life could emerge by chance and it’s not just implausible and it’s not just improbable. It is outright impossible.” Dr. George Wald, Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist and professor emeritus at Harvard University.
Or as the British expert on the origin of the universe, Sir Frederick Hoyle, put it, “Believing life could result from chance is like believing a tornado could sweep through a junkyard and the winds could accidentally assemble a fully-functioning Boeing 747 with stewardesses and all.”
Let’s be rational here, Evolution fails to explain the origin of life. But the flip side of that is that the very evidence of life in all of its intricacy and all of its molecular complexity points powerfully in the direction of God as being creator.
In the next post, we will look at a few more reasons from science to believe that “God created the heaven’s and the earth.”
Darrell
- [i] The website ofPBS, “Steady-State Universe,”http://www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/universes/html/univ_steady.html.
[ii] The Secular Web, “Creation Ex Nihilo—Without God,” last modified 2011,http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mark_vuletic/vacuum.html
Other Sources: The Case for a Creator, Lee Strobel, Zondervan, 2004
Upwards Church 