SE120609
Master and Masterpiece
2. The Case for a Creator
This month, millions of children are banking on the existence of a wonderful person who is not a family member, but who loves them very much even though they’ve never met him. They know this person is fat, wears a red suit, and flies in a sleigh drawn by tiny caribou, and can fit into any chimney to deposit gifts for them 4 days after the winter solstice.
What will she do on that one Christmas Eve she decides to test the Fat Man hypothesis – and she observes her parents wrapping gifts?!! Will she persist in her belief in the little fat man, or throw away the myth based on evidence.
Would anyone not agree that the dominant voices in our culture tell us that anyone who believes in a Creator is in the role of the little girl who believes in Santa Claus. We grant that the myth many find comforting, but all rational people eventually except that belief in a Creator is on the same level as talk of
- rain dances,
- fairies and unicorns and
- a world series for the Mariners!
o An other fantasies that lack empirical proof.
Do you still believe in Genesis 1:1?
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth.”
Is that just a…
o Satisfying, comforting myth?
o But one ultimately unsupported by the best evidence?
Many think so.
Now, some of you think the idea of a Creator is a no-brainer. It’s self evident. You don’t need to hear me talk about it… next subject. Great, you can maybe go refresh your coffee for the next 20 minutes, but talk to your unchurched friend, maybe some in the room, this idea is not self evident*.
And if you asked them to present their case AGAINST a Creator, they will do what? They will go straight to the theory of evolution.
“We’ve found the laws of random mutation and natural selection were able to do all the work of making us – this leaves a Creator unemployed! So why believe in one?”
“Evolution”. The word haunts people of faith. They repeat the word with disdain or fear. Well, has this one idea crippled Christianity, has it dealt a death blow to belief in a Creator? Has it answered every question about origins? When presented with evolution we can ask two ?’s:
- One if the theory of evolution is true, is it completely incompatible with belief in a Personal Creator God or Christian Scripture?
- Two is the theory is completely air tight? Are there problems, controversy, improbabilities or faith leaps within it? Does it account for evidence the best?
About the first response, the media tells us we have two choices:
- Believe in evolution and reject God and reject the Bible’s account of origins. Or
- Believe that the universe was made 6000 years ago in 7, 24hour days.
But that’s a false dichotomy. I want you listen to Dr William Lane Craig, who says Christians do not have to accept that kind of either/or thinking. This is a debate he had with prominent atheist Christopher Hitchens. Craig is an evangelical Christian. Listen:
(1) DOES GOD EXIST DVD – 45:16 to 47:32 Stop after, “open to evidence and follow where it leads.”
Christian can be open to ALL the evidence. Scripture can accommodate more than one view. In Extended we’ll talk about the different views of origins:
- Atheistic Evolution. Nothing created everything. After matter appeared, all life arose through undirected natural processes.
- Theistic Evolution. God created everything by setting the laws of nature to make the creation of man possible, and superintending the process of evolution.
- Progressive Creationism. God created everything in different stages or eras spread out over very long periods of time.
- Young Earth Creationism. God created everything in the universe between 6 and 10 thousand years ago over 6, 24hour days, and all age is apparent.
Later, we’ll unpack the strengths and weakness of each view and share where you stand.
But look: if you’re a Christian, you can follow the evidence wherever it leads. If amoeba to man evolution should be one day be irrefutably confirmed by evidence, it does not destroy our faith. But for the atheist, he cannot be open to the possibility of design and purpose in the universe, even if the evidence for it becomes insurmountable.
So we can just follow where the evidence leads. But where does the evidence lead? Dr. Craig said, evolution has enormous improbabilities within it. So if this theory is used as a trump card against a Creator, we need to examine it critical eye.:
1. ICONS OF EVOLUTION;
If you ask for proof that undirected macro evolution has happened from single cell organism 4 billion years ago, to complex life today, you will get a list of proofs printed in biology texts for decades:
- Miller experiment done in the 50’s where they simulated Earth’s early atmosphere and added electricity and produced the building blocks of living cells
- Evolutionary Tree of life reconstructed from the fossil record shows all living things branching out from a common ancestor.
- Picture of embryos of amphibians, birds and humans that are totally similar, showing they all evolved from fish.
- Peppered moths on trees that showed how camouflage and environment produced a new species of moth.
- Darwin’s finch beaks which showed finches evolving into a new species.
- Fruit flies that mutated an extra pair of wings.
But if you read Jonathan Wells book, Icons of Evolution he tells us every single one of these prime evidences for amoeba to man evolution are deeply misleading. For example,
- The Miller experiment used the wrong atmosphere and has been largely discredited. But it continues to give the false impression that scientists have shown how the first step in the origin of life happened.
- The tree of life is not an reflection of the fossil evidence. In actuality the fossil record is noted by two things, says evolutionist Stephen Gould: sudden appearance and stasis. Listen to Jonathan Wells talk about how misleading this tree of life icon is:
o (2)CASE FOR A CREATOR DVD 14:08 to 17:04 “So it’s not our job to force the evidence into a theory that just doesn’t fit it.”
- What about those pictures of embryos drawn by Hackel in the 19th century? Well they are totally inaccurate and probably were intentionally distorted to make them look the same. In actuality human, fish, frog and chicken embryos are very different at their first stage.
- Peppered moths? Well, we saw those pictures of how the moths changed from light to dark because of pollution. Here’s what we were not told. The moth photos that made it into textbooks around the world were pinned onto the trees and staged.
- With Darwin’s finches, their beaks changed because of a drought and a whole new species was predicted within 200 years. But when the drought ended the beaks went back to their original size. It was an example of adaptation, not macro evolution.
- Fruit flies did mutate an extra pair of wings when bombarded with loads of radiation, but the new wings had no muscles so they were an evolutionary dead end.
Now, let me be clear: the fact that all these icons of evolution have serious problems does not prove evolution didn’t happen. But it does prove that sometimes atheistic philosophy warps evidence as much as theistic philosophy warps evidence. AND it says one thing more:
- if these are the BEST examples of proof or amoeba to man, undirected evolution, and
- if these best examples have this many problems,
o then friend, it’s not unscientific to ask for better evidence than this.
What if we step away from biology and look at
2. EVIDENCE OF A CREATOR FROM COSMOLOGY
Ever asked, why is there something rather than nothing? The atheist says you don’t need a God to explain natural cause and effect. This was caused by that, and that was caused by something else. But can you keep on going back forever? Is the universe eternal?
The ancient Greeks thought so. So did Hindus, the Mayan culture, Chinese philosophy, even Galileo and modern scientists as well, ALL thought that the universe was eternal and unchanging. That was the situation, until a man came along who stood the evidence on it’s head. Albert Einstein. I’ll let the William Lane Craig explain it:
(3)CASE FOR A CREATOR DVD 19:38 to 22:47 – “had a beginning at some point in the finite past”.
The universe is finite. Mark it down. It is NOT eternal. What begins to exist must have had a cause, right? Therefore the universe, because we know it had a beginning, must have a Cause. But that cause can not itself be the universe! It had to be outside the universe, outside of nature. And that Cause must therefore, by definition be supernatural.
If all time, space and matter came into being out of nothing, then that Cause had to be
- beyond time (ETERNAL) and
- beyond matter (ALL POWERFUL) and
- beyond space (OMNIPRESENT).
o That’s a good starting point for a definition of what?
o God!
3. EVIDENCE FROM PHYSICS
Even if somehow matter could create itself, out of nothing, why didn’t this matter just spin off into some chaotic mess? Yet what we have is a highly ordered universe that functions according to laws.
Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose computed the odds of the Big Bang producing a highly ordered universe by accident as opposed to a chaotic disorderly one. Before I give you their odds, here’s some numbers for perspective:
- The are 1018 seconds in the history of the universe. That’s 10 with 18 zeros behind it.
- The total number of subatomic particles in the universe is said to be 1080.
o The odds of an ordered cosmos accidentally forming after the Big Bang are
o 1 in 10123!
To sustain belief in no Creator behind this incredible precision, one has to believe that all the physical properties are just so, by total accident.
You ask, well A how many things had to line up to create a universe that allows for life and B, how precise? Answers: A, a lot and B, very:
the strength of gravity,
the intricate balance of sub atomic parts,
the density of the universe, otherwise known as the cosmological constant
the weight of certain elements,
Listen to Lee Strobel describe how finely tuned the universe is by just one of these laws of physics, the strength of gravity:
(4)CASE FOR A CREATOR DVD 27:31 to 30:00 “one atom in the entire universe.”
So will you believe that all this happens to be perfect for sustaining life by TOTAL accident? But not just any accident, an accident on the order of winning the lottery a million times in a row!!
It makes us agree with Stephen Hawking who said,
“it’s hard to explain why the universe should have begun this way, except as an act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”
Last area of evidence for a creator:
4. EVIDENCE FROM INFORMATION.
I'm going to draw an analogy here. Some of you have heard of SETI institute. That stands for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Since 1960, they’ve pointed huge satellite dishes toward the sky listening for radio signals from space. They are listening for a pattern in the random static they normally receive from space. Why? The late Carl Sagan said,
all we need to PROVE that there is intelligent life out there, is just a single sentence of intelligible information from space.
Now, why would he say just a single sentence would PROVE alien existence? Because they would instantly know that random static could not accidentally form anything by chance.
He’s got a point, right? If you got just one line of a message from space, what would conclude? You would say, language requires Intelligence, right?
With that in mind, I want you to think about something you studied in biology: DNA. DNA is a language. Literally, it's a chemical language based on a genetic 4 letter alphabet. DNA is like computer software that records the precise instructions for piecing together every part of you, from your 600 muscles to your 2 million optic nerve fibers to your 100 billion nerve cells.
Here's the point.
If one single sentence received from outer space would convince scientists beyond any doubt that there must be an intelligence behind it, then doesn't the encyclopedia of information written inside every DNA molecule prove conclusively that there is intelligence behind life?
You decide. This is what Dr Stephen Meyer says:
(5) CASE FOR A CREATOR DVD – 53:30 to 54:30 – “signature of a Creator.”
CONCLUSION
Friends, we have allowed the voices of science to cause us to lose our sense of wonder in the universe. How did we let that happen? I’ll tell you how: by equating the discovery of certain causes with the removal of God from the world. That philosophy, not science.
Why did we let that happen? With every new discovery, we are not making the universe simpler. It’s become more and more complex. Our awe and wonder should be increasing!
You might find yourself today skeptical in the whole idea of miracles until you realize that the whole of our universe appears to be nothing more than one incomprehensibly big miracle!
PRAYER
EXTENDED tomorrow.
