The belief that our
wondrous universe could have evolved by blind chance is crazy.
And I do not at all mean crazy in the sense of a slangy invective
but rather in the technical meaning of psychotic. Indeed such
a view has much in common with certain aspects of schizophrenic
thinking.
Karl Stern, University of Montreal Psychiatrist 101
At the beginning of this
book we made mention of something called the anthropic principle
and said that it was gaining widespread acceptance in the scientific
world. As we pointed out then, the anthropic principle holds that
the universe is not a purposeless, pointless, or random conglomeration
of matter and that, on the contrary, it was carefully and deliberately
designed to serve as a home for human life.
Since then we have seen a host
of evidence demonstrating that the anthropic principle is indeed
a fact: evidence ranging from the speed at which the Big Bang
was propagated to the physical balances of atoms, from the relative
strengths of the four fundamental forces to the alchemy of stars,
from the mysteries of the dimensions of space to the layout of
the solar system. And everywhere we've looked we have seen an
extraordinarily precise arrangement in the structure of the universe.
We saw how the structuring and dimensioning of the world in which
we live and even of its atmosphere are exactly what they need
to be. We witnessed how the light sent to us by the sun, the water
we drink, and the atoms that make up our bodies and the air that
we inhale constantly into our lungs are all amazingly fit for
life.
In short, any time we observe
anything in the universe we encounter an extraordinary design
whose purpose is to nurture human life. To deny the reality of
this design is, as the psychiatrist Karl Stern put it, to overstep
the bounds of reason.
The implications of this design
are also obvious. The design concealed within every detail of
the universe is most certainly proof of the existence of a Creator
who is in control of every detail and whose power and wisdom are
infinite. As the Big Bang theory has revealed, this same Creator
created the universe from nothingness.
Unsurprisingly,
the discovery of this truth by science upset quite a few scientists
and it continues to do so. These are scientists who equate science
with materialism; they are people who are convinced that science
and religion can never get along and that being "scientific" is
synonymous with being an atheist. They have been trained to believe
that the universe and all the life in it can be explained as the
product of chance events that are completely devoid of any intention
or design. When such people encounter the obvious fact of creation,
their great dismay and confusion are natural.
In order to understand
the consternation of materialists, we need to take a brief look
at the question of the origin of life.
The Origin of Life
The origin of life, which
is to say, the question of how the first living things came into
being on Earth, is one of the biggest dilemmas confronting materialists
in the last century and a half. Why should that be so? It's because
even a single living cell, the smallest unit of life, is incomparably
more complex than even the greatest technological achievements of
the human race. The laws of probability make it clear that not even
a single protein could ever have come into existence by mere chance;
and if this is true of proteins–the most basic building-blocks of
cells–the accidental formation of a complete cell is not even thinkable.
This is of course proof of creation.
|
There are 2,000 types of proteins
in a simple bacterium. The probability of their all coming
into existence by accident is 1 in 1040.000.
In a human being there are 200,000 types of proteins.
The word "impossible" is too tame to describe the likelihood
of such an event occurring by chance.
|
Because
this is a subject that is discussed in more detail in other
books of ours, we will just present a few simple examples here.
Earlier
in this book we showed how the accidental formation of the balances
that prevail in the universe was impossible. We will now show
how the same is true for the accidental formation of even the
simplest life-form. One study on this subject that we can refer
to is a calculation made by Robert Shapiro, a professor of chemistry
and expert on the subject of DNA at New York University. Shapiro,
who is both a Darwinist and an evolutionist by the way, calculated
the probability that all 2,000 of the different types of proteins
that it takes to make up even a simple bacterium (the human body
contains about 200,000 different types), could have come into
being completely by chance. According to Shapiro, the probability
is one in 1040.000.102 (That number
is "1" followed by forty thousand zeros. and it has no equivalent
in the universe.)
Certainly it is plain what
Shapiro's number must mean: The materialist (and its companion
Darwinist) "explanation" that life evolved as an accident is certainly
invalid. Chandra Wickramasinghe, a professor of applied mathematics
and astronomy at the University of Cardiff commented on Shapiro's
result:
The
likelihood of the spontaneous formation of life from inanimate
matter is one to a number with 1040.000 noughts after
it…It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution.
There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any
other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must
therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.103
The astronomer Fred Hoyle
makes the same point:
Indeed,
such a theory (that life was assembled by an intelligence) is
so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being
self- evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific.104
Both Wickramasinghe and
Hoyle are men who, during much of their careers, approached science
with a materialist bent; but the truth that confronted them was
that life was created and both had the courage to admit this. Today,
many more biologists and biochemists have put aside the fairy-tale
that life could have emerged as an accident.
Those who
are still loyal to Darwinism–those who still contend that life
is a result of chance–are indeed in a state of consternation as
we said at the beginning of this chapter. Just as the biochemist
Michael Behe meant while he said, "The resulting realisation that
life was designed by an intelligence is a shock to us in the twentieth
century who have gotten used to thinking of life as the result
of simple natural laws."105, the shock that
such people feel is the shock of having to come to terms with
the reality of the existence of God, Who created them.
The dilemma that these adherents
of materialism have fallen into was inevitable because they are
struggling to deny a reality that they can clearly see.
At this point, our duty
is to summon those who, influenced by materialist philosophy,
have overstepped the bounds of reason, to reason and commonsense.
We have to call them to cast aside all their prejudices and to
think, to ponder the extraordinary design of the universe and
of the life in it and to accept it as the plainest proof of the
fact of God's creation.
But the real author of this
call is not ourselves but God. God, Who created heaven and earth
from nothing, summons the human beings He created to exercise
their reason:
Modern science has itself
proven the truth of creation. It is now time for the scientific
world to see this truth and derive a lesson from it. Those who
deny or ignore the existence of God, and this is especially
true of those who pretend that they are doing so in the name of
science, should realize how deeply misled they are and turn away
from this path.
On the other hand, this truth
revealed by science has another lesson to teach to those who say
that they already believed in the existence of God and that the
universe was created by Him. The lesson is that their belief may
be superficial and that they have not fully thought about the
evidence of God's creation or about its consequences and that,
for this reason, they may not be fulfilling all the responsibilities
incumbent upon their belief.
Having come to the realization
that God exists and that He created everything, to remain indifferent
to this truth is indeed a sort of "bewitched". It is God Who created
the universe and the world in which we live perfectly for us and
then brought us into being as well. The duty of every person is
to regard this as the most important fact of his life. Heaven
and earth and everything in between belong to God the Sublime.
Humanity should regard God as its Lord and Master and serve Him
as is due.