Evidence of Design So Overwhelming Only the Wilfully Obtuse Deny

Is science showing there really is a God?

• ERIC METAXAS
• THE AUSTRALIAN
• DECEMBER 26, 2014 2:38PM

Science is increasingly making a case for the existence of God. Source: Getty Images

IN 1966 Time magazine ran a cover story asking: Is God Dead? Many have accepted the cultural narrative that he’s obsolete — that as science progresses, there is less need for a “God” to explain the universe. Yet it turns out that the rumours of God’s death were premature. More amazing is that the relatively recent case for his existence comes from a surprising place — science itself.

Here’s the story: The same year Time featured the now-famous headline, the astronomer Carl Sagan announced that there were two important criteria for a planet to support life: The right kind of star, and a planet the right distance from that star. Given the roughly octillion — 1 followed by 24 zeros — planets in the universe, there should have been about septillion — 1 followed by 21 zeros — planets capable of supporting life.

With such spectacular odds, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a large, expensive collection of private and publicly funded projects launched in the 1960s, was sure to turn up something soon. Scientists listened with a vast radio telescopic network for signals that resembled coded intelligence and were not merely random. But as years passed, the silence from the rest of the universe was deafening. Congress defunded SETI in 1993, but the search continues with private funds. As of 2014, researches have discovered precisely bubkis — 0 followed by nothing.

What happened? As our knowledge of the universe increased, it became clear that there were far more factors necessary for life than Sagan supposed. His two parameters grew to 10 and then 20 and then 50, and so the number of potentially life-supporting planets decreased accordingly. The number dropped to a few thousand planets and kept on plummeting. Even SETI proponents acknowledged the problem. Peter Schenkel wrote in a 2006 piece for Skeptical Inquirer magazine: “In light of new findings and insights, it seems appropriate to put excessive euphoria to rest … We should quietly admit that the early estimates … may no longer be tenable.”

As factors continued to be discovered, the number of possible planets hit zero, and kept going. In other words, the odds turned against any planet in the universe supporting life, including this one. Probability said that even we shouldn’t be here. 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. Without a massive planet like Jupiter nearby, whose gravity will draw away asteroids, a thousand times as many would hit Earth’s surface. 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 have been perfect by accident? At what point is it fair to admit that science suggests that we cannot be the result of random forces? 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 finetuning necessary for life to exist on a planet is nothing compared with the finetuning required for the universe to exist at all. For example, astrophysicists now know that the values of the four fundamental forces — gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the “strong” and “weak” nuclear forces — were determined less than one millionth of a second after the big bang. Alter any one value and the universe could not exist. For instance, if the ratio between the nuclear strong force and the electromagnetic force had been off by the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction — by even one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000 — then no stars could have ever formed at all. Feel free to gulp.

Multiply that single parameter by all the other necessary conditions, and the odds against the universe existing are so heart-stoppingly astronomical that the notion that it all “just happened” defies common sense. It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row. Really?

Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who coined the term “big bang,” said that his atheism was “greatly shaken” at these developments. He later wrote that “a commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology … The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”

Theoretical physicist Paul Davies has said that “the appearance of design is overwhelming” and Oxford professor Dr. John Lennox has said “the more we get to know about our universe, the more the hypothesis that there is a Creator … gains in credibility as the best explanation of why we are here.”

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.  

The Wall St Journal

Letter From America (About a "Miracle Baby" in the UK)

This Woman Refused to Abort

Doctors Said Her Unborn Child Only Had a One Percent Chance of Survival 

Billy Hallowell
TheBlaze
Sept 25, 2014

After her waters broke at just 16 weeks, Katy Evans said doctors recommended that she abort her unborn child. But rather than comply, she continued on with her pregnancy, ignoring claims that the baby would only have a 1 percent chance of survival.

Evans, 35, who lives in Hitchen, Hertfordshire, England, told the Daily Mail that she began attending support groups and reading about similar cases after being diagnosed with preterm prelabor rupture of membranes, a condition that leads to the loss of essential amniotic fluids.It was in her research that she found the hope she needed to continue on with her pregnancy.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

“I’m a positive person, by nature, and I refused to give up on the pregnancy or mourn this baby until we knew exactly what was happening,” she told the outlet.  After rejecting recommendations that she abort, Evans said she went home with uncertainty still abounding, but that something miraculous happened.

Two weeks after her water broke and left the unborn baby with almost no amniotic fluid, doctors found that it had somehow replenished — and that the baby was developing normally.  While it was still an uphill battle, as she faced infection and potentially having her waters break again, Evans said she was elated when doctors told her the news.

“This was a very much wanted pregnancy. I could feel my baby kicking. I already loved this little person,” Evans added. It’s amazing how you will fight for this baby inside you. I wanted my child to make it.”

AP

In January 2014, nearly five months later when she was at 34 weeks, Evans and her husband welcomed their second child, Leo, into the world; he was born completely healthy and came just six weeks early.

“We feel unbelievably lucky. It’s just over a year now since I was sitting in that hospital bed, waiting for a miscarriage,” she told the Daily Mail. “There was certainly a point when I told myself that there wasn’t much hope. To go from that to looking at my son, a year on, feels surreal and wonderful. Leo’s grandparents call him the miracle baby.”

Read more about the touching story here.

(H/T: Daily Mail)

Creation By Divine Command

The Regular is the Miracle

Christians believe in the God Who is the Cause of all causes.  Here is an excerpt from one of the most comprehensive confessions ever made by the Church, written about four hundred years ago:

God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass: yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established. (“Of God’s Eternal Decree”, Westminster Confession of Faith 3:1)

Natural causation exists only because God has ordained and commanded all.  But this confession, this aspect of the undoubted Christian faith, has never been understood by materialists and Unbelievers in general.
  To them god can ever only be nothing more than a warranting concept, a bucket if you will, to hold all that we don’t know and understand about natural causes.  As scientific knowledge increases, and our understanding of natural causation grows, the “bucket”, and therefore god, shrinks.   This is known as the “God of the gaps” theory. 

Materialists cling to it like petulant children because the identification of god with all that we are agnostic about is already required by their materialist pseudo-religion. It is the only god their religion allows them to acknowledge.  For them it is always “matter versus God”.  For the Christian it is always “only matter and natural causes because of God”.  Thus, the dichotomy of matter versus God has only and always been a straw man.  When materialists talk of god they always are making reference to an idol–to a god as they have conceived it to be, not to God as He has revealed Himself to be.

Marilynne Robinson reflects on this circumstance.

For almost as long as their has been science in the West there has been a significant strain in scientific thought which assumed that the physical and material preclude the spiritual. The assumption persists amongst us still, vigorous as ever, that if a thing can be “explained,” associated with a physical process, it has been excluded from the category of the spiritual.  But the “physical” in this sense is only a disappearingly thin slice of being, selected, for our purposes, out of the totality of being by the fact that we perceive it as solid, substantial. We all know that if we were the size of atoms, chairs and tables would appear to us as loose clouds of energy. [Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 9f]

Robinson, of course, is making reference to the astounding discoveries over the last century in particle physics.  It turns out that matter is not “hard” at all.  It is all loose pulsating clouds of energy.  We are all loose pulsating clouds of energy.  Robinson continues:

It seems to me very amazing that the arbitrarily selected “physical” world we inhabit is coherent and lawful.  An older vocabulary would offer the world “miraculous.”  Knowing what we know now, an earlier generation might see divine providence in the fact of a world coherent enough to be experienced by us as complete in itself, and as a basis upon which all claims to reality can be tested.  A truly theological age would see in this divine Providence intent on making human habitation within the wild roar of the cosmos. 

But almost everyone, for generations now, has insisted on a sharp distinction between the physical and the spiritual.  So we have had theologies that really proposed a “God of the gaps” as if God were not manifest in the creation, as the Bible is so inclined to insist, but instead survives in those dark places, those black boxes, where the light of science has not yet shone.  And we have atheisms and agnosticisms that make precisely the same argument, only assuming that at some time the light of science will indeed dispel the last shadow in which the holy might have been thought to linger.  [Ibid.]

Given what we now are learning about the cosmos and the natural order, the old dualism between matter and spirit is exploding to pieces.  This is not to say that men will cease clinging to it with stubborn ferocity.  It is to say, however, that their intractable stubbornness will be increasingly plain.  The material realm’s testimony to the God who created all things is getting louder and more scintillating as our understanding of the material grows.  The chaotic, wild roar of the cosmos makes the plain, the hard, the ordinary, the predictable, and the regular character of the creation appear comprehensively and utterly miraculous.