One of the accusations that I hear lobbed at Christians a lot, is that there are no arguments for the existence of God. This is usually followed by the accusation that Christians just believe on blind faith.
And there are times, when we Christians take these accusations and internalize them. We start saying things like, you just have to take it by faith.
But the Bible never calls us to a blind faith. The Greek word for faith is pistis (pis’-tis), and instead of meaning blindly accepting something someone gives you, it actually has the understanding of trust, based on experience. In fact, the first time the word is used in the Gospel of Matthew, it is in connection with experiencing God’s provision and then lacking in faith or trust, towards his future provision (Matthew 6:30). In fact when Jesus is asked by John the Baptist’s disciples if he is truly the Messiah, Jesus points to the proof of people being healed, demons being exorcised, and the gospel being preached.
Because if God is true, then there should be logical reasons for his existence. Instead of stepping back from the accusations of blind faith, we should be able to stand firm in our trust of God, and present sound arguments for God’s existence.
So, in the next several weeks we are going to look at arguments that we can use, to not only strengthen our own faith, but also present the logical reasons for God’s existence. And we’re going to approach this, as best we can, by using Scripture, and atheist to show just how logical God is.
And it all starts with what we find in passages like Psalm 19, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. 2 Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. 3 They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them.Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world (1-4).”
The Apostle Paul says it like this in Romans 1:20, “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 people are without excuse.”
So, for our first argument, let’s look at creation. This argument is called the Fine Tuning Argument. In short, the Fine Tuning Argument goes like this, “…the fact that the universe is able to support life depends delicately on various of its fundamental characteristics, notably on the form of the laws of nature, on the values of some constants of nature, and on aspects of the universe’s conditions in its very early stages (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fine-tuning/).” In other words, our universe is too perfect for life, to be an accident.
The Bible puts it this way in Isaiah 45, verses 12 and 18, “12 It is I (the Lord) who made the earth and created mankind on it. My own hands stretched out the heavens; I marshaled their starry hosts…18 For this is what the Lord says—he who created the heavens, he is God; he who fashioned and made the earth, he founded it; he did not create it to be empty, but formed it to be inhabited…”
In his 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking wrote, “It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as act of a God who intended to create beings like us….In fact, if one considers the possible constants and laws that could have emerged, the odds against a universe that has produced life like ours are immense (http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Nave-html/Faithpathh/hawking.html).”
In an article for the publication the New Scientist, Marcus Chown wrote, “IT HAS been called the Goldilocks paradox. If the strong nuclear force which glues atomic nuclei together were only a few per cent stronger than it is, stars like the sun would exhaust their hydrogen fuel in less than a second. Our sun would have exploded long ago and there would be no life on Earth. If the weak nuclear force were a few per cent weaker, the heavy elements that make up most of our world wouldn’t be here, and neither would you.
If gravity were a little weaker than it is, it would never have been able to crush the core of the sun sufficiently to ignite the nuclear reactions that create sunlight; a little stronger and, again, the sun would have burned all of its fuel billions of years ago. Once again, we could never have arisen.
Such instances of the fine-tuning of the laws of physics seem to abound. Many of the essential parameters of nature – the strengths of fundamental forces and the masses of fundamental particles – seem fixed at values that are “just right” for life to emerge. A whisker either way and we would not be here. It is as if the universe was made for us
(https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128221-500-existence-why-is-the-universe-just-right-for-us/)
In a youtube video, a naturalist by the name of Fraser Cain said, “I’ve got to say, you are one of the luckiest people I’ve ever met. For starters, you are the descendant of an incomprehensible number of lifeforms who were successful, and survived long enough to find a partner, procreate, and have an offspring. Billions of years, and you are the result of an unbroken chain of success, surviving through global catastrophe after catastrophe. Nice going.
Not only that, but your lineage happened to be born on a planet, which was in just the right location around just the right kind of star. Not too hot, not too cold, just the right temperature where liquid water, and whatever else was necessary for life to get going. Again, I like your lucky streak.
Yup, you are pretty lucky to call this place home.
In fact, you happened to be born into a Universe that has the right physical constants, like the force of gravity or the binding force of atoms, so that stars, planets and even the chemistry of life could happen at all. But there’s another lottery you won, and you probably didn’t even know about it. You happened to be born on an unassuming, mostly harmless planet orbiting a G-type main sequence star in the habitable zone of the Milky Way. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcTDFUDWCp8)
These are atheist and naturalist people, speaking to the incomprehensible reality, that our universe appears to be perfect for life. Meaning, without the laws of physics work the way they do, or something else just a hair off, none of this would be possible.
Now, the question becomes what does it mean that the universe is fine tuned?
Well, from the an article by Robert Roy Britt for the website Live Science, we’re going to look at five, of what he calls “lucky facts” of earth (https://www.livescience.com/21546-earth-facts.html).
Fact 1: The earth is in the habitable zone of the solar system. If we were Venus, we would be to close to the Sun and therefore be to hot. Things like water, the basis for all life, would boil. If we were Mars, we would be too cold, and our water would be ice. But being right where we are, we have liquid water, a requirement for life. But not only are we in a habitable area of our solar system, our solar system itself is in a habitable region of our galaxy. We’re far away from the middle of the galaxy where there’s a lot of radiation, o no life. We’re away form the chaos of the arms of the galaxy, where things are like an L.A. freeway. And we’re away from the outer edges of the galaxy, where the gravity is less stable, and we could fly off into the unknown.
Fact 2: We have a natural orbiting satellite called the Moon. Firstly, it helps create tides on Earth. The Tidal Zone, contains sea life, that are eatable for us. Tides also are a way that the oceans cleans itself, making it possible for life to continue in them without becoming stale. Not only does it create tides, but the Moon also protects us from incoming asteroids that could cause devastation to the earth.
Fact 3: Our earth is pretty stable as planets go. With the Sun coming up and going down at regular intervals. If it wasn’t, the earth would be scorched by the Sun’s heat on one side and frozen on the other. We also have temperate zones on the earth. Though life can survive in extremes, with microbes being found even in volcanic areas, most life thrives in moderate areas. Areas that are above freeing temperatures, and below sweltering ones. Many people in Quartzsite in the winter are a realization of this very fact. That being out the cold is better for you. This in turn gives rise to plants, who clean the carbon dioxide from the planet and replace it with oxygen. This also allows us to have a variety of crops and seasons.
Fact 4: There’s this thing called constant gravity. And in reality, science doesn’t completely understand how it works. We know the effects of gravity, and how more mass means more of it, but why? In fact, I remember hearing one atheistic scientist come up with the idea that we’re seeping gravity from another reality. But one things for certain, anymore of it and there would be nothing here, because the whole of the universe would collapse into itself Any less, and our planet couldn’t stay in it’s habitable zone.
Finally, Fact 5: Like in Star Trek, the Earth has a shield. The Earth has a protective magnetic field, that keeps out cosmic rays from scorching us, and solar storms from devastating us.
Those are just five “lucky facts” about the fine tuning of the universe. There’s more, but I think we’ve presented a good basis. Without any one of these things, life cannot occur. And the natural question that follows this apparent fine tuning of the universe is why then is it like this?
In a Q&A session, MIT Professor, Alex Byrne, says that the best explanation to the fine tuning argument is a god (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQHmaim6EWg). But at that explanation Byrne becomes uncomfortable, because now he has to ask the next logical question, who is this god?
And it’s easier to take the course of people like ASU Professor Paul Davies who wrote in an article entitled, “Yes the universe looks like a fix. But that doesn’t mean that a god fixed it.” Where he starts off the article with, “Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth - the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient "coincidences" and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal. Fred Hoyle, the distinguished cosmologist, once said it was as if ‘a super- intellect has monkeyed with physics’.”
But when Davies ends his article, instead of concluding that there really is a super-intellect monkeying with physics, instead he concludes, “Thus, three centuries after Newton, symmetry is restored: the laws explain the universe even as the universe explains the laws. If there is an ultimate meaning to existence, as I believe is the case, the answer is to be found within nature, not beyond it. The universe might indeed be a fix, but if so, it has fixed itself (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/jun/26/spaceexploration.comment).”
But as C.S. Lewis once wrote in a work called The Laws of Nature, “The trigger, the side wind and the earth are not laws, but facts or events. They are not laws, but things that obey laws…here comes the snag. The law won’t set it in motion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_20yiBQAIlk).”
By saying this, C.S Lewis helps us realize that the universe itself can’t fix itself, because to fix itself right, would mean that it had intent. But it doesn’t have intent, it has laws to which it must abide by. It cannot fix a law, because it has no concept of a way to fix it. Therefore it needs an outside source, the thing in which set the universe in motion.
But this outside source must be greater. It cannot be captured by the same laws as the universe, but rather beyond the laws in order to put them in motion.
In a 20/20 interview in 1989 Stephen Hawking said this, “It is difficult to discuss the beginning of the universe without mentioning the concept of God. My work on the origin of the universe is on the borderline between science and religion, but I try to stay on the scientific side of the border. It is quite possible that God acts in ways that cannot be described by scientific laws.”
And again we are brought back to the concept of god, a being beyond the constraints of a universe that appears in all manners of the idea, fine tuned for life. Specially, life on a planet we call earth.
But who is this god, as MIT professor Alex Byrne asks? Well it is the one that, from Isaiah 45, verses 12 and 18 says, “12 It is I who made the earth and created mankind on it. My own hands stretched out the heavens; I marshaled their starry hosts…18 For this is what the Lord says—he who created the heavens, he is God; he who fashioned and made the earth, he founded it; he did not create it to be empty, but formed it to be inhabited…”
It is the one whom Paul spoke about when he said, “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 people are without excuse.”
And the Psalmist spoke about when he said, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. 2 Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. 3 They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world (1-4).”
And he is the God whom the Apostle John said was Jesus when he wrote, “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made (John 1:3).”
The reality is, the question isn’t, is the universe fined tuned by God? The question is, are we willing to accept it? By rejecting the logical conclusion that a being beyond the universe created it, is a rejection, not based on the evidence, but rather on our desire to either accept God or not.
My challenge for you this week, is to spend time searching for more information on the fine tuning of the universe. We covered five facts today, but there are many more. Because, if God is true, then his creation reflects it’s Creator, and we can praise him that he has give us evidence to trust him deeper. Amen.
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