Faith-Filled Summer #3: Science and our Creator

This is the third part of my current series exploring the reasons for my faith, written with the hope of putting into words this highly personal but important slice of life. This week I’ll be talking about our miraculous world.

I’ve shied away from the subject of science in the past, mainly because I’ve experience first-hand how emotional this topic can be. This may come as a surprise to some, but there are compelling arguments whether or not the 7 days of creation are 24 hours or longer periods of time. So it’s my goal to be sensitive to the multiple sides, knowing there are many devoted followers of Christ who dearly hold different views of creation. It’s my belief that whether a person thinks the world was created thousands of years ago or billions will make little difference once we’re in heaven—together. One of my brothers, a pastor, holds the belief that everything was created just thousands of years ago. Although I believe the 7 days of creation were long periods of time, I know my brother and I can agree to disagree on this topic and never doubt how much we love God and how much He loves both of us.

The most exciting result of investigating science is the increasing evidence in the universe for a Creator. The more scientists learn about the fine-tuning required to make life possible right here, right now, the more creation seems to point to a Creator. Even atheist Fred Hoyle said something along the lines of the universe being so fine-tuned it’s as if it knew man was coming.

Last week I wrote about why I trust the Bible as the word of God. I’ll add another reason for that trust: the Bible is the only holy book that places God, the Creator, outside of time. Time is a dimension of the universe and began at its creation, which God set in motion. Beside that, the Bible, 2,500 years ago, rightly named the stars and universe as stretching out (Ps. 104:2, Job 9:8, Is. 42:5 to name a few) but it wasn’t until Einstein’s theory and Hubble’s experiment that proved the universe is indeed expanding.

Did you know our moon is a miracle? It’s 50 times bigger than any other moon in our solar system. Just by chance? Nasa says a Mars-sized body collided with Earth and the debris formed into our moon. This big moon “satellite” orbiting the sun alongside of us was just what we needed to make our atmosphere friendly for life, and what we still need today to stabilize our rotation. Without the moon, in its ridiculously large size, our orbit would be wobbly, our tides unstable, and our climates wouldn’t be regulated. The earth’s thin crust (around a really hot middle) is not only beautiful, but it keeps us comfortable and provides an environment for time markers. Without seasons how would we record the passage of time? (Such things as tree rings and ancient air bubbles in icecap snows, and the layers in molten rock and even in coral fields help us to do this).

And did you know the Eclipses of the sun and moon allow scientists to study the sun’s surface? The size of our moon allows perfect eclipses, as if God knew we’d want to explore and investigate the universe around us.

Earth is also perfectly placed in the sun’s orbit with other planets so much larger like Jupiter and Uranus which act as the perfect shields to protect us from a sometimes unfriendly universe and its debris. It’s like—hey! Somebody planned to keep Earth protected for the long haul.

Our atmosphere also allows just enough radiation to penetrate—any more and we’d all be fried.

I do believe there were upright, bipedal creatures called hominids and then Neanderthals whose DNA does not match modern man’s. There is scientific evidence to suggest these bipedal hominids lived as long ago as 7 million years and for the Neanderthals as recently as 100,000, but they have no genetic link to man. One of the reasons God may have created them as a precursor to man was to acclimate the animals already existing to the presence of an upright, superior hunter. I read that in areas where fossils show these hominids existed the animal population actually sustained itself once humans reached those areas, perhaps because the animals had been conditioned to fear creatures who walked and hunted like we do. In areas that didn’t have a record of these creatures the animal population was greatly reduced once man entered the area, because they hadn’t experienced the hunting ingenuity man used.

So that brings us to Adam and Eve, created just thousands of years ago. Even many Christians who believe the creation event was 7 short days believe Adam and Eve could have been created as many as 40,000 years ago, so that’s something we can agree on. The exciting thing about this date is that along with the presence of modern humans came other big bangs: of worship and art and language.

This is just a snippet of an overwhelming amount of evidence for a fossil record that shows evidence of a creator. For more information about creation, I suggest hunting the Reasons to Believe website, which offers many resources on this topic from a Christian perspective. If you’re especially science-minded, you might be interested in the list of scientific design elements that explain just how fine-tuned our universe is. At the end of Parts 3 and 4 are statistics about the probability of all the events happening “by accident,” in relation to having a planet exist with all of the necessary elements necessary for life. Here’s one of the summaries about our life-supporting earth:

Thus, less than 1 chance in 10 to the 1032 (power) exists that even one such life-support body would occur anywhere in the universe without invoking divine miracles.

(The 10 – 1032 means a ten with 1,032 zeroes after it, a number so big I can’t even visualize it. One chance in a number so large is a chance I wouldn’t take if I played the lottery.) 🙂

These numbers would vary depending on who calculated them, but no matter who does the calculating the number is incredibly, almost unimaginably large.

Nearly all of the information on this particular list is beyond my comprehension, but then adding numbers like 237 + 458 are difficult for me, at least without writing the numbers down! What I do know after skimming lists like this is that there is more than enough evidence to support a Creator than everything around us being just an accident.

And if the Bible is the only book that reflects the incredible scientific discoveries man has made recently, doesn’t that give us one more reason not only to trust it, but to trust the Creator who is speaking to us in its pages?