From Five Free Miracles to Five Key Questions

10 May From Five Free Miracles to Five Key Questions

I’m going to switch gears just a bit in this blog post, and for the next several.

Even though the title of this series is “Why Believe in God?”, it is written for Christians, who already believe in God. I chose to write this series because, even as Christians, we can get overwhelmed by life and begin to lose clarity and conviction on the things we believe. We can begin to question ourselves, and wonder if it all really is true.

In our indecision, in our uncertainty, in our lack of resolve, we can be fooled into thinking that rejecting belief in God is an option, or that following Him half-heartedly because of unresolved questions will yield whole-hearted results. It will not.

However, the answers to many questions fall into place once we grasp the towering reality that if we reject God, we’ve only done half the job. The other half is that we have to explain reality without Him.

And when we try to explain reality without God, we see that it cannot be done! We come to grips with the sobering fact that whatever the answers are for our questions about God, they can only be found by moving toward Him, not away from Him.

Where cause/effect reasoning takes us

To this end, cause/effect reasoning is an essential part of life. If it’s possible to know anything, we must use laws of reasoning, and one law of reasoning is that every effect must have an adequate cause.

You can’t stop a charging elephant with a pea-shooter. If a charging elephant is stopped, it had to be with something more powerful than a pea-shooter, because that “cause” (the pea shooter) is not enough to create the “effect” (the stopped elephant).

We then transfer that principle to the universe and ask “what caused the universe?”, the optional answers are limited to three!

Either the universe is eternal, or something came from nothing, or it was created.

No one believes anymore that the universe is eternal. There is scientific evidence that the universe had a beginning.  Scientists estimate it to have been around 13 billion years ago.

Nor does anyone in touch with reality believe that something can come from nothing. The law of reason tells us that if there is truly nothing, something cannot come from it.

So that leaves one very (to most modern scientists) unpleasant possibility: the universe was created by a source outside the universe. Scientists are loath to admit to that, but there it is.

As a result, if scientists admit to an outside source, they prefer to appeal to a non-personal force. This option is impossible to maintain, however, as we’ve seen throughout this series, because of the many features of reality that cannot be explained by that option.

That leaves an intelligent source: God, or a god. But even there, our options are limited. 

So, let’s do just a little review to set the stage for answering five key questions that might still be lingering in our minds.

If the universe is created by God, which God?

There are three categories of divinity from which to choose when deciding which God is the creator God:

1. Naturalistic gods of groups such as Native Americans or Amazonian Tribal People or African Shamans, etc.
2. Gods of eastern religions such as Hinduism or Buddhism.
3. The God of Abraham

Naturalistic gods or the gods of eastern religions do not have any creation accounts that rise above the level of legend. They have no credibility, no link with history, or verifiable facts. That advantage rests only with the God of Abraham.  But even then, we have three options:

1. Judaism
2. Christianity
3. Islam

So which God are we talking about? Well, if Jesus is who He says He is, then Christianity is true. Islam is not, and Judaism is incomplete because of their conclusion about who Jesus is. So, to determine if Jesus is who He says He is, we must look to the resurrection. If Jesus rose from the dead according to prophecies given thousands of years earlier, as the evidence demonstrates that He did, it’s reasonable to conclude that He is who He says He is, and the God of the Bible is the creator God.

But, in their desperate desire to keep God out of the equation, modern science tries to explain parts of reality, while ignoring other parts, all the while hoping that no one notices.

This phenomenon was articulated sometime back by ethnobotanist Terence McKenna, in a TED talk when he said, “Modern science is based on the principle: ‘Give us one free miracle and will explain the rest.’ The one free miracle is the appearance of all the mass and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it in a single instant from nothing.”

But in reality, it is far worse than that. As we have seen, modern science is not asking for one free miracle. They are asking for five.

Five miracles fundamental to existence that scientists are powerless to explain

1. How something came from nothing. We have already seen that the universe cannot be eternal and something cannot come from nothing.
2. How order came from chaos. Even scientists who reject God as the answer to the existence of the universe often admit that the order and apparent design of the universe is the most compelling argument for the existence of a creator God.

Scientists believe that there was a “Big Bang,” a cosmic explosion that produced all the matter and laws of the universe. Explosions always result in chaos. Their theroetic explosion, however, resulted in unimaginable order, precision and apparent design. In The Tailor-Made Universe, scientist P.C.W. Davies wrote, “Why does it all fit so well? It looks like someone made the universe. I don’t believe it was made, but it sure looks that way.”

3. How life came from non-life. In his book The Cosmic Blueprint, physicist Paul Davies writes, “it is possible to perform rough calculations on the probability that the endless breakup and reforming of complex molecules could lead to a small virus after a billion years. There is one chance in over 10 to the 2 millionth power,” which is statistically harder than flipping a coin and having it come up heads 6 million times in a row.

Davies concludes by saying “the spontaneous generation of life by random molecular shuffling is a ludicrously improbable event.”

4. How consciousness came from non-consciousness. Renown physicist John Hagelin said, “There is a deep philosophical problem surrounding how you get consciousness from a hunk of meat.” The hunk of meat to which he is referring is the brain. If there is no God, if there is nothing but whirling molecules, how in the world do we account for consciousness?

Of this, Darwinian philosopher Michael Ruse wrote,

“Why should a bunch of atoms have thinking ability? Why should I, even as I write now, be able to reflect on what I am doing and why should you, even as you read now, be able to ponder my points, agreeing or disagreeing, with pleasure or pain, deciding to refute me or deciding that I am just not worth the effort? No one, certainly not the Darwinian as such, seems to have any answer to this…. The point is that there is no scientific answer.”*

5. How transcendence came from consciousness. Humans think about things that transcend their physical life. We have a concept of beauty, right and wrong, God, the possibility of life after death, and we are hardwired to worship a being higher than ourselves. Modern science has no explanation for this.

Conclusion

These are five miracles that modern science asks us to give them. But we do not. Instead, we look at the evidence and opt for believing in God.

Having said that, there are still some things that challenge the minds of thinking Christians. So, we want to close out this blog series by looking at five additional challenging questions facing Christians who want to be comfortable with their faith and comfortable sharing their faith with others.

Next week, we’ll look at the first one. I look forward to seeing you then.

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