“The Sky Above Proclaims His Handiwork”
“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork,“ Psalm 19:1 (ESV)
This week at ECU we are hosting a talk by Dr Lewis Jones on the topic of Intelligent Design. My limited understanding of Intelligent Design is that it shows evidence for some sort of intelligence behind the creation and design of living creatures.
As the Scripture teaches us, we should see evidence for the Creator from creation, even in a fallen world. Therefore I am interested to see if Intelligent Design has anything to add to the ongoing debate about the relationship between science and Christianity.
But I’m not a biologist. My university education was as a physicist and so I want to explore in this article some of the evidence for a creator from the perspective of physics.
We should expect to see wisdom in God’s creation. The personification of wisdom describes herself:
“The LORD possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth, before he had made the earth with its fields, or the first of the dust of the world. When he established the heavens, I was there; when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master workman, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the children of man.”
Proverbs 8:22-31 (ESV)
God’s wisdom should indeed be evident in the fundamental physical laws of the universe. There is a branch of physics called ‘cosmology’ which studies the universe as a whole. One of the startling discoveries of cosmology in the last century was that the universe was expanding. Albert Einstein’s original theory of general relativity would have actually predicted this before the evidence was found, but he altered the equations to make them fit a static universe!
The current consensus is that the universe originated around 15-20 billion years ago with a “Big Bang”. All matter and energy, space and time were created from… apparently nothing. No scientific explanation has been found for the beginning of the universe, although there is much speculation among scientists. This picture fits quite nicely with the traditional Christian (and Jewish) doctrine of creation ex nihilo (from nothing).
What’s more, the universe that resulted from this Big Bang has certain properties. There are particular types of matter, and a set of four forces through which this matter interacts. The four forces are gravity (this is what holds us to the ground and keeps the Earth going around the Sun), electromagnetism (what it sounds like), and two nuclear forces; the strong (keeps the sun burning) and the weak (radioactivity).
These forces have relative strengths that seem to be fine-tuned such that life can exist in our universe. For instance, if the gravitational force was slightly stronger or weaker then stars in the mass range of our sun could not be formed, and it is these stars, which allow for planets (like earth) that can sustain life.
Scientists have responded in two main ways to these sorts of arguments that use scientific evidence for an intelligent designer of the universe.
One stream of though is typified by popular author and professor from the University of Adelaide, Paul Davies. He has written books such as “The Mind of God” and “God and the New Physics” in which he sets out these sorts of evidences and concludes that there must be some sort of designer.
He concludes his book, “The Mind of God” with a statement of his belief that, even though we may never attain a theory of everything, "the existence of mind in some organism on some planet in the universe is surely a fact of fundamental significance. Through conscious beings the universe has generated self-awareness. This can be no trivial detail, no minor byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here."
Davies however rejects the identification with this intelligence with the Christian God, or that of any religion based upon revealed truth. Instead, he sees the current scientific breakthroughs as a surer path to God than religion!
The other major response to the amazing coincidence of a universe fine-tuned for life is to suggest an infinite number of universes with different laws. On this view, it is not surprising that we observe a universe capable of supporting life, for there could be no observer in universes incapable of this! Of course, we have no access to these universes and no experimental evidence or theoretical basis for their existence.
Indeed, much of modern scientific thought intended to deny the need for a Creator requires such speculative beliefs. My logical mind is incapable of such a leap of faith, and finds belief in a historically documented resurrection from the dead to be much more rational.
[Steve Bell]
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