Is there God? 4f) Science] Creationism and science

Theistic creationism scientific evidences

So, last time we have dissected evolution theory, and we have seen how shaky the evolution theory is. However, simply doubting the evolution theory doesn’t mean that the scripture claim of God and of creation is proven. Thus, this time we will try to put the claim of creation to the test.

I have to begin this article by warning the readers that we need to be very cautious here on how we should approach the issue. I cannot stress enough importance of really understanding that what we are ultimately trying to understand here is none other than God, the true God. To determine the existence of God while at the same time attempting to judge God or further placing God under our limited ratio is not only an inconsistent logic, it is also a blasphemy. While God, refers to a being which nothing greater can be conceived (greater = more perfect), often, our attempt to determine the existence of God ends up making ourselves to be above God. We could unconsciously assume that we are greater than God. And when this happen, no matter what facts we found, it will be harder for us to accept God, because we have started the journey with the wrong footing.

In a theistic worldview, the source of highest authority that defines reality would neither be our experience, nor our feeling, nor our logic. A reality with God in it would imply that the author of any objective truth is God Himself. Reality is objectively defined by God. The objective narrative of history is owned by God. And since God is our creator, this would imply that there is a huge gap between us and God whom we seek to understand. For us, creatures, to know God is like a program trying to know its programmer, or like music score trying to understand its composer, or like a car trying to understand its engineer. While the creator understands his creation to the fullest extent, a creation, on its own, has little or no understanding of its creator. 

And so, how can we know God? For a creation to know God, the Creator needs to reveal Himself to His creation, explaining in a way that can be understood by us, the creation. Yes, the first logical way to know God is through the Word of God. We can know God through His own testimony about Himself. This method is when God reveals Himself via communication to His creation (special revelation). It’s like when a father testifies to his own children that he is their father and explains to them what sort of person he is. Fortunately, it is not the only way for us to know God. There is a second way. And the second way to know God is through His creation (general revelation). This is like how through graphology we can figure out the writer’s personality through his hand writing or how we could tell so much about a composer from his music. 

Psalm 19:1-4 
“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. 
Day after day they pour forth speech; Night after night they reveal knowledge.
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.”

Just like what is written in the psalm above, I am going to show some evidence for God’s glory that is observable through His creation. For the purpose of our discussion, I will show especially the evidence in relation to the event of creation.



 
First evidence: evidence of a beginning

The first evidence of creation event is the fact that there is a beginning. Although in the past atheists and sceptics insisted on the presupposition of an eternal universe, this assumption is no longer accepted to be true. Nowadays, scientists in general believe the idea that our universe has a beginning. This concept of universe having a beginning is not something that only creationist scientists held. Nowadays, even the atheist and the agnostic scientists, through scientific studies have come to the same conclusion. What does it mean when scientists say that the universe has a beginning? Not only that scientists conclude that matter did begin to exist some time ago in history, they have also found that space has a beginning of its existence. Moreover, scientific study also concludes that even “time” was not eternal - there is such thing as the beginning of time.  

For a while, there was a rebuttal from few scientists trying to defend the idea of eternal universe by proposing the idea of a recurring big bang, where the universe began to explode, followed by decay, and then looping to the next cycle of universe explosion. However, this theory was quickly dismissed by Professor Stephen Hawking when he explained about the beginning of time. What was there before time begins to exist? Nothing. There cannot be a recurrence of the beginning. A beginning implies that this universe is finite, not eternal.

There are various reasons and methods that lead to this scientific finding. Some might incorporate the beginning of the universe with the big bang theory. Others come to the conclusion as the reverse implication from the theory of expanding universe while others may come from the idea of big freeze and other various reasons. In summary, scientific findings at the moment only manage to establish that there is a beginning though it cannot be certain yet on how it actually begins. 

This means, in the last four centuries, science has only proven what the Bible has claimed more than 4000 years ago. Prior to human ratio achievement, the Holy Scripture has proposed the idea of a beginning, even a beginning of this universe from nothingness (ex nihilo).

Genesis 1:1
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

Hebrew 11:3
“By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.”

This makes a lot of sense for creationists because God the creator would have known the complete truth about His creation, and would be able to tell mankind, knowledge that is supra-rational. The term supra-rational is different from the term irrational. Supra rational refers to the things that may be incomprehensible by human ratio but is true and thus, is not contradicting with the whole truth. This first evidence shows that it is possible to have faith in a theistic worldview without contradicting to any truths, including the well-established scientific truth.

Now, let us think for a while, which one is more acceptable as an explanation:

In my opinion, out of the options available, it is way more reasonable to accept the eternal personal God as the reason for a beginning. 



Second evidence: contradictions, mysteries, and unlikely probability that is only explainable by God.

Revelation 4:11
“You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honour and power,
for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being.”

The second evidence for creation is because it makes perfect sense. Atheists have long since attempted many theories to replace the only possible truth: that there is God, and He created the universe. However, up to today all these theories are highly not probable and sometimes full of contradictions in themselves. 

Atheists and sceptics were hoping that as scientists understand more of the universe, they could get rid of God. They assume that God does not really exist, and the Gods that religions believe in are merely the “God of the gaps”. They expect that one day science will explain everything, and there will be no more area that requires God explanation. Contradicting to this expectation, however, as scientists understand more of this universe, the more they are overwhelmed by the complexity and fine-tuning of the universe we live in. Not only the complexities that are microscopic in nature, but also the complexities and fine tuning that appears in huge objects such as planets and our solar systems. 

On this occasion, I will briefly describe why our universe, when explained in naturalistic atheistic worldview results in unconvincing scientific theories that are highly improbable and sometimes contradicting to their other theories. Now if we observe our vast universe, we understand that there are so many stars, so many planets, so many asteroids and we just happen to live on this planet that we call earth. Perhaps we haven’t realized, but we actually live in a rare galaxy, a rare location and a rare planet, that is just perfect for us to live in. 

Let us consider our earth and our solar system that allow advance organism to live. Our earth is positioned at the right distance from the sun. Our earth is also positioned at the right distance from other stars as well as other planets such as Venus, Mars and Jupiter. Our earth just happens to be in this rare position to enable us to stay in its course revolving around the Sun in a stable manner. We are not too close to any massive objects to get sucked in by the gravitational force, but also not too far away from the Sun to simply get drifted away in this seemingly endless universe. 

Furthermore, we also need to consider how the Sun, which is the closest star that the earth is revolving around, is somewhat a stable active star. Our Sun is a type of star that has a slow burning rate, not the type to burn out in a matter of mere hundreds of years. It is also a kind of star that does not have too many explosions but instead simply a star that relatively emits constant stable heat. This stability allows us, inhabitants of planet earth to receive just the right amount of heat (not too much, not too little) at the right seasons for us to grow and develop. 

Our earth also has just the right size for the natural gravity law for us to live in. I wonder whether we could say that it is a mere coincidence that the universal gravity constant and the size of our planet is just right to allow us to have the right earth-gravity of approximately 9.8 ms-2. This gravity that we have on earth is not too strong to crush us, but also not too weak that it let us or other gases and particles to escape the earth. 

The earth has amazingly “perfect” compositions that allow us to drink, breathe and grow. We need plenty of oxygen to breathe but we don’t want too much oxygen on earth or else earth will become flammable. Our earth has plenty of water strangely enough for the third planet closest to the sun. Our earth also has the right composition and thickness of ozone to actually reflect and filter out the dangerous asteroids as well as radioactive waves. While at the same time, the ozone also keeps the “good stuff” on earth and stops them from leaving the earth.

It is quite amazing as well if we realize how the size and distance of the Earth, the Sun and the Moon as well as the course of earth revolving around the Sun and the course of the moon revolving around the Earth allow us to enjoy the rare phenomenal beauty of solar eclipse. The distance from Earth to Moon is about 1:400 compared to the distance from Earth to the Sun. While at the same time the size of the Moon is also about 1:400 when compared to the size of the Sun. Isn’t this an incredible “coincidence”?

I won’t bore you with too much information. However the bottom line is this: the probability of us to actually exist through mere unguided accident is very slim. In the past, scientists said the chance of all this things to happen the way they are, by chance was around 1 x 10-40, then it quickly shrunk to 1 x 10-120, then 1x10-130, then recently it has gone smaller again to 1x10-161. What has actually happened is that the more scientists understand the mystery of the universe, the more they realize how small it is the probability of having all these to happen by chance. So, don’t hold your breath expecting that this probability figure is going to increase anytime soon, perhaps it never will.

By the way, 1 x 10-161 means that the probability of our existence through unguided chance is only:
1 in 10,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000.

Further to this, there are also contradictions that exist between the theories and the realities of our universe. In this occasion, I will mention two samples of contradictions in regards to our earth. Firstly, scientists are having difficulties explaining how the earth, as the third planet closest to the sun, can have so much water. And so, for the moment, they agree on a ‘miraculous’ theory hypothesizing that billions of years ago, after the earth was formed, it got stricken by a watery asteroid (… really?). 

Another contradiction actually comes from the expanding universe theory. The expanding universe is observable, according to the scientists. For example the distance between the earth and the moon are increasing at a rate about 4 cm per year. So they believe that the universe is actually expanding like an explosion caused by the big bang. What many scientists didn’t realize initially is that with the rate 4 cm per year, it would imply that 1.5 billion of years ago the moon would have touched the earth. This figure of 1.5 billions of years ago definitely does not fit with the old earth timeline that is proposed by evolutionists (see the previous article regarding evolution: Earth age is 4 billion+). To get around that, some scientists propose another miraculous theory that the moon was not there in the beginning, but has just flown into the earth gravitational field some time ago.

This second evidence aims to persuade us that it is more reasonable for us to believe that all this order and harmony that we have cannot be a simple product of chaos + chance. It is logical and reasonable to accept that these complexities that we have in all layers (from grand cosmology up to micro physics) are results of design. It is not irrational for theistic scientists to believe that this universe must have been created and designed by God, the infinite creative creator.

If you are interested to know further about cosmology, watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FetjUAvXFk8


I will stop here and share just two scientific evidences that support creationism. I would not dig down too deep on this matter for now, because I’m quite convinced that regardless of all the evidence given above, hardly any sceptics or unbelievers would accept the creation event and the existence of God. And no matter how many scientific evidences given, it will not make much difference.

Given the same facts, the theists and the atheists would interpret them totally differently. Even though, we live in the same universe, some of us could seem to see this as work of creation, while others only see this as big chunks of matter and energy to learn. Even though the atheists could never prove that God does not exist, they will keep on trying to come up with theories that they hope to replace the “God” explanation. 

At least there are four major areas that scientists cannot explain. First, is how from nothing, it became something (matter, energy, natural law, etc). Second is how from non-living matter came out life. Third is how from mere living organisms such as bacteria, plants and animals, we now have humans with sense of morality, ratio and beauty. lastly is how a fragile planet, even more fragile creature survives till today (for God believer, we believe that God preserves us, while for atheist the answer will be "a miraculous luck". There have been attempts to explain these things. Unfortunately, it never stands against the test of time. One theory is proven wrong, only to be replaced with another short-lived theory. For many of the atheists, it is better for them to propose hundreds of wrong theories rather than to simply accept the possibility that God might actually exist.

And so, I am convinced that there are deeper issues that cannot be answered even by any number of evidences. Therefore, I would like to address those issues first on my next post, before we continue any further in our journey.