The wonder of creation
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I was born in a city and have always lived in a city. And I like it that way. But, I have to say, it is easy to get a little self-absorbed in a city. With tall buildings all around, masses of people, and life that progresses at a frenetic pace, I have found that, if I am not careful, my vision grows narrower and narrower as I, quite literally, can’t see beyond the next building. For this reason, I am always thankful for the opportunities that I get to get away for a while to “re-adjust my vision”.
I still remember the couple of days that I spent by the coast in Wollongong (Australia) in 2007. I was there to attend an academic conference, but my hotel was by the beach, and just a few days of walking by the gentle waves at sunrise and sunset reminded me that there is a huge world beyond the little corners in which we all live. It also reminded me that the most beautiful, the most awe-inspiring, and the most well-designed things on this earth aren’t man-made at all.
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Numerous passages in the Bible point out that evidence for the existence of God is displayed all around us. For example, in the Old Testament, the Psalmist says:
“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 display knowledge.
There is no speech or language
where their voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.” (Psalm 19:1-4)
And in the New Testament, the apostle Paul writes to the Romans, saying:
“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” (Romans 1:20).
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Indeed, we need only to look at nature which is all around us – the perfectly formed shape of a flower, the absolute breath-taking beauty of the morning and evening sky, the night stars twinkling at us from an unimaginable distance away, the steady rhythm of waves breaking on a beach, and (need I add) the perfect functionality of the human body – to see that it’s not so hard to believe in the existence of a divine and almighty Creator.
This is what the Bible means when it says that creation “proclaims the work of [God's] hands” or that God’s “eternal power and divine nature” can be understood from what has been made. It means that if we stop and take an honest look around us, it would be very hard to imagine that any of this could have come about apart from a Creator who intentionally and intelligently designed it all.
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I like the way that Mark Cahill put it in his book One Heartbeat Away (BDP Publishing, 2007):
Every time we look at something built by man – a house, for example – we know it had a builder, someone who assembled it. When we see something that has design, like a watch, we know it had a designer who planned it. When we see artwork, like a painting, we know there is an artist who painted it. When we observe order – say twenty Coke cups lined up in a row – we know there was an “orderer” who set them up that way. When we look around the universe at things not made by man, what do we see? We see creation, design, art, and order. So if everything man-made has a creator, designer, artist, or orderer behind it, why would we not think that there is a Creator, Designer, Artist, and Orderer behind the universe?” (p. 15-16)
Cahill continues a few pages later:
I was talking with a man one day in downtown Atlanta and I asked him a question about spiritual matters. He replied that he was an atheist and that there was no way to prove there is a God.
We were standing among tall buildings so I pointed to one of the skyscrapers and said, “Prove to me that there was a builder for that building.” He answered, “That’s easy. The building itself is proof that there is a builder.”
He was 100 percent correct. We know that you don’t just gather some concrete, pipes, windows, paint, wires, etc., then turn around and look back to suddenly find a building. A building requires a builder.
I said, “Exactly. The building is proof that there is a builder.” I then added, “The sun, the moon, the stars, the oceans, the sand, each unique snowflake, the three billion pieces of your DNA that are different from mine, are absolute proof that there had to be a Creator of this universe.” …
Just because you can’t see, touch, taste, smell, or hear the builder of a skyscraper doesn’t mean that such a person doesn’t exist. You don’t need any amazing faith to believe there was a builder of a building you can see; you just need to look at the evidence and make an informed decision. And the best piece of evidence you could have is the work that builder left behind.
The same holds true for the God of this universe. The evidence left for us to look at is all the evidence we will ever need in order to know that our universe has a Creator.” (p. 18)
[You can read the introduction and chapter 1 of Mark Cahill's book here: http://audio.markcahill.org/Heartbeat.pdf]
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For those amongst us who are fortunate enough to understand the internal workings of the human body, the evidence is even more astounding. Noel Gibson, for example, has pointed out that our bodies are a masterpiece:
“When you hear, 24,000 strings vibrate. A grand piano has 240, and is a mechanism 1 million times larger than the human ear. You live, because your heart pumps 40 million times per year, and uses 400 million berri-like structures in the lungs for collecting oxygen and discharging impurities.” (Noel Gibson, Twenty Minutes to Decide!, quoted by Ross Tooley (1993) in We Cannot But Tell, p. 64.)
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Paul Brand and Philip Yancey, in their intriguing book Fearfully and Wonderfully Made: A Surgeon Looks at the Human and Spiritual Body (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1980), also talk about the wonders of the human body. In the Preface to the book, we read:
“I have come to realize that every patient of mine, every newborn baby, in every cell of its body, has a basic knowledge of how to survive and how to heal, that exceeds anything that I shall ever know. That knowledge is the gift of God, who has made our bodies more perfectly than we could ever have devised.” (Dr Paul Brand, quoted by Philip Yancey in the Preface to Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, p. 14.) Read an excerpt from the book here.
And, in another part of the book, Brand and Yancey write:
“Think of the stimuli your skin monitors each day: wind, particles, parasites, changes in pressure, temperature, humidity, light, radiation. Skin is tough enough to withstand the rigorous pounding of jogging on asphalt, yet sensitive enough to have bare toes tickled by a light breeze” (p. 124).
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Phillip Bishop, professor of exercise physiology at the University of Alabama, in a thought-provoking start to his short article, Evidence of God in Human Physiology, asks:
“What are you doing right now? If your first answer was, “nothing” you are badly mistaken. Right now while you sit quietly, a myriad of wonderful events are taking place necessary for your survival. Right now your heart is beating. If you’re in average physical condition, it beats between 60 and 70 times per minute, 93,000 times per day, 655,000 times per week, 34 million times per year, and 2.4 billion beats in the average lifetime. What’s so amazing is that, most of the time, it fuels itself, paces itself, repairs itself, and alters itself in response to lifestyle changes, with no conscious effort on your part. In addition to your heart, your liver is detoxifying your blood, your brain is storing away information, cells are being formed and cells destroyed, energy is being used and produced, and many other tasks vital to life and function all carry on in a wonderful, harmonious way.” (For more on how the wonders of the human body point to a Creator God, have a look at Bishop’s whole article.)
I don’t know about you, but I find it difficult to imagine how anyone could take a genuine, honest look at themselves and come to any conclusion other than that Someone designed us and intentionally created our bodies to work the way they do. How is it possible to imagine that our eyes, our ears, our hands, our brains, our hearts, and everything else about us are the result of an accident or a chance occurrence?
If you really wanted to grill me about scientific facts, and dates, and how this evidence stacks up against that evidence, there will probably be lots of questions that I can’t answer, and this used to bother me a great deal. But I look at myself and I look at other people around me, and there is just no way that anyone could convince me that we are not divinely and beautifully created. As the Psalmist says in Psalm 139: 14: “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made”.
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The scientists and the academic-minded among us root around in laboratories calculating this, that, and the other, in order to come up with evidence for whether there was an intelligent designer to this universe. And I have nothing against that. If anything, I am profoundly grateful for the advances made in science which have provided even more supporting evidence that the Christian faith is very much grounded in reason and rationality. I rejoice when I hear that more and more evidence is emerging from the field of Physics that points to the fact that SOMEONE must have designed the universe. Physicists are realising that too many factors are “just right” for it to be a coincidence or an accident. As Professor Robin Collins says: “Over the last thirty years or so, scientists have discovered that just about everything about the basic structure of the universe is balanced on a razor’s edge for life to exist” (quoted in Lee Strobel’s The Case for a Creator (Zondervan, 2004, p. 160)). For example:
GRAVITY: Did you know that our force of gravity is so precisely perfect for us? If we stretched a ruler all the way across the universe and imagined that it was broken up into little one-inch divisions, and if we imagined that the current force of gravity that we have is set at a particular point on that ruler, just moving that setting one inch along that ruler (remember, which is stretched across the universe) would increase the force of gravity such that we would all be crushed. (Based on an example from Lee Strobel’s The Case for a Creator, p. 161-162.)
ROTATION OF THE EARTH: “Any appreciable change in the rate of rotation of the earth would make life impossible. For example, if the earth were to rotate at 1/10th its present rate, all plant life would either be burned to a crisp during the day or frozen at night” (Mark Cahill, One Heartbeat Away, p. 23).
ELECTROMAGNETIC FORCE: “If the electromagnetic force in atoms were weakened by a mere 4 percent, then the sun would immediately explode” (from “What does it mean that God speaks through creation?” by The Navigators).
THE PROPERTIES OF WATER: “The ocean is the world’s thermostat … It takes a large loss of heat for water to pass from liquid to ice, and for water to become steam quite an intake of energy is required. Hence the ocean is a cushion against the heat of the sun and the freezing blast of the winter. Unless the temperatures of the earth’s surface were modulated by the ocean and kept within certain limits, life would either be cooked to death or frozen to death” (Bernard Ramm, The Christian View of Science and Scripture, Eerdmans, 1954, p. 148, quoted in Paul E. Little, Know Why You Believe, Victor, 2003, pp. 21-22).
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I am very glad that there is scientific evidence that points in the same direction as the Bible, and I am grateful for anything that helps people to come to a point where they are able to take the step to trust in the God of the Bible. At some point in my past, the knowledge that Christianity can be grounded in scientific rationality certainly helped me.
But what if someone doesn’t understand all this scientific evidence, or has no access to it, or only understands part of it (like me)? Does that mean that such a person is not in a position to believe in God and accept Jesus as their Saviour?
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I’ve recently come to the revelation that God has provided, plainly, before our eyes, all the evidence we need to believe that He is the divine Creator of this universe. The Bible tells us that “God’s invisible qualities … have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made” (Romans 1:20) and that creation “proclaims the work of his hands” (Psalm 19). This means that God has left enough clearly-visible and obvious evidence of His divine nature for us to see, if only we care to take a moment to look at His creation.
It’s great if we can offer scientific evidence to explain why the Bible’s account of God’s creation should be believed. But here’s the thing: God doesn’t expect us to. The Bible says in Hebrews 11:3, “By faith, we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command”.
God has already left ample evidence of His power and His divine nature for all of us to see, in plain sight. So, look around and at yourself, and take some time to think about it. Creation really does declare the glory of God our Creator.
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(1) Header: Wollongong coastline, taken in 2007. (2) Wollongong coastline at sunset, taken in 2007. (3) Sunset in York, UK, taken in 2006. (4) Loch Garry, Scotland, taken in 2005. (5) Photograph of mother and baby’s hands, by Anna Cervova, from http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/ (6) Picture of girl sitting on hillside, by David Niblack at http://www.davidniblack.com/ (7) Copernican Armillary Sphere, Royal Observatory Greenwich, London, taken in 2010. This is a Copernican model of the solar system which shows the sun at the centre. (8) Water lily, from Kew Gardens, London, taken in 2011.
“You may find it hard to believe that God could make everything out of nothing, but the alternative is that nothing turned itself into everything. Which takes more faith to believe?” (Mark Cahill, One Heartbeat Away, BPD Publishing, 2007, p. 23)
