A priest and an atheist were walking down the beach one
morning. They came across a Rolex laying in the sand. The atheist looked at the
priest and asked, “How do you think this got here.”
After a moment of deep thought the priest replied. “After
hundreds of millions of years of the waves churning up the shore it just formed
there for us to find.”
“Do you know how absurd that sounds?” asked the atheist.
The priest just smiled. “Yes, I do.”
I find atheism to be greatly absurd. Many atheists tend to
be scientifically oriented and tell us we need to be open minded to possibility
but absolutely shut down the possibility of a supreme being, an intelligent
designer, a creator, let’s call him…God. Atheist scientists reject God because
they cannot prove he exists yet most of what they do propose is considered
theory because it also cannot be definitively proven either. The proof that
Judeo-Christian religions give for the existence of God is just as sound as
some of the evidence science gives for some of their theories. So let’s start
at the beginning and see where this takes us.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. The
earth was without form and darkness covered creation. Then God said, “Let there
be light”, and there was light.
The universe emerged from an extremely dense singularity. There
was an explosion of light and matter that has been expanding ever since. This
is known as the “Big Bang Theory” and is widely accepted in scientific circles to
be the most plausible cause for the beginning of life as we know it.
Ironically, this theory was put forth by the Belgian Catholic priest, astronomer,
and professor of physics Reverend Georges Lemaître. Notice
that the two statements do not directly conflict with one another. It is more
like two different witnesses explaining what they saw in their own way.
Then God separated the heaven from the earth and the
earth was formed amid the ocean.
Science tells us that the Earth formed around 4.54
billion years ago, approximately one-third the age of the universe, by
accretion from the solar nebula. Volcanic outgassing probably created the primordial
atmosphere and then the ocean, but the early atmosphere contained almost no
oxygen. Still no direct conflict…
Then God created the trees and the animals, birds of
the air, and fish of the sea. Last God created man.
The Hadean eon represents the time before a reliable
(fossil) record of life; it began with the formation of the planet and ended
4.0 billion years ago. The following Archean and Proterozoic eons produced the beginnings
of life on Earth and its earliest
evolution. The succeeding eon is the Phanerozoic,
divided into three eras: the Palaeozoic, an era of arthropods, fishes, and the
first life on land; the Mesozoic, which spanned the rise, reign, and climactic
extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs; and the Cenozoic, which saw the rise of mammals. Recognizable humans
emerged at most 2 million years ago, a vanishingly small period on the
geological scale. Seems that science and the Bible tend to be in general
agreement here.
So science tells us that everything just exploded
into being from seemingly nothingness. Then gases gathered together and began
to cool forming the stars and the planets and the other celestial objects. One
of those planets, earth, was first a gas, then cooled to a molten solid. During
that time all of the different atoms began to form and then those atoms
gathered together to form molecules. Time, pressure, and heat all combined in
just the right order and amount that one of these molecules began alive and was
the first living single celled creature. That creature reproduced and
reproduced and reproduced and eventually evolved to a new creature. This
process continued until the earth was teaming with life and eventually, through
evolution, man came into being.
But there is no supreme being, no intelligent
designer, no God who put all of this into motion. Nature did all of this on its
own. Here’s my rub with all of that…
If we were going to build anything, a house, a
bridge, a giant sky scraper, the first thing we do is to create a blueprint.
The blueprint tells the builder how to build the object. Life is no different.
Life has a blueprint. The blueprint of life on earth is deoxyribonucleic acid,
DNA. DNA is an acid, a protein structure that instructs a cell on what it is to
do, replicate, live. All life on this planet contains DNA and DNA does not
naturally exist outside of the cell structure. DNA itself is not alive.
We have been able to map out the human DNA genome.
It is complex and genius in its structure. Like our Rolex on the beach it could
not have just formed on its own and then gone on to create the cell in which it
lived. It would be more plausible to say that a fetus is capable of forming its
mother around it and then move on with its development.
Scientists generally agree that the genome points to
an intelligent designer but atheist scientists refuse to make the jump to
calling that designer God.
I was once on a flight with a woman who asked me
what I thought was between the particles of an atom. I did not have an answer
as I have never seen a scientific one. She said that she thought that it was
God’s love and that it was his love that keeps the atom together. At the time I
thought the woman was a bit bananas but the further my formation goes the more
I know that she was absolutely correct.
DNA is God’s fingerprint on every single living
cell. For me, it is definitive proof of the existence of God. God is love and
love can never be forced. For love to exist there has to be a choice. God has
given us the choice to believe in him or not and has given us enough wiggle
room to logically argue ourselves out of belief.
Angels definitely know of God’s existence. For them
their only choice is to serve or to revolt. There is no middle ground. Man was
offered love over choice. This was the true envy of the devil.
