Hard Questions: Nay sayers?

Today, we are going to look at a couple of questions of nay sayers, or people who say that God does not exist or the Bible is disproved for one reason or another. These types of questions can be uncomfortable for us because we do not feel like we have sufficient evidence to refute their claims.

In the last 150 years, no single area has provided a jumping off point for turning away from God or saying no to God like the realm of science. There has been a dramatic push to take God out of public education, in part, under the guise of the “impartiality” of science.

Scientific investigation, by definition, is “the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.”  So what does the Bible say about the physical and natural world?


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

What has been observed about the heavens?

How about the size of the universe? 1027 meters

What about the number of stars? 70x1021 Counted by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2003.

The universe has a beginning. (The Big Bang)

The universe is made up of galaxies, stars, planets, moons, black holes, neutron stars, pulsars, magnetars, gamma ray bursts, supernovas, quasars, nebulae, comets, asteroids, meteoroids, cosmic dust.

Let’s take a quick look at the universe having a beginning. In the past (pre 1920’s), the universe was believed to be infinite and eternal. Einstein’s theory of relativity brought forth the concept that the universe was expanding. Since Einstein was unwilling to accept this, he added a constant to keep the universe the same size. Subsequently, the red shift was observed by Edwin Hubble in 1929. Hubble observed that galaxies that are farther away are moving away from us faster than ones that are closer to us. Einstein said that adding a constant to keep the universe a constant size was “the biggest blunder of my life.” And, the universe is still expanding. In fact, in 1999, astronomers discovered that the universe expansion is not decreasing but increasing. In 1964, cosmic microwave background radiation was discovered which further supported the idea of a universe origin. The Big Bang is now accepted by almost all scientists.

While we’re on the point of the universe expanding, the prophet Jeremiah wrote,

This is what the Lord says: "Only if the heavens above can be measured and the foundations of the earth below be searched out will I reject all the descendants of Israel because of all they have done," declares the Lord. Jeremiah 31:37

Not only is the universe huge beyond measuring, but it is also expanding. This is similar to Psalm 103:12 which says, “your sins are removed as far as the east is from the west” rather than as far as the north is from the south.

The theory, supporting evidence, and acceptance of the Big Bang is a phenomenal leap. Just contrast for a moment. Since the time of Greek philosophers, apart from the Bible the universe was regarded to be eternal. In just the last 80 years, nearly every scientist has come to agree that there was a beginning.

However, the Big Bang theory makes no possible statement for the origin of the universe. It documents that there must have been a beginning. Georges Lemaitre who first published what would become the Big Bang theory in 1927, described it as the beginning of time itself. The Big Bang occurred on “A Day Without Yesterday.”

Now, a few months ago, Melissa and I were at home, asleep, snug in our beds in the wee hours of the morning when all of a sudden there was a tremendous bang or crashing noise. Fortunately, it came from outside the house and not on top of the house. In the morning, we went out and found that a tree had fallen in the woods behind the house.

When we got up what did we expect to find? There must have been some cause for the crashing sound. You don’t get a bang without a cause. If you heard a tree fall, and you asked what made that bang? And then, I said, “Oh, nothing.” You would not accept my answer.

So the universe has a beginning, and anything that begins must have a cause. Therefore, the universe has a cause. The English astrophysicist, Sir Arthur Eddington wrote, “The beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agree to look on it as frankly supernatural.”

Furthermore, as this evidence points toward a Creator, William Craig wrote that we can even draw conclusions about the attributes of the Creator. “This supernatural cause must be an uncaused, changeless, timeless, and immaterial being … It must be uncaused because we know that there cannot be an infinite regress of causes. It must be timeless and therefore changeless, at least without the universe, because it was the creator of time. In addition, because it also created space, it must transcend space and therefore be immaterial rather than physical in nature.”

I have a lot of fun continuing to delve deeper and deeper into the origin of the universe, but I don’t want to deprive you of seeing some incredible structures and behaviors in other parts of the physical and natural world.

Before we leave the discussion about the universe or cosmology, it is important to note that scientists have discovered “the Big Bang was not some chaotic, primordial event, but rather a highly ordered event that required an enormous amount of information. In fact, from the very moment of its inception, the universe had to be fine-tuned to an incomprehensible precision for the existence of life.”

Stephen Hawking calculated that if the expansion rate on second after the Big Bang were smaller by one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000 (1017), the universe would have collapsed into a fireball. British physicist P.C.W. Davies concluded the odds against the initial conditions being suitable for the formation of stars is one followed by a thousand billion billion zeroes. In addition, if the strength of gravity were changed by only one part in ten followed by a hundred zeroes, life could never have developed. There are at least 50 constants and quantities – for example, the amount of useable energy in the universe, the difference in mass between protons and electrons, the ratios of the fundamental forces of nature, and the proportion of matter to antimatter – that must be balanced to a mathematically infinitesimal degree for any life to be possible.

To conclude the discussion on the universe, I will read a quote from Patrick Glynn who was an atheist and later became a Christian in large part by studying the precise balance of the universe.

Today, the concrete data point strongly in the direction of the God hypothesis … Those who wish to oppose it have no testable theory to marshal, only speculations about unseen universes spun from fertile scientific imagination … Ironically, the picture of the universe bequeathed to us by the most advanced twentieth-century science is closer in spirit to the vision presented in the book of Genesis than anything offered by science since Copernicus.

This is what God the Lord says-- he who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and all that comes out of it, who gives breath to its people, and life to those who walk on it Isaiah 42:5

The heavens truly “declare the glory of God … proclaim the work of his hands … pour forth speech … and 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.”

The works of God are on display for everyone to see. They are not hidden from us. Let’s read now Romans 1 verse 18

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For 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, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. … They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator. Romans 1:18-23, 25

Let’s step now from the heavens to biology. Evolution has become such an integral part of biology, it is often accepted without question. I know that when I was in junior high and high school, it was taught as truth. No one really got worked up about it. It was accepted rather than questioned.

If I had to frame this as a hard question, someone might ask, “Since evolution is proven, doesn’t this discredit the Bible?”

And from a historical perspective, Michael Denton a molecular biologist wrote that Darwin, “broke man’s link with God” and consequently “set him adrift in the cosmos without purpose.” Quoting Denton further

As far as Christianity was concerned, the advent of the theory of evolution … was catastrophic … The decline in religious belief can probably be attributed more to the propagation and advocacy by the intellectual and scientific community of the Darwinian version of evolution than to any other single factor.

Today, I want to ask the question, “Is evolution proven? Is evolution fact?”

Certainly, many scientists and writers are focused on evolution as fact.

Sir Julian Huxley – “Darwin’s theory is … no longer a theory, but a fact … Darwinianism has come to age so to speak. We are no longer having to bother about establishing the fact of evolution.”

Isaac Asimov – “Today, although many educators play it safe by calling evolutionary ideas ‘theory’ instead of ‘fact,’ there is no reputable biologist who doubts that species including homo sapiens, have developed with time, and that they are continually, though slowly, changing.”

Carl Sagan – “Evolution is a fact amply demonstrated by the fossil record and by contemporary molecular biology. Natural selection is a successful theory to explain the fact of evolution.”

Richard Dawkins – “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).”

Biology: Exploring Life, Jane Reece – “The theory of evolution is no less reliable than is the ‘atomic theory’ or the ‘germ theory of infectious disease.’ As with atoms, which cannot be directly observed, we cannot directly observe the production of new species by evolution. Biologists have gathered a tremendous amount of evidence in support of biological evolution, however, and not one major piece of evidence has ever been obtained that suggests it has not occurred … Conversely, the so-called theory of creationism proposes no testable hypothesis and thus cannot be proven right or wrong. Proponents simply accept it on faith. The theory of evolution, however, suggests many predictions that can be tested.”

Huxley, Asimov, and Sagan purport evolution as fact.

What does the theory of evolution claim? That life arose from inorganic chemicals and organized itself in successive steps of complexity through mutation and natural selection.

The understanding of the workings of biological systems has exploded in the last 60 years. The more biologists learn, the more these systems are revealed to be more remarkable and intricate than previously imagined.

At the time of Darwin, microscopes were capable of seeing cells. However, a cell appeared to be a blob of plasm or like a bit of Jello.

Today, biologists see cells as amazing biochemical factories with the capability to replicate themselves.

DNA is the star of the show in the cell. All the information needed for the design and function of the cell is contained there. If you took all the DNA out of one cell and stretched it out, it would be as long as I am tall. If you took all the DNA out of every cell in my body, and squeezed it together, it would fit in an ice cube. If you took all the DNA from every cell in my body and stretched it out end to end, it would reach more than 10 billion miles. That’s enough to stretch across the diameter of the orbit of Pluto and have some left over! The DNA in one cell contains the information equivalent to 200 books with 1000 pages each.

All life on earth is DNA based. How non-life stepped across the threshhold of becoming life cannot be explained by evolutionary microbiologists. If you compare the information in a living cell to the most highly ordered non-biological system, like a crystal or a snowflake, it’s like comparing the complete works of Shakespeare to the sentence, “I love you, I love you, I love you” repeated over and over again.

Nevertheless, Harvard biology professor and Nobel laureate George Wald published an article in Scientific American which said,

However improbable we regard this event [the start of all life], or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at least once. And for life as we know it … once may be enough.

Time is in fact the hero of the plot. The time with which we have to deal with is of the order of two billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time the “impossible” becomes the possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs miracles.

This sounds very nice and quite authoritative, but it turns out to be wrong. It was so wrong, that 25 years later, Scientific American made the shocking decision to print an unequivocal retraction.

Although stimulating, this article probably represents one of the very few times in his professional life when Wald has been wrong. Examine his main thesis and see. Can we really form a biological cell by waiting for chance combinations of organic compounds? Harold Morowitz, in his book Energy Flow and Biology, computed that merely to create a bacterium would require more time than the Universe might ever see if chance combinations of its molecules were the only driving force.

I’m running out of time, so before we close out. I want to introduce you to a couple of terms. When I was taught about evolution, the word evolution was applied to any type of change. It turns out there are two key types of evolution. Microevolution and macroevolution. Microevolution is an observable phenomenon. And it is apparently so well known that the Microsoft Word spell check believes it is a word. Gregor Mendel and his work with pea plants. Breeding of dogs and birds. Darwin’s finches and their change of beak size. These kinds of things are representative of microevolution. Small changes within the same type of organism. Even radiation experiments on fruit flies result in a kind of microevolution. You can get fruit flies with 4 wings or 3 eyes or missing appendages, but you always end up with fruit flies. You can’t bombard fruit flies with radiation and end up with mosquitoes or beetles or house flies.

Macroevolution is the business that Darwin, Sagan, Asimov, and Huxley are getting at. This is the development of whole new kinds of animals. Something that did not previously exist. There is no documented record of macroevolution occurring. We do not see intermediate forms of animals. We only see distinct kinds of animals both alive today and in the fossil record. In fact, Darwin himself said,

The number of intermediate varieties which must have formerly existed on the earth, [must] be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graded organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.

Darwin also wrote in the Origin of Species,

The geological record is extremely imperfect and this fact will to a large extent explain why we do not find intermediate varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps. He who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record, will rightly reject my whole theory.

And the modern evidence for the geological evidence, Colin Patterson an evolutionist and paleontologist of the London Museum of Natural History said, “I will lay it on the line – there is not one such [transitional] fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.” David Raup, the director of the Field Museum of Natural History said,

We are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time.

Finally, from Stephen Jay Gould

The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of the branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of the fossils.

The last term I want to introduce is “irreducible complexity.” This is another “showstopper” for Darwin. Darwin said, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely breakdown.”

That’s the point of “irreducible complexity.” There are many systems in biology which are irreducibly complex. The flagellum of the bacterium has been described as the most efficient machine in the universe. This little bio-motor spins up to 100,000 RPM and can stop within a quarter of a turn. There are over 40 components. If only one is missing, then you have a broken motor. Any of our sense organs have issues of irreducible complexity. Think about the eye without a lens, or an ear without an eardrum or middle ear connecting bones that are too large to transmit sound waves. According to Darwin, natural selection would eliminate the beginnings of these changes before they could take hold. If a fish were transitioning from the sea to dry land, what does it do with an appendage which is neither a fin nor a leg?

The last example I have is the clotting of blood. If you have a cut, there is an amazing sequence of events which stops the flow of blood and initiates the healing process. If this process doesn’t work, it is very likely that you would bleed to death. If you were evolving and did not have the fibrin protein to contain the red blood cells and begin the clot, but you did have all the other components, would you live long enough to pass down these “not yet beneficial” systems?

As a result of the lack of evidence in favor of evolution as well as the inability for incremental changes of natural selection to result in increasing complexity, evolutionists have begun to propose new and different theories to explain where life comes from. These theories are attempts to help evolution along, anything to omit God from the equation. If you are interested, read through The Case for Faith by Lee Strobel.

Biologist Richard Dawkins wrote, “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA said, “Biologists must constantly keep in minds that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.”

The primary counterargument to evolution today is called intelligent design. A couple of examples: If you were driving along in South Dakota and spotted Mount Rushmore. You wouldn’t say, look honey, that’s an amazing rock formation. Don’t you think it’s interesting how that cliff is shaped just like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Of course not. You would think that someone carved their faces into the cliff.

In the same way, if you were walking in the woods, and came across a pocket watch, you wouldn’t say, “Wow, what an interesting display of nature. I wonder if what kind of plant this is.” You would recognize the watch as a device designed with an intelligent purpose. (By the way, this is known as Paley’s Argument, taken from the book Natural Theology written by William Paley.)

We can even go simpler than the pocket watch. If you find an arrowhead, you do not say, “My, what an unusually shaped rock.” No you look at the arrowhead, and say, “Someone shaped this rock into an arrowhead. You recognize an intelligent design.

Romans 1 said, “what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For 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, so that men are without excuse.”

We may see what God has done because he has made it plain to us. It is up to us whether we accept Him, or if we reject Him.

You have trusted in your wickedness and have said, 'No one sees me.' Your wisdom and knowledge mislead you when you say to yourself, 'I am, and there is none besides me.' Isaiah 47:10

The fool says in his heart, "There is no God." Psalm 14:1

I have one last item I’d like to close with. This is from an article written by Dr. James Le Fanu. He was discussing a biologist’s theory regarding whether or not there is a hormonal conflict going on between a mother and her unborn child.

But Dr Haig’s theory does highlight the most remarkable phenomenon in human reproductive biology. Theoretically the mother should reject the foetus because it is genetically different, just as she would reject a transplanted organ. She does not do so, however, because the cells of the placenta are unique in not expressing on their surface the antigens which the mother’s immune system would interpret as foreign. The foetus is immunologically "invisible".

In evolutionary terms this could be interpreted as evidence of a successful adaptation by which the "selfish" genes of the foetus ensure their own continued propagation but it might more appropriately be described as a miracle.

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. Psalm 139:13-14

The quotations and supporting evidence were taken from:

The Truth Project from Focus on the Family - http://www.thetruthproject.org/

The Case for Faith – A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity by Lee Strobel

More Than Meets the Eye – Fascinating Glimpses of God’s Power and Design by Richard A. Swenson, M.D.