The Case for a Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God (Case for ... Series)

by Lee Strobel

“The fine tuning of the universe provides prima facie evidence of deistic design.”11

“Though man is not at the physical center of the universe, he appears to be at the center of its purpose.”15

just a one-percent change in the strong nuclear force would have a thirty- to a thousand-fold impact on the production of oxygen and carbon in stars. Since stars provide the carbon and oxygen needed for life on planets, if you throw that off balance, conditions in the universe would be much less optimal for the existence of life.

“As you can see, compared to the total range of force strengths in nature, gravity has an incomprehensibly narrow range for life to exist. Of all the possible settings on the dial, from one side of the universe to the other, it happens to be situated in the exact right fraction of an inch to make our universe capable of sustaining life.”

When I asked Collins about this, he told me that the unexpected, counterintuitive, and stunningly precise setting of the cosmological constant “is widely regarded as the single greatest problem facing physics and cosmology today.” “How precise is it?” I asked. Collins rolled his eyes. “Well, there’s no way we can really comprehend it,” he said. “The fine-tuning has conservatively been estimated to be at least one part in a hundred million billion billion billion billion billion. That would be a ten followed by fifty-three zeroes. That’s inconceivably precise.”

“For instance, there’s the difference in mass between neutrons and protons. Increase the mass of the neutron by about one part in seven hundred and nuclear fusion in stars would stop. There would be no energy source for life.

In light of the infinitesimal odds of getting all the right dial settings for the constants of physics, the forces of nature, and other physical laws and principles necessary for life, it seems fruitless to try to explain away all of this fine-tuning as merely the product of random happenstance.

Some skeptics have attacked the fine-tuning argument from another direction, raising what has become known as the Weak Anthropic Principle. According to this idea, if the universe were not fine-tuned for life, then human beings wouldn’t be around to observe it. Consequently, they contend that the fine-tuning requires no explanation. “You have to admit, there’s a certain intuitive appeal to that,” I said to Collins. “I think John Leslie had the best answer to that,” he replied. “Suppose you were standing before a firing squad of fifty highly trained marksmen who were all aiming directly at your chest from a short distance away. You heard the order, ‘Ready! Aim! Fire!’ But you didn’t feel anything. You remove your blindfold and see you’re still very much alive. Not one bullet hit you. “Now, you wouldn’t allow the skeptic to simply dismiss the situation by saying, ‘Oh well, if they had shot you, you wouldn’t be here to comment on the situation.’ No — the circumstances are still surprising and they would still demand an explanation. Did they conspire together to miss you? Was this a mock execution? And the same thing is true for the fine-tuning of the universe. It still demands an explanation. My assessment is that the best explanation is a designer.”

If the six numbers that underlie the fundamental physical properties of the universe were altered “even to the tiniest degree,” he said, “there would be no stars, no complex elements, no life.”27 Declared Rees: “The expansion speed, the material content of the universe, and the strengths of the basic forces, seem to have been a prerequisite for the emergence of the hospitable cosmic habitat in which we live.”28

“the fine-tuning by itself can’t tell us whether God is personal or not. We have to find out in other ways. But it does help us conclude that he exists, that he created the world, and that therefore the universe has a purpose. He made it very carefully and quite precisely as a habitat for intelligent life.”

It’s turning out that the Earth is anything but ordinary, that our sun is far from average, and that even the position of our planet in the galaxy is eerily fortuitous.

Earth’s location, its size, its composition, its structure, its atmosphere, its temperature, its internal dynamics, and its many intricate cycles that are essential to life —the carbon cycle, the oxygen cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the phosphorous cycle, the sulfur cycle, the calcium cycle, the sodium cycle, and so on — testify to the degree to which our planet is exquisitely and precariously balanced.20

a whole range of factors — conspire together in an amazing way to make Earth a habitable planet,” Gonzalez said. “And even beyond that, we’ve found that the very same conditions that allow for intelligent life on Earth also make it strangely well-suited for viewing and analyzing the universe.” “And we suspect this is not an accident,” Richards added. “In fact, we raise the question of whether the universe has been literally designed for discovery.”

We now know that there’s a massive black hole at the center of our galaxy. In fact, the Hubble space telescope has found that nearly every large nearby galaxy has a giant black hole at its nucleus. And believe me — these are dangerous things!

“If you look at the deepest pictures ever taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, they show literally thousands of galaxies when the universe was really young. People have commented, ‘Wow, look at all those galaxies! I wonder how many civilizations there are looking back at us?’ In that picture, I’d say zero. Thousands and thousands and thousands of galaxies —but zero Earths, because the heavier elements haven’t built up enough yet.”

“In terms of habitability, I think we are in the best possible place,” Gonzalez said. “That’s because our location provides enough building blocks to yield an Earth, while providing a low level of threats to life. I really can’t come up with an example of another place in the galaxy that is as friendly to life as our location. Sometimes people claim you can be in any part of any galaxy. Well, I’ve studied other regions — spiral arms, galactic centers, globular clusters, edge of disks — and no matter where it is, it’s worse for life. I can’t think of any better place than where we are.”

“Fortunately, our sun is not only the right mass, but it also emits the right colors — a balance of red and blue.

It would take a star with the highly unusual properties of our sun — the right mass, the right light, the right composition, the right distance, the right orbit, the right galaxy, the right location —to nurture living organisms on a circling planet. That makes our sun, and our planet, rare indeed.

To me, it was amazing enough that the moon “just happens” to be the right size and in the right place to help create a habitable environment for Earth. Again, it was piling on more and more “coincidences” that were making it harder to believe mere chance could be responsible for our life-sustaining biosphere.

When I took this together with all of the various “serendipitous” circumstances involving our privileged location in the universe, I was left without a vocabulary to describe my sense of wonder. The suggestion that all of this was based on fortuitous chance had become absurd to me. The tell-tale signs of design are evident from the far reaches of the Milky Way down to the inner core of our planet.

“What’s really amazing is that total eclipses are possible because the sun is four hundred times larger than the moon, but it’s also four hundred times further away. It’s that incredible coincidence that creates a perfect match.

the very time and place where perfect solar eclipses appear in our universe also corresponds to the one time and place where there are observers to see them.”

In fact, we believe that the conditions for making scientific discoveries on Earth are so fine-tuned that you would need a great amount of faith to attribute them to mere chance.”

As Gonzalez and Richards explained earlier, plate tectonics is essential to having a livable planet. One byproduct of the movement of these crustal plates is earthquakes, which, in turn, have provided scientists with research data that would otherwise be difficult to obtain.

“But if the universe was designed with us in mind, why is it so incredibly vast?” I asked. “There’s a lot of empty space out there. Isn’t that wasteful and unnecessary?” “Because the universe was designed for discovery, we need something to discover,” Richards replied. “The universe is vast and we’re small, but we have access to it. That’s what is amazing. We can see background radiation that has come from more than ten billion light years away.”

“Darwin once complained that pollen couldn’t have been designed. After all, he said, look at the waste! Millions upon millions of particles are produced, but very, very few are used in the development of flowers. “However, what he didn’t realize was that pollen is one of the most useful tools we have in the scientific exploration of the past, in part, because it can be dated through Carbon 14. When we find pollen in lake sediments and ice cores, we can use it to gauge how old the layered deposits are and what the ancient climate was like.

We are, by astronomical standards, a pampered, cossetted, cherished group of creatures; our Darwinian claim to have done it all ourselves is as ridiculous and as charming as a baby’s brave efforts to stand on its own feet and refuse his mother’s hand. If the universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence. It is my view that these circumstances indicate the universe was created for man to live in.48

If God so precisely and carefully and lovingly and amazingly constructed a mind-boggling habitat for his creatures, then it would be natural for him to want them to explore it, to measure it, to investigate it, to appreciate it, to be inspired by it — and ultimately, and most importantly, to find him through it.

If Darwinian evolution is going to work, it has to succeed at the microscopic level of amino acids, proteins, and DNA. On the other hand, if there really was a designer of the world, then his fingerprints were going to be all over the cell.

“So the mousetrap does a good job of illustrating how irreducibly complex biological systems defy a Darwinian explanation,” he continued. “Evolution can’t produce an irreducibly complex biological machine suddenly, all at once, because it’s much too complicated. The odds against that would be prohibitive. And you can’t produce it directly by numerous, successive, slight modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor system would be missing a part and consequently couldn’t function. There would be no reason for it to exist. And natural selection chooses systems that are already working.”

“Right now, there’s only one principle that we know can come up with complex interactive systems, and that’s intelligence. Natural selection has been proposed, but there’s little or no evidence backing that claim.

Complex biological systems have yet to be explained by naturalistic means. That’s a fact. Even Darwinists admit that in their candid moments. And as science advances, we’re continuing to find more and more complexity in the cellular world.

The world is too complicated in all its parts and interconnections to be due to chance alone. I am convinced that the existence of life with all its order in each of its organisms is simply too well put together. Each part of a living thing depends on all its other parts to function. How does each part know? How is each part specified at conception? The more one learns of biochemistry the more unbelievable it becomes unless there is some type of organizing principle —an architect for believers, a mystery to be solved by science (even as to why) sometime in the indefinite future for materialist reductionalists.21

In fact, he said the information needed to build the proteins for all the species of organisms that have ever lived — a number estimated to be approximately one thousand million — “could be held in a teaspoon and there would still be room left for all the information in every book ever written.”

Meyer agreed. “Virtually all origin-of-life experts have utterly rejected that approach,” he said with a wave of his hand. “Even so, the idea is still very much alive at the popular level,” I pointed out. “For many college students who speculate about these things, chance is still the hero. They think if you let amino acids randomly interact over millions of years, life is somehow going to emerge.” “Well, yes, it’s true that this scenario is still alive among people who don’t know all the facts, but there’s no merit to it,” Meyer replied.

“Even,” I asked, “if the first molecule had been much simpler than those today?” “There’s a minimal complexity threshold,” he replied. “There’s a certain level of folding that a protein has to have, called tertiary structure, that is necessary for it to perform a function. You don’t get tertiary structure in a protein unless you have at least seventy-five amino acids or so. That may be conservative. Now consider what you’d need for a protein molecule to form by chance.

“Run the odds of these things falling into place on their own and you find that the probabilities of forming a rather short functional protein at random would be one chance in a hundred thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. That’s a ten with 125 zeroes after it! “And that would only be one protein molecule — a minimally complex cell would need between three hundred and five hundred protein molecules.

“Cambrian explosion” — in which a dazzling array of new life forms suddenly appears fully formed in the fossil record, without any of the ancestors required by Darwinism — also is powerful evidence of a designer. The reason: this phenomenon would have required the sudden infusion of massive amounts of new genetic and other biological information that only could have come from an intelligent source.

“The fossils of the Cambrian Explosion absolutely cannot be explained by Darwinian theory or even by the concept called ‘punctuated equilibrium,’ which was specifically formulated in an effort to explain away the embarrassing fossil record,” Meyer said. “When you look at the issue from the perspective of biological information, the best explanation is that an intelligence was responsible for this otherwise inexplicable phenomenon.”

“So when you encounter the Cambrian explosion, with its huge and sudden appearance of radically new body plans, you realize you need lots of new biological information. Some of it would be encoded for in DNA — although how that occurs is still an insurmountable problem for Darwinists. But on top of that, where does the new information come from that’s not attributable to DNA? How does the hierarchical arrangement of cells, tissues, organs, and body plans develop? Darwinists don’t have an answer. It’s not even on their radar.”

Paleontologists now think that during a five-million-year (or even shorter) window of time, at least twenty and as many as thirty-five of the world’s forty phyla, the highest category in the animal kingdom, sprang forth with unique body plans. In fact, some experts believe that “all living phyla may have originated by the end of the explosion.”30 To put this incredible speed into perspective, if you were to compress all of the Earth’s history into twenty-four hours, the Cambrian explosion would consume only about one minute.31

“The big issue is where did the information come from to build all these new proteins, cells, and body plans? For instance, Cambrian animals would have needed complex proteins, such as lysyl oxidase. In animals today, lysyl oxidase molecules require four hundred amino acids. Where did the genetic information come from to build those complicated molecules? This would require highly complex, specified genetic information of the sort that neither random chance, nor natural selection, nor self-organization can produce.”

“First, even assuming a generous mutation rate, the Cambrian explosion was far too short to have allowed for the kind of large-scale changes that the fossils reflect.

The data at the core of life is not disorganized, it’s not simply orderly like salt crystals, but it’s complex and specific information that can accomplish a bewildering task — the building of biological machines that far outstrip human technological capabilities. What else can generate information but intelligence? What else can account for the rapid appearance of a staggering variety of fully formed, complex creatures that have absolutely no transitional intermediates in the fossil record? The conclusion was compelling: an intelligent entity has quite literally spelled out evidence of his existence through the four chemical letters in the genetic code. It’s almost as if the Creator autographed every cell.

Amazingly, many scientists and philosophers are now concluding that the laws of physics and chemistry cannot explain the experience of consciousness in human beings. They are convinced that there is more than just the physical brain at work, but there also is a nonmaterial reality called the “soul,” “mind,” or “self” that accounts for our sentience. In fact, they cite its very existence as strong evidence against the purely naturalistic theory of Darwinian evolution and in favor of a Creator who imbued humankind with his image.

the year-long British study provided evidence that consciousness continues after a person’s brain has stopped functioning and he or she has been declared clinically dead.19 It was dramatic new evidence that the brain and mind are not the same, but they’re distinct entities.

“So if the materialists are right, kiss free will good-bye. In their view, we’re just very complicated computers that behave according to the laws of nature and the programming we receive. But, Lee, obviously they’re wrong — we do have free will. We all know that deep down inside. We’re more than just a physical brain.

“Third, if physicalism were true, there would be no disembodied intermediate state. According to Christianity, when we die, our souls leave our bodies and await the later resurrection of our bodies from the dead. We don’t cease to exist when we die. Our souls are living on. “This happens in near-death experiences. People are clinically dead, but sometimes they have a vantage point from above, where they look down at the operating table that their body is on. Sometimes they gain information they couldn’t have known if this were just an illusion happening in their brain. One woman died and she saw a tennis shoe that was on the roof of the hospital. How could she have known this?

“Regardless of what anyone thinks about near-death experiences, we do have confirmation that Jesus was put to death and was later seen alive by credible eyewitnesses,” he said.44 “Not only does this provide powerful historical corroboration that it’s possible to survive after the death of our physical body, but it also gives Jesus great credibility when he teaches that we have both a body and an immaterial spirit.”

“What positive evidence is there that consciousness and the self are not merely a physical process of the brain?” I asked. “We have experimental data, for one thing,” he replied. “For example, neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield electrically stimulated the brains of epilepsy patients and found he could cause them to move their arms or legs, turn their heads or eyes, talk, or swallow. Invariably the patient would respond by saying, ‘I didn’t do that. You did.’45 According to Penfield, ‘the patient thinks of himself as having an existence separate from his body.’46