SE041114
How I met
3. Fingerprints for God
SLIDE
This week, we want to make the case for God. If you talk to the resident agnostic in your life, they will tell you they think the case for God is weak. Or, to put it another way, the case against God is very strong. Open and shut. Which reminds me of a story, told by Lee Strobel - former journalist for the Chicago Tribune.
He tells of a time he was reporting on the attempted murder case of James Dixon. Here’s what happened: Dixon, armed with a gun, was heard arguing with his girlfriend. The police were called. When the police arrived, the girl’s father came out, but was attacked by Dixon. When the policeman tried to break it up, he was shot in the chest. Just then, backup came and took Dixon to jail.
When the case finally came to trial, the evidence was overwhelming.
- Dixon’s gun, with his prints all over it, was found in the bushes a short ways away, with one bullet having been fired.
- And the cop’s shirt had powder burns showing he’d been shot at extremely close range.
- Dixon had a record and to cap it off, he confessed he had shot the cop.
o An open and shut case. Or was it?
Two days after opening arguments, Strobel got a call from an informant. He spoke quietly:
“word is, the officer involved had a pen gun, a .22 caliber pistol that’s made to look like a fountain pen. It’s also illegal for anyone, including policemen, to carry. The policeman shot himself accidentally with his own gun in his shirt pocket. He framed Dixon to avoid trouble for carrying an unauthorized weapon!”
Strobel took this tip and reopened the case. Suddenly, things no one had considered came to light. For example:
before the policeman arrived, witnesses reported seeing Dixon pounding on the door with the heel of his gun. The gun had gone off in a downward direction. Strobel found a chip in the pavement to back that up – this also accounted for the bullet that was missing.
new witnesses said they saw Dixon throw his gun into bushes before the police arrived.
After a little CSI work, the powder burns in the policeman’s shirt were concentrated inside the pocket.
And finally, when pressed why he pleaded guilty, Dixon said, he was told he’d get only one year if he pleaded guilty. He had already spent 360 days in jail waiting for trail. If he just confessed, he’d be out in a few days. But if he pleaded not-guilty and lost, they’d throw the book at him.
When this new evidence came to light, Dixon was exonerated and the policeman, who had received a medal for bravery was fired from the department.
So, I wonder how many people in this room, have ever made assumptions about the state of the evidence for a some spiritual claim? Or had your filters affect how objectively you examined that evidence? Remember, we said we want to find a worldview that best corresponds to the evidence in the world, right?
So with our time today I want to examine three lines of evidence that constitute the Case For God, reasons to believe the God hypothesis is truth. We’re not going to show irrefutable proof, but the plausibility of God, given:
- FINE TUNING
- FIRST CAUSE
- MORALITY
1. (SLIDE) FINE TUNING
As it turns out, the universe we live in extremely fine tuned for Life. Imagine someday we’re exploring in space and we come upon a bubble just floating in space. Inside the Bubble there’s all kinds of life forms thriving, and you’re amazed. But then, on the side of the Bubble, are a series of knobs and dials. And you realize that each of these dials controls some part of the environemtn in the Bubble:
- One controls the temperature
- One controls the barometric pressure
- One controls the humidity
- One controls gravity, the amount of radiation, the amount of light etc.
Each dial can have a bunch of settings, so it’s amazing that someone has set this biosphere up, with presciely these conditions to make the life inside viable. So you wonder to yourself, what if I tweak the knobs and dials. That’s when you discover something else about those dials.
You find out that moving any one of them, ANY amount destroys life in the Biosphere.
Not only are they tuned, just so, to work together, any adjustment to any of them, would devastate the biosphere, it would collapse and everything dies.
The universe, we are finding, is just like that biosphere, only more so. And these dials we’re talking about, are not about clunky stuff like temperature or air, these dials control the guts of the universe at the level of Physics. If you need another illustration, the dials are the software of the universe, not the hardware. The programs running the physics of the universe, which affect all matter in the universe.
So just like the person coming across the biosphere in space, there’s two wonders here:
- One is that there are physical laws that govern how stuff works. The universe is ordered, it has structure, it has predictability.
- Two, these laws are themselves so precise that any change in them makes life highly improbable if not impossible.
You might want to know what are these dials on the universe. They are highly specific values for things like:
- The gravitational constant
- The velocity of light
- The strong nuclear force
- The mass of atomic particles
- The cosmological constant
To give you a picture of the fine tuning, just take the last value for the cosmological constant. How much play is there in that one dial? If it was different by one part in 10x60 – yes, one followed by 60 zeroes – what we see around us would not exist and we would not be here to see it.
(SLIDE) Paul Davies: "Suppose, you wanted to fire an arrow at a one-inch target on the other side of the observable universe, twenty billion light years away. Your aim would have to be accurate to that same part in 10(60).
If the gravitational constant was changed in the same way it would mean, no stars, no galaxies, no planets could form. Imagine a ruler stretched across the observable universe, and the dial is set at point along that ruler. You could not move that ruler one inch and still have this universe. So what explains this?
- LAW – did it have to be that way? Well, so far, we have no reason to believe that these dials couldn’t be turned all over the place, there’s no other dial controlling all these dials.
- CHANCE – could it be an accident? Well, if one was this finely tuned, maybe, but all of them together, balanced on a razor line of precision?
o It’s not likely. So what you’re left with is:
- INTELLIGENCE. The improbability screams out that this is designed.
Now this inference is challenged, as you can imagine. The first way around this is
- to imagine that this is a happy accident.
But how can that be? One is to imagine that there are many universes, an infinite amount of universes in fact, that are springing up all the time. SO it’s no surprise if there’s a million million universes that one is going to have these precise properties that lead to life. It’s like I go to Vegas and ask, what are the chances of me walking up to one slot machine and with one quarter, win 7 million dollars on my first try? No good. But what if I get to repeat this 7 billion times, where I fly to Vegas, come to a slot machine and win big?
Each time I go, the chances are terrible, but enough chances and the impossible suddenly becomes possible. Well, you have to ask yourself two things about that.
- One, is even if there were a universe making machine, this would simply back up the question one step. The complexity of the universe generator would need intelligence to explain it, since even a bread maker needs to be well designed.
- Two, is what is the state of the evidence for the multiverse? To put this politely there’s no experimental evidence for the existence of these universes, nor will there ever likely to be because by definition, another universe can’t be observed from inside this one.
o Most honest scientists will tell you the multiverse is pure metaphysics which puts it on par with the God hypothesis. But you have to ask, which is more plausible, a randomly generated universe generator, for which we have no evidence? Or Intelligence?
? it's pure science fiction!
The second part of the design argument comes from the complexity of biological organisms. What we’re seeing now is an information revolution in technology that just so happens to come about at the same time as we’re finding out how all of biology is NOT driven by chemistry, but by information. It used to be you could imagine with the right chemicals and proteins, that a simple cell could arise by shuffling the parts.
What we now know is that life is driven by information, not chemistry. One of the scientists driving the intelligent design movement looked a one of Darwin’s mentors, Sir Charles Lyell who said:
“look for causes now in operation to explain the what you see”
And when he realized that at the root of every cell, and all life was information, he asked himself, what is the sole known cause of specified, complex information, like the kind we see undergirding everything living thing? The answer? Intelligence.
(SLIDE) This design argument from physics and biology is so powerful that in fact that it convinced a leading atheist 6 years ago – Anthony Flew – to convert to theism. Why did he convert?:
"There were two factors in particular that were decisive. One was my growing empathy with the insight of Einstein and other noted scientists that there had to be an Intelligence behind the integrated complexity of the physical Universe. The second was my own insight that the integrated complexity of life itself—which is far more complex than the physical Universe—can only be explained in terms of an Intelligent Source. I believe that the origin of life and reproduction simply cannot be explained from a biological standpoint despite numerous efforts to do so. With every passing year, the more that was discovered about the richness and inherent intelligence of life, the less it seemed likely that a chemical soup could magically generate the genetic code. The difference between life and non-life, it became apparent to me, was ontological and not chemical. The best confirmation of this radical gulf is Richard Dawkins' comical effort to argue in The God Delusion that the origin of life can be attributed to a "lucky chance." If that's the best argument you have, then the game is over. No, I did not hear a Voice. It was the evidence itself that led me to this conclusion."
2. First Cause
Argument goes like this:
- Whatever begins to exist has a cause
- The universe began to exist
- Therefore the Universe has a cause
Everyone, from ancient Greeks to Modern Atheists believe the universe was eternal. Consistent with Atheism AND Pantheism. They both said:
- Matter comes before Mind
- Universe is all that there ever was
- Gods arise out of the Material World
o Bumper sticker – “in the beginning, Man created God.”
o so Ancient Jews looked kind of silly: In the Beginning God.
Recently, all this overturned by Discovery of the BIG BANG.
Einstein theory suggested an expanding universe. Implication? A Beginning.
- Fudge factor, to make the facts “fit” the steady state model.
- Hubble confirmed his original equations were right
- Penzais confirmed it with discovery of cosmic background radiation.
SO, the discovery of a beginning sent shock waves through the scientific community because the implications of a beginning are clear:
- A beginning, needs a BEGINNER.
o So if we admit there’s a cause, why couldn't it just be a material cause?
- A beginning, means, space, time and matter come into existence at the singularity.
- - you can't have a material cause without MATERIAL!
SLIDE 1
If Time, space, matter and energy come into existence and had a beginning, and are FINITE, then it’s not logical to say that they were caused by something bound by time, space, matter or energy.
That means the likely cause of the these things stands OUTSIDE them and is:
TIMELESS
(Eternal)
SPACELESS
(Omnipresent)
IMMATERIAL
(Spiritual)
ENORMOUSLY POWERFUL
(Omnipotent)
I’ve met some atheists who might go with this, but then say the Cause may be all those thing, but it doesn’t make it God. No, but it’s a good start on a definition for God! And one thing more
SLIDE 2
Everything inside the universe depends on something else. It flows in a chain of cause and effect bound by natural law.
Whatever stands outside the universe as it’s cause, must therefore NOT be bound by natural law, since they didn’t exist at the point of Creation. That means that Cause is NON-CONTINGENT, meaning?
- …not Bound by Natural Law
- ...not dependent on anything else to exist
If something is not bound, it is truly Free. So the first Cause had a quality that nothing else in the universe has: it’s Free. Truly free. There’s only one thing we know of that can act apart from the necessity of natural law and that’s Personality.
- That means, there is a strong case to be made that the first Cause is also PERSONAL!
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” ? Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers
SLIDE Morality
WE touched on this last week:
If there is no God, morals are not objective
Moral are objective
Therefore there is a God.
Anyone can SAY morals are subjective, lots of people try to say it and defend it. But there are few people who live it. One such person said:
SLIDE:
• Then I learned that all moral judgments are value judgments, that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either “right” or “wrong”… I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the unsupportable “value judgment” that I was bound to respect the rights of others.
That person was Ted Bundy. He was a rapist and a serial murderer. And he was also highly intelligent and his logic here is air tight.
CONCLUSION:
All these arguments were anticipated by Paul in the Bible
Rom 1:19-20
since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 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.
NIV
Rom 2:14-16
14 (Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, 15 since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.) 1
NIV
Next week: Jesus
