I was listening to a podcast this week featuring intellectual and author Charles Murray from Harvard and MIT. He recently wrote a book entitled “Taking Religion Seriously which describes his journey from agnostic to Christian1.
Murray’s transformation began with the kind of mental puzzler that men have considered for years; “Can God create a stone so big he can not lift it? How many angels can fit on the head of a pen?” A friend proposed the question at the top of this article. The thought goes like this, “If there is no God, then why do we exist?” “If we exist, then of what are we made, and why do we know we exist?” This is the kind of problem solved by the famous quote from French mathematician Rene Descartes who wrote, “I think, therefore I am.” This four-hundred-year-old statement hints at a more modern explanation for our existence. It is something called the Anthropic Principle. It states that so many variables exist over time, there is no way our world would exist and support life. Not only must everything have been “just right2” for people to evolve over millions of years, several forces must have obeyed the same properties over that entire time.
Gravity, the speed of light, the makeup of molecules with exactly the same properties. For instance, water molecules would have to freeze at 32-degrees and boil at 212. How fragile is that kind of constant? In our current state of existence, the freezing and boiling temperatures of water change with elevation to see level. You may think of gravity as a constant, but evidence from the polar ice caps suggests gravity has changed over the years and even caused the North and South Poles to switch and wander from time to time.
This is all quite a mental exercise. But take this principle with you. The Anthropic principle not only suggests the “dials of evolutionary time” had to be set just so for life to exist or persist on this planet.
The other possibility is that man was the entire point of Creation. Life was no mistake of time, ooze, and lightning. Someone or some being controlled evolution for the sole purpose of provided one world in a thousand that would support life.
Then these random sets of events provided human beings with the intellect to recognize the very principle that causes them to exist. Yes the universe is created by God and in such a way that humans would recognize the theory and look to find and explain it. Sound familiar? “The God who made the world and everything in it…does not live in temples made by man…he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth…that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.”-Acts 17:24-27.
Science is puzzled because we exist. The Christian is not: “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.”-Hebrews 11:3. Or as the Lord told Abraham, he is the one and only God,”who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”-Romans 5:7.
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