In
our everyday experience, just about everything seems to have a beginning. In
fact, the laws of science show that even things which look the same through our
lifetime, like the sun and other stars, are running down. The sun is using up
its fuel at millions of tonnes each second—since,
therefore, it cannot last forever, it had to have a beginning. The same can be
shown to be true for the entire universe.
So
when Christians claim that the God of the Bible created the entire universe,
some will ask what seems a logical question, namely
‘Where did God come from?’
The
Bible makes it clear in many places that God is outside of time. He is eternal,
with no beginning or end—He is infinite! He also knows all things, being
infinitely intelligent.1
Is
this logical? Can modern science allow for such a notion? And how could you
recognize the evidence for an intelligent Creator?
Scientists
get excited about finding stone tools in a cave because these speak of
intelligence—a tool maker. They could not have designed themselves. Neither
would anyone believe that the carved Presidents’ heads on Mt Rushmore were the
product of millions of years of chance erosion. We can recognize design—the
evidence of the outworkings of intelligence—in the
man-made objects all around us.
Similarly,
in William Paley’s famous argument, a watch implies a
watchmaker.2
Today, however, a large proportion of people, including many leading
scientists, believe that all plants and animals, including the incredibly complex
brains of the people who make watches, motor cars, etc., were not designed by
an intelligent God but rather came from an unintelligent evolutionary process.
But is this a defensible position?
Molecular
biologist Dr Michael Denton, writing as an agnostic, concluded:
‘Alongside
the level of ingenuity and complexity exhibited by the molecular machinery of
life, even our most advanced [twentieth century technology appears] clumsy … . It would be an illusion to think that what we are aware
of at present is any more than a fraction of the full extent of biological
design. In practically every field of fundamental biological research
ever-increasing levels of design and complexity are being revealed at an
ever-accelerating rate.’3
The
world-renowned crusader for Darwinism and atheism, Prof. Richard Dawkins,
states:
‘We
have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully “designed”
to have come into existence by chance.’4
Thus,
even the most ardent atheist concedes that design is all around us. To a
Christian, the design we see all around us is totally consistent with the
Bible’s explanation that God created all.
However,
evolutionists like Dawkins reject the idea of a Designer. He comments (emphasis
added):
‘All
appearance to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind
forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. A true watchmaker has
foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections,
with future purpose in his mind’s eye. Natural selection, the blind,
unconscious, automatic process which
Life
is built on information, contained in that molecule of heredity, DNA. Dawkins
believes that natural selection6
and mutations (blind, purposeless copying mistakes in this DNA) together
provide the mechanism for producing the vast amounts of information responsible
for the design in living things.7
Natural
selection is a logical process that can be observed. However, selection can
only operate on the information already contained in genes—it does not
produce new information.8
Actually, this is consistent with the Bible’s account of origins; God created
distinct kinds of animals and plants, each to reproduce after its own
kind.
One
can observe great variation in a kind, and see the results of natural
selection. For instance, dingoes, wolves, and coyotes have developed over time
as a result of natural selection operating on the information in the genes of
the wolf/dog kind.
But no new information was produced—these varieties have
resulted from rearrangement, and sorting out, of the information in the
original dog kind. One kind has never been observed to change into a totally
different kind with new information that previously did not exist!
Without
a way to increase information, natural selection will not work as a mechanism
for evolution. Evolutionists agree with this, but they believe that mutations
somehow provide the new information for natural selection to act upon.
Actually,
it is now clear that the answer is no! Dr Lee Spetner,
a highly qualified scientist who taught information and communication theory at
‘In
this chapter I’ll bring several examples of evolution, [i.e., instances alleged
to be examples of evolution] particularly mutations,
and show that information is not increased … But in all the reading I’ve done
in the life-sciences literature, I’ve never found a mutation that added
information.9
‘All
point mutations that have been studied on the molecular level turn out to
reduce the genetic information and not to increase it.10
‘The
NDT [neo-Darwinian theory] is supposed to explain how the information of life
has been built up by evolution. The essential biological difference between a
human and a bacterium is in the information they contain. All other biological
differences follow from that. The human genome has much more information than
does the bacterial genome. Information cannot be built up by mutations that
lose it. A business can’t make money by losing it a little at a time.’11
Evolutionary
scientists have no way around the conclusions that many scientists, including
Dr Spetner, have come to. Mutations do not
work as a mechanism to fuel the evolutionary process.
Scientists
have found that within the cell, there are thousands
of what can be called ‘biochemical machines.’ All of their parts have to be in
place simultaneously or the cell can’t function. Things which were thought to
be simple mechanisms, such as being able to sense light and turn it into
electrical impulses, are in fact highly complicated.
Since
life is built on these ‘machines,’ the idea that natural processes could have
made a living system is untenable. Biochemist Dr Michael Behe
(see The mousetrap man) uses the term ‘irreducible
complexity’ in describing such biochemical ‘machines.’
‘… systems of horrendous, irreducible complexity inhabit the
cell. The resulting realization that life was designed by intelligence is a
shock to us in the twentieth century who have gotten used to thinking of life
as the result of simple natural laws. But other centuries have had their
shocks, and there is no reason to suppose that we should escape them.’12
Richard
Dawkins recognizes this problem of needing ‘machinery’ to start with when he
states:
‘The
theory of the blind watchmaker is extremely powerful given that we are allowed
to assume replication and hence cumulative selection. But if replication needs
complex machinery, since the only way we know for complex machinery ultimately
to come into existence is cumulative selection, we have a problem.’13
A
problem indeed! The more we look into the workings of life, the more
complicated it gets, and the more we see that life could not arise
by itself. Not only is a source of information needed, but the complex
‘machines’ of the chemistry of life need to be in existence right from the
start!
Some
still try to insist that the machinery of the first cell could have arisen by
pure chance. For instance, they say, by randomly drawing alphabet letters in
sequence from a hat, sometimes you will get a simple word like ‘BAT.’14
So given long time periods, why couldn’t even more complex information arise by
chance?
However,
what would the word ‘BAT’ mean to a German or Chinese speaker? The point is
that an order of letters is meaningless unless there is a language convention
and a translation system in place which makes it meaningful!
In
a cell, there is such a system (other molecules) that makes the order on the
DNA meaningful. DNA without the language/translation system is meaningless, and
these systems without the DNA wouldn’t work either.
The
other complication is that the translation machinery which reads the order of
the ‘letters’ in the DNA is itself specified by the DNA! This is another one of
those ‘machines’ that needs to be fully-formed or life won’t work.
Dr Werner Gitt, Director and Professor at the German Federal
Institute of Physics and Technology, makes it clear that one of the things we
know absolutely for sure from science, is that information cannot arise from
disorder by chance. It always takes (greater) information to produce
information, and ultimately information is the result of intelligence:
‘A
code system is always the result of a mental process (it requires an
intelligent origin or inventor) … It should be emphasized that matter as such
is unable to generate any code. All experiences indicate that a thinking being
voluntarily exercising his own free will, cognition,
and creativity, is required.15
‘There
is no known natural law through which matter can give rise to information,
neither is any physical process or material phenomenon known that can do this.’16
We
can therefore deduce that the huge amount of information in living things must
originally have come from an intelligence, which had to have been far superior
to ours, as scientists are revealing every day. But then, some will say that
such a source would have to be caused by something with even greater information/intelligence.
However,
if they reason like this, one could ask where this greater
information/intelligence came from? And then where did that one come from … one
could extrapolate to infinity, for ever, unless …
Unless there was a source of infinite intelligence, beyond
our finite understanding. But isn’t this what the Bible indicates when we read, ‘In the beginning God …’? The God of the Bible
is an infinite being not bound by limitations of time, space, knowledge, or
anything else.
So
which is the logically defensible position?—that matter eternally existed (or
came into existence by itself for no reason), and then by itself arranged
itself into information systems against everything observed in real
science? Or that a being with infinite intelligence,17
created information systems for life to exist, agreeing with real
science?
The
answer seems obvious, so why don’t all intelligent scientists accept this?
Michael Behe answers:
‘Many
people, including many important and well-respected scientists, just don’t want
there to be anything beyond nature. They don’t want a supernatural being to
affect nature, no matter how brief or constructive the interaction may have been.
In other words … they bring an a priori philosophical commitment to their
science that restricts what kinds of explanations they will accept about the
physical world. Sometimes this leads to rather odd behavior.’18
The
crux of the matter is this: If one accepts there is a God who created us, then
that God also owns us. He thus has a right to set the rules by which we must
live. In the Bible, He has revealed to us that we are in rebellion against our
Creator. Because of this rebellion called sin, our physical bodies are
sentenced to death—but we will live on, either with God, or without Him in a
place of judgment.
But
the good news is that our Creator provided, through the cross of Jesus Christ,
a means of deliverance for our sin of rebellion, so that those who come to Him
in faith, in repentance for their sin, can receive the forgiveness of a Holy
God and spend forever with their Lord.
By
definition, an infinite, eternal being has always existed—no one created God.
He is the self-existing one—the great
‘I am’
of the Bible.19
He is outside of time—in fact, He created time.
You
might say, ‘But that means I have to accept this by faith, as I can’t
understand it.’
We
read in the book of Hebrews, ‘But without faith it is
impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he
is, and that he is a rewarder of them that
diligently seek him’ (Hebrews 11:6).
But
this is not blind faith, as some think. In fact, the evolutionists who deny God
have a blind faith—they have to believe something that is against real
science—namely, that information can arise from disorder by chance.
The
Christian faith is not a blind faith—it is a logically defensible faith. This
is why the Bible makes it clear that anyone who does not believe in God is
without excuse:
‘For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world
are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his
eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse’ (Romans 1:20).
1.
Psalm 90:2; 106:48; 147:5. Notice that it is only things which have a beginning
which have to have a cause. See J. Sarfati, If
God created the universe, then who created God?, CEN
Technical Journal 12(1)20-22, 1998. Return
to text.
2.
W. Paley,
Natural Theology, 1802. Reprinted in 1972 by
3.
M. Denton, Evolution:
A Theory in Crisis, Adler and
4.
R. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, W.W. Norton & Co,
N.Y., p. 43, 1987. Return
to text.
5.
Ref. 4, p. 5.
Return
to text.
6.
Natural selection—the
concept that some variants in a population will be less ‘fit’ to survive and/or
produce offspring than others in a given environment. Return
to text.
7.
See C. Wieland, Stones
and Bones, Creation Science Foundation Ltd, Australia, 1995, and G. Parker,
Creation:
Facts of Life, Master Books, Green Forest, Arkansas, 1996. Return
to text.
8.
L. Lester and R. Bohlin,
The Natural Limits to Biological Change, Probe Books, Dallas Texas, pp.
175–6, 1989. Return
to text.
9.
L. Spetner,
Not by Chance, The Judaica
Press Inc,
10. Ref. 9, p. 138.
Return
to text.
11. Ref. 9, p. 143.
Return
to text.
12. M. Behe,
Darwin’s Black Box, The Free Press,
13. Ref. 4, pp. 139–140.
Return
to text.
14. Actually, generating
words is far simpler than sentences or paragraphs. Simple calculations show
that even a billion years would not be enough time to generate even one protein
‘sentence.’ Return
to text.
15. W. Gitt, In
the Beginning was Information, CLV,
16. Ref. 15, p. 79.
Return
to text.
17. Thus, capable of
generating infinite information, and certainly the enormous, though finite,
information of life. Return
to text.
18. Ref. 12, p. 243.
Return
to text.
19. Exodus 3:14; Job 38:4; John 8:58, 11:25 et al. Return
to text.