Science is a Gift from God

 

Sometimes the obvious is overlooked.  At other times, it is merely denied.

Such is the case in the debate about Intelligent Design (ID), that is, the debate about whether physical reality is the intentional creation of a divine being.  It is even more the case when it is proposed that the Intelligent Designer is God, the God of the Bible.

At first glance, the universe does indeed seem to be intelligently designed.  At second glance, reasonable doubts can be asserted.  But in the end, close scrutiny of the facts, once all factors are considered, leaves no reasonable doubt.  The universe is no accident, not a coincidence, and not the happenstance outcome of authorless natural laws.  Its appearance of order and structure are strong evidence for intelligent design, and the more items of evidence that are gathered, the more strongly they support divine intent and purpose.

During the second glance, so to speak, no one should be condemned for proposing alternative explanations.  This is because inaccurate readings of Holy Scripture led many people astray in their quest for scientific truth.  Politics posing as religion cast further discredit, in the minds of many, on the institutions of religion.  During a flurry of scientific findings, matters descended into the weeds, so to speak, generating further confusion among the many details.

One would think that those scientists who remain unconvinced that the universe is the work of a divine creator, would do so for purely scholarly reasons, for reasons based on, well, reason, based on the facts, bolstered by discoveries.

One would think so, but one would be wrong.

The evidence is so strongly in favor of divine creation that even the greatest of the great minds of science sometimes grasp at straws to dismiss God, if they are already disinclined to accept Him.  This is not an attempt to disparage scientists.  Nobody is perfect, and even the much vaunted Stephen Hawking, for all his astounding achievements, attempted to discredit belief in God based on reasoning so flawed as to be breathtaking.  Hawking asserted that God could not have created the universe, because before the universe existed, there was no time.  And since creating the universe must take time, God could not have created the universe, because He would not have had time to do so.

Of course the glaring flaw in this thinking is that something gave rise to the universe, something gave rise to time, and if that "something" could do it without time, then so could God.  How could so great a mind as that of Stephen Hawking have made such a blunder?  One must guess, but a good guess would be that his reasoning was not scientific.

Other great scientists make similar errors, although not always as glaring.  For example, those who adhere to the philosophy of natural-materialism disavow that there is any objective measure of morality.  According to them, moral rights and wrongs are subjective, constructed by human minds, and dependent on the changing values upon which society bases its social policies.  Then in the next breath, some of these scientists condemn organized religion because many believers preach that, for example, homosexuality is immoral.  Some scientists condemn the preachers themselves as immoral.  Immoral according to what standard, we may ask.  Either there is an objective standard or there is not.  If there is not, then it is not scientific to label the preachers as immoral.  If there is an objective standard of morality, then from where else can it come other than from God?

The natural materialists seem desperately attempting to have it both ways.

As was mentioned at the outset:  Sometimes the obvious is overlooked.  At other times, it is merely denied.  When it comes to the evidence of intelligent design, there are those who overlook it, and there are those who simply deny it.

While one must hesitate to ascribe motives to those who disagree with us (for in many cases, those motives are innocent), one also cannot ignore the indications that sometimes those motives are based on strong personal feelings that get in the way of objective, scientific analysis.

 
Here is indirect, but strong, evidence for intelligent design:

Nature is knowable by the human brain.  That simple statement encompasses something so profound that few people, even few scientists, fully appreciate it.

Albert Einstein touched upon it when he said, “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.”  Again, this is a statement so profound, at so many levels, that it is easily passed over.

In order for humans to be able to understand physical nature, two complementary conditions must be met. 

The first, of course, is that the human brain must be structured in such a way that it can work out nature’s principles— such as for example the law of gravity, but also, more esoteric phenomena, including dark matter, dark energy, black hole stars, and even the origin of the universe.

The second condition that must be met is that nature is structured in a way that makes it discernible at all.  That the universe might be discernible to a vast network of mega-computers, working feverishly for billions of years— even that would be remarkable, considering the size, scope, and subtlety of the cosmos.  Despite its vastness, its grandness, its enormous complexity of detail— despite all that, the universe is indeed discernible.  Moreover, it is not only discernible, but its principles can be worked out by a brain that is vanishingly small in comparison to the universe, and amazingly simple in comparison to the forces that conspire to create and shape the cosmos.

Having stated these two conditions, there is a third factor that makes it all the more astonishing.  It is that the comprehensible universe could, and would, fashion the comprehending brain.

If one were to accept the strictly material explanation of nature, that is, if one would assert that everything in physical nature can be explained by (and only by) other things in physical nature, then it would be easy to dismiss the brain-universe partnership as an amazing coincidence.  That would be a stretch, to say the least.

To be sure, natural-materialists can offer explanations that rely on chance, and on speculations such as the multi-universe hypothesis (MUH).  These do not conform, however, to the strict scientific method.

A hypothesis at least as plausible as the natural-materialist philosophy is the Intelligent Design hypothesis (ID).  In a sense, the MUH is actually a step in that direction, since it, too, assumes a higher order of nature into which the observed universe fits.  MUH, however, simply says that if we cannot rationally explain the vast universe, we’ll just assume an even bigger universe, as if that would help, and then await more evidence.

As for more evidence, there already is evidence— for ID.  The evidence is plain to see:   nature is structured, coherent, and exhibits the properties that an intelligently designed universe would.

Moreover, ID explains both why the universe is discernible, and why the human brain can discern it.  ID also explains why these two facts are interlocked in a brain-universe partnership.  If it is plausible to say that the physical universe designed the human brain, it is no less remarkable to assert that the universe itself was designed— intelligently designed in such a way as to make it discernible to the human mind.

Science is a gift from God.

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