“We have to admit—observed American biochemist and Nobel laureate Christian Boehmer Anfinsen—that there exists an incomprehensible power or force with limitless foresight and knowledge that started the whole universe going in the first place.”
The fascinating world of scientific inquiry reveals to our eyes a stupendous, delicately balanced universe endowed with a purpose and meaning. We need not be great scientists to see the cause-and-effect relationships linking every detail of the reality around us. Everyone is able to see that the vast majority of observable effects point to a Cause—a Personal God, who created the human race and accomplished its salvation. Only intellectual dishonesty forces us to come up with bizarre theories, which, while offering little of scientific value, give us the comfortable illusion that God neither exists and nor places any demands on us.
Knowledge of the universe
Serious scientists who study the universe and the laws governing it are coming to the most astonishing conclusions. It turns out that the image of the cosmos as a pile of rubble chaotically scattered about the space-time continuum is simply at odds with reality. The precision with which the cosmos is built forces us to our knees if only we are intellectually honest and able to admit that there exists Someone who is cleverer and more powerful than ourselves.
To appreciate the incredible exactitude of the laws governing the universe, imagine taking a millimeter-scale tape measure and stretching it from one end of the universe to the other. The number of centimeters on such a long tape would be inconceivably large. Marked in red upon this tape is a single point, which represents the one precise law of gravitation. What would happen if this law were less precisely conceived? If the gravitational forces were a just a little stronger or weaker? If the mutual forces of attraction of the celestial bodies were minimally greater or smaller? You might think nothing special would happen: perhaps we would be a little heavier or a little lighter. In point of fact, even the minutest change to the gravitational laws would be catastrophic to the whole universe.
Look again at our tape measure stretched across the universe with that little red point representing the law of gravitation. It we shifted that point but a few centimeters, thereby ever so slightly changing the principles governing universal gravitation, the whole cosmos would collapse like a house of cards. Only our pride and arrogance prevent us from admitting that the cosmic laws did not arise by accident and that Someone infinitely cleverer and more powerful than ourselves framed these laws with infinite precision and then set them in motion.
“Astronomy—stated the astrophysicist and Nobel laureate Arno Penzias—leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say ‘supernatural’) plan.” He added, “The creation of the universe is supported by all the observable data astronomy has produced so far.”
“I think only an idiot can be an atheist” insisted Christian Boehmer Anfinsen, the biochemist and Nobel laureate. “We have to admit that there exists an incomprehensible power or force with limitless foresight and knowledge that started the whole universe going in the first place.”
And yet there are people endowed with superior intelligence who consciously embrace atheism and renounce elementary honesty. “I do not want to believe in God,” admitted the biochemist, physiologist, and Nobel laureate George Wald (this while he was still an atheist). “Therefore, I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible; spontaneous generation arising to evolution.”
The evidence of biology
Despite the aggressive claims of the media and authors of school textbooks, current biological knowledge rules out the possibility of life emerging spontaneously from insentient matter. Francis Harry Compton Crick, Nobel laureate in genetics and biochemistry, observed: “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”
Reliable scientific knowledge refutes the sensational claims that electric discharges could spawn out of the “primeval soup” molecules from which life would subsequently arise. Professor Crick states unequivocally: “The great majority of sequences [of amino acids] can never have been synthesized at all, at any time.” This is because amino acids create protein chains only in the presence of enzymes—and enzymes do not arise independently of living organisms. Without life there is no life.
The discoveries of molecular biology astound scientists by a degree of precision that would be inconceivable without the agency of an intelligent creative power. On the functioning of living organisms, Nobel laureate and biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi von Nagyrapolt observed: “To interact in a chain, these precisely built molecules must fit together most precisely, even as do the cogwheels of a Swiss watch. But if this is so, then how can such a system develop at all? For if any one of the specific cogwheels in these chains is changed, then the whole system must simply become inoperative. Saying it can be improved by the random mutation of one link is like saying you could improve a Swiss watch by dropping it and thus bending one of its wheels or axes. To get a better watch, all the wheels must be changed simultaneously to make a good fit again … [So too in a living organism] all this [would have] to be developed simultaneously, which, as a random mutation, has the probability of zero.”
A perfect example of such a system in which all the elements needed to have been prepared and completed simultaneously is the ground beetle known as Stenaptinus insignis (bombardier beetle) whose defense mechanism enables it to spray a hot aqueous mixture of chemicals at its predators. It is hard to believe in the evolution by gradual change of a little bug with such a mechanism in its body. How could these interacting systems evolve from something else, since every mistake in developing the explosive irritant would cost the poor beetle its life? How, then, could it have transmitted to its offspring the genetically coded information needed to avoid these mistakes?
Another example of the sophisticated technology existing within a living organism is the nanometric-scale flagellar motor built into the common bacterium Escherichia coli, which each of us carries in his stomach, Still another is the single-molecule temperature-compensating circadian clock, which keeps time in the cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus (Cf. C.H. Johnson, M. Egli, Ph.L. Stewart, “Structural Insights into a Circadian Oscillator,” Science, October 31, 2008; 322 (5902), pp. 697-701). Comparing these systems to the achievements of twenty-first-century nanotechnology is like comparing the lapidary masterpieces of a consummate jeweler with crude and ungainly piles of scaffolding. Only pride and intellectual dishonesty prevent the thinking person from acknowledging the Creator as a craftsman of genius who cleverly designed and assembled complex systems with such superb precision.
Greater wisdom was shown by that uneducated Jewish woman of the second century B.C., when she spoke to her son: “I beseech you, my child, to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed” (2 Macc. 7:28). An astonishingly apt observation! Many a professor today has something to learn from her.
Historical evidence
While the natural sciences provide us with proof of God as the Personal Cause of all things, history points clearly to God as the loving Father, who always has close to His heart the creature created and engages in a dialogue with Himself. The Scriptural documents recount the actions of God from the moment of the creation of the world and humankind, through the calling of Abraham and the creation of the Israelite people, to the realization of all the messianic promises in the person of Jesus Christ and the activity of the newly established Church. No one person or even group of persons could have planned and brought to realization such a scenario over the space of a few thousand years. In His dialogue with mankind, God reveals Himself as the Lord of human history, in which there are no accidents and whose purpose is to bring to salvation all those who want to be saved.
To realize His plan of salvation for mankind, God made frequent use of people whom we call prophets. To show His people the one way to heaven, He made known to them in advance the whole array of traits personifying His Son, who would become that very way. Thus the prophecies eliminated any possibility of error or false claims. No one but Jesus would fulfill them.
In the person of Jesus were fulfilled two groups of prophecies: those that could easily be accomplished by anyone (e.g. entering Jerusalem on a donkey) and those over which of the human will has no control (e.g. the time and place of death and manner of death). Every reader of the New Testament will observe—and this in the very first pages—the oft-repeated verse: “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet” (cf. Matt. 1:22; 2:5, 15, 17, 23; 3:3). The entire ninth chapter of Josh McDowell’s book Evidence that Demands a Verdict is devoted to a detailed analysis of these prophecies and the probability of a random person fulfilling them. The author cites 332 messianic prophecies fulfilled in the person of Jesus. He calculates the probability of fulfilling only eight of these at 1: 1017. Presented graphically, this would be like finding a marked one-dollar coin among 1017 unmarked ones. Such a number coins would cover the entire State of Texas with a layer one and a half meters deep!
Yet is the Bible a reliable historical document? What do the specialists say? Professor Nelson Glueck, director of the American School of Oriental Research, states: “I have excavated for 30 years with a Bible in one hand and a trowel in the other, and in matters of historical perspective I have never yet found the Bible to be in error.” Even more compelling is the statement of Dr. Clifford Wilson, former director of the Australian Institute of Archeology: “I know of no finding in archaeology that’s properly confirmed which is in opposition to the Scriptures. The Bible is the most accurate history textbook the world has ever seen.” Likewise, Millar Borrows, professor of archeology at Yale University, states: “Archeology has in many cases refuted the views of modern critics. It has shown, in a number of instances, that these views rest on false assumptions and unreal, artificial schemes of historical development.”
Archeology confirms that the events described in the Holy Scriptures, far from being myths, fables or pious legends, are real accounts based on concrete cultural and historical realities. Intellectual honesty demands that we acknowledge the Bible to be an authentic document recounting a true encounter between a real God and mankind.
Proof of the Resurrection
The crowning point of God’s love for man occurred when the Son of God took on human flesh to redeem humanity with His blood and wash all men and women of their sins. In addition to the corroborated accounts of eyewitnesses who were present at the moment of Jesus’ death, and then saw Him alive, we have two substantive proofs of the fact of the Resurrection. These are the Shroud of Turin, Jesus Christ’s burial cloth, and the Veil of Manoppello, a napkin made out of a sheer fabric known as byssus. Both fabrics bear the image of the tormented and risen Christ—an image that no human hand could possibly have created.
The noted German Biblicist Professor Klaus Berger observed: “According to Jewish tradition, two witnesses needed to be produced in order to bring someone before the court. And here, we have precisely two witnesses—John and Peter; but we also have two exhibits, two pieces of cloth: the Shroud of Turin and the Veil of Manoppello. These, then, are two substantive proofs of the Resurrection. The Resurrection is a fact. It is not a theological metaphor. The Resurrection is a reality. The Veil of Manoppello attests to it.”
The minutest details of the Shroud of Turin support the authenticity of this extraordinary relic: the wounds conforming to the Gospel accounts of the passion of Jesus down to the last particular, the coins over the eyes indicating the customs of the times and the time of the Crucifixion, the flower pollens indigenous to the region of Lake Galilee in the first century B.C. Even the imprint on the fabric was the result of the then unknown science of irradiation—and no twenty-first-century technology is yet able to replicate the image. Could this have been a forgery? Here is what the scientists of the NASA Institute of Space Research had to say: “To us scientists, the possibility of counterfeiting the image on the Shroud would be more miraculous than the resurrection of Christ, since it would mean that the entire body of science of the twentieth century was unequal to the mind of a fifteenth-century forger—which would be an absurdity.”
Intellectual honesty demands that we make a decision. Alas, dishonesty sometimes leads us not only to the rejection of obvious facts, but also to more or less conscious acts of fraud. The 1988 C14 datings of the Shroud were an embarrassment, since they were conducted on a sample containing only 40% of the original ancient linen fabric; the remaining 60% of the material consisted of cotton fibers of Medieval date. Honesty demands publicizing the matter in the media at least on the same scale as the publicizing of the results of the fraudulent studies, which dated the Shroud around the years 1260-1390.
Blessed John Paul II stated: “Accepting the arguments of many scientists, we must acknowledge that the Holy Shroud of Turin represents a special Paschal witness of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection.” In the silent message of the Shroud, an open, honest mind hears “an echo of the word of God and centuries of Christian consciousness: believe in God’s love, the greatest treasure given to humanity, and flee from sin, the greatest misfortune in history” (Blessed John Paul II, Turin, May 24, 1998).
Conclusion
Every one of us has a free will and the right to choose. Every one of us is free to choose evil and death and reject love and life. Yet in His infinite mercy God gives us so many proofs of His existence and love that the intellectually honest person, irrespective of his education, culture, and piety, can readily be convinced and ”believe that [God] exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Heb. 11:6).
“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted” (Heb. 12: 1-3).