[The text below represents an edited transcript of this Tomorrow’s World program.]

God’s Creation: Evidence for God

Many claim that science has removed the need for a Creator. After all, they say, we now know that the universe began in a sort of Big Bang—expanding in every direction we can see. We understand the structure of matter—why it behaves the way it does, and the laws that govern it all.

Closer to home, we understand life itself, they say. It simply evolved from non-living matter, with chance combinations of chemicals, enduring over time as they were somehow more fit for survival and duplication until, billions of years later, you have a world of whales, giraffes, bald eagles and, yes, even television hosts.

Yet, when you look more closely, those claims fall apart. Because in every aspect of the world—if you’re willing to seek out and to accept the evidence—you see the fingerprints of a Divine Creator.

Ancient King David of Israel composed many of the psalms of the Bible, and in them he makes a simple and elegant point.

The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God” (Psalm 14:1).

Yet there are many scientists today who would call King David the fool. They stare into the cosmos above, or examine the variety of life in the world, and see no evidence of God anywhere at all. They look into nature and see nothing in it that points beyond nature.

This sentiment was, perhaps, most famously expressed by biologist, evolutionist, and staunch atheist Richard Dawkins, when he wrote:

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference (River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, 1995, p. 133).

That is, the universe and all that is in it look exactly as we should expect them to if there is no God.

So who’s right? Mr. Dawkins? Or King David?

Without a doubt, King David is correct.

Too many physicists, cosmologists, and biologists refuse to see the evidence before their eyes—refuse to acknowledge the fingerprints of God that exist all over the very subjects they study. They proclaim a dedication to following the evidence, but when the evidence points in a direction they find undesirable—they look away.

My friends, we don’t have to repeat their mistakes.

The Heavens Declare God’s Glory | Psalm 19:1

God’s fingerprints are numerous throughout His creation. For instance, in Psalm 19, David wrote:

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows His handiwork (Psalm 19:1).

That is, David looked on the cosmos around us and saw God’s fingerprints there. He recognized the truth revealed in the very first verse of the Bible.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1).

So without a telescope or spectral analysis or cosmic microwave measurements, David could still look at the universe above his head and conclude: This is a fingerprint of God who created all of this.

Big Bang Theory: A Beginning Requires a Cause

And science has backed the Bible up—as the evidence does point to a universe that did not always exist. There really was a “beginning” to everything.

Today, the Big Bang theory is taken so much for granted that many do not realize that when evidence for it was first discovered, scientists vigorously opposed it because it sounded too much like Genesis’s description of God’s creation in the book of Genesis.

For instance, when Georges Lemaître first suggested that relativity implied that the universe began at a certain point in time, Albert Einstein told him that “it suggests too much the (theological) idea of creation.”

Writing in the esteemed science journal Nature, astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington said of the idea:

Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant to me (Vol. 127 (1931), p. 450).

And astronomer and cosmologist Fred Hoyle mocked the idea of a beginning to the universe, saying that the idea of a “big bang” was “a form of religious fundamentalism.” In fact, he coined the term “big bang” to ridicule the idea, saying that:

The reason why scientists like the “big bang” is because they are overshadowed by the Book of Genesis (“The End of the World: from the Standpoint of Mathematical Physics,” vol. 127 (1931), pp. 447–453).

Why they were all unnerved is perhaps best summed in a statement by famous physicist Stephen Hawking. As New Scientist magazine reported in [2012], he noted:

A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God (“Why Physicists Can’t Avoid a Creation Event,” New Scientist Magazine, January 11, 2012).

Well, many years have passed, and the verdict is in. The scientists who rejected a beginning of the universe because it sounded too much like the Bible were wrong, and a universe that came into existence at some point in time is now considered the reigning theory in cosmology. As prominent physicist Alexander Vilenkin wrote in 2007:

With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning (Many Worlds in One, 2007, p. 176).

Why would so many scientists consider that a problem? Well, think about it: If the universe had a beginning, then what caused that beginning? After all, science is very much the study of cause and effect. If the universe itself is the effect, then what was the cause?

And when scientists talk about the universe, that means the entirety of the natural world: all matter, all energy, all space, and all time. So the cause of their beginning would have to be beyond matter, beyond energy, beyond space, and beyond time. That is, if all that is natural had a beginning, then it points to a cause that is supernatural.

That is, the beginning of the universe is one massive “fingerprint” that points to God.

But we can go further.

Scientific Proof of God

What makes science and the study of this vast universe possible? Not just the fact that the universe exists, but that it is a law-abiding and orderly universe.

Calling the beginning of the universe the “Big Bang” gives the wrong impression that it was like an explosion of randomness and chaos, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Laws of the Universe

Just consider the collection of mathematical equations and laws that ensure all things in creation run in an orderly, structured way. The way in which the universe expands, the manner in which energy, matter, and the fundamental forces interact is strictly governed by precise, mathematical laws—such as:

• Newton’s Laws of Motion
• Maxwell’s Equations concerning light and electromagnetism
• the Einstein Field Equations
• the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
• the Schrödinger Wave Equation

Many fundamental laws reign over our reality, keeping it ordered and functional.

And yet, the order and structure go further. While there are still mysteries we don’t fully understand, such as theoretical dark matter and dark energy, the standard model of modern physics tells us that everything we see in the universe is built out of only 17 basic building blocks:

• 12 basic particles of matter
• 4 force carrying particles
• 1 particle giving the others mass

Imagine all the vast variety we see here on earth, let alone throughout the cosmos—all built from a construction set of only 17 basic, invisible, law-abiding particles, making the entire universe possible.

How can anyone in their right mind conclude that this astonishingly versatile, universe-building “construction set” came into existence randomly and without planning and intelligence?

And yet the order goes even deeper, because the universe is more than ordered and law-abiding. The laws exhibit extreme fine-tuning to make complex life like ours possible.

For instance:

• the strength of gravity
• the relative strengths of charges and the masses of the particles that make up the atom: proton, neutron, and electron
• the fine–structure constant, ⍺
• binding energy between proton and neutron in a deuteron
• the carbon resonance level
• the cosmological constant
• the rate of nuclear fusion in stars

All of these factors—and more—required values so precise that if some of them were off by only a fraction of a percent, stars could not form, the universe could not expand, and human life could not exist.

As Stephen Hawking put it in his groundbreaking book, A Brief History of Time:

The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life (A Brief History of Time, Hawking, 1988, p. 125).

Or as astronomer and cosmologist Fred Hoyle wrote:

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question (“The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” Engineering and Science, vol. 45 (1981), pp. 8–12).

Again, the science points in the direction of a divine God—a God whose superintellect and planning mind did exist before the universe.

Bible Verses About Creation and the Lawgiver

The Bible declares about that God in Isaiah 33:22.

The LORD is our Lawgiver (Isaiah 33:22).

And in Jeremiah 33:25, God declares that He has:

…ordained the ordinances of heaven and earth.

And the Bible says He did not just make it an orderly, law-abiding creation, but one intended to be inhabited by LIFE.

We see this in Isaiah 45:18.

For thus says the LORD, who created the heavens, who is God, who formed the earth and made it, who has established it, who did not create it in vain, who formed it to be inhabited: “I am the LORD, and there is no other.”

Now let’s look at another passage written by King David that takes us in a completely different direction in our hunt for God’s fingerprints.

In Psalm 139:14, we read:

I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvelous are Your works, and that my soul knows very well.

Yes, David saw God’s fingerprints on the grandest of cosmic scales, but he also saw them in the smallest and most intimate scales—in his own body. Frankly, in your body, as well.

Cells and DNA Carry Information Beyond Chance

Life itself carries the fingerprints of God.

Consider, for instance, the smallest unit of life: The cell.

As biologists have learned to peer into the microscopic world of the living cell, they have discovered an absolutely amazing world so intelligently structured in its vast array of inner workings and mechanisms that it puts to shame every piece of human technology ever invented.

Within that tiny, microscopic, invisible realm are amazing molecular machines:

• pumps
• gateways
• transportation systems
• waste management apparatus
• communication systems
• interactive architecture
• chemical recognition mechanisms
• environmental maintenance equipment

And in the center of it all: DNA—an information storage system of vast capabilities.

Richard Dawkins stated in his landmark book The Blind Watchmaker that:

There is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopaedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over(The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins, pp. 115–116).

Wow! DNA and proteins and other molecular apparatus that process, duplicate, repair and maintain it represent nanotechnology of nearly unimaginable complexity and wonder that, for all of our efforts, we have yet to be able to create ourselves.

In a paper published in 2012, prominent molecular geneticist George Church said plainly:

DNA is among the most dense and stable information media known (“Next-Generation Digital Information Storage in DNA,” Science, vol. 337 (2012), p. 1628).

Less than a year later, the journal Nature reported that a team of scientists demonstrated this capacity in DNA by encoding all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the original scientific paper by Francis Crick and James Watson about the structure of DNA, a color photograph of the European Bioinformatics Institute in England and an audio excerpt of Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech in a tiny bit of DNA. Not a hard drive. Not a USB drive. In a tiny bit of DNA. Then, they mailed the DNA—in a vial with no special packaging—from the United States to Germany, where colleagues were able to successfully decode the contents back into their original text, visual, and audio formats, with 100% accuracy (“Towards practical, high-capacity, low-maintenance information storage in synthesized DNA,” Nature, vol. 494 (2013), pp. 77–80).

The complexity of the cellular machinery and the information-bearing capacities of DNA should be seen as fingerprints pointing to the presence of a great designer behind them. Yet most scientists continue to look away from the obvious conclusions of the evidence, no matter how much work they must do to convince themselves that the obvious isn’t obvious.

For instance, evolutionist Richard Dawkins wrote in his book, The Blind Watchmaker, “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose” (p. 1).

Similarly, Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the amazing structure of the DNA molecule, has written, “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved” (What Mad Pursuit, p. 138).

What fascinating admissions! Each man is saying that biologists spend their time staring straight at the Designer’s fingerprints, yet must—for some reason—work to prevent themselves from concluding that there is a Designer.

Mr. Dawkins says that biology is the study of complicated things that appear to have been purposefully designed. Mr. Crick says that the evidence of design is so strong that biologists must force themselves not to accept the evidence and to believe in evolution, instead.

It seems that many scientists have forgotten the Duck Principle: If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.

More seriously, such examples of willing and intentionally cultivated ignorance should remind us of a warning from the Apostle Paul.

In Romans 1, beginning verse 18, he wrote the following:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse (Romans 1:18–20).

Truly, without excuse! It is sheer folly to ignore the evidence and choose to believe that such an intricate and powerfully intelligent system as we find in our own cells was not designed! With every cell reading the programs encoded in our DNA—like a hundred trillion computers reading a hundred trillion hard drives, every second of every day of our lives—then our own lives are astonishing evidence to the existence of our own Creator. The fingerprints of our Creator are there—all over life—all over our own lives, even down to the microscopic designs of our complex cellular machinery.

That is not an accident.

God Created You for a Purpose

God did create the cosmos to enable human life, and He did design human life—including you—for a grand and amazing purpose. And you bear His fingerprints on you because He is crafting something out of you. He is invested in you. And He longs to give you a life and a purpose greater than any you have ever imagined.

So to set up the experiment, consider this… God didn’t just design life. He designed a WAY of life that will help you accomplish His goals for you. And as the Creator of all life, God knows how life is to be lived.

Jesus Christ tells us in the book of John:

“I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly” (John 10:10).

For those who want that life—who want God near to them, guiding their lives and steps—He explains very clearly how to make that happen in the book of James, chapter 4 and verse 8.

Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you (James 4:8).

If you want a closer walk with God, if you’re willing to take those first steps in building a deeper, more intimate relationship with your Creator—then the experiment I propose is this: Begin with your own prayer life.

Watch this next video showing how you can draw near to God in prayer—in the same way Jesus Christ did—when you learn to pray as He intended, as you follow the seven steps that Jesus Himself gave in the model prayer.

As you set yourself to draw near to God then, just as He promises, He will draw near to you.