You are right in saying that rational arguments will only get one so far and no further but they form the preamble for the entrance of faith. I would say that most people within our society have a burning unanswered question before them. Does God exist or does He not? How this question is answered has far ranging consequences on how we live and how open we will be to the question of faith. It is also interesting how the assumption that there is no God slips through unobserved and then outrageous conclusions are drawn. So let’s take a closer look at the question of God’s existence.

If there is no God, then what becomes the main agent of explanation? The answer often proferred is chance.

The British National Council of Arts conducted an experiment. A computer was placed into a cage which was also occupied by six monkeys. After one month of hammering away, the monkeys produced fifty typed pages. The interesting thing was that amongst those fifty pages there was not a single word – not even a simple word such as I or a. The chance of getting one word in this trial, by chance, is (I won’t go into the math) one in 27,000.

A lot of atheist claim that given enough time, a monkey would be able to come up with a Shakespearean sonnet. Let’s consider “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day…” There are 488 letters in that sonnet. The chances of that coming up by chance are 26488 or, to put it into the more common base 10, 10690 . There are approximately 1080 particles in the whole universe. Now, suppose you were to convert these particles into computer chips spinning out random letters at a rate of one million per second. You would still be a huge distance away from a sonnet. Conclusion: chance explanations are not really explanations; they are just ways of trying to hide our ignorance.

Since those propagating atheism cannot accept the existence of God, then the only recourse they have is to invoke chance, in spite of the evidence that the claim of life arising by chance from inanimate matter is so slight that it approaches zero, irrespective of the number of years that one can claim the universe has existed. But since there is no alternative for them they stick to their guns and swallow what is impossible – that life arose spontaneously from matter by mere chance and has no meaning and purpose which comes with territory of chance.

There are some fundamental questions that atheists, and other seekers, must face. We know that the universe is not chaotic but behaves in a predictable manner and we come to this conclusion because of our discovery of the existence of physical laws. These laws mathematically describe the behavior of the universe and sometimes even enable us to make predictions. So – how did these laws come about? Where did they come from?

The second major question that faces those who want to learn more about the cosmos, and particularly, the biosphere is – how did life originate from non-living matter?

And the third fundamental question is – how did the universe come into being?

For those who believe in the existence of God, the answers to these questions are clear and obvious. Let’s look at them more deeply.

The interesting thing is not only that there are regularities in the world, but they are open to a mathematical description. The answer given by scientists – note we are not here relying on theologians whom we would worry about being biased – is that the laws of the universe originate in the Mind of God.

A scientist who thought deeply about this question was Einstein. Einstein says that he never found a better expression than “religion” for this trust in the rational nature of reality and of its peculiar accessibility to the human mind. He speaks of the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence. (Think of how this almost paraphrases chapter one of John’s Gospel about the incarnation of the Word).

Einstein speaks of a firm belief in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience.

Erwin Schrodinger, another Nobel Prize winner in physics and his work laid the foundation for the New Science that enabled us to make sense of what is going on in the interior of atoms. He points out what we have considered in previous letters. The scientific picture of the world around me is very deficient he says. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but is ghastly silent about all that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell a word about the sensation of red and blue, bitter and sweet, feelings of delight and sorrow. It knows nothing of beauty and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are often so silly, that we are not inclined to take them seriously.

Schrodinger goes on to say that science ignores God. This is not astonishing. If its world picture does not even contain beauty, delight, sorrow, if personality is cut out of it by agreement, how should it contain the most sublime idea that presents itself to the human mind?

Max Planck (you guessed it, another Nobel Prize winner) proposed the existence of quanta of energy and this opened up the possibility of Quantum Mechanics. He lost his son in the first World War and wrote how his Christian faith helped him during the terrible time of his loss. He says that religion and science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against skepticism and against dogmatism, against unbelief and superstition.

Dirac (Nobel Prize winner in physics) predicted the existence of anti-matter before any experimental evidence for this existed. He also laid the groundwork for reconciling Quantum Mechanics and Einstein’s Relativity Theory through the famous Dirac equation which is chiselled out on Dirac’s tombstone. He interestingly was a very reticent man who spoke rarely. At Cambridge the other physicists had a unit for the rate of speech. One Dirac was one word per hour. He attended the same grammar school as Archibald Leach otherwise known as Cary Grant. Dirac loved mathematics and it helped him to partially overcome his shyness. He observed that ‘God is a mathematician of a very high order and He used advanced mathematics in constructing the universe’.

Paul Davies (finally, not a Nobel Prize winner, but a winner of the Templeton award) points out that it is interesting that physical laws are learned of not through observation but through the application of mathematics to experimental observations. The laws are written in a cosmic code that we must crack in order to reveal the message that is God’s message. In other words, physical laws are not invented by us, as some claim, but are discovered by us. They are an inherent component of the reality that we call the universe.

John Barrow, a physicist, in his Templeton address, comments that how strange it is that little squiggles on pieces of paper can tell us how whole universes behave. Interestingly, he goes on to say that religious conceptions of the universe are approximations and analogies to help us grasp ultimate things. They are not the whole truth, but this does not stop them being a part of the truth.

If one accepts the fact that there are physical laws and I don’t think there is anyone who doesn’t accept their existence, then something or someone must stand behind these laws. Oxford philosopher John Foster says that the theistic option is really the only rational one.

The atheists claim that natural laws exist reasonlessly and that the universe is ultimately absurd. They claim that that is what science teaches but this is a gross misrepresentation of what science says. If one considers rationality as an important and justified position to take vis-à-vis reality then one is forced to concede that the universe is not meaningless. The atheistic position is irrational. There must be an unchanging rational ground in which the logical, orderly nature of the universe is rooted.

The important lesson to take away from this is that anytime chance is invoked as an explanation for an observation, it is really a statement that we have no explanation. It is made to sound plausible but it really offers no substantive explanation. Therefore when biologist atheists claim that everything arose by chance, and developed by chance, then this is really an acknowledgement that they have no idea what is going on. The much vaunted and abused catch-all phrase of natural selection does not help them either. Natural selection does not produce anything – it is not a positive force. It only eliminates or tends to eliminate whatever is not competitive or which hinders survival.

The other bête-noire for biologists is the idea of teleology, that there is a goal towards which the universe is striving. But, more about this in the next letter.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas