Evolution

God of the Living

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This sermon was preached by Brian Watson on November 3, 2019.
MP3 recording of the sermon.
PDF of the written sermon (or read below).

We don’t live in a culture that seeks to understand. We live in a culture of people who think they’re right and want to shut down anyone opposed to them. Or, that’s how it seems to me, at least. It appears that many people of different persuasions want to assume that what others believe is incoherent, and, if put to the test, absurd. And the way that people sometimes try to prove this is through what you might call a “gotcha” question.

Let me give you an example of such a question that some Christians have asked atheists who believe in some form of Darwinian evolution. They ask something like this, “If humans have evolved from apes, why are there still apes?” The question is supposed to expose how foolish the evolutionists are. Now, I don’t believe in some form of Darwinian evolution, or what is called macroevolution. I don’t believe that random, undirected mutations of DNA could, against all the odds, produce different species. I don’t believe in that for theological reasons, but also scientific ones. I have studied what neo-Darwinians believe and I find errors in their reasoning. And because of that, I recognize that the “gotcha question” I posed earlier is a really bad one. Darwinians don’t believe that we evolved from apes who, inexplicably, still exist when natural selection should have wiped them out. No, they believe that we and modern apes have a common ancestor, an ape-like species that no longer exists. To quote an atheistic neo-Darwinian, Jerry Coyne, “We are apes descended from other apes, and our closest cousin is the chimpanzee, whose ancestors diverged from our own several million years ago in Africa.”[1]

Now, I’m not going to talk a lot more about evolution. My point is that Christians can engage in this “gotcha” question business. Of course, atheists do it, too. You’ve probably heard someone question your belief in the Bible by asking a question like, “Adam and Eve (at first) had two sons, Cain and Abel. Cain killed Abel, and then we’re told Cain had a wife. Where did she come from?” Or, atheists and Muslims might question the doctrine of the Trinity. “How can God be one and three? Isn’t that a contradiction?” They might question the doctrine of the incarnation: “How can Jesus be fully God and fully man?”

There are many different answers to those questions. Adam and Eve might have had daughters that we’re not told about, and Cain could have married one of them. God is three persons who share one divine substance, who are so united in their thoughts, will, and purpose that they act as one. Jesus is the only person with two natures, one divine and one human. And there are excellent books written about these subjects.[2]

But my point is not to answer those questions in detail. I bring all of this up because today, in the Gospel of Luke, we’re going to see some of Jesus’ enemies ask him a “gotcha” question. They don’t come to him seeking to understand what he believed. Instead, they try to trap him with what they think is not only a tricky question, but one that can’t be answered well at all. And Jesus answers them by showing that they’re wrong. Then, he asks his own “gotcha” question, and they can’t, or won’t, answer him.

We’ll see all of this in Luke 20:27–44. I invite you to turn there now. If you haven’t been with us, the Gospel of Luke is one of four biographies of Jesus that we have in the Bible. We’re getting closer to the end of the story that Luke tells. Jesus is now in Jerusalem, and it’s three days before he will be crucified. He is facing opposition from all kinds of people, including different groups of Jewish theologians and leaders and politicians. Eventually, he’ll face Gentiles, too. None of these people can show that Jesus is in the wrong.

We’ll begin by reading verses 27–33:

27 There came to him some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection, 28 and they asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, having a wife but no children, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. 29 Now there were seven brothers. The first took a wife, and died without children. 30 And the second 31 and the third took her, and likewise all seven left no children and died. 32 Afterward the woman also died. 33 In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had her as wife.”[3]

We’ve met the Pharisees before. They were one group of prominent Jewish religious leaders in Jesus’ time. Now, we meet the Sadducees. They were “the priestly aristocracy of the Jewish people.”[4] The name “Sadducee” comes from Zadok, who served as high priest about a thousand years earlier, when Solomon was the king of Israel. Many of the high priests in the first century were Sadducees. But most English speakers learn who they are by this little saying: “The Sadducees denied life after death, which is why they were sad, you see.” Luke tells us that they denied there is a resurrection. They also didn’t believe that all of the Hebrew Bible was binding. They adhered to the first five books of the Bible, the books of Moses. And, they thought, since those books don’t clearly teach about the afterlife, there must not be any.

These men come up to Jesus to try to show him that the doctrine of life after death is absurd. So, they come up with an outlandish scenario. But first, they quote Moses. What they’re referring to is part of the law that God gave to Israel through Moses. This is what Deuteronomy 25:5–6 says:

5 If brothers dwell together, and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the dead man shall not be married outside the family to a stranger. Her husband’s brother shall go in to her and take her as his wife and perform the duty of a husband’s brother to her. 6 And the first son whom she bears shall succeed to the name of his dead brother, that his name may not be blotted out of Israel.

This practice is very strange to our modern ears, but the law held that if a man dies, leaving a childless widow, his brother should take the widow as a wife and give her a son. In that day, widows were very vulnerable. They wouldn’t or couldn’t make much money, and they would have to rely upon the kindness of strangers, as it were, to survive. But perhaps more importantly, if the dead man had no left no children to carry on his name, it would “be blotted out of Israel.” It would be as if the man never lived. In the Sadducees’ way of thinking, since there is no afterlife, the only way to have one’s memory retained is through descendants. Perhaps some atheists today might think something similar: it’s important to leave a legacy.

Assuming that law, and that people are married in the resurrection, the Sadducees then present their absurd scenario, which isn’t seven brides for seven brothers, but one bride for seven brothers. A woman is married to one brother who dies, leaving her without a child. Brother two steps in, but he dies before the woman can have a son. The same happens with brothers three, four, five, six, and seven. So, this poor woman has been married to all seven brothers, not one of which has fathered a child.

Now, the Sadducees, ask, perhaps holding back their snickering, “In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be?” They assume that life in the resurrection will be like this life, only eternal. They assume that people will be married in that life. So, who will this woman be married to? Not one of these brothers has a better claim on her than the others. Will she be married to all seven? That seems absurd. In fact, the Sadducees are employing a tactic called reduction ad absurdum: they think they are reducing a belief in the resurrection to an absurdity. If we are raised from the dead, they think, then absurd situations will result.

Now, using that technique isn’t always wrong. Sometimes the best way to test out an idea is to see what consequences would follow from it if it were true. But to use that technique rightly, you have to understand the idea in the first place. And that’s were these men fail.

Let’s look at Jesus’ answer in verses 34–40:

34 And Jesus said to them, “The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage, 35 but those who are considered worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, 36 for they cannot die anymore, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection. 37 But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. 38 Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him.” 39 Then some of the scribes answered, “Teacher, you have spoken well.” 40 For they no longer dared to ask him any question.

Jesus tells them they’re wrong. I don’t know why, but Luke doesn’t include what Matthew and Mark do. In Matthew 22:29, Jesus says, “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.” The Sadducees don’t understand the Hebrew Bible, they don’t understand the resurrection, and they don’t understand that God has the power to raise up people from the dead.

So, Jesus corrects them. He says that people marry in this age, but they won’t do that in the new creation. In the new creation, there is no death, and no need to produce more people. Procreation will no longer be needed. And God’s purpose for marriage will have an end. I’ll explain why in a moment. But the key thing that Jesus is correcting is their assumption that eternal life is going to be exactly like this life, only infinitely longer. Jesus is implying that things will be dramatically different in the new creation.

Then, to show that the Sadducees are wrong about their denial of the resurrection, Jesus meets them where they are. It’s like he’s saying, “You believe in what Moses wrote? I do, too. Now, don’t you know in Exodus 3, when God speaks to Moses at the burning bush, he says that he is the Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Those men were dead for hundreds of years. God didn’t say he was their God. No, he still is, because Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob still exist. They haven’t been resurrected yet, but they will be one day. Still, they’re alive as spirits in heaven. God is the God of the living, not the dead.”

The technique that Jesus uses here is a great one to use. You start by pointing out something that both you and your debate partner agree on. Then, you show how your beliefs better explain that agreed-upon data better than your opponent’s beliefs. Christians, we can do this with human rights. We can say to atheists and agnostics, “You believe in human rights? I do, too. Now, if there’s no God and we’re the product of undirected, impersonal forces, why should all humans have rights. If we’re continually evolving, and if natural selection tends to eliminate the least fit members of a species, why shouldn’t we treat only those who are healthy, smart, and talented as fully human and ignore the needs of the disabled and people who are less gifted? That really doesn’t make sense. But if we’re all created by God and loved by God, then regardless of our abilities, we are all valuable.”

You can do that with other issues, such as rationality, or human intelligence. You could say to the atheist, “You believe that humans have intelligence and can discover the truth? So do I. But if we’re the products of undirected, impersonal, unintelligent forces, and if evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest, then that means that everything about us is tuned for survival, not truth. If every organ of our body, including our brains, are the product of the survival of the fittest, then that means they are good at surviving. But that doesn’t mean our brains will know what is true. Perhaps our brains believe a lot of useful fictions, lies that help us survive longer. But if we’re the products of a super intelligence, God, who has made us in his image and after his likeness, then we are intelligent, too, and can come to know the truth.”

That may sound strange at first, but a number of people, including Darwin himself, have realized that if the universe is the product of a godless process of evolution, then there’s no reason to trust our brains. Even Darwin had this thought.[5] If our thoughts are just the result of chemical reactions in our brains, then there’s no reason to trust they are true. But we couldn’t get anywhere in our thinking if that were the case. That’s why C. S. Lewis once wrote, “A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court.”[6]

Jesus’ answer is brilliant, and even some of his other opponents, the scribes can recognize this. And at this point, no one else—not the Pharisees, the scribes, the Herodians, or the Sadducees—dared ask Jesus another “gotcha” question.

I’m going to come back to the idea of resurrection in a moment, but first I want to see how Jesus asks his own question. Let’s look at verses 41–44:

41 But he said to them, “How can they say that the Christ is David’s son? 42 For David himself says in the Book of Psalms,

“‘The Lord said to my Lord,
“Sit at my right hand,
43  until I make your enemies your footstool.”’

44 David thus calls him Lord, so how is he his son?”

This is a bit tricky to understand if you don’t know the Bible. In the Old Testament, God made many promises made that one day, a special person would come who would fix all of the problems of Israel and all of the problems of the world. And, just to give us a more complete picture of the biblical story, in case we don’t know it, in the beginning God made the universe to be a theater for his glory, a temple where he and his people would dwell together in harmony. He made us in his image and after his likeness, which means that we were supposed to have a special relationship with God, one marked by our love of God, our worship of God, and our obedience to God. But the first human beings didn’t love and trust God, and therefore they disobeyed. Ever since, we have lived apart from God’s special presence, separated from him by our sin, which is our rebellion against him. God didn’t abandon his creation, however. He always had a plan to bring his people back to himself. He even promised that one day he would recreate the universe to be a perfect place once again. That’s what I mean when I talk of the resurrection or the new creation. God will recreate the world so that his people live with him forever in a real, physical world, one that doesn’t have an evil or death.

God promised that there would be someone who could bring about this new creation, who could fix this mess. We learn that this figure would come from Israel, from one of Abraham’s descendants. More specifically, he would be of the tribe of Judah. Later, we learn that he will be a descendant of David, the greatest king of Israel who lived and reigned roughly a thousand years before Jesus was on the Earth. This figure would, like kings and priests, be anointed. That’s why he’s called Messiah, which is based on a Hebrew word for “anointed,” or Christ, which is based on a Greek word for “anointed.”

So, Jesus quotes the beginning of Psalm 110, which he says was written by David. Again, this would have been written about a thousand years earlier. In the Psalm, David says that “the Lord,” which we can understand as God or, more specifically, God the Father, said to David’s “Lord,” “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.” The “right hand” isn’t a literal description as much as a description of power. Whoever is God’s “right hand man” shares his position of power and authority. God says to David’s Lord, “Come here until I put all your enemies under your feet.” Now, in Jesus’ day, it was assumed that David’s “Lord” would be a king who is his descendant. It could have referred to Solomon, his son. But it doesn’t seem to describe Solomon very well. It seems to be talking about the Christ, a descendant of David who would do more than Solomon could ever do.

Now, how could David, the king, refer to his own descendant as “Lord.” Fathers don’t usually address their sons as their own leaders. In David’s case, his son Solomon wouldn’t become king until after David died. Who could be David’s “Lord” when he wrote this Psalm? That’s what Jesus is asking when he says, “David thus calls him Lord, so how is he his son?”

Jesus doesn’t get an answer from his enemies. Luke doesn’t tell us that clearly, but Matthew says, “no one was able to answer him a word” (Matt. 22:46). What Jesus was getting his audience to consider was that the Christ had to be greater than David, and probably not a mere human being. Because we have the whole Bible, we can answer Jesus’ question. Jesus is David’s Lord. As the Son of God, he has always existed. He existed in David’s day. And he has all the authority and power of God the Father. In fact, other passages in the New Testament say that Jesus is at the right hand of God the Father (Acts 5:31; 7:55–56; Rom. 8:34; Eph. 1:20; Col. 3:1; Heb. 1:3; 8:1; 10:12; 12:2; 1 Pet. 3:22) and that Jesus will reign until all enemies, including death, are “under his feet” (1 Cor. 15:25–26). Jesus is both David’s son and his God and King, as strange as that may seem, because he is both God and man. The Son of God became a human being over two thousand years ago. He did this without ceasing to be God. He added a second nature to himself, one that coordinates with his divine nature so that he is one person with two natures, fully divine and yet also fully human. And, by the way, David’s son can be his Lord only if there is a resurrection, if David is still exists as a spirit and will, one day, be raised in bodily form from the grave.

Jesus is the answer to the riddle that he asks, just as Jesus is the answer to other riddles of the Old Testament. In Moses’s day, almost fifteen hundred years earlier, God said that he is “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation” (Exod. 34:6–7). How can God be merciful and gracious, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and also be a God “who will by no means clear the guilty”? Which is it? Is he going to forgive sin or punish sin? Perhaps it’s both. God’s plan to fix the problems of the world focuses on the problem of sin, because sin is what corrupted the world. To renew the world, God must remove sin. But how can God remove and even destroy sin without destroying his people? If the penalty for sin is death, which is what the Bible says (Rom. 6:23), then how can God be a righteous judge and punish sin without everyone dying forever?

The answer is Jesus. When the Son of God became man, he came to do what we cannot. He came to live a perfect life, always loving, honoring, and obeying God the Father and loving other people. Though he was perfect, he took the death penalty for his people. He died on the cross, an instrument of torture and execution reserved for the enemies of the Roman Empire. But when Jesus died, he didn’t just die a painful death—a literally excruciating death. He also faced the wrath of God, the spiritual punishment for our sin. The best way to understand this quickly is to think of him enduring hell on Earth so that his people don’t have to go to hell. All who trust in Jesus, who put their faith in him and swear their allegiance to him, will be spared that fate.

After Jesus died, he rose from the grave, in a body that cannot die again. He did this to show that the penalty for sin had been paid, that he has power of sin and death, that he is the Son of God, and that his predictions of death and resurrection were true. He also rose from the grave as the first installment of a new creation, a guarantee that someday in the future, all of God’s people will have a resurrection. Jesus then ascended to heaven, to sit at the right hand of God the Father. But he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. Everyone will have a resurrected body, and everyone will live forever. But not everyone will be in the new creation with God. Those who don’t put their trust in Jesus will be cast out, into darkness, into torment.

So, this passage teaches us about the identity of Jesus. He has the same authority and power as God, which is why God the Father can say to him that he is his right hand man. He is the Son of God, which doesn’t mean he has less power or authority than God the Father. But he’s also David’s son because he was born to a descendant of David, Mary, and he lived life as a real, though unique, human being. And from the whole Bible, we know that Jesus is the answer to sin and death. He is the key that unlocks the riddles of the Bible and the gate to the new creation.

We also get a brief glimpse of what life in that new creation will be like. We don’t have a lot of specific information about what life in that perfect world will be like, but from what God has revealed to us, we know that there will be continuities and discontinuities. In other words, some things will be the same, and other things will be different. God’s people will live on Earth, but the Earth will be perfected, with no more sin and evil, no more decay. We will have bodies that are recognizable, but they won’t have the effects of decay and they won’t die. We will worship God, but our worship will be enhanced because will be directly in God’s presence. And we will have relationships with each other, but they will be different. We will no longer be married to one another. Instead, we will be married to God. That sounds really strange at first, but think about what marriage is. It’s supposed to be a lifelong, exclusive relationship of love. We’re told in the Bible that the reason that God created marriage is to provide a picture of the relationship between himself and his people (Eph. 5:32–33). Our marriages right now foreshadow the true marriage. God could have made humans from scratch, instead of having them procreate. He could have made humans that multiply in other ways that don’t involve sex. And God didn’t need to create the only right context for sex, which is marriage. But he did all of this to provide a picture of the relationship he will have forever with his people. Marriage is one metaphor of the relationship between God and his people. There are others. Christ is the head of his body, which is the church. The Holy Spirit dwells in the temple, which is now the church. God is the King of his royal subjects. He is the Master of his servants. Jesus is also our friend and brother. Each metaphor provides us with a different understanding of our relationship to God. In a similar way, Jesus is our groom and we Christians are his bride. That doesn’t mean anything sexual, by the way. That relationship transcends sex and romance. It means that we are bound to one God in an exclusive relationship that includes love and trust. When we make other things more important to our lives, we’re cheating on God. God wants us to be faithful.

Now, the whole idea of no marriage and no sex in eternity sounds very strange to us. We tend to think that sex is one of the most pleasurable experiences that this life provides. But what we don’t know is that eternal life will be so pleasurable and so amazing that we won’t miss sex. To understand this, I want to quote again from C. S. Lewis. This passage comes from the book I already quoted, Miracles:

The letter and spirit of scripture, and of all Christianity, forbid us to suppose that life in the New Creation will be a sexual life; and this reduces our imagination to the withering alternative either of bodies which are hardly recognisable as human bodies at all or else of a perpetual fast. As regards the fast, I think our present outlook might be like that of a small boy who, on being told that the sexual act was the highest bodily pleasure should immediately ask whether you ate chocolates at the same time. On receiving the answer ‘No,’ he might regard absence of chocolates as the chief characteristic of sexuality. In vain would you tell him that the reason why lovers in their carnal raptures don’t bother about chocolates is that they have something better to think of. The boy knows chocolate: he does not know the positive thing that excludes it. We are in the same position. We know the sexual life; we do not know, except in glimpses, the other thing which, in Heaven, will leave no room for it. Hence where fullness awaits us we anticipate fasting.[7]

When we hear about the fact that there won’t be marriage or sex in the new creation, we’re like kids who can’t imagine that sex would exclude what we think is the great pleasure. Perhaps today kids would think that would be playing video games. They might say, “If I can’t play video games while doing that, well, I don’t want to do that at all.” That’s because they can’t imagine a greater pleasure. Right now, we can’t imagine that life in the new creation with God will be so much better than our experience right now that we won’t lack for anything. But that’s what God has told us. Life with him will blow our minds. It will be like this life, only far, far, far greater, to such an extent that we really can’t understand it now. But the reason life will be so much better is because we’ll be with him, and there’s nothing greater than him.

If you are a Christian, continue to put your hope in Christ and live your life in light of eternity. There are things that are more important than marriage and career and entertainments. Even the suffering of this life will be counted as nothing in light of eternity. In fact, our suffering will make us appreciate eternity even more (2 Cor. 4:16–18).

If you are not a Christian, I will tell you this: The only way to experience real life after death, and the only way to have pleasures so great that even sex will count as nothing, is to trust in Jesus. He is the answer to the riddles of your own life. Humble yourself, confess your sin to him, and follow him as if he is your King. He is the only one who can conquer sin and death and unlock the door to a new, greater, more pleasurable eternal life.

Notes

  1. Jerry A. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True (New York: Penguin, 2009), 192. He goes on to assert, “These are indisputable facts.” Well, no they aren’t facts. We don’t have irrefutable proof of such an evolution. As some have said, the theory is underdetermined by the data. For a fine refutation of Darwinian evolution (in its original and modern forms), see Stephen Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design (New York: HarperCollins, 2013). See also my review essay on these books: https://wbcommunity.org/two-views-evolution. ↑
  2. The books that deal with creation are many. I would recommend books by Hugh Ross as a starting place. For the Trinity, see Michael Reeves (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012) or Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God, 2nd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017). For the incarnation, see Thomas V. Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate (1986; reprint, Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2001) or Bruce A. Ware, The Man Jesus Christ (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012). ↑
  3. All Scripture quotations are taken from the English Standard Version (ESV). ↑
  4. Eckhard J. Schnabel, Jesus in Jerusalem: The Last Days (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), 71. ↑
  5. In a letter to William Graham, written on July 3, 1881, Darwin wrote, “With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkeys mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” In The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin Including an Autobiographical Chapter, ed. Francis Darwin (London: John Murray, Albermarle Street, 1887), 1:315–16, quoted in Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 316. ↑
  6. C. S. Lewis, Miracles, rev. ed. (1960; New York: HarperOne, 2001), 21. ↑
  7. Lewis, Miracles, 260–61. ↑

 

God of the Living (Luke 20:27-44)

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Jesus’ opponents ask him a “gotcha” question, intended to show that he is wrong. Jesus answers their question by showing that they do not understand what Jesus believes, neither do they know the Bible and the God of the Bible. Then, he asks a question of his own that they cannot answer. Find out why God is the God of the living, who Jesus is, and the hope of eternal, resurrected life that we have in him. Pastor Brian Watson preached this sermon, on Luke 20:27-44, on November 3, 2019.

God, Are You Real?

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Brian Watson preached this sermon on September 24, 2017.
MP3 recording of the sermon.
PDF typescript of the prepared sermon.

Today, we’re starting something new. I’m going to give a series of messages answering people’s questions. I titled the sermon series, “If You Could Ask God One Question, What Would It Be?” The idea is to see what people would ask God if they could speak to him directly. But I’m also taking questions about God, or even handling people’s questions about the Bible or the Christian faith.

When I ask, “If you could ask God one question, what would it be?” I’m presupposing that there is a God. I’m assuming that God exists. Most of us here are Christians, and we may never doubt the existence of God. But some of us may have doubts, and we all know people who are skeptics. They may wonder if indeed God exists. Their question may be, “God, are you real?” Or, “God, are you there?” We all know people who outright reject the existence of God. Simply quoting the Bible to these people likely won’t work, since they don’t yet trust that the Bible is the written word of God. Before they can believe the word of God, they need to know that there is a God.

So, how do we know that God exists? I’m going to answer that question as well as I can in about forty-five minutes. Of course, I can’t give a full answer in one message. But I want to give us some good reasons to believe that God—and specifically the God of the Bible—indeed exists. I’m going to work through this very carefully and logically, so please follow closely.

To begin to answer this question, we need to have some idea of who God is. Monotheistic religions—religions that believe in one God—believe that God is a perfect being.[1] The standard monotheistic vision of God is that he is personal, eternal, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, benevolent, and immaterial. That last part is very important. God isn’t matter. The Bible says that God “dwells in unapproachable light” and that “no one has ever seen or can see” him (1 Tim. 6:16).[2] And Jesus said that God is spirit (John 4:24). That means that we can’t see God.

The Bible also says that there is a separation between us God and us due to our sin, which is our rebellion against God, our disobedience of his commands, and our general way of living life without reference to him. Isaiah 59:1–2 says this:

1 Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save,
or his ear dull, that it cannot hear;
2   but your iniquities have made a separation
between you and your God,
and your sins have hidden his face from you
so that he does not hear.

This explains why we don’t always sense God, why we don’t see him or hear his voice directly. We are estranged from God.

How would you get to know a stranger? There are two ways. The first way is you could get to know about the stranger. You could learn facts about him or her. You could dig up information online, see if any news stories are written about this person, see if they have a website or blog, or discover their social media profiles. You could even stalk this person or hire a private investigator to do that for you.

Yet we can’t see God. We can’t learn about him, at least directly, through observation or experimentation. Though we can’t see God, the Bible tells us that there are clues to his existence which are available to all people. In Christian theology, we call these clues general revelation.

One passage that tells us this is found in the New Testament book of Romans. Romans is a letter written by the apostle Paul, who was commissioned by Jesus to spread the message of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. This is what he writes in Romans 1:18–20:

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

Paul’s point toward the beginning of this letter is that all human beings are in quite a predicament. We all know God exists, but we ignore him. We suppress the truth about him and don’t live for him. Instead, we worship false gods. And, therefore, we stand condemned by God. Now, if true, that’s bad news. Paul does get to good news later. I will, too. But I want to focus on what he says about our knowledge of God. He says that that “what can be known about God is plain,” because “God has shown it.” More specifically, two of God’s attributes, “his eternal power and divine nature,” are evident from “the things that have been made.”[3]

Is this true? Can we know something of God from the created order?

Well, yes, I believe we can. This doesn’t mean we can know everything about God from studying the universe, but we can know that he exists, and that he is eternal and powerful and intelligent.

Some people don’t realize that there are many arguments for the existence of God. When I say, “argument,” I don’t mean a fight or a quarrel. I mean a philosophical argument, a case presented to show that God exists. Each argument is not definitive “proof” that God exists. Someone can always doubt any of the premises of these arguments, or simply refuse to believe. But they show that the idea that God exists is rational. And when multiple arguments for God are presented, they accumulate a certain weight. In short, together, these arguments make the case that the God hypothesis, that God exists, makes far better sense of life than the atheistic hypothesis, that there is no God. You can’t simply write these arguments off.

When it comes to arguing for the existence of God from the existence of the universe and the complexity of life, there are at two major arguments. The first argument for the existence of God that we’ll consider today is called the cosmological argument. I know, “cosmological” is a big word. It simply refers to the “cosmos,” or the universe. The idea is that the very existence of the universe needs explaining. Why, after all, is there something rather than nothing? This argument states that the best argument for the existence of the universe is that God created it.

Put more formally, this is the argument:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Let me explain each point. The first premise is that everything that begins to exist has a cause. That’s an important qualification. Because there is one thing that didn’t begin to exist. And that thing is the ultimate bedrock, the thing that needs no other explanation. We believe that thing, or being, is God. Christianity has always believed that God is eternal, uncreated. He doesn’t require an explanation. The Bible presupposes his existence and begins with these words: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). God sometimes calls himself “I am” (Exod. 3:14; Isa. 41:4; 43:10, 11, 13; 44:6; 48:12; John 8:24). The idea is that God exists, period. He doesn’t need any other explanation. He is the one necessary being. Everything else is contingent. That means that everything else might not have come into existence. The universe doesn’t need to exist. But God does.

Now, if you reject God, you have to state that universe exists, period. It’s just a brute fact. And many scientists used to believe that the universe itself was eternal, that it had no beginning. But in the twentieth century, significant scientific discoveries called that belief into question. And that leads us to the second premise of this argument, which is that the universe began to exist.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, many scientists believed that the universe was eternal and static. However, some American astronomers, including Edwin Hubble, observed that distant heavenly bodies were moving away from the Earth, leading them to conclude that the universe was expanding. Judging from the current rate of expansion and extrapolating this data backwards would suggest that at one point the universe was very small and very dense. Scientists believe that all matter, energy, and space were in this dense ball, which expanded into the universe as we know it. Though scientists can’t get “behind” a certain point using models, this suggests that the universe had a definite beginning. This is the so-called “Big Bang.”

Some Christians are afraid of the “Big Bang,” because they think accepting it is the same thing as accepting some form of Darwinian evolution. But the two really don’t go together. In fact, the term “Big Bang” was created by an atheist, Fred Hoyle, in 1949, and it was intended as a pejorative term. He rejected the Big Bang theory because it suggested that God created the universe.

In the 1940s, scientists predicted that if this hypothesis were true, then cosmic background radiation would be found on the edges of the universe. In other words, residual energy of the initial and incredibly hot explosion would be found at the edge of the universe in a cool, harmless form, and the temperature of this radiation would be uniform all around the edges of the universe. This prediction was confirmed in 1965, when two physicists, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, working at the Bell Telephone Labs, found this cosmic background radiation. They were working on a satellite designed to detect microwave radiation and they found that such radiation was coming to earth from all directions of space. Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel Prize in 1978. When he won that prize, Arno Penzias said, “The best data we have concerning the big bang are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.”[4]

Penzias said that because if everything that begins to exist has a cause, and the universe began to exist, then it has a cause. What else could cause the universe to exist except God? Not only would an incredibly powerful force need to create the universe, but, as we’ll see, an intelligent agent would have to plan and carry out this creation.

More of the details of this argument are available online at our website, wbcommunity.org. If you search for the “Articles” section under the “Media” tab, you can find an article about this cosmological argument with far more details than I have time to present this morning.[5]

Before we move on to the second argument we’ll look at this morning, I want us to consider this: If God can create a universe out of nothing, can he not perform miracles? Some people have a hard time believing miracles are possible. Yet miracles are reported throughout the world on a somewhat regular basis, even if they are relatively rare. And miracles are certainly part of the Christian faith. If God could make a universe out of nothing, could he not cause a virgin to become pregnant? Could he not raise Jesus from the dead? Can he not, some day in the future, restore the universe to be a perfect place? If God has the power to cause a universe to come of nothing, he has the power to change us and fix this broken world.

Since time is short this morning, I’ll move on to the second argument. The big fancy name for this argument is the teleological argument, but I’ll simply call it the design argument. In fact, there are many different design arguments that can be made. All of these arguments state that life is designed, and therefore there must have been a Designer who created life. And, of course, that designer is God.

Put more formally, here is the design argument:

1. Every design has a designer.

2. The universe has highly complex design.

3. Therefore, the universe has a Designer.

The first premise of the argument is obvious. Of course, every design has a designer. If I found a machine of some kind, even if I didn’t know what it did and even if it were broken, I would still recognize that someone designed and made that machine. We recognize design when we see it.

That leads to the second, and more controversial premise, which is that we find evidence of highly complex design in the universe. As expected, atheists challenge this premise. Francis Crick, who co-discovered the structure of the DNA, says that “biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.”[6] He said that because biologists continually see what evidently looks like design. But, according to Crick, this intuition that life is designed must be beat back by our firm belief in unguided evolution, which is the atheistic explanation of how life emerged. Richard Dawkins, a famous atheist and evolutionary biologist, says, “One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbably appearance of design in the universe arises.”[7] So, both Crick and Dawkins acknowledge that there certainly appears to be design in the universe. But their atheism won’t allow a Designer in the door. Yet since they can’t ignore the idea that complex forms of life somehow emerged out of non-living things, they have both posited that aliens somehow “seeded” life on Earth.[8]

As I stated before, we recognize design when we see it. Design requires information, not law-like patterns or random chaos. Here’s an illustration of what I mean. This week we had some powerful winds. On Thursday, a number of branches and even one larger limb fell from the big tree outside these windows to my right. The branches happened to fall in a random pattern that didn’t mean anything. But suppose I went outside on Thursday and found that the branches were arranged in such a way as to form letters, which spelled out the words, “I love you.” Would I suppose that somehow the winds had just happened to cause the branches to fall into that pattern? Or would I suppose that somehow had taken the fallen branches and then arranged them into that meaningful pattern? Of course, that would be the best hypothesis.

The point is that we recognize design, because design results in complex patterns that appear in specific arrangements. (This concept is called specified complexity.) Intelligence is required to generate information, to arrange branches or letters or, as we’ll see, nucleotides (the chemical bases that make up our DNA) into particular, meaningful arrangements. Random, unguided events degrade information, they don’t create it. Imagine if I took all the letters of all the words of this sermon I have written, and I put each letter on a little slip of paper. Imagine I had all of those slips of paper stacked on top of each other, so that all the letters appeared in their proper order. Then imagine I took those slips of paper and threw them into the air, confetti style, so that they landed on the floor. Then imagine I randomly grabbed the slips of paper and put them into a new, reordered stack. What are the chances of that new ordering of letters producing meaningful words and sentences? Sure, I might have some new words, and perhaps even a few words strung together. But most of it would be gibberish.

Here’s why this matters. We find evidence of design in cellular biology. In other words, we find design at the microscopic level in even the simplest life forms. Charles Darwin knew nothing of the complexity of life since it was only in the twentieth century that we could even begin to observe such complexity. DNA is our genetic material. It is quite literally encoded information that is found in each of our cells. It is very much like a language. The information contained in DNA is so complex that Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, said, “DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.”[9] The information in our DNA determines our physical traits. The information in our DNA is like a set of instructions that are used to build proteins, the building blocks of our bodies.

It turns out that the code of DNA must be rather precise to build new proteins in our bodies. It appears almost impossible that random, or unguided, changes to our DNA would produce new proteins. This is significant because those who believe that large-scale evolution is responsible for the emergence of all of life believe that new traits and, ultimately, new species emerged through random mutations in DNA. The idea is that small changes in DNA led to new traits in species. The members of species that had beneficial new traits were able to out-survive and out-procreate other members of their species. Thus, the new trait was passed on to more members of that species so that, in time, all members of that species would have that trait. And with each successful trait added through random mutations, a species would eventually evolve into a new species. A nearly countless series of small changes to species accounts for all the diversity of life.

The problem is that the chances of producing new, functional proteins through random mutations is unimaginably small. Proteins consist of amino acids, linked together in chains. Recent studies have shown that the probability of a mutation producing a sequence of 150 amino acids that could fold to produce a stable protein is 1 in 1074. That’s one followed by seventy-four zeros. But a stable protein isn’t necessarily a functional one. The probability of producing a stable protein old of that size is 1 in 1077. That’s “one chance in one hundred thousand, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion.”[10] Keep in mind that there are about 1080 atoms in the universe, and that longer proteins can consist of 400 amino acids. The chances of producing a functional medium-size protein by way of random mutations is about the same chances that a blind astronaut has of finding one particular atom in the whole universe. Now, someone can always say, “Well, it’s incredibly improbable, but that’s just how things have worked out.” But I find that it would take much more faith to believe that idea than to believe in God.

Another way that we can see design in biological is in the complexity of molecular machines. Michael Behe, a science professor at Lehigh University, wrote a book about complex biological systems called Darwin’s Black Box.[11] He noted that some biological systems are irreducibly complex. That means that if you take one part away, the system doesn’t work anymore. In other words, it would seem impossible for small evolutionary changes to produce these complex systems, because any advantage that an organism would have comes only by having the whole system. His famous example is the bacterial flagellum. The flagellum helps a bacterial cell swim by acting like a rotary propeller, similar to the way an outboard motor propels a boat. The propeller of the flagellum is a hair-like structure called the filament, which fits into a universal joint called the hook. The hook attaches the filament to the cell’s outer membrane. On the inside of that outer membrane, connecting to the opposite end of the hook, is the rod, which acts as a drive shaft. The rod is connected to the stator, which is embedded in the inner membrane of the cell. Within the stator is the rotor, which rotates the rod, spinning the hook and filament so that the bacteria can “swim.” Several O-rings and other parts hold the structure together, and the motor of the flagellum is powered by a flow of acid through the membrane of the cell. The flagellum can move at up to 100,000 RPM. This system is amazing complex and incredibly small (a flagellum is about 10 micrometers, or 10 millionths of a meter), and this is found in simple, single-cell organisms. Are we supposed to believe that these molecular machines are the result of blind, purposeless, undirected processes? From everything that we know, such complexity is the result of an intelligent agent. Who else but God could come up with DNA and the complex, fully-integrated systems that we find in cellular biology?

If you want to know more about this story, I would encourage you to watch a documentary about Michael Behe called “Revolutionary.” You can watch it on YouTube or at www.revoltionarybehe.com.[12] You can also read about this design argument in far greater detail on our website.[13]

Before moving on to the final argument, let us consider what it means for God to be the designer of life. If God designed life, isn’t there a purpose? If he has designed the laws of physics and the complexity of biology, hasn’t he designed all of life? Doesn’t he dictate our purpose and how we should live? Shouldn’t we want to know what God’s design for our lives is?

There’s one more clue to God’s existence, something that is available to all of us. The apostle Paul, in the book of Romans, says that all people have information to know that there is a God. The Israelites had special revelation from God. God performed miracles in their midst and spoke to them and gave them his law. So, they certainly have no excuse for ignoring God and violating his commands. But Gentiles (non-Jews) are also without excuse because, as we’ve seen, they have the witness of God’s creation to tell them there’s a God. But Paul also says they have a conscience which indicates to them that there is a moral law.

To see this, let’s read Romans 2:12–16:

12 For all who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law. 13 For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified. 14 For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. 15 They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them 16 on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.

The meaning of some of this is debated, but I think that when Paul says that Gentiles, though they don’t have the law, sometimes do what the law requires, he means that all human beings have a general sense of morality.[14] A moral law is part of the fabric of God’s design, and we all sense this law. Everyone knows murder, rape, and theft are always wrong. We may not agree on the particulars, but civilizations have largely agreed on basic morality. When we do follow the dictates of that moral law, our conscience is clear. Yet we so often do what we know to be wrong, so that our conscience accuses us.

This leads us to the moral argument for the existence of God. Put formally, it goes like this:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties don’t exist.

2. But objective moral values and duties do exist.

3. Therefore, God exists.

The basic idea is that if there is an objective moral law, something real that we can appeal to when injustice occurs, it has to be rooted in something real. It can’t be manmade law, because then we can always change it. Moral values or facts, such as murder is wrong, must be grounded in something (or someone) that is unchanging, and even transcendent and eternal. Moral obligations or duties, such as “you shall not murder,” are personal. They are laws, and laws are written by moral agents. Any unchanging, universal, transcendent moral law must be rooted in the existence of God.

Many atheists have been aware of this. Jean-Paul Sartre said, “It [is] very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him.”[15] Friedrich Nietszche said, “There are altogether no moral facts,” and that morality “has truth only if God is the truth.”[16] And then there’s Richard Dawkins, who writes, “In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”[17] In other words, according to these atheists, if there is no God, there’s no transcendent moral law.

But we all know better. Every time we make a universal moral claim, such as racism is always wrong, or that rape is always wrong, we’re not just stating an opinion. We’re appealing to something greater than a personal preference, or even a temporary, manmade code. We’re appealing to a transcendent moral law.

Almost forty years ago a professor at Yale Law School named Arthur Leff wrote an article about ethics in a law journal. He begins his article with these words:

I want to believe—and so do you—in a complete, transcendent, and immanent set of propositions about right and wrong, findable rules that authoritatively and unambiguously direct us how to live righteously. I also want to believe—and so do you—in no such thing, but rather that we are wholly free, not only to choose for ourselves what we ought to do, but to decide for ourselves, individually and as a species what we ought to be. What we want, Heaven help us, is simultaneously to be perfectly ruled and perfectly free, that is, at the same time to discover the right and the good and to create it.[18]

In other words, he says we need a transcendent moral law that come from a final, perfect authority. But he also doesn’t want to be ruled by that authority. What he’s saying is that all moral controversies can be boiled down to what he calls “the grand sez who.”[19] When one person says, “Such-and-such is wrong,” the other person can say, “Says who?” Moral evaluations require an evaluator. According to Leff, “the evaluator must be the unjudged judge, the unruled legislator, the premise maker who rests on no premises, the uncreated creator of values. Now, what would you call such a thing if it existed? You could call it Him.”[20] Leff says, “Either God exists or He does not, but if He does not, nothing and no one else can take His place.”[21]

Then, he adds:

We are never going to get anywhere (assuming for the moment that there is somewhere to get) in ethical or legal theory unless we finally face the fact that, in the Psalmist’s words, there is no one like unto the Lord. If He does not exist, there is no metaphoric equivalent. No person, no combination of people, no document however hallowed by time, no process, no premise, nothing is equivalent to an actual God in this central function as the unexaminable examiner of good and evil. The so-called death of God turns out not to have been just His funeral; it also seems to have effected the total elimination of any coherent, or even more-than-momentarily convincing, ethical or legal system dependent upon finally authoritative extrasystemic premises.[22]

To put it more simply, he’s saying that if God doesn’t exist, then who makes the ethical rules? Who makes the final moral judgments? What is the answer to “says who”?

Leff isn’t a believer. He gives no reason for rejecting the God hypothesis other than the fact that he doesn’t want to have an ultimate authority rule over him. But he ends with these words:

All I can say is this: it looks as if we are all we have. Given what we know about ourselves and each other, this is an extraordinarily unappetizing prospect; looking around the world, it appears that if all men are brothers, the ruling model is Cain and Abel. Neither reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked to make us “good,” and worse than that, there is no reason why anything should. Only if ethics were something unspeakable by us, could law be unnatural, and therefore unchallengeable. As things now stand, everything is up for grabs.

Nevertheless:

Napalming babies is bad.

Starving the poor is wicked.

Buying and selling each other is depraved.

Those who stood up to and died resisting Hitler, Stalin, Amin, and Pol Pot—and General Custer too—have earned salvation.

Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned.

There is in the world such a thing as evil.

[All together now:] Sez who?

God help us.[23]

The death of God is the death of an objective moral law and an ultimate moral evaluator. And that is, ultimately, a very bad thing, because it would mean there is no justice, no final court of appeals, no one to say definitively that this is right and this is wrong. Everything would be up for grabs.

We can learn a bit about God through these arguments. They establish that believing in God’s existence is rational. I think they establish that theism (that God exists) is far more probable than atheism. I think the God hypothesis is far better than an atheistic one. But these arguments only take us so far. They are limited.

Earlier I said we can learn about a stranger by observing them and by digging up facts about them. But if we want to know a stranger, we need to listen to that person. We need to let him or her speak. We have no other way of truly knowing that person’s personality, desires, thoughts, hopes, dreams, regrets, secrets, and so forth. And so it is with God.

One of my favorite authors is a pastor named Tim Keller. He has written two great books that give us reasons for believing in the existence of God. The more recent one is Making Sense of God, which shows that without God we wouldn’t have reasons to believe that our lives have meaning, that there are rights and wrongs, or that we could ever have justice and hope.[24] His earlier book, which I view as something of a modern classic, is called The Reason for God. I highly recommend both of them to anyone who doubts that God exists. In The Reason for God, Keller writes:

When a Russian cosmonaut returned from space and reported that he had not found God, C. S. Lewis responded that this was like Hamlet going into the attic of his castle looking for Shakespeare. If there is a God, he wouldn’t be another object in the universe that could be put in a lab and analyzed with empirical methods. He would relate to us the way a playwright relates to the characters in his play. We (characters) might be able to know quite a lot about the playwright, but only to the degree the author chooses to put information about himself in the play.[25]

And here’s the thing: the author of life has put information about himself in this play. In fact, the author of life has entered into the play.

We Christians believe that Jesus is God. As the Son of God, he has existed forever. We believe God the Father created the universe through the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit. And yet, over two thousand years ago, the Son of God also became a man. This is what it says at the beginning of another book in the New Testament, the book of Hebrews:

1 Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. 3 He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, 4 having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs (Heb. 1:1–4).

Notice that it says that God has spoken. He has revealed himself. Prior to Jesus’ birth, God had primarily revealed himself through the prophets. We call Scripture “special revelation,” because it gives more specific information about who God is and what he expects of us. The most special and specific revelation of God is his Son, who came in the flesh. Jesus taught us most clearly about the ways of God. He, the one who created the world and now sustains it by his powerful word, also died in place of sinners. It’s as if Shakespeare wrote himself into Hamlet to die in place of the melancholy Dane. Or, to put a contemporary twist on it, it’s as if J. K. Rowling wrote herself into the Harry Potter books—and actually, physically entered into the world of those books—to die in place of Harry and his friends.

The best way to know God is to know Jesus. And there is evidence that Jesus lived, died, and then rose from the grave.[26] The best evidence we have about Jesus is the Bible, but there are sources outside the Bible that also confirm his life, death, and resurrection.

We have all broken God’s moral law. We have failed to live according to God’s design. We fail to love and live for the Creator of the universe. But Jesus came and lived the perfect life, fulfilling God’s design for humanity. And though we have broken God’s moral law and deserve punishment, Jesus took that punishment for his people when he died on the cross. And he rose from the grave as the first installment of a new creation, one that won’t be contaminated by sin and death. Everyone who trusts in Jesus has their sins paid for and will live with him forever in that new creation.

So, the question is, “God, are you real?” And the answer is a resounding, “Yes!” What is the greatest proof? God sent his Son. To know Jesus is to know God. If you’re here today and you want to know more about Jesus, I would love to help you. But for now, let’s pray.

Notes

  1. Anselm (1033–1109), a medieval Christian theologian, said to God: “You are something than which nothing greater can be thought.” In other words, God is the greatest conceivable being. Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion, trans. M. J. Charlesworth, in The Major Works, ed. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 87. ↑
  2. All Scripture quotations are taken from the English Standard Version (ESV). ↑
  3. See also Psalm 19:1–6. ↑
  4. This was reported in The New York Times, March 12, 1978, quoted in Edgar Andrews, Who Made God? (Carlisle, PA: EP Books, 2009), 94. ↑
  5. See https://wbcommunity.org/cosmological-argument. ↑
  6. Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 138, quoted in Douglas Axe, Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed (New York: HarperOne, 2016), 3–4. ↑
  7. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 157. ↑
  8. Francis Crick, Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981). Dawkins makes that claim in the film, Expelled ↑
  9. Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, rev. ed. (New York: Viking, 1996), 228; quoted in Douglas Groothuis, Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2011), 316. ↑
  10. Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design (New York: HarperOne, 2013), 200. ↑
  11. Michael J. Behe (New York: Free Press, 1996). ↑
  12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ToSEAj2V0s; http://revolutionarybehe.com. ↑
  13. https://wbcommunity.org/the-design-argument. ↑
  14. My understanding of this passage is informed by Thomas R. Schreiner, Romans, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1998), 116–125. ↑
  15. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), 22, quoted in Paul Copan, “Ethics Needs God,” in Debating Christian Theism, ed. J. P. Moreland, Chad Meister, and Khaldoun A. Sweis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 86. ↑
  16. Friedrich Nietszche, Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ (New York: Penguin Books, 1068), 55, 70, quoted in Copan, “Ethics Needs God,” 86. ↑
  17. Richard Dawkins, “God’s Utility Function,” Scientific American 273 (Nov. 1995): 85. ↑
  18. Arthur Allen Leff, “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law,” Duke Law Journal 1979, no. 6 (1979): 1229. The whole article can be found at http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3810&context=fss_papers. ↑
  19. Ibid.: 1230. ↑
  20. Ibid. ↑
  21. Ibid.: 1231. ↑
  22. Ibid.: 1232. ↑
  23. Ibid.: 1249. ↑
  24. Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical (New York: Viking, 2016). ↑
  25. Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008), 126–127. ↑
  26. For more information, see https://wbcommunity.org/jesus, particularly the first sermon, “How Can We Know Jesus?” (December 14, 2014). See also https://wbcommunity.org/evidence-resurrection-jesus-christ and the resources linked to that page. ↑

God, Are You Real?

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Brian Watson begins a new sermon series, “If You Could Ask God One Question, What Would It Be?” Does God really exist? How do we know? There are some compelling existence of God (the existence of the universe, the appearance of design in biology, and the existence of a universal and transcendent moral law). But the best argument for God is Jesus.

Favor, Providence, and Kindness (Ruth 2)

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Pastor Brian Watson preaches a message on Ruth 2. He focuses on three words that sum up what God is doing in this chapter: favor, providence, and kindness. He also shows how Christianity accounts for why we should be generous and kind to one another, and how a competing worldview (naturalism) does not.

Two Views on Evolution

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The following paper was written by Pastor Brian Watson a few years ago. It may be easier to read in this PDF version.

Introduction

The Bible indicates that God’s activities in creation and providence are clearly revealed in nature. Paul writes that God’s “invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made,” and because of this, all human beings “are without excuse” for their sin (Rom. 1:20).[1] According to David, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork (Ps. 19:1). Jesus told his disciples not to fear, because not even a sparrow dies apart from God’s activity in the world (Matt. 10:29). The overall witness of the Bible is that the world provides evidence for God and his works.

The neo-Darwinian theory of evolution presents a significant challenge to the biblical witness.[2] If all of life has indeed evolved from a common ancestor through the impersonal force of natural selection acting upon unguided genetic mutations, there would be profound implications that call into question several areas of theology, including the nature of God, creation, providence, revelation, anthropology, hamartiology, and soteriology. If this theory were true, one might doubt that the Bible is true, or that there is such a thing as general revelation. One might doubt God’s sovereignty, or try to limit the sense in which God created and is sustaining the universe. If this theory were true, one might doubt that there was a first man named Adam who fell into sin. If there is no original sin, that might make us wonder about the nature of salvation. It is easy to see how Darwinism might threaten Christian theism.

In order to provide better understanding of the evidence for and against evolution, I will compare and contrast two recent works. The first book is Why Evolution Is True, by Jerry Coyne, a professor of Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. The second book is Darwin’s Doubt by Stephen Meyer, a philosopher of science and the director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute. After providing a summary of both of these books, I will evaluate the arguments of Coyne and Meyer and discuss why this argument matters for Christians.

The Case for Evolution

In the preface to his book, Coyne acknowledges that some critics of evolution state the this theory is in crisis. “But evolution is far more than a ‘theory,’ let alone a theory in crisis. Evolution is a fact. And far from casting doubt on Darwinism, the evidence gathered by scientists over the past century and a half supports it completely, showing that evolution happened, and that it happened largely as Darwin proposed, through the workings of natural selection.”[3] He believes that the battle between evolutionists and creationists is “part of a wider war, a war between rationality and superstition.”[4] In hopes of winning the battle, Coyne seeks to present “the main lines of evidence for evolution” in his book. “I offer it in the hope that people everywhere may share my wonder at the sheer explanatory power of Darwinian evolution, and may face its implications without fear.”[5]

In the introduction to his book, Coyne clearly indicates the religious implications of (neo-Darwinian) evolution. “While many religious people have found a way to accommodate evolution with their spiritual beliefs, no such reconciliation is possible if one adheres to the literal truth of a special creation.” For Coyne, evolution replaces revelation. “Evolution gives us the true account of our origins, replacing the myths that satisfied us for thousands of years.” Throughout, Coyne asserts that the theory of evolution is fact. Yet some religious people fail to accept “the plain scientific fact of evolution” even though there exists “incontrovertible evidence for evolution’s truth.”[6] It is clear to see that Coyne’s agenda extends beyond mere science.

In the first chapter, Coyne establishes “the modern theory of evolution.” “Life on earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species—perhaps a self-replicating molecule—that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.”[7] This theory of evolution consists of six key components: evolution, gradualism, speciation, common ancestry, natural selection, and nonselective mechanisms of evolution.

Evolution means that a species changes genetically over time. Modern species of animals and plants descended from ancient, extinct species, and these changes are based on alterations in DNA. Gradualism means that evolutionary changes in species take place gradually over many generations. Large-scale changes in a species (such as the addition of teeth or limbs) do not take place in one or even a few generations, but over long periods of time. Speciation refers to the “splitting” of a branch of Darwin’s tree of life into distinct branches. To understand this process, imagine two similar species that now exist. According to the modern theory of evolution, at one point in time, there was a common ancestor to both species. Yet genetic mutations occurred, producing two distinct species. (One species is thought to be distinct from another when the two cannot interbreed successfully.) “It stands to reason that if the history of life forms a tree, with all species originating from a single trunk, then one can find a common origin for every pair of twigs (existing species) by tracing each twig back through its branches until they intersect at the branch they have in common.”[8]

The fourth element of this theory of evolution is common ancestry, which means all species can ultimately be traced back to a common ancestor. Coyne claims that this tracing can be discovered through DNA sequencing and an examination of the fossil record. The fifth element is natural selection. “Selection is both revolutionary and disturbing for the same reason: it explains apparent design in nature by a purely materialistic process that doesn’t require creation or guidance by supernatural forces.”[9] Natural selection occurs when individuals within a species have good genes that enable them to procreate, while other individuals with bad genes are not able to procreate as much and eventually die out. Nature “selects” the more fit animals (those that procreate and pass on their genes to an abundant number of descendants) and weeds out the less fit animals (those that produce fewer descendants). The sixth and final element of the modern theory of evolution is evolutionary change caused by non-selective processes. This refers to random, non-adaptive, relatively minor changes such as those caused by genetic drift.

Coyne realizes that some people think evolution is “only a theory,” so he explains that in the world of science, a theory is a set of propositions that seek to make sense of facts. For any given theory to be considered scientific, it must be testable and capable of making predictions that can be verified. If a theory bears up under testing, if its predictions are verified, if enough evidence accumulates in support of the theory, and if no decisive evidence against the theory exists, it is considered fact. However, this does not mean that today’s “factual” theory will not be falsified in the future. Coyne even admits that “it is possible that despite thousands of observations that support Darwinism, new data might show it to be wrong.”[10]

Coyne’s major lines of evidence come from the fossil record, vestigial traits, the geographical distribution of those fossils, homology (the similarity of different species), genetics, and evolution visible today. Fossils are essential evidence for macroevolution.[11] Fossils develop when the remains of an animal or plant end up in sediment on the bottom of a body of water, usually a lake or an ocean, and the hard parts of that animal or plant (soft parts are rarely fossilized) are replaced by dissolved minerals, so that a cast of the creature is left. Of the millions of species that have ever lived (estimates range widely from 17 million to 4 billion), there remain only about 250,000 fossilized species, which constitutes “only 0.1 percent to 1 percent of all species—hardly a good sample of the history of life!”[12] These fossils are then dated by using radioisotopes, which decay gradually into other elements. The time of the decay is measured in terms of half life, the time it takes for half of that isotope to decay. The ages, locations, and types of fossils are used as evidence to support the theory of evolution.

If Darwin’s theory is correct, then in the fossil record, one should find simpler creatures in the earliest strata, with more complex species appearing later in time. “Later species should have traits that make them look like the descendants of earlier ones.” The first organisms, simple bacteria, appear in sediments that are 3.5 billion years old (the earth is 4.6 billion years old, according to radiometric dating). Simple multicellular organisms such as sponges arose 600 million years ago. Four-legged animals emerged 400 million years ago, followed by amphibians 350 million years ago, amphibians 100 million years later, then birds about 200 million years ago. “Humans are newcomers on the scene—our lineage branches off from that of other primates only about 7 million years ago.” Coyne boldly declares, “No theory of special creation, or any theory other than evolution can explain these patterns.” By examining changes in a species over time in the fossil record, gradual evolution can be observed. For example, changes in the trilobite, an early arthropod that belongs to the same phylum as insects and crustaceans, are gradual within a three-million-year window of time. “The fossil record gives no evidence for the creationist prediction that all species appear suddenly and then remain unchanged.”[13]

From the observance of gradual, small changes, evolutionary scientists infer large-scale changes. When scientists find two fossils that appear somewhat similar and separated by a vast period of time, they predict that they will one day find a transitional form, a “missing link,” that will prove that the one species evolved into the other.[14] Evolutionary scientists predicted that a transitional form between fish and amphibians would be found, and such a species, Tiktaalik roseae, was discovered in 2004. Prior to this discovery, it was observed that 390 million years ago, the only vertebrates in existence were fish. Thirty million years later, however, there appear in the fossil record tetrapods, four-footed vertebrates that lived on land. Somewhere in that 30-million-year gap of time, transitional forms—perhaps fish that have some features common to amphibians—must have existed. Fossils of Tiktaalik roseae were found on an island in the Arctic Ocean, north of Canada. These fossils are about 375 million years old, what one would expect of a transitional form. These creatures were fish that also had features common to amphibians, including a neck, eyes and nostrils on the top of the head, and sturdy bones. Coyne presents similar evidence for transitional forms between reptiles and birds and land mammals and whales.

Coyne also shows that animals often possess vestigial traits. Examples include the ostrich, which has vestiges of wings that no longer fly, rodents that have vestigial eyes that no longer see, and whales that have vestigial limbs and pelvic bones. These vestiges are taken to be traces of evolutionary history. In addition to vestigial limbs or organs, there is also the existence of vestigial genes, or “dead” genes, “genes that once were useful but are no longer intact or expressed.”[15] Though Coyne does not use the term “junk DNA,” this is what he is referring to: genes that no longer produce their “normal” function of making proteins. Coyne also claims that the development of embryos is proof of evolution (embryos, while developing in the womb, appear to resemble their supposed ancestors, therefore reenacting their evolutionary history).

“Bad” or imperfect design is also evidence of evolution: “Perfect design would truly be the sign of a skilled and intelligent designer. Imperfect design is the mark of evolution; in fact, it’s precisely what we expect from evolution.” Examples of imperfect design, according to Coyne, include the human male’s urethra, which runs through the middle of the prostate gland, and the human female’s giving birth through the pelvis, “a painful and inefficient process that, before modern medicine, killed appreciable numbers of mothers and babies.”[16]

Other lines of evidence for evolution include the geographic distribution of species that one would expect if the modern theory of evolution were true. “The biographic evidence for evolution is now so powerful that I have never seen a creationist book, article, or lecture that has tried to refute it.” Coyne claims that the fossil record, combined with our knowledge of how continents, glaciers, and land bridges have all shifted over time, supports evolutionary theory. “If evolution happened, species living in one area should be the descendants of earlier species that lived in the same place. So if we dig into the shallow layers of rocks in a given area, we should find fossils that resemble the organisms treading that ground today.”[17] That is precisely what scientists have discovered. Also, animal and plant life on islands tends to be different from life on the mainland because those islands have a relative lack competitors and predators, and natural selection is driven by competition and predation.

The theory of evolution depends upon adaptation, which requires three things: variability within a population of species (some difference of traits), a genetic basis for variations (heritability), and the effect that variation has on producing offspring. Genetic mutations that result in a variation that help produce more offspring will be chosen by natural selection, while traits that inhibit mating will be weeded out. Adaptations accrue gradually, so that each beneficial trait is passed onto subsequent generations, which outbreed the creatures lacking the beneficial trait. Creatures with the beneficial trait may then have their own genetic mutations that positively affect breeding, and are passed on to future generations. It is important to understand evolution favors not those who live long, but those who live long enough to breed abundantly. “Given how natural selection works, it shouldn’t produce adaptations that help an individual survive without promoting reproduction.” These “adaptations always increase the fitness of the individual, not necessarily of the group or the species.”[18]

Scientists are able to view evolution occurring in the present in their own labs. Such evolution is often seen in microbes such as bacteria. Bacteria can mutate in order to survive on new food sources, or to resist antibiotics. These changes are microevolutionary, of course, as Coyne admits. “Given the gradual pace of evolution, it’s unreasonable to expect to see selection transforming one ‘type’ of plant or animal into another—so-called macroevolution—within a lifetime.”[19] Still, Coyne insists that we know that macroevolution happens because of the evidence found in the fossil record.

In the midst of laying out the case for neo-Darwinian evolution, Coyne wonders if natural selection acting upon genetic mutations could actually produce all the biological complexity we see today. “We know of no other natural process that can build a complex adaptation. The most commonly suggested alternative takes us into the realm of the supernatural.” However, Coyne is not willing to consider the supernatural, for that is not a scientific task. Rather, he suggests that scientists must think of ways that all of biological life could have evolved, even if we do not know that it has evolved in such a way. This is particularly true in understanding how complex structures at the cellular level have developed. “Understanding the evolution of complex biochemical features and pathways is not . . . easy, since they leave no trace in the fossil record. Their evolution must be reconstructed in more speculative ways.”[20]

Coyne also examines how the act of sex drives evolution, often through male competition to mate with females. Since females can only be pregnant so often (one pregnancy lasts a certain amount of time) and males can procreate many times with little cost to them, females are in the position of being very choosy over which mate they will accept. It is female choice that drives sex selection. Coyne admits that the very act of sex “is in fact one of evolution’s greatest mysteries” and he ponders why sex has not been replaced by parthenogenesis (the development of an organism from an unfertilized egg). Yet he never seriously considers that sex could be the gift of a beneficent creator. Instead, he would rather imagine that females possess a gene that can identify healthy male mates, though there is no evidence to back this claim.[21]

Coyne also discusses how new species arise. Species are “evolutionary accidents,” often arising as one population becomes geographically separated from another.[22] This is known as the theory of geographic speciation. As populations split, mutations occur, natural selection culls the beneficially mutated organisms from those that have deleterious mutations, and these populations eventually become new species. Coyne believes that even if this happened rarely, there would be enough time in 3.5 billion years for there to be 100 million species living today (the actual number is only 10 million). In a study of fruit flies, it was estimated that “[g]enetic barriers between groups became strong enough to completely prevent interbreeding after about 2.7 million years of divergence.”[23] That is how long it takes from one species to diverge from another.

After writing a chapter about the origins of human beings, Coyne concludes with some reflections about evolution. He boldly claims that “every fact that has something to do with evolution confirms its truth.” “Despite a million chances to be wrong, evolution always comes up right. That is as close as we can get to a scientific truth.”[24] He admits there are still mysteries left to solve, such as the cause of the Cambrian “explosion” of life. The issue of the explosion of new life in the Cambrian era leads us to the second book under examination, Stephen Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt.

The Case against Evolution and for Intelligent Design

In Darwin’s Doubt, Meyer seeks to challenge the Darwinian theory of evolution by addressing “Darwin’s most significant doubt,” the “Cambrian explosion,” in which new animal life forms appear in the fossil record without “evolutionary precursors.”[25] As stated above, Darwin’s theory stated that all of life descended from a common ancestor. Therefore, all subsequent life that evolved from this common ancestor would branch out of a common root, from a narrow “trunk” of a tree of life. If this theory were fact, one would expect to see a few, very old, simple fossilized organisms, followed by diverse, complex, newer fossils.[26] The relatively few, simple organisms would gradually evolve to possess a greater variety of unique features and body plans.

Yet the fossil record does not bear this out. Very few fossils exist from before the Cambrian era (541 to 485.4 million years ago). Then, in the Cambrian era, “many new and anatomically sophisticated creatures appeared suddenly in the sedimentary layers of the geologic column without any evidence of simpler ancestral forms in the earlier layers below.”[27] Most of this “explosion” occurred in a 6-million-year window of time. These new creatures belong to different taxonomic categories known as phyla.[28] It seems as though new, complex forms of life suddenly emerged, rather than gradually evolved. Then, and only later, is there evidence of smaller-scale variations within taxonomic groups. This evidence is contrary to Darwin’s theory of gradual evolution.

In scientific experience, large-scale mutations are always harmful to the creature, leading to dysfunction and death, not fitness. Therefore, only small-scale mutations would be beneficial. Darwin realized that this was a problem, as did one of his contemporaries, Louis Agassiz, the foremost paleontologist at the time. “Agassiz concluded that the fossil record, particularly the record of the explosion of Cambrian animal life, posed an insuperable difficulty for Darwin’s theory.”[29] In Darwin’s own words, “To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer.”[30] Darwin hoped that the fossil record was incomplete, and that future discoveries of transitional forms would support his theory.

However, major fossil discoveries since Darwin’s time have not vindicated his theory. Charles Doolittle Walcott’s discovery of the Burgess Shale in British Columbia in the early twentieth century led to the collection of more than 65,000 specimens of fossils. These fossils demonstrate the amazing variety of life that first emerged in the Cambrian era. Many of these organisms had new body plans not found in earlier strata of fossils, which suggested that these creatures suddenly emerged, with no apparent ancestors to be found. Walcott, who favored Darwin’s theory, suggested what is known as the “artifact hypothesis.” He postulated that Precambrian fossils existed but these artifacts were not yet found.

Yet these fossils still have yet to be found. Oil companies developed new drilling technologies in the middle of the twentieth century which allowed them to drill deeper into sedimentary rock. “As geologists evaluated the contents of these drill cores, they did not find Walcott’s predicted Precambrian fossils.” Others suggested that since Precambrian creatures were likely soft-bodied, they would not be fossilized. This theory was refuted by a large fossil discovery in southern China at the end of the twentieth century. The Maotianshan Shale, discovered in 1984, yielded a number of fossilized remains of soft-bodied animals. Scientists found Precambrian microscopic sponge embryos, yet they did not discover fossils of more complex organisms that could be ancestors of the Cambrian animals. “That well-developed, clearly ancestral animal forms were not preserved, when tiny sponge embryos were, strongly indicates that such forms were simply not present in the Precambrian layers.” What little Precambrian fossils we have are of a few different types of organisms that “bear no clear relationship to any of the organisms that appear in the Cambrian explosion (or thereafter).” The roughly 40 to 50 million years that separate these Precambrian fossils from the Cambrian fossils “does not constitute anything like enough time to build the necessary anatomical novelties that arise in the Cambrian and Ediacaran periods.”[31]

Fossils, though, are not the only evidence used to support Darwin’s theory of evolution. Evolutionary biologists also appeal to homology, the similarity in anatomy and in DNA sequences found in different species of animals. By studying the molecules and genes of animals, biologists are able to reconstruct the supposed evolution of various species. However, there are problems: (1) the rates of molecular evolution vary depending upon which molecule is being studied; and (2) the speed of the supposed evolution depends on knowing that two species diverged from a common ancestor, when that divergence happened, and the genetic difference between the two species today. Yet only that third element can be known with certainty. Evolutionary biologists end up assuming the very thing they are trying to prove.

Genetic studies fare no better. The evolutionary trees produced by studying the supposed evolution of genes also result in conflicting branching patterns. Referring to a 2010 study performed by biologist Michael Syvanen, Meyer writes, “Syvanen’s study compared two thousand genes in six animals spanning phyla as diverse as chordates, echinoderms, arthropods, and nematodes. His analysis yielded no consistent tree-like pattern.”[32] However, “evolutionary evangelists” like Coyne and Richard Dawkins speak as if all the scientific evidence produces one “perfect family tree.”[33] According to Meyers, “the statements of Dawkins, Coyne, and many others about all the evidence (molecular and anatomical) supporting a single, unambiguous animal tree are manifestly false.”[34]

That the fossil record does not support Darwin’s theory is a problem, as is the presence of conflicting trees based on various molecular and genetic studies. A greater problem is found in the improbability of a genetic mutation producing new information that would lead to the building of new body plans. If a reptile evolved into a bird, at some point wings would need to be formed, and these wings consist of particular cell types, which would consist of various proteins, which are the building blocks of cells. The information that leads to the production of those proteins is found in DNA. So, an animal’s genes would have to mutate to produce new code that would result in the production of new proteins. As Meyer observes, “to build a new form of life from a simpler preexisting form requires new information.” Darwin knew nothing of DNA, but genetic information discovered in the twentieth century was used to produce the “New Synthesis” or “neo-Darwinism.”[35] It was then believed that small-scale changes in an animal’s DNA would eventually lead to large-scale evolutionary changes, such as the emergence of wings. While in theory this may be possible, the question is whether it is plausible.

Meyer demonstrates how amazingly complex DNA is. It is essentially written code, much like a language, consisting of base pairs of nucleotides that use four different “letters” or bases. A single-celled organism has between 318,000 and 562,000 base pairs of DNA. A fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) has 140 million base pairs. The addition of more nucleotides is equivalent to the addition of information, which is specified information, for only the right combination of nucleotide bases will result in the production of proteins.

The structure of DNA was discovered in 1953 by Francis Crick and James Watson. In the second half of the twentieth century, some mathematicians and scientists started to calculate the chance of a genetic mutation producing one protein. In the early 1960s, Murray Eden, a professor of engineering and computer science at MIT, calculated that the chance of arranging amino acids (each consisting of three nucleotide bases) to produce one average-length protein (consisting of about 250 amino acids) was 10325 (1 followed by 325 zeros). Over twenty years later, Robert Sauer, a molecular biologist at MIT, calculated on the basis of mutagenesis experiments (he tampered with the DNA of fruit flies to produce mutations) that “the ratio of functional to nonfunctional amino-acid sequences at about 1 to 1063 for a short protein of 92 amino acids in length.” To put that into perspective, consider that there are only 1065 atoms in the Milky Way. Therefore, the chance of a genetic mutation producing one small protein is “roughly equal to the probability of a blind spaceman finding a single marked atom by chance among all the atoms in the Milky Way galaxy.”[36] Moreover, most genetic changes, ones that result in a change of just one amino acid, often result in proteins that lose function, and these would be weeded out by natural selection. More recent studies have shown that the probability of a mutation producing a sequence of 150 amino acids that could fold to produce a stable protein is 1 in 1074. However, a stable protein is not necessarily a functional one. The chance of a mutation producing a functional protein of 150 amino acids is 1 in 1077, or “one chance in one hundred thousand, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion.”[37] Longer proteins consist of over 400 amino acids that are precisely sequenced, so that the probability of a mutation leading to a longer protein is exponentially more improbable.

Given these probabilities, evolutionary biologists often assume that complex genetic information already existed, and that sections of this information were somehow copied or repositioned to form new genes. This type of speculation ignores the emergence of specified information, but it also does not take into account the improbability of rearranging already existing genetic information to produce more specified complexity. [38]15 Meyer provides the reader with a helpful analogy:

Overall, what evolutionary biologists have in mind is something like trying to produce a new book by copying the pages of an existing book (gene duplication, lateral gene transfer, and transfer of mobile genetic elements), rearranging blocks of text on each page (exon shuffling, retropositioning, and gene fusion), making random spelling changes to words in each block of text (point mutations), and then randomly rearranging the new pages. Clearly, such random rearrangements and changes will have no realistic chance of generating a literary masterpiece, let alone a coherent read.[39]

Specified complexity is one term that intelligent design (ID) advocates such as Meyer use to communicate that information must be ordered in a precise way for it to be productive. Another term used by ID advocates is irreducible complexity. Irreducible complexity refers to a “single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.”[40] Meyer states that “complex biological systems” consist of tens or hundreds of independent and necessary parts. “Any system that depends for its function on the coordinated action of many parts could not be changed gradually without losing function. But in the neo-Darwinian scheme of things, natural selection acts to preserve only functional advantages.”[41] In other words, a mutation is much more likely to degrade information and hamper function, not introduce or enhance information and improve function. Natural selection would not preserve animals that had systems that did not function.

Earlier, it was stated that the chance of producing one functional protein was highly improbable. The probability of coordinated mutations, even just two of them, to produce new genes and proteins—and new, integrated biological systems—is also highly improbable and would require vast amounts of time. For example, scientists have discovered that it would take 216 million years to generate only two coordinated mutations in the line of hominids. (Hominids belong to the family of primates known as Hominidae, which includes humans, gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees.) Yet humans and chimps have only been around for 6 million years. Therefore, “the neo-Darwinian mechanism does not have the capacity to generate even two coordinated mutations in the time available for human evolution.”[42]

Meyer shows that organisms require much more than mutations in genes that code for proteins. Regions in DNA that do not code for proteins “control and regulate the timing of the expression of the protein-coding regions of the genome.”[43] The regulation of genes is controlled by the developmental gene regulatory network, which resembles a “genetic circuit.” Other circuits that we know of are obviously the result of human intelligence, not blind, unguided, mechanical processes. In light of the complexity of DNA, as well as the complexity of these circuits, unguided evolution is implausible.

Apparently, animals require more information than that found in DNA. The development of animals requires epigenetic information, information not found in genes. The unique shape and arrangement of body parts is determined by epigenetic information, the subject of recent scientific studies. This information is found in the inner structure of cells, the structure of cell membranes, and even the sugar molecules on the surface of these membranes. (Genetic information produces proteins and RNA molecules, not sugars.) Once again, such complexity is highly improbable if the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution is true. To put it more strongly, the theory of evolution cannot account for such information.

Meyer discusses other theories of evolution, such as punctuated evolution (which states that large-scale changes came in relatively short bursts of time, followed by long periods of little evolution), various models of self organization (which state that somehow cells have organized themselves, something that assumes preexisting information), and neutral or nonadaptive evolution (in which natural selection plays a small role, so that neutral or deleterious mutations are allowed to accrue, and then somehow result in large-scale evolution). Each of these other theories are weighed and found wanting because they cannot account for specified information.

Finally, Meyer introduces the concept of ID. Given the specified and irreducible complexity found in biology, it is logical to assume that some intelligence is behind all of life. This conclusion is logical because whenever we observe specified and irreducible complexity (in language, in computer codes, in machinery), it is the result of intelligence. Chemicals cannot organize themselves into DNA any more than ink and paper can organize themselves into a book, or pixels could organize themselves into this essay.

Determining the origins of life requires using abductive reasoning, or inference to the best explanation. This mode of reasoning is used to adjudicate competing hypotheses, to see which one best explains the evidence. This method is used by police detectives as well as historical scientists. Historical scientists should “cite causes that are known from our uniform experience to have the power to produce the effect in question.” A conclusive inference is generated when there is only one known cause that can produce the effect or evidence. “Logically, if a postulated cause is known to be a necessary condition or cause of a given event or effect, then historical scientists can validly infer that condition or cause from the presence of the effect.”[44] Meyer reasons that the complexity found in animals, particularly the explosion of new life in the Cambria era, requires intelligence. Furthermore, evolutionary explanations, which by their nature exclude intelligence, do not have the power to explain the complexity and diversity of life. Meyers concludes, “since we know of no ‘presently acting’ materialistic cause that also generates large amounts of specified information (especially in a digital or alphabetic form [such as what we find in DNA]), only intelligent design meets the causal adequacy requirement of a historical scientific explanation.”[45] Meyer also demonstrates that this conclusion is no less scientific that the theory of evolution.

Evaluation

The theories of evolution and ID are attempts to make sense of various facts present in the world. They are stories that try to give shape and meaning to scientific data. Among the prominent facts are the fossil record, homologous features of various animals (similar body structures, similarities in DNA), and the complexity of DNA and molecular structures. The stories of evolution as well as ID, or, more specifically, Christian theism, are attempts at explaining reality. Jerry Coyne says that evolution is “not a grand philosophical scheme about the meaning of life.”[46] Yet at the beginning of his book, he favorably quotes atheist Michael Shermer, who claims that evolution matters because science matters and, “Science matters because it is the story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.”[47] Evolutionary theory ends up constructing a worldview that competes with Christianity.

The attempt to construct a different worldview is demonstrated when Coyne writes of evolution in a quasi-religious way: “Learning about evolution can transforms us in a deep way.”[48] Natural selection becomes something of a god substitute. Throughout the book, natural selection is personified. It “makes each species,” “can create intricate adaptations,” and has “bequeathed a brain” to us. Yet, Coyne also states that natural selection does not truly act. Rather, it is an impersonal process. “There is no will involved, no conscious striving.”[49]

At a distance, the story of evolution can be rather impressive, particularly the geographical distribution of certain fossils and the similarity between certain animals. Yet, when one looks at the details, there are many problems. Meyer rightly points out the fact that the fossil record does not square with Darwin’s theory. This is evident in the Cambrian explosion. The greater problem is the improbability of new genes that produce functional proteins being created through random mutations. The probability is close to zero. Yet more information than just protein-coding genes is necessary to create new body plans of animals. Even Coyne admits, “Natural selection can act only by changing what already exists. It can’t produce new traits out of thin air.”[50] Coyne does not attempt to explain how biological life emerged in the first place. He simply punts the issue to scientists who study abiogenesis.[51] Yet if evolution is going to be the “epic saga about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going,” it must tell us the origins of life. Coyne speaks about “the amazing derivation of life’s staggering diversity from a single naked replicating molecule,” yet he does not tell us how that molecule appeared, or how he knows there was such a molecule.[52] Throughout his book, he continually makes such unsupported assertions.

There are two other important problems that emerge in Coyne’s book, though he does not seem to be aware of them. At one point, he discusses the sense of smell controlled by olfactory receptor (OR) genes. These genes produce OR proteins, which are located in cells that line the tissues of the nose. “Different odors contain different combinations of molecules, and each combination stimulates a different group of cells. The cells send signals to the brain, which integrates and decodes the different signals.” In explaining how these cells evolved in mice, he claims that OR genes diverged from each other in the process of duplication, “with each gene’s products binding to a different odor molecule. A different type of cell evolved for each of the thousand OR genes. And at the same time, the brain became rewired to combine the signals from the various kinds of cells to create the sensations of different odors.”[53] This description is beyond belief. There are three independent things involved here: the odor-producing molecule, the OR genes/cells, and the brain. How did the OR genes and the brain evolve independently to produce an accurate understanding of an odor-producing molecule? Who or what hardwired the brain?

The second problem also involves the brain. Coyne says that natural selection has given us a “brain complex enough to comprehend the laws that govern the universe.”[54] He also indicates that we have free will[55] and the ability to create “our own purposes, meaning, and morality.”[56] The problem for Coyne and other evolutionists is that if everything has evolved, so have our brains. If our brains have survived, they have done so not to know absolute truth, but to help us survive. Absolute truth may, in some cases, help us to survive, but evolution certainly would not guarantee our ability to ascertain what is true.

This conundrum is one that evolutionists cannot afford to ignore. Charles Darwin himself acknowledged this possibility towards the end of his life. In a letter written the year before he died, he wrote, “The horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the conviction of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”[57]

It seems that the arguments of Coyne and others are intentionally misleading. They speak as if all scientists agree upon the details of macroevolution, but this is simply not the case. According to Meyer (and proven by his numerous citations), “Evolutionary biologists will acknowledge problems to each other in scientific settings that they will deny or minimize in public, lest they aid and abet the dread ‘creationists’ and others they see as advancing the cause of unreason.”[58] By hiding significant evidence, evolutionists are being dishonest, whether they are intentionally or unintentionally being so. Another dishonesty is the way Coyne repeatedly speaks of evolution as fact. This statement is true if evolution means “change over time,” or if it means microevolution, such as small changes observed in various species. Yet if Coyne means that full-blown neo-Darwinian macroevolution is a fact, he is committing the fallacy of equivocation. “The fallacy of equivocation is the fallacy of speaking out of both sides of your mouth,” writes William Dembski.[59] In some senses of the word, evolution is fact (changes over time have taken place), but not in others. There can be no doubt that this equivocation is intentionally misleading. In the end, Coyne’s arguments fail and rather than calling into question the veracity of the Bible, he reveals his own lack of intellectual integrity.

Though Coyne’s arguments fail, and his writing clearly shows his atheistic bias, he brings up a significant issue that ID does not address adequately. He discusses many evidences of “bad design” in nature.[60] This objection to design is not uncommon. This objection states that if God (or some other intelligence) created us, why do we have imperfections? Without the biblical story of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration, it is difficult to account for such imperfection.

Since all of creation is in a fallen state, the Christian would predict that there are evidences of imperfection in biology. Earlier, Coyne was quoted as wondering why a creator would have women give birth through the pelvis, because such a process is painful and can lead to death. Yet God told Eve, right after sin entered the world, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children” (Gen. 3:16). Paul tells us that creation was subject to futility and groans for the day when it will be set free from its “bondage to corruption” (Rom. 8:29-22). While the Bible does not speak in scientific terms, this bondage must include what appears to be imperfect design. These “flaws” in nature do not disprove Christianity; if anything, they serve as evidence for the fallen state of humanity.

However, ID does not frame its arguments in light of the Bible. It states that some intelligence created and designed life, but it does not identify the God of the Bible as the Designer. I suppose one cannot scientifically prove that God exists and that he has created everything, and ID seeks to be a scientific discipline. Christians should think of ID as a useful tool that can be used in apologetics, not a theological movement.

As tool, ID has produced positive results. One prediction made by ID advocates is that “junk DNA,” parts of the genome thought to be functionless, would be discovered not to be junk. In 2012, the ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) project revealed that at least 80 percent of the human genome performs significant biological functions. “Other research in genomics has shown that, overall, the non-coding regions of the genome function much like the operating system of a computer. Indeed, the noncoding regions of the genome direct the timing and regulate the expression of the data modules or coding regions of the genome, in addition to possessing myriad other functions.”[61] This discovery is further evidence of work of God.

Science has its limits. Though it is useful, it cannot solve every mystery. Coyne relies on massive amounts of speculation, assuming that events happened over the course of millions years without any hard evidence to support his claims. Meyer (a Christian) admits that he does not know how, scientifically, the designing intelligence created life. Though the Bible does not speak in scientific terms (such as how God created DNA and epigenetic information), it is God’s revelation to humanity. It tells us what we could never learn on our own. It tells us that God made everything at his command, for his purposes. No amount of science or speculation can ever tell us why we exist, or give us hope the way the gospel does. Science cannot tell us who we are or why we die. Science cannot save us. Still, Christians should study science to learn more about the world God made, to develop medicine and technology that benefits humanity, and to defend the faith against specious claims made by scoffers like Coyne.

Notes

 

  1. All Scripture references are taken from the English Standard Version. ↑
  2. Darwinism is the theory that all current species have evolved from a common ancestor through the process of natural selection acting on variability within species. When Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species in 1859, he did not know what produced such variability. In the twentieth century, and continuing into the twenty-first century, scientists have learned a great deal about genes. This information was combined or synthesized with Darwin’s theory of evolution to produce what is known as neo-Darwinism, the theory that natural selection acts upon genetic mutations. When people speak of Darwinism today, they often mean neo-Darwinism, though the two are often used synonymously. One of the problems of evolution, as we shall see, is that is often unclear what is meant by that word. It can mean anything from change over time, to small-scale changes in a species, to an all-encompassing theory of the evolution of all of life from a common ancestor. ↑
  3. Jerry A. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True (New York: Penguin, 2009), xiii-xiv. ↑
  4. Ibid., xiii. ↑
  5. Ibid., xiv. ↑
  6. Ibid., xviii, xv, xviii. ↑
  7. Ibid., 3. ↑
  8. Ibid., 7. ↑
  9. Ibid., 10-11. ↑
  10. Ibid., 16. ↑
  11. Macroevolution refers to large-scale evolutionary changes, such as emergence of new species and new body plans. Microevolution refers to small evolutionary changes, usually within a species. The distinction between these types of evolution is significant, though often blurred by proponents of neo-Darwinism., who assume that microevolution inevitably leads to macroevolution. As Coyne explains, “as far as we can see, macroevolution is simply microevolution extended over a long period of time” (Ibid., 236 n. 5). ↑
  12. Ibid., 22. ↑
  13. Ibid., 25, 28, 29 (original emphasis), 32. ↑
  14. It should be noted that when scientists speak of predictions based on the theory of evolution, they are not referring to future events, but future scientific discoveries. In the case of fossils, scientists predict future discoveries of past events. ↑
  15. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, 67. ↑
  16. Ibid., 81 (original emphasis), 85. ↑
  17. Ibid., 88, 96. ↑
  18. Ibid, 121 (original emphasis). ↑
  19. Ibid., 133. ↑
  20. Ibid., 136, 138. ↑
  21. Ibid., 155, 163. Coyne event admits that there are only two studies that provide evidence that females choose males with better genes. Moreover, “a fair number of studies have found no association between mate preference and the genetic quality of offspring” (Ibid., 166). ↑
  22. Ibid., 176. ↑
  23. Ibid., 182. ↑
  24. Ibid., 222, 223. ↑
  25. Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design (New York: HarperOne, 2013), xii. ↑
  26. For a visualization of this “tree,” see the nineteenth-century evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel’s depiction: http://www.biologydirect.com/content/6/1/33/figure/F6?highres=y (accessed November 29, 2013). This image appears in Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt, 4. ↑
  27. Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt, 7. ↑
  28. “During this explosion of fauna, representatives of about twenty of the roughly twenty-six total phyla present in the known fossil record made their first appearance on earth” (Ibid., 31). ↑
  29. Ibid., 8. ↑
  30. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859; repr. Cambridge, MA: HArvard University Press, 1964), 308, quoted in Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt, 23. ↑
  31. Ibid., 55, 68, 82, 88. ↑
  32. Ibid., 120. ↑
  33. Dawkins says that in this video clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjxZ6MrBl9E (accessed November 29, 2013). ↑
  34. Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt, 124. ↑
  35. Ibid., 155, 158. ↑
  36. Ibid., 180, 183. ↑
  37. Ibid., 200. Proteins have three levels of structure: the primary structure consists of chains of amino acids (polypeptides); the secondary structure consists of coiled or folded chains of amino acids; the tertiary structure consists of a number of those protein folds that form into a three-dimensional structure. ↑
  38. 15 According to William A. Dembski, “An event exhibits specified complexity if it is contingent and therefore not necessary, if it is complex and therefore not readily reproducible by chance, and if it is specified in the sense of exhibiting an independently given pattern” ( “Intelligent Design: A Brief Introduction,” in Evidence for God, ed. William A. Dembski and Michael R. Licona [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2010], 105). ↑
  39. Ibid., 219. ↑
  40. Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (New York: Free Press, 1996), 39. ↑
  41. Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt, 232. ↑
  42. Ibid., 248. ↑
  43. Ibid., 265. ↑
  44. Ibid., 349, 351 (original emphasis). ↑
  45. Ibid., 361. ↑
  46. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, 225. ↑
  47. Michael Shermer, Why Darwin Matters (New York: Owl Books, 2006, 161), quoted in Coyne, Why Evolution is True, xv. ↑
  48. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, xv. ↑
  49. Ibid., 94, 116, 233, 117. ↑
  50. Ibid., 54. ↑
  51. Ibid., 236 n. 5. ↑
  52. Ibid., 233. ↑
  53. Ibid., 70. ↑
  54. Ibid., 233. ↑
  55. “There is no reason, then, to see ourselves as marionettes dancing on the strings of evolution. Yes, certain parts of our behavior may be genetically encoded, instilled by natural selection. . . . But genes aren’t destiny” (Ibid., 230). ↑
  56. Ibid., 231. ↑
  57. From a letter to W. Graham (July 3, 1881), in The Autobiography of Charles Darwin and Selected Letters (1892; repr., New York: Dover, 1958), quoted in James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog, 5th ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009), 103-104. ↑
  58. Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt, 97. ↑
  59. William A. Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge between Science and Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 115. ↑
  60. See Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, 81-85. ↑
  61. Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt, 401. ↑