God's fingerprint
Have you stopped, stepped back from your busy life and had a good look at what’s around you, at nature, at yourself. Can you appreciate the marvellous design in nature, that you yourself are wonderfully made, a miracle of engineering? We tend to take the earth for granted but we live in fact in a very privileged and special place in the universe, the earth is an oasis in the desert of space, well suited to support life, it is unique as far as we know. Since Darwin’s day our knowledge of how things work has increased, research continues to highlight that all life has design of the most sophisticated order and complexity. All by some happy accident? Some incredible sequence of time and chance? That is scientifically impossible – as the old saying goes you get owt from nowt, every effect has a cause, time and chance alone are not sufficient. The ingredients to make our universe are time, space, energy/material and information. Information is needed to get things organised, moulded and structured into working systems, input of energy without direction is chaos, as per the classic example of a bull in the china shop, lots of energy and lots of chaos. Yet the universe in not chaotic, it is orderly and is restrained by laws such as gravity. Information has no substance as such in the sense of it is not matter or energy, an example of information in nature is the DNA strands in our cells, they are packed with information in the form of a self repairing, self replicating program designed to produce humans. Information can never come about by chance because it always has a purpose, an end goal, it involves an idea, a strategy, design must have a designer, and information must have a source. Where did this information originate? Also we are more than just atoms in motion, there is the outer physical man and there is also the inner man, our minds, our self self, our personality, our intelligence, where did that come from? There must be a sufficient cause for all this and if it cannot come about by chance it must have come about on purpose, logically speaking then we are left with the obvious answer, there exists a Designer of supreme intelligence.
We can look to verse one in the bible for the answer to the origin of the universe - in the beginning (time starts here) God (the source of the information), created (input of knowledge, direction to the energy) the heavens (space) and the earth (energy/matter). The Creator God is the first cause then and biblical creation means that there is a grand design, an overall plan, a meaning and purpose to your life. The bible gives a blueprint in which we can make sense of what we see, of how we got here in the first place and where we are going, it puts things into perspective. In the functional sense then the earth is the centre of the universe, the stars and planets are the supporting cast, and it is certainly no accident that the earth is so happily situated.
Though some things have the appearance of vast age, the earth is a relatively young earth, a number of things make it impossible for the earth to be more than thousands of years old, the decrease in earth’s magnetic field for instance. Records of family trees in the bible put the earth’s age at around 6000 years old. Everything in the beginning was created perfect and in harmony with itself, the earth had an extensive land mass with a seas, lakes and rivers but there were no vast oceans or mountain ranges. There was a water mantle above the atmosphere which diffused heat around the earth, and this eliminated extremes of temperature so that all the land was inhabitable. Further to this the atmospheric pressure was greater with consequent beneficial oxygen availability for life, hence plant life, animals and insects in the past were generally bigger as shown in the fossil record.
Things started going wrong when man rebelled against his Creator and He eventually overthrew the world with a global flood - “the springs of the deep burst open” and it “rained forty days and forty nights” when the water mantle that was above the atmosphere collapsed, the earth’s ice age quickly followed. The vast mountain ranges and ocean basins were formed during and shortly after the flood to accommodate the excess water. The fossils record show the effect of animals being rapidly buried, marine deposits are found on the top of the tallest mountains and frozen mammoths are found in the arctic, the earth is still very beautiful but it is a shadow of its former glory. You may have noticed that not all is quite right in the world, the law of entropy is at work, and this law applies to all systems in the universe. It came into effect the day when man rebelled against his Creator. The entropy law says that things are wearing out; things generally are breaking down and running down hill, the sun is losing its power, the moon is drifting slowly away from the earth, the earth’s magnetic field is weakening, the speed of light is decreasing, species become extinct, and the genetic pool is slowly corrupting. The universe is unwinding, like a clock that has been wound up and is let go to wind down.
Evolution offers no real solution to the design we see in the world, it contends that things only have the appearance of design and that everything is just a product of chance and time. The universe is supposed to have started with the big bang, an incredible explosion yet explosions are always destructive, not constructive, because there is energy but no direction, no harness. The evolution theory is fundamentally flawed because it cannot account for where the information came from in the first place. Natural selection can only select from what is already there, in itself it will not produce anything new, what we see is a loss of genetic information as species become extinct. Created kinds will always be created kinds because the information for say an apple is locked into the DNA sequence. With skill and trial different varieties of apple can be produced, left to themselves however they will revert back to wild crab apple. There is variation in apples, but apples will always be apples, horses horses, dogs dogs, etc, because there is no mechanism for new information to enter the DNA chain. Mutations are not new information because they are random, they cannot add to the information; the effect is either neutral or harmful (like the effects of radiation). Evolution is an upward process; this does not accord with the law of entropy.
There are many reasons why creation makes much more sense scientifically than evolution, to believe in evolution you must have blind faith and believe in spite of the observable evidence, evolution does not work scientifically. Whereas to believe in creation you need faith but it is not blind, I believe because of what I see, it fits, it makes sense scientifically and fits in with the observable evidence.
What then if we were created, what difference does it make to me, to you. It makes a difference because the Creator God is a Person, otherwise we wouldn’t have personalities either, the cause is always greater than the effect. We love because God first loved, we see, we think, we hear, we speak, because God can see, think, hear and speak. We share similar physical attributes as other animals in God’s creation; lungs, blood, muscles etc because we are designed to live in a similar environment. We are separated from other animals however because we are created in God’s image, in that sense our spirit is eternal and goes on beyond the grave. He is a rational, just and holy God, all knowing, who has demands of us, what we should do and say whilst we are on His earth, we are accountable to Him. This life is a stepping stone, a test if you like, to fashion us so that we may share in His eternity, if we disobey Him we sin, the penalty for sin is separation from God in eternity (Hell), that means an eternity of sorrow and torment “weeping and gnashing of teeth”. We all sin but fortunately for us, God is also a merciful and loving God who has had made one way that we can escape the penalty of sin, that is through his Son, Jesus Christ, only through Jesus, there is no other way. Jesus died for all of us and He has risen from the grave, He will also return to earth one day soon, this time as King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
The fact that you can see and think at all is a testament to design of the highest order but can you see the design, can you see His fingerprints in nature, they are a big clue for you to realise that there is a Creator. Sadly most people are sleepwalking through life with their minds on automatic. Its time for you to take the red pill and wake up from your dream state. Wake up and take hold of eternal life, it’s free.
