The case for God (4)

Contemplating the amazing design of our universe, physicist and Nobel laureate, Arno Penzias, tries to explain it this way: “Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe…created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life. In the absence of an absurdly improbable accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan.” Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould describes humans as “a glorious accident” of evolution that needed sixty trillion contingent events. Cosmologists estimate the earth to be 4.55 billion years old. So, to accomplish those sixty trillion events would necessitate more than thirty-six essential events a day for 4.55 billion years—just to get Homo sapiens. And conveniently, each of these thirty-six new events would have to occur in the right place, at the right time, in the right sequence. And this doesn’t take into account the astronomical number of “accidents” required to form the tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of individual ecosystems. One individual put it this way: “The odds would be better of getting hit by lightning at the moment you won the Power-ball lottery while dying in the crash of a plane that got struck by a meteor.” Dr. Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, a believer himself, describes exploring nature as “a way of getting a glimpse of God’s mind,” and observes, “All truth is God’s truth, and therefore God can hardly be threatened by scientific discoveries.” God is real, and when you reach for His help, you will get it.