All the Evidence You'll Ever Need Is All Around You
“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” - Psalm 14:1
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Charles Darwin took the phrase, “survival of the fittest,” from Herbert Spencer, an English philosopher, biologist and sociologist, who, in 1882, became renowned for recognizing and articulating the five manifestations of scientific phenomena throughout all the universe as time, force, action, space, and matter.
In Genesis 1:1, the Holy Spirit reveals each of these five manifestations of reality in one verse:
“In the beginning… [time]
God… [force]
created… [action]
the heavens… [space]
and the earth.” [matter]
In the middle of the 20th century, mathematician John von Neumann conducted a thought experiment to build the perfect machine. He described it as self-propelling, self-repairing and self-reproducing. And while theoretical work continues in regards to conceiving how such a machine might be built, human capacity to actually do so remains unattainable. However, as John MacArthur recently pointed out, von Neumann was actually describing every living cell in the universe.
The engineering genius behind even a single cell in your body is so astronomically massive that it has completely baffled the greatest scientific minds for generations.
As you begin to understand the nature of creation, it begins to take on the appearance of intention, design and meaning, and not the random accidental falling out of some eons-old explosion of nothingness. Nature is constructed by layer upon layer of interwoven intricacy and precision, from gravitational forces and atomic weights and DNA to ecosystems and water cycles. The phrase “finely tuned” is both absolutely appropriate and laughably understated at the same time.
Only a person wishing to escape from God would look at the world around him and conclude that what he’s seeing was randomly self-created. Psalm 19:1 says that, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims His handiwork.” Indeed they do.
But also, of course they do. The very fact that we care about nature at all or are overwhelmed by its beauty, by the secrets of its operation, and by its unthinkable size is evidence of this truth. My dogs would not care in the slightest about a trip to the Grand Canyon and my appreciation of the wonder of that place is not simply the result of higher intelligence. If I am nothing more than a highly intelligent animal, than the Grand Canyon is nothing more than a hole in the ground.
When it comes to mankind, our sinful desires often outweigh our reason. Our own fallen natures have made us spiritually suicidal. We are surrounded by the evidence of God every day and yet we choose to believe that it all just happened to arrive here on its own.
Academic brilliance, vast intellect and encyclopedic know-how are no match for a person’s sinful desire for autonomy. Some of the greatest minds of our time look at the most obvious truth in all of reality and deny it in order to maintain the illusion of control and authority over their own lives. All of the degrees, published books, and elite universities in the world won’t keep someone from becoming a fool in the eyes of the Bible.
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