Thought for the week: How did this world come into being?
Renowned American biologist Edwin Conklin once said: “The probability of life originating from an accident is comparable to the probability of the 'Unabridged Dictionary' resulting from an explosion in a printing factory.”
While many glibly suppose that this world came about by random chance there are dozens of features of this globe which needed to be precisely as they are for life to exist - not just life on planet earth or life as we know it, but any form of life anywhere in the entire universe.
The BBC website for children on science tantalisingly says: “At the Big Bang, the ingredients of the Universe were created - a set of numbers, called constants of nature, such as the speed of light, the strength of gravity, and the number of dimensions of space. Remarkably, these numbers seem to be just right for our Universe to contain life. If they were just a little bit different, it might quickly collapse, or not contain the right chemical elements, or stars and planets might not form. So is there a reason that we seem to have won the cosmic lottery?"
And people of faith want to say: ‘Yes’! There is a reason, and that reason is God! Vince Vitale puts it this way: “Imagine you take out a deck of cards and start playing poker with your best friend. And in the first 12 rounds, she gets 12 straight royal flushes. (That would be like winning the lottery 12 times in a row!). What should we think? She’s cheating!
Why? Because it’s so incredibly unlikely for someone to get 12 straight royal flushes just by chance that someone must be messing with the cards, and yet, if the start of the universe had been just the slightest bit stronger or conditions a tiny bit different, particles would have disappeared into thin air. They would have dispersed so quickly and wound up so far from each other that all we could have got would have been cold, simple molecules, nothing like the sort of complex chemistry required for any embodied form of life.
Christians contend this universe is anything but the result of randomness. Someone ordered the cards. Someone designed the universe and if that is the case we cannot just shrug our shoulders and say: "So what!"
Romans Chapter 1 v 20 says: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse!”