A priest and an atheist were walking down the beach one morning. They came across a Rolex laying in the sand. The atheist looked at the priest and asked, “How do you think this got here.”
After a moment of deep thought the priest replied. “After hundreds of millions of years of the waves churning up the shore it just formed there for us to find.”
“Do you know how absurd that sounds?” asked the atheist.
The priest just smiled. “Yes, I do.”
I find atheism to be greatly absurd. Many atheists tend to be scientifically oriented and tell us we need to be open minded to possibility but absolutely shut down the possibility of a supreme being, an intelligent designer, a creator, let’s call him…God. Atheist scientists reject God because they cannot prove he exists yet most of what they do propose is considered theory because it also cannot be definitively proven either. The proof that Judeo-Christian religions give for the existence of God is just as sound as some of the evidence science gives for some of their theories. So let’s start at the beginning and see where this takes us.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. The earth was without form and darkness covered creation. Then God said, “Let there be light”, and there was light.
The universe emerged from an extremely dense singularity. There was an explosion of light and matter that has been expanding ever since. This is known as the “Big Bang Theory” and is widely accepted in scientific circles to be the most plausible cause for the beginning of life as we know it. Ironically, this theory was put forth by the Belgian Catholic priest, astronomer, and professor of physics Reverend Georges Lemaître. Notice that the two statements do not directly conflict with one another. It is more like two different witnesses explaining what they saw in their own way.
Then God separated the heaven from the earth and the earth was formed amid the ocean.
Science tells us that the Earth formed around 4.54 billion years ago, approximately one-third the age of the universe, by accretion from the solar nebula. Volcanic outgassing probably created the primordial atmosphere and then the ocean, but the early atmosphere contained almost no oxygen. Still no direct conflict…
Then God created the trees and the animals, birds of the air, and fish of the sea. Last God created man.
The Hadean eon represents the time before a reliable (fossil) record of life; it began with the formation of the planet and ended 4.0 billion years ago. The following Archean and Proterozoic eons produced the beginnings of life on Earth and its earliest evolution. The succeeding eon is the Phanerozoic, divided into three eras: the Palaeozoic, an era of arthropods, fishes, and the first life on land; the Mesozoic, which spanned the rise, reign, and climactic extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs; and the Cenozoic, which saw the rise of mammals. Recognizable humans emerged at most 2 million years ago, a vanishingly small period on the geological scale. Seems that science and the Bible tend to be in general agreement here.
So science tells us that everything just exploded into being from seemingly nothingness. Then gases gathered together and began to cool forming the stars and the planets and the other celestial objects. One of those planets, earth, was first a gas, then cooled to a molten solid. During that time all of the different atoms began to form and then those atoms gathered together to form molecules. Time, pressure, and heat all combined in just the right order and amount that one of these molecules began alive and was the first living single celled creature. That creature reproduced and reproduced and reproduced and eventually evolved to a new creature. This process continued until the earth was teaming with life and eventually, through evolution, man came into being.
But there is no supreme being, no intelligent designer, no God who put all of this into motion. Nature did all of this on its own. Here’s my rub with all of that…
If we were going to build anything, a house, a bridge, a giant sky scraper, the first thing we do is to create a blueprint. The blueprint tells the builder how to build the object. Life is no different. Life has a blueprint. The blueprint of life on earth is deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA. DNA is an acid, a protein structure that instructs a cell on what it is to do, replicate, live. All life on this planet contains DNA and DNA does not naturally exist outside of the cell structure. DNA itself is not alive.
We have been able to map out the human DNA genome. It is complex and genius in its structure. Like our Rolex on the beach it could not have just formed on its own and then gone on to create the cell in which it lived. It would be more plausible to say that a fetus is capable of forming its mother around it and then move on with its development.
Scientists generally agree that the genome points to an intelligent designer but atheist scientists refuse to make the jump to calling that designer God.
I was once on a flight with a woman who asked me what I thought was between the particles of an atom. I did not have an answer as I have never seen a scientific one. She said that she thought that it was God’s love and that it was his love that keeps the atom together. At the time I thought the woman was a bit bananas but the further my formation goes the more I know that she was absolutely correct.
DNA is God’s fingerprint on every single living cell. For me, it is definitive proof of the existence of God. God is love and love can never be forced. For love to exist there has to be a choice. God has given us the choice to believe in him or not and has given us enough wiggle room to logically argue ourselves out of belief.
Angels definitely know of God’s existence. For them their only choice is to serve or to revolt. There is no middle ground. Man was offered love over choice. This was the true envy of the devil.
