Scientific Evidence of God

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Section I

A full course on the reasons, evidence, and plain logic that point to the Creator, moving from the beginning of the universe to the fine-tuning of creation, the information written in the cell, the fossil record, the origin of life, and the witness of conscience and reason. Each section is a reading with a short check. Enter your name as it should appear on your certificate, then begin.

Section II

Reading

Rewind to the Beginning
Who Created God?
The Universe Had a Beginning
The Fine-Tuning of Creation
The Information in the Cell
Irreducible Complexity and Design in Living Things
The Fossil Record and the Flood
Life Cannot Come From Non-Life
The Witness Within: Conscience, Reason, and the Moral Law

1. Rewind to the Beginning

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Let's rewind to the beginning. The Big Bang is called the standard model, and the standard model has problems. Start with the one that matters most: for a claim to count as science, it has to be observable. If it is not observable, it is not science. And we have never observed a violation of the laws of thermodynamics — except in one kind of case, which we will come to.

Take entropy. Left alone, things become simpler, not more complex. Picture a decaying building where a crack happens to look a little like a smiley face. That crack will not slowly become a more detailed face; it will fade, because it was never intended, just coincidence in the decay. But if you come back and the face is sharper, more defined, you know someone has been there chiseling. Mountains crumble, the earth is winding down, the sun is winding down. Nothing left to itself becomes more complicated. That is observable science.

The same test applies to evolution between kinds — a fish becoming a monkey, a monkey becoming a man. It has never been observed. Darwin himself set the standard: if monkeys became humans, there should be millions of skeletons of all the steps in between. We have millions of monkey skeletons and millions of human skeletons, and not the millions of in-between skeletons his own theory requires. By his own reasoning, the theory fails.

Now back to the beginning. If the universe was once a state of nothingness, or stillness, there is no reason for nothing to explode for no reason. That has never been observed. And if you answer, "Maybe pressure built up," then that pressure is energy, and energy has to come from somewhere. Things cannot sit pressurized for all eternity and then, countless eons later, decide for no logical reason to blow.

This is usually where people start reaching. They will say, "Maybe it didn't start with a bang; maybe it was a series of bangs and contractions, a wave that has always been going." But that is against science too. We have never observed a force of energy without an initiation and a depreciation — every wave has a start and a finish. So even if we are somewhere in the middle of a wave, the wave itself began. However far you rewind, you arrive at an origin. That is observable, and that is unarguable.

So here is the one exception. The laws of thermodynamics have never, ever been observed to be violated — except by the intervention of a self-conscious entity. The chiseled face on the decaying wall is the proof: order and complexity appearing against the flow of entropy is the signature of a mind at work. And the laws of thermodynamics make it absolutely impossible for the origin of everything to have started on its own. The only observed cause that ever produces that kind of beginning is a self-conscious entity.

2. Who Created God?

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"Who created God?" Notice what happens the moment someone asks it. They have stepped into the God-believing conversation. You cannot ask about the origin of something you say does not exist. If I deny there is a distant star and then, once convinced it is there, ask how it got there, I am now talking about a star that exists. The question about origins comes after existence is established, not before.

Second, if a rule of logic is true, it has to be true across the board. If "who created God?" counts as an argument against God existing, then "who created the universe?" counts as an argument against the universe existing. Which in turn is stating that the universe existing is evidence of a Creator. If you say the universe doesn't need a Creator, then you also must say that a Creator doesn't need a Creator either; otherwise your logic is one-sided and therefore false. The argument defeats itself.

Third, and most important: the question is not even connected to the point. Whether God was created, was not created, or who created Him has nothing to do with whether He exists. Hold up a computer mouse. Who created this mouse? Whether you know, whether you don't, whether it was made or popped into being, has no bearing on the fact that the mouse is sitting in your hand. There is a technique in psychology where someone throws out a point you can't answer, hoping you will conclude that some other, unrelated point must therefore be false. Don't be tricked by it. "Who created the mouse?" cannot make the mouse disappear.

For what it is worth, from what we know of God there is no creator of God, because God stands outside of time and made time. You can argue about that if you like, but it is a pointless argument, because it proves and disproves nothing about whether God exists.

What we do know is this. We have existence. It is scientifically impossible for existence not to have had an origin, and it is scientifically impossible for that origin to have started on its own, because that would violate the laws of thermodynamics — which have never been observed violated except by the intervention of a self-conscious entity. So it is scientifically impossible for there not to be a God.

That conclusion has support from an unexpected direction. Many astrophysicists studying string energy have found patterns that match computerized code, which is why a large number of scientists today take simulation theory seriously. But simulation theory is belief in a developer of the simulation: belief in a God by another name. And it is worth remembering that the greatest contributors to science in history, Darwin and Einstein among them, were believers in God. Those who deny God do not hold the high ground of scientific history; still, that point is beside the argument, so set it aside.

Stay on the point that stands: a beginning without a self-conscious entity is not observable science, and so it is not science. Every recorded violation of the laws of thermodynamics has had a self-conscious entity behind it. Anyone who insists reality began without one has stepped outside of science. There is no profit in arguing with someone who wants to play around with that. Lay the argument down and move forward with those who are intelligent and humble enough to follow the evidence.

3. The Universe Had a Beginning

I want to take the point we settled at the start and put it under the strongest light we have. We said that however far you rewind, you arrive at an origin. That is not a religious slogan I am asking you to accept because I said it. It is the plain reading of what men who never intended to help the Bible have measured with their own instruments.

Begin with the expanding universe. When astronomers turned their telescopes on the distant galaxies, they found that the light coming from them is stretched, shifted toward the red end of the spectrum, and the farther away a galaxy is, the more stretched that light is. Everything is moving apart. Now run the film backward. If everything is spreading out, then yesterday it was closer together, and the day before that closer still, and if you keep rewinding you do not arrive at an eternal universe sitting comfortably forever. You arrive at a moment when it was not spreading yet. You arrive at a beginning. Men did not want that conclusion; the measurements gave it to them anyway.

Now bring in the second law of thermodynamics, which we handled in our first lesson. Usable energy is running down. The sun is burning through its fuel and will not burn forever. Heat spreads out and never gathers itself back up on its own. Order decays into disorder. Here is what that means for the age of things: if the universe had been here forever, the fuel would already be spent, the heat would already be evenly spread, and there would be no sun burning over your head this morning and no fire left anywhere. The candle is still burning, therefore the candle was lit. That is not complicated. And remember the one exception we established: the only cause ever observed to run against that downward flow is the intervention of a self-conscious entity. The beginning itself is that exception, and no other exception has ever been recorded.

Then there is the cosmic background radiation. There is a faint, even heat spread across the whole sky in every direction, the leftover warmth of a universe that was once unimaginably hot and has been cooling ever since. Cooling means it had a temperature to cool from. A room that is cooling was heated. That radiation is the ash of the fire, and ash testifies to a fire, and a fire testifies to a lighting.

So now put the pieces on the table together. The galaxies are flying apart, the fuel is running down, and the warmth of the beginning is still faintly measurable in every direction. Three independent lines, and all three say the same thing: this universe is not eternal. It began.

And once you have granted a beginning, you cannot avoid the next step, and here is why. Whatever begins to exist has a cause. Nobody argues with that principle anywhere else in life. If you hear a knock at your door, you do not say the knock knocked itself. If a building appears on an empty lot, you do not credit the lot. You look for who did it. A beginning without a cause is not something anyone has ever observed even once, in a laboratory or out of it. So the universe began; therefore the universe has a cause; and that cause cannot be part of the universe it caused, cannot be made of the matter it brought into being, cannot be inside the time it started. It must be outside all of it, and powerful, and personal — because a decision to begin is the act of a will, not the behavior of dust.

Now hear how the Scripture said it long before a telescope existed. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Not, in the beginning the heaven and the earth were already there. In the beginning. The Word of God opens by asserting exactly what the evidence finally caught up to. And Hebrews puts the mechanism plainly: Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear. What you see did not come from what you can see. It came from the word of a God you cannot see.

So do not let anyone tell you that faith is believing without evidence. The evidence is stretched light, spent fuel, and lingering warmth, and all of it points backward to a door that was opened from the other side. The heavens themselves have a birthday, and Someone was there before it.

4. The Fine-Tuning of Creation

Having settled that the universe began, we come to the next question, and it is a heavier one than most people expect. It is not only that this universe exists. It is that this universe is set. Adjusted. Dialed in. And the more carefully men measure it, the more uncomfortable the numbers become for anyone who wants to believe nobody did it.

Consider the constants of physics. Gravity has a strength, and it is not a strength it had to have. Make it slightly stronger and stars burn hot and die fast, collapsing before anything could live around them. Make it slightly weaker and matter never gathers into stars at all; you get a thin cold fog spread across nothing forever. The strong nuclear force, the one holding the center of every atom together, has a value too. Adjust it a hair down and only the simplest atom holds together, and you have a universe of hydrogen and no chemistry, no carbon, no water, no body. Adjust it a hair up and the hydrogen fuses away early and the stars have nothing to burn. The cosmological constant, the number governing how the whole thing expands, is balanced so finely that the smallest deviation either flings everything apart before a galaxy can form or crushes everything back together. These are not conveniently wide ranges. These are knife edges. And there are dozens of them, and every single one is standing on its edge at the same time.

Now come home from the stars and look at where you are sitting. This earth is not merely somewhere; it is somewhere particular. Move it nearer the sun and the oceans boil off. Move it farther and the water locks into ice and stays there. It sits in the narrow band where water can be liquid. It turns at a rate that keeps one face from roasting and the other from freezing. It carries a magnetic shield that turns aside radiation that would otherwise strip the air away, and an atmosphere with just enough oxygen to burn fuel in your blood without setting the whole world alight.

And then there is the moon. It is a strange thing, unusually large for a planet our size, and it does work for us. It steadies the tilt of the earth so the seasons stay in their courses instead of tumbling wildly. It pulls the tides that stir the oceans and keep the shallows alive. Take the moon out of the sky and this is a very different and far less habitable world. God said He made the lesser light to rule the night, and it is ruling still, and doing more for us than most people ever consider when they look up.

Then look at water itself, which we handle every day without wonder. Almost everything in creation contracts and grows denser as it cools. Water does that, and then near freezing it turns around and expands, so ice floats. Because ice floats, lakes and seas freeze on the top and stay liquid underneath, and life survives the winter. Had water behaved like nearly every other substance, the oceans would have frozen from the bottom up and stayed frozen. Water dissolves more substances than anything else we know, which is why it can carry nourishment through a body. It holds heat so well that it moderates the climate of a whole planet. One substance, and it is exactly the substance life requires.

Here is the plain reasoning, and I want you to hold it firmly. When you walk into a room and find a piano tuned, you do not conclude that the strings tightened themselves. Tuning is not what strings do on their own; strings go slack. A tuned instrument implies a tuner. That is not a leap of faith, that is ordinary intelligence. And this universe is not one string in tune. It is every string, on every instrument, in the whole orchestra, held at pitch together — and when men hear the music they are asked to believe there was no hand on the tuning pegs.

Some try to escape it by saying there must be countless other universes, and we simply happen to live in the one that worked. Notice what has happened. To avoid one Creator whom nobody has seen, they have proposed an infinite number of universes nobody has seen, none of them observable, none of them testable. That is not science, by the very standard we set in our first lesson. It is a faith, and a more expensive faith than ours.

The Scripture told us the purpose behind the tuning. Isaiah says of the Lord, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am the LORD; and there is none else. He did not scatter matter and hope. He formed it to be lived in. And so David could look up with no instrument but his eyes and say, The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. They are still declaring it. Every constant is a note, and the whole creation is singing on key, and the Lord Jesus Christ, by whom all things consist, is holding the pitch.

5. The Information in the Cell

We have looked out at the stars. Now I want you to look down, into yourself, into a single cell so small that a line of them across the head of a pin would still leave room. What men found when they finally got instruments fine enough to see inside is, to my mind, the most devastating discovery science has ever handed to unbelief. Inside that cell they did not find simple jelly. They found writing.

DNA is a code. I am not speaking poetically. It is a code in the strict and technical sense, with an alphabet of four chemical letters arranged in a precise order along a long molecular strand. Those letters are read three at a time, and each group of three is a word specifying which building block to add next as a protein is assembled. There is a signal that says start and a signal that says stop, exactly as a sentence has a capital and a period. And the meaning does not come from the chemistry of the letters. Any letter can sit next to any other letter; the strand does not care. The meaning is in the sequence, and sequence is not chemistry. It is information laid upon chemistry, precisely the way the meaning of this page is not in the ink.

Then there is the matter of error correction. Copying is where information goes wrong, and living cells copy this code constantly. So the cell carries proofreading machinery: molecular systems that run along the strand, find a letter placed wrongly, cut it out, and put in the right one. Think about what error correction requires. To correct an error, a system must already possess the standard of what is correct, and must be built to compare the copy against that standard, and must have the tools to repair it. A system that can proofread itself is not an accident of chemistry. Nobody has ever seen spilled ink write a page, much less spilled ink that checks its own spelling.

And the code is not idle; it runs a factory. Inside that cell there are machines that read the instructions, machines that carry raw material to the assembly floor, machines that fold the finished product into exactly the shape it must have or it is useless, machines that tag the waste and haul it away, and a system of rotary motors that generate the power for all of it. There are transport tracks with walking motors that step along them carrying loads. There is a gate on the wall that checks what comes in and what goes out. If you saw that on a factory tour, you would ask who designed the line. It is a factory the size of a speck of dust, and it builds copies of itself, which is a thing no factory of ours has ever managed.

Now here is the principle I want written on your heart, and I want you to test it against everything you have ever seen. Information always comes from a mind. Every single time, without one exception in all human experience. Wind and water can carve a canyon, but wind and water have never written a sentence in the sand. Frost makes beautiful patterns on a window, but frost has never left a message. When explorers find marks on a cave wall that spell something, no one says erosion did it; they say a person was here. We deduce a mind from information without hesitation in every other field of investigation — archaeology, cryptography, forensics, the search for signals from distant stars. Men would call a coded radio signal from space proof of intelligence, while insisting that a coded chemical library inside every cell of their own body proves nothing at all. That is not a conclusion from evidence. That is a decision made in advance.

And notice how much information we are speaking of. The code in one human cell, written out in ordinary letters, would fill a shelf of thick volumes, and there is a copy in nearly every one of your trillions of cells, and it was small enough to fit in a single fertilized cell at your beginning. That is a library packed into a point, and it is written in a language, and languages have authors.

David never held a microscope, and yet he wrote what the microscope confirmed. I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well. Fearfully and wonderfully. He goes further, and it is almost startling how exactly he says it: Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them. Written in a book, before there was one of them. Three thousand years before anyone learned to read the letters in a cell, the Holy Ghost told David that God wrote him down first and built him afterward.

So when you look at your own hand, understand what you are looking at. You are not looking at an accident. You are reading a document written by the Lord Jesus Christ, by whom all things were made, and every cell in that hand is holding the manuscript.

6. Irreducible Complexity and Design in Living Things

We have seen that the cell is written. Now I want to show you how the cell's products are assembled, because there is a difficulty here that has never been answered, and once you see it plainly you will never unsee it.

The theory of gradual development requires that every complicated living machine was built one small step at a time, and that each step along the way had to work well enough to be worth keeping. Nothing is preserved that does not function. So the question is not whether a thing is complicated. The question is whether it could have functioned in a partial state. And there are machines in the body that simply cannot.

Take the eye, which Darwin himself confessed gave him a cold shudder. It is not a lens. It is a lens, and a variable opening to control the light, and a curved layer of light-sensitive cells laid out in order, and a chemical cascade inside those cells that converts a particle of light into an electrical signal, and a nerve bundle carrying that signal, and a region of the brain that can interpret the signal as an image, and muscles to aim it, and a tear system to keep it clear. Now ask honestly: what is the survival value of a lens with no retina behind it? What good is a retina with no nerve to the brain? What good is a signal arriving at a brain with no capacity to read it? Each part is useless, or worse than useless, until the others are present. The pieces have no value except together.

Take the little motor that drives certain bacteria. It is a rotary engine, and I mean that literally: it has a drive shaft, a bushing set in the cell wall, a rotor, a stator, and a long whip-like propeller, and it spins at astonishing speed and can stop and reverse direction in a fraction of a turn. Men who study it draw it as an engineering diagram, because that is what it is. Remove the propeller and you have a motor turning nothing. Remove the drive shaft and the rotor spins uselessly. Remove the bushing and it tears the wall. It is a machine of many matched parts, and it does not partly work; it either turns or it does not.

Or take the clotting of blood, which is quieter but just as striking. When you cut yourself, a chain of proteins activates in a precise order, each one triggering the next, until a mesh forms and seals the wound, and then another set of factors tells it to stop so the clotting does not run through your whole body. Leave a step out of the cascade and you bleed to death from a scratch. Leave the stop signal out and the clot spreads until it kills you. The system needs the whole sequence, in order, with its brakes installed, on the very first day it is needed — because the animal that is still developing the second half of the cascade does not live to pass anything on.

Here is the principle. A machine that does not work until all its parts are present cannot be built one piece at a time by a process that only keeps what works. That is not a religious objection; it is a logical one. If you set a mousetrap on the table and take away the spring, you do not have a trap that catches fewer mice. You have a piece of wood. Blind chance has no foresight; it cannot stockpile parts for a hundred generations while waiting for the last piece to arrive, because nothing preserves a useless part. And chance certainly cannot hold a plan in mind, because chance has no mind to hold it in.

I know the standard reply: that the parts had other jobs first and were later borrowed for this one. Consider what that answer actually requires. It requires that parts built for other purposes happened to be the right size, the right shape, the right strength, and the right chemistry, and happened to be present in the same place at the same moment, and happened to be assembled in the right order by machinery that also had to arise, all so that a working engine would appear. Borrowing parts does not remove the need for an assembler. Take every component of a wristwatch out of watches that already existed, throw them on the ground, and see if the hands begin to move. The parts were never the miracle. The arrangement is the miracle.

So what shall we say? That the living world is full of machinery whose every part testifies against the idea that no one arranged it. Paul was not looking through a microscope when he wrote it, but he wrote it exactly right: For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse. Clearly seen. Understood by the things that are made. And notice how the verse ends, because it is the whole weight of this lesson: without excuse. The evidence is not obscure. It is inside your own eye while you read this page.

7. The Fossil Record and the Flood

In our first lesson we noted Darwin's own standard: if one kind slowly became another, the ground should be crowded with in-between forms. Let us go down into that ground and see what is buried there, because the rocks have long been read, and they do not say what people were told they say.

Start with the lowest layers holding an abundance of animal life. Men expected a gentle ramp: simple things first, then a slow widening into the great categories of life. What they found instead is often called an explosion, and the word is honest. Suddenly, in that band of rock, nearly all the major body plans appear at once — creatures with eyes already formed, with jointed limbs already working, with nervous systems, gills, guts, and armor — fully formed, fully functional kinds, with no long line of ancestors beneath them. Darwin knew about this and admitted it was a serious objection to his view, and he hoped that future digging would fill the gap. The digging has gone on for well over a century in every continent, and the gap has not filled. It has widened, because now we have found more fully formed creatures in that layer, not more in-between ones.

And the same pattern holds all the way up. Fish appear as fish. Bats appear as bats, with wings finished. Turtles appear with shells complete. The famous transitional forms of the schoolbooks are a handful of disputed candidates, argued over among the specialists themselves, several of them quietly withdrawn after years of celebration. Where are the millions? A theory that requires innumerable gradual steps, and produces a museum case of debated exceptions, has been refuted by its own prediction.

Now let us ask a question people rarely ask: how does a fossil form at all? Watch what actually happens when a creature dies in a field or a lake. It is eaten. What is not eaten rots, and what does not rot is scattered and weathered until nothing is left. Slow burial does not make fossils; slow burial makes disappearance. To fossilize a creature you must bury it fast, deep, and completely, sealing it off from air and scavengers under a weight of sediment. And that is exactly the condition the fossil beds testify to. We find fish fossilized in the act of swallowing other fish. We find creatures preserved with their soft parts, curled as if convulsed, in enormous graveyards where thousands of animals are jammed together and sorted by the flow of water. We find great beds of shellfish closed tight, which is what they do when buried alive. These are not the remains of quiet centuries. These are scenes of catastrophe.

Then look at the rock itself. Vast stacks of sedimentary layers, laid down by water, stretch across whole continents — the same sequence of layers found on opposite sides of an ocean, with sharp boundaries between them and no sign of the long ages of erosion and root growth that should mark the top of any surface exposed for millions of years. In many places the layers are bent and folded like cloth without cracking, which soft, wet sediment will do but hardened stone will not, telling us the whole stack was still soft when it was pushed. We find trees standing upright through many layers at once, which cannot happen if those layers took ages to accumulate; the tree would rot long before the burial finished. Marine fossils lie on the tops of high mountains. The water was over everything, and it left the receipt.

And there is a witness of another kind. Go among peoples who never met one another, on islands and in jungles and on the high plains, and you will hear one story in many tongues: a great flood that covered the world, a warning given, a family and animals preserved in a vessel, birds sent out to test the water, a landing on a mountain. Hundreds of such accounts have been collected. Men do not invent the same memory independently. A shared story on every continent points back to a shared event the fathers of every nation carried away with them.

The Word of God tells the event plainly. In the days of Noah, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened — water from beneath as well as above, which is exactly the kind of upheaval those graveyards and continental layers demand. And then, the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Under the whole heaven. That is not a local river rising.

Peter tells us that men would refuse to see this, and that their refusal would be a choice, not an oversight. For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished. Willingly ignorant. The stones are shouting, the whole earth is layered with the evidence of the judgment, and men walk over it every day and say nothing happened. Do not be among them. The God who judged the world once by water has said He will judge it again, and He has always given warning first.

8. Life Cannot Come From Non-Life

Every argument about origins arrives at one doorway, and nobody has walked through it. Grant, for the sake of discussion, a universe, a planet, water, and chemicals. You still have a rock with a puddle on it. Nothing in that inventory is alive. And the question that will not go away is how you get from chemistry to life.

For most of history men assumed life sprang up on its own from decaying matter — maggots out of meat, mice out of stored grain. Careful experiments ended that assumption. When the flask was sealed against contamination, nothing appeared. When it was opened, life came in from outside. Out of that work came what is called the law of biogenesis: life comes only from life. It is one of the most thoroughly tested conclusions in all of biology. Every observation ever made supports it, and not one observation contradicts it. Now here is what I want you to notice. The same men who insist that we must never accept what has not been observed will ask you to believe the one thing that has never been observed even once, and to believe it as settled fact. Life from non-life is not an established finding. It is an exception demanded by a philosophy.

They have tried in the laboratory, and the attempts are worth knowing honestly. The famous textbook experiment passed electricity through a mixture of gases and produced a few simple building blocks — some amino acids, in a sludge. The difficulties are severe. The gases were chosen to make the reaction work and are not what most now believe the early atmosphere held; put oxygen in and nothing forms, leave it out and there is no ozone, so radiation destroys what does form. The products had to be trapped and removed at once, because the same energy that made them breaks them down. And the amino acids came out in both mirror-image forms mixed together, while life requires them all of one handedness, and no natural process sorts them. After seventy years, the honest summary is that we have made some bricks under carefully arranged conditions and are no nearer to a house.

Then there are the odds. Take just one modest protein of a hundred and fifty links, each link chosen from twenty possible kinds and each needing the correct handedness and the correct type of bond. The number of ways to arrange it wrongly is so vast that if you converted every atom in the observable universe into a laboratory and let each one try a new arrangement every fraction of a second for the entire supposed age of the universe, you would still not expect to stumble upon one working sequence. And one protein is not a living cell. The simplest independently living cell known needs hundreds of different proteins, all present together, plus the coded instructions to build them, plus the machinery to read the instructions — and the machinery is itself made of proteins built from those instructions. The code needs the machine and the machine needs the code. Chance is not a small explanation here. Chance is no explanation at all.

Now let me take the reasoning we used earlier about the simulation and stretch it one more step, because it fits here exactly. We said that men who look at the deep structure of reality and find it patterned like code end up proposing a developer, which is belief in a God under another name. Follow that through. A program needs a programmer. Nobody has ever seen code write itself. Nobody has ever seen a machine assemble itself out of parts it had to build using instructions it had to write first. And in the cell, as we saw, we have exactly that: a written code, running on machinery, correcting its own errors, and manufacturing the very components that read it. If men are willing to conclude a developer from patterns in physics, they cannot refuse the same conclusion when the code is far more explicit and sits inside every living thing on the planet. The logic must go both ways or it is not logic.

Here is the plain matter at the bottom of it. Life is not merely complicated chemistry. You can assemble every chemical of a body in exactly the right proportions in a vessel and you will not have a living creature; you will have a paste. Something must be given that chemistry does not contain. Scripture says what it is: God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. The dust was necessary and the dust was not sufficient. The breath had to come from outside.

John states the source without hesitation. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. In Him was life. Not in the chemicals, not in the lightning, not in the warm pool. Life was in the Lord Jesus Christ before there was anything living to receive it, and it came out from Him into the creation, and it comes out from Him still into every soul that is born again. The world is looking for the origin of life in a puddle. It is standing in a Person.

9. The Witness Within: Conscience, Reason, and the Moral Law

We have spent this course looking outward at the heavens and downward into the cell. Now I want to turn the lamp on the one doing the looking, because there is evidence inside you that you carry everywhere. Begin with something so ordinary that people miss its weight. Two plus two is four. It was true before there were men to say it. Now tell me where it is. Weigh it. It has no mass, no location, no temperature; you cannot put the number four in a jar. Yet it is no opinion in your head, for if you decide it is five, the bridge falls down.

The same goes for the laws of logic. A statement cannot be both true and false in the same way at the same time, and that rule governs every argument ever made, including the argument of the man who denies God, who cannot reason one sentence without it. But it is not a chemical, and it did not evolve. The conclusion is inescapable: reality is not only matter. Immaterial things are real and universal, and they govern the physical world without being part of it. Grant that, and the objection that God cannot exist because He is not matter collapses, for the man raising it uses immaterial laws to raise it.

And where do such laws come from? Laws of thought are what minds produce, not what dust produces. If reality is founded on rationality — and every scientist assumes it is — then rationality was there before us. That is what Scripture says: God is Spirit, not matter, and creation was framed by His Word. We do mathematics on paper and find the stars obeying it, because the universe was made by a rational mind and we were made in the image of that mind. That is a family resemblance.

Now come to the second witness, and it is louder. A moral law is written on the human heart, and every man knows it, including men who deny it. Watch the person who says right and wrong are only social customs when he is himself robbed or betrayed. He does not say, how interesting, a different custom. He says, that was wrong. Or consider murder. Go to any culture in any century on any continent, and you will not find one that honored the murder of the innocent within its own community. They differ about who counts as innocent and about penalties, but nobody ever taught that treachery is beautiful and kindness contemptible. Those are disagreements about boundaries, laid on a moral law everywhere the same. If each tribe invented morality, we would find societies built on the opposite values. There are none. A law binding all men and standing above all men did not come from men. It came from the Lawgiver.

Paul stated it exactly. The Gentiles who never had the law do by nature the things contained in the law, Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness. Written in their hearts, not learned from a book they never had. Your conscience is a witness stand in your chest, and God put it there.

Gather the whole course into one armful. The universe began, and whatever begins has a cause. The constants stand on knife edges, and a tuned instrument implies a tuner. The cell is written in a code that corrects its own errors, and information comes from a mind. The living machines do not work in pieces, so they were not built in pieces. The rocks remember a catastrophe. Life never comes from non-life, because a program needs a programmer. And nearest of all: reason and conscience within you, pointing to a God who is Spirit. The heavens declare, the cell declares, the conscience declares. That is no thin thread. It is a rope, and every strand holds.

Which is why Scripture is severe about unbelief: The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. Notice where he says it — in his heart, not his head. It is a decision of the will, made because a God who exists is a God to whom we must answer. So the question that ends this course is not whether the evidence is sufficient. It is. The question is what you will do about it.

Paul stood in the most educated city of his day and told them: God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands. He made every nation of one blood, that they should seek the Lord… though he be not far from every one of us. Then came the command this course has been walking toward: now commandeth all men every where to repent: Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.

The evidence of creation is not given so you can win arguments. It is given so you will repent and come to the Lord Jesus Christ, who made all things and was raised from the dead as God's assurance to every man. Do not stop at agreement. Bow your knee, confess Him, and be saved.