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August 3, 2008
The Heavens Are Telling the Glory of God
a sermon on Psalm 19.1-6
by David C. Mauldin
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Mobile, Alabama
“The heavens are telling the glory of God.” Indeed they are. Watch a sunset.
Look up at the night sky. Poke around the beach at low tide. You will marvel at
creation. But what about science? When we probe the mysteries of the natural
order, do we find our faith shaken or affirmed? Do we find less reason for
wonder and awe or more?
I believe the natural sciences strengthen our faith and increase our wonder. The
more you know, the more you marvel. Learn enough and you may gain a new
appreciation for the wisdom, power, and goodness of God. That has been my
experience and the experience of friends in scientific fields. A couple I know
in Nashville are both doctors—he an eye surgeon and she an ob-gyn. They have
expressed to me how the elegance and complexity of the human eye and the process
of human reproduction strengthen their faith because these things tell the glory
of God.
I have never seen a good reason to set religion and science against each other.
Nor have I taken much interest in the creation versus evolution debates. Science
has always been a friend to my faith, never an adversary. I’ll tell you why.
First, my faith stands or falls on the resurrection of Jesus. Based on
historical evidence and personal experience, I am convinced God raised Jesus
from the dead and he is alive today. Because of my faith in Jesus, I trust the
Bible, and it says God created the universe. Science can never disprove the
existence of God or creation. Its methods are too limited for that. It can offer
evidence that points in one direction or the other, and the evidence I have seen
only strengthens my belief in a Creator. Science can posit theories about how
our world came to be the way it is, evolution for example. These may be more or
less accurate, but my faith doesn’t hang in the balance.
I tend to be agnostic towards theories like evolution. Maybe Darwin was on to
something, although there are scientific problems with the theory of evolution.
For example, Darwin had no idea how incredibly complex cells are. There are
problematic gaps in the fossil record. And his theory falters over the sudden
diversification of life in what scientists call the Cambrian explosion—thousands
of new species and forms in a relatively short span of time. So I’m not sure I
buy evolution, but if tomorrow someone proved it to me, I would still believe
God did it. Science is not inherently atheistic. On the contrary, it is
compatible with Christian faith. It was no accident that modern science
originated in the Christian culture of Western Europe. Unfortunately,
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philosophical naturalism (the belief that the material stuff you can see ands
touch is all that really exists) often gets smuggled in with a theory like
evolution. In other words, atheism was a faith choice someone made before doing
any science, then they claim atheism is the result of science.
The second reason science is a friend to faith: All truth is God’s truth.
Therefore truth, wherever we find it, will always fit together into a seamless
whole. Third, we must always keep in mind that scientific theories are
provisional. What is accepted without question today may be entirely discarded
tomorrow. Of course some things are fairly certain. We will not discover
tomorrow that the universe is actually much smaller than we thought. We will not
find that cells operate quite simply. Fifty years ago, the best scientific
evidence did not lend nearly as much weight to belief in a Creator as it does
today. Pity the person who gives up on God because of a theory the next
generation disproves.
All this is to say that Christians are free to go fearlessly wherever the
evidence might lead. And if the evidence points toward an intelligence behind
the universe, so much the better. Now, a quick bit of housekeeping. I am going
to throw a lot of scientific facts at you this morning, so I really need a lot
of footnotes. You can get them in the printed copy of the sermon, which will be
available early this week and later on our website. I have also listed a few
helpful references in the bulletin. These are good places to begin a scientific
inquiry. Verbal footnotes are distracting, so I will try to keep them to a
minimum. Because our time is limited, I can only hit a few of the highlights, so
I invite you to love the Lord your God with all your mind and probe further into
the natural sciences. You will be amazed.
The universe seems to have known we humans were coming. It seems to be designed
with us in mind. I have heard the following illustration from both Alister
McGrath and in Lee Strobel’s book, The Case for a Creator: Imagine you travel to
Mars and find there a biodome. In the control room are more than 30 dials, each
with a vast range of settings—thousands of possible settings for each one. Life
in the dome is only possible if every one of the dials is set precisely at one
point. And they are. Life flourishes. What would you assume? That someone set
the dials! That picture only begins to approximate the delicate balance in the
universe that makes life possible. Our universe is incredibly fine tuned.
Here are a few examples: Strobel’s book invites readers to imagine a ruler
marked off in inches, “billions upon billions upon billions of inches” [p. 131].
This ruler would stretch all the way across the universe. It would represent the
range of force strengths in nature: “with gravity being the weakest force and
the strong nuclear force that binds protons and neutrons together … being the
strongest.” What would happen if gravity were only slightly stronger, say you
moved it from its current setting by just one of those billions of inches? The
force of gravity would increase more than a billion-fold.
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Life would become impossible. Any animal larger than an insect would be crushed.
Stars would never last as long as a billion years (compare that to our sun’s
lifetime of 10 billion years). If the force of gravity were increased only a
thousand-fold (not the billion-fold increase moving the setting by one inch of
the force scale would cause) a planet with earth’s mass would be only 40 feet in
diameter. When you consider the total range of possible force strengths, gravity
had to be set at an incomprehensibly precise setting in order for life to exist.
[See Strobel, p. 131-2]
Or consider the cosmological constant, which is “the energy density of empty
space.” Based on what we know, this could have any value, positive or negative,
large or small. We would expect it to be positive and very large. But it isn’t.
It is small. And thank God it is. If it were large, matter could not have
clumped together in the early stages of the universe—no stars, no planets, no
people. If it were a large negative value, everything would have clumped
together. Again, no stars, no planets, no people. Robin Collins explains it this
way: “There’s no way we can really comprehend [how precise the cosmological
constant is tuned]. The fine-tuning has been conservatively estimated to be at
least one part in a hundred million billion billion billion billion billion.
That would be a ten followed by fifty-three zeros” [Strobel, p. 133]. Now you
may not have heard of the cosmological constant before, but Collins calls its
precision “the single greatest problem facing physics and cosmology today.” It
had to be incomprehensibly fine-tuned for life to exist, and it is.
“There are more than thirty separate physical or cosmological parameters that
require precise calibration in order to produce a life-sustaining universe” [Strobel,
p. 132]. Consider the ratio of mass between neutrons and protons. “Increase the
mass of a neutron by about one part in seven hundred and nuclear fusion in stars
would stop. There would be no energy source for life” [Strobel, p. 134]. “If the
electromagnetic force were slightly stronger or weaker, life in the universe
would be impossible” [Strobel, p. 134]. A one-percent change in the strong
nuclear force would have a catastrophic effect on the production of oxygen and
carbon in stars [Strobel, p. 131]. And oxygen and carbon are essential for life
as we know it.
When hydrogen is converted to helium, seven one-thousands of its mass becomes
energy. “Lower that value very slighty—from 0.007 percent to 0.006 percent,
say—and no transformation could take place: the universe would consist of
hydrogen and nothing else. Raise the value slightly—to 0.008 percent—and bonding
would be so wildly prolific that the hydrogen would long since have been
exhausted” [Strobel, p. 138]. Either way, life is impossible.
What I am trying to do with this barrage of facts is to give you a clue how
amazingly precise everything has to be for life as we know it to exist. Our
minds cannot fully grasp this point. The universe is so unlikely as to be
impossible … unless there is an intelligence behind it. Consider: If I had a
deck of cards and dealt myself a royal flush,
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you would be surprised, but not entirely incredulous. It is possible after all.
But what if I did it twice in a row? Three times? Ten times? The odds of my
doing so are a lot more likely than that all these parameters necessary for life
would just happen to be what they are. If I dealt three straight royal flushes,
you would never believe it was chance. You’d think I had stacked the deck.
Honestly, I would too.
So on one hand, I do believe the complexity and fine-tuning we see in the
universe point toward a Creator. You can’t prove God this way, but he seems the
most likely explanation to me. On the other hand, my faith is not based on this,
as I have said. Yours probably isn’t either. For we who have faith, this sort of
understanding should lead us to glory in God’s wisdom and power.
But wait, there’s more! So far I have only talked about physics. I also want to
give the briefest glance at astronomy.
Earth is not an ordinary planet orbiting a common star in some backwater of the
universe. We are incredibly privileged. We are in just the right place in just
the right kind of galaxy. If we were in an elliptical galaxy or an irregular
galaxy, there would probably be no safe zones for life. Too much radiation. Our
galaxy, the Milky Way, is a spiral galaxy. If we were too close to the center,
we would face danger from excessive radiation and black holes and exploding
stars. Even the arms of the spiral are dangerous. Our solar system is nestled in
a safe place between two arms. [See Strobel, p. 169]
Our sun is just the right sort of star. It gives off enough energy, but not too
much. Its lifespan is just right. We are also just the right distance from the
sun. “Too much nearer and everything on Earth would have boiled away. Much
farther and everything would have been frozen” [Bill Bryson, A Short History of
Nearly Everything, p. 247]. Our orbit is also fairly circular. If it were more
elliptical, we would have seasons of such cold and heat that life as we know it
would be impossible. The moon is also essential. The Earth is the only planet in
our solar system with a moon comparable in size to itself. The others have very
small moons relative to their own size. “Our Moon, however, is more than a
quarter the diameter of the Earth” [Bryson, p. 248]. Without our moon, “the
Earth would wobble like a dying top … The Moon’s gravitational influence keeps
the Earth spinning at the right speed and angle to provide the sort of stability
necessary for the long and successful development of life” [Bryson, p. 249].
Finally, just one point about the earth itself: Our planet has a molten interior
that acts like a big heat engine. It created the gasses necessary for our
atmosphere. It provides a magnetic field that shields us from radiation. And the
movement of plates in the earth’s crust, called plate tectonics, recycles the
ocean floor and pushes up land masses. Without the movement of plates, all land
would have worn away long ago and settled to the ocean floor. Earth would be
covered with water to a depth of 2.5 miles. [See
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Bryson, p. 248]. Considering how inhospitable the universe is to life, we had to
be in just the right place at the right time on just the right kind of planet in
just the right kind of solar system around just the right kind of sun. Explain
this how you will, I say God knew what he was doing.
One last thing you might consider: We have minds that can understand the
universe we live in. Why is that? It didn’t have to be that way. We ask
questions. We delight in discovery. We find nature beautiful. Why? Could it be
that God wants us to understand our universe so that we might understand
something of its Creator? In it we see his power, wisdom, and goodness.
Scientific discovery can hint at a Creator. Natural wonder can direct our minds
to its architect. But in order to really know God, we must look to where he has
revealed himself to us most completely, and that is in Jesus Christ—God in the
flesh.
When you look up at the sky at night and see the stars, how do they make you
feel? Do they tell you that you are small and insignificant, a mere speck of
dust on some rock out in the middle of nowhere? Or do they speak to you of your
Creator—a God of wisdom, power, and goodness, who loves you and wants you to
delight in him? If you know Jesus and have experienced his grace, you know what
the stars mean. Truly, the heavens are telling the glory of God, and the
firmament proclaims his handiwork. Amen.
rev_mauldin@yahoo.com
Further Reading
Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator (Zondervan, 2004).
ISBN: 0310240506
John Polkinghorne, The Faith of a Physicist (Fortress, 1994)
ISBN: 0800629701
Alister McGrath, Glimpsing the Face of God (Eerdmans, 2002)
ISBN: 0802839800
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (Broadway Books, 2003)
ISBN: 0767908171
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