 Some Proofs of GodWhat would a logical person accept as proof of God? Would he require God Almighty to appear before him in order to acknowledge His existence? Would he apply this same criterion to everything else in life? For example, do you believe in the President of the United States? Have you ever seen him in the flesh? He might counter that you have seen his photograph, but this does not meet the original criterion. Such photos are evidence based upon other evidence. That is, you have confidence in the news media and photography. And what of George Washington of whom we have no original photographs? To believe in him requires that we depend on other evidence, primarily written documents by other men. In all practicality and fairness then, let us apply the same criterion to the proofs of God that we would to anything else in life…namely evidence that demands our belief and places upon us a responsibility. CREATION VS EVOLUTIONEither man was created by GOD with a purpose and a destiny, as the Bible declares, or he is a multifaceted complex organism accidentally and with no reason or purpose formed from non-living nothing. If the latter be true, my innermost being is revolted at the loss. In addition, self-gratification is the only value to physical life so "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die!" On the other hand, if creation is our origin, how our being rejoices with hope and life takes on real meaning beyond the animal senses. We now have a purpose for living that gives our very existence real value. Let's examine the FACTS… ENTROPYThe second law of thermodynamics states that in a closed system entropy increases1, which is to say that disorder increases or things become more disorganized. The ultimate closed system is the universe. According to many astronomers, the universe came into existence about 15 billion years ago2 out of nothing — the "Big Bang." Since then the universe has been running down, that is, it is becoming more disordered, or to say it another way, its entropy is increasing, and its energy is being irretrievably scattered, never to recover. Who wound it up? Who caused the universe to appear suddenly out of nothing? Who decreed that its constituent particles must behave in a certain fashion — so that there is such a thing as nuclear energy, atoms made of assemblages of subatomic particles, unions of atoms (chemistry), and all that? The answer is obvious. FOSSIL RECORDIf evolution (the slow process of natural selection and the transmutation of one plant or animal species into another) were true, many, many forms of transitional life should be easily found in the fossil record, but they are not. In the fossil record we find the absence of gradual evolutionary transformations, too few of "transitional" intermediates, and sudden appearances of fully formed organisms. Evolutionary biologists excuse themselves on this, and point to a claimed "incompleteness" of the fossil record. Paleontologists now regard the fossil record as adequate and complete.3 And, the missing links are still missing. LIFE FROM LIFEAll observable evidence tells us that only life begets life. Life has never been observed to come from inorganic or lifeless materials, either in nature or in the laboratory. Those who put their faith in abiogenesis (life arising from lifeless chemicals by chance) have never advanced a credible scenario to explain how this might have happened. They make a number of implicit assumptions, none of which is supported by evidence. One of these is that life in its minimal form is simple (i.e., a self-replicating molecule). But without the protections of the cell, the lifetimes of these molecules are very, very short. Second, they presume that there was a "prebiotic soup" on the early earth. Evidence should exist in the geologic record if this were so, but none exists. While there are organic chemicals in the oldest rocks, they are all remnants of living things.4 There are also theoretical objections to the "prebiotic soup." Amino acids, the building blocks of life, cannot form if there is oxygen in the atmosphere. And if there is no oxygen, there is no ozone, which filters out almost all the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation. With no ozone the lethal dose of ultraviolet is acquired by contemporary organisms in about 0.3 second; for the organic compounds required in the abiogenesis theory it would be comparable.5 Another assumption is that life emerged gradually over a long period of time. Paleontologists tell us that the fossils from the Cambrian epoch — the earliest epoch in which fossils are found — came into being very rapidly ("the Cambrian explosion"), representing at least 70 phyla6, including all of the 30 or so counted today.. This is evidence that all life, including you and me, came from the hand of the ONE Who is life.7 PROBABILITYThe probability of the origin of life by accident is beyond all reason. To illustrate probability, we may line up two objects, "A" and "B" in two orders, AB or BA. Three objects may be lined up in six different orders. (The formula for calculating the number of ways n objects can be arranged is 1×2×3×4 … ×n, called n factorial or n!.) For four objects, the number of ways is thus 24, for 5 objects it is 120 ways, for 10 it is 3,628,800, and for 15 it is a little over one trillion (1 followed by 12 zeroes, or 1012), for 20 it is a little more than 1018. Now, what is the point? A cellular enzyme molecule in a modern cell consists of a chain of some 100 to 500 amino acids, of which there are 20 or so kinds in living systems. Calculating the probability of a functional enzyme happening by chance out of the supposed "prebiotic soup" of randomly-occurring organic chemicals is more complicated than the n! used in the examples above (which assumes n kinds of items arranged n at a time), because in an enzyme there can be repeated amino acids and there are more than 20 places in the chain to put the 20 amino acids. Molecular biologist, Michael Denton, generously estimates that there is one chance in 1020 for amino acids to just happen to join up in the right order to form a simple enzyme molecule.8 Even if this did happen, we still would not have life, only a tiny part of a complete set of enzymes and DNA for a living cell. Now calculate the chances of this one enzyme molecule somehow coming together with some 100 other required different but similarly improbable enzymes at the same time and somehow being enclosed by a membrane in order to hold them all together to form a living cell: the probability is less than one in (1020)100, or one in 102000. Compare this number (102000) with the total number of atoms in the entire observable universe. Now this must be a really a mind-boggling number! It is "only" 1080, cosmologists estimate.9 So one chance in 102000 is too infinitesimally small to be imagined! Critics say "but there are billions and billions of planets out there!" Scientists are now finding that the universe is not as habitable as once thought, and that a life-friendly planet like the earth is rare indeed.10 But let us suppose for the sake of comparison that every atom in the universe is a life-friendly planet. Then the probability of life arising by chance on at least one of them is 1080 times as large, or one chance in 101920 (that is, 1 in 102000/1080). Is one chance in 101920 any more imaginable? But the critics say, "You don't calculate the probability right!" They suppose that there would be billions of simultaneous trials going on all the time, and in their theory you only have to get one molecule that self-replicates (self-replicators do exist).11 You must not base your calculation on sequential trials, they say. However, because these long-chain protein molecules do not last long unprotected, abiogenesis requires the occurrence by accident of all 100 or so enzymes, plus matching DNA or RNA (the "blueprint" molecules which contain the code for assembling the necessary enzymes), all at once, in one place, within a very complicated membrane. Therefore we believe that the probability calculation stands. THE WORD OF GODThe Bible alone is proof of the existence of God! Please read Proofs the Bible is the Word of God. THE EVIDENCE OF CHRIST IN YOUIf you are a Christian, your new spiritual birth is evidence of a living God. You have the evidence within yourself! He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself: he that believeth not God hath made him a liar; because he believeth not the record that God gave of his Son. And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. I John 5:10-11 Therefore if any man [be] in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. II Corinthians 5:17 "…Christ in you, the hope of Glory." Colossians 1:27 1 Microsoft Bookshelf 98 CD. 2 Deborah Zabarenko, "Universe to Endure and Expand Forever, Teams of Astronomers Say," Reuters News Service, Nando Times at www.nando.net, 9 Jan 1998 (quoted in Hugh Ross, "Big Bang Gets New Adjectives-Open and Hot," Facts & Faith Vol 12 No 1, 1st Quarter 1998); Hugh Ross, "Spectral Lines Don't Lie," Facts for Faith 7 (4th Quarter 2001) 3 Christopher R. C. Paul, "Adequacy, Completeness and the Fossil Record," The Adequacy of the Fossil Record. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998; M. J. Benton, M. A. Wills and R. Hitchin, "Quality of the Fossil Record Through Time," Nature No. 403, 2000 (both quoted in "Evolutionists are losing their best excuses," Facts for Faith, Quarter 2, 2000). 4 Hubert P. Yockey, "The Soup's Not On," Facts & Faith 10, no 4 (1996). 5 Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Adler & Adler, 1986, p. 262. 6 Fazale Rana, "Extinct Shell Fish Speaks Today," Connections, Vol 3, No 2 (2nd Quarter 2001) 7 John 1:1-4. 8 Michael Denton, op. cit., p. 323. 9 Encyclopædia Britannica,. "Superunification and the Planck Era," Encyclopædia Britannica CD 97, 1996. 10 Gonzales, Brownlee, and Ward, "Refuges for Life in a Hostile Universe." Scientific American, October 2001; Brownlee and Ward, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe. Copernicus, 2000. 11 Ian Musgrave, "Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations," The Talk Origins Archive at www.talkorigins.org, 21 Dec 1998.
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