Decades of intellectual atheism peaked with Richard Dawkins’ 2006 book ‘The God Delusion’. The pro-evolutionary biologist argued that the creationist idea of a universal deity behind the design of the Universe is undermining the education of ‘proven scientific facts’ such as the evolution of species. His point was that Creationism is a metaphysical philosophy which has passed its purpose of helping us understand our place in the Universe. Dawkins, considered ‘the most famous atheist alive’, recently mentioned that while evolutionary Biology has ‘superseded’ Creationism, the Multiverse theory of physicist Stephen Hawking is now delivering the coup de grâce. Propounding how an almost infinite number of universes coexisted simultaneously, Stephen Hawking wrote in his 2010 book ‘The Grand Design’ that our Universe is one in billions, having the suitable physical laws and conditions for life, thereby ‘logically’ resulting in its emergence: a matter of cosmo- logical randomness on an unimaginable scale of repetition. Stephen Hawking has become the Charles Darwin of Physics and Cosmology.
Homo Habilis, our ancestor?
Since the publication of Darwin’s book ‘On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection’ in 1859, evolutionists have failed to concretely explain how the Homo genus contains a diverse plethora of primates still in existence today: apes, gorillas, baboons, etc. Why and how did these ‘distant cousins’ defy the evolutionary process of ape-to-humans? Or should we instead regard the Homo Habilis, Homo Erectus and the Neanderthals as primitive and extinct primates having no evolutionary link to us? The evolutionists have countered this with the DNA argumentation that we share more than 98% of DNA similarity with chimpanzees. What people should understand is that DNA is a universal cellular entity which we even share with plants. The DNA of a man and a banana for example is 50% similar. Humans share DNA, which are the building-blocks of chromosomes, with any other living organisms. To argument that DNA similitude is an evolutionary fact would be as misleading as concluding we have ‘evolved’
from stone because we share atoms with them. The ‘prehistoric’ fish called Coelacanth which lived in the Cretaceous period was thought to have gone extinct 60 million of years ago. The fish was howe- ver rediscovered in 1938 in the Indian Ocean, having sustained no evolutionary metamorphosis and remaining identical to the 100 million years old fossils of its ancestors. Evolutionists have since explained that the Coelacanth had stopped evol- ving. This echoes the obscu- rantism for which creationists are vilified by evolutionists. Charles Darwin confessed that ‘to suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light…could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree’. If the inimitability of the eye cannot be explained through evolutionary mutation, how can it explain the outcome of the formidable cognitive and self-conscious brain? Today Science has demonstrated that mutation is a degenerative process bringing chaos to order and
not the other way.
A Universe out of Nothing?
The fundamental question of Cosmology has been where does the Universe come from. In ‘The Grand Design’ Stephen Hawking answers that ‘because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing’. Can something spring out of nothing? For over a thousand years, Astronomy and Cosmo- logy have constantly evolved and reshaped their understanding. From Ptolemy’s 2nd century geocentric belief of an Earth-centered worldview, to the heliocentric Sun-centered ‘universe’ of 16th century thinking through Galileo, we slowly discovered how our ‘universe’ was in fact a solar system. Up until the 1910’s the prevailing vision was that our galaxy the Milky Way was all the Universe contained. Edwin Hubble would discover in 1922 the existence of other galaxies, thereby expanding our cosmological vista. The idea of an eternal universe would be upheld for decades by the scientific community, before Stephen Hawking’s Big Bang Theory proved that the Universe did have a beginning in time. The theory now explains how 14 billions years ago, a compressed singularity, a millionth time smaller than a grain of sand, contained everything. And it happened that this primal ‘atom’ exploded, releasing everything that will make stars and galaxies across millions of light years. What caused this inflation is the question no cosmologist is able to answer today. Or should we ask who triggered it?
Where does God come from?
We know today that the Universe is a closed bubble: everything within is confined to it, whether space or time. As we go deeper into the subatomic world, matter disappears into quarks. What we understand as matter or anything that exists, is in fact the energy field distributed between these quarks. The Newtonian law stating that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but only change form can be illustrated by picturing the Universe as an immense sea. The creation of an object can be likened to a rising wave and when the object is destroyed, it is only the wave receding and disappearing. Nothing is essentially created or destroyed therefore, since our whole Universe is a gigantic pool of constantly-transforming energy.
The process of birth and death of anything within the Universe is simply therefore a change of shape and form. But philosophically, we should hereby understand that the laws governing these two phenomenons are themselves confined to our Universe. Therefore to ask the question ‘who created God?’ is nonsensical, in the sense that ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ are components and fabrics of what makes the Universe we live in.To ask ‘who created God?’ is to infer a creative process from within to an entity outside of it. It would be similar to a painting questioning in how many brushstrokes was its Artist created.
Why is the Universe that big?
People ask if God meant to create Man as the metaphysical center of the Universe, then why create the immense galactic phenomena of billions of stars which have no apparent connection with humans? Firstly, in the same way the ecosystem of life on Earth requires the existence of a plethora of living organisms
where we humans fit in without apparent connection, the galactic ecosystem requires for the Universe to have comets, asteroid belts, planets, novas and supernovas in addition to stars and galaxies.
Secondly, the Universe is really the nutshell for an almost infinite probabilities of life emerging. We can be certain that across the millions of galaxies out there, there are as many planets with the suitable conditions for life. And if randomness and natural selection can lead to the emergence of life from nothing, then our Universe should be a budding cosmopolitan of exotic and intelligent life forms. For decades now, not a single direct or indirect interstellar signal has been detected with Earth’s radio-telescopes. Changing instruments, NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope analyzed recently the heat emission from a catalog of 100,000 promising stars chosen from millions. The idea was the detection of heat (mid-infrared wavelength) strongly related to possible technological activities. Nothing was detected. The purpose of a gigantic Uni- verse is to be the proof that however immense the pool of randomness is and however big the statistical possibility for life to be, life can only happen if there is a Grand Designer behind it.
