Is it Reasonable to Believe in this Scientific Age?

Introduction

Our subject this morning, during this period, belief in God, is it reasonable in this scientific age? I’m sure that everyone in this audience, if you have followed at all the news, the teachings of men, are well aware that there are lots of people in our age who believe that belief in God is antiquated, medieval, and not for folks who are informed. There has been a rather significant move in our country in the past generations, particularly since the early 1900s, to say that this cosmos and all that is in it, life in particular, can be explained without the necessity of positing God. The evolutionary theory about which we will speak the next three days of this meeting, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday evening, is practically a religion for those who become convinced by it that it explains life in all its forms and even the origin of the cosmos itself.

1. Scripture: The Testimony of the Natural World

Those who take that view believe that those of us who believe in God, and I speak very clearly this morning that I do believe in God, have not been brought up to the modern age. That’s why I ask this question. Is belief in God reasonable in our brief discussion this morning we can give some understanding of why it is that belief in God certainly still is reasonable. In fact, it is my view that we have less excuse than ever for missing that there is a God. So it will be my hope this morning in this brief discussion to be able to give some points toward that end. Let’s start with Scripture. The book of Psalms in chapter 19 declares that the testimony of the natural world is strong and powerful for the existence of God.

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, and night into night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their line has gone throughout all the earth and their words to the end of the world. Yes, the psalmist declares that one can observe the heavens, and they grant a powerful testimony, even without words that there must be a creator of what we observe. The Bible, in several passages, declares to us that the God of heaven has left the testimony of Himself not only in His Word, but in His world.

In this passage, we find the Apostle Paul and Barnabas in the midst of a group of people who are trying to make them gods. They rush in amongst them to try to make them stop. The reason they’re doing it is because of a miracle that was performed.

But verse 15 says, Men, why are you doing these things? We also are men with the same nature as you, and preach to you that you should turn from these vain things to the living God who made the heaven, the earth, the sea, and all things that are in them. Who in bygone generations allowed all nations to walk in their own ways. Nevertheless, he did not leave himself without witness, in that he did good, gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness. The apostle said the living God left a testimony of himself, a witness in the natural world that we ought to be able to see. And he said to these heathen people who worshiped idols and sometimes even other human beings, you have no business doing that.

The true and living God has left a powerful witness. Then turn with me, if you will, to Romans, or let’s go to Hebrews 11 next, chapter 11 and verse 3. Where the scripture says, By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible. Let me explain that passage briefly. What that passage says is through faith, which verse 1 says is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. God would never have us believe in him without evidence, without substance. Faith is what fills in the gaps where we cannot directly see. But he’s given us plenty of things that we can observe directly that testify of who he is.

And verse 3 says, by faith we understand the worlds were framed by the Word of God. The latter part of that verse says, the things we can now observe were not made of things which we can now observe. So what it says is the things that are now observable at one time were not, and God made them so they are.

That God in fact created the things that are visible by the power of his the breath of his mouth.

2. His Invisible Attributes Are Clearly Seen

And I’m thankful for a few minutes to talk to you about that. One other passage in the New Testament, I call your attention to in the book of Romans, chapter 1. Verse 20 says, For the since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse. Romans the first chapter in verse 20 is the biblical expression of the argument from design, which has always been the most powerful argument from nature for the existence of God. And I would like to refer to that argument, his invisible attributes, in other words, things that cannot be directly observed, can be understood by the things that are made. What’s the argument?

You look at things around you and you look at their properties and their characteristics and you examine them carefully, and they say to you, somebody or something made this, it did not get in the condition it’s in by itself. That’s the argument. And Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, when we look at the evidence of the natural world in some detail, and I hope you can be here, that’s the argument we’ll be appealing to in every case. And I might add, for those of you who are Bible believers in this audience, which I suspect most everyone is, the Bible itself says that the natural world testifies of the creator independent of this book. And that in fact men are without excuse who miss that God created. So, for the remainder of our time this morning, at least till the very end, I would like to turn with you for a few moments to the testimony of God’s natural world and look somewhat at what the heavens testify and the relationships of the earth to the heavens that would say to us in the 21st century, since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes are clearly seen.

What can you see, according to this passage? You can see his eternal power. Whoever created this universe, of which we know a small smidgen, must have been marvelously powerful, beyond our ability to comprehend. And it should bring us to our knees in humility before his presence as one who is so far beyond us that we don’t deserve to be in his presence, as the psalmist of old said, when I consider the heavens the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which you have ordained, what is made that you are mindful of him, or the Son of Man that you visit him. Psalm chapter 8. Yes, his eternal power is displayed with such majesty, and we know more about it in the 21st century than man has ever known.

And his divine nature, his divinity, my version says his Godhead. Nature declares, when we examine it carefully, that whatever it was, whoever it was that created this marvelous universe and all that’s in it, must be beyond us. He must have a nature that is not like ours, because it’s so far beyond us. It declares divinity. And because of that, with the testimony of the natural world, man can come to humble himself in the presence of the Almighty God and be humble. Let’s talk a little bit about God’s eternal power. And I make no apology for bringing a little bit of science in here because our science is what’s helped us to investigate the natural world. So I hope your minds are alert and you’re ready to think with me.

3. The Sheer Size of the Cosmos

Because this is going to be more like a class than a sermon. And I want you to stay with me. I understand there’ll be some things about this that not everybody will comprehend if you haven’t had a science background. What I’m hoping is that we can be overwhelmed with the powerful evidence for the powerful God. So let’s start this way. Let’s look at the sheer size of the cosmos as we know it now. And understand there are limitations to man’s ability to observe. We have designed instruments to help us. And we’ve even sent some instruments out into space now, haven’t we? That help us observe the cosmos even more fully. The Hubble telescope being the latest example of that. Let’s talk a little bit to get an idea of the sheer size of the cosmos.

Let’s talk about our own galaxy. Everybody in this audience knows that our latest understanding of where we are in the cosmos is we’re in the Milky Way galaxy. A spiral galaxy. It has a globular center and then has spirals coming out from it. And we in our solar system are located in that galaxy. It is said by the latest estimates that that galaxy contains some 100 billion stars, of which our Sun is one of them. Now, that just in itself is overwhelming, except to senators and representatives who spend about that every month. But a hundred billion stars is a lot of stars, ladies and gentlemen. In one galaxy, in one place in the cosmos. What’s even more amazing is that that one galaxy has been estimated to be about 100,000 light years in diameter.

Here’s what that means. If you take those spirals in that galaxy and you go out to the outermost spiral and go all the way across to the other end of the outermost spiral, that distance across is a hundred thousand light years. That’s for our one galaxy. Now, the reason I ask for this board is because I want to expand on that just a little bit. What is a light year? Here’s how you get it. There are 60 seconds per minute. I think everybody knows that. If you multiply that times 60 minutes per hour, you’ll get the number of seconds in an hour. 60 times 60 is 3600. So there’s 3600 seconds in one hour. If you multiply that by 24 hours per day, that’ll give you the number of seconds in a day.

I don’t know what that number is. It’s 24 times 3600. Then if you multiply that by 365 days per year. That’ll give you the number of seconds in a year. That number’s getting on up there, don’t you think? It’s a pretty good size number. It’s how many seconds there are in a year. Now if you multiply that number by 186,000 miles per second, which is how fast light travels in one second. 186,000 miles. That’s moving along pretty rapidly. Multiply all those numbers together, you’ll get the number of miles that light travels in a year. That’s called a light year. So this equals a light year. Now, according to the statement I have on the screen here, our galaxy is 100,000 light years across. That means it would take light 100,000 years to travel all the way across our galaxy.

So if you want to know how far that is, you multiply this times 100,000. That’ll tell you how big our one galaxy is. And that’s the number in red up here. Let’s see what that number is. Well, the first three zeros would be the ones, the tens, and the hundreds place, then we’ve got the thousands, and you go another three, you got the millions, then the trillions, then the uh, pardon me, the billions, and then the trillions. So it’s 588 quadrillion miles across, if that helps. It is huge. That is the size of our cosmos. Imagine, try to think of it this way. If you were sitting over here at the end of our galaxy, right here, and you sent a message across that galaxy to the other side at the speed of light.

You would send a message over here, it would get over here to this end, and they send you a message back instantly at the speed of light. It would take you 200,000 years to get that message back. At the speed of light. The sheer size of our cosmos, ladies and gentlemen, boggles the mind. I’m not talking in this example about the cosmos. I’m talking about one galaxy. It is estimated now, since the Hubble telescope has gone out beyond our atmosphere and has taken pictures all over of the galaxies that are out there. And ladies and gentlemen, if you’ve not looked at the pictures from the Hubble telescope out on the internet, you need to get out there and do it. There are all kinds of galaxies.

There are globular galaxies, elliptical galaxies. There’s one like ours, the spiral galaxies, quite a few of those. It is estimated now that there are over a trillion galaxies, many of them a lot bigger than ours, and with more stars in them. So you take our galaxy and you multiply that by a trillion. And you’ll be talking about the sizes of all the galaxies put together. But folks, what I forgot to tell you is there’s also a lot of space between the galaxies.

And you get some kind of a concept of the sheer size of this cosmos as we understand it. And I’m convinced we do not understand it by any stretch of the imagination in the 21st century. But do we have some kind of comprehension of the size of this? Much better than man’s ever had. And within that cosmos, we see order everywhere we look. And we ought to be overwhelmed with the majesty of the one who must have put this together. Some of us remember the first time man went to the moon and flew in that little spaceship around the dark side of the moon. And then came around that dark side of the moon for the first time in history and took a picture of an earthrise.

Not the sunrise, but the earthrise. And that is a picture of that first earthrise photographed by man. This over here is the moon’s surface. And there’s our planet Earth. It’s a rather regal looking planet, isn’t it? Lots of blue. And that’s because 70% of the surface of the earth is covered by water. And it’s a magnificent sight. And at least some of the astronauts that went out there and saw this magnificent picture said, thanks be to God for the majesty of what he created. But it’s far from all of them that did that. Because some think this came about by natural means, without intelligence needed at all. When we look at that earth from the moon, it looks very dramatic.

4. Our Position in the Universe: A Privileged Planet

Surely you know, don’t you, that many people believe for centuries that the earth was in the center of everything and remained fixed, did not move, and that everything else moved around it. The sun, the moon, and the stars all moved around the earth, and that thus God’s total attention was focused on the immovable earth which he created in the center of everything. I might add, ladies and gentlemen, that that notion was supported by many people by reading this book. And you may not be aware that in the 21st century, there is a rather vocal minority of people that call themselves the geocentrists, who still believe the earth is in the center of everything and doesn’t move. And guess where they go to try to prove it?

Right here. So may I take a little bit aside from this lesson and ask you to listen to this closely? Will you be a little bit careful in your use of scripture about using it to support what we understand by modern day science? You need to be careful about that. Because men have done that in the past, like the geocentrists. They have used the Bible to support the geocentric theory. The earth is in the middle and everything goes around us. And now that we no longer believe that, I don’t think anybody in this audience believes that still. But if you do, let’s talk about it. What do you do with all those scriptures that you used to support the geocentric theory before when now we don’t believe it anymore?

It’s dangerous business. You need to be very careful about using the scriptures to support modern day scientific theories. Just be careful, I’m saying. So that was thrown in free of charge. That’s not part of the lesson. But I think it’s an important point. Since Copernicus, here’s what the philosophers of men have done. They have said, Copernicus has taught us we’re not all that important. We human beings are located on one little tiny speck surrounding this sun, and we’re rotating around it. It’s not rotating around us. And later discoveries said that Son of ours is just an average sized star. It’s no big deal. And we’re just one little planet revolving around that average sized star. But it’s worse than that, beloved. We’re located on one of those spirals of that galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy.

We’re not even in the center of the Milky Way galaxy. We’re out here on one of these spirals. Kind of an average star with a little tiny planet revolving around it and a few others. Out on one of the spirals of one of those trillion galaxies in the universe. So what are we bragging about? We’re not much. Neither are we the focus of any God’s attention. If there is a God. F to it, this next picture. You see the pointer up there? Can we get these lights off right here? Is that possible? You’re not going to be able to see it very well even with the lights on. But that pointer is pointing to a little blue dot. That didn’t help much, did it? There is a little blue dot there.

Oh, now you can see it a little bit. And I will tell you where this picture came from. It came from the Voyager spacecraft, which was sent up in the 1980s. And the Voyager spacecraft took the picture from about four billion miles away. That’s the picture of Earth from four million miles away. Four billion miles away. From the Voyager spacecraft. Now let me read you what Carl Sagan said about that. Want to get the lights back on now so I can see what I’m doing up here?

Because of the reflection of sunlight, this is a quote from Carl Sagan. Because of the reflection of sunlight, Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if it were some special significance in this small world. But that’s just an accident of geometry and optics. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusions that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale blue light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves, says Carl Sagan. And in this modern day scientific age, many scientists would tell you, you need to save yourself. There’s no God out there who’s going to come save you.

You’re just a little speck in the midst of vast nothingness. You have no significance. You’re not the center of anything. So why do you believe in a God? I pause there to let you meditate about that a little bit. I have been confronted by that very thing several times. Both in my college career and in speaking to a number of atheists, both here and in Romania, other parts of Eastern Europe. You’re aware, of course, that under the communist system, children were taught from the time they were babies that belief in God was not only antiquated and medieval, it was dangerous. Or, as Karl Marx said, it’s the opiate of the people. And to believe religious things like God is a danger to society. And so I had the privilege of talking with any number of people who had never in their life had anyone explain to them there’s a rational reason to believe in God.

That the natural world itself is a testimony that there must be a God. No, they’ve been taught the opposite. And I’m telling you, beloved, the evidence God has left us on this little tiny speck in the midst of a cosmic vast darkness is so powerful we have no excuse for missing it. So what do we say about ourselves? We can’t deny this. I’m convinced it is a fact that we’re not in the center of the universe immovable. I believe we are revolving around a sun in the one of the spirals of the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of a trillion galaxies or more. So how does that make us special? Well, again, I don’t have the time to explain it to you, but there’s an interesting book that just came out called The Privileged Planet by Gonzalez and Richards, in which they take the position that while it is true we’re not at the center of the universe or the center of anything, when you start examining all of the things necessary to make life on this planet exists.

It begins to look like we’re a privileged planet. And what these gentlemen also uncovered is this interesting scenario. Not only are there literally hundreds of factors that must all be precisely within a very limited range in order for life to exist. Our ability to measure those very factors is also evidently unique to this planet. So the fact that we are inhabiting this planet and can also measure these properties seem to go together. Well, it’s a fascinating lot of science in here. You may want to skip some of those parts. But I’ll tell you the bottom line of what they’re saying. The more we learn about our position in the universe, the more unique it becomes.

5. The Incredible Amount of Matter in the Cosmos

Folks don’t believe that so much anymore. We’ve found too many reasons not to the sheer size of the cosmos should overwhelm us. But what about the incredible amount of matter in the cosmos? I want to give you some small feel of how much matters out there. And are all of you aware that the first law of thermodynamics says the total amount of matter and energy in the universe is a constant. That’s one of the best attested principles in science. That there is not matter and energy being created or destroyed. It remains the same. They can interchange matter and energy, but the total amount of it’s remaining the same. If that’s the case, ladies and gentlemen, and matter is not eternal, which I’m convinced it isn’t, then that means at some instant the creator made all this stuff by the breath of his mouth.

And from then on it just changed form. So how much matter is there out there and energy? We’ll talk about matter. Let’s take our sun, typical of other stars. Our sun gets its energy by fusing hydrogen atoms together. Hydrogen atom, hydrogen atom, fuse them together, you produce helium. In the process of producing helium, some amount of matter is converted to energy. It’s the energy the sun has then. The process of fusion. If we could ever learn to control fusion reactions, we would never have to worry about energy again. We don’t need a rock. We haven’t learned how to control fusion. But that’s what happens in every star as far as we know. Now I want you to watch up here.

Is that right? That’s right, isn’t it? Tons. So that’s times 2,000 pounds per ton. So multiply 2,000 times that number, and that’s how many pounds of hydrogen are lost in the sun every second. I don’t think you got it. That’s a lot. What happens then is you get 560 million tons per second of helium and four million tons worth of energy.