by Eric Metaxas
Isn’t the miracle of the virgin birth like the creation of the universe in the Big Bang? If God could insert the entire universe from “outside” the system, why couldn’t he insert a sperm cell into the otherwise “closed system”? The head of a sperm cell is approximately five millionths of a meter by three millionths of a meter. If the entire universe erupted into being through a rent in the fabric between being and nonbeing, why couldn’t something as small as a sperm cell do the same? If we can accept a single singularity of the Big Bang, on what basis can we reasonably claim no other such singularities are possible? If God is “outside the system” and can reach “inside the system” to create the universe, can’t he reach inside the system at other times, to do what we would call miracles?
John Lennox reiterates this idea, that miracles signal a transfer from outside our closed system into our closed system, and once the transfer has been made, the “inside” laws take over. “What Christians are claiming about the Resurrection of Jesus,” he says, “is not that he rose by some natural processes; that would violate the laws of nature. No. Christians claim that Jesus rose because God injected enormous power and energy from outside the system. Now, unless you have evidence that the system is totally closed, you cannot argue against the possibility of miracles.”
There is the rub. How can scientists argue against the possibility of miracles unless they have real scientific evidence proving that the system is totally closed? Doesn’t all that we are coming to know from the new world of quantum physics make the case that it is totally closed less and less plausible?
WHAT IF SCIENCE ITSELF POINTS BEYOND SCIENCE?
So what if everything we learn from science points us toward the idea that information came in from outside the system, from a world beyond the realm of science? What if science points us beyond science?
For example, many scientists in examining the staggering order of the universe have come to the conclusion that it did not come into being randomly but instead must have been designed by some kind of intelligence—by a designer. What if the scientific evidence for “design” is overwhelming? Hard-line scientific naturalists and atheists say we must never be open to this possibility and must dismiss it out of hand. But why?
It is perfectly logical to consider the idea that the appearance of intelligence must signal actual intelligence. If we find the ten-foot-tall letters H-E-L-P dug into the sand on a deserted island, who among us could believe those marks perhaps had been formed by the natural, nonrational forces of water and wind? Something inside us recognizes that it is not random, that there is an intelligence behind it, and we must rationally be open to this possibility.
John Lennox agrees. “I want to be free to follow the evidence where it leads,” he says. “That is, to my mind, the true Socratic spirit of science. To force a naturalistic paradigm on everything has the effect of closing down science, rather than opening it up.” But fear of provoking the ire of hard-line scientistic ideologues has kept many more open-minded scientists from speaking their minds, much less publishing on the subject. But there have been encouraging signs.
Just ten years ago, probably the most prominent atheist of the twentieth century, Antony Flew, concluded that a God must have designed the universe. It was shocking news and made international headlines. Flew came to believe that the extraordinarily complex genetic code in DNA simply could not be accounted for naturalistically. It didn’t make logical sense to him that it had happened merely by chance, via random mutations. It is a remarkable thing that Flew had the humility and intellectual honesty to do a public about-face on all he had stood for and taught for five decades.
If someone says that it is “antiscience” to speculate as Antony Flew and John Lennox and more and more are doing, it is like a baker insisting that everything in the world outside his bakery is “antibaking.” He may feel that way, but it’s a bizarre claim. Rational thought that extends beyond the strict confines of science is not “antiscience” at all. One must wonder why some scientists would try to exclude all rational inquiry that is not strictly scientific. That act of exclusion is, of course, itself unscientific. With no scientific evidence that the system of this universe is completely closed, they nonetheless insist that it is. The only honest thing to say from the point of view of science is that we cannot know, that that extremely important question is simply beyond the scope of science to answer.
There are many important things beyond the scope of science. Asking why the universe exists or asking what is the meaning of life—or simply loving our children—are beyond that scope, but profoundly worthy activities nonetheless. When did scientists come to play the sour role of sneering at anything beyond the sphere of their chosen field?
Certainly many of the scientists who insist there is nothing beyond science and nothing beyond the universe of matter and energy—and who further insist that speculation that there might be something is “antiscience” and “irrational” must know there is no scientific or rational basis for such claims. We must assume that they are simply ideologically uncomfortable with such speculations and wish to do all they can to put an end to them. But we must call this tactic what it is: a bluff. And let us call this bluff. Let us say that ironically this is not science and let us say that very ironically it is itself “antiscience.”
We must assume that if one devotes one’s life to discovering what can be known, one may be naturally uncomfortable with the humbling idea of saying We don’t know or We cannot know. One may be not only uncomfortable but even somehow fearful of Mystery and threatened by her. But it is a kind of secular fundamentalism and Pharisaism that gives in to these feelings, that bristles and bridles and blushes at anything that threatens the sacrosanct inviolability of their closed system. So in their harrumphing declarations they would banish Mystery herself, with mud and rocks sealing her in a cave and hoping she never escapes. But Mystery, though hidden, is part of all truth, and the truth, of course, will out.
CAN WE PROVE THAT A MIRACLE HAPPENED?
Convincing reasonable people that something happened and “proving” that something happened are not the same thing. If we are talking about a miracle like the resurrection of Jesus, we cannot “prove” that it happened any more than a prosecutor can “prove” that someone committed a crime. The prosecutor can convince a jury and that jury might even agree unanimously on a verdict, but that’s not quite “proof” in the purest sense of the word. Ultimately, whether something can be “proved” or not is a little bit besides the point. In a court of law we talk about things like “reasonable doubt.” We condemn people to death or set them free based on conclusions that are not, strictly speaking, “proved,” but for which we nevertheless have enough evidence to make firm conclusions and to deliver final verdicts. Examining miracles is usually something like that.
With regard to medical “miracles,” it’s certainly possible to prove that something “happened.” One can show before and after X-rays and/or photographs; one can get testimony from doctors. But we cannot prove that what happened was necessarily a miracle. Just because something happened (e.g., a tumor vanished overnight or perhaps even before someone’s eyes) does not mean that we can prove what happened was miraculous, that God was behind it. These are separate issues. So just because something miraculous-seeming happened does not necessarily make it miraculous. It’s more honest to say that we don’t know how something happened. Many doctors have attested to extraordinary events but cannot make the leap to say that God was behind what occurred.
In a Veritas Forum held at Harvard University in 2012, John Lennox said the following:
[N]ormally, when we think of science, we think of inductive methods. We do an experiment 100 times. We get the same result and we expect that to happen the 101st time. Well, you can’t repeat a resurrection to see if it happened or not and what we therefore have to employ are the methods of forensic science.
Setting up a classic scientific exp
eriment with falsifiable results is simply not always possible every time we wish to decide whether a miracle happened. But we can certainly decide whether one happened with the evidence obtained from other methods, just as we would do in a court of law.
THE GOD OF THE GAPS
In the nineteenth century, the evangelist and scientist Henry Drummond coined the term “God of the gaps.” It is the idea that whatever one cannot explain or understand, one attributes to “God.” But this is essentially a negative definition of God, and of course as science progresses, our need for this “God of the gaps” diminishes. In his famous Letters and Papers from Prison, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:
. . . how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.
Since Bonhoeffer wrote those words in 1943, this positive view of God has been increasingly affirmed. As scientific knowledge increases, we have more evidence, not less, pointing to a creator. For example, as recently as March 2014, astronomers announced the discovery of what they believed to be primordial gravitational waves, further solidifying the case for the Big Bang. Surely to anyone ideologically wedded to a materialistic worldview, this must all be confusing and disturbing.
The science of archaeology has similarly uncovered more and more evidence for the historicity of the Bible. For example, for centuries, the world knew nothing of the Hittites apart from the references to them in the Old Testament, but in the early twentieth century, archaeologist Hugo Winckler discovered thousands of tablets inscribed with Akkadian cuneiform. This and other discoveries proved beyond any doubt that the Hittite empire had indeed existed, just as the Bible said. Similarly, in 1994 a broken stele was discovered at Tel Dan in Northern Israel, bearing an inscription referring to the “House of David.” Until that time, there was no reference to the royal house of David outside of the Old Testament, and many had thought it was simply mythic.
In the nineteenth century, Darwin postulated that the gaps in the fossil record would slowly be filled as more and more fossils were uncovered. He had hoped to show the streamlined unbroken and steady development from one species to the next. But just the opposite has happened. Instead of finding fossils to fill in the gaps between other fossils, scientists have uncovered more and more of the same kinds of fossils. We have found more examples of the species we have already discovered, and no clear and incontrovertible links between them.
But all of these things are nothing when compared to the evidence that points to the idea that our universe could never merely have happened, that it had to have been intended because it has such an overwhelming appearance of design. The more science uncovers about the conditions necessary for life to exist, and the conditions necessary for the universe to exist, the more science points to a creator. We will plunge into the fascinating details of this in the next two chapters. As the self-proclaimed agnostic and famous physicist Robert Jastrow has put it, “For the scientist who has lived by faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
John Lennox gives us the following conclusion: “The more we get to know about our universe, the more the hypothesis that there is a creator God, who destined the universe for a purpose, gains in credibility as the best explanation of why we are here.”
4
IS LIFE A MIRACLE?
Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: Life itself is the miracle of miracles.
—GAUTAMA BUDDHA
If Spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change!
—HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
People are often heard to exclaim that Life is a miracle! It’s difficult to know what that means, because it can mean many things. Generally speaking, it seems calculated to provoke us to wonder at the amazing things all around us, that we might appreciate them and delight in them. Along these lines, Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “the invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.” And George Bernard Shaw said, “If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.”
Still, the idea that “life” is a miracle is quite different from what most of us think of when we think of miracles. Typically, most of us think of more instant and dramatic things, as when a blind man receives his sight, or a tumor disappears overnight, or a dead man rises from the grave. For some good reasons, the sentiment that “life is a miracle” can sound like a Hallmark cliché. But what if it’s not? What if life—the simple existence of life on Earth—was as much a miracle as any of these other impossible, dramatic, breathtaking things? What if the existence of life on Earth was demonstrably more outrageous and more astounding than the virgin birth?
LIFE ON PLANET EARTH
It’s exceedingly rare that we should pause to consider the idea of our existence on planet Earth. We tend to take it entirely for granted, and this is hardly surprising, just as fish take water for granted and the birds and bees air.
We know that our planet supports life, and some of us even know that, to the best of our knowledge, no other planet in the universe supports life. But do we know why that is? Why should this planet be perfectly suited to supporting life? As it happens, it shouldn’t. But we shall come to that.
Many people, though, are of the opinion that other planets must support life. We simply haven’t found them yet. The idea is that there are so many planets in our incredibly vast universe, sheer odds must dictate that some of them must be able to support life. One often hears that to think otherwise—to think that our planet is the only planet in the unspeakably vast universe to support life—is to be hopelessly arrogant. However, this is neither logical nor true. Whether it is arrogant is another story. But based on what we know today, anyone who asserts that it is not true is doing so not out of scientific evidence but out of blind ideology.
To be fair, a half century ago, when this idea originated, it was completely logical. That’s because, at the time, we had very limited knowledge concerning the parameters necessary for a planet to support life. In fact, when Carl Sagan and others declared this idea to great fanfare, we knew of only two conditions that needed to be fulfilled for a planet to support life. We believed that certain kinds of stars were necessary, and we knew that there needed to be a planet just the right distance from those stars. Given those two parameters, Sagan and his colleagues estimated that about 0.001 of all stars in the universe could have a planet that would support life, and given the vast numbers of planets and stars and galaxies, there would have been a spectacularly high number of planets that could support life. All we then needed to do was find that life, which we promptly tried to do with something called SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
But as the years have passed and our failure to find the merest hint of life has sunk in, scientists have discovered more and more conditions necessary for life to exist. They have themselves begun to understand why we haven’t succeeded in finding a hint of extraterrestrial intelligence. The more that we have studied and measured the universe, the more we have seen that the conditions for life are far more stringent than previously thought. The number of variables necessary for life on a planet in the universe has exploded, while the number of possible planets that could conceivably support life has withered. The number shrank all the way down to zero years ago, and as the number of variables necessary to support life have continued t
o grow, the number of planets that could support life has sunk further and further below zero. The odds against a planet supporting life have grown and grown, to unfathomable and dizzying heights of impossibility. But the popular understanding of this situation has not come near to catching up with the science.
As of now, fifteen years into the twenty-first century, we know of so many conditions that are absolutely necessary for a planet to support life that not only is it extremely improbable that any other planets can support life, it’s extremely improbable that our planet should support life. To speak statistically and logically, life of any kind should not exist and we shouldn’t be here. Our existence is a statistical and scientific virtual impossibility. That may certainly sound far-fetched, but it’s what the most advanced science now leads us to conclude: that the odds are stacked so dramatically against even a single planet in the universe possessing the proper environment to support life that the existence of this planet and life is an anomaly of an impossibly high order. Yet here we are, existing—and not merely existing but thinking about the idea that we exist. What are we to make of this?
Understanding some of the details will help, so let’s examine a few of the parameters scientists have determined to be crucial for life. As we say, that number has leapt higher and higher with every year since 1966, when Carl Sagan made his calculations.
The sheer and increasing number of these conditions is staggering, but only a handful of them are easy for us laymen to fully comprehend, so we will limit ourselves to those.* What follows here is therefore a tremendously abbreviated list—just a taste, really. But we should keep in mind that each of these conditions is crucial. If any one of them is not met, life of any kind cannot exist. But since each of these many, many variables lines up perfectly—as they must—some physicists have come to use the expression “fine-tuned universe.” This is because—whatever one’s ideology on the subject might be—it has the overwhelming appearance of having been “fine-tuned” to support life. By whom is, of course, another story.
