If I ask you if you believe in God, would your answer be from sentiment and conditioned reasoning, or have you come to your own conclusions, from personal experience and “search”?
You see, whether your answer is in the affirmative or not, we all need to realize that a lot of our thoughts and subsequent beliefs are a product of early conditioning and paradigms passed down from infancy. While our dispositions are not set in stone, early impressions play a big part in our outlook and beliefs as adults.
Depending on the kind of life you’ve had, your answer will lean towards a resounding yes or no, or be muddied by experiences you are yet to fully understand, leaving you inconclusive (sometimes reflected as indifference).
While I will not question your stance, it is evident that we have all acquired positions on every topic we argue about. In the end, all men, whether they are aware or not, expend some faith in the creeds and teachings we identify with. If anything, this buttresses the individuality of man. That we can start out believing one thing (or nothing sometimes), and a few teachings and/or experiences later we believe the exact opposite. There will always be arguments for, and against every theme. In the end, we can only seek solace in motive, reason, and sound thought.
Our history as humans documents a species exploring the world in search of meaning; Most of the time at least – there is no meaning to be found in needless wars and pogroms.
Collectively, we have sought to trace our origins, asking questions along the way, unearthing the workings of nature, and sometimes, unnecessarily tampering with it.
Many have debated our origins and over centuries ideas have clashed, and sometimes swords. One thing is evident though – our hunger and relentless search for answers.
Curiosity it seems is an enduring human element
All the many ideas posited about our origins are roughly split into two major factions. The “Creationists” who believe that the universe as we know it was created by an ENTITY (God in most cases) and the “evolutionists” who put forward the theory that life evolved, and our universe came about by a single event – The Big Bang (Darwinism and other related theories).
Each side of the divide thinks the others’ version is ridiculous and “obviously” wrong.
But, we’ll See… Won’t we?
In an attempt to explain creation/evolution, we need to establish some basics
1. Everything we have seen, experienced, or interacted with, is designed to some extent; and design, is usually deliberate (“happy accidents” occur from time to time)
2. The influence of “chance” and “coincidence” while acknowledged cannot exactly be measured.
Using these as models, we can set some boundaries and create a system or mental model to analyze both arguments.
Creation
There are many variations of this story (it’s not exactly a theory), but the Christian version is by far the most popular today. It presents God the creator, as the entity behind the formation of the universe as we now understand it to be.
Evolution
In two main points,
1) diverse groups of animals evolve from one or a few common ancestors;
2) the mechanism by which this evolution takes place is natural selection),
evolution puts forward that living things on Earth have their origin in other preexisting types and that the distinguishable differences are due to modifications in successive generations.
In essence, we all evolved from one "parent" organism.
Long Shot?
Remember how I said that we all expend some faith in believing these theories? Well, there’s even more faith in unbelief - You see, a good number of people believe that there are no complex theories to our existence and that we just… are. They neither believe in the theory of evolution or the creation story.
That all this complexity, just happened.
Creation says God created the world and all the inner workings and systems. But sometimes, things don’t work as they should. These “anomalies” are explained by concepts that point to the interference of an external force. Many say diseases and other ills of nature happen because the natural order has been polluted since the fall. Miracles and divine intervention usually explain the opposites.
Evolution, on the other hand, explains our origins and current existence as one that occurred by chance. That the world, nature, and all in it came about by variation, inheritance, selection, time, and adaptation.
On both sides, there are lots of supporting arguments, if you keep an open mind that is.
Now, from what you know, both theories are not so easy to unpack. There are lots of accompanying views and theories that seem to solidify each stance.
Now, let’s revisit our first question, but rephrased.
Do you believe God created the world?
Wait.
Don’t answer. Not yet.
What if I told you that as outlandish as God may seem from your bible stories, the concept of his existence is more believable than evolution?
Still skeptical? Well, indulge me a little.
Chance
By evolution, all of life, including the planets, star systems and all that we know today, was made possible by one evevnt, billions of years ago.
The Big Bang Theory is the leading explanation about how the universe began. At its simplest, it says the universe as we know it started with an infinitely hot, infinitely dense singularity, then inflated — first at unimaginable speed, and then at a more measurable rate — over the next 13.8 billion years to the cosmos that we know today.
The current version of Big Bang theory – the one used most by modern cosmologists – is called the Lambda-CDM model. It postulates that our universe began at a specific instant, expanded to be flat (i.e. has zero curvature) and is made up of 5% baryons (i.e. the matter that makes up everything we see – galaxies, stars, planets, people), 27% cold dark matter (hence the “CDM” of the theory’s name) and 68% dark energy.
Now, what are the odds that an event, unplanned and uncontrolled, led us here?
Well, in 2016, a new study suggested that there are around 700 quintillion planets in the universe, but only one like Earth.
So, 1 in 700 quintillion (700,000,000,000,000,000,000).
What. Are. The. Odds?
Now, back to the science.
The Lambda-CDM model further states that the universe is expanding at a rate referred to as Lambda (the Greek letter) and is governed by the principles of Einstein’s General Relativity. The Lambda-CDM model has been spectacularly successful at explaining what we observe in the universe. It makes predictions repeatedly confirmed by observation.
But it is not without problems; as with all scientific theories, the Lambda-CDM model continues to evolve.
Now let’s pause a moment, so that we might draw a distinction between the appearance of all that energy in the Big Bang and its sudden expansion. In that sense, the Big Bang was not the event that caused our universe. Rather, it was the event that gave birth to the universe. Why is this distinction important? It’s important because, although science has been able to establish a history of the universe right back to when that tiny point suddenly created our entire cosmos, what preceded it, the reason for that tiny point of energy being there in the first place, is unknown, and may forever be unknowable.
The Big Bang is the theory we have constructed for how the universe we see around us came to be. It does not attempt to answer the most common question we humans ask about the origin of the cosmos: why? And this question likely cannot be answered, because, by definition, whatever caused the appearance of that tiny point of energy, containing the seeds of everything that would ever be, was not of this universe.
Therefore, whatever caused the universe left no evidence of its existence for us to study, no clue as to what it was. It is also likely that, being something completely outside the universe, we would, in any event, be unable to comprehend it. The laws of physics, of motion, of gravity, of electromagnetism, of thermodynamics, simply did not apply at the moment of the universe’s birth because they did not yet exist: they certainly cannot describe the presence and origin of that tiny seed.
Design, and the Creator we undermine
To get a sense of who/what God is, I think we can start by looking at ourselves. The Christian bible leaves a clue too.
Genesis 1:26-27 says,
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
If you pay attention to how we create, how we move from idea to final product, we can draw parallels.
If the excerpt from Genesis is anything to go by, we are made after God himself; so while we might not BE him, we are literally models of a more complex entity. So naturally, we have inherited some “qualities’ and “behaviors”.
Now, we can all agree that years ago, the concept of mobile phones might have sounded too futuristic to be reality. If you’ve seen minority report, watch it again. Most of those “impossible” technologies exist today.
There was a time air travel was a myth. But here we are today, planning vacations and booking flights like we’re ordering donuts off the counter.
You see, some concepts sound outlandish until we see them in reality.
The building is proof of a builder
In our search for origins, one of the requirements is proof. Nobody believed sufficiently in flight travel, until the Wright brothers’ first successful flight in 1903.
It’s a curious thing to watch us admit that a table did not appear by chance; that a car did not just happen because everything it’s made of, came together at a particularly precise time, that the combination of unrelated materials ended up as a BMW.
We have seen rock formations and caves, and found explanations in the weathering of rain and other climate factors over time.
Granted, these things are minute compared to a whole universe, but as we have observed in systems, these things tend to scale, if there’s any truth to them.
We live in buildings where we subconsciously agree, without being asked, that builders made this structure possible.
Design
A lot of times, we have made distinctions between Art and Design. In all the schools of thought, varying in their theories and opinions, one thing seems constant.
While Art can be random, Design is never.
In fact, one definition of design, is “planning”.
These arguments inform our understanding of principles and concepts. They help us explain the world around us.
Now, look at the world around you, the systems you’ve come to know and trust. The intelligence in their workings.
Look to yourself, and how your body, an impossible mass of chaos, functioning smoothly, even as you’re completely unaware of a lot of its processes.
Chances are, you’ve never bothered to learn the implications and processes involved in taking one step. Just one.
Imagine you had to KNOW this to have a shot at walking. Imagine having to remember that you have to breathe. Imagine there wasn’t such a thing as reflex, and a racket hits you square in the face, as you’re still trying to remember how to dodge.
Imagine believing all this complexity just happened. That none of it was designed. That it’s all happenstance.
You see, I told you God is not so outlandish.
We live in a world, designed to work effectively.
If we can trust our intelligence enough to believe the reality of nature and its beautiful, intelligent design,
Is it really far-fetched to believe that someone, or something more intelligent designed all this?
Do you believe God created the world?
Now I actually want to hear your answer.