False Arguments About the Origin of Existence: Matter and Chance.Part3

Even if the universe’s existence is attributed to that which is not God (e.g., evolution, causality, nature, matter, or coincidences and necessity), we cannot deny one fact: Everything displays, though its coming into existence and subsistence and death, both an allcomprehensive knowledge as well as an absolute power and determination. As we saw in Overbeck’s experiment, one misplaced or misdirected gene may ruin or terminate life. The interconnectedness of everything, from galaxies to atoms, is a reality into which every new entity enters and wherein it must know its unique place and function.

Is there a better demonstration of the existence and free operation of an all-comprehensive knowledge, an absolute power and will, that particles of the same biochemical constituents should produce, through the subtlest adjustments in their mutual relationships, unique entities and organ-isms? Is it satisfactory to explain this as heredity or coincidence, seeing that all such explanations rest on the same all-encompassing knowledge, absolute power, and will?

We must not be misled by the apparent fact that everything happens according to a certain program, plan, or process of causes. Such things are veils spread over the flux of the universe, the evermoving stream of events. Laws of nature may be inferred from this process of causes, but they have no real existence. Unless we attribute to nature (or to matter or coincidence and necessity) what we normally would attribute to its Creator, we must accept that it is, in essence and reality, a printing mechanism and not a printer, a design and not a designer, a passive recipient and not an agent, an order and not an orderer, a collection of nominal laws and not a power.

To understand better why these cannot have any part in existence, let’s analyze the purpose, harmony, and interrelatedness in creation by observing some plain facts. Again, Morrison draws our attentions to some of these:

The bulk of the Earth is now reduced to very permanent dimensions and its mass has been determined. Its speed in its orbit around the sun is extremely constant. Its rotation on its axis is determined so accurately that a variation of a second in a century would upset astronomical calculations. Had the bulk of the Earth been greater or less, or had its speed been different, it would have been farther from or nearer to the sun, and this different condition would have profoundly affected life of all kinds, including man.

The earth rotates on its axis in twenty-four hours or at the rate of about one thousand miles an hour. Suppose it turned at the rate of a hundred miles an hour. Why not? Our days and nights would then be ten times as long as now. The hot sun of summer would then burn up our vegetation each long day and every sprout would freeze in such a night. The sun, the source of all life, has a surface temperature of 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and our Earth is just far enough away so that this “eternal fire” warms us just enough and not too much. If the temperature on Earth had changed so much as fifty degrees on the average for a single year, all vegetation would be dead and man with it, roasted or frozen. The Earth travels around the sun at the rate of eighteen miles each second. If the rate of revolution had been, say, six miles or forty miles each second, we would be too far from or too close to the sun for our form of life to exist.