How do you explain the miracle of dawn? With heavenly clockwork, an immense fireball rises over one horizon and marches inexorably toward the other, bringing light and heat, making all life possible, and astonishing the sentient beings who stand witness. My best dawns were after sailing through the night, and seeing the darkness slowly conquered by the rising Sun. If you’ve ever watched a dawn, from first rays to final glory, you know it is a miracle.
In the ancient world, dawn, like every other mysterious thing, happened at the will of the gods. Over thousands of years, and most impressively in the last few hundred years, we’ve come up with different stories. We now say the Sun is a ball of burning stuff, of hydrogen atoms in a controlled ten-billion-year thermonuclear explosion. We now say the predictable march across the sky, and all other clockwork of the heavens, are the result of gravity, a fundamental force of nature where objects interact over great distances. Many extend this progress story – this “grand progress narrative” of “natural” causes replacing divine causes – to the origin of humans, we sentient creatures who observe the dawn. Many will tell you we are here because life arose by accident, and that, through blind, unguided evolution, the continual process of natural selection preserving the best mutations, those first cells eventually transformed into human beings.
This “grand progress narrative” supports a philosophy called Scientism. Scientism is the belief that everything can be explained by so-called “natural” causes, without God. Scientism is clearly not science, but it masquerades as science, and many can’t tell the difference. The grand progress narrative is scientism’s main theme. Scientism says there will always be a natural, materialistic explanation, and that if we just wait long enough we will figure it out. Scientism claims that natural causes alone can and will explain the dawn, and even how we came to be here.
Most people aren’t aware that in the last few decades this grand progress narrative has been proven false. Scientific progress has not slowed; fortunately for us new discoveries continue. But this thousand year old story of “natural” causes replacing divine causes has been reversed. To see why, let’s look at the dawn piece by piece.
We know the Sun is made of “stuff,” mostly burning hydrogen. We now also know that, without God, there is no explanation why stuff, or anything else, exists. All of true science – observation, experimentation, and reasoning – now leads us to a unique event – a universe created out of nothing, all matter and energy, even time and space itself, created in a single “big bang” instant. This “big bang” theory forced Atheists to retreat and claim, with absolutely no scientific evidence whatsoever, that our universe somehow popped out of an infinite, eternal, and perpetually inflating “multiverse.” This infinite multiverse theory was disproven by the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin singularity theorem of 2003, what I have previously called the “God Theorem.” As one scientist put it, “With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape: they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.”
We know that the clockwork of the heavens results from gravity. We have learned that gravity, along with dozens of other constants and features of our universe, is “impossibly fine-tuned,” set just perfect for life. If the force of gravity were stronger or weaker by one part in a number with 60 zeros life would not exist. That’s a greater precision than throwing a dart randomly and hitting a bulls-eye on the other side of the universe. Other features of our universe are even more precisely set. Without God, we have absolutely no explanation for this fine-tuning, and the amazingly perfect design of our universe.
Some say the first life arose by accident. Science now tells us that’s a fantasy. Harvard’s “Origin of Life Initiative” crashed and burned, its scientists crushed by the enormity of the problem. We now know that even the most “simple” life is a fantastically designed collection of micro-miniaturized factories and roads and storage facilities. Without God, we cannot explain the origin of life.
Some say, most of our popular culture will insist, that human beings arose solely through blind, unguided evolution. Yet we have found massive amounts of original information in every species on Earth. Throughout all of science, all of human history, all of our human experience, we have never found meaningful information that did not arise from a mind. This information – unique DNA coding in each species – proves the existence of a transcendent intelligence.
At this time in human history, we are witnessing a new dawn. Scientism’s grand progress narrative has been exposed. Without God, there is no explanation why anything exists. Without God, there is no explanation for the incredible design and fine-tuning for our universe. Without God, there is no explanation for the origin of life. Without God, there is no explanation of the creation of new species, including and especially human beings. It is a new dawn for belief, and if we as a culture can grasp the wonder, and work together as God wants, there may be hope for us yet.
Thanks for reading.