Is God for Real?

By Paul Chimera


It takes real hubris to proclaim that God does not exist, that all that’s here is here by chance, that life itself is an accident.

To a large extent, I think Dr. Francis Collins nailed the reason why some people – without even considering the evidence – choose to be non-believers: it gets them off the hook (albeit in their minds only). Dr. Collins is director of the national Human Genome Project, and is both an M.D. and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of North Carolina and Yale University, respectively. He’s also a devout Christian.

But until age 27, Dr. Collins was actually an atheist, he admits. In a public presentation he gave not long ago about his pioneering work on the genetic code of human life, he said, “I decided to become an atheist without considering the evidence. It was convenient being an atheist – not being answerable to anybody, surrounded by lots of temptations and not having to worry about the consequences.”

But then Collins, like many of his brethren in the scientific community, began to follow the evidence and where it might lead, and their conclusions were inescapable.

Dr. Mark Eastman, M.D., in a speech about science and faith, quoted the esteemed physicist and information scientist, Hubert P. Yockey, who noted that the mathematical probability of a single protein arising by chance is one in 2 x 10 to the 75th power. That’s a “2” with 75 zeros after it.

Sir Fred Hoyle, the famed English astronomer, said this about the origin of life: “The probability that higher life forms might have emerged by chance is comparable to the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard could assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”

Human Genome Project Director Collins noted, after reading C.S. Lewis’s seminal book, Mere Christianity, that “based on pure logic, it was more reasonable to believe in God than not to. Jesus Christ was a person unlike any other…the historical evidence for Jesus Christ was very overwhelming to me.”

But let’s question for a moment that, if we accept that God is real, how come we don’t see him? The irony is that we do; we just don’t look very carefully, and we take way too much for granted. A nun, speaking recently on the EWTN religious television network, reduced all this down to a rather clear way of understanding how God’s hand is evident in our daily lives.

She posed, for example, the notion of the planets revolving around the sun. Why do they not steer off-track, but instead remain rigorously on their same course, she asked? What about the billions of stars? Or even that we have summer, then fall, then winter, and spring? “How,” she queried, “did the world come into being?”

Dr. Eastman underscores that it was surely not by chance – not some wondrous emergence from a primordial soup. He recalls, when in medical school, holding a human brain. In his younger days he considered himself an evolutionist and, yes, even an atheist. In a sardonic tone, as he recalled holding that brain, he recently told an audience, “Billions of years of random molecular collisions produced this!” He chuckled, and the audience joined him.

Western New York attorney Jeffrey A. Spencer, in an insightful essay published a few years back in The Buffalo (N.Y.) News, stated, “As any computer geek can tell you, you can’t get a more complex information program out of a simple one. Einstein recognized that one of the fundamental laws of the universe is that matter moves over time from order to disorder (Second Law of Thermodynamics). The theory of evolution asks us to believe that all this incredible complexity, organized through an amazingly complex information system, happened by accident over time…Doctrinaire evolutionists take issue with the ‘intelligent design’ movement, alleging the theological implications of a ‘designer,’ yet are comfortable in continuing to proselytize for their own ‘faith’ that astoundingly complex life on planet Earth somehow arose through a haphazard accidental process.”

Several years ago, Anthony Flew, the British philosophy professor who had been the leading champion of atheism for over a half-century, changed his mind. His thoughts were documented on video (you can look him up on youtube). An Associated Press report out of New York stated, “At age 81, after decades of insisting that belief in God is a mistake, Anthony Flew has concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the universe. A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, Flew said in a telephone interview from England.”

It is said that when Albert Einstein was asked about his work, he explained, “I merely trace the lines that flow from God.” Still, of course, there are skeptics. When the aforementioned medical doctor, Mark Eastman, was giving a presentation about his religious convictions, a professor at the back of the room raised his hand in dissent. “We are scientists,” he said adamantly about himself and a group he had with him. “We do not believe in things that can’t be seen, felt, or empirically measured.”

Dr. Eastman was thus forced to tell the academician, in so many words, “Well, sir, no one has ever seen or felt the human mind, yet we know it exists. According to your theory, then, am I not justified in believing you don’t have one, since we can’t see it?” (Not a precise, word-for-word direct quote).

The professor and his colleagues were speechless.

Dr. Eastman explains that our mind – though non-physical – nonetheless is real. We know it exists, just like God. “When we see the things that are made, we see the evidence of an information scientist, the evidence of an engineer in the machine-like structure of living systems, and the evidence of a vastly powerful biochemist,” said Dr. Eastman.

Dr. Michael J. Behe, a molecular biologist and professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and an unabashed Christian, points out the “irreducible complexity” of astoundingly harmonious systems, such as that of the flagellum (tail) of a single bacterium. He refers to these amazing, microscopic creatures as “molecular machines,” where – if even one tiny component of the perfectly orchestrated system were to not operate properly – the bacterium would cease to function.

In his web-based Research Summary, Dr. Behe declares, “Despite much general progress by science in the past half century in understanding how complex biochemical systems work, little progress has been made in explaining how such systems arise in a Darwinian fashion. I have proposed that a better explanation is that such systems were deliberately designed by an intelligent agent.”

Dr. Francis Collins, speaking about the same microscopic organism – the bacterium that Behe was referring to – said that the nanotechnology here suggests that the bacterium’s flagellum “is an impossibly complicated thing for evolution to have created.”

Let me return to Dr. Behe for a moment. In speaking of a “designer” behind such marvels of nature, he illustrates his point by asking us to consider the ordinary mouse trap. You need three things to have an effective mouse trap: the spring-trap, bait, and a mouse. But until someone (a designer) puts those elements together, you’ll never catch a mouse. Dr. Behe has also posed the thought-provoking scenario of a wrist watch. No one questions that the device was designed – yet the design of the human wrist below it – a far more complex “device” – is subjected to doubt.

“We now know,” wrote attorney Jeffrey A. Spencer in the previously mentioned Buffalo News article, “that even a ‘simple’ cell has the complexity of a modern city, and that each living creature has billions of these interdependent cells, perfectly coordinated to perform thousands of functions. All this complexity is directed by an information system (DNA) that far exceeds the Encyclopedia Britannica in its magnitude.”

One of the most eloquent and popular advocates of Intelligent Design and Christianity is Lee Strobel, author of, among other books, The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus. In a speech about how DNA proves God’s existence, Mr. Strobel noted that when America announced the Human Genome, President Clinton said, “Today we are learning the language in which God created life.”

Strobel points out that DNA is literally a language, encoded with a 4-character chemical alphabet that precisely spells out the assembly instructions for all the thousands of different proteins our body is constructed of. DNA, in fact, is “the most efficient information-storage system in the universe,” Strobel said. “Where,” he asks rhetorically, “did that come from?”

His talk concluded with a reference to nanoscientist Dr. James Tour of Rice University, one of the leading experts in the molecular world. Tour wrote, “Today I stand in awe of God because of what he has done through his creation. Only a rookie who knows nothing about science would say science takes away from faith. If you really study science, it will bring you closer to God.”

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