I would indeed say yes, but to determine which God does require some effort, but first we must establish if belief in some sort of Cosmic Creator is indeed rational and has merit for belief. Please understand that I am not establishing a case for any particular god at the moment, just seeing if there is even a god to begin with.Ending our search before it begins because we don’t know if it’s Allah, Krishna or Jesus is foolish. It is the equivalent of saying,
“We don’t know if Joe, Blake or Michael is the murderer and since we don’t know who did it, what is the point of investigating?”
You investigate the murder precisely to find out if it is Joe, Blake or Michael and rule out the possibilities of who committed the murder until we are left with one or none of them, but the first thing we must ascertain is… Is there a murderer at all?
If we can demonstrate there is no God, then questions as if it is Allah or Yahweh become moot points as we have ruled them out with one single blow, HOWEVER if there is evidence that some sort of Creator exists, then that question suddenly reemerges with the utmost importance of answering as Yahweh and Allah have VERY DIFFERENT perspectives on the human condition and how to be right with them. First, let’s examine some of the evidence. Keep in mind we will have to talk some more about evidence and interpretations of evidence a little later on, but lets start with a bang and get into the fun stuff! Science!
.
Seconds 1-18 blackness. at 20, boom! imagine this Big Bang! even if you don’t believe in God, gotta admit it’s a pretty cool visual!
The scientific evidence points to a cosmic beginning of our universe. Edwin Hubble observed that distant galaxies are red shifting away from us. This calls for the electromagnetic spectrum.
Humans can only see a small fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum which we call visible light. As you can see with the wavelengths of light, the closer the crest (top of the hill shape on the wave line) and troughs (bottom of hill shape on the wave line) the more energy of that the wave has. Blue light on the spectrum then contains more energy because of the increased frequency of the wave, red light having less energy because of the decreased frequency between the crests and troughs in comparison with blue light. Note the Doppler effect.
When the ambulance is approaching you the wave lengths increase, thus creating a higher frequency which in turns produces a louder noise. When it drives away from you, the wave lengths decrease creating a lower frequency which in turn produces a quieter noise. Since sound is also a wave like light and higher frequencies produce louder noises as the source of the sound approaches you and lower frequencies produce quieter noises as the source of the sound goes away from you, then we can conclude that brighter light like blue is approaching and red light is moving away from us. Now as the stars move away from us the distances between the wavelengths stretch out, thus all indicating that the universe is expanding.
Now if the universe is expanding what would happen if we “rewound” the clock? We would suddenly see stars moving closer and closer together all to a single origin point for the universes beginning.
Einstein equations show us that energy and matter are the same thing. Reducing Uranium to it’s primordial state incurs a huge explosion of energy. Matter then is energy and vice versa. If there were a huge explosion of energy, we should expect faint echoes through the universe that would indicate such…
In 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered this after glow by accident. They were puzzled at the uniform noise their radio receiver was picking up uniformly throughout the sky. A Princeton university team led by Robert Dicke were trying to find the CMB and it wasn’t long until both teams realized that is just what was being picked up on the radio receiver.
Einsteins theory of relativity (which has proven successful by an experiment performed by atomic clocks and your GPS) predicted that the universe must either be expanding or contracting.
When combined with Hubble’s findings, the CMB and Einsteins equations we have substantive evidence that the universe had a cosmic beginning.
A curious thing, all of the elements for our existence were created in the furnace of stars. I find this ironic. To even consider the question of whether God exists or not we need potassium and sodium ions.
Our brains are made up of glial (non-neuronal cells) and neurons. Neurons communicate with each other by nerve impulses or action potentials.
At rest neurons carry roughly a -70 mv charge resting potential. This means it is at rest and not really doing anything. In this state there are more sodium ions outside the neuron and more potassium ions inside of it. Once enough stimulation for the neuron occurs however (when it reaches -55 mv), it sends out a nerve impulse. This stimulus causes potassium and sodium channels in the neuron to open.
Since the resting potential of the neuron is negative, positive sodium ions flooding in make it more positive. Once the threshold is hit, the neuron sends neurotransmitters through the synaptic cleft to another neuron and this process continues. When you recall a memory, stand up to go the bathroom or think of the complexities of the universe, neurons are communicating through this process. But are the sodium and potassium for this process just a “given” in our universe?
In nuclear fusion, stars crunch protons together to create a new element. An element is determined by the number of protons in contains in the nucleus of the atom.
19 for potassium, 11 for sodium…
So at the beginning of our Big Bang, what would happen if we messed with the expansion rate?
Briefly, stars are literally exploding on the inside with the force of thousands of atomic bombs, expending energy, releasing gamma rays and expanding from the explosion from the inside of it’s core. The weight of it’s own gravity pulls everything inward and with great force, pushes and compacts protons together, close enough to where the strong nuclear force takes over and a gluon “locks” them together and forms a new element. Two hydrogen atoms crushed together form helium and so forth and now eventually we have all of the atoms of the periodic table of elements.
Stars are formed when gas and dust can begin to collapse under their own gravitational attraction. As the gas collapses the material at the center begins to heat up and a proto star is born. As the cloud collapses a dense hot core begins to form and collects more gas and dust until finally it becomes a main sequence star like our sun.
If we increased the expansion rate of the universe, gravity wouldn’t have time to pull these gases together and we would only have a universe full of hydrogen and helium with no potassium or sodium to be able to think. If we lessened the expansion rate, gravity would be far too effective at pulling these gases together and nuclear fusion would be so strong that we would have a universe full of lead and not much else! Again, no sodium and potassium to even contemplate the deeper existential questions that torment us…
I laugh at the sheer absurdity of our universe don’t you? Meaningless and purposeless, it somehow exploded itself into existence from underlying quantum processes in a vacuum, defied the impossible and somehow formed amino acids in the correct chain (an absolute zero chance mathematically) to from the first organism that fought it’s way to create apelike creatures who scratch their head, contemplating the very nature of it’s existence (as well as their own), providing the necessary potassium and sodium ions to do so, in the furnace of stars that had to be finely tuned to produce the elements to enable them too… all by accident unless, it wasn’t.
Here is an interesting thought. What if it wasn’t? What if the universe was intentionally created for life of some sort? Maybe it actually does have purpose and the universe was set up in a way to intentionally produce intelligent life?
Well why would God do it this way? Am I saying that God couldn’t have made life another way?
No that is not what I am saying at all, I believe that God created in this manner intentionally so that we could come to rationalize His existence by understanding that the universe is intelligible and tuned with our purpose in mind. Sure a cosmic endoplasmic mess with life in another way is possible, but to reason the universe with us in mind demonstrates how special we are to Him.
In one sense, the universe seems so big and unnecessary and we just small insignificant specks, however, when you look at it from another angle the universe make us feel lonely and miserable, unimportant little ants in a vast universe, but once you come to understand that there is a Creator behind the veil you realize the universe wasn’t created in it’s vastness to make us feel small and insignificant, but rather to demonstrate His glory, but more importantly to show us our importance to the One who fine tuned it precisely for relationship with us
Makes sense to me, but which Creator? That is a question for further investigation in a future writing!
Exactly! So often people say they do not believe in God and you gotta wonder why? The universe was created perfectly, as you said, had an absolute zero chance mathematically to form an organism. I’m shocked that people belive it is all a coincidence. Take away which God they belive in, i think the universe itself is proof enough. You know a lot about the science that is above my head, but I like how you broke it down to make it more understandable.