Faith And ScienceНамуна

Does belief in God make sense in an age of Science?

Many people today believe that life in the universe results from blind and random forces. They consider this a matter of scientific fact, and that belief in God is merely a matter of blind faith.

Anglican theologian William Paley made an argument that, for over a century, was regarded as an irrefutable argument for the existence of God. He argues that while walking in an isolated piece of land, suppose I stumbled upon a stone, and were to ask the question of “how the stone came to be there?” The answer one might get, he argued is, “it had lain there forever”. Furthermore, he argues that suppose if one were to stumble upon a watch, and the same question were to be raised again then surely the response would not be the same as the one given earlier. Paley’s point was that one does not have to be an engineer to see that the watch was intentionally designed. Again, one may not know who did it, but sure enough someone did it. Such design demonstrates the presence of a designer who may be called the divine “watch-maker” of creation. 

In critically examining the scientific empirical evidences, no one can deny the fact that life in its simplest form is complex. Considering the living cell which is one of the most sophisticated structures on Earth, it has within it more information than the Encyclopedia of Britannica. In fact, John Lennox argues that information plays a very important role in the study of the origin of life. However, many, including some scientists who are inclined towards evolution, believe that time plus matter plus chance can account for the complexity of life. For instance, Nobel Prize winner, Jacques Monod writes, "Chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution...." To attribute the complex information packed in a cell or to anything in creation to chance, necessity, or the combination of both, is like claiming that the Oxford English dictionary that I owned is a product of an overnight explosion in a nearby printing press. No one in their right mind would accept my explanation for it is a fact that every designed product in the human experience demands a designer. Why is that? Information always presupposes intelligence or a mind. Like the watch, to find this level of complexity by chance is unlikely, or for information to have evolved is unlikely. Therefore, it is more plausible to say that an intelligent source was responsible for the origin of life. No wonder the writer in Psalm 19:1-2 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God: the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge.”