By Accident or On Purpose?

WILLIAM J. FEDERER

Did everything happen just by accident or was it on purpose?(1)

Cambridge biochemist Rupert Sheldrake, author of Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation, 2009, remarked in his TEDx Talk (Whitechapel, 1/12/13) “The Science Delusion”:

“As (ethnobotanist) Terence McKenna used to say, ‘Modern science is based on the principle, Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.’ And the one free miracle is the appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe, and all the laws that govern it, from nothing in a single instant.”

It takes faith to believe that, by chance, nothingness produced everything in an instant, that unguided random accidents created all things, from the unimaginably complicated DNA molecule to all that is beautiful, including selfless love, a baby’s giggle, the masterpieces of Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and the intelligence to appreciate them.

What about fractals? In geometry, these are intricate shapes made up of miniature renditions of that shape, made up of even smaller versions, repeating in infinity, with each having slight differentiations, so each is both the same yet unique.

Nobel Prize winning physicist Eugene Wigner wrote in “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” 1960:

“It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here... or the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind’s capacity to divine them.”

If all things come from nothing, then eventually all things will return to nothing, therefore your life is meaningless, just the result of millions of mindless mistakes.

Or, as C.S. Lewis put it in The Oxford Socratic Club (1944):

“If... I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in Christianity, but I cannot even fit science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.”

Oxford mathematician John C. Lennox wrote in God’s Undertaker – Has Science Buried God, 2007:

"Indeed, faith is a response to evidence, not rejoicing in the absence of evidence... The apostle Paul says what many pioneers of modern science believed — that nature itself is part of the evidence for the existence of God... Adam Sandage, widely regarded as one of the fathers of modern astronomy... is in no doubt... 'God to me... is the explanation for the miracle of existence – why there is something rather than nothing'... To the majority of those who have reflected deeply and written about the origin and nature of the universe, it has seemed that it points beyond itself to a source which is non-physical and of great intelligence and power."

In English poet William Cowper’s words:

“Nature is but a name for an effect, Whose cause is God.” Danish poet Hans Christian Andersen put it beautifully:

“The whole world is a series of miracles, but we’re so used to them we call them ordinary things.”