The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [102]
Ever the theologian, Richards jumped back in. “In the Christian tradition, this is quite at home,” he said. “Christians have always believed that God testifies to his existence through the book of nature and the book of Scripture. In the nineteenth century, science effectively closed the book of nature. But now, new scientific discoveries are reopening it.”
“But if the universe was designed with us in mind, why is it so incredibly vast?” I asked. “There’s a lot of empty space out there. Isn’t that wasteful and unnecessary?”
“Because the universe was designed for discovery, we need something to discover,” Richards replied. “The universe is vast and we’re small, but we have access to it. That’s what is amazing. We can see background radiation that has come from more than ten billion light years away.”
“Plus,” added Gonzalez, “we needed supernovae to build up the heavy elements so life-bearing planets could develop. And one particular type of supernovae is incredibly useful as a ‘standard candle.’ Type 1a supernovae have ‘calibratable liminosities’ so we can use them to determine distances and to probe the expansion history of the universe. So, again, we see the connection between habitability and measurability.”
Richards made one other interesting observation. “Darwin once complained that pollen couldn’t have been designed. After all, he said, look at the waste! Millions upon millions of particles are produced, but very, very few are used in the development of flowers.
“However, what he didn’t realize was that pollen is one of the most useful tools we have in the scientific exploration of the past, in part, because it can be dated through Carbon 14. When we find pollen in lake sediments and ice cores, we can use it to gauge how old the layered deposits are and what the ancient climate was like.
“Darwin only looked at pollen from a biological standpoint; when we look at the big picture, we see it has another use he never anticipated. Perhaps the same is true in many other instances throughout the universe.”
A CHERISHED GROUP OF CREATURES
I pushed my chair back from the table as if I had just consumed a hearty meal. In a sense, I had. Gonzalez and Richards had served me a remarkable feast—fact upon fact, evidence upon evidence, discovery upon discovery that compelled an incredible conclusion. As I sat there and digested the data, my mind turned to the book God and the Astronomers, which I had been reading on the airplane just prior to our interview.
In one chapter, John A. O’Keefe describes how he went away to school at the age of fourteen and began to get into arguments with his roommate about God. These encounters turned him toward astronomy, a field where scientists were beginning to find new and exciting evidence about the possibility of a Creator.
After earning degrees from Harvard and the University of Chicago, O’Keefe went on to become a renowned astronomer and pioneer in space research. The late Eugene Shoemaker called him “the godfather of astrogeology.” He was awarded many honors, including the Goddard Space Flight Center’s highest award, and is credited with numerous breakthrough discoveries in his scientific research at NASA. 45
It was the discoveries of astronomy that bolstered O’Keefe’s faith in God. He once ran calculations estimating the likelihood of the right conditions for life existing elsewhere. He concluded that if his assumptions were correct, then based on the mathematical probabilities “only one planet in the universe is likely to bear intelligent life. We know of one—the Earth—but it is not certain that there are many others, and perhaps there are no others.” 46
O’Keefe said he would have no theological problem if, indeed, other civilizations existed. That’s the position of many Christians. 47 God certainly could have created other life-populated planets that the Bible doesn’t reveal. But it