The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [65]
I leaned over and punched the “stop” button on my recorder. I couldn’t think of a better segue to my next interview. Now that Craig had made a powerful case for God as Creator of the universe, it was time to consider the laws and parameters of physics. Is there any credibility, I wondered, to the claim that they have been tuned to an incomprehensible precision in order to create a livable habitat for humankind?
For Further Evidence
More Resources on This Topic
Craig, William Lane. “Design and the Cosmological Argument.” In Mere Creation, ed. William A. Dembski. Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1998.
——. Reasonable Faith. Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, revised edition, 1994.
——, and Quentin Smith. Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Moreland, J. P. and Kai Nielsen. Does God Exist? Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1993.
6
THE EVIDENCE OF PHYSICS: THE COSMOS ON A RAZOR’S EDGE
It is hard to resist the impression that the present structure of the universe, apparently so sensitive to minor alterations in numbers, has been rather carefully thought out. . . . The seemingly miraculous concurrence of these numerical values must remain the most compelling evidence for cosmic design.
Physicist Paul Davies 1
Would it not be strange if a universe without purpose accidentally created humans who are so obsessed with purpose?
Sir John Templeton. 2
He became a spiritual skeptic when he learned about Darwinism as a student. He worked for a while at a major Chicago newspaper and went to graduate school at an Ivy League university. Spurred by his wife’s Christianity, he later began investigating the evidence for a Creator. With his mind opened by the facts, he ended up shedding his atheism and embracing God, eventually writing a book that recounted his intellectual journey to faith.
If that sounds like my story, it is3—but, coincidentally, it’s also the story of Patrick Glynn, a former arms-control negotiator for the Reagan administration and currently the associate director of the George Washington University Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.
Glynn first encountered evolutionary theory while a student in parochial school, immediately recognizing that it was incompatible with the Bible. “I stood up in class and told the poor nun as much,” he recalled.
Convinced that reason was “the only path to truth,” Glynn became a confirmed atheist by the time he received his doctorate from Harvard University in the 1970s. “Darwin had demonstrated that it was not even necessary to posit a God to explain the origin of life,” he said. “Life, and the human species itself, was the outcome of essentially random mechanisms operating over the eons.”
After marrying a Christian and finding himself in frequent debates with her over spiritual matters, Glynn said his mind “became sufficiently open” so that he was willing to check out whether there was any rational evidence for the existence of God. He was hardly prepared for what he would learn:
Gradually, I realized that in the twenty years since I opted for philosophical atheism, a vast, systematic literature had emerged that not only cast deep doubt on, but also, from any reasonable perspective, effectively refuted my atheistic outlook. . . . Today, it seems to me, there is no good reason for an intelligent person to embrace the illusion of atheism or agnosticism, to make the same intellectual mistakes I made. 4
What evidence was responsible for this stunning spiritual turnaround? Among the most influential discoveries he encountered in his investigation was the so-called “anthropic principle.” The term, derived from the Greek word anthropos for “man,” was coined by Cambridge physicist Brandon