GENESIS 1.1: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. (ESV)
While attending a university many years ago I became confronted with an ardent, passive-aggressive atheist. He was my Geology professor for the academic year, and with a smile on his face he battered the class with his non-belief in God. And he seemed to delight in this. I was certainly no match to reply to him as I sat there in my desk. His academic credentials were impeccable and I didn’t know anything about anything he was talking about.
But I did learn much from him. And not everything was destructive to the belief in God and faith in Christ. I learned that scientific study had concluded that the universe did have a beginning, rather than the thinking of the steady-state theory, which taught that the universe always had existed. The significance of this point was not lost on me.
I also learned back then that the primary theory about the origin of life on earth was that protein precipitated out of amino acids, which were brought to earth on meteorites. But the statistical probability that this could take place by random cause and effect was estimated to be so prohibitive that in scientific notation it would be expressed as 1 out of 10 to the -320th power. For me, I understood this as not possible.
I also figured out that the professor didn’t tell me where the amino acids came from in the first place. Nor the meteorites. Nor the matter of the universe. And so he had no explanation for these fundamental building blocks and what philosophers call “First Cause”. And what about the design of the amino acids themselves? They did have their own complexity.
When the academic year came to a close, the professor admitted to the class that he could not prove any of his assertions of non-belief in a Creator/Designer of the universe. And he went on to say that his issue was that he was unwilling to submit his life to the authority of a Creator. And he would rather believe that life was brought to earth by aliens on a spaceship, than express belief in God.
I viewed this statement as a not so scientific wrapping up of the year with him as a professor. But I did leave his classroom better informed. Whether or not he would admit it, science in its own way, supported the conclusion that the universe did in fact have a Creator and Designer.