Does God Exist?
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Does God exist?
One of the most important questions we ever face is, �Does god exist?’ The conclusion you reach can affect your view of your family, work, money, morality and even life itself.
If asked, вЂ?Does God exist?’ many persons would reply by repeating what they have read or heard from others. However, you personally should give thought to the question. In his book Man, God and Magic, Dr. Ivar Lissner observes that a “fundamental difference between man and beast” is that “man is not content merely to sleep, eat and warm himself.” Man has a “strange and inherent urge” that can be called “spirituality.” Dr. Lissner adds that вЂ?all the civilizations of mankind have been rooted in a quest for God.’ So your coming to grips with the question, вЂ?Does God exist?’ is an evidence that you have not neglected an important attribute—your spirituality.
How could you go about determining whether there is a вЂ?maker and ruler of the universe, a Supreme Being,’ as one dictionary defines “God”? Well, reason indicates that if there is a вЂ?maker of the universe,’ there should be indications of its beginning, also evidence of design and order. In your examining whether there are such, we invite you to consider what biologists have found about life and what has been learned about our universe by physicists and astronomers using telescopes and space probes.
YOUR LIFE—IS CHANCE RESPONSIBLE?
Why not begin with yourself? Where did your life come from? True, it was passed on by your parents. But how did life on earth originate?
in an effort to produce life in a laboratory and thus explain how it began, chemists have sent sparks through mixtures of special gases. One result has been some amino acids (molecules of the sort that are the �building blocks’ of living things). Those amino acids, though, were not living. Furthermore, they were not the result of mere accident; they were produced by trained scientists under controlled conditions in modern laboratories.
There are more than 200 natural amino acids, yet only a special 20 in the proteins of living things. Even if some amino acids could result from lightning, who selected just the right 20 found in living matter? And how were they guided into the exact sequence necessary in protein? Research analyst Dr. J. F. Coppedge calculated that �the probability of just one protein molecule resulting from a chance arrangement of amino acids is 1 in 10287.’ (That is a figure with 287 zeros after it.) Additionally, he points out that, not one, but �a minimum of 239 protein molecules are required for the smallest theoretical form of life.’ Do you think that such evidence points to life as resulting from blind chance, or is it from intelligent design?
Consider also another type of laboratory experiment that has been publicized in newspapers as “creating life.” With complex equipment scientists have taken a virus produced by a living organism and separated the components. Later they have taken these components and reunited them into a virus. However, biologist RenД© Dubos explains in the EncyclopÐ*”dia Britannica that it is really a mistake to call this feat “creating life.” Neither these scientists nor others have been able to make new life from inanimate material. Rather than suggesting that life comes from chance, this experiment showed that “all the biological machinery” needed for life “had to be provided by preexisting life.”
Even if scientists could produce living protein from inanimate matter, it would simply confirm that preexisting intelligent life was needed as a directing force. Obviously, humans were not here to begin life on earth. Yet life was created, including human life. Who is responsible? Bible writers long ago came to a conclusion that merits serious consideration. One said: “The breath of the Almighty gave me life.” Another added: “[God] is himself the universal giver of life.”
A closer look at your body will help you to reason further on this.
Life throbs in your body, made up of about 100,000,000,000,000 tiny cells. The cell is the basic component of every living thing on earth. The more carefully it is studied, the more complex it is seen to be.
Each of your body cells can be likened to a microscopic walled city. The cell contains parts that are like power plants to generate energy. “Factories” in the cell make proteins as well as hormones for shipment to other parts of the body. There is a complex network of channels to transport chemicals into the cell and out of it. “Sentries” stand guard to control what is brought in and to battle invaders. The key to all of this is the nucleus, the cell’s “city hall.” It directs all cell activities and contains the genetic blueprints. Some of the cell parts are so tiny that their details cannot be clearly seen even with a 200,000-power electron microscope. (An ant magnified that much would, in effect, be over one-half mile, or 0.8 km, long.) What can explain such amazing complexity and organization in each of your 100,000,000,000,000 tiny cells?
At one time you were a single fertilized cell in your mother’s womb. That cell divided to become two cells, then four, and so on. Later, some of those cells became muscle tissue. Others formed your eyes, bones and heart. How was it that the cells formed each of your body parts at the right time and location? Why, for example, did cells develop into ears where they belonged, and not on your knee or your arm?
Look even more closely. In every cell you have tens of thousands of genes and the vital DNA, which tells the cell how to function and reproduce. It is said that the DNA in each cell contains enough information to fill an encyclopedia of 1,000 volumes. It determined the color of your hair, how fast you grew, the width of your smile and countless other details about you. All of that was �written down’ in the DNA of one cell in your mother’s womb.
In the light of even these few points about the cell, we ask: Since our parents did not consciously prepare the incredible genetic blueprint or the cell, who did? Can it reasonably be accounted for without an intelligent Designer?
Of all your organs, probably the most amazing