The Script has been Flipped

We all know the story.  Galileo has a telescope that shows that the earth revolves around the sun and the Church won’t look into it.  Galileo persists for a time in saying that the sun is the center of the universe but through the pressure of the Church the free-thinker is forced to recant.  And this, we are told, is the relationship between religion and science. They are enemies that can’t be reconciled.  Such is one of the reasons why people, that I meet on the street while doing evangelism, will say things like “I don’t believe in God because I believe in science.”

But is this the whole story?

For starters when I heard about this, I racked my brain to try to figure out anywhere in Scripture where it says that the sun revolves around the earth.  It certainly wasn’t a doctrine that I believed, and I had spent countless hours pouring over the Bible seeking to understand what it really said, so when I heard that the Church had believed this I was taken aback.  It was only later, after reading Is Atheism Dead by Eric Metaxas, that I realized that this episode had been largely exaggerated by anti-Christian voices as a means of disparaging the faith.

Atheists portray Galileo as one of their own – a free-thinking man who doesn’t want to be forced to live under the constraints of the Church – but this depiction is false.  The great astronomer was a devout Christian who deeply feared God.  When he was asked about his findings and how they related to Scripture he was adamant, and obviously accurate, in saying that he saw no contradiction. He thought it was important to read Scripture with a humble heart saying,

“In points that are obscure, or far from clear, if we should read anything in the Bible that may allow of several constructions consistently with the faith to be taught, let us not commit ourselves to any one of them with such precipitous obstinacy that when, perhaps, the truth is more diligently searched into, this may fall to the ground, and we with it.  Then we would indeed be seen to have contended not for the sense of Divine Scripture, but for our own ideas by wanting something of ours to be the sense of Scripture when we should rather want the meaning of Scripture to be ours.” (Metaxas, IAD)

Galileo lived in a world that had largely been affected by the Protestant Reformation.  For the past 100 years the Reformers and Catholics had clashed over many things with one of them being the ancient philosopher Aristotle.  Protestants were generally against the place that Aristotle had in learning – particularly in universities dominated by the “scholastic” school of thought – and Rome in response to this, doubled-down on their belief that his thoughts were useful in understanding the world.

This matters because it was Aristotle who taught that the Earth was the geometric center of the Universe.  So, when Copernicus proposed that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and when Galileo picked up his theory a century later, they were bumping up against the numerous proponents of the ancient Greek philosopher in the scholastic universities. It was these professors who wouldn’t look into Galileo’s telescope, and it was these same individuals who pressured the Church to silence the great astronomer.  History tells us that the Church shamefully gave into this pressure, but it is important to understand that it did so largely out of a defense for Aristotelian ideas, which it saw as being an important buttress against Protestantism.

In short, Galileo’s battle with the scholastic university professors of his day was an inner-church struggle which saw the early scientist challenging the synthesis of Scripture with Aristotelian ideas.  This conflict is an important one because it was a preliminary step in establishing the scientific method as a means to understanding the natural world, rather than assuming that the universe conformed to the preconceived “perfect forms” of Greek philosophy. But it has been exaggerated by secular voices as the “Copernican Revolution” that “swept man out of his proud position as the central figure in the universe” and reduced the earth to a “third-rate planet revolving around a tenth-rate sun drifting in an endless cosmic ocean.” (Metaxas, IAD)

It is a strange – almost juvenile – idea to think that the earth’s location in the cosmos has anything to do with its importance in the scheme of existence.  It is this type of thinking that says things like “smart people wear glasses” or that the “tallest man in a country should be its king”.  The idea that physical attributes are indicative of intrinsic worth is a notion that is so shallow that one is expected to leave it behind after puberty.

In fact, the newer discoveries of the scientific community are saying something completely different regarding the “pale blue dot” that the late Carl Sagan nihilistically referred to as the earth.  I have written three posts about these findings – which are being coined by scientists as the “Finely Tuned Universe”.  Which is the idea that life on earth is dependent on multiple factors that theoretically could be a number of different values, but just happen to possess the properties that they need to be, in order for everything that we know – including our own existence – to be possible.  My first post is about how Carbon, which is crucial to all known forms of life, is produced within stars.  A process that is heavily dependent on the mysterious constants of physics.  My second post muses about these mysterious laws themselves and further expands about the possible range of values that they could have been (as compared with what they actually are) and what that says about the world that we live in.  My third post goes into how different factors in the universe, our solar system, the earth itself, water and so on, had to be the way they are in order for life to have been possible on our planet.

Though I’ve devoted three posts to this we’ve really only scratched the surface of the Fine-Tuning argument.  There is a treasure trove of books to read about this that go in depth regarding physical laws, chemical compounds, locations of galaxies within the universe and so on that explain how if just one of these many factors were different in any way that we wouldn’t be here.  If the reader is interested in this subject, I’d recommend going to the Discovery.org website to find books by authors about this.

A Divine Blueprint

The reality of this perfectly calibrated world that we live in casts a large shadow on naturalistic theories regarding the origin of the universe and the history of life.  I go into how it impacts the Big Bang Theory and makes the materialistic explanation of the origin of the universe even more incredible than it already was in a posted titled “It Had To Be Perfect”.  These revelations make it so that in the Big Bang Theory philosophical naturalists are not only saying that the universe had a beginning, but also that this theorized primordial explosion must have been perfectly calibrated to make it so that all these factors, that have been so finely tuned, came about in the way that they needed to be.  One might imagine that such a perfectly mapped explosion, that materialists believe was the initial impetus for everything that we know today, would have been planned by a Divine Blueprint.  Something that almost echoes Proverbs 8:22-31 which reads,

“The Lord created me at the beginning of His way, before His works of old. From eternity I was established, From the beginning, from the earliest times of the earth. When there were no ocean depths, I was born, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills, I was born; while He had not yet made the earth and the fields, nor the first dust of the world. When He established the heavens, I was there; When He inscribed a circle on the face of the deep, when He made firm the skies above, when the springs of the deep became fixed, when He set a boundary for the sea so that the water would not violate His command, when He marked out the foundations of the earth; then I was beside Him, as a master workman; and I was His delight daily, rejoicing always before Him, rejoicing in the world, His earth, and having my delight in the sons of mankind.”

We see here in this breath-taking passage that before the material world was created that God established a plan.  What is interesting about these verses is that they seem to be describing Christ – who Himself is the Wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:24) and “by whom all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth” (Colossians 1:16) – as the One the Father partnered with in forming the world that we know today.  And is it not fascinating that both Scripture and the naturalistic approach to the origin of the universe both testify that there was a time before the universe existed, and that the world that we know today seems to have been intricately planned to the perfect detail, not unlike the way a Master builder constructs a Cathedral – where the architect starts with the end in mind.

Such thoughts bring the words of the apostle Paul in Romans 11:33-36 to one’s lips, as seemingly the only appropriate response to what one has just considered. 

“Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who became His counselor? Or who has first given to Him, that it would be paid back to him? For from Him, and through Him, and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen.”

The Shadow that Fine-Tuning Casts on Darwin

But the notion that a naturalistic approach seems to point to some kind of Divine Fingerprint just before the beginning of the universe isn’t the only implication that the Finely-Tuned Universe has on materialistic theory.  It also has some pretty powerful implications on Darwinian Evolution as well.

It would be hard to have grown up with any connection to the secular world without having heard of Darwin’s theory of Evolution.  It is forced upon us the way Moses’s wife forced a flint upon her unsuspecting son (see Exodus 4:24-26), as a kind of circumcision that one must have in order to enter secular society.  It has a dark past¹ and massive problems, not the least of which are that there are none of the supposed transitional forms that Darwin (or his disciples) predicted in the fossil record.  But it, nonetheless, is the founding myth that modern secular society is built upon.

I have gone in depth about both my critique of Darwinism and, one might think strangely, how I believe that it can be reconciled with Scripture.  The latter of which can be summarized by the way that God used the phrase “Let the Earth bring forth Animals” as a way of seeing Him using the earth as an intermediary material process as a means for bringing about the existence of plant, animal and human life.  This means that though I am a critic of Darwinism on philosophical and logical grounds, I am still open to Theistic Evolution on the basis that one could read Scripture and come to the conclusion that God used the material world as a “middle man” that He stood back and “let cook” to bring about the living creatures that we know today.

But regardless of my feelings about Darwin, the theory of Evolution is no longer the wrecking ball for faith in God that it used to be.  This is due to the fact of the Finely Tuned Universe that we live in which makes it so that evolution, if one assumes that it did indeed happen, could only have occurred because the world had been perfectly set up for it to take place.  And the development of life in the Universe can be seen as a kind of inevitable consequence of how the explosion that the scientific community calls the Big Bang had been arranged.

As such, the evolution of living creatures can be viewed as a kind of contained randomness, that God let take place, within the Finely-Tuned framework that He established just after the Big Bang.  Should the necessary properties for life have not been so perfectly arranged, then evolution would have been impossible.

This flips the script on the theory of evolution so that, if one accepts it, Darwin’s theory is just one of the many facets that God chose to utilize in His Master Plan of creating a habitable universe made up of all sorts of living creatures for the purpose of having a relationship with mankind – His crowning creation.

So, while atheists cling to a narrative that sees the fact that the earth revolves around the sun as some kind of nihilistic proof of our supposed “cosmic insignificance”, evidence is mounting that points to the earth as the inevitable consequence of the laws of physics and the composition of the universe, which are exactly as they need to be for life to have been possible.

And just like the scholastic proponents of Aristotle refused to look through Galileo’s telescope to see reality for what it really was, so the secular world refuses to allow the ramifications of our Finely Tuned Universe to be seen for that they really are. So, while the earth may not be the geometric center of our solar system, it more and more seems to be the happy result of the perfectly calibrated state of the universe.

Which again leads us to a marvelous pause – a Selah – where we can muse upon something truly extraordinary, which is that the uniqueness of this universe that we find ourselves in, which is confounding our expectations at every turn, is pointing at a reality that we are the great prize of existence.  The “delight” (Proverbs 8:31) of a mysterious inscrutable Being who we, in the wonder of it all, look up to the Heavens and call God.

 

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*All References to (Metaxas, IAD) refer to the incredible book Is Atheism Dead? by Eric Metaxas that can be purchased here: https://socratesinthecity.com/product/is-atheism-dead/

¹I plan to talk about Eugenics and the “Social Darwinism” (which is what happens when you give real world application to Darwinian ideas) of the early 20^th century – when Darwin was ascendant – and how that found its culmination in many of the practices of Hitler’s Germany in a future post