Posted on 04/07/2002 2:18:35 PM PDT by f.Christian
Water is one of the essentials for life. Most of the H2O in the universe is either in the form of ice or vapor. Free-flowing water, so common on our planet that we do not even think about it, is apparently uncommon elsewhere and requires a rather narrow range of temperature to continue to exist in that state. On earth, water moves about in a continuous cycle, being drawn up in the form of water vapor, and then falling back to earth as rain or snow, flowing down into rivers eventually to return to the sea, where it begins the cycle over again. This water cycle, too, is crucial to the existence of higher forms of life, and probably to life per se.
Every schoolchild knows that matter contracts when it is cooled and expands when it is warmed. Yet there is an exception to this general principle when the temperature of water drops to the freezing point. At that point, the ice that is formed slightly expands, allowing the ice to float on the top of a body of water instead of sinking to the bottom. If this were not the case, all of the water in lakes and rivers would freeze during the winter season, killing all the fish and other life therein. How else to explain this extraordinary exception allowing continuation of this life but through the handiwork of the Creator?
In his book The Creator and the Cosmos, and in a separate article, "Astronomical Evidences for a Personal, Transcendent God," appearing in the collection The Creation Hypothesis, Dr. Ross presents impressive lists of further proofs, drawn from nature, supporting the idea of an all-wise Creator. Among these are the following:
Our moon is larger in relation to its planet than any other in our solar system. This allows it to wield sufficient gravitational force to affect tides, thereby cleansing coastal waters and keeping nutrients replenished. Yet, it is not so great as to cause too severe a tidal effect on oceans and the atmosphere. The thickness of the crust of the earth is precisely right. Were it much thicker, too much oxygen would be transferred from the atmosphere to the crust, and if it were thinner volcanic and tectonic activity would be too frequent and violent. The oxygen to nitrogen ratio is such that advanced life functions proceed neither too quickly nor too slowly. The amount of reflected light in relation to the total amount falling on the surface of the planet is just right. Were it greater, glaciation would cover much of the earth. Were it lesser, a runaway greenhouse effect would develop.
Ross attacks an intriguing question that sometimes places those who believe in a personal Creator on the defensive. If the whole object of creation was our tiny planet, the earth, and the human beings living on this tiny planet, why did God create so vast a universe? The author supplies a highly credible response: "[T]he mass density of the universe, as huge as it is, focuses on the needs of humans. How? The mass density determines how efficiently nuclear fusion operates in the cosmos. The mass density we measure translates into about a hundred-billion-trillion stars...." If the mass density is too great, he explains, too much deuterium is made which would have caused the stars to burn too quickly. However, if the mass density is too small, so little deuterium and helium are produced that the heavier elements requisite for life would not have formed. "What that means," he comments, "is that the approximately hundred-billion-trillion stars we observe in the universe -- no more and no less -- are needed for life to be possible in the universe. God invested heavily in living creatures. He constructed all these stars and carefully crafted them throughout the age of the universe so that ... humans could exist and have a pleasant place to live."
Ross calculates, in one of the many tables in his book, the probabilities for attaining the necessary conditions to support life, from such things as the size and nature of our galaxy and the global distribution of continents, down to soil mineralization and seismic activity. The probability, he writes, that even one such planet would occur accidentally anywhere in the universe, is much less than one chance in one million trillion.
Ross concludes that "the characteristics of the universe, of our galaxy, and of the solar system are so finely tuned to support life that the only reasonable explanation for this is the forethought of a personal, intelligent Creator whose involvement explains the degree of fine-tunedness. It requires power and purpose."
No less purposeful, and no less indicative of God's power, is the nature of life itself, as revealed to us by researchers into life at the microcosmic level. A.E. Wilder-Smith holds three doctoral degrees and is counted one of Europe's great scientists. Wilder-Smith writes of a startling paradox in the thinking of those who believe that the universe, and life on earth, are naturalistic phenomena.
According to naturalistic thinkers, life sprang forth spontaneously from non-living matter here on earth, and eventually evolved through various stages to become man. Now, inasmuch as there are billions of stars, it is mathematically probable that there will be countless planets as well, and by laws of probability there will be other planets like earth, where conditions will be harmonious for life. (This theory is false, of course, as we have already seen from Dr. Hugh Ross' research, but it is still promoted by some.) Given long enough periods of time, and favorable conditions like those of earth, life, according to naturalistic thinkers, will automatically and inevitably spring up and evolve from the less to the more complex. Human or humanoid creatures are inevitable too, according to this model, and science and technology are inevitable. Thus, according to their ideology, human creatures rather like ourselves must be out there, and some of them must have, by now, developed similarly to ourselves and must therefore be capable of sending radio signals into space, since they too will have come to the realization that they are not alone.
Now an interesting question arises: How do we tell the difference between signals from some extra-terrestrial intelligent life forms, and the sorts of radio emissions produced by stars, pulsars, radiation, and so forth? The answer is that signals from an intelligent life form must be a non-random series of impulses. As Wilder-Smith observes, "If any source of emission betrays non-random impulses or sequences which can be reduced to a code or a language, then that source betrays intelligent properties of some sort." All scientists would agree that non-random radio impulses cannot originate in natural law, and so, "when radio astronomers or other scientists pick up any emission or emissions showing non-random sequences they will be hot on the track of ETI [extra-terrestrial intelligence]."
Random impulses contain no messages, but non-random impulses do, according to some particular language convention. As Wilder-Smith puts it, "Sometimes a great deal of erudition is needed to derive from non-random sequences the language convention bearing the message. This high art is regularly practiced in deciphering ancient documents written in unknown languages, for the frequency of certain letters and their sequences in a document sometimes betray the language convention, which information then yields the meaning or intelligent message hidden in the composition." Should our searches of the universe with radio telescopes pick up the right sorts of signals, then scientists can claim to have evidence for extra-terrestrial intelligent life. Despite ongoing attempts for almost 40 years, no such signals from outer space have ever been detected. However, it seems that scientists have been looking in the wrong place. "The base sequences of the genetic code, that is the order in which adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine appear in succession to one another, is certainly by no means random," states Dr. Wilder-Smith. "[T]he sequencing of the whole long biologically active DNA macromolecule is certainly and totally non-random in nature.... But over and above the non-randomness of the DNA sequencing, hard work on the part of Crick and Watson and many others following them revealed that this non-randomness of the sequencing is contingent upon a language convention.... What other conclusion is possible from these facts but that behind such non-random genetic sequences governed by a language convention, intelligence or at least an intelligent source must with certainty lie?"
Wilder-Smith suggests that ETI scientists step away from their radio telescope searches for non-random sequencing and instead take a close look into an electron microscope at some suitably prepared genetic code sequences, where they will see exactly that for which they have been looking. "In many cases," he says, "the non-random sequencing may be directly perceived!" In so looking, if they grasp what they are looking at, and if they are truly honest and not wholly self-serving, they will admit that "an intelligent source must be the initiator of this fact of nature" and that "information and intelligence are behind all biology and the genetic code...."
True science, in the hands of honest and true scientists, supports the assumption that God exists and is the Intelligence, the Master Planner, the Designer responsible for all creation and for life.
... Part2---open for comments!
... Part3---comments(closed)!
...Part3---here-now...open for comments!
once you believe in God it is Creation(evolution) only.
Why God does what He does---
mixing creation--evolution together...
I have my ideas---thoughts and they have more to do with His character(humility)--plans(destiny)...
our decisions--choice!
Can you be a half vegetarian?
I mean the answer is yes...why?
For example, the Pope "accepted" Darwinian evolution while simulataneously dimissing its naturalitic assumptions---this is an abuse of the pure doctrine of Darwin.
And compromising Christian theology to accomodate Darwin makes for poor theology.
Brian.
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