Does God Exist?
Two Possibilities
There are two possibilities of origins – special creation and evolution. It has become intellectually preferable to accept the evolutionary theory. It has won popular acceptance in science and higher education. Even many professing Christian denominations have accepted it, if only passively.
Though in the minority, there still remain scientists, educators, and fundamentalist religious groups, as well as those in Judaism, who cling to belief in the existence of God. Many of these, however, especially among the more or less religious individuals, have merely assumed the existence of God, simply because they were taught it from childhood. It has been believed in the circles in which they have lived or associated. But few of these have proved it!
Of course, on the other hand, perhaps a vast majority who accept evolution, at least passively, were simply swept into that acceptance in college. It has become the scholarly "IN" thing. The opposite belief, special creation, has not been taught. They have probably not examined it. Too frequently proponents utilize the psychological ploy that it is a badge of scholarly status to accept evolution, and a stamp of ignorance or intellectual inferiority to doubt the hypothesis.
All of which goes to show that people in general believe what they do, simply because they have been taught it or because it has been accepted in their particular social environment. People want to belong! They go along with their particular group. In general, they believe what they have taken carelessly for granted – without examination or proof! People generally believe only what they are willing to accept.
Two hundred years ago it appeared under the popular catch-phrases "deism" and "rationalism," then "higher criticism." This pseudo-scholarship employed, as it advanced, such attractive titles as "progress", "development." and "evolution." The theory of evolution provided the atheist an explanation of a creation without a Creator.
But this "rationalism" failed to account for the origins of things and of life; and today the more candid among geologists and biologists confess that they do not know how life could have evolved from inanimate matter, through the simple life forms to the complex, interdependent species we see about us, finally to man. Lanark’s theory of "use and disuse," Darwin’s "natural selection," and other theories have now fallen by the wayside, and "mutations" explain only the presence of varieties less fit to survive.
Amazing New Knowledge of Science
What, then, has Science actually determined? Discovery and study of radioactivity during the past century has proved that there has been no past eternity of matter. Radioactivity is described as a process of disintegration. The atomic age is opening up new fields to explore. Soon after Madame Curie discovered the element radium, in 1898, it was discovered that radium, and the other radioactive elements as we know now, are continually giving off radiations.
So notice carefully what this now disclosed fact of science means: Uranium is a radioactive element heavier than radium. It has an atomic weight of 238.5. In decomposing, it gives off a helium atom, weight 4, repeated three times, and then the substance left is radium, atomic weight about 226.4. Radium, then, is simply the end product of uranium after it has lost three helium atoms. Then the disintegration continues in radium. And the final product of this process of radioactive disintegration is the element lead! Of course this process requires great periods of time.The calculated half-life of radium is 1590 years, uranium much longer.
In the darkroom of an X-ray laboratory, a tiny portion of radium is placed on a mirror at the far end of a hollow tube, and looking into this tube through a magnifying glass appears a large, vast, dark sky, with thousands of shooting stars falling toward you from all directions. Actually, what you see are the emanations of tiny particles being emitted by the radium, greatly magnified. We know, therefore, that there has been no past eternity of matter!
The radioactive elements in existence today have not yet been in existence long enough to have run their course, and disintegrated into lead. To have always existed, without any definite time of starting in the past, this "life" period of radioactive elements long ago would have run its course. All radioactive elements would have long ago disintegrated into lead. Since these elements exist only for a definite span of years, and all the uranium, radium, thorium and other radioactive elements in the world have not yet existed that many years, there was a time, prior to the duration of this span in the past, when these elements ‘did not exist’!
Here we have definite scientific proof that ‘matter has not always existed’.Here we have definite specific elements which once, in the long ago, did not yet exist. Then there came a time, later, when these elements ‘came into existence’.
How did life get here? Science has learned some things about that, too. The wisest of the ancients did not know what science makes available today. It is demonstrated today that ‘life comes only from life’ and that each kind reproduces only after its kind. Genesis 1:25.
The works of Tyndall and Louis Pasteur, in the field of bacteria and protozoa, finally demonstrated scientifically once and for all in these more minute fields what Redi first demonstrated with larger organisms. All the advances of medical and surgical science in the treatment and prevention of germ diseases are based upon this great truth of the law of Biogenesis -that LIFE can come only from pre-existing LIFE.
No fact of science stands more conclusively proved today. Life ‘cannot come from dead matter’. We could go further, and show that what science has discovered about energy and its origin and the laws of conservation of energy, also proves conclusively that "the works were finished from the foundation of the world" (Hebrews 4:3), that the material creation is a completed work, which is not now going on!
Is Anything Superior to Your Mind?
The transmission of knowledge to your mind is limited to the channels of your five senses.Do you know of anything that is superior to your mind? Look at the planets coursing through the sky, the entire cosmic universe, with its suns, its nebulae and galaxies. They are inanimate. They have no mind, no intelligence. They cannot do what you can do – think, reason, plan, or carry out plans according to private volition and will.
The human mind can know, think, reason, plan, and carry out its plans to execution. It can invent and produce instruments by which it may acquire knowledge of the vast universe, or of the minutest particle. By developing rockets and computers, man has sent astronauts to the moon and brought them back alive. He can cause rivers to run backward, turn the forces of nature to serving human needs. And now he has learned how to release the energy of the atom, and utilize a power so vast that man is able at last to annihilate all life from the earth.
But there remains one thing no man ever has been able to do. He cannot build, make, produce, or create anything that is superior to himself! A man can take existing materials and out of them build a house. An automobile is almost a living thing, but the intelligence and powers required to invent and produce it are superior to the thing produced. To suggest to you that anything you could invent, make, build, or bring into being could be superior in intelligence and ability to you and your mind would certainly insult your intelligence!
You have only the alternative of believing that something less than your intelligence produced You – that dumb, purposeless Unintelligence brought into being your intelligence! The only rational possibility is to acknowledge that the very presence of the human mind is ‘proof’ that the great First Cause is also the Supreme Intelligence, infinitely superior to the abilities of man.
Suppose that you could add to your powers of reasoning, planning, designing, the actual creative process, so that you could project your will anywhere to produce and bring into being whatever your mind should plan and desire. Then, suppose you undertook the designing, creating, fashioning, shaping, and setting in motion a limitless cosmic universe – with planets and suns and nebulae and galaxies in all their splendor, each of these vast units being of such intricate and complex construction as the existing universe. On one of these planets you would plan and produce all the forms of life that exist on this planet – not reproduce, for there would be no present universe to copy.
There would be worlds within a world, down to the minutest infinitesimal particles of matter we cannot even see by the aid of the most powerful microscopes. Do you think your mind would be equal to the task? Is it rational, then, to believe that any power or force lacking even human intelligence could have planned, designed, created, formed, fashioned, shaped, put together and set in motion the awesome universe? The First Great Cause who created matter is revealed as the Supreme Intelligence and Architect of The Universe.
Here are human beings on this earth, composed mainly of certain specific elements – living, organic matter. These elements of life must be supplied and replenished through food, water, and air. No man with all his ingenuity and science and laboratory facilities can produce food! That is, he cannot take plain inorganic matter and turn it into the living substance we call food. But some Power, Force, Intelligence, or Being did in some way, at some time, start the process going – a process too wonderful for any man to devise or produce.
And so it is that out of the ground grows grass, and green leafy vegetables, and all other vegetables, and vines, and trees yielding fruit – each with its seed in itself, each through this seed reproducing after its kind – and it is very good! But when a marvelous little grain of wheat is planted in the ground, a plant develops and sprouts above the ground, and in some manner too wonderful for any human mind to understand or imitate, the elements drunk in through the roots from the ground are utilized by the life germ in the seed of wheat, and new grains of wheat appear.
During this process, the inorganic iron and other elements dissolved in the ground, are drunk into the roots and carried up into the new grain of wheat, have been actually converted into organic matter which can be assimilated as food. And this same marvelous process takes place in the growth out of the ground of all grains, vegetables, fruits and foods. When we eat animal meat we are merely consuming, secondhand, the vegetation which the animal ate.
Man, with all his vaunted science, his technical facilities, with all his inventive genius, lacks the intelligence and the powers to produce a grain of wheat, or to convert inorganic matter into living food. Then is it rational to say that forces or powers exist, of no intelligence, which have been able to produce this living miracle of food? Did not a far ‘greater’ intelligence than man design, create, and supply us with all of this?
Look up into the great vast sky at the ‘master clock of the universe’, which never misses a second – and ask "did all that just happen"? There was no ‘Watchmaker’?
Can you believe, no Master Mind thought
out and planned that vast universe, brought it into being, set each star
and planet in its own precise orbit. Did
it just design itself, put itself together, wind itself up and start
running? Was there no Intelligence – no planning – No Creation?" What we have studied here PROVES that God DOES EXIST. And as He is quoted as saying," … they
shall know that I am the Eternal" Ezekiel 38:23.
For further scientific proof of God’s existence, see ‘Seven Proofs God Exists’ on Page 3 of the America And Britain’s Future Free Library.
Summary, Herbert Armstrong, Free Library Copy
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