In my college geology class in Oklahoma, our professor stated that evolution is only considered a theory because it isn’t a scientific law like gravity; given the overwhelming nature of the evidence, he explained, evolution should be taught as simple fact. He then explained the origins of the universe, which, in his view, required no Creator. I especially remember his explanation of how the Earth formed: Innumerable asteroids slammed into each other and became super-heated; heavy elements settled, lighter elements rose, and the Earth literally burped out a breathable atmosphere, a process he identified as “outgassing.” This breathable atmosphere would prove critical when life spontaneously generated and evolved into living organisms, ultimately resulting in mankind and the present “greenhouse gas”-belching society we see today.
The most interesting part came in the next class when he explained that plate tectonics (the idea that the movement of the Earth’s plates causes earthquakes, volcanoes, and many other geological phenomena) is a theory, and we needed to realize as we studied it that the theory of plate tectonics could be wrong — quite a contrast to his dogma on evolutionary theory and the origin of the universe.
The solidarity of the education system in teaching evolution as fact is something you as a teen must be prepared to answer. Most scientists believe it and have even accepted the idea that the universe formed by spontaneous generation. Unlike some creationists, they do seek concrete evidence of their claims, yet such proof cannot be found. Since evolution is unproven, scientists too must believe their theory with unseen evidence—what the Bible calls “faith” (Hebrews 11:1). Some of our greatest scientific minds are actually asking the religious of the world to dismiss their God and their faith for an unproven theory. The price for failing to comply is the label of being scientifically incompetent, if not altogether ignorant.
Yet, for most religious people, the fact that God exists is something to take on faith alone. Most require no proof. Surely scientists must find the religious argument absurd: Accept God’s existence because of faith in God—a circular argument if ever there was one. For someone who doesn’t already believe in the Almighty God, the idea that they should accept it on faith is preposterous!
Obviously, neither of these two stances deserves our support.
But this fundamental question of supreme importance warrants serious attention and thought: Does God exist?
If you believe in God, and you base your belief on faith alone, I ask you to prove it. After all, if you expect anyone to take seriously your claim that God exists, shouldn’t you be able to offer concrete evidence and proof?
Let’s consider His existence, not based on the notion of faith, not based on invalid claims, but based on evidence—on rock-solid proof.
Proven Before
Herbert W. Armstrong, author of the eye-opening booklet Does God Exist?, proved the existence of God many years ago after receiving a challenge himself.
“‘Herbert Armstrong, you are simply ignorant!’ accused Hertha [Mrs. Armstrong’s sister-in-law]. Her words stabbed deeply into what was left of my ego. ‘One is uneducated, and ignorant, unless he believes in evolution. All educated people now believe it’” (Autobiography of Herbert W. Armstrong).
Mr. Armstrong knew that there were only two possibilities, special creation or evolution, and was determined to prove which was correct. He realized that the two subjects must be studied together to reach a true, factual conclusion—yet they rarely are. True evolutionists were almost exclusively “dyed in the wool” atheists, he quickly discovered. Since that time, many on both the scientific and religious side now promote theistic evolution, claiming that God started the creation through the evolutionary process. That isn’t compatible with your Bible though—Genesis 1 tells us exactly how God made His creation on Earth, and it wasn’t through a gradual evolutionary process.
Mr. Armstrong was willing to look at both sides. He wrote, “… very early in this study of evolution and of the Bible, actual doubts came into my mind about the existence of God!” (ibid). On the surface, the claims of evolutionists can appear convincing. They appear quite scientific. Yet they lack facts to support their claims.
Don’t Assume
Mr. Armstrong summed up the proof that God exists this way: “Creation is the proof of God” (Which Day Is the Christian Sabbath?). That does not mean that we simply look at the birds and the trees and gaze starry-eyed into the heavens, realizing that since the world exists, there has to be a God. The creation around you does provide scientific proof of its Creator, as we will show.
The evolutionists do not study this proof in that context because their purpose is to attempt to explain a creation with no Creator. They combine a myriad of theories of natural selection and mutations and spontaneous generation that all have a ring of validity. Yet when offering their speculations, they suppose, hypothesize and guess.
Let’s confine ourselves to the scientific facts at hand and prove that the Creator God does exist! As Mr. Armstrong did, let us do so by evaluating the creation and the laws of science.
Proof That Matters
By studying radioactive elements, Mr. Armstrong learned that there had to have been a time when matter did not exist—that there is no past eternity of matter. Every 1,600 years, for instance, half of the existing radioactive element radium-226 disintegrates into lead. Eventually, there will be no more radium! If these elements had always existed, there would be no radium left today. Yet radium and other radioactive elements clearly still exist. Since these elements only exist for a set period of time, we know that there was a time when there was no matter. That means there was a time when matter came into existence.
The evolutionary theory would need to explain how these radioactive elements came into being in the first place. Try to wrap your mind around the concept of something coming from nothing—it isn’t easy! Ironically, it takes a great deal of faith.
If, then, we know that radioactive elements do not come from nothing, that they in fact disintegrate over time, then we know that there must have been a “first cause,” a “higher power” or super-powerful Being of some kind that brought these elements into being.
When Mr. Armstrong faced his classic challenge to disprove evolution, most scientists still believed the universe had always existed. In fact, they were initially resistant to the idea of the big bang theory because it sounded too religious—and it had been introduced by a priest. This changed in 1965 when two Bell Labs employees discovered cosmic microwave background while trying to fix an antenna. The idea that “the size of the universe increased by a factor larger than a million trillion trillion in less than a millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second” (The Fabric of the Cosmos) became entrenched throughout the scientific community.
But why would that happen? Our Awesome Universe Potential says: “Now—if that is right, then where did this ‘cosmic seed’ come from? Big-bang theorists can’t explain it. In fact, they don’t even try: The origin of matter is not part of the theory.
“Why did it suddenly expand? This too is a mystery to cosmologists.
“And there is another problem. In nature, things decay—they move from order toward disorder. Greene says this natural law suggests that the universe in its infancy began ‘in an extraordinarily special, highly ordered state of low entropy.’ Extraordinarily special? Highly ordered? Well then, how did it start out in such a state? Once again, science is silent.”
“The real big bang was a well-planned, deliberately executed act of creation!” the Plain Truth magazine wrote in June 1984. “How would you expect a superpowerful divine Being to bring forth an entire universe? With a small fizzle, a limp thud or a weak whimper? Of course not! The creation of the universe was accomplished with a glorious display of light, heat, matter and energy—a display that still reverberates throughout space ….”
The implications of what science actually knows about the beginning of the universe and its continued expansion for billions of years help to prove the Bible’s account is true, which is explained more thoroughly in chapter three of Our Awesome Universe Potential.
The Proof of Life
Something or someone brought matter into being. Yet, the question remains: Where did life on Earth come from? Many theories presented by scientists give possible scientific explanations that offer no proof, and even worse, faulty evidence.
One irrefutable scientific law is the law of biogenesis—that life can only come from life! A rock can’t come alive. Not even in a billion years—it cannot happen. This law also states that living things can only produce more living things like themselves. In other words, horses don’t give birth to elephants. This is quite a sticky point for evolutionists. But there are no exceptions to this rule.
Mr. Armstrong pointed out, “No fact of science stands more conclusively proved today. Life cannot come from dead matter” (Does God Exist?). Much as the law of gravity guarantees that everything is held down, the law of biogenesis tells us that life comes from life and not from anything else. If a species becomes extinct, it doesn’t spontaneously generate again—it’s gone!
In recent years, some evolutionists have asserted that biogenesis is not a law, that it too is only an unproven theory. However, all the relevant scientific data, all of it, disproves that assertion.
Knowing that life only comes from life, you cannot account for life without a Lifegiver. This scientific law requires a living Creator!
Now we know two things: Something had to have created matter, and something had to have created life.
Yet simple observation proves that life comes in many different forms. For example, it is not always intelligent. Plants do not think, as we do. Even animals do not have the reasoning power that mankind does. Can we prove the supreme intelligence of God as Creator?
Man’s Limited Creative Power
There is nothing in the physical universe superior to the human mind. Even the vast expanse of the heavens—with all its splendor, with the planets hurtling through space, with billions of stars in the cosmos, with nebulae, black holes and other cosmic phenomena—is inanimate. It cannot reason or think.
Despite man’s intellectual superiority to the rest of creation, there is one thing that even he cannot do: He cannot produce anything superior to himself.
You might build a house, a computer or a car. Your intelligence and power of invention will always be superior to that which you created. It would surely be insulting to tell someone that he could make something superior in intelligence and ability to himself. We are, however, now seeing arguments that some AI models are not only more intelligent than we are, but able to design superior product as well, an argument that started when IBM’s Deep Blue computer defeated Garry Kasparov in a chess match for the first time. Today, no chess grandmaster can consistently stand up to the power in a smartphone. While that’s a discussion for a future article, within the scope of creation versus evolution, no scientist would claim an artificial intelligence, running on code written by human intelligence, would be able to create a single blade of grass or start the big bang. Life doesn’t come from non-life, and AI is non-life—and even it required designers!
Evolutionists are asking us to believe that something less intelligent and less sophisticated than man produced man! It postulates that unintelligence—dumb, inanimate matter without purpose—brought about intelligence.
Alternatively, consider that the presence of the human mind is proof of a mind superior to our own—proof of a supremely intelligent God!
Consider, also, your own ability to create. Although mankind is able to reason, plan and design, we have no actual creative power. We can only “create” from already created materials. If you tried to create—really create—you would have to design, from scratch, all the forms of life on this planet. You also would have to design and create matter, all the way down to particles so small that they cannot be seen even with the most advanced microscopes.
Mr. Armstrong asked, “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 we behold? The first great Cause who created matter, then, stands revealed as the supreme intelligence and architect of the universe!” (ibid).
Holding to Their Faith
It surely takes a tremendous amount of faith to believe that the entire physical universe sprang from nothing, that life came from non-life, that intelligence came from non-intelligence, and that the intricacy we see around us is the product not of design, but of random forces. Consider God’s explanation and the many proofs you have seen here: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).
Those who stubbornly refuse to accept the proof of the existence of the living God have probably stopped reading by this point. But their proof is coming. We are rapidly approaching the time when Jesus Christ will return to this Earth in the full, supreme power and glory of the Creator God. Then they too will know that He is God!