7 REASONS WHY A SCIENTIST BELIEVES IN GOD*
(This article of Mr A. Cressy Morrison, former President of the New York
Academy of Sciences, first appeared in the "Reader's Digesf' (January 1948);
then on recommendation of Professor C. A. Coulson, F. R.S., Professor of
Mathematics at Oxford University, was republished in the Reader's Digest
November 1960) - It shows how science compels the scientists to admit to the
essential need of a Supreme Creator.
We are still in the dawn of the scientific age and every increase of light
reveals more brightly the handiwork of an intelligent Creator. In the 90 years
since Darwin we have made stupendous discoveries; with a spirit of scientific
humanity and of faith grounded in knowledge we are approaching even nearer to
an awareness of God.
For myself I count seven reasons for my faith.
First:
By unwavering mathematical law we can prove that our universe was designed and
executed by a great engineering Intelligence. Suppose you put ten coins, marked
from one to ten, into your pocket and give them a good shuffle. Now try to take
them out in sequence from one to ten, pulling back the coin each time and
shaking them all again. Mathematically we know that your chance of first
drawing number one is one in ten; of drawing one and two in succession, one in
100; of drawing one, two and three in succession, one in a thousand, and so on;
your chance of drawing them all, from one to number ten in succession, would
reach the unbelievable figure of one chance in ten thousand million.
By the same reasoning, so many exacting conditions are necessary for life on
earth that they could not possibly exist in proper relationship by chance. The
earth rotates on its axis at one thousand miles an hour; if it turned at one
hundred miles an hour, our days and nights would be ten times as long as now,
and the hot sun would then burn up our vegetation during each long day, while
in the long night any surviving sprout would freeze.
Again, the sun, source of our life, has a surface temperature of 12,000 degrees
Fahrenheit, and our earth is, just far enough away so that this 'eternal fire"
warms us just enough and not too much! If the sun gave off only one-half its
present radiation, we would freeze, and if it gave half as much more, we would
roast.
The slant of the earth, tilted at an angle of 23 degrees, gives us our season;
if it had not been so tilted, vapours from the ocean would move north and
south, piling up for us continents of ice. If our moon was, say, only 50
thousand miles away instead of its actual distance. Our tides would be so
enormous that twice a day all continents would be submerged; even the mountains
would soon be eroded away. If the crust of the earth had been only ten feet
thicker, there would be no oxygen without which animal life must die. Had the
ocean been a few feet deeper, carbon dioxide and oxygen would have been
absorbed and no vegetable life could exist. Or if our atmosphere had been
thinner, some of the meteors, now burned in space by the million evey day;
would be striking all parts of the earth, starting fires everywhere. Because of
these, and host of other examples, there is not one chance in millions that
life on our planet is an accident.
Second:
The resourcefulness of life to accomplish its purpose is a manifestation of
all-pervading Intelligence. What life itself is no man has fathomed. It has
neither weight nor dimensions, but it does have force; a growing root will
crack a rock. Life has conquered water, land and air, mastering the element,
compelling them to dissolve and reform their combinations.
Life, the sculptor, shapes all living things; an artist, it designs every leaf
of every tree, and colours every flower. Life is a musician and has each bird
to sing its love songs, the insects to call each other in the music of their
multitudinous sounds. Life is a sublime chemist, giving taste to fruits and
spices, and perfume to the rose changing water and carbonic acid into sugar and
wood and, in so doing, releasing oxygen that animals may have the breath of
life.
Behold an almost invisible drop of protoplasm, transparent and jelly-like,
capable of motion, drawiug energy from the sun. This single cell, this
transparent mistlike droplet, holds within itself the germ of life, and has the
power to distribute this life to every living thing, great and small. The
powers of this droplet are greater than our vegetation and animals and people,
for all life came from it. Nature did not create life; fire-blistered rocks and
a saltless sea could not meet the necessarv requirements. Who, then, has put it
here ?
Third:
Animal wisdom speaks irresistibly of a good Creator who infused instinct into
otherwise helpless little creatures. The young salmon spends years at sea, then
comes back to his own river; and travels up the very side of the river into
which flows The tributary where he was born. What brings him back so precisely?
If you transfer him to another tributary he will know at once that he is off
his course and he will fight his way down and back to the main stream and then
turn up against the current to finish his destiny more accurately.
Even more difficult to solve is the mystery of eels. These amazing creatures
migrate at maturity from all ponds and rivers everywhere - those from Europe
across thousands of miles of oceans - all bound for the same abysmal deeps near
Bermuda. There they breed and die. The little ones, with no apparent means of
knowing anything except that they are in a wilderness of water; nevertheless
find their way back not only to the very shore from which their parent came but
thence to the rivers, lakes or little ponds - so that each body of water is
always populated with eels. No American eel has ever been caught in Europe, no
European eel in American waters. Nature has even delayed the maturity of the
European eel by a year or more to make up for its longer journey. Where does
the directing iruptilse originate?
A wasp will overpower a grasshopper, dig a hole in the earth, sting the
grasshopper in exactly the right place so that he does not die but becomes
unconscious and lives on as a form of preserved meat. Then the Wasp will lay
her eggs handily so that her children when they hatch can nibble witliout
killing' the insect on which they feed, to them dead meat would be fatal. The
mother then flies way and dies; she never sees her young. Surely the wasp must
have done all this right the first time and every time, or else there would be
no wasp. Such mysterious techniques cannot be explained by adaption; they were
bestowed.
Fourth:
Man has something more than animal instinct - the power of reason.
No other animal has ever left a record of its ability to count ten or even to
understand the meaning of ten. Where instinct is like a single note of a flute,
beautiful but limited, the human brain contains all the notes of all the
instruments in the orchestra. No need to belabor this fourth point; thanks to
the human, reason we can contemplate the possibility that we are what we are
only because we have received a spark of Universal Intelligence.
Fifth:
Provision for all living is revealed in phenomena which we know today but which
Darwin did not know - such as the wonders of genes. So unspeakably tiny are
these genes that, if all of them responsible for all living people in the world
could be put in one place, there would be less than a thimbleful. Yet these
ultra-microscopic genes and their companions, the chromosomes, inhabit every
living cell and are the absolute keys to all human, animal and vegetable
characteristics. A thimble is a small place in which to put all the individual
characteristics of two thousand million human beings. However; the facts are
beyond question. Well then, how do genes lock up all the normal heredity of a
multitude of ancestors and preserve the psychology of each in such an
infinitely small space? Here evolution really begins - at the cell, the entity
which holds and carries genes. How a few million atoms, locked up as an
ultra-microscopic gene, can absolutely rule all on earth is an example
of profound cunning and provision that could emanate only from a Creative
Intelligence - no other hypothesis will serve.
Sixth:
By the economy of nature, we are forced to realize that only infinite wisdom
could have foreseen and prepared with such astute husbandry.
Many years ago a species of cactus was planted in Australia as a protective
fence. Having no insect enemies in Australia the cactus soon began a prodigious
growth; the alarming abundance persisted until the plants covered an area as
long and wide as England, crowding inhabitants out of the towns and villages,
and destroying their farms. Seeking a defence, the entomologists scoured the
world; finally they turned up an insect which exclusively feeds on cactus, and
would eat nothing else. It would breed freely too; and it had no enemies in
Australia. So animal soon conquered vegetable and today the cactus pest has
retreated, and with it all but a small protective residue of the insects,
enough to hold the cactus in check for ever.
Such checks and balances have been universally provided. Why have not
fast-breeding insects dominated the earth? Because they have no lungs such as
man possesses; they breathe through tubes. But when insects grow large, their
tubes do not grow in ratio to the increasing size of the body. Hence there has
never beetn an insect of great size; this limitation on growth has held them
all in check.
If this physical check had not been provided, man could not exist. Imagine
meeting a hornet as big as a lion!
Seven:
The fact that man can conceive the idea of God is in itself a unique proof.
The conception of god rises from a divine faculty of man, unshared with the
rest of our world - the faculty we call imagination. By its power, man and man
alone can fmd the evidence of things unseen. The vista that power opens up is
unbounded; indeed, as man is perfected, imagination becomes a spiritual
reality. He may discern in all the evidence of design and purpose the great
truth that heaven is wherever and whatever is; that God is everywhere and in
everything, but nowhere so close as in our hearts. It is scientifically as well
as imaginatively true; in the words of the palmist; The heavens declare the
glory of God and the firmament sheweth His handiwork.
Source:
God -An Islamic Perspective
By: Allamah Sayyed Saeed Akhtar Rizvi
