Has science disproved the existence of God?[1] According to many in the secular world holding to evolution, it has. In fact, Science with a capital “S” has so clearly disproved the existence of God that Christians are viewed as having sacrificed their intellect if they continue the archaic belief in God. According to evolutionists, faith in God is just as ridiculous as believing that Queen Elsa from Disney’s Frozen is a real queen, with real powers. One of the most outspoken opponents of the Christian God is evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Over the years Dawkins has claimed many times that Science has disproved the existence of God. One such example comes from his book The God Delusion, where he writes, “If all the evidence in the universe turned in favour of creationism, I would be the first to admit it, and I would immediately change my mind. As things stand, however, all available evidence (and there is a vast amount of it) favours evolution.”[2]
Statements like these by Dawkins and others catch many Christians off guard. How should a believer respond to such claims that there is a “vast amount” of evidence to support belief in evolution? The best way for a Christian to respond is to simply ask the question, “What evidence supports evolution?” or “What evidence has disproved the existence of God?” Put the burden of proof back in the lap of the person making the claim. Let them provide the evidence. Although this article will not be able to give an in-depth study of each field of science, it will highlight several fields to show that scientific evidence supports the belief in God. More than that, this article will also show that people like Richard Dawkins actually recognize and admit that science provides evidence for a Designer.
Oftentimes when the topic of origins comes up, Christians are treated with pity for believing in the God of the Bible. According to many, intelligence and belief in God do not go together. However, a review of history shows that many great scientific minds recognized God’s existence through their study of different scientific fields. Henry Morris lists many of the founders and primary developers of science and writes,
Men such as Johann Kepler, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, David Brewster, John Dalton, Michael Faraday, Blaise Pascal, Clerk Maxwell, Louis Pasteur, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), and a host of others of comparable stature were men who firmly believed in special creation and the personal omnipotent God of creation, as well as believing in the Bible as the inspired Word of God and in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Their great contributions in science were made in implicit confidence that they were doing His will and glorifying His name in so doing. They certainly entertained no thoughts of conflict between science and the Bible.[3]
Evidence of an Intelligent Creator
These great men of science clearly saw evidence, through creation, for an Intelligent Creator. Walter Bradley writes that Johannes Kepler noted, “The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.”[4]Galileo Galilei came to the same conclusion when studying science. He observed that “the laws of nature are written by the hands of God in the language of mathematics.”[5] Kepler and Galileo clearly understood that the universe was rational and mathematical and that the order they observed through creation could only be explained through the existence of an Intelligent Creator.
Edwin Hubble and Albert Einstein are two more scientists who saw scientific evidence in their fields which pointed to a Creator. In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble discovered the “redshift,” which showed that the universe is expanding.[6] After observing the redshift with Hubble in 1931, Albert Einstein also concluded that the universe was expanding, which is shown in his “General Theory of Relativity.[7] The significance of Hubble and Einstein’s discovery is that if the universe is expanding, then the universe must have had a beginning. If the universe had a beginning, then there must have been a First Cause. Christian apologist and philosopher William Lane Craig, in his book Reasonable Faith, addresses this line of reasoning with the Kalām cosmological argument. Craig writes, “The Kalām cosmological argument may be formulated as follows: 1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause. 2) The universe began to exist. 3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.”[8] The “Cause” according to Craig, is the God of the Christian Bible.
Although Einstein rejected the concept of a personal God, as found in the Christian Bible, he still believed in a rational God and thought that God’s existence was the only logical reason for why order existed in the universe.[9] In an interview with George Sylvester Viereck, Einstein said the following when asked if he believed in God:
I’m not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent being towards God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand those laws.[10]
Microscopic Evidence
Evidence for God is found not only when looking through the lens of a telescope but also when looking through the lens of a microscope. Hugh Ross explains in his book The Creator and the Cosmos, that advancements in technology have revealed things that had once been hidden. He gives the example of the F1-ATPase enzyme, which is a biological rotary engine.[11] Ross points out that “this tiny motor includes the equivalent of an engine block, a drive shaft, and three pistons.”[12] The bacterial flagellum is another example of evidence for a Creator. In his book Darwin’s Black Box, Michael Behe explains that the bacterial flagellum has a propeller that is driven by a small motor and contains a universal joint, rotor, bushings, a stator, and a driveshaft—all parts found in a rotary engine designed by engineers.[13]
There is an even greater dilemma for evolutionists to overcome: the improbability of life’s coming into existence by chance. Stephen Meyer makes this clear in his book Signature in the Cell. Meyer’s writes, “If we assume that a minimally complex cell needs at least 250 proteins of, on average, 150 amino acids and that the probability of producing just one such protein is 1 in 10164 . . . , then the probability of producing all the necessary proteins needed to service a minimally complex cell is 1 in 10164 multiplied by itself 250 times, or 1 in 1 in 1041,000.[14]
According to Alexandre Maia of the Mayo Clinic, “The human body is composed of an estimated 37.2 trillion cells.”[15] If the probability of one cell’s being formed by chance is 1041,000, then the probability of 37.2 trillion cells’ being formed by chance is an even more staggering number!
The emergence of a cell by chance gets even more complicated for evolutionists. For example, in an issue of Scientific American, Chemist Robert Shapiro points out that “DNA replication cannot proceed without the assistance of a number of proteins.”[16] Shapiro highlights an additional complication, writing, “Proteins used by cells today are built following instructions encoded in DNA.”[17] As the article clearly indicates, DNA cannot exist without proteins, and proteins cannot exist without DNA. Shapiro goes on to say, “The above account brings to mind the old riddle: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? DNA holds the recipe for protein construction. Yet that information cannot be retrieved or copied without the assistance of proteins. Which large molecule, then, appeared first—proteins (the chicken) or DNA (the egg)?”[18]
Although Dawkins and others claim that evolution is supported by an overwhelming amount of evidence, the evidence is actually lacking. Instead, the evidence for a Creator is undeniable. Unfortunately, these evolutionary scientists are driven by their evolutionary worldview that causes them to suppress evidence that surrounds them. This suppression is made clear by their own words. For example, Richard Dawkins writes, “Biology is the study of complicated things that gives the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”[19] Further, according to Stephen Meyer, Francis Crick once made a similar confession of suppressing the truth: “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.”[20] In their own words, these scientists admit that the evidence must be ignored in order to hold to the evolutionary worldview. These men are actually stating that the evidence they are looking at in their fields points to a Designer, and that they must ignore that evidence.
Notes:
[1] This article was adapted from my doctoral ministry project; see Brian O’Connell, “Developing an Apologetics Course to Better Equip the Saints at La Grange Church in La Grange, Kentucky” (DMin project, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2022), chap. 3.
[2] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 19.
[3] Henry M. Morris, The Biblical Basis for Modern Science (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2020), 24.
[4] Johannes Kepler, Defundamentis Astrologiae Certioribus, thesis XX, 1601, quoted in Bradley, “The ‘Just So’ Universe,” 160.
[5] Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), quoted in Bradley, “The ‘Just So’ Universe,” 160.
[6] Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards, The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery(Washington, DC: Regnery, 2020), 169-70.
[7] Gonzalez and Richards, The Privileged Planet, 171.
[8] William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (Chicago: Moody Press, 2008), 111.
[9] Richard Olson, “Physics,” in Science & Religion: A Historical Introduction, ed. Gary B. Ferngren (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 360.
[10] Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 386; Kline, Mathematics, quoted in Bradley, “The ‘Just So’ Universe,” 160.
[11] Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos (Glendora, CA: Reasons to Believe, 2018), 162.
[12] Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos, 140.
[13] Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Free Press, 2006), 71-72.
[14] Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 213.
[15] Alexandre Maia, “Functional Epigenomics,” Mayo Clinic, accessed January 14, 2022, https://www.mayo.edu/research/labs/functional-epigenomics/about.
[16] Robert Shapiro, “A Simpler Origin for Life,” Scientific American 296, no. 6 (June 2007): 47.
[17] Shapiro, “A Simpler Origin for Life,” 48.
[18] Shapiro, “A Simpler Origin for Life,” 48.
[19] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015), 4.
[20] Meyer, Signature in the Cell, 20.