Episode 25 – God, Ethics, and Design

Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The goal of Anchored by Truth is to encourage everyone to grow in the Christian faith by anchoring themselves to the secure truth found in the inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God.

Script Notes:

The Lord detests dishonest scales, but accurate weights find favor with him.”

Proverbs, Chapter 11, verse 1, New International Version

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding;

in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.

Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord and shun evil.

This will bring health to your body and nourishment to your bones.

Proverbs, Chapter 3, verses 5 through 8, New International Version

They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them. This will take place on the day when God judges people’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares..

Romans, Chapter 2, verses 15 and 16, New International Version

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VK: Hello! I’m Victoria K. Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. I’m here today with RD Fierro, author, founder of Crystal Sea Books, and part time poet. Today on Anchored by Truth we are going to wrap up this brief series on how we can be sure that the God of the Bible exists. To help us get going in our discussions in our last few episodes we used some extracts from Crystal Sea’s upcoming audio book version of one of RD’s books, The Prodigal’s Advocate. But today, RD, you said you wanted to give the listeners a preview of another project that Crystal Sea is working on. This project we are going to call The Genesis Saga?

RD: Right. We’ve been in the studio for a while now working on the Genesis Saga and while we’re not quite ready to release the project we wanted to give the folks a preview of part five of the project. Overall the project will be a rhymed presentation of the story of creation and the fall. The first four parts of the project are going to be the story itself, but part five is going to be truly unique. Part five which we’re calling the Truth in Genesis is going to be a very brief – but rhymed – summary of a summary of the evidence that points to the absolute need for the God of the Bible to exist for us to be able to make any sense of our world and universe.

VK: So this is a sort of poetic approach to Christian apologetics. I can honestly say that I don’t think I’ve ever seen or run across anything like that. Obviously, some of the greatest poetry ever written – I’m thinking of Milton’s Paradise Lost – is magnificently Christian. But combining rhyme and contemporary apologetics -that’s a new approach.

RD: Well, nobody ever accused us of not being willing to take a risk.

VK: Can’t wait to hear this – and there’s no need to. So, here is a preview of The Genesis Saga part five: The Truth in Genesis.

---- The Truth in Genesis

VK: Ok. That’s kind of amazing about how many ideas you can pack into a few minutes of rhymed verses. I particularly liked:

The smallest cell holds billions of atoms

Organized with exquisite precision.

Did all those brilliant molecular machines

Come to life with no Mind’s decision

That fits so perfectly with what we’ve been talking about in our last few episodes of Anchored by Truth. The presence of order and design in the universe can’t be explained unless there was a Cosmic Mind behind it all. Maybe to begin today’s discussion we should briefly review the line of reasoning that you’ve been following that demonstrates that the existence of the God of the Bible is a logical necessity.

RD: I think that’s a great idea because we have been covering a lot of ground in the last few episodes. Let’s take it by step by step.

VK: Sounds good. Let’s start with the fact that Psalm 19 verse 1, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” is not only a statement of adoration but also of fact.

RD: Exactly. There are only four possible explanations for the existence of a hat, suit, or pair of boots – or the universe for that matter. The universe could be an illusion, self-created, self-existent, or created by someone or something that is self-existent.

VK: But the universe isn’t an illusion because to have an illusion you need a being to experience the illusion. So that’s not valid. And the universe can’t be self-created because nothing can create itself. Creating is doing and something must first be something before it can do anything. So the idea of self-creation is self-defeating.

RD: So the first two possibilities are out. The third is out because our best empirical observations of the universe tell us that it had a beginning in space and time, and that it is running out of usable energy so it will have an ending as well. Because anything that’s self-existent has to be eternal – and because the universe’s attributes demonstrate that it is not eternal – the possibility that the universe is self-existent looks very improbable. That leaves the final possibility that the universe must have been created by a Being that is, itself, self-existent.

VK: Yes. And that conclusion is further reinforced by the empirical observation that even the physical universe exhibits the properties of order and design. And last time we quoted Einstein who said that “the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.” If the universe didn’t exhibit order and design it would be impossible to study it scientifically because science is a consistent exploration for cause and effect. Many of the early giants of science attributed the order present in the universe to the fact that they believed the universe was created by a Being of logic and order. Since they believed that the Creator God was a God of order and design they thought that it made sense to investigate how the universe reflected those attributes. These included Sir Isaac Newton who formulated the laws of motion and gravitation, Louis Pasteur one of the 3 main founders of bacteriology, and Carl Linnaeus father of modern taxonomy. These early giants of science and many others were ardent and devout Christians

RD: Right. Today we take for granted that the universe exhibits a logical harmony on both a galactic and a subatomic scale, but that was not a view that was present in all cultures. And we find that the highest expression of order and design present in the universe in the order and design that is necessary for life. Because life doesn’t just require the ordering and organization of physical matter it also requires that there be an informational overlay on the physical matter. No life can exist without this informational component. Even the simplest forms of life, including single celled bacteria, are made of billions of atoms all of which are arranged – to quote the poem – with exquisite precision. But even more than being arranged precisely the atoms and molecules that comprise a cell must act – behave – in very specific ways. Information driven instructions are necessary to tell the molecular machines - the atoms and molecules that comprise living creatures to perform their tasks. To exist life demands information.

VK: What you are alluding to is that the organizational structure and activity of a single celled animal like an amoeba would make the most complex human factory or construction project look like a mousetrap by comparison. In fact, the cell would more closely resemble an entire city of machines rather than a single factory. And each machine would be busily carrying out a precisely assigned task that would be essential for the life and health of the cell. Some of the molecular machines would have to be able to pass through the cells boundary to bring in molecular bits of energy producing substances and others would carry waste products out. So the protective barrier that keeps the cell together would have to be able to open and close, but only at precise times and precise ways. In many ways, the order and design that we see in the motions of the stars and planets is matched, or exceeded, in what it took to create the simplest forms of life, much less create the higher orders of animals, especially man.

RD: Precisely. And thus far we’ve only talked about the existence of life. Last time we began to talk about other attributes that we see present in our existence that point even more decisively to a single Mind that designed and implemented the world and life as we know them. Only a logical, purposive, and creative Mind could explain why living creatures exhibit purpose and intentionality. Randomly created purposiveness is a logical contradiction. How does order emerge from chaos in the absence of an external force? It can’t. But an all-knowing, all-powerful, self-existent Being can ensure that anything it creates does possess logic, organization, harmony, and purpose. Even in our creation we see such attributes and even more than that we see evidence of the fall from the fact that all human beings, except for perhaps genuine sociopaths, know that they aren’t perfect.

VK: And for us to know that we’re not perfect means that we know that there are standards that we should uphold and obey, but we don’t. It’s impossible to be aware of imperfection without first having the idea that somewhere, somehow there is something that is perfect. We have to be aware of the standard and we have to be aware that the standard has applicability to us. When spectators watch a sporting contest they know that there are rules that apply to the participants, but they don’t worry about following them, because they know that – at least for the time being – those rules don’t apply to them. No one worries about breaking rules that they know don’t apply.

RD: Yes. And the existence of those standards – those ethical obligations if you will - and our failure to abide by them explains the existence of sin and despair. It’s been said that many creatures can experience misery but man is the only animals that is aware that he and she is miserable. But man is also the only creature that can experience hope. Sin, despair, and hope proceed from the dual concepts of legislation and expectation. Behavioral standards are a form of obligation – what I’m calling legislation here. But a law or standard is meaningless if there is no corresponding expectation that someone will adhere or conform to that standard. As you mentioned spectators at a sporting contest don’t need to worry about being in or out of bounds, but the players on the field or court do. Well for legislation to exist somewhere there must be a Legislator. The existence of Laws demands a Lawgiver. Even if we to ascribe to the universe – which is a phenomenally complex structure – the quality of self-existence, it’s very hard, impossible even, to understand where inanimate matter and energy would derive the ability to impose obligations on one particular subset of its atoms and molecules: namely those that comprise men and women.

VK: Yet the Bible’s presentation of God as creating the heavens and the earth, then populating it with living creatures, culminating with man describes what we see about us in fine detail. God made man in His own image so when he created man he gave man moral and ethical sensibilities to be able to understand what would be expected of him. And God gave man reason and logic to be able to comprehend the logical consequences of what would happen if man ignored the standards that God designed. And initially, Adam and Eve had a pretty light lift. All they had to do was not eat of one particular tree – the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They could have eaten of any other tree in the garden. But they ignored that singular, initial prohibition. And because they were the designated representatives of mankind their failure affected all of their descendants including us. That’s what the Bible tells us, but today many people deny that story.

RD: Yes, and, in doing so, they deny the Biblical explanation for the origins for things that we know exist. So, those who deny the truth of the Bible now have to come up with alternative explanations. Other religions obviously offer different explanations even if they agree with the notion of a single, omnipotent Mind as the original creative source. As we have mentioned even non-Judeo Christian philosophers such as Aristotle with his Unmoved Mover have been able to reason that far. What is clear though is that one of the explanations that is the most popular in our culture today – that the universe is self-existent – fails on multiple levels.

VK: Well, we’ve covered a lot of territory in this brief exploration of how we can be sure that the God of the Bible exists. We’ve seen how a universe that has a beginning and ending demonstrates that it’s not eternal and therefore not self-existent. And we’ve also seen that even somehow even if the universe was self-existent there would also have to be a guiding Mind present to explain the existence of the order, design, purpose, and personality. Order and design are evident even in the inanimate operations of the universe. And purpose and personality are clearly evident in the animate portions. And that Mind must also possess ethical attributes. We’ve briefly alluded to the fact that man’s ethical failures, a failure to live up to prescribed expectations and standards, explains sin and despair. But what about hope? How does that Mind’s ethical attributes – as described by the Bible explain the existence of hope.

RD: Hope, real hope, is only possible when we come the reality of the Christian faith because only Christianity provides a fully coherent explanation for how ultimate hope for men can exist. Obviously, we’re talking about the hope that is found in Jesus. If all we knew about the ethical operations of humanity was that there were standards that we didn’t measure up to then we’re forced into sort of Faustian choice between believing that perfect justice is not possible or that the best destination for men after death would be oblivion. Neither one of those possibilities is intuitively satisfying or particularly appealing. If our entry into a sort of demi-heaven were dependent on us supposedly making more good choices then bad choices we would still be left with the question of who decided what was good or bad and on what basis the Judge made such a decision. A judge who was capable of error would be an imperfect judge. But a perfect judge would logically demand perfection of his ethically bound creatures because His standards would reflect His character. And absent a judge and life after death simply means we are left with oblivion. A choice that is well recognized by the nihilists.

VK: But Jesus obviously interrupts all those dismal prospects and introduces real hope. Because Jesus was fully human He was able to represent mankind before God. And because He had lived a sinless life there was no need for Him to atone for His own sins. So, when he offered Himself as a sacrifice he was able to be a suitable representative for all those who would place their trust in Him. And because Jesus was fully divine He was a being of infinite worth so the value of His sacrifice was more than sufficient to atone for the sins of those He represented. Thus Jesus brings real hope to imperfect men. He fully satisfies the just demands of a perfect Judge so the Judge isn’t compromised when He grants believers entrance into an eternal heaven where they can enjoy a world where creation’s original perfection has been restored.

RD: True dat. Jesus said in the book of Revelation that He was the Alpha and the Omega. He was not only the beginning of creation but he is the consummation of its restoration.

VK: Sounds like it’s a great time to have a prayer. Since we know that Jesus is both the cause not only of hope but of our blessed assurance that our future is secure in his hands let’s listen to a prayer of adoration for the Son of God.

---- Prayer of adoration for Jesus

VK: Because a lot of our radio episodes are linked together in series of topics we want to remind listeners that if they missed any episodes or if they just want to hear one again, all of these episodes are available on your favorite podcast app. To find them just search on “Anchored by Truth by Crystal Sea Books.” We hope you’ll be with us then and we hope you’ll take some time to encourage some friends to tune in too, or listen to the podcast version of this show.

If you’d like to hear more, try out crystalseabooks.com where “We’re not famous but our Boss is!”

(Bible Quotes from the New Living Translation)

The Book of Psalms, Chapter 8, verse 3 through 5, New Living Translation

Colossians, Chapter 1, verses 15 through 17, New Living Translation