Where Did God Come From?

The question of the origin of God has caused many people to scratch their chins in wonderment. Whether by the curious Christian or the antagonistic atheist, this question has been asked for centuries. To quote atheist Sam Harris, “If God created the universe, who created God?” And what was God doing before creation?

 

Saint Augustine, as far as we can tell, was the first person to formulate a doctrinal position on this. His answer was that God created time itself while He was creating the universe. The phrase that opens the Bible, “in the beginning,” speaks of the beginning of time. God was not doing anything before He created, because the concept of before didn’t exist. That is a time word, and God operates outside of time.

 

Thomas Aquinas built on this supposition, writing that every effect must have a cause, and nothing in the universe came into existence on its own. A was caused by B, and B was caused by C, and C was caused by D, ad infinitum. But if we follow this all the way back to the very beginning, there had to be something that caused the fist effect. This is often referred to as an uncaused first cause. 

 

If there is no Higher Power then we have to answer that question of origin somehow. What caused the appearance of the earliest particles? They couldn’t “just so happen” to exist. They need a first cause. 

 

If you believe in a Higher Power then the answer becomes much easier. God is the uncaused first cause. He existed before there was anything, and when He decided to do so, He created the universe. Part of Aquinas’ logic was that everything in a series has a cause, but that God is in a category all by Himself. We do not need to trace anything back further than God. In God we have the origin and source of everything else.

 

Dinesh D’Souza compared God to the author of a book. If we were to read something like Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, we want to know about the character’s back stories. When we follow Pip, or when we meet Mrs. Haversham, we want to know where they came from. But no one reads the book and demands to know where Dickens came from. As the author of the book, the characters come about as a matter of Dickens’ own will, but we do not need to grapple with the author’s origins. 

 

In a similar way, God, as the author of the universe, has brought about everything we see as a matter of His own will. Which is easier to believe: that a powerful God intentionally and intelligently created the world through His will, or that some unexplained particles accidentally created the world through chaos? 

 

“You are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power; for you created all things, and by your will they exist and were created.”

Revelation 4:11

How Do You Explain Religion?

 

As long as there have been people, there has been religion. As far back as we can trace, people have been religious from Day 1. While religions differ across continents and centuries, the common denominator is that people believe in a higher power, and they do something to pay homage to that deity. The fact that the world is still very religious in 2021 is a big problem for those who believe in Darwinian evolution.

 

We are supposedly evolving towards perfection. Darwinists have no problem with their caricatures of dumb cavemen believing in God; those barely human, dumb-as-bricks mongrels were too stupid to know any better. But by now there should not be any more religious people. Evolutionists teach that religion is an illusion, and it requires that one believes what is false to be true, and what is true to be false. The very idea of survival of the fittest means that humans should reject what is false because we should only do that which contributes to our own survival. Don’t take my word for it. Famed atheist Richard Dawkins said the existence of religion presents “a major puzzle for anyone who thinks in a Darwinian way.” Evolutionists know that religion hurts their theory. 

 

Religion does not contribute to our survival, humanly speaking. People give up things because of religion. Consider Christianity: most of us give away our money as an offering, wake up early on Sundays and spend our time at services; we abstain from things the world says we need; we deny ourselves and submit to a person we cannot even see. Our ancestors brought their best produce, even their best heads of cattle as sacrifices to the Lord. According to evolution, these things should have been weeded out to guarantee our survival. Contrary to what Darwinists say, religion isn’t going away any time soon.

 

That is because religion does contribute to our survival. Prayer is a wonderful gift, and faith, hope, and love make the world a better place. Atheists say they can be “good without God,” but God is the one who defines what is good. This is the biggest reason why religion is a problem for evolution: deep down we all know there is a God.

 

In Romans 2:14-15 Paul wrote, “For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do the things in the law, these, although not having the law, are a law to themselves, who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and between themselves their thoughts accusing or else excusing them.”

Even the Gentiles, according to the apostle, have God’s law written on their hearts. The law was written on tablets for Jews, but in reality, all people know God’s law. We know stealing, lying, and hurting others is wrong, and we know this without having to read the Ten Commandments. In the same way, even without reading a Bible, we know there is a Higher Power, an Intelligent Designer. Evolutionists say religion is an illusion, but the only illusion is evolution.

 

One Race

Racial tensions continue to mount in our country, and this always bothers me. People like to point fingers of blame at certain individuals for creating the problem; I have seen some blame the recent skirmishes on President Trump, as if these same instances of murder-by-cop and protests-turned-looting didn’t happen multiple times under the previous administration as well. If we want to blame people, there are a few we can blame.

First, we blame the perpetrators themselves. The ones who commit acts of racism are dead wrong, and no one is to blame for their actions but themselves. Second, we blame Adam and Eve because racism is a result of sin. Every act of evil perpetrated in the name of hatred is the result of the absence of Jesus in a person’s life. We have tried to legislate away racism, but obviously that does not work. Racists need Jesus, just like every other sinner.

But I would also propose we blame Charles Darwin, or as I like to call him, “The Father of Racism.” Before his complete fiction known today evolution, all people were rightly viewed as being one race. Darwinian evolution teaches that humans came from lesser life forms, and the natural result of that way of thinking is to view one race as more evolved than the other. Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton wrote a book based on Darwin’s, and he went a step further, calling for selective breeding of people to eliminate the less desirables (Darwin praised his book). Influenced by both Darwin and Galton, Ernst Haeckel introduced Darwinian evolution and Galton’s “judicious marriages” into Germany. He championed a German colonialism that viewed Germans as being at the top of the evolutionary ladder, while what he called “wild races” (the “negroes”) were in between primates and people. This is the Germany into which Adolph Hitler was born, and his holocaust was the natural result of this mindset. (By the way, Margaret Sanger was also greatly influenced by this way of thinking, and she founded Planned Parenthood as a way of “exterminating” the “undesirables” that were produced by lesser races)

Amazing, isn’t it? Society wants to “cancel” George Washington because he was racist, but we teach Darwin’s theories to our children. Charles Darwin has done more to promote racism than any single person in history (not including Satan, of course).

The reality is we are all part of one race—the human race. We are all homo sapiens. There are no evolved races and wild races. We are each fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God. Whether male or female, African, Asian, or American, we are each more than 98% identical, and the major difference is in the amount of pigmentation in our skin. The difference in our skin goes back to the Tower of Babel, not to an imaginary rung on the ladder of evolution. We need to love each other as God loves us, as Jesus called this the second greatest commandment: “There is a second just like it—You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:39).”

A Cool Coincidence

Have you ever heard of the North American walnut sphinx? It is a moth caterpillar that has one of the coolest defense mechanisms in all of creation. God equipped this insect with a nice camouflage, but birds are still able to track them down and eat them. The walnut sphinx has been nicknamed the accordion worm because of the way it compresses its body lengthwise when it is under duress. The moth has tiny holes called spiracles that allow air to exit its body while it is compressing, and the sound of the rushing air creates a whistling sound.

Here is the cool part: the whistling sound emitted by the walnut sphinx sounds exactly like the alarm call of the very songbird that is trying to eat it. When the songbird hears the mimicked alarm call, he thinks a fellow bird is warning him of nearby danger, and the bird flies away. It has been said that this moth whistles while it irks. The whistling sound has clocked in at 80 decibels, which is louder than the average volume at which humans talk.

In an evolutionary journal called Scientific American, Christopher Intagliata described this phenomenon as “A cool coincidence, for sure.” That five-word sentence tells you all you need to know about the difference in Darwinian evolution and belief in the biblical account of a Creator God. The evolutionist is confronted with dozens of examples of intelligent design (I have written frequently about it in these columns), and they must conclude it is “a cool coincidence.” When the evidence points towards God, they so badly want to be the god of their own lives that they dismiss intelligent design as a coincidence (usually while saying Christians don’t get science). The science points a Christian towards God, but causes the evolutionist to settle for “a cool coincidence.”

It is a cool coincidence that the amount of gravity on our planet does not cause us to fly away, but neither does it crush us. It is a cool coincidence that Earth’s distance from the sun neither scorches us nor freezes us. It is a cool coincidence that Earth rotates in such a way as to give us day and night, as well as seasons, and we get just enough of each.

I don’t have to believe in millions of coincidences. I don’t have enough faith to believe in evolution. It is so much easier to trust in a Sovereign God that fine-tuned this universe, our bodies, and everything else to run just right. I don’t believe in coincidences; I believe in Creation.     

Bees and the Bible

For many of us, when we see bees buzzing around it is time to take cover. While we certainly do not want to be met by the bee’s stinger, these small insects serve an important purpose, and I’m not just talking about honey.

As you read this column, please keep in mind that evolution teaches that all life forms do what they do either by trial and error, or else by getting it right the first time. Now lets examine the honeycomb and try to decide how bees ever figured out the mathematics behind their operation. It begins by worker bees eating honey, then excreting clumps of wax; other bees will gather the wax and mold it into columns of six-sided cells. In order for the wax to remain firm enough to hold but soft enough to work with, it must remain 95 degrees. By clustering together in the honeycomb, bees are able to keep the wax at the needed temperature. In order to make the classic honeycomb look, the cell walls must be at a 120-degree angle in relation to the other walls to make the hexagonal design, and each partition is less than .1 mm thick. The cells are tilted upward at 13 degrees, the exact dimension needed to keep the honey from dripping out. The bees then seal off the bottom of the columns by constructing three four-sided diamond shapes that meet in a point, thus interlocking and keeping the honey safely inside.

Mathematicians have tried other shapes, including curved sides on hexagons or mixtures of polygons, but have concluded that the bees’ method is the most economical. Do we attribute the bees’ incredible math and architectural skills to luckiness or trial and error? Did they get it exactly right the first time, or did they tinker with their hexagons until they had the perfect pattern? Why would the first bees ever have gathered up the wax secreted by other bees and decided to mold it into a honeycomb? How do all bees everywhere build identical combs?

Isn’t it easier to believe that an Intelligent Designer created the bees, and gave them the instinctive knowledge to build their honeycombs? Yes, bees give us honey, but they also point us to God, the maker of heaven and earth, and they serve as a stinging indictment against the lunacy of Darwinism.

Smile

Have you ever seen a chimpanzee smile? Let me answer that for you: you haven't. You may have seen them make silly faces, but you have not seen them smile because they do not posses the ability to smile. They lack the necessary muscles and nerves required to smile and laugh. 

While humans have about 50 facial muscles, apes have fewer than 30. Among the 20 fewer muscles are the ones at the corners of the lips needed to lift upwards into a smile. Even if they had those muscles they still would not have the nerves that work in conjunction with the muscles. 

Have you ever seen a baby smile? Let me answer that for you: you have. Babies are born with the ability to smile, even if it is several months before they smile out of happiness. Smiling is something humans have hard wired into our DNA from birth. 

Why can humans smile but not chimps? According to Darwinian evolution, anything humans have that lesser creatures do not have has evolved out of necessity. In other words, those extra facial muscles are only present because humans cannot survive without them. But how do primates survive just fine without the ability to smile? Why would humans have evolved the extra muscles and nerves? What does that have to do with survival of the fittest? 

The evolutionary answer would be that animals simply don't need to smile in order to survive, but the natural question arises: why do humans need to smile? Humans were created in the image of God, and we are the pinnacle of His creation. He made us last and set us apart, and we are the only redeemable part of Creation because we are the only ones He died for. He made us emotional beings and gave us the ability to communicate non verbally. Whenever we smile we are testifying to God’s magnificent creation, and even on our worst day, we have a lot to smile about. 

If you find yourself having a bad day, say with Job, “I will forget my complaining; I will put off my sad face and smile (9:27).” Smile, if for no other reason, because you can.

The First Office Chair

Here’s a fun fact for you: Do you know who invented the office chair?

The first office chair was crudely fashioned by Charles Darwin in the 1840s so that he could get around his workspace more easily. Darwin accomplished this feat by affixing small wheels to the bottom of the chair that was in his study. Within a few years his chair caught on, and soon German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck was putting these wheeled-chairs throughout the parliament.

Our office chairs today only loosely resemble Darwin’s. While some sofas and accent chairs haven’t changed much in 150 years, the office chair has come a long way. We could say that it has evolved.

Slowly, over time, Darwin’s office chair shed its upholstery and covered itself with faux leather because it knew that leather would one day be a classier look in offices. The chair continued to slowly evolve over time, adding a reclining feature, a height adjustment lever, and a high-back option; in what can only be described as a miracle, Darwin’s chair traded in its four wooden legs for a central leg with protruding wheels, which would allow it to better fit under desks.

Sound impossible? That’s because it is. Even Darwin himself would realize how far fetched it is to believe that his primitive chair would adapt itself on its own, regardless of the amount of time involved. The truth is, each of the improvements made to the office chair were made on purpose by intelligent people who saw ways to make it better. We call that intelligent design.   

There is not a rational person on the planet that would believe a chair adapted itself on its own, so why do we believe that living beings far more complex than furniture have done the same? The more we look at the created universe, the more we see intelligent design, not random chance. God is that Intelligent Designer who made all things exactly as they should be.

All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.

John 1:3

Dinosaur Tracks

Over the Fourth of July weekend we went to the Dinosaur Valley State Park in Glen Rose, Texas. The park is a beautiful 1,500-acre area highlighted by the Paluxy River; visitors can dig for fossils, take a dino hike, and see animatronic dinosaurs inside the museum. There are also multiple fossilized dinosaur tracks preserved, including a few successive left-right patterns.

As expected, the information provided boasts that the footprints formed during the Cretaceous Period, which was approximately 113 million years ago. Over the last million years, the river allegedly eroded away rock layers, leaving the tracks exposed for us to observe. This matter-of-fact information seemingly upholds Darwinian evolution and hurts the biblical claim of a young earth.

But how are these footprints preserved? Secular Geologists believe in a slow and gradual process that would have taken an extremely long time, but common sense says that wind, rain, and other factors would have eliminated these tracks from fossilizing. The biblical solution is that a worldwide Flood caused the dinosaur tracks to be quickly buried by new layers of floodwaters and the minerals brought with them. In fact, an unbiased person would almost certainly conclude that dino tracks could only be preserved by rapid burial, supporting the Genesis account and refuting evolution.

Consider the fact that the vast majority of these dinosaur trackways are in straight lines, compared to the normal meandering pattern of animals. The straight trackways seem to indicate that the dinosaurs were in great distress, running for their lives. If we picture the dinosaurs running towards higher ground to escape the rising floodwaters, we can understand the straight nature of the tracks, and the rapid burial to preserve those tracks. Evolution doesn't have an answer for these fossils, but God’s Word does.

It is easy to believe what we are told by the experts because they are the experts. But while visiting the State Park I noticed a few things. One was in the FAQ section of the museum, under the question, “What color were the dinosaurs?” The answer began, “We don't know. But…” The depictions we see today of green or tan dinosaurs are entirely guess work. And that is fine, so long as we keep in mind that most of what the experts say is entirely guess work. A second thing I found interesting was a re-creation of a dinosaur that basically looked like a giant crocodile. The placard said this was not a crocodile, though, because it did not live near water.

The very last line of the information conceded that only a single one of these creatures has been discovered. How do they know it didn't live near water? How do they know it wasn't just a large crocodile? We cannot let a science based so largely on guesswork lead us away from the Bible. Don't be intimidated by hypothesis packaged as fact.

“I form the light, and create darkness…I the Lord do all these things.”

Isaiah 45:7