The British scientist, Sir Isaac Newton, once had a skilful mechanic make him a miniature replica of the solar system. It had different sized orbs representing the planets joined together by gears and belts so as to move in harmony when it was cranked.
Sometime later Newton began to be visited by a scientist friend who did not believe in God.
One day as Newton sat reading in his study with his mechanism on a large table near him, his unbelieving friend stepped in. Scientist that he was, he recognized at a glance what was on the table in front of him. Stepping up to it, he slowly turned the crank. With undisguised admiration he watched the heavenly bodies all move in their relative speed in their orbits. Standing back a little to admire it he exclaimed, “My, what an exquisite thing this is! Who made it?”
Without looking up from his book Newton answered, “Nobody!” Quickly turning to Newton, the unbelieving friend said, “Evidently you did not understand my question. I asked who made it?” Looking up, Newton solemnly assured him that nobody made it, but that the various pieces that made up this model of the solar system, that he so much admired, had just happened to come together by chance to take the form that it was in. The astonished unbeliever replied with some vehemence, “You must think I am a fool! Of course someone made it, and he is a genius, and I would like to know who he is.”
Laying his book aside, Newton arose and laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “This thing is but a puny imitation of a much grander system, whose laws you know, and I am not able to convince you that this mere toy is without designer and maker; yet you profess to believe that the great original, from which the design for this model is taken, has come into being without either designer or maker! Now please tell me by what sort of reasoning do you reach such an incongruous conclusion?”
Sadly, this friend of Sir Isaac Newton has many like-minded associates today. It is so common in our western society to believe that it all began with some mysterious Big Bang… as if nothing could give birth to something.
Today we are learning more and more about the most amazing complexity of even the simplest life-forms. They are more complex than Sir Isaac Newton’s model of the solar system. We’ve unravelled the DNA in our genes and found that they are really long strings of massive amounts of information. But that raises the question: where did this huge amount of information in our DNA originally come from? You can try to argue, like Isaac Newton’s friend, that it got there all by itself. More commonly people readily cheat a little at this point. They don’t want to attribute these things to a creator God but they readily talk about Mother Nature (with a capital M and a capital N) which then becomes, in reality, a substitute god of sorts.
The song-writer got it right in Psalm 19 when he reminds us that we can see God’s fingerprints in nature. And the apostle Paul reminds all of us that we are without excuse – for what can be known about God is clearly evident. God’s eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what He has made.
When Isaac Newton’s friend asked, “You must think I am fool,” I think I would have been tempted to say, “Yes! Because there’s another Psalm that says, “The fool says in heart, ‘There is no God!’”
John Westendorp