The Rubik’s cube was invented back in 1974. It has become a popular puzzle that’s still readily available today. I’m sure you’re familiar with the Rubik’s cube. That cube has 9 coloured spots on each of its six faces. The idea of the puzzle of course is that, when it has been scrambled, to get all nine similarly coloured dots back onto the same face of the cube. The six sides of the cube, with nine dots on each face mean that there are a total of 54 spots on a Rubik’s cube. Mathematicians have worked out that your chance of putting them into the correct order blindfolded is one in 43-quintillion. If you’re like me you’ll have trouble getting your head around a figure like 43-quintillion. Well, to help you let me point out that 43-quintillion is 43 followed by 18 zeroes*. That’s an awesome figure. To help us visualise the enormity of that number mathematicians have also worked out that 43-quintillion Rubik cubes would cover the earth’s surface about 275 times.
If you think that 43-quintillion is an awesome figure let me give you some even more mind-boggling figures. I understand from molecular biologists that every cell of your body has 25 DNA molecules. Furthermore every DNA molecules has anything from 500-thousand to 2.2-million pairs of information. If you want to know what that looks like it means that if we could lay the pairs end-to-end we would have a string of information about three metres long and containing more than 7-million pairs of information. So if the chance of solving a Rubik cube blindfolded is 1 in 43-quintillion or one in 43 followed by 18 zeroes, what is the chance of getting all our DNA in order, randomly, to make a human being? I have no idea but Carl Sagan once stated that the chance of life coming about by chance is 1 in 1 followed by 2-billion zeroes. I don’t think we even have a name for that sort of figure. It highlights the point that you need an awful lot of faith to believe that we got here by means of a chance collision of atoms.
The apostle Paul had this to say about the Lord Jesus Christ: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For everything was created by him, in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and by him all things hold together.”
I don’t know whether you ever saw that movie, The Life Of Pi. It’s the story of an Indian boy whose parents take their zoo from India to Canada. On the way they suffer shipwreck and their son Pi ends up on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. The plot of the Life Of Pi is that Pi is telling a novelist his story but it asks you to make a judgment: “I just told you two stories. Which one do you prefer?” I want to ask you that question. There are two stories about how we got to be here on planet earth. One story is that it happened by chance – the chance of one to one-with-two billion zeroes. The other story is that there is an eternal God who made us. Which story do you prefer?
There used to be an international contest for Rubik cube lovers. I believe the record time for solving a scrambled cube is just sixty seconds. Well, I’d like to make a confession. I’ve had a Rubik cube sitting on my desk for more than forty years and I still haven’t figured out how to do it. Well, one of my grandkids solved the puzzle for me. She peeled off all the coloured dots and stuck them back on again in the right order. Okay! But try doing that with our DNA.
John Westendorp
- The figure is actually 43,252,003,274,489,856,000