Let’s enter the imaginarium for a few moments here. Suppose that you were around to witness God’s drawing board when He was designing the universe.
To put some scale to the level of God’s creativity here, imagine just for a moment that you were going to write a short story about landing on an inhabited alien planet where no human has ever set foot. What would that planet look like? What kind of life would be there, and what governs the way they live their lives? Don’t be shy or hold back, be as creative as you possibly can.
You’d probably imagine things you’ve already seen or heard from movies, TV shows, or books. Taking something you’re already sort of familiar with, then tweaking it…we can call that one degree of separation. Now think about God creating this planet. He made it out of absolutely nothing, and He did it without anything to borrow inspiration from or to model after. That’s at least two degrees of separation, and it’s something we as humans have a hard time wrapping our minds around.
Back to God’s workshop. Some people might envision sketches of antelopes, clay models of whales, and a scale model of a sparrow in a wind tunnel. While that would all be pretty cool to watch unfold, I’m more fascinated with the way He, once again, from nothing, laid out the rules of physics, chemistry, and biology.
We’re so set on the constancy of what we know as physical laws that the idea sounds absurd, but God could just as easily established different rules and had them work out fine and still be in harmony with all the other naturally occurring laws He set in place. Imagine if instead of what we’re used to, the following things hold true:
Materials with greater densities float above those with lesser densities. Water boils at 50 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level. The speed of light is the same speed as the speed of sound. There are bugs that combine grains of sand to form volcanic rock. Zebras give birth to aardvarks. Visible light is not the only visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Space is hot, not cold. The sky is yellow, not blue. The earth spins not west to east, but south to north, and it takes 33 hours instead of 24 to make a complete rotation.
According to what we know and understand, any single one of these things simply cannot happen. If He wanted to, God could have made all of these “absurd rules” work together simultaneously, and have it make sense. He could have made them the physical and scientific laws we abide by, but He didn’t. The laws we observe and rely on are the ones He gave us, and they provide context for our understanding of the universe.
I’ve studied physics, chemistry, and biology to some degree, and it can be especially frustrating to get the math wrong and not be able to figure out where you went wrong. It’s very helpful, however, in getting some insight into just how creative God is; imagine being so creative that you come up with physical laws that work in harmony with all other physical laws and living things on the planet, and you nail it on the first shot. You even get the nuances and exceptions right! Just one example: there are three basic forms of matter…gas, liquid, and solid. Ordinarily as a molecule moves from solid to liquid to gas, it takes up increasing amounts of volume. On the flip side of that coin, a cloud of gas takes up less room as a liquid, and even less room as a solid. You’re fitting the same amount of mass into smaller amounts of volume, so it becomes more and more dense. Here’s the kicker – water doesn’t behave that way, and continued life on Earth depends on that fact. Water actually expands as it moves from liquid to solid form. (Ever freeze a full container of water? I hope you weren’t too attached to it.) This single concept changes everything, and getting it wrong meant we’d have a really hard time surviving. If water behaved like most other forms of matter, ice would form at the surface and then settle to the bottom, making room for more ice to form at the surface and subsequently settle. Eventually the whole body of water would freeze solid, (probably) killing anything living in it.
Or what about the fact that Earth’s core is a big glob of slowly spinning molten iron? This gigantic dynamo produces a magnetic field that extends beyond our planet and protects us by diverting the crippling charged particles that the sun is constantly emitting. If this magnetic field didn’t exist, the sun’s particles would relentlessly strip Earth of its atmosphere, creating two major problems for us. First, there would be nothing left to breathe. Second, the reduction in atmospheric pressure would cause all liquid water to boil off and escape into space, even at low temperatures. Our planet would become a lifeless dry rock with no significant atmosphere (like Mars), but because God set things up so that the science would work together to maintain a habitable environment, we’re still able to walk around without wearing pressure suits.
It’s mind-blowing! The logic and creativity is without parallel. Yes, God is a God of love, of compassion, of power, of emotion, of so many “touchy-feely” things, but He’s also the God of logic, of order, of completeness, of “yeah, I considered all of those things when I set the universe in motion.” In the military I heard about the importance of weighing the “second- and third-order effects” of an event. God considers the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh order effects of an event, and then some.
That’s the God we serve. He’s not some aloof buffoon sitting on a cloud somewhere, eating grapes and throwing lightning bolts. He’s alive and well, and He’s actively involved in what happens every day in the life of His creation’s masterpiece: you. The next time that you feel your life is nothing more than an accident or that nobody even knows you’re there, remember that the God of all things had you in mind when He created this world, and when He went to the cross. The creator of the world decided He would rather die than live without you. He sees you, you matter to Him, and He has a plan for your life.
Oh God, the more we learn about science, the more it points to you. Some students of science will go to great lengths to avoid acknowledging the evidence of a designer, but thank you so much for revealing yourself through it! May You be glorified through it!