Hey, Church!

This Sunday, we will begin a new sermon series about miracles.

The dictionary defines a miracle as “an effect or extraordinary event in the physical world that surpasses all known human or natural powers and is ascribed to a supernatural cause.”

Author Eric Metaxas wrote, “No sooner does the subject of miracles arise than someone must ask whether anyone can today really believe in such things.”1 The miracles of Jesus recorded in the Bible, such as giving sight to the blind, casting out demons, or raising the dead, are actually infinitesimally small acts of God compared to His work of creating the universe ex nihilo (out of nothing). Metaxas offers a helpful analogy: “Believing that God could create the universe but could not perform any infinitely smaller miracle is illogical. It is very much like saying, ‘Oh, yes, I certainly believe that Tolstoy could write War and Peace, and did, but could never believe he’d be able to move a comma in the manuscript. That would be too much.’”1

It is not too much to believe that the same God who spoke our wildly complex universe (by all practical measures, impossible apart from an intelligent Creator) into existence would continue to speak into that existence. An honest person will say, “Of course He can, and does, intervene in the affairs of human beings!” The unchanging character of our God has always desired to be with His people, to lead, guide, protect, provide, counsel, forgive, and heal them–for His glory and their good. The world may think us odd for believing in such things. Christians would think it odd if God did not intervene in such supernatural works of power.

Again, Metaxas analogizes: Not one of us would fly over a deserted island and, upon noticing the word H-E-L-P formed out of fallen trees in the sand, would conclude it came about through a random act of nature. It would be immediately obvious to us that there was intelligent design behind such a formation. If that is true of a simple pattern of a few logs, how much more obvious must it be that a Creator stands above and behind the creation of the nearly infinitely more complex universe?

Consider just a few of the countless mind-boggling facts that science has discovered about the universe. To keep the list brief, I’ve put the lengthier explanations in the footnotes.

The latest images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope suggest an estimated 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe (which scientists can only guess amounts to less than 3% of the whole).
The number of variables necessary to sustain life are so staggering that, statistically speaking, our existence on this planet is a scientific virtual impossibility. And scientists continue to discover more with each passing year of research.
If Earth were slightly larger or slightly smaller than it is, life could not exist.2
If Earth rotated even a little bit faster or slower, life could not exist.3
If Jupiter were not in our solar system, life could not exist. This is because the mass of Jupiter is 318 times larger than the Earth’s, which acts as a sort of gravitational shield against comets and space debris.
The moon, itself, is an even more remarkable miracle. Its considerable gravity gives our oceans their ebbing and flowing tides. If the moon was slightly larger or smaller, life as we know it could not exist. The moon is also responsible for stabilizing the Earth’s rotational axis. As the angle of this axis dictates seasons and stabilizes temperatures, even a slightly greater or smaller tilt would make Earth uninhabitable.
“But by 2001 the number of fine-tuned characteristics necessary for life had leapt to 150, and when we do the calculations we discover that the odds of a planet supporting life are less than one in ten to the seventy-third power. That’s a one followed by seventy-three zeroes. In the known universe, the number of planets is only about ten to the twenty-third power. According to these figures, the odds of any planet being able to support life are one in ten to the fiftieth power. To express this more visually and without concern for conserving zeroes, that is one in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.”4
To test the “Big Bang” theory, as it was coined by Sir Fred Hoyle in 1949, consider the dramatically different sort of explosion it must have been. “We now know that if the speed of this universe-creating explosion had been ever so slightly different, the universe would not exist.”5
Physicists describe four fundamental forces that are so perfectly tuned that if even one was different “by a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent, the universe itself could not exist. These four forces are 1.) gravity, 2.) the electromagnetic force, 3.) the weak nuclear force, and 4.) the strong nuclear force.”
“[It’s] a fact known to all those who study such things that by the time the universe was one-millionth of a second old, the values of these four forces were set, as it were, in cement. Nor have these forces deviated in the slightest in the [alleged] fourteen billion years since.”
“For any life to be possible in the universe, we need not only a superabundance of carbon but also the presence of at least forty different other elements.”6

Ok, here are just two more for now, though there are perhaps countless other amazing statistics worth mentioning:

The ratio between the strong nuclear force and the electromagnetic force is so perfect that “if the ratio between them had been different by just one part in ten to the sixteenth power, the universe as we know it would not exist. To put it in another way, if that ratio had deviated by .00000000000000001 percent, the universe would not be here.”

“Still, even these freakishly tall odds pale in comparison to the ratio of the electromagnetic force to the gravitational force. Physicists have calculated that if that ratio had been different by one part in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, the universe would not exist.”

We could go on and on and on… Metaxas’ book is only a small sampling of the vast amount of data supporting intelligent design. When you consider how absolutely perfectly all of these variables had to align in order for our universe to exist, let alone to support life, let alone human life with all of the body’s complexities, rational mind, and everlasting soul, we can only bow low to the Creator in humble praise and thanksgiving.

To bring us back to where we started, what miracle do you count impossible in your life? Is there a relationship that needs resurrection? A grim diagnosis? An addiction you can’t kick? A material need? If God has gone to such great lengths to create us, along with a habitat suitable for our existence, and then gave His own life to redeem us, how can we doubt Him in these relatively small things? If Tolstoy can move a comma in the manuscript, our God can raise something that has died.

Come to Him hungry and expectant this Sunday!

Your brother,

Ryan

1 Eric Metaxas, Miracles, 12.
2 Metaxas, Miracles, 38: That’s because the size–or really, the mass–of a planet determines how much gravity is has, which determines much else…. If Earth were slightly larger, it would of course have slightly more gravity, which has interesting implications. It’s not just that a person who weighs 150 pounds would weigh more. It’s that if Earth had just a little bit more gravity than it now has, methane and ammonia gas, which have molecular weights of sixteen and seventeen, respectively, would remain close to our surface. Since we cannot breathe methane or ammonia, which are toxic, we would die. More to the point, we would never have come into existence in the first place. If you’re thinking we might have evolved to where we could breathe those gases, that’s more science fiction than reality. Simply put, life cannot coexist with large amounts of methane and ammonia. But if Earth were just a bit larger, these deadly gases would not dissipate into the atmosphere but would stay right down here where we would have to inhale them.
On the other hand, if Earth were a tiny bit smaller and had a bit less gravity, water vapor, which has a molecular weight of eighteen, would not stay down here close to the planet’s surface but would instead dissipate into the atmosphere. Obviously, without water we couldn’t exist. As we’ve all heard, our bodies are 75 percent water. To think that the size of Earth must be almost exactly what it is or we wouldn’t exist is sobering and, frankly, not so easy to believe.
3 Metaxas, Miracles, 40: If the “Earth rotated ever so slightly slower, the temperature swings between night and day would be inescapably deadly… If our planet rotated a bit more quickly and therefore gave us shorter days, it would produce impossibly high winds. Just how high, we cannot say. Winds on Jupiter are routinely one thousand miles per hour, so if Earth rotated slightly faster than it now does, we may conservatively imagine that it would produce winds sufficient to make impossible a stable environment conducive to life of any kind.”
4 Metaxas, 43-44.
5 Metaxas, 48-49. “But to say that it was controlled or precisely calibrated can hardly begin to explain the degree of control involved. In fact, the speed at which the cosmos expanded out of that microdot in question was so outrageously perfectly calibrated that physicists say it constitutes the ‘most extreme fine-tuning yet discovered in physics.’”
6 Metaxas, 51. The same guy who coined the term “Big Bang” (Hoyle) discovered that “the nuclear ground-state energy levels (The lowest energy level of an element) of helium, carbon, oxygen, and beryllium had to be extraordinarily fine-tuned for enough carbon to be created.” And that’s just carbon! Hoyle, an atheist, later wrote that the notion that this fine-tuning had “just happened” was statistically impossible, such that it gave an overwhelming implication of a “guiding intelligence,” and that this, more than anything else, had “greatly shaken” him and his atheism. Hoyle said, “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The number one calculator from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”
7 Metaxas, 51-52, referencing theoretical particle physicist Paul Davies, who has himself said that “the impression of design is overwhelming.”