The Mystery of a Well Tuned Biosphere

"The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands." (Psalms 19:1 NIV).

According to writer Paul Johnson "The most extraordinary thing about the 20th century was the failure of God to die. The collapse of mass religious belief, especially among the educated and prosperous, had been widely and confidently predicted. It did not take place. Somehow, God survived, flourished even."

Riding the tide of enthusiasm that followed Darwin's theories, scientists at the beginning of the century touted "time and chance" as the only plausible architect of the universe. Genesis was decried as a man made myth. As astrophysicists explored the expanding universe and traced its origin to a remarkable beginning and molecular biologists took to cracking DNA code, an indelible imprint of intelligent design and purpose continued to surface. The propositional truth of the ancient book of Genesis provided a coherent and relevant narration to the new findings. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light."

In the November 9th issue of Newsweek magazine, George F. Will wrote an editorial titled "The Gospel from Science." "In the late 1920s, astronomers established that numerous galaxies near ours are racing away from us and each other at millions of miles per hour. This, and the fact that the universe is bathed in radiation, suggested that matter and motion originated rather as Genesis suggests, ex nihilo, out of nothing, in a stupendous explosion of light and energy."

"The idea of purposefulness, an idea that science seemed, for a while, to drain from life, may be making a comeback. Science no longer suggests a meaningless mechanics of mere genes and whirling atoms. If the universe seems to desire life, it is odd to say that life is an automated artifice arising from an accidental cataclysm that was full of sound and fury but signified nothing."

The editorial continues: "One of the most impressive results of the 'meaningless accident,' the 'chemical fluke' that produced life was the man who wrote: 'Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark! what discord follows.' Shakespeare was writing about society. What he wrote is even more true of the universe. Take but degree away (the one quadrillionth of 1 percent margin for error from the ideal necessary to keep the universe from collapsing in on itself or dispersing into a soup too thin to aggregate into stars) untune that string, and what follows is not just discord but eternal entropy and ice. So, what--who?--was the great Tuner?"

As playwright Tom Stoppard puts it, "The idea of God is slightly more plausible than the alternative proposition that, given enough time, some green slime could write Shakespeare's sonnets."

The "teleological principle" (the evidence that suggests intelligent purpose and design in natural phenomena) is being given more credence as we are humbled by an increased knowledge of the universe. Everything in the universe seems purposed, and its conditions particularly favor the existence and sustaining of life on this third planet from the sun.