wHERE DID WE COME FROM?

There are two primary beliefs on the origins of the universe and humanity, naturalistic evolution and creationism.

Explanations of NaturalistIC Evolution

“According to the standard Big Bang model, the universe was born during a period of inflation that began about 13.8 billion years ago. Like a rapidly expanding balloon, it swelled from a size smaller than an electron to nearly its current size within a tiny fraction of a second. Initially, the universe was permeated only by energy. Some of this energycongealed into particles, which assembled into light atoms like hydrogen and helium. These atoms clumped first into galaxies, then stars, inside whose fiery furnaces all the other elements were forged.” (Ker Than, “How Did the Universe Begin?”)

“The universe could so easily have remained lifeless and simple — just physics and chemistry, just the scattered dust of the cosmic explosion that gave birth to time and space. The fact that it did not — the fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing — is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice. And even that is not the end of the matter. Not only did evolution happen: it eventually led to beings capable of comprehending the process, and even of comprehending the process by which they comprehend it.” (Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution)

Explanation of Creationism

The belief that nature and aspects such as the universe, earth, life, and humans originated with supernatural acts of divine creation.

So What Happened? 4 Viewpoints of Creationism:

Theistic Evolution: God created the building blocks and the natural laws of the universe. He created these things with the eventual emergence of life in mind, but at some point early on, He stepped back and let His creation take over.
Gap Theory: Proponents contend that there was a primitive creation and ageless past inferred in Genesis 1:1. This period could have gone on for billions of years. Then God continued with creation starting in Genesis 1:2.
Fiat Creationism (Young Earth): God created the earth by divine decree and holding to a strict 24-hour day as mentioned in Genesis 1. This would hold that the earth is thousands of years old not millions or billions years old.
Progressive Creationism (Day Age): The currently held scientific view that the universe is 13.7 billions years old, and the earth is 4.5 billions years old. The creation story as told in Genesis 1 is generally interpreted using a literal framework of the days of Genesis 1. The word “day” would actually be an “age” that could represent millions of years.

(Systematic Theology, Stanley Horton, The Creation of the Universe)

Recommended Reading: “Seven Days that Divided the World” by John Lennox

thoughts about naturalistic Evolution

There is as much of a leap of faith to believe in naturalistic evolution as there is in believing the Christian account of creationism. We see this reflected in Richard Dawkins statement above about evolution.
Some physical materials (elements) and laws of physics would have had to have been in place in order for the “Big Bang” to occur. Where did these things come from?
Cause: what caused the ‘Big Bang” and why did it happen when it did? Much thought goes into what happened after the “Big Bang” but not much is talked about what happened before.
There are great questions surrounding the numerical probability of random naturalistic evolution. Here are some examples:
Fred Hoyle and N.C. Wickramasing found the odds of the random formation of the single enzyme to be 10 to the 20th power. There are 2,000 enzymes and the chance of all 2,000 enzymes occurring in random order would be 10 to the 40,000th power.
Donald Page at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Science calculated the odds against the universe randomly taking a suitable form for life at 10,000,000,000 to the 124th power (End of Reason).
The expansion and contraction rate in the first seconds would have to be so perfect that it would be the equivalent to taking aim at a one inch square target, 20 billion light years away, and hitting the target (Article).
Stephen Hawking said, “The odds of a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications” (The Reason for God, Tim Keller).
“To continue in atheism, I would need to believe that nothing produces everything, non life, produces life, randomness produces fine tuning, chaos produces information, unconsciousness produces consciousness, non reason produces reason, I simply didn’t have that much faith (Lee Strobel).

Thoughts about Creationism

The Complexity, Beauty, and Intelligence of the Universe:
Only 4% of the universe is observable to us. The other 96% is made substances that we cannot see or comprehend. Stars, galaxies, planets, orbits, gravity, how they all spin, and how they all work together speak to the beauty and intelligence of a universe and to the creator who formed it. There is too much complexity to be by chance.
Fine Tuning of the Earth or Intelligent Design:
Fine-tuning of the earth refers to the surprising precision of nature’s physical constants and the early conditions of the universe. To explain how a habitable planet like Earth could even exist, these fundamental constants have to be set to just the right values (like tuning a dial to find just the right radio station). If the universe had physical constants with even slightly different values, the universe simply could not support life: it would expand too quickly, or never form carbon atoms, or never make complex molecules like DNA (Article).
The earth itself and how it was designed and how it functions speak to a creator. The earth is unique from any other planet. The earth is made up of just the right amount of water, gravity, and oxygen. It is the precise distance from the sun to support human life. The earth’s exact 24 hour orbit around the sun never waivers or changes. Every three months, the earth tilts precisely to give us seasons. Even the earth’s atmosphere is a unique balance of just the right elements. Does this all happen by chance?
The Miracle of the Human Body:
Eyes- Your eyes can distinguish up to one million color surfaces and take in more information than the largest existing telescope. Your body has more than 600 muscles and your brain is the conductor so we can walk, work, run and function. Your hands are engineering marvels that pivot, pick up, grab, and lift.
Heart- Your heart beats around 100,000 times a day. Such pressure is needed to pump blood through 60,000 miles of veins and capillaries. The heart pumps 6 quarts of blood, circulating three times every minute. In one day, your blood travels a total of 12,000 miles.
Your body is made up of approximately 100 trillion cells. They all came from the division of one single cell. The biological makeup of the male and female are designed to recreate the human species in perpetuity. We have fingerprints as unique as the snowflake. The miracle of the human body is a extension of the hand of the creator.
The Uniqueness of Human Consciousness:
Intelligence- We are the only species that has elevated our language, society, and education. We can do in utero surgery and we’ve landed a man on the moon. We’ve created the computer and can talk to almost anyone in the world.
We experience not just innate intelligence, but also the capacity to understand beauty, meaning, purpose, forgiveness, love, family, and marriage. We believe these are other things God has placed into creation.
Moral Reasoning- We have the innate sense of right and wrong from birth. Every culture knows that murder is wrong. Why? Because of the intrinsic value of humanity. We believe everyone was created in the image of God. We have innate sense of morality and justice. This too speaks to the hand of a Creator.
Darwin taught the "survival of the fittest.” So what are the moral origins of giving to the poor, helping a child or elderly, giving away money and food? Kindness and is the antithesis of Darwin’s theory.
“In fact, it takes a lot of faith to imagine human values can arise from an impersonal universe.”
- Tim Keller
“There is something that is directing the universe which appears to me as a law urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong.”
- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Early Historical Evidence: has always shown a belief in God or some type of religious expression.
Most anthropological studies show signs that in early civilizations there were things like temples and shrines that point to a belief in god. Even the Egyptian pyramids point to belief in the afterlife.
Why has the concept of God or religion always been around? We may not agree with the other beliefs in god from early civilization, but from the beginning of time, history shows that there has always been a belief in god and the afterlife.
Ecclesiastes 3:11: He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
Humanity was created with a desire for worship and connection with God.
The Personal Religious Experiences of Billions of People:
What do we do with the personal religious experience? It may not be scientific or mathematic, but do we discount someone’s personal experience when they feel like they have talked with God, heard form God, or experienced life change?
How can someone who lives their life in the belief that there is no God, and has never experienced God’s presence question the personal faith experience of someone else?
Billions and billions of people have personal religious experiences that should be considered.