Universe

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. -Genesis 1: 1 (NIV).  God was at the beginning, before heaven, before earth.  The Bible describes Creation as appearing at God’s command from nothing.  Virtually everything that exists was created by God ex nihilo ( out of nothing).  God started with nothing and created everything.  It came by God’s sovereignty.  He brought everything into existence through His direct acts, by His word alone.  This is how all Creation – the universe, the earth and all that is (space, matter, energy, time) came into being.  There were no pre-existing building blocks to make all that exists.  By His infinite creative power and wisdom and out of His own Being, God independently brought the universe and all that is in its totality into existence out of nothing.  He is infinite (boundless, without limits), eternal and transcendent, and He yet sustains all things.  The universe had a beginning; it is finite; it is temporary; it is dependent on God to uphold it through His Divine Providence.  Several verses throughout the Bible confirm this truth claim about Creation: Genesis 1: 1;  Proverbs 3: 19; Psalm 90: 2;  Psalm 104: 24-34;  John 1: 3;  Romans 4: 17;  Colossians 1: 16;  Acts 4: 24;  Acts 17: 28;   2 Timothy 1: 9;  Titus 1: 12;  Hebrews 11: 3;  Revelation 4: 11.

God’s power is manifest throughout the universe.  The universe is staggeringly vast and complex.  NASA confirms that just our Milky Way galaxy alone contains 100 to 400 billion stars.  Even the oft-used phrase “the known universe” implies there is more than we can see that is beyond our present scope of knowledge.  There’s no accounting for the existence of our expansive universe. The magnificent size of the universe is mind-boggling.  Based on today’s most powerful telescopes and methods, the best guess at the present time estimates the size of the universe in miles across to be 5.5 x 10 to the 23rd power (i.e. 550,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). Yet scientists believe the real total universe is even far larger than that, when factoring in that the outermost areas are still expanding at a rate so fast beyond us it eludes calculating.

The universe is intelligible.  It is accurately fine-tuned for the needs of intelligent life.  There is specifically an inherently precise mathematical character of the universe which messages its existence came into being via an intelligent agency.  It did not come into being as formed coincidentally via a purposeless cataclysmic cosmic accident.  Something did not arise from nothing.  The universe cannot explain its own existence.  It was wrought from pure imagination.  It was imagined and brought into existence supernaturally by a personal Being, a Creator God who is our own Creator as well.  And it is continually preserved and sustained by the will of Almighty God.  Our world is guided by complex physical laws, yet laws of physics and mathematical equations do not explain why our universe or we exist at all or why we have conscious intelligence.  The underlying laws of physics that regulate our world are not self-explanatory.  Order and symmetry rule the day.  The deep levels of biological order and organization seen in the living systems of our world are the products of deliberate Creation from the mind of God.  We live in a finely-tuned, mathematically-ordered cosmos astonishingly designed to support human life that makes science even possible.  But it is not just a cosmos most orderly.  It is beautiful! 

The universe is not just finely-tuned.  It shows consistent, active, forthcoming wisdom in highly-ordered, fantastically complex information.  It is not just well-formed.  It operates according to laws of great power.  It shows direction and purpose and exhibits grand organization.  There is a comprehensive, unfolding, great deal of built-in orderliness.  It is not realistic that the extraordinarily complex ordered information and specificity evidenced in protein, DNA and RNA and even the smallest bacteria came about through random chance mutations.  Many “anthropic constants” (reportedly there are more or less 122 of these) had to have been exactly balanced in the extreme (e.g. oxygen had to have a precise balance or humans would suffocate; gravity is so precise that we would not exist as upright bipedal beings if it were altered by even the smallest degree).  God has revealed His existence through His Creation.  Our universe can rightly be considered a deliberate great work of art created with love by an infinitely intelligent Creator.  Beauty is not necessary for our survival, yet our universe is characterized by elegance and beauty.  The physical universe is inherently mathematically precise to such a degree that is not explainable by chance.  Our physical world could have been a random disordered chaos, yet instead it is intelligible, has laws and constraints and order, and follows a rational form.  Our universe remarkably accommodates the origination of life such as the formation of carbon and the force of gravity.  A well-known Nobel Prize recipient Oxford mathematical physicist concluded the universe appears to have had a beginning that was by necessity extremely highly ordered.  The Second Law of Thermodynamics requires that our universe had to have had a highly ordered, highly accurately organized beginning.  What are the odds that such a universe could have eventually been produced that had an environment suitable for life?  The acclaimed Oxford mathematical physicist quantified the odds that the precision needed for original conditions in the beginning to accurately produce a universe having an environment suitable for life are less than 1 chance out of 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123.  That is 1 out of a billion, billion, billion, etc., repeated more than a billion billion times – a number so unimaginably and exorbitantly large it would be impossible for us to ever write out or speak such a large number.