Ian Cooper argues for Christianity as the best explanation for the universe and human beings
‘I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.’ C.S. Lewis
By ‘everything else’ Lewis means both the universe and ourselves.
As far as the existence of the universe is concerned, Christians say that God made it and any other explanation is inadequate. Secular folk will retort: ‘and who made God?’ When the Christian replies that God is eternally self-existent, secularists will insist on the same eternal self-existence of the universe. However, what is more likely: an eternally self-existent intelligence, aka God – who is by definition infinite – or an eternally self-existent material universe? Given that intelligence is a higher order, doesn’t that make intelligence more likely?
Put crudely, isn’t it more probable that a creator came before a creation? The Christian might also ask how a material universe was self-existent or somehow made itself, not least when the Big Bang points to some beginning. Could it all just be a cosmic happenstance?
More evidence for a creator also comes from looking at the fine-tuning of the universe, sometimes called the Anthropic Principle – why we have a habitable world.
This shows how against all the odds we have the basic physical constants that make human life possible. Just to take one example, if gravity were a little stronger the universe would collapse, while were it a little weaker no stars would form and there would be no earth. What are we to make of this? One response is to suggest that there are many universes (the multiverse idea) because with trillions of universes a habitable world like ours just had to turn up – eventually. However, it’s mere conjecture without any solid supporting evidence, as we can’t see outside our universe. The Anthropic Principle, by contrast, is very suggestive. A habitable and beautiful world like ours has been created. It’s not just a product of chance.
Human beings: who we are
Let’s try now to account for human beings, why we are here and especially the way we are. Why should we think a Creator made us rather than us being the products of a random evolutionary process? The best starting place is to look at something we all share - our common human experience. Don’t we think our lives matter and have meaning? Don’t we believe in truth, demand justice and love beauty, and just know that life is precious and that death is wrong? Why is this? And it’s not that we think these things. The real giveaway is that we all live as though these things are true and real in our daily lives, even if we can’t explain them. If someone doesn’t hold to these things, we usually see them as having given up or even being ill.
Now the Christian explanation for this common human experience is that we are people, made by a personal God in his image. We have physical bodies but a spiritual and personal nature. For the secular person it’s more difficult. If the only reality is nature (naturalism), we are just products of a purely physical evolutionary process. This process, which is random, a matter of chance mutations, is based on the principle of survival through natural selection. It has created us as bipeds with big brains – clever animals. Now, fairly obviously, all the qualities of human experience that we have mentioned above– meaning, truth, justice, beauty, etc. – are meaningless if we are just animals, however clever.
The secular response to this is to say that evolution produces these qualities in us as part of its process. So we get ‘morality’ as a consequence of the need for group survival – the need to co-operate. And we get ‘love’ as a product of need to mate and reproduce. But this faces the problem that you are trying to derive non-physical qualities like goodness from a purely physical process. This can’t be done. It’s a category mistake. From this evolutionary perspective, these qualities can only be understood as helping us survive and evolve. They have no intrinsic value or purpose and are not real in the way we usually understand them. That’s the logic. This means that morality, what is really good as opposed to what is really evil, is just a survival mechanism. Morality becomes just a word, an empty word. The same empty rhetoric then applies to all the other facets of our common human experience. Every important quality of our experience – truth, beauty, goodness etc. –is reduced to promoting survival, nothing more. Can you actually buy that? Now it’s not that some sort of evolutionary process is excluded, far from it, and we are clearly physical creatures. The question is, does the secular account really explain what we all experience? Before answering this, it’s important to see how the secular position actually pans out.
Whatever their theory, most secular people in practice can’t see themselves as just products of a chance evolutionary process. They do believe in real human worth and all the values and qualities we have mentioned, even if they have no basis for doing so. It’s a matter of faith, which is ironic when they so stress reason and science. But very few are consistent. Being a clever animal is too bleak and they can’t live that way. They think of themselves as being moral and having lives that matter. And they do. So they are forced to be inconsistent and operate at two levels. On the top they precariously hold to values of human worth, etc. – usually the current liberal values. But at the bottom they just stick to science and naturalism. They have a divided view of things. Ironically, they forget that the values they hold onto came from the Christianity that they dropped! And, the reason why they hold on to those values is that they too are made in the image of God, whatever they think.
Now let’s look a bit more at the Christian explanation for our human qualities and values. This insists our personhood cannot arise from a purely physical process alone, however complex. Rather our personhood comes from the person of God, the source of all values. He made us persons within our physical bodies. We have also been created with a purpose in mind rather than as products of chance? So – created persons or chance animals, isn’t that the choice? Isn’t the explanation with God as our personal Creator, rather than just self-existent nature, simply more plausible? The Christian view is also more coherent. It explains why we are very physical but personal in an integrated way. God made us like that. It’s also interesting, because it implies that when you look in the mirror, or pass all the people in the street, you are in some way looking at evidence for God! We reflect his image. It’s a pretty muddy and stained reflection but it makes us persons – and precious. So the Christian explanation really works and God’s existence is reasonable.
However, if God’s presence is seen in what he has made, in the universe and in us, it’s still very indirect. He himself stays invisible. He may have left his mark around on the world and on us, but he seems distant, if not absent, and the world is a mess. But the second stage in the case for Christianity is a good deal more direct. It has to do with God’s intervention in history. It’s about how this culminates in God coming down into the human scene, in the form of Jesus Christ, and doing something about the mess.
This article is the first chapter from Ian Cooper’s new book Making Sense: The Case for Christianity and some objections, published by Fast-Print Publishing, ISBN 978 1 784 564 568. Available from www.fast-print.net/bookshop £4.99 plus £2.95 p&p or on Amazon or ask your local Christian bookshop.
RESOURCES:
There is plenty of further material on the overall credibility of Christianity: Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis is the classic, The Reason for God by Tim Keller and Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic are also excellent.
