ONE HEARTBEAT AWAY - 6

                                             ONE HEARTBEAT      AWAY         6

      
                                   
Mark Cahill's book


Cause and effect

There is something in science called  the Law of cause and effect. This is an indisputable, universal law that says for every  material effect there had to be a cause. There is nothing in the universe that doesn't have a cause behind its existence. Your parents caused you, your grandparents caused your parents, etc.,

But if you continue going further and further back, there will not be an infinite regression. You must eventually reach a 
First Cause  (or an Uncaused Cause) , which created that  first effect. Something  doesn't just come out of nothing all by itself.  In other words there had to be some causal agent that 
began the process and set our whole universe in motion. 

Robert Jastrow , founder of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA, acknowledges this requirement:

The universe and everything that has happened  in it since the beginning of time, are a grand effect without a known cause. An effect without a cause?  That is not the world of science; it is a world of  witchcraft, of wild events, and the whims of demons, a medievil world that science has tried to banish.

Even  Charles Darwin admitted:

"The impossibility of  conceiving that this grand and  wondrous universe , with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief  argument for the existence of God ... I am aware that if we admit a first cause , the mind still  craves to know whence it came, and how it arose."

Some scientists may not like to admit  what that casual agent might be, yet according to this law, it is irrefutable that everything that has a beginning has a cause, including the universe. The universe (an effect) cannot simply bring itself into being . It requires a cause that is outside itself.

Scholar  C.S. Lewis wrote, in God in the Dock:

An egg that came from no bird is no more "natural "  than a bird that had existed from all eternity.  And since the egg-bird-egg sequence leads us to no plausable beginning , is it not reasonable to look for the real origin somewhere  outside the sequence altogether?  You have to go outside the sequence of engines, into the world of men, to find the real originator of the rocket. Is it not equally reasonable to look outside Nature for the real Originator of the natural order?

What do you think? 

Louis Pasteur, the famous scientist , said of our world  "The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator."  His logic convinced him that our complex , orderly creation requires a Creator.

Sir Isaac Newton stated, "This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the councel and dominion of  an intelligent and powerful Being."  

You may find it hard to believe that God  could make everything out of
 nothing, but the alternative is that nothing turned itself
 into  everything.  Which takes more faith to believe?"

Evidence of design

As we've seen with the Coke can example, blind, random chance does not give rise to design.  You will never hear of a tornado whipping through a junkyard and leaving a fully formed 747 jet, a Mercedes or a skyscraper in its wake. Why? Blind chance cannot do that. 

If you placed all the pieces of a watch into a shoe box and shook it for ten minutes, do you believe it would shake into a functioning watch?   Of course not. What if you shook it for a year?Would a functioning watch come out of the box?   Say you were able to shake it for five billion years; would you then have a functioning watch?   There is no possible way for that to happen.

And if  it couldn't happen by  chance to something relatively simply as a watch , it most certainly couldn't happen to our magnificently complex universe.



Next post tommorrow 11th July