By Deacon Mike Siebert
CONNECTING FAITH AND LIFE
Everything falls apart; it's almost a law of nature!
The water heater eventually stops working or leaks all over the floor. The car eventually won’t start. In more scientific terms, nature tends towards maximum chaos or disorder; in other words, without the expending of energy, everything falls apart, decays and collapses.
Think of an old building – like the Roman Coliseum. It’s made of some of the hardest concrete ever made, yet it still has crumbled. Eventually, it will all be returned to sand because nature tends toward disorder.
You know this from experience!! Moments after you clean the house, somebody steps in with muddy shoes. Or maybe a stronger example: imagine if you only cleaned the bathroom once a year;you would not only see the chaos, but you could smell it. Nature tends toward disorder.
Yet, if we look around us, we see order!
The movement of the planets; the cycle of the seasons; the migration of birds. Scientists see order throughout the universe – how galaxies work; how gravity impacts stars and planets. It’s almost as if there’s some grand design that put it all together!
It would be easy to think that, on such a grand scale, gravity and mass, light and black holes are what bring order to the universe. There doesn’t have to be a grand design or a Grand Designer, does there? But what if we look at a smaller level? Look at the human body. What are the chances that all the parts of your body randomly came together? Think even smaller. What are the chances that, in a universe of chaos, our eyeballs work at all?
Somehow they appeared and got connected to our brain – and they can distinguish color. And what are the chances two of them would develop on the front of our faces with just the right spacing to allow us to focus and perceive depth and distance; and have a tear-duct system to lubricate; and grow eyelashes and an eyelid to keep out dust; and muscles and nerves that make the eyelid blink without even thinking about it?
That much order goes against the rule of nature to tend toward chaos.
Our bodies start to decay the moment we stop taking in and utilizing energy. We must have food and water. Cells store up energy so the heart can keep beating and the brain keeps us breathing. Stop the brain, and we start to decay immediately. Energy must be expended to stop chaos.
So why isn’t the universe one colossal dust bunny? What energy caused all of this order in our universe? Is it purely gravity that created our eyes with the ability to recognize the color red? What are the chances that this same body, which somehow developed two eyes, also developed skin with the ability to heal itself when cut? And it developed the ability to eat and digest, and excrete the remains of digestion.
Keep going – hearing, smell, lungs, kidneys. So many things in our body must work together. If one thing gets out of line, we fall apart. Surely there must be an energy holding all of this together…
Where does this energy come from? Even if we concluded that gravity or sunlight somehow was the energy that created our eyeballs, we’d have to ask the question: where did the stuff come from to make our eyes and our body, and the sun and the planets?
Was it the big bang? Where did the stuff in the big bang come from? And what energy triggered the big bang? Keep asking questions; eventually, we come to the conclusion that something or someone out there must have created all things and continues to hold all things into being (Col 1:16-17).
Otherwise we’d all be just a colossal dust bunny.
Author’s notes: Some ideas in this article came from a source I don’t remember – so thanks to the original author. Also, evolution and natural selection are not contrary to our Faith. We just believe they may be tools that the Divine Creator used to form the universe.