Is there scientific proof that God
exists?( Page 2) |
| John Archibald Wheeler is a colleague of Einstein and
a name revered by most cosmologists and quantum physicists of today.
Now he has come up with this new concept about the composition of
the universe. These are his words. “To the question ‘what
is the world made of?’ you are likely to come up with the answer,
‘matter and energy’. But I say that the universe is made
of information; matter and energy are only incidental.” The
following two examples illustrate the concept. |
| 1. In a modern factory a robot can
make a car using metals and plastics as raw materials and energy for
cutting, welding molding etc. But we know that the robot cannot perform
this operation without copious amounts of information programmed into
it. |
| 2. In a cell a ribosome can manufacture
protein from amino acids using oxidation energy. For this the ribosome
should get information from the DNA in the nucleus. The universe and
life on earth are systems that work and evolve in a very efficient
manner. This means that quite a lot of information had gone into their
creation. |
| Could a scientist be more explicit about the role of
a Creator in creation? He means that ours is a pre-programmed universe.
All the physical laws, all guidelines for evolution were set down
and all physical constants fine-tuned at the moment of creation, at
time zero on the Big Bang time scale. This reminds me of a phrase
from my junior catechism about ‘the Almighty who created everything
by a single word, - fiat -, meaning let it be.’ It didn’t
take seven days or14 billion years, just one moment, one word. Is
this not the ‘word’ or ‘logos’ that Apostle
John speaks of in the first verse of the first chapter of his Gospel?
The Greek word ‘logos’ could mean, word, idea or even
information, I am told. “In the beginning was the word. The
word was with God and the word was God…” |
| At the outset I had stated that there could be no scientific
proof for the existence of God. But I guess we can consider two sets
of facts as proof of the hand of God in creation. |
| The first and foremost is the complexity
of life. The scientists at the start of the twenty-first
century have no clue as to “How a group of lifeless particles
suddenly formed the first living cell.” (Paul Davies). We can’t
blame them, as the simplest cell is so complex. Our human body, according
to these scientists, has about 100 trillion cells (that is 1 followed
by 14 zeroes). Each of these cells has the DNA molecule, differing
in composition from tissue to tissue, but each containing about 3
billion letters. (Here the term letter is used to denote one of four
nucleotides that form the rungs of DNA ladder). Thus the DNA is called
the book of life. But the term book is not apt in this context as
there are no books with 3 billion letters in it. It is more like a
library of 3000 books each with 1000 pages with 1000 letters for each
page. This is the instruction manual for producing a human being.
These three billion nucleotides make the thirty thousand or so genes
in our cells. A common single celled bacterium has around 1500 genes.
The simplest living cell known to scientists contains 480 genes. The
scientists and technicians who can build the supersonic passenger
jets, or the most sophisticated computers cannot still fathom the
mechanism that caused the first living cell to be formed let alone
make one. It is here that we can clearly see the hand of God at work. |
| The second, and a very interesting fact is the ‘fine-tuning’
of the physical constants.. The parameters of fine-tuning
are many. If one of these, say the mass of electron or the magnitude
of the charge on it was ever so slightly – even by a fraction
of a million – more or less, the elements like carbon oxygen
or the heavier ones, so essential for life, would not have formed.
That would mean that there would be no life in the universe. Or again,
if the so-called ‘lumps’ in the ‘primordial soup’
soon after creation was slightly larger, the gravity would have made
the whole of the existing matter that make up our universe collapse
into one giant black hole and that would have been that! No galaxies,
no stars, no planets, no life! If these same lumps had been ever so
smaller the gravity would not have been sufficient for the matter
to coalesce into galaxies and stars! The universe would have been
just an ocean of clouds and gases. There are a few other interesting
physical constants which if not so fine-tuned – if it were slightly
higher or lower - there would have been no universe like ours, no
life! And to me, a believer, here is the clear picture of the hand
of God at work. These lessons from modern cosmology, quantum physics
and biology is very clear proofs for the existence of God. At least
I feel so. |
|
