People who long to rid the world of God and faith have for centuries made the claim that certain discoveries in science have finally nailed his coffin lid down. ..

For some reason they assume that once scientists observe and understand something more of nature, or if they just peel back a layer of complexity to reveal another one, the existence of God is even less likely than before.

For example, a couple of weeks ago I heard someone speaking on the subject of neurology, and asserting that as we can now identify regions of the brain which control certain of our activities and emotions, the conclusion (a giant leap of bad logic) must be that there is no soul or spirit in us, and so there is therefore no God. All that exists, they say, is an incredibly mind-boggling material arrangement of trillions of synapses and billions of neurons, which over millions of years of fortuitous change have arranged themselves into this organ about which so much has yet to be understood…and here we all are thinking about it.

The first man in space declared with great relish and incredible intelligence (irony) that he couldn’t see God above the atmosphere. The “Higgs-Boson” made God redundant; space is so vast that it’s obviously too big for God; bees’ antennae house large numbers of sense organs that can detect touch, smell, sounds and taste, proving that bees are not operated by God, and Shakespeare’s genius was simply a lucky blip in the evolution of man’s brain. Gravity holds us to the earth which is evidence that no God is doing it; the existence of the periodic table of elements proves that we don’t need a God to make the building blocks of nature, ice on a moon clearly demonstrates that life evolved from non-life in a puddle on the earth; a hundred and twenty million rods and seven million cones, plus all those nerve fibers in the eye show that the cones and rods give us sight and not God, and astounding mathematical patterns in all of nature prove that God isn’t there: we’re all just promoted pond-scum.

This kind of faulty logic is worse than saying that since you can observe a beautifully made watch keeping perfect time all on its own it obviously wasn’t made by anyone.

It seemingly hasn’t occurred to the “enlightened” ones that since God is spirit (John 4:24) he is not physically visible with human eyes; that God, having created space, is “bigger” than space and is not confined to space-time as we are, and that the brain is a physical organ for a physical world, being far too complex to have arisen from a puddle except in the most corny old sci-fi movie. It serves as an interface between spirit and the physical world.

They don’t consider that a bee’s sense receptors were created so that it could go about its business without having to be driven; that God created gravity in order to enable structures to exist and co-exist in the universe and to hold us to the earth; that those cones, rods and fibers were designed to give physical creatures working eyes, and that mathematical design throughout the universe is evidence for a Master mathematician.

Scripture paints a picture of a very big God-far bigger than any of us can begin to grasp. The man of wisdom, Solomon, prayed:

“The heavens, even the highest heavens, cannot contain you…” (2 Chronicles 6:18 NIV).

David, long before the microscope, said:

“I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful” (Psalm 139:14).

Paul, nineteen hundred years ago, said:

“…to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine…” (Ephesians 3:20);

and he said of the Son:

“…in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17).

Among the many statements of Jesus Christ is this one:

“…even the very hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matthew 10:30).

The unbeliever’s assessment of God invariably ignores the testimony of scripture-of a God who declares himself to be the originator and sustainer of all things-and turns instead to his own faulty, weak, namby-pamby view of what he thinks God would be like “if” he existed. His god is the ultimate straw man, the one he can gleefully knock over, kick, set fire to and then bury: “God is dead-now let’s steal everything he made and create our own story of origins and our own set of rules”.

I reject the puny god of the unbeliever. What makes much more sense to me is this God:

“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the end of the world” (Psalm 19:1-4).

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