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OF MONKEYS AND MEN #4
THE PERFECT PLANET
It makes for an unlikely sermon illustration, because
the old and still-debated science fiction classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey,
was certainly an ode to the upward evolutionary path of mankind. If you’ve
seen the mysterious masterpiece by Stanley Kubrick, written by Arthur
Clarke, you remember that monkeys turn into men, and at the very end of
the epic, the space traveler finally dies, sheds his worn-out body, and
is reborn as the Star Child. And all the way through, this towering, silent
monolith is present, leading mankind onward and upward, pulling it up
to a higher destiny.
Just in those thirty seconds, friend, I’ve told you all I know . . . and
a little bit more! I have a laptop computer that’s about as rebellious
and naughty as the infamous HAL 9000, but as we continue to study this
topic of God’s creative power, I think we can actually salvage two fascinating
lessons from this long-ago story. Because even as the apes in the early
scene, with their primitive clubs and riverbank conquests, come across
the black pillar, the perfectly rectangular monolith, the filmgoer immediately
realizes that an intelligent force has invaded the drama. The surrounding
hillsides are jagged, randomly shaped . . . but here is a new presence
that is MADE. All its corners are at perfect 90º angles. It is a
designed visitor, and as we’ve studied already this week, anything that
is designed has a designer. That’s true for monoliths and Maserati motorcars
and mama goats.
Right at the end of the story, though – and please don’t e-mail anyone
here at the Voice of Prophecy asking for an interpretation of this strange
story – there’s one more little lesson we can rescue from the screen.
The visiting astronaut is suddenly in this kind of house. There’s a table.
Chairs. Food. A bed. Paintings. Stuff – HUMAN stuff. Things that would
be familiar to this alien person who comes to deepest space from so far
away. But some unseen force, anticipating his arrival, has put things
there that will be familiar to him. “I go to prepare a place for you”
– so to speak. And as the story ends, the familiar theme music, “Also
Sprach Zarathrusta,” fills the speakers of our TV set.
Well, friend, enough of that for sure. We noticed that, back on this date
in 1959, the world saw its first photo of earth, beamed back from Explorer
VI. But as we look at this one very real world that we still can call
our own, we see the same dual truths to give us hope. First of all, we
see everywhere – designed miracles. Waterfalls and people and galaxies
and gravity. Babies being born. One oxygen molecule bonding with two hydrogen
ones to give us a delicious drink we call water.
But not only is this a designed world we live in . . . if we pay any attention
at all, we discover that it was designed FOR US! Even the world’s best
scientists are conceding something called the Anthropic Principle. Speaking
of design and Mount Rushmore and babies in their bassinets, did you know
that all the evidence in the world points to the reality that this universe
was designed to support and nourish human life? We get a few stats from
Christian pastor Bill Hybels of Willow Creek Church in Illinois. He and
Mark Mittelberg wrote this book called Becoming a Contagious Christian
– it’s excellent all the way through, and we’ve borrowed from it before
– and in one chapter he gets some help from the men and women in the white
coats, who tell us these fascinating things.
For instance: if you were to raise or lower the universe’s rate of expansion
by just one part per million, there would be no life. In his book, The
Accidental Universe, physicist Paul Davies writes:
“The force of gravity must be fine-tuned to allow the
universe to expand at precisely the right rate (accurate to within one
part in ten to the sixtieth power.)” (I don’t know much about trigonometry,
but that’s a lot of zeroes!) Davies continues: “The fact that the force
of gravity just happens to be the right number with ‘such stunning accuracy’
is surely one of the great mysteries of cosmology.”
IS it a mystery? Or does it simply tell us that something
or SomeONE calibrated those gravitation scales in a deliberate and designed
way?
Speaking of space odysseys, here’s some more. If the average distance
between stars were any greater, there would be no planets. Any smaller,
and there could be no planetary orbits necessary for life. If you were
to jigger just slightly – and please don’t go home and do this – the carbon-to-oxygen
ratios on planet earth even just the tiniest bit, our Voice of Prophecy
radio audience would immediately be zero, and I wouldn’t be doing that
well either.
Is it a hot August day where you are on this Thursday? Well, I advise
you not to complain, because according to this Bill Hybels essay, if you
were to tilt earth’s axis just slightly one direction, we’d freeze to
death. Go the other way just one degree, and we’d instantly burn up. Back
in 1996, when I was on a mission trip to the Philippines, I honestly thought
maybe somebody HAD tipped the earth toward the sun a few degrees, or at
least our hotel room, the same day the air conditioning in our little
van broke down. It was hot! But friend, listen, this planet was designed
by a loving God who wanted you and me to be here to enjoy life.
Speaking of hot, did you know that we are the absolutely perfect distance
from the sun? It ranges between 91.4 and 94.5 million miles away, and
most of the time we can make that work, except once in a while in January
in my home territory of Saskatchewan. Any closer than 91.4 million . .
. that wouldn’t be good. Any farther away, and it wouldn’t just be a cold
winter, it’d be ALL winter. As in deep freeze for the human race.
By the way, if you want to have some fun – and have an hour to kill –
get out a recent World Almanac and just browse through the section on
astronomy. Even for a novice, the details about our solar system are just
amazing. Just be glad, for example, that you and I don’t live on Uranus.
First of all, it’s -323º on Christmas Day out there, and being that
it’s tipped something like 98ºinstead of 23º like here on our
cozy little world, the seasons are fairly violent. But what’s worse is
that, according to its way of rotating, if you set up housekeeping at
Uranus’ north pole, the sun comes up and stays up for 42 straight YEARS
. . . and then goes down and it’s pitch black (and cold) for 42 more straight
years. Now, friend, that’s a long winter – and again, don’t we thank God
to live on the third rock out and not the seventh one?
And you can take these comparisons and just apply them
in all areas of science. How about the buzz that was created when a 59-year-old
man named Robert Tools lived with an artificial titanium AbioCor replacement
heart beating in his chest? For a few months it actually worked . . .
although not nearly as well as the heart that our heavenly Designer places
by default into the chest cavity of every little baby born on planet earth
– and that is beating inside of you and me on this very Thursday.
And DNA? You talk about design . . . and all the scientists and genome
researchers know it. In Chuck Colson’s recent book,
How Now Shall We Live?, he addresses this same Anthropic Principle, and
writes:
“All these seemingly arbitrary and unrelated values
in physics have one strange thing in common: they are PRECISELY the values
needed to get a universe capable of supporting life.”
Hybels and Mittelberg make it even more personal. Here’s
how they put it:
“Someone must have gone to a lot of effort,” they write,
“to make things just right so that you and I could be here to enjoy life.
In short, modern science points to the fact that we must really matter
to God!”
By the way, did you know the origin of the word anthropic?
I haven’t been to the seminary for a good many years, so most of these
linguistics I have to get out of my big fat Greek dictionary, but the
word anthropic actually means “human being.” That’s it! This Anthropic
Principle reiterates that God cares about human beings and has built this
world specifically for our survival.
So friend, the next time you look at a globe and you see its perfect tilt
– 23º27', no more, no less – don’t just walk away. Notice that those
are the fingerprints of God. When you go for a swim, and you’re underwater
for 30 seconds, and then come up really eager to breathe something that’s
21% oxygen, remember the fingerprints of God. See them. The oxygen and
the fingerprints are both invisible; we see them by faith. But we CAN
see them. Thank Him for them. In Romans 1:20, Paul writes:
“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible
qualities – His eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen,
being understood from what has been made.” Then he adds: “So that men
are without excuse.”
And what are we without excuse regarding? I think it’s
if we just simply drift through life, thinking that we made ourselves
and master ourselves and are answerable only to ourselves . . . and don’t
see or acknowledge the fingerprints of God, the design in everything around
us.
By the way, those who do see those fingerprints, and embrace the God they
belong to . . . are going on a space odyssey of their own. Have you made
your reservation yet?
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