Evidence for the Existence of God
My junior year of high school Cyril hired a new football coach, Larry Mantle. Coach Mantle was the youngest brother of the Hall of Fame baseball player Mickey Mantle. When Coach Mantle began coaching at Cyril, he was well into his late 60s and didn’t really care to walk around at practice all afternoon and he rarely wore shoes. Instead of walking, he drove around in a golf cart older than the Model T. Occasionally, he would emerge from the cart with knee-high tube socks on to actually show us what he meant while coaching us. It was quite a spectacle.
Despite his age and his odd coaching style, we all loved Coach Mantle. He had the greatest stories about growing up as the younger brother of the greatest baseball player to ever live. Often at the end of practice we would sit and listen about his summers in New York City or games he had attended. However, after the stories, there was always a problem, his golf cart would run out of juice. I despised that golf cart and so did most of the other guys. When it ran out of battery, we were forced to push the cart into the field house. It was not a fun experience. Coach Mantle would be laughing at us the whole way back to the field house.
Our love for Coach Mantle did not outweigh our orneriness, and at the end of the season, a few friends and I decided to get our revenge on Coach Mantle. We “borrowed” a key to the fieldhouse and the coach’s office and went to work in the dead of night. We painstakingly deconstructed the golf cart and walked it piece by piece up the stairs to the coach’s office. Then we reassembled the cart, planted a video camera to be able to watch the moment of discovery, and waited for the next morning to arrive.
The next morning, I got up early and headed to the school. I hid in my pickup, waiting for Mantle to arrive, but at the first bell he was still not in. This was not uncommon for Coach. He had no teaching responsibilities and was pretty loose with what time he would come to work. I knew I would have to wait in class for the fun to unfold. I was glad I had planted a camera to watch the whole incident unfold.
About thirty minutes into class, a familiar voice came over the intercom, “Brandon Thompson to the office.” I knew Mantle had arrived. After a light scolding in the office, I made my way down to the field house to talk to Coach. We laughed until we cried and I grabbed the camera. He was excited to watch the footage as well.
The video showed Coach Mantle walking into his office, pouring himself a cup of coffee, sitting down, grabbing the newspaper and starting to read. As he was reading, another coach asked him if he noticed anything different. He peered over his newspaper and saw his golf cart. He then looked at the small door and then the stairs. I can’t write what was said next, but my name was involved in his tirade of anger and laughter. Coach Mantle knew my fingerprints were all over that golf cart appearing in his office.
Much like the scenario described above, we can look at this world and know that something or someone is behind its creation. The universe didn’t just appear out of thin air with no cause or mind behind creation. The universe is so finely tuned that the evidence clearly points to a Creator. There are certain things in nature that must be so finely tuned that if just moved a small degree the universe could not exist at all. Astrophysicist Hugh Ross explains the finely tuned nature of the strong nuclear force and expansion rate of the universe by describing stacking dimes across a billion North Americas all the way to the moon, then blindfolding yourself, and picking one exact dime. If any other dime is picked the universe couldn’t exist.[1]
The example above is just one of many things that point to a Creator. The gravitational constant must be fine-tuned to 1 in 1060. The strands of DNA in our bodies contain organized information that makes life possible. We are located in the perfect place in the cosmos to support life. If we were any closer to the center of the galaxy, we would be bombarded by harmful radiation. Our location in the arm of a spiral galaxy gives us the perfect view of the night sky, without space junk flying in toward us constantly. It appears a Creator has placed us in this exact spot, wired us for discovery, and given us the ability to appreciate His work.
There are countless examples of God’s fingerprints in Creation. Even atheist Stephen Hawking, remarked in his 1988 book A Brief History of Time that, “The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.”[2]
I encourage you to take a walk outside this week, watch the sunset, look at the stars, sit beneath a tree, and appreciate how great of an artist the God of the Bible truly is. The Bible says, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” (Psalm 19:1 ESV). If we just take the time to look, we can see God’s work at play in nature.
[1] Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos: How the Latest Scientific Discoveries Reveal God, 4th ed. (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2018), 115–116.
[2] Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), 125.
