The Rev. Dr. John Tamilio III, Pastor
© 2022, Dr. Tamilio
If you’ve heard me preach in the past for any length of time, you’ve probably heard me say (every so often) that none of the readings in the Lectionary struck me that week. This is rare, but it happens. This week, it’s the opposite. Every single one of the readings seemed to scream out, “Preach on me! Preach on me!”
In the reading from Ezra, which we did not include in worship today, we see and hear the prophet reading from the Torah (the five books of Moses) to all those gathered. The Epistle Lesson is from 1 Corinthians 12 wherein the Apostle Paul speaks of the church as the body of Christ and how all the members of the church, like all the members of the body, serve a unique and important function for the body to be whole and holy. Jesus opens the Word as well — and raises the ire of his listeners. This is the story of him going into the synagogue in Nazareth and reading from the prophet Isaiah. Afterwards, he says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” If you read past verse 21, you’ll see the anger such a claim caused among the worshippers.
Sandwiched between these readings is Psalm 19, which opens with the glorious line, “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.” This reading came up at our Bible Study two weeks ago as we read a piece by Addison H. Leitch on General and Special Revelation. The discussion that ensued focused on how all of nature is a witness to the incredible, creative power of God. Leitch writes, “Men have known these things [that “heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork”] for generations. They have gloried in the glory of a God who manifests himself in his wondrous works.”[1]
Basically, this passage is saying that if you look around, you will see the fingerprints of God all over the place. Let’s think of it from a scientific perspective for a second, because that is the argument that the atheist will commonly use against the believer. We talked about this a little bit last week when we discussed how your very existence is a miracle because the odds suggest that you shouldn’t exist. You are a miracle. But let’s take humanity out of the equation, if only for a moment. The universe as we know it — and we only know very little about it, since it is ever-expanding — the known universe is such that only the staunchest skeptic, and the person who puts faith in incredibly slim odds, would say that the Big Bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago, created our ordered existence all by itself with no intervention.
Let’s break this down, shall we? Prior to the Big Bang, there was nothing. There was just a void. However, somehow, in the middle of it all, there must have been a tiny speck of something: matter, gas, energy, something. This in itself nullifies that there was nothing, because if there was a point from which everything came, then there was something to begin with. But let’s leave that alone for a moment. There was nothing. Then, suddenly, and for some unknown reason, there was an explosion within the nothing that started everything — a sort of self-caused combustion that sent the cosmos spinning. The Earth wasn’t formed for another 9.26 billion years.
So, the universe slowly, but deliberately fell into a pattern that has order and purpose after billions of years of cosmic evolution. Once the Earth was set in motion, it took over four and a half billion years for us, and all other life, to evolve. Again, the odds of us showing up on the scene, being able to inhabit a planet that could sustain us, and developing into creative, thinking beings is staggering. According to astrophysicist Erik Zackrisson from Uppsala University in Sweden, the odds of the Earth existing is 700 quintillion to one — that is “a 7 followed by 20 zeros.”[2]
I am not sure how to wrap my brain around that number. Let’s put it into perspective as best we can, though. According to “Slot expert John Robinson…the chance of hitting Megabucks is 1 in 49,836,032.”[3] That is close to the number 50 followed by six zeros. That means, if my calculations are correct (with the help of Microsoft Excel), that you have a 14 trillion, 46 billion, 62 million, and 94 thousand chance in 1 of winning the lottery over the Earth has of existing! I still cannot wrap my head around that number! That’s not even figuring out the odds of human beings existing on this planet. The number gets significantly larger. It is 3.5 tredecillion to one. Yes, that is actually a number.
I think it takes more faith to be an atheist.
Numerous philosophers throughout history — from the Greek Plato and Aristotle, from the Jewish Maimonides and Spinoza, and from the Christian Aquinas and Leibniz, Clarke, Swinburne, and Craig — all of these thinkers embrace the basic claim that “things just didn’t pop up out of nothing. Someone, a pretty powerful Someone, had to cause the universe to come into existence. You just can’t have causes going back forever. God must have made the world. Nothing else makes sense.”[4] The Psalmist felt the same way: “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.”
Indeed, the chorus that sings praises to God is filled with voices. Birds whistling in the garden and crickets chirping at night; ocean waves crashing against a rocky shoreline; thunder shaking everything in its path as lighting illuminates the sky; the roar of wind through the trees; the pitter-patter of rain saturating the soil; the sun tearing through the cloud cover each day; the life that lives under the Earth’s surface, which is more abundant than the life that walks on top of it; the utter complexity of the human body to regenerate and heal itself — this, and so much more, point to a sense of order that cannot be denied.
All of life, all of existence, all of the universe owes its existence to a creative God who fashioned everything out of nothing (ex nihilo), because he chose to. God did not suffer from any sort of lack. He created the universe as we know it out of love so that he could share his love with us. How everyone does not walk around all the time with their jaws on the floor is beyond me. Don Stewart writes, “Nature gives evidence to the precision and creative hand of God.”[5] God’s fingerprints abound. They can be seen on every rock, every tree, every animal, every person. Amen.
[1] Addison H. Leitch, “General and Special Revelation” from Carl F. H. Henry, ed., Basics of the Faith: An Evangelical Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2019), 14.
[2] Nathaniel Scharping, “Earth May Be a 1-in-7-Quintilling Kind of Place,” taken from Discover (online): published February 22, 2016.
[3] “Megabucks Progressive Jackpot Odds,” taken from The Wizard of Odds (online): published January 8, 2019.
[4] This quote, and the names listed prior to it, are from Louis P. Pojman, Philosophy of Religion (Long Grove: Waveland Press, Inc., 2009/2001), 20.
[5] Don Stewart, “What Does Nature Tell Us about God’s Existence?” taken from Blue Letter Bible (online).