When I get some free time, I will occasionally read through the Feynman Lectures on Physics, which are essentially transcriptions of the lectures Richard Feynman gave to the freshmen of Caltech in the early 1960’s. There was one day a few weeks ago where I had some extra time on my hands and so I opened the website, but instead of going to a specific subject, I just started from the beginning with the first couple lectures. These were all about what physics is, giving a pretty interesting and in-depth background on the science. What caught my eye, however, was the seeming evidence of God in all of it.

I am a Christian, but blind faith is something I am not a fan of. I have such a hard time accepting a fact without understanding “why” it’s true, which is great for my schooling, but less helpful when it comes to God. I would request more concrete proof of my faith, only to be given answers that didn’t scratch the itch in my brain. When asking how we can know God exists, I was told things like “We can’t know for sure, we just have to have faith”, which is true, but doesn’t offer any help on why we should have faith in the first place. Another common response to my question was “Well, look around at things like anatomy, it’s far too precise to be random”, and this answer was much better, but it still didn’t satisfy my curiosity.

My biggest qualm with what I am going to call the “precision argument” is other explanations for the precision usually end up getting dismissed. The specific example that often gets pointed to is anatomy, and more specifically, the human eye. This is a completely fair and reasonable example for believers, as it is a beautiful creation, a perfect example of how we were “wonderfully made” by God (Psalms 139:14). The eyeball gives us a rather flexible set of abilities, like a wide but focusable field of vision, and the ability to see many colors in both bright and dim environments. There may be other animals that can do some of these skills better, but then they become quite specialized and lose the versatility that sets us apart. So I do agree, the eye is an amazing example of God’s design and planning, but using that to show why God exists has a major flaw: there’s another, not-necessarily God-based, reason the eye might be the way it is.

We can blame Charles Darwin for this other reason, as his theory on natural selection and evolution has quite a lot of well-tested, God-free data12345 backing it. What his hypothesis essentially says is that at any given point, the collective group of a species will “naturally select” the best set of genes to propagate into the next generation, and that is how life became what it is today. Under this idea, we can say our eyes were just a byproduct of human evolution, there wasn’t necessarily any sort of “design” to them, we were just choosing the sets that would help us best in the future. This, quite unfortunately, pokes a massive hole6 in using our anatomy to prove Gods existence, and is why I personally had such a hard time accepting the “precision argument” as definitive proof of God.

Another example of this line of reasoning that I couldn’t completely justify would be the “precision of the universe”. Essentially, this one boils down to the idea that the absolute precision required for the universe to exist proves that God designed it. This is things like how far we are from the sun, the fact that water expands when it freezes, or how subatomic particles interact, as changing any one of these could do anything from freezing life off the planet to making atoms explode. Like the eye, this makes a solid argument for God, but there’s another explanation that I believe keeps it from being conclusive. If these conditions have to be true for us to exist, then given the relatively infinite randomness of the universe, they eventually would have been met somewhere, and we wouldn’t be around to debate this if we weren’t in that somewhere, giving a plausible explanation as to why everything is the way it is, once again outside of God.

So I lived for a while, trying to fully accept that God existed without having evidence I couldn’t explain by other means. It was one of the biggest struggles in my faith, as I couldn’t entirely quiet the scientific portion of my brain going “but why”. And then, God answered my internal question that I had been too ashamed of to give to Him directly7, through the secular Feynman Lectures. In the introductory lessons, he has a quite long portion explaining how physics is all about combining the different branches of the science, finishing with the line: “The question is, of course, is it going to be possible to amalgamate everything, and merely discover that this world represents different aspects of one thing? Nobody knows.”8 This got me thinking, and I came to the conclusion that the different natural sciences may produce a multitude of theories that can be explained outside of God, but I can’t think of a single reason for all of the foundational concepts to be so simple and related if the universe was produced from random events.

For example, suppose you’re a mechanical engineer, experimenting with a spring by attaching a weight to it and tracking its movement. Now pretend that I’m an electrical engineer, running my own experiment by building a circuit comprised with components called inductors and capacitors and tracking the energy in the system. Like good scientists do, we collect data, write down our findings, and report our results, only to see that we got basically the same data! We ran completely independent experiments on very unrelated material, but found that they can be modeled by the same exact math, falling in a category known as “oscillations”.

Oscillations are my favorite example to look at, as I was taught it about the same time I was spit-balling this post in my head9, and it kinda blew my mind because I cant think of a single reason why it should be that way. Why, if everything was produced randomly, should I be able to represent springs and electricity in such similar manners? And it’s not forcing them (in the sense that either model becomes useless) to do that either, in both systems, through their own analysis methods, you naturally produce this very helpful (and surprisingly simple) mathematical model.

There are many other very interesting examples of this, like the fact the motion of atoms can describe all of heat and mechanics or that electric and magnetic waves are kinda the same thing even though they’re totally not, and I saw the more I studied physics, the more I saw God. Everywhere I looked, there was a level of simplicity, relatedness, and intuitiveness to everything in the world, that just wouldn’t make sense to exist if everything was a result of random interactions. That would be like if I put a blindfold on, threw paint at a wall, and somehow ended up with Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night”10, it just wouldn’t make sense.

But then I was concerned for a moment, has the precision argument just put on a scooby-doo mask convincing enough for me to accept it? I don’t think so. If I were building the universe, myself being (hopefully) better than random interactions, I could probably get a working product together given enough time. I imagine this like a programming problem, where I would sit and fiddle away, ever so slowly getting the behavior I want until it finally runs like I want it to. Unfortunately, if any of my previous coding experiences say anything, the new little humans11 I made would try to develop their own physics to study the universe, only to see that it’s very strange, unintuitive, and inconsistent. I may have done my best, which is hopefully better than random interactions, and the behavior may be correct, but the second anyone tries to look at what’s going on, it dissolves into a confusing mess. This is where I believe my physics argument differs from the precision argument, as there is an infinite number of other ways the universe could be running, many of which I have to imagine are far more chaotic, but we live in one that has an incredible amount of order and simplicity to it, for no evolutionary or requirement reason that I can think of.

So, although the results of the various sciences can be explained outside of God, I believe there’s a strong case to be made for His existence through the natural sciences, as I believe it’s far more logical for everything to be intelligently designed and put together, than it is for us to get so incredibly, improbably lucky, as for it to happen by chance… Occam’s Razor anyone?12

  1. Darwin’s Original Paper ↩

  2. Khan Academy ↩

  3. Evidence Supporting Evolution ↩

  4. Article On Testing Natural Selection ↩

  5. Evidence for Evolution by Natural Selection ↩

  6. I don’t think evolution is in opposition to God by any means, as I believe things like the phrase “after it’s kind” in Genesis suggest that things are supposed to change across generations. Also, God created absolutely everything, and since things like natural selection have so much data to support them, it’s something He must have done. Isaiah 40:12 is a particularly fun reference here. ↩

  7. Don’t do what I did, give the things that bother you to God because He cares and wants to hear them (1 Peter 5:7) ↩

  8. Lecture 2: Basic Physics ↩

  9. Thanks God. I have full faith that He intentionally had all of this click together at the same time, as any part of this would have been good evidence for me, but connecting all of the dots at once really solidified it for me ↩

  10. The more obvious example would be “The Mona Lisa”, but I like The Starry Night more, and it’s my blog, so fight me ;) ↩

  11. Assuming I go with humans, what if I made the new intelligent life look like the Ophanim angels described in the bible? (Ezekiel 10:12-14)… terrifying, but it would be fun ↩

  12. Occam’s Razor ↩