So as the last two messages have shown, all sensible thought tells us that the universe does have meaning and that reason is, far from being an accidental by-product of a purposeless universe, given to us by God; for nature herself cannot produce reason or rational thought without something outside of her putting it into her. Under these premises, any part of our thinking that nature is able to alter cannot itself be reason, and must be, in one sense, part of what we call ‘erroneous thinking’. And we see that this awareness affects all of us (including atheists) in a quite subliminal way. 

 

When we formulate opinions about what we are entitled to, we are really identifying the part of our cognisance which knows about purposes. It is true that the reason which God gives us can be used wrongly, but we are fully aware that corrective reason is available to us in several ways. It can come from another person, it can come with a few minutes of rumination in solitude, or it can come through our praying to God for help. The latter involves God giving us a little more of His reason or directing us towards the correct part of reason inside us which we cannot at that moment locate. 

 

And this brings me to another point. All of us were taught in school about the Laws of Thermodynamics (although I have forgotten more than I have remembered). Does not the Second Law of Thermodynamics state that any system will become less ordered as time progresses - unless, of course, there is something else, something bigger and more powerful, supplying energy to restore the order? How, then, can atheist evolutionists claim that the opposite has happened - that order has increased as time has progressed - without a transcendent being supplying energy to the order? 

This is precisely what I was referring to a moment ago when I talked about a transcendent Creator being the director and supplier of all human reason. The argument that it was an accident seems to contradict the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The idea that the Second Law applies only to closed systems is merely putting the problem back one stage further - for the proportions we are talking about involves the universe itself being an open system.

 

There also seems to me to be much confusion over the nature of God. I have read several atheists’ books of science these past few years, and there is a prevalence of ridiculous postulates, one of which is the question of the apparent complexities of a being that has the capabilities to create our universe. Thus they claim that if a being existed that was capable of creating our universe He or It would have to be much more complex than anything within nature (this obviously goes without saying - although they seem to make a point of saying it repeatedly). But then their thinking descends into foolishness; for they go on to claim that this being would have to have come about through a similar evolutionary process as things have done within nature. In other words, they claim that a being so complex must have come about with single-step progression (incremental changes), because something so vastly complex cannot have just happened without such a process. 

 

There seems to me to be a complete confusion here. In fact, it is not the sort of statement that I would expect from supposedly intelligent scientists. When we think of our Heavenly Father, we must not, at any point, smuggle in thoughts of before and after, cause and effect, past and present, or any other thoughts which reflect realties in the space-time continuum. God is transcendent of all these things. Admittedly, it is not possible for any of us to imagine a place that is transcendent of time, for as soon as you attempt to picture it, you are already imagining moments following one another. But this certainly does not mean that our Lord is explicable by any method used to explain things within the laws of our universe. Any attempt to do so involves a confusion of thought regarding entities. 

 

Within nature itself, a process can explain an entity, but it does not always follow that there is a process which explain the process. In fact, if we were to continue in a regressive analysis - obstinately removing God from the picture at each stage where explanation is required - we would find that matter itself explains processes more than processes explain matter. Theists believe that they have a perfectly good explanation - for they believe that the relationship between the universe and the process of creation is analogous to the relationship between God and man; that is, everything that is created for the purposes of our soul - including our reasoning, our love, our morality and our hunger for Him - is made known to us through a divine process of transference, from creature to Creator. This, to me, makes so much more sense than inconsistent and illogical naturalist theories. 

 

But there is a broader point to be made regarding the idea that God evolved into what He is now. It has quite an interesting psychological connotation - it gives us, I think, a little sense of the divine. Let us suppose two contrasting things. Firstly, suppose that we believe in an all-loving omnipotent God. And suppose we were somehow told that God had not always existed, that He was, in fact, a product of an evolutionary process lasting trillions of years. He started as a crude and simplistic supernatural being with no creative/creational properties and evolved into a vastly complex supreme being - the God we currently worship. Now suppose the alternative - that the God we currently worship is, in fact, outside of time, that He has always existed, that He cannot be explained by any natural laws. 

 

Even if we were to discover that God A is a more powerful being than God B, would we not feel much better with the second kind of God? I think the answer is always yes. This is a little sense of the divine that we have; the ability to receive a little bit of what He is. And if you think that this type of feeling should occur naturally, you would be quite wrong. If we sneak naturalism, including that of naturalistic psychology, into the equation, then this kind of thinking does not occur in any other kind of thinking. 

 

Our expectation of providence is very different to our expectation of all earthly things, for every earthly thing that we can treasure is hoped for, not as something that has always been there, but as something that will develop from nothing. Love between a man and a woman, friendship, personal achievements, personal abilities, and all things like that cannot come instantly, they cannot even live outside of time; for they all have to grow. And notice here that I say earthly things, for this does not, of course, apply to things that are part of the divine, like morality, grace and love. 

 

It is not love itself which is growing - love is, in its original sense, outside of time (just like reason) - it is the individuals growing into love that I am referring to. It is as though we have a built-in mechanism for recognising things that are part of the divine and things that grow into the divine. However long we have been evolving we have been assimilating a co-ordination between the eternity that God set in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11), and how everything else fits into it. We certainly do not behave as if we are merely the result of a naturalistic process; we behave as though a little part of us knows, and always has known, the true nature of God. 

 

Having admitted a moment ago that our psychology affects our perception of our religion, this, I think, also applies to our perception of macro-evolution. You will meet many Christians who are appalled at the idea that we evolved from cruder creatures - even if God was guiding the process at every stage. I think this objection is more psychological than anything else - many people have a preconceived aversion to words like ‘evolution’ and ‘natural selection’. I have known one or two Christians to be thoroughly intrigued by accounts of major changes within certain species and how those changes occurred, yet have seen a look of disapproving incongruity appear on their faces when the words ‘natural selection’ or ‘Darwin’ or ‘evolution;’ are uttered. ‘I don’t believe in that’, they stridently decree.

 

My experiences tell me that some people are preconditioned (by their environment and background) to dismiss these things out of hand. And here is why I think it is largely psychological. We like to think of God, not as Someone who starts off the process and allows evolution to take place, but as a God who is always there, acting as a sort of providential supervisor. This of course, does not belong to the irrational part of man’s thinking, for we all know, or should know, that whatever method God used for creating us, He is a part of every single one of us - therefore He is present in everything we do. 

 

But we like to think of action rather than supposed inaction. I think an analogy will show what I mean. A engineer who designs and builds a plane that could travel from Norwich to Sydney without a pilot is more of an intelligent designer than an engineer whose plane needs a pilot. Yet I am quite certain that most people would feel safer travelling in the second type of plane. Despite the fact that plane number one was far more technologically advanced, we would still prefer an expert to be in control. Of course, our reservations regarding technology play a huge part, but I think the point is still a valid one. A God who creates the whole evolutionary process and only intervenes when necessary (such as the incarnation), does not seem to some people to be as caring and as interested as a God who is forever involved in every small detail of earthly things. 

 

Psychologically, many people prefer the second type of God and they proclaim that way of thinking as more intelligent and more reasonable. But it is not necessarily so, for very often that type of thinking leads people into major conflicts with scientific theories; that is, dichotomies exist that need not exist - such as the intransigent and seemingly ridiculous view that life on this planet is only approximately 6,000 years old. 

 

I do not think that we should be too preoccupied with how God did His creating (I certainly do not believe that the days of creation in Genesis are literal 24-hour periods), we should be more interested in why He did his creating. He created us so that He could love us, first into existence, then, so we could grow in Christ to experience divinity itself. 

 

In actual fact, I think we can cognitively diminish some of the true quality if we insist that we have a God who merely accords Himself with human desires. Who in all fairness would feel the same sort of awe for a God who was forever appearing to people because they demanded to see if He existed or not? No, I think it is far more beneficial to the human mind to be in awe of God for the right reasons. In one sense, the idea that God started off the process with the big bang, and that that moment of instigation itself somehow had all the constituent parts of creation inside, seems to me quite a beautiful and powerful thing. 

 

The incarnation was planned even before the universe was created, and if all the things that are truly precious, truly spiritual, truly Him, are older than creation too, our perception of Him should not be affected by things that are underpinned by time and movement. Evolutionists might have got it wrong - young earth creationists might have got it wrong, but these things are, to me, secondary. 

 

If we think as much about why we were created as we do about how we were created, we will develop a better understanding of our place in creation. I am not, of course, suggesting that rational enquiry into the origins of mankind or the origin of the universe is a bad thing in itself - for I believe that God encourages us to learn things and think things through. I do, however, think that the same type of rational enquiry is bad if it makes our desire to know Him and our desire to find out why we were created secondary things.