|
;This
article of Mr A. Cressy Morrison, former President of the New York Academy
of Sciences, first appeared in the "Reader's Digest" (January 1948); then on
recommendation of Professor C. A. Coulson, F. R.S., Professor of Mathematics
at Oxford University, was republished in the "Reader's Digest" November 1960
- It shows how science compels the scientists to admit to the essential need
of a Supreme Creator.
We are still in the dawn of the scientific age and every increase of
light reveals more brightly the handiwork of an intelligent Creator. In the
90 years since Darwin we have made stupendous discoveries; with a spirit of
scientific humanity and of faith grounded in knowledge we are approaching
even nearer to an awareness of God. For myself I count seven reasons for my
faith.
First: By unwavering
mathematical law we can prove that our universe was designed and executed by
a great engineering Intelligence. Suppose you put ten coins, marked from one
to ten, into your pocket and give them a good shuffle. Now try to take them
out in sequence from one to ten, pulling back the coin each time and shaking
them all
again. Mathematically we know that your chance of first drawing number
one is one in ten; of drawing one and two in succession, one in 100; of
drawing one, two and three in succession, one in a thousand, and so on; your
chance of drawing them all, from one to number ten in succession, would
reach the unbelievable figure of one chance in ten thousand million. By the
same reasoning, so many exacting conditions are necessary for life on earth
that they could not possibly exist in proper relationship by chance. The
earth rotates on its axis at one thousand miles an hour; if it turned at
one hundred miles an hour, our days and nights would be ten times as
long as now, and the hot sun would then burn up our vegetation during each
long day, while in the long night any surviving sprout would freeze. Again,
the sun, source of our life, has a surface temperature of 12,000 degrees
Fahrenheit, and our earth is, just far enough away so that this 'eternal
fire" warms us just enough and not too much! If the sun gave off only
one-half its present radiation, we would freeze, and if it gave half as much
more, we would roast. The slant of the earth, tilted at an angle of 23
degrees, gives us our season; if it had not been so tilted, vapours from the
ocean would move north and south, piling up for us continents of ice. If our
moon was, say, only 50 thousand miles away instead of its actual distance.
Our tides would be so enormous that twice a day all continents would be
submerged; even the mountains would soon be eroded away. If the crust of the
earth had been only ten feet thicker, there would be no oxygen without which
animal life must die. Had the ocean been a few feet deeper, carbon dioxide
and oxygen would have been absorbed and no vegetable life could exist. Or if
our atmosphere had been thinner, some of the meteors, now burned in space by
the million every day; would be striking all parts of the earth, starting
fires everywhere. Because of these, and host of other examples, there is not
one chance
in millions that life on
our planet is an accident.
Second: The resourcefulness of life to accomplish its purpose is a
manifestation of all-pervading Intelligence. What life itself is no man has
fathomed. It has neither weight nor dimensions, but it does have force; a
growing root will crack a rock. Life has conquered water, land and air,
mastering the element, compelling them to dissolve and reform their
combinations. Life, the sculptor, shapes all living things; an artist, it
designs every leaf of every tree, and colours every flower. Life is a
musician and has each bird to sing its love songs, the insects to call each
other in the music of their multitudinous sounds. Life is a sublime chemist,
giving taste to fruits and spices, and perfume to the rose changing water
and carbonic acid into sugar and wood and, in so doing, releasing oxygen
that animals may have the breath of life. Behold an almost invisible drop of
protoplasm, transparent and jelly-like, capable of motion, drawing energy
from the sun. This single cell, this transparent mistlike droplet, holds
within itself the germ of life, and has the power to distribute this life to
every living thing, great and small. The powers of this droplet are greater
than our vegetation and
animals and people, for all life came from it. Nature did not create
life; fire-blistered rocks and a saltless sea could not meet the necessary
requirements. Who, then, has put it here ?
Third: Animal wisdom speaks
irresistibly of a good Creator who infused instinct into otherwise helpless
little creatures. The young salmon spends years at sea, then comes back to
his own river; and travels up the very side of the river into which flows
The tributary where he was born. What brings him back so precisely? If you
transfer
him to another tributary he will know at once that he is off his course
and he will fight his way down and back to the main stream and then turn up
against the current to finish his destiny more accurately. Even more
difficult to solve is the mystery of eels.
These amazing creatures migrate at maturity from all ponds and rivers
everywhere - those from Europe across thousands of miles of oceans - all
bound for the same abysmal deeps near Bermuda. There they breed and die. The
little ones, with no apparent means of knowing anything except that they are
in a wilderness of water; nevertheless find their way back not only to the
very shore from which their parent
came but thence to the rivers, lakes or little ponds - so that each body
of water is always populated with eels. No American eel has ever been caught
in Europe, no European eel in American waters. Nature has even delayed the
maturity of the European eel by a year or more to make up for its longer
journey. Where does the directing iruptilse originate? A wasp will overpower
a grasshopper, dig a hole in the
earth, sting the grasshopper in exactly the right place so that he does
not die but becomes unconscious and lives on as a form of preserved meat.
Then the Wasp will lay her eggs handily so that her children when they hatch
can nibble without killing' the insect on which they feed, to them dead meat
would be fatal. The mother then flies way and dies; she never sees her
young. Surely the wasp must have done all this right the first time and
every time, or else there would be no wasp. Such mysterious techniques
cannot be explained by adoption; they were bestowed.
Fourth: Man has something more than animal instinct - the power of
reason. No other animal has ever left a record of its ability to count ten
or even to understand the meaning of ten. Where instinct is like a single
note of a flute, beautiful but limited, the human brain contains all the
notes of all the instruments in the orchestra. No need to belabour this
fourth point; thanks to the human, reason we can contemplate the possibility
that we are what we are only because we have received a spark of Universal
Intelligence.
Fifth: Provision for all living
is revealed in phenomena which we know today but which Darwin did not know -
such as the wonders of genes. So unspeakably tiny are these genes that, if
all of them responsible for all living people in the world could be put in
one place, there would be less than a thimbleful. Yet these
ultra-microscopic genes and their companions, the chromosomes, inhabit every
living cell and are the absolute keys to all human, animal and vegetable
characteristics. A thimble is a small place in which to put all the
individual characteristics of two thousand million human beings. However;
the facts are beyond question. Well then, how do genes lock up all the
normal heredity of a multitude of ancestors and preserve the psychology of
each in such an infinitely small space? Here evolution really begins - at
the cell, the entity which holds and carries genes. How a few million atoms,
locked up as an ultra-
microscopic gene, can absolutely rule all on earth is an example of
profound cunning and provision that could emanate only from a Creative
Intelligence - no other hypothesis will serve.
Sixth: By the economy of nature,
we are forced to realize that only infinite wisdom could have foreseen and
prepared with such astute husbandry. Many years ago a species of cactus was
planted in Australia as a protective fence. Having no insect enemies in
Australia the cactus soon began a prodigious growth; the alarming
abundance persisted until the plants covered an area as long and wide as
England, crowding inhabitants out of the towns and villages, and destroying
their farms. Seeking a defence, the entomologists scoured the world; finally
they turned up an insect which exclusively feeds on cactus, and would eat
nothing else. It would breed freely too; and it had no enemies in Australia.
So animal soon conquered vegetable
and today the cactus pest has retreated, and with it all but a small
protective residue of the insects, enough to hold the cactus in check for
ever. Such checks and balances have been universally provided. Why have not
fast-breeding insects dominated the earth? Because they have no lungs such
as man possesses; they breathe through tubes. But when insects grow large,
their tubes do not grow in ratio to the increasing size of the body. Hence
there has never been an insect of great size; this limitation on growth has
held them all in check. If this physical check had not been provided, man
could not exist. Imagine meeting a hornet as big as a lion!
Seventh: The fact that man can conceive the idea of God is in itself a
unique proof. The conception of god rises from a divine faculty of man,
unshared with the rest of our world - the faculty we call imagination. By
its power, man and man alone can fmd the evidence of things unseen. The
vista that power opens up is unbounded; indeed, as
man is perfected, imagination becomes a spiritual reality. |