A number of years ago my son was doing a subject at Uni called “Evolutionary Biology”.  He told me that he approached his lecturer at the end of a lecture one time, and asked her how the first single cell organism arose.  Her answer was “Evolution requires lots of small steps of faith, creation requires one large step of faith”.  I mentioned this to a student science teacher the other day, and she said that was a good answer.  I found that response surprising.  Surely science is about going where the evidence leads, no matter how unpleasant that might be, it is not about following steps of faith.

So what evidence do we have?  I know this is an old argument, but it is still a good one.  Take the modern smartphone, it is incredibly complex, the hardware is at the peak of man’s design and manufacturing capability, and then you add the software, the apps. We know that you need one or more intelligent designers and fabricators to produce one.  It is impossible for a smartphone to arise from random processes. This is something that has been observed (scientifically if you like), countless times.  No complex mechanism can arise without this intelligence.  It’s a law of nature.

Now take a single cell organism.  It is another order of complexity on top of that in the smartphone.  The cell can go out into its environment and gather all the raw materials it needs and process them to fabricate a copy of itself – incredible!  Way beyond our current technology.

And then you take a multi-cellular organism, such as a human, and you add yet another level of complexity on top of that again.

If observation tells us that something simple like a smartphone requires intelligent design and fabrication, then obviously a single cell, and especially a multi cellular organism must also require it.  That is where the scientific evidence leads.

Now you might comment, you are saying there is a God, but who made God?

But this God, what Dawkins refers to as the “terminator”, is outside his creation, not needing a designer, because he has always existed.

You might comment, but isn’t this a step of faith?  But cosmologists are happy to propose the existence of dark matter based on the effects they see in the universe, so why not propose God, on exactly the same basis?  We see the universe we inhabit, and logically, for it to exist as it does, there must be a God of some sort who designed and fabricated it.

And we know that this is required because of other lines of inquiry as well.  We know that this universe complies with the second law of thermodynamics.  It is winding down.  If we are being scientifically sensible, we know we need someone outside the universe to have wound it up in the first place.  In other words, if there was a big bang, who caused that bang to occur?  The logical conclusion is, there must be a God.

Now I take Dawkins point that this doesn’t prove that God has the attributes that Christians describe of him, that requires another discussion, but it certainly shows it is logical, scientific, to say he exists.

Ref: The God Delusion, page 77