In high school, I had the opportunity to play football for Larry Mantle. Coach Mantle was the youngest brother of the hall of fame baseball player Mickey Mantle. When Coach Mantle began coaching at Cyril, he was well into his late 60’s and didn’t really care to walk around at practice all afternoon, so he rode in an old golf cart.
I despised that golf cart and so did most of the other guys. The reason we hated that golf cart was not because we didn’t like Coach Mantle, we thought he was awesome, we hated it because it always ran out of juice by the end of practice. When it ran out of battery, we were forced to push the cart into the field house. It was not a fun experience.
At the end of the season, a few friends and I decided to get our revenge on Coach Mantle. We “borrowed” a key to the fieldhouse and the coach’s office and went to work in the dead of night. We painstakingly deconstructed the golf cart and walked it piece by piece up the stairs to the coach’s office. Then we re-assembled the cart, planted a video camera to be able to watch the moment of discovery, and waited for the next morning to arrive.
The next morning, Coach Mantle walked into his office, poured himself a cup of coffee, sat down, grabbed the newspaper and started to read. As he was reading, another coach asked him if he noticed anything different. He peered over his newspaper and saw his golf cart. He then looked at the small door and then the stairs. I can’t write was said next, but my name was involved in his tirade of anger and laughter. Coach Mantle knew my fingerprints were all over that golf cart appearing in his office.
Much like the scenario described above, we can look at this world and know that something or someone is behind it. The universe didn’t just appear out of thin air with no cause. The universe is so finely tuned that the evidence clearly points to a Creator. There are certain things in nature that have to be so finely tuned that if just moved a small degree the universe could not exist at all. Astrophysicist Hugh Ross explains the finely tuned nature of the strong nuclear force and expansion rate of the universe by describing stacking dimes across a billion North Americas all the way to the moon, then blindfolding yourself, and picking one exact dime. If any other dime is picked the universe couldn’t exist.
The example above is just one of many things that point to a Creator. The gravitational constant must be fine tumed to 1 in 1060. The strands of DNA in our bodies contain organized information that makes life possible. We are located in the perfect place in the cosmos to support life. There are countless examples of God’s fingerprints in Creation. Even atheist Stephen Hawking remarked in his 1988 bookA Brief History of Timethat, “The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.” I encourage you to take a walk outside this week, watch the sunset, look at the stars, sit beneath a tree, and appreciate how great of an artist the God of the Bible truly is.
-Brandon Thompson