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| Pillars of Creation Nebula, photo taken by Hubble |
I grew up in an agnostic home. I started attending college when I was 21. At the time, I pursued a mechanical engineering degree. Later on, I transferred to civil engineering as it would allow me to live in more small-town settings.
My freshman year, I took precalculus, chemistry and other classes. My second year, I took calculus, physics, and others. While taking those classes and learning all these physical laws, I got a nagging feeling in the back of my head that this all cannot be by chance. The universe is too beautiful and is put together like a finely tuned clock for this to just be happenstance. This couldn't be just a random set of events, laws and fundamental constants like the atheists would want you to believe. This is when I started to suspect that God really existed.
I probably need to apologize in advance as this was about a quarter century ago that I studied all of this, and now I have became a little rusty with those things I learned. This is not a complete list, nor could it ever be. As we as humanity are continuing to discover new things, we are in constant need of revising old hypotheses and theories. Also, I don't have the ability to explain everything in detail in this article, but I will leave links where appropriate if you want to investigate a particular subject in more detail.
Some are just dumb facts, like the fact that water expands when it freezes, that should make any inquisitive person step back and say "Gee, that's lucky". If you think about it, if water contracted when it froze, then ice would sink to the bottom of lakes and oceans. Eventually the ice would fill up oceans and lakes, making life nearly impossible for anything north of 50 degrees latitude and plunging us into a permanent ice age. Expansion when freezing is a fairly rare phenomenon in chemistry, but it exists with water.
GOD IS A MATHEMATICIAN
Calculus is the mathematical study of rates of change. Isaac Newton discovered that
https://math.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Calculus/Book%3A_Calculus_(OpenStax)/05%3A_Integration/5.03%3A_The_Fundamental_Theorem_of_Calculus
Math is a funny concept. It is a theoretical tool, but at the same time, it is the only field of study that there are complete and absolute provable propositions. Anything else in the universe are found through measurements which are subject to fallible interpretations. Today, with the advent of computers, we have accelerated our knowledge and depth of mathematical understanding.
There are numerous mathematical theorems out there that work out just like they do, many that we probably haven't discovered yet. Whatever it is, it they didn't work like they do, our universe would be fundamentally different and we would cease to exist.
THE FOUR FOURCES
There are four fundamental forces governing the interaction of particles in the universe. The strong force binds nuclei together. The weak force pushes nuclei apart and allows for beta decay which is the creation of electrons which are necessary for chemical reactions. Electromagnetic force is the driving force between chemical reactions. Gravity holds masses of material together.
What is interesting is that if any one of these forces were even slightly different, we would cease to exist as we know it. Chemical reactions could not occur in a relatively stable environment, or planets and stars may have never formed, or we could have all collapsed into black holes. Whatever the outcome, it wouldn't have been good.
PLANK'S CONSTANT
Plank's constant connects the particular photon energy E with it's associated wave frequency f.
E = hf
h is a fundamental number which has other applications in many other equations. Basically, it holds the wave/particle relationship in the universe. If this number were any different, we may be able to pass through one another like waves, or we could have been obliterated in a sea of monoatomic powder. Whatever the outcome, it wouldn't have been good.
THE ARROW OF TIME
Another fundamental principle of the universe is that entropy (i.e. disorder) always increases. A broken glass will never unbreak itself. Unless there is an insertion of work and/or order from outside of the system, things will decay with time. The question poses, if entropy always increases in a closed system as our universe is supposed to be, where did the initial order and energy come from?
DOZENS OF OTHER LAWS
In our physics and thermodynamics class, we learned many different laws about Newtonian mechanics. Inertia, F=ma, For all actions is an equal and opposite reaction, Gravitational Law (F = (G*m*M)/(R^2)), Gas law: Pv=NRT, Electrical laws, electrodynamic laws, thermodynamic laws, and probably many fundamental laws about the physical universe that we don't even know yet.
If any one of these were different, we would have blown up or collapsed into primordial goo. Or, we would have spiraled into the sun or be flung out into the emptiness of space. Whatever the outcome, it wouldn't be good.
https://www.vedantu.com/physics/basic-laws-of-physics
EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE AND JAMES WEBB
Since the 1930's we have observed that the universe is expanding. With this information, we deduced that the universe is 13.8 billion years old. However, in 1994 with the Hubble telescope, more accurate measurements deduced that the universe's expansion has been accelerating. This has let to a number of hypotheses, including dark matter, dark energy, and cosmic inflation to explain this phenomena. It reminds me of our model changing when telescopes were first invented. There were numerous hypotheses put out until a new updated hypothesis was agreed upon.
Although the philosophy of science disagrees with such practice, we have a real problem with new hypotheses being stated as fact and anyone that disagrees is labeled a Neanderthal for questioning new "scientific" ideas (i.e. big bang, global warming, evolution, etc.). Maybe this mostly happens in the political arena, but colleges and most high dollar fields of study are influenced by political dollars, corrupting the system.
Recently, NASA launched a new telescope which is sensitive to infrared light and designed to look to the furthest reaches of space possible. Right now, the findings are still open for debate, but images of the primordial universe show well developed galaxies, much more developed than anticipated. It suggests that either our model of the universe is wrong, or we have some tweaking to do with our current theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_universe
https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-dozens-early-galaxies
"HAPPY ACCIDENTS"
On top of the fundamental laws of the universe, there are many things that needed to happen for Earth to be able to create and sustain life. The size of the sun is critical to give the Earth a wide enough of an orbital distance, and yet be stable enough to not explode or collapse for billions of years. The moon needed to crash through the Earth 4.5 billion years ago to give us the wide variety of elements with just the right proportions necessary for life. We needed the right circumstances with just the right primordial soup for life to be created, something we have not even came close to doing in a lab yet. We needed the right temperature with the right atmosphere. The various elements needed to interact with each other how they do. I have a 4 inch thick book of different physical properties of a host of substances. Most all of them are crucial to life or how the world works.
THE FERMI PARADOX
Another thing that would perplex the agnostic old me is the Fermi Paradox. If we were just here by chance, same with many other worlds, why haven't we seen any evidence of any space aliens and all of that Star Trek jive? Certainly, there would be a host of other alien civilizations that would have developed the technology for space flight already. If you google "fermi paradox", you will be bombarded with a host of explanations. But, life finds a way and it seems implausible that an interstellar civilization wouldn't have happened somewhere in our galaxy already.
I personally believe that we are not alone. God wouldn't go through the trouble of creating a vast universe with trillions of galaxies if we were the only ones here. In Sunday School, we are taught about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and how the Earth will be cleansed by fire. Perhaps God does it similar in other worlds, and those civilizations are never allowed to develop the technology necessary for interstellar travel. There could be people out there 400 light years away just like you and I, looking at their own night sky and also wondering why they don't see any aliens.
TAKEAWAY
This can't be just a happy accident that we are here, living, breathing and thinking about how we got here. There are far too many ducks that needed to be lined up just from a random set of events. Knowing this, we can only conclude that we were put here on purpose for a reason.
I'm not a fundamental Biblical scholar that says everything in the Bible happened exactly as it is written. As far as the Garden of Eden, it may have happened, but much of it could only be a symbolic story written to explain to early mankind our nature and relationship with God. We do have remains of cavemen and dinosaurs, which contradicts with our Biblical understanding of creation. But, we do also have this understanding that the beauty and complexity of the universe surpasses any reasonable supposition that this is by random chance.
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