"The Case for a Creator" by Lee Strobel

• The Kalam Argument:
• Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
• The universe began to exist.
• Therefore, the universe has a cause.
• The evidence of experience suggests that whatever begins to exist does have a cause.
• The quantum vacuum is not what most people envision when they think of a vacuum -- that is, absolutely nothing. On the contrary, it’s a sea of fluctuating energy, an arena of violent activity that has a rich physical structure and can be described by physical laws. These particles are thought to originate by fluctuations of the energy in the vacuum. So this would not be an example of something coming into being out of nothing, or something coming into being without a cause. The quantum vacuum and the energy locked up in the vacuum are the cause of these particles.
• Almost all scientists today believe that the universe began with the Big Bang, not that the universe has always existed. And predictions about the Big Bang have been consistently verified by scientific data. Unquestionably, the Big Bang model has impressive scientific credentials.
• After looking at the scientific evidence, I agreed that a cause sparked the Big Bang. But that’s not the same thing as saying that the cause was God.
• There are two types of explanations -- scientific and personal:
• Scientific explanations describe how preexisting conditions and natural laws cause something.
• Personal explanations describe how an agent or that agent’s will causes something.
• I came to realize that there can’t be a scientific explanation of the first state of the universe. Because it’s the first state, it cannot be explained in terms of earlier initial conditions and natural laws leading up to it.
• If everything has a cause, what caused God? Remember, this argument is not that everything has a cause, but that everything that begins to exist has a cause. If God is eternal, as Christians believe and the Bible claims, then he had no beginning and thus no cause.
• So if there is an explanation of the first state of the universe, it has to be a personal explanation -- that is, an agent who has the will to create it.
• The high information content in the cell offers strong evidence for an act of intelligent design of the first life.
• Is there a Creator? Science can’t tell us either way, which is fine. We’re certainly free to look around for other evidence that the Creator still exists.
• Undeniably, there are variations within species of animals and plants, which explains why cows can be bred for improved milk production and why bacteria can adapt and develop immunity to antibiotics. This is called microevolution.
• Types of evolution:
• micro - gradual changes within a kind of animal
• macro - gradual change from one kind of animal to another
• Within a single species, common ancestry has been observed directly.
• Darwin’s theory predicted a long history of gradual change, with the differences slowly becoming bigger and bigger until you get the major differences we have now. But the fossil record, even in Darwin’s day, showed the opposite. Instead of slowly developing, major groups of animals appear suddenly in the fossil record in what’s called the “Cambrian explosion.”
• When some people talk about evolution, they mean merely that there has been change over time. If that’s all there was to Darwinism, then there wouldn’t be any controversy, because everyone agrees there has been biological change over time. Darwinism (updated as neo-Darwinism) claims much more than that -- it’s the theory that all living things are modified descendants of a common ancestor that lived long ago. According to Darwinism, every new species that has ever appeared can be explained by the result of natural selection acting on random genetic mutations.
• Darwin’s tree is a good illustration of an interesting theory, but it’s not an accurate description of what the fossil record has produced.
• The anthropic principle is the observation that the universe has all the necessary and narrowly characteristics to make human life possible.
• The theory of Intelligent Design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not a random and undirected process.
• In scientific terms, when a machine can’t be simplified any further, it is said to have irreducible complexity. In other words, you can’t make it any less complex than it is and still have it work.
• A system is irreducibly complex if it has a number of different parts that all work together to accomplish the task of the system, and if you were to remove one of the parts, the system would no longer work.
• DNA is the carrier of genetic information for all complex organisms. A gene is a stretch of DNA that tells a cell how to make a specific protein. Chromosomes are the strands of DNA on which the genes occur. The total of all the genes in a living creature is called its genome.
• If you’re a spiritual skeptic or seeker try finding answers to these questions:
• First, is there a God who created the universe?
• Second, did God reveal himself to humankind through the Bible or other sacred scriptures?
• Third, is Jesus the Son of God -- deity united with humanity -- who can help us as he claimed?