Seven Reasons Why a Scientist Believes in God by CRESSY MORRISON

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Dear Members,

 

A. CRESSY MORRISON, Former President of the New York

Academy of Sciences

 

WE ARE STILL IN THE DAWN of the scientific age and

every increase of light reveals more brightly the

handiwork of an intelligent Creator. We have made

stupendous discoveries; with a spirit of scientific

humility and of faith grounded in knowledge we are

approaching ever nearer to an awareness of God.

 

For myself, I count seven reasons for my faith:

 

1: By unwavering mathematical law we can prove that

our universe was designed and executed by a great

engineering intelligence.

 

Suppose you put ten pennies, 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, putting

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 1000, and so on; your

chance of drawing them all, from number one to number

ten in succession, would reach the unbelievable figure

of one in ten billion.

 

By the same reasoning, so many exacting conditions are

necessary for life on the earth that they could not

possibly exist in proper relationship by chance. The

earth rotates on its axis 1000 miles an hour at the

equator; if it turned at 100 miles an hour, our days

and nights would be ten times as long as now, and the

hot sun would likely burn up our vegetation each long

day while in the long night any surviving sprout might

well freeze.

 

Again the sun, source of our life, has a surface

temperature of 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and our

earth is just far enough away so that this " eternal

life " 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 as much more, we would

roast.

 

The slant of the earth, tilted at an angle of 23

degrees, gives us our seasons; if the earth had not

been so tilted, vapors from the ocean would move north

and south, piling up for us continents of ice. If our

moon were, say, only 50,000 miles away instead of its

actual distance, our tides might be so enormous that

twice a day all continents would be submerged; even

the mountains could soon be eroded away. If the crust

of the earth had only been 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.

 

It is apparent from these and a host of other examples

that there is not one chance in billions that life on

our planet is an accident but It is his Grace we

exist.

 

 

 

2: The resourcefulness of life to accomplish its

purpose is a manifestation of an 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 elements,

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

colors every flower. Life is a musician and has taught

each bird to sing its love song, the insects to call

one another 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, jellylike, capable of motion, drawing

energy from the sun. This single cell, this

transparent mist-like droplet, holds within itself the

germ of life, and has 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 salt

less sea could not meet the necessary requirements.

 

Who, then, has put it here?

 

 

 

3: 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 accurately.

 

Even more difficult to solve is the mystery of eels.

These amazing creatures migrate at maturity from ponds

and rivers everywhere - those from Europe across

thousands of miles of ocean - 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 start back and find their way not

only to the very shore from which their parents came

but thence to the selfsame rivers, lakes or little

ponds. 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

directional impulse originate?

 

 

 

4: 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 belabor this fourth point; thanks to human

reason we can contemplate the possibility that we are

what we are only because we have received a spark of

Universal Intelligence.

 

 

 

5: Provision for all living is revealed in such

phenomena as the wonders of genes.

 

So 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 genes inhabit every living cell

and are the keys to all human, animal and vegetable

characteristics. A thimble is a small place to hold

all the individual characteristics of almost three

billion human beings. However, the facts are beyond

question.

 

Here evolution really begins - at the cell, the entity

which holds and carries the genes. That the

ultra-microscopic gene can absolutely rule all life on

earth is an example of profound cunning and provision

that could emanate only from a Creative Intelligence;

no other hypothesis will serve.

 

 

 

6: 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

defense, entomologists scoured the world; finally they

turned up an insect which lived exclusively 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 forever.

 

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 never

has 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!

 

 

 

7: 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 find the evidence of things unseen. The vista that

power opens up is unbounded; indeed, as man's

perfected imagination becomes a spiritual reality, he

may discern in all the evidence of design and purpose

the great truth that heaven is wherever and whatever;

that God is everywhere and in everything that nowhere

so close as in our hearts.

 

It is scientifically as well as imaginatively true,

as the Psalmist said: The heavens declare the Glory of

God and the firmament showeth His handiwork.

 

Regards

 

Pl Chant

 

Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare

Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare

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