Intelligent design

    Hello! I just wanted to quick say thank you for reading my blog. I'm looking forward to doing ministry throughout my life, and writing things on here is one way I can practice expressing my thoughts on ministry and apologetics. If you read this and have any questions, or any ideas for future things I could write about, feel free to comment your thoughts below. Thanks again, and I hope you enjoy! 

    Being a Christian who is constantly around other Christians is pretty easy, but sometimes it leaves us unprepared for conversations with people who have no belief in God whatsoever. I've heard many people say, “Oh God’s not real. There’s no proof that he exists. Christians only believe in Him based on blind faith” If you’re someone who holds your faith in Jesus as important in life, hearing comments that belittle your faith like this can really hurt. How can we as Christians respond to doubt and disbelief in the world? Are people right when they say there’s no tangible proof for God? Is our faith a blind one? These are hard questions, and I wanna provide some answers. 

    Saying there’s no proof for God is actually quite absurd. I could probably write a 50 page essay on all the proof of God that there is. However I think the most convincing and obvious proof of God is intelligent design. What is intelligent design? It’s tangible observations that we can make in our universe that directly show evidence of a powerful design. As I’ve done Biology, Chemistry, and Physics throughout high school, I’ve encountered a ton of examples of intelligent design. Here are a few of my favorites. 

    Does the idea of sound ever seem confusing to you? It is to me. There’s these sound waves in the air all around us, caused by the vibrations of a million different things. That’s what speaking is, your vocal cords making vibrations in the air. It’s crazy how our ears are able to pick up all of these random sound waves, and turn them into actual sounds that we hear and can understand. How does that happen? Well the ear is made up of a lot of different parts, but let me introduce you to the spiral organ of the ear, found in what’s called the cochlea. This is a picture of it: 

Image from veteriankey.com

This is a very simplified picture, but it shows the basic structure of the ear. Sound comes in through the left side, vibrating off of the eardrum. However those sound vibrations must be interpreted into their different frequencies. That’s what the spiral organ does. If you look at the picture you’ll notice the line pointing out the spiral organ points to a line of hair-looking fibers along the spiral. Believe it or not, those fibers (There are over 20,000 of them!) are tuned to different frequencies. The ones closest to the opening of the ear pick up higher frequencies and the ones further along in the spiral pick up the lower frequencies. These fibers are organized by pitch in the same way a piano is! 

    So as sound travels through the spiral organ, fibers pick up all its different frequencies and convert them into nerve impulses that get sent to the brain.That’s amazing! We literally have a perfectly tuned piano in our ear, capable of detecting the different frequencies in sound and converting them into electricity for the brain to interpret. When you look at a piano, do you think it could have built itself? Do you think that the keys ordered themselves from highest to lowest pitch by chance? Of course not! Design like this requires a designer.

    Take a nice deep breath of air. Even though you don’t think about it, you take a breath every few seconds. Ever think about what you’re breathing in? Oxygen right? Well not just oxygen. If the air was 100% oxygen we would have a lot of issues. Plants need carbon dioxide for photosynthesis. High oxygen concentration would result in a lot of fires, and we really can’t breathe 100% oxygen for survival. Luckily our air is only 21% oxygen and 78% nitrogen. Luckily nitrogen is a harmless gas that we breathe right back out. Also luckily, there’s a little carbon dioxide in the air as well for plants to live off of. But really…none of those are lucky. They are designed. The odds of such a perfect combination of gasses happening on their own is not even worth thinking about. 

    But that’s not all. Giving us breath isn’t the only thing our atmosphere does for us. There are three different types of dangerous light that the sun shines on the earth: ultraviolet light, X rays, and gamma rays. These rays would make life on earth impossible, if it wasn’t for the gasses that blocked them. Turns out, nitrogen, oxygen, and ozone each block one type of dangerous light. Each gas is perfectly suited and perfectly positioned to protect us from light that would kill us. For example ozone is only in the upper atmosphere, which is convenient as it cannot be breathed in, but it still does it's job of blocking dangerous light from striking earth. Three deadly kinds of light, three gasses to block them; it’s obvious our God knew what he was doing, and is looking out for us. 

    While both those examples are cool, if someone asks me why I believe in God, I never really get that complicated. I don’t need to. The most plain and obvious example of intelligent design is…everything. The mere fact that matter exists is proof it must have been created. After all, you can’t get matter from nothing; and that’s why the big bang theory doesn’t make sense. If something began to exist, whatever came into existence must have been created by something already in existence, and that creator would be on the outside of whatever he created. Thus the only logical explanation for the creation of time, space, and matter is that a supremely powerful being, himself outside of time, space, and matter; created the three out of his will. That is God. 

    Many people will, despite any evidence presented, refuse to believe in God simply because they don’t want to. However I hope by seeing the intelligent design in our world, you will be strengthened in your own faith and confident in the power of your great God. He has given us an amazing world to live in, and we have no reason to doubt his power and love for us. God's gift didn't end at our amazing world though, he freed us from our own sinful nature by sending Jesus to take the punishment for our sins. Now we can live free by his grace and love. Spreading that message, is the purpose of all the incredible things God has created.