Is Anyone Up There? Looking for Clues - Part B

There is within human beings universally a sense of right and wrong. It's not always the same. The values and standards aren't always the same. It can shift from culture and depending on what kind of programming etc. from their youth, but it seems to be universal. And here's the deal, this is something that goes on, people engage in and think about every single day but they're totally unaware of it.

It shows up when a wife criticizes her husband for doing something that's not right or a child is mad because his sister got more ice cream than he did and he says that's not fair. There are many experts and intellectuals today who say the very notion of God's existence is ridiculous, but that's why it's crucial for you to be able to explain how you know there's a God. And today on Connect with Skip Hi-Tech, Skip looks at the cosmos and within the conscience, helping you examine these substantial pieces of evidence for God's existence. But before we begin, here's a great resource that will help you become the difference maker God created you to be. I've enjoyed watching the growth and the ministry of my friend Levi Lusko. This month's Connect with Skip resource, Take Back Your Life, the new book by Levi Lusko.

Here's Levi to tell you about it. It's all around this idea of taking back your life. It's a 40-day interactive journey to thinking right so you can live right. And it's going to be really powerful and special, I think, for people to have this. Not only is it in hardcover, which just makes me happy because I've never had a book released in hardcover, but it has a ribbon so you'll be able to keep track of your progress through these 40 days. It would be an incredible gift to someone who is looking to grow in their faith or for any of us who want to maybe kind of do an oil change for your heart, a checkup on your wellness, on where you're at.

It'll deal with internal difficulties and help you deal better with external circumstances that are challenging as we explore how we can get to the very best version of ourselves that we are meant to be. Get the book, Take Back Your Life, with a donation of $35 to connect with Skip. Call 1-800-922-1888 or online at connectwithskip.com. This hardcover book by Levi Lusko will help you take back your life. It's a 40-day interactive journey to thinking right so you can live right.

1-800-922-1888. Okay, we're in Romans chapter 1 and Psalm 19 today as we get into the teaching with Skip Heideck. So there was a Christian walking through the woods with an atheist and they came upon a large eight foot in diameter glass ball and the Christian said, huh, where'd that come from? The atheist said, I don't know, but someone must have put it there.

They both agreed. So then the Christian thought, okay, what if the ball was a little bit larger, say 16 feet in diameter? Would that also need a cause? The atheist said, well, sure, smaller balls need causes and larger balls also need cause. So then the Christian smiled and said, okay, well, what if the ball was 8,000 miles in diameter and almost 25,000 miles in circumference and size of the earth? And so the atheist saw that trap coming and said, well, sure, you're right. If smaller balls need causes and larger balls need causes, then a really big ball needs a cause. So the Christian said, okay, now, what if you make the ball the size of the universe?

Does it need a cause? And the atheist said, of course not. The universe is just there. And that's just a little argument that is thrown out in some philosophy courses. But that's about as good as the explanation for the universe gets with some people. You know, atheists used to laugh at us for saying someone made something out of nothing.

They used to laugh at us for that. Now we can laugh at them for saying nothing made something out of nothing. No wonder Paul says, from the time the world was created, the people have seen the earth and the sky and all that God has made. They can clearly see his invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature.

So they have no excuse whatsoever for not knowing God. And we've learned a few things over the years. We've learned that our universe is expanding.

There's debate as to the rate of expansion, but we know that it is expanding. Now, if you put that process in reverse, what happens? The universe collapses into nothingness and you get back to where there's no space, no time and no matter. And according to the theory of general relativity, you can never have space without time. And you can never have space and time without matter. So if matter had a beginning, and we know it does or had, then time must have had a beginning and the universe therefore is not eternal. So what is the first uncaused cause of it all?

That's the question that must be answered. So you go all the way back to the beginning. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The Bible opens up with the first uncaused cause. Opens up with a cosmological argument. The second clue is not looking for a cause, but looking at the world itself, looking at the cosmos as it is called. Carl Sagan loved to call it that. The world in which we live, the cosmos. And as we look around, boy, it looks as though, this is what they'll say, it looks as though it's been designed.

It appears to be an ordered system. It even seems as if the universe anticipated us. It's funny, I've heard this language from very astute scientific minds who do not believe in God as the first cause, but they'll say, it looks as though, just so happens, it looks as though the universe is finely tuned to anticipate advanced complex carbon-based life like ours. This is the teleological argument, the argument from design, and even the ancient Greek philosophers were impressed by the order of the universe. And Plato, in refuting atheism successfully in his time, said, the order and the motion of the stars shows a mind that ordered it.

Of course, he was polytheistic, but theistic nonetheless, and believing that it didn't come by random chance. And so David writes in Psalm 19, and we just looked at it, day after day, they pour forth their speech, and night after night, they display knowledge. I recommend to you, we did it about a year ago, I'll do it again, a great book, now turned into a film called The Privileged Planet. It's excellent, it's excellent. And the researchers in the book and in the film show that the earth is uniquely situated within the Milky Way galaxy, at a place that they call the galactic habitable zone. That there are a very thin margin of space that could accommodate the advanced complex carbon-based life that we enjoy on earth. It couldn't happen anywhere in the galaxy, it's just this very tiny little corner, and we happen to be there. It's perfect for habitation, it's also perfect for observability, for us to look at the universe around us and to enjoy it. And so think about it, it just so happened that the earth is 93 million miles away from the host star, the sun, that has a surface temperature of 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Isn't it great that it just so happened to be that way? Because if our orbit was just a little bit closer like Venus, we'd all burn up, just a little bit further away like Mars, we'd all freeze to death, life couldn't happen. It just so happens that the earth is spinning 365 and a third times on its axis as it makes its yearly jaunt around the sun. Why?

Why not 30 times? Well, then the days and nights would be 10 times longer, and there'd be alternate periods of very, very hot and very, very cold freezing and life couldn't exist. We couldn't enjoy it. It just so happens that the earth is tilted 23 and a half degrees on its axis, stabilized by a large moon, very important, that enables the four seasons that bring us this kind of constant stable life on earth. Just so happens that the gravitational force and acceleration of gravity at 9.8 ms squared is what it is. If it was a little heavier, we'd not be able to move. If it was a little bit less, we'd fly off. It just so happens that our atmosphere on this privileged planet is a combination of oxygen to nitrogen 79 to 20 percent with one percent of varying gases. Just happens to be that way.

If it were 50 percent and 50 percent, the first guy to light a match, the first guy to light up a cigarette, kaboom, we'd be blown off this planet. It just so happens that the oceans are the dimension that they are. Isn't that a fluke of nature, that the ocean and landmass are the ratio that they are? It's estimated that if the oceans were half of the present size, we would only have one fourth of the rainfall annually that we get on the earth. You know what that would mean to New Mexico? Places like dry deserts don't get a whole lot of it.

It'd be horrible. If the oceans were just one eighth larger than they are, we'd have four times the amount of rainfall and the earth would be a swamp. And what about all that space up there? It just so happens that all of that space and placement of the planets in our galaxy are there perfectly and needed for life on earth. How many of you saw a movie some years back called Contact? Ever see that movie Contact? Filmed largely in New Mexico and written by Carl Sagan, by the way, the book. And so here's these big devices pointed out towards space reading radio waves to see if there's aliens communicating with earth, intelligent life out there. And there was a sentence, a sub-theme that ran through the movie. It was mentioned two or three times. It said, if there isn't life elsewhere, then there's a lot of wasted space out there. I said that a few times in the movie. If there isn't life elsewhere, then there's a lot of wasted space out there.

That turns out to be very untrue. There's no wasted space. And the position in space of the bodies and the planets are very necessary to buffer us on this earth from things like solar winds that could destroy us or debris coming through space. The placement of Jupiter, for instance, shields us from objects that would careen toward the earth and destroy life on earth. Did you know that there have been objects as large as the earth coming toward the earth? If they were to hit the earth, it would be total destruction. But they're shielded by Jupiter.

It just so happens that the way they orbit the sun shields us. Well, we listen to that and we go, it didn't just so happen. It was just so designed that way. Exactly.

Exactly. The design element defies that it just so happened and it's a clue that God has left for us to observe. I don't know if you've ever heard of the name Antony Flew. Antony Flew was the most famous intellectual atheist. For 50 years, he provided the source material for the atheistic arguments of some of the smartest atheists in the world.

The ones that are most famous used his material. Antony Flew presented a paper before C.S. Lewis's Socratic Club defending the atheistic position very effectively, until 2004. In 2004, Antony Flew made a shocking announcement. This one-time ardent atheist said, God must exist.

Shocked the world. He said the universe must be the work of an intelligent designer. Now, why did he say this? Because he studied the DNA. And as he studied the DNA, he said, it shows that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements together. The enormous complexity looks to me like the work of design.

Ta-da! He found the clue. He found the clue of design.

He figured it out. It's the same thing as if you were to walk along the road and you find a watch. This is O'Paley's argument, William Paley, the watchmaker argument.

Still a very good argument, by the way. If you find a watch, you look at it and you go, I bet there's a watchmaker somewhere who made the watch. See, that's more plausible than if I were to say, no, no, no, no. Actually, what happened is over billions of years, explosions and floods and gases and Earth's crust shifted and glass finally formed over a metal object.

Little hands grew inside in gears and took billions of years. But you'd say, you're an idiot. You'd be right. Because the design infers a designer. Just like if you see a painting, you must think, I bet there's a painter.

Or if you find a book, I bet there was an author. Or if you hear music, I bet there was a musician and a songwriter behind it all. The design speaks of the designer. And so David wrote, the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament or the starry expanse shows his handiwork.

Now, for those of us who are believers, it's better. It's more than the clues. The clues lead us to the relationship where we're going to talk about in the next several weeks how we have a relationship with God and we find out his attributes. But when we look up at the expanse, we make the next step. If the art that's hanging in the skies is that cool, what must the artist be like himself?

And so when we drive along the side of the road and it's a beautiful sunset in New Mexico and we pull our car over and we look at it, we don't go, hmm, what a marvelous fortuitous occurrence of accidental circumstance. We say, I know the designer of that. Robert Jastrow was NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies representative. He wrote a book called God and the Astronomers and he writes, for the scientist who has lived by faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance. He's about to conquer the highest peak. As he pulls himself over the rock, he's greeted by a band of theologians who've been sitting there for centuries.

I love that. I love when these guys find the clues and it leads them to the existence of God and a designer God who made a designer planet and we've been waiting for them to come and many of them do. The third and final clue I want to talk about today isn't looking for clues or looking at the cosmos but looking within the conscience and this is called the moral law and it's alluded to as we read in Romans chapter one. Here's a universal feature of human existence. There is within human beings universally a sense of right and wrong. It's not always the same.

The values and standards aren't always the same and it can shift from culture and depending on what kind of programming etc from their youth but it seems to be universal and here's the deal. This is something that goes on, people engage in and think about every single day but they're totally unaware of it. It shows up when a wife criticizes her husband for doing something that's not right or a child is mad because his sister got more ice cream than he did and he says that's not fair or a nation defends a smaller nation against an aggressor nation on moral reasons. That's called the moral law. Where does this sense of right and wrong come from and why is it so universally felt and here's here's the kicker. Even agnostics and atheists enter into this. I've heard them say well look at this world it's full of injustice. There's so much evil, tsunamis and cancer. In other words there's something morally wrong.

How do you know? Unless you are appealing to something that's right. So you can't say there's injustice unless you have or are appealing to a standard of justice. That's called the moral law.

C.S. Lewis by the way was won by this argument. He was converted and he writes the universe seemed so cruel and unjust but how would I got this idea of just and unjust. A man doesn't call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. He was a Oxford atheist who was converted by the moral law.

So Paul in Romans chapter 1 verse 19 and I'm reading this now in the New Living Translation. For the truth of God is known to them instinctively. Everybody makes moral comparisons. Well that person's better or worse or this is right and that is wrong but moral comparisons demand an objective moral standard of some kind. So if I were to put a couple pictures up on the screen of Mother Teresa and Adolf Hitler. You look at that and I know you're chuckling because instinctively you know that Mother Teresa is better than Adolf Hitler.

What she believes, how she lived, what she thought. You'd only have to go to a college philosophy course to get that turned around and think anything different. But you know that intuitively.

That's the moral law. Where does that come from? It's a clue. I was in the airport some time back. My wife actually found this book and thought I should get it and I agreed.

I loved it. It's called The Language of God. It's got a DNA model on the front. It says the scientist presents evidence for belief. Well what catches my attention about the book is it was written by Francis Collins.

Now I don't know if that rings a bell. Francis Collins is one of the most eminent scientists living today. He is the head of the Human Genome Project. Ever heard of that?

The decoding of the human DNA and unveiling and unraveling that language, breaking the code. He's the head of that project. He was an agnostic who became a very staunch atheist and now he's not. Now he believes in God. Now he has faith and he admits in the book that he had drawn his conclusions about God without examining all of the data, which is a no-no for a scientist. And so he said to my own shame, here I had a presupposition that God doesn't exist.

He can exist, but I hadn't examined all the data. He started examining the data. Now he believes in God. And what got to him was this thought of the moral law.

He read C.S. Lewis's book, Mere Christianity, and this is what he writes in this book. Could there be a more important question in all of human existence then, is there a God? He read Mere Christianity, examined the argument of the moral law, and he writes this, I had started this journey of intellectual exploration to confirm my atheism. That now lay in ruins as the argument from the moral law and many others forced me to admit in the plausibility of the God hypothesis, he calls it. Faith in God now seems more rational than disbelief. I just want you to hear that because last week I made a statement that if you are an atheist, you have way more faith than I do as a theist and as a Christian. It takes more faith to hold your position as an atheist than it does for me to hold my position because of the evidence. Now here is the head of the Human Genome Project, one of the astute scientists of our time who says faith in God seems more rational than disbelief.

And there are so many of these testimonies of people who find the clues. They look for a cause and then they look at the world and they look within the conscience and eventually many of them look up to God. So my plea and appeal to you as the body of Christ is that you engage in the conversation with unbelievers and when they're at Starbucks and they bring up a notion of how God can exist, that you take these tools out and you use them and you engage in the process. And let's not become a fortress mentality kind of a church where no, you want to learn anything about God, you come to church.

Well Jesus didn't say come ye, he said go ye into all the world. And so as we get emptied out in just a few minutes and go to our homes and our jobs and our places of influence, engage them in conversation. Now as you do, three things I want you to remember. You'll be challenged. You will be challenged. If you can't wait to share these with people and you start engaging in it, you're not going to have them immediately probably go, okay well let's pray then right now.

I'm ready. They're going to want to think it through. They have pre-dispositions toward not believing because they've been told wrongly that you can't be intellectually honest and believe in God at the same time. And they bought that line so you're going to be challenged. Number two, you can be confident. You don't have to weasel around anymore with this stuff. You can be confident that though they have good questions, you've got great answers to meet any of those questions.

Some of the greatest minds in history have come to know Jesus Christ personally and still retained all of their scientific involvement. So you will be challenged. You can be confident.

Number three, you should be careful. You should be respectful. Don't bulldoze them. Don't walk and go, you pagan.

Hell for you. You won't win many that way. You want to be respectful.

You want to let them wrestle and ask the questions and be kind to them. I leave you with this, a familiar passage Peter said in 1 Peter chapter 3 verse 15. But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you with meekness and fear. And that's with respect, with respect.

But engage, get into the battle, talk it out. You'll be fascinated how God will use it. That concludes Skip Heitzig's message today from the series The Biography of God. Right now, here's Skip to tell you how your support helps keep these messages coming your way and connects more people to God's love.

Knowing God is the greatest knowledge that anyone could ever possess. That's why we want to make these biblical teachings available to more listeners like you so they can connect to the one true God as well as His Word. Please consider giving a gift today to help us do just that. Here's how your vital support can connect even more people to the living God. Visit connectwithskip.com slash donate to give your gift today. That's connectwithskip.com slash donate or call 800-922-1888.

Again, that's 800-922-1888. Coming up tomorrow, Skip Heitzig points out the exciting ways God speaks to you. The Bible is filled with biographers, people who interacted with God and they wrote about what they observed and what God said to them, what God did for them. We have in this book a true biography of God. Connect with Skip Heitzig is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.