26 January 2024 Mark 4:26-34
Jesus came proclaiming, “The Kingdom of God is at hand!” (Mark 1:15). There is reason to be thinking about God everywhere, all the time.
Only people weren’t thinking about God. They were sloppy, they were lazy, they were discouraged, they were badly instructed, uninstructed, so he taught them. He used images they were familiar with: “It is as if a man were to scatter seed on the land…and the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how” (4:27). Today this looks a lot like what philosophers call the “Fine Tuning Argument” for the existence of God. How do we account for the existence of a world in which the initial conditions of the universe have produced a world that produces human life, a world which so reliably produces food from the earth season after season to sustain human life?
Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest scientific minds in the history of the world, said that a world like ours can emerge from a series of random events. In his magnum opus, A Brief History of Time, the most widely sold science book ever written, he famously postulated that if you were to give a pack of monkeys enough time banging away randomly at a typewriter, they would eventually produce a Shakespearean sonnet (p. 123).
Stephen Hawking said you can get a world that way. That’s like the burning bush for many people. It made the cover of The New Yorker.
Eventually, however, some MIT guys did the math. They took the shortest sonnet of Shakespeare, Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day…,” 482 letters. They imagined 482 grab bags, each containing the 26 letters of the alphabet, and calculated the likelihood of consecutively drawing from each bag in the correct order all the letters of Sonnet 18. They determined that likelihood to be one chance in roughly 10 to the 700th power – for the uninitiated that is 1 followed by 700 zeroes. When you consider that the number of particles in the universe is about 10 to the 80th power (protons, neutrons, electrons, muons), the age of the universe in seconds is about 10 to the 18th power, and the weight of the known universe in grams is about 10 to the 56th power, that number, one chance in 10 to the 700th power, seems impossibly large. The MIT guys concluded that monkeys can’t make a sonnet – you don’t get a sonnet by chance, much less a single strand of DNA, much less a world that produces food season after season to sustain human life, much less a universe.
It makes more sense to say that Someone is behind it all.
There is reason to be thinking about God everywhere, all the time.
The Kingdom of God really is at hand.
Of course, the Fine Tuning Argument doesn’t prove that the Someone behind it all is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who was born of a virgin and raised from the dead. Still, it is a mighty big concession, especially from MIT guys, that the order of the universe suggests that it is the result of an intention. And since intentions are the kinds of things that only persons can have, it suggests that the Someone behind it all is a Person, who is timeless, changeless, spaceless, immaterial and massively powerful. Generally speaking, when people talk about a being like this, they are talking about God. And there are other arguments, plenty, that will get you closer to the God of the Bible.
You see where we are going with this.
There is reason to be thinking about God everywhere, all the time.
Even the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who was born of a virgin and raised from the dead.
The Kingdom of God really is at hand.
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