The Design

God desires your love. He does not compel you to love Him. He invites you to love Him. There is no proof of God. Not only is there no proof now, we strongly suspect that it will be this way forever. If there was proof, you would be compelled to love Him. And that's not love. That's tyranny. God is not a tyrant. God is love. And the only way He can enter into full communion with you is through freedom. You must choose. This is His Way.

All that being said, there is evidence. We will approach this evidence with the respect that His Creation demands. Step by step. First and foremost, the Newcomer is our audience. For the scientifically initiated, there is food here for you too. You'll just have to be patient and first read things that you may already know. To encounter such ideas is to rejoice in what you have already learned. Let's get started.

All of nature appears to be designed. And a design must have a Designer. This is an easy one for most. You don't even have to know much physics. Just look at a flower and you can see how much order there is. Now staunch skeptics will say that the order present in the flower followed from first principles in physics, and that might be true. But where did those underlying first principles come from? Why are those ordered? Principles that don't follow from other principles are called first principles and we see these abundantly in nature.

Now the nature of God is an entirely different question. He could be an evil genius or an all-good genius, but whichever He is, you're stuck with the inevitable conclusion that a conscious Being must have put the universe together very carefully.

Before we dive into nature's construction, let us first turn to the mathematics of probability calculations. Now it makes no sense to calculate the probabilities of events after they happen. For example, if I'm walking up to the physics department and I see the license plate EHH 318, I might think: "Whoa! What are the odds of that?" You could find out how many cars are in the state where I lived, so on and so forth, and find some probability, say 1 in 4 million. But it makes no sense to calculate the probability after you see it. The probability is 1 actually (i.e. 100%), because it already happened.

That being said, the mere fact that there is an order implies that it was ordered by Someone. Someone made the license plate with that order of letters and numbers. So it makes no sense to calculate the probability of all the laws being ordered a particular way, but the mere fact that they're ordered implies that Someone ordered them. The probability that it was ordered by Someone is also 1 (i.e. 100%).

Let's now consider a particular case. I'm going to use the unique conditions for life on earth as an example. The earth seems to have been placed in a sweet spot for life. We are just the right distance from the sun. Not too close so that the oceans don't vaporize. And not too far so that the oceans don't freeze. The angle of earth's tilt is just right for the four seasons, so on and so forth. Ok here we go. It makes no sense to calculate this probability, because it already happened. If it hadn't happened, we wouldn't be here. You wouldn't be reading this sentence.

That being said, it does make sense to do this calculation for life elsewhere in the universe. Those planets must possess the same unique conditions that we have here. Framed properly, the probability calculation for earth matters a great deal because it is precisely this calculation that determines how much life there may be in the universe.

To summarize, probability calculations for events that have already been observed don't matter. Probability calculations for events that have not yet been observed do matter. This is an important property of probability calculations. We state this at the beginning of our journey so that mania doesn't set in. Evidence will be presented here that may seem like overwhelming proof. But it isn't. It is only evidence. God wants you to freely choose Him. As do I. I can't explain why this is so important. You have to experience it. Seek earnestly and I can assure you that your day is coming.

Let's now turn our attention to the philosophy of science. Scientists don't discover absolute truths. We only discover models that give correct predictions to within certain accuracies. For hundreds of years, Isaac Newton's 2nd law of motion, (F = ma) was considered as fundamentally true. It wasn't until Albert Einstein came along and showed that Newton's 2nd law had to be modified when traveling at high speeds. Einstein's model introduced a correction factor to the mass that had to be accounted for when particles were traveling near the speed of light. So Newton's "law" was never actually a law but only a model that had been experimentally verified at low speeds. In fact, Newton's model is still useful for low speeds and is still taught in Physics classrooms all around the world. For now we have accepted Einstein's model as useful for making predictions at all speeds but also fully accept that another genius may come along and show that his model needs further correction to explain things with greater accuracy. No theory is safe.

There are only useful models in physics that can be used to make predictions to a certain accuracy. And every model must be open to being discarded. Therefore, the scientific method proclaims that there can be no truth in science. The only truth in science is that there can be no truth. In our search for truth, we must ask the correct question. The question isn't, "What is the truth?" The correct question is, "Who is the truth?" I must confess that I believe we are close to the truth in physics. That when we get up to heaven, there might be a science class taught by Saint Thomas, and he will share with us, "Yes, your model of the atom is essentially correct." That being said, it's not possible to discover this truth while in this world. Only after passing from this life to the next, will we truly see. It's sort of ironic that science is in the same boat as religion, both requiring leaps of faith. The scientific method proclaims that if a more precise and consistent model comes along, then we must discard the old model in favor of the new. Echoes are good:

The only truth in science is that there can be no truth.