Physics Professor Tells Students Scientific Evidence Points To A 'Designer'

The debate is not over until God says it's over.

A physics professor at the University of Oklahoma who often spends his time studying smashed subatomic particles at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN laboratory in Switzerland has another hobby – smashing the notion that all scientists believe the universe was created by some sort of cosmic accident.

Dr. Michael Strauss has given some iteration of a lecture he’s titled “Scientific Evidence for the Existence of God” to students and peers at universities across the nation for nearly 15 years, including at Stanford, UT Dallas, UC Santa Barbara, and most recently Thursday at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he said observable and testable scientific evidence points to a “designer who cares about humanity.”

This is coming from an experimental particle physics expert who also says scientific evidence shows the universe is 14 billion years old, and that it was created through a so-called “big bang” – which many people also hear from the likes of atheist and agnostic scientists.

But Strauss, also known for his knowledge and expertise on the Higgs boson “God Particle,” told his audience of roughly 200 students and professors who packed a campus auditorium to hear him speak that the discoveries of modern science give abundant evidence for the existence of a transcendent, intelligent designer who created the universe and has a purpose for humanity.

[...]“If everything in the universe came into being, then the cause of the universe must be transcendent, not a part of this universe,” Strauss argued. “Science kind of stumbled onto something that the Bible declared long ago … that the universe had a beginning.”

Strauss also brought up evidence for the existence of God by citing the apparent design of the universe, noting the amount of matter in the universe, the strength of its strong nuclear force, and the formation of carbon is so finely tuned that if any of these parameters were modified in the slightest, human life could not exist. Strauss stated there are about 100 similar finely tuned parameters.

Strauss’ third point delved into what he called the “rare Earth hypothesis.” Strauss detailed what it would take to for an earthlike planet to form by chance, a planet capable of sustaining not only bacteria, but higher life forms, such as those found in science fiction stories. (Think Class M planets from Star Trek.)

He highlighted how Earth is unique, with its moon, sun and solar system perfectly aligned to allow life to survive. Few if any planets have a large moon in orbit around it to help provide just the right atmosphere. Few if any planets have a neighbor such as Jupiter, which is so large its gravity sucks into it potential threats to Earth, such as comets and asteroids.

In fact, there are 322 such parameters needed for a planet capable of sustaining intelligent life to form, and the probability for occurrence of all 322 parameters to develop by chance is 10 to the minus -282.

“It is unlikely that Earth could ever be duplicated,” Strauss said Thursday.

More here.

2 Peter 3:5

For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and 

the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God,

The Earth was formed from water? Yeah. There’s lots of it – and not just here on Earth; it is the most abundant compound in the known universe:

Depending on where you look in the universe, there is more – or less water than astronomers had been predicting. These findings come as a result of observations made by the Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS). SWAS is operated by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as one of NASA’s Small Explorer Projects (SMEX) and was designed to study the chemical composition of interstellar gas clouds. Its primary objective is to survey water, molecular oxygen, carbon, and isotopic carbon monoxide emission in a variety of galactic star forming regions.

SWAS was launched on 5 December 1998 from Vandenberg Air Force Base aboard a Pegasus-XL launch vehicle.

In a series of papers published this week in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, some contradictory information has emerged. In regions of space where the temperature is only 30 degrees above absolute zero, water was found to be far less plentiful than expected. Conversely, according to a press release, “within gas clouds where new stars are being born, the gas can be heated to temperatures of several thousand degrees Fahrenheit; here the water concentration seems to be as much as 10 thousand times larger.”

The Word of God is not a scientific text, it was never meant to be read as such. It is a spiritual and historical text. But if you look closely, there are some amazing hints about the physical properties of our world.

H/T iOTW Report