I am a city girl at heart. Much as I love looking at beautiful scenery, a part of me feels more at home in a city, and there is only so much of looking at mountains and gazing at the ocean that I can do before I start to go a little nuts. But, I have to say, it is easy to get a little self-absorbed in a city. With tall buildings all around, masses of people, and life that progresses at a frenetic pace,  I have found that, if I am not careful, my vision grows narrower and narrower as I, quite literally, can't see beyond the next building. For this reason, I am always thankful for the opportunities that I get to "re-adjust my vision".

I still remember the couple of days that I spent by the coast in Wollongong (Australia) in 2007. I was there to attend an academic conference, but my hotel was by the beach, and just a few days of walking by the gentle waves at sunrise and sunset reminded me that there is a huge world beyond the little corners in which we all live. It also reminded me that the most beautiful, the most awe-inspiring, and the most well-designed things on this earth aren't man-made at all.

Numerous passages in the Bible point out that evidence for the existence of God is displayed all around us. For example, in the Old Testament, the Psalmist says:

"The heavens declare the glory of God;

the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Day after day they pour forth speech;

night after night they display knowledge.

There is no speech or language

where their voice is not heard.

Their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world." (Psalm 19:1-4)

And in the New Testament, the apostle Paul writes to the Romans, saying:

"Since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made" (Romans 1:20).

Indeed, we need only to look at nature which is all around us - the perfectly formed shape of a flower, the absolute breath-taking beauty of the morning and evening sky, the night stars twinkling at us from an unimaginable distance away, the steady rhythm of waves breaking on a beach, and (need I add) the perfect functionality of the healthy human body - to see that it's not so hard to believe in the existence of a divine and almighty Creator.

For those amongst us who are fortunate enough to understand the internal workings of the human body and the universe, the evidence is even more astounding. Noel Gibson, for example, has pointed out that our bodies are a masterpiece:

"When you hear, 24,000 strings vibrate.  A grand piano has 240, and is a mechanism 1 million times larger than the human ear. You live, because your heart pumps 40 million times per year, and uses 400 million berri-like structures in the lungs for collecting oxygen and discharging impurities." (Noel Gibson, Twenty Minutes to Decide!, quoted by Ross Tooley (1993) in We Cannot But Tell, p. 64.)

Paul Brand and Philip Yancey, in their intriguing book Fearfully and Wonderfully Made: A Surgeon Looks at the Human and Spiritual Body (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1980), also talk about the wonders of the human body. In the Preface to the book, we read:

“I have come to realize that every patient of mine, every newborn baby, in every cell of its body, has a basic knowledge of how to survive and how to heal, that exceeds anything that I shall ever know. That knowledge is the gift of God, who has made our bodies more perfectly than we could ever have devised.” (Dr Paul Brand, quoted by Philip Yancey in the Preface to Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, p. 14.) Read an excerpt from the book here.

And, in another part of the book, Brand and Yancey write:

"Think of the stimuli your skin monitors each day: wind, particles, parasites, changes in pressure, temperature, humidity, light, radiation. Skin is tough enough to withstand the rigorous pounding of jogging on asphalt, yet sensitive enough to have bare toes tickled by a light breeze" (p. 124).

Phillip Bishop, professor of exercise physiology at the University of Alabama, in a thought-provoking start to his short article, Evidence of God in Human Physiology, asks:

"What are you doing right now? If your first answer was, "nothing" you are badly mistaken. Right now while you sit quietly, a myriad of wonderful events are taking place necessary for your survival. Right now your heart is beating. If you're in average physical condition, it beats between 60 and 70 times per minute, 93,000 times per day, 655,000 times per week, 34 million times per year, and 2.4 billion beats in the average lifetime. What's so amazing is that, most of the time, it fuels itself, paces itself, repairs itself, and alters itself in response to lifestyle changes, with no conscious effort on your part. In addition to your heart, your liver is detoxifying your blood, your brain is storing away information, cells are being formed and cells destroyed, energy is being used and produced, and many other tasks vital to life and function all carry on in a wonderful, harmonious way." (For more on how the wonders of the human body point to a Creator God, have a look at Bishop's whole article.)

From the field of Physics, too, more and more evidence is emerging that points to the fact that SOMEONE must have designed the universe. Too many factors are "just right" for it to be a coincidence or an accident. Professor Robin Collins says: "Over the last thirty years or so, scientists have discovered that just about everything about the basic structure of the universe is balanced on a razor's edge for life to exist" (quoted in Lee Strobel's The Case for a Creator (Zondervan, 2004, p. 160)).

I am (as I'm sure you know) not a Physicist, but I can just about understand the implications of simple examples like these:

If we stretched a ruler all the way across the universe and imagined that it was broken up into little one-inch divisions, and if we imagined that the current force of gravity that we have is set at a particular point on that ruler, just moving that setting one inch along that ruler (remember, which is stretched across the universe) would increase the force of gravity such that we would all be crushed. (Based on an example from Lee Strobel's The Case for a Creator, p. 161-162.)

 

"If the electromagnetic force in atoms were weakened by a mere 4 percent, then the sun would immediately explode" (from "What does it mean that God speaks through creation?" by The Navigators).

So, look around and at yourself, and take some time to think about it. Creation really does declare the glory of God our Creator.

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