form this radial alignment, the root of each feather must be pointed
John 1:3-5
“Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that
has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The
light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.”
1) Introduction
• What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen in nature? Perhaps
it’s a sunset? Perhaps it’s something massive like a huge waterfall or
canyon? Perhaps you’ve been lucky enough to swim in a coral reef or
see the Northern lights?
2) Salt lakes…
• I was once fortunate enough to travel across Bolivia, where among
other amazing things I spent a few days on the beautiful salt lakes,
Salar De Ayuni. When it rains, these form the largest natural mirror on
this planet!
• When we study nature we see incredible things that blow our minds.
Closer to home, have you ever managed to take a look at a peacock
feather? They are utterly breathtaking.
3) Peacock feathers
• See the way the feathers fan out perfectly. There are around 170 of
them!
• Notice the way these “eyes” are spaced apart with a remarkable
degree of uniformity.
• The feathers form a semi-circular fan over an angle of more than 180
degrees. The fan formation is beautifully even. For the feathers to
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with a remarkable degree of accuracy.
• Not only this. A peacock can also make his feathers vibrate and
produce a characteristic hum.
4) Peacock feathers
• But let’s look even closer one of these beautiful feathers.
• There are almost one million barbules on one single peacock feather.
• The individual strands of the feather are coloured so perfectly that
there is a coordinating circular pattern that crosses from strand to
strand. It’s as if someone took a paintbrush and painted circles across
a hundred straight strands of hair. It is remarkable.
• I mean… what are the odds? This must be the work of a divine
Creator!
• And yet… If you asked most people, they’d probably say that science
has disproved the existence of God.
5) Science says…
• In science we’re usually told, “Life arose by chance association of
organic substances, and slowly over millions of years developed by
natural processes from cells all the way to you and me.”
• At school, on TV, in textbooks, encyclopedias, museums and so on, we
are almost ALWAYS presented with this concept as proven fact.
• To question it makes you seem anti-intellectual.
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6) Give it enough time
• And although the odds of all this forming naturally seem pretty small,
we’re told it’s simply a matter of time…
• Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker uses the example of
dealing a perfect bridge hand.
• “It may seem highly unexpected for a perfect bridge hand to be dealt,
but it’s only because we live such short lifetimes”.
• Now I don’t play Bridge and I doubt you do either…but let’s test the
theory with something we’re familiar with.
7) Heads or tails? [Play the game!!]
• Let’s imagine we decide to toss 100 coins up in the air.
• What are the odds that they’d all land with heads facing up? It can’t
be that much can it?
• Yes it is! The odds of 100 heads is just under 1 in 1030
• Now, let’s say you tossed all 100 coins every second since the world
began 4.6 billion years ago (a conservative estimate)
• 145 million billion seconds have lapsed in 4.6 billion years. That’s
quite a lot!
• And yet the odds of throwing 100 heads in our new experiment are
still extremely low… 1 in 8.7 trillion!!!
8) A protein forming naturally…
• Now we’ve got some idea of how this works, let’s take the maths one
step further. What about forming a protein naturally…?
• Walter Bradley, PhD, materials science, and Charles Thaxton, PhD,
chemistry, calculated that the probability of amino acids forming into
a protein is 1 in 4.9 x 10191
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• This is well beyond the laws of probability, and a protein is not even
close to becoming a complete living cell.
• [In maths it’s accepted that any probability less than 1 in 1050 will
never happen. That is the cut-off].
9) A cell forming naturally…
• So what about making a living cell??
• Sir Fred Hoyle who has a PhD in astronomy, and Chandra
Wickramasinghe, professor of applied maths and astronomy,
calculated that the probability of getting a cell by naturalistic
processes is 1 in 1040,000
• This is an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even
if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.
• I am a mathematician, and the maths alone proves to me that the
world could not have begun without some significant intervention.
10) What about the planets?
• Physicist Paul Davies calculated that in order for planets to exist, the
relevant initial conditions had to be fine tuned to a precision of one
part in 10 followed by a thousand billion billion zeroes at least.
• Gravitational force must be what it is, for planets to have stable orbits
around the sun. Otherwise if gravity had a greater force they would
fall into the sun and burn up or if weaker, they would escape from
their orbit into a very cold, outer darkness. It is estimated that a
change in gravity by only one part in 10 to the power of 100 would
have prevented a life-permitting universe.
• Stephen Hawking wrote, “If the rate of expansion one second after
the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred
thousand million million, the universe would have re-collapsed before
it ever reached its present size.”
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• Our universe is exquisitely fine-tuned, made with unbelievable
precision and accuracy. As philosopher William Craig writes:
“Improbability is added to improbability until our minds are reeling in
incomprehensible numbers.”
• The only POSSIBLE explanation for this is that something or someone
outside of space and time, someone divine and eternal, could have
started it all. Science points to the existence of God!
11) First law of thermodynamics
• Have you come across the first two laws of thermodynamics?
• … The First Law of Thermodynamics states that matter and energy
can’t be created or destroyed. You can convert energy from one kind
to another, but doing this won’t mean any gain or loss of energy.
• It’s a law we use when calculating momentum and we see it at work
when we play games like pool.
• The thing is, if matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed,
where did all that energy come from which started up the world,
without an external force?
12) Second law of thermodynamics
• The second law of thermodynamics, follows from the first.
• “In a closed system, with no outside input of order or information,
systems ALWAYS tend to increase in entropy (disorder).”
• Basically, left to its own devices, everything goes from order to
disorder.
• Leave a car in a field for twenty-five years and it will rust.
• Leave your bedroom untidy and it will not tidy itself but will go into
further disorder and chaos!
13) Applying the second law…
• How the second law of thermodynamics support the idea that life
spontaneously arose….?
• It doesn’t! Without external intervention, everything goes from order
to disorder.
• It simply wouldn’t be possible to start with basic elements such as
hydrogen and for them to form over millions and millions of years
into:
• Basic chemicals
• Then amino acids
• Then proteins
• Then cells
• Then life, with humans whose brains are the most complex,
organised material in the universe!
• That runs in complete contradiction to scientific laws, without the
intervention of a being who is outside of time, who has not been
created but has always been.
• Of course, we would’ve saved quite a bit of time today if we’d gone
straight to the Bible, because it tells us exactly that…
14) John 1:3-4
• Last week you learn about the WORD who existed before all time, was
with God and was actually God…
• And today we see that through HIM all things were made. Read v.3-4
• Just in case we’re not clear… without him nothing was made that has
been made!
• He is the source of all life. Everything originates from him.

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• It now makes sense. Only an eternal, divine being, outside of space
and time, could have made the immensely complex and finely tuned
universe in which we live.
• There’s another factor to consider and that’s the idea of irreducible
complexity.
15) The Bombadier Beetle
• The tiny bombardier beetle has an amazing defense mechanism.
• He has twin ‘exhaust tubes’ at his tail
• From these, he fires boiling-hot noxious gases with a loud pop, into
the face of his enemies!
• He mixes two chemicals (hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone),
which would usually form a dirty, ugly mixture.
• But the clever little beetle uses a special ‘inhibitor’ chemical to stop
the mixture from reacting.
• When the enemy approaches, he uses two enzymes, to make the
chemical reactions go millions of times faster.
• These chemicals catalyze the extremely rapid decomposition of
hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen and the oxidation of
hydroquinone into quinone, causing them to violently react and
explode—but not so soon as to blow up the beetle, of course!
• His defense mechanism is amazingly complicated, and could only have
been created with all the parts working together perfectly.
• Anything other than a perfectly working defense mechanism, and
he’d blow himself up! He must’ve been made fully formed.
• He is irreducibly complex. Just like a mousetrap or the ligaments of
our knee joints, until fully formed he has little use.
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16) Irreducible complexity
• Here’s what Charles Darwin said about any organ found to be
irreducibly complex…
• “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which
could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight
modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” Charles
Darwin, Origin of Species
• In my view, we can be left in no doubt that God must exist.
• In Romans 1:20 Paul states “For 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, so that
people are without excuse.”
• So why do people choose to ignore the possibility that the world was
not just formed by naturalistic processes, and that it requires the
intervention of a Creator?
• I think it’s because people are biased. The default position for many is
that God doesn’t exist.
17) Naturalism over observation
• According Scott C. Todd, an immunologist at Kansas State University
“even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such a hypothesis
is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.”
• Science will often not allow us to draw any conclusions that God
created the world, because belief in God is not allowed into science
lessons…!
18) John 1:5
• “The light shines in the darkness but the darkness has not understood
it.”
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• Back in 2006, two extraordinary events took place:
a. Richard Dawkins said that he believes, but cannot prove, “that
all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all design anywhere in
the universe is the … product of Darwinian natural selection.”
In other words, much of what he believes is unsupported by
evidence.
b. But the other extraordinary event was that the late English
philosopher and atheist, Professor Antony Flew, publicly
announced that he had abandoned his atheism, and had done
so on the basis of scientific arguments, which now persuade
him that there is a God.
• We’ve seen evidence around us that shows there has to be a Creator
behind it all. But people will react differently to this. Some will accept
it, and others will dismiss it.
• And even if we accept it, if we only go by what we see around us as
evidence for God, we don’t really understand what God is like
anyway. Yes, pretty awesome to have made all this. Yes, extremely old
or, as we’ve seen, outside of time! Certainly beyond our
imaginations…
• But what about his character? What is God really like?
• One of the great Christmas verses from the Bible comes later in John 1
v18, “No one has ever seen God, but God the one and only, who is at
the Father’s side, has made him known.”
• This is why Christmas is so amazing. No other religion offers anything
like it – the claim that the Creator of the universe has entered his own
creation!
• We can speculate about what God is like, but when we look at Jesus
we really see God revealed in human form, whom we can relate to.
• Verse 5 describes Jesus as a light, shining the darkness. When he
came 2000 years ago he came into our world of suffering, pain,
sadness, selfishness and death. But Jesus triumphed over all this.
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• Verse 5 is more accurately translated as “The light shines in the
darkness, but the darkness has not overcome it.”
• So, Jesus has triumphed over darkness. When he encountered
demons on earth, they were terrified of him because they knew he
had conquered the darkness.
• And when faced with death, though it looked very much like he was
defeated, death could not hold him. The darkness could not overcome
him. He rose from the dead. The light of the world came back to life!
• This is why Easter is so exciting for Christians.
Let’s draw to a close…
It may be that you have dismissed Jesus it the past because you think
science has disproved the existence God. Well, if that’s the case, please
think again. Please see that science does quite the opposite. Open your
eyes to see that this world shouts out the existence of a Creator,
someone outside of time and space, to create all this out of nothing. And
open your eyes to Jesus, God in human flesh, to see what this Creator is
really like.
It may be you’ve been following Jesus for years but find it hard to keep
going? Well, take heart. You are following the very source of life and light,
the creator who was there from the beginning. He is the light, and the
darkness of this world has not overcome him. Whatever this life throws at
you, Jesus the light has triumphed over the darkness.
Either way, make Jesus the centre of everything. He is the source of life,
the true light, the real hero of this story, the unique Creator of the
universe, the answer to the mathematical improbabilities of this universe,
and he has overcome the darkness of our world.
How differently we would live if we really truly believed that Jesus
created the entire universe and has overcome the darkness.
[Read the passage to end?]
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