Complexity and Design

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Well, how many of you have ever seen the aftermath of a tornado in person? It’s Oklahoma, so if you’ve been in the state five minutes, you probably have. Probably a better question is how many of you have not seen the aftermath of a tornado?

Anybody? Okay. I think that’s no hands in the room.

We know what that looks like. Having grown up in Moore, I think a tornado, I think there’s a tornado and some damage on our city seal. I think that’s just part of the design of it now. We got pretty used to looking at that.

And I would hear stories, and you’ve probably heard stories too, of weird things done by tornadoes, weird patterns left in the debris. And those things are unusual. But in general, a tornado doesn’t leave more order in its wake than what was there before, right? It’ll just take a neighborhood where somebody has gone through and designed houses, and they’ve very carefully put those in order.

They’ve put the framing and the plumbing and the wiring and the drywall and the roofing. They’ve done all of that and put it in order, and the tornado will take that, and it’ll go through there, and it’ll just scatter all of that, like my children in a room full of toys. It’ll just leave a mess behind.

The tornado doesn’t usually leave more order and more complexity. It leaves less. Well, I was reading something this week where a man was talking about a tornado hitting a junkyard.

He was using it as an example. To my knowledge, a tornado didn’t actually hit a junkyard that this man was talking about. And honestly, I’m trying to remember the guy’s name.

I read some of the other things he believed about the origins of life, and they’re just batty. They’re just crazy. But on this, I think he’s correct.

He was talking about the origins of life, and he was talking about suppose a tornado hit a junkyard. He said, the odds of life springing up spontaneously by itself on this planet without any kind of interference by an intelligent force, the odds of life just coming into existence are greater than the odds of a tornado hitting a junkyard and leaving behind a fully assembled Boeing 747. Now, I’ll admit, some of the things he believed were crazy.

His argument was, therefore, aliens left life on this planet. Now, going back to last week’s discussion, last week’s message, my question would be, who created those aliens? Who put that aliens there?

Or as I heard a Cajun preacher say when I was a kid, who that alien mama? Who put that alien there? Okay, so we’ve still got the problems we talked about last week about if it existed and it had a beginning, it needs a cause.

Okay. So I think overall his theories were crazy, but I think he was right on gauging the probability that life just sort of spontaneously appeared. We wouldn’t expect that a tornado would hit a junkyard and leave behind a fully assembled and operational Boeing 747 in its way.

We wouldn’t expect that. And yet it’s more likely that that would happen than that life would just appear from non-life. It would just develop.

And now, I think that makes good sense. We know that life doesn’t just come from non-life through random chance. We don’t see that anywhere.

We don’t, that is not, as much as people would like to say, oh, that’s science, science, that’s the scientific view. We can’t observe that happening anywhere, ever. We’ve never observed it to happen.

But critics will say, oh, these aren’t the same thing. This argument about the 747, the tornado in the junkyard, it’s not the same thing because they’ll say, well, complex life like us. They’re not talking the little itty-bitty particles that we can’t even see, the little organisms. They’re talking life like us.

That didn’t happen through one chance and one development. That was hundreds of stages. Okay, if that’s your view, how many tornadoes would have to hit the junkyard before it would assemble a fully functional 747.

I’ll give you, okay, maybe it took several stages, several things to happen to go from non-life to us. Maybe that did take several stages. So how many tornadoes do I need to give you to hit the junkyard before we get the 747?

That’s the question that came to my brain. It still doesn’t compute. It still doesn’t make sense that you go from non-life, you go from inorganic materials, and through a series of random happenings and random chances, that you get the complexity and the design that we see in life around us.

It’s not just us, but you look at the whole natural world around us, and all of it, as far as I can see, just screams, somebody did this. Because we see the complexity of life. We see how all these things work together.

And the complexity, the complexity of life around us, the complexity of all the animals and how they interact with each other, and the plants and how the plants are in just the right parts of the world for just the right animals, and how all of these things work together, that complexity implies design, and design implies a designer. This is called the teleological argument. Again, that’s a big word, don’t check out on me, and I only say that not to insult you, but sometimes I hear people start, I’ve taken enough philosophy classes in college that I’d hear people use big words like that, and suddenly I’m thinking, what’s for lunch?

I can’t listen to this anymore. Okay, stick with me for a minute, because even though the word teleological argument is a big word, a big phrase, it’s a pretty simple concept. It’s the idea that there’s design in things that they were made for a purpose.

Because that word teleological comes from the Greek word telos, which means end or purpose. And so the teleological argument says that things were designed with a purpose in mind. That’s all it is.

Things were designed with a purpose. And if they were designed with a purpose, then there was a designer. So this argument says the universe shows signs of teleological order.

It means it shows signs that somebody put this together on purpose, that somebody designed it. It shows signs of that. I think we can argue that.

I think we can look at the plants and the animals. We can look at the position of our planet. We can look at all these things and say, okay, maybe there’s evidence on your side that it happened from random chance.

I think there’s evidence on our side that says it was put there on purpose. It was designed that way. And quite frankly, I don’t have enough faith to believe it just happened by random chance.

That’s where I stand on it. There’s a book years ago titled, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. I don’t have enough faith to believe all this just came about by random chance. I believe the universe shows signs of order and design.

And if there’s order, then it requires an intelligent designer to do it. And as Christians, we believe that that intelligent designer is God. It’s called the teleological argument.

That’s a very simple version of it. Because I couldn’t find. .

. You know, we did the cosmological argument last week. I found where somebody put it in just a couple steps, a couple bullet points.

Great. I love bullet points. Couldn’t find that for the teleological argument.

I had to read through all these paragraphs and distill it down myself into these bullet points. It should be so simple. If the universe shows signs of design, somebody had to design it.

So it’s the idea that the complexity of life in the universe points to a creator. And when we look at something that has been designed, the more complex it is, the more expertise it requires. I can see Charlie Stack blocks.

Of course, then he’ll go, ah, just knock them all down. But I can see Charlie stack blocks, and for him to do that requires about 20, 21 months of expertise that he’s got in life. Then I see Benjamin putting together, I don’t know, spaceships or whatever he’s doing with his Legos.

Dinosaurs now? I don’t know what all. His birthday was yesterday.

I don’t know what all he got. I just know there are Legos everywhere. But he puts together these really impressive things.

He’s very, you might not know this to watch him, but he’s very regimented, very much, okay, there’s got to be order here and follow rules. And so he can look at the directions of Legos or Kinects, and he can put together some pretty impressive things. That requires more expertise than what, because it’s a more complex design, it requires more expertise than what Charlie did, stack and blocks.

Now, Charlie will get there maybe if he lives that long. But the more complex we see life, the more expertise was required to design it. And I sat down and I kind of had some fun with this this week, looking at some of the things that we can look at nature and see the complexity of the design that’s there, and some of the things that mankind has tried to emulate, the complexity of design that’s already found in nature.

I was reading an article that was talking about how Velcro was invented. It wasn’t something somebody dreamed up. A guy noticed that his dog kept getting burrs or goat’s heads.

I think I learned that term from Brother Ken. I didn’t know what a goat’s head was. He asked me if I had goat heads in my yard.

No. And I realized he was talking about a plant. Get these burrs stuck in the fur of his dog.

And so he’d pick them out. And he’s like, why are they so sticky? Well, he’s naturally curious.

And looking at them under a microscope. I didn’t realize there’s tiny hooks on them. And he thought, maybe I could use that.

And there’s all sorts of things. Evidently, you know, scientists look at the sonar that dolphins have, and they’ve used that to develop stuff for the Navy. And I don’t even know what all, but I looked at some of these things this week, at how complex the systems of life are on Earth.

And I think we know that. We look outside and we say, oh, the sunset, isn’t that beautiful? The stars, aren’t they beautiful?

but we don’t think about the complexity that went into all these things. Owls. I didn’t know this, but owls have a special kind of curved feather.

I don’t know if it’s all owls, but some owls have a special kind of curved feather that allows them to fly slower and more quietly, which is really good when you’re sneaking up on small animals that you want to eat. Because sometimes birds are loud. They let out that piercing screech, and you can hear the wings whooshing in the air.

The owls have to be very quiet. and so these feathers allow them to fly slower. Don’t tell me that’s by accident.

Octopods, octopods, whatever you call them when they’re plural. An octopus, only a lot of them. They use an internal sac inside themselves to propel themselves through the water because they can squeeze the muscles on the outside of the sac, which is inside of them, and they can squeeze the water out and it’s like a jet propulsion system that they’ve had for thousands of years before we even had the idea of a jet. And they’ve got this design that allows them to propel themselves through the water, squirting water out.

Bees. I didn’t know this, but bees evidently have three or four ways of navigating. And apparently bees can use the stars.

I didn’t know this. I was reading about it this week. I’m still a little unclear on that myself.

But they’re capable. I thought this was really cool. Bees can navigate according to the magnetic field of the Earth.

And they’ve been doing that since before human beings even knew there were such things as magnets or magnetic field, before we had magnetics figured out. Bats. We know about the echolocation system on bats.

They send out the sonar things. And evidently, they were talking about a study where they strung these really thin cords across a totally dark room. Something like dental floss, only thinner.

They strung it across a room and let the bats through. And they were able to avoid all of these tiny cords just by bouncing sound off of them. Don’t tell me that that ability came about by accident.

I don’t buy that, not even on double coupon day, all right? That’s not how. .

. Random chance leads to chaos. When I let my children do random things, it leads to chaos in the house, all right?

Spiders can spin. They’ve got a way of spinning web material that’s wet, and they can wrap it around stuff and tie it around stuff, and it shrinks enough when it dries, and they do this over and over, and they are able to lift stuff up into the trees, which is horrifying to me to think about. But the spiders can do this with this mixture of web.

They were designed to be able to do that. That didn’t come about by accident. Moths can communicate with something like radio waves.

Moths, those stupid things that get stuck in our lights, in our light fixtures, they emit radio waves. I mean, that’s incredible. And folks, the animals are just the tip of the iceberg when we look at the design in God’s universe.

There’s a precise balance of forces that are required to hold the elements together. The atoms that make up every element, that make up who we are, there has to be a precise balance of gravity and other forces. Otherwise, the atoms would collapse in on themselves or the parts of the atom would fly apart.

And there’s this precise, fine-tuned balance within our very atoms that holds the entire universe together. You look at the Earth, and if its size was much different, or if its axial tilt, you know, the way it tilts on its axis, which is what gives us the seasons, if the axial tilt were much different, if its orbit were much smaller or much larger, if its revolutions around the sun were much larger or much smaller, If the position of the moon, if the size of the moon, if any of these things were off by very much from what they are now, the earth could not support life. That’s why some Christians and some scientists have called it the privileged planet.

It’s in a unique position to support life. And I’m sorry, I know some people smarter than I am think this way, but I just can’t bring myself to believe that that could have happened by accident. And the earth’s position relative to the sun is in just the right spot for life.

Some of you think it’s way too cold in here. Imagine if the earth were further away from the sun. It’s really hot in here to me.

It could be worse. We could be a whole lot closer to the sun. God put the planet in just..

. I believe God put our planet in just the right place. You look around you and there’s all sorts of evidence of design.

You just have to be looking for it. but there’s evidence of design and God creating all these things for a purpose because the intricacy and the complexity of the universe, whether we’re talking about the part that we have to look at on a telescope because it’s so big and it’s so far away, or if we’re talking about the parts that we look at through a microscope because they’re so small, from the grandest scale to the smallest scale, there is intricacy and there’s complexity that I still say all points to design. And if it’s designed, there’s got to be a designer.

As Christians, we believe that that designer is God. So let’s look at what God’s word says about the design of our universe and the telos, the purpose behind all of it. Psalm chapter 19, if you have not already turned there with me.

Psalm chapter 19. It says in verse 1, The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night reveals knowledge.

There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their line has gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them he has set a tabernacle for the sun, which is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoices like a strong man to run its race.

Its rising is from one end of heaven, and its circuit to the other end, and there is nothing hidden from its heat. So this starts out by saying the whole universe points to God’s glory. It says the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork.

The firmament is the earth. It’s what we stand on. Okay, so looking at this from a human perspective, we can look out at the firmament, and we can look up at the heavens.

And the heavens declare his glory, the firmament shows his handiwork, and what this is telling us is that when we can look all around us and we can see the skill that God has. We can see the knowledge, the wisdom. We can see his precision.

We can see his handiwork. The earth is his portfolio of look at what I can do. So we can look around us and we can see the work of God all around us and we can also look at the sky above us and the stars just scream out the glory of God.

I remember when I first moved to Arkansas. Up until then, I had pretty much always lived right around Oklahoma City. And I love the Oklahoma City area, but you can’t really see the stars.

You know, it wasn’t until I moved to Arkansas that I realized there were more than about six stars visible from the earth. I moved to Arkansas, and I lived not too far outside Fayetteville, but there mountains in between us, in between my house and the city, that blocked a lot of the light. And so I’m out there one of the first days after I’ve moved there, and I’m taking the garbage out at night, rolling the poly cart, and they didn’t know what a poly cart was either.

It’s like we were speaking different languages. There’s big rolly trash cans. I was rolling that down to the curb, and I’m coming back in and walking back toward my garage, and I happen to look up, and I see more stars than I’ve ever seen in my life.

and I think I stood out there for about an hour just staring up in amazement at what was going on, the heavens above me, what all was going on up there. And I tell you what, when you see not city stars, but when you see country stars and you start to ponder on all those stars, it’ll make you feel really small, really fast, because you realize the vastness of God’s universe. And I started to ponder on the vastness of that universe, and I started to ponder on the power that was necessary to make it all.

And I went from standing there in my driveway in the middle of the night, staring at the stars, to thinking about how incredible God is. That’s exactly what it means when it says the heavens declare the glory of God. Because we can look at the universe, being able to see those stars, being able to see the planets and the shooting stars and all the things that we can see.

We know that that’s so much bigger than us. We know that there’s so much more out there than even our planet. And it takes an incredible might to have hung it all in place.

And you start thinking about who that is. You start thinking about God and his capability and all he’s done. you can’t help but give him glory if you recognize that he’s the one who put it all in place.

The same is true of the firmament. If we believe he’s done all this, we can’t help but look at his handiwork and say, isn’t he good? Isn’t he good?

It’s like when I was talking to Phil on the phone last night. He was telling me about the situation with his heart and the improvement and the amazement of the doctors, and all I could say was, isn’t he good? God is so good.

Isn’t he good? And folks, if we recognize him as the one who made all of this, if you’re thinking, what’s so great about the world? Get out of town sometime, okay?

I took the boys to the Wichita Mountains. Madeline was supposed to go with us, but she had gotten in trouble that day. I took the boys to the Wichita Mountains one day last week while they were on spring break.

And I think Benjamin understood for the first time why Daddy likes hunting and fishing so much. It’s not so much catching something, although I’d be delighted if I do. But we pulled over at a spot and the three of us got out of the truck.

And it was kind of rainy that day, so there weren’t a lot of people in the Wichita Mountains Park anyway. And we pulled over in kind of a back area of the park. And we got out of the truck, and I said, Benjamin, do you hear that?

I don’t hear anything. I said, exactly. You couldn’t hear anybody talking.

You couldn’t hear any automobile noise. All you could hear was the blowing of the wind. You could hear a few birds in the background.

You see the wind blowing through the grasses. See the waves lapping on the little pond over there. And we just stood there for a few minutes until Charlie got antsy.

And I said, this is why, Daddy, this is why I like hunting and fishing, because I can be out in God’s creation and just enjoy what he’s made. I couldn’t have made all that. That’s God’s handiwork.

it’s God’s handiwork and he says not only do the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork but he says day unto day utter speech and night unto night reveals knowledge day and night roll into one they just keep going and yet God is glorified continually throughout every day and throughout every night he says every day utter speech that means the language that creation is speaking is spoken throughout every day and is glorifying God. And night unto night reveals knowledge. The knowledge of God continues to be revealed every night.

It’s not just a one-time thing. Hey, that was a particularly pretty sunset. That shows that God is designing things and that God is Lord over all creation.

It’s not just that momentary sunset. It’s not just that particularly awe-inspiring mountain. It’s everywhere we look throughout creation when we see God’s handiwork, His glory is being shown to the world.

And it says in verse 3, there is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. And on first glance, this sounds like God being glorified in every human language. But again, he’s talking about creation.

And that leads me to believe that when we hear the wind rustling through the tall grass, that the voice and the language of creation is testifying to the glory of God. When we hear the cattle lowing over on the next hill, The voice of creation is testifying to the glory of God. When we hear the birds squawking as they’re going either north or south, depending on the time of the year, it’s creation.

It’s the voice and the language of creation testifying to the glory of God. There is no speech, there is no language where their voice is not heard. All of this rolls in together and tells me that there’s nothing in creation, there’s nothing that God designed that does not testify to his glory as the creator and sustainer of all of it.

Since their line has gone out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world, you can find the testimony of God’s glory no matter where you go. You can go from the deserts of Arabia to the ice flows of Antarctica. You can go from the prairies of North America to the Himalaya Mountains, and you will find testimony to God’s glory at every corner of our planet.

in them he is and in the heavens as well you search from end to end and people like to see people like to see signs and deities in the stars that’s why we have the constellations ancient people said oh that looks like Orion that looks like you know I can’t even remember my wife could tell you my wife loves the stars and the constellations but they named them after their gods because they saw their gods in the stars well folks we don’t have to look For gods among the stars, because we worship the God who made the stars. From corner to corner, his glory is testified to. In them he has set a tabernacle for the sun.

Now, in the day that this was written, a lot of people worshipped the sun. Actually, a lot of people in the ancient world, in various cultures, worshipped the sun. The Egyptians worshipped the sun.

I know learning even about my Choctaw ancestors, I’m told that they were sun worshipers as well. I mean, on every continent, you had people worshiping the sun. There’s their chief deity.

And what the psalmist is saying here is that God created the heavens and made them as a tabernacle for the sun, not for the sun to be worshiped, but for the sun in this tabernacle to have a place of prominence to testify to his glory. because just like the earthly tabernacle, the heavenly tabernacle is about us recognizing the greatness of God. See, the Israelites had a tabernacle, and it’s where they’d go to worship God.

And so God has taken this thing that people worship. The psalmist is saying God is the one who made it. And don’t worship it as a God.

God made it. Don’t worship it as a God and look to it for your sustenance. God put it where it is.

God put it in the midst of this great heavenly tabernacle, not to glorify it, but to bring himself glory. He said the son is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber. Bridegroom coming out of his chamber, there’s excitement there.

And he says he’s like one who rejoices, and he rejoices like a strong man to run its race. He’s ready, he’s strong and he’s prepared to run his race. I’ve seen, my dad is a runner, I am not.

My dad is a runner, and I’ve seen the difference between when he feels prepared to go out and run and when he doesn’t. So when he feels prepared to go out and run, boy, he’s up early and got those tennis shoes on, and he’s off ready to go. And then there are other mornings where, I really don’t want to do this, but I need to get in my, what is it, 14 miles?

I need to get in my 14 miles today. What? He does this on purpose.

He says the son is like somebody who’s ready to run his race. He’s itching to go, meaning that the sun can’t wait to rise every morning and shine forth the glories of God. And his rising is from one end of heaven, his circuit to the other, and nothing is hidden from its heat.

And some commentators say that this heat that burns down from the sun is symbolic of the glory of God, that it touches everything. Because God created this sun and put it in the tabernacle in the heavens to bring himself glory. Everywhere it’s rays shine down, God’s glory is shown down as well, to use this metaphor that the psalmist uses.

So we see in this, man, I’ve talked a lot and I haven’t even gotten to my points. But I’m going to give them to you quickly. I just realized it’s 1130.

First of all, the universe was designed to glorify God. It was designed to support life. It was designed for many other reasons, but it’s ultimate reason.

its ultimate purpose for design, its ultimate telos, is to bring glory to God. He says the heavens declare the glory of God. Second of all, we need to know this morning, the more we learn about our world, the more cause we have to praise Him.

Some people look at the world, and the more they learn about the world, the more they believe there is no God. We look at the exact same evidence and say the more we learn about our world, the more reason we have to praise God because we recognize all the more His goodness, We recognize his greatness, his wisdom in putting it all together. Sometimes his sense of humor.

You look at some of the animals, I’ve got to conclude God has a sense of humor. All right? The more we learn about our world, the more we have cause to praise him.

That’s because there’s no speech, there’s no language where the voice of nature glorifying God is not heard. And third of all, his glory is on display for all to see. It’s right there.

Just like the sun’s rays burning down with heat, God put this sun in its heavenly tabernacle to bring himself glory. Just as the sun’s rays beat down on every inch of our planet, God’s glory is on display for all to see. It’s there for all of us to see it.

Some people don’t want to see it. Some people do want to see it. But regardless of what we want or don’t want, it’s there.

Now, one more thing I want to give you. What happens when we look at what God has put so plainly before us and we reject it? Because we all look at the same evidence.

We all see the same creation. We all see the same nature. But we draw different conclusions.

Romans chapter 1 speaks to this, that man often refuses to see the truth that’s right in front of him. In Romans chapter 1, starting in verse 18, it says, For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth and unrighteousness. Some of your Bibles may say, who hold the truth in unrighteousness.

That’s an older meaning of the word hold that means like hold back. Not that God is punishing those of us who hold on to the truth, but those who hold back the truth, those who withhold the truth, or suppress the truth as the New King James says. Who suppress the truth in unrighteousness because what may be known of God is manifest in them.

They have access, they can see all the evidence of the glory of God in nature. They can see the demonstration of his presence there, for God has shown it to them, verse 19. Verse 20, for since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.

The Apostle Paul is saying nobody has an excuse to deny God because we can all see the evidence of him. It’s all around us. It’s right there.

Because although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. And now this is not putting, I’m not trying to put down our neighbors and friends who don’t believe in God. We all at some point or another are in this boat.

We may believe in God, but we still don’t want to recognize him as God. We want to be God, and our hearts are darkened, okay, apart from Jesus Christ. Professing to be wise, they became fools and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things. Now that’s Romans 1.

18 through 23. So what happens? Why do people look at the evidence around us and deny God?

Well, the Apostle Paul says it’s because we just don’t want to admit it. Because if we admit that, if we look at the evidence from creation, and we admit that there’s a God who created all of this for a purpose, and who created us for a purpose, then we’re accountable to his purpose. We’re accountable for the choices we make, whether we live up to his purpose or not.

And the Bible says that it’s human nature. This is not an us versus them thing. It’s human nature that we want to pretend that we’re not accountable to what God says.

And that’s created no end of problems for man. That’s what led Adam and Eve to sin. They