Author Archives: John Samson

How can a good God allow evil?

Posted on by

This is not an armchair question. It is a hospital-room question. It is asked through tears at a graveside. It rises from the heart when the phone rings with bad news, when betrayal lands like a gut punch, when a child suffers, when the body breaks down and the world seems brutal, heartless, and cruel. So before we say anything else, we should say this: it is a valid question, and it deserves more than a tidy answer tied up in a neat bow.

In this ‘Got Questions?’ series, I have already made the case that God exists. Now comes the question that lands hardest when life hurts: How can a good God allow evil?

And even after we say true things, some will still protest, “But why this evil, why this loss?” Behind every question is a heart, often a wounded one. Sometimes the deepest need is the ministry of presence: a brother or sister who listens, prays, weeps with those who weep, and does not rush the grief. And right there in the pain, God often comes near, even when He does not explain the reasons. He draws near to the brokenhearted (Psalm 34:18). Psalm 73 captures that honest turmoil of the soul, and the slow return to trust… “until I went into the sanctuary of God” (verse 17). It was in the sanctuary, among God’s gathered people, that Asaph saw God as He truly is. His heart was steadied, and everything came back into its proper place.

So we are asking something sharper than whether God exists: since God is good, holy, and sovereign, why is there evil, and why does He permit so much suffering in His world?

What is evil?

We should begin by defining what we mean by “evil.” Evil is not a created substance. It is not a “thing” God made the way He made light and land and stars. Evil is real, and its wounds are deep, but it is a corruption of the good, a twisting of what God made upright. Scripture calls sin “lawlessness” (1 John 3:4). It is rebellion against God’s good rule, whether loud defiance or quiet refusal.

Some ask, “I understand that human beings willingly commit moral evil. But why earthquakes? Why childhood cancer?” Scripture teaches that creation itself was subjected to futility and groans because of the Fall (Romans 8:20-22). The whole world is broken because humanity’s rebellion fractured everything. Death, decay, and disaster entered through the Fall (Genesis 3; Romans 5:12). We live in a fallen world, where everything, including nature itself, reflects the consequences of sin.

We ask God to remove evil, but we forget that evil is not only “out there.” It is in here. If God removed all evil today, He would have to remove us too, because evil lurks in every human heart. Saying so does not minimize your experience. It tells the truth about what has happened to all of us.

Evil presupposes God

Now notice something important. The moment we call something “evil,” we are appealing to a real moral standard. We are saying, “This ought not to be.” That word ought announces a real standard. Goodness is objective. It is binding. And it only makes sense if there is a holy God whose character is the measure of what is good. Take Him away, and what stops “evil” from shrinking into mere preference, like choosing coffee instead of tea? The heart knows evil is more than that.

And this is where the question takes an unexpected turn. Some raise evil as an honest objection to belief in God, and the objection deserves an answer; much of this article is my attempt at one. The skeptic can even grant Christian premises for the sake of argument and ask whether a good and sovereign God is consistent with the world we see. Fair enough. But notice what the objection borrows: a real standard of good and evil that binds even God’s critics. What grounds that standard? Remove the Judge, and you do not get rid of guilt, you get rid of a courtroom. You can still feel outrage, but you can no longer say, with moral authority, “This is truly wrong.” Take God away and the pain of evil remains, now stripped of ultimate meaning, final accounting, and any certain hope of justice.

The mystery of God’s sovereignty and holiness

But now we come to the very heart of the issue. If God is sovereign, why does He permit evil at all? Scripture does not satisfy every curiosity, and it does not invite us to put God on trial. When Job pressed God for an explanation, God answered with God, not with a chart: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” (Job 38-42). In other words, we are not competent to sit as judges over the Judge of all the earth.

Notice: God never tells Job why he suffered. But after encountering God Himself, Job says, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:5-6). Job got God instead of explanations, and that was enough. Sometimes seeing God rightly is the answer, even when the “why” question remains.

None of this makes God indifferent. He is holy, and He has the right to govern His world according to His own wise and righteous purposes. He is not accountable to His creatures. He does not take counsel from us. He is the potter, and we are the clay. And yet, Scripture also insists on something else at the same time: God is light, and “in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). He is never the author of sin, and He never excuses the sinner. We commit evil because we want to. We cannot shift the blame upward.

There is mystery here, and Christians should admit it without embarrassment. We do not know all that we would like to know about the origin of evil. Many simplistic answers fall apart under honest scrutiny. But Scripture does not leave us in the dark. It insists on holding two truths together: nothing unfolds outside His providence, and yet He remains perfectly holy. We can affirm both truths even when we cannot fully explain how they fit together.

Think of light. Physics tells us light behaves as both a wave and a particle. These seem contradictory, but both are true, and scientists hold them together even without fully understanding how. If finite minds can hold together mysteries in the physical world, why should we be shocked when infinite realities exceed our complete comprehension? Mystery does not mean contradiction. It means our minds are finite and God’s ways are higher than ours (Isaiah 55:8-9).

God’s answer: The incarnation and the cross

Now we come to the center of the Christian faith, and it is not an argument; it is a Person. The God of the Bible is not a distant, detached, deistic deity, merely watching the gears turn from far away. He stepped into our world in Jesus Christ. He shared our flesh and blood. He was tempted as we are, yet without sin. He is able to help sufferers, and He is a High Priest who sympathizes with our weakness (Hebrews 2:14-18; 4:15). In that sense, God can look at our protest and grief and say, truthfully, He understands why we hate evil. He does too. He has seen what evil does up close.

And then we come to the cross, the place where this question is finally silenced and answered at the same time. What is the most evil act in human history? The crucifixion of the Son of God. Sin and hell and hatred and cowardice gathered together and did their worst, and the only truly righteous Man was murdered in public. And yet Scripture says Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23). What men meant for evil, God meant for good (Genesis 50:20). God was not reacting to the cross. He was accomplishing redemption through it. If you want to know what God thinks of evil, look at what it cost Him.

At the cross, the incarnate Son of God bore our sins and endured their full penalty in our place. “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24). The price tag of redemption is the measure of how seriously God takes evil. And the fact that the Son paid it Himself is the measure of how much He loves sinners.

And Christ did not remain in the grave. The resurrection is God’s public declaration that sin, suffering, decay, and death will not have the last word. The risen Christ is the firstfruits of a renewed creation, the first sheaf of a harvest still to come (1 Corinthians 15:20), when God “will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore” (Revelation 21:4). The graveside, the hospital room, the breaking body: the risen Christ has an answer for each of them, and the answer is resurrection.

Evil will be judged

And this is also why the Christian can say, with tears and with confidence, that evil is not ultimate. God will judge it. God will expose it. God will repay it in perfect righteousness. There is a day coming when every hidden thing will be brought into the light, when every wrong will be judged and no injustice overlooked, and when God’s holiness will be seen to be beautiful, not harsh.

Some say, “I don’t like the idea of judgment.” But if you hate evil, you should long for judgment. Judgment means the child abuser does not get away with it. The genocidal dictator does not escape. The unrepentant oppressor faces justice. A God who never judges evil is not good. He is complicit. The cross shows us God’s heart: He offers mercy now, but He will bring justice in the end.

And hear this clearly: the Lamb is reigning now. By faith we see it already. Christ is seated, His kingdom is advancing, and even the bitterest seasons remain under His wise hand. God works all things together for good for those who love Him (Romans 8:28). Notice carefully: Paul does not say all things are good. He says God works them for good. Cancer is not good. Betrayal is not good. Abuse is not good. These are evils. But God, in His sovereign wisdom, can take even the worst evils and weave them into His redemptive purposes for those who trust Him. He is never the author of the evil, and He never approves it, but He does not waste it either. And one day what faith sees will be confessed openly. Every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess the reality that is true right now: Jesus Christ is Lord (Philippians 2:10-11). History will reach its appointed end with the Lamb exalted, and with God vindicated as good and holy forever.

Even now, God restrains evil more than we know. The world is fallen, but it is not as evil as it could be. There is still beauty and kindness, still laughter and love. These are mercies. And God’s patience is forbearance, giving space for repentance, holding out mercy through Christ while the door is still open.

What should we do with this?

So what should we do with this? If you are suffering, you do not have to pretend it does not hurt. You are invited to trust the God who is holy, wise, and never cruel, and who has proved His heart at Calvary. And if you are skeptical, do not stop at the question. Look at what you are appealing to when you call something “evil,” then look at the cross, where God’s holiness and love meet in full brightness. The God who will judge evil is the God who entered history to save sinners.

You do not have to understand all God’s reasons to trust Him. You only have to look at the cross, and then at the empty tomb, and see what kind of God He is.

Do not let evil drive you from God. Let it drive you to the cross, where God has already begun to undo it.

If you are suffering, or if you have questions you want to talk through, please reach out. We are here for you.

Evil is loud, but it is not lord. Jesus Christ is Lord.

If Matter Is All There Is, Where Did Persons Come From?

Posted on by

Got Questions? series, article 3

In our “Got Questions?” series so far, we have asked whether God exists and whether science makes God unnecessary. There is another question underneath both of those, and it touches every one of us. We are not merely objects in the universe. We are persons.

So here is the question: how do you get persons from an impersonal universe? How do you get mind, meaning, love, guilt, laughter, reason, and conscience from matter and motion?

I want to be careful how I put the challenge, because it is easy to argue against a version of the other side that nobody actually holds.

What the other side is actually claiming

No serious scientist believes that time by itself does the work. Nobody thinks you can leave a pile of chemicals alone and come back to a poet. The claim is more careful than that, and it deserves to be stated in its strongest form: unguided physical and chemical processes, given energy, environmental cycling, and vast stretches of time, produced increasing complexity, and that complexity eventually included life, and then minds, and then selves.

That is a serious proposal. It is not obviously absurd, and pretending otherwise will not persuade anyone worth persuading.

But stating it carefully does not dissolve the question. It sharpens it. Grant the processes. Grant the time. You still have to ask whether those processes adequately account for what we actually find: coordinated information, a code and something that reads the code, and, most stubbornly, a first-person point of view. A self that reasons about truth, that loves, that chooses, that feels the weight of “I ought” and “I ought not.”

The question is not whether the naturalist can tell a story. The question is which account better explains the world we actually inhabit.

Life is more than having the right parts

Consider one recent piece of evidence, and consider it honestly.

In 2016, a team led by Clyde Hutchison at the J. Craig Venter Institute reported a synthetic bacterium with a deliberately minimized genome, JCVI-syn3.0. They did not create life from raw chemicals. They started with an existing synthetic derivative of Mycoplasma mycoides and used repeated cycles of design, deletion, and testing to strip out genes that could be removed. The result retained 473 genes under laboratory conditions, and at the time of the report, 149 of those genes had no assigned biological function. [1]

Two honest qualifications. First, that organism was minimal relative to one bacterium in one laboratory environment, not the simplest possible living thing. Second, later work has narrowed the mystery, mostly by computational prediction rather than experiment. [2]

So what does the experiment show? It does not prove design, and I will not claim that it does. What it shows is how much coordinated complexity remains even in a system engineered downward as far as its designers could push it, and how much intelligence was required to get that result. Nobody left chemicals in a dish and came back to syn3.0. Brilliant people arranged what they already understood.

And that points to something the origin-of-life problem keeps running into. Life is not merely a matter of having the right parts. Having amino acids is like having an alphabet. Having them in the right sequence is like having words. But a living cell also needs grammar (the genetic code), a translator (ribosomes), an energy source (ATP), error correction (DNA repair), packaging (membranes), and reproduction (cell division). These systems do not operate in isolation. They reference each other.

No one has to show all of that arriving at once. The precursors may have been simpler, and replication, catalysis, and primitive translation may have developed together rather than in sequence. Serious researchers are working on exactly this. A 2022 Nature paper showed peptides growing directly on RNA, which suggests how a world of nucleic acids and proteins might have started. [3]

But notice how those same authors describe the underlying question. How and when RNA learned to instruct peptide synthesis is, in their words, “one of the grand unsolved challenges in prebiotic evolutionary research.” That is not my verdict on their field. It is theirs. They may yet crack it. They have not cracked it.

Parts remain parts.

Chemistry and the problem of the inside

That brings us to the harder problem, and this is where the real weight of the question lies.

Suppose we one day trace the whole chain from simple chemistry to complex nervous systems. Even then, the deepest mystery is untouched: why do we experience anything at all?

Bite into a pizza. You do not merely process information about temperature and taste. You experience it. There is someone on the inside who feels that warmth, tastes that flavor, enjoys that moment. A computer can analyze the ingredients perfectly and experience nothing. It is empty inside. So why are we not like that? Why is there a “you” on the inside experiencing your life, instead of a body going through the motions with nobody home?

Philosophers call this the hard problem of consciousness. [4] It is not the question of how the brain processes information. It is the question of why the processing is accompanied by any inner experience at all.

Some suggest consciousness simply emerges once a system gets complex enough. But emergence names the mystery rather than solving it. We can explain wetness in terms of how water molecules behave together, because wetness just is a way of describing that behavior. Consciousness will not reduce so easily. Someone could study your brain all day and see exactly which neurons fire when you taste chocolate, and still not know what it is like for you to taste chocolate. The description from outside does not deliver the view from inside.

Chemistry can produce reactions. Reactions do not aim at truth. Reactions do not weigh evidence. Reactions do not love their children. An impersonal cause is a strange candidate for the origin of personal realities.

Can naturalism account for reason?

Here we should be careful again, because this is where Christians often overreach.

If someone says that all truth and meaning are illusions, that claim destroys itself. He is asking you to believe him because what he says is true. If truth is an illusion, there is nothing there to believe.

But most naturalists do not say that. They believe meaning is real, that conscience is real, that our minds can discover truth, and that these are genuine higher-level realities arising from physical processes. Some are atheists and moral realists both. It would be a cheap victory to pretend that every materialist openly regards love as a chemical trick, and it would not be true.

The real question is deeper and harder to wave away. Can a universe of exclusively non-rational causes account for rational inference?

C. S. Lewis pressed this in Miracles. His point was not primarily about survival. It was about the difference between a cause and a ground. A belief may be produced by prior physical events in your skull. But rational thought requires more than that. It requires that a conclusion be held because it follows from reasons, that the logical relation itself does the work. If every thought is only the latest link in a chain of physical causes, it is difficult to see how any thought is ever an insight rather than an occurrence. [5]

The naturalist will answer that rational relations can be realized in physical processes. Of course they can. Your brain is certainly doing something while you follow an argument. But to say the inference is realized in the neurons restates the connection rather than explaining it. The question is why one thought ought to follow another. “Ought” is not a word chemistry knows.

Alvin Plantinga developed a related argument decades later, and the two are often blended together, so it is worth keeping them straight. Plantinga’s version concerns reliability: if our faculties were shaped only to promote survival, we have little reason to think they were shaped to track truth, since a useful false belief serves survival just as well. [6]

A naturalist has a fair answer to Plantinga: accurate beliefs usually do aid survival. Seeing the cliff as a cliff beats seeing it as a meadow. That reply has force, and I think it is largely right as far as it goes.

But it leaves Lewis’s question standing. Reasoning assumes our minds can track truth, and not merely survive. That expectation makes sense if we are made in the image of a rational God. It is harder to account for if we are cosmic accidents.

Christianity’s answer: the personal God

Scripture begins, “In the beginning, God.” Not impersonal forces, not blind matter, not fate. A living, personal God.

And the Bible says we are persons because we are made in His image (Genesis 1:26 to 27). Your capacity to think, choose, love, and know right from wrong is not the residue of random chance.

Which raises something worth pausing over. When you flip a fair coin, it has a 50% chance of landing heads. But chance does not make it land one way or the other. Chance is a word we use to describe potential outcomes, a mathematical description rather than a causal agent. R. C. Sproul argued this at length: chance has no creative power. It cannot build anything. It cannot design anything. [7]

The naturalist will say he never claimed chance builds anything. He appeals to lawful processes in which some outcomes are probabilistic. Fair enough. But a law is not a mind either. Neither probability nor regularity intends anything. And persons are a strange thing to find at the end of a process where nothing ever intended anything at all.

Christianity has an explanation. You are not a mistake. You are made for relationship with your Creator.

The Bible goes further. All things were made through the eternal Word, and in Christ “all things hold together” (John 1:1 to 3; Colossians 1:16 to 17). The foundation of reality is not less than mind. It is the living God who speaks, commands, loves, and saves.

The Person who entered our history

Christianity’s claim is that this personal God did not remain distant.

Here we have to be precise, because this article is about persons, and the wording matters. The eternal Son did not become a person at Bethlehem. He eternally is a divine Person. In the incarnation, the Person of the Son took to Himself a true human nature. “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Without ceasing to be God, He took our humanity and entered our history as “the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). Truly God and truly man.

And He did not come merely to explain what a person is. He came to save guilty persons.

That word “guilty” is the one we have been circling. Conscience is not a rumor. It is a witness. We have not merely thought about the personal God, we have offended Him. And Christ lived the righteous life we have not lived, bore the judgment our sins deserved at the cross, and rose from the dead, so that everyone who turns from sin and trusts in Him is reconciled to his Creator and counted righteous in Him (2 Corinthians 5:21). God “commands all people everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30).

That is the gospel. Not a technique for feeling personal about the universe. A crucified and risen Savior who deals with real guilt.

An invitation to follow the evidence

Antony Flew was a prominent twentieth-century atheist philosopher who argued against God’s existence for decades. Late in life, he abandoned atheism. He pointed to the laws of nature, the origin and organization of life, and the existence of the universe itself. He wrote, “I now believe that the universe was brought into existence by an infinite Intelligence.” [8]

Flew did not profess Christian faith. But his change of mind shows that a lifelong atheist could conclude that mind, rationality, and life require more than an impersonal universe can supply. The question is whether the evidence will carry you further than it carried him, all the way to Christ.

If you are wrestling with these questions, start here: read the Gospel of John slowly and honestly, with an open Bible and an open mind. Ask God to show you the truth. Since God is personal, your personhood is not an accident, and your conscience is not an illusion. It is a signpost.

Christianity is not offering God as one option among many. It is announcing that God has made Himself known in the Person of Jesus Christ, and that He now calls you to repent and believe. And if you would like to talk it through, come and speak with us.

Footnotes

[1] Clyde A. Hutchison III et al., “Design and Synthesis of a Minimal Bacterial Genome,” Science 351, no. 6280 (March 25, 2016), doi:10.1126/science.aad6253. JCVI-syn3.0 was reported with 531 kilobase pairs and 473 genes, including 149 genes of unknown biological function.

[2] Magdalena Antczak, Martin Michaelis, and Mark N. Wass, “Environmental Conditions Shape the Nature of a Minimal Bacterial Genome,” Nature Communications 10 (2019): 3100, doi:10.1038/s41467-019-10837-2. Combining computational methods, the study assigned functions to 66 of the 149 proteins with confidence and some level of annotation to 133, leaving 16 entirely unannotated. The same paper notes that an earlier engineering-based approach by Danchin and Fang provided annotations for 71 of the 149. These are in silico predictions rather than experimentally confirmed functions.

[3] Felix Müller, Luis Escobar, Felix Xu, Ewa Węgrzyn, Milda Nainytė, Tynchtyk Amatov, Chun-Yin Chan, Alexander Pichler, and Thomas Carell, “A Prebiotically Plausible Scenario of an RNA–Peptide World,” Nature 605, no. 7909 (May 12, 2022): 279 to 284, doi:10.1038/s41586-022-04676-3. The quoted phrase is the authors’ own description of the problem.

[4] David Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, no. 3 (1995): 200 to 219.

[5] C. S. Lewis, Miracles (1947; revised 1960), chapter 3, “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism.”

[6] Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford University Press, 2011), chapter 10, “The Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism.” Plantinga first published the argument as “An Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism,” Logos 12 (1991): 27 to 49.

[7] R. C. Sproul, Not a Chance: The Myth of Chance in Modern Science and Cosmology (Baker Books, 1994).

[8] Antony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese, There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (HarperOne, 2007), 88.

Does Science Make God Unnecessary, or Does It Actually Point to Him?

Posted on by

Second in the “Got Questions?” series

In the first article of our “Got Questions?” series, we asked: how can we know God exists? We considered the Bible’s claim that God has not left Himself without witness: in creation, in conscience, and supremely in Jesus Christ.

A natural follow-up often sounds like this: “I trust science. I trust airplanes. I trust the laws of nature. I do not need to add God.”

Let me say something plainly at the start. Christians are not anti-science. We are grateful for careful observation, honest experimentation, and true discovery. The historian James Hannam has documented in detail how much modern science owes to the Christian Middle Ages, and how the familiar story of a long war between faith and science was largely manufactured in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by men with an axe to grind. [1] Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle, and James Clerk Maxwell were not doing their work in spite of their faith. They expected the universe to be orderly and intelligible because they believed a wise Creator had made it.

Science and naturalism are two different things

Here is a distinction that governs everything else in this article. Most arguments about God and science go wrong because this gets skipped in the first thirty seconds.

Science is a method. It investigates how things work within the natural order. It measures, tests, predicts, and revises, and it is extraordinarily good at what it does.

Naturalism is a philosophy. It claims that the natural order is all there is and that nothing exists beyond it.

Science by itself cannot establish naturalism, because naturalism is a claim about everything, advanced from inside a method that only examines things within the world. When someone says that science has made God unnecessary, what has usually happened is that a method got quietly swapped for a philosophy and nobody noticed the substitution.

So here is my answer to the question in the title, stated up front. Science does not make God unnecessary, because science investigates processes within creation. It does not address why there is a creation to investigate, why the world holds together in a law-governed way, or why our minds can grasp it at all. Those questions arrive the moment you stop doing science and start asking what science assumes.

Trusting the airplane assumes more than aerodynamics

When you step onto a plane, you trust that it will fly and land safely. You trust the engineers, the pilot, the maintenance crew, and yes, the laws of aerodynamics. You trust them because you have seen patterns. Planes have flown many times before, and experience teaches you to expect they will fly again.

That everyday confidence rests on something we rarely stop to examine. It depends on your mind being able to reason from repeated experience. It depends on the world being stable enough that patterns can be found at all, and on those patterns holding tomorrow as they did yesterday. Step onto the plane and you are trusting that your mind can know real things about a real world.

Now a skeptic may reply, “Evolution explains why our brains work well enough to survive.” That reply has some force, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than brushed aside. Faculties that track the environment accurately would plainly help a creature survive. It matters a great deal whether you judge correctly the distance of a cliff edge or the intentions of a predator, and beliefs that get such things right will tend to keep you alive.

But notice how far that gets us, and where it stops. Natural selection selects for successful behavior, not for the truth of beliefs as such, and the two can come apart precisely where the stakes are highest for this conversation. Whatever advantage accurate perception of cliffs and predators may confer, it tells us very little about whether faculties shaped for survival are generally reliable when they range out into abstract mathematics, formal logic, metaphysics, and sweeping claims about the ultimate nature of reality. And here is the sharp edge of it: naturalism is itself one of those sweeping claims. If our reasoning can be trusted only where survival was at stake, then the reasoning that produced naturalism is exactly the kind we have least reason to trust.

The difficulty here belongs to evolutionary naturalism, the philosophical addition that the whole process is blind, unguided, and aimed at nothing. Evolutionary biology by itself does not generate the problem, and a Christian who accepts some form of common descent is not committed to the claim that the process is purposeless.

Christianity offers an answer that fits the world we actually inhabit. The universe is intelligible because a rational God made it, and our minds can grasp reality because we are made in His image (Genesis 1:26-27). That is why investigation works, and why it is worth pressing further.

Looking for God inside the machine is the wrong category

Some people say, “I do not see God in the laws of aerodynamics, so God is unnecessary.”

But you never find the maker of a thing as a component inside the thing. You could take a car apart for a lifetime and never find the inventor sitting under the hood. That would tell you nothing about whether there was an inventor. You would simply have asked the wrong kind of question.

God is the Creator of the system, not an object within it. So the useful question runs deeper: why is there an intelligible, law-governed world at all, and why do we have minds capable of discovering it?

This deserves saying carefully, because Christians have sometimes argued badly here. God is not a gap filler, a name we write in wherever science has not yet reached, to be erased when the research catches up. He is the foundation that makes the whole scientific enterprise possible in the first place, so Christianity has no interest in setting Him against aerodynamics, chemistry, or physics.

Hold on to that, because it disciplines what comes next.

The design discussion goes deeper than complexity: it goes to meaning

Many debates about God and science orbit around design. People argue over whether some biological structure is too complex to have arisen by evolutionary processes. Those conversations turn detailed and technical quickly.

There is another layer underneath, more basic than questions about biological machinery. It is the layer of information and meaning.

Modern genetics shows that DNA is an ordered sequence carrying biological information, written with a four-letter alphabet: A, C, G, and T. [2] One copy of the human genome contains roughly 3 billion base pairs distributed across 23 chromosomes, and most of your cells carry two copies, one inherited from your mother and one from your father. [3] A base pair is two complementary DNA letters joined together, adenine with thymine and cytosine with guanine, like a single rung on a ladder. [4]

Consider what happens with seven letters. If you see F-R-E-E-W-A-Y on a sign, you do not treat them as random shapes. They communicate because an agreed language already exists, and because you have a mind that can read it. Something parallel holds in the cell. DNA’s letters function as information because there is a code and a translation process that reads and applies them. So the question runs past the letters to the language system itself. Where did that come from?

And that system is not hypothetical. Within protein-coding genes, the DNA sequence is first copied into a working message. A molecular machine then reads that message in three-letter words. Helper molecules act as carriers, bringing the right building blocks at the right time, so the cell can assemble proteins. [5] The cell has a built-in reading and translating system that turns a stored message into working parts.

Chemistry is obviously involved in all of this. The point is that coded information and an interpreting system are a different sort of thing from chemistry alone. Words and languages are not the same kind of thing as ink and paper.

So how far does this take us? Less far than some Christians claim, and further than many skeptics will admit.

It does not take us here: “Science cannot explain the origin of the genetic code, therefore God.” That argument would contradict everything I have just said about gap filling, and I am not going to make it. The origin of the code is a genuinely open question in origins research. Naturalistic models have been proposed, involving chemical affinities, early replication systems, selection, and coevolution. They are debated and incomplete, but they exist, and honest apologetics does not pretend otherwise. If someone hands me a full account of the code tomorrow morning, nothing in the Christian faith falls over.

Nor does it help to point to computer simulations where code evolves solutions, or to genetic algorithms that optimize designs. Such programs can show what selection accomplishes once a replicating system and a fitness measure are already in place. They do not explain where those prerequisites came from, because a programmer supplied them. That is the very thing the origins question is asking about the natural world.

Here is what the genetic code actually contributes. It is an exhibit, not a gap. This article has been claiming from the start that the world is intelligible, that it is the kind of place that can be read, and that Christianity accounts for this while naturalism helps itself to it without explanation. The cell is that claim in miniature. At the base of biological life there is a message, a code, and a machine that reads it. Whatever process produced that arrangement, the arrangement is there. Naturalism must account for it as the outcome of unguided physical processes. Christianity can treat it as entirely at home in a world made by the eternal Word.

Francis Collins is worth mentioning here, though not for the reason he usually gets cited. Collins led the international Human Genome Project. He was raised with little religion and was an atheist by graduate school. His movement toward faith did not begin with DNA. It began in medical school, where seriously ill patients and their convictions forced open questions he had dismissed, and it went forward through C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity and the argument from the moral law. He came to Christ around the age of twenty-seven, more than two decades before the genome draft was announced. [6] What his genomic work did was give an existing faith something to worship over. Standing at the White House in June 2000 to announce the first draft of the human genome, Collins said he found it humbling and awe-inspiring to realize that “we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God.” [7]

I give the sequence because the sequence matters. Collins is no evidence that DNA converts atheists. His value here is different: a first-rate scientist found the Christian faith intellectually serious, and the further he read into the genome, the more the language of worship struck him as the natural language for what he was looking at.

A brief note for clarity

Some Christians believe God used evolutionary processes as His means of creating life over long ages. That is a discussion for another time, and faithful believers hold different views on it.

But notice that even on that understanding, evolutionary mechanisms would describe processes within creation. They would not explain why a law-governed creation exists at all, why those processes possess the capacities they possess, or why the world is intelligible to the human mind. The questions this article is asking sit underneath the biology rather than alongside it, and they are still waiting whichever way the biology goes.

Christianity says the universe is word-shaped because it comes from the Word

Here is where the Christian answer becomes both bold and coherent.

In Scripture, matter is never ultimate. The Bible opens with God creating by His word, and John’s Gospel identifies the eternal Word through whom everything was made:

“In the beginning was the Word … and all things were made through him” (John 1:1-3).

And Scripture adds that this same Christ sustains what He originated:

“By him all things were created … and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:16-17).

Christians are therefore not surprised to find order, meaning, and intelligibility woven through reality. We expect it. It is what you would expect of a world created and upheld by the eternal Word.

You might reasonably suspect that all this is elegant philosophy and nothing more, unprovable in principle. But Christianity does not rest on philosophy alone. It makes a public historical claim, open to investigation: the Word who made everything entered history at a particular time and place, performed public miracles, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and rose bodily from the dead. Paul staked the entire faith on that event and invited the test: “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). The evidence for the resurrection deserves an article of its own, and it will get one.

Then the claim becomes concrete:

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

The heart of the matter

If all of that is true, an obvious question follows. Why are these arguments not simply decisive? Why does a case that looks clear to one person look thin to another?

Scripture answers directly, and the answer is uncomfortable. Our difficulty is moral before it is intellectual. Paul says that what can be known about God is plain, that God has shown it to us, and that men suppress the truth by their unrighteousness (Romans 1:18-20). We do not lack evidence. We resist a claim, because we do not want to honor Him as God.

This tells you what an argument like this one can and cannot do. An argument can answer real questions, clear away genuine misunderstandings, and expose how thin our excuses are. It cannot cure the heart’s resistance to God. That work belongs to grace alone. Arguments have their place, and this one is worth making. We should not ask more of it than it can give.

Which means we need more than arguments. We need grace.

That is precisely what God has given. He has not confronted us with evidence and left us to sort ourselves out. The eternal Son, through whom all things were made, became flesh, died for our sins, and was raised for our justification. He came to reconcile rebels, to seek and to save the lost.

If you sense not only questions but resistance in yourself as you read this, you are not alone. That is simply the human condition, and it is exactly why the gospel is good news.

A word to the Christian who has felt outnumbered

Some of you reading this are believers who have felt intellectually cornered: by a professor, by a colleague, by a son or daughter home from university with hard questions. You have wondered privately whether the clever people know something you do not.

Hear this. The Christian faith has nothing to fear from honest investigation and never has. You are not holding a fragile position that survives only so long as nobody examines it closely. The eternal Word, whose wisdom stands behind the reading and translating systems within the cells of your body, took on flesh so that you could know Him. Ask your questions. Read widely. You will not lose Him at the bottom of the enquiry.

An invitation

If you are wrestling with these things, here is a step you can take this week. Read the Gospel of John slowly and honestly, with an open Bible and an open mind. Ask God to show you the truth. Christianity does not ask you to silence your questions. It asks you to bring them to Christ.

Christianity is an announcement: God has made Himself known in His Son, and He now calls you to come to Him.

If you would like to talk any of this through, come and speak with us. We would be glad to.

Footnotes

[1] James Hannam, “Modern Science’s Christian Sources,” First Things, October 2011 (Issue 216). Hannam is the author of The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution (Regnery, 2011), published in the United Kingdom as God’s Philosophers (Icon, 2009).

[2] “ACGT,” National Human Genome Research Institute, Genetics Glossary, Genome.gov.

[3] “Human Genomic Variation,” National Human Genome Research Institute, Fact Sheet, February 1, 2023, Genome.gov. In simple terms, DNA is written using four chemical letters (A, C, G, and T), often called bases or nucleotides. A chromosome is a long, packaged DNA molecule. Humans have 23 chromosomes in one complete set, and most human body cells carry two complete sets, one inherited from the mother and one from the father. This two-set arrangement is why we speak of pairs of chromosomes. (A note for curious readers: some cells are exceptions. Mature red blood cells, for instance, have no nucleus and so do not carry nuclear DNA in the usual way.)

[4] “Base Pair,” National Human Genome Research Institute, Genetics Glossary, Genome.gov.

[5] Bruce Alberts et al., “From RNA to Protein,” Molecular Biology of the Cell, 4th ed. (Garland Science, 2002), NCBI Bookshelf. In standard biological terms, the DNA sequence of a protein-coding gene is transcribed into messenger RNA (mRNA). A ribosome, itself a molecular machine, then reads the mRNA in three-letter units called codons. Transfer RNAs (tRNAs) act as adaptors, matching codons to specific amino acids, which the ribosome links together to form a protein.

[6] Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press, 2006), especially the opening chapters, where Collins recounts his atheism, the patient who challenged him, his reading of Lewis, and his conversion at twenty-seven.

[7] Remarks on the Completion of the First Survey of the Entire Human Genome Project, June 26, 2000, transcript, National Human Genome Research Institute, Genome.gov.