The Need For A Designer

Stephen Hawking, one of the most respected physicists in modern times, has said that “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”

How ridiculous! When, in the entire history of the human race, has anything, ever, even once, created itself spontaneously, let alone something that is as incomprehensibly complex and beautiful as the entire universe?

This brings us to my first argument for a Creator:

Never, ever, in the history of humanity, has an explorer uncovered a buried brick wall, or discovered the remnants of a stone foundation in the woods overrun by bushes, or a piece of painted pottery excavated from an archaeological site, and assumed that such a thing occurred naturally without a human being involved in the process. It’s a given. No one even thinks to challenge that idea! Of course a person did this. It’s not even questioned.

Why? Why do we take it 100% for granted that such a historical artifact was indeed created by a human being?

I submit that it’s because that wall, that shard of pottery, that arrowhead, that piece of antiquity, possesses two characteristics that demand it was created by an intelligent being: purpose and design.

Mesa Verde National Monument is a fascinating place. Brick cliff dwellings have been built under a cliff, in which some past civilization lived and prospered. At least for a while. We don’t why they left, but we can see the buildings and artifacts they left behind, and of course we intuitively know that these buildings were designed and built. They could not have occurred through natural unguided processes.

But why do we instinctively know this?

Because they contain design and purpose.

The design is evidenced in the size of the buildings and rooms, the size and shape of the hand-made bricks (made from the surrounding soil and water), the height of the walls, and the choice to locate the structure under the overhang of a huge cliff.

The purpose is clear in the features of the buildings: the upper floor had a hole in the floor with a ladder that could be pulled up at night to keep animals and thieves out. The doors were sized to fit the inhabitants. The grain bin was designed to keep their corn safe through the winter. The pottery found on site had the purpose of carrying water, the ladder had the purpose of allowing the people to climb up into the upper rooms.

Design and purpose. They are evident in every archaeological artifact ever discovered. And no one ever, ever, ever thinks that such things happened naturally.

Yet the universe has infinitely more design, more engineering, more purpose, more beauty, and yet there are those who believe it created itself.

This is a ridiculous, self-refuting idea. And I’m speaking from a perfectly pragmatic, logical standpoint. To insist that every single human invention ever created was the result of intelligent design, and yet to deny that the universe could have happened all by itself is actually—let’s be honest here—a very stupid idea.

“The fool says in his heart ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 14:1).

I’m sorry, but although what I am about to say is said in love, because I care about the man’s eternal destiny, I still must say it because it’s biblically true: Stephen Hawking is a fool. I love him, but he is absolutely dead wrong.

He thinks that the laws of the universe could have created themselves, and he says “because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing”, but a man of his intellectual stature ought to understand that a physical law can create nothing. Physical laws are statements about how reality works. They can no more create a star or an amoeba or a pine tree than the fact that I have brown eyes.

Traffic laws only dictate how things work, they do not cause anything to happen. Traffic laws cannot create traffic lights or write tickets, the laws only explain things.

Design, by its very definition, requires a designer. And purpose is closely related to design. In fact, aside from pure aestheticism, design and purpose are intimately intertwined.

The very work that Hawking himself accomplishes as a physicist is proof that any kind of creative or productive endeavor must require a Producer. Would he ever surmise that his equations, the books he’s written, the peer-reviewed papers he’s produced, came about by some law of nature in the absence of any human being? Of course not! How ridiculous! Yet he insists that the universe, and every living thing on the earth, in all its complexity, in all its symbiotic relationships, in all its amazing beauty, happened all by itself.

The arguments of Hawking and people like him are 100% logically self-refuting. Their very arguments defeat themselves. His argument of autonomous creation is refuted by his own hard work. Nothing in the history of all humankind has ever created itself, and nothing ever will. The second law of thermodynamics forbids, it, the presence of design and purpose forbids it, the very rules of logic forbid it.

Design requires a Designer. Laws, even natural laws, require a Lawgiver. Purpose requires a Purpose-giver. Ultimate origins require an Originator. Period.

Case closed.