"Seven Reasons Why I Believe in God."

Abraham Cressy Morrison (American scholars, president of the New York Academy of Science

"We are still only in the dawn of scientific knowledge,"

"The closer we come to daybreak, the more brightly shines our morning, the more clearly the creation of the omniscient Creator is illumined before us. Now in the spirit of scientific humility, in the spirit of faith based on knowledge, we are all the more confirmed in our conviction of the existence of God.

"I personally number seven circumstances which determine my belief in God. They are:

"First: Absolutely distinct mathematical laws demonstrate the universality of the creation by a Supreme Intelligence.

"Suppose you take ten pennies and mark them from one to ten. Put them in a bag and give them a good shake. Now try to draw them out in sequence from one to ten putting each coin back in your sack after each draw. Your chance of drawing number one is one in ten. Your chance of drawing one and two in succession would be one in one hundred. Your chance of drawing one, two and three in succession would be one in a thousand. Your chance of drawing from number one to number ten in succession would reach the unbelievable figure of one chance in ten billion.

"By these same mathematical arguments they say that for origin and development of life on earth, such an incredible number of interrelated and interdependent events would have been required that without intelligent direction, simply by chance, there is no way it could possibly have arisen. The velocity of the rotation of the earth is a thousand miles an hour. If the earth rotated with the speed of one hundred miles an hour, then our days and nights would be ten times as long as now. The hot sun of summer would then burn up our vegetation each long day, and every sprout would freeze in such a night.

"The sun has a surface temperature of 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and our earth is just far enough away so that this ‘eternal fire’ warms us just enough and not too much. If the temperature on earth had changed so-much as fifty degrees on the average for a single year, all vegetation would be dead and man with it, roasted or frozen.

"The earth is tilted at an angle of twenty-three degrees. This gives us our seasons of the year. If it had not been tilted, the water vapor from the ocean would move north and south, piling up continents of ice. If the moon, instead of being at its present distance, were removed from us only by 50,000 miles, our high tides and low tides would be so enormous that twice a day all the lowlands of all the continents would be submerged by a rush of water so enormous that even the mountains would soon be eroded away. Had the crust of the earth been ten feet thicker, there would be no oxygen and all life would be doomed to destruction. If the oceans were comparatively deeper, the carbon dioxide would absorb all the oxygen, and all life would again perish. If the atmosphere enveloping our earthly sphere were a little thinner, some of the meteors which are now burned in the outer atmosphere by the millions every day would strike all parts of the earth, and would set fire to every burnable object.

"These and innumerable other examples attest to the fact that for life to arise spontaneously on earth there is not one chance in a whole multitude of millions.

"Second: The wealth of source material from which life draws strength for fulfillment of its mission, in itself testifies to the presence of a self-sufficient and omnipotent Intelligence.

"What life is, no man has yet fathomed. It has no weight or dimensions. Life has force. A germinating kernel can demolish a rock. Life conquers water, dry land and air, possesses their elements, cramming them together, dissolving them, transforming their combinations.

"Life is a sculptor and shapes all living things, an artist that designs the leaf of every tree, that colors the flowers. Life is a musician and has taught each bird to sing its love songs, the insects to call each other in the music of their multitudinous sounds. Life is a chemist that gives taste to our fruits and perfume to the rose. Life’s chemistry changes water and carbonic acid into wood and sugar but in doing so, releases oxygen that animals may have the breath of life.

"Here before us is a drop of protoplasm, an almost invisible drop, transparent, jellylike, capable of motion, drawing energy from the sun. This single cell, this transparent, mist-like droplet, holds within itself the germ of all life, and has the power to distribute this life to every living thing, great and small. The powers of this droplet of protoplasm are greater than the powers of our existence, greater than all the animals or people, for all life came from it and without it no living thing would have been or could be. It is not nature that created life. Rocks split by fire and fresh water seas would not have been sufficient to meet the requirements for the origin of life.

"Who puts life into the speck of protoplasm?

"Third: The intelligence of animals is indisputable evidence of the wisdom of the Creator, who instilled instincts in His creatures, without which they would be completely helpless.

"The young salmon spends years at sea, then it returns to its native river and travels up the side of the river into which flows the tributary in which it was born. What brings them back with such precision? If a salmon going up a river is transferred to another tributary, it will at once realize it is not in the right tributary and will fight its way down to the mainstream and then turn up against the current to finish his destiny.

"Another great mystery is hidden in the behavior of the eel. These amazing creatures migrate at maturity from all ponds and rivers everywhere — those from Europe across thousands of miles of ocean — and go to the ocean depths south of Bermuda. There they breed and die. The little ones, with no apparent means of knowing anything to prevent their being lost in the ocean depths, go the way of their fathers, to the same streams, ponds and seas from which they first began their journey to the Bermuda islands. No American eel has ever been caught in European waters, and no European eel has ever been caught in American waters. Nature has also delayed the maturity of the European eel by a year or more to make up for its much greater journey. What is the source of this sense of direction and will power?

"A wasp, having overcome a grasshopper, stings it in exactly the right place. From this blow the grasshopper ‘dies.’ It loses consciousness but continues to live, as a form of preserved meat. After this, the wasp lays her eggs exactly in the right place that when they hatch, her children can eat without killing the insect on which they feed. Dead meat would be poison for them. Having completed her work, the wasp mother flies away and dies. She never sees her young. Is it not beyond doubt that the wasp must have done all this right the first time and every time, for otherwise there would be no wasps. This mysterious knowledge cannot be explained by the fact that wasps teach one another. It is deposited in their flesh and blood.

"Fourth: Man functions with more than animal instinct.
He has reason. There has never been an animal which has had the capacity to count to ten. It is not able to comprehend the meaning of ten numerals. Instinct is like a single note on a flute, beautiful but limited; whereas the human brain contains all the notes of all the instruments in the orchestra. It is worth mentioning one point: thanks to our intelligence, we are able to understand what we are, we have self-awareness, and this capability is provided only by the spark of Universal Intelligence implanted in us.

"Fifth: The miracle of genes — the existence of which was unknown to Darwin — testifies to the fact that for all life there was manifested care.

"The genes are so infinitesimal that if all of them which are responsible for all human beings on earth today could be collected and put in one place, they would all be able to fit in a thimble. And the thimble still would not be full! These ultramicroscopic genes are the absolute keys to all human, animal and vegetable characteristics. A thimble is a small place in which to put all the individual characteristics of four billion human beings. However, the facts are beyond question. If this is so, does it follow that the gene contains in itself the key to the psychology of each separate being, containing all of this in such a tiny space?

"Here is the beginning of evolution! It begins at the cell, the entity which holds and carries the genes. The fact that a few million atoms contained in ultramicroscopic genes can be the absolute key governing life on earth, is evidence proving the manifest care for all life that someone provided for them beforehand, and that this providence proceeds from a Creative Intelligence. No other hypothesis in this case is able to help solve this riddle of existence.

"Sixth: How strange is the system of checks and balances in nature. We are compelled to acknowledge that only the most perfect intelligence is able to envisage all the correlations arising from such a complicated system of checks and balances.

"Many years ago in Australia, several species of cactus were planted for use as a hedge. The cactus had no insect enemies in Australia and soon began a prodigious growth. People began to seek the means to fight against it. The march of the cactus persisted until it had covered an area as great as England, crowded the inhabitants out of towns and villages and destroyed their farms, making cultivation impossible. No device the people discovered could stop its spread. The entomologists scoured the world and finally found an insect which lived exclusively on cactus, would eat nothing else, would breed freely, and which had no enemies in Australia. As soon as this insect conquered the cactus, the cactus pest retreated, and with it all but a protective residue of the insects, enough to hold the cactus in check forever.

The checks and balances have been provided, and have been persistently effective. Why indeed did not the insects which multiplied so incredibly quickly overcome all life? Because the insects have no lungs like man possesses, but breathe through tubes. When insects grow large, the tubes cannot grow in ratio to the increasing size of the body of the insect. Because of the mechanism of their structure and their method of breathing, there could never be an insect of great size. If this physical check had not been provided, man could not exist. Imagine a bumblebee as big as a lion.

"Seventh: The fact that man is capable of grasping the idea of the existence of God, is in itself sufficient evidence.
The conception of God arises from that mysterious capability of mankind which we call imagination. Only because of this power and only by means of its help, man, and no other living creature on earth, is able to find confirmation through abstract things. The expanse of knowledge which is opened by this capacity is perfectly immense. Indeed, thanks to precisely the imagination of man, the possibility of spiritual reality arises. Man is able to define, with obvious purpose, the great truth that Heaven exists everywhere and in everything, the truth that God lives everywhere and in all, and that He lives in our hearts.

"Thus, from science as well as from imagination, we find confirmation of the words of the psalmist, The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork (Ps. 19:1)."

The famous surgeon and professor in the universities of Cologne, Bonn and Berlin, August Bier (1861-1949) says, "If it ever happened that science and religion fell into disagreement, harmony would be restored through discovery of more precise basic data.