Nature and Science Speak about God

August 24, 2020Science & Faith

If we think of what conditions were like at the time of the formation of the earth, it seems all the more miraculous that life could come into being at all.

Isaac Asimov has painted a fearsome picture of the beginning of things. Correcting the earlier hypothesis in favour, at the beginning of this century, he writes:

Currently, scientists are convinced the earth and the other planets did not form from the sun, but were formed of particles coming together at the same time that the sun itself was being formed. The earth was never at sun temperature, but it did grow quite warm through the energies of collision of all the particles that formed it. It grew warm enough so that its relatively small mass could not hold an atmosphere or water vapor to begin with.

The solid body of the newly formed earth had, in other words, neither atmosphere nor ocean. Where then did they come from? There existed water (and gases) in loose combination with the rocky substances making up the solid portion of the globe. As that solid portion packed together more and more tightly under the pull of gravity, its interior grew hotter and hotter. Water vapor and gas were forced out of combination with the rock, and came fizzing out from its substance.

The gaseous bubbles, forming and collecting, racked the baby earth with enormous quakes: escaping heat produced violent volcanic eruptions. For unnumbered years, liquid water did not fall from the sky; rather, water vapor whistled out of the crust and then condensed. The oceans formed from below, not from above.

What geologists mainly dispute now is the rate at which the oceans formed. Did the water vapor all fizz out within a billion years or less, so that the ocean has been its present size ever since life began? Or has the process been so slow that the ocean has been growing all through geologic time and is still growing?

Those who maintain the ocean formed early in the game and has been steady in size for a long time, point out that the continents seem to be a permanent feature of the earth. They do not appear to have been much larger in the past, when the ocean was supposedly, much smaller.

On the other hand, those who maintain the ocean has been growing steadily point out that volcanic eruptions even today pour quantities of water vapour into the air; water vapor derived from deep-lying rocks, not from the ocean. Also, there are sea mounts under the Pacific with flat tops that may have once been at ocean level but are now hundreds of feel below.

Be that as it may, if the oceans had been deeper by just a few feet more, they would have absorbed all available carbon dioxide and oxygen, and no vegetation of any kind could have survived upon the earth’s surface. If the air in the atmosphere had been less dense than it is at present, the twenty million meteors that daily enter it at speeds of about thirty miles per second, would be crashing down all over the earth, burning up all combustible matter and perforating the whole of the earth’s surface.

The heat alone of a meteor travelling 90 times faster than a bullet would be enough to annihilate so vulnerable a creature as man. It is thanks to this atmospheric layer being of an appropriate density that mankind is safeguarded against these fiery showers of celestial debris. This density is also exactly right for solar actinic rays to reach the earth in such proportions as will promote the growth of vegetation, destroy harmful bacteria, and make vitamins available which may be absorbed directly from the sunlight through the skin, or indirectly from edible matter through the digestive system. How wonderful it is to have all these benefits inexact proportion to our requirements.

Take oxygen, for example. It is the source of life and is not obtainable from any source other than the atmosphere. But had it formed 50% of the atmosphere or more, instead of the present 21%, combustibility of all matter on the earth’s surface would have been so high that even if just a single tree caught fire, whole forests would at once explode. Similarly, had the proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere been as low as 10%, life might conceivably have adjusted to this over the centuries, but it is unlikely that human civilization would have taken its present form. And if all of the free oxygen instead of only a part, had been absorbed by the matter present on the earth’s surface, no animal life would have been possible at all.

Along with oxygen, hydrogen, carbon dioxide and carbon gases in their free form as well as in the form of different compounds are the most important ingredients of life; the very foundations, in fact, on which our life rests. There being not even one chance in a hundred million that all these elements should have assembled in such favourable proportions on any other planet at any one given time, we have to ask ourselves how it came about that such freely moving gases formed themselves into a compound and remained suspended in the atmosphere in exactly the right proportions to sustain life. As the noted physicist Morton White puts it, ‘Science has no explanation to offer for the facts, and to say it is accidental is to defy mathematics’.

We have to concede that there is a formidable array of facts in this world and the universe, which cannot be explained unless we admit the intervention of a superior mind. For instance, the density of ice is less than that of water, because as it freezes, its volume increases in relation to its mass. It is because of this that ice floats instead of sinking to the bottom of lakes and rivers and gradually forming a solid mass. On the surface of the water, it forms a layer of insulation to maintain the water below at a temperature above freezing point. Fish and other forms of marine life are thus permitted to survive throughout the winter, and, when spring comes, the ice melts rapidly. If water did not behave in this way, all of us in general, and people in cold countries in particular, would face severe calamities. Clearly this property of water is tremendously important to life.