I want you to imagine that you and your friends are sitting in a space ship ready to blast off for a tour of the universe. If you left today at noon, traveling at the speed of light, you would eat your supper this evening as you left our solar system. It would take you 5 and ½ years to reach the closest star to our solar system. And it would take you 10,000 light years to reach the edge of the Milky Way Galaxy! The Milky Way Galaxy contains approximately 200 billion stars and is 100,000 light years across, but since our planet is near one of the edges, it would only take us 10,000 light years to get to the edge. When you finally cleared the Milky Way Galaxy, you would be traveling through the unimaginably vast universe where the closest neighboring galaxy, M31, is 2 million light years away. Astronomers tell us that there may be as many as 125 billion galaxies in the universe!

But before we do too much exploring of the universe, let’s take a look at the planet we live on, planet earth. It is a beautiful and unique speck in the universe with color, variety, weather and life.

So how did planet earth end up the way it did? How did it become so unique…so full of life of every type imaginable? And speaking of life, how did it get here in the first place?

Did it all ‘just happen to happen’; was it all by chance? Or was there a plan; a design; a Creator? To help with the answer, I want to offer some information about our planet that is really quite impressive. It is information that shows how unique and special our planet our planet is among, not just the other planets in our solar system, but as far as we can tell, unique and special in the universe.

And the most unique things about our planet have to do with its location and its abundant and critical resources that allow it to sustain life. This uniqueness is known as “The Anthropic Principle“. Simply stated, it means that the physical structure of the universe is exactly what it must be in order to sustain life. Put another way, the universe is fine tuned for life to exist. But where that life can exist is unique to our planet alone!

Consider these realities about the earth:

• If the earth were only a little closer to the sun, surface temperatures would be far higher than the boiling point of water and unable to support life.

• If the earth were only a little farther away from the sun, everything would freeze leaving the landscape a barren frozen wasteland and the concentration of carbon dioxide would become so high that the air would not be breathable.

• And speaking of the sun; we all know it is a star and it is burning inferno. The surface temperatures are approximately 11,000 degrees. It is a yellow star. If it were a red star, which the vast majority of stars are, the surface temperature would only be around 3,500 degrees, far too cool to support life on the earth. If it were a blue star, the surface temperature would be as much as 30,000 degrees, far too hot to support life on earth.

• But the orbit of the earth is just the right distance from the sun and the sun is just the right kind of star and the right size of star to allow life-sustaining temperatures and atmosphere. Some scientists call this ‘The Goldilocks Effect’ and it goes something like this: “Earth supports life alone among the planets because it is not too hot and not too cold, but just right.”

• Jupiter is positioned in such a way relative to the earth that it protects us from the impact of life-threatening comets, which are attracted to it rather than earth, due to its tremendous gravitational pull because of its enormous size.

• Earth is located away from the asteroid belt and so avoids being bombarded by asteroids.

• Earth is large enough to have a gravitational pull to retain our atmosphere, yet small enough to not retain many harmful gases.

• Earth has a magnetic field that if it were weaker, it would be devastated by cosmic radiation. If it were stronger, it would be devastated by severe electromagnetic storms.

• Earth has oxygen, and plenty of it.

• Earth has water and plenty of it.

• Earth is a unique place in the universe where life can exist…and we all know that earth is a place where life does exist! How did that happen? Some say, by chance. According to the World Encyclopedia, ‘organic evolution’ is, “The idea that living things evolved from non-living matter and changed through the ages.”

And maybe that is how it happened, but let me offer just one piece of ‘food for thought’; DNA.

DNA is the ‘language’ in the heart of the cell, a set of instructions telling the cell how to construct proteins - much like the software needed to run a computer. This microscopic part of a human cell contains as much information as 3 sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica - all 36 volumes and the information is in the precise order that it needs to be to make sense.

According to The National Human Genome Research Institute web site:

• DNA is why elephants only give birth to little elephants, giraffes to giraffes, dogs to dogs and so on.

• DNA is made up of chemical building blocks called nucleotides: a phosphate group, a sugar group and one of 4 nitrogen bases.

• The 4 nitrogen bases determine the instructions in the DNA. The sequence of the nitrogen bases determine, for example, if the eyes will be brown or blue.

• DNA instructions are used to make the ‘language’ of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins, which do most of the work in our bodies.

Now if you didn’t understand everything about DNA, you are not alone, neither do I. Understanding DNA is not my point, being amazed by it is!

I recently watched “Universe”, a documentary put out by the History Channel. It has one entire DVD on how the earth came to be and how life began on this planet. A star exploded and over billions of years small parts began to collect together forming this planet. It was very violent and very fiery. But eventually it settled down and all of the necessary ingredients for life landed here and eventually in a body of water some chemicals began to interact with one another and in time, life began on our planet! One of the scientists interviewed summed up the origin of life with these words, “We owe our heritage to the scum of the earth.” Maybe we do. Maybe it was just chance. But maybe not. The odds of our earth being perfectly positioned and capable of sustaining life and that life actually exists and that it all happened by chance has been calculated to be by chance 1 chance in 100 million trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion.

Dr. George Wald, a scientist and winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine once said, “There are only two possible explanations as to how life arose: Spontaneous generation arising to evolution or a supernatural creative act of God…There is no other possibility. Spontaneous generation (a now discarded theory that living organisms can arise from non-life matter) was scientifically disproved 120 years ago by Louis Pasteur and others, but that just leaves us with only one other possibility…that life came as a supernatural act of creation by God, but I can’t accept that philosophy because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation leading to evolution.”

I will admit that belief in creation takes faith. Hebrews 11:3 says, “By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.”

Both evolution and creation take faith to believe, simply because no one was there to verify it. Take your pick. I choose to believe that a Supernatural being created all of this. I choose to believe the first statement of the Bible, Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

What do you think?