If you had visited my man cave a few years ago, you would have seen a stack of bricks, a pile of sand, and sacks of mortar. If you visit me now, we could escape the winter cold by sitting near the wood stove. Assuming you notice the brickwork, at no point would you conclude the building materials arranged themselves in such an orderly, useful fashion. Our warm visit would benefit from my plan and purpose, a meeting with the fire chief about chimney design, and a mason skilled to lay the bricks just so.
I invite you into this scenario to consider how the world came to be. Did it begin with the raw materials which assembled themselves (“bottom-up”), or was there a designer and builder (“top-down”)? If you insist on the former, perhaps you agree with philosopher Thomas Nagel who famously insisted, “I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.” Professor John Lennox points out, “If bottom-up is the only legitimate form of explanation, then there is, by definition, no ultimate top-down causation. Therefore, God is dead and science has buried him.” Nagel feels the tension because he knows a bottom-up theory is too weak to bear the load of such a weighty conclusion about God’s demise.
Another example. I met a pretty young co-ed in college. We became friends and more. I left for university. The mailman delighted me when he delivered her letters (no email in those days!). Eons of time would never be enough for the ink to appear on the paper on its own. What I held in my hand was far more than ink and paper. It was a message containing information communicated by a person. Information can only come from intelligence. This is what troubles Nagel even as he insists God cannot be allowed as an explanation for the information coded into the DNA of every living thing.
Nagle can see that it is impossible for living things to organize themselves in a “bottom-up” sequence. He wrote a book entitled, Mind and Cosmos: Why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of the world is almost certainly false” (2012). He is courageous to publish such a politically and scientifically incorrect book. But he remains determined to resist the most reasonable, satisfactory, and rational explanation that best fits the data. You see it when God asks, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” (Job 38:4). In fact, “All things came into being through Him” (John 1:3).
Neither my chimney nor my wife’s letters to me could have emerged from their raw materials without purpose and intelligence. Neither did you. God made you. He wants you to know Him. He’s quite alive!