A cosmic whodunit
The Hardy Boys mystery books were a favorite of mine in my pre-teen years. By close observation and deductive reasoning from fragmented facts, Joe and Frank always solved the mystery and caught the bad guy. Their real life equivalents are forensic pathologists who analyze blood, hair, or fiber evidence from a crime scene which, when combined with other forms of evidence, can help identify the perpetrator. Detectives may also develop a partial profile of the personality and abilities of the suspect based on the information gathered from the scene. But is it possible to apply forensic reasoning to the universe as a whole? If there is a “Someone” responsible for the way the universe is, could we develop a partial profile of this Someone from our basic understanding of the universe? Engineer and inventor David Penny has suggested that, indeed, we can develop a profile of the Creator from what has been created.1 Penny suggests that key observations about the universe in general, and human beings in particular, indicate that the agent responsible for creation must have had at least four characteristics. That is, the Creator would be personal, powerful, intelligent, and non-material (i.e. spiritual).
Every engineer, painter, or sculptor is at least as complex as the most complicated part of whatever they create. So, firstly, the Creator would be a person and have insight, reasoning, and emotions as do the most complex of living things: human beings. Secondly, the Creator would have access to, and control over, all the energy needed to start the universe in the beginning. Consider that when you wind up a rubber band-powered airplane, you actually transfer your energy to the rubber band. From the point when the plane is released, the energy in the rubber band is converted into the spinning of the propeller and the energy is spent. So, too, the universe started with a set amount of energy imparted to it by the Creator and has been running down ever since. Thirdly, the Creator would have the intelligence to create consistent physical laws that govern the interactions of matter, as well as the intelligence to design and build complex biochemical motors and living systems. And, fourthly, to accomplish all this, the Creator would need access to all parts of the very large universe simultaneously and therefore could not be made of matter as He would need to travel faster than the speed of light. Nor could a Creator made of matter survive the intense temperatures some predict were present at the moment of creation. So, whether the universe was large or small, the agent of creation could not have been made of physical matter.
What we leave behind always reveals something about us. But it can also be incomplete. The same is true of the forensic universe. It reveals in part the transcendent, powerful, personal God of creation. But it is the further revelation in the Bible of the death of Jesus Christ on the cross that more completely reveals His love for each of us.
1 David Penny, Scientific Implications About Origins, http://www.gravitationalrelativity.com