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Oh, Lord God! Behold, You Yourself have made the heavens and the earth by Your great power and by Your outstretched arm! Nothing is too difficult for You (Jeremiah 32:17, NASB).
We’ve all experienced carbon over the holidays: The black wicks left after burning candles scented to smell like cranberries, evergreen, or farts (gag gift to me from my grandkids). The blackened steaks that I try to avoid while grilling for my family’s Christmas dinner. The logs left over from the previous day’s fire in the fireplace.
Organic things burn, and living things contain 58 percent carbon.
Carbon has a relatively weak bond with itself, meaning it connects easily to oxygen, losing electrons to form carbon dioxide and producing heat in the chemical exchange. Since carbon absorbs light, its color is black — thus, the black of incompletely burned wicks and logs.
I’m not trying to ruin your next candlelight and fireplace dinner with non-romantic and boring basic chemistry. But I must note that since carbon reacts easily and quickly to other elements, our breathing, digestion, excretion, and reproduction depend upon carbon.
Without carbon, we are nothing but rocks, metals, or nuclear isotopes. And I tend to think of my life as more elegant and meaningful than a mere isotope. But I may have a too high opinion of myself.
With carbon so abundant and critical to life, we must ask, “Where did it come from?” And God, our Divine Designer, can be the only answer.
It takes a universe to raise the Earth.
All those billions of stars must exist to get the right cosmic mass density needed to create enough carbon for life to exist on Earth. Yep, science tells us that if a few billion stars are left out of the universe — no carbon, no Earth, and no Interruptions!
Also, it takes the right balance of carbon for life on Earth. A planet lacking carbon can’t sustain life, and a planet with too much carbon creates a suffocating, life-threatening atmosphere.
In the 1950s, famous astronomer Fred Hoyle wrote. . .
A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion beyond question.
Not only carbon, but all aspects of our universe, world, and life require Divine design. There’s no explanation for anything without God. Did matter, energy, cosmic mass, planets, black holes, monkeys, cats, humans, rational thinking, self-awareness, love, and hope — just flicker into existence?
Psalm 14:1 says, “Only fools say in their hearts, ‘There is no God’” (NLT).
I think a rational explanation for the existence of atheists and agnostics would be too little or too much carbon in their brains.