Principle # 1: God exists
In his Pirush Mishnayot, Maimonides (1135-1204) formulated the 13 principles of the Jewish faith. “The first principle is to believe in the existence of God… and that He is the cause of the existence of all that exists.” In other words, Maimonides explains that the belief in God consist of believing in the existence of a Creator of the Universe. That’s the first thing we should know about God.
There was always opposition to this principle. For centuries, the idea that prevailed was that of Aristotle, who held that the World was not created by God, is eternal and has always existed as we see it today.
It took a long time until this idea changed. In 1929 Edwin Hubble discovered something revolutionary. The universe is not static, neither is moving in an orbital circular way. The universe, Hubble proved, is expanding! And if it is expanding, it must have had a starting time, a point zero when it all began. That was the first indication in the history of scientific thought that the universe had a Creator. As I explained in my book “Awesome Creation”, secular scientists of that time (the 1930’s, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington and many others) strongly rejected the idea of an expanding universe, because they considered it a “religious” concept. The idea of the beginning of the universe is very close to the idea of Creation, these naturalist scientists reasoned. With unusual candor Eddington said: “Philosophically, the idea that the universe had a beginning, is repugnant to me …”.
Either way, from that time, Aristotle’s idea of the eternal universe, which dominated the thinking of the scientific world for over 25 centuries, finally collapsed.
And although many scientists will always persist in denying that what science is discovering reinforces the belief in the existence of a Creator, these evidences are now stronger than ever. Why? Because in the same way the powerful telescope Hubble developed in Pasadena, helped humanity to “discover” the Creator of the universe, microscopes are helping us today to appreciate more than ever the sophistication of the microcosm, especially, the incredible complexity of the cell and its components: “Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than -10^20 grams, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machinery built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world. Each microscopic cell is as functionally complex as a small city. It is irreducibly complex. When magnified 50,000 times through electron micrographs, we see that a cell is made up of multiple complex structures, each with a different role in the cell’s operation. As we delve further into the cellular world, technology is revealing black boxes within previous black boxes. As science advances, more of these black boxes are being opened, exposing an “unanticipated Lilliputian world” of enormous complexity that has pushed the theory of evolution to a breaking point.
Today, thanks to the possibilities we have to observe the incredible complexity of the macrocosm and the microcosm around us, perceiving the exquisite design of Creation, and the subsequent existence of God, as its intelligent Creator, is more accessible than ever
