June 18, 2000 Humble Messenger

SEVEN REASONS WHY A SCIENTIST BELIEVES IN GOD
Adapted from the book, "Man Does Not Stand Alone" by A. Cressy Morrison, Former president of the New York Academy of Sciences
(Reprinted with permission from the December 1946 Readeršs Digest. Originally appeared in Man Does Not Stand Alone, 1944 Fleming H. Revell Co., a division of Baker House Book Co.)[Due to the length of this article, it is being published in three parts. If you wish to have the entire article, you will need the Humble Messenger from last week, this week, and next week. srf]

Second: The resourcefulness of life to accomplish its purpose is a manifestation of all-pervading Intelligence.

What life itself is, no man has fathomed. It has neither weight nor dimensions, but it does have force; a growing root will crack a rock. Life has conquered water, land and air, mastering the elements, compelling them to dissolve and reform their combinations.
Life, the sculptor, shapes all living things; an artist it designs every leaf of every tree and colors every flower. Life is a musician and has taught each bird to sing its love songs, the insects to call each other in the music of the multitudinous sounds. Life is a sublime chemist, giving taste to fruits and spices, and perfume to the rose, changing water and carbonic acid into sugar and wood, and in so doing, releasing oxygen that animals may have the breath of life.

 Behold an almost invisible drop of protoplasm, transparent, jellylike, capable of motion, drawing energy from the sun. This single cell, this transparent mistlike droplet, holds within itself the germ of life, and has the power to distribute this life to every living thing, great and small. The powers of this droplet are greater than our vegetation and animals and people, for all life came from it. Nature did not create life; fire-blistered rocks and a saltless sea could not meet the necessary requirements.
Who, then, has put it here?

Third: Animal wisdom speaks irresistibly of a good Creator who infused instinct into otherwise helpless little creatures.
The young salmon spends years at sea, then comes back to his own river, and travels up the very side of the river into which flows the tributary where he was born. What brings him back so precisely? If you transfer him to another tributary he will know at once that he is off his course and he will fight his way down and back to the main stream and then turn up against the current to finish his destiny accurately.

Even more difficult to solve is the mystery of eels. These amazing creatures migrate at maturity from all ponds and rivers everywhere‹those from Europe across thousands of miles of ocean‹all bound for the same abysmal deeps near Bermuda. There they breed and die. The little ones, with no apparent means of knowing any thing except that they are in a wilderness of water, nevertheless start back and find their way not only to the very shore from which their parents came but thence to the rivers, lakes or little ponds-‹so that each body of water is always populated with eels. No American eel has ever been caught in Europe, no European eel in American waters. Natures has even delayed the maturity of the European eel by a year or more to make up for its longer journey. Where does the directing impulse originate?

A wasp will overpower a grasshopper, dig a hole in the earth, sting the grasshopper in exactly the right place so that he does not die but becomes unconscious and lives on as a form of preserved meat. Then the wasp will lay her eggs handily so that her children when they hatch can nibble without killing the insect on which they feed; to them dead meat would be fatal. The mother then flies away and dies; she never sees her young. Surely the wasp must have done all this right the first time and every time, else there would be no wasps. Such mysterious techniques cannot be explained by adaptation; they were bestowed.

Fourth: Man has something more than animal instinct‹the power of reason.

No other animal has ever left a record of its ability to count ten, or even to understand the meaning of ten. Where instinct is like a single note of a flute, beautiful but limited, the human brain contains all the notes of all the instruments in the orchestra. No need to belabor this fourth point; thanks to human reason we can contemplate the possibility that we are what we are only because we have received a spark of Universal Intelligence.