“Choose your miracle.”
The Christmas story and, with it, the incarnation, is a miracle. God becoming man through the virgin birth is an understandably tough pill to swallow if you are just hearing it for the first time. But, as we have mentioned before, the Bible begins with an even more audacious claim that God created something from nothing. However, the concept of “spontaneous creation” is one that is held by all sorts of Scientists. Rebecca McLaughlin, in her book, Is Christmas Unbelievable?, talks about how, in the end, no matter whether we see God at the center of the universe or “spontaneous creation,” we still have to choose a miracle to explain it all. The question then is, does the Christmas story provide a better answer for me? Mclaughlin explores this question when she writes,
“The scientific theory now known as the Big Bang was proposed in the 1930s by a Belgian Roman Catholic priest called Georges Lemaître. At the time, it was strongly resisted by some atheist physicists. Honestly, I get it: the idea that the entire universe had begun as a single incredibly dense, energetic point—what Lemaître called a “cosmic egg”—seems so implausible. In fact, it was first called the Big Bang by an atheist physicist who was mocking the idea. It sounded absurd. It also sounded far too much like the biblical claim that God made the universe out of nothing. The previous scientific consensus was that the universe had always existed, and this fit more comfortably with atheism. As famous physicist Stephen Hawking observed in his best-selling book A Brief History of Time, “There were therefore a number of attempts to avoid the conclusion that there had been a big bang.” While there have certainly been times in history when Christians have resisted scientific advances, this is an example where the shoe is distinctly on the other foot! Our knowledge of the physics of the universe has grown since Lemaître’s hypothesis first hatched. One thing we have learned is that our world seems to be incredibly fine-tuned. If the fundamental laws of the universe were even fractionally different, there would be no stars, no planets, and no life. The weirdness of this has led some scientists to hypothesize that there are billions of other universes with different laws, and ours is the one that just happened to work out. From a Christian perspective, there’s no problem with the idea that God made multiple universes. After all, he made billions of galaxies, and our tiny little planet is still central to his plans. But even if there are a practically infinite number of other universes, so that the fine-tuning of our universe is less implausible, we’re still left with the question of why reality exists at all?
Why is there something rather than nothing? In his last book, Stephen Hawking claimed to have answered this question:
“Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing … Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
But if we read closely, we’ll see that Hawking hasn’t really solved the problem of why anything exists in the first place. As agnostic physicist Paul Davies points out, Hawking’s “spontaneous creation” depends on the existence of eternal, unchanging, transcendent laws “that just happen to exist and must simply be accepted as given.” Davies observes that these laws “have a similar status to an unexplained, transcendent God.” In other words, Hawking argues that physical realities depend on eternal, non-physical realities—which is what Christians have been saying all along!
Yet there’s far more to the Christian view of God than that. According to the Bible, God didn’t just “light the blue touch paper” of the universe and step back, like my husband setting off fireworks for my kids on New Year’s Eve. God rules the universe from first to last. He cares about the world he’s made and the people he’s made—about you and about me. We know this because of what we celebrate at Christmas. Jesus was born to be “Immanuel,” which means “God with us” (Matthew 1:22-23). And when we contemplate that the eternal God out there—with the power to create billions of stars and planets—would become a tiny baby down here, born to live with us and die for us because he loves us, the only right response is worship. …
Choose your miracle…
The story of Christmas stretched the credulity of my four-year-old. But some of the world’s top scientists believe it to be true. And as we have seen, without God the very existence of reality itself is a question mark left dangling in the night sky. If Christianity is true, we can look up and wonder why the God who made the galaxies also cares for you and me (Psalm 8:3-4). But if there is no God, we can only look up and wonder if our lives have any point to them at all. As Australian author and speaker Glen Scrivener puts it, “Christians believe in the virgin birth of Jesus. Atheists believe in the virgin birth of the universe. Choose your miracle.”[1]
[1] Excerpt from: McLaughlin, Rebecca. Is Christmas Unbelievable?: Four Questions Everyone Should Ask About the World’s Most Famous Story . The Good Book Company. Kindle Edition.