By RAYMOND DE SOUZA
Part 4
You must have noticed that there are plenty of laws in nature: in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, algebra, geometry, etc. Scientists do not invent the laws of nature; they just discover them. Even the smallest speck of dust is, in all its movements and changes, subject to fixed natural laws. The same holds for living things — plants, animals, and men: Each species grows, develops, and acts in the same way. They follow the specific laws of their own nature.
The entire universe is bound together into one vastly and incredibly complicated whole, like a great, marvelous machine, whose parts are admirably fitted together in perfect order.
Look at the orderly movement of the galaxies, the Milky Way; or what we can see in the photos taken by the Hubble telescope; or the marvelous structure of living things and their organs, such as sight and hearing, the wonderful instincts of animals, as in the work of bees and the nest-building of birds.
Moreover, the free activity of man, his great achievements in science, literature, and art — all these marvels are gifts of nature, yes, but always in conformity with its laws. Animals that do not fly do not fly, purely and simply. Wings do not grow on dogs or toads, let alone turtles. But men don’t fly either, and yet they can learn the laws of aerodynamics and make machines that fly. Men’s intelligence can perfect the order of the universe.
Now, is it reasonable to suppose that those natural laws, producing effects so vast, and yet so orderly in their entirety and in their smallest detail, could have sprung from mere chance? Can there be a law without a lawmaker? Or is it not immensely more reasonable to admit that intelligible laws come from intelligent minds, the lawmakers?
That is, a Lawmaker who framed those laws, and directed them in their working as to achieve the ends desired. That Lawmaker must be a being of an incredibly vast intelligence. He must also possess free will, for He has given that faculty to one of His creatures: man. He must possess power beyond our capacity to measure, a power to which our minds can affix no limit.
Back to your old photographic camera: Its maker collected the materials he required; he shaped, filed, and polished them with great care, and finally fitted them together. Now you have your camera. You may admire his skill, and yet you know that, you yourself, with proper training, could also make a camera of your own.
But what of the maker of that other camera, the human eye? How did He do His work? In some most mysterious way which we are quite unable to understand, and which we recognize as far beyond the possibility of imitation! We can learn to manufacture a camera made of metal or plastic, but we cannot learn to make a human eye on our own — to have human eyes we must follow the laws of nature and beget humans, who are normally born with eyes.
The great Isaac Newton who discovered the laws of the motions of the heavenly bodies wrote as follows:
“This most beautiful system of sun, planets, and comets could in nowise come into existence without the design and ownership of a Being at once intelligent and powerful. . . . This Being governs all things, not as if He were the soul of the world, but as the Lord of everything. . . . We admire Him for His perfections, we venerate Him and we worship Him for His Lordship” (Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica [1687], III, Sch. Gen.)
We know there is a God because of the basic law of motion.
When we studied physics in high school, we learned about the properties of matter. One of those is called inertia. It states that an inanimate body cannot start a movement or stop a movement without a mover from outside. So, if you roll a ball on the ground, you know that, sooner or later, it is going to stop. Why?
Because of at least two factors that interfere with its movement: gravity and friction. But, if the ball is thrown by a rocket launcher into space, where there is neither gravity nor friction, it will go on moving and on and on forever, unless it hits another body in space to make it stop or slow down.
Conversely, the ball could not throw itself rolling on the floor nor into space unless a force from outside — your arm or a rocket-launcher — would start the movement. This is called the law of inertia, and every scientist knows it.
You may ask: So what? Simple: If planets move around the sun, how did they start moving? Who made them move? To say that it was a big bang only postpones the problem, because you cannot explain the energy inside the original mass and who ignited the explosion. The same can be said of the movement of electrons around the nucleus of an atom. They could not start the movement without an outside mover.
So, everyday experience shows us that things move. Nothing in the visible world can move entirely of itself, i.e., without help. No moving thing contains in itself the complete explanation of its movement. This is especially so in the case of inanimate bodies. They move only as they are moved. They do not move themselves in any way. They get all their motion from outside their beings.
Let us apply these observations to the Earth and to the heavenly bodies. That some of these bodies are in motion is manifest. The movement of the Earth on its axis is a proven fact. Its motion around the sun is likewise certain.
How did Earth get its motion? Many physicists say that it got its motion from the sun, which, spinning around, flung it off as a fragment. But from where did the sun get its motion? Some say that the sun got its motion from a larger body of which it once formed a part, while others assert that the sun with its motion is the result of a collision between two stars. But how did the motion of the larger body or the stars originate?
Science can provide conjectures, but in doing so, it merely tells us of another moving body or bodies whose motion would equally need explanation.
That answer would leave us exactly where we were: We should still be as far as ever from a final and satisfactory explanation of the motion of the earth. The only real reply, which excludes all further inquiry, is that the motion is due immediately or ultimately to some unmoved source of motion, to the first mover.
There must exist, therefore, a being distinct from the world who gave it motion. That being is either the first mover or a being moved by some other. If that mover is moved by another, from where did that other derive his motion? The question as to the source of motion can be answered satisfactorily only when, at last, we reach a first mover who is not moved by any other. That first mover we call God.
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(Raymond de Souza is an EWTN program host; regional coordinator for Portuguese-speaking countries for Human Life International [HLI]; president of the Sacred Heart Institute, and a member of the Sovereign, Military, and Hospitaller Order of the Knights of Malta. His website is: www.RaymonddeSouza.com.)
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