Welcome to the Daily Chizuk. People ask, “Prove to me that there's a God. I don't see Him.” The Midrash (rabbinic exposition) at the beginning of this week's parasha talks about how Abraham came to the realization that there's a Hashem. It gives a mashal (parable) of a man who saw a big palace all lit up and operating. The man said, “It couldn't be that this just happened. There had to have been someone who created this and is running it.” A man called out and said, “I am the Baal HaBira (Master of the Palace); I made this.” So too, Abraham looked at the world and said, “It's impossible for this to just have happened. There must be a creator.” And Hashem called out to him and said, “I am the creator.” By examining the world around us, you will be convinced that there's an intelligence, a design, a plan, and a purpose in the world. Chovot HaLevavot (Duties of the Heart) tells us that the world was created by Hashem to teach about Him.
Take a look at the earth. It's located at the exact distance it needs to be from the sun. If it were any further away, we would all freeze; any closer, we would burn up. Even a fractional variance in the earth's position relative to the sun would make life on earth impossible. And it always stays at the right position, even though it's rotating around the sun at a speed of 67,000 miles an hour. Astronomers used to believe that there were only 2000 stars in heaven. Today we know there are over a hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone, and there are over a hundred billion galaxies. Try to understand what this means. The distances are so vast. We have pictures of stars using the Hubble telescope that are 13 and a half billion light years away. And what's a light year? Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. The vastness of space is unbelievable. Mah rabu ma'asecha Hashem (How great are Your works, Hashem).
And all of these galaxies are traveling at very high speeds. Our galaxy travels at 250,000 miles an hour. And they are all crossing and rocketing across the sky. And each one is being controlled by Hashem with a name and a purpose. And this is only what we could see. There's also something called dark matter, which is matter not seen by the observable universe. Scientists believe that 85% of the universe is made up of dark matter, which means what we know of is only 15% of what's really out there. The universe is so orderly. The laws of nature never change. Gravity remains consistent. The rotations stay the same. There's something called a neutron star, which is a star that was once something like four times larger than the sun and collapsed into something much smaller. They are so dense that a single teaspoon of this star would weigh a billion tons. And they rotate 642 times per second. And each time they emit a radio signal. And they haven't missed a beat in thousands of years. Every 1.33 times. Every 731109 seconds. With such perfection, scientists are awestruck. There's no logical necessity for a universe that obeys rules. One of the Nobel Prize winners for quantum electrodynamics said, “Why nature is mathematical is a mystery. And the fact that there are rules at all is a kind of miracle.”
Take a look at the body. Our brain processes more than a million messages per second. The eye can distinguish among 7 million colors and can handle 1.5 million messages simultaneously. In every cell of our bodies, there exists a very detailed instruction code like a miniature computer program called DNA. It's a 3 billion lettered program in every single cell telling the cell exactly how to act. One of the discoverers of this DNA, Francis Crick, was quoted as saying, “An honest man armed with all of the knowledge available to us now could only state that in some sense the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle. So many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.” Life could not have evolved from non-living chemicals under any conceivable earth conditions.
So how are there still atheists? Crick himself developed a theory called panspermia in which he proposed that there's some form of primordial life that was shipped to the earth billions of years ago in spaceships by more evolved alien beings. That's right, they're down to believing in aliens who came from a place that's more advanced than us. The greatest proof of Hashem is that the Jewish people have had among them the greatest minds that ever lived, and that we are a stiff-necked people; it's not easy to get something by a Jew. If you learn Gemara in depth, you see that the Rabbis explore every possibility imaginable, and all of our great sages were convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt: there's a Hashem, Hashem created the world, Hashem runs the world with such a perfection, and Hashem is involved constantly with each and every one of us. Shabbat Shalom.