Astronomer Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe (reasons.org), of whom much is heard in these pages, has long emphasized that all of natural history prior to mankind was fine-tuned to prepare the cosmos not for mankind simply, but for mankind and his development of high-tech civilization.  He even categorizes the features of the physical universe by their tendency to foster either simple, single-celled life, or large, air-breathing organisms, or human civilization, or – high-tech human civilization.

I have long wished for some elucidation from Ross as to the reasons he considers high-tech civilization in particular to be the goal in God’s creative activity.  An answer has occurred to me; and while I can’t say I actually heard this from Ross, it strikes me as something he would probably readily endorse.

The last 70 years has seen an explosion of scientific discovery, fueled, to a large extent, by the development of science technology that has enabled us to study the cosmos in ways that were not possible until now.  That science technology – the space telescopes, the super-colliders, the computers – would never have been developed by itself, apart from the advance of technology generally.  Modern science is indeed the invention of a broadly high-tech civilization.

And what have we discovered with our sophisticated and very expensive new kit?  Everywhere we look, we find the unequivocal signs of active intelligence.

So I think Ross would say that God prepared a planet for advanced civilization so that we would find him.

It gives a fuller understanding, it seems to me, of Romans 1:20:

[God’s] invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

Those invisible divine attributes – God’s existence, his divinity, and his power – were evident even to primitive man.  Our study of Creation continues to make God’s power, genius, wisdom, and love more and more obvious; yet somehow men still deny him.  Can judgment be far off?