I recently read an intriguing book called God’s Blueprint by Christopher Knight. Although explicitly not a Christian book it’s premise is that there are too many coincidences in how the world fits together. The key examples are the relationship of the Earth, Moon and Sun and the structure of DNA. On the large scale, it is remarked how the Sun has a diameter 400 times that of the Moon but, being 400 times further away, appears about the same size. On the micro scale, Knight observes that DNA contains plenty of ‘junk’ and posits that this would be an ideal place for a message to us from our creator to be hidden, in a tiny but massively replicated package that is reproduced from generation to generation.

Overall, the suggestion of the book is that we are created and that we are reaching a point where we may be able to decode the messages left for us; indeed, evidence from the ancients suggests that we have lost some of the insight that our forebears once knew. The thesis is intriguing but perhaps not entirely convincing. A few facts get overworked to determine patterns but many questions are not tackled. For example, if our ancestors had cracked much of this hidden knowledge, how comes they managed to make such a thorough job of losing it again?

I think that a sounder basis for a reasonable faith comes from looking not at the Sun but the Son – Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God. Entering history a mere 2,000 years ago, a reasonable doubt has to convincingly explain him away. Plenty have done that to their alleged satisfaction and there are still many questions left unanswered (and two millennia of church history that is not all clearly suffused with the love of Christ) but my conviction that the most important question to answer is not ‘where did we come from?’ but ‘what do you think about Jesus?’.