Presenting

Click the slide, or press → or Space (a clicker works too), to show the next thing; ← goes back. F presents full screen. P opens the presenter view, a second window with your notes, the next slide, and a timer, that moves with the slides: put it on your laptop and the slides on the projector. N shows the notes under the slides.

Your script

1. Is anyone there?

   Say: Today's big question is one people have asked for thousands of years. Look up on a clear night. Where did all of it come from? Is anyone behind it?

   Say: We're going to look at three clues scientists found, and then at what the Bible says.

2. Who left this here?

   Ask: If astronauts found a car parked on the moon, would anyone think it came together there on its own, given enough time?

   Answer: No. They'd know someone built it and brought it there. A car has parts that fit together for a purpose.

   Say: Today we'll look at clues that our whole universe was made on purpose too. Keep this car in mind: we'll come back to it when we get to clue three.

   Clicks: 1. the line “Could it have built itself there?”

   Sources: Apollo 15's lunar rover

3. Memory verse

   Do: Read it together three times. Then say it with motions: “in the beginning” (point back over your shoulder), “God created” (hands up), “the heavens” (reach high), “and the earth” (touch the floor).

   Say: These are the very first words of the Bible. For a long time, many great thinkers said the universe had always been here. The Bible said it had a beginning.

   Older kids: Grades 3–4 learn Psalm 19:1 and grade 5 learns Romans 1:20. Both are on their worksheets.

4. The universe had a beginning

   Say: For most of history, many of the greatest thinkers said the universe had always been here. Even Albert Einstein, in 1917, changed his equations to keep the universe still.

   Say: Then, in 1929, an astronomer named Edwin Hubble measured the galaxies. This is his real graph. Each dot is a galaxy. The farther away a galaxy is, the faster it's rushing away from us. The universe is getting bigger!

   Do: Blow up a balloon with dots drawn on it, or spread your hands apart slowly. Now run the film backward: everything comes closer and closer together, until you reach a beginning.

   Ask: If the universe is getting bigger, what was it like long, long ago? (Smaller, closer together, and finally a beginning.)

   Clicks: 1. the line “Run it backward, and everything comes together at a beginning.”

   Sources: Hubble's 1929 paper · Einstein's 1917 static universe

5. An echo from the beginning

   Say: In 1964, two scientists, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, were using this huge horn antenna in New Jersey. They kept hearing a faint hiss, from every direction, day and night.

   Say: It was the afterglow of the hot early universe, still in the sky today. It won them the Nobel Prize.

   Say: Penzias said the data were what he would have predicted with nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, and the Bible as a whole.

   Ask: Why would a scientist say that? (Because the Bible said all along that the universe had a beginning.)

   Clicks: 1. the line “It was the afterglow of the universe's hot beginning.”

   Sources: The 1978 Nobel Prize · Penzias in The New York Times, 1978

6. Dials set just right

   Say: Imagine the universe has a control panel with dials. One sets how hard gravity pulls. One sets how tightly atoms hold together. One sets how much energy a star gets from its fuel.

   Say: No law we know of makes the dials what they are. They could have been set differently. But nudge almost any of them a little, and there are no stars, no chemistry, and no you.

   Do: Have everyone hold up a pretend dial and turn it very, very slowly. Say: The astronomer Martin Rees worked out that a stronger gravity would leave only a small, short-lived universe.

   Ask: If you found a radio with every dial set exactly to your favorite station, what would you think? (Someone set it.)

   Worksheet: Grades 1–2 set the dial on page 1 now: draw the needle in the thin green part.

   Clicks: 1. the line “Turn almost any of them a little, and there are no stars and no people.”

   Sources: Rees, Just Six Numbers (1999) · Fine-tuned universe

7. A code in every cell

   Say: Inside every living cell is DNA. It's a real code, like the letters in a book: four letters, read three at a time. Each three-letter word means one building block of a protein, the tiny machines that do the work in your body.

   Say: Your cells are reading that code right now, many words every second.

   Say: Remember the car on the moon? A cell is far more intricate than any car, and it runs on written code. Nobody has ever made life from non-life in a lab.

   Say: When the human genome was first mapped in 2000, Francis Collins, who led the project, said we had “caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God.”

   Ask: When you see writing, what do you know? (Someone wrote it.)

   Clicks: 1. the line “Chemistry alone has never been shown to write a code like it.”

   Sources: The genetic code · The origin of life (abiogenesis) · White House remarks on the human genome (2000)

8. The clues point to a Maker

   Say: Put the clues together. A universe that had a beginning. Dials set where the slightest nudge would leave no stars and no life. A written code inside every cell.

   Say: Each one points past nature, to someone with the power to make it and the mind to design it. Science can follow the universe back to its beginning. It can't tell us who began it. The Bible does: God.

   Say: Christians disagree about how long ago the beginning was, but not about who made it.

   Worksheet: Grades 3–4 fill in the clue sentences on page 1 now.

   Clicks: 1. the card “A beginning” · 2. the card “Dials set just right” · 3. the card “A code in every cell” · 4. the line at the bottom

9. Watch the video

   Do: Play the one-minute Short (left). The full video (right) is 15 minutes, for older kids or for home.

   Ask after: What clue did the video show that we talked about?

10. True or false?

    Do: Read each one and have kids stand up for true and sit down for false.

    Answers: 1. False, it had a beginning. 2. True. 3. False, there would be no stars and no people. 4. True.

    Clicks: 1. the answer to 1: False. It had a beginning. · 2. the answer to 2: True. · 3. the answer to 3: False. There would be no stars and no people. · 4. the answer to 4: True.

11. Read real DNA

    Say: DNA has four letters: A, C, G, and T. Your cells read them three at a time. Each three-letter word means one building block of a protein.

    Say: These are the first seven words of the real gene for hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in your blood. ATG means start. GTG means valine. And so on.

    Say: One typo matters. Change the seventh word from GAG to GTG, and glutamic acid becomes valine. Someone who inherits that typo from both parents has sickle cell disease.

    Ask: What does it tell you that one wrong letter can make someone sick? (The code is precise, like a message that has to be written exactly right.)

    Worksheet: Grade 5 decodes these words with a code table on page one.

    Clicks: 1. what each one means · 2. the line at the bottom

    Sources: The human hemoglobin gene, HBB (NCBI) · Sickle cell disease

12. Think it through

    Say: Here's a way to think it through, one step at a time. First: everything that begins to exist has a cause. A sandcastle, a song, you.

    Say: Second: the universe began to exist. That's clue one.

    Say: So third: the universe has a cause. And since space, time, and matter all began together, that cause has to stand outside space, time, and matter, with the power to bring them into being.

    Ask: Who fits that description? Genesis gives that cause a name: God.

    Worksheet: Grade 5 finishes this argument in their own words on page two.

    Clicks: 1. step 1 · 2. step 2 · 3. step 3 · 4. the line at the bottom

    Sources: The cosmological argument

13. He is not far away

    Say: If someone made all this, the next question is: does he care about me? The Bible says yes. Paul told a crowd in Athens that God made us so that we would seek him and find him, “though he is not far from any one of us.”

    Say: The Bible's whole story is about this Maker coming close to us, and most of all in Jesus. In the next lessons we'll see how.

    Say: You can talk to him right now, wherever you are. Tonight, look up at the sky and tell him: if you're there, show me.

    Worksheet: Grades 3–4 look up the four verses on page 2 now, starting with Acts 17:27.

    Clicks: 1. the line “He “is not far from any one of us.” You can talk to him today.”

    Sources: Acts 17:22–28

14. Say it again

    Do: Say the verse together, filling in the missing words. Then try it with eyes closed.

    Answers: beginning, created, heavens, earth.

    Worksheet: Everyone fills in their own memory verse on page 2 now and colors a star each time they say it.

    Clicks: 1. the missing word “beginning” · 2. the missing word “created” · 3. the missing word “heavens” · 4. the missing word “earth”

15. Talk and pray

    Do: Talk about one or two of the questions, then pray together. Kids can repeat the prayer one line at a time.

    Worksheet: Grades 1–2 draw something amazing God made. The answers to every worksheet are printed upside down at the foot of each page.

    Clicks: 1. the prayer

16. Pictures and Scripture

    Every picture on these slides, with its credit, license, and a link to its source.