Astrophysicist Gives a Scientific Answer to "The Problem of Evil"

the best-selling science book of all time is A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking it's now over 25 million copies sold just in the print edition alone and I read that book when it first came out and I got one quote I want to share with you it's on page 171. he says we want to make sense of what we see around us and ask what is the nature of the universe what is our place in it and where did it and we come from why is it the way it is and one reason why his book was so popular he makes a point every human being asked these questions that would argue that's because God put a spirit within each one of us it's the spirit within us that drives us to ask these questions but as I read his book he really only provided physical answers for those questions which is why I was motivated to write this book why the universe is the way it is to not only look at the physical questions but the spiritual questions because that's really what drives us to ask the questions that he was talking about and I'm going to pick one point only out of this book and that is how God designed the universe for the eradication of evil and suffering now of all the world's religions only Christianity provides an adequate explanation for why evil exists in the world atheists try to throw this out as a stumper of Christianity but atheism has no answer for why there's evil in the world only the Bible provides us with an answer and again we have the Bible on display at the back room the Bible alone of all the books that exists provides an answer to the problem of evil now many Christians focus on answering that question the problem of evil I've noticed however sometimes it can come across as a little hard or harsh when non-christians are listening so what I'm going to offer this evening is what it suggests is a more Winsome and logical way to try to communicate the resolution of the problem of evil with people who are not within the Christian faith with people who are not yet believers and this actually factors into what we call the new atheism the atheism of the 21st century which is fundamentally based on this premise that we live in a universe that's way too messed up way too chaotic for it to be created by a personal loving God so I'm going to show you some quotes from some of the more atheists a famous atheist scientists and how they articulate this Stephen Hawking himself in the very same book A Brief History of Time says quote our solar system certainly is a prerequisite for our existence but there does not seem to be any need for all these other galaxies basically saying if God's behind us why 200 billion useless galaxies and then we have Victor Stinger the particle physicist I debated at the Caltech skeptic Society conference he wrote in his book God the fail hypothesis it seems inconceivable that a Creator exists who has a special love for Humanity and then relegated it to a tiny point in space and time and he actually developed this as a quote a new argument against God by saying if God really loved us he would have allowed us to explore and inhabit the entirety of the universe the fact that he can find us put us in this little prison House of planet Earth proves no such God exists and we went on to say does God really need so much pain and suffering to achieve his ends this is a possible God but a hideous God and the debate we had at Caltech was all about the fine tuning of the universe and whether that demonstrates there's God his point was there's other ways God could have done it which wouldn't have involved all this pain and suffering we see but my response is this yes God could have fine-tuned the universe so he wouldn't need those 200 billion other galaxies but it would have been a universe with different laws of physics it would have been a universe with different space-time dimensionality and God designed the space-time dimensionality and the laws of physics to be efficient tools for him to rapidly eliminate and eradicate evil while at the same time enhancing the Free Will capability of human beings who choose to spend eternity with him because one of God's goals in creating was to magnify the expression of his love through his creatures well let me get at the first issue that's been thrown out by these new atheists why so-called 200 billion useless galaxies why is the universal very massive with a universe that's governed by gravity thermodynamics electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear force the universe's Mass determines what elements you'll see in the periodic table if you make the universe more massive than what we observe then the universe quickly takes all the primordial hydrogen and converts it into nothing but elements heavier than iron and in such a universe you've got no carbon no oxygen no nitrogen no possibility for life make the universe the slightest bit less massive the universe forever will have only hydrogen or at best just hydrogen and helium once again you get a universe but no carbon no oxygen no nitrogen and no possibility for life to what degree do you have to fine-tune the mass to better than one part in a quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion if you want to get adequate quantities of carbon oxygen nitrogen and the right ratios so life becomes possible in the universe now that's one reason why you have to fine tune the size and the mass of the universe I'll give you one more there's actually several but here's one more the universe's Mass also plays a role in determining how rapidly the universe expands one thing I think you all remember from your Junior High physics class two massive bodies under the influence of gravity attract one another and the closer together those bodies are the more powerfully they attract and so gravity acts as a break on the expansion of the universe but if God sets up the universe so it expands too rapidly from the cosmic creation event gravity will not be able to collect the primordial gas of the universe to make galaxies stars and planets and if the universe is forever nothing but dispersed gas there's no place for life to reside life becomes impossible on the other hand if you expand the universe at a slightly slower rate gravity will so efficiently collect the mass of the universe that it quickly makes nothing but black holes and neutron stars and they're the minimum density is 2 billion tons per level teaspoon full can you imagine putting that into a cup of coffee boom two billion tons the density is so extreme that molecules are impossible atoms are impossible even protons and electrons are impossible and life is impossible and here we see an even more extraordinary degree of fine-tuning design so yes given the laws of physics the universe must be exactly the size and mass that it is to an extremely high degree of fine-tuning design or there'd be no possibility for physical life to exist anywhere anytime in the universe which allows me to do a paraphrase of John 3 16 for God so love human beings that he created 50 billion trillion Stars plus a hundred times more stuff than that because the Stars only add up to a point actually a quarter of a percent so we could have one pale blue dot in which two live and enjoy life so come Thanksgiving day I hope you thank God for those 50 billion trillion Stars and all the rest of the stuff that makes up the universe well why is the universe not only so large but so old in fact I was on an airplane once with an atheist Quantum physicist and he asked me this question okay if God really wanted human beings why wait 13.8 billion years so I was able to explain to him given the laws of physics and the space-time Dimensions that God chose then if we were placed during the earlier in the history of the universe light from the cosmic creation event would not have enough time to travel on the space surface of the universe and reach our telescopes so for example if we were created five billion years earlier in Cosmic history we'd only be seeing the last two-thirds at Cosmic history we would be completely ignorant about the cosmic creation event now the same thing's true in the future because right now we're living at a time when the farthest reaches of the universe are expanding relative to us at the velocity of light now because of dark energy in the future it'll expand it more rapidly than the velocity of light so if God put us here any later in the history of the universe light from the cosmic creation event would be moving away from us at greater than the velocity of light which means we wouldn't see it again if God were to put us here five billion years into the future we'd only be seeing the last two-thirds of the history of the universe the one that created the universe wanted us human beings not only to be able to read the entirety of the 66 books of the Bible he wanted us to be able to read the entirety of the book of nature to be able to witness a hundred percent of its history as an astronomer I can tell you it's our ability to actually directly image the cosmic creation event to actually see what the universe looked like when it was only 1 100 billionth of a trillionth of a trenth of a second old where we get the most compelling rigorous scientific proof that a god Beyond Space and Time created everything God put us here at the one time in Cosmic history when we could witness what he was doing from the cosmic creation event forward in time only at 13.8 billion years after the cosmic creation event can humans observe all the cosmic history and directly witness God bringing the universe into existence and maybe I need to preface this a little bit astronomy is the one discipline of science where we directly access the past or as I tell my wife because I'm an astronomer I cannot be held responsible for events in the present all of my data comes from the past because it takes light time to travel from stars and galaxies to our telescopes but we now have the capability to look so far away we're looking literally at the cosmic creation event 13.8 billion years ago so God so loved the human race that he invested 13.8 billion years of meticulous design to make a place for us to live and enjoy life and view all of cosmic history if you pick up my latest book improbable Planet you'll see a few paragraphs in there where I make the point that astronomers today now recognize that there cannot be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe why because everywhere else we look we're looking back in time and we now have the astronomical data to establish that it's physically impossible to bring intelligent life upon the cosmic scene and less than 13.79 billion years and since that's where we are right now we must be the first intelligent life on the cosmic scene you know God could have created them but he would have created them at this moment and since their data from the past which means we really should be shutting down the Enterprise of looking for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe okay we live in a very dark Universe why is it so dark and let me give you an inventory on this the stuff that we see in the universe the heavens declare the glory of God but the stuff we see in the heavens it adds up to point two seven percent of all the stuff of the universe 99.73 percent of it has dark stuff and there's three different kinds of dark stuff dark energy which was discovered in 1999 exotic Dark Matter that's matter that doesn't strongly interact with light and then ordinary Dark Matter 99.73 percent one thing we discovered we need exactly those quantities of Darkness the three different kinds of Darkness had to be exquisitely fine-tuned and both their abundance and Cosmic location to make life possible matter of fact if the dark stuff were altered by just one part and 10 to 120 second power 122 zeros after the one physical life would be impossible anytime anywhere in the universe now that's a mind-boggling huge number to put it in context if you were to add up all the protons and neutrons in the universe that's only 10 of the 79. we're talking 10 to the 122. and so what I've done in several my books is to compare the fine-tuning design of the dark stuff in the universe to the very best example of human engineering and ventiveness and Engineering achievement which in my opinion would be these amazing gravity wave telescopes that have just recently discovered gravity waves in the past year and a half and as we compare the fine-tuning design and the dark stuff to the best design that we human beings have been able to achieve we see that the one that designed the dark stuff at a minimum is 10 to the 97 times more intelligent and more knowledgeable than the Caltech and MIT physicists that invented and designed these gravity wave telescopes or it could put it another way 10 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times better funded than the US government that actually made these telescopes possible which establishes that we not only worship a god beyond space and time it's a god that is personal in his ability to design the universe to such a great degree now I've spoken on these subjects on University campuses where the audience is basically people with Masters and phds and the Sciences who are not believers and one of their responses is we think it's just a sheer coincidence that we human beings happen to be here at the one time when we can astronomically observe all the cosmic history that's just an accident well I said we do live in a universe of 200 billion galaxies where each Galaxy is an average of 200 billion stars don't you find it interesting that we are orbiting a star where we're in the unique location where we can see all of cosmic history we're not only at that unique moment in time we're also at that unique location within this vast unimaginably big Cosmos let me demonstrate this okay here's our Milky Way galaxy and our solar system is orbiting quite far away from the central bulge that Central bulge of our galaxy is half the stars in our galaxy in the center of that bulge is a super giant black hole radiating deadly radiation we're far enough away where we're not being killed by that radiation but also far enough away where the bright light of the center of our galaxy does not make astronomical observations impossible but there's another point not only are we far from the galactic bulge or far from spiral arms right now we're halfway in between the Perseus and Sagittarius spiral arms now we cross the spiral arm every billion years but the last time we crossed was half a billion years ago right now we're halfway between now that's the safest place for advanced life you really can't have advanced life when you're close to a spiral arm again radiation and you've got dense molecular clouds that cause issues but also when you're close to the spiral arm it illuminates the nighttime sky being halfway in between that's what gives us a dark sky at night and one of the amazing things about our Milky Way galaxy is that it has tiny gaseous nebulae the only way you can sustain that spiral structure is to have these gaseous nebulae where news stars are forming the maternity Wards of our Milky Way galaxy but unlike other spiral galaxies we have hundreds of these and they're all small the other thing we notice about our solar system it's a long ways from the nearest gaseous nebulae the nearest one is the Orion Nebula you can see it tonight but you're going to need good eyes to be able to see it it's barely visible to the naked eye it's the basically the central sore star of the sword that hangs down from the belt of Orion but our Milky Way galaxy is atypical and that it does not have any large bright gaseous nebulae for example here's a spiral galaxy that's only six percent the size of our Milky Way galaxy and this is one of the gaseous Navy the tarantula nebula that exists this is typical the spiral galaxies have these big gaseous nebulae what I'm going to do the next slide is show you a side-by-side comparison everything to scale in terms of the brightness and the size and so on the right hand side we have a tarantula nebula on the left hand side you have the Orion Nebula now can you see the Orion Nebula you probably can't but what I'm going to do is show you another slide where I brighten It Up by about a factor of 20 times that little tiny dot that's the Orion Nebula 20 times brighter than what it really is now if we were to have the Orion Nebula and the tarantula nebula trade places it would fill 80 Moon diameters across the sky it would be so bright it would be brighter than the full moon you could read a newspaper by it and it'd be so bright we'd have to shut down our telescopes then the other amazing thing is we live in a highly fine-tuned cluster of galaxies life is only possible in a cluster of galaxies for a number of reasons but the vast majority of galaxies are in these really big dense clusters of galaxies where you got three to twenty thousand galaxies in the cluster and they're all jammed tightly together here for example is the center of a typical cluster of galaxies now can you imagine yourself being an astronomer say on that spiral galaxy in the middle there you look to one side there's a super giant Galaxy you look up to the top there's another one several in the bottom it's really going to mess up your astronomical observations we live in a cluster of galaxies where there are no giant galaxies two medium large galaxies ours and the Andromeda galaxy and unlike what is typical where the galaxies are like this far apart look how far apart they are in the local group here's our Milky Way galaxy down at the bottom there's the Andromeda at the top and you've got dwarf galaxies all the way through we get a clear view of the heavens now what I've briefly reviewed for you here as some of the evidences that we have that the universe is not only designed to make a home for us human beings and human civilization it's designed for a purpose the very fact that God put us at the one time where we could read a hundred percent of the history book of the universe and the only location in the universe where we could read a hundred percent implies that there must be some reason why God wanted us to have access to the entire history book of the universe just like I think you could make a case as a theologian for Why God wanted us to have access to the entirety of the 66 books of the Bible many of which you see on display at the back so we are at the one time and the one place which I'd argue is evidence that there's purpose not only for the universe but purpose for as human beings the anthropic principle basically says the entire universe was designed and fine-tuned throughout its entire history to make possible entry point for human beings I'll talk about that tomorrow afternoon and my talk on the universe but something that was discovered just a couple of decades ago is what's referred to as the anthropic principle inequality namely that it takes a minimum as I've already explained 14 billion years to prepare a home for human beings you cannot get Advanced life on the cosmic scene any earlier than that given the laws of physics however it was a Brandon Carter that calculated that those same laws of physics and Cosmic features tell us that the maximum time in which intelligent beings could live in a civilized State cannot be longer than 41 000 years and tomorrow evening I'll explain why I think the number is actually ten thousand years now that's not the window of time for human existence at the window of time for human civilization so yeah we're talking Stone Age with just a few things thousands of people running around you can get a slightly longer time when only a slightly longer time window now the reason why this is referred to as the anthropic principle inequality there's about a factor of a million difference between the minimum time to prepare a home for us and the maximum time in which we could live in that home in a civilized State and in my book why the universe is the way it is you'll see several chapters laying out why this inequality must be true I'm only going to give you a couple of highlights one reason why we know we need about 14 billion years is because for advanced light to be possible you have to be living on a planet that is super endowed in uranium and thorium it's the decay of uranium and thorium that makes the Continental land masses but I talked about this earlier today that we need for life that also allows us to have a nice strong stable magnetic field that protects us from deadly solar and Cosmic radiation and what this curve shows you is that uranium and thorium are exclusively made in supergiant stars and the universe aggressively makes these Stars when it's young but already the universe is making fewer and fewer of these supergiant stars and now the uranium and thorium is decaying at a more rapid rate than the formation of the stars that make these two elements but what I want you to notice is there's a point in the history of the universe where uranium and thorium hit a peak abundance if you look at that date that's when the universe is about 9.2 billion years old when did the solar system form it formed when the universe was 9.2 billion years old and so our solar system formed at the moment uranium and thorium hit that Peak abundance now you might say well why didn't God just create us human beings 4.6 billion years ago well there's a reason why he waits actually many reasons why he waits those extra 4.6 billion years but I'll just show you one stars are like human beings they're unstable when they're young they're unstable when they're old they're maximally stable in their middle age only for stars is far more extreme than it is for human beings as this graph will show you here this shows you the flaring activity of our star of the Sun and this is true of all stars that when stars are young they're throwing out ultraviolet x-ray radiation and these deadly flares now the y-axis there is logarithmic the flaring activity was a million times more frequent and intense when the sun was young and likewise will be so in the future when the sun is old and what I want you to notice is that dotted line it hits a minimum when the sun is 4.6 billion years old so that's why you add the 4.6 to the 9.2 you get the 13.8 but something else astronomers have discovered we're now seeing neutrinos coming out of the Sun and are measurements of neutrinos coming out of the solar furnace and the interior the sun tells us that our star entered an exceptionally stable Luminosity phase a little less than 50 000 years ago and that Luminosity stability will only last for most another 50 000 years so that kind of gives you an idea of that narrow time window we're looking at about a 90 000 year window in which we got sufficient solar Luminosity stability where human civilization would be possible on the face of the Earth and you can combine this with the growth of the continents for human civilization to be possible you want the continents for a number of reasons to cover about 29 percent of the surface of the Earth uh Peter Ward an atheist has written a book where he says of his 28 percent were in trouble if it's 30 percent were in trouble 29 percent were okay the continents will continue to grow they will eventually hit 30 percent when do they hit 29 percent when the earth is 4.6 billion years old again you can get the book why the universe is the way it is you'll see there are numerous reasons for why it takes that period of time and also why we have multiple narrow time winners and this actually enhances the fine-tuning argument because there are about 20 narrow time windows that are essential for human civilization and they all have to coincide so for example there's the availability of fossil fuels there's a narrow time window when you have that fossil fuel availability at a maximum we're in that narrow slice but that narrow slice of time must overlap that narrow slice that we get for optimal solar Luminosity stability and the fact that they all line up at that one moment tells us certainly this is the handy work of God now Brandon Carter the British cosmologist developed a philosophical application for this uh incredible anthropic principle inequality but I'll give credit to my wife I think she's come up with a better one and I've done a number of the weddings officiated a number of weddings and what amazes me about the wedding ceremony if you take out the music part and some of the remarks that the Father the bride might make it's about a 20-minute ceremony and in America the average wedding costs about twenty thousand dollars in Asia it's much more money but here we're cheapscapes it's just twenty thousand dollars and if you look at the time that's spent in preparing for that 20-minute window it adds up to about one man year well I think more accurately we would call it one woman year since the ladies tend to spend more time on this but you might argue with the Father the bride be insane to spend twenty thousand dollars in something that lasts 20 minutes or would the bride and her mother spend a whole year of work preparing for that 20 minutes we don't think they're insane because of how valuable that 20-minute moment is because that 20 minutes is a joining together two families and establishing a man and a woman and a lifelong relationship that's going to be a testimony of the Gospel to the world every time I do a wedding I weave the gospel right into it how the bride represents the church and the groom represents a Christ so it has it's an incredible not only physical significance and emotional significance those spiritual significance as well but it was Brandon Carter that pointed out not a Believer he said you know this anthropic principle and equality I don't know everything that it means but at the minimum it tells me there's somebody beyond the universe who puts an extremely high value on us human beings and a very high purpose nothing else he says can explain the significance of this enormous inequality factor of million inequality but I remember being on the airplane with this atheist Quantum physicist he asked me about eight questions over the course of two hours about the universe and one of the questions he asked was a Decay question he says you know we live in a universe that is an extremely high measure of entropy in fact nothing is more entropic nothing is decaying at a more rapid rate than the whole universe itself and he says everywhere we look we see Decay now this is actually something you see in the Bible Romans 8 speaks about this pervasive law Decay and affecting the entirety of the universe and so his question is if God is all powerful and all loving why all this decay and so I explained to him that God designed the universe with this law of Decay and the other laws of physics to make possible the Redemption of billions of human beings not over billions of years but just thousands of years accompanied with the permanent eradication of evil and the simultaneous enhancement of human Free Will in other words God gave the universe the best possible physics fact I would argue this is where we see the greatest fine-tuning evidence of all the universe being fine-tuned to be Tools in God's hands to bring about the eradication of all evil and the suffering and to enable willing human beings to receive the offer of redemption through what Christ that is on the cross have an eternally secure relationship with Christ at the same time in a hands-free will and a greater capacity of love and here's the Romans passage the whole creation has been groaning hundreds bondage to Decay now as an astronomer I can tell you it's not possible to separate the space dimensions of the Universe from the time dimension of the universe so in this text talks about the entire universe it's not talking about just the entire spatial geography it's also talking about the entire temporality of the universe the whole universe for the past 14 billion years has been subject to this pervasive law Decay and sometimes I've taught to audiences where they dispute this idea that everything is decaying I simply say hey look at one another now we're all evidences of ongoing Decay with respect to time but it's not all bad the Decay is such that it actually allows stars and planets to form if the universe were decaying at a slower rate than what we observe you wouldn't get galaxies forming or planets for me now it's also true if you made it a greater level decay stars and planets would not form the Decay rate is fine-tuned to make possible exquisitely fine-tuned to make possible the Galaxy stars and planets that are necessary for life it's also exquisitely fine-tuned to allow plants to grow and to produce the food so that animals can digest that food and use that food to perform work unless these laws of physics were exquisitely fine-tuned animals would not be possible plants would not be possible now these are some physical reasons for why we see this pervasive law Decay there's also spiritual reasons that it's optimal for the Restraint of evil it's optimal for preparing humans for their roles and the new creation you know several of us here have supervised graduate students and one of our responsibilities as professors is we make our graduate students work hard or as I tell my graduate students my job as your professor is to make us suffer at my hand and what I find interesting they'll actually pay a lot of money to my sponsoring institutions to suffer my hand and if I don't make them suffer enough they complain to the dean they want the suffering because they realize it will prepare them for a worthwhile rewarding future career likewise we're told in many of the New Testament texts particularly Paul's writings and Peter's writings that this is what's preparing us for future careers in the new creation one of the things we notice is the Decay rate is not so high as to discourage us from productive work now we own a home in the Los Angeles Basin up by the foothill mountains of the San Gabriel's and we've got a small backyard and a small front yard my wife really likes that backyard and front yard to look a certain way and so there will be times where she encourages me to devote a whole Saturday to getting the front and backyard the way she wants it but one of the things I've observed as a physicist I can spend a whole Saturday getting it the way she wants the laws of physics within two weeks are going to put it back to exactly where it was before it did any work at all and so my wife has a hard time motivating me to do yard work because I realized I could put in all that time and within two weeks I'm back to square one if the rate of Decay were even slightly higher than we see in the universe I don't think my wife would ever be able to motivate me to do yard work it's basically hey would immediately Decay what's the point fortunately two weeks is not so long that she can't motivate me to do it at least on occasion the only thing we want to notice is the Decay rate is not so low as to let human sin and evil go unrestrained something we see in the Garden of Eden the very moment that Adam and Eve rebel against their Creator God tells them that from that point forward they will be experiencing more pain more work and more wasted time that's what you see in Genesis 3 and that curse is simply a consequence of God having already established the laws of physics guaranteeing ahead of time that once sin is brought into God's creation the more we human beings sin the more work we're going to have to do the more time we're going to waste and the more pain we're going to experience undoing the damage of the sin and evil that we introduce and biologically God designed Us in such a way that none of us enjoys extra pain extra work or wasted time you also see throughout the Bible exhortations to those in authority when you discipline the evil doers discipline them in such a way that they'll experience more pain more work and more wasted time that's the way you can encourage him to avoid evil and to pursue a virtuous a pathway and in the process discover you can't do it by yourself I mean if we try to undo this damage of our sin and evil we quickly discover that there's limitations and those limitations are designed to motivate us to go to the only one that can really Deliver Us from the consequences of her evil and sin and this extends not only to the law of Decay but the law of gravity the law of electromagnetism the strong and weak nuclear forces and even our space-time dimensionality one thing we notice in terms of time we're all constrained to a single dimension of time and the constraint is more than that we're in a dimension of time where time cannot be stopped or reversed and we're limited by three dimensions of space moreover three dimensions of space that are rapidly expanding from the cosmic creation event what this does number one it limits our human contacts and because of how big the space dimensions are it separates us from one another so for example have I got an evil thought in my mind where I want to do Malice on someone I know in Germany chances are I'm not going to be able to do much about it I'm going to be limited by the space-time dimensionality God has imposed on me from being able to carry that out the other thing you notice in Genesis chapter 6 is that here we have Humanity living 800 900 years but it breaks it brings about untold multiplication of evil and the human species easy to understand if you've got a serial killer living to be 900 years they're going to kill a lot of people in 900 years and who are they going to kill they typically don't kill other serial killers we notice that today they go after the righteous and so quickly the human population weeded out the righteous and left us these Wicked people there but God in Genesis 6 3 shortens our lifespan to a maximum of about 120 years which means that an Adolf Hitler is not able to do as much killing as he wanted to do I mean that's what happened in 1944 as doctors told him you're dying of Parkinson's disease and just the knowledge that his life was soon going to come to end cause Adolf Hitler especially in the last year of the war to make decisions that basically limited the amount of people he intended to kill he actually had a plan not only to eradicate jewry from Europe he'd have planned to eradicate the German population he was not able to carry it out that the last year of the war he was speeding around on a special train all over Germany Exterminating German meters left and right but he couldn't get to all of it he was limited in space and he was limited in time so the space-time dimensionality also his design to be a factor in dealing with evil but the bottom line is there has to be some ultimate hope purpose and Destiny for each one of us the universe has been designed for us has been designed to bring about the end of evil it's been designed to allow us to see everything from the cosmic creation event forward but here's a difference when you compare the Bible with the other religions of the world in the context of the problem of evil why the other religions really don't offer anything the other religions offered the equivalent of a One Creation model now yes they do talk about heaven but they talk about heaven in a way that's comprehensible within our laws of physics and space-time dimensions only the Bible offers a true to Creation model the very good creation we see in Genesis 1. the best possible creation to eliminate evil and suffering and to enhance the free real capability of those who choose God's offers of redemption but following this creation will be a brand new creation where there is no possibility for evil ever to exist and because there's no possibility for evil God no longer has to put chains around the new creation of gravity thermodynamics of the nuclear forces or the space-time Dimensions now he has the freedom to create a brand new realm the ultimate creation so this creation is a very good creation but the ultimate perfect creation is Yet to Come God will not bring it about until the problem of evil is done you see that in Romans 8 23 let me give you a quick overview of what I would refer to as the two creation model I think you'll see why only this biblical two creation model offers a satisfactory answer to why they're presently as evil and suffering in the world now even before number one and this is something I'll talk about tomorrow evening how there are passages in the Bible that tell us God begins as works of redemption before he creates anything which implies that everything that God creates is for the purpose of redemption that's my message of tomorrow evening uh but following God's working out this Plan of Redemption and initiating his works of redemption he creates our universe of matter energy space and time and then very carefully uh designs and fine-tunes the universe and the Earth for the entry of us human beings and he places Adam and Eve and Eden in this idyllic Paradise in the Garden of Eden but here's something you see in the text now that we've got Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden God opens the gate to the Garden of Eden and invites into the garden Satan who is Satan first of all Satan's the first sinner Adam's not the first sinner Satan's the first sinner and Satan we're told is the most powerful being that God created he's the most intelligent the wisest the most powerful and God has him come into the Garden of Eden keep in mind God had the option of keeping Satan away from Humanity for the rest of Eternity God did not choose that option he recognized that by bringing Satan in the Garden of Eden we human beings would be exposed to the greatest challenge in the context of evil now let me give you an analogy you know Gary and I both have PhD degrees you know what that PhD means it's a guarantee that neither one of us will ever have to be tested for a competency in our specific disciplines based on the idea that you and I have already been subjected to the most difficult tests possible in the context of our disciplines so it's pointless to test us again and so we get that guarantee well likewise God Is providing us with a guarantee by introducing exposing us to the most difficult challenge in the context of evil if we can pass that challenge nothing can ever encourage us to use our Free Will for evil intent for the rest of Eternity we will have passed the most difficult tests now let me tell you a story when I came to the University of Toronto as a freshman graduate student there were 13 of us in the Freshman Class and the professors in the astronomy Department set us down they said U13 are the cream of the crop we know you're all intelligent we know you're all prepared to work very hard otherwise you would have never gotten in here we here on the professional staff are here to help you and to assist you but we guarantee that the program we're taking you through is way too challenging for you to pass it without our health if you refuse our help you will not get the PhD we're here we're available please come to us okay of the 13 of us only six of us got the PhD two of my peers wound up spending more than a year in the mental hospital in fact what's interesting he had the 16-story physics and astronomy Tower where we all worked right next door was a 12-story mental hospital and we felt we needed corridors between the two buildings of different levels because of how many in the astronomy and physics department wound up spending time there [Laughter] well some of my professors were in there as well so quite the place but the whole point is this my professors said they were available to help but they did not give me a guarantee that if I took their help I would pass because some of my peers did take their help and still did not pass God gives us a guarantee he basically tells us you can't pass this test by yourself Satan is way more powerful than you are but if you come to me for help I guarantee you will pass this most difficult test and that's an offer he makes to all human beings so he explains why God invited Satan into the Garden of Eden and it's God himself who conquers evil on the cross and then he brings his Redemptive offer to all the people groups of the World and then there reaches a point as it says in Romans 8 when the full number of humans that God intends to redeem will be redeemed and when that happens God permanently eradicates evil and places redeem humans in their new home not this universe but a brand new creation where we humans will rule with Christ over the Angels you say why over the angels the Angels watch the grace of God and operation and those of us who are followers of Jesus Christ we who are followers experience the grace of God and it's because of that special training that time will come when we'll be rulers and judges and teachers over the Angels but also over everything else God chooses to create in the new creation and there's actually a hint to that in Revelation at 21. and what does it say about our blessed home in the future I am making everything new it's going to be nothing like this creation as Paul says as beyond what any of us can think or imagine and I'm just going to wrap this up pretty quickly normally I take 10 minutes to go through the description of what we got to look forward to the new creation but I want to leave some time for questions and discussion we're told that the new creation begins immediately after the removal of evil it's not the paradise of the Garden of Eden it's way better than the Garden of Eden otherwise why would God bring Satan if that was the ultimate there's no reason to bring Satan in there but God is promising something far better because our parents in Garden of Eden lack something that we who are followers of Jesus Christ presently possess we possess eternal security they did not possess eternal security the first creation is removed as God spoke the universe into existence a time will come when he will speak it out of existence and several passages describe exactly how that will happen and some of my cosmologist friends think they've actually found the model that's consistent with those biblical texts of God removing the universe it's going to be a much bigger place than this planet Earth I mean this planet Earth after all is way too small to house the number of humans that God intends to redeem it's going to be a place where nothing decays as tells us that explicitly in Revelation 21 no decay what does that mean it means everything you create will need zero maintenance I mean everything we create in this world because of thermodynamics at least for every two hours I spend creating an hour has to go to maintaining what I create there won't be any a need to invest that hour in the new creation it's a place where nothing dies no death no disease no disabilities no injuries it's a place where there's no gravity and no electromagnetism say how do you know that it talks about this building 1500 miles in each side with with Corners that violates the law of gravity there's a reason why all Cosmic bodies bigger than 300 kilometers across are spherical in shape gravity forces those spherical shapes and yet we have something described in Revelation 21 that's much bigger than that it also tells the new creation no Shadows no darkness no stars no sun because everything will emanate with light that's not electromagnetism it's a completely different kind of light and it's a place where there's no grief no remorse I don't have time to go into that there's reasons why we will not even have grief or remorse over those human beings that choose to spend eternity away from God it's not going to be length width height and time it's going to be completely different dimensions it may not even be SpaceTime Dimensions but we do know their Dimensions there's an angel with a measuring Rod it's a place of unimaginable Joy Beauty and peace unimaginable reward and Splendor we're told none of us can possibly think or imagine how great the reward the beauty and Splendor will be it's a place of continual fellowship with God and it'll be a place of very fulfilling purposeful careers not just for a few decades but for all eternity you're going to be fulfilled in your career relationship limits will be limited and our Free Will capacity will be expanded let me just finish this little description with a story of what happened when I sign my name in the back of a Gideon Bible giving my life to Jesus Christ I began to imagine life in the new creation and just saying wouldn't it be incredible I mean we've just heard Gary talk about these amazing Apostles that we see in the New Testament don't you yearn to have a private afternoon office appointment with John with Paul with David with Moses and all the other Heroes we see in the text and I began to calculate the minimum number of redeemed human beings that will be there in the new creation it exceeds about 35 billion human beings that's conservative it could be more okay and I said my name is Ross I'm towards the end of the alphabet if I try to get on the Apostle Paul's appointment calendar I'm going to be waiting a really really long time if I had to actually calculated how many tens of millions of years I'd have to wait before a two-hour slot opens up on the Apostle Paul's appointment calendar however what I've read in Revelation 21 we will be one as the father and son are one there will be no marriages in the new creation I discussed this with my wife and I made the point I think God's going to deliver us in the geometric time in the New Creation will no longer be constrained to one dimension at a time because it will no longer be the evil that requires us to be constrained to linear time and if we're in geometric time I'll be able to spend eternity with my wife or we're never apart from one another just side by side for the rest of Eternity but that will not limit me from having a similar relationship with every other human being an angel and God himself and the new creation and my friend or philosopher on staff Ken sample said Hugh I'm not so happy about this I need my cave time where I'm all by myself and I said well in geometric time you can have a whole dimension of time where you're all by yourself for all of eternity but simultaneously you can be having these intimate Eternal relationships with every other being in the new creation he says okay I think I can handle that part so but this leaves us with Life's greatest question a question you see in the book of Hebrews chapter 12 or chapter 2 verse 3. how shall we escape if we ignore such a great salvation and here's what I'm suggesting one reason why non-christians that we engage will often just dismiss our presentation of what we're offering through Jesus Christ they don't recognize the magnitude of what Christ suffered for them on the cross that's another whole talk but they also don't recognize the magnitude of what's being offered to them in the new creation now the Apostle Paul said no I has seen nor ear has heard no mind is conceived what God has prepared for those who love him but it's the same Apostle Paul who said every day spend some time meditating on your future reward and encourage one another with what you come up with yes it's impossible to imagine how great and wonderful it'll be but do your best to try and whatever you come up with realize God's offering something even better than that and share that with one another it will help you live a righteous life here and now and get ready for your future careers in the new creation I want to read more you can check this out why the universe is the way it is but yeah I got about six minutes left for questions and discussions so whenever you want to raise up thank you

Channel: Daily Dose Of Wisdom

Views: 343,635

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Id: HOixhxqGiNc

Length: 55min 38sec (3338 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 18 2023