Can You Prove God Exists? Interview with Dr. Hugh Ross - The Becket Cook Show Ep. 36

atheists today have nowhere else to go if they're not going to use a multiverse then they really do have to accept there's a personal being that brought the universe into existence a personal being with far more knowledge and intelligence and creativity and power and care than we human beings [Music] hey guys welcome to the becca cook show today i have a very special guest he is an astronomer and a believer uh his name is hugh ross and i'm excited to have him on the show because we're going to talk about science and kind of in god and how the two go together and so i'm excited to have him on the show because uh i think this is going to really help a lot of people and edify people in terms of faith in terms of you know what science is all about and and how it correlates to faith so hugh ross welcome to the becca cook show well thank you for having me on your show so tell us first what what your your organization is reasons to believe tell us about that right it's an organization my wife and i found it 36 years ago and what we do is we take the latest discoveries on the frontiers of scientific research and i use that to show people that the more we learn about nature and science the more evidence we have for the supernatural handiwork of god and beyond that we show how what we see in science comports what we see in the pages of the bible that the revelation of god through nature uh corroborates what we see in the revelation of god through scripture and vice versa yeah i love that and i i i we kind of touched on this right before the show i had i have a friend from high school and uh his name is chase and i saw him at a reunion a high school reunion five years ago and i because i got saved 12 years ago and so when i saw him i mean i told everyone at the reunion about my conversion and and everything and i but i saw chase and i told him about my story he actually read my book and i but i told him about you know beating jesus and and having this amazing conversion and his response to me was becca i'm a science guy like i can't i can't believe in god so i want to use this episode to kind of dispel that myth that there is some sort of like uh opposition of science and in theology and so first let's get into uh so you've written many books one one of this is a great book i just read this the creator in the cosmos uh this is i highly recommend this i have beyond the cosmos which is amazing who was adam which is amazing and part of the genesis debate which i read in seminary which i was surprised to find out when uh because i went to my bookcase to get this and i was like wait hugh ross he's one of the authors so you've written many books and um including why the universe is the way it is and navigating genesis you know you're mentioning your friend chase i meet a lot of people like chase and i tell them chase i wasn't raised in a christian home i didn't really get to know christians till i was 27 but i began to be passionate about science when i was seven i knew i would be an astrophysicist from the age of eight onwards and was very diligent studying that and it's my study of astrophysics that brought me to faith in christ and persuaded me that the bible uh was the inspired word of god and that usually causes them to ask questions okay well how did uh how did that work for you and so i just said my opportunity to get into the details and then i often will respond by saying you know you think that there's an issue with science contradicting what the bible reveals uh where do you think there's a problem and so i invite them to put me on the defensive you know show me where you think there's a problem or an issue and kind of help them get through that tell us actually because that that is you talk about this in uh in the book the creator in the cosmos tell us how science led you to christ like give us the details because that is interesting right well you were mentioning albert einstein and he was the one that came up with the theory of general relativity and when he solved his equations it predicted that the universe has a beginning and that kind of went against the grain of astronomers at that time but people like edwin hubble and a slifer basically established yes the universe is expanding and it's expanding in a way that traces back to a cosmic beginning and then over the decades since albert einstein the evidence has become progressively more and more compelling and extensive there really is a cosmic beginning and not just any kind of beginning but even the beginning of space and time itself which implies there must be a causal agent beyond space and time that created our universe a matter energy space and time i was at age 17 i became convinced that a cosmic beginner existed and began to look for that beginner and i started looking for him the writings of the great philosophers especially the books by emmanuel kant and i realized that he had the wrong concepts of space and time and of the universe and that's when i began to look at the world's holy books and i was able to quickly dispense of things like hinduism buddhism islam baha'i but eventually i picked up a bible and i was given a gideon bible when i was 11 years old i didn't read it till i was 17 but when i began to open up that gideon bible i realized this book is different for all the other holy books it accurately describes the state of the universe it accurately describes the history of the universe the history of birth and the history of verse life and i especially was uh blown away by the fact that found passage in the bible that describe the big bang features of our universe and as an astronomy student i was aware no one had these concepts outside of the bible until the 20th century which told me that for thousands of years the bible stood alone in saying the universe has a beginning that includes the beginning of space and time that it expands from that beginning it expands under laws of physics that never change or one of those laws is a pervasive law decay and you know i knew enough about physics to realize that meant the universe would have to get colder and colder in a highly predictable way and so i was asking yourself the question it'll only be a matter of time before astronomers can make the temperature measurements i wonder how these temperature measurements will comport with what the bible predicted thousands of years ago well you'll see a figure in that fourth edition of the crater and the cosmos basically showing you how those temperature measurements perfectly fit the biblically predicted curve and so i was seeing that scientific predictive power in the bible and the fact that the bible never made a provable scientific error that persuaded me this book must come from the being that created the universe well what are a couple just uh one or two examples of that from the bible that predicted well the ones i talked about the expand the universe nobody had a clue about that scientifically until the 20th century uh but i was particularly impressed with the first page of the bible i mean that's the genesis one creation account and it describes 10 events of creation and i recognize at age 17. each one is scientifically accurately stated and they're all in the correct chronological order i actually even calculated the probability that someone without divine inspiration writing 3 400 years ago could come up with that by chance and at age 17 i calculated that probability was more remote than one chance in uh 10 to the 80th power and uh so that impressed me and motivated me continue reading through the bible as i continue to read through the bible i found over a hundred places where it had accurately predicted future scientific discoveries and i spent 18 months looking for a scientific error i couldn't find a single scientific error in the bible now to be honest i did find passages in the bible i didn't understand but i couldn't uncover a single provable scientific error whereas when i went through say the hindu vedas i was able to find dozens of them in a matter of just a day or two and likewise with all the other world's holy books so the bible to me stood alone it also stood alone and it described god in ways that can't be visualized by human beings whereas in all these other holy books that god was described in a way that can be viewed by people that are constrained to the dimensions of length with height and time so i took that as evidence these other books they're inventions of human beings but the message i saw in the bible said it must come from someone who can experience more than just our four space-time dimensions wow i love that and so back to einstein before so before einstein did was the kind of the consensus of the scientific community was it that the universe was eternal yes that was a consensus for about the 300 years previous to albert einstein uh that the universe was eternal and when einstein solved his equations he said we got to fix this and that's when he came up with a cosmological constant but he assigned a very different value to it than astronomers do today and his goal was to adjust his equations so there would be no beginning but it was just a matter of a couple of decades before astronomers came up with measurements that say hey this is not the way the universe looks it really does have a beginning and einstein admitted later in his life that his alteration of his equations of general relativity was the biggest scientific blunder in his career and so and what was his what was einstein's reasoning at the end of his life for not coming to faith because i think he talks about that he does and he says that he came to a point where he believed in the god of spinoza uh but not a personal god so he was okay with a god that creates the universe he was okay with the universe having a beginning just a few billion years ago but apparently he was not okay with god as a personal being that would be evaluating and judging his life and at the end of his life he said what bothers me about judaism and christianity is that there doesn't seem to be a resolution between god predetermining everything and human free will but again einstein was trying to fix that problem in the context of the dimensions we can visualize length with height and time and you picked up that book earlier beyond the cosmos where i said long after einstein passed away theoretical physicists determine that there's actually ten dimensions that make up the universe not just four there are six tiny space dimensions that accompany the three big ones and the space-time theorems prove that there must be a causal agent beyond time that can create time which implies there must be at least the equivalent of a second dimension of time and in the context of that extra dimensionality or transdimensionality you can resolve human free will and divine predetermination but that was the big stumbling block uh for einstein and he admitted that in his own words wow that's interesting and so and let's get into the big bang theory who who coined that term because i think it was uh almost a um it was almost an attack on the idea of the big bang it's a pejorative term but who who first came up with the idea of the big bang uh well fred hoyle was the one that coined the term big bang right uh but he coined it as a means of derision uh because he was very opposed to big bang cosmology uh he was one of the three that was proposing the steady state theory and later he came and what's the steady state theory can you explain that well the steady state theory says the universe is expanding but as it expands new matter appears basically fred hoyle was hypothesizing there was a fifth force of physics which he called the creation force so as the universe expands more and more matter is created so the universe basically looks the same at all times and therefore the universe would not have a beginning it would be infinitely old but it was again it was only a matter a decade before astronomers said we look far away and the universe doesn't look the same it's different the universe really does look like the photo album of your grandfather where you see him as a newborn baby and then as an infant and a toddler and as a teenager and then you see him getting gray hair he says that's what the universe looks like we can look far away hence farther back in time and we see that the universe looks very youthful if we look far away and so it's not steady state so it was part of the the um kind of crushing that argument was part of it hubble was it hubble who discovered the red shift yes and so tell us about the record talk about the red shift because i mean that's kind of like the the illustration is like there's dots on a balloon and as the balloon expands you see the dots kind of grow farther further and farther apart and that's what's happening to the galaxies in the universe right that's that's what redshift is right well that that's was the work of edwin humble he said you know let's measure the distances to these galaxies let's measure their velocities relative to us and see if it fits or contradicts and expand the universe and in 1929 he published a paper he says it fits the expanded universe with the beginning that's a few billion years ago and uh you know his student uh alan sandage uh took over his project after edwin had a sudden death and uh he was basically said no it's more than a few billion years it's more like 15 billion years and today we've got measurements that are sufficiently precise that we know it's 13.79 billion uh plus or minus 0.04 and what did hubble ever was he a christian or no well uh he was a theist exactly he he was a private individual and so it's really hard to tell where he was at the end of his life but he certainly accepted that the universe had a beginning and that it implied a beginner but not a whole lot more i mean rudy we don't know exactly what he believed about that beginner at least nothing nothing substantial in print now and you mentioned in uh the creator in the cosmos that when when the idea of the big bang theory it's that the term big bang is misleading to the lay person why why is that well fred hoyle came up with the term uh you know the big bang and how late people look at it is it's just a chaotic explosion of all the stars and galaxies and matter and energy in the universe and that's not what the big bang creation model tells us rather it's a highly fine-tuned expansion of the universe and so unlike a grenade exploding all the matter and energy the universe is constrained to the three-dimensional surface of the four-dimensional expanding universe and the surface is highly fine-tuned all the matter and energy on the surface is expanding at the same rate to within a precision of 56 places of the decimal so it's the most highly fine-tuned expansion phenomena we can observe in all the physical reality so nothing chaotic about it at all yeah yeah because it does big bang sounds like chaos so and you you talk about the there's three fun fundamentals of the big bang that are taught in the bible can you expound on that yeah well one is that the universe has a beginning a beginning of matter energy space and time and that comes out of the fact that we know that general relativity governs the dynamics of the universe and it was in the 1970s that astronomers and physicists came up with the first of the space-time theorems which tells us it's not just a beginning of matter and energy it's a beginning of space and time itself so that's one biblical statement a second biblical statement is that the universe expands from that cosmic beginning and there's 11 places in the bible where six different bible authors speak about this cosmic expansion can you give an example of like what's a what's a verse that kind of points to that well uh there's seven verses in the book of isaiah but they're not well translated into english they're typically translated uh that god was stretching out the universe stretching it out like one unfurls a tent to live in it so you see passages like that but the verb that's translated stretching out is the hebrew verb nata which means the expansion of what's being described i wrote an article on that there's a whole chapter on this uh in the crater in the cosmos fourth edition where i make the point that that hebrew verb natal shows up in all three hebrew verb forms when you go through those 11 biblical texts which means jesus is not figurative language the bible literally is speaking about a cosmic expansion and i've been accused of reading that into the text from my perspective of a 21st century astronomer but nemonities 850 years ago a jewish theologian came to the exact same conclusion based on those biblical texts so long before astronomers discovered the expanding universe we got the bible stating that the third point would be the laws of physics that govern the universe do not change jeremiah 33 the laws that govern the heavens and the earth are fixed and look at that whole chapter god says to the jews you change your mind all the time but i'm an immutable god i'm a god that does not change as proof look at the laws that govern the heavens and the earth as they don't change i don't change and then the book of ecclesiastes and the book of romans speaks about how god has subjected the entire universe to a pervasive law decay and that's four chapters that would be entropy right yeah that's entropy and the message of ecclesiastes is everything in the universe is decaying no matter where you go no matter what time or place everything is decaying and when i get pushback on that from audiences i just tell the audience look on one another we're all evidence of ongoing decay so uh it's everywhere however if that's really true about the universe uh physicists will tell you any system that's expanding under constant laws of physics or one of those laws is a law of entropy aka the second law of thermodynamics that's a system that gets cooler and cooler in a highly predictable rate it's the principle of your automobile engine as the piston chamber expands it cools down and the gasoline stops burning when you compress the chamber if you got a diesel engine you don't need a spark plug because the piston chamber compresses to such a degree that that compression by itself ignites the gasoline and so that's happening to the universe and today we have the telescopes to look far away hence far back in time and measure the radiation from the cosmic creation event and based on the measured age of the universe uh that uh cooling curve that we measure perfectly fits what the bible predicted thousands of years ago yeah and the the big bang also supports the kalam argument can you just tell us what the kalam argument is well that's uh and do you support i mean are you are you a proponent of the kalam argument or not i'm definitely a proponent of the kalam argument that the universe has a beginning then that implies there must be a cosmic beginner the column argument has come under attack because people say well okay you know the universe has a cause there must be a causer but what about what's happening before that and what i point out is that today the column cosmological argument is strongly sustained by the space-time theorems because the space times theorems tell us there is not an infinite regress in time time itself was created time was created in the universe was created so that implies that they're indeed must be a causal agent outside of space and time that creates everything so thanks to about 30 space-time theorems that have been published in the past 50 years there's no escape in the column argument in fact uh the most powerful of those space-time theorems uh the bourdai guth belinkan theorem alexander velenkin one of the three authors of that theorem wrote a book a year afterwards and basically said for cosmologists there is no escape they have to face the fact that the universe has a cosmic beginning and everything that implies and what he meant by that is there has to be some cause beyond space-time man and energy that brought the universe into existence today there is no escape yeah and you and you mentioned the is the infinite regress of of time or what did you say the infinite regress well some philosophers have tried to refute the con the column cosmological argument goes back to the 9th century a.d and some modern day philosophers have said well who's to say that there can't be an infinite regress an infinite number of beginnings uh then that would have to have that would have to cross infinity which is impos which is impossible right well it's kind of it's nonsensical yeah it is and physicists are referred to as turtles all the way down you know that there's a universe on top of a gigantic turtle once underneath that turtle another turtle what's underneath that turtle another turtle it's turtles all the way down well the space-time theorems tell us uh there are no turtles you cut the universe and you got a causal agent beyond space-time matter and energy yeah and so what happened in 1992 that reinforced the big bang theory it was that with the kobe satellite what was that all about well uh there were people like fred hoyle and others pushing back saying okay if it's big bang then how do you explain the galaxies and galaxy clusters because our measurements of the radiation from the cosmic creation event were basically saying uh the universe has the same temperature everywhere if the universe has the same temperature everywhere then that means you're not going to get structures like galaxies and galaxy clusters and big bang proponents you know pushed back and said all we need are very tiny temperature fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation the radiation left over from the cosmic creation event and he actually calculated that the temperature variations they would need would be about one part and a hundred thousand well back in the 1980s we didn't have instruments that sensitive the kobe satellite was the first time we had instruments sensitive enough to see those tiny temperature differences and uh yeah it came back uh with what the big bang model had predicted and this was referred to in newspapers around the world has a powerful proof that indeed we live in a big bang universe with a big bang creation event since that time much better instruments have been put into space the latest being the planck satellite and they've been able to make these temperature measurements to better than one part and a tenth of a million and so now we have a very detailed picture about what that cosmic background radiation looks like and the when you look at the hot spots the hot spots become future galaxies and galaxy clusters and now we've got very detailed maps of galaxies and galaxy clusters thanks to the sloan digital sky survey and it perfectly fits what we see in the radiation maps of the radiation left or from the cosmic creation event so it's basically demonstrating every year that goes by uh the case for big bang cosmology uh gets exponentially stronger well that raises the question then why do scientists still debate the big bang theory while it's still being put to the test and now this is what businesses do i mean we're still testing general relativity even though it's been verified to 18 places the decimal there are physicists out there saying well this is remarkable but let's see if we can push it to the 20th place of the decimal and let's see if we can see some special wrinkle in general relativity that might have some significance for cosmology or particle physics and they point out for example that's really what general relativity was uh you go back 150 years ago astronomers were able to explain all the observed features of the universe with newtonian mechanics but at the end of the 19th century it said we can't explain the advance in the precession of mercury's orbit uh there's a few seconds discrepancy in the orbit of the mercury and uh and they also saw a tiny one for venus and so they said there must be some tiny adjustment we need to make to newtonian mechanics and general relativity said we can explain that adjustment now today general relativity has been exhaustively tested as has the big bang creation model and we've yet to find any wrinkles even at 18 place of the decimal that doesn't mean we might not find them at 40 places a decimal but it basically tells us general relativity and big bang cosmology explains everything in extraordinary detail and it looks like there isn't any hidden physics that we've overlooked and that's why i mean i think that's why some scientists or physicists go to the multiverse argument and can you tell us what that the multiverse argument is and why it's a weak argument well it was basically designed to uh discount the personality of god i mean the big bang creation model basically tells us you have to accept deism if i engage physicists and astronomers that call themselves atheists when i have them define their terms they're basically dias they do believe there's a causal agent beyond space and time that created everything but they're emphatic that that causal agent has no personality we're not talking of being it's just some kind of star wars type force out there that brings the universe into existence and certainly isn't paying any attention to how i live my life but the fine tuning of the universe basically establishes this causal agent must be a personal being it's called the anthropic principle that when we measure the laws of physics we measure the features of the universe we see a degree of fine-tuned design that far transcends the best that we human beings are able to pull off by factors of 10 to the 96 times i know i think the fine-tuning argument is probably the strongest argument for a creator and so what give us give us some examples of fine tuning well the one that astronomers refer to as the greatest evidence for fine tuning that we can measure is dark energy dark energy makes up 70 of the universe but if you were to make the dark energy uh somewhat stronger it would cause the universe to expand so rapidly that gravity would never be able to attract enough uh gas to make galaxy stars and planets and therefore life would be impossible but if you make the dark energy very slightly weaker then the universe expands so slowly that gravity collects all the gas of the universe and compresses it in a short period of time into nothing but black holes and neutron stars there again you've got a universe where life is impossible and for life to be possible you have to fine tune that dark energy to one part and ten to the 122nd power and if you contrast that with the best example of human fine-tuning design dark energy beats out the best example of human engineering inventiveness and achievement by a factor of 10 to the 96 times which means that the one that designed dark energy to make our existence possible in the universe at a minimum is a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times smarter than we are more powerful than we are more intelligent and knowledgeable and caring than we are and these are characteristics only a personal being can manifest but you're right i mean i was predicting back in the 1980s that hey every year that goes by the fine-tuning evidence gets exponentially stronger in fact you'll see stuff at our reasons.org website basically demonstrating it gets about a thousand times stronger with every passing month and so that really pushed the non-theist back into a corner what are we going to do with this undeniably very compelling evidence and they said well maybe we can explain away all the fine-tuning if there's an infinite number of universes where every universe is different from every other universe and then all this fine-tuning appears simply by pure chance we happen to be living in the one lucky universe and i predicted that back in the 1980s that atheists would eventually have nowhere else to go but to appeal to an infinite number of universes with an infinite variety of characteristics which is impossible it's impossible to verify that you know so it's it's kind of again it's nonsensical well i like you'll see this in the crater in the cosmos fourth edition i cite the atheist astrophysicist leonard suskin who basically said we atheists have got to stop using the multiverse argument to discount as god because it explains everything and a model that explains everything explains nothing and he kind of stopped there but you'll see an analogy in the book where i say well if you really have an infinite number of universes uh where every universe is different from the other you're in that infinite number of universes you'll have an infinite number of planets just like earth and on those infinite number of planets like earth you're going to have an infinite variety of birch tree species and birch trees peel white pieces of bark and if you've got an infinite variety of bird street species species will peel thin white pieces of bark that are perfectly rectangular that measure eight and a half by 11 inches and those pieces of bark will randomly fall on soils with random chemicals in them that are going to imprint markings randomly and all those pieces of birch bark and all those random imprintings will duplicate all the letters equations figures and diagrams in every scientific research paper ever published by human beings which means all those scientific research papers they did not come from the minds of research scientists the multiverse did it so basically what leonard suskin says if you're going to appeal to the multiverse to get rid of god you get rid of all intelligent design including all human intelligent design therefore the appeal to a multiverse is worthless it is of no benefit we atheists have got to stop using it it's a bad argument but what i point out in the crater in the cosmos is that uh atheists today have nowhere else to go if they're not going to use the multiverse then they really do have to accept there's a personal being that brought the universe into existence a personal being with far more knowledge and intelligence and creativity and power and care than we human beings yeah and i liked your illustration i think it was in your uh there was a chapter called a just right universe about fine tuning and you i think it's in that chapter you give this red dime analogy or illustration can you tell us about that because i thought that was really powerful well and this would apply to many of the features of the universe that we can measure in many cases the fine tuning is so exceptional it's far greater than if you viewer to cover the entire north american continent with dimes uh where the dimes extend all the way up to the moon and you would have to do that on 10 billion north american continents and those 10 billion north american continents covered with dimes from here to the moon as densely packed together as possible you insert randomly one red colored dime and that huge pile of dimes and the fine-tuning we see in many features of the universe actually exceeds that example of fine-tuning that someone blindfolded could rummage through those 10 billion north american continents covered with dimes from here to the moon and be able to pick one and it would be the red one yeah that's that's pretty that's pretty amazing fine tuning and you in uh in the crater in the cosmos you talk about um this was interesting to me you say that hinduism for example has been ruled out as a viable religion scientifically so explain how hinduism is doesn't comport with science well after i gave up on emmanuel kant the first religious holy book i looked at were the hindu vedas and they speak about a reincarnating universe most people are aware that reincarnation is a fundamental doctrine of hinduism and it's based on the idea that the entire universe reincarnates and so everything is reincarnating including the universe as a whole but in the hindu vedas it says that the universe goes through these repeated beginnings but the cycle time is 4.32 billion years well as a 17 year old i knew from the measurements it's more than 4.32 billion it got the number wrong but i also realized that the problem with hinduism they need a mechanism to get the universe to repeat you know where it has an ending and then a restart and they don't have a good explanation for the restart mechanism and i recognize that the entropy that we observe in the universe is a hundred million times too high to make possible any mechanical restart or rebounce mechanism and so on that basis i said it can't be hinduism this is something that's clearly contradicted by the observations of the universe i next looked at buddhism uh but what you see in buddhism it's basically the same cosmology as hinduism so i put that aside too i looked at islam and i saw that the creation texts in the quran contradict one another and one of them actually makes the point uh that the stars are closer to us in the planets and you don't need telescopes to realize that's not true even with a naked eye you can discern uh that the planets are much closer to us in the stars yeah and so let's let's turn to stephen hawking of course i read a brief history of time when it came out in the 90s what what is uh what does he what does stephen hawking get wrong in that book because it was a popular it was a very popular book and it was written in a popular level but what does he get wrong about time and what does he get wrong in that book well he gets a lot of things right uh he basically makes the point that hey he was one of the authors of the first of the space-time theorems along with roger penrose and he doesn't say this uh in a brief history of time but when he was interviewed for reader's digest he said we proved that the universe was created we proved that time was created and so he was making statements based on his own research that comports beautifully of what the bible states but what he does say in a brief history of time is we can escape these implications of a beginning at the time and a causal agent beyond time by hypothesizing that the universe has imaginary time to complement real time and you know a lot of us have taken courses in what's called complex variables it's a field of mathematics where we have imaginary numbers and uh basically what hawking was implying if we can have two dimensions of time rather than a single dimension of time then we're not stuck with a cosmic beginning but if you read a brief history of time he says quickly thereafter of course we realize the entire universe is constrained by a single dimension of time uh so it was a just so story and a lot of people don't recognize hawking's honesty he basically stated that it's a just so story he says hey if we can hypothesize imaginary time there's a way out but of course the real universe doesn't have features and he basically uh was promoting a deistic interpretation uh in that book now later when he came out with the uh um he wrote a book with malod now the caltech atheist physicist the grand design and in that book it's clearly atheism that's being promoted but i'm not sure that it correctly describes hawking's philosophical views it does describe milled miles phillip phillis no doubt mled now is an atheist but since they were co-authors a lot of people have presumed hawking must be an atheist it's possible he became one late in his life but when he wrote a brief history of time he was basically promoting deism and to affirm that i have a book on my bookshelf and it's basically a book that came from a semester-long course that stephen hawking and roger penrose taught at cambridge university and uh what was fun about the course it was a debate course and so hawking and penrose would alternate lectures and uh you know hawking was basically defending deism and penrose was defending theism neither one of them defended christianity but you know penrose has been on record there's purpose behind the universe there's some kind of person behind the universe that's as far as he take it uh but the book is quite entertaining to read highly technical but there's this back and forth uh between penrose and hawking a very friendly debate but it offers really good insights from a theoretical physics perspective on looking at the universe from a deistic perspective contrasted with a theistic perspective and i can't remember if did hawking give a reason at the end of his life why he didn't come to faith was there what was what was his stumbling block well you'll see it in a brief history of time it's towards the end of the book where he basically says my goal in life is to gain the mind of god to know everything that god knows and he says i don't mean just know everything about the universe i want to know about human free will i want to know about god's predetermination i literally want a hundred percent of the mind of god and he also wanted to be autonomous his reaction to the christian god is that this is a god that would be in judgment over him and he says in fact a friend of mine don page he's a theoretical astrophysicist uh i knew him when i was at caltech and he went on to become a postdoctoral research fellow uh with stephen hawking at cambridge and he actually lived uh in the home of steve and stephen and jane hawking what he told them is he lived in his home he says look i'm a christian are you okay with me beginning my day with a prayer and bible study and uh jane and stephen said yeah we're okay with that in one condition and uh you know don said what's the condition it says we want to join you so literally for a four-year period wow uh stephen hawking had a daily prayer and bible study uh with don page amazing but what dawn tells me and you know his wife jane was an evangelical uh uh anglican they divorce though right they're divorced oh yeah yeah a hawking divorcer yeah um but what she wrote and what don has written is with stephen hawking he's fine about god but as soon as you cross that line to a personal god you get the famous stephen hawking smirk which means i'm not paying attention anymore right i've checked out right and you you talk about in the in the book you talk about um practical versus absolute proof and jp moreland i i took apologetics from jpmorlin at uh talbot at biola but uh and he calls he calls the practice he uses the term i think he uses psychological certainty but you use practical proof and so talk about practical proof versus absolute proof now they mean by absolute proof where there's zero possibility for any alternate explanation and my response to that is that's only possible if we know absolutely everything about the universe but that'll never happen uh you know we're constrained by the space-time dimensions of the universe which means we can learn a lot but we're not going to learn everything but we can learn enough where the proof becomes practical and an analogy i've used is you know i've been married for 44 years and i married my wife without absolute proof that she existed i mean it was a possibility i've been fooled by a very sophisticated three-dimensional hologram but i did enough experiments and observations to realize there's an extremely high probability that she really does exist and really is a human being and i had enough evidence that i was prepared uh to marry her and i can tell you this every year of marriage that evidence gets stronger but even today after 44 years of marriage i do not have absolute proof that my wife exists but i got very strong practical proof that she does exist and basically i challenge my atheist peers saying you make decisions every day very confident decisions every day without absolute proof in fact we don't have absolute proof of anything not even two plus two equals four really falls in the category of absolute proof we have a very high probability that two plus two equals four but it's not absolute proof and therefore you're being philosophically inconsistent to demand this level of absolute proof for god but you're okay with having less than absolute proof to marry the woman you're married to or to conclude as a mathematician that two plus two equals four and so i just challenge him you need to be consistent how much practical evidence do you need to be persuaded that the god of the bible exists i asked i challenge them to come up with a number because i know whatever number they come up with i can deliver i can come up with the evidence that they're asking for that this god really does exist and often that gives me an opportunity to say i think there's another reason why you're resisting giving your life to jesus christ as creator lord and savior can we talk about those reasons but i want to put a caveat on that i found that you cannot go down that path until you first build a level of trust and establish credibility and integrity on the scientific issues if you can do that then you'll reach a point where people are willing to trust you with their deep personal reasons and typically it's someone that wounded them i mean yeah an example that i think you'll see in the book is that i participated in a debate at caltech in front of the international skeptic society so i debated the particle physicist victor stinger in front of 750 atheists from all over the world and after the debate was over i engaged the atheists in the audience and i said i've seen a new piece of evidence for my christian faith this weekend right here at your conference and of course that got their attention and i said well what do you mean and i said well i was last on your program and but i attended all the lectures from these world-leading atheist scientists and what i observed from each one of them and from all of you and the audience is how extremely passionate you are that the god of the bible does not exist and how your whole focus is on the god of the bible as says all the other gods of the religions of the world you ignored the whole focus was the god of the bible and it says if you really were persuaded that the god of the bible doesn't exist you'd all be treating him like the easter bunny but the fact that you're so passionate about his non-existence tells me you really do believe he exists but you don't like him and the response i got once i got from people in the audience was it's not that we hate the god of the bible it's that we despise his followers and one after another i got stories of how they've been wounded by people that claim to be followers of jesus christ wow there's a passage in the book of matthew that says if you will not forgive others the god that you offended will not forgive you because what you're doing is a human being saying this human wounded me more than we all have wounded christ on the cross we're basically saying the offense i experience is bigger than the events god experienced and the reason matthew says that's a problem you're basically putting yourself above god and so however i tell people look i can understand that you're struggling trying to forgive this person that offended you and you often always it's in their youth but it said would you be willing to allow the god that you offended to a far greater degree to step by step and give you the power to forgive this person if they say yes to that i gotta hold for them but they say i'll never forgive that person until the day i die then i said well i'm not sure that you'll ever be able to receive the offer of forgiveness and redemption from the one that created the universe wow i love that that's amazing and do you agree with this assertion because this is uh j.p moreland talked about this that there is empirical evidence of the existence of god in terms of and he he illustrated it this way if you line up let's say a hundred born-again christians like genuine christians if you line them up and ask them what happened to you that uh each story will basically be the same i was lost i now i'm found my life was a wreck and now i'm you know it's totally transformed so what do you think about that argument the as an empirical argument for the existence of god well it's one empirical argument i would add though you need to combine that with what i would say more concrete and persuasive arguments uh because i see the same thing in islam and hinduism they'll line up a bunch of people but i think what's interesting about uh jp moreland's uh uh analogy there is you line up a hundred christians you're gonna get a hundred different stories but every one of those christians has been transformed you're gonna get the down and outers you're also going to get the up and outers people whose lives were fantastic everything was going their way and they too had a transformation where they realized you know what even though my life is so successful uh there's something missing and uh and i run into those kinds of people more often than i do the down and outers it's the up and outers yeah and uh i wasn't up and outer there you go yeah i was an up and downer and so how does this is the basically the last question and then i'll just ask one more thing but how does science how does all of this get us from a transcendent creator to the god of the bible very good question i mean one of my more popular talks i give when i'm speaking on university campuses or business firms cosmic reasons to believe in christ and kind of where we began this interview okay how do we establish deism there must be a causal agent beyond space and time then how can we appeal the science to go from deism to theism where there must be a personal god then how can we use science to show that this personal god must be a redeeming god because that's the distinction of the god of the bible it's not just a god that creates and creates us it's a god that redeems us from the grip of sin and evil over our lives and so what we've been doing at reasons to believe and you'll see this in my latest books and i got a book coming out in a few months called design to the core and what i'm doing in improbable planet and design to the core why the universe is the way it is is say the strongest fine-tuning argument you get is when you put the design of the universe the earth and earth's life and the context of what needs to happen in order for billions of humans or the equivalent of humans to be redeemed from sin and evil permanently while they retain their free will and what i've been discovering is literally every component of the universe earth and earth's life and every event in the universe earth in earth's life plays some role in making possible the redemption of billions of human beings in a relatively short period of time i mean you get this much fine-tuning evidence of what you need to do to get bacteria you get way more fine-tuning evidence if you want bacteria to stick around for three billion years and you need that to chemically transform a planet so plants and animals become possible but the level of fine tuning for plants and animals is exponentially greater than what you need to get bacteria for three billion years and then they get humans living not just plants and animals but humans the exponential evidence goes up far greater than it does for plants and animals but the greatest increase in fine-tuning evidence is not just for human beings but for billions of humans to be redeemed from their sin and evil and you have literally every event every component plays role the entire universe and all of its features have been designed to make our redemption possible and lately what i've been doing with my secular peers is saying look i know you're not a christian i know you don't believe in god but i'll give you a tip on how you can become a more successful scientist do your scientific research from the biblical redemptive perspective and why don't you see if that makes you more successful and coming up with amazing scientific discoveries put it to the test but of course my goal is as they become a more successful scientist they'll realize maybe there's something to this christian faith i need to check out yeah and that's that's what happened to me i mean i was so kind of frustrated my whole kind of adult life and nothing really there was no sort of uh paradigm or um theory of the universe or theory of life that really made sense and then once i was transformed by the gospel and i read the bible it's like every single word it just all made sen it just made sense everything was like oh i finally could relax i finally could breathe because i was like this is perfectly like it's just it just makes perfect sense every single thing in this this book is is amazing so well i had the same experience it wasn't just all this scientific accuracy and predictive power i saw in the bible the moral message of the bible had an amazing elegance and beauty to it it was so elegant and beautiful i said i want to do everything i can to live up to this moral standard and for a year and a half i tried to do that and realize i don't have the resources to pull that off but as i read the bible god said look i this book was written basically to make that point no one can live up to the standard that i demand but i'm here to give you what you can't do for yourself i said that's just too good of an offer to turn down well i love that we'll leave it at that and i hope um chase if you're watching i hope this this helps you and dr hugh ross thank you so much for being on the show i really appreciate it uh you're very welcome and people can get free chapters of my books reasons.org ross

Channel: Becket Cook

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Keywords: Chynna Phillips Baldwin, California Preachin', Becket Cook, Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Dave Rubin, Allie Beth Stuckey, Candace Owens, Steven Crowder, Dr. Michael Heiser, The Remnant Radio, Big Bang, Kalam, Albert Einstein, Supernova, Stephen Hawking, Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, William Lane Craig, J.P. Moreland, Carl Sagan, Immanuel Kant, Hinduism, The Vedas, Hubble, Multiverse, Fred Hoyle, COBE, Bertrand Russell, God

Id: JYjo2sie8t0

Length: 60min 20sec (3620 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 05 2021