EWTN Live Fr. Mitch Pacwa, S.J. and Fr. Robert Spitzer, S.J.

our atheist making us afraid to examine science or can we use science to prove that God exists we're jumping into the world of astrophysics tonight on EWTN live so please stay with us thank you very much and welcome father Mitch Pacwa welcome to EWTN live our chance to bring you guess I'm all over the world before we get to our guest and I just want to mention that today is the Feast of saints Marcellinus and Peter they both died in 304 during the persecution of Diocletian last year that persecution it was the last of the Roman empirical persecutions of the church and it was the worst of them it was their last gasp effort in fact inspired by the mother of one of the generals of Diocletian because she was a witch who hated Christianity so she instigated that persecution with through her son and then Diocletian went along with it one of the things though that Saints Marcellinus and Peter are great for us to keep in mind is that you can go to the tomb of the Emperor Diocletian who presided over this persecution and when you go there it's in the city of split and when you go to that tomb you notice he's not there you know is the martyrs they threw his body out and they brought the martyrs and after he died this was part of the great triumph of the church over the Roman Empire and it's a great witness to us that as mighty as the Empire might have been as violent and vicious as they were it was at that point Roman Empire zero Christians one one the other way around Christians one Roman Empire zero and we're gonna keep that with the rest of the we can go on through communists and the rest right now tonight you have a guest who's no friend of mine he is not afraid to bring his Catholic faith into the scientific world in fact he says the existence of God can be better explained now more than ever by contemporary science and modern philosophy and he can't imagine why agnosticism and atheism becoming a bit more popular than they used to be so please welcome the president of the magis Centre for reason and faith father Robert Spitzer SJ how the heaven are you well I'm very well thanks to you and in the wonderful opportunity here to be with you this is a great sender that you said it's called the magis stands means what and learn more or even more yeah and this is a basic theme for us Jesuits mhm you know the st. Ignatius always taught us to go for the greater glory of God's and seek to do the more and this is a scent magis center for reason in faith you are just going right in line with our Jesuit past are you not I am and also in line with the encyclical of pope john paul ii ii infeed as a trot CEO encouraged us faith and reason encouraged us to try to bring faith and reason together because faith without reason just breeds superstition and reason without faith becomes nihilistic materialistic and relativistic so he he's got a great point and our young people especially need to need to know that not only our reason and faith compatible but that reason especially in the form of contemporary astrophysics points very strongly in the direction of a creation and even of God just before we get to that because I think that this is a very important line for us to pursue the reason I mentioned about our Jesuit past it's been Jesuits who've been involved in astrophysics astronomy in its day and wasn't astrophysics then but it was a story we've been running the papal astronomical observatory for centuries and I started and it was judge with mathematicians and scientists who came up with our calendar because of their scientific work this is not science and religion have never been in combat 'el in our tradition no in fact oddly enough a certain Jesuit physicists and and astronomers like voila actually were responsible for some of the data that Galileo used early on to form scientific methodology and so Stephen Barr and others have done some very good work and William Wallace in a book called Galileo and his sources points out that the Jesuits at the Roman College were well before the time of Galileo already practicing a certain form of empirical methods scientific method and did they get kicked out of the church because they were using scientific method no Galileo well that's a whole huge historical but he was never assumed you know it was never excommunicated at all he was how about tortured and put to the rack no no none of that stuff unfortunately just so again this is not incompatible they've been bumps in the road yeah but that's true of science itself oh yeah absolutely so so let's let's take a look at this then but there you're working it how is it that you think you can prove that there's a creation through astrophysics and what would be even the problem that people might face it with that question hmm well you can't prove a creation like you can in in metaphysics or a philosophical proof because science to begin with is right it's empirical but you can establish a strong people don't know what empirical means what do you mean by oh it's based on observations of fact and measurement and so science itself doesn't work by deduction it works by a form of induction and that induction can come to a strong likelihood so we talked about well-established scientific theories we talked about well corroborated scientific theories and of course we don't talk about having a complete explanation because right we're always open to some new discovery something more could be discovered empirically and and that could throw the the theory off but a well corroborated theory very much has a convergence of data and so after a while when you get lots of datasets that converge on the same set of numbers and and those numbers are interpretive of very different data sets then you begin to say this is pretty solid stuff and you don't want to go abandoning it until there really is some datum that that would force you to do so and so science can come too strong likelihoods yeah so what science does is it looks at the data the information that's in the universe and they use wonderful instruments better than we've ever had before that's very true that the Hubble telescope is just one of all of the cosmic background Explorer satellite the Maps satellite I mean these things are terrific instruments were not just measuring the cosmic background radiation but all kinds of things that and in the Hubble telescope is quite advanced and and really has come to help us understand not only you know the formation of galaxies but galactic systems and so all of this is now data and from that you can induce that is you can come to a conclusion that what this probably means is this until we get more data that's right you try to explain the information that you get that's the inductive method that's right so you can come to a probabilistic conclusion that there is a beginning and that probabilistic conclusion so long as you have it based on multiple data bases and you've considered the the various alternatives to the theory if you have a convergence of data that's strong you can come to a strong probabilistic conclusion for example about a beginning or a point at which the universe actually came into existence yeah and but it's not the same as absolute proof nope because nobody saw that actual beginning if you had that data go on before you mm-hmm that would be the beginning but because you'd already be it already there but you don't have that but you have all this information from which you draw the conclusion and there was the beginning mm-hmm that's right no given that the existence of a beginning to creation why is that did that always what was that always held by scientists what was the argument about as to whether the beginning of the universe or not yeah I mean for a long while you know if you go back to the time of Aristotle Aristotle did not believe in a beginning he believed that the universe extended infinitely back in time but then of course that was influenced by judeo-christian thought and particularly st. Augustine who wrote very convincing arguments of the possibility of a beginning and not only a beginning of the universe but a beginning of time itself so st. Agustin really did transform and frankly his theories are still quite scientifically acceptable and so remarkable remarkable intellect as well as of course a saint and and then you you move along until you get to the time of Newton and Newton who was actually a very religious man Newton actually did make the assumption that the universe was Infinite in time and he also made it that it was infinite in space and also infinite and mass and so essentially this undermined what was called teleological arguments or arguments for design and the reason that it did was because if you have an infinite amount of mass and an infinite amount of space for an infinite amount of time well conceivably it could aggregate into just about anything or get into any form of complexity so long as aggregation as possible and and Newton's clearly thought that so it's almost like you have a denominator of infinity and a probability equation and so some of this down now I'm talking scientific language let's so what you're talking about here is that even Newton's theory was correct the universe is infinite never had a beginning will never ever end mm-hmm it has no limit in in terms of its extension that in its unlimited amount of matter infinite amount and unlimited in the amount of aggregate able matter so what does that mean anything it can get it can form complexes so you can get more and more more complex things out of it in other words you can have form first atoms then it can form molecules Manakin form say planets and Suns and then other organisms and and rocks etc it's an aggregate that's right that's right and so at the time it looked like well maybe the universe isn't so special and okay human beings arose out of it but well given an infinite amount of time anything could happen so maybe it's not so surprising I mean we do seem somewhat special but well you know you know and of course the naturalistic hypothesis which was not really so intrinsic to Newton Newton actually felt human beings were very special in one way but his assumptions in the pre Campea Mathematica which was a very important work of his basically let alone still get that Mathematica is still available yes it is bookstores and starch people still should read it mmm-hmm to understand science oh yeah so so he was showing what they're basically what happens of course is you know people think okay no creation you know anything could happen human beings are not special even though Newton himself didn't do that a lot of people started you know you know forming what's called a naturalistic hypothesis well maybe you know we could just assume from the vantage point of science that even the the metaphysical domain is can't be extended beyond what's not is natural what's what's nature what's physical and what's and of course then you get what's called naturalism and naturalism means there there isn't a metaphysical there's not a beyond physics no super there's not a super nature or supernatural there is no God there is no spirit or no angels anything like that this is just matter is infinite and matters completely explanatory you could basically explain everything through some sort of material causation and for a long time that that view really held quite a bit of sway until this Belgian priest by the name of Father George Lemaitre comes along in 1927 he had graduated from MIT and took a PhD in physics actually in cosmology well he was really started as a mathematician but what goes on in the area of physics and and then becomes a colleague of Einstein's and then while teaching at the versity of levan he basically discovers a theory of universal expansion which is later verified by several other astronomers including the great American astronomer Edwin Hubble and then later on he postulates from his theory of universal expansion that the universe originated from what he called a primeval atom a point which was very very small and then as it were you know a huge explosion drove mass energy into the universe itself we know Fred Hoyle and kind of a sarcastic remark just said oh we'll call it the Big Bang but he meant it kind of as an insult but the name stuck over lemaitre's name the primeval atom but really after hub bubbles verifications and then when Penzias and Wilson discovered this 2.7 Kelvin uniformly distributed radiation that would have had to been from a very early era of the universe itself it was pretty clear because of its uniform distribution that would have had to have gone back to the earliest of IRA's in the universe and was strongly suggestive of the fact that was a bang yeah there was a big bang and father Lemaitre was correct so to begin to bring this down the idea that it matter was Infinite had like Newton postulated it was a hypothesis for mm-hmm this had a lot of influence it certainly influenced people like Karl Marx and many other atheists probably Charles Darwin Tania and number of these folks were very influenced by that idea but in the 20s and 1920s a priest for the Lemaitre is the one who says no there it began with this tiny but compressed an explosion mm-hmm this tiny atom that exploded and it's a Catholic priest who gives us the Big Bang Theory yes and he actually had very good physical theories in fact Einstein Einstein at first didn't like it because you know obviously he wanted the universe to be a steady-state he didn't like the idea of an expanding universe at first but then after some problems introducing a cosmological constant into his equations what wound up happening is you know he heard Lemaitre a second time and upon hearing him actually the third time actually did say at one point that it was the most satisfying physical theory he had heard to explain the universe as he knew it so so so then the two things that go on first the universe is not infinite in time it has a beginning that would be seem to be the suggestion from what's called the standard Big Bang model and there are now actually you can add some additional evidence to that but at that time and right now today we have what's called a standard Big Bang model and the standard Big Bang model just associates the beginning of time with the Big Bang now since lemaitre's time there have been several theorists who have come along say well maybe there was a pre Big Bang period and maybe there was even a multiverse and we're just a little pocket universe or bubble universe that's in this larger multiverse and so there have been introductions of let's call it fuller concepts of the universe but these are highly highly theoretical right there they're completely hypothetical there's no evidence for them a good example of that would be the it's a little crazy but it's an example of that theory the movie men in black didn't see it well it's it's a movie and in there there are you know universes inside universes and our universe has some inside of it and then we're inside another universe and well in in a sense that multiverse would be something similar I mean it's a very well worked out you know cosmological theory but yes the one thing is it's a theory it's a hypothesis right so this they don't have evidence to prove it it's just an offices right so I mean the standard Big Bang model could be correct and therefore the Big Bang could be the beginning of time itself but here's the the interesting point even if it isn't even if there was a pre Big Bang period or even if we are in a multiverse evidence from both the second law of thermodynamics our entropy and evidence from what we call space-time geometry arguments especially what's called the board of villain Canon Guth theorem proved that that pre-big bang period would also have to have a beginning and proved also that a multiverse itself would have to have a beginning even though we might be just a bubble universe nestled in it so all of a sudden it's not no longer dependent upon asserting that the standard Big Bang model must be correct because even if you assert oh no there were bounces in a pre Big Bang era which was quantum cosmological that too would have to have the beginning the multiverse itself would have to have a beginning and this board of villain Canon GU theorem are it's just so generally applicable so extensively applicable and it has only one assumption that the average Hubble expansion in this pre-big bang condition be greater than zero well if it's an inflating condition which you'd have to have in this pre-big bang condition it would have to be greater than zero and if it's greater than zero it has a beginning so now the evidence more than ever today by the way that theory was formulating 2003 it is still as valid today there have been challenges to it it's right people have tried to make exceptions but the exceptions actually have been redressed very very well and so right now the best physical evidence we have is that the universe had a beginning a point at which it came into existence okay so it has a beginning in time but also because with this Big Bang Theory game it's not infinite amount of matter either it's it's expanding but it has limits yeah so it's not an infinite universe or is nor is it infinite in time you know that changes no the very premises for the old-time atheists oh very much so as a as a matter of fact I mean we pretty much know the amount of matter in the universe and matter you know you can divide up the what's called mass energy and into three parts you have what's called visible matter and that's matter that gives rise to electromagnetic radiation or light and it electricity it does things so this is you know the matter that we're accustomed to and that's only 4.6 percent of the matter in the universe then we have dark matter which is 23% approximately that doesn't emit a light spectrum and so it's a very different sort of thing although it does have gravitational interaction and with that that would be what people call black holes it could form a black hole could cause of a very powerful force of attraction and then you have a very powerful force of repulsion that's connected with the space-time field itself and that's called dark energy and dark energy is about 72.4% more or less of the mass energy of the universe well you can kind of figure out what's there because we know pretty much what the visible matter is that's about 4.6 percent and that's 10 so the 53 kilograms what's visible is only 4% about 4.6 4.6 percent yeah that's it and so everything else I'm blind to see well you're ninety-five point here directly blind to it because it doesn't have a light spectrum but quite frankly you can detect it because it has this powerful attraction force right so you can detect it by strange things going on in the proximity of a lot of dark matter so you can know that it's there but I can't see what my think can't see it with your eyes so so once again when people call me blind right well in this particular case yeah you don't have any alternative but honestly we know pretty much how much visible matter there is out there it's it's 10 to the 53 kilograms worth and that's about 10 to the 80 baryons worth and that's a large amount a baryon is a particle that basically describes either a proton or a neutron 'very has lots of rest mass and and so if you know basically the barbarians maybe 10 dat can calculate back where thats about 10 to the 53 kilograms and and that's all there is it that's finite and so so there's 10 to the 15 nobody say 10 to the 53rd you're not giving odds on a horse race you're talking 10 with 53 zeroes 1 1 1 5300 so we don't know what name for that number and in the trill attention showing change right it's big yeah and but it still means that the universe is very definite very limited very fine a huge in its way but another way it's got a limited weight and is not infinite that's correct so if there - if it's not something that is eternal if it's not something that is infinite but it's both limited in time and space this means that the universe is clearly not God yeah well yeah God by definition is infinite and so the universe cannot be God a limited amount of mass limited amount of energy limited amount of time definitely not God by any standard definition yeah I'm starting to hear in my mind back here running around the song he's got the whole world in his hands they mean our planet but the whole you know even that mass now you could change that song too he's got the whole universe in his mind yeah exactly so this is one of the bases for proving that that there is a creator this is what makes the hypothesis of a Creator who is larger than this limited amount of time and limited amount of matter and who and and well it started as a single dot a small piece that explodes he would be the one that creates that that would be the hypothesis you propose yeah and you could actually you have some very good theorems that back that up so basically you can pretty much show that any a universe any multiverse any universal condition you would like to postulate so long if it's connectable with our universe then you can't have a speed greater than the speed of light and what board a villain can in Guth showed is that for example if you have an observer zooming by us at a hundred thousand miles per hour but remember the entire universe is expanding so let's suppose it's moving toward another galaxy which is far far away from us and that galaxies moving away from us at 20,000 miles per hour by the time that rocket reaches there the observers on that galaxy will see the universe coming at 80,000 miles per hour because of the recessional velocity of the galaxies well what more Davila can and Guth reason was then the more the universe expands then the more the recessional velocity you know of everything from everything else begins to slow down the relative velocities of things in the universe so well if you go backward just just wish you understand this so that the universe is expanding yes as it does so that the constant is the speed of light yeah so you can't go backwards in time because if you're getting slower and slower and slower and slower and your relative velocities well if you try to go backwards for an infinite amount of time backwards you can't ever reach an infinity because eventually you're getting faster and faster and faster as you go back in time because right the universe has been expanding and and slowing down all these relative velocities you're going to hit what in a finite proper time the speed of light if you hit the speed of light that's the absolute maximum if you have any universe that's connected with our universe it's not going to exceed the speed of light so for all intents and purposes you cannot go backwards you'll hit the absolute maximum in a finite proper time and that we would call at least a boundary to pass time so and so we've got we've got a variety of these boundaries variety of these limits and somebody who someone a creator you know who is greater than all these all right and who exist before them all mm-hmm would be the what we'd call God as st. Anselm said he's that greater than which nothing can be imagined right and so so that would be the limit and one of the other limits then it comes not from the speed of light but the limit that comes from I need to take a break but let's just establish that this is basic mm-hmm you know from science and physics and you get a good clear understanding that there the theory of God the Creator is very very scientifically logical yes it's it's also very probable but I I think so yeah I just want to let you know that fathers switch has a brand new book called the new proofs for the existence of God this is at ewtn religious catalogue and you can get ahold of religious catalogue by going to www.hsn one eight hundred eighty five four six three one six and let me just ask one question before you break do you define any of these words inside the book i define them all thank you very much thank you again father Spitzer is the president of the magis center of reason and faith and you can go to their website to have any words to find on the website yeah reason in faith or God or proof all right so let's go to the website which is www.hyken.com I reason faith just make that one word ma GIS majus reason reason faith org and look that up and check out some of this information also we have a nice group here folks of come from different parts of the country and we would love to have you come and join us you can come as individuals families or as big groups in parish we'd love to have you come contact our pilgrimage department at two zero five two seven one two nine six six two zero five two seven one two nine six six or go to our website www.jfn.co.jp/toho at us get you some fried okra gives you some Crowder peas and who knows what else they have over there so get it on up coming down there to visit us all right you ready for some questions I am I'll bet you are let's go over to a call you have Rick on the line hello Rick are you doing fine things were you from Connecticut and I I agree that I've done a pilgrimage Ennis T were the greatest pilgrimages we've ever done in our lives and I'm 40 years crooler full ewtn yes well we'll let glad that you come back anytime look we what's your question tonight I had a question for father Robert Spitzer can he share anything about intelligent design and does the if they if they find out what the god particle is in dark matter will that be proving God or what there's is there something that's there's more gravity in this existence in this universe that seems to show evidence that the gravity is coming from another universe because there's not enough mass to hold everything together all right so the number of questions there let's start off first of all what is intelligent design what does that mean well it means that there is a supernatural designing agency and there are two kinds of intelligent design arguments one of them is formulated by people and the biological sciences and they're looking at when there seems to be a gap in certain evolutionary processes and trying to at least hypothesize that God would have to be an explanatory factor in those gaps so I don't do that well just so people understand this according to Darwin's theory of evolution he said that there would be a lot of missing links you know that were no longer around but they made the transition from one stage of evolution to the present stage and in fact this was sort of an evil doctrine by him in some ways because he considered Africans to be a link between humans and apes and that which is not good sighs I mean they're fools humans are not a link but that but that was where he got into some goofy thought but we don't always see such links and so the intelligent design says there was some guidance to jump because there's some gaps that have just jumped over and they're on missing links well that's your those theorists believe and and you know that's a specialty really more of biology I approached it the intelligent design from the vantage point of physics which is a very different matter what we look at it generally is okay how can you explain the constants of the universe having what's called anthropic values values yeah what does that mean but values which will give rise for example to a life form any kind of a life form in the universe so what do we do at this juncture you're calculating probabilities so for example if the weak force coupling constant which is a very important constant if that constant we're off by one part in ten to the fifty ten to the fifty is fifty one was fifty so basically you're you're literally dealing with a very very minuscule fraction one part in 10 to the fifty in either one direction or another direction if it goes in one direction the universe has a catastrophic collapse if it goes in another direction the universe is so explosive that those explosions disrupt the formation of life as the universe continues to expand well okay the question then is is how in the world did the weak force coupling constant have the precise value that it has so we can avoid the two catastrophes take another one the the strong nuclear force constant there's four forces in the universe and those forces have constants attached to them now the strong nuclear force constant if it's off by two percent in one direction so let's suppose we increase the strong nuclear force constant by two percent then there will be no hydrogen in the universe if we reduce the strong nuclear force constant by two percent then you'll have nothing no element heavier than hydrogen in the universe which of course would preclude life in either direction or planets or plan well certainly the vast majority of planets unless you had one that was you know purely hydrogen on the one hand or one they had no hydrogen on the other but certainly it would preclude life and and so we have there's about 20 constants right and you know in the this new series that I've done for EWTN I just take seven of them and I give instances of how just slight variations in those constants will preclude any life form from developing I mean another very important one is you know the stars are very close to the boundary of convective instability so which means what which means they could be like a blue giant or a red dwarf and the blue giant in the red dwarf that's bad news for life let's just put it very simply yeah life cannot exist in either a red dwarf or a blue giant see you need to there's too much energy of different kinds and either one of those cannot have an existence of human life that's right this a life period and so so you need stars in between and and some like baby bears pores it can't be too hot just right that's exactly it and so if you just have a miniscule variation in electromagnetism or a miniscule variation the gravitational constant or minuscule variation in the electron mass compared the proton mass that's the end it goes to the boundaries of convective instability goes to blue giants it goes to red dwarfs but the fact is you're not going to get life-forms out of them and there are many others such variations that are not permissible yes sort of again so folks understand this is an extremely important concept you have how many constants again twenty of twenty twenty years old yeah so now if you the ones that we know of are exactly right for life to exist yeah pretty much if any of them varied some is slight a variation as one to the 50th right smaller X within 2% which is a huge amount of wiggle room greater or less right then life could not exist that's correct or the universe and it's not one of these or two mm-hmm that have to be exactly tuned it's 20 they have to be it's hard enough for a musician to kind of a guitar - oh yeah or a violin you're talking 20 different constants of the universe without what you can't exist correct well which no it could exist but it would be such a chaotic and thank you yeah that's right there'd be nobody there to observe it yeah that's for sure that's so the question then becomes is there someone who is so powerful and so intelligent as to make sure all that the 20 constants exist and that they're tuned to exactly the precise level they have to be so life can exist that would be the question we have physicists and philosophers just go through the backwards kind of a logic they say okay look pure chance is out of the question I mean are you kidding me that the values could have been higher or lower in a huge degree so that the precise yeah and the precise value it's got to be in this very narrow window so you start looking at that we don't know nothing you're talking about a thin line thin line yeah exactly and because of that you know you start saying you up your chance out of the question I'll give you one that's absolutely fascinating is Roger Penrose very famous physicist it's trying to calculate what the odds of our low entropy at the Big Bang is and low entropy is you want a state of low entropy because low entropy means high degree of organization if you have high entropy that means a high degree of disorganization in other word things entropies when things go apart they look at disorganized and scattered instead of being complementary you make some makes it possible to organize high entropy means that go really far apart and yes the and here's here's the rub the rub is that we need a low entropy universe in order to have complex life-forms developed because you need complex organized energetic states in order to have life-forms developing it so happens that our BIGBANG had a very low entropy but low entropy is totally totally against the odds and in roger penrose actually calculated it's a very simple calculation really and in what he discovered that the odds against an a low entropy universe happening by pure chance are 10 raised to the 10 raised to the 123 to 1 against so that's a double exponent let me explain what that figure looks that's a bigger number than I can add dad's right because you have a 10 and then in the exponent you have a 1 with a hundred and twenty three zeroes after it in the exponent if you try to write that number out an ordinary notation with let's say every zero being three point type it's gonna take up a huge chunk of the universe now that's a big number against this low entropy universe arising now after Roger Penrose made this calculation I mean basically you cannot say that pure chance can explain anything I mean this is like saying to a monkey you know monkey type out the entire corpus of Shakespeare in the next two weeks I'll be back and the monkey believed typing you know all the rent doesn't even understand the instructions just randomly typing them on the keys and you come back and lo and behold Macbeth and Hamlet perfectly done you begin to suspect something is awry here this seems highly improbable you know by random tapping of the keys so you begin to conjecture aha an intelligent person has entered the room with a fine knowledge of Shakespeare but the point is whatever you conjecture pure chance is not going to explain how the monkey went ahead and did it so I'm from Chicago I'm suspicious I want know who the monkey paid all happens right good sir were you from I'm from Melbourne Australia good to have you here good what is your question just as some Thomas Aquinas systems and theories guided the church and and the formation of clergy for many centuries I'd like to ask father Spitzer whether he believes that it's possible that science and astrophysics might guide the church and the formation of clergy over the next few centuries I think it's inevitable I think with the advent of the entropy evidence for a beginning the fine-tuning arguments for a beginning the Vorta villain Canon Guth theorem even the board abortive Iligan theorem from 1993 there's so much good evidence for beginning I think it's it's there's a strongly probabilistic you know a conclusion about a beginning I think it's going to have to be factored in I mean you can't come to the same kind of a conclusion about the existence of God that you can from a metaphysical or a philosophical proof in science but this does have a significant amount of empirical weight and it does have you know converting what John Henry Newman called you know an informal inference you get a convergence of lots of physical data on a similar conclusion and a similar set of numbers at that juncture you begin to think okay even though it it is a metaphysical conclusion at the end of the day that the universe can't explain itself that the universe had a an absolute boundary to its past time and therefore you have a point at which it came into existence that's got to have some influence well especially when we live in a world where there are a number of people trying to claim science makes atheism more logical this is the claim of somebody like Richard Dawkins mm-hmm and Christopher Hitchens yes but they'd never address any of the physical evidence right it's the at most remarkable error of omission I have ever seen I mean how do you sit there and talk about how science and faith are diverging and never talk about any of the evidence that has come out you know relentlessly since 1993 it's amazing to me and so this that what you're offering is just an look he won't cover it I will that's precisely the point and there's a weirdo this stuff here's a very good intellectual John Griffith he made this remark he said he said boy if our university needs an atheist to enter into a debate the physics department is not much help you know basically you know what he's they look at this evidence and they move toward the the faith that there is a God who created this finite you know I think there is a real openness to it and then Richard Dawkins and others do not convey that no they convey something little master let's go over to John's calling it hold John hello where are you from John Ohio great and what's your question I gotta say we got the Jesuit power going to Davis what this is for both you father Mitch and father Robert what if we meet scientists incensed by their own limited mind they feel God cannot be proven therefore God does not exist and I was wondering this was kind of an evangelism question because I really wouldn't know I wouldn't have the brains what to say really so there you go yeah you can first of all my father Spitzer's book yeah hey keep plugging that book but yeah you can't just because something can't be proven doesn't mean it doesn't exist like for example for years and years we could never prove the existence of an electron and and of course they they exist and suddenly a proof came and that didn't mean to they suddenly came into existence electrons been around for 13.7 billion years which is the age of the universe and of course we couldn't prove it we just couldn't prove it so the absence of a proof does not ever entail non-existence secondly in science you can't get the absolute proof you know that we've been talking about but you can get as I've said before an informer informal inference based on convergent and 2-seed in probability so you take all kinds of probabilistic data from all kinds of different evidence sets you merge them all together if one explanation explains a variety of the data sets then at the end you can say at least there seems to be a high degree of probability that might occur you could always say in science that something could change but for all intents and purposes you know there's a high degree of probability that there could be a beginning and that beginning might well have been caused by a super intellect a super intellectual designing agency now if you can extraordin to know that there are these limited not just bands but thin thin lines that cannot be varied from what they are on that to be constants to know what all of them are and then to have the power to set them in place mm-hmm that's the other side of his nuts not just knowledge it's being able to put it there oh yeah I mean there have been some fantastic instances of physicists who have converted from atheism I mean the most famous cases Fred Hoyle and Fred Hoyle for example he was a very adamant atheist and he would go around actually proclaiming it quite vociferous Lee and then one day his partner William Fowler showed him that the resonance structures which resonance structures and things that hold atomic structures fast almost like you know vibrations that that hold things together that the resonance structures of carbon which an atom beryllium oxygen and helium have to be at very very very precise levels in order for any of these things to stick together into bond and interestingly enough Hoyle saw this evidence and he changed his mind he not only became a theist he became a very Pro climate or EST he even several passages indicating that he thought it that there were no blind forces worth speaking of that he believed that a super intellect had monkeyed with the constants of physics to make them come out felicitous ly for you know carbon bonding and other kinds of cosmic coincidences and then proclaimed that he thought that this conclusion of this super intellect was quite that to challenge it was quite out of the question let's have another question from our studio audience man where are you from from Orange County California wonderful place and what is your question for father Spitzer along the lines of the pop culture atheist that you were talking about father Pacwa in our high school and universities although the students I think there's a resurgence of faith and they have very clear feel more comfortable than ever before having a relationship with God I think they're also greatly affected by these pop culture atheists because of new media and how information is spread so instantaneously and it's just you know an evil that's you know out there and I want to know how you're gonna get this information out to these students or it will use it use this as a tool a defense against this you know effect of the pop culture atheism as a matter of fact I'd even add that and some of the campuses I've been to atheistic students are becoming more aggressive wearing a Pro atheist blatantly atheism t-shirts and banners and such to promote promote this atheism so what are we gonna do that gets us to the college kids I'm just interesting ly enough it's the kids in the hard sciences are the least inclined toward atheism the ones in the humanities are more inclined right but what are we gonna do could I shamelessly promote my own website sure I mean what the Magister for reason faith one of the big thrusts said it has is to make high school curricula particularly for Catholic and Christian schools so that in a five module series that can be shown to seniors in high school we can get a lot of the data that we've been just talking about tonight out in a very comprehensible and systematic way with some mature Reles to them and you've also got this new series that you've been working on that's right we have a documentary that we are working on this documentary will feature 10 very esteemed physicists including Arno Penzias who discovered you know the 2.7 degree Kelvin background radiation cosmic microwave background radiation along with Robert Wilson and he won of course a nobel prize for but we are going to feature them speaking about how the physics played into their own faith and how this is it going to be on the Discovery Channel well we're filming it we're hoping for it because we're filming it in 3d and of course we would love to to get it on on someplace like the Discovery Channel and it would be a very very good possibility we do have very very fine physicists who will be on the program in addition we're trying to formulate college courses to see this is one of the things that's very very important that we do our best to become aware of this this is you use a lot of difficult vocabulary it's because it's difficult because it's not familiar to most of us we don't use this kind of vocabulary but this is the vocabulary of science and physics and it's also where if we don't know it some of the atheist promoters you know these new atheists can try to bamboozle the people and so and trick is thinking well it's not look either you're close-minded religious people who believe in faith or you're a scientist who's unknown and you're saying this is a false dichotomy very much a false dichotomy and and quite frankly there is a lot of bamboozling going on out there there are a lot of people who you know as we always said in our first philosophy lessons arbitrarily asserted arbitrarily denied you know you're arbitrarily asserting of faith and saints are going in divergent directions the data shows precisely the opposite and the theorems show precisely the opposite so this is definitely a bamboozled and I'm against so one of the things I'm up against is the end of the shelf Oh so thank you yeah being here with us look I really look forward to this new series please join me in giving a blessing to our audience may Almighty God bless you and keep you cause his face to shine upon you the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit amen and you know as tough as he is to understand sometimes we've got to have father over here father Spitzer and all the other folks were bringing us a kind of knowledge that not only makes sense of our faith but make sense of our world and they're opening up new challenges but we can do that because this network is brought to you by you and it's for you so please keep us in between your gas bill electric bill and cable bill and we will continue to pay all of our bills especially throughout this summer season a lot of people go away so keep that up and we'll do our best to bring more programs to you thank you you

Channel: EWTN

Views: 35,434

Rating: 4.7939396 out of 5

Keywords: astrophysics, science, faith, Catholic

Id: QI1QBj3aFfg

Length: 56min 31sec (3391 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2010