Fr. Robert Spitzer, S.J. - "Science, the Creation of the Universe and Beyond"

all right good evening everyone and welcome to the winter newman lecture on science the creation of the universe and beyond with father robert spitzer whether you're a student a faculty member or a member of the larger community we're glad you're here my name is andrew klapnik and i'm lily wheaton will be your host for tonight's lecture before we move on lily and i wanted to introduce ourselves briefly uh i recently graduated from american university in washington dc with a degree in history and now i'm serving as a volunteer missionary at oregon state university i graduated from oregon state university with a degree in rangeland management last june as a missionary i now assist with the many different programs that the newman center offers as a student i had the opportunity to attend several newman lectures on various topics however as a science major i often found myself questioning whether or not the church's teachings and the scientific discoveries and theories i was learning about coincided i believe that this particular lecture will be able to help answer many of those questions the goal of the newman lecture series is to bring together people who hold a wide range of philosophical beliefs and religious beliefs for discussions on urgent and thought-provoking topics through father spitzer's lecture tonight and your questions we hope we can all enlarge our minds and learn more from one another at this time we'd like to thank our host for the night the newman center at oregon state university who for the last five years has hosted these newman lectures the newman center strives to provide oregon state students opportunities to encounter christ and grow in the catholic faith if you'd like to learn more about the newman center you can check us out at osun.org so now we'd like to explain how the night will go once we introduce our speaker for the night he'll have time to present for about 40 minutes following the presentation there will be time for questions we ask that if you have a question submit it during the talk using the q a button at the bottom of your screen we acknowledge that questions can be very similar so we'll manage sorting through them as you send them in questions are open to everyone and i and we welcome all questions however we ask that they are succinct and to the point uh and now it's time i'd like to introduce our speaker for the night father robert spitzer father spitzer is the president of both the mages center of reason and faith and the spitzer center and he has been published widely on the topic of faith and reason and in 2010 he appeared on larry king live and debated stephen stephen hawking and leonard malotta now on the existence of god father spitzer also appears weekly on his ewtn show father spitzer's universe where he answers viewers questions about god science virtue and other existential questions please welcome or welcome father spitzer and and thank you for speaking with us this evening thank you uh andrew and lily it's uh great to be with all of you and of course with all of our oregon state guests and those who are participating from way beyond the confines of oregon i just want to speak to you tonight about the evidence for god an intelligent creator that is now being supported by science in a variety of different ways let me just start with this assertion since the publication of his final paper in 2016 in the journal of high energy physics stephen hawking and um thomas hertoghe have really moved the um the needle uh forward on the idea of bringing together um the philosophical view of cosmology the physics view of cosmology and the implications of these things for science now that's a big assertion that you know science is opening upon an intelligent creator so i have a lot of explaining to do and i'm just going to go through it sort of step by step and i'm going to try and finish up in 45 minutes here as best i can that way we'll have a lot of time for questions first what can science do what can't science do the first thing is science methodologically cannot disprove the existence of god why not because unfortunately science has the restriction of needing to be grounded in observational data so if you can't run an assertion observational data it's not going to work for science now here's the problem observational data comes from within our universe in other words we can't observe anything that's beyond the event horizon in our universe we can't even get to the extent of our universe we're even caught by our universe's event horizon so think about this for just a moment number one science has to come from observational data number two that observational data has to come from within our observable universe and then we've got the problem of god being beyond not only our observational universe if god existed he would have to also be beyond our you know a multiverse after all the creator has to be at least in some respect transcend um or be beyond uh what our universe or what the creation of god is so we've got a problem we have to we see that our data from science has to come from within the universe god's beyond the universe how can we use data from our universe to disprove an entity that is beyond in principle beyond our universe the answer is we can't it's impossible methodologically science can't disprove god it would be like a cartoon character uh assembling all of the data from within the cartoon to disprove the cartoonist enough said science also though can establish some things about our universe that may imply the need for a transcendent creator we'll talk a lot about that tonight but one of the things science can do is it could establish uh perhaps an extent of the universe or an extent of maybe our bubble universe within a multiverse it could do something like that it could also established the need for a boundary in of past time uh in our universe so that we couldn't um have a universe that existed um prior to that past boundary and we'll talk about that evidence tonight there's a good deal of it but um the the fact is science can do that because it's not talking about god disproving god it's actually talking about our universe but some of the facts of the of our universe are actually going to establish some limits to the universe which may imply uh the need for a transcendent creator who is highly intelligent all right just a little bit of background for those of you who are not coming at this from a physics background a point of view um you know the big bang theory is where all of this began and the big bang theory believe it or not began with a belgian priest monsignor or father george lemaitre in 1927 he was definitely a catholic priest actually as a matter of fact a world war one uh hero but um he got a doctorate from mit later of course got additional doctoral qualifications from harvard and became a colleague of einstein's and eddington's and what he discovers in his probing of einstein's general theory of relativity and seeing the initial data for redshifting in our universe he basically wrote a paper in 1927 called um before there was uh the day before there was no yesterday and he uh published that and i gave it to einstein einstein read the paper and he said well the physics and the mathematics is correct but the idea that there could be an expanding universe is preposterous now einstein really wanted the universe to be in a steady state the idea of an expanding universe was well somewhat repulsive to him and so he really did not want to admit it he actually put in a cosmological constant that would guarantee a stable universe but unfortunately he wound up basically dividing by zero so um this was pointed out to him by not by lemaitre but others and finally of course he kind of opened himself up to the possibility in 1929 edwin hubble uh a very important american astronomer right next to me actually um uh up at mount wilson observatory uh discovered that um the universe as we move further and further away in the universe the red shifting is increasing the further away we get then the faster uh objects like a galaxy are moving away from us and in order to explain that uh with the problem was called the the um uh the uh the problem of recessional velocities of extra galactic nebulizer this is just a big mouthful which basically says that the further away we get the faster things are moving away from us the only way you can really explain it is if the universe is expanding as a whole galaxies are not moving away from each other in fixed space said lemaitre and later agreed hubble and einstein right basically the space is stretching and growing right between the galaxies and that's what's causing the galaxies to move faster and faster away now i could explain this to you if i had a lot more time to to to do it but you're welcome to ask any question about how this works during the q a session for the moment just con picture the universe like a balloon and just picture there's a whole bunch of dots on that balloon you start blowing up that balloon and you notice without the dots actually moving on the surface of the balloon the dots are getting further and further and further away from each other why because the space-time continuum the elastic on the balloon being uh you know analogous to the space-time continuum is stretching and growing but this also explains to what's now today called the lemaitre constant and also now the hubble constant right and the lemaitre equations we still have you know the uh the walker lemaitre space-time equations that still exist today in cosmology and um but anyway he uh showed um that the expansion of the universe in this manner where space time is expanding rather than the galaxies themselves that would actually you know correlate with hubble's data um you know showing that the recessional velocities uh indicated by the redshifts are getting greater and greater as we move further and further away so um of course in 1929 two years after uh lemaitre's publication of the article that einstein didn't like so much the the basic thing though is hubble did show that the recessional velocities of the universe the red shifting of the distant galaxies was actually correspondent to lemaitre's original equations at which point einstein did admit he said to lemaitre okay this is one of the most satisfying theories of creation uh that i have ever seen a creation of the universe that i have ever seen so um that pretty much changed everything uh as you probably know from some of your studies right the aristotelian worldview or the newtonian worldview of the universe was that the universe existed for an infinite amount of time and all of a sudden now now we're talking about the beginning of space time we're talking about the expansion of space time and that changes everything it's not like galaxies are moving around big space the whole of phases of the whole of space-time if we go back far enough namely 13.7 billion years plus or minus 100 million years if we go back far enough all of a sudden we get to a point where space time is squished into 10 to the minus 33 centimeters now once you get to that point there is no yesterday said lemaitre and that is the case so now we're literally dealing with a whole different view of cosmology view of cosmology that's opening up to a a creation event now there's lots of confirmations that have occurred um uh to of the big bang theory but uh uh just a few of them that you might note uh penzias and wilson and by the way we have a nice little um you know interview with uh arnold pencius who uh discovered the uh what's called the 2.7 degree kelvin uniformly distributed radiation we've got a nice interview with him if you just go to manjacenter.com and click on cosmic origins that little uh videotape there you can see in his interview but the point is he basically confirmed with another data set that in fact the universe was uh you know it came out of a big bang and the you know of course they were a little bit off in their calculations they thought at that time uh it was between 15 to 18 billion years ago as it turns out today it's about 13.7 billion years ago that's when the big bang occurred uh we have a lot of information about the universe as a whole today we know that there's about 10 to the 55th kilograms worth of um visible matter in our universe we also know that um uh that well there's probably about five times more dark matter than that you can do the multiplying for yourself and then we know um that there's much more um uh dark energy in our universe dark energy by the way just go back to that balloon for just a moment and dark energy is a kind of a a quality of the space-time continuum uh we'll just call it dark energy we'll call it a vacuum energy but it's actually pushing accelerating the expansion of the space-time continuum through its presence so dark energy is not anything like dark matter right because dark matter acts like any other matter it collapses uh the space-time continuum uh whereas dark energy does the opposite it's accelerating the expansion of the space-time continuum as a whole okay so that we have a pretty good idea about this and i could you know we know that we have four universal forces i'll talk about this later right where there's a gravitational force the electromagnetic force there's a strong nuclear force and there's the weak force and we know the various particle constituents down to the up court downpour strange court charm court etc so we have a very good idea of what our physical universe looks like and we have a pretty good idea of now that um uh you know we have um uh you know a sense of of the uh of the elementary particle the complete uh set of elementary particle equations um we have a pretty good idea of what the um what the universe is like uh so why is this all important in terms of of uh getting a picture of our universe or the origins of our universe do we have to appeal to a transcendent cause now clearly father lemaitre thought you did um for a while there all the way up until the discovery of of dark energy or vacuum energy um even stephen hawking believed that you had to have a beginning of the universe and a transcendent explanation of it but then a series of discoveries were made uh in what's called inflationary theory with where alan guth dr alan guth and mit made a big discovery of inflationary theory and then we had basically quantum gravity theories and when the coleman deluccia uh tunneling effects were perfected uh we could see that um you know that all of a sudden hey there might be some possibilities of some really strange kinds of pre big bang physical or universal configurations so what were the major ones that came out of the discovery of quantum gravity and inflation number one was the multiverse originally the multiverse just think of a multiverse as being a big huge mega universe and this mega universe is generating these little bubble universes and again you could have trillions upon trillions and upon trillions of these bubble universes one bubble universe of which is ours it's our bubble universe but there's trillions of other bubble universes in this multiverse so that's a real possibility in inflationary theory for a long while inflationary theory was thought to be finite uh but as we shall see there's two different now multiverse theories there's finite um multiverse and finite inflation and now we have what's called eternal inflation uh which gives rise to an infinite multiverse so those are two big propositions that have come up i'm going to talk in some detail about that in a minute and then um the cyclic universe is that is to say the bouncing universes where the universe is not in a multiverse config configuration you've got an expansion and then a contraction and then a re-expansion and a reconstruction into these big crunches etc okay so that's one other possibility so like our big bang is 13.7 billion years ago however prior to that time there could have been another cycle another expansion and another conjunct and prior to that there could have been yet another one and theoretically but actually we'll see in a moment but not really not practically there could be an infinite number of such cycles which means that the universe could exist for an infinite amount of time and you can get the point well a finite multiverse is not going to allow the universe to exist for an infinite amount of time but an eternal inflation and an infinite multiverse would allow um the multiverse to exist for an infinite amount of time so i'm just giving you the possibilities here and then we've got a combination of bouncing universe plus um uh multiverse uh which can be done in string theory and basically you can have these string theoretical universes where you've got uh um you know uh uh um let's just say uh a bouncing universe on steroids you have you know two three dimensional um uh you know units that are caught between a four dimensional bulk space time in this string universe of 11 dimensions right and then the the the two um you know a little bit of feedback here sorry and the two um universes are colliding in the bulk space time and coughing out additional uh universes so these are the big possibilities that quantum cosmology and inflation have allowed so i mean with all these possibilities how can anybody establish that there had to be a beginning of physical reality i mean how can you establish that there might have to be a beginning of a multiverse how can you establish that there would have to be um a um you know an intelligence behind that beginning an intelligence in the creator itself well hang on and here's the next slide and you can see this upside down triangle so we're first going to look at some of the evidence for a beginning from two major areas the board of lincoln and guth proof and there you see that name guth again alan cooth the father of inflation and then we're going to take a look at the entropy um uh area and we'll look at what happens when you combine uh the board of lincoln good proof with entropy when you're talking about um non-eternal inflation when we're talking about um a multiverse which is which is not eternal uh then we'll also talk about um uh fine-tuning of universal constants fine tuning of universal constants gives rise to a huge area of cosmology which is basically the whole area of you know how did we get the precise values of the constants that we call them free parameters right constants are free parameters they don't have to be anything according to the equations of our universe as a whole and so how did they get the values that they got which were precisely the values you need in order to get a life form in the universe and we're going to discuss the possibilities and then we're going to look at where all of this leads and where stephen hawking and thomas hertog's 2016 paper in journal of high energy physics all of a sudden uh you know makes this sort of big leap forward so um we'll just take a look at all the points in the uh upside down triangle right now let's take the board of lincoln and go through again i don't have time to go through this but if you want to go through it all you have to do is go to crediblecatholic.com so just go to crediblecatholic.com and there's a icon there for the big book just go to the big book and then just click on volume one the whole proof is there i'm just going to give you the summary uh right now and by the way if you go to my book new proof through the existence of god um you know from physics and philosophy just take a look at that book it's in chapter one uh the proof is there here's the basic upshot these three physicists very important physicists um arvind borda who's close to me at the university of california santa barbara there there's another physicist alexander valenkin who we'll hear much more about in a moment he's the director of cosmology at tufts university in boston and alan guth the father of inflationary theory who holds the high chair of cosmology there at mit and massachusetts institute of technology so these three businesses got together and they in 2003 and basically they published this by the way uh in um in uh you know the journal of physics or physics review journal a d and i've got all these citations there um in them in the big book that i just talked to you about so if you want to read the article yourself you can't what's the upshot of the article what the board of lincoln and guth showed is that if you have an expanding system and basically this could be an expanding universe or it could be an expanding multiverse or it could be an expanding bouncing universe that has a series of cycles and you sum up the cycles what they basically showed is that if you have an expanding system universe or multiverse or string universe or whatever that system will require a beginning at some point in the finite past now the great thing about this proof is that it only has the one condition that you have an expanding system now it does apply to all these possibilities that we just talked about so for example does it apply to our universe yes our universe is definitely an expanding system uh no question about it we have an average hubble expansion greater than zero so no problem there we're going to have to have a beginning according to bbg bbg just means border blanket and theorem so we have to have a beginning according to bbg secondly inflationary multiverses all the multiverse theorems that you know theories that we have that are real theories they're not quantum multiverses where you have these branch universes existing quantum mechanics what we're talking about is the cosmological multiverse all known multiverses require what's called inflation that was one of the things that was added uh to the to the big bang theory and inflation by definition remember inflation is caused by dark energy right inflation means an expanding in fact an acceleratedly expanding uh universal system or multiversal system now here's the thing to remember you can't have a multiverse without inflation but inflation automatically means that you have not just an expanding system an accelerating expanding system and that means that the multiverse is going to have to have a beginning now again i'm just talking about the flop finite multiverse here we're not talking about eternal inflation right now but for the time being uh we're going back you know in time just simply saying as far as we know any multiverse with inflation has to have a beginning and we'll talk about how the infinite multiverse and eternal inflation theory got postulated in just a moment but let's go to string universes in the higher dimensional space of string theory remember if string theories are going to generate new bubble universes they have to be nucleating and remember as the nucleation takes place right the diameter that is to say you know the circumference of this string universe is always growing you know larger and larger and larger which means what that you've got to have a net increase in velocity you're going to have to have basically an expanding system in order to have a nucleating system generating new universes and finally we could also say well does this apply um you know to um uh other uh you know bouncing universes applies to all bouncing universes so if you read the the article there of board of lincoln and guth they do all the work for you you can see the physics there uh where they basically show that you're going to have to have a beginning in the finite past of any multiverse uh well we'll just say the condition for eternal inflation has not yet been explicated at this point so um and we'll talk about the eternal inflation universe being virtually impossible and we'll talk about that just give me about 15 minutes and i'll be there but the point right now is any multiverse any string universe any bouncing universe or any combination thereof you've got an expanding system and if you have an expanding system then bbg applies and if bvg applies then basically you're going to have a beginning in the finite past enough said so that gave everybody a whole lot of pause this is way back in 2003 and we'll talk about uh alexander blinken in 2006 and 2012 in just a moment but let's go to another quickly to another um area where um the beginning of the universe gets established and that's entropy again i'm going to have to give you the really brief explanation of this given the time constraints but all of it's on the big book volume one if you want the equations you want everything um kind of explained in detail so the main thing right now though is entropy is basically a measure of disorder within the universe so um you know every system has what's called order and order just to make a long story short is disequilibrium within the system if you have equilibrium in a system the system is dead it can't do anything it can't create any physical activity you need some kind of disequilibrium so every um now our universe in the standard big bang model our universe is basically um it has very very very low entropy and we'll talk about the number for that entropy in just a moment but over the course of time as the universe acts and does its thing so creates new stars and new planets and physicists are thinking about it so as the universe is performing its work every time it does so it uses up just a little bit of that order that low entropy uh that our universe started with that disequilibrium that our universe started with so if the universe has been around for an infinite amount of time it should have used up all of the free energy that it had it should have used up all of the order that it had that low entropy that disequilibrium that allows it to do things and if it used all of that up basically it would be a dead universe there would be nothing left except uh you know a well a remnant of cosmic background microwave radiation that is asymptotically approaching 0 degrees kelvin which means it ain't going to do nothing it's going to be freezing cold and not even physicists would be able to think about it but the point is it's not that way as a matter of fact our universe is very active still creating new stars and systems still creating new planets physics is still thinking about it the point is it's got we're at a very very uh a point where at a point of very low entropy and so uh obviously just from the face of it uh the universe can't have been around from uh for an infinite amount of time now let's go to this quote from alexander valencia and um in 2006 he wrote a book uh basically many universes in one and by the way lincoln does believe in a multiverse no question about that and he believe in in this book in 2006 he combined the board of lincoln and guth proof with the evidence of entropy two different kinds of systems and evidence that are coalescing with one another not just qualitatively but quantitatively now here's his conclusion which by the way a lot of physicists adhere to to this very day it is said um that uh that a good argument will convince a reasonable person i'm going to paraphrase it it is said that a good argument will convince a reasonable person and that a proof will convince even an unreasonable one well now that the proof is in place what proof the board of lincoln and proof plus the entropy evidence now that the proof is in place cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past eternal universe there is no escape they must confront the problem of a beginning now that is a very very assertive statement that we have to come to grips with not just as philosophers or theologians you have to come to grips with that as a scientist the proof is in place and more than this um as we'll see in in 2012 um you know lincoln came to you know to stephen hawking's birthday party at cambridge uh university in front of all the greatest physicists in the world this is the 70th birthday party for him and uh he wrote he read a paper called why scientists cannot avoid a beginning and um of course hawking at that time hawking did not hold to a beginning of a multiverse beginning of inflation etc he was still kind of open uh to the possibilities in 2012 but valencia read this paper which lisa gross by the way for the new york times called the worst birthday present ever because at the time of course really didn't want the beginning of the multiversary universe but anyway that's that's the import and by the way that quote from valencia doesn't just apply to our universe it applies to a multiverse in which our universe could be situated as a mere bubble universe so science even at this juncture back in 2006 to 2012 is still you know it's it's coming right on the cusp of showing not only a beginning but as we'll see in a moment uh a beginning that is caused by a transcendent um causative force outside of space-time asymmetry either of the multiverse or the universe so that's where we were in 2012. now let's step back for just a moment and go to the fine tuning of universal constants first of all what's a constant a constant is basically as i said it's a free parameter but it's it's a mathematical value within our equations of physics which remains constant throughout every place in our universe and every time of our universe so a constant that's why it's called a constant because it never varies now these constants they control all of the um the outcomes of our physical laws and all of our physical equations it's the constants that make it work and so these are really important numbers second thing to know about constants is they're all fixed right at the time of the big bang so we have a variety of free parameters that i'm not going to go into all the complexities of but you're welcome to ask questions about it later but the main thing is we've got a variety of these constants about 20 of them that are fixed in place at the beginning of our big bang now why is this so important because even though the available parameter space for these constants it's a huge range right within our universe in other words the constants could have been a huge range higher or lower than they um than they actually were at the big bang and and here's the problem if they were just even a microscopic amount right just a very small amount higher or lower than their actual values at the big bang then you would have no life form on it possible in our universe it'd be absolutely impossible for a life form to develop let me just give you a few examples of this including the most vexing one which comes from roger penrose who's the great physicist over there at oxford the main thing here to see is notice that the um that the life permitting parameter space is very small for life to to occur whereas the range of possible parameter space for each of the constants is significantly significantly larger okay let's take i'm going to go to low entropy at the beginning of our universe remember what i was just saying about entropy a few minutes ago that you need low entropy in order uh for the universe to have some energy to do things with some free energy to do things with so high entropy at the beginning of the universe would be the death knell for life forms because if you don't have any free energy out there you're certainly not going to be able to sustain a huge complex universe like ours and not only sustain it but allow life forms to originate in it a life forms to complexify and evolve within it and develop within it you're going to need a lot of energy to do that and so roger penrose said about saying okay well um what would it take to have the low entropy of our universe at the big name what are the odds that this would happen over against the for the the um uh phase space options for a high entropy universe which would not give rise to life forms and he calculated the number to be as follows 10 this is a double exponent coming 10 raised to the 10 raised to the 123 to 1 against so that's a double exponent you guys so that means that the exponent of the first 10 down there is really 10 to the 123. so the exponent is a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion children trillion trillion children killing 200 children trillion trillion trillion trillion children trillion trillion trillion children children 18 times okay now that's the exponent now if you multiply 10 times itself that trillions of numbers of times guess what the odds of our universe having the low entropy that it had to give rise to life forms is about the same odds as a monkey typing the entire corpus of shakespeare by random tapping of the keys in a single try can you imagine this so you come into the room and you give the monkey um a you know a task you give them a bunch of uh a paper that's rolling into a typewriter and the monkey can just randomly tap on these keys until you know he's got an unlimited amount of paper to randomly type on the keys and you come back into his room of course after humanely feeding him for five years you come back in and suddenly you notice he's got the entire corpus of macbeth in folio perfect condition and then you turn the next bit and there's hamlet in perfect folio condition and you think my gosh random tapping of the keys this is highly improbable yeah it's really highly improbable in fact any physicist and of course penrose himself would say it's virtually impossible that this could have happened by pure chance and so you can see why the multiverse is going to become very important because you can't do this in a one-off pure chance and i mean come on the monkey-typing entire corpus of shakespeare went up good not gonna happen so the only way you're gonna get that low entropy i mean at the beginning of the universe the only way you're gonna do it is if you have trillions upon trillions actually 10 to the 10 to the 123 possible universes and by the way just to get a a sense of that number that's a if you took a one and put zeros after it and every zero was 10 point tight our entire solar system could not hold that number that's how against the odds our low entropy so necessary for life is in our universe let me just give three other examples and you'll get the point so for example uh we have remember those four forces i was talking about the weak force the strong nuclear force the electromagnetic force and the gravitational force well all of them has a have a constant so for example the gravitational force has the gravitational force constant and you might have learned that in your physics courses right the newtonian constant initially now of course it's space-time um you know general theory of relativity defines this thing in a more more complex fashion but the constant is still valid and then of course we have the electromagnetic force and it actually has three constants associated with it the mass of the proton the mass of the electron and the electromagnetic charge and then we also have the strong nuclear force which has the strong nuclear force coupling constant and then of course you have the weak force that's you know very integral to particle decay and many other things that are really important in our universe and so the weak force has the weak force constant attachment now we can take a quick look at this and just you can begin to see where the available parameter space is huge but the life permitting parameter space is almost microscopically small by comparison for example if you took the weak force constant and the gravitational force constant relative to the cosmological constant so if you took those just those two constants and you varied them by only one part in 10 to the 50th that's like having a decimal point 49 zeros and a one that's a teeny teeny teeny teeny fraction you just varied it one part in 10 to the 50th higher or lower from the values that those constants actually had then either the universe would have been exploding continuously right in its expansion which would have incinerated everything in the universe it turned it molten right which by the way is exceedingly bad for life forms or on the other hand if you make them lower relative to the cosmological constant boom the entire universe collapses into itself in fact it collapses into 10 to the minus 33 centimeters with almost infinite crushing power which is also exceedingly bad for life forms so if you take a look at those two options right and you say well wait a minute you mean we averted complete annihilation of any possibility of life form by only one part and 10 to the 50th of the week first constant and the gravitational constant at the big bang yep that's what i'm saying you know the odds against that happening by pure chance at the big bang it's a monkey typing macbeth that's that's really what it is i mean the huge available parameter space is about the monkey typing mcmahon okay just give you a couple more examples and you'll get it the the next one is let's take the those uh electromagnetic the constants of the electromagnetic force so the mass of the proton mass the electron electromagnetic charge if you basically alter those things by one part in 10 to the 39th i mean right we live truly on the border of convective instability right our stars are we're so lucky we have stars that won't incinerate us or freeze us we've we live in this amazing border but if you just changed any one of those three constants mass proton mass the electron electromagnetic charge by one part and 10 to the 39 that's a decimal point 38 zeros and a one teeny fraction higher or lower than every single star in our universe would have been either a blue giant or a red dwarf now if it were a blue giant that would be very bad because blue giants they can extend you know trillions and trillions of light years right there they're very explosive huge stars which can basically annihilate and incinerate everything but if you've got a universe or a galaxy filled um with blue giants the galaxy would just be molten hot and centering anything which of course is exceedingly bad for life forms alternatively if you just buried it the other direction by one part and 10 to the 39th and those three constants every single star in our universe would have been a red dwarf everything i mean those stars are so cold won't give a hawaiian a tan it will literally basically allow everything in the universe to freeze i mean really freeze deep freeze which is exceedingly bad for life forms again you mean we averted complete cosmological disaster for the possibility of any life form by one part and 10 to the 39th at the big bang yup that's what i'm saying same thing monkey typing macbeth that's the odds of this happening by pure chant and uh you can see again this is the um uh you know um the higgs you know discoveries and and um you know sir fred hoyle's discoveries uh regarding um the strong nuclear force coupling constant i mean if you vary that uh strong nuclear force coupling constant by just two percent higher you would have no hydrogen uh in the universe no hydrogen in the universe no stars no water no iron bad for life forms alternatively if you varied it just two percent lower from the value it just happened to have at the big bang there would be no element heavier than hydrogen the periodic table would be reduced to one element hydrogen in the in the universe well what would that mean well you sure wouldn't have any carbon for starters and you wouldn't have any complex molecules go ahead make a complex organism out of pure hydrogen atoms forget about it the point is disastrous for life forms in either direction now you have the point now these things are very vexing because as i said the available parameter space um for non-life permitting constants in the universe is gigantic gigantic gigantic compared with the life permitting parameter space in our universe at the time of the big bang so all physicists are interested in this you know everybody is now there are certain people who tried to to cast it off right and so maybe victor stenger he wrote a book called the fallacy of fine tuning a while back but that has been responded to again and again um by uh right and i'm happy to answer the questions about it but um uh by a variety of different physicists and i can give you some articles you can read uh that stingers uh attack on that uh basically um is not um is not workable because it leads to some real contradictions and basic physical theories not to mention uh contradictions of observation and so uh by the way there's equivocation in the middle of his argument as luke barnes um from uh you know the melbourne uh astronomical observatory pointed out about uh seven eight years ago okay so um but anyway people are interested in this so how are we going to explain this that's really the basic question is it going to be something like transcendent intelligence like god or is it going to be a multiverse that's what it basically comes down to everybody and you'll see why in a moment the finite multiverse can't do it but i gotta take up before i do anything i gotta take up the infinite multiverse which is eternal inflation so way back in about 2010 2011 2012 the eternal inflation theory um was developed by a set of physicists um basically holding that if you if you had a fractal-like expansion rather than an expansion of our universe like uh we we see today expansion of the space-time geometry system as a whole if you had a series of fractal-like expansions perhaps it would be possible to have eternal inflation but you would have to have a fractal multiverse to have an eternally inflating universe which could give rise to an infinite multiverse now at first everybody thought well okay that answers the question of fine tuning a multiverse could do it if it were eternal but then four problems developed and i'm just going to go through them very quickly with you the first problem is stephen hawking and thomas hair top stephen hung and her talks i said in 2016 published this paper and when they published this paper and paper in the journal of high energy physics whoo it was a big huge blow to a lot of people who are putting a lot of stake in the eternal uh inflation theory what basically hawking and uh hairtag showed was that um you cannot there's a complex uh series of equations and observations but the basic upshot of their argument is the universe we have cannot have originated from a fractal multiverse it could not have origin the remnants of the fractal would be obvious and now with the planck satellite we can clearly see that that we cannot have originated from a fractal multiverse but if that's the case if we're not in a fractal multiverse then um we are not going to have eternal inflation says hawking and airdog there has to be a beginning to the inflation the multi if if we came from a multiversion by the way multiverse completely hypothetical but we came from a multiverse we couldn't have come from this fractal multiverse and therefore we could have come from an eternally inflating condition uh multiverse which means that the inflation would have had a beginning well what does that mean the multiverse would have to be finite now hold on to this because that's very important can we explain all those constants and conditions all those things that i was just talking about could that be explained by a finite multiverse no as we shall see in just a moment but hang on there let's continue looking at the eternal uh multiverse the second thing is a very important business is by the name of thomas banks by the way one of the big strong proponents of the um of the eternal uh inflating uh infinite multiverse was sean carroll and um you can see uh sean carroll's very very uh um you know a big protagonist but the thing is is thomas banks keeps writing into sean carroll's um blog site and he keeps giving these papers and basically banks gave two devastating papers based on observational evidence and the equations of physics as we know them the first thing he attacked of course was basically what's called the string theory landscape i can't explain it right now but it's a combination of quantum gravity plus uh inflationary uh multiverse and in the string theory landscape you have a possible generation of tons and tons of possibilities um you know along um uh you know maybe maybe in the end possibly explaining some of the constants um originating that i just talked about but what basically bank shows is if no if you take a look at this in comparison to low energy dynamics uh in the universe what you're going to find is that they will violate violently the experimental evidence that we have today so basically banks really shut down and but this was not published in sean carroll's blog this is published in um i forget it was one of the i don't think it was a journal of high energy physics i think it was physics review letter anyway the the point is he uh published this article and boy that put you know a little damper on suskin's uh string theory landscape which hasn't come up uh into promise too much of late the second area where banks came in is he attacked eternal um inflating theory itself and showed that you basically it violates the coleman de lucia um tunneling concert you need quantum tunneling uh basically in in order to basically come up with a multiverse of the kind uh and internally inflating multiverse but the problem is is that the dynamics of that eternally inflating multiverse would conflict with the the quantum tunneling uh from colin delucia that you would need in order to produce it so of course it turns out to be again a difficulty of reconciling experimental evidence with the um actual theory of an internal multiverse so once hawking hertog and banks kind of got finished looking at the experimental evidence the eternal multiverse was heading down the tubes in a major way but then there were two other real problems which will sound very almost funny but they're very serious indeed the first is called boltzmann brains and the second is brief brains now the the boltzmann brain basically a boltzmann brain coming you know from ludwig volts von boltzmann basically the the the boltzmann brain is like like you your human brain fluctuating into existence spontaneously in a thermal vacuum now i know you think you know what a crazy idea this is but it's not so crazy because you remember that low entropy universe i was just talking about and the odds against that low entropy p universe were 10 raised to the 10 raised to the 123 to 1. well here's the deal with that problem of most of the um universes would be like high entropy universes what boltzmann's disciples basically speculated was well suppose then you didn't have a complex universe like ours that lasted for a long time like ours which didn't need as much low entropy but what's the the highest entropy condition we could think of um that could give rise uh to something assembling uh you know a brain spontaneously at some point in time well of course it's a thermal vacuum so that's a pretty you don't require a lot of um entropy there so the entropy question is resolved the problem is that the boltzmann brain in other words the problem is that you would have trillions upon trillions upon trillions of these simpler universes that would fluctuate your brain or anybody's brain into existence spontaneously fully loaded with all your memories of being basically an organic organism uh that's uh that's in a complex universe like ours right you would have trillions upon trillions upon trillions of those bolts membranes for every um possible universe that would be complex like our universe is well what does that come down to it comes down to ladies and gentlemen you are a boltzmann brain you are not an organic a physical organic being that lives in a complex organic universe with galaxies etc etc you couldn't possibly be that if you had an infinite multiverse there would be a trillion transformation no there would be a virtual infinity of your boltzmann brains for every single one that would be an organic uh universe like ours requiring low entropy you're a boltzmann brain and by the way it's not just thermal fluctuations it's even quantum fluctuation so don page and others right have basically very important physicists there at university calgary have shown that basically it's not just uh you know if someday somebody says well we can figure out a way around thermal vacuum well you can't figure out a way around quantum vacuum because they're everywhere present and needed in our universe and those quantum vacuoa they'll give rise to what's called brief brains way before any kind of organic universe like ours okay what's my point well if you don't want to be a brief brain and you don't want to be a boltzmann brain and you're going to respect the evidence of hawking and hertog and and banks etc the eternal multiverse is pretty much toast it's not really gonna be scientifically experimentally viable going forward into the future okay well where is you know what's left well what's left is just the finite multiverse or our universe etc so the finite multiverse what's wrong with that why couldn't a finite multiverse i mean it could generate every it could generate trillions upon trillions upon trillions even though it's of bubble universes maybe we could get one like our own out of the deal here's the problem and sean carroll himself the biggest proponent of the multiverse thread john carroll himself actually you know says this uh outright and he says you know the problem is that inflation requires more fine-tuning than the universe that it's supposed to explain so in other words we have to have extremely remote and rare conditions in order for uh to you know to have almost smooth uh multiverse in order for inflation to take place in it and then once the inflation uh starts the conditions for the start of the inflation are highly improbable and then this the uh this the cessation of the inflation is highly improbable well if you add the smooth conditions plus the the conditions for the start and the conditions for the cessation of the inflation at precisely the right moments means you were talking about fractions of a second here if you're talking about those conditions they are far more improbable than our universe having life forms in it well what what's the problem with that in a multiverse every single bubble universe and the finitely expanding um a multiverse every bubble universe would have to have come out of an inflationary condition whose odds are far more improbable than the odds of the universe that they are producing that's the problem the finite multiverse won't do the trick so where do we stand at the end of the day and right at this point let's take a look well we've got some options the number one option is just our universe itself well we don't have a theory of everything that will explain um our constants the values of our constants in our universe so that's not going to be the ultimate explanation of our universe our universe can't do it all by itself number two it's not going to be able to be done by a bouncing universe and the reason for this is and by the way this was also discovered by sean carroll he basically showed that if the universe expands and contracts and expands and contracts well just think of it this way every time you have an expansion in contraction you really elevate the level of disorder the level of entropy goes skyrocketing up for every cycle so now you just think at the beginning of our universe we have 10 range to 10 race to 123 to 1 against just for our cycle now imagine that our universe would have come out of um a universe going back every past cycle has to have much um lower entropy than our cycle and then the universe the bounce before that would have much lower entropy until as sean carroll says you would have to have at the right you know t minus infinity right you'd have to have infinite fine tuning with no apparent explanation infinite hot fine-tuning is infinitely against the odds the odds of that happening are a flat out zero so that's not going to do it the infinite multiverse okay well how about the eternal multiverse bouncing universe excuse me the eternal multiverse won't do it either we just saw the big contradictions with hawking hair target banks and um boltzmann brains and brief brains so that's not gonna work well then how about the finite moment we just saw that the inflationary conditions require more fine-tuning than the actual universe the actual life in our universe so that's not gonna work so what are we left with at the end of the day we are ladies and gentlemen facing the need for intelligence we can't do it with merely physical properties you know we've run out of options basically by the way roger penrose had a a conformal a cyclic cosmology but that has a lot of empirical problems that i could explain in the q a if you want me to the main thing right now is we're left without options and so we're going to have to appeal to intelligence now there's one fellow by the name of max tegmark very important physicist max tegmar thinks he's can get around the problem of having to postulate a transcendent intelligence like god and he says well you know we there's a thing called a level four multiverse and a level four multiverse really that level four multiverse it doesn't have like um bubble universes as its constituents it actually has mathematical systems as its constituents now so we've got a a basically a universe of mathematical system one mathematical system two until that multiverse exists all the exhausts all the possible uh mathematical systems that you could uh you know as it were uh weave into a universe like ours or a multiverse if we do live in a multiverse like ours so that seems like a good answer and says tegmark i don't have to appeal to a transcendent intelligence i'm saying that mathematics is physics and physics is mathematics well unfortunately this gets into a philosophical problem and i'll just say that easy answer to this uh idea of math being physics and physics being math is rongo bongo because it's what's called a category error in philosophy and you right you have these things called universals or concepts on the one hand you have these other realities that are individuals that are you know are physicalized they're in space and time so you can have one or the other but tegmark cannot have his cake and eat it too essentially if you try and say that the multiverse really is just mathematics then the universe is a universe of pure ideas if you try and individualize um mathematics if you try to put individuation and space time into mathematical equations you won't have a mathematical equation anymore you won't have a concept anymore you won't have a quantity that can stand for a group anymore you won't have a variable anymore those are all ideas if you put individuation you you literally take away the idea part of it if you put in physical space and time you take away the idea part of it so you can't do that alternatively you can't say uh either that physics is is basically a conceptual because physics has individuation so the more conceptual you try to make physics the more you take away its individuation and its space time a coordinate system so you you can't have your cake and eat it too ted mark's system does not work i conclude my talk with just saying this we have been through an abductive argument here and what i can tell you is right now the only option that remains to us is a transcendent intelligence there is a high probability of a beginning even of a multiverse or a string universe in the higher dimensional space of string theory and also there is a high probability that that creator of that beginning and you say well you live from a beginning to a creator i'll give you the quick proof for why that is the case if you have a beginning of what we'll call physical reality whether physical realities in a multi-diverse and you know a oscillating or bouncing universe or string universe in higher dimensional space string theory just our universe doesn't matter if physical reality has a beginning then prior to that beginning physical reality was nothing that's all there is to it a beginning would signify a fiscal reality would be physical reality equals nothing prior to that state and if that were the case then i can assure you the only thing that nothing can do is nothing so prior to the beginning of physical reality physical reality having been nothing could not move itself from nothing to something because the only thing it could do was nothing because the only thing nothing can do is nothing so therefore something else something transcendent is going to have to move or create x nihilo from nothing this physical reality from its state of nothingness into a state of reality now that if that creator really does exist we can conflate it with also the creator the this massive intelligence that is required to explain the fine tuning of our universal constants and if we do have an inflating multiverse from which we originated even to explain the the tremendous fine tuning of the inflationary conditions from which our universal roads our supposed bubble universe arose now you've got basically we're we're at the hub i mean we're basically at the point where science is truthfully pointing even stephen hawking admits there has to be a beginning to the inflation right i mean he changed his position we're getting to the point where truly great physicists are saying that we've run out of options by the way there's a wonderful book called a fortunate universe by luke barnes you might want to read that cambridge university press just take a look at that it puts you into some good language i'll leave you two quotes but basically we're at the point where we look like we may be pointing from a scientific point of view to um a creation of a universe by a highly intelligent transcendent uh intel intelligence um here's a quote that was originally coined by robert jastrow uh he was the head of of um nasa's goddard institute of space studies in fact he was a founder funding director nasa's institute of space study now he said this a long time ago but because we are in the position we're in now with hawking and airtight and so forth now that we're in this position we're confronting what jastrow confronted way back in the 1990s late 1980s and this is what he said he said you know when the scientist gets to this point right it's almost like a nightmare for the scientist has kind of thrown off uh you know what you know the just theologizing about the beginning of the universe and has taken on a methodology of strict empirical um and uh you know observation of testing and of mathematical deductive reasoning to apply to this up to these observational tests and evidence and those scientists they scaled the heights of knowledge and came to the final precipice and pulled themselves over only to discover a band of theologians there awaiting them for centuries that's where we are right now and i think um i think that stephen hawking certainly realized it and a variety of other people have realized it but one last quote this is from good old fred hoyle fred hoyle used to be the great atheistic gadfly of the physics community and for a long long time he'd always postulate the atheist opinion but finally his his uh partner william fowler came into him one day and he had actually you know derived all the equations that would be required for the resonance levels of oxygen beryllium uh carbon and um and um and hydrogen and he looked at the those resonance levels which have to be in a very exact confluence and he looked at those things and he brought it before oil and he just said well you know uh fred what do you what do you think of this and uh fred came out with two um statements the first one this is the former atheist remember the first one was the odds of having an abundance of carbon in our universe given the requirements for the uh precise um precise levels of resonance for these four elements carbon beryllium oxygen hydrogen the basic possibility of this happening is um about the same as a tornado blowing through a junkyard assembling a boeing 747 ready for flight he then said later in the california institute of technology journal he just put it this way he said i do not think that there are any blind forces worth speaking about it seems to me that there must be some super calculating super intellect monkeying with the constants of physics and those of chemistry and biology as well i consider this to be beyond the shadow of a doubt that's where we remain today i would be glad to take uh any of your questions and so um thank you very much for your kind attention i know i went over but i just needed the time to put out the argument in its complete form today thank you thank you very much uh father spitzer i i especially appreciated um sort of the drama of of all these arguments that are being thrown out by different by different scientists um it's very exciting uh to sort of see how it began and where it's ending up and i'm excited to have more conversations with students um in the in the days to come about about about all this great at this point we'll open up to the questions that you have submitted if you're still formulating questions feel free to continue submitting them okay so our first question father comes from gerald mcafee and he asks do you accept intelligent design uh i understand that tomists do not accept it for some reason yeah well um i i don't be not because of any thomistic principle um i certainly believe in an intelligent creator outside of space-time asymmetry because of the argument that i just gave but um intelligent design goes a little bit further and what they want to say is that god is involved in you know every gap in the in the evolutionary system and and that god actually uh pushes there are real gaps that's true but whether or not god is the reason that the gap got closed in the evolutionary lineage that's still an open question the odds against it are sometimes very significant but we don't have a proof right now that evolution needs god uh to to proceed now um you know 66 percent of of young scientists are today theists overall fifty-one percent uh these means believe in god fifty-one percent believe in god that's the pew surveys i think it was the 2014 assessment of the um of the association for the advancement american association for the advancement of science so that um uh basically think well wait a minute if 66 of these young scientists believe in god somehow well how do they feel about evolution do they really believe in intelligent design some do but most honestly um are still you know opening themselves to the possibility that evolution uh could have developed uh in its um um you know by being front loaded by god as it were so um you know uh you know um uh um francis collins for example wrote that you know he's the head of the genome project he's a very very staunch christian wrote a book called um the handwriting of god he believes in an evolutionary process where um uh um god kind of front loads everything so a kind of a a protogenesis sort of approach uh to evolution front loading god lets it go then you have people too like taylor de chardin he was a jesuit priest who basically promoted the idea of orthogenesis so you have basically a final cause like an omega point that's pulling uh the universe toward its completion now these are ways in which god might then be influencing of the evolutionary process without getting involved in every gap so it would um you know a lot of scientists do believe as i said about 66 of the young ones do believe in um probably uh most of them either in a proto or an orthogenesis approach to god's involvement in the evolutionary process but there are some that believe that god is actually um you know involved um like michael palani um might you know be somebody who's like proto um orthogenesis kind of a guy he might be you know very famous chemist and philosopher he would be the type that would say well you know maybe god is all three he's front loading he's drawing everything to its completion like you know final cause what they are to make up one or he's uh kind of also influencing things providentially as they go along so there's a wide variety but we don't have a proof that god is interfering in fact um you know i i am a believer in miracles obviously and i think there are some very good miracles which i'm not you know going to talk about tonight but i do think god does come into our universe and does interact with us obviously i'm a christian and a catholic but um you know trying to say is there scientific proof of that you can't establish it beyond the shadow of a doubt and the reason is you can't have a scientific proof for a miracle in the sense that you know a miracle of course is supernatural caused supernaturally caused whereas you know a scientific test as we've already said has to be you know a natural causation to test for something within the universe but what you can do is you can give some scientific validation to a miracle by showing that there's no known physical process that can explain this event like a healing or explain the eyes of our lady of guadalupe or the image on the shroud of turin which may well have taken six to eight billion watts of light energy to produce for 140 billionth of a second well i don't know of any natural causes that could explain that but you can't just leap and say that's a scientific proof because of course miracle is supernaturally caused so um i guess uh i hope i answered your question i really don't uh kind of go for the um for just leaping to a proto-orthogenesis but i you know deep down inside i believe that god's interacting providentially with the universe all the time i wouldn't call it though my belief scientific i would call it a scientifically validated faith there's a lot of faith that's put into that i'll leave it at that thank you our next question is from sarah and she asked is fl is inflation or inflammation the same as expansion or is it just the illusion of expansion dark energy runs parallel to the unconscious brought to the forefront of unconsciousness by the archetype of pluto and even more recently by iris the goddess of chaos and discord well i'm you know i can't comment on the literary images from a scientific point of view but inflation is very real this is not just some kind of mental state inflation occurs in the universe because there really is dark energy there really is vacuum energy embedded into the space-time continuum of our universe if all of our observational data is correct and it looks pretty sound right now from the planck satellite and others so the the idea that inflation is very real and that dark energy is very real and that the inflating content of our universe is that there's an inflaton field i think there's a good uh possibility of that but certainly not eternal inflation as i said there are very good reasons from hawking hertagon banks that that is not the case so but the literary images and that might be some way we might want to try and understand something from our own mental point of view but it would not be our physical universe or science person all right uh thank you very much father uh next question is from jim hearn does this bvg theory correspond to aquinas's uncaused cause uh no it doesn't well first of all it's not the bbg theory it's the bbg theorem a theorem is like a proof that you learned in geometry so it's really hard to get out of i'll put it that way a theory is what we currently believe to be the best way of unifying all the observe observational data and the quantification of observational data so the main thing though is that the bbg theorem is not uncut cause the uncaused cause argument is actually very uh valid argument and i have a book called um new proofs for the existence of god contribution to contemporary physics and philosophy i put the mystic proof into um um into a form uh that you know is very consistent with science but it is not the same as bbg what bbg is showing is that physical systems that we know of right the physical systems we know of uh must have um a beginning now that's great but the uncaused cause argument goes much further than that right and the reason that it does is what the uncaused cause argument shows and i think very validly is you cannot have anything which is a combination of potency and act it would take me a long time to explain these uh aristotelian to mystic terms to you but basically you are going to have to have at the end of any series you're gonna have to have a pure act and that pure act that's like an unrestricted being that's and physics can't show that the creator of the universe is an unrestricted being or a unique being per se it can show though that you might have to have a transcendent really smart being um at the beginning of of our uh universe but it wouldn't tell you that that being is unique and unrestricted whereas the uncaused cause argument can do that for you let me just give you a quick illustration and maybe this will bring it home why it goes a lot further and by the way it's a metaphysical argument rather than a physical argument and here's the the reason imagine for a second that every single being in our universe or every single being in the whole of reality skip our universe that just just the whole of reality every single being was a caused being in other words it's a being that needs a cause in order to exist so just imagine we've got an infinite number of beings in the whole of reality but every single one of those beings in the whole of reality is a being that must be caused in order to exist you're probably seeing the implications already if you take that collectivity that infinite number of beings that needs a cause in order to exist what do you have in totality that whole system no matter how you can link them together in circles you can link them together in all kinds of branches and do anything fancy you want but the totality of all those beings that needs a cause in order to exist is itself that whole group is itself a cause i mean a being that needs a cause in order to exist but wait a minute the whole of reality is is represented by this then the whole of reality is a being that needs a cause in order to exist and there's nothing in the whole of reality that can make it exist because the whole of reality you just said are composed of causes of beings that need a cause in order to exist that means nothing would exist you wouldn't exist i wouldn't exist that's why aristotle and saint thomas said oh that's why you're going to need at least one uncaused reality in the whole of reality now if you go to my book i can show you that any uncaused reality will have to be unrestricted by its very nature and if it's unrestricted it must be one and only one and there's two very good proofs for that but it goes beyond tonight's time all right our next question is from richard freeman he asks i've heard a couple of my teachers say that the total entropy of the universe is constant is that supported by anything or something they made up no actually uh uh the entropy of the universe is not constant the entropy of our universe is going down now in an inflationary system uh like the one that is proposed you in order to get the result of constant entropy within the universe what you'd have to do is propose a sean carroll eternal multiverse system which i have already told you the problems of the sean carroll proposal on the internal multiverse sean carroll's the only person i know of who actually says that entropy would remain constant in such a multiverse everyone else will say that entropy ultimately must go down in any physical system including a finite multiverse including our universe etc and certainly in our universe the the entropy is not remaining constant we have tons of physical evidence showing that entropy is going up up and that order um that's needed for uh energetic activities going down down down with the passage of time and i just use someone as um as commonsensical as albert einstein albert einstein by the way said that the law of increasing entropy right is the most solidly established canon in all of physics everything else might change said einstein but the law of increasing entropy the second law of thermodynamics is never going to change because it is based not on physical facts but rather it is based on statistical let us say mathematical statistical probabilities so i'm afraid those teachers of yours who are seeing that are assuming that um uh something akin to a sean carroll like inflating um multiverse uh which can continue on indefinitely but in light of what i've just said i do not think that this is a solid proposal but anyway in our universe the entropy is certainly not remaining constant our universe is um is uh um pretty much experiencing uh increases in entropy even if we consider inflation uh to be along the lines of sean carroll all right this next question is from andrew i've heard somewhere the monkey typing shakespeare uh the the example you gave is is the definition of infinity therefore wouldn't that make it at least plausible uh that the monkey could type out shakespeare yeah well if anything which is infinitely um an infinity against something is equal to zero possibility of it so no an infinity would establish the impossibility of the reverse now if you're talking about an asymptotically approaching uh infinity then yeah conceivably any so long as you don't say you reached infinity uh you're not proving impossibility however scientists do very commonly say once you get to a point where like i said you've got the monkey typing shakespeare i mean yeah there's a chance there's one out of 10 race to the 10 to the race to the 123 to 1 a chance of this happening by pure chance is there one physicist in the whole of the the current group of main physicists that would agree with that statement that this would actually occur in a one-off chance not one it's a flat out zero from a probabilistic analysis it couldn't be seriously entertained as a scientific hypothesis so um but if you if you want to say well there is really a possibility there is a possibility but it's like if this is going to occur um like i said then you believe that the monkey's going to type shakespeare by random tapping on the keys in a single try and my thought is fat chance that's not gonna happen so um we're not as they say we're not that lucky so um but anyway but it's a good question it's a good possibility all right this question is from moises garcia and he asked does the fact that our universe still has entropy and that it can't have been around for infinity does that mean that one day our universe will run out of entropy and end if so is there any assumption to how long yes a current estimate uh estimates right now um well there's a wide variance in this book first of all yeah our universe has still has low entropy right so it has high order so that's your correct voices it it does have a high order but eventually it will um run down so current estimates are that in 3 trillion years from now all the there won't be any stars or anything in our universe we're going to basically there won't be any energy to speak of to heat anything so life's going to be impossible anyway in 3 trillion years and we'll just call that um a cold death but then there's also what's called heat death that's where entropy approaches um complete equilibrium total equilibrium and scientists think it's somewhere between 30 to 300 trillion years from now but you don't have to worry about us going to 30 to 300 trillion years before we reach the end of um you know entropy we're going to reach the end of any light uh or heat in our universe in three trillion years for sure if not soon so um but there's a good question my sister and that's that's that's basically the current estimates uh all right i think that that has interesting implications for um the end times and the bible and so forth so far i think anyway uh next question is from phil bride how does the god particle fit into this i've heard these particles described as simply disturbances disturbances in nothingness or fields yeah the god particle is really not a guard god particle to be honest with you peter higgs this is by the way what he's talking about is the higgs boson and the higgs boson um is was the one big indicator the experimental indicator if we could see that uh the higgs boson then we would know there was a higgsian field and if there's a higgs field then basically how the higgs field acts at the big right first of all the higgs field is not a replacement the higgs field wasn't around before the big bang let's put it that way the higgs field is around um after the big bang so you have the unfolding of the universe in three stages um you know after um you know the big bang so the big manual occurs then um we have what's called the generation of a space-time field occurs probably about 10 to the minus 40 second seconds after the big bang so we that we roll out of a quantum gravitational universe into what's called um a space-time universe at 10-42 seconds then we have the inflationary condition uh that takes place where the universe is gonna uh undergo the superinflation um that will occur then after that um the uh the uh um you basically got what's called the strong nuclear force rolls off from the electro weak force and then at that point the higgsian field comes into play and the higgs field just think of it acting like a molasses so you got all this energy that's bursting off the big bang so less than a second after the big bang the first three eras of our universe are already passed right so we have the space-time era we've got the inflationary era we've got the electoral week um era and then all of a sudden the sigsian field comes in now all this energy is is blasting out and what it's doing is it's actually acting on the negative electromagnetic energy the so-called leptons and acting on the so-called positive electromagnetic energy the hadrons and so these leptons and hatred energy is moving out but what's happening is it's going through now this higgs field which is acting like this molasses it's slowing down the the lepton um energy and the hatred energy and when it slows it down it gives it a phenomenon called rest mass in other words something that will interact with the gravitational field and once this happens um you know basically you then roll on to the rest of the ears of the universe right and once those ears happen the post inflationary thing you you have um well you know um i don't want to go through all the eras of the universe right now because i just don't have the time but what you would see um is eventually the universe would reach its state out of its plasma state it would then go into stellar nucleosynthesis you start getting stars and galaxies and so forth but the main thing to know is this was the last step in elementary particle theory was to get to that higgs field and once that occurred elementary particle physics was basically put together now peter higgs he was looking for that uh higgs boson which would indicate his prediction of the higgs field he was looking for it for a long long time very difficult you know using these colliders et cetera and so when he went to his publisher with the book uh he wanted to call it well the g.d particle and uh you know um and his publisher said peter you can't use damn in a book title so peter said well just drop it and just call it the god particle honestly that's how the term god particle got point now the one thing is does it have anything to do with creation no does it have things something to do with after the big bang coming to what's called elementary particles through red masks yes it's a very important discovery but it has nothing to do with god i mean i know some popular media people talked about it as if it did but it doesn't it was just wrong news or what they call fake news so anyway but it's good question but that's how it all happened our next question is from allison juncker how does the creation story work with the creation of the universe well uh this is kind of a theological answer and here is the main point um in the um in the universe itself right um uh you've got um okay let's just let's go back to pope pius xii who wrote a an encyclical way back in 1942 called divino aflante spiritu and what pope pius was trying to do was reconcile the world of scriptural theology with the world of science so he's confronting it in 42 because we're already beginning to see uh these um you know obviously difficulty with two different kinds of narratives and here's what pope pius said he said the point of scripture is to give sacred revealed truths necessary for salvation sacred revealed truth so god's going to reveal something to a sacred biblical author and that truth is really going to be important for salvation what is the point of physics or science the point of science is to give a correct empirical mathematically based explanation of the physical universe that we observe now is the point of sacred scripture to give a correct empirical mathematical explanation of the physical universe we observe no that is not the point of scripture god didn't care about that when he was speaking with the biblical author alternatively is the point of science to give sacred revealed truths necessary for our salvation no its methodology couldn't possibly do that nor could the methodology of theological revelation come to a physical scientific empirical mathematical description of the universe so that's the first thing let science be science and let scripture be scripture says pope pius xii very good advice so let's take then the genesis story some people say and by the way i know that there are christian brothers and sisters of ours that do hold to a theory of inspiration basically the dictation theory of inspiration where god actually gave exact words uh to give a physically correct description of the universe to the biblical author catholics do not believe in the dictation theory of inspiration catholics believe instead in what's called the co-participative theory of inspiration and co-participative basically means that god inspires the biblical author inspires him to do what inspires him to give the people of his time and place the answers to questions that are being you know challenged by let's say heterodox myths that are around um at the time of uh fifth and sixth century bc israel okay so for example let's take the genesis narrative maybe it goes back to about 600 bc maybe as early as 500 b i mean as late as 500 bc so somewhere in that neighborhood so what is the biblical author's task and what's god trying to do the biblical author is suffering from like the gilgamesh epic and all these other rival epics right and so he you know you know people are coming and saying oh you know there's many gods and of course you can say as much as you want well there's one guy and then people are saying well there's a sky god and a mountain god and a sea god you can't deny this and he goes yeah i'm denying that all those things are creations of god there's only one god the absolute god and and he is one and only one and so forth and so on well how do you do that without creating a metaphysical treatise back in 600 bc how are you going to do that well i mean aristotle and plato did give metaphysical treatises of that fact way back in 400 bc but in 600 bc in a semitic culture the way you did it was with a story with a narrative and so the biblical author creates a narrative where there's one and only one god and by the word of his mouth all creation comes into being now this is by the way everybody thought that the cosmological of forces like sea and wind and fire and so forth they were all like gods for a long while it's the biblical author that comes along and uncannily says they're really not they're just creations of god something which metaphysicians and later physicists established through metaphysical and logical methodology and later scientific methodology but what's the point the biblical author's point is just four-fold here are the truths that he feels are necessary for salvation he's being inspired by god to say this number one god is absolute and there's only one number two everything else in the universe sea mountains when whatever are creations of the one god they are not themselves divine period number three human beings are not cannon fodder for the gods to play with right human beings are created in the image and likeness of god they have an inestimable worth you can't just treat them like dirt you just can't treat you must treat them justly as god would treat them justly with the inestimable value of being made in the very image of god and then of course matter is not evil matter is good because every time god creates he turns on he sees that his creation is good now those four truths totally beyond physics and science alternatively imagine if the biblical author had this narrative to tell his people in 600 bc in the beginning was a quantum cosmological configuration and upon the first year at 10 to the minus 40 second seconds that quantum cosmological configuration rolled out of its quantum symmetry and became the space-time universe of general theory of relativity the space-time con continuum now controlling the gravitational impact of the other three forces and then an inflationary era occurred at which the entire universe inflated uh to the a terrific size in the period of 10 to the minus 23 seconds and then after that the strong nuclear force unrolled out of the electro weak force at blah blah blah blah of course these people would go what in the world are you talking about it couldn't possibly have understood anything by the way it would be totally unnecessary for salvation it's really good as a scientist to know it but it doesn't have anything to do with salvation so said pius xii we can keep both methodologies and both truths side by side without contradiction just don't make the the biblical author give a pronouncement about physics like the universe is 5000 years old don't do that if you do that you got a problem because it's a mixture of methodologies and a mixture of intention as i said as catholics we believe in a co-participative inspirational theory rather than a dictation one but as some people believe in the other we do not have a problem at all reconciling faith and science biblical narrative and science sorry i went on and on so thank you thank you very much father uh for that explanation i think a lot of students were excited to hear about uh whether the scientific view of creation and the the biblical view of creation could coincide uh so that's that's all the time we have for questions so so thank you again father for your contribution to the newman lecture series um and for all all the work you're doing with the mages center and with your your tv show uh to educate us on on topics of science and faith and and religion it's been an honor to be with all of you uh blessings thank you very much at this time we'd like to offer a special thanks to all of our sponsors whose support makes these intellectually simulating conversations along with all that we do here at the newman center possible if you're interested in supporting the newman lectures you'll see a link in the chat to do so in just a moment in the meantime we would also like to announce next terms newman lecture yes so uh renowned philosopher dr peter craft we'll be discussing uh how we can make sense of suffering uh from uh from a philosophical perspective uh make sense of all the suffering that we see in our world today and we're very excited to announce also that this lecture will occur in person at the learning innovation center on oregon state's campus on april 8th and and more information will be available in the coming days on osu newman.org with that we're going to conclude this evening with a video explaining a little bit more about what the newman center has to offer thank you all again for your participation and have a wonderful evening in a world of success in one direction comfort without aspirations love without intimacy individualism without solitude running without purpose knowledge without wisdom company without community and laughter without joy we believe that good things can be better we present an alternative we want everyone to know that they are not stuck that there is more that we have not experienced it all that there is an alternative [Music] we believe in love and friendship in union with god and interior life we believe in development and creativity we believe in respect and care [Applause] in the pursuit of knowledge and the attainment of wisdom we believe in contentment happiness and joy we believe in christ the same yesterday today and forever

Channel: Newman Center at Oregon State University

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Id: 8uVVUY4j1Mw

Length: 110min 24sec (6624 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 13 2022