Has Science Disproved God? With Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe

has science made god obsolete can you believe in creation while also believing the big bang theory or that the universe is very old where does scientific discovery stop and faith begin or are they even mutually exclusive have christians just fallen prey to the god of gaps fallacy and while we're at it what about like aliens and deep space and ufos we're going to be covering a lot today all of that and so much more on today's episode of theology on air well welcome back to theology on air i am sarah stone i'm the outreach director for young adults at memorial drive presbyterian church here in houston texas joined as usual by evan mcclanahan senior pastor at first lutheran in midtown houston and uh before i introduce our special guest though if you're watching many of you may know him just by sight uh theology on air is a ministry born out of theology on tap which is of course where a bunch of young adults in houston get together for uh craft beer and to talk about theology and philosophy and faith and culture and all kinds of juicy things and um science and faith comes up a lot so today i'm sure we're gonna be answering someone's question but in the podcast theology on air we get to go even deeper into some of these ideas and dig in so if you like what we're doing please go and rate us review us on whatever platform you listen or watch subscribe tell your friends all the things um so that we can keep doing this um but i am very excited this is this name is sort of a legend in my household um our guest today is astronomer hugh ross who is the founder and president of reasons to believe rtb as we might call it today an organization dedicated to integrating scientific fact and biblical faith his books include weathering climate change why the universe is the way it is and navigating genesis and he let me take a selfie with him a few years ago so he's a very smart man but also very down to earth and so welcome dr ross we're so excited to have you well thank you for having me on your show yeah um i think probably the best way to start before we dig into you know aliens and wormholes and things like that is just to say tell us a little bit about you who who is hugh ross tell us a little bit about your own story of faith um coming to faith and then maybe start to get into what got you interested in science sure well i was born raised and educated in canada and i got interested in astronomy when i was seven years of age i wanted to know why the stars were hot and my parents told me to go to the library and i came home with five books from physics and astronomy that was kind of what i did every weekend and during my growing up years i would take like a year and just focus on a sub-discipline of astronomy and when i was 16 i really studied cosmology the science of the origin history the universe and that's when i realized of all the different models to explain the origin history of the universe the one that was fitting the observations was the big bang creation model and i knew it was big bang there had to be a beginning there was a beginning there had to be a beginner so starting at age 17 i went on a quest to find this cosmic beginner now i didn't know any christians i was not raised in a christian home so the first place i looked was in the writings of the emanuel cop and rene descartes so well i mean i i looked at especially emanuel kahn because he's considered the father of modern cosmology but when i read his critique of pure reason i said this is not fitting the observations of the universe and i went to a very diverse public school and we had people from all over the world and so i was challenged by my fellow students to look at the different religions of the world so i spent about a year going through hinduism buddhism uh you know confucianism i went through islam baha'i and finally i did pick up a bible and uh when i tell people i didn't really get to know christians until i showed up at cal tech at age 27 i did see two christians from 30 feet away when i was 11 years old and these were two businessmen that came to a public school and were giving away gideon bibles i spent 18 months uh going through a gideon bible typically between midnight and two in the morning but nobody knew what i was doing but after 18 months i realized this is a book that is accurate and everything it communicates about science history and geography i was particularly impressed that the book recorded uh predictions of scientific discoveries thousands of years ahead of its time i was yeah i was particularly impressed that uh the four fundamental concepts of big bang cosmology were in the old testament thousands of years before astronomers had a clue that the universe had these features and so was recognizing the accuracy of the bible and his predictive power its power to predict future scientific discoveries and future historical events that persuaded me this really is a communication from the one that created the universe and i have to give the gideons credit they tell you exactly what you need to do once you become persuaded that the bible is the inspired inerrant word uh from the creator of the universe and uh they don't let you off the hook either they got a place for you to sign your name and date it committing your life uh to the creator of the universe as creator lord and savior from all your sins past present and future so i signed my name in the back of that gideon bible and having studied the bible for that period of time realize being a follower of jesus christ means a young must be committed to share your faith with people you meet so immediately i began sharing my christian faith with my fellow students and professors and uh i'm sure they were all thrilled about that well some were some were not you know some people just blew me off others said hey this is something i remember the very first experience i had uh it was my physics lab partner and uh he says hugh i can see by the look on your face you've got something important to tell me oh wow but please let me speak first he says i've been going through some personal struggles i've told nobody about says i need to be able to find god do you know anybody on this campus that knows anything about god and that led to a four-hour conversation that afternoon and uh i'm not sure he ever gave his life to christ he went on to be the chairman of the physics department at the university of alberta but i know he had many graduate students that were followers of jesus christ and they told me that john samson personally encouraged them to integrate uh their faith with their scientific research how interesting i well one nice shout out to the gideons even though they are obsessed with kjv they are putting bibles in people's hands and i love that um i think it's particularly interesting that you started with science and you were sort of a believer and fascinated by science and then when you read the bible it seemed to fit because i think christians often get pigeonholed into saying well you already believe this thing so you're going to find a way to make science work and fill in the blanks whereas you started by saying i'm fascinated by science but now i need to know more about the designer right and i think that's pretty cool well with all the world's holy books i said you know i'm going to put them in the best possible interpretive light but when i did that with the quran the hindu vedas the buddhist commentaries it was clear it was filled with plenty of scientific and historical errors so i said this can't be from the god that created the universe but when i subjected the bible to the same test it passed all the tests that is so interesting can you give a couple of examples of how the bible predicted some scientific truth well i started with page one genesis chapter one and two and right away i recognize that these opening chapters of the bible were fitting the scientific method now i was naive it wasn't until nine years later i realized why the bible so perfectly follows the scientific method the scientific method was derived from the bible so of course uh it follows a scientific method but you know step one of the scientific method do not interpret until you establish the frame of reference or the point of view step 2 do not interpret until you establish the starting conditions well i looked at genesis chapter 1 what you see in genesis 1 verse 2 it states the frame of reference the spirit of god is hovering over the surface of the waters of planet earth underneath the cloud layer and it gives you the four starting conditions the earth begins dark on the surface of the waters the waters cover the whole surface of the earth the earth is empty of light and i'm fit for life and even at age 17 i knew that those were the correct starting conditions for the earth and then i began to go through the six days of creation and recognize everything was in the correct chronological order and it was also correctly stated uh the best i found outside of the bible was the enumeration of the babylonians and they got 2 to 14 right the other creation texts all scored zero so seeing the bible get a perfect score that was my first clue this book may be different this may actually be a communication from the god that created the universe so i began to go through the bible chapter by chapter and i spent a minimum of an hour a day studying the bible and it took me 18 months to get to revelation 22 because every time i saw something to test i put it to the test and what really blew me away is when i got to the new testament and read 1st thessalonians where paul says test everything hold fast to that which proves to be good and i never found any statement like that in any other holy book it was basically you know encouraging me uh to do subjective testing the bible was saying no you must base your faith on objective testing yeah it's it's like it was giving you permission to be the scientist you already were right right so for those of our listeners i'm going to ask the next question is going to be to kind of dive into this old earth creation uh explanation or theory whatever i've been told i use the word theory and hypothesis incorrectly so i've been trying to correct that recently i'll say i have a theory and i guess i'm supposed to say i have a hypothesis because the theory is pretty tested anyway but it seems just for our listeners that there are kind of three big camps of thought within christianity about origins of the universe one would be the um young earth creationism the you know literal six day creationism and then at the other end of the spectrum would be the biologos camp which is the theistic evolution which is that god used evolution as his means to um put the universe in the world together and us um but then there's this this theory in the hypothesis or something in the middle which is where you stand uh which is that the earth and the universe are very old um but the uh god used creation not macro evolution so maybe explain a little bit about like the reasons to believe uh you know what this old earth creationism is what you guys believe well i really didn't get to engage christians until eight years after i became a christian they're hard to find in canada especially in canadian academia so it wasn't until i got to caltech to do my postdoctoral research where i got to know committed christians and during that time it never occurred to me that anyone would ever read the bible from a young earth perspective i didn't even run into young earth creationists until nine years after i've been a believer and the reason why is that when i picked up the gideon bible i recognized right away that the word day in genesis one and two must have at least three distinct literal definitions because three are used in the text uh you know creation day one it's contrasting days and nights so that's a day for the daylight hours on creation day four it's contrasting seasons days and years that's day is 24 hours but genesis 2 4 uses the word day to refer to the entirety of creation history now that's day as a significant passage of time the other thing i noticed at age 17 is that the first six creation days are accompanied by the evening morning phrase and i didn't know exactly what evening and morning meant in the original hebrew but i knew at the minimum it was telling me each of these creation days has a definite start time and a definite end time but when i got to creation day seven i noticed there is no evening morning phrase it's missing so it told me we must still be in god's seventh day and what does the text say about the seventh day that's when god ceases from his work of physical creation and you know part of my story is that my parents were worried that i was being obsessed by astrophysics it was basically all i was studying and so they tried to broaden me and they knew that had to be done in some other discipline of science so they bought our family this big thick book an evolutionary biology and i read that at age 10 and a half and i went to my parents and said mom dad the numbers don't add up oh my gosh before humanity and we see virtually none after humanity so can you tell me why and i said no go ask your science teachers my science teachers say no go talk to those university professors uh that you know nobody could give me an answer but when i read genesis chapter one i said here is the answer to the fossil record enigma for six days god creates that explains the huge abundance of speciation events we see in the pre-human era and the fact that god sees us from his work for creation explains why we're not seeing that today it also explains why so many biologists in their research say we see no evidence for the supernatural handiwork of god the reason why is they're looking on the wrong day if you're looking at the day when god is resting from his creation work you will not find scientific evidence for god's supernatural intervention in the physical realm it also explains why so many of us astronomers believe in god because our data comes from deep time where we see evidence for the miraculous everywhere so that kind of solidified things for me and you know when i did run into people who took a theistic evolutionary perspective within the church what i discovered was maybe this isn't true of all of them uh but for the ones i've met uh they have this background of being raised in a christian home and being taught that the only correct interpretation of genesis 1 is 24 hours and they see that as violating the scientific record in all scientific disciplines we get overwhelming evidence that the earth and the universe and life on earth has been here for billions of years but since i never had that perspective in my study of the bible it's like i was wide open to the idea yes there's natural processes that go on but in the pre-human era it's a combination of the natural process and god's supernatural interventions it was clear to me all along you're not going to explain the origin of life by naturalistic processes and as i attend origin of life research conferences the principal researchers there admit that the discipline is going backwards the more they learn about the origin of life uh the more impossible it becomes to try to explain it from a naturalistic perspective yeah it doesn't look like um doesn't jim tour have something where he'll buy someone lunch if they can even in a model like prove origins of life from a naturalistic is that i think that's a thing of it he's part of reasons to believe i think isn't there evolution 2.0 uh which is there's a book written recently called evolution topic you've heard um why does that need to do it it was one of those like someone raised a million dollars i think to to for evidence of you know evolution as as as the darwinists have claimed it but i don't know if evolution is our topic but i did have a kind of a question about how you believe and i would say i'm an old earth creationist as well to the extent that i understand it um but how is it that god does intervene when the the time comes for him to intervene in these kind of eras of creation right so let's say so would you say that day one is a certain number of years millions or billions of years day two is the same etc etc um and so would you say then like if we just jump ahead for example to the sixth day that god about six to ten thousand years ago or i don't know if you have a number on the story of adam and eve literal adam and eve um but when you know how would you say that god intervenes in those times well i think the text compels you to interpret the days as consecutive there are consecutive days that follow one after another uh but there's nothing that texas says the days have to be equivalent periods of time and when we compare it with a scientific record and by the way uh psalm 19 romans 1 tells us that god reveals himself through two books the book of nature and the book of scripture both are utterly reliable and trustworthy in fact the way i interpret psalm 19 it's not an option for a christian not to study theology i tell people don't leave it up to your pastor or your seminary professor this is such a fun endeavor god wants every christian to be a theologian but likewise he wants every christian to be a scientist and i tell people it's way too much fun to leave it up to professionals like myself you need to dive into it and particularly when you read the book of job you come away with the idea that here we are in the 21st century but it's interesting that you have people in the 21st century with phds in science that in many respects are more ignorant about science than people lived 4 000 years ago as because of the urbanization of the human population the majority of humanity has never seen the milky way the majority of humanity has not had contact with wild birds and wild mammals that have never been abused by humans it was job that says look to these creatures they will teach you and what he meant was they'll teach you critical spiritual lessons and i think those lessons are lost on the majority of humans today so in many respects we need to look at people like job and abraham and say they were better scientists than some of our best trained scientists today um i think well i have so many questions um why don't i just dive in and then as you hear something we'll well i also think i missed uh one of the questions you asked me so feel free to come back yeah was your question about sort of the original pair and well yeah i mean oh yeah i i do you know like in in genesis it talks about how god almost presents himself to adam and eve for example you know and they they run away and hide in genesis 3. um and maybe maybe this is beyond the scope of our conversation but um i think for a lot of people they would find it difficult or hard to understand how god sort of just sits back maybe and watches to some degree for millions or billions of years then all of a sudden like the time has come where it's like okay now i'm going to create man and i don't know i'm just curious kind of what that looks like you know um when i was studying the bible it became clear to me what god was up to it's like it tells us in the book of revelation that god wants to redeem an uncountable number of people for every tribe nation language and people and i knew the greeks at that time had a number system that went up into the billions so it's basically telling us part of god's plan he wants to redeem billions of human beings unto himself which requires a planet that's capable of sustaining billions of human beings moreover acquires a planet where these humans can develop the technology where they can take the good news of salvation through jesus christ to all the people groups of the world in a relatively short period of time and that requires a huge treasure chest of biodeposits and something you see in the longest of the creation psalms it's psalm 104 if you go to verse 29 and verse 30 it tells us it's the property of all life to die off but god recreates and renews the face of the earth and psalm 104 also communicates god has created life on planet earth in a huge abundance and diversity no matter where you go you see life it's everywhere and it's there in great diversity and abundance as because of that great diversity and abundance and the 3.8 billion years of life history we humans have more than 76 quadrillion tons of biodeposits that we can mine to launch and sustain our civilization and fulfill the great commission in thousands of years rather than millions of years or billions of years so from my perspective as a christian as a student of the bible it makes sense that god would take billions of years to create so that his higher goal of redeeming billions of human beings unto himself can be achieved in just thousands of years and as an astrophysicist i'm aware that all stars get brighter as they continue to fuse hydrogen to helium the sun today is 23 brighter than when it was when god first created life and that makes so much sense of psalm 104 it's a property of all life to die off and then god recreates in order to compensate for the brightening the sun it's crucial that an intelligent mind remove life from planet earth on a regular basis and replace it with new life that's more efficient of drawing greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere so that the temperature at the surface of the earth can remain optimal for life and as i share with my friends who are theistic evolutionists or atheists or agnostics in their sciences say only a mind that knows the future physics of the sun the earth and the moon would know which light to remove and which new life to replace that remove life with if it's left up to naturalistic process it quickly gets out of sync and our planet becomes permanently sterile yeah wow okay i have a theological question for you and then a science question and then a bunch of other questions but the theological question is and this isn't in the ones i sent you i just thought of it um one of the things i've just wrestled with personally as i've tried to figure out where i fall on this spectrum um is this idea like the theological problems that arise when um when you have an old earth because that would mean that there is death and decay before the fall right before adam and eve chose to sin and there was this sort of cosmic shift in dominion over the planet and all of that um and it seems to me that that at least the teaching that most people get is that at the fall that's when death and decay and suffering and all of these things entered into the world but for for a longer earth and universe model it has to there has to have been animal death leading up to that so kind of how do you how do you answer that question well there's two explicit texts in the bible that address that question romans 5 and uh first corinthians 15. romans 5 is the most extensive verses 12 through 19. what it tells us in verse 12 is that death through sin was visited upon all people as a consequence of adam's rebellion in the garden of eden doesn't say death to all life this is death to all humans and also says death through sin well the only species of life on planet earth that's capable of experiencing sin is us human beings yeah the text is very careful and is saying this is the first time death came to humans it doesn't say this is the first time death came to plants and animals and you get a repetition of those caveats in first corinthians 15 verses 20 to 22. so nowhere in the bible does it say that there was no death of plants and animals or bacteria occurring before the offense of adam in particular you have several texts in the bible that tells us the laws of physics have not changed and will not be changed until the full number of humans and god intends to redeem have been redeemed yeah i mean you've got jeremiah 33 where god says i'm not like you i never change i'm immutable as evidence of my immune ability look at the laws that govern the heavens and the earth if they have never changed i have never changed i will never change and we astronomers can measure the past physics of the universe and that's because the farther away we look the farther back in time we see because it takes time for light to reach our telescopes as we look at that light we can determine that indeed the laws of physics have not changed throughout the past history of the universe that we can show that they remain constant to 16 places of the decimal man okay well you convinced me that was good all right science question and this is going out especially to a girlfriend of mine who is um she's on a spiritual journey of her own but she's a science teacher and so she's teaching science at a christian school and she asked me to ask the next scientist that we interviewed about the cambrian explosion how because you mentioned earlier something about you know the fossil record aligns perfectly with what we would expect when you read the bible at least in this light um but and correct me if i'm wrong but there's sort of like a an explosion of species and then nothing or tell us maybe what the cambrian explosion is for those that don't know and then how do you explain that uh from your point of view okay if you want the details you can go on our reasons.org website put in the search engine day four it'll pop up an article i've written about discoveries that were made in 2018 that basically verify what genesis teaches about creation days four and five in incredible details a remarkable breakthrough but what you see in the history of earth is that the oxygen content is going up but it goes up and jumps it's not a gradual rise and so you got what's called the great unconformity which happened about 578 to 580 million years ago and this is where the oxygen content nurse atmosphere because of a major geological event that caused huge amounts of continental land mass to landslide into the oceans this resulted in the oxygen content going from less than one percent up to eight percent and it's an immediate jump but as soon as it jumps up to eight percent you've got the avalon explosion of life and these are creatures as large as two meters across and it's the first appearance of animals you go from nothing but microbes to these creatures that are two meters across but they don't have a digestive tract they don't have a circulatory system the reason why there's not enough oxygen in the atmosphere to support animals of that complexity and then there's another geological event that causes these creatures to go extinct but within less than a million years after their extinction event you got the cambrian explosion that occurs 543 million years ago and the event that wiped out the avalon animals jumped the oxygen content from eight percent up to ten percent and the moment it hits ten percent you've got these cambrian animals these are animals with a brain a heart a circulatory system a digestive tract and what you see is that you immediately have optimized predator prey relationships there's no time lag these animals show up out of nowhere with no evolutionary history moreover the more calm most complex phyla show up right at the beginning of the cambrian explosion i've written about this in my book improbable planet and i quote seven evolutionary biologists who testify and these are people that are not theists now they testify that the cambrian explosion the more we learn about it the more impossible it becomes to explain this from a naturalistic perspectives yeah i was going to say that's an apologetic tool at that point right i mean if it's if it's unexplainable evolutionarily that's just another kind of feather in the cap of of theater right i got an article coming out on this in early july at our reasons.our website saying when you look at the cambrian explosion this is also true the avalon explosion you get the phylus showing up before the new classes show up uh before the new orders show up it's the opposite of what you get from an evolutionary perspective from an evolutionary perspective you're going to get the genera first uh followed by the uh families orders and classes last of all the phyla but you see in the fossil record the new files show up first and they show up suddenly their immediate appearances of these new phyla and later you get the new classes you get the new orders uh which is exactly what you'd expect from a creation perspective yeah fascinating oh man every time you answer a question it makes me think of like five more questions and i haven't even really started the ones i sent you do you want to jump in with anything before i nerd out some more well this might go to a different area but i'm one of the words you're you're hearing a lot these days is scientism right there is a sense that science has a kind of outsized place uh science uh the the invocation of science is meant to shut up critics um and you see it actually a lot with the covet stuff i don't necessarily want to go there unless you all want to um but you know there seems to be a you know follow the science it's something we've heard a lot for the last year and a half although the science is changing um just just yesterday science changed or do the scientists words change exactly so maybe just offer a definition of scientism and and and contrast that to the right use of science from a biblical or a christian point of view well scientism is a philosophical term implying that science can explain everything and it assumes that the totality of reality can be explained by physics and chemistry and that's counter to a christian world view now when you look at genesis chapter one for example you see the hebrew word to create something brand new that never existed before it shows up three times first for the physical universe in genesis 1 1 and in creation day 5 for animals that are not just physical but they're also soulish and that god endows them with mind will and emotions and the third time it shows up is for human beings where it's making the point this is a life form that's not just physical and soulish it's also spiritual so the bible directly declares that there's reality beyond physics and chemistry and how i deal with my colleagues who take a scientist perspective a scientism perspective is to say we've got space-time theorems which prove beyond any reasonable shadow of doubt that there is a beginning to the universe a beginning that includes the beginning of space and time itself which means there must be a being or an entity beyond space and time that creates our universe a matter energy space and time so that by itself establishes there's reality beyond we can explain by physics and chemistry and the second point i would raise is human exceptionalism i mean if it's just physics and chemistry and if we're the product of naturalistic descent from a common ancestor then we humans would differ from the rest of the animals and planet earth only by degree not fundamentally in kind but the scientific evidence overwhelmingly tells us we humans do differ by degree but we also differ fundamentally in kind across the spectrum and in particular recent science papers published on the capacity of humans to invent and use symbols and to use symbols in their communication is a unique characteristic no animal has that capacity it's unique to humans and likewise our capability of inventing new technology it's unique to humans yes there's about a dozen different species of bipedal primates have preceded us what we notice is no evidence that they had symbolic capability and no evidence of technological advance yeah i uh i recall something i say to my son if we're working on something together you have to have the right tool for the right job and one of the things that just strikes me is that science just isn't the right tool for the job of explaining the nature of everything that it does a really really good job explaining the nature of much within the creation but it really can't go beyond the creation and the only i'm trying to think what have i not heard uh to explain it from agnostics they'll say well i just don't know okay that you know i don't know how things came to be i'm not going to say it's god or or not i just don't know then there's the multiverse theory which says well this is just you know one of many universes or something like that i don't know if we want to go there um i guess one of many universes doesn't make sense because like so many that but at some point yeah everything works but what what really can can people say because i i just my mind is somewhat boggled that you're right if if science and or if space and time came into existence at a certain time you're left with something beyond it so why don't people find that convincing well a number of my peers do find it convincing they might identify themselves as atheists but they're functional dias they believe that there is a creative force or a creative entity beyond space and time but they deny that that creative entity is a personal being and this is where the fine-tuning argument is crucial because we look at the universe and see how it's fine-tuned in almost every respect you can imagine to make possible the existence of humans and of human civilization that implies that this agent must be a personal being so it basically forces you into the theistic camp but a lot of my peers really haven't looked at this fine-tuning evidence to any great degree matter of fact recently as i engage my scientist peers who are not believers i say look from what i can understand and see it seems like every component of the universe and every event in the universe earth in her's life plays some role in making possible the redemption of billions of human beings from their propensity to uh be sinful and evil and you may not believe this but i'm just going to encourage you why don't you do your scientific research from a biblical redemptive perspective and see if it doesn't make you a more successful scientist so i'm kind of using that as an approach to encourage them to actually look at the evidence and say hey this really works it really does make us more efficient in our scientific research and if that's the case maybe there's some validity to looking at creation from redemptive perspective and as a pastor i'm sure you're aware there are biblical texts that tell us that god began his works of redemption before he created anything at all which implies that everything that god creates is for the purpose of redemption the latest books are bring out and reasons to believe basically document that that indeed is what's happening in the record of nature you said a phrase in there um that i had already put on the list of questions um you said something about space-time well you were talking about the this transcendent creator has to be outside of space material whatever um whenever i get into these conversations with my very smart atheist friends especially the physicists um and i say things like well you know there was a beginning to the universe they'll say well you're using a linear language space time works differently from time and there's like something about a and b theory and then they keep talking and i get lost because i am not a scientist um so maybe help us understand the difference between space time and time as we understand like we are you know it's whatever 2 44 p.m um but also how does your understanding of time and space time uh dovetail with this still working that god really is this transcendent being that created something from nothing and how do i basically i want to know how to win these arguments well stephen hawking uh he's passed away now yeah but he wrote in his brief history of time that uh you know there's a way to work around the implications of the space-time theorems let's just assume the universe is governed by two-time dimensions instead of a single-time dimension then there's an escape from the implications of the space-time theorems but he also wrote in that book he said of course we do realize that the universe is constrained by a single dimension of time that can't be stopped or reversed so we really are stuck with the space-time theorems uh and what he was basically doing is something you see in romans chapter one if you attribute qualities to the creation that only god has then you get a different model but it's basically transferring your worship from the creator to the creation but i do admire that hawking was honest enough to admit this doesn't work that the space-time theorems do imply uh that there must be an agent outside a cosmic time that's capable of temporal type phenomena which is exactly what the bible teaches and so interpreting it from that perspective it's a powerful proof of theism so space time is not like regular time so you said something earlier about 543 million years ago i mean that's something that like it's like looking at a watch or looking at a timeline but i guess it doesn't work that way in space it works fine if you're looking at relatively local distances like say within our galaxy or a galaxy cluster but once you get into the large scale structure of the universe we realize that length width height and time actually behaves as a four spatial dimensional phenomena so we astronomers refer to the universe as a four dimensional system where all the galaxies stars all the matter and energy is constrained to the three-dimensional surface of the four-dimensional universe and in general relativity space-time dimensions uh take on the same kinds of properties so refer to the space surface of the universe as a space-time fabric of the universe and this is why you can't really visualize the geometry of the universe because our human brains are limited to making visual pictures within three dimensions not dimensions beyond those three on the other hand we can use mathematics as a tool to tell us what's true and what is not true in four dimensions of space or three dimensions of time or even a million dimensions of space i have a math friend for example who wrote a paper who basically said if you've got a million independent dimensions of space you can put spherical oranges in a cubicle box where there's no spaces between the oranges everything is built but don't try to visualize it it can't be done no it'll keep you awake at night i as you were talking i'm thinking about some movie where they talk about time and they have a piece of paper and then they bend the paper and they poke a hole through and that's to explain wormholes which is my very cool segue to ask you about wormholes um i'm going to ask you a few questions that are just i pulled some friends and said what would you want me to ask dr ross because i have all questions about like theology and philosophy but they were like what about ufos but before ufos what tell us about wormholes is that real or is that just interstellar like can we travel through space now worm bottom line is wormholes are mathematically conceivable but physically impossible and the physics is this uh you've got you got two black holes each black hole will have a space-time singularity and if you can actually fit those two space-time singularities perfectly together where they touch one another theoretically you could travel from the space-time realm at the mouth of one black hole into the space-time realm uh at the event horizon of the next black hole but here's the problem the mathematical possible or the physical probability of getting the two singularities to perfectly touch that probability is zero and also pretty low probability i'm no mathematician but yeah the probability that they would mean stable is also zero and there's also an argument why say a past collapsing universe can't be joined to the present expanding universe it's not possible to join the two geometries together in any stable way mathematics star trek just lied to me my whole childhood say that one more time a past collapsing and is that kind of the oscillating theory of the universe that that the universe is infinitely old it's just been expanding there are journals for example that encourage astrophysicists to speculate but the mathematics that we know works and so if you got physics letters b it's filled with articles talking about uh past universes that lead to our present universe they're all mathematically feasible but they're all physically impossible so that's like roger penrose or pembrose's he holds to that view right that was stephen hawking's co-author i believe doesn't he hold to the oscillating universe eternally into the past in essence but interpret penrose in context he's a mathematical physicist and he's basically arguing the math works okay and he's explicitly written this and i cite him in my book the creator in the cosmos fourth edition he says yeah this is mathematically feasible but physically you're not going to be able to join the geometry of a past collapsing universe uh to the present expanding universe yeah and uh that is kind of fascinating yeah because that's like the multiverse that's one of the escape hatches of avoiding the beginning right you can either just say it yeah but it doesn't work either yeah yeah and interestingly it was leonard suskin who's not a theist who said we atheists have got to stop using the multiverse it's a bad argument now what i did in the crater in the cosmos fourth edition is give lay people an analogy for what leonard suskin was saying he was basically saying the multiverse explains everything and a theory that explains everything explains nothing so basically it's okay if you've got an infinite number of universes where every universe is different from the other universe and that concept you're going to have an infinite number of planets just like planet earth and those infinite number of planets like planet earth you're going to have an infinite variety of birch trees and birch trees have the property that they peel white pieces of bark but if you've got an infinite variety of birch tree species one of those birch tree species will peel thin pieces of white bark that are rectangular and measure eight and a half by 11 inches and those pieces of bark will randomly fall on soils with random chemicals in them that'll make random markings on the pieces of birch bark in fact with an infinite number of universe they'll produce all the markings on those pieces of birch bark that match every equation paragraph diagram and figure and every research paper has ever been published which means all that scientific research literature did not come from the minds of human scientists the multiverse did it oh i love it self-defeating yeah it's a self-defeating argument that's funny when you started saying it a half by 11 i was like i see where he's going with this interesting this stuff is fascinating and i appreciate you putting it in terms that i can understand if i concentrate um next sort of fun or silly question or maybe it's not silly aliens i think when people the question is do you think aliens could exist and we really are not talking about like bacteria right or something that produces oxygen but some sort of sentient being like we see in the movies do you think they're out there could be out there and then how does that work theologically well when my boys were little they would ask me dad are there aliens and so i would go into my wallet and pull out my resident alien card is it that because you're canadian you're a citizen that their dad was an alien they said well given all the astronomy he talks about i guess he really is an alien that's how he knows so much no but uh one of the books i had a hand in is called whites in the sky and little green men where we talk about ufos and extraterrestrial life and i have a chapter in that book where i explain physical beings like us cannot traverse interstellar space it violates the laws of physics and one recent demonstration of that is that elon musk and his colleagues have a plan to send spacecraft to the nearest star but they realize that interstellar space is filled with a sufficient density of particles that if you send spaceships out from earth at ten percent the velocity of light those spaceships will be destroyed before they get to the nearest star unless you make the spaceship really small so their plan is we're going to send a thousand spaceships to the nearest star where none of the spacecraft are bigger than 10 centimeters across we know that all of them will experience significant damage but they anticipate that maybe a hundred of those spacecraft will be sufficiently undamaged that they'll be able to achieve some of the functions that are built into them and therefore we're going to get information about that nearest star but it's also clear you're not going to be able to send a light form with a body size bigger than one centimeter so maybe we can send an ant or a termite to the nearest star even that would be a huge challenge but we're not going to be able to send mammals we're not going to be able to send beings like ourselves uh interplanetary we might be able to send creatures throughout our solar system but not to the nearest star um much less many galaxies over and we've already destroyed wormhole travel i think we're out of options so whatever we're seeing whatever is whatever was on that 1988 episode of unsolved mysteries i watched last night on amazon prime love that show by the way um yeah whatever that was it wasn't it wasn't little green men well let me spoil your enjoyment for the star wars series every star wars movie begins on a galaxy far far away only astronomers have looked at galaxies far far away none of them have the characteristics like our milky way galaxy does to make events like possible we're living on the only nolan galaxy where advanced life is possible we're also living in the only galaxy group amongst the millions in the universe where advanced life is possible everywhere we look we see that things are unique i was gonna say that keeps pointing to the designer right and the specialness of us there's only one super galaxy cluster that's fit there's only one galaxy cluster that's fit only one galaxy group only one galaxy there's only one region the local bubble within our galaxy or advanced life as possible and you also got to be within what's called the local fluff and we happen to be in that you just say local fluff yeah that's that's okay i'm not really fantastic i want to like name a restaurant that or something local fluff well teases me and say you when you use the term local flop make sure people are we know you're referring to astrophysics and then not with some lady walking down the hall oh goodness can ask quickly i've heard it said that the universe has to be as big as it is for life to be possible within our own solar system within our own galaxy is there a 30-second answer as to why that is the case because a lot of people say well the universe is so big and we're so small there you know we're just a little pale blue dot and that whole thing from cosmos so we're meaningless we don't have value we're just solar accidents or universal accidents whatever why does the universe have to be big if we're just happy in our little solar system here well the mass of the universe determines what fusion will take place in the first three minutes after the cosmic creation event and if you make the total mass of the universe very slightly less so little helium will be fused from the primordial hydrogen during those first three minutes that those will be the only two elements that'll ever exist in the future history of the universe stars will not be able to make elements heavier than helium on the other hand make the universe the tiniest bit more massive and so much helium is produced during those first three minutes that the future stars rapidly convert all matter in the universe and to elements that are as heavy as iron or heavier in both cases you have a universe where there is no carbon no oxygen no nitrogen no phosphorus and no possibility for physical life it must be exactly the mass that it is for physical light to be possible okay i've learned several terms and words just in this one episode primordial i never heard that word before primordial but anyway and local fluff i'm not gonna forget that um here's a question that somebody asked and gosh i haven't heard this in years this sort of idea but that maybe this concept that heaven and hell i think i think most people agree that heaven and hell maybe aren't like geographical locations right if you go down enough you get to hell up enough you go to heaven right we understand them more as like heaven is where god dwells hell is apart from god that kind of thing but i think there are still some people that might think that heaven and hell might be located in outer space have you heard of such a thing and is that something that anyone actually still thinks yes i think it's because you see in the new testament jesus referring to heaven above and hell below but put yourself in a two-dimensional universe where you've got a flat land and creatures that have only length and width and you're trying to tell them where you are you say well i'm above you and they think that that word above means that you're somewhere in their plane no i'm in a dimension beyond your plane right when jesus was using the term above and below he's referring to heaven and hell being in dimensions beyond that of our physical unity outside of what we know we continue to read in the new testament it predicts a time will come when god will remove this physical universe from existence and when he does that heaven and hell both survive which is direct biblical proof uh that heaven and hell are not part of our physical universe they survive the removal of the universe so since you said removal of the universe and because i remember a little bit of our chat a few years ago at that conference i remember you saying something about everything we think about as the beginning of the universe has an effect on our eschatology meaning how things will end maybe i realize we we're at the end of our podcast and we only have a few minutes left and i'm asking you a major question about you know end times but in what ways has your thought process on all of this affected the way you think about how things will be quote at the end because you just said something about um the earth being uh i don't know what you said destroyed but then lots of people would talk about that god's gonna make the earth new and remake the earth so maybe just say a few words about your kind of eschatology well i wrote about this in my book why the universe is the way it is and by the way people can get three chapters of my books at reasons.org slash wasp what i wrote there uh is that the laws of physics like gravity thermodynamics electromagnetism they all play a crucial role in god's hands to eradicate evil and suffering from the human and angelic realm and therefore we humans remain in this universe until that moment that god is permanently eradicated evil and when that happens the universe will fulfill this purpose and that's when god replaces this universe with a brand new realm and if you read the last two chapters of revelation the new creation there's no gravity there there's no thermodynamics there there's no electromagnetism there we don't need those laws anymore because evil no longer exists and also be different dimensions that refers to an angel with kind of a yardstick so it will be some kind of physical entity but it's not going to be the dimensions of length with heightened time we experience here if for no other reason it tells us that we humans will be one like the father son and spirit are one which tells me that god's gonna deliver us from linear time and put us into geometric time i don't know about the two of you but when i gave my life to jesus christ and began to think about life in heaven i realize you know i'm pretty close to the end of the alphabet and given all the people that are going to be in the new creation it's going to be many millions of years before i can have a private office appointment with the apostle paul or moses but when i read revelation 21 and 22 i said i don't have to worry about that in the new creation god is going to grant the apostle paul and moses and all the other believers the capacity to hold billions of simultaneous private one-on-one conversations intimate conversations and fellowship with one another impossible one-time dimension but definitely conceivable in two time dimensions which explains why there's no need for marriage or families in the new creation you know i've done i've done a lot of uh you know managed a lot of weddings and when i tell the bride and groom is this this day you're committing yourself to say yes to one human being and no to the rest of the human race but a new creation that won't be necessary will be able to have intimate eternal fellowship with one another without any break or cessation uh that's why wyatt tells us no one can think or imagine a great and wonderful being but also explains why god doesn't give us that until evil has been eradicated because with evil around we would take advantage of that second time dimension direct untold harm on the rescue yeah i mean there are shows made about this right where you have alternate timelines and terrible things happening and but i think this is kind of getting at what happens in the garden which is when sin enters god has to send them away from the tree of life right because if they were to live eternally um in their fallen state it would be it would be awful for them and mints of mercy that he puts them outside the garden so that's an interesting interesting something to noodle on um and i have resisted all kinds of immature jokes so be proud of me um do you have any final questions before i'm good i guess let's let's end here if you if someone came to you and said okay i've listened to all of this and that's great it still feels like you're kind of doing a god of the gaps kind of thing um you know you you've you're filling in god where we don't know things i'm just for those that don't know what the god of the gaps is we don't yet have some sort of scientific understanding of some mystery and so we phil got in um but really eventually we will know all these things either if they say that or if they just say in general just science has made god obsolete what's kind of your go-to quick response to to to fight that idea well gaps in our knowledge and understanding will be with us forever we're never going to learn everything about the universe or ourselves or about one another there's always gaps but gaps is a wonderful way to put things to the test and so i encourage my scientists peers and others you want to contrast the god of the gaps with the no god of the gaps and just say okay from an atheistic perspective as we learn more and more about nature are the problems in our model uh getting smaller and less problematic or the problems getting bigger more numerous and more problematic and likewise from a theistic perspective what happens to the gaps as we dig in and do more research and we've written a number of books here reasons to believe basically documenting from a scientific perspective from an atheistic perspective the gaps get bigger more numerous and more problematic as we continue to learn more and more and more from the theistic perspective the gaps get less problematic smaller and less numerous that's always a sign of whether or not you're on the pathway to truth and again we're never going to have absolute proof of our existence or the existence of god but by looking at the gaps we can get greater and greater certainty i always tell people i married my wife without absolute proof that she exists but i did enough observations to realize there's a very high probability that she really does exist and so i went ahead and committed my life to her and now that i've been married to her for four decades i have even more observational evidence that her existence really is enough that i can spend my life with her but even after 40 years i still lack absolute proof of her existence and i say that to my atheist friends because a lot of them say i will not believe until i have absolute proof i'd say that's philosophically inconsistent yeah we don't have absolute proof of anything however we have practical proof and we're to base our life on what we can practically prove yeah no that's really good um if people want more information about or if they want to check out any of the books that you've referenced or the articles or just hit you up to ask you more nerdy questions where can people find you well i'm on both facebook and twitter and i do take questions of both facebook and twitter and they can get free chapters of my books at reasons.org ross and every week i post an article called today's new reason to believe where i keep you abreast of the very latest scientific discoveries that are giving us an even stronger uh piece of evidence for the christian faith that's very cool say that last part again where where do people find that at reasons.org reasons.org yeah i mean our scientific team is posting articles literally every day basically making the point you see in job and songs the more we learn about nature the more evidence we uncover for the supernatural handiwork of god literally every day papers are being published that make that point yeah no i i went on a binge a couple years ago of y'all's podcast and i remember listening to something about the human eyeball and something about junk dna and after a while realizing i had to take a break because my brain sort of hurt but in a good way um it's it's dizzying the amount of um scientific discoveries that point to god um it's very cool okay and of course if you want any information about theology on air or theology on tap you can find everything you need to know at houstontot.com and um again dr ross thank you so much for joining us and for those listening thank you again for joining us until we talk to you next time or see you we encourage you as always to question freely think deeply and disagree as needed do [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Theology On Tap

Views: 915

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Id: ZQFY4VxPFck

Length: 68min 16sec (4096 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 05 2021