Hugh Ross vs Peter Atkins • Debating the origins of the laws of nature

[Music] welcome along to today's edition of the show where we're asking where did the laws of nature come from my guests today are Hugh Ross and Peter Atkins Hugh Ross is an astrophysicist and president of reasons to believe a science and faith research organization his book the creator and the cosmos is now in its fourth edition and aims to show why the latest advances in scientific discovery support the case for a creator and the truth of Christianity you can find out more about Hugh and reasons to believe at their website reasons org Peter Atkins is a former professor of physical chemistry at the University of Oxford he's well known as an atheist voice in the science and faith debate and his latest book conjuring the universe aims to show that the origins of the laws of nature are perfectly explicable without any need for God and you can find out more about his book at the owe u P website Oxford University Press thank you Hugh and Peter for joining me on today's program oh you're welcome great to have you with us and just a little introduction to you both and a brief explanation about the books that you're both here to talk about Hugh this is actually the the creator and the cosmos has been around some time this is its fourth edition why do you keep updating it well because of what you see in psalms and joke that the more you learn about nature the more evidence you'll see for the supernatural handiwork of God and so we're committed to demonstrate that that indeed the more we astronomers learn the stronger the evidence becomes for the Creator God of the Bible now we don't have time for the long version but give us a potted history of how you came to faith because it was really through your study of the universe and astrophysics wasn't it yeah I was born and raised in Canada I was not raised in a Christian home didn't know any Christians but it was through my astronomy that I realized the universe had a beginning and I said there's a beginning there must be a beginner and it began to search for that beginner first and philosophy then through the Hindu Vedas and looked at other holy books like the Quran Buddhist commentaries and finally picked up a Bible and spent 18 months going through it trying to find a provable scientific error or contradiction discovered that it actually gave all the elements of big cosmology that really impressed me the fact that it got all the science right and so I eventually signed my name in the back of a Gideon Bible giving my life to Jesus Christ that obviously took you in the direction eventually of alongside the research you were doing as a physicist and astrophysicist to actually found reasons to believe and essentially you often speak of reasons to believers as seeing that there are two books that we write from John to explain yeah the book of nature and the book of Scripture and how God designed the book of nature to expose his attributes and don't get us to the book of Scripture and so yeah ours is a two books organization and just saying the more we learn about both the more compatibility we find between both and when it comes to some of the big advances that we've seen in the last half a century in terms of astrophysics and the origin of the universe nature of the fine-tuning of the universe and so on are these some of the key things that you bring out in creator in the cosmos well the fourth editions got 80 pages a new content and that's because we have so much more fine-tuning evidence than we had say you know 15 years ago and so I bring out that new fine-tuning evidence the fact that we have much stronger case for Big Bang cosmology than we had fifteen years ago so I talk about that and also address several of the atheist challenges to the you know Big Bang creation model and how to respond to those okay well we've got one of those challenges right here right pizza Atkins it's great to have you back on the program now you're a professor of physical chemistry by background but you've chosen to sort of expand in some ways in this new book into the area of the physics of the universe and so on do you find that all of these disciplines tend to merge into one another at some level well that's the whole point of science it's not a series of islands of isolated activity it really is a reticulation of ideas which depending where they come from meld together and they're not in conflict they're not like Christianity and Islam where if we're we're which are in conflict where they mingle but ideas from astronomy and biology actually are mutually supportive and that's really one of the great strengths of science and and I suppose back in the day whereas today scientists tend to focus very exclusively on a very tight niche the the Natural Sciences were really quite broad people you know scientists were were science in a sense when I was active as a scientist then of course I had to specialize yes everyone does but I think now that I'm ancient I kind of stand back and and look at the whole tapestry of science yes and it is such a glorious tapestry that I just like to share it with everyone even people who are not articulate in the sciences they should see the the insights that science has provided we've heard a huge story of how he came to faith in part through what he saw as the evidence for God in the universe has have you always seen yourself as an atheist or was there any journey towards that sort of particular view well I was brought up as an unthinking child in the Church of England and as soon as I went to college and realized that one could have ideas of one's own then I I shed the religious carapace that had been pressed on me and started to look the world through a scientists eyes and found that that was wonderfully invigorating hmm and with the new book then just to give us a sense of what you're doing with with the book because at the very outset you you do make it clear that if God has ever been posited as an explanation for the universe you're very much intent on showing why that really is not necessary and in fact that we can speak of a universe that came from nothing well yeah I think there in the principal idea is that we scientists are humans of simplicity from complexity that we see this glorious world around us with you know the whole panoply of of fantastic things that we're surrounded by and they the wonder of but we scientists believe that it all Springs from simple seeds and what we try to do is to hack away at nature looking for those simple seeds and I once went to a lecture by a philosopher who said and I won't name him and who said that in his view the simplest explanation of the origin of the laws of nature was that God pushed every electron in the right direction all the time now this seemed to me to be a bit profligate in when it comes down to explanations so I set about wondering if there was a simpler explanation of the laws of nature laws like the conservation of energy that the amount of energy in the universe remains constant at certain value things like that and I identified three principles one is indolence hmm that you don't need to do anything at all the second is anarchy that you let anything go and hope to find a lure emerging emerging and the third is ignorance you don't know something but let's see what the consequences of ignorance are and what I do in this book is to show that these three principles of indolence anarchy and ignorance account for well let me claim all the laws of nature and so if you haven't got anything going on that is guided you don't need a guide err will come to discussing in a bit more depth in a moment's time just briefly and we'll let you respond to it why overall do you believe God is a is a bad explanation well it's unnecessary unless it's a totally intellectually lazy explanation I mean it anyone who says that it's this happens because God wills it or God caused it and so on is actually evading the real answer the the real answer lies in a mechanism which only science can actually identify q why do you disagree with Peter on that well I read your book Peter and saw what you wrote about simplicity my perspective is that in science things are never as simple as they seem that's always more complicated and I think really the principle is one of elegance and beauty that really the right answer in science is that what shows the greatest elegance and beauty rather than simplicity and even in something as simple as astrophysics always finding out what we thought was simple answers elegance meaning that you know it's there's a certain like like look at the equations of physics and I like Maxwell's equations very simple there's simple but there's an all-ages elegance different simplicity well simplicity basically says that things aren't complicated but they are complicated the Constitution well simplicity does is to say that the root cause of things is simple but the consequences can be quite extraordinary complex well yeah but what I saw in your book is the simplest answer will be more likely the right answer but our experience in science is the opposite you see I think you should be very pleased with my approach because if I can show that the laws of one of the great problems of theology is how God actually interacted with whatever there was to cause the world to bring it into being you know how does this thing outside space and time actually put it shoulder to the cosmos and get it moving now what I do is it provides a route for an explanation to that because I show that nothing had to be done at all that you've actually will God didn't have problems in this idea this idea that nothing had to be done but but just before we get to that Hume what why do you believe that God is a perfectly valid explanation obviously Peter says it's intellectually lazy well then what I see in your book is this idea God is not necessary but I could use that to discount everything for example I could say my wife of 40 years doesn't necessarily exist I can come up with a scenario no but no that's not so notice no let me finish here let's see let's say the end of that year yes yeah mainly that the way we need to proceed in science as we look at competing models and say okay which of these different models is gaining more support as we continue to do scientific research not whether or not we can find some way of discounting something because mean we can't prove anything absolutely in science what science does is show higher and higher probabilities for a particular model but no model is ever complete and so that's I think the way we need to proceed you've got a non-theistic model you got a theistic model as we continue to learn about nature which one is gaining the graters and just a full pizza comes back why do you believe the theistic model where God is behind the whole show is is gaining traction over the non-theistic how is that more elegant and why is it awesome well I look at five things the origin of the universe the origin of life the exceptionalism of humanity the fine-tuning argument and the fact that the Bible has scientific predictive power well I think it does I mean what is the next great advance in science going to be well I in one of my books I basically make a whole bunch of prediction okay what tell me one great advance in science the Bible predicts and has not yet taken place well for example I wrote an article pointing out we need to go back to the moon find the earth transported soil in that soil we'll find the fossils of verse first life which will never find here in the earth because of Earth's geology and we're gonna build a determine who got the origin of life model right the theists or the non-theist by looking at those pristine fossils that were traded here 3.8 billion years ago mmm well that happened well I think the Chinese are probably going to beat the Americans so going back to the moon and you know the first met the Apollo mission was designed to find pristine lunar where in the bible does is it asserted that by going to the moon you will find these primordial fossils while a Bible gives credit to God for life here in planet Earth and you know there's a non-theistic model for the origin of life there's a theistic model which is he more elegant which is more elegant well I mean look at the origin of life I mean that's something we've been researching now for over 60 years in some depth is the evidence we're finding origin of life research favoring the theistic models are the non-theistic model it is favoring a theistic montt isn't I mean the theistic model is just a lazy man's approach to explanation it says I can't think of a way that life can begin so God must do it what scientists do and are doing extraordinarily ascent successfully is digging away intellectually into chemistry into biology and apparently they're not making progress Peter of course they're making progress plus I go to origin of life research conferences I hear what these gentlemen are saying they publish is a terribly difficult problem and we're not going to throw up our hands and say oh it's so difficult but I think I think Peters view is that that by positing God is the explanation it's effectively throwing in the scientific towel now I'm so throwing in the intellectual about the intellectual towel why for you Hugh is is it valid to say no when you have a certain type of evidence you should posit that there is a creative intelligence behind that a divine intelligence in your view yeah I mean just a discount god I think is being scientifically lazy you need to look at both alternatives there's God behind it or you know God not behind it to just simply forget about one it I think it's intellectually lazy let's look at both and see which way the I mean is going it's interesting to me Peter that at the beginning of your book you quote Francis Bacon a clever man very clever man but of course a very devout Christian as well yeah and so work were those you know 17th century scientists who so many of them claimed a very devout Christian faith all intellectually lazy these people who birth have enough knowledge of science in science was in its early days then yes science has only been going for what four hundred years serious science since Galileo and and Newton and and and so on and the early scientists including people like Michael Faraday in the 19th century exemplars in this in the 20th century as well simply didn't have the whole tapestry of science before them to see what an extraordinary progress it had made but we do have modern and also religious belief also depends upon cultural conditioning and there's some people in the past were in environments which really supported religious views what do you make of that well I came from an office of perspective I was not raised in a Christian environment and know any Christians at all until it was 27 met them interesting that Caltech that's where I first met two serious believers so I I don't think I have that bias coming into this and what what do you make of this view that essentially they simply didn't know enough about science those those the you know those who really began the the birth of modern science like bacon and Faraday and others the the had had they known enough they would now be in biology that's always James Clerk Maxwell I mean he's relatively recent and yet yeah yeah there's a relatively recent but he's not recent I mean he's in the embedded in the 19th century so it's recent science and advances in your own field of astrophysics and cosmology and well a lot of my colleagues are believers and you know I've seen Nobel laureates come to faith in Christ you had an atheist why do you think that happens because it got exposed to the evidence the evidence points in exactly the opposite direction well that's where we disagree I see it strongly pointing in a theistic direction I mean look at Big Bang cosmology I mean there's a strong reaction again against the Big Bang in the early part of the 20th century because of its Christian implications but now the evidence is overwhelming that the Big Bang model is correct and therefore we now when we talk about the Big Bang and in your book Pizza you you talk about this idea whether it's this universe or some previous incarnation of our universe there there was at some point at which as you put it nothing rolled over into something yeah it's a very interesting way of putting it and you even say at the beginning of your book in short I want to show that nothing is the foundation of everything it sounds very a contradiction in terms obviously and that's part of the reason I'm I'm sure you put it that way Hugh's view I assume Hugh is that what we know of the way that space time and matter all had its initiation in this Big Bang event is evidence that there is a cause for that that must precede it there must be beyond in a sense space and time well like the you know the space-time theorems there's now 30 different space-time theorems and what I notice over the past 40 years those theorems have become progressively more compelling that there really is a beginning of space and time and therefore a causal agent beyond space and time that raised everything I believe with the first half of that sentence I I agree that it looks as though there was a beginning of time which was but I don't believe that it was caused because you can't have a causal event unless you actually already have time yeah but you're presuming that that's very naive in other words to extrapolate our current understanding of causality that this event precedes that and so on let's see what your response is to that right back to the beginning before that was time you thought that in your book that Peter that you presumed that time and temporality constrained to one dimension that can't be stopped or reverse but the Christian perspective on this is that God has temporal capability independent of cosmic time and therefore there's opportunity well you can invent any properties of God that you want without evidence but what but we do have evidence for the space-time theorems you well you have evidence of space-time there but they don't point to the existence of God while they do point to something beyond time I think it's it's natural to ask what lit the blue touch paper you know where did everything I think it's it's naturally naive okay because if if you don't have temporal time you don't have temporal ordering so you do not have causality and so the extrapolation of everyday causality such as things going on around us now being caused by a preceding event no longer applies well what what do you how do you in in in that sense then get from nothing to something a clue right but you're appealing to the principle of causality and that's basically your way of discounting God as saying well if there's no time there's no possibility for causality but again what you're positing is that you get causality without time so that's point we both agree I'm saying that time came into existence at the event that we call the creation when as you put it in in the way that I put it when nothing rolled over into something but you're not willing to in any way give an explanation yes I am how how that occurred scientists don't know the right moment but scientists are edging back to the beginning of time and they're not going to give up now shrug their shoulders and say oh so isn't easy go-to is isn't as we approach that metaphysical barrier though it's not physical its scientific well I all I'm saying is well isn't there an actual sense in which as you approach a point to which you can no longer speak of time existing and space and matter and energy they all seem to reach this infinitely dense moment in our yeah but I want universities all that well exactly and and can we even speak of before that was if there is no time and so on well in another book that I wrote which I were not actually talking today called creation revisited I I did in fact explore possible ways of thinking scientifically about the event by which not turned into something but you know it's pure speculation but it just shows that it is not outside the domain of well let a human came there literally to to construct thoughts about how it might happen again a show course science will come and give an okay so Peter is confident that there will be a naturalistic mechanistic scientific explanation for how nothing became something you just the last few minutes before we have to go to a break explain why for you that's not going to happen from a a purely naturalistic point of view it has to involve God at some level well there's a limit to what we can explore through scientific observations I mean if God made twelve universes we're only going to be able to explore the one that we're in so there are limits but what I notice about books being put up by atheist not just yours but books by Lawrence Krauss and others is that their appeal as to that which we can't possibly know shouldn't we be basing our beliefs on what is measurable and testable experiments and observations and so and what I notice so why don't you apply those criteria to theology I do don't you faith is the absence of evidence well for example I mentioned earlier that would impress me about the Bible is it have predicted the fundamental principles of zigged and cosmology no it doesn't read the text I well I've read your book where you quote the text yes I suppose at some point I actually read the Bible a bit anyway but what you've got is a group of old men sitting around several thousand years ago writing down fantasies and but those pointers you proved to be correct what you do you jump on a word and you say ah I will stretch this word to include the inflation the universe and things like that it's like saying Oh what's what would in an analogy be well it's just one word a passage in the Bible where where Sampson is bound his hands are bound by cords a Hebrew word for making this up Hebrew word for cord is the same as string aa string that means string theory but that's not what I'm doing yes like you two outs it because he I think you're referring to the Bible texts about the expansion of the universe and there are 11 different passages by six different authors they use three different Hebrew verb forms to explain what this verb is all about and it's clear speaking about the expansion universe it's not just me reading this into the text Jewish scholars centuries ago saw the same thing in the biblical text long before we scientists discovered that the universe really is expanding I mean a number of people have also pointed out you that right there at the beginning of Genesis God created and that was significantly different from a number of the other pagan views of creation which involved simply taking the existing elements and reordering themselves well as a creation event which for you is again an indication that's why I rejected Hinduism and Confucius and because they talk about God creating within space and time that eternally exists the Bible says no time doesn't exist until God creates the universe we're going to go to a break and we'll come back to Peter I'm sure you're anxious to to respond we're talking about where did the laws of nature come from today and we'll return to that topic as well in the course of today's edition of unbelievable I'm Justin Briley Hugh Ross and Peter Atkins and I guess on today's program we'll give you the ways to get in touch with the show as well to give your thoughts on today's discussion in just a moment's time for more conversations between Christians and skeptics subscribe to the unbelievable podcast and for more updates and bonus content sign up to the unbelievable newsletter as I mentioned you as you mentioned yourself others popularizers in the scientific realm have been talking about this in recent years Lawrence Krauss you mentioned who's again a firm atheist in his outlook and he wrote a book called a universe from nothing what's wrong with scientists saying that the universe came from nothing I mean do they really mean nothing is the first question right and on reasons dot or you'll see a 16-page review our road of Laurens crosses book basically making the point he talks about nine different kinds of nothing in his book and each of us nothing's is actually something so quite distinct from the Christian you mean Christianity also has this concept of creation ex nihilo that the universe came out of nothing and that's defined in Hebrews 11:3 how the universe that we can detect did not come from that which we can detect and so in that sense the nothing being spoken of is nothing material though nothing material it has always been proposed Lawrence Krauss --is nothing's are actually materials quantum space-time fluctuations are not in material I mean we know that they can produce virtual particles for example and so you know where did the space-time quantum fluctuations come from so in a sense Lawrence Krauss in your view didn't actually show the universe came from nothing he showed that it came from something and that still leaves the question I suppose of where did that something come from exactly right what what do you make of those attempts to sort of show entirely with you okay I was not expecting it but yes I'll take that okay I I think what we have to do is to distinguish the emergence of this universe from maybe a pre-existing universe where laws of nature already exist such as can give quantum fluctuations and such right I'm not interested in that I don't think that really gets to the heart of the problem as you say you and as God said before you what you've really got to think about is absolutely nothing when how can absolute nothing not just empty space time but nothing at all no space no time but it's very hard to actually conceive that yeah you could cause because we always think in three dimensions indeed yes but you know somehow or other we've got to grasp that particular ungraspable it sounds yet because I think the the real question of what happened at the creation is that absolutely nothing turning into what appears to be something and now and that's why I could see you it's so difficult to get anywhere because it's hard to conceive you know what's in any kind of agency can exist any kind of well that's all indeed nature could be there yeah but I'm not going to go down that room because I wrote about it in another book I mean simply in this book I'm interested in the laws of nature okay we'll take us on that journey not the incipient of the universe but my as well as indolence anarchy and ignorant ignorant also posit the possibility that nothing very much happened creation I'd like to think that nothing at all happened but right that's really stretching that that is that does believe the time being but nothing very much happens means that when absolutely nothing rolled over into being something the properties of absolutely nothing were preserved okay okay so that is the indolence part of okay now there are very clever mathematical theorems due to the mathematician Emmy Noether who shows that whenever you have a symmetry in this case the ument uniformity of absolutely nothing mmm then you have what's called a conservation law that is a statement that a particular property is unchanging and unchanging for all time so my view is that when absolutely nothing rolled over into being something we can talk about that more in the moment it preserved the uniformity of of absolutely nothing and so when we've actually got space-time space-time this is before the Big Bang inherits the uniformity of absolutely nothing okay now if you have uniform time then according to this theorem by any nota you have the conservation of energy so suddenly you have got the first law of thermodynamics effectively yeah I'm not only that I mean the conservation of energy underlies the whole concept of causality and the existence of scientific explanation so it's an extraordinarily foundational law so there's this sense in which for you this this law that we experience and see in the universe can somehow be tied back into this nothingness yes II did it absolutely I mean I mean like my question first will and and I'll let Hugh pitch in as well at this point because this is stretching my brain if it but when you speak of the uniformity of nothing simply by giving it a property aren't you saying sort of aren't we constantly running up against the problem we're having to describe yes something that I'm supposed to be nothing and I've got all sorts of problems as well and I'm not going to try to disguise those problems right yeah is there still nothing somewhere and things things like that so let's ignore these right it's really not much ado about nothing here yeah what's your view of that's one of my childhood titles by the way what's your view of Peters whole thesis here which is that you can get that the way that the properties in that the laws of the universe exhibit themselves sort of somehow tie back into this state of nothingness well what I see Peter doing you're you're tributing causality to nothing you're triggering causality in the laws of physics not and so well that seems pretty clear from your book that you're attributing rather than tripping causality to a creator you're saying that the laws have this property or nothing has this property and I say where do we have evidence that nothing produces something I mean it's speculation and you admit that your book that it is all speculation and I'm saying well really the way we got to go with our philosophical worldviews is base it on what we can actually learn through observations and experiments and so I grant the speculation so I got speculations too but I don't want to ground my beliefs okay your speculation but his evidence so what I'm saying well I'm saying that I couldn't find I mean can I can I just pick you up before you come back Peter just just to expand that thought so it's clear hue your view is that because Peter has no prior evidence of something coming from nothing that's that's a speculation on his part whereas you believe that there is evidence of things coming about because of agency because of a cause because of a an intelligence and so for you that it's natural to assume that when we see everything coming into existence that there is an intelligence behind it well the principle of cause and effect applies throughout all with Sciences we never see that violated why do we expect it to be violated at the cosmic creation event because you cannot extrapolate from when there is time to when there is not time that's the naivety of it but that's the naivety of that kind of argument but they're noticing yeah but you're compressing all temporality into cosmic time okay David for example we know of three large dimensions of space and multiple small dimensions of space well we suspect they might be but at least we know about the three large dimensions of space why can't we have more dimensions of time than what we see I've got an answer to that I don't want to get too technical on this but I think let's go back to nothing again I think it is subject yes in a sense we have still got nothing and let me not go into I'm just tapping the table here because as far as I can see that appears to be a very physical universe we live in yeah you say in your effect you are deluded by what science is what science does is to get beneath okay period or explain how no I being full let me take an example a simple example electric charge yes there are positive charges yes there are negative charges presumably when there was absolutely nothing there was no charge so what we've got to do is to account for how electric charge was created in because we know of a observationally that there are positive and negative charges but what we also know observationally from astrophysics is that the net charge the total charge of the universe is zero we if there was an imbalance of positive and negative charges so strong as the electromagnetic force that it would blast the universe apart before gravity had a dime to her to to keep it all together so we knew also that not only as their positive charge and negative charge we know that there is exactly the same amount of positive charge and as there is of negative charge so what happened at the creation was not the creation of charge but the separation of no charge into is not positive or negative yeah so I think I think that the more you look at the properties of the universe you find that there is the opposite yes so that what when absolutely nothing rolled over into apparently being something what it really did was to roll over ring being nothing into its two opposites now I think that that is a much simpler thing for science in the future to explain than saying this was created and that was created well responses the one that's experimental evidence well I agree but if you've got ante nothing and you know ante particles and particles yeah and they almost balance one another out and it's just like having a bank account I gotta have ten dollars of debt and ten dollars of assets they cancel it to nothing but guess what that's not nothing the debt is real the assets are real and we talk about everything being completely balanced I don't think so I don't I don't go for these analogous well thank you finishes though yes it looks like the universe is extremely symmetrical but you look at it at very great detail you see it's slightly asymmetrical I mean there's a book written in 1980s left-hander creation not written by a theist written by a non theist who made the point that we see very slight imbalances and those slight imbalances are critical to get life in universe so it's not like everything a man and that is part of the fine-tuning of the part of the census is these very very specific imbalances just like on enormity the universe is uniform and homogeneous and large scales now that was perfectly uniform and homogeneous there'd be no life we need a slight departure from uniformly a homogeneity yes we're talking about cosmic homogeneity and uniformity and we're talking about the conservation of energy so it's the big scale that we're talking about they're not the scale yeah but I agree that you that time is not uniform locally because of distortion by mass I'm sure sure as such like but you overall I think justice there is no charge in the universe there are plenty of other example is is there no charge in the you know I mean is it well there's no net charge is zero says it's zero 237 place of the decimal I mean maybe we go to 60 places the decimal will find something I mean that's something that we physicists you looking at yes it's uniform if we go to that many decimal places but there's actually theories being proposed where they talk about well maybe there's actually some primordial magnetic fields now so far as I mentioned in my latest book two nine place the decimal we don't think so however there are BIGBANG creation models of actually deposit that there might that fact but peach seems to want to move from saying there's there's these two you know aspects the positive and negative forces in the universe that if they will effectively cancel each other out and therefore there is actually really nothing but your view is even said in that bank account analogy the fact there are two things that would cancel each other out does not mean there's there's nothing that way these are still fear I mean but it's observational and but you challenged me to come up with experimental evidence and what I'm putting onto the table in front of us is this experimental evidence I'm quite happy for it to be explored 2,000 decimal places pray that is very very important right but I don't think you're prepared to let God be explored to a thousand decimal place oh I am definitely well no evidence that you want to look at the evidence is there and part of the evidence in your view he will move on from the creation event the Big Bang - to the fine-tuning of the universe which is he has a lot of ink has been spilled and a lot of airwaves have been filled on this show right debating that you it was actually one of your examples of kind of because it's such a hard thing sometimes - to imagine just how it critically fine-tuned these particular forces are to allow for the emergence of life in the universe you you had a very good analogy for it in I think one of the early editions of creator and the cosmos where you talked about piling pennies up to the moon right back on concert can you just extract because that helps people I think to give a sense of what we're talking about here well I think just give you a few minutes to do that before Pete's I think we both agree that the fine-tuning evidence is strong but where I think we need to go is okay if there's no God behind all this we're gonna eventually see the fine-tuning heaviness decline but the fine-tuning evidence gets stronger and stronger from a Christian worldview perspective that's really evidence for a Christian worldview and so that's kind of what we're give us an example of the fine-tuning and talk about pennies being piled up on continents and how that all straight example to have life possible in the universe a universe has to have a certain cosmic mass density a TAS have a certain space energy density and we can measure how fine-tuned it must be in order for there be any possibility of life anywhere in the universe and it's at a level of one part in 10 to the 120 second power and that far exceeds the best example of human engineering fine-tune design by about a factor of 10 to the 97 times which means the one that was responsible for that fine-tuning design must be more intelligent more knowledgeable more creative and powerful than we human beings I mean fine tunings basic the analogy argument you know we compare our capability for fine-tuned design what we see in the universe to make our existence possible the other point we make is it looks like the fine-tuning evidence is much more persuasive if you want humans comparative you want a bacterium hmm and particularly if you want a lot of humans on a planet with the technology where they can discover the great philosophical truths that lie behind the universe that's where we see the greatest exponentiation of the fine-tuning evidence and the fact that every month the fine-tuning evidence gets stronger than it was the month before I mean one of the analogies I enjoyed was that given one of these forces that quite be so very specific in order for life to be able to develop in the universe to one part in 10 to the 37 and you compared it to covering the entire North American continent and dimes all the way up to the moon a height of about 239,000 miles next pile dimes from here to the moon on a billion other continents the same size as North America paint one dime red and mix it into the billions of piles of Dimes blindfold a friend and ask him to pick out the one dime and those are the odds that they'll pick out the red dime at the odds of 10 to the 37 and that's very conservative the and that's a very conservative the odds are am i sexy I think that kind of helps people to slightly grasp just how precise these values had to be given that it appears they could have taken other values but that they have these very specific values that do allow for the emergence of life now you're familiar with this argument Peter the and and the people like Hugh have been pressing that you the Atheist has to has to answer this problem why do we live in a universe which is so apparently fine-tuned for life to exist when it could have been otherwise well and and is that not a very powerful argument for there being a creative intelligence behind it let's unpick what's been said first of all God seems to have favored rock more than life as there is more rock in the universe than there is life so he's made a peculiarly difficult selection of fundamental constants to get life he could have chosen a different set of fundamental constants and avoided all the rock that there is think of it all the rock was alive and worshipping him he would be really satisfied but you know that's rather well well that should you come back to that in a moment yes Aryan so God favors rock again than life yes secondly we're basing our views on the the kind of chemistry that we're familiar with and different fundamental constants also lead to different properties of the elements so maybe a slightly different choice of fundamental constants would mean that say aluminium or silicon it would play the role of of carbon much more satisfactorily than carbon current currently does with no idea okay but these are sort of superficial arguments and the got two more arguments okay one is the possible argument I know Hughes expect to need to to roll out that is that there's trillions of universes and that the multiverse hypothesis yeah you have to be careful with that term but let's call it multi because there are quantum mechanical illusions there as well which I don't want to go into but suppose there are trillions and trillions in fact ten to the thousand rays the forty trillion and universes then it's not surprising that at least one of them has got this current yes can we happen to won the lottery yeah well multiverse because we're in it so that's the possibility and whether one could ever get experimental evidence for the existence of the multiverse and I use are you in a sense more do you find that even as as hypothetical as that theory is it's more satisfactory than God as an as a it involves no causality and therefore no causa right but the fourth or whatever it is argument is I think you have to think about the foundations of what we're talking about what's what's so special about life okay why are we making life such a marvelous property agree I agree it's extraordinary I agree that through evolution life once it had emerged from the inorganic has led to our current consciousness and who knows what in the future but it's somehow slightly yes in a sense a bit egotistical us to do something yes it says klezmer a cure to stroke I think so life is a jolly nice property of matter but apart from that why let's just let's start really bring up some of these God seems to preferred rocks to humans so are we actually got is the will universe actually fine-tuned for the rocks we don't have a lot of rocks you're not going to get humans I mean maybe the total size of the universe must be extraordinarily fine-tuned to get life anywhere in the universe so it must have a lot of rocks in order for a light to be possible given the laws of physics and you're meant to mention the multiverse all multiverse models are subject to the space-time theorems so you don't avoid the causality issue and I notice you quote Leonard Susskind I mean he's an atheist like yourself but he wrote a paper basically saying we have to avoid as a theist some multiverse hypothesis the reason why it explains everything and a model explains everything explains nothing not good well let me continue because you'll see an analogy and the crater in the cosmos is if you're going to apostatize a multiverse you're gonna have an infinite number of planets like Earth you're gonna have an infinite number of trees you're going to birch trees Birds trees Pele white sheets of bark you're gonna have an infinite with an infinite variety of universes they're going to have birch trees that pee pieces of bark that are the size of a4 paper they're gonna fall on soil that's got random you know chemicals in it that make markings on it which means that all the papers published by all the scientists in the world didn't come from their minds they came from the multiverse the multiverse did it the point he's making I think is that in a in a multiverse where everything that can happen will happen it you've got everything so disease I'm een I told you it'll be very cautious in your use of the term it could be that all those other billions trillions what quadrillions of universe is I have no life in what I agreed but if you're gonna appeal to an actual infinity you're actually gonna wind up with an infinite number that have life in them yeah I mean if I talking about literally explain I mean I mean the strange you accuse me of having a theory which explains everything and you're sitting there proposing that God can do absolutely everything so why can't I say that God is nonsense as much nonsense as my nonsenses well because your God's got a mind oh he hasn't he's outside space and time he doesn't have a mind he's not some sort of figure with a brain I think you know you had an Anglican background I mean in Anglican theology there's this idea that everything we see in universe testifies that there's a mind behind it I mean we're not our mind come from it came from evolution well they're there again you're violating the principle cause and effect in this sense you don't right yeah well you are in this sense everything we measure in science tells us that you get the lesser from the greater not the other way around that is absolute nonsense no alluding to the second law of thermodynamics I think and it shows the typical misunderstanding of that extraordinarily wonderful law and maybe we do that in the next session well maybe we will let's go let's go to a quick break and we'll we'll just have ten minutes or so to wrap up what's been a very lively conversation our program today between Hugh Ross and Peter Atkins they're my guests debating where did the laws of nature come from we're looking at the universe and whether God or nothing is the best explanation at some level for it continue our conversation in just a moment's time here on the show that aims to get you thinking unbelievable if you listen to unbelievable Justin Brierly on the premier Christian radio and enjoy the conversations between Christians and skeptics then this is the perfect app for you for the latest updates podcasts videos articles bonus content and much more download premier unbeliever wah today [Music] I'll come back to you first of all Peter here because you were wanting to press into something Hugh had raised which for you appeared to him being appealing to the second law of thermodynamics which is this idea that there everything tends towards a state of if you like dispersal chaos I mean this is another example of entropy as it's I mean I I saw that in he was book he gives another example of pouncing on a word and then pretending okay that it actually accounts for the whole of 21st century science this word that I saw was decay and you said you passed on the word and you saw said okay that means that they of ancients had already discovered thermodynamics or had anticipated it because you know the second law of thermodynamics is all about decay but you know these old guys were surrounded by dead camels they were surrounded by dead dogs corpses and decaying meat and so on that's what they meant by decay they didn't mean by decay the the very clever subtle dispersal of the chaotic just what about the Apostle Paul well give us the example the oh you're thinking of that well Romans 8 says the entire creation is subject to a pervasive law decay and dead plants used the word universe he meant by universe is what he could see around him well it may be I suppose the whole point is that a few believes that there's predictive power there's a sort of some prophetic almost element to this it may well be that Peter didn't have in mind obviously the laws of the universe at the point he was standing but nevertheless his words seemed very opposition to the nature of the idea of a second law of thermodynamics constantly the character that is typical of the Bible and right whose approach to it though it is it is written in elastic the words can be stretched to mean anything I say well not really I mean I would not make that accusation against the Quran for example or against the Hindu Vedas but the Bible is really specific and we've got all it says as you quote it is that the universe is everything in the universe decays what the second law of thermodynamics does is to explore the consequences of that and to show that there are local abatements of chaos like I would agree driven by decay elsewhere right and nowhere is that subtlety alluded to in the Bible the second law shows that structures can emerge Paul didn't say that because that things can emerge all he saw was dead camels I mean your view is I mean we're not going to get agreement on this obviously and and you you obviously do believe that what Peter what Paul said in Romans is is applicable to a scientific view but but your view is that what we experience now is simply a pocket of order in a overall system that tends towards disorder you've computed in that sense piece of it that we are you know local the local structures can emerge from decay elsewhere but you do face up to the fact that you know if we simply go on a purely naturalistic view of where the universe is headed we are headed towards the so-called heat death of the universe at some point where there will be every all of metal and energy will be so dips dispersed that no life can possibly exist its receivables a kind of a cold sterile void it's not a necessary future will is conceivable what I find interesting is that in a sense the Christian story as I far as I see it acknowledges that if that's the future actually God's going to do something about it going to redeem the universe in some way so that not is is that your view here that the nuts that's cosmic wishful thinking is not I don't think so what's the evidence of God doing something very fact 400 trillion years time well I think he's going to do a lot faster than four trillion years but the whole point is and we looked at the fine-tuning argument we see that it's most enhanced in the context of redemptive theology which tells us that there's going to be a divine rescue if you that's gonna save us when the heat death of the universe nonsense well again Peter look at the evidence and it's simple logical fine-tuning evidence but I've already demolished that as I don't think so I mean I mean what you said in your book about fine-tuning actually Peter is that no one has a clue as yet why these values have their current and for a serendipitous value yes I mean whose view is simply that God the best explanation is that there is an intelligent that's just lazy it's not lazy in the sense that if we continue to do the research which way does the trend go I mean that's you can't call that laziness that's been diligent well the the more science progresses the less neat it has of God it's the other way around I mean look at the origin of light we were talking about that earlier well we see at origin of life research conferences that every successive conference they have a lesser case for naturalist and more names that they're running into running there are more intractable problems as we continue to learn more difficult look into just throw up our hands and say the fact that its meaning more difficult we have got as many difficulties as there are we have possible explanations it's just that we don't know the we don't know the early conditions on earth yet sufficiently well what I'm interesting to know though Peters is I think at one level some people might accuse you of being so committed to atheism that you'd never be willing to countenance any evidence that might lend support to a creator behind the universe so I'm just interested what sort of evidence could science or the physical universe present to you that would make you think actually that that is evidence that there's a a mind behind this that a very difficult question if I were looking in the Bible for evidence heaven forbid I would expect to see maybe increase in entropy as equal to Q reversible / temperature and that is if there was literally an equation in my equation the Bible rather than all this wishy-washy elastic writing so so if if there was something like that that they discovered in the Bible that I think they was probably left well exactly but the problem is would actually make you yeah I mean is there anything from you know is there any kind of evidence in the universe that could make I mean if the stars lined up to spell Peter please believe in me it's about I died with that guy put it down to madness you put it down a say a personal man right yeah it sounds like Peter that there is no evidence sort of persuade you away from me well to be honest I think that's probably the case in that sense do you even have an evidence-based view if you're actually committed to atheism a priori well I'm predicting that there will be no such evidence that's not quite the same thing as being committed to it a prior where I I I come but you said there's no evidence that would persuade you otherwise I think it's much more likely that I would have gone mad then such evidence would have been provided right so it's very imprints Apple it's impossible to ever persuade you that God exists I didn't quite say that but well what would persuade you I can't conceive of I suppose even if I died and was confronted with you know some Peter saying welcome to heaven I probably think I was dreaming which leads me on to my next question if I were dead would you want it to be true I mean do you do you want God to exist in any shape or form would you be as pleasantly surprised if you wake up on the other side of death I've found a life of eternal bliss let's play by Bona chores and the man isn't man and superman well heaven is heaven is found to be so boring they ask to go down to hell for a bit of fun well what I mean it feels fair to ask you the same question but in your case you what would make you lose your belief in golden Christianity well I don't think any belief system is really of any value if it can't be proven wrong how can you be right if there's no way you can be proven wrong and so for example a viral crew front sorry I had to interrupt them I don't been proven proved wrong I am successively being proved right that's what I'm off I can't conceive any way in which you could be proved wrong that's that's in whereas it's unfalsifiable in that sense your your system isn't that fair to say from what you've said not quite I think I take a positive view the progressive proof of being right it's not quite the same as as being unfalsifiable and falsifiable yeah but okay from what I understand your position there's unfalsifiable but I would argue mine is so for example above George's what he's hold survival yes yes I mean a belief system isn't worth anything if it's not falsifiable just great go ahead okay well if you were to show me incontrovertible evidence that the universe had no beginning that would be catastrophic to my Christian faith if you could show me but we humans had a beginning so that doesn't come I'm not concerned to do that okay well likewise if we were to show that we humans were not exceptional compared to all life that would be catastrophic to my personal sense that we can reflect upon the nature of the world and invent the concept of God this is evidence what the Bible declares the Bible declares that we are exceptional likewise the resurrection if the resurrection have you converted by the end of the show by Sam don't we my I it's been really fun thank you both well we are gonna have to import you draw it to a close and it would have been fun to have carried on but it was interesting I think to get to that that that foundational level of what what we're talking about when we come to evidence and and to hear both of your perspectives on that thank you both for being with me on the program I hope you'll come back Peter maybe when the next book is out I know you continue to write in the whole area of science and the history of science and so on and I wish you all the very best in this universe that ultimately is made from nothing came from nowhere and presumably is heading towards a state not a good vote anyone but I just want to let people understand what they should go on to understand mmm Hugh thanks for coming in as well on the creator and the cosmos so make sure to check out the links from today's show you can find out more about Hugh and reasons to believe it reasons dot org and links there of course to the creator and the cosmos 4th edition and Peter Atkins new book conjuring the universe are now available from Oxford University Press there are links from today's show if you want to find out more there do go to premier Christian radio comm slash unbelievable but for the moment Hugh and Peter thanks for being with me on the show today Misha composer too you

Channel: Unbelievable?

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Keywords: unbelievable, justin brierley, premier christian radio, christianity, atheism, philosophy, faith, theology, hugh ross, reason to believe, peter atkins, physical chemisty, astrophysics, cosmology, multiverse, oxford university

Id: hVCVt-dvVOc

Length: 63min 38sec (3818 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 10 2018