Rock of Ages & the Ages of Rocks - Stephen Meyer - The Christian Mind - Part 7

my tack title today is the Rock of Ages and the age of rocks but I've been told I have Liberty to apply that those concepts in a metaphorical way The Rock of Ages is of course God the ages of the rocks is a way of referring to scientific inquiry and what I want to talk about today is what we can know or not know about the reality the reality of God from his st. Paul puts it the things that are made what does the natural world reveal about the reality of God or not in talking about this I'll be going a bit further than what I usually talk about in just making a strictly scientific case for intelligent design I'm going to look at how the case for intelligent design might fit into a broader case for theistic design or for the reality of God as an explanation for not just developments in biology where I spend most of my time working but in the scope of many scientific discoveries so I'm going to put my work in intelligent unintelligent design in a broader context today now many of you may be familiar with a group of authors known as the New Atheists how many have heard of these folks okay Christopher Hitchens who unfortunately recently passed away Sam Harris Richard Dawkins perhaps the best-known with his book The God Delusion and Dawkins in fact I think typifies the perspective of these folks because what his main claim is is that science properly understood renders belief in God untenable implausible in the extreme if you understand Dawkins argues that life is the result of a purely mindless undirected Darwinian process then you must also understand that life merely gives the appearance of having been designed he famously says that biology is the study of complex things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose what's the key word in that quotation obviously well purpose except it's the appearance for him the purpose is an illusion the it's the appearance of design the appearance of a purpose because and why is it merely an appearance why is it an illusion because there's an unguided undirected Darwinian mechanism that has produced that appearance without itself being guided or directed in any way and so for Dawkins since design is an illusion the possibility of a designer is delusional he argues that the strongest reason for believing in the existence of God was always the argument from design the evidence from nature and now that we know that that evidence is not pointing to an actual designer but instead to an undirected process that merely mimics the power of a designing intelligence we can safely conclude that God is either does not exist or has left no evidence whatsoever behind of his existence such that to believe in such a being is effectively delusional this is the New Atheism science properly understood undercuts belief in God it conflicts with belief in God now obviously the Dawkins perspective conflicts with the biblical view if you go to the Old Testament you find passages like Psalm 19 in which the psalmist says the heavens declare the glory of God and the skies proclaim the work of his hands something about nature says the psalmist is pointing to the reality of the creator beyond nature you get the same perspective in the New Testament Romans 1 says for since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood and I like to italicize the last part being understood from what has been made the the things we study in science the things the natural world are part of what reveals the reality of God and his attributes his power his wisdom his reality so obviously this new atheistic perspective runs directly counter to the biblical understanding of the relationship between science and nature on the one hand and God on the other science which is the study of nature reveals the reality of the Creator that's the biblical view it directly opposite to the view of Dawkins and the new atheist of course that's not too surprising they are writing polemical works very directly opposed to a theistic biblical Christian view of reality what maybe a little more surprising is to realize that the perspective of the new atheist is also diametrically opposed to the perspective of the early modern scientists the scientists who are responsible for the origin of modern science and here I think of people like Robert Boyle the famous chemist Johannes Kepler the famous astronomer who said by the way that scientists or that we called natural philosophers at the time but he said that natural philosophers have the high calling of thinking God's thoughts after him Sir Isaac Newton Galileo many of the of the leading scientists of the of the period of time called the Scientific Revolution when modern science was getting going were devout men of faith and typically men of Christian faith and moreover they had well I have on the screen a slide from the front piece of a book well it's actually a paraphrase of the book of Romans this is was written by John ray who was one of the founders of modern biology and the book title is the wisdom of God manifested in the works of creation it's got that old-fashioned F for an S so you pronounce that manifested I guess okay so what this shows though the deep connection and thought between the biblical understanding of the relationship between the the natural world and our understanding of the Creator that was part of the way that scientists were thinking at the time they had a watchword in fact that was part of the inspiration for science in the first place and I and this watchword was intelligibility there was a deep seeded conviction among the scientists who were founders in the various disciplines of science that nature was intelligible because it had been made by a rational intellect namely them it had been made by God and because God was irrational and he had a rational mind and had made us in His image such that we had rationality we could indeed think God's thoughts after him we could perceive the rationality the order the design that had been built into the universe that was the very foundation of science very much the opposite of the view you find with these new atheists a couple years ago actually about 10 years ago now I had an opportunity to testify before something called the u.s. Commission on civil rights and they were investigating whether or not there was viewpoint discrimination in the teaching of biological origins in the public schools any thoughts on that when I heard of the the the hearing I my first thought was I wouldn't have thought you needed a hearing to determine that if you open up the standard textbook you get the Darwin only full orbed Alleluia chorus in virtually every textbook that's used in in public high schools nevertheless I testified and got quite a grilling at first because I not only am a Darwin skeptic I favor the alternative idea of intelligent design and one of the commissioners began to ask me a lot of questions that seemed to reflect a lawyerly strategy of impeachment as if he was trying to impeach my credibility well did your supervisors at Cambridge know that you had these views would they have approved the questions like that and at first I thought he was very much opposed but then he took a more sympathetic line in the questioning and he said now isn't this view of intelligent design that you hold essentially the same idea that was advanced by by Johannes Kepler and and Robert Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton and when I heard the name of my heroes I perked up and I said well yes it is it was that's exactly what they believed and he said and and well I was interrupted at that point by my opposite number of the hearing and and she she said well it's true that Newton believed in intelligent design but he took great pains to keep his ideas about religion separate from his science notice how that was framed intelligent design equals religion now I'm not one of these people that memorizes blocks of texts or even Bible verses that well but it just so happened at this point in time I'd been working on an essay which I had in my briefcases I'd finished it the night before and it had a quotation from Sir Isaac Newton in it and I found myself saying something that sounded very impressive I said well but that's not true in the general skolem to the Principia I said doesn't that sound impressive all that means is the introduction but you know the commissioners didn't know that and and size it in the general Scalia to the Principia Sir Isaac Newton said the following and I'm going to read you the quote I didn't I went back and looked at the transcript I didn't have it quite word-for-word but it was close enough here's the quote from Newton he said oh yeah I actually I said one other thing I said in the general skolem to the Principia arguably the greatest work of physics ever written okay and admit it arguably is it's either Newton or Einstein you know so and this is what Newton said he said though these body he was talking about the the fine-tuning of the planetary system the way all the planets are delicately balanced to maintain this beautiful stable orbit and he said though these bodies may indeed continue in their orbit by the mere laws of gravity yet they could by no means have first derived the regular position of the orbits themselves from those laws thus this most beautiful system of the Sun planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being capital B now I simply made the point and follow up that right in the introduction to the greatest work of physics ever written or arguably so Newton was making arguments for intelligent design he did not separate his support for intelligent design or the evidence for intelligent design her his argument for intelligent design from his science it was built into the very fabric of one of the greatest works of physics ever written so that raises a question for us interestingly in the hearing the I in I was a very young professor at the time not nearly as well-known as my opposite number and the commissioners knew very little about intelligent design so there was a probably a huge bias against our point of view but after I cited this this passage from Newton there were these smiles that broke across the faces of several of the commissioners and they started nodding as if hmm this could be more interesting than we thought you know so anyway the this little story and specifically the quotation from Newton and from John ray and our understanding of the history of science raises a really obvious question how did we get from Newton to dock and how do we get from the idea that nature displays the handiwork of the Creator such that you can tell by examining it and looking at it to the idea that nature shows there is no creator and that belief in God is tantamount to a delusion that's a pretty big shift well as always with things like this there's a story and in this case it says it's the story of intellectual or scientific history and it's largely the story of what happened in the 19th century and it starts actually in the field of astronomy where where Newton himself had worked astronomy in physics there was a French physicist named Pierre Laplace who wrote a book right near the turn of the 1800s it was published in 1799 was called the celestial mechanics and after its publication Laplace was called in to a meeting with Napoleon the the Emperor now in the book the celestial mechanics Laplace attempted to do what Newton in that last quotation said you could not do which is explain the origin of the solar system as the result of of purely unguided natural forces the basic laws of gravitation he had a theory called the nebular hypothesis that suggested that grab the gravitational forces it caused gases to congeal in a purely natural way there was no need for an intelligent and powerful being fine-tuning the planetary orbits gravity could explain it all now of course for Newton gravity was a manifestation of God's ordering of the universe but Laplace was now moving in a different direction now he's called in before Napoleon or at least so the story goes historians are not really sure whether this happened or it's merely apocryphal but it's a good story either way and Laplace comes in before Napoleon and Napoleon says to him Pierre you've made you've made French science very proud you've shown up Sir Isaac Newton in the British remember they're at war at the time and and written a phenomenally important book but I have one question for you I've read Newton too and I find mention of God on nearly every page in his book but I find no mention of God in your work and Laplace is said to have puffed himself up and then said Theodore I have no need of that hypothesis that's my French accent sorry I wasn't very good with it he has no need of that hypothesis what hypothesis the god hypothesis the design hypothesis he thinks he can explain the origin of a very important event in the history of the cosmos the origin of our solar system by reference to purely unguided undirected natural forces and natural laws now this approached to the understanding the history of the cosmos extends from physics and cosmology eventually into geology and finally into biology perhaps the most important figure in this kind of grand synthesis that arises in this 19th century is of course Charles Darwin in a leading biology textbook college biology textbook written by Douglas Fatuma he explains it this way he says that Darwin by coupling the undirected purposeless variations to the blind and caring process of natural selection was able to make spiritual theological or spiritual explanations of life superfluous unnecessary he to Darwin also had no need of that hypothesis the god hypothesis or the design hypothesis his mechanism of natural selection could do what previous biologists thought only intelligent agents could do natural selection could produce the appearance of design without being guided or directed in any way so when you step back when historians have stepped back and looked at this hunt roughly hundred year period of the 19th century we've the historians of science have seen that a whole series of new developments in science came online in which scientists put forward theories that attempted to explain the origin of very significant events the origin of the solar system the origin of the mountains and the canyons and the great geologic features the origin of all the new species and eventually even the origin of life in the human species all by reference to purely unguided undirected processes and these were all scientific theories various types of evolutionary theories and when you strung them all together you had a seamless story you could tell about the history of the cosmos from the beginning of the solar system all the way to the origin of man and woman and that way of looking at the world which was in the nineteenth century very much a matter of the science of the day also became the foundation of a great worldview of a philosophy and that philosophy has a name it's sometimes called scientific materialism it's the idea that science supports a materialistic world view now let's talk about what I mean by a materialistic world view how many of you are familiar with the world view catalog called the universe next door by James Dyer it's a wonderful way to get into to understand the different world views the different major philosophical systems that vie for our allegiance today but sire has a great way into this he talks about seven different questions that every worldview must answer in a worldview by the way can you you're going to renewing the mind conference so I'll ask this rhetorically I don't expect people to just shout out but can you define a worldview siren defines it operationally in a very effective way he says a worldview is is a set of more or less coherent answers to some fundamental questions not questions about for example who's going to win the next election or who won the world series or the composition of the chemical formula for salt not questions like that but more fundamental questions like what is the thing or the entity from which everything else comes what's the nature of the external world around us is it an orderly system or a chaotic system what's the nature of a human being are humans free to choose or they totally determine those kinds of questions and of those worldview questions sire argues that the one that is most fundamental is what the question he calls the prime reality question technical philosophers call that the the subject of metaphysics and that prime reality question is this what is the thing or the entity from which everything else comes now can you see that what was going on in 19th century science was in effect giving an answer to that foundation a worldview question so when you're looking at these questions of origins you're looking at questions that are scientific but they're also incorrigibly philosophical at the same time the 19th century scientific answer to the question of the prime reality was well in the beginning were the particles and the particles became complex stuff and that complex chemical stuff eventually arranged itself and became a living cell and that living cell evolved by undirected unguided Darwinian processes and produced more complex forms of life and eventually one of those very complex forms of life namely human beings conceived of the idea of God in other words the materialistic worldview is it has God in the system but God is an illusion The God Delusion God is only an idea in the mind of man what's fundamentally real what is the thing from which everything else has come is matter and energy it's the material stuff of which the physical universe is made which has been here in the tree in the materialistic way of thinking from eternity past in fact we shouldn't say in the beginning where the particles if we're going to be consistent scientific materialists we should say from eternity past were the particles there was no beginning okay just as Christians and Jews believe that God is the eternal self-existent thing from which everything else came the materialist believes that matter and energy are the eternal and self existent thing from which everything else comes now the point is that by the end of the 19th century elite opinion in science and philosophy leading intellectuals were coming around to this materialistic worldview and they believe that the materialistic worldview had the support of science itself it was all these origins theories that seem to underwrite this way of looking at the world so in a real sense in an important sense the new atheism is not new at all the new atheism is actually repackaged late 19th century scientific materialism to make bestsellers it's it's an old ideology which is though I must acknowledge very much still with us the dominant thought form on the college campus today at the university levels research universities I would say the dominant thought form in the most of the elite media culture and information culture in the elite media the law schools the courts even many seminaries is this either we sometimes got naturalistic worldview or materialistic worldview and so and many things many things follow from it if you hold that there is no if you hold that the the fundamental reality is matter and energy and that there is no God independent of the universe that brought it into existence it's very hard to also hold to an objective morality because there is no standard above us all to which we can appeal instead we just do what we've been programmed to do by the particles in motion by the deterministic material forces that affect us we don't have freedom of choice and we can't even begin to talk about what the aughts are that are implied in moral statements so the the the worldview that you hold ends up affecting your view of ethics your view of the sanctity or lack thereof of life and many many other issues and this materialistic worldview is the dominant way of thinking today especially in the universities but because the universities are so central to our culture in many many other spheres of of elite culture and when students go off to college guess what happens to them they come from a religious home where they believe in God well they very quickly encounter this very opposite way of viewing everything and a lot of kids feel like they didn't get the memo all these smart professors are thinking one way and it's so opposite to what they were raised with and del Tackett who's here with us today will tell you that the that freshman year in college can be a killing fields for faith alarming statistics on the number of of Christian students who lose their faith in the very first year of college they're they're encountering a cognitive dissonance and it's very acute well so far I've been giving you a lot of bad news okay that this materialistic way of thinking is the dominant way of thinking and up until recently it has had the support of modern science by the way I have a the picture on the screen is a worldview a diagram depicting the materialistic worldview you might help you to see it pictorially the circle represents the physical universe the pendulum represents the laws of nature everything else in the circle represents all the different aspects of physical reality the key thing in the materialistic worldview is the assertion that there's nothing beyond that physical sphere there's no God no creator no purposeful designer who brought the universe into existence the universe is eternal and self existent so that's the picture of reality that's very much still with us in the academy very much still with us in the culture it came from developments in 19th century science the exciting news is that the testimony of science has shifted dramatically since the 19th century when this worldview became dominant and so even though this worldview still is culturally pervasive even dominant in the universities the basis for the worldview has evaporated that is to say there have been a series of discoveries in modern science in very recent science that undercut this way of thinking altogether that challenged the materialistic worldview and in fact I'm going to argue support a theistic worldview suggest the reality of a creator beyond space and time who is intelligent and there and also active now I'm going to give you a quick survey of some of these scientific discoveries the first one occurred in the field of cosmology and it's often associated with the work of Edwin Hubble a Belgian priest named father LeMond tree and other scientists working in the nineteen teens and 20s Hubble is famous now even today because there's a telescope named after him somebody's chuckled when I said that because if you followed the news that poor Hubble telescope was always broken when they were trying to get it up running how you like that make a great discovery in science get a telescope named after you and then it's always in the news because it doesn't work but anyway Hubble came into astronomy in the 1920s at a very propitious time it was at just the time that astronomers were gaining access to these large dome telescopes that were able to resolve very tiny pinpoints of light in the night sky prior to Hubble and the scientists were looking into the night sky at this in the 1920s there was debate among astronomers as to whether or not the Milky Way galaxy in which we in which our solar system resides was the only galaxy or whether there might be others beyond it Hubble resolved that issue as he also resolved these points of light because as he looked through this Great Dome telescope at the Palomar Observatory at Mount Wilson in Southern California he was able to determine the little points of light that had been viewed through ordinary telescopes before and were dis looked like little points actually revealed galaxies whole galaxies with hundreds and millions of stars and so the picture behind us is a spindle nut nebula a type of galaxy and he saw spiral nebulae many different galaxies in every quadrant of the sky such that today astronomers have something they called the Hubble Deep Field and it's a picture of the night sky and if you take a little picture of any part of the night sky there's on the picture behind you'll see a little square box a little quadrant now the next slide is going to be that quadrant amplified further magnified further with telescopic magnification and you see that even in the tiniest little square in the night sky there are galaxies galore and so the first thing that Hubble determined was that we live in an immense universe it was grand in scope beyond our wildest imaginations galaxies in every direction now that was just uninspiring but there was also a very theoretically and philosophically significant discovery that he made that was closely associated with this and that is the discovery that these galaxies are moving away from us in every direction the night sky that galaxies are receding and the evidence for that came from something called redshift it was light it it's that the light coming from these distant galaxies like this auditorium is a great visual aid if you look up at just the the the canisters of light you could imagine them as galaxies in every direction but the light coming from those distant galaxies was redder in its hue in its electromagnetic spectrum and its color than it would otherwise be if the galaxies were stationary in relationship to us how many how many have heard of the Doppler effect you know you know of that from the if you have a train moving away from us going to the sound of the train whistle hmm it will it will drop in pitch well the drop in pitch corresponds to a shift in wavelength up in Seattle we had these these I don't know if you can talk about beer commercials in a church but why not we had these beer commercials for Rainier beer and they had these guys dressed up his beer cans that rode around on motorbikes and when they when they would at the end of the commercial they would ride off into the sunset saying Rainier beer and you had the Doppler shift happening I'm probably the only person that watched that and thought Doppler shift rather than let's go get a brewski you know okay anyway the same thing of what was my point yes the same thing happens with light that was the point that if you have an object receding away the light coming from that distant object will stretch out get longer wavelengths and those longer wavelengths of light correspond to the red end of the ultraviolet spectrum if you pass that light through a prism the red light is longer in wavelength and indicates a recessional velocity when it's coming from a distant object now this was an amazing discovery and in every direction of the night sky where they checked this out it was the same thing every galaxy was moving away from us now what do you infer from that well I have a visual aid and it's not a beer can okay it's a balloon and this Hubble you know got to thinking about this and he realized that if the galaxies and I've drawn these little spirals on the balloon okay so think going forward in that this is a forward direction of time what's happening if all the galaxies are moving away from us that means the universe must be expanding outward in a kind of spherically symmetric expansion so as you go forward in time you get the universe getting bigger and bigger and bigger now what happens if you wind the clock backwards like the Saturday morning cartoons where they make the characters go backwards okay what if the you bet what the technical term is back extrapolate in time if you go back a thousand years is the universe bigger or smaller okay did you go back and go back and back and back and back the further you go back in time the universe gets smaller and smaller and smaller till eventually you reach the beginning point of the expansion where everything was congealed together and Hubble realized that if an expanding universe implied a finite universe a universe that actually has a beginning a beginning in time now this was a really significant discovery because at the very same time on the other side of the country there was this physicist with bad hair named Albert Einstein okay and Einstein had come to the same conclusion that the universe must have a beginning but then he said no no no no that cannot be right yeah and Einstein came to it on the basis of his theory of general relativity which was a theory of gravitation and the equations of his theory suggested that that the universe must be expanding outward and decelerating in order for all of the math to work out and but when he realized that if it was expanding outward it must have had a beginning he said no that can't be right so the force of expands so then he posited an arbitrary force that was meant to counteract the force of expansion in just the right measure so that the universe would be static and therefore could have existed eternally without expanding or contracting this arbitrary force was called his cosmological constant he picked a very precise value so it would counteract the force of expansion that he thought must be happening to make his gravity equations work out so he'd by a long process of theoretical reasoning in advanced physics Einstein had come to the conclusion there must be a beginning and then said no that can't be right and then he introduced an arbitrary factor to try to eliminate the implication of a beginning from his own theory when I was a physics student we used to call this dry labbing where you know the professor gives you an experiment to do and you know what the answer is supposed to be but you do the thing with the hockey pucks on the air table and it's not coming out right and it's getting near the end of the period and you want to go to dinner and so what do you do now I'm not saying I ever did this okay but I know some people who did yeah you know you take the pen and you you you adjust the value so that it meant they match the theory okay that's called dry lapping that's essentially what Einstein when the greatest physicist in the history of the world that's essentially what he did he fudged he fudged okay because he had a preconceived idea that the universe must be eternal and that was so strong it was such a strong philosophical predilection that he adjusted the science to try to meet with that then then hubble comes along and discovers that the universe actually is expanding there must have been a beginning and so he invites Einstein out for Nia to view the evidence that he'd been viewing through these grand telescope and there's some famous newsreel footage where Einstein comes out and he looks through the telescope with Hubble in the background smoking his pipe and he comes out and meets the the media and says uh I now see the necessity of a beginning that's the german accent that was a little better didn't you think yeah Oh beginning I have an actor friend who coaches me on these things it's really pathetic okay in any case Einstein gets it and later says that his cosmological constant his little fudge factor was the greatest mistake of his scientific career he should the innocent in essence the heavens talked back and the the testimony of the sky was that there was a beginning to the universe now this just set in motion a whole series of really interesting debates and discussions in the field of astronomy and cosmology and alternate alternative theories were proposed one astronomer famous British astronomers named Arthur Eddington and said this he said philosophically the notion of the beginning of the present order is repugnant to me I should like to find a genuine loophole I simply do not believe the present order of things started off with a bang the expanding universe is preposterous it leaves me cold now sorry I'll stick to the science for now I'm sorry anyway this is in psychology a theory known as denial did you notice how he started this statement it's philosophically I don't like it it's not the evidence and it says thus and so it's philosophically I don't like it what's the philosophy that makes the discovery of a finite universe repugnant it's this materialistic view we've been talking about though or naturalism the idea that it's matter and energy from eternity past if Hubble's results are correct they're suggesting that matter and energy are not from eternity past there was a beginning to the expansion now that issue was even further clarified by another famous physicist named Stephen Hawking and writing in 1968 a famous scientific paper he and another physicist from Oxford you know Stephen Hawking the famous physicist with the Lou Gehrig's disease in the in the wheelchair okay and he's at Cambridge Roger Penrose a colleague at Oxford in 1968 the two collaborated and wrote a famous paper showing that not only was there a beginning to the universe in time but there was also a beginning to space itself they did something and there won't be a test on this afterwards so don't worry but they solved the field equations of general relativity they solved some of in Stein's theory equations about how gravity works and you can kind of imagine this as you go back further and further in time there would be more and more matter see Einstein's theory was that as matter gets bunched together a concentration of matter causes the curvature of space that was Einstein's theory of gravitation and causes preferred lines of trajectory around concentrated matter so if you are thinking that way and you think is you go back and back in time as matter it gets closer and closer and closer to being all bunched up space is going to get curved more tightly and tightly and tightly and what Hawking and Penrose showed is that the curvature of space-time approaches an infinite as you go back in time a amount of time so you get back far enough the curvature of space becomes so tight that it's infinitely curved infinitely tightly curved now an infinitely tightly curved space refers not so curved space got a big sphere little tighter little tighter keep going tighter eventually an infinitely curved space corresponds to zero spatial volume let me ask you a question mr. scientific materialist how much stuff can you put in no space it's funny buddy it's also a profound question you see I mean it raises the the Hawking Penrose singularity theorem as its called has posed I think a very formidable challenge to the whole worldview of scientific materialism because its implication is that if there's no if there's a zero point for time a singularity in time and space it also implies it the universe comes out of literally nothing physical it's like the view of the medieval theologians who believed in the doctrine of create Co ex nihilo creation out of nothing physical and that's what we're coming to in modern physics and cosmology it's profound I think it also creates the basis of a reformulation of an ancient argument called the cosmological argument because if you want to explain the origin of the universe the cosmological argument was the argument that you it's the first cause argument everything begins to exist has a cause the universe began to exist therefore the universe must have a cause beyond itself we call that cause God it's an ancient argument during the Enlightenment the philosophers questioned this because no one was sure about the second premise that the universe began to exist if the universe began to exist in time and space and matter and energy then to explain the origin of the universe to give a causal explanation for the origin the universe we need to invoke a cause that transcends matters based time and energy and of the possible entities we could think of that has that profile God kind of comes to the top of the list okay a trends we need a transcendent cause of great power to bring the universe into existence so the cosmological argument is back on the table as a result of these new developments in cosmology obviously there's a connection to the biblical point of view as well the first words of Genesis are after all in the not in the eternity past okay so very interesting one other thing connection if you're a Christian in the New Testament you have the idea that the plan of God existed from before the beginning of time which implicitly and this is referred to twice which implies that time itself is a created entity which is kind of what physics and cosmology is now indicating as well time itself had a beginning so profound stuff now that's discovery number one let me give you two other things here these won't i won't take quite as much time on these but they're also they're equally exciting and then so we have evidence of a transcendent cause and a definite beginning for the universe but in physics there's another discovery that's been made that gives us more information about that transcendent cause if you will it's the discovery of what's known as the fine-tuning the fine-tuning of the laws and constants of physics as well as the initial conditions of matter at that first micro micro milli second after the origin of the universe let me let me explain if we think about that here's an illustration of what the physicists are talking about let's just take the expansion rate of the universe turns out if the universe we're expanding even a little bit faster or a little bit slower we would either have what's called if it was a little slower we would grab it we'd have a gravitational rika lapse where everything would fall back onto itself was going a little bit faster the matter in the universe would dissipate too quickly and we would end up with what's called the heat death of the universe and it further turns out that the expansion rate of the universe is exquisitely finely tuned to about one part in 10 to the 60th power that's one part in a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion okay now I grant you not much in comparison to the federal budget deficit but pretty impressive nonetheless if you're an engineer and you're in you're familiar with the notion of tolerances the fine-tuning of this one parameter that makes life possible is it's an within exquisite to an exquisite top finely tuned tolerance very small tolerance for error it's got to be right on the bull's eye okay now I may not have made this point clear why is the fine tuning important well because if things were even a little bit different a little too fast a little too slow the universe would not be a suitable place for life life depends on these fine tuning parameters think of it as the Goldilocks universe not too hot not too cold not too fast not too slow not too big not too small forces not too strong not too weak everything delicately balanced to make life possible okay and there are about three dozen of these fine tuning parameters that have been discovered at the fundamental level in physics things like the the strength of gravitational attraction the gravitational force constant is the physicists referred to it the speed of light the ratio of other fundamental forces and on and on it goes so there are lots of these parameters and one physicist is liken this to he asked you to get a handle on what's going on and ask you to imagine that you're you've gone into a the universe creating machine you're out in space traveling around with starred the Starship Enterprise or something do they still do that I think that's old anyway you're out in space and you come across this space station and it says universe creating machine so you're a physicist you want to know how it was done you're curious you go inside and you find there's this the panel with all these dials and knobs and each one of them is set to a very precise value for all these fundamental forces and parameters of the universe and so you whip out your pencil your physicist you make some calculations and you realize that if you changed any one of those dials or sliders or knobs by one click either way for various reasons life would be impossible in the universe and this physicist Sir John Polkinghorne in Great Britain says he says what do you make of that his aunt he has a understated British answer he says well I don't say that the atheists are stupid I just he says I would say that the theistic design hypothesis provides a more satisfying explanation okay another British physicist that I had the good fortune to meet when I was a graduate student Sir Fred Hoyle put it this way he said a common sense interpretation of the data suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics and chemistry to make life possible I like the way the monkeys always make it into the origins debate even in physics okay so that's another huge development in modern science that was completely unforeseen in the 19th century the very fabric of the universe the laws the fundamental laws and forces and constants of physics are exquisitely finely tuned to make life possible in a common sense interpretation of that suggests design suggests not just a transcendent cause but an intelligent cause that operated from the very beginning okay now the next area is the area that most fascinates me and that is the area of that with the evidence of design and biology and it's the whole question of the origin of information if you want to give your computer a new function what do you have to give it code code yeah very good code information software well it turns out the same thing is true in life and we we've come to appreciate this since the discovery of the structure of the double helix by Watson and Crick in 1953 and all the amazing discoveries that happened in the immediate wake of that along the spine of the the DNA molecule are four chemicals called bases or sometimes called nuke technically they're nucleotide bases and Francis Crick who was the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA suggested in 1957 the something he called this sequence hypothesis and the idea of this is that these four chemicals the nucleotide bases convey information for building all the proteins and protein machines that our bodies need to stay alive that every cell in every living organism needs to stay alive the machinery of life is made of proteins the proteins are built Crick suggested in accord with instructions that are stored on the DNA molecule that the DNA molecule is literally storing digital code and those bases that store the information are functioning much like alphabetic letters in a written language or digital characters in a machine code which is to say it's not the chemical properties of these these chemical subunits in DNA that matter it's their arrangement think of Scrabble letters on a board got a pile of them they don't do you any good but if you arrange them properly you can get the triple word score you can convey a meaning well if the nucleotide bases along the spine on the spine of the DNA molecule and they're represented chemists actually represent them with the letters AC G and D if they're arranged properly they provide instructions for the cell so that it knows how to build these important proteins and protein machines that the cell needs to stay alive closest analogy is to something that's that goes on up in Seattle where I'm from at the Boeing plant and engineers will be familiar with this as well it's a technology called CAD cam computer assisted design and engineering computer engineer or a electrical or mechanical engineer will sit at a console maybe he's trying to design a wing for an airplane he'll make make some selections of some parameters those selections will be literally codified into digital form that digital information will be sent down a wire it will be translated into a machine language that can be read by an assembly arm and then that information will direct for example maybe the rivet the riveting arm to put the rivets on the right place on the airplane digital information being used to direct the construction of mechanical parts Ford uses it all kinds of companies use this technology now guess where else it's being used inside the cell even in little bacterial cells we've got high tech in low life it's incredible so informated discovery of late 20th century biology is that information is running the show in life in even the simplest cells and that the information revolution that we talk about in our own high-tech world has been already at work since the beginning of life itself so now what do we make of all of this and this is turns out that this the discovery of information in living systems is creates a huge mystery and it's not the mystery of the structure of DNA Watson and Crick to solve that problem I call this mystery by the way the DNA enigma and the DNA enigma is not the structure of the DNA molecule Watson and Crick figured that out they elucidated the structure of DNA it's not where the information for building proteins resides we know where that information is stored it's stored in the DNA molecule it's not even what that information does we know what the information does like the cad/cam plant the information directs the construction of the protein parts what's the mystery surrounding that information it's the mystery of where it came from it's the mystery of origins it's the mystery of the ultimate origin of that information and so the discovery of the in Meishan and DNA is closely linked to another mystery in science another issue in science and that's the question of the origin of life itself because to build life you've got to have the information in DNA to build the parts that life needs to survive just like with your computer you want your computer to have a new function you need to provide it with code if you want a build of a living cell in the first place you've got to have the information the instructions for building the parts of the cell that it needs to stay alive so you want to explain the origin of life you got to explain the origin of information and the quote behind me is from a scientist saying this now I first encountered this DNA enigma in 1985 I was a young scientist I was working in the oil industry at the time and I went to a conference where there was a scientist it was a discussion of the origin of the universe the origin of life and the origin nature of human consciousness some of the big worldview questions that arise in the scientific disciplines and there was a scientist there who had just written a book called the mystery of life's origin and at this conference all the scientists discussing the origin of life were agreed that no one had an adequate evolutionary explanation for the origin of the first life now this shocked me I was under the impression that the evolutionary biologist had this question all sewn up I'd read the textbooks after all but the leading people in the field were openly acknowledging that this was a profound mystery now as it happened I got to know one of the scientists who was there a mutual friend introduced us his name is Charles Saxton he'd written a book called the mystery of life's origin in which he laid out chapter and verse the difficulties attendant attempts to explain the origin of even the simplest living cell by undirected chemical evolutionary processes and the biggest difficulty of them all was the problem of the origin of information all attempts to account for it from purely physics and chemistry undirected natural forces had failed and Thaxton had begun to entertain the idea in the epilogue to this book that perhaps the information in the DNA that the foundation of life was actually an indicator of what he called an intelligent cause after all information is the kind of thing that mines produce it was an intuitive connection for him but when he thought he needed to just to propose now I began to get to know him better he mentored me and a year later I was off to grad school and I had a burning question in the back of my mind and that was could you make an argument for this idea of an intelligent cause or the design hypothesis or what later became known as the idea of intelligent design could you make an argument could you make a rigorous scientific argument for the design hypothesis and as I embarked on my graduate studies I eventually came to the works of Charles Darwin and Darwin's work was very important in helping me answer this question because Darwin said or Darwin was using a method of scientific reasoning that helps scientists investigate events in the remote past the origin of life was after all an event the remote past in Darwin's method suggested that scientists because we can't observe what happened a long time ago we have to infer it and what we want to infer is that possible explanation which would best explain the data it's a method called the inference to the best explanation or sometimes called the method of multiple competing hypotheses but that led me to another question which was what constitutes the best explanation when you're trying to explain an event in the remote past and one day I was reading one of the scientists who had been an influence in Darwin's life and the light went on this scientist was named Charles Lyell he was a famous geologist and he said that when you're trying to figure out what happened a long time ago we should and he was talking and specifically about geology but the method applies to all the historical sciences he said we should be looking for causes that are now in operation in other words we should explain events in the remote past by causes that we know from our present experience have the power to produce those events if you're in eastern Washington and you're a geologist and you find a layer of white ash well you could posit that it was a earthquake or that maybe a flood did it or maybe anok eruption which one of those three is best obviously the volcanic eruption why because what of what we know from our present experience we know that volcanoes produce layers of ash and we've never seen an earthquake or a flood do that so using this same method of reasoning I suddenly realized that it was possible to make a rigorous scientific argument for intelligent design rather mischievously actually using Darwin's own method of reasoning because if you begin to think about what we know from our ordinary and repeated experience from our present experience about what it takes to create information it turns out that there's only one known cause of the origin of information and that is intelligence it's mind not an undirected material process another scientist I was reading at the time put it this way he said the creation of information is habitually associated with conscious activity well that's right if you think about it Bill Gates has said that DNA is like a software program only much more complex than any we've ever written how do they build software at Microsoft not by wind and erosion know some people have issues with were you know but never mind that okay it takes it generally takes a programmer to make a program right in fact more generally whenever we find information and we trace it back to its ultimate source we always come to a mind not a material process whether we're talking about a hieroglyphic inscription or a newspaper headline or information embedded in a radio signal or information in a software program whenever we trace it back to its ultimate source we always come to an intelligent designer to a mind not an undirected material process so the discovery that at the foundation of life there is information and that to get life going in the first place you have to have information points to an intelligence at the foundation of life it points to the need for intelligent design as the best explanation for the origin of life itself and now notice in reasoning that way I'm using Darwin's own method of reasoning to come to a decidedly non Darwinian conclusion which is that there is actually evidence of design in biology and that's that's the argument I'm making signature in the cell in much more detail now what do you get when you when you pull all these strands of evidence together well we see that there's evidence of a definite beginning to the universe which seems to point to the need for a transcendent cause beyond matter space time and energy we also see that there's evidence of a designing intelligence of design from the very beginning of the universe with the fine-tuning of the laws of physics and chemistry but we also see that there's evidence of design that arises well after the beginning of the universe in the history of life suggesting that that designing intelligence also is active in the creation not a deistic intelligence or deistic creator that only acted at the beginning but an intelligent who acts at the beginning but also in time as well and so when you pull those strands of evidence together I argue that that the best explanation is actually the theist a theistic design hypothesis or the idea that God exists the reality of God explains the cosmological of the evidence of the definite beginning the cosmological and fine-tuning as well as the origin of information in DNA in other words I hold to intelligent design but I also upon further deliberation about the whole ensemble of evidence that science is not presenting us believe that the best explanation for the identity of the designer is a designer who has the attributes that Jews and Christians and the Bible itself has long attributed to God himself transcendence intelligence and imminence activity within the creation so I think it's a very exciting time to be a person of faith who is also into science far from the testimony of the new atheists who say that science makes belief in God untenable or delusional I think that st. Paul was right that the things that are made do reveal the reality of the creator and is interesting even many secular scientists and historians of science knowledge in this one Frederick Burnham historian of science is this he says the idea that God created the universe is a more respectable hypothesis today than at any time in the last hundred years I don't think it's just a respectable hypothesis I think it actually provides the best explanation for this ensemble of evidence that has come from physics chemistry and biology from as st. Paul says the things that are made and so I think the god hypothesis is back and I thank you very much you

Channel: Idea Pump

Views: 73,806

Rating: 4.7513323 out of 5

Keywords: Stephen Meyer, National Conference, The Christian Mind, The Christian Mind National Conference, The Christian Mind 2012, Reformed Theology, Christianity, Calvinism, Defending Your Faith, RC Sproul, R.C. Sproul, John MacArthur

Id: dvMQXzidVG4

Length: 63min 4sec (3784 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 23 2014