Stephen Meyer: God and the Origin of the Universe

[Music] yes good morning I am looking forward to the combined Q&A afterwards when I was in Britain I learned the British had a kind of approach to questions and the answers the little different than ours I was in a grad school seminar my first year in Britain little wet-behind-the-ears American grad student there was a distinguished professor of conti and philosophy that came to our department he was giving this extraordinary lecture I asked a question in the middle because he was talking about some things in consul Asif II that I had never heard of and I asked him if there was a bibliographical source a book that I can read about that aspect of Kant's philosophy I said you know I'd never heard of that and afterwards my supervisor took me aside and said Maya he said I know in this state you've learned that the only stupid question is the one you didn't ask and then he said it's different here and he said if you're to succeed you must learn to Bluff and he said everyone here is bluffing if you're to succeed you must learn to Bluff - so in future if you have a question that reveals ignorance please come ask me privately he said we will have an extended Q&A I'm gonna kind of reveal the surprise right now we have the astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez here with us who is the co-author of privileged planet and one of the real luminaries in the intelligent design movement he's going to help Jay and me field questions on the subject of the next two lectures I'm gonna be talking about the beginning of the universe and Jays gonna be a little bit about the fine-tuning that you heard about from Eric and then I'm gonna pass the baton to Jay and he'll be talking more about the fine-tuning and the priviledge planet hypothesis and then we're gonna bring Guillermo up and we will have this extended Q&A and it will be American rules no stupid questions okay all questions are valid all right I'd like to begin by talking a little bit more about this media blackout Eric Metaxas was talking about and I'm having a little bit of difficulty as it almost always happens with the PowerPoint there we go Richard Dawkins is one of those popularizers that we're all we all encounter in that cultural flood of information that Eric was talking about here's a quotation that has influenced Minh and many of his so-called scientific atheists or the new atheist movement they started publishing books in 2007 and they've been monster million sellers and this is a quote from one of those books he says the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design no purpose no evil no good nothing but blind pitiless indifference you may remember that one of his first best-selling books was the blind watchmaker and Dawkins's argument runs like this he says that science properly understood undermines belief in God why because before Darwin Darwin we knew that the strongest argument for the existence of God was always the evidence of design in nature but when Darwin came along we were able to explain that appearance of design that illusion of design as the result of a blind undirected process called natural selection acting on random variations and now biologists would talk about natural selection also acting on random mutations but that undirected process explains the appearance or illusion of design so now we know there's no real design only an illusion of design and therefore there's no designer and if there's no designer there's no God and so he says if you want to believe in God you're still free to do so is a sort of subjective superstition he calls it the god delusion but there's no objective evidence for the reality of God and that's one of those really powerful cultural messages and I know having been a professor this really profoundly has affected a lot of students people in in that pre post and college age years when most of us form our worldviews in fact there's a lot of polling data on this that young people are losing their faith in droves as they go to university many of them do come back later many don't science and the perception that there is quote no scientific evidence for God is one of the really powerful reasons for that loss and a lot of that is coming from this cultural messaging from these folks we call the new atheists and also the professor at who has been influenced for over a century by the rise of what we call scientific materialism a worldview about which I'll talk a bit more as the talk unfolds now obviously this perspective that science is in conflict with faith or that science properly understood undermines belief in God is very contrary to the perspective of the biblical writers in Psalm 19 in the Tanakh the Old Testament the Hebrew Bible we encounter the idea that the heavens are actually in some way declaring or revealing the glory and reality of God you get the same idea in the New Testament st. Paul talks about in Romans 1 this famous passage he he says for since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities his eternal power and his divine nature sometimes in the older translations of the Bible translated wisdom have been clearly seen being understood from what has been made in other words if you look at nature there's something about nature that not only affirms the reality of God but actually reveals something about the qualities of the creator his power and his wisdom is intelligence now this is obviously a very different perspective than that of the new atheist and I suppose we shouldn't be too surprised that the Bible writers and the new atheist disagree about what nature can tell us about the reality of God but what might surprise you is that the new atheist perspective on what science can tell us about the reality of God is diametrically opposed to the perspective of the founders of what we call modern science historians of science talk about a period of time from roughly 1300 to 1700 others dated 1500 to 1700 they call it the Scientific Revolution that's when science in its modern form is an organized form of of inquiry an investigation of nature really got going and think of that period of time we think about the Giants of the Scientific Revolution like Johannes Kepler the great astronomer we think about Galileo we think about Robert Boyle the the the groundbreaking chemist and we think about for example Sir Isaac Newton here's a front piece of one of the early works in biology late 17th century one of the kind of really cutting-edge pieces of biological research at that period of time notice the front piece the the the introductory page here it's a paraphrase of the book of Romans that that passage I just read the wisdom of God manifested in the works of creation there were a lot of them so it was in two parts it was two big volumes by John ray a fellow of the Royal Society the first organized scientific society in the world Ray like many of the founders of science during this period of time was a devout Christian who believed that by studying nature he was learning about the wisdom of God now the scientists at this period of time had had two key concepts that historians of science have identified as crucial to the rise of modern science one was the idea of order and the idea there was that nature is an orderly system they would talk about the Concours of nature an orderly system and it was it was orderly because it reflected the mind of God God was a God of order and he built order into the world and therefore we could perceive those patterns of order which the early scientists called laws of nature and they were laws because there was a lawgiver it was a juridical theological metaphor that suggested that the order of nature was a manifestation of the ongoing superintendent superintending by God of his power over nature I talked last night in the interview with Eric about Newton's notion of the laws of nature he thought that he were a manifestation of constant spirit action it was the Spirit of God who imposed upon the the brute matter an order that could be perceived by the scientists which we describe mathematically as laws of nature that was one key idea from this pier time the other was the idea perhaps even more profound of intelligibility to most of us without scientific training the nature can look very chaotic hard to discern what's going on it's not but the early scientists had the conviction that if they studied nature carefully that it would reveal its secrets it was intelligible to them because we human beings are made in the image of God God is a rational creator he built rationality order and put design into nature and because he built our minds as well in His image we could perceive the rationality the order and the design that he built into the natural world and so this made science possible and it made this incredible flowering of organized science possible in this in Western Europe during this period of time in a decidedly Christian milieu a period when most of the leading intellectuals had a if not a real genuine faith a Christian worldview now this perspective reached an almost majestic quality in the writings of Sir Isaac Newton I had an experience a couple years ago several years ago now where I was called to testify but for a group called the United States Commission on civil rights and they were investigating whether or not there was something called viewpoint discrimination in the teaching of biological origins when I got the the invitation to testify I my first thought was well I wouldn't have thought you needed a hearing to establish that all you have to do is open any college or high school biology textbook and there's only one perspective offered it's the contemporary Darwinian perspective and in the discussion or presentation of evolutionary theory there is not in these textbooks even oppression of some of the contemporary critiques of for example the creative power of the mutation selection mechanism which many evolutionary biologists now doubt but not a mention of that so of course there's viewpoint discrimination but in any case the commissioners were interested in my perspective as a proponent of the theory of intelligent design I came and gave a short testimony and afterwards one of the commissioners in the back row I started asking kind of series of aggressive questions that I thought were meant to impeach my credibility he's asking about where I did my PhD and what did my would my supervisors have thought of my perspective on ID blah blah blah but then he said isn't your perspective though very similar to that of a Johannes Kepler and Robert Boyle and an Isaac Newton some of the early founders of modern science and I you know when I heard the name of my heroes I my spirit brightened and and I began to talk a little bit about that and then my opposite number at the hearing who was there defending the Darwin only approach to science education interjected and said well what what dr. Maier is saying is true Sir Isaac Newton was a very religious man she said but he took great pains to keep his religious ideas about intelligent design notice how she equated the two out of his scientific work and I'm not one of these people that memorizes poetry or even Bible verses very readily but it happened that I had in my briefcase with me an essay that I'd finished just that week with a paragraph a block quote from Isaac Newton and it's the one that I have on the on the screen behind me and I had it nearly committed to memory and so I found myself think something that sounded very impressive I said well but actually that's not true in the general skolem to the Principia dot-dot-dot general skolem just means introduction but she didn't know that neither did the commissioners and I so I quoted this pretty pretty close to verbatim let me share it with you this is Newton he's talking about the solar system he's presenting in the in the Principia his theory of universal gravitation but knowing how this law now works he's got to mathematically describe he's still amazed that the solar system is as stable it has all these stable planetary orbits because he's aware of how there's this delicate balancing of all the gravitational forces and this is what he says though these bodies the planets may indeed continue in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity yet they could by no means have at first derived the regular position of the orbits themselves from those laws thus this most beautiful system of Sun planets and comets could only proceed from the council and Dominion of an intelligent and powerful being capital B and as I finished paraphrasing the the commissioners in the back of the the room I saw that several smiles break across faces like this could be a lot more interesting than we thought you know I'm the I'm the young upstart and here's the person speaking for the scientific establishment because whether or not the commissioners were persuaded of my views on intelligent design they realized that as a matter of historical fact the founders of modern science were very favorable to this idea and they built it into their scientific work it wasn't something they they kept separate as a theological proposition they thought science itself was pointing to the design of an intelligent and powerful being now obviously that's a very big shift in perspective from that of Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye the Science Guy and all these popularizers we've been hearing about so how did we get from Dakin art from Sir Isaac Newton to Richard Dawkins that's it that's a big intellectual shift and there's a there's a story to be told about this in intellectual history or scientific history in it it really begins in the 18th century or the and there's a kind of a series of scientific ideas that come about that end up producing that worldview shift in some ways it starts with another physicist named Pierre Laplace he in 1799 Newton dies in 1727 the Principia is 1687 so about a century later 1799 Laplace writes this book called the celestial mechanics and in in the celestial mechanics he attempts to do what Newton in that previous quotation said you couldn't do which was explained the origin of the solar system purely by reference to the law of gravity and some clustering of nebula nebula gases he doesn't Newton thought it was a setup job he thought it was finely tuned somehow there that God had designed the solar system Laplace tries to dispense with that idea he's brought before Napoleon a few years later to receive commendation for this important book and according to the story as it's told Napoleon asks him you know wonderful book we're glad you showed up the British but I know that Newton used to write a lot about God and his scientific works but you don't why is that and he as said to have puffed himself up and said seer I have no need of his that hypothesis that was my French accent sorry about that part this now is one of those things that historians of science debate about whether this conversation actually happened some say it's apocryphal others not whatever is the case it certainly captured the spirit of the age and the spirit of the coming age especially in the 19th century one by one there were theories that that came online that [Music] disputed the idea that there was any evidence of design in nature and that instead purely undirected natural processes could explain all the origin of all the things we see around us so we have this account of Laplace of the solar system then in geology we have some very reasonable explanations but relying on on purely undirected unguided processes to explain the origin the mountain ranges in the canyon and the great geological features and then in biology we have of course darwin's great theory 1859 the Origin of Species he attempts to explain the origin of all the new forms of life as a result of unguided undirected processes in particular natural selection acting on random variations his idea is extended first bite he doesn't himself to explain the origin even of human beings in his book The Descent of Man and then other early evolutionary theorists urns tackle and thomas henry huxley extend the idea in the other direction to account for the origin of the first self-replicating so by the end of the 19th century you have this seamless completely naturalistic completely materialistic story from the origin back very far back to explain the origin of the solar system to planet earth to the features on planet earth to the first life to all the new forms of life finally to the human life and so this is a completely materialistic account and as a result of this by the end of the 19th century you don't just have a series of theories about origins sorry for the rhyme but you also have something like a comprehensive worldview developing and scholars call this this worldview scientific materialism how many are familiar with the term worldview okay that's that's really good it's getting into wider currency when I was in college I was a physics and earth science major I majored in both fields and one of the reasons I did the science stuff was my dad was a mechanical engineer when I went off to college I knew I didn't want to be an engineer whenever he was fixing the engine in the car and he had me help I dropped the the wrench in the most inaccessible place and and he go like you know because I was thinking about other things and so he said before I went to college II said look son I know you don't want to be an engineer you don't have to follow me in my footsteps but before you choose a major please take at least two years of college math because if you don't have that math under your belt you're gonna be limited in what you can you know what you can do and I said okay sure dad don't have to be an engineer I'll do anything I'll take the path so I get done with the two years of college math and about all you can major in at this at the liberal arts college where I was attending was physics and physics was about as close to engineering as you could get in the college where I was and I think my dad got what he wanted you know so this is awesome but I was always sneaking across campus to sign up for one philosophy class every year cuz he heard the interview last night I was always interested in these these deep Y questions and one semester I was taking a course called atheistic existentialism it was my junior year and it was all about Nietzsche and Sartre and Camus and they depressed you know God is dead a theistic existentialist writers and anguish for larnice and despair and I was doing really really well at the despair part and I got an A in this class and the great slip came home at Christmastime we have this kind of Germanic work ethic thing in our family even as a college student my dad is intercepting the report card and so one night he says you know I'd like to have a little chat and we're sitting at dinner and he says yeah it's the great slip out and he starts reading the grades and the first one is atheistic and he says atheistic atheistic what in the blank he says is atheistic what am i stench ilysm he says and then he pauses for effect and it reads it and this is a like that's a bad thing and then the next grade is theoretical mechanics and as my most important physics class that term in it he reads it B and then he gives me this look like it is now time for offspring to give a count of offsprings behavior and and I start getting really defensive and I say dad dad dad look I know these philosophy classes don't mean anything to you but they're important too because that's where you learn about about worldviews and about what people are thinking at that deep level and everybody has a worldview it's kind of like a personal philosophy and it informs your perspective on other issues and then it and if you understand people's worldview you can understand where they're coming from and why they use the terms they do and he interrupts when he says son you don't need a worldview you need a job and now I'm one of those dads you know so III get that now and my dad being a mechanical engineer is actually now really excited about what we're doing on intelligent design but it took a while and anyway the point is worldview is very important it is a kind of a good way of thinking of a worldview is it's a personal philosophy that everyone has whether they know it or not and world use answer some very fundamental questions about reality not not questions like what is the formula for for salt or who won the World Series but deeper questions like what is the thing or the entity or the process from which everything else comes in fact I see that in people who write about worldview that they call that the prime reality question the most important question and the dominant worldview in our elite knowledge culture today is this worldview that I would just mention called materialism or sometimes called naturalism the idea nature is all there is there's nothing beyond it nature made of matter and energy and so if you're familiar scripturally with something like the prologue to the book of john where it says in the beginning was the word or from back to Genesis in the beginning God said you know there's the idea in the theistic worldview that what is the prime reality is a personal God with a mind of creative intentions who brings the universe into existence and then through his intellectual power shapes matter to to create and generate all the things we see around us the materialistic worldview you know sort of the flipside of that ja9 prologue says from eternity past where the particles there was no beginning the thing that is eternal in self existence is matter in energy and that matter and energy arranged itself to become more complex stuff more complex living stuff eventually and the living stuff evolved by Darwinian processes is to prove to all the new forms of life we see including one form of life namely us who conceived of the idea of God and so you have God in the materialistic worldview but only as a concept and only at the end of the process in the theistic worldview the whole thing is reversed you start with God then you get matter and then you get all the wonderful things we see around us as a result of God's creativity so these two worldviews are in a kind of ideological conflict and the conflict between science and faith is not a conflict between scientific evidence in faith it's really a conflict between these two worldviews one of which claims to be based on science but I'm gonna suggest that maybe that's not actually the case the bad news for people of faith is that this materialistic worldview really does dominate the culture now the elite culture the the universities many of the elite science research institutions the law schools the courts students who are of faith know this when they get to those places they know they got to kind of keep quiet because this is theirs their view is not the dominant view but there's there's a good news and that's what I'd like to talk about this morning and that is that the science of the 19th century that gave rise to this perspective has been eclipsed by major developments in science over the last 100 years in three main areas cosmology physics and biology let me talk first about the the cosmology or the astronomy the shift in this field starts in the 1920s there's a now famous astronomer named Edwin Hubble most of us have heard of him because of the famed Hubble telescope it's kind of a bummer for him because he's a really great scientist he got a telescope named after him and it's always broken and they have to go up there and fix it but anyway Hubble starts working in the 20s he comes out of law the field of law into astronomy at a really propitious time they're building these great domed telescopes this is the hundred inch diameter telescope at Mount Wilson that Hubble used and using these great big telescopes the astronomers are able to at this time to start resolving these onto photographic plates the light coming from little tiny distance previously indistinct points of light in the night sky and it turns out that these little indistinct points once the light is collected over with a long exposure on a photographic plate through these big telescopic lenses the light starts revealing structure and this is a picture of what's called a spindle nebula and there were others spiral nebulas and oh that sorry that was a well that's a spiral and here's another spiral nebula now this reignited a debate that had been going on in astronomy between astronomers who thought that our Milky Way galaxy was the only galaxy and other astronomers who thought that there were other galaxies beyond the Milky Way Island universes if you will beyond the Milky Way and this was called the great debate in the 1920s but in 1924 Hubble was able to settle this debate by using some new techniques for estimating distances he was able to deduce to determine that the Andromeda nebula was actually the Andromeda galaxy that it was a separate galaxy in the way he was able to show that as he was using these new techniques for measuring distances he determined that the Andromeda galaxy when the closest ones to us was 900 thousand light years away that was his estimate at the time and we the astronomers thought at the time the Milky Way was only 300 thousand light-years across so clearly it had to be way beyond the Milky Way therefore it was a separate galaxy and the Andromeda nebula which this meant gas cloud was renamed the Andromeda galaxy that was pretty awesome and as they began to look at other points of light using these same techniques they found that there were galaxies in every direction of the night sky in fact if you look at this little square that's highlighted on the PowerPoint that's like a little tiny part of the visual field maybe like a diamond arm's length and now if we were to magnify that it reveals galaxies galore in even the tiniest little quadrant in the night sky is and and the current estimate is that there are about 200 billion galaxies in the visible universe so in just the space of a decade our sense of the the immensity of the universe was just magnified incredibly now that was really and that was an amazing discovery but even more important was what was discovered as a result of the light coming from these galaxies turns out that the light was redder than than the scientists expected you don't have you if you shine light through a prism and it separates into colors the red through to the blue and the violet and the red light has a long wavelength and if an object is is emitting light and moving away it will cause the wavelength of the light to stretch out and it will look redder than it would otherwise look so the the the light coming from the the the gases in the far away galaxies looked redder than similar light would look coming from if we looked at it spectra in the spectra in a laboratory and they call this the redshift in other words the wavelength was stretched out it's kinda like the the Doppler shift was sound when if a train whistle goes by goes hmm sound well that's the wavelength of the sound stretching out same thing happens with light and so the scientists were able to discern that the galaxies are actually moving away from us that's what the redshift meant now that had incredible implications for the question of the origin of the universe itself Hubble used data from a a unsung hero in astronomy named Vesto Slipher to about this redshift and so here's here's the here's the implication of all this if the galaxies are moving away from us in every direction in the forward direction of time the only way that could be true is if there is a kind of spherically symmetric expansion of the universe that everything is expanding in the forward direction so if we think of I got a visual aid in the forward direction of time you have the universe getting bigger bigger and bigger and the galaxies every galaxies getting further and further away from every other galaxy but if you wind the time clock backwards if you back extrapolate when you think well what was the universe like a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago or a million or a billion or however far back you go eventually you get to the point where all that galactic material is going to congeal or would have come back to the same point a point marking the beginning of the expansion of the universe and arguably the beginning of the universe itself and so we have from observational astronomy the first hint that the universe has not been here eternally it's not eternal in self-existent but rather it had a beginning this is one of Hubble's plot showing that that there was a law that further out the galaxies are the faster they're moving away and that again can only be true if it's Minerva's expanding in this spherically symmetric way now about this time actually a little before this time there is a famous physicist with really bad hair who had come to the a very similar conclusion and this was Albert Einstein he he was in the 19-teens still working in germany eventually he came to Princeton to escape the Nazis but in the teens he came up with another theory at a new theory of gravity known as general relativity and we talked a little bit about this last night but it's basically the the conceptual idea behind it is that matter causes space to bend such that other matter passing through that space will have its motion changed by that preferred by those preferred lines of trajectory so as a result of this he's thinking well if matter causes space to bend then that means that if all you have in the universe is that gravitational field then everything should be collapsed onto itself into something like a black hole but we don't live in a universe like that we live in a universe where there's massive bodies separated by empty space so there must be some counter beaming force of expansion to to counter to offset the gravitational force which means that the universe must be in some way dynamic there's something pushing outward but if some pushing outwards then that would imply that there could have been a beginning and that troubled Einstein because at this point his career was different later but at this point his career he was very much a scientific materialist and so he posited something it was kind of a fairly arbitrary conjecture on his part but he proposed that this outward pushing force which the cosmological constant had exactly the right magnitude so that the outward push was conspire gravitational poll and you had a universe that was static now they're expanding nor contracting it was kind of a contrived value that he assigned to this but it worked to eliminate the idea of a beginning and for time for him that was a sigh of relief but then in the 20s of physicists started working with these equations and they realized you know that's pretty contrived Einstein that would be an incredible degree of fine-tuning to have that cosmological constant with exactly the value that you you Einstein chose for it the math allows a lot of other values that would imply most other values would apply a dynamic universe that's thing one and then this amazing physicist a belgian catholic priest named father LaMotte ro is with einstein at a conference in the 20s and they're in a taxicab ride going to the the conference and ylim entre tells einstein first of all your physics is contrived the equations really suggest a dynamic universe you know and we know it but also have you heard about this redshift data that Hubble's working with out in California because it's showing that the dynamic expanding universe is really what the heavens have talked back in fact in fact and Einstein was listen to la mantra and eventually made his way out at Hubble's invitation to Pasadena California and had a peak for himself through the hooker hundred inch telescope and came out and announced to the media after seeing this in his heavy German accent he came out and said I now Z is a necessity off a beginning and later and explained that the value is arbitrary value he chose for the cosmological constant was the greatest mistake of a scientific career because he allowed his philosophical presuppositions his predilections to determine his scientific theory rather than letting the evidence decide the question and anyways a great moment in the history of science it established what is now known as the Big Bang Theory when you have this convergence of theoretical physics general relativity with observational astronomy and that in turn established that the universe had a beginning now Einstein was not the only the only scientist at the time who didn't like this Sir Arthur Eddington a famous British astrophysicists said this he said philosophically the notion of a beginning of the present order is repugnant to me I should like to find a genuine loophole I simply do not believe that present order of things started off with a bang the expanding universe is preposterous it leaves me cold he said this in psychology is known as the theory of denial no you notice what the evidence he's citing he's not fighting it he says philosophically he doesn't like it and later physicists you know kept asking what's the big deal why our physicist said about the idea of a beginning Princeton physicist Robert Dicke put it this way he said he said an infinitely old universe would relieve us of the necessity of explaining the origin of matter at any finite time in the past it matter itself comes into existence then you can't invoke matter as the cause of the origin of the material universe you need something that is immaterial that transcends matter and this conclusion was highlighted later in the 1960s by some work by Stephen Hawking there's a bigger story here that I'm compressing and maybe with Guillermo we can talk a bit more about it there were after the Big Bang was proposed there were some other models proposed the steady-state model the oscillating universe model these each attempts to preserve an infinite universe that didn't have a beginning but one by one as more observations of different kinds came online in astronomy these were set aside as inadequate theories and then in the in the mid-60s there was an extraordinary development in theoretical physics Stephen Hawking probably know of him wonderful inspiring figure you know the physicists confined to a wheelchair with the ALS disease when he's working as a PhD student he's working on black hole physics and he's aware of the way that you know matter causes the space to curve and he begins to you know he's thinking okay that's what's going on with the black hole there's so much matter it's curved so tightly you can't get anything out but he starts to apply this idea to the universe and he's realizing that is the universe is going forward in time the matter is getting more and more dispersed but as you wind that clock backwards again in your mind's eye you eventually get to a point where the matter is so tightly curved or the matter so densely compact that space is getting tighter and tighter more tightly curved in its curvature and eventually the mathematics something called the field equations of general relativity which he and Roger Penrose solved imply that there is an infinite curvature at some point in the finite past now an infinite curvature corresponds to zero spatial volume and then you have to ask what we discussed last night how much stuff can you put in no space and the answer is well no things go in no space I mean it's and so this singularity theorem has this profoundly anti-materialistic implication and it happens that Hawking worked for much of the rest of his life to try to as WC Fields put it he was looking for a loophole you know he was looking for a way around this conclusion Hawking was a really interesting figure he was a kind of theologically sensitive even you could say God obsessed atheist and so he was aware of what he'd shown in 1968 with Penrose but then he was developing other other ideas one called quantum cosmology which we can discuss in the Q&A in which I discuss it length in my new book trying to find a way around this this conclusion but the straightforward application of general relativity to the origin of the universe implies a creation event and we'll have a little quiz on these equations afterwards but anyway this is the curvature goes to an infinite zero spatial volume the astronomer Robert Jastrow said this is an exceedingly strange development unexpected by all but the theologians he's writing in the 80s and notice our starting point remember I start my starting point with Dawkins he said that the universe is exactly as we should expect if there's nothing but blind pitiless indifference but these astronomers say no this is totally unexpected from a materialistic standpoint but it was expected by the theologians and Jastrow went on to say for the scientists whose lived by his faith in the power of reason the story ends like a bad dream he scaled the mountains of ignorance he's about to conquer the highest peak and as he pulls himself up over the final rock he's greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries entirely expecting that the universe would have a beginning because after all in in the the biblical witness you had the first very first words are in the beginning Arno Penzias one of the leading physicists who have played a big role in this story in refuting what's called a steady state theory with his work on what's called a cosmic background radiation put it this way he said the best day do we have concerning the Big Bang are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses the Psalms and the Bible as a whole and indeed it is rather striking the first words of the Bible are in the beginning in the epistles in the New Testament there are two different mentions of the plan of God existing before the beginning of time which is really striking in light of relativity theory because the singularity theorem implies that time itself is a created entity which has a beginning and there's even mentions 11 or 12 separate mentions in the Tanakh the Hebrew Bible of God stretching out the heavens either having stretched or stretching out the heavens so the this new cosmology is in a way very much expected on this from the standpoint of theism it also helps revive an ancient argument for the existence of God that went like this everything that begins to exist must have a cause the universe began to exist and the universe therefore must have a cause separate from itself all causes are separate from their effects we call that transcendent or separate cause God now I developed this argument in a little different way in my new book on the return of the god hypothesis using a method of reasoning known as inference to the best explanation or if you have an historical event you try to explain it by reference to all the possible causes you could consider and then you examine those causes to see which one are causally adequate or sufficient to explain the effect and if you find causes that aren't sufficient you one-by-one eliminate them and in the best case you elect that one cause which is which has the powers or is known to produce the effect in question when what I've done in the book is I apply this not to scientific hypotheses but to the different worldview hypotheses with respect to the origin of the universe I look at materialism and materialism has this problem if matter itself comes into existence a finite time ago in the past then there's no matter before that to do the causing it's an inadequate cause it's not causally adequate pantheism has the same problem because it equates God and matter it says that God is in all the material things around us that's the Eastern philosophy but and God in matter are coextensive so before there was matter there was there before man if the universe the material universe had a beginning before that there was neither matter nor God and so pantheism also lacks a separate cause separate from the universe that could bring it into existence it lacks transcendence theism on the other hand posits a God that's independent of the universe and therefore can provide a causally adequate explanation for the origin of the universe from something else because there is a something else there's a transcendent entity of great power who could bring the universe into existence it happens that deism also posits a transcendent entity and as we talked about last night the question between deism and theism would be is there any evidence of design after the beginning of the universe but both deism and theism could account for the origin of the universe in my reckoning and so applying this method we end up with something like this a God hypothesis of some kind now in my book and Jay will talk a bit more about the fine-tuning but there are all always counter arguments to good theistic arguments and one of the ways you assess how good argument is is how well it sustains its strength in the face of counter arguments or critique and one of the the big counter arguments today against this cosmological argument that I'm developing is Hawking's new idea that he developed after the singularity theorem called quantum cosmology and that's just the idea that the laws of that when the universe is very small quantum physics can describe the universe in that early state and those quantum laws would make our universe in some way expected and he has a famous quotation from the last major book he published before he died where he says because there is a law such as gravity and he's talking about a law of quantum gravity the universe can and will create itself from nothing spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing why the universe exists and why we exist now there's a whole lot to say about this I get into this in great detail in the new book and we'll talk about in the Q&A if you like as well but you can see just from this quotation there's a fundamental confusion underlying this whole enterprise Hawking was a great physicist and a subpar philosopher and this is just really bad philosophy the laws of physics describe what matter and energy do in relation to each other once you have them they don't describe where matter and energy come from okay they describe what matter and energy do what stuff does but they don't explain what where stuff came from so this is what what you call a category error and it runs all the way through Hawking's work on quantum cosmology as well as popularizers like Lawrence Krauss --is so we can talk more about that in the QA I discussed all of this in my new book the return of the god hypothesis and but I think you can see just in conclusion that Dawkins is bold assertion that universe looks as we would expect from the standpoint of a materialistic worldview is patently false it looks exactly as we would expect from a theistic point of view and people have to come up with really abstract cosmological a speculative cosmological ideas like quantum cosmology and multiverses to get around things like the fine-tuning and the evidence for a definite beginning to the universe thank you very much [Music]

Channel: Discovery Science

Views: 233,407

Rating: 4.6872759 out of 5

Keywords: science, philosophy, biology, evolution, Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, human origins, science and faith, intelligent design, Discovery Institute, Charles Darwin, biologic institute, icons of evolution, darwin's doubt, Stephen Meyer, Jonathan Wells, Douglas, Axe, Evolution News & Views, Michael Behe, William Dembski, John West, Jay W. Richards, Darwin Day in America, Darwin's Black Box, Privileged Planet

Id: 7pk9oDrpf6k

Length: 45min 41sec (2741 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 18 2019