The Science & Faith Podcast - James Tour and Fritz Schaefer: The Big Bang, Stephen Hawking, and God

[Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome to the science and faith podcast with dr james tour i'm james tour and you can find out about me by going to my website jmtour.com or my social media site drjamestore.com this particular event today is is uh is in collaboration with west u baptist church and cross point church and uh if in the future you'd like to uh be part of the audience to be able to ask questions you can go to signup.drjamestour.com and that you can sign up there to be part of the audience for future broadcasts so i'm a practicing scientist and i love jesus more than anything else in the world and that's what makes this particular podcast unique and with that beginning let me just talk a little bit about our guest today our guest today is dr henry fritz schaefer and he's one of the most highly regarded chemists on the planet he he did his undergraduate work at mit his phd at stanford in uh chemical physics both of his degrees are in chemical physics and uh uh also he's uh he started as a professor think about this he started at a pro as a professor at at berkeley at cal berkeley at the age of 24 he started as a professor and he taught there for 18 years and then he moved to the university of georgia to be director of the center for computational quantum chemistry and uh he's world renowned on his publications he has more than one thousand six hundred scientific publications that's a lot that's a lot of papers and uh uh and then he's he's been cited more than seventy thousand times so he's very well known in the chemistry community he's also known for his faith uh he's an open and outspoken believer in jesus christ he lectures all over the world and and uh i've known fritz for more than 25 years and i'm always amazed because he sends out these emails on uh where his travelings are going to be he says i'll be leaving for india tomorrow and going at these six locations and so he gives these lectures all over the world and we're going to hear one of his lectures today but before we do that i'm going to ask him a really important question so fritz welcome to the podcast thank you jim okay and i want to ask you a really important question before we get before we begin i just gave this overview of of of uh your remarkable education and background and everything why do you as an educated person how can you believe in something so amazing as a physical resurrection of jesus christ well i think the historical evidence is is very strong the alternative is to conclude that jesus's closest friends uh were engaged in a vast conspiracy to feed themselves to the lions and the probability of that seems very small to me well that was concise i appreciate it and with that i'm going to turn it over to you to to take over and just just give us this amazing talk which i i heard more than 25 years ago but i'm going to hear it because it's been heavily revised over the years the big bang stephen hawking and god so here's our title and this is is the date this is where we work the center for computational quantum chemistry wonderful new building uh my students and i uh take up all the upper floor and a little bit of the lower floor here my students this they are socially distanced um all these students were are here now or or close to here and just a great group of people to work with 14 phd students several senior workers and and some undergraduates and so on and so forth okay let's talk about world view for just a little bit um everybody has one and uh as experiences out of them forms a world view carefully thought out world view reflects the deep hunger among human beings for an overarching framework to bring unity to their lives now i should say a little bit about the relationship between my own research and the title of this lecture and so here is my first paper on interstellar molecules molecules that inhabit the most sparsely populated that is in terms of molecules parts of the of the universe so this is from 1973 and we're still quite actively engaged in in this research our 2018 paper shown there what's cosmology um it's probably it's well it's the study of the universe as a whole it's structure origin and development um the questions it addresses are profound both scientifically and more generally such as is the universe finite or infinite in content and extent most important is the universe eternal or did it have a beginning was the universe created if not how did it get here and uh if so how was this creation accomplished what can we learn about the agent and events of creation another many many more points here and i would refer you to hugh ross's excellent book called the fingerprint of god now there's been great resistance to this idea that the universe had a beginning oftentimes a very distinguished scientist uh arthur eddington experimentally confirmed einstein's general theory of relativity in 1919 stated a dozen years later philosophically the notion of a beginning to the present order of nature is repugnant to me i should like to find a genuine loophole albert einstein's reaction to the consequences of his own general theory of relativity appears to acknowledge the threat of an encounter with god through the equations of general relativity we can trace the origin of the universe backward in time to some sort of a beginning however before publishing his cosmological inferences einstein introduced a cosmological constant of fudge factor uh to yield to force upon the upon the universe a static model for the universe he later changed his mind and said that was his biggest mistake ultimately gave grudging acceptance to what he called the necessity for a beginning and eventually to what he called the presence of a superior reasoning power but he never did accept the reality of a personal god a god who is concerned about each person in our audience uh there are five ancient arguments for the existence of god i'm only going to mention one here you've taken an elementary philosophy course you've seen them all but the one i want to talk about is the cosmological argument the effect of the universe's existence must have a suitable cause why such strong resistance the idea of a definite beginning of the universe why was arthur eddington so unhappy about that idea well let's try to break it down into three parts cosmological argument everything that begins to exist must have a cause that's how we do science now suppose our universe began to exist then the universe must have a cause and i think you can see that is a line of thought which would be discomforting to people and and the best way to fight this is to argue that the universe did not have a beginning uh robert dickey uh some time ago uh said that an infinitely old universe would relieve us of the necessity of understanding the origin of matter at any finite time in the past the strongest statement is by walter nerds the nobel prize winner for his discovery of the third law of thermodynamics this is this is strong he said to deny the infinite duration of time would betray the very foundations of science that's a strong uh uh very strong statement if he were with us today he would feel betrayed simon sings little book called the big bang six years ago 16 years ago addresses the question is the big bang theory a christian conspiracy he quotes fred hoyle who we'll hear a little more about later oil was equally scathing when it came to the big bang's association with religion condemning the big bang theory as a model built on judeo-christian foundations uh stephen barr university of delaware has been quite active in these discussions and says this the historical fact is that christians believed in the beginning of time while scientific materialists strongly preferred the idea of an ageless universe in 1946 george gamoff russian-born american scientist proposed that the primeval fireball or big bang was an intense concentration of pure energy it was the source of all the matter that now exists in our universe the theory predicts that all the galaxies in the universe should be rushing away from each other at high speeds as a result of that initial big bang forward 22 years 65 observation of the microwave background radius by by arnold penzius and robert wilson from the bell telephone labs convince most scientists of the validity of the big bang theory further observations which we'll talk about beginning in 92 and going to the present have moved the big bang theory from a consensus view to the nearly unanimous view among cosmologists that there was an origin to our universe approximately 13.7 billion years ago let's get a definition hot big bang theory states that the entire physical universe all the matter and energy and even the four dimensions of space and time burst forth from a state of infinite or deer near infinite density temperature and pressure very unusual circumstances marno penzias who shared the nobel prize with robert wilson for their for their um work on the uh um on the big bang confirmations uh six months before he got the no maybe seven months before he got the nobel prize he said this to new york times the best data 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 the bible as a whole remarkable oh here they are penzias and and wilson uh penzias is the one with the wonderful bald head and uh and wilson is the other um now penzias is still living but he has not changed his mind about these things and in 95 he was asked why some cosmologists were so affectionate in their embrace of an infinitely old universe and this is what he said well some people are uncomfortable with the purposefully created world to come up with things that contradict purpose they tend to speculate about things they haven't seen such as an infinitely old universe dennis shama fits into our story in a couple ways uh he was stephen hawking's thesis advisor at cambridge university and he's no longer with us but in his in his time he's been gone for three or four years uh perhaps the most prominent advocate of the steady state theory the universe the idea that our universe is infinitely old he gave up on the steady state hypothesis and had a press conference and announced this in quite a quite a humorous and intriguing way he says the steady state theory has a sweep in beauty much of which he was responsible for that for some unaccountable reason the architect of the universe appears to have overlooked i hope you like that now george smoot um scientific team leader of uh the group for which the nobel prize was given in 2006 smoot um and i were classmates together at mit uh we both showed up in uh i guess it was september of 1962 and we both graduated on time in may of of of 96 and 66 and smooth was well let's just say what shall i say smoke was very well known but it wasn't for anything he might accomplish in the future in physics this is his announcement of the big bang ripples experiments for which he got the nobel prize observed by the kobe satellite kobe cosmic background explorer of nasa he says it's like looking at god this this appeared on the front page of the new york times so this is a really startled a lot of people science historian frederick burnham one week later gave a a summary of this he says these findings big bang ripples now available make the idea that god created the universe more a more respectable hypothesis today than at any time in the last 100 years is the big bang theory a christian conspiracy uh jeffrey burbidge uh we lost 10 years ago was a very famous astrophysicist one of the tiny number of scientists rejecting the kobe conclusions by the year 2010. he not only rejected them he said they came from philosophy he he continued to believe the universe to be infinitely old to the end but he discounted these new experiments as coming from quote the first church of christ of the big bang now that was uh my friend smoot george smoot didn't like that very much and he had his own uh press conference and said in fact none of the 17 members of my research term his team has any connection to the first church of christ at the big bang burbidge favored the steady-state hypothesis a view that he said supports hinduism not christianity here's george smoot in his book wrinkles in time he wrote this before he got the nobel prize this is what he says there is no doubt that a parallel exists between the big bang as an event and the christian notion of creation from nothing charles bennett jones hopkins university talks about his own experiments wilkinson probe uh big bang ripples have been confirmed by more recent and continuing results from the wilkinson microwave and isotropy pros probe wmap and this is what bennett had to say to science science watch he said the wilkinson probe launched in 2001 and has now mapped the temperature variations or anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation over the full sky with unprecedented accuracy and precision uh bird from shorts well i'll just uh just recently in physics today the kind of the new york times of the physics community titled his article new cosmic microwave background results strengthen the case for inflationary big bang cosmology now what is all this about when you get a long way from anything in our universe uh the the temperature is not absolute zero it's not warm but it's 2.725 uh degrees kelvin it's very very cold but not zero and in fact what the big bang ripples mapped were differences in this temperature in different regions of space and the observations fit the big bang predictions extremely well and that's as as as well as we can do in in theoretical chemistry theoretical physics just make predictions in advance and have them confirmed by later experiments adrian cho another article in science magazine is titled long way awaited data sharpened picture of the universe's birth i'm glad that that a lot of these naysayers did not live to see this statement of the universe's birth here's a timeline this is due to alan guth uh and over here on the left hand side we see kind of the big bang and then various things happening here we are today on the right hand side the wilkinson probe and a period of 13.7 billion years now where are we going with this by definition time is that dimension in which cause and effect phenomena take place no time no cause and effect thus times beginning is concurrent with the beginning of the universe as the space-time theorem says it follows that the cause of the universe must be some entity operating a time dimension completely independent of and pre-existent to the time dimension of our cosmos this conclusion is powerfully important to our understanding of who god is and who or what god is not it tells us that the creator is transcendent operating beyond the dimensional limits of our universe it tells us that god is not the universe itself nor is god contained within the universe and if you're saying well i knew that already that god is not the universe itself nor is god contained within the universe there are a couple of billion people on our our planet who believe one or both of these things this is from hugh ross another book of his the creator and the cosmos excellent leon letterman nobel prize in physics 1988 for uh particle accelerator experiments ads that letterman has just passed has the the best title of all these books i guess i should have said that perhaps most people know that stephen hawking's book a brief history of time has sold more than 25 million copies exceeding by a factor of 25 any book ever published on science but others decided this might be a good way to improve their retirement funds and letterman wrote the book with the best title the god particle and i don't think this is a great book but the introduction is amazing and so i'll quote it he says in the very beginning there was a void a curious form of vacuum a nothingness containing no space no time no matter no light and no sound yet the laws of nature were in place and this curious vacuum held potential a story logically begins at the beginning but this story is about the universe and unfortunately there are no data for the very beginning he wants to emphasize this he says none zero we don't know anything about the universe until it reaches the mature age of a billionth of a trillionth of a second that is some very short time after the creation of the big bang when you read or hear anything about the birth of the universe someone is making it up we are in the realm of philosophy only god knows what happened at the very beginning leon letterman the god particle stephen hawking uh in his book said similar things the actual point of creation lies outside the scope of the presently known laws of physics and alan gutha we'll talk about a little bit later kind of his north american counterpart the instant of creation remains unexplained so this the notion of creation is is just inherent in these statements here's alan guth in his office at mit um some of you are under the mistaken impression uh that professors science professors are very tidy but you can see this is this is not the case here now stephen hawking died in in march a bit more than two years ago he certainly was the best known scientist in the world net worth at the time of his death was 20 million despite his staggering medical expenses including round-the-clock professional medical care for 25 years here is my favorite picture of of stephen hawking this picture was taken when he was about 65 i think and i think he looks about 40 years old in that picture but this is this is my favorite picture of him he um became famous first between 1968 and 1970 with uh his work co-authored with roger penrose and george ellis uh george ellis i know quite well we'll come back to him they demonstrated that every solution to the equations of general relativity guarantees the existence of a singular boundary for space and time in the past this result is now known as the singularity theorem uh hawking went on to do things by himself and with his phd students for example 1974 quantum evaporation of black holes exploding back black holes and hawking radiation oh here is a here's a artist's conception of a black hole this is about 20 years old this art it's in one of stephen hawking's books and it's entitled black hole rips matter from a companion star uh i like this now what's happened since then is the first black hole has been observed now why was this such a big deal it's um it's three years ago april 2017 this the event horizon telescope project turned eight satellites towards one point in space scientists were trying to take a photo that would confirm years of speculation and they rising about black holes they were taking a picture of the now famous black hole in the middle of this galaxy missing this year hawking surely was the most famous physicist in history who did not receive the nobel prize in fact one year probably within the last five years they the nobel prize committee wrote wrote a one-page essay on why hawking didn't get it and what they said is that the swedish royal academy demands that an award-winning discovery must be supported by verifiable experimental or observational evidence and hawking's work remains unproved although the mathematics of his theories is considered beautiful and elegant science waited until 1994 for the first solid evidence not an observation for the existence of black holes the verification of hawking radiation or his more radical theoretical proposals seems far off now that said if some of aspects of hawking's research turn out to be wrong he will still have had a profound impact on the history of scientific thought he is truly a great scientist in addition to being a very brave man now all this came to the to the public through this movie uh the theory of everything and this uh this guy who looks like harry potter uh eddie redmayne won the the ultimate uh academy award for the best actor and these pictures have some of of eddie and some of hawking now on the upper left that is eddie redmayne next to him is the real stephen hawking uh on the upper right i think that's the real stephen hawking and maybe in the on the lower left i'm not sure i mean they did such a good job in this movie i'm not sure whether that's the the real thing or eddie on the right we have eddie all by himself and to me he looks very much like harry potter oh here this is cute stephen hawking his first wife jane wilde posed with their actor counterparts eddie redmayne and felicity jones eddie redmayne is a tall guy so uh there they are all together um now let's go back to the start of of hawking's career uh new year's eve 1962 stephen hawking met the woman we saw on the previous slide jane wilde just one month later he was diagnosed with hemotrophic lateral sclerosis also given two years to live what a what a terrible uh prediction i've had three uh colleagues scientific colleagues who uh got this als disease and they were all gone within three five years of the of the diagnosis at this point steven was by all account he's a pretty average performing graduate student at cambridge that's okay cambridge is a great university and average students are pretty good by the standards of the rest of the world let's go back to his first uh biographers michael white and john gribben to look at this point and they wrote this there's little doubt that jane's appearance on the scene was a major turning point in hawking's life the two of them began to see a lot more of one another and a strong relationship developed it was finding jane wilde that enabled him to break out of his depression and regenerate some belief in his life and work for hawking his engagement to jane wilde was probably the most important thing that ever happened to him it changed his life gave him something to live for and made him determined to live without the help that jane wilde gave him he almost certainly would not have been able to carry on or had the will to do so and they were married after he was supposed to be no longer living i think i have a photo there's the wedding has a cane already but he's he's looking pretty good six months after he's supposed to be dead um his parents on the left her parents on the right we could talk stories about both of them but we won't and it's it's not just his biographers that said they're talking himself that what really made a difference was i got engaged to a woman named jane wilde that gave me something to live for jane wilde uh is an interesting person in her own right she has a phd in um i hope i can get this right in the medieval lyric poetry of the iberian peninsula and uh spain and and and and portugal first here's her state without my faith in god i wouldn't be able to live in this situation they were married for i guess 25 years wouldn't have been able to marry stephen in the first place because i wouldn't have had the optimism to carry me through and i wouldn't be able to carry on with it now the reason for hawking's amazing success as a popularizer not just doing science but but making it available to the public is he addresses some pretty basic problems of meaning and purpose that concern all thinking people book overlaps with christian belief and it does so deliberately but it is graciously and without rancor it's an important book and needs to be treated with respect and attention um there is a main character in the book a brief history of time and that character is introduced in about page 30 or 40 in which he says this it is difficult to discuss the beginning of the universe without mentioning the concept of god my work on the origin of the universe is on the border line between science and religion but i try to stay on the scientific side of that border it's quite possible that god acts in ways that cannot be described by scientific laws and elsewhere he says i thought i'd left the question of the existence of a supreme being completely open and continues it would be perfectly consistent with all we know to say that there was a being capital b who was responsible for all the laws of physics this is his uh essay in the american scientist when asked any number of times whether hawking believed that science and christianity were competing philosophies he said of course not if that had been true then isaac newton would not have discovered the law of gravity hawking knowing isaac newton have been a christian now the book makes some intentionally ambigu ambiguous statements and some of them i just love uh like this one hockey says even if there's only one possible unified theory it is just a set of rules and equations what is it that brings fire into the equations it makes the universe to describe them and this one too god not only plays dice he sometimes throws them where they can't be seen this is a response to um albert einstein's famous statement that uh why he didn't believe in quantum mechanics as if god does not play dice with the universe so hawking obviously disagrees with him does believe in quantum mechanics in a brief history of time oh this is the best thing i think in the previous year time it addresses a question that concerns some people today the idea that god might want to change his mind like i said it's an example of the fallacy pointed out by saint augustine uh hawking likes augustine of imagining time as a being existing imagine god as a being existing in time time is a property only in the universe that god created and then we see his humor again presumably god knew what he intended when he set it up so up until what will they say 2015 it appeared that hawking did believe in god um not a personal god but it appeared that he did believe in god and he was quoted favorably by um religious people um and he did have a rather full life here he is at zero gravity in 2007 the kennedy space center in florida and a person that can't walk i mean this has got to be a tremendous experience accepting his disability stephen hawking had an adventurous life uh and i'm saying until about 2010 hawking seemed friendly toward belief in god they even went to a church case with his first wife and sometimes he let the the kids in the congregation play with his uh his amazing wheelchair the most amazing wheelchair ever constructed however in 2014 now this is getting on this is just about six years ago while lecturing in the canary islands you see he gets around he stated that he changed his mind his exact statement i am an atheist um yeah this is alan guth let me get back to him um and talk about his no i don't think i will get back to him this will go on too long it's a great paper you ought to read it well maybe i will do it this um this paper addressed the question of whether there was a big bang but the universe is nevertheless um eternal and the idea was that yes there was a big bang in our universe but before that there was a big crunch another universe that came together before that a big bang and this goes on all the way back in and uh alan guth who also doesn't have the nobel prize yet put this to rest showed that even if the universe contains enough mass to halt its current expansion any ultimate collapse would end in a thud not about so only one big bang early 1998 two observational research scenes that is people that look into the sky independently made the startling and announcing announcement stating that the expansion of the universe is accelerating it's getting more and more faster all the time saul perlmutter berkeley brian schmidt australian national university science called this the discovery of the year for 1998 and 16 years later nobel prize in physics alan lightman has written an interesting book called the origins of lives and world the lives and worlds of modern cosmologists published at harvard uh university press i'm surprised that any responsible mit graduate would would be involved with harvard university espresso that's another question and this is what he says he says indeed contrary to popular myth scientists appear to have the same range of attitudes about religious matters as does the general public that is to say having a phd in science doesn't seem to have a whole lot to do whether one believes in god or not charles towns was a colleague of mine that a perfectly remarkable person in some sense i followed him for a good part of my life when i uh began that my undergraduate studies at mit charlie towns was the um and i spelled his name wrong too there's no e at the end uh was the uh uh the provost of mit he had already discovered the laser he hadn't gotten the nobel prize for it quite yet but it was it was obviously coming and he was about to get the nobel prize and he had what we sometimes describe as the nobel disease that is after you win the nobel prize what else is there to do in life and so charlie became an administrator provost the second highest administrator at mit and he did it the whole four years that i was there and he hated the job uh just just hated it and then he went back to science he moved to berkeley he him a faculty member there in 1966 and he was there the whole 18 years i was there and only died recently and this is from his autobiography which i think we're going to show at the bottom in my view the question of origin seems always left unanswered if we explore from a scientific view alone thus i believe there is a need for some religious or metaphysical explanation i believe in the concept of god and in his existence this is it from his book making waves uh published by americanistic especially from the last chapter called spiritual views from a scientific base arthur civallo also no longer with us professor of physics at stanford nobel 1981 he was very visible on campus when when i was a phd student at stanford he certainly was the most beloved member of the stanford physics department always had a smile on his face students would stop and walk across campus he'd love to talk to them quite a quite a remarkable uh quite a remarkable person and this is his statement we're fortunate to have the bible and especially the new testament which tells us so much about god in widely accessible human terms there's a context to most every statement and the context is he's he's comparing what we can learn with science with what we can learn about other things and he's saying that although the bible is widely accessible in human terms that sometimes science not so much identifies himself as christian george alice is my friend i met him on the waterfront at cape town maybe about 2014 something like that he's been professor of physics applied mathematics forever at the university of cape town and also a um a very heroic person he was a a very strong opponent of the the the apartheid system and nearly went to jail on on many occasions i asked george why didn't you go to jail he said well i got right to the point where he's going to jail and didn't seem like it was going to serve much purpose so a distinguished cosmologist co-author with stephen hawking on the classic book the large-scale structure of space-time now that to my knowledge this is the only book that uh that stephen hawking uh published that's all physics and uh it's a classic book and that means it sold two thousand copies uh and in in uh these two things are not together but george ellis has made this statement god's nature is revealed most perfectly in the life and teachings of jesus of nazareth as recorded in the new testament we met most recently in germany a couple of summers ago where he was visiting professor at the university of munich as i was john polkinghorn of mathematical physics at cambridge there there are two professorships of theoretical physics in in cambridge and one is the one hawking out and the other is poking lords and he later became president of queen's college in cambridge this is his statement i take god very seriously indeed i'm a christian believer and believe that god exists and has made himself known in human terms in jesus christ john polkinhorn john barrow i i knew pretty well during my years at berkeley it's been a while since i was professor at berkeley i still go back every summer but john barrow is now professor of mathematical sciences at cambridge that's the position that polkinghorn had and uh he used to show up at berkeley every january and february uh and he initially he was a very quiet guy the rest of them he met with the christian faculty for lunch every week it took a long time for the rest of us to he was only a lecturer at the university of sussex back then so we weren't quite sure who he was and eventually he kind of opened up and said he did cosmology uh for for a living and and i asked him uh i said john why are you always in berkeley in january and february and his response was have you ever been in cambridge in january and february i said yes i did and the fog was oppressive he says that's why i'm at berkeley this is his statement upon receiving a million euro prize i certainly don't believe there's some fundamental difference or conflict between a theistic that is christian perspective on the world and the practice of practice science he's a member of the reformed church in cambridge yeah then cosmologists wrote the book on the fine-tuning of the universe alan sandage astronomer in pasadena also just passed did not get the nobel prize but he got a prize worth half a million dollars crawford prize of the royal swedish academy of sciences and this is from his what he has to say in this book i quoted before origins lives and worlds of modern cosmologists he has asked the ancient question well maybe not so agent 200 years can a person be a scientist and also be a christian and he talks about how he is and how he became a christian at the age of 50. he says yes the world is too complicated in all its parts and inner connections to be due to chance alone i'm convinced that the existence of life with all its order and each of us organisms is simply too well put together now this is not the way this story is supposed to go i mean the story should have gone that sandage was in the atacama desert in chile at one of these most outstanding telescopes in the in the world he went outside for a break he looked up in the sky and he was just overwhelmed by the uh the enormity of the universe and god's uh responsibility for no he said biology made me do it here's don page he's a he's an excellent friend of mine uh this is from four pages in one of the major newspapers in canada the beautiful mind of don page uh he uh paige is a good guy let's see what else i'm going to bring up here yeah collaborated with stephen hawking on applications of quantum theory to gravitational physics and customers he actually lived in the hocking home for three years when he was a postdoctoral fellow with hawking and his job was to get stephen up and going in the morning make sure he had some breakfast and get him over to the laboratory uh and he said this i'm a conservative christian in the sense of pretty much taking the bible seriously for what it says of course i know that certain parts are not intended to be read literally so i'm not precisely a literalist but i try to believe in the meaning i think it is intended to have it's a it's a good statement well he invited me to the university of alberta to give a very early version of this lecture it's almost all different now and when we were done he said shaffer come on into my office i have a few questions to ask you and uh i said sure thinking we were going to go to lunch but this this question period wasn't so much a question period he was just explaining to me and more and more and more in more detail everything he thinks about uh about cosmology and i never did getting lunch uh that day which is kind of sad but it was a wonderful conversation this is a save i said to don i know you're a christian in this statement back here this is known by everybody sometimes it's even in physics textbooks i said give me something that nobody knows about give me something that's really new and this is what he gave me if the universe basically is very simple the theological implications of this would need to be worked out perhaps the mathematical simplicity of the universe is a reflection of the personal simplicity of the gospel message and i'm going on with his statement that god sent his son jesus christ to bridge the gap between himself and each of us who have rejected god or rejected what he wants for us by rebelling against his will and disobeying him this is a message simple enough even to be understood by children don page chris aisham very famous professor of theoretical physics imperial college london imperialism very distinguished university maybe just a small step behind oxford and cambridge aisham was labeled britain's greatest quantum gravity expert by paul davies a well-known writer and this is no compliment because stephen hawking is british and what he does for a living is quantum gravity we don't need to take sides in that in that discussion i will say that aisham uh i i gave again a very early lecture on this topic at imperial college and uh aisha was my host and introduced me and said um said to me um let's go into my office so i can ask you a few questions and this is a couple of years after the don page no lunch arrangement that's i was very very nervous about this but we went into his office and he asked me a few questions and he took me to a wonderful indian restaurant not far from the imperial college uh campus this is something from chrysanthemum the god of christianity is not only the ground of being he's also incarnate ground of being a term that paul tillich used to like to use the god of christianity is incarnate in the person of jesus christ and and chris continues essential therian is the vision of the resurrection as the new creation of the old order and the profound notion of the redemption of time through the life and death of jesus christ okay rick smoly former colleague of professor james tour in fact they have a number of important papers together uh died way too young just at the age of 62 is the father of nanotechnology nobel prize in chemistry 1966 and uh and he was a good friend of mine as well we i i one of the few failures in in rick's uh life took place when he interviewed for a faculty position at berkeley i think it was 1981 or thereabouts and he was turned down because they thought he was too old to become a professor he'd taken his time getting getting along um but we became good friends at that point i wanted to hire him um but a typical meeting between rick smoly and myself is he would say shaffer are you still a christian i said of course i am i said rick are you still an atheist he said yes i am and he was an infamous atheist well let me make that statement more neutral he was he was a very vocal atheist and until he had a discussion with jim tour in about the year 2000 and maybe jim can explain that to you at the end but that began something new and rick's quote uh recently this is before his debt obviously i've gone back to church regularly now rick smalley had not entered a church in at least 40 years gone back to church with a new focus to understand as best i can what it is that makes christianity so vital and powerful in the lives of billions of people today even though almost 2 000 years have passed since the death and resurrection of christ amazing from rick smoly although i suspect i will never fully understand i think i now think the answer is very simple it is true a remarkable statement by rick and he's going to continue here to talk about the big bang it says god did create the universe about 13.7 billion years ago and of necessity has involved himself with his creation ever since purpose of this universe is something that only god knows for sure but it is increasingly clear to modern science that the universe was exquisitely fine-tuned to enable human life we are somehow critically involved in his purpose our job is to sense that purpose as best we can love one another and help god get the job done uh this is maybe not the best theology ever but it shows the tremendous heart that that rick smalley had for jesus christ now i'm getting ready to come to some concluding comments perhaps preparatory to that let me say that the big bang represents an immensely powerful yet carefully planned and controlled release of matter energy space and time all this is accomplished within the strict confines of very carefully fine-tuned physical constants and laws power and care this explosion reveals exceed human mental capacity by multiple orders of magnitude so where do we go from here here's where i go from here with seven concluding points all brief the creator must exist the big bang ripples and the wilkinson probe are clearly pointing to an ex-milo creation consistent with the first few verses of the book of genesis two this creator must have awesome power and wisdom quantity of material and the power resources within our universe are truly immense misinformation or intricacy manifest in any part of the universe and especially the living organism as alan sandage said is beyond our ability to comprehend and what we do see is only what god has shown us within our four dimensions of space and time third this creator's loving the simplicity balance order elegance and beauty seen throughout the universe uh demonstrate that god is loving rather than capricious uh this creator is just and requires justice inward reflection and outward investigation of firm human beings have a conscience the conscience reflects the reality of right and wrong and the necessity of obedience each of us falls hopelessly short of the greater standard uh perhaps the most obvious characteristic of humankind is selfishness uh we uh down deep somewhere each one of us thinks the the universe revolves around us or at least we think that it should revolve around us um this is what selfishness is who can keep his or her thoughts and attitudes pure for even an hour and i i like to quote the autobiography of benjamin franklin here because as a young man at age 17 he decided he was not going to sin anymore he was his life was going to be perfect there will be no no faults and he tried it for a while and didn't work and he said to himself or something like this you can read about this i think a lifetime is too long i think i will just just be good for a year tried that this kept going down to got to the point where one day he couldn't keep his attitudes thoughts pure and he gave up on this plan because this creator is loving wise powerful made a way to rescue us when we come to a point of concern about our personal failings we can begin to understand from the creation around us that god's love wisdom and power are sufficient to deliver us from this otherwise hopeless situation if we trust our lives totally to the rescuer jesus christ we will be saved the only path is to give up all human attempts to satisfy god's requirements and put our trust solely in jesus christ and his means of redemption namely his death on the cross um thank you very much that was that was amazing this is the talk has changed in the last 25 or 27 years since i last saw it thank you um you know i i think rather than ask you any questions because there's a bunch of questions that have come in that that from the audience that i'm going to ask you i'll just i'll just uh uh give a couple minutes to say what happened with rick smalley yeah he was he was antagonistic he was antagonistic against the gospel against jesus christ against christians and then at one point we were both flying together to speak with the ceo of intel about i i about molecular electronics and he about carbon nanotube electronics and we just happened to sit next to each other on the flight he and i drove up together and then we kind of split up at the airport i said i'll see you on the flight and we both got bumped up because of our status in the first class right next to each other and he turned to me during the flight and he looked at me he said do you believe all that stuff in the bible i said i think i do why do you ask and he said finally someone with a brain that i can talk to and and so we spoke for about an hour and he had questions about dating uh isotope dating and and the age of the universe and things like that and after about an hour he said you know you know why you talked to me i said what do you mean why you you just engaged with me in this conversation i said why is that he said because you're really a jew and uh um if you'd have been a baptist you would have just said well that's just the way things are but because you're a jew you talked with me and i happened to have a book by c.s lewis in my in my briefcase i was reading was god in the doc by c.s lewis and i said here here's one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century christian thinkers and i gave him the book and then when we got to to uh um to california we were we went to our respective hotel rooms and then that next morning he came out he had already read the book he gave it back to me because this was a very deep thinker and uh then when he before i i flew back to houston after that meeting he flew somewhere else and i left on his desk before he got back i put hugh ross's book a god of the cosmos or something like that and i put mere christianity and i put the case for christ and uh he read them all and he came and he said you know i liked i i liked these books uh the mere christianity i i felt was interesting but all at the end he said well that's just the way that so so therefore jesus christ exists but this book by this guy hugh ross that was really something and uh um and i said would you like to meet you ross he says yeah i said okay i'm going to invite you ross to campus to give a talk you meet him and in the meantime he says i'd like to get to go with you for lunch he says i want you to answer for me one question what is the power behind christianity as we were having lunch in the faculty club the president of the university who was malcolm gillis at the time he was in the faculty club and did like he often does he would just come to the faculty club get a plate and then walk around and sit at one of the tables with some of the faculty and he walked up to us and he said can i join you and rick said sure we're we're learning about the power behind christianity and the president said oh i'd like to hear about that too and uh so we had a a a conversation about the power behind christianity but what really got rick was some very subtle things he says jim how can you have one wife whom you love so much and she loves you and have these four children that love you how how do you do it in this research group where everybody seems to be getting along how do you do that so it was really the simple things of life that were causing him to be attracted to this so it's an interesting story about rick great any thoughts on that yeah you need to write something about this okay all right maybe i'll maybe i'll do that i'll write this and kind of kind of uh record it so that uh there's a record of this and some of the interactions that were going on and the things in his life yeah i was going to say surely jim somebody is going to write a biography of rick smalley i mean he he is one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century and i hope this this will get in there i know you don't have time to to write a biography of rick but uh somebody will yeah yeah so here's some questions from the audience there's a lot of them and so we'll get through what we can i have a question on the second premise of the column cosmology argument the universe began to exist what is your opinion on the universe being created from a vacuum did that vacuum begin to exist at some point and where did it come from yeah leon letterman said it came from a vacuum um i don't think that's precisely right because there wasn't there was nothing i mean it's it uh it it wasn't a vacuum it just wasn't so i i don't agree with letterman in his statement that this all took place in a vacuum i mean it was this is before any vacuum ever existed okay here's another one did the quantum fluctuations at the beginning of the universe exist eternally how do we know whether they whether they did or didn't well we can't be dogmatic about anything that happened before the big bang um i i think the answer to that question is these quantum fluctuations are part of our universe and they're they're not pre-existing uh the the big bang now if you want to argue that for some uh brief moment or or uh picosecond or something like that that god brought these quantum fluctuations into existence that's okay and then followed by the big bang guth says that the instant of creation of the universe remains unexplained but isn't that only if the explanation remains a natural explanation is there another way to explain the creation of something for example one one's will or desire or thought like the very creation of this very question originated from a consciousness not chemical processes yeah the creation of our universe uh begins with a consciousness namely the consciousness of god um so uh i i agree with that but but that's the only consciousness that's around 13.7 billion years ago that's right i mean god is so good jesus is so magnificent it's wonderful i mean if i'll tell you if if you're not a scientist and you're just starting out in college consider becoming a scientist it is so beautiful to look at these things and then just marvel at the beauty of jesus christ and and and what he does and what he's able to do and then he comes and lives amongst us and becomes our friend and he models for us what it is to walk before god i mean just magnificent here's another question why do you think that einstein's acceptance of the beginning of the universe was grudging was that peer pressure from colleagues if so how might a scientist today be able to confidently follow the truth wherever it leads well i think einstein's position like that of eddington uh and others was philosophical he didn't he wanted the universe to be infinitely old uh he didn't want a creator and uh so he he um put into his theory a fudge factor in which the universe is infinitely old but at the end of the day it didn't work and he finally did concede that there was a beginning but it was pain it was a painful concession yeah and as you know i mean einstein the universe that was infinitely old as you know fritz there's there's a lot of scientists today you know we're presented with things and we don't we don't quickly give up our positions on things that's true that's true we want our ideas to be the ones that win that's right how do we know the universe is not oscillating is there proof of this what did good provide the universe can speed in its the universe can speed in its expansion but how do we know that it cannot slow down oh we we know that from the experiments of uh saul pearlmunner and uh and and schmidt because the fact that the universe is is accelerating means that it's going to beat any gravitational forces that might be out there it's just going to humanly speaking our universe is just going to expand expand expand expand expand now that i don't we're not going to be around when we get to the point where there's not enough oxygen for us to breathe but but scientifically the the expansion will go on forever they're just you need more gravity for the universe to recollapse more than there is can you provide an answer to this question i commonly hear if god created the universe then who created god are there theories of how god was created uh i mean in in mythology there are lots of theories how different gods were created i mean that's you know that's but uh no uh you know the the reality is that god is the uncaused cause now you know hugh ross likes to talk about these things how god exists in many more dimensions than we experience and in that sense that god existed before our universe was was created but no there isn't a hint of a suggestion in the bible or anything in christian faith that god was created by something else god is the uncaused cause does quantum mechanics provide a plausible explanation for some biblical miracles while still operating within the laws of physics many people have attempted to explain biblical miracles uh on the basis of some purely natural phenomenon for example the the the red sea the crossing the red sea is just just a lot of wind came up when the people of israel crossed over and and the wind uh disappeared when the egyptians were plunked in the middle of the place um i i mean that doesn't seem very logical to me but maybe that is how god did it i i don't know i mean the thing that's remarkable about the the crossing um is that the egyptians didn't survive it hawking quote i think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing according to the laws of science unquote is that science or philosophy um it's science in the sense that there's no evidence in opposition to that point of view it's not science in the sense that we have uh the video of the the gods creating the universe i mean a lot of stuff happens in a real hurry and so in that sense it's it's not science but it's you know the absence of evidence is something that always needs to be considered it has been claimed that god is the author of the mysteries in the universe that scientists are seeking to understand it has also been said that the influence of the holy spirit moves upon the mind and conscience of believers and leads them into all truth do you believe that a higher divine intelligence has assisted you in acquiring the knowledge that you possess well sure i mean i think that's true for every human being that god he has this common grace that goes out to everybody gives virtually everyone intelligence and so yeah that's that's god doing that uh i certainly uh agree with that now to have that common grace is not the same as to know jesus christ and there there's a lot that goes after that what is eternity how does it differ from the taunt how does it differ from time and how do we see those two related to the universe and god well eternity is a long time i think that's the first thing that needs to be said and you you know i think when i was younger and i heard people talking about infinity i tried to count to infinity a few times and that didn't seem all that uh that promising so yeah eternity is a long long time there are two places it can be spent i didn't talk about the the place i'm not going to spend it jim's not going to spend it we don't want anybody to spend it there we want people to to live forever in the presence of jesus [Music] the bible teaches that quote everyone who wants to live a godly life in christ jesus will suffer persecution unquote second timothy 3 12. as a scientist who openly acknowledges his belief in jesus christ have you been persecuted for your faith if so in what way has that persecution been manifest well sure uh and so is jim i mean jim isn't in the top 1 1 thousands of scientists in the world he he appears to me to be headed on track for the nobel prize but he has not been elected to the national academy of sciences which which should have happened 15 years ago so these things happen i don't want to be all negative about this though because there are some benefits occasionally i had a student come to visit a prospective phd student from a major university in in the midwest and he came in and we talked about science for half hour so and they said well one other thing i want to want to tell you and i said okay well far away you know we're trying to get you to come here to graduate school but whatever you got to say we'll listen to you said well i went to see professor x who was my thesis advisor at university y and i told him that you looked to be the best person in your field and i i wanted to go do research with you and he looked at me in the strangest way and said that would be a horrible mistake professor schaefer is a religious fanatic it would be a horrible mistake for you to go and work for him and this student relayed to me that he walked out of the professor's office and said to himself that's where i'm going to work for the infamous professor schaefer so sometimes these uh these stings and arrows have the opposite effect yeah could you speak about the alleged hostility of the church against science i recently had a professor reference the persecution and abuse of galileo what is the christian influence on science well i don't think that person got the galileo story right if you read any recent biography of galileo you know that most of his persecution came from uh from politics he was never put in jail uh by the church i don't want to defend the catholic church for everything because i'm not not catholic but i think the real story about galileo is is more complicated than some have upset okay well fritz we're gonna we're gonna wrap it up there i just want to say that um you know again i've i've known fritz for for more than 25 years 27 28 years since we first met and and he is one of the few chemists out there that is really doing high-powered research who's a believer and not afraid to say it and to speak about it so i've always looked to you for it as a as a mentor and a a model to follow and i appreciate what you do and that you're always flying all over the world and speaking to all these students and you really love them and care about them and it is it is a tremendous thing to think about and i want to encourage young people as well if you are thinking about the sciences you can have an enormous impact because when you start building your reputation in science the world gives you a platform to speak and now you can also use that as a springboard for the gospel fritz could you just just uh uh wrap that up for us yeah i mean i think it's it's true it's great to be a christian in science i mean you you love science and you you know who to thank for it so i think it's uh it's good i want to say just a little bit about your science because jim has made a discovery i guess in the last year or certainly the last year and a half of how to make graphene graphene is a remarkable substance which got a nobel prize for uh within a few years after its discovery and jim has finally figured out how to make this stuff cheaply and this is really going to revolutionize all kinds of things in in our society the only other thing i want to say jim is that i'm a little uncomfortable doing these zoom lectures i've done three of them now and i can't see the audience so i can't tell how you all are all are responding this but let me say this if you're if you're listening to this and if you're not a christian and you'd like to hear my story and talk about these things please email me just look up the university of georgia chemistry department and you can find my email address so god bless and and i'll say the same thing if you are not a believer this is for people who are not believers and you want to hear my story about how i came to jesus you send me an email i will have a private zoom conversation with you and you will come out a believer that i know because if you go to the step to contact me uh you're among the chosen and you're going to come into the kingdom and uh so so uh i invite you to do that as well with that we want to wrap this up i want to say thank you fritz for your time for giving us your time and thank you for joining us on the science and faith podcast we'll do one more after this with dr john lennox in a week and i invite you to that as well thank you very much thank you [Applause] foreign

Channel: DrJamesTour

Views: 34,544

Keywords: Dr. James Tour, Jim Tour, Science, Faith, Jesus, nanomachines, NanoEngineering, Bible, Professor, Chemistry, Science and Faith Podcast, Apologetics, Schaefer, Henry Schaefer, Fritz Schaefer, Computational Quantum Chemistry, Big Bang, Stephen Hawking, God, Cosmology, Universe, Cosmological Argument, Kalam

Id: gDqDX_WjXBU

Length: 73min 18sec (4398 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 24 2020