Episode Transcript
[00:00:23] All right, let's start out with a word of prayer and offer this time to the Lord.
[00:00:30] Lord, we pray for your presence this morning. Give us clarity by your spirit to be able to see reality with great clarity.
[00:00:39] I pray that you might help me to be able to put things forth clearly.
[00:00:44] I pray that the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts might be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
[00:00:57] Well, I'm going to be dealing with in this session an argument for God's existence that's sometimes been called the argument, the cosmological argument, or it's an argument from cause and effect.
[00:01:10] And I'm going to try to give a simple form that I think is very usable by any of you.
[00:01:15] But the problem is that the objections to it can be many and diverse and very complex and philosophical. But I will try to at least address the main objections here and try to illustrate to you how you can drive home this argument from a number of different angles and perspectives. But first, a comment on the place of arguments for God's existence.
[00:01:41] Certainly there are many arguments that can be given on many different levels, but you often find that they may not be equally persuasive to people, that there's a psychological factor that often goes with an argument. Sometimes the argument that's my favorite argument will not connect with another person.
[00:02:06] Sometimes an argument that I think is not so persuasive will connect with someone and they'll say, wow, I hadn't thought of that before. That's very helpful for me to think about. So that arguments may be valid and may be logical, but may not be equally effective with people.
[00:02:27] So that you need to understand that and be able to find something if you're going to use one that will be helpful to people. In many cases, to argue for God's existence is not something that people will sit down and listen to.
[00:02:43] It might take a while to do. Although I think I have a friend, Mike Marshall, who claims to be able to give the whole argument in three minutes. And I think you can. You can give an argument for God's existence in three minutes. I've done it with taxicab drivers. I've done it with my son when he was 5 years old. And I'll mention to you that story in just a minute.
[00:03:08] It takes a while to unpack all of the things that are involved in it, but nevertheless, I think you can do it. I think the argument I'm going to give you this morning you could do in three minutes, but you have to work a while to understand it and be able to address the various objections to it.
[00:03:25] Just a couple more thoughts on arguments for God's existence. You could start at various levels we talked about earlier, the difficulty of maintaining the universal negative.
[00:03:40] For instance, that God does not exist. And perhaps if you've seen this whole series have been part of this whole project that we've been dealing with, you'll remember the golden Alaska analogy. And that analogy says, well, what would you have to know in order to know that there's no gold in Alaska? Well, you'd have to know the borders of Alaska, how deep Alaska goes, and dig up every square inch of Alaska, because if there's one square inch you didn't dig up, you might find gold there. On the other hand, how would you go about proving the positive statement that there is gold in Alaska? You would just find one piece of gold. And presumably if you found one piece, you'd find it a lot sooner than by proving the negative.
[00:04:29] Now, to move it up to a higher scale, what would you have to know in order to know that there is no God?
[00:04:34] You'd have to know everything, because if there's one thing you didn't know, it might be God. Now that's not an argument for God's existence, it's just it talks about the difficulty of maintaining God's non existence in a dogmatic sense. So perhaps that observation might be helpful at least to get someone to think about what you're going to present.
[00:04:56] A second kind of argument that we've pursued in some ways throughout this course is a more presuppositional argument. And that would be taking people's ideas or theories and pushing them to the logical conclusion of their false assumption. Or on the other hand, taking certain ideas that people believe and pushing them towards an adequate basis for their highest aspirations.
[00:05:22] That's a very important thing. Like with atheism, we've tried to illustrate earlier that if you push atheism to its logical conclusion, it leads to a rather grim, meaningless universe where, as Bertrand Russell says, you build your life on the basis of unyielding despair.
[00:05:40] There's no solid basis for morality or meaning or significance. It reduces in some ways to nihilism or sense of nothingness or despair if pushed to the logical conclusion. And we have various people that have observed that. Jean Paul Sartre, atheist, existentialist, or Albert Camus who said the only really serious question is whether or not to commit suicide, or people from the theater of the absurd. We have a whole school of thought that's really taken, really, actually done a good service for us to show where atheism leads. If you really push it to its logical conclusion, you see where it ends up. On the other hand, if you do have meaning and dignity and morality and immortality and various other things that are very deep aspirations within people, where is the adequate basis for it? And we've tried to illustrate with regard to some of the theories that we've looked at in the past how that will lead now. I think that it's important to be able to do that to get people to think about the implications of the views that they hold to.
[00:06:53] All too often, believers are on the defensive when they could, in a gentle way, be on the offensive. Not be offensive, but be on the offensive in terms of asking questions and really showing people where their theories and worldviews lead, how they can have an adequate basis for the things they say and where their worldviews lead if you take them to the logical conclusion. But even if you do that, say, with atheism, atheists might possibly be willing to come to the point, well, we do have to base our lives on the basis of unyielding despair, and perhaps the things that I really do want, I don't have a basis for.
[00:07:36] So people might be able to accept the logical conclusion of their false assumptions or adequate basis for their highest aspirations. It would at least make people think that maybe their theories are inadequate to address reality and inadequate to address what they really want within their lives.
[00:07:53] So that's a value. But it's good to go another step beyond and provide a positive argument for your position. And that's what we're doing in this session is to look at an argument for God's existence, or actually we're going to look at another one, argument from desire in a later session to come at it from two different angles. Now, there are many arguments for God's existence.
[00:08:18] We addressed earlier something of the moral argument for God's existence. Peter Kreeft, in his book Handbook of Christian Apologetics, gives 25 arguments for God's existence, all of which he thinks are valid. So there are many different approaches you can follow. And I'm just going to give one in this session and one in a later session to illustrate a couple of the different kinds of arguments that can be used.
[00:08:45] The argument that I'm going to give you is the cosmological argument again, and it can be stated very simply.
[00:08:53] I remember one time, my son Trey, when He was about 5 years old, he's always been a deep thinker and he particularly thinks deeply late at night, right before he goes to bed. Now, maybe it's an evasive technique to stay up later, I don't know, but I don't think so. I think it's actually when he puts.
[00:09:17] When the room is dark and he's there, all of a sudden his thoughts come to the surface. All those things that distract him go away and he can really talk about the things that he's been thinking about. So about five years old, one time he was sitting in bed late at night and he said, dad, I have a question that even you can't answer.
[00:09:38] And he said, who made God?
[00:09:42] And I said, well, I think I can give you an answer. I can give you an answer in probably three minutes or less, but I'm not sure you'll be able to fully grasp the answer to it. But I think it's nevertheless a valid argument. I've done this kind of thing again with taxicab drivers and here's the way the argument goes. I'll state it very simply and then I'll unpack one by one, each of them. The way the argument goes is this.
[00:10:10] Something exists now. If something exists now, then something has always existed. Unless something comes from nothing.
[00:10:21] And that something that's always existed is most likely either the universe or one who's created the universe.
[00:10:29] And if you can eliminate the universe as being that which has always existed, you're left with the one who's created the universe.
[00:10:39] That's the way the argument flows, and let's take on each different part of it. First of all, something exists now.
[00:10:50] This is actually one of the most profound things that we can think about philosophically. And the issue is why does something exist rather than nothing?
[00:11:02] Ponder that for a while. Why does something exist rather than nothing?
[00:11:09] Meditate on that for a little bit. We'll short circuit your mind. I mean, why is anything here?
[00:11:18] Why does anything exist? Why is there not nothing that exists?
[00:11:24] It's perhaps the most basic question, but it seems to be a given that something exists now.
[00:11:33] At least the idea that you exist, or if you're talking to another person giving this argument for God's existence, that they exist now, if they would question, for instance, as a solipsist might, whether they exist. I suppose one ironic way to deal with it is not to talk to them because they don't exist. But even this idea that something exists now is hard to evade.
[00:12:00] The idea that you exist is hard to evade. It was Descartes, you remember, that went back to the things that various things he could doubt. And he was pushing back the doubting to the furthest level. And one of his last doubts was perhaps the universe was created by an evil demon.
[00:12:22] And it was actually illusory. It was actually an illusion created by an evil demon.
[00:12:29] And as he thought about it, he said, well, if I'm doubting whether the world's an illusion, at least I'm thinking to doubt that the world's in an illusion. And if I think, therefore I am, cogito ergo sum. So by even doubting whether the world was an illusion and whether he really existed, he proved, in a certain sense, at least existentially, that he existed because he had to think it out. If there's an illusion, there's got to be someone to be deceived.
[00:13:08] So it's difficult to evade the idea that the universe or you exist.
[00:13:16] One of the great problems that we addressed in an earlier session, the New Age movement, One of the great problems that they have to overcome is if the whole world is Maya or illusion. It's. It's an allusion to whom.
[00:13:32] It's hard to state the New Age perspective Without involving yourself in a contradiction at that level.
[00:13:41] So it does seem that it's pretty clear that something exists, that we exist now. The second step is, if something exists now, then something has always existed.
[00:13:57] Now ponder that a little bit. If something exists now, then something has always existed.
[00:14:04] Unless something comes from nothing.
[00:14:08] Let's deal with that last thing first. Unless something comes from nothing, I won't spend a long time on this, but it's worth at least pondering a little bit touching on it. Because this idea that something comes from nothing is not often put forward. But it's certainly a logical. I don't know if it's logical, but it's at least a possibility.
[00:14:33] One of the statements that comes from ancient times is ex nihil, nihil fit.
[00:14:40] Out of nothing, nothing comes.
[00:14:44] We don't have any experience.
[00:14:47] Something really popping into existence out of nothing.
[00:14:51] Like if we're pulling across an intersection and an ambulance is coming, coming through. We don't assume that that ambulance both exists or does not exist at the same time, the same relationship. If it exists, I suppose we ought to get out of the way of that ambulance. Or if a Mack truck is coming down the road, it 60 miles an hour. We don't assume that that truck exists or does not exist. We don't pull out in front of it.
[00:15:24] We don't question whether that's there. Or on the other hand, we don't expect if we look both ways before we cross the intersection that all of a sudden an ambulance or a Mack truck will appear going 70 miles an hour through the intersection. We don't expect that something will just pop into existence out of nothing. We have no experience of that.
[00:15:49] Science assumes that there is cause and effect, that there would be a reason why that would come to be so that the idea that something pops into existence out of nothing, it goes totally counter to our experience. I know Francis Schaeffer.
[00:16:06] I don't know if this illustration is helpful. It's difficult, if not impossible, to talk about nothing, because you almost have to when you talk about nothing, speak about it as something.
[00:16:21] Of course, that's a contradiction. But here's an illustration that may prove helpful or may not. This is what Francis Schaeffer used to do. He would draw a circle and he would say, well, inside this circle is nothing. Now, that's usually the way we speak about nothing. We speak about it as within the scope of something, so that this nothing is in a way, a something inside of this circle. But he said, try to erase the lines for this and imagine what he called nothing, nothing. Now, he spoke about true truth, and he also spoke about nothing, nothing.
[00:17:00] And that's what he said. Now try to imagine nothing, absolutely nothing existing.
[00:17:12] Not even a little bit of something around the nothing, but absolute nothingness.
[00:17:18] How would then something come into existence out of absolutely nothing or out of what Francis Schaeffer called nothing? Nothing.
[00:17:30] It's something that scientists or philosophers don't postulate, nothing as a source for the universe, because it seems like a move of desperation.
[00:17:45] If you ask people what's their answer to the origin of the universe, and they say nothing, that seems like evasive. It's not a satisfying answer.
[00:17:56] So most people choose another route, and that is to say that the universe has been here forever, that we have an infinite series of finite causes going back forever. So usually the two options that are pursued are the universe or one who created the universe. Just to put it a slightly other way, really, it's the same basic idea. I'm just stating it slightly differently, is what Francis Schaeffer spoke about. He said, when it comes down to it, there are only three options, three and only three for the origin of the universe.
[00:18:40] They're really not many.
[00:18:42] This is worth even putting forward and getting people to think about.
[00:18:46] You have the idea of nothing, or secondly, the impersonal or the personal.
[00:19:04] You really only have those options with regard to the origin of the universe. Universe either comes out of nothing.
[00:19:12] Option we just mentioned, or the origin of everything as impersonal, like matter, time and space, universe, or the origin is personal.
[00:19:27] It's just another way of putting this, but more using the personal impersonal as being the two.
[00:19:34] And this covers the waterfront really as far as the three options through which we can view that something that's always existed.
[00:19:47] We're going to spend the rest of our time dealing with the idea of the impersonal, or this idea that the universe is that which has always existed.
[00:19:58] Now, if you can show in any way, use any argument to show that that's unlikely or impossible, you have won your case. And actually there are several arguments that can be given, some logical and some scientific.
[00:20:16] I mean, one is to show that it's impossible to have actual infinite number of finite things.
[00:20:25] Another is to show that it's impossible to have an infinity with respect to time in the past. Another is to look at the Big Bang theory. And another is to look at the second law of thermodynamics. And really I'm going to address very quickly the first two because they're somewhat difficult to grasp and grasp clearly. And then I'm going to spend more time on the scientific arguments, the second law and the Big Bang.
[00:20:55] But any one of those, let me make this point, Any one of these, if you can establish it, would stand on its own. And if you have all four, it's cumulative. It's just four different arguments for this same idea that the universe is not eternal.
[00:21:13] The universe had a beginning, the world had a beginning that hasn't just been here forever.
[00:21:20] The something that's always existed is not the universe.
[00:21:25] Alright, the first is the impossibility of actual infinite number of finite things. Now if you want a full study of this, I'll point you to a couple really great sources.
[00:21:36] One is by William Lane Craig. The Kalam Cosmological Argument actually has two volumes on it, but both of which are very helpful. One is on the history of the cosmological argument and another is more of a development of it. Or you can go for a little bit shorter coverage of it to JP Moreland's book Scaling the Secular City. And the first chapter of that book is on the Kalam Cosmological argument.
[00:22:04] And what they argue is that it is possible to think about infinity as a theoretical concept.
[00:22:19] We have a mathematical symbol for the idea of infinity, but of course infinity is a very difficult thing to talk about and we can put it as a symbol, but it's impossible in some ways to fully describe. Leads to all Kinds of conundrums, kind of like Zeno's paradox. It leads to all kinds of different strange ideas. I know when my boys were very little, we used to play with this idea of infinity. And I would say, well, what's infinity plus one?
[00:22:56] Infinity. What's infinity minus one? Infinity? What's infinity times infinity? Infinity.
[00:23:06] It's one of these strange concepts that's difficult to get your hands on. We can talk about it theoretically or put it in terms of a symbol, but we can't really grasp fully what it means.
[00:23:20] And what the Kalam cosmological argument talks about is that it leads to all kinds of strange paradoxes. This idea of thinking about an actual infinite number of finite things.
[00:23:35] And I don't know that I'm going to try to fully develop that here, because I might lose you in the process. But let me just mention a couple things that they use, and I'll leave you to read the book to get it further.
[00:23:47] Just think about just the idea, the difficulty of speaking about these things.
[00:23:53] For instance, he says, imagine a library with an infinite number of books, and it has an infinite number of black books and an infinite number of red books.
[00:24:06] Now, if you take out, check out of the library, all of the red books, how many books do you have left in the library?
[00:24:16] Infinite.
[00:24:17] Does that boggle your mind? That's like Zeno's paradox. Or let me just give you another illustration. It was given by someone in the Middle Ages, and it was by Bonaventure. And again, this is just the difficulty of talking about this idea. Imagine, say, that just theoretically speaking, that the sun and moon have been around for infinity.
[00:24:43] I'm not saying that scientists would say that. I'm just saying imagine that just for an illustration, and each revolution of the sun equals 12 revolutions of the moon.
[00:24:56] All right? If there's an infinite number of events past, then the number of revolutions of the sun would equal the number of the revolutions of the Moon, even though it's 12 times greater.
[00:25:11] Now, does that boggle your mind? Well, perhaps you think I'm playing word games here, but it's really difficult to speak about or even think about an infinite number of finite things past.
[00:25:26] And it's part of the argument that there's the idea of potential infinity, and the idea of actual infinite number of finite things is inconceivable or inexpressible and actually could not be, is what the Kalam argument argues. Well, I don't think I fully made my case here, but go to the books and be able to do It. Another argument which again is difficult to grasp unless you ponder on it in a while is it's impossible to have an infinity pass. With regard to time, this is also very difficult to grasp. I'll try the best I can to be able to make the point. But you could imagine infinity going past in time and coming up towards the present.
[00:26:12] Now, again, it's very difficult to even think about these things. But imagine this is about the best I can do.
[00:26:19] Imagine starting in the present and counting back, or going back in a reverse order to I suppose not a beginning, but just keep going back.
[00:26:35] Now, the issue is that if you counted back, when would you ever stop?
[00:26:43] Never. You would have to just keep going for all infinity. Right.
[00:26:50] Now imagine coming back the other way.
[00:26:55] If you came back from infinity, would you ever arrive at the present point?
[00:27:04] The issue is no.
[00:27:06] The present point would never arrive, but the present point has arrived. Therefore the past is not infinite. Now, again, I don't feel like I fully made my case. I feel like I've made an observation. But if you want a fuller discussion of it, go to William Lane Craig or JP Moreland or others that make this case and unpack it more fully. But they are powerful and I think valid arguments that are very thought provoking.
[00:27:42] What I find to be more helpful with people is something that's more easily graspable, that the universe had a beginning. And that is the idea of the Big Bang theory and the idea of the Big Bang theory, I'll put it simply, and then we'll talk about it a little bit more in terms of its history and at least sketch some of the reasons why people think even more so now than before that it's true the universe went back to an infinitely dense piece of matter.
[00:28:15] And at some point in the past, long, long time ago, the universe, this infinitely dense piece of matter, went bang. And the universe went out from there. And the whole universe as we have it now comes out of this Big Bang. But of course, that leads you back to the question of what?
[00:28:36] How did this infinitely dense piece of matter get there?
[00:28:41] And why did it go bang?
[00:28:44] Takes you right back to the original question.
[00:28:49] What caused this infinitely dense piece of matter?
[00:28:54] You're right back at the very fundamental question of God's existence at that point.
[00:29:02] We'll come to that in just a second.
[00:29:05] Let me just mention, because I think I can deal with it more quickly, the second law of thermodynamics. And this is always something that's very helpful as well. Second law of thermodynamics, basically Argues that the total entropy in the universe is increasing.
[00:29:22] The idea here is that batteries run down, that the sun and the stars are running down, that heat is being lost and becoming equally distributed within the universe. The stars are dated, the sun is dated. And if the second law of thermodynamics applies to the whole universe and has been operating for infinite time on the stars and on the sun, then what would be the conclusion?
[00:29:53] If the universe has been always operating according to the second law, then there would be no more hot bodies. The universe would already be cold. The heat would be equally distributed an infinite time ago.
[00:30:11] Now, does that boggle your mind a little bit? I think perhaps it does. The idea is that the sun, the stars have been wound up, so to speak. They've been charged at some finite point a long time ago, and the second law has been working ever since. Now, I suppose you could postulate another part of the universe or someplace that we haven't observed where the second law works in reverse. Use Star Trek language, something like antimatter, where energy is created rather than becoming dissipated.
[00:30:50] But if that's the case, then that would be a different type of being.
[00:30:54] And that type of being would be that which is which would have being in itself, which would have ability to create.
[00:31:09] It would be a first cause, much like God himself, self existent, having power, a necessary being to explain the rest of the universe. It's much like arose by another name, God, One that provides the origin that doesn't need to be explained. It's been always existent because it has existence within itself, a self existent, necessary first cause.
[00:31:45] So that it would seem that the second law does lead you back to this idea of the universe having a beginning, or at least pointing to a different order of being that allowed the universe to come into being.
[00:32:03] Okay. The big bang theory, going back to this infinitely dense piece of matter has been held for a while. Back in the early 20th century, there was a Dutch astronomer, Wilhelm de Sitter, and he was reflecting on Einstein's theory of relativity, and he predicted an expanding universe. And he postulated that if the universe is expanding, then it was once closer together. The universe is blowing up.
[00:32:33] In other words, it had a beginning.
[00:32:36] Einstein. When he heard about the theory, he was initially irritated and didn't like the implication of this theory. In fact, in order to counter it, he invented a new force called anti gravity, as well as a cosmological constant to try to disprove this idea of a beginning. Later, Einstein admitted that this cosmological constant, postulating it, was the biggest mistake of his life. But he was evading this idea or the implications of this idea that the universe had a beginning.
[00:33:07] Later, in 1920, Edwin Hubble discovered through a redshift, he said, that galaxies were moving rapidly away from each other, that space is getting bigger, that space was expanding along with the universe.
[00:33:25] Scientists realized that the galaxies were not flying apart because of a mysterious new force, but because of a primeval explosion that happened a long time ago. Some people have even used the number and I don't quite know how they get it, but a number like 15 billion years ago, where the universe was compressed back into a piece of matter smaller than an atom. And then a Big Bang happened. And Steven Weinberg describes this. The universe was filled with light. The temperature he postulates was 100 trillion degrees centigrade. And protons and neutrons formed into atoms and gravity turned, drew them into galaxies and into stars so that all of our matter and the Earth go back to this Big Bang, this so to speak, creation event that happened a long, long time ago.
[00:34:21] Hubble had Hubble's law which says the further away a galaxy, the faster it's going away. It's not drawn in by gravity, it's actually going out escape velocity. So the question is, if this bang went out, is it like a oscillating universe, is it going to go out and then be by the force of gravity be drawn back in? And this idea of Hubble's law says it's going out and it's going out faster and faster. So it's not slowing down, being drawn in by a gravitational pull, but it's going out at escape velocity.
[00:35:02] Some astronomers were very distressed by this idea though.
[00:35:09] Arthur Eddington said that this concept of the Big Bang was preposterous, incredible, repugnant. Physicist Philip Morrison said, I find it hard to accept the Big Bang. I'd like to reject it. Alan Sandage of Carnegie Library said such a strange conclusion cannot really be true now. Why do you think they would say that?
[00:35:32] Well, because it goes counter to some of their beliefs. It involves, we can put it different ways, a moment of creation, a singularity.
[00:35:44] We don't know anything about the before the Big Bang, time has no meaning before the creation. It borders on the metaphysical something of a miracle that happened.
[00:35:57] So that it goes counter to some of these scientists worldview. In fact, some even tried to produce, as Einstein did earlier, a theory that would counter it. Like Fred Hoyle put forward a steady state theory of the universe. He said that as the universe burns up, a new energy is created. So he was saying, according to this idea, that according to his idea, space and time are eternal. The universe was always here. And in 1959, 2/3 of astronomers and physicists believed in this steady state. So we had a real battle going on between the Big Bang and the steady state idea of the universe. But the steady state theory received a death blow or a severe blow. In the 1960s, Bell Labs, Arno Penzias, and Robert Wilson discovered radiation coming from space. If the universe began in a Big Bang many years ago, the radiation from that fiery blast would still be present. And they postulated, according to scientific theory, what that radiation would be like. It would be a few degrees above absolute zero. And their measurement was right in that same ballpark, slightly less. But it was kind of a whisper from the early moments of the creation.
[00:37:16] Later, this primordial background radiation was confirmed by NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite COPE satellite.
[00:37:29] And they were able to predict, in theory how much hydrogen, lithium, deuterium and helium should exist in the universe. What they actually discovered was in line with what we find of these elements today.
[00:37:43] Stephen Hawking wrote his famous book that was somewhat of a best seller, although I don't know how many people have actually read the whole thing. It's a brief history of time where he said, there must have been a Big Bang singularity.
[00:37:58] Now, some philosophers or scientists have said this about this Big Bang. Arthur Eddington says the beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agree to look at it as frankly supernatural or. Arno Penzias says, the best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted if I had nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, and the Bible as a whole.
[00:38:23] Perhaps one of the more interesting and fascinating books that I read was by Robert Jastrow called God and the Astronomers. And it's a very helpful, clear, easy to read book. And he has this one section in there where he talks about the evidence for the Big Bang theory. And he comes up to this classic quote. He said, for the scientist who lives by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, and he's about to conquer the highest peak, like you coming up, like you're coming up to the top of Mount Everest or you want to see what's there right over the peak. And he says he's about to conquer the highest peak. And as he pulls himself over the final rock, he's greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.
[00:39:13] It's right back to this Big Bang. You're back to the ultimate theological question. Why is there something rather than nothing?
[00:39:30] All right, so you're back to the most fundamental questions.
[00:39:34] How can you evade. Some philosophers have tried the move of desperation to say, well, it doesn't seem like the universe could be eternal, but maybe this did come out of nothing.
[00:39:48] Victor Stenger says the universe may be uncaused, it may have emerged from nothing. So you have an uncaused effect. But most people again will not try that move of desperation. I thought atheists refused blind faith. Seems that that's what a Victor Stenger idea would be. So the Big Bang theory is sticks in the crawl, atheists, because it does lead back to questions that are frankly supernatural lead back to the most fundamental theological questions. There's another idea I want to at least put forward. I'm not going to have a chance to fully develop it in the time frame we have here, but you need to at least be acquainted with it and perhaps pursue it in more depth. And that's called the Anthropic principle. There are lots of different books that have been written on it. Then there's a great book, Dinesh D'Souza's book, what's so Great About Christianity. It summarizes a number of these different ideas. And there are several other books that we'll include within a reading list that you can look at on this subject.
[00:41:00] But it's the idea that the universe seems that it was not only designed for us to be here, but there couldn't even be life unless the universe was constructed in a very fine tuned fashion. Let me just give you a few of the rather staggering things that had to come together in order for life to be there at all.
[00:41:27] For instance, if the initial explosion of the Big Bang would have differed in strength by as little as one part in 10 to the 60th and one part in 10 to the 60rd, the universe would have either quickly collapsed back on itself or expanded too rapidly for the stars to form. In either case, life would be impossible.
[00:41:47] There's another person that's explored this and I point you to some of his works, John Jefferson Davis. He points out that an accuracy of 1 part in 10 to the 60th could be compared to firing a bullet at a 1 inch target on the other side of the observable universe 20 billion light years away and hitting the target.
[00:42:07] Rather staggering thing. Can't even really conceive that, but it's incredible. The second thing is the calculations indicate that if the Strong nuclear force, a force that binds protons and neutrons together in an atom, have been stronger or weaker by as little as 5%, life would be impossible.
[00:42:29] Another calculations by Brandon Carter show if gravity had not been had been. If gravity had been stronger or weaker by one part in 10 to the 40th, then life sustaining stars like the sun could not exist. And this would make life impossible.
[00:42:46] If the neutron were not about 1.001 times the mass of the proton, all protons would have decayed into neutrons or all neutrons would have decayed into protons and thus life would not be possible.
[00:43:04] Another factor is if the electromagnetic force were slightly stronger or weaker, life would be impossible for a variety of reasons.
[00:43:16] Imaginatively, you could think of each instance of fine tuning as a radio dial. Unless all the dials are set exactly right, life would be impossible. Or one could think of the initial conditions of the universe and the fundamental parameters of physics as a dartboard that fills a whole galaxy and the conditions necessary for life to exist as a small one foot wide target. Unless the dart hits the target, life would be impossible. The fact that the dials are perfectly set or that the dart hit the target strongly suggests that someone set the dials or aimed the dart.
[00:43:52] Turns out the universe has to be as big and old as it is to contain living beings such as you and me.
[00:44:01] It seems. Physicist Paul Davies says that we have been written into the laws of nature in a deep and I believe, meaningful way. John Burroughs and Frank Tipters in the Anthropological Cosmological Principle. One of these writers on the anthropic principle says a life giving factor lies at the center of the whole machinery and design of the world.
[00:44:24] Martin Rees in his book Just Six Numbers argues that six numbers underlie the physical properties of the universe. If one of these six, say gravity, were different even to the tiniest degree, there would be no stars, no complex elements, no life. Rhys calls these numbers providential.
[00:44:45] Stephen Hawking again says if the rate of expansion of the Big Bang was smaller by even one part in 1000 million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it even reached the present size.
[00:44:58] Fred Hoyle says a super intellect has monkeyed with the law of physics.
[00:45:05] Now, there are three fundamental reactions to this anthropic principle.
[00:45:13] One is called the lucky us response. A second is multiple universes. And the third is the conclusion I would come the designer universe. The first one, the lucky us idea is this. The universe is at accident. Whatever the odds, the cosmic dice must have rolled lucky sevens.
[00:45:35] It just happens to be we're here. So the improbable, the incredibly, impossibly improbable must have happened.
[00:45:46] But as many people argue, the anthropic principle does not say given the billions of stars in the universe, it's remarkable that life turned up on our planet. Rather, it says the entire universe had to be formed the way it is to contain life at all.
[00:46:02] Antony Flew, who was perhaps in the last generation the most famous atheist. He's one that all the Christian theologians and philosophers debated. He was the most adamant. But Anthony Flew always claimed that he would follow the evidence wherever it leads.
[00:46:21] And recently in these past few years, he's become a theist. He's not yet become a Christian, but he's become a theist. And part of that was finding a valid form of the cosmological argument.
[00:46:34] And another was looking at the anthropic principle. It just is too fine tuned, too improbable to lead to the lucky us kind of approach to things. And it's persuaded him the evidence has caused him to move away from his dogmatic atheism and follow the evidence wherever it leads. And he has written a book called it was originally There is no God with no crossed out and There is a God Instead and gives some of the arguments that he has put together on this subject.
[00:47:18] There's been some controversy about the book and in some other lectures I give sources and some thoughts on it you can go to on the C.S. lewis Institute website.
[00:47:34] In any case, he really thinks that as Lee Smolin says, that luck will certainly not do here. We need a rational explanation of how something this unlikely turned out to be the case.
[00:47:49] After a while, this lucky us is not persuasive, it's just too miraculously fine tuned. But a second move that people take is the multiple universes idea or the idea that there's perhaps an infinite number of universes where each universe has its own set of laws. Now the attraction of this and its something that appeals to atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Dennett that if you multiply universes then you can get more probabilities in here. If you have an infinite number of universes to work with, then I suppose it becomes more possible that the improbable could happen given every physical condition, every arrangement of matter and energy would be realized and everything that could happen does happen.
[00:48:42] However, it seems to be a move of desperation because what's the empirical evidence that this is the case and the idea is none.
[00:48:54] Weinberg calls this very speculative, having no experimental Support. Smolin calls these ideas fantasy.
[00:49:03] It's a move of desperation. Usually Richard Dawkins points to Occam's Razor. You always pick the simplest possible explanation.
[00:49:13] In this case he multiplies complexities and makes it infinitely complex in order to come to his own conclusion, which seems to go directly against what he argues. In other places, Occam's Razor is the most simple explanation would be that which is preferred.
[00:49:34] There are other books that have argued along this line and I point you to them. One of them by Francis Collins called the Language of God is a very helpful book addressing some of these issues from the idea of DNA and genetics. And he also addresses various aspects of the anthropic principle in his work as well. It's very persuasive. Scientists have to wrestle with this kind of issue and I think some of these new atheists don't give sufficient time and attention to it because it makes them very uncomfortable with what's going on.
[00:50:11] So you have not only the evidence that's out there, but I think that there's plenty of evidence for God's existence, as I mentioned from various other sources and we pointed to some of these in the past and we will look at a couple more in the future lectures in this series.
[00:50:31] One is, and we're not going to spend a lot of time on this that's not been explained is how do we have the origin of life?
[00:50:39] How do you get life from non life? This is not something that's been explained. It seems very difficult to do. So how do you get consciousness from unconsciousness?
[00:50:53] Again, that boggles your mind. You think that this podium, if given infinite amount of time, would develop consciousness. It's a difficult issue to bridge that.
[00:51:05] How do you get rationality from the non rational or irrational universe?
[00:51:15] It's a powerful argument, something to consider. We've addressed it a little bit in previous lectures in this series, but it's something to ponder. How do you get the moral out of the non moral?
[00:51:30] We looked a little bit earlier in this series at the moral argument which goes something like this, that unless God exists, there is no evil or good.
[00:51:42] Second premise, there is evil and good, therefore God exists.
[00:51:48] We talked about that earlier and it's particularly the argument that I give in my book True Truth.
[00:51:56] We're going to look at in a later lecture in this series at the Idea of Love.
[00:52:03] Darwin says that if you could just show me one act of truly other centered, any act that's truly other centered, it would annihilate my whole system.
[00:52:20] Anything that would go counter to what Richard Dawkins calls the selfish gene.
[00:52:27] Any truly unselfish act that would annihilate my whole system. We're going to look at that later.
[00:52:34] So there are various angles that you can come into.
[00:52:38] On top of this, you add the teleological argument, or how do you get the personal out of the impersonal? Many other issues that could be explored. I point you back to Peter Kreef's book, Handbook of Christian Apologetics. There are many different angles so that you can go out to the universe, the anthropic principle, or the Big Bang, or the second law. You can go to some logical arguments, as in the Kalam cosmological argument, or you can just start even just within yourself, and look at just the idea of life itself, or consciousness, or rationality, or morality, or love.
[00:53:20] All of these are pointers towards the existence of God.
[00:53:26] Let's close at that point.
