Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Life? Scientific Evidence for God - FAS2604

SPEAKER 1 Is our universe an incredible cosmic accident or is it fine tuned by a creator for life? Today, we're diving into the evidence for intelligent design. From Newton's law of gravity to the Big Bang, we'll explore why so many scientists are stunned by the universe's perfect conditions for life and ask, does this point to God? Does cosmos reveal the fingerprints of a designer? Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Kaysie Vokurks. Joining me to discuss these questions is Dr. John Ashton. Welcome once again to the program. SPEAKER 2 Hello, Kaysie. SPEAKER 1 Dr. John has written a book called the Big Does God Exist? And in today's program we'll be drawing on insights that are found in this book. So Dr. John, in your book it highlights that Newton's inverse square law of gravity is crucial for stable orbits and for life on Earth. Now, when skeptics claim this law is just a result of like a three of our three dimensional universe, how would you answer and what does the fine tuning of these physical constants really reveal about intelligent design? SPEAKER 2 Yes, well, there's powerful evidence now that the universe can't be the result of a random accident. And a lot of this data is certainly explained very well in that, in chapter two, I think it is, of the book by Dr. Danny Faulkner, who's professor of astronomy at the University of South Carolina. He does a really excellent job of explaining this and particularly some of the physics, such as Newton's square law and this sort of thing. So essentially, if we just start with that one, Newton's square law, we find that the gravity is a function of what we call the inverse square. So it's if the radius or the distance the objects are apart is squared and it's underneath, so it diminishes by the square. Now one of the things that they've noticed is that if it didn't obey this inverse square law relationship, orbits, for example, of planets and stars wouldn't be stable. So it's very interesting. So just a simple thing like this, and one of the fascinating things of this is that this is a function of a three dimensional space system. Now it's hard for a lot of people. We're so used, we live in a three dimensional space, right? But why should it be three dimension? Why not 4, 16 or 1 or 2? Now one of the other fascinating things is, for example, if it was one or two dimensions, life as we know it, biological systems as we know it couldn't exist and function. So that wipes out those dimensional systems for a living organism. So again, three dimensional systems seem to work. If we Go to multiple dimensions. Whether life could exist in those, that's a, a bit of a question. But that's just one example of how everything seems set up just for life. SPEAKER 1 Fine tuned and perfectly. Yeah. Designed to use that term to fit with it. And so I guess, yeah, people have come at that, that question from different angles thinking, you know, it's just, it's just because of how it is as opposed to. No, someone designed it. But I guess it could be hard to, to understand how it could just come to be and yet be so perfect. SPEAKER 2 Yeah, sure. SPEAKER 1 In its condition. So, yeah. Okay, so your book also talks about the Big Bang theory in that chapter two by Danny Faulkner. And this was, it was once rejected by many scientists, but it now, it points to a universe with the beginning. That's the idea of the theory. The Big Bang theory has a start point. How does the universe's low entropy start and its precisely balanced expansion rate provide evidence for a creator rather than just random chance? SPEAKER 2 Okay, so this gets fairly deep in terms of mathematics. But when we, so there were views and a lot of ancient views was that the universe has always existed, it's always been there much the same. It's an infinite universe and everything. So I think one of our previous ones we argued there's arguments against there being infinite matter and so forth from logic. But again, one of the things is now as we look at the fact that stars are running down, we can see that entropy is increasing. In other words, the state of disorder in the universe is increasing. It's observed. Right. And that enables us to extract work. Right. So and, and that's why we can have energy then to, to do things. Right. But one day essentially everything would stop, right. It would run down. So Apollo, looking at that in reverse, we can say, okay, then the universe must have had a star and this whole concept then, okay, well how did it start? Yes, you know the big question. Yeah, a big bang. And one of the things we need to say right up front is that scientists don't know. SPEAKER 1 Yes. SPEAKER 2 Okay, so this is very important thing. There's things that we can measure, we can observe, and this sort of thing we can do repeatable experiments. And therefore we can know things. When it comes to how the universe formed and how it started, that's something we can't actually know, but we can look at, say, okay, if we ran science backwards, what would happen and so forth. The problem is when we run the existing laws of nature backwards, nothing works. We can't explain the origin of the universe. So one of the Things that we have. For example, is the second law of thermodynamics that entropy will tend to increase. Everything tends to the state of Gray's disorder as a common way of doing it, of expressing it. Now, when we do the calculations for how for the entropy to just be right, so that the universe does expand at just the right rate or doesn't form, and then just contract on itself and expands at just the right rate, so it allows for, you know, matter and everything to form. The probability of that occurring, if I remember, I was calculated by Roger Penrose, a professor at Oxford. I think he won the Nobel Prize for physics in 2020. And the value for memory is something like 1 in 10 to the power 10 to the power 10. 10. Now, this number is so huge, right, that if you had a zero for every atom that we estimate to be in the universe. That's every atom in the universe. Right. And you think that, you know, in a teaspoon of a tablespoon of water, there's about 10 with 23 or 24 zeros after it. Atoms. Right. There would not be enough zeros if we had a zero for every atom in the universe. To write the probability of that occurring by chance, it's one in that number. That number is in that. Yeah. SPEAKER 1 So this is just to get entropy, right, for the universe to work. SPEAKER 2 Yeah, yeah. In the beginning. So this is ultimate fine tuning. SPEAKER 1 Wow. SPEAKER 2 When we look at other factors such as the gravitational constant, and again, just going on memory for this, but I think it's the probability is something like 1 in 10 to the power 30 or 1 to 10 to the power 50. So that's 1, you know, 10 with 50 sort of zeros after it. You know, it's sort of, you know, trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions sort of thing. One. And. But that's just for the gravitational constant, where you have the probability of the weak force, the strong force, all these other factors, we. We add all these up, these probabilities up, plus you, you know, this, the entropy one. We can see the, the chances of this occurring, right. Of this universe occurring is just improbable. SPEAKER 1 Yeah, yeah. SPEAKER 2 And so. But of course, we're here now. What. So when you look at that, right, if you look at just straight maths, if you look at just straight science, the universe shouldn't be here, but we are here. So that, in my mind, that provides powerful evidence for the metaphysical position of a creator God, that we were somehow created by something outside this material universe that just Tweaked everything. Right. And leading astronomers who aren't necessarily Christians, like Sir Fred Hoyle, who's professor of astronomy at either Oxford or Cambridge years ago, is dead now. He pointed out the same thing. The evidence is there that some supernatural thing, something outside the universe, tweaked everything so that it worked. The rate at which stars can synthesize the elements and all this sort of thing, everything is just right in terms of the gravitational constant and all those sort of things for this to occur. SPEAKER 1 Absolutely. Yeah. So that's pretty compelling when you think about those things. SPEAKER 2 It is. It's very, very compelling. SPEAKER 1 Yes. SPEAKER 2 And if people want to look these up themselves to, you know, just check what we've been saying. If they, for example, just Googled, I think it's. And this Stanford University encyclopedia on fine tuning, something like that, the article on fine tuning, they will give these. The actual data of the numbers there. SPEAKER 1 Yeah. So these. Yeah, I guess there's various elements, like you've mentioned the gravitational constant. You've mentioned low entropy start. There's also the expansion rate. There's also the idea of clumpiness of matter early in the universe and that being needing to be in just the right amount in order for galaxies and life to exist. So what would you say? You know, we've got all these improbable factors if someone is still trying to argue that the universe formed from itself, like, what would you say to that? SPEAKER 2 Yeah, sure. Okay. The, the issue is that science still has no explanation for the origin of the universe, and many people aren't aware of that. There was a paper published in Scientific American, I think was in the February 2017 edition, maybe 2016, one of those February editions called Pop Goes the Universe. And some top astronomers from Princeton and Harvard pointed out, for example, that inflation theory isn't even science. Now, inflation theory underpins the Big Bang. And essentially what it says is that at the initial Big Bang, the universe, space and so forth, expanded faster than the speed of light. And they point out that there's a whole lot of, you know, the basic evidence for this is all contrived. It actually doesn't fit the observed data. And one of the fascinating things that supported this, for example, recent findings from the James Webb Telescope that was put out there. And they got the initial findings when they looked at the initial. At the light from the furthest galaxies away from the furthest distance in space. Right. That should have exposed and given them some insights into this clumpiness and how matter originally formed. But when they. The data came back and remember, according to their theory, we're going back in time, you know, 13 billion years, something like this. So this should have been, as the matter was just forming what they found were fully formed spiral galaxies. SPEAKER 1 Wow. SPEAKER 2 It didn't reveal this clumpiness at all. Well, they were already fully formed. So again, everywhere they've looked. And that's why a number of scientists have published statement saying that, hang on, the Big Bang needs to be revisited. It doesn't fit the data. All the claim fitting of the data has been using cyclic reasoning where people have actually put in the evidence that they've observed, redesigned the theory and then said, oh, see, it predicts the evidence, but they put in the data that they'd observed to start with to develop the theory. It's just pure cyclic reasoning. So people need to clearly understand that there's actually no observed scientific evidence that supports the Big Bang theory. And this is very important to understand that. SPEAKER 1 Yeah. SPEAKER 2 And there's a lot of scientists that claim that, oh, there's all these papers that have been published. SPEAKER 1 Yes, right. SPEAKER 2 But when you actually focus in, the evidence actually isn't there? And the claimed evidence in all the cases so far is circularly a reason they've used the initial data that they put into the system to actually justify that it worked. Yeah, well, of course it works because it was designed, they set up the theory to make it work. So people need to be very, very clear on that. There's actually no scientific evidence to support the Big Bang theory as working. SPEAKER 1 Thank you for explaining that because I believe that that will probably be something which people may not have considered. And I've just taken that that theory is this gospel as it is kind of thing. SPEAKER 2 Yeah, there's a lot of assertions. Yeah, just assertions not based on evidence. SPEAKER 1 Yeah. So thank you for pointing that out. That we need to dig deep and understand what's really going on with that, with those theories and that evidence. Thank you for sharing. Have you ever struggled with doubts about God's existence or known someone who has what helped you through it? Share your thoughts and stories in the comments. Your journey could inspire someone else searching for answers.