Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
Just the other day we were contacted by a friend who was really excited to watch a new movie dvd that she'd been given by her sister. And it was titled against the tide. And it was a movie about Professor John Lennox and his passion for the evidence for God.
Now I have his book against the flow, which is a really good book. So Professor John Lennox, of course, is a professor of mathematics and philosophy at Oxford University. He's an emeritus professor there, I think, and he's been there for some time.
And he's a very strong Christian. And as I said, I have his book against the flow, in which he talks about how our society is becoming very secular. But it's a time for christians to really point out that Christianity makes so much sense.
The Bible account of the history of the world makes so much sense. And he draws quite an analogy to the book of Daniel in the Bible, which is sort of roughly in the middle of the Bible there. And Daniel, of course, chief, became the chief advisor to King Nebuchadnezzar, the king who built the famous gardens of Babylon and essentially built the Babylonian empire up to its peak.
And Daniel had been a captive, a young jewish captive who was trained in the schools of learning by Nebuchadnezzar. But Daniel kept to his principles. He kept to his vegetarian diet and showed not only superior intellect, but his faith in God was rewarded in many supernatural events that are recorded there.
And of course, what happens today is that so many people are sceptical of these supernatural events having taken place, such as the dream of Nebuchadnezzar, which revealed the future of the world, essentially right up to the second coming of Jesus, the return of Jesus. And Nebuchadnezzar had had this dream, of course, and you can read about it in chapter two of Daniel. And if anyone listening doesn't have a Bible, remember, you can just go on Google and Google the book of Daniel, chapter two.
The Bible will come up and you can read it there for yourself. It's an amazing story about, or amazing account, really, of how King Nebuchadnezzar had a dream, an amazing dream. He couldn't remember it, or at least said he couldn't remember it, but wanted to know the interpretation, asked his wise man to interpret it for him.
And of course they couldn't. So he said, well, okay, well, if no one can, you're wasting my time as supposed wise men, and you'll be put to death. And Daniel, who was only a junior at the time went and saw the king, asked to see the king and told know, give me some time, I'll pray to my God and I will have the revelation of the dream.
And Daniel did pray and God revealed in a dream to Daniel what the dream was and its meaning, and Daniel was able to go in and tell the king. And that's pretty cool that God revealed to Daniel what the dream was and also the interpretation. And it outlined the history ahead of the different kingdoms.
And you can read about it there, if anyone's listening, hasn't read the book of Daniel. It's certainly an amazing book. It's full of prophecies that have been fulfilled.
We know it was written well before the time of Christ. I mean, it was written during the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar by Daniel, but the sceptics have tried to say it was written later and all this sort of thing, but so many of the prophecies were fulfilled much later on. Anyway, so Daniel predicted the time when Christ would come initially, the first time as well.
Yeah, so an amazing book there. And so Professor John Lennox talks about that and how Daniel stood up in this really pagan idolatrous society. And again, we have that today as we see the rise of atheism, or atheistic humanistic views in our schools as sort of a soft form of Marxism is being taught, we see that the education system is attacking the standards of God's kingdom in the area of morality, sexuality, creation, how we came to be here.
And so I was really excited when this friend said, look, I've got this movie that's just my sister bought from the United States. As I understand, it's not released yet here in Australia, and it's called against the tide. It's very interesting in that Lennox goes through a little bit about his history, his upbringing, and how his father challenged him to always consider the opposing views to Christianity, because we need to have evidence base and strong arguments for Christianity, because Christianity is a faith religion.
We believe it, but we believe it on the basis of evidence. And this is where John Lennox is really brilliant in this area, in that he's a mathematician, a brilliant mathematician, extremely logical, and he's able to identify the illogical arguments that are put up against Christianity at some time. And of course, he has debated a number of well known atheists, such as Dr. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Peter Atkins, who's an atheist chemist at Oxford University as well, and shown the shortcomings in their arguments. One of the important arguments that he brings up is the overwhelming evidence that the universe had a beginning. And he brings this up again, that the whole atheist position, the whole secular position, has to be that somehow the universe created itself and thoughts.
But that doesn't really provide an answer because we don't observe that happening. We don't observe new laws of physics forming. We don't observe new fundamental particles.
As the brilliant physicist James Clark Maxwell point out, how can you have the evolution of atoms occurring? How did they evolve? And we don't really see evidence of this. We don't see evidence of if the universe did put itself together by some amazing fact, we don't see evidence of this. Now, of course, one of the ways that scientists try to get out of this is by the multiverse theory, the idea that there are almost an infinite number of universes formed, and we just happen to be in one that works well to support life.
But of course, there's no evidence of these other universes. And really, it's just fantasy. It's just thinking up something for which we can never prove, we can't identify, we can't see.
And so in a way, it's worse than believing in God, because when you think about believing in God, there is the testimony for thousands of years, right back the time of Abraham and Moses and this sort of thing of supernatural experiences, experiences with God, where God intervened with the laws of nature and demonstrate his presence and spoke to people. He spoke to Moses from the burning bush. He spoke to Abraham.
Abraham saw angels, and so many of the Bible writers saw angels. And we also have accounts of many christians that have chosen to believe in this, in God and have worked for him and have served him and the experiences of answers to prayer themselves and miraculous situations, miraculous healings. And so many of these people are highly credible people and people who change the course of history down through time.
And when I think about it, the civilizations based on Christianity have led to the highest standard of living, the most stable democratic governments, peace and law and order. But this is gradually being eroded away. And we see this even as I was talking to my youngest son just the other day, he was saying that in just his lifetime, and he's not even 40 years of age, he's seen the change in culture.
And also from the time back, as he's heard from stories talking about when my wife and I were first married and also when we grew up as children, how western civilization has changed, particularly, for example, in Australia, in the culture which he's experienced, and how over this time, there's been this huge decline in church attendance, this huge decline in really trusting and believing in God and turning to secularism, and particularly in our education system, has encouraged that. I've talked about it many times, or at different times, sort of thing. Our young people are being taught the Big Bang theory.
There's no evidence for the Big Bang theory. Big Bang theory relies on inflation theory, and inflation theory can't be falsified. It's impossible to test it.
It can be used to prove anything. So the big Bang theory really isn't even science, and yet it's taught as science, and yet the science proponents that are pushing for it keep pushing that it is, but the evidence isn't there. And these are the sorts of arguments that John Lennox is putting up, that so many of the assertions and claims of atheism and secularism and humanism and this sort of thing are just wishful thinking.
They're not, in many cases, they're not logical. They don't follow from the logical evidence that we see around us, the hard physical evidence that we see around us. And also they deny the supernatural evidence for which there has so much been recorded down through history by credible witnesses, including the resurrection of Jesus himself.
But also the christian story of sin, of an antagonist, Satan, who wanted to change God's laws, the influence of Satan in so doing, in creating evil, which is the breaking of God's laws, which essentially summarised in the ten Commandments that are given there in Exodus, chapter 20. And again, if anyone hasn't read those who are listening, again, just go on Google and Google the Book of Exodus, chapter 20 and you'll read the ten Commandments there that were given by Moses to God. God actually wrote them miraculously himself on stone, and gave them to Moses.
And of course, Jesus summed it up in two simple statements of the know thou shalt love God and thou shalt love thy neighbour. And that means to sow kindness and care and respect. And we can see that those two principles solve so many things.
And it really irks me that so many people are against Jesus, or you mention the name of Jesus and they get upset about. But if you read the teachings of Jesus as recorded in the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the Bible, and again, if people don't have a Bible, it's so easy. Now, you can just google these books on the Internet, they're free.
You can read the passages. There are so many websites that have them there in different translations, the new American Standard Version or the new King James Version, or different paraphrases, and we can see what a beautiful person Jesus was and how consistent he was and what he taught and what he did in terms of healing and so forth, and bringing peace to people, restoring people's self esteem and value, but pointing out the hypocrisy of the so called church at that time. But getting back, I guess, to the science and professor John Lennox film about Professor John Lennox.
I would certainly encourage people who can get hold of a copy or watch it on Netflix or whatever. Yes, against the tide, the story of John Lennox faith in Christianity. But also, if you google it, you'll come up.
There's an hour programme where Cambridge philosopher of science expert Stephen Myers interviews John Lennox. And that's about an hour programme, available again free on YouTube to watch. There's powerful arguments.
You can also watch the debates between, for example, Professor Lennox and Richard Dawkins and see the powerful evidence that Lennox is able to bring up and also his personal testimony. But when we look at the science evidence, I was reading a very interesting article just recently by Aleksei Popov. Now, many people wouldn't have heard of him, but he's a specialist in elementary particle physics who holds the position of senior scientist at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protovino in Russia.
And he's also worked at the Brookhaven National Laboratories and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. And he writes a very, very interesting paper on fine tuning. It's entitled fine tuning of the universe.
And it's essentially the first chapter in this book, Design and Catastrophe: 51 Scientists Explore Evidence in Nature, that's published by Andrews University Press. So, as I said, I've been taking quite a few articles from this Design and Catastrophe: 51 Scientists Explore Evidence in Nature. And so he's got the first chapter, fine tuning of the universe.
And it's interesting, he says, when we look up at the starry sky in a cloudless night and remember John Lennox's argument, and again, against Dawkins and all these sort of things, is that when you look at the evidence, there's so much. Look at the universe, there's so much evidence for design and that it was made for a purpose. And Aleksei Popov, Dr. Aleksei Popov, says essentially the same thing. He says, we admire the beauty of the picture that opens before our eyes. The countless stars and galaxies capture our imagination.
But what caused all this to exist? Is it natural that our universe contains such complex and beautiful structures? It's interesting that the structure of the universe is regulated by natural laws. And so a second question can be raised. Why do these laws act in such a way that all of these complex structures can exist.
And that's an important question, you see, because not only can you have laws, but you've got to have laws that actually work constructively together. And this is another thing we've often talk about in evolution theory, irreducible complexity. But the same thing applies with regard to the laws of physics themselves.
Like, if they're supposed to have just been randomly generated by blind forces, how can they act so cohesively together? And this is a very important aspect. And so he points out, the strength of the laws of physics is determined by the relatively small number of so called fundamental constants, such as the gravitational constant and the speed of light, Planck's constant, the mass of the electron. And so, and what he says is why we call them fundamental constants, is that these constants can't be derived from any other laws.
They have fixed numerical values, and we can just measure them, but we can't derive them mathematically from any other, more fundamental concepts. And so what he's saying is that these values, the values for these particular constants, have been set in place, but they all work together, they work cohesively. And if they were just slightly different a little bit, the whole system would fall down.
And I think this is something that particularly a lot of biologists and proponents of evolution really don't understand and comprehend. And also the secularists that are wanting to promote atheism and this sort of thing and keep God out of the classroom, they don't understand. There's overwhelming evidence from an intelligent designer that put this together just right.
And even if you had a multitude of universes, which is a huge waste of energy, space and time and so forth, it doesn't necessarily mean that you would derive at one that would actually work like the way ours does. Because when you look at the probability of it, the probability is absolutely enormous as to be essentially well and truly defined as impossible. And I'll perhaps talk about that in a moment.
But for a long time, scientists assumed that the structure of the universe is stable to the variation of these constants. But of course, it changed when Paul Durak proposed that fundamental constants may change over a period of time. And this proposal triggered an intensive study of the potential stability of the universe in the face of possible changes in the fundamental constants.
And the result of the study, which was unexpected, actually, by many scientists, was that our universe is very unstable to such variations. In other words, the numerical value of these fundamental constants are fine tuned to such an extent that the fine tuning is absolutely essential for the stability of the universe. If these constants were to deviate from the measured values, all the complex structures in the universe would cease to exist.
So I'll just read that. That's actually a statement from Dr. Popov that if these constants were to deviate from the measured values, all complex structures in the universe would cease to exist.
And he gives an example, and this is one that's perhaps easy to understand. Most of us have heard about protons and neutrons. So they're the fundamental particles that make up the nucleus of an atom.
And together they give the atomic mass proton, Newton. Both have a mass of about one, and that's the atomic weight as really the sum of an atom, of an element is the sum of the protons and neutrons. But he writes that these masses are very close to each other, with differences between them being a thousand times smaller than the masses themselves.
But they make possible the existence of all the chemical elements in the universe. If the mass of the neutron was just 1% higher than its actual value, neutrons inside the atomic nuclei of most chemical elements would be unstable, and these elements simply could not exist. The same would be true if the mass of the proton were a little smaller than its present value.
Conversely, if the mass of a proton was just zero, 2% higher than its present value, protons would be unstable, and the existence of hydrogen, which is the main constituent components of stars, would be impossible. The same is true for the mass of a neutron. If it were just zero, 2% less than its actual value, it would lead to proton instability and dramatic consequences for our universe.
But there's more. The strong interaction is a force that holds protons and neutrons inside the atomic nucleus. If this force, the value of which is determined by the strong interaction constant, were just 5% smaller, it would lead, among other destructive consequences, to the absence of deuterium in our universe.
And without deuterium, the proton proton nuclear reaction, a base reaction in the sequence of nuclear reactions inside stars, would not proceed, which in turn would lead to a starless universe. So if the strong interaction constant were just 2% bigger, it would lead to the existence of a diprton, in other words, the bound state of two protons. With the existence of diprtons, the speed of the proton proton reaction would be ten to the 18 times faster, and stars would burn out completely in a very short period of time, also leading to a starless universe.
So we often don't hear about these constants, but these are the sort of things that are just so finely balanced. One of the things, of course, we all know about is gravity. When we let go of a cup, it falls to the floor.
That's gravity. My grandchildren are learning that at the moment, gravity is responsible for the force of attraction between all massive bodies in the universe and defines the structure of the universe. But we also have electromagnetic force, and this responsible is for, among other things, for the attractive repulsive forces between electrical charges.
And we course learn that in school. An unexpected fact that scientists have discovered is that the electromagnetic force is ten to the 40 times higher than the force of gravity. Two equally charged massive bodies repel one another at ten to the 40 times more strongly than the electric force, by the electric force, than attract by the force of gravity.
The ratio between the gravitational and electromagnetic forces of ten to the -40 is tiny, but it plays a very important part in the life of stars. If this ratio, which is already very small, were slightly less, all stars would be red dwarfs. If it were just slightly bigger, all stars would be blue giants.
In either case, just a small deviation from this number would lead to the absence of sunlike stars in the universe, so there wouldn't be any life. And he goes on to point out that who or what put all of the fundamental constants in their places. In general, there's only two possible answers to that question.
They were given exactly the right values by chance or by purpose, if the form is true. In other words, if they form by chance, we can estimate the probability of such fine tuning occurring just by chance. And if we calculate the probability, it will look really improbable.
There are several estimates that he cites from a number of references, and they range from a power of ten to the -3000 so that's just one in ten to the power 3000, or ten to the power ten to the power 123. Now, both these numbers are impossible. To give you an idea, the estimated number of atoms in the universe is ten to the power 80.
So that's the number of atoms in the universe. And so you can imagine that numbers like ten to the power 3000, or ten to the power ten to the 123, and the chances are one in that, or ten to the power -3000 et cetera. We can see it's absolutely impossible.
Absolutely impossible. These numbers are so probabilities are so incredibly small that they amount to nothing. And so the overwhelming evidence is that our universe was created by a supernatural being, God, a supernatural mind, who is not physical, who's outside space and time.
And that's the main point that Professor John Lennox is trying to get across. We have this evidence, right, from science itself, that God exists.
You've been listening to Faith and Science and if you want to re listen to this programme, cheque the references and so forth, just remember to Google 3AB Naustralia.org.au and click on the listen button.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day.
You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
