Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
Around us, we see nature, the plants, and animals, and insects. And there's so much evidence for when we consider the fact that all these amazing organisms come to be as a result of cells that are programmed by a unique code that we call DNA, which programmes the structure from the initial gamut cells or eggs, to fertilised eggs, to the particular organism or fertilised seed to particular plant and so forth. And so there's these amazing codes, there's this amazing biochemistry that we observe that underpins all life.
Thousands of balanced, well, chemical reactions, actually, that are out of balance, and that's why they continue to go. But biochemical systems that in themselves are balanced and continue to operate many cycles. Biochemical cycles operate.
We know that there are tiny machines, molecular machines, that make up part of the cells and part of our organism. And when we look at these things, there's amazing design, well, evidence for design, in terms of if we were to make such an equivalent machine or try to make such an equivalent machine, we would require lots of engineers, a lot of intelligent thought.
And so, in many ways, this points to a super intelligent designer. And of course, this is what the Bible refers to as God, the creator God who made the universe. But one of the other evidences for creation and for the existence of some supernatural being—mind—that is outside space and time and matter, is the existence of the laws of physics and chemistry themselves that make this whole universe and life possible and able to operate.
So we have laws of physics, and one of the most common ones, of course, is gravity. When we jump up, we fall down. If we push a pencil off the side of the table, it falls to the ground, it's pulled down by a force.
And we say that that object's been accelerated by the force of gravity, and it falls towards the centre of the earth, towards the centre of mass. And so masses are attracted by gravity, by these gravitational forces. And the same, most of us have played with magnets and we have magnetic fields, and there are equations and constants that govern the strength of magnetic fields.
And of course, we're learning chemistry, about molecules. And the atoms are held together in molecules by chemical bonds. And these are all forces that control and make different compounds possible, chemical compounds possible, which, again, in turn, make different types of materials and substances possible, including the substances that constitute living organisms.
And so some of these things we may not think of in everyday terms, but again, we find evidence of supernatural design here in the terms of fine tuning, what is called fine tuning. Now, back in about 1982, the physicist Paul Davies has written quite a number of books, published a book by with Cambridge University Press called “The Accidental Universe”. And of course, physicists and scientists that don't want to accept the reality of God, they have to explain the origin of all these things by some sort of random natural processes, because this is the whole idea is to keep God out of the science classroom.
And really, the evidence is overwhelming. We've got a tidal wave of scientific evidence now for a creator, for the existence of a creator, the creator God. In fact, the evidence fits really well, the creator God described in the Bible.
And of course, that's why I'm a Christian as well as many other people, and many other scientists, when they recognise this. And the pushback now is as scientists are trying to push back and find answers to somehow still explain how things can exist just by themselves. But the evidence is just growing all the time that it's overwhelmingly impossible, absolutely impossible.
Not in trillions of trillions and trillions and trillions of years. And as I mentioned in many programmes, it really frustrates me that students and young people aren't being taught the evidence for a creator God, the evidence for creation. Instead, they're being told all the time about evolution, the Big Bang theory and so forth.
Despite the fact that top scientists, top astronomers, for example, point out that the Big Bang theory is improbable, as a matter of fact, it isn't even science, because none of it can be tested. And the predictions don't hold up, really, even shouldn't be considered as science. Matter of fact, there's far more evidence for creation than there is for the Big Bang theory.
And yet this is a compulsory part of teaching science students, particularly in schools in Australia, and again, they're being taught the theory of evolution. Yet we know the codes required to produce new body parts and new types of chemical functions and new types of organs can't arise by chance. You've got amazing molecular machines, such as the electric motors that drive the flagella in bacteria, existing in primitive organisms.
And these are highly sophisticated control systems underpin the operation of these electric motors and sensory systems to direct the organism to food. Chemical sensors, really advanced systems way beyond, even with our current knowledge today, we could design and synthesise on that sort of scale, that would work today.
And our students are told that somehow, from nonliving molecules, these first life formed, and yet basic food chemistry, if you sterilise something and it's dead, it's not going to come alive again, otherwise we all be risk of food poisoning. And yet all the ingredients for life are there. But organisms don't become back alive.
And we know why, because there's hundreds of biochemical reactions that have to be put in just the right amount of out of balance to produce just the right concentration of ingredient for the next reaction to go and so forth. And this has to all occur simultaneously at the same time. So it's impossible to start up a dead system again.
And so we have evidence all around us that life is supernatural. And of course, what Davies was looking at was the evidence. Well, the universe must have been an amazing accident.
And then since that time, a number of books have been published looking at the amazing fine tuning of the universe. And when we look at calculating the statistics, pointing out how impossible it is. One of those books was published in 1986, “The Anthropic Cosmological Principle”.
It was published by Oxford University Press, by John Barrow and Frank Tipler. And then in 2000, Martin Reese published a book, “Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe”. And that was published by Basic Books in 2000.
And then in 2004 another book was published, “The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery”. That was a very interesting book by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards.
And again, they point out how the earth is just so unique in where we are, what the properties are and of our planet, its dimensions and everything. It's just absolutely perfect for life. And the chances, again, of this happening are so implausible that really, it's unlikely that any other life actually exists in the universe.
And then, of course, in 2007, Roger Penrose, another physics professor at either Cambridge or Oxford, I can't remember which one, published his book, “The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe”. And he does some very interesting statistics, which, when we look at the fine tuning for the universe, it's absolutely amazing. And again, the probability of it occurring is so huge, it's astronomical use matter of fact.
In his book, the Road to Reality, he estimates the odds of an initial low entropy state of the universe, which is a requirement for our universe to form of occurring by chance alone, are in the order of one to the power—It's such a huge number—, it's hard for me to actually explain it to you, but it's one in ten to the power, ten to the 123 power 123. So that is absolutely huge.
In other words, it's one in ten with ten to the power 123 zeros after it. This is an astronomically huge number. In other words, ten to the power 80.
Would be the estimated number of atoms in the universe. And so ten to the power 160 would be, if there are as many universes as there are atoms in the universe, that would be the number of atoms in all those universes.
Well, this number is actually almost the power that you're raising to. Instead of ten to the power 160, is ten to the power almost as big as the number of atoms that there would be in the number if we counted all the atoms, if there were as many universes as there are atoms. In other words, it's an astronomically absolutely impossible number.
This ratio has actually been described by people as vastly beyond our powers of comprehension. And so, essentially, this is how unique our universe is. And again, it points to remarkable, special creation.
So I thought I'd run through, too, some of the examples of the evidence of fine tuning a matter of know. Stephen Hawking, who, again, I understand was an atheist, admitted that the remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers, which, referring to the constants of physics, seem to have been very finely tuned to adjust it to make it possible for the development of life. And he wrote that in his book, “The Brief History of Time”, on page 125.
And so here we have some top physicists. Roger Penrose, of course, was,. I think Stephen Hawking was at Cambridge, and so that means Roger Penrose would have been at Oxford, but they were corresponding professors there. So we can see here the top professors of physics, some of the top professors of physics in the world in our lifetime, have pointed out the uniqueness of the fine tuning of these constants, which, again, the chances of these things just occurring by chance, that just happen to be right. There's so many of them, as said, when you do the calculations, you come to some astronomical number, for example, the gravitational force constant, right? And gravity. This is what holds people on planets and holds the planets, stars and galaxies together. If it was too weak, the planets and stars cannot form.
If it's too strong, the stars would burn up too quickly and wouldn't last very long. If we look at the electromagnetic force, and so this is a small scale, attractive and repulsive force that holds atoms and electrons and atomic nuclear together. If it were much stronger or weaker, we wouldn't have stable chemical bonds.
And then, of course, there's the strong nuclear force constant, where this is another small scale, attractive forces that holds the nuclei of atoms together, which would otherwise repulse because of the electromagnetic force. If it were weaker, the universe would have far fewer stable chemical elements. And so that would eliminate a lot of the elements that are essential for life to form.
Then, of course, there's the weak nuclear force constant that governs radioactive decay. If it were much stronger or weaker, then life essential stars wouldn't form.
So these are the four fundamental forces. The gravitational force constant, or force constants, the gravitational force constants, the electromagnetic force constant, the strong nuclear force constant, and the weak nuclear force constant. And then, of course, there's the cosmological constant. And this refers to a balance of the attractive force of gravity with a hypothesised repulsive force of space, which seems to be only observable at very large size scale.
So it's still being investigated. But what they're saying is this must be very close to zero. That is, these two forces must be nearly perfectly balanced.
And to get the right balance, the cosmological cost must be fine tuned to something like one part in ten to the power 120. So, to give you an idea, as I said, it's estimated that there are about ten to the power 80 atoms in the universe. And so if you had half as many universes as there are atoms in the universe, and you added up all the atoms in those, and you had to pick one atom, just one atom, out of all the atoms that were in all those universes, remember, as many universes as there are half the number of atoms in this universe, that's the probability of picking just the right value for the cosmological constant.
If it was just slightly more positive, the universe would fly apart, slightly more negative, the universe would collapse. So I think, as we see this fine tuning, there's so many things that are just fine tuned to be just perfect. Yet without God, we have to believe that without an intelligent being behind this, setting it all up, that could understand this, and setting up this whole idea of magnetism, of electric fields, of gravitational fields, of nuclear forces and so forth, all these things have been set up. Just like the code of the DNA code is an amazing information system. It's been set up. The evidence is so obvious. It's been set up by a mind, a great mind.
Again, as with the cosmological constant, the ratio of the other constants must be fine tuned relative to each other as well. And since the logically possible range of the strengths of some forces is potentially infinite, to get a handle on the precision of fine tuning, theorists often think in terms of a range of force strengths.
For example, a strong nuclear force is ten to the power, 40 times stronger than gravity. That is 10,000 billion, billion, billion, billion times the strength of gravity. And if you think of that range, as represented by a ruler stretching across the entire observable universe of about 15 billion light years.
If we increase the strength of gravity by just one part in ten to the 34 of the range of force lengths, and that would be equivalent of just moving less than one inch across this rule of the diameter of the universe, then the universe couldn't have life sustaining planets. So that's how closely fine tuned. So that is an example to give us a picture, right? It's so fine tuned that if you had a ruler the width of the routing across the entire observable universe, and you moved it just one inch, then things would get out of balance.
When we think about the Bible describes God as the creator, self existent one, and it makes so much sense. People say, who made God? Well, the Bible says God is self existent. And also because he doesn't have of course, he doesn't have a beginning time. And it's fascinating, of course, without matter, you can't have time. And when you look into general relativity, and so, so much of what the Bible says actually makes sense.
But the other thing is too, that our thoughts are non material. Our thoughts aren't material. You can't weigh our thoughts.
You can't put our thoughts in a measuring cylinder and measure their volume. You can measure our brain, but not our thoughts. Our thoughts are non material, and we control our thoughts.
There's this non material essence of who we are. And God is non material too. And we communicate with God.
And there's evidence in the Bible that God has inspired the writing of the Bible. And that's what the Bible says. Men that were inspired by the Holy Spirit wrote down their inspiration.
And it's amazing when we look at all the records of the Bible, books written over a sort of one and a half thousand year period or so, and they're all coherent and they fit together and they build on one another, and they're building this picture. And of course, then there is the life of Jesus as well. You know, I was just reading the other night in Luke, the example of the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the religious leaders in the time of Jesus you know they were just waiting to pick a fight with him. And one sabbath he was in the temple and a man came in with a withered hand. And Jesus, they were looking at him thinking, will he heal on the Sabbath? And he healed the man's hand, and they were amazed and they got really cranky.
And there are so many miracles like this that are recorded by a number of witnesses that Jesus did that can't be faked. And they were there and they happened in people. People that were blind were made to see, people that were dead were raised to life, been dead for a number of days.
This sort of thing, crippled, where people had been crippled all their life, were healed in front of witnesses. And this was the evidence that Jesus gave that he was God. He was God incarnate that had come to earth to show us how to live.
And what do you say? Love one another, do good to those that do bad things to you, don't take revenge. And when you think about the teachings of Jesus, they lead to peace, they lead to good endings. Now, of course, there are a lot of people that have claimed to be christians that have done terrible things.
But if you read what Jesus said and taught, they weren't doing the things that Jesus said they might have thought that they were. But when we read the Bible and read the actual teachings of Jesus, the fundamental principle is to love one another and to do unto others as you'd have them do unto you and so forth, not to act selfishly and so forth. These reactions, if everybody did that, would lead to peace.
But also, of course, when we see the world as running down and the consequences of sin, we're running out of resources, big time. Fresh water, arable land, the destruction that we're doing to rainforests, the pollution of waterways, all these sort of things all point to the earth running down, as well as, of course, the increased rate of mutations in our own human bodies. All point that the earth has a finite time.
And of course, God describes the system he created initially. The Bible talks about how the earth, the universe, the whole lot is going to be destroyed and remade again, this time without sin, without evil. Why? Because we have free will.
Creatures, creatures in there, us who have chosen that, they want to do the right thing. In other words, they don't want to be part of doing evil.
And that's what accepting Jesus, our saviour, is all about. It's making that decision to I don't want to be part of this evil world. I want to be in a world that is perfectly good, where people love one another, there's kindness and nothing goes wrong, there's no death or sorrow. And that's what God promises, that he's going to remake it, and that he's offered us forgiveness for the bad things we have [done] if we choose to change and want to be a good person, want to do the things that God wants us to do.
And of course, there's lots of other evidence, too. I got bit sidetracked there. There's so many other examples of evidence of fine tuning.
For example, when we look at the, we've looked at the massive things in the universe, but there's also the ratio of the masses for protons and electrons. If they were slightly different, the building blocks for life, such at DNA, could not be formed.
Even if we consider the velocity of light. If it were much larger, stars would be too luminous. If it were smaller, stars would not be luminous enough.
The mass excess of the neutron over the proton. So you remember, in the structure in the nucleus of the atom, you've got essentially protons, which are positively charged, and neutrons, and they're orbited essentially by the negative charge particles of negligible mass, electrons. And of course, if the mass excess of neutrons over protons, if it were greater, there would be too few heavy elements for life.
If it were smaller, the stars would quickly collapse as neutron stars or black holes. Even as the universe is fine tuned at the cosmic level, local conditions can vary dramatically. And that's what Gonzales and Richards wrote about in the privileged planet.
And they identify twelve factors that can be found on the Earth that are absolutely essential for life. They talk about steady plate tectonics with just the right type of geological interior, which allows the carbon cycle and generates a protective magnetic field. If the Earth's crust was significantly thicker, plate tectonic recycling would not take place.
There's just the right amount of water in the crust, which provides a universal solvent for life. We have a large moon with the right planetary rotation period, which stabilises the planet's tilt and contributes to tide. In the case of the Earth, the gravitational pull of the moon stabilises the angle of its axis at nearly a constant 23 and a half degrees.
And this ensures relatively temperate seasonal changes and the only climate in the solar system mild enough to sustain complex living organisms. We've got just the right concentration of sulphur. We have just the right planetary mass.
If the Earth were smaller, its magnetic field would be weaker, allowing the solar wind to strip away our atmosphere. We'd become a dead, barren world. Like Mars, we're near the inner edge of the circumstellar habitable zone, which allows the planet to maintain just the right of liquid water on the surface.
There are so many things that fit just the position of the Earth in the universe and so forth. We have all this evidence there again, pointing to fine tuning, pointing to creation by a supernatural, divine creator. And I believe that's the same creator that's described in the Bible.
And so again, we have this overwhelming evidence for creation, not naturalism. It's absolutely impossible, for on the basis of scientific evidence we have now, for our universe and planet to have formed by chance.
You've been listening to Faith and Science and if you want to re listen to these programmes or catch up on other programmes, remember to Google 3ABNAustralia.com.au all one word and click on the listen button. And remember to tell your friends about this programme too, on your social media pages.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day. You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
