Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
Just a couple of days ago, I read of an interview with Dr. Paul Davies. He's a world famous cosmologist.
Some years ago he wrote the book The Mind of God. And I think he was awarded the Templeton prize for his work in that area. In this interview, which was just as I said a few days ago, he was asked, did he believe in eternal life or life after death? And he said, oh, well, the question is still out on that.
He wasn't sure. He seemed to indicate, but he did make the interesting comment, that one of the fascinating things that science really has no explanation for is consciousness. That is our mind, our thoughts.
And of course, this is one of the key issues evolutionary theory really can't explain because it works on chemical mutations. So how did consciousness arise? How did this whole concept of consciousness, which is non material, we can't weigh it, we can't measure its volume of our thoughts. It's non material, but that's who we are.
And so I guess the other question that goes with that is with everyone, with us all is where do we want to spend eternity? Is there really life after death? Is there a future? Or is our life here just a few decades? And then our chemistry, our biochemistry, the molecules and atoms that make us up just return to dust. But what about our thoughts? And so this really leaves open a very important issue. I have a little card, just like a little business card, which I call a hope card.
And on the front it's just got a little personal testimony. Know, I've had many answers to prayer and I believe that there's a God, Jesus Christ, who loves us. And then I just say on the back of some websites that you might be interested in helping you to know God because Jesus himself said that this is eternal life, to know God the Father and Jesus Christ his Son, whom he sent.
And Jesus also taught that this is the will of God. And in particularly in John 6:40, the other verse, of course, is in John 17:3. But in John 6:40, Jesus said, this is the will of my Father, that everyone who sees the Son should have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.
And so this is God's will actually, that we live forever. Our consciousness will survive. And of course, the Bible is a whole account of people's encounter with God and that this world became subject to evil and really needs to be replaced, destroyed and replaced again with a new earth where there is no evil.
The Bible talks about how God has planned a future for us a future in which our consciousness is preserved and we have recreated new bodies that won't fail and deteriorate. Our biochemistry won't break down over time and our consciousness will be preserved in that. We'll be able to live a life again and forever. And with God, who designed the amazing universe, designed the amazing living systems. And this is a wonderful promise in my mind.
It's interesting as from time to time offer these cards. I might be buying petrol or something and there's no one around. Talk to the cashier person and say, look, would you like one of my hope cards? Or I meet someone, you come up with a bit of a conversation about things, and then as you part and say, well, look, would you like one of my hope cards? And the whole idea of it was that, or is that to give people the opportunity to connect with christian programmes that are available on the Internet because glyphs, websites where they might come to know about God? Because it really concerns me that so many young people particularly don't know about God.
And it's surprising too. While many people take the cards, there are many people that don't take the cards as well.
And I really feel for those people because God has promised us eternal life there and where we spend eternity really is a very important thing. If people miss out on that and it's such a free gift. The Bible talks about how eternal life is a free gift of God.
God created us originally to live forever, but he wants us to make a choice. Do we want to live forever in a good environment, in an environment where there is no hate and bad things happening, an environment where everything is good and based on love and people have that choice and God leaves it up to us to make that choice. But I can see in our culture today, and it seems very clear to me, that there have been so many attempts down through history, when you look at the history of things to obliterate, for example, the Bible account, to destroy the copies, to ban people from reading it.
And even today in our world, we know that the persecution of christians around the world is a growing issue. And also the fact that christian doctrines, the christian history of civilization, which really underpins modern civilization, and hospitals, medical systems and education and so forth, so many of these things were found in the context of a christian background and the end of slavery and all of these sort of things. And of course, we see slavery today, but in the world, in non christian places.
So it's very important that people understand this history, but it's being denied, in my understanding, taking out of curriculums and so forth, a big argument. Courses stemmed especially from the teaching of evolution and long ages and this sort of thing, which appear to discredit the Bible. And of course, in the past, if you listen to previous programmes where I've talked about the overwhelming evidence that we have now for a young earth, radiometric dating, the results really cannot be validated.
We have no standard reference rocks to validate the methods. And yet, when we look at erosion rates and so many other factors that decline in the earth's magnetic field, all points to a very young earth and young solar system. And the evidence is there, but it's not being presented in our curriculum.
And we know from the complexity of biochemistry, evolution is absolutely impossible. You can't have some millions of identical random long chain molecules just forming by chance, then assembling themselves into a structure, and then a very special molecule encoding a description of that structure forms which we call DNA, and then a code reading system, ribosome, also involving hundreds of thousands of atoms, to construct this molecular machine that can read the code and reconstruct a new identical structure like the first cell. There's just so much points to.
It's absolutely impossible. It can't occur. And the same in the universe.
The universe we observe has precisely. Well, it's interesting. The evolutionist Richard Dawkins, in one of his books, claimed the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Well, of course, his remarks were meant to be provocative, but, of course, are they accurate? What would a universe of sheer randomness and chance look like? And it's interesting, in one of Dawkins' books he actually concedes that biology gives the appearance of design. In his book The Blind Watchmaker. I think it's pretty well on page one.
But, of course, it's not only biology that leads us to question Dawkins' assessment about the universe, and, by the way, that description of the universe. Dawkins' claim that the universe has the properties we would expect if there was no design. He made that claim in his book River Out of Eden, on page 133.
And I think when we look at the cosmos, and this is, for example, what Paul Davies was studying, the cosmos itself provides such strong indication of intelligence. The universe, along with the physical laws and the constants which govern the day to day operation of the universe, give every indication of being fine tuned to allow complex life, such as ourselves, to exist and flourish. And it's interesting that this evidence is so well established that it's even been given its own title. It's called the anthropic principle. And there are books that have been published on that. Matter of fact, the implications of a designer are so strong, in fact, that atheists have been forced to come up with some crazy mechanisms to explain away this extremely odd fact.
And only od from an atheist perspective, of course, because as christians, christians have an explanation. There is a creator, a loving God creator. But one of the ways that atheists have to try to explain this away is by appealing to the multiverse theory.
And you can read about this and google, there are all these different articles, and of course, the cosmologist Paul Davies talks about this, too. And of course, in cosmology, they talk about universes lasting for so many billions of years and then being gobbled up or replaced, all sorts of crazy ideas. But the multiverse theory is one in which essentially they're trying to base it on probability.
And essentially it's a theory where they say, well, just about everything has a possibility of happening. It might be what we would class as impossible to happen. But their argument is eventually, if you have billions of trillions of zillions of years, that something like that could happen.
But to make it happen a little bit faster, instead of there just being one universe, they say, well, what if there are almost an infinite number of universes? And so our universe just happens to be one of an infinite number of universes that exists where everything just did work out right for life? So you can see this as a crazy and very wasteful way, suggests that there's this enormous amount of material out there and so forth, and that we just happen to be in the one that's lucky. And then they say it's only natural that we should observe it, since if we were any of the other ones, we wouldn't be able to exist at all. So, of course, this cosmic fine tuning is really not a scientific answer.
I mean, you can't reproduce it or anything. It's just a made up explanation. But it illustrates how far atheists have to go to to try and explain the existence of the universe and the fact that the universe is so finely tuned.
In other words, the gravitational constants, the different other force field constants that are involved are extremely fine tuned. The laws of chemistry and physics are amazing how they all fit together. The periodic table structure, the structure of the atoms, the properties of the different atoms that result from these different structures of the different bonding scenarios, so that we can have elements like carbon that can make diamond and have another similar structure that make, like, graphite that slides.
It's like a lubricant, yet it's the same atom. We can have the properties of hydrogen bonding in water so that water, just before it freezes, expands so that ice floats on the lakes and lakes don't freeze solid and destroy all the life in them. They form this insulative coating on the top.
And it's interesting that Paul Davies, who's an evolutionary astrophysicist, really, he writes, how seriously can we take this explanation for the friendliness of nature? This is talking about the multiverse. Not very, I think, for a start, how is the existence of the other universes to be tested? To be sure, all cosmologists accept that there are some regions of the universe that lie beyond the reach of our telescopes. But somewhere on the slippery slope between that and the idea that there are an infinite number of universes, credibility reaches a limit as one slips down that slope.
More and more must be accepted on faith and less and less on open to scientific verification. And so here's top physicist pointing out that once we jump into these multiverse universe explanations of things, we're in the realm of fairy tales. You can make up anything because you can't prove anything.
But we can make observations out there in space. We can observe biochemistry and biology. And what does it all point to? It points to a Creator. It points to a designer. Of course, the origin of this many world thinking on the scientific community goes back possibly to a bit of a joke suggestion by Erwin Schrodinger, who was one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Of course, they were looking at the so called wave function probabilities of certain events and the random decays of atomic particles.
And there's lots of fascinating things and problems that these scientists have looked at. In fact, if we look at light, the fact that light has these two properties of properties of particles and of waves, light can be affected by gravitational fields. Hence we have this black hole phenomena where it appears that the gravitational pull is just so strong that light can't escape and no forms of radiation can escape.
They're all drawn back on themselves. And I suppose if we can understand this, if you were to throw a ball into outer space, if you throw a ball up in the air, it'll come back down. If you throw it harder, it'll go further, but that'll come back down.
But eventually, you can throw it hard enough that it won't come back down. In other words, you are able to give an acceleration that exceeds that of gravity. And so it is able to escape into outer space and continue growing.
And it's the same with light. Light that is near a very strong gravitational field just doesn't have the energy to be able to escape. It can go up, but it just gets pulled back down.
It can't escape into outer space for us to see it. So that's the sort of principle of the black hole. It's interesting, Paul Davies goes on to say, in terms of the extreme multiverse, explanations are therefore reminiscence of theological discussions.
Indeed, invoking an infinity of unseen universes to explain unusual features of the one we do see is no better than having an unseen creator. And he points out that the multiverse theory may be dressed up in scientific language, but in essence, it requires the same leap of faith as it does to believe in creator.
So this is one of the things that we really need to point out, and that is that science hasn't disproved God. Science has no explanation for the universe, really for the origin of the universe. Sure, in schools, we get taught about the big bang theory and this sort of thing, but really the scientific substance for that, it just fails. You need all these other sort of paradigm theories, inflation theory and so forth, that can't be proved, can't be tested, need dark energy, dark matter, all these sort of things to prop the theory up.
So the bottom line is that we can't explain our existence. We can't scientifically explain the universe. We can't scientifically explain the origin of a DNA code that could form, that would describe accurately the structure of a living cell that had formed.
So when we think about these things and when we look at the diversity of nature, of the beautiful animals and flowers and plants and so forth, to me, we see this amazing beauty and complexity, but we also see the impact of evil. Animals have to kill one another to survive and so forth. And also we see the effect on humans of evil.
When I think of the advances that we're making in medicine, in treating diseases like Parkinson's disease now, where we sort of can connect electrodes to the brain and help bring relief, we can making tremendous advances in treating different types of cancers and heart disease and diabetes, we making tremendous inroads in surgical techniques, in controlling childhood diseases and so forth. And at the same time, we're building terrible rockets and bombs and things that are killing people. We have other people fighting and shooting one another.
We have a breakdown in family relationships. We have a lot of domestic violence. In certain western countries, the relationship of marriage is breaking down.
We have the impact of alcohol and drugs on people's minds, leading them to, in many cases, to do really bad things while under the influence of those substances. And so we can see this affected to exactly what the Bible describes, that an evil influence has come in and affected our minds. And the beautiful message of the Bible is that there is an eternity, there is a life after death.
And Jesus talks about this, he talks about that when we die, we're asleep, asleep until Jesus returns again and recreates God says the world is going to be destroyed by fire. People are worried about global warming. Well, it's going to get a lot worse than that.
The world will be totally destroyed and recreated again instantaneously. And people wonder how this can happen. And I just wish there were more opportunities for creation scientists to get their work published.
But when you think about it, your thoughts can affect the movement of your fingers and you can write an essay or a poem or describe a scene. And I simply think that God's. If our thoughts can do that, if our thoughts can affect electrical fields that affect nerves, that affect the movement of our body, surely God's thoughts can affect the force fields that constitute the universe and just recreate it with his mind and instantaneously.
So to me, the scientific explanation for God to be able to do instantaneous creation is there. We have the evidence for it. And there's a lot more that can be said about that if we can instantaneously, virtually or almost instantaneously, governed by the speed of transmission of electrical impulses in our body.
But for God's not limited by the speed of light at all. And so God can have his thoughts, influence force fields instantly to recreate things, to create things. And I'm sure that's how he did in the beginning.
And God sees going to create it perfect and recreate those of us who choose, who want to be there. God has forgiven us for all the bad things that we've done. He just wants us to come to him and allow him to live in us and bring about those changes which he describes as the Holy Spirit coming into us.
It's part of God himself coming in and dwelling in us and changes. And I've experienced that in my own life. I can see the changes in my life, my attitude to things, since I accepted Jesus as my saviour.
So when we think about the science of the universe, the science of eternity, it makes sense. The Biblical account that there is a creator God who has always existed, He has no beginning, He has always been there, and He is about to remake this universe so there is a hope for a life after death. There is that special opportunity for each of us to choose that and that's why I'd encourage everyone listening to read the Bible and perhaps start with the New Testament. It's perhaps easier. And of course the Old Testament has the history there and read for ourselves the account. It makes so much sense, it fits with science.
And remember of course that you can re listen to these programmes by just googling 3abnaustralia.org.au all one word and click on the radio and listen buttons and scroll down the different programmes there and remember to put details and tell your friends about these programmes that they too may learn the overwhelming evidence we have for a loving God who loves us and has a future plan for us for eternity.
I'm Dr. John Ashton.
You've been listening to Faith and Science. Have a great day.
You have been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
