Matt Colby - Reasons to Believe - Class 1 - The Athiest Delusion

Automatically transcribed. Accuracy is good but not perfect, and words are sometimes wrong. Trust the audio over the text.

1. 0:00

   You could probably say that in a really broad sense. You could place everybody in the world into one of three different categories. You could say either they’re a theist, which means they they believe in either a God or multiple gods. They’re an agnostic, which means they they don’t have an opinion or they’re undecided one way or the other, or they’re an atheist, which means that they would tell you they believe that there is no God.

2. 0:35

   Now, I realize that these categories are pretty broad, and for our purposes in this class right now, when we talk about a theist, let’s talk about somebody who’s religious, and more specifically, let’s talk about a Christian. And more specifically, we want to think about ourselves. Christadelphians because there are people who could fit into this category who aren’t religious.

3. 0:57

   For example, there are people who are called deists so that deists believe in a God, but they don’t believe that that God has anything to do with mankind. They may believe that that God created all things, but there’s no message from that God, so they don’t care too much. So for our purposes, let’s say religious people, Christadelphians, Christians, belong in this left hand category, the theist.

4. 1:20

   And on the far right side we have the atheist, the person who says there is no God. And in the middle there’s this large group of people and there might be a lot of reasons why they’re undecided. They might be on the fence and they’ve looked at the evidence for God, or the evidence that there is no God and they’re undecided.

5. 1:37

   Or they may have have been religious at one point, or have been an atheist at one point and and over time they’ve just sort of gotten cynical and decided that they don’t care. Whatever the reason right now for this class, we really care about those two outside opposite categories, The two people who really most strongly disagree with each other, the theist and the atheist or the Christadelphian and the atheist.

6. 2:04

   Because there’s one thing that these two groups have in common that really bind them together in a way you might not have realized. We talk sometimes about post modernism and that’s the idea that that there’s no universal truth, there’s no absolute truth. We’ve talked about it a lot, and at this point it’s it’s actually kind of an old subject. But a lot of people in that middle category who are agnostic might feel that way.

7. 2:29

   That there’s no absolute truth, That you can have something that is truth to you and I can have something that’s truth to me, and that they can be our truths can even be opposite and opposed to each other. But because there’s no greater truth, there’s only self truth, the truth that matters to the person. And both the Christadelphian and the atheist reject that idea because just like the religious person, the atheist also believes in an absolute universal truth. Both groups are looking for truth and they care about it and they believe there is the truth that you can find. And that’s why they’re willing to say either there is a God or there is no God.

8. 3:09

   And that’s why sometimes, quite often you’ll see see people who were religious, they don’t become agnostic. They they go all the way to the other side and become atheists or people who are atheists and they all of a sudden believe in God because because the common binding characteristic is that they both care an awful lot about truth.

9. 3:28

   Now this first class, it’s the title is The Atheist Delusion and it’s based on a book that was published in 2007. So the title is kind of a parody of this book, The God Delusion. And The God Delusion was was written by a man named Richard Dawkins. Richard Dawkins is a professor of evolutionary biology at Oxford University, and he’s one of the most famous New Atheists in the world today.

10. 3:56

    So a New Atheist is sort of a more modern movement. The New Atheists are a little bit different from regular atheists and that they actually are really outspoken and disliked. They’re outspoken against religion. They think religion is is really bad and they attack it and they spend a lot of time attacking it. And this is sort of what separates the New Atheists from just general atheists.

11. 4:18

    They’re not content to just believe there’s no God. They want to attack the people who believe that there is a God and try to try to change their mind. And so when this book was published in 2007, it was very controversial. It was very popular in some circles. It was what we would call polarizing it. It created a lot of arguments.

12. 4:37

    And if you were to read it, you’d find some main themes that that run throughout it. And I’m going to, I’m going to put these main themes up on the screen. These are not chapter headings in the book or subheadings or anything like that. These are just generally the main themes you would find in the book.

13. 4:55

    So Richard Dawkins, some of his main messages in the book are these that faith is blind, but that science is based on evidence that science supports atheism and not Christianity. So in this book, even though Richard Dawkins is attacking religion and belief in a God in general, he’s very specifically doesn’t like Christianity and is attacking the Christian religion. The design is dead.

14. 5:21

    Otherwise you have to explain who designed the designer, that religion is dangerous, that nobody needs God to be moral. This is actually a slogan on the side of a bus in the UK at one time. Good without God. And it would have famous people who were also atheists whose faces were on the side of the bus, and it would say so and so is good without God. And finally, that Christian claims about the person of Jesus are not true and that his miracles violate the laws of nature.

15. 5:55

    So these are some of the themes that run throughout this book. And so you can tell it’s it’s quite a heavy book and it’s got a lot of challenges for people who who are religious people like Christadelphians who who do very much believe in God. And we’re not going to be able to tackle every single one of these items in our classes this weekend, but we’re going to cover a lot of them, and we’re going to start at the beginning of this list. Richard Dawkins has said that faith is blind, but science is based on evidence.

16. 6:26

    Now, I mentioned to you that these new atheists like Professor Richard Dawkins are very much militant. They’re outspoken in their attacks on religion and on Christianity. And this is very much true of Richard Dawkins. I’m going to show you a quote where he talks about how much he dislikes faith, how bad he thinks faith is. This quote is quite old now.

17. 6:52

    It’s from 1997, but here here are the kind of things that he has to say about faith in a publication called The Humanist he wrote. It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, mad cow disease and many others. But I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate. Faith, being belief that isn’t based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion.

18. 7:29

    Now, I don’t know if you noticed, but just there, he said that faith is just as bad as as viruses that are destroying lives that are killing hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands of people around the world. He says faith is that bad, and now he defines it as believing in something when there’s no evidence.

19. 7:49

    And Richard Dawkins, when he talks about religious beliefs and when he talks about faith, we start to see that he’s now outside of his field of expertise, because this is not how we define religious faith at all. There’s a word for that. We would call that blind faith, but that’s not biblical faith. Now I’m going to play for you a video clip. In 2007, The God Delusion was published and later that same year there was a debate between Richard Dawkins and another man named John Lennox.

20. 8:22

    And John Lennox’s a professor of mathematics and historian of science, also at Oxford University. He also is a Christian apologist, which means he spends his time defending the Christian religion and he debated Richard Dawkins on 2 occasions, and the first of those occasions was in 2007. And the subject of that first debate was The God Delusion, because it had just been published and this video clip, it’s about two minutes long.

21. 8:49

    These two men are talking about faith and the nature of faith and what it means. And here’s where things get tricky. I’m going to try to bring the laptop up here and put the microphone up against the speakers. We’ll see how that works.

22. 9:04

    Oh, thank you. That’s way better. Thank you very much. All right. I apologize for the video quality here, but hopefully the sound is good. We’ll find out.

23. 9:19

    When you say faith is rational and evidence based, I mean is that true? What needs to be faith I mean is that is that evidence for it? Why do you need to call it faith and say that evidence? Remember you said with that the faith in relative in Einstein theory of the relative is is.

24. 9:42

    That’s of course serious, but. The the evidence is is all important in Einstein. Predictions fitting with with fact and the whole body of theory. Whereas we only need to use the faith and there isn’t any evidence you should you’ve got faith in your life. Is there any evidence for that? Yes, yes, yes, plenty evidence.

25. 10:08

    I. Let’s generalize. No, I’m not my wife. Let’s say let’s. Say, let’s say in general, how do we know that somebody loves us? OK, you could use the word. It’s not. It’s not the right use of the word because you you know. Why, no. I love you because all sorts of little signs catches in the voice of people looks in the eye.

26. 10:46

    That’s the evidence. That’s not safe. Well, they’re coming down to pure, to pure magics, I think. Even if there’s too much like capacity, it’s

27. 11:21

    I like to leave that clip playing a few seconds longer than I need to so we can see Richard Dawkins sputter. But I would encourage you to go watch the whole thing, because while Richard Dawkins loses that particular discussion on the nature of faith, the whole debate is very much, very far from being one sided. It’s very interesting.

28. 11:43

    You could go online and and watch it. I think it’s about an hour long. And when he comes up against the simple contention that that yes, you can use the word faith, even when there’s evidence involved, he has to fall back on saying, well, we’ve just come down to pure semantics, which means we’ve come down to the definition of the word, which of course that was the whole nature of this discussion, debating the meaning of the word faith. Now, I’m sure that throughout the course of his life, Richard Dawkins has come into contact with many religious people who have what we would call blind faith is to say they don’t. They can’t really explain to you why they believe what they believe.

29. 12:19

    They don’t really have evidence that they know about, and I’m sure that shaped his feeling about religion in general. But that’s not biblical faith. I’d like you to come with me to Hebrews Chapter 11. And of course you might have guessed we might go here, the great chapter on faith, Hebrews Chapter 11. I’m going to start reading from the beginning of the chapter in verse one.

30. 12:44

    I’m going to read the 1st 3 verses for context, I’ll be reading from the ESV now. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen for by it. The people of old received their condom commendation. By faith. We understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.

31. 13:12

    Now when I read verse one I read from the ESV it said faith is the conviction of things not seen. Some of you are probably reading from the King James and this was probably your memory verse as it was mine, It says faith in the King James is the evidence of things not seen and that’s a good translation of the word. That word for conviction or evidence in the Greek is alejos, and it means a proof or a test, like the act of presenting evidence of the truth of something. That’s the very, very much tied in the Bible to the very definition of faith.

32. 13:45

    Our our faith is is very much based upon evidence. Biblical Faith, Christadelphian Faith. You couldn’t have it without the evidence. And the whole purpose of this series of classes as we go forward tonight and this weekend, is to talk about that evidence. Evidence that God is real, that he exists. Evidence that Jesus was his son, and that at a point in time a man really was raised from the dead. As incredible as that may seem.

33. 14:14

    Evidence that what we have in front of us truly was preserved in a unique and special way to prove to us that it really is the word of God. Evidence that the the original Christian religion in its pure form is the one true religion that contains truth. I’d like you to come with me to Romans chapter one. Have a look at this.

34. 14:35

    The Apostle Paul wrote this starting at verse 16 Romans chapter one. He said I am not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes to the Jew 1st and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith. As it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.

35. 15:18

    For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world and the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. Paul says if you simply observe nature, you can see there the stamp of the Creator. God has shown it to you. This was deliberate.

36. 15:43

    God put himself there for you to see in His very design of creation. So if you ask the question what is science? One correct answer would be it’s simply the observance of nature. It’s observing nature, cataloging it, testing it. So put another way, you could say that Paul said through science we can see the stamp of our creator. We should be able to look at science and see God. Now the title of this class, besides being based on on the book The God Delusion, is it really has two meanings, the atheist delusion and and one of them is more obvious than the other.

37. 16:26

    The first one, of course, is the one you might have thought that that atheists are are deluded and they’re thinking. But the other, less obvious meaning is, is that atheists have been deluding the world with a particular message. And the message is this, that science and religion are opposed to each other, that it’s an ongoing battle between the two and they cannot be reconciled and one or the other must win.

38. 16:54

    But they cannot live together in harmony. And just by saying science versus religion, that frames the subject in that way. And you hear that quite often today. Perhaps you’ve heard it in school. Now let’s let’s do a mental exercise here. Let’s imagine that somewhere, in some remote part of the world, in a jungle somewhere, somebody left a brand new Ford truck, and then they took off, just left it there. And nearby is a tribe of aboriginals, and this tribe has no idea that anybody else exists in the world. They don’t know anything about the rest of human society or technology or anything else.

39. 17:33

    They’re very primitive. But they stumble upon this brand new Ford truck. They can’t even begin to explain it. It doesn’t look like anything else in their environment. And let’s imagine that whoever left it there left it with a tank full of gas and the keys in the ignition. So eventually, as as they’re playing around with it, they figure out how to turn it on and they figure out how to drive it. It’s incredible.

40. 17:55

    But they can’t explain it. They can’t even begin to explain it. What do they do? What do they say? Well, the same thing that ancient humans did for hundreds of years. They say it’s magic and they say it’s a God and they worship the truck. And on the front of it are the letters Ford in a language they don’t know, they can’t understand. So this is Ford the God, and they worship the truck as as a God.

41. 18:20

    Isn’t that what happened for hundreds of years in ancient human history and many societies? But let’s imagine that over time, they’re actually able to figure it out. They can actually reverse engineer the truck, take it all apart. They figure out how it works, and they can then put it back together, maybe even build a new one.

42. 18:38

    They understand the mechanics of how the truck works. What do they do now? Well, they realized they took it apart. There was no God. They got down to the smallest piece. There was no, they didn’t find God in the truck. So not only do they say this truck is not a God, they say this truck didn’t have a creator.

43. 18:58

    It just happened. There was no mind behind this truck, despite the fact that it clearly was designed for a specific, unique purpose. No mind behind it because we can explain how it works. We can explain the mechanics of it. Now, you and I know that’s ridiculous because we have more knowledge. We know that, well, Henry Ford didn’t design this truck that you see on the screen, but certainly a team of engineers at Ford did. We know that there were many minds behind the design of this truck, and it seems ridiculous to us that somebody could look at something like that and say, no, nobody created this. But of course you see where I’m going here, because that’s what it exactly what atheists are saying. That just because we can explain many things about the universe, the mechanics of how it works, that means that there wasn’t a mind behind it all.

44. 19:49

    Because we can explain how it works. But the reality is those two things are not related at all. Just because you can explain how something works does not mean that there wasn’t a mind that created that thing.

45. 20:02

    But atheists have been convincing the world that science and religion are opposed for a long time now, and I think it all started back in the year 1860. In 1860, Darwin published his On the Origin of the Species, and of course that was quite a quite a controversial thing. When that came out, the concept of evolution was introduced to the world and and people had very strong feelings about it one way or the other. And later that same year, in 1860, there’s a famous debate that took place between two men.

46. 20:32

    And those men were on your left, Reverend Samuel Wilberforce, known as Soapy Sam. He was known as one of the best public speakers of his day, but apparently quite pretentious, which is why he was called Soapy Sam. And on the right we have TH Huxley, Thomas Henry Huxley, known also as Darwin’s Bulldog. And these two are going to debate the merits of of the theory of evolution and this famous debate And interestingly enough, Thomas Henry Huxley on your right, who would be defending the theory of evolution, didn’t really want to participate in this debate, but he had a lot of scientific colleagues who peer pressured him into doing it. They happened to be atheists also. And so the debate took place in a very crowded hall in the Museum of Natural History at Oxford University in the year 1860.

47. 21:22

    And interestingly enough, there’s no transcript of the debate. So we don’t know actually what was said, except for one thing that apparently all eyewitness accounts agree on that this took place. At one point Samuel Wilberforce said to TH Huxley, is it from your grandfather or your grandmother that you claimed descent from a monkey? And TH Huxley, clearly angry and red faced, composed himself and stood up and calmly replied.

48. 21:50

    I would not be ashamed to have a monkey as an ancestor, but I would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth. And that comment apparently had such an impact on the audience that one woman fainted and had to be carried out the bag. Now this debate has come down to us as the first great victory of science over religion.

49. 22:15

    Which is weird, because when we look at the facts, it doesn’t look like that at all. For example, TH Huxley wrote afterwards. I think the very next day he wrote. I believe that I was the most popular man in Oxford for a full 4 and 20 hours afterwards. But Samuel Wilberforce would write.

50. 22:35

    I think I thoroughly beat him. So both men felt that they had won the debate and no major newspaper picked up the story. But there was 1 magazine that did, and in the article about it, which was very short, the publication was called the Athenaeum. They said these two men, Huxley and Wilberforce have each found foe men worthy of their steel.

51. 22:58

    Which is to say in modern English that this was was a very evenly matched debate. And it turns out that Samuel Wilberforce, even though he was a theologian, he was a reverend. He was very much educated in the sciences, he knew a lot about it, and he was friends with Charles Darwin, who was sick and couldn’t attend the debate. And later Sam the Wilberforce would write a review of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species. And And Darwin himself, who was a lot less adamant about his own theories than many other scientists would eventually become, wrote this about Wilberforce’s review. He said it’s uncommonly clever.

52. 23:35

    It picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts and brings forward, well, all the difficulties it quizzes me most splendidly, said Darwin. So, So Samuel Wilberforce was not ignorant at all when it came to science. And from all factual references that we have, this was a pretty evenly matched debate. So why then has this come down to us through history as the first great victory of science over religion? Well, just that very sentence has framed it in a certain way, hasn’t it?

53. 24:05

    Science over religion, science versus religion. It’s framing the narrative to say these two things are opposed to each other. And there have been historians who have written about this debate, John Henley Brooke wrote in his book Science and Religion. It’s a significant fact that the famous clash between Huxley and the Bishop was not reported by a single London newspaper at the time. Indeed, there are no official records of the meeting, and most of the reports came from Huxley’s friends. You see, what happened is Huxley’s friends who had pressured him into participating in the in the debate. As soon as it was over, they went throughout the scientific world and they told everybody this was a great defeat of science.

54. 24:43

    Science defeated religion, a great defeat of religion by science, another historian, Frank James from the Royal Institute of London, said. Had Wilberforce not been so unpopular in Oxford, he would have carried the day and not Huxley. Apparently Wilberforce was not very well liked because he was so pretentious. Even the Prime Minister of England at the time apparently had some nasty things to say about him.

55. 25:08

    So Frank James said because he was so unpopular, the favor didn’t go in his way. But this was he very much carried his own weight in this debate. And ever since that time, this has been the narrative science versus religion. The two have to be at odds with each other. That’s the way it would seem when you say it like that. And yet the Apostle Paul said in Romans chapter one that when you look at creation, at the things that that God has put into place, you should be able to see the stamp of the Creator. And if you can’t then you’re ignorant, said the Apostle Paul in Romans chapter one.

56. 25:49

    And so here we are today talking about it still. And from here on out, I want to start by saying that I’m, I’m not a scientist. I think it’s important to acknowledge that I’m not an expert in, in some of the fields I’m going to be talking about, which is why I’m going to rely on people who are in this class and especially in the third class today. These two, those two classes will be based in the sciences and in math.

57. 26:13

    I’m going to rely on people who are at the top of their field scientists and some of them are Christians and some of them are atheists and some of them are agnostic and we’re going to see what they have to say about it despite whatever their belief system might be. And the 1st Ave. of the sciences I want to talk about is genetics.

58. 26:29

    I hope this doesn’t make you too uncomfortable if you if you don’t like this subject in school. But most of you have probably seen this, a strand of DNA and on the right hand side you see DNA and on the left hand side you see RNA. Inside of all living cells, we have DNA and the DNA is called a double Helix structure, which means it’s kind of like a ladder, but a ladder that’s been twisted and twisted and twisted and the the sides of that ladder are made-up of sugar phosphates and inside are rungs, if you will, of each ladder and those rungs have two pieces each one of those two pieces on every rung is called a nucleobase and those two nucleobases are joined in the middle but by a weak bond. So it’s very easy to go down the middle and just split it right in two and get a strand of RNA.

59. 27:19

    And those nucleobases, there’s only four of them in DNA, cytosine, guanine, adenine and thymine. And scientists have categorized them. So they’re simple by letters, CGA and T, as you can see. And the order of those nucleobases in a strand of DNA is extremely important because this is actually we’ve discovered it’s actually a language built inside of all things DNA, has been described as a like a computer program or a computer hard disk. It contains a database of information and the program to produce a specified product.

60. 27:54

    Now when the DNA splits in two, and we’re going to talk about a little bit about how that works in a second, the nucleobases are almost all the same and the half of a strand of DNA which becomes RNA except for the very last one. So thymine is replaced with uracil. Now, for life to continue to exist, all living cells have to continue to replicate themselves.

61. 28:17

    And to do that, the DNA itself is split in two, and it will actually also leave the cell that it’s in. So a DNA will split from 1 strand into two new strands. Here’s a diagram of that and something called the healer case. Kind of like a pair of scissors walks right down the middle of the strand and cuts it in two into two different pieces. And then an enzyme called adna polymerase walks up to each half of each strand and builds the other half of that strand of DNA.

62. 28:44

    And as it goes along, it puts all the nucleobases in place for each rung of of that ladder. And that DNA polymerase, once it’s done with a new strand, it actually walks back and forth up the strand as a proofreader to make sure that nothing’s out of place. If it finds a nucleobase that’s wrong, it kicks it out, puts the right one in.

63. 29:05

    So every once in a while it doesn’t catch it and there’s a mistake. That’s what we call a genetic mutation. So each of the between 10 and 100 trillion cells in the human body contains a database larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica. And the human genome is over 3 1/2 billion letters long. If you think of letters as those nucleobases CGA and T 3 1/2 billion letters long. Which is why there was a project called the Human Genome Project. Remember that it was completed in 2003. It took a long time to decode the entire human genetic code. So the RNA will also leave the cell behind and enter this thing which is called a ribosome, which to us you know is microscopically small.

64. 29:55

    But on the on the subatomic level, it’s actually quite big. It’s like a giant translation machine and the RNE gets RNA strand as you see there, it’s fed into the ribosome. And as it gets fed in the, the ribosome reads every single nucleobase like a letter, like it’s translating a code as it comes along and every single piece that it sees is the next piece of the recipe for protein that is being created.

65. 30:20

    And as this happens, proteins are being created within the ribosome. Here’s where it gets really interesting. You cannot have DNA without first having proteins, but you can’t create proteins without having DNA as the recipe. You see. The two cannot exist without each other. So the theory of evolution is based on the idea that life arose from many, many steps of very simple processes, from very simple to more and more complex. But every single step in that process was very simple. Well, this presents a problem to that, because at a certain point you get what you might have heard before, the term irreducible complexity.

66. 31:10

    It’s the all question which came first, the chicken or the egg? Because you can’t have DNA without proteins, but you can’t create proteins without DNA, which would suggest at some point there was a chemist involved, a mind to put these two things together for the first time.

67. 31:28

    And if you think that maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about because I’m not a scientist, let’s rely on some scientists. The man who was the leader of the Human Genome Project was a man named Francis Collins and in 2003 it was publicly announced that the project was completed And at the public announcement of the completion of the Human Genome Project, this is what Francis Collins had to say to the press. It is humbling for me and awe inspiring to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book previously known only to God.

68. 32:05

    You see, Francis Collins is and was a Christian, not in spite of his professional work, but because of what he saw. He’s on the breaking edge of the work in genetics, and everything he saw proved to him that there must have been a mind behind it all. Now, before the advent of some of the more popular New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, one of the most well respected atheists in the world was a man named Anthony Flu. And in 2003, Anthony Flu was pretty old, and he’d spent his entire career being an advocate for atheism. But in 2004, he switched teams, he changed his mind, and he said I’m not an atheist anymore.

69. 32:54

    And here’s what he said in an interview with ABC News in 2003. He said my whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato’s Socrates. Follow the evidence wherever it leads. Well, I like this quote. I think it’s a very intellectually honest one. If you’re really looking for truth, then you’re going to be all consumed by the evidence and you’re going to follow it in whatever direction it leads. So he says, I’ve always said wherever the evidence takes me, that’s where I’ll go.

70. 33:21

    You see the title of this interview. Famous atheist now Believes in God. And it’s no coincidence that this happened in 2004, right after the completion of the Human Genome Project, because at a symposium a little bit later, this is what he had to say. The reason why he said what I think the DNA material has done is show that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements together.

71. 33:49

    The enormous complexity by which the results were achieved looked to me like the work of intelligence. And he said there must have been a mind behind it all. Now, to be fair to you right now, Anthony Flew didn’t become a Christian. He became what I described earlier, a deist, somebody who believes that there must be a God, but but that that God doesn’t speak to us now.

72. 34:10

    So he wasn’t religious in that sense. But you can imagine how this affected the new Atheist community. At the time they were not very happy with Anthony Flu making this announcement and Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and others. Well, they said this once, Great mind has gone senile and soft and it’s a real tragedy. But if you were to go back to and watch YouTube videos of clips, interviews with Anthony Flu at this time, you’ll find that this guy, at this time in his life, when he changed and said I’m no longer an atheist, he was anything but senile. You’ll find him eloquent and intelligent. He died in 2010, but he died believing in God because of where the evidence LED in the genetic field. Now I want to switch to another Ave. of science. This is physics at the big sense and the big sense, we’re looking at the whole universe now, and I don’t even pretend to be able to explain this equation to you, but this is one of Einstein’s field equations, and right in the middle of it is this symbol, this one here it’s the Greek symbol Lambda. And in this field equation it represents the value of the energy density of the vacuum of space. And when Einstein came up with this equation, he believed that the universe was static.

73. 35:28

    That means it’s not moving, just sitting here in one place, which means that that number, which is referred to as the cosmological constant, was 0. Einstein would later call this his single greatest blunder, because later we discovered that the universe actually is not sitting still. It’s not static. It’s expanding. And in the 1990s, we discovered that not only is the universe expanding, it’s accelerating in its expansion.

74. 35:58

    So it’s not expanding at a constant pace, it’s expanding at an ever more rapid rate, which means that this cosmological constant representing the energy density in the vacuum of space, had to be something other than 0. And scientists don’t know exactly what that number is. They’ve got a theory that it’s something like this 10 to the power of -120, which is an extremely infinitesimally small number. Whatever that number is, if it was just marginally larger or smaller, the universe we are in today would look nothing like the universe we’re in today.

75. 36:50

    It would either collapse upon itself or fly apart. That number has to be exactly what it is. This is what is referred to by many as the fine tuning of the universe and in a documentary called Particle Fever about the discovery of the Higgs boson. If you don’t know about that, I’m going to tell you a little bit about it in a minute, one of the world’s youngest and brightest physicists named Nima Akani Hamed, says. This about the cosmological constant, he says. It needs to have an extremely precise value, and if the value is different even by a tiny bit, it would radically change what the world looks like around us.

76. 37:31

    If you saw a situation where a parameter has a very dangerous value, where if you change it a little bit, the world would change radically and we’d be dead, you would wonder where that came from. How is that possible? So just on the face of it, you would look at the situation and say, wow, someone really cared to put this parameter at just the right value so that we get to be here and that it’s a pleasant universe. This is the sort of thing that really keeps you up at night. Now, I’ve looked into Nimr Khani Hamad. I really wanted to know what his beliefs were. Is he an atheist?

77. 38:05

    Is he, is he religious? Is he agnostic? I couldn’t find out. I don’t know. But nevertheless, here’s a scientist, a physicist at the top of his field, saying this kind of stuff. Man, think about it all night long. Sometimes it just seems like there must have been a mathematician behind it all. Now, if you’ve looked at the titles of these classes, you’ll know that the third class is called the language of mathematics.

78. 38:30

    So stay tuned for that one. I want to talk to you about something that’s kind of a dangerous mindset sometimes for people who believe in God. It’s a phrase. It’s called God of the Gaps. God of the Gaps is the mindset that goes like this. You believe that whatever God has done, we’re incapable of being able to explain it or comprehend it in any way. So if we can explain it, maybe that means God didn’t do it. Now we don’t think that.

79. 39:07

    We don’t think that far through, but often perhaps we fall into this trap of thinking that we’ll never be able to understand this stuff because God is so much greater than we are. We’ll never be able to explain it. But the problem with thinking that way is that the God that you believe in exists within the gaps of human understanding.

80. 39:23

    Things that we didn’t know 100 years ago that we thought of as miraculous, we can now explain the mechanics of how those things work. So if this is the way you think, then the God you believe in is shrinking as scientific understanding grows. And so the important thing to understand is that God is the God of the whole show and we might be able to explain some of what he’s done.

81. 39:45

    That doesn’t mean he didn’t design it. Just because those Aboriginals tore apart that Ford truck and there was no God inside doesn’t mean that there is no God. Just because you can explain the mechanics of how the universe works doesn’t mean there was a mind behind it all. Especially when you look at every Ave. of science and you see purpose there. That’s the stamp of the creator that Paul talked about. Every once in a while we think as a species, maybe as as a scientific community, scientific community thinks they’re about to close the door, close the gap on some grand subject only to realize that, man, we really didn’t know anything at all, did we?

82. 40:27

    And this is the case with the discovery of the Higgs boson. We talked about the mass, energy density in the vacuum of space and and the reality is in space things move the way they shouldn’t based on what we could see before the discovery of the Higgs boson. So that there was theorized this field called a Higgs field by a scientist named Peter Higgs.

83. 40:45

    And that’s some other scientists in the 1960s think of it kind of like just molasses, which would describe why things move slowly through space when it seems like they should move a lot faster. Some uninvisible field that we can’t see. And if this were true, then he defined what the particle that would look like that created this field.

84. 41:05

    It was called the Higgs boson. It would look like this. It would have these characteristics, but it would be really hard to see. And it wasn’t until modern times that we had the technology to be able to see it. And from 1998 to 2008, a Large Hadron Collider was built in Geneva, Switzerland. This is a 27 kilometer long loop. It’s a particle accelerator.

85. 41:25

    It shoots particles around and around so they’re almost the speed of light and then it crashes them into each other. And it has very precise cameras that take pictures of what happens in a very minuscule fraction of a cent second and that moment when the explosion occurs. And finally, we had the technology to be able to see and discover the Higgs boson if it really exists, and they had to test it for a few years. It wasn’t until 2012, when the first Test was officially performed with the Large Hadron Collider and around the world, scientists sat in rooms with televisions, sometimes in the middle of the night in some parts of the world, waiting to hear if they’d see it.

86. 42:04

    And they did. They discovered the Higgs boson, and a lot was riding on the actual mass of this particle. If it was about 115 giga electron volts, then it was going to go to prove one particular theory about the scope of the universe called a body of theories called supersymmetry, which kind of says that every particle has another corresponding particle, we just haven’t discovered them all yet. But if the mass of the Higgs boson was more like 140 giga electron volts, then it was going to instead go to prove the multiverse series of theories.

87. 42:38

    Maybe you’ve heard of the multiverse. This is the idea that there are an infinite number of other universes out there, and we just happened to be in the one that we’re in, the one that supports life, but they’re just an infinite number of others. That’s the body of of multiverse theories. And the mass of the Higgs boson was going to determine, I cannot explain to you why, but was going to determine for many scientists which one of these theories was most likely true. So several weeks went by before they’re able to actually go through all the results and confirm them. And it turned out to be right in the middle, 125 giga electron volts, which meant that nobody knew anything anymore. All the theories had to be rewritten. Neither one of them was really accurate. And at the end of that documentary I told you about earlier, particle fear, which is all about the discovery of the Higgs boson.

88. 43:30

    One of the scientists that’s featured in it had this to say, as he’s driving home from just finding out that this is the mass of the Higgs boson. He he’s still struggling to to comprehend it. And he says if this is true, the Higgs is about 125 Gev, and that means that almost all of my models are ruled out, which is pretty cool.

89. 43:51

    Supersymmetry could still be true, but it would have to be a very strange version of the theory. If it’s the multiverse, well, other universes would be amazing of course, but it would also mean that no other new particles would be discovered. So anyway, we have something to do. Scientists can be weird sometimes. He was really excited about the fact that all of his theories were wrong and he had to start all over again. He said.

90. 44:16

    Well, we’ve got work to do because there are a lot of times when we realize how small and insignificant we are in our complexity when compared to our creator, and how much we don’t have figured out. And sometimes it seems like a gap is almost closed and then it gets blown wide open again.

91. 44:35

    Now, we’ve talked a lot about science and several different scientific fields and the history of science. And you might be wondering, are we going to deal with evidence for the Bible at all, For the proof that the Bible is the inspired word of God, that Jesus is the son of God, that he really was resurrected from the dead.

92. 44:55

    And the answer is yes. We’re going to start with that tomorrow morning. And to segue into that, I want to show you another video clip, and this is a clip of the second debate that happened between the same two men you saw before, Richard Dawkins and John Lennox. This one happened in 2008.

93. 45:13

    And the Oxford Museum of Natural History, the historic site we’re seeing, the Wilberforce and TH Huxley had that debate in 1860, all those years ago. So have a listen and then we’ll close after we listen to this video that I think is just a little over 2 minutes long. Just to note this video, I’ve spliced a few parts of it together to keep 1 theme of the conversation going. So just keep that in mind.

94. 45:36

    There’s one point where somebody says, well of course it is. That’s when I jumped forward in time. It doesn’t relate to what was just said. Keep that in mind. The dog.

95. 45:49

    Division, you said that it’s under sorry, the issue among the stories that Jesus actually existed. I check for the age of the story. That is not so. And the story history is not natural science. But what I don’t understand is this why you would write something like that? I don’t think it’s very important question.

96. 46:16

    That has not even. Way of history and let’s let’s see the time and maybe like like the other vision of possibility that some sort of thing Jesus existed. However, you’re going to say that Jesus will form a virgin of Jesus water eternal washing into wine. That is probably as decided there is no religious.

97. 47:08

    So when you say anti scientific I what I mean like that is that if at the good science you constantly have to keep in mind that any then my little magic tricks. No, no. Because in order to recognize the testament called miracle, especially after God, you must be living. The universe that has regularities that will be recognized.

98. 47:43

    I agree with you with the fact that that’s exactly, I would recognize, deadly, more public all over the place. You would think it was very special, but the fact is you need two things, not one. We’ve got the regularities, which we call the laws of nature, but we’re not called in a sense descriptive that we can use.

99. 48:06

    He also need to be able to recognize those so that, for example, when Joseph discovered that his right to be very friendly, he certainly didn’t do the he was over the North. He did exactly where they stand, but he didn’t do anything. It took very special convincing for him to realize that something extremely special can happen, but science cannot stop that. The question is of course.

100. 48:36

     Did such a thing ever happened? And the central focus of the New Testament is not that which is not so readily accessible to evidence, version, perception, but the resurrection of Christ and ancient historians, fascinatingly. Basically going over ancient historians whose discipline is very available and not only Christian ancient historians, ancient historians. Many of them, even at the sceptical end of the spectrum, say that the evidence for the resurrection of Christ is very powerful.

101. 49:11

     The explosion of the Christian Church from a long process of Christian group of Jews in the 1st century, the empty trim of the whole rest of it, has even LED gates on Hermesh, is one of the most distinguished ancient historians of Oxford to to say yes to plenty and hallucinae. So we have to ask her about how being prepared to believe the story potentially or not.

102. 49:44

     So we’ve just spent a lot of time talking about science and how we can see God in the natural world and how science is not opposed to religion, that the two very much work in harmony. Apostle Paul said that you should be able to, through science, see God, and we’ve seen how that is true in in several areas of the sciences.

103. 50:05

     But once we believe that there is a God, then we’ve still got a lot of questions in front of us. Like did he speak to us? Is this book that we have in front of us reliable? Is it the word of God? Was Jesus truly the Son of God or just a regular historical figure?

104. 50:25

     And that last one is where we’re gonna start our thoughts tomorrow morning.