Science and Belief in God

Introduction

Well, I want to thank the elders for the privilege of speaking with you this evening on this topic. Is the microphone on? Is everything good? All right. How dare I question the IT guys? Good to see everybody tonight. Thank you for turning out for this series. The elders have also agreed that we’ll teach this series like we were in my science class. So welcome to my science class, everybody. I hope you’re here and ready to listen because there’s lots to talk about and lots to represent, which I pray will increase your faith in the God who made us. Thank you for singing that song so well as you did. So you see the topic tonight. Christianity and science. Conflict or coherence. I took that title from this little book by Henry Schaefer.

Anybody in this room ever heard of Henry Schaefer? Probably not. He’s not that well known, but he is an outstanding professor of chemistry that’s taught in lots of the best schools in America. And the book Science and Christianity Conflict or Coherence is his treatise that came out of a class he taught at the University of Georgia for many years for college credit that spoke to the fact that there is coherence between Christianity and science, not conflict. And this book is full of examples of many other scientists who believe the same thing. So it is an excellent treatise, and I’d recommend it to you. I’m going to be talking this week about a whole lot of books that you may be interested in pursuing. Because we’re just barely going to touch the hem of the garment of a lot of things.

And if you want to dig in more deeply, you need to get these books and dig in for yourself. So I’m going to provide Tony, our expert, IAV and IT guy, with a copy of a bibliography that I have made that has all the books I’m going to mention and a whole bunch of others. And the best ones have four stars. So you’ll know which ones you ought to start with. So that’s where this title comes from. And I like it because Dr. Schaeffer is a widely respected chemistry professor and an open proponent of belief in God, in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, and the Bible as the Word of God. So it is the case, ladies and gentlemen, that the Bible, which of course is the text upon which Christianity is based, makes a claim that supports what I’m about to do tonight.

So I’m going to read those to you to start with. When I do this series of lectures in a church building like this, it is important to me to begin with passages of scripture. Because I want you to see that God in his own word has testified that what we’re about to do tonight is supported by his word. So let’s go to Psalm chapter 19 in the Old Testament. This Psalm of David says, the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night reveals knowledge. There’s no speech nor language where their voice is not heard, and their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.

This is one of my many passages in the Old Testament that say the natural world gives a testimony that there is a God. So that’s a passage in the Old Testament supporting the notion that we can look at the natural world and come to know that it’s reasonable to believe there’s a God. Then I want you to turn to Romans chapter 1 in the New Testament. And this really is the theme passage for this week. It begins in verse 18, Romans 1. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness and ungodliness of men who suppress the truth and unrighteousness. Because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them.

Why is that? Verse 20. For the invisible, since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power in Godhead, so that they are without excuse. So, what this passage says is you can see the invisible God. God is not a being that can be observed like a physical object, but you can see him. And how is that? You can see that he has eternal power and a divine nature by examining the things that are made. Ladies and gentlemen, that is revolving around an observation of nature. And that’s what science is about. It’s observing nature. And it’s the famous argument from design. When you see evidence of design, you immediately think somebody designed that.

And that’s the approach we will be taking in this series. I’m using every night this week the argument from design. And when I get finished, I hope you will, by the way, listen to all three, and then go do your study for yourself as well. I hope you will be overwhelmed with the evidence from the natural world that there is a God. I’m starting that with this notion. The Bible itself says it’s appropriate to examine nature because there’s a grand testimony that God exists. So please don’t take any offense. If I say for the rest of my time this evening, I’m going to put this book right over here. Love to speak from that book as you might have noticed from yesterday. But God has another book.

And we’re going to turn our attention tonight to his other book.

1. Key Scientists Were Strong Believers in God

And since this is a class, I want interaction. I’m keeping you involved. I mentioned yesterday in my Bible class that I don’t allow sleeping. So I’ll say it again. I expect you to stay awake and alert because we’ve got lots to talk about. And if you start getting sleepy, we’ll do something about that. Remember yesterday? Yeah. And I understand why you get sleepy. If I were sitting in your chair, I’d get sleepy too. But I don’t allow it. So I’m going to keep you with me, I hope. And when I ask you to participate, I want you to do it. Because this class is going to be more meaningful to you the more involved you are. All right. That’s my introduction. Let’s get at it. Many of the key scientists in the age of enlightenment, A.D.

1600 to 1800, were strong believers in God, in Jesus Christ, and in the Bible as the Word of God. That was the foundation, ladies and gentlemen, of the scientific method. Because it’s in that period of the Renaissance that men began to understand better how to try properly observe nature. So when people say that Christianity and science are in conflict today, these gentlemen, about which we’re going to speak in a moment, would have absolute disagreement with that. So would Dr. Schaefer in his book and hundreds and hundreds of other scientists that have ever lived. And I firmly disagree that there’s conflict. No, while there are people today that say you cannot be a believer in God and a good scientist at the same time, they are absolutely wrong.

And I want to show you why. Let’s start with Johannes Kepler. How many of you have ever heard of Johannes Kepler? About four or five of you. So he’s not the most popular scientist that has ever been. But I want to tell you if you study his life, he’s an amazing scientist. He is credited as an astronomer of examining the evidence that he had in those days. We’re talking the 15 and 1600s of the heavens to the point that he was able to describe the planetary motion and he determined that it was elliptical rather than circular, which was quite a change from what men believed quite firmly. And his evidence was based on what had been observed by great astronomers like Tycho Brahe and many others.

But folks, he did all his calculations using logarithms. God forbid. We have calculators.

I want you to listen to what he said. I was merely thinking God’s thoughts after him. Since we astronomers are the priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature, it benefits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather above all else of the glory of God. Don’t you love that? He believed that when he was discovering things about nature, he was thinking God’s thoughts after him. And unfolding to mankind the secrets of the universe which God made. That was not unusual in those days, as these men uncovered some of the great evidences of God. How about this one? How many have heard of Isaac Newton? You better raise your hand for that one. He’s probably the greatest scientist that ever lived, I think so.

And I can give you lots of reasons for that. He independently invented the calculus. I taught calculus for about 30 years. Some of you were my students. And you may remember that we had calculus at 8:15 in the morning, right, Kathy. Best hour of the day, class. You walk into my calculus class at 8:15 and I’m smiling. Good morning. Happy to have you. You’re studying a topic that’s the most important class you will take if you’re in the mathematics and sciences, because it studies the subject of infinity. And infinity is the closest you’ll ever get to thinking God’s thoughts after him. So I’m not going to teach you calculus tonight, but not only did Isaac Newton teach it, he invented it.

And of course, used it for amazing things. He also formulated the classic laws of motion, and he invented and applied the universal laws of gravitation. He’s credited with mathematically describing the law of gravity, which impacts us all, and which has had tremendous influence in the science in the natural world. He built the first practical reflecting telescope. He pioneered studies of light and optics. His works on optics opened up the vistas for so many further discoveries after that. And he theoretically determined the speed of sound, and we could fill this board and these whole walls with things he accomplished. Now I want you to listen to something he said in the general scolium of his most important work, The Principia. It’s the general introduction. Though these bodies, speaking of the heavenly bodies in our solar system, may indeed continue in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity, yet they could by no means have at first derived their regular position of the orbits themselves from these laws.

Thus, this most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the council and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.

There is no conflict, ladies and gentlemen, between belief in God and the natural world proclaiming that. The sciences clearly do.

And notice the subheading evidences of the existence and attributes of the deity collected from the appearances in nature. The whole book is showing you how nature teaches you there is a deity. And one of the most famous parts of that book is the famous watchmaker argument. Have you heard that one? Probably most of you have. I’ll just give you just a little bit. And may I do it in British? Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to natural theology. I ask you, class, were you to walk across a heath and kick over a stone, and there you found a watch. Would it be your reaction that that watch just somehow got there by itself? Highly unlikely. Were you to take that watch and examine it carefully? And by the way, he would proceed to talk about all the different intricacies of the watch.

And then he said, You would certainly declare somebody designed that. And you would be correct. Nature is full of such instances, only far more complex than any watch. And the theme for our entire course will be to study what nature shows you about the eternal watchmaker. Welcome to natural theology. That was a class everybody took, including Charles Darwin, by the way. And that class so impacted Charles Darwin that he decided to become a preacher. Were you aware of this? Because everybody’s heard of Charles Darwin. He studied to be a preacher first. Then he became the naturalist for this trip where they took around the world. He made lots of observations, and as a result of all those combinations of things, he was also a good scientist.

Made lots of observations, and coming out of that, he began to question whether every species of living things was made by God just like it is and where it is, and that species are inviolate. That means you can’t change them. And each was uniquely created, and he began to think, no, maybe species can start some other way. Which of course impacted his view about God. We’ll talk a little more about that. The fact is, he took this class. I hope we can do even better than William Paley in the next three days. Because I will tell you something. We’ve discovered in the sciences in the last hundred years more than all the time together before that about how life works. You live in the most exciting time in the history of mankind.

2. Science Turned to Scientific Materialism

So I hope you have loved the sciences. And if you haven’t, you need to start. I’m going to try to convince you. In fact, my real goal these three days is for you to walk out of here absolutely stunned with what you’ve just learned. May I say one more thing before we get into details? You’re not going to understand everything I talk about. And my conviction is I need to give you enough detail to blow you away. Whether you understand every detail of all of it or not, you’ll get the point. So don’t worry if you get lost some of the time. Get the big picture. And you will be stupefied. So here we are now in the 20th century. How many of you watched part or all of the Sagan series on the cosmos?

That was the most popular TV science program ever produced. And in the original program, here’s what he said the cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the ultimate expression of scientific materialism. And that’s what Carl Sagan believed. But ladies and gentlemen, that is not a scientific statement. Science can no more tell you that. That’s his philosophy. And he states it as if it’s the beginning of a science series. And I say, shame on him for not making such a distinction. Because that statement is not science, it’s philosophy. But that’s where our science has turned in the 20th and 21st century. And it gets worse. Richard Dawkins, 1941 to present, British evolutionary biologist and author, professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University in England, one of the most prestigious universities on earth.

I bring him up class, and I will use him several times because he has been given the title of Professor of the Public Understanding of the Sciences. And I would say to you, my judgment is he has become one of the most unlikely characters to be doing that. And he’s made all kinds of statements that cannot be supported well at all. But he’s the one trying to explain to you common folk and me what science is all about. And he’s completely wrong about any number of things. So he wrote a book called The Selfish Gene in 1976, in which he criticized positions of faith. He says faith is blind trust in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence, it is a process of non-thinking.

Well, that’s not very nice. I will tell you, no matter what position you take on origins, how things came about, it’s going to be a position of faith. You’re going to believe it based on an evidence that supports it. And it doesn’t have to be blind. Folks, in the Bible, when the Bible speaks of faith, it is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. God wants our faith to be founded on evidence. He never has expected us to just close our eyes and say, I believe it. And anybody that takes a position on origins is in the same place. So he’s totally wrong about that. And he misrepresents faith. And then he wrote another book, which is worse, called The God Delusion in 2006.

He said, if this book works as I intend, religious readers will open who open it, will be atheists when they put it down. So he just openly says, My goal is to convert you to atheism.

And then he says, among many other hateful things, God is a delusion, a psychotic delinquent invented by mad, deluded people. Is that nice? That’s not nice at all. And it’s a complete misrepresentation. So, Henry Schaeffer, Isaac Newton is a psychotic delinquent. If that’s the case, there’s an awful lot of folks that don’t agree with that. But here’s this blatant human being, the professor of the understanding of science, speaking this way. I will tell you, there are lots of scientists embarrassed by him. Doesn’t shut his mouth, however. So, how did things so radically change in 200 years? From the 1600s to the 1800s, the majority of famous scientists believed in God. Not anymore, class. The fundamental approach to science these days is scientific materialism. And if you are not in agreement with that approach, you’re going to have a difficult time becoming well respected and used.

So I want to spend just a few minutes on a little bit about the history of science in the last 200 years. Pierre Simon de Laplace, 1749 to 1827. He considered himself Isaac Newton II. He was far from it. But here’s what he said in one of his texts nature with its matter, energy, and forces could produce and maintain our solar system. There is no need for a God hypothesis. So he said. And then there was Charles Lyell, the writer of Principles of Geology, an attempt to explain the former changes in the Earth’s surface by reference to the cause now in operation, causes now in operation. His whole thesis was you don’t need God to explain geological formations either. So I’m showing you that piece by piece, people began to declare God’s not needed.

Charles Darwin’s book, which came out in 1859 called The Origin of Species. By the way, would you look with me at the subtitles? By means of natural selection or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life. Did you know that was the subtitle of his book? My opinion, ladies and gentlemen, is that book has had a greater impact in this world than any other book except the Bible. Because it has brought many people to have a lower view of God and change their religious convictions. He wrote in a very convincing way that species can be produced without God. There’s no need for designer, according to Darwin, to account for the origin of species of life. Natural selection, acting on natural variation, accounts for the appearance of design.

3. Time to Revisit the Argument from Design

And so we don’t need God anymore to produce species of living things. So Darwin said. And then in the early 1900s, O’Paren and Haldane came up with a theory that you don’t need God to produce living things from non-living things, because things back in the ancient days were different enough that you could have produced things that were living from non-living. And so now you don’t need God to produce living things either. So over the period of about 200 years, moved farther and farther away from the existence of God, and a separation developed between science and belief in God. I say, class, it’s time to revisit the argument from design. And I’m going to try to show you why, especially in this time, we need to look at that again.

So I’m going to start with this book. It’s called The Return of the God Hypothesis. It’s written by Stephen C. Meyer, as you can see. And by the way, I put these books up here if you want to come up and look at them later after this is over, and we’ll have a bibliography for you, too. Stephen Meyer has written three great books. I call them his trilogy. First was the signature in the cell, second was Darwin’s doubt, and the third is this one: the return of the God hypothesis. It’s a takeoff on what De Laplace said. We don’t need the God hypothesis. Meyer is saying what we’ve learned in the last hundred years has reinvented the notion that science teaches we do. So it’s the return of the God hypothesis.

And here’s what he says. The evidence has become overwhelming that the universe, space, matter, and time had a beginning. Did you know that most atheists didn’t want to accept that? They want nature to be eternal, then you don’t have to explain how it got here. Now, science, the abundant evidence of science is it did have a beginning, space, matter, and time. That’s a big problem for a scientific materialist. Because then who brought that about if it had a beginning? And how did that come to be? It’s problematic. And I’m not going to deal with that particular one in great depth because it’s harder and it’s more mathematical class. But I’ll have lots of books about it if you want to follow out. That the evidence is powerful now that there was a beginning.

Yes, thank you.

Second, the universe, our solar system and Earth are remarkably fine-tuned to support life on Earth and have been since the beginning. That second one is my theme for tonight. Everywhere you look, class, it looks like things are fine-tuned for us to be here. We’ll come back to that in a minute. The third thing is even the simplest forms of life at the biochemical level contain massive amounts of digital information. You see those underlying there? Being used to produce and maintain an untold number of molecular machines and complex processes. In other words, at the tiniest level, things are really complicated. And they have lots of information being used to do amazing things that sure look like somebody made that. Those three things were not known years ago.

4. The Goldilocks Enigma: Things Are Just Right

And today science strongly supports every one of them. So let’s talk a little bit about number two up there. And I’m going to do that by introducing another book here. This is called the Goldilocks Enigma. It’s by Paul Davies. Class, Paul Davies is an evolutionist through and through. He’s a scientific materialist. He does not believe in God. But he’s honest enough in his book to portray what’s really the case. So I’m going to read you just a couple of statements from his book. And the first one’s up here. One of the most significant facts about nature, arguably the most significant fact about the universe, is that we are part of it. Would you agree? It’s remarkable that there are human beings that can do the stuff we do.

We are the most remarkable creatures on the face of the earth. Then he says, everyone agrees that the universe looks as if it was designed for life. So I’m going to read you another statement here on page three. On the face of it, the universe does look as if it’s been designed by an intelligent creator expressly for the purpose of spawning sentient beings. That means beings that think. And I say, Amen. It sure looks like that everywhere you look. And he admits that. As I shall discuss in the following chapter, science is at last coming to grips with the enigma of why the universe so uncannily is fit for life. So, class, I want you to remember this one if you don’t remember anything else. What science has learned is everywhere you look, it looks like things were designed so we could live here on earth.

We human beings. That’s what it looked like. And folks, if you were in a court case, the evidence is the same for both sides. Nobody disagrees with what I’m about to tell you. The question is, how do you interpret it? And I will tell you, it’s a challenging thing for a scientific materialist to explain how everything is so fine-tuned so we can be here. It’s problematic. So he calls it the Goldilocks Enigma. Wonder why.

Kids, can y’all help me? What did Goldilocks do? Didn’t Goldilocks go out in the woods? What did she do? Yeah, she went to the house of the how many bears? Three bears. There was Daddy Bear and Mama Bear and Baby Bear. And she went inside the house and she first went to the table, didn’t she? And she found three what? Bulls of porridge. So she tested the first one and it was too hot. Then she tested the second one and it was too cold. And then she tested the third one and it was well, I don’t need better words than that. It was just right. That’s exactly right. So that’s why he calls this the Goldilocks Enigma, because everywhere you look, things are just right for us to be here.

And if you change them one teency little bit, we wouldn’t be here. That’s a fact. And that fact has been uncovered so dramatically in the last hundred years. And here’s another statement he makes in the anthropic principle. The really amazing thing is not that life on Earth is balanced on a knife edge, and it is, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife edge and would be total chaos if any of the natural constants were off even slightly. That’s the understatement of the century class. You can’t change those constants hardly at all, or you wouldn’t be here. So those are the facts. How about the details? In the 1960s, when I was in college, scientists had discovered 12 characteristics of the cosmos and our solar system fine-tuned to make human life possible.

It was just beginning to be uncovered in those days. And I can tell you that my teachers in college were telling me, you believers in God better get over it because the more we learn about the sciences and about what science can tell us, the less we need God. And they were doing that on the basis of the kinds of things I just told you. I’d love to go back and talk to some of those same professors today. Because by 2020, there were 50 at least 50 books published documenting the anthropic principle. That is, there are things that are there that if they weren’t there, we wouldn’t be here. And Hugh Ross and his staff of scientists at Reasons to Believe have cataloged over 800 fine-tuned characteristics as essential for any potential human life site in the observable universe.

5. Tampering with the Evidence: Foundational, Regional, Locational

Now, some folks don’t agree with Hugh Ross and all his analysis of that, but I’m telling you, there are hundreds of things that have to be, you say it with me. Just right. Now let’s try it again, and this time you really say it. There are hundreds of things that have to be just right. That’s exactly right. Or you wouldn’t be here. So let’s talk about a few of them. To do that, I’m going to introduce you to another book here. This is called God’s Crime Scene by Jay Warner Wallace. If you mamas and daddies want to start with a book, this is the one you ought to get first. God’s Crime Scene.

His daddy was a detective in the police force. Jay Warner Wallace became a detective in the police force. In fact, he became so good at it that they put him on the cold case detective. What’s a cold case detective guy do? Yeah, they have a case that’s old, it’s gotten cold, and he’ll take one of those cold cases and uncover it and oftentimes solve it. That’s a tough job, class. As a result of his work as a cold case detective, he was eventually convinced that Christianity was true. And he wrote this book to convert his own daddy. Hadn’t worked yet, but he’s working on it. And so this book is a wonderful treatment of how you take evidence and it can lead you to a conviction.

And that’s built on how many things are said. Just right. So, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to take a little bit of his chapter two. Every chapter in this book is built around a case that he solved. So, I’m looking at you real closely and see if anybody’s looking sleepy because this is not nighttime reading. I’m telling you the story for a purpose. The title of this chapter is Tampering with the Evidence. And let me tell you the background of this case. Something happened in a house. Two people were dead. And the question is, was that an accident or was it murder? And that’s what they had to solve. And so what you do is examine the evidence in the house and around the house and all that relates to it.

And the question is could that death have happened only by what’s in the house? Or did it take someone tampering with the evidence to make it happen? Are you with me? Are you with me, class? Nod your head. All right. Otherwise, I think you’re half asleep. Here we go. Helen knew something was wrong when her daughter Carrie failed to answer the door. It was a bright summer afternoon. Carrie said she’d be home. Her car was indeed parked in the driveway. Helen tried to peek in through the living room window, but the curtains were unusually drawn. Carrie never locked the back door, but when Helen walked around to the backyard of the old house, she found the door locked and all the windows closed. That wasn’t like Carrie.

She usually left one badly worn rear window slightly ajar. Not this time. Helen began to panic. She knew Todd and Carrie had a tumultuous marriage, one that included physical violence. Todd had moved out, but Helen was still feared for her daughter’s safety. You see, the couple had a child named Lexi. But the violence had only intensified since her birth. A week ago, Todd had threatened to kill Carrie. And just last night, Carrie had called and confided to her mother that had been another fight. When Helen couldn’t get Carrie to answer the door that afternoon, she decided to call the police. The officers responded and met Helen on Carrie’s front porch. After getting approval from their sergeant, they forced an entry into the home. Approaching the rear of the house, the officer began to smell gas.

So they backed out and called the hazmat team. And I’m not going to read you all the detail, but the hazmat team came, followed up by these detectives, and they did a lot of background work and they used the evidence that started to pile up. Let me just tell you four big things that they found. One, there was a pocket door at the bottom of that stairwell that led upstairs that was closed and wouldn’t open. She never closed that door. Second, the door to the master bedroom upstairs was closed, and there was a pile of laundry in front of it, dirty laundry. Are you kidding? She never would have left dirty laundry anywhere. Third, the old house had been retrofitted with a gas heater that was mounted to the wall separating the bedroom from the upstairs hallway.

The pilot light was out, but the gas valve was wide open. Fourth, we discovered, this detective said, that the gas company had turned off the gas service for lack of payment. Two days before the time of death, Todd had paid to restart that service. So they started to investigate this as a homicide. Too many factors.

Like he hated her and was going to kill her. He said he would.

Something happened outside of that house to make that gas thing be like it was.

That’s the things all around the house that were just not right. And then there were locational issues, things inside that house that didn’t add up. And when you put all that together, I will tell you the end of the story. Todd was convicted of first degree murder of his wife and daughter, who were both dead upstairs in the bed.

And nobody saw it, class. You listening to me? He was convicted on the combination of circumstantial evidence that was overwhelming. That’s very much like what we’re dealing with. And that’s what he says here. Let me read it to you. His words are better than mine. We were compelled to examine the evidence of tampering because one of one important fact, there were two dead bodies at the crime scene. In a similar way, when we look at the nature of our universe, the existence of living bodies ought to provoke an investigation. Like our murder scene, there are foundational, regional, and locational conditions, and I’m going to show you screen after screen of those in a moment that demand explanation. The foundational laws of physics, the regional properties of our solar system and the locational conditions on our planet are there.

You can observe them. But did this have to be the case? And how did these come about? Or did somebody from outside have to tamper with this? Are you following me? So let’s talk about some of the evidence that has piled up in the 20th and 21st centuries.

I could talk about one of those for the next hour. There are hundreds of them. So I want to talk about one. Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravity and expressed it mathematically. I’m going to say it to you mathematically. The force of gravity is equal to the gravitational constant times the mass of object one times the mass of object two divided by the distance between them squared. You got that? No. But that’s the formula for the force of gravity. It’s directly dependent on mass, and it’s inversely proportional to the distance squared. So the farther apart they are, the less is gravitational pull by the square. Alright? That’s a law. In that law, there’s a gravitational constant class that’s been discovered. That’s something you have to measure.

You can’t make it up. It doesn’t come from the theory. You have to measure it. And we’ve gotten so accurate on that thing. That gravitational constant has to be so you can’t change anything up to the 37th decimal place. Are you with me? And you go to the 37th place past zero. I mean past one. All the way to the end. And if you change something at that place, we wouldn’t be here. That’s how finely tuned it is. The gravitational constant has to be what it is, or you wouldn’t be here. Don’t believe me, class. You go look for yourself. Nobody disagrees with this. That’s one of the constants. The ratio of protons to electrons is another biggie. You can’t change that. Look, I think this is the best way to describe it.

Imagine you have this machine like this, and it’s got dials on it, and this is a universe-making machine. And it’s got hundreds of dials on it. And every one of those dials has to be set. The setting for the dial for this thing is different from that one, it’s different from that one. But every one of those dials has to be say it. That was weak class.

Every one of those dials on that universe’s making machine has to be just right. And what I mean by that is just right. You change any of them by one teeny little bit to the 37th power, and you wouldn’t be here.

And as Davies admits, science is finally trying to deal with it because it sure looks like somebody did this. Yes, it does. So why don’t we just admit that’s the most reasonable explanation? It’s because we’re not having God’s foot in the door, that’s why. Well, there are a whole bunch of others that we could talk about. Those are foundational type factors that affect the whole universe. Everywhere. But there are also regional factors. So we’re down now to our own galaxy, which is a pretty big place. They say there’s a hundred billion stars, and what’s our galaxy’s name, everybody? The Milky Way. And you know why we call it that. Because when you look in the sky, where out a place where you don’t have so much light, you can see this band across the sky, can’t you?

And that’s a band of stars. There’s so many of them, it’s just like a band. So we call it the Milky Way. We live in a galaxy. And in our galaxy, it has to have certain conditions, or you wouldn’t be here. That’s just the truth of the matter. So you have to have the proper type of galaxies, not just any old galaxy that will do. And so, you heard of the James Webb telescope? Put up in space in 2022. That thing has brought us, hold it, don’t what? Don’t do it yet. That thing has brought us information we’ve never had before. And I want to read you, well, I don’t have it here with me, but I’m going to quote for you what NASA said about the first picture that was released from James Webb Telescope for the public.

This was released in July of 2022, I believe. Here’s what NASA said. The picture you’re about to see, and I’m going to show it to you on the screen here in just a minute. If you took one grain of sand, one grain of sand, are you with me, class? And you held it out at arm’s length and closed one eye, what you’re about to look at is the amount of this universe that would be covered up by that grain of sand. Did you catch it? In other words, that grain of sand is going to block out a little bit of what you’re seeing, right? The piece that it’s blocking out is what you’re going to be looking at.

I don’t think you got that yet. Is that a T90 little bit of the universe? It’s enough for a grain of sand to block out. That’s not much, is it? The picture that the Webb telescope is giving us was able to project so far out into space that you’re seeing things that far away and look what’s in it. Go, lights out. All of them. See, you live in too much light around here. It’s called light pollution.

Just look at that. All of that we’ve never seen before because it was such a small place in space, we couldn’t see it, but the James Webb telescope could make pictures of it. And it’s a complex process to make pictures of that. It takes a long time. But look at all these. I mean, you might say to yourself, look at all those stars. No, class, most of those blobs are galaxies. That’s a galaxy. That’s a galaxy. So is that. See this one right here? What does that look like? Can you tell? Can you see the spirals coming out there? That’s a spiral galaxy looking at it on its top. That’s galaxies all over the place.

This is July the 12th, 2022. They released this. President Biden is the one that was given credit for releasing it. That’s called the Galaxy Cluster SmackSo 723. Look, class, what I’m telling you is there are more galaxies and stars out there than we ever dreamed. But would it be any surprise to a Bible believer that there are lots of stars? Are you kidding? God says in the Bible the stars will be like the sands of the sea, unnumer innumerable. Well, it’s more innumerable than we thought. And a lot of them are shaped into galaxies. Class, it’s problematic that there’s so many galaxies to a scientific materialist. If this universe is infinite, there shouldn’t be any globs of matter like that left. But there are more and more and more and more of them.

Lights back on. Please. Thank you. Thank you guys, by the way, for getting that done. There are three basic types of fundamental galaxies. Ellipticals, you see those? And irregulars and spirals. I will tell you, there is no disagreement. You can’t have a solar system like ours in elliptical and irregular type galaxies. There’s lots of reasons for that. It needs to be a spiral galaxy. And guess what kind of galaxy ours is? It’s a spiral galaxy. There’s a whole lot more to it than that. For example, it’s important where you are in the galaxy, not just any old place, because when you look at a spiral galaxy from a side, this is the center of it. It’s got a big old glob in there. If our solar system were sitting in here, there would be so many forces acting upon it, you would have nothing alive.

It wouldn’t even be there. There are only a couple of places in a spiral galaxy where you could have such a system, right out here or right out here. And it’s about one 150th of the total volume of that galaxy, which eliminates most of the galaxy. It’s important where you are in the galaxy. In other words, it has to be what, class? Just right. Guess where our sun and our solar system is? Right there. Isn’t that a coincidence? See, my question to you is going to be how many coincidences does it take for you to say, I give up? Somebody did that. That wasn’t a coincidence. Well, so far we’ve talked about just a tiny few, and I’m telling you, we can multiply it into the hundreds.

The location of our solar system in exactly the best place in a spiral galaxy. It’s critically important to life on Earth. But it’s not good enough just to be in the right place. You’ve got to have the right kind of star. You think any old star will do, class? Not at all. And everybody knows it. So what about our star? Well, I’m going to give you some comparisons. There’s our star compared to the planets. It’s pretty big, isn’t it? But when you compare it to other stars, like Sirius and Pollux and Arcturus, there’s our sun. Doesn’t look so big anymore, does it? Let’s go bigger. How about Aldebaron, Betelgeuse, and Antares? And where’s the sun? It’s right there. Can you see it? Neither can I. It’s one pixel right there.

So our sun is not a very big sun, not a very big star. In the spectrum of stars. Did you know there’s a bunch of stars smaller than our sun? They’re called dwarf stars. So our star is approximately in the middle. It is exactly just right. In terms of its size, very important. That’s not all. It also has to be in the proper range for temperature and for what it radiates. I’m presently developing a new lecture called the Children of Light. You class are children of light, not just because you’re Christians, but because light is absolutely critical to you being alive. And we get exactly the right kind of light from our sun. It is just right. The kind of radiation the sun puts out, and at the level it does so is extremely critical, and it’s within a very narrow, limited variable.

And if it weren’t, you wouldn’t be here. So you need to get on your knees and thank God for the sun. It’s just right in a host of ways. But it’s important where the planet is, too. Just because you have the right sun doesn’t mean you’re going to get life on a planet, right? Is anybody looking for life on Jupiter? Are you kidding? Jupiter is so huge, it has all kinds of problems. It’s going to support life. How about Neptune and Saturn and Uranus? And those are too big, class? Or too hot.

So which of these things? Well, we know there’s ones on Earth, right? What’s that one right there? Mars. No, that’s not Mars. The closest in size to Earth is Venus. And that’s Mars, and that’s Mercury, and that’s Pluto, which we’re still counting. By the way, how many moons does Pluto have? Did you find out like I asked you to? Three? You’re missing two. But I’m glad you looked. You must have looked at an old encyclopedia. Because that latest mission to Pluto discovered two more. So my next assignment class is to find out the names of the five planets of moons of Pluto. Okay? I’ll ask you tomorrow. Alright. Are they looking for life on Venus class? It’s the closest in size to the Earth. No, they’re not looking there.

You know why? It’s too hot, and most of its atmosphere is sulfuric acid. Not real good. Not a good place for living things. And it rotates backwards. It’s kind of a stupid planet. The fact is it has properties that doesn’t support life. Folks, it’s not just good enough to have a planet the right size and in the right place. You see, there’s a habitable zone around a sun where you can have living things. You have to have the temperature regulated between zero and a hundred degrees for water to exist primarily as a liquid. And that’s not just edit. So you see what I’m saying? The location of the planet’s important, but are there 16 other things about that? Yes. Size, location, how it rotates. There’s a whole host of things relative to our earth that matters.

So here’s locational things. Now we’re down to Earth itself. Folks, the Earth has to have a proper mass, a proper spin. You know how important it is how our Earth spins? Critical. Did you know it’s tilted at 23 and a half degrees? What does that help us with, class? The seasons. We have how many moons does Earth have, class? One. Did you know that our moon is? You didn’t know too well because that was terrible. We could spend a month talking about the importance of the moon to living things. And if we had more than one moon, it would just mess things up. We have the right size moon with the right rotation. There’s so many things about our moon that’s just right. And you don’t have any appreciation for that enough, but it’s the truth.

6. Design at the Nano Level

And then if you start looking at the earth itself, its atmosphere and its crust, and how many other things, and then the biochemicals that we’re going to talk about tomorrow night, and cells and the machines that are inside them. Hundreds, hundreds of things. There’s a modern day picture of one cell. You mamas and daddies and grandparents who haven’t been in school for a while. We know so much more about what’s goes on in that cell now. I’ve been reading the last two weeks a new book called How Life Works. And I want to tell you, the man who wrote it is a complete and utter evolutionist. He thinks somehow nature did all this. It makes me want to throw up. But the stuff we’re discovering about how the complexities of life at the biochemical level, it’s overwhelming.

I’ve been crying over the majesty of what we’re beginning to uncover. We don’t know anything yet. And what we do know is so powerful, there is no way on God’s earth that that happened without a designer. We are now working on things at the micro level, which is the one millionth of a meter, and the nano level, which is one billionth of a meter. We now have engineers that are called nanoengineers. That means they’re working down at the size of molecules and doing things. That’s tomorrow night class. And I’m going to finish my lecture tonight with a big old teaser. So here we go. There’s some things that are different sizes, just to give you a picture. Frog eggs are one millimeter, roughly. Paramecium is 100 micrometers.

That’s the micro level. Adenovirus is 100 nanometers. Antibodies are 10 nanometers. DNA is in the one nanometer. You’re down on the atomic level here. That’s what we’re working with. And engineers are learning all the engineering that’s taking place down at that level, class. Class, we’ve talked about out so far in space, we’ve got millions of more stars and billions of more everything than we ever knew. And all of it is organized. And now we’re down at the lowest level you can get. And everywhere we look, it’s more organized and involved and has more things that have to be just right than we ever knew. I want to introduce you to Dr. James Tour. He’s a professor of chemistry, materials science, and nanoengineering at Rice University. He’s a world-renowned expert on nanoengineering.

I’ve had the privilege of sitting in that man’s office and interviewing him and talking to him because he heard about my lectures and asked me to come meet him. He’s a humble believer in God and in Jesus Christ. He’s a Jew. But he’s a Messianic Jew. You know what that is? That’s a Jew who’s become convinced that Jesus Christ is the Messiah. And he’s blatantly open about it. He has it on his website. And he tells his students to come to me so I can tell you more about the Messiah. He has a whole list of reasons you ought to believe that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead. The key evidence that he’s the Son of God. I love that. But he’s also one of the foremost nanoengineers in the world.

Here’s one of the things he’s been working with. This graphene class. Graphene is a single layer of carbon. Just carbon. You can see it’s kind of structured there. We’ve been able to produce graphene in recent years. And now we’re testing what all it can do for us. Here’s one of the tests that he did. He took a little mouse like this, and he cut his spinal cord, severed it. That’s not nice. Then he placed graphene in there between it with some other chemical substances and closed him back up and turned the little guy loose in a cage, of course. And over the next month or so, he grew back about 80% of his capacities. There’s not a good explanation for all that yet, but it worked.

Somehow the graphene helped that knit back together. Not sure how.

Which is being decimated by our own administrations. And he may invent something that’s going to help us reinvent that whole industry, which would be wonderful. The point is the man’s a genius who’s doing all kinds of practical things using science at the nano level. So class. He has a team of about 30 people. If you’ve got things going on you can engineer at the nano level, of course you’ve got to build a car. So he’s built a nano car. You see it up there? It’s got four wheels, it’s got an axle, it’s got a drive shaft. This part turns around, and that’s what drives it. See it over here? That makes it move. It moves on gold foil. And you can make it move by shining light on it or blowing chemicals on it, and it’ll move.

It’s incredible. This series of pictures here shows you it moving. Let me see where it is here. See this, this, that, and that. It’s moved from here to there. It’s not going to fly away, folks, but it’s moving. So, of course, if you’ve got different ones making nano cars, what’s the next thing you got to do? Have a race. So we had the first international nanocar race class, April 28th and 29th in 2017 in Toulouse, France. The competitors were Austria and the U.S., which is Rice University’s team. France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and another U.S. university, Ohio University. And I’m very pleased to tell you that after the race was completed, the Austria-U.S. team won the whole thing. They win 150 nanometers in one and a half hours.

You remember what a nanometer is? Take a meter and divide it into one billion equal parts. And this thing moved 150 of those. Well, that’s about like. But that’s whipping along for a nanocar class. Switzerland came in second. They went 133 nanometers in six and a half hours. And the rest of them gave up. So is it easy to build a nanocar? No, it is not, class. Neither’s anything else at the nano level. And you’re going to tell me that those engineered things we’re seeing at the nano level weren’t designed by somebody. You need your head examined. I gotta tell you this one thing. Hang in here with me. This was the original nanocar that he designed, he and his team. Took them years. It moved 1.8 revolutions per hour at 60 degrees.

In other words, that motor moved 1.8 times in what? In an hour. I mean, it rotated one and a half times in an hour. I mean, that is slow, glass. And of course, it didn’t get anywhere. So they started over and they reproduced another one, and when they ended up using it, the only difference between this one and that one in this rotor part, look at this. You see that S right there? That’s a sulfur in this six carbon ring. Sulfur’s replaced it. Over here, it becomes a five carbon ring. That’s the only difference between those two. And so when they ran this little guy, he went three million RPS RP per second. That’s the one that won the race.

Now, class, did he know when he started designing that second car that’s how it would work out? He did not. They started over and used all their human intelligence they could work with to try to design a car that really worked. And it did. I’m telling you, that took engineers. Here’s some comments from him. The nano cars built by the Rice University team were much smaller and far less complex than the Kinesan and Dynee Walkers and other molecular machines coming in every living cell. Here’s what he said. What we did is nothing compared to what nature’s already doing. The rice team has been working on nanocars for over 20 years. Every molecular machine in living cells is much larger, at least 10,000 times, much more complex and much more sophisticated.

Here is a taste class of the amount of work and intelligence it took to produce a nanocar. What I’m about to show you is a part of an article he wrote for those guys that all lost the race to tell them what he did to build a nanocar with his team. So everybody’ll let you read that for a minute.

Details of one molecule characterization.

Are you finished? Here’s page two. That is amazingly complicated things. That’s what it took in this case. But I’m not finished because the article was produced in Tetrahedron Magazine on April the 13th. Well, he turned it in. They produced it on May the 17th, 2017. That was right after that race. He had already written this article. And look, that is 281 pages of supplemental characterization data. We showed you two. There’s 281 pages. That’s how much work it took by a team of 30 people over 20 years to produce one little silly machine that runs around.

And we know good and well they would not have happened without it. And there are all kinds of factors that have to be for a nanocar.

Conclusion

Can we honestly say that came about by any means other than God made it? I don’t think so. And then you have guys like Richard Dawkins saying, you just do blind faith, and you’re so stupid you believe in this delinquent God. Shame on him. Christianity and science are not in conflict, class. When you examine things in nature, everywhere you look is design, everywhere. And design demands a designer. And this designer must be amazingly far beyond anything we can imagine. Science shows us that everywhere we look from the macroscopic to the microscopic, things look like they are made. Or as Davies said, they look like they have to be just right. Still pretty weak. You are not stupefied yet. But you will be. You’re past it. Is it reasonable to believe in God in this scientific age class?

It has never been more reasonable in the history of mankind. And do you ever hear that in the public media? But you’re hearing it tonight. And don’t you miss tomorrow night and Wednesday night? Thank you for your careful attention and your good participation. I hope you remember just right. Because it’s the truth. Thank you.