My talk title today is “The Rock of Ages
and the Age of Rocks,” but I have been told
I have liberty to apply that, those concepts
in a metaphorical way.
“The Rock of Ages” is of course God.
“The Ages of the Rocks” is a way of referring
to scientific inquiry.
And what I want to talk about today is what
we can know or not know about the reality
of God from as Saint Paul puts it, “from
the things that are made.”
What does the natural world reveal about the
reality of God or not.
In talking about this, I’ll be going a bit
further than what I usually talk about in
just making a strictly scientific case for
intelligent design.
I’m going to look at how the case for intelligent
design might fit into a broader case for theistic
design or for the reality of God as an explanation
for not just developments in biology where
I spend most of my time working, but in the
scope of many scientific discoveries.
So I’m going to put my work on intelligent
design in a broader context today.
Now many of you may be familiar with a group
of authors known as the new atheists.
How many have heard of these folks?
Okay.
Christopher Hitchens, who unfortunately recently
passed away, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins,
perhaps the best know with his book The God
Delusion.
And Dawkins, in fact I think, typifies the
perspective of these folks because what his
main claim is, is that science properly understood
renders belief in God untenable, implausible
in the extreme.
If you understand, Dawkins argues, that life
is the result of a purely mindless, undirected
Darwinian process, then you must also understand
that life merely gives the appearance of having
been designed.
He famously says that biology is the study
of complicated things that give the appearance
of having been designed for a purpose.
What’s the key word in that quotation?
Obviously… well, purpose, except it’s
the appearance for him.
The purpose is an illusion.
It’s the appearance of design, the appearance
of a purpose.
And why is it merely an appearance?
Why is it an illusion?
Because there’s an unguided, undirected
Darwinian mechanism that has produced that
appearance without itself being guided or
directed in any way.
And so for Dawkins, since design is an illusion,
the possibility of a Designer is delusional.
He argues that the strongest reason for believing
in the existence of God was always the argument
from design, the evidence from nature.
And now that we know that that evidence is
not pointing to an actual Designer, but instead
to an undirected process that merely mimics
the power of a designing intelligence, we
can safely conclude that God is… either
does not exist or has left no evidence whatsoever
behind of His existence, such that to believe
in such a Being is effectively delusional.
This is the new atheism.
Science properly understood undercuts belief
in God.
It conflicts with the belief in God.
Now, obviously the Dawkins perspective conflicts
with the Biblical view.
If you go to the Old Testament, you find passages
like Psalm 19, in which the Psalmist says,
“The heavens declare the glory of God, and
the skies proclaim the work of His hands.”
Something about nature, says the Psalmist,
is pointing to the reality of the Creator
beyond nature.
You get the same perspective in the New Testament.
Romans 1 says, “For since the creation of
the world, God’s invisible qualities, His
eternal power and divine nature have been
clearly seen, being understood,” and I like
to italicize the last part, “being understood
from what has been made.”
The things we study in science, the things
of the natural world are part of what reveals
the reality of God and His attributes, His
power, His wisdom, His reality.
So obviously, this new atheistic perspective
runs directly counter to the biblical understanding
of the relationship between science and nature
on the one hand and God on the other.
Science, which is the study of nature, reveals
the reality of the Creator.
That’s the biblical view, directly opposite
to the view of Dawkins and the new atheists.
Of course, that’s not too surprising.
They are writing polemical works very directly
opposed to a theistic, biblical, Christian
view of reality.
What may be a little more surprising is to
realize that the perspective of the new atheist
is also diametrically opposed to the perspective
of the early modern scientists, the scientists
who are responsible for the origin of modern
science.
And here I think of people like Robert Boyle,
the famous chemist; Johannes Kepler, the famous
astronomer, who said by the way that scientists
or they were called natural philosophers at
the time, but he said that natural philosophers
have the high calling of thinking God’s
thoughts after Him; Sir Isaac Newton; Galileo.
Many of the leading scientists of the period
of time called the scientific revolution,
when modern science was getting going, were
devote men of faith and typically men of Christian
faith.
And moreover they had… well, I have on the
screen a slide from the front piece of a book
that’s actually a paraphrase of the book
of Romans.
This was written by John Ray, who was one
of the founders of modern biology.
And the book title is The Wisdom of God Manifested
in the Works of Creation.
It’s got that old-fashioned “f” for
an “s,” so you’d pronounce that “manifefted,”
I guess.
Okay.
So this shows though the deep connection in
thought between the biblical understanding
of the relationship between the natural world
and our understanding of the Creator that
was part of the way that scientists were thinking
at the time.
They had a watchword, in fact, that was part
of the inspiration for science in the first
place.
And the watchword was intelligibility.
There was a deep-seated conviction among the
scientists who were founders in the various
disciplines of science that nature was intelligible
because it had been made by a rational intellect,
namely it had been made by God.
And because God was rational, and He had a
rational mind, and had made us in His image,
such that we had rationality, we could indeed
think God’s thoughts after Him.
We could perceive the rationality, the order,
the design that had been built into the universe.
That was the very foundation of science, very
much the opposite of the view you find with
these new atheists.
A couple of years ago, actually about ten
years ago now, I had an opportunity to testify
before something called the U.S. Commission
on Civil Rights.
And they were investigating whether or not
there was viewpoint discrimination in the
teaching of biological origins in the public
schools.
Any thoughts on that?
[laughter] When I heard of the hearing, my
first thought was I wouldn’t have thought
you needed a hearing to determine that.
If you open up the standard textbook, you
get the Darwin only full-orbed Hallelujah
Chorus in virtually every textbook that’s
used in the public high schools.
Nevertheless, I testified and got quite a
grilling at first because I not only am a
Darwin skeptic, I favor the alternative idea
of intelligent design.
And one of the commissioners began to ask
me a lot of questions that seemed to reflect
a lawyerly strategy of impeachment, as if
he was trying to impeach my credibility.
“Well, did your supervisors at Cambridge
know that you have these views?
Would they have approved?
And questions like that.
And at first, I thought he was very much opposed,
but then he took a more sympathetic line in
the questioning, and he said, “Now, isn’t
this view of intelligent design that you hold
essentially the same idea that was advanced
by Johannes Kepler and Robert Boyle and Sir
Isaac Newton?”
And when I heard the name of my heroes, I
perked up, and I said, “Well, yes, it is.
That’s exactly what they believed.”
And he said…
well, I was interrupted at that point by my
opposite number at the hearing.
And she said, “Well, it’s true that Newton
believed in intelligent design, but he took
great pains to keep his ideas about religion
separate from his science.”
Notice how that was framed.
Intelligent design equals religion.
Now, I’m not one of these people that memorizes
blocks of texts or even Bible verses that
well, but it just so happened at this point
in time I had been working on an essay, which
I had in my briefcase as I’d finished it
the night before.
And it had a quotation from Sir Isaac Newton
in it.
And I found myself saying something that sounded
very impressive.
I said, “Well, but that’s not true.
In the General Scholium to the Principia,”
I said.
Doesn’t that sound impressive?
[laughter] All that means is the introduction,
but you know, the commissioners didn’t know
that.
[laughter] And so I said, “In the General
Scholium to the Principia, Sir Isaac Newton
said the following,” and I’m going to
read you the quote.
I didn’t…
I went back and looked at the transcript.
I didn’t have it quite word for word, but
it was close enough.
Here’s the quote from Newton.
He said…
O yeah, actually I said one other thing, I
said, “In the General Scholium to the Principia,
arguably the greatest work of physics ever
written.
Okay.
And it arguably is.
It’s either Newton or Einstein, you know,
so….
And this is what Newton said, he said, “Though
these bodies,” he was talking about the
fine tuning of the planetary system, the way
all the planets are delicately balanced to
maintain this beautiful stable orbit.
And he said, “Though these bodies may indeed
continue in their orbit by the mere laws of
gravity, yet they could by no means have first
derived the regular position of the orbits
themselves from those laws.
Thus this most beautiful system of the sun,
planets, and comets could only proceed from
the counsel and dominion of an intelligent
and powerful Being,” (capital “B”).
[applause]
Now, I simply made the point in follow up
that right in the introduction to the greatest
work of physics ever written, or arguably
so, Newton was making arguments for intelligent
design.
He did not separate his support for intelligent
design, or the evidence for intelligent design,
or his argument for intelligent design from
his science.
It was built into the very fabric of one of
the greatest works of physics ever written.
So that raises a question for us interestingly
in the hearing.
I was a very young professor at the time,
not nearly as well known as my opposite number,
and the commissioners knew very little about
intelligent design, so there was probably
a huge bias against our point of view.
But after I cited this passage from Newton,
there were these smiles that broke across
the faces of several of the commissioners,
and they started nodding as if, umm, this
could be more interesting than we thought,
you know.
So anyway, this little story and specifically
the quotation from Newton and from John Ray
and our understanding of the history of science
raises a really obvious question.
How did we get from Newton to Dawkins?
How did we get from the idea that nature displays
the handiwork of the Creator, such that you
can tell by examining it and looking at it,
to the idea that nature shows there is no
Creator and that belief in God is tantamount
to a delusion?
That’s a pretty big shift.
Well, as always with things like this, there
is a story.
And in this case it’s a story of intellectual
or scientific history.
And it’s largely the story of what happened
in the 19th century.
And it starts actually in the field of astronomy
where Newton himself had worked, astronomy
and physics.
There was a French physicist named Pierre
Laplace, who wrote a book right near the turn
of the 1800s.
It was published in 1799.
It was called The Celestial Mechanics.
And after its publication, Laplace was called
into a meeting with Napoleon, the Emperor.
Now, in the book The Celestial Mechanics,
Laplace attempted to do what Newton in that
last quotation said you could not do, which
is explain the origin of the solar system
as the result of purely unguided natural forces,
the basic laws of gravitation.
He had a theory called the nebular hypothesis
that suggested that the gravitational forces
cause gases to congeal in a purely natural
way.
There was no need for an intelligent and powerful
Being fine tuning the planetary orbits.
Gravity could explain it all.
Now of course, for Newton gravity was a manifestation
of God’s ordering of the universe.
But Laplace was now moving in a different
direction.
Now he’s called in before Napoleon, at least
so the story goes.
Historians are not really sure whether this
happened or it’s merely apocryphal, but
it’s a good story either way.
And Laplace comes in before Napoleon, and
Napoleon says to him, “Pierre, you’ve
made French science very proud.
You’ve shown up Sir Isaac Newton and the
British.”
Remember they are at war at the time, and…
and he had written a phenomenally important
book.
“But I have one question for you.
I’ve read Newton too, and I find mention
of God on nearly every page in his book, but
I find no mention of God in your work.”
And Laplace is said to have puffed himself
up and then said, “Sir, I have no need of
that hypothesis.”
That’s my French accent.
Sorry, it wasn’t very good, was it?
He has no need of that hypothesis.
What hypothesis?
The God hypothesis, the design hypothesis.
He thinks he can explain the origin of a very
important event in the history of the cosmos,
the origin of our solar system by reference
to purely unguided, undirected, natural forces
and natural laws.
Now this approach to understanding the history
of the cosmos extends from physics and cosmology,
eventually into geology, and then finally
into biology.
Perhaps the most important figure in this
kind of grand synthesis that arises in this
19th century is, of course, Charles Darwin.
In a leading biology textbook, college biology
textbook written by Douglas Futuyma, he explains
it this way.
He says that Darwin by coupling the undirected
purposeless variations to the blind uncaring
process of natural selection was able to make
spiritual, theological or spiritual explanations
of life superfluous, unnecessary.
He too, Darwin also, had no need of that hypothesis,
the God hypothesis, or the design hypothesis.
His mechanism of natural selection could do
what previous biologists thought only intelligent
agents could do.
Natural selection could produce the appearance
of design without being guided or directed
in any way.
So when you step back, when historians have
stepped back and looked at this roughly hundred
year period of the 19th century, historians
of science have seen that a whole series of
new developments in science came online, in
which scientists put forward theories that
attempted to explain the origin of very significant
events, the origin of the solar system, the
origin of the mountains and the canyons and
the great geologic features, the origin of
all the new species, and eventually even the
origin of life in the human species, all by
reference to purely unguided, undirected processes.
And these were all scientific theories, various
types of evolutionary theories.
And when you strung them all together, you
had a seamless story you could tell about
the history of the cosmos from the beginning
of the solar system all the way to the origin
of man and woman.
And that way of looking at the world, which
was in the 19th century very much a matter
of the science of the day, also became the
foundation of a great world view, of a philosophy.
And that philosophy has a name.
It’s sometimes called scientific materialism.
It’s the idea that science supports a materialistic
world view.
Now let’s talk about what I mean by a materialistic
world view.
How many of you are familiar with the worldview
catalog called The Universe Next Door by James
Sire.
It’s a wonderful way to get into, to understand
the different world views, the different major
philosophical systems that vie for our allegiance
today.
But Sire has a great way into this.
He talks about seven different questions that
every worldview must answer.
And a worldview by the way can you… you’re
in a “Renewing the Mind” conference, so
I’ll ask this rhetorically.
I don’t expect people to shout out.
But can you define a worldview?
Sire defines it operationally in a very effective
way.
He says a worldview is a set of more or less
coherent answers to some fundamental questions
– not questions about, for example, who’s
going to win the next election or who won
the World Series, or the composition of the
chemical formula for salt, not questions like
that, but more fundamental questions like,
what is the thing or the entity from which
everything else comes?
What’s the nature of the external world
around us?
Is it an orderly system or a chaotic system?
What’s the nature of a human being?
Are humans free to choose or are they totally
determined?
Those kinds of questions.
And of those worldview questions, Sire argues
that the one that is most fundamental is the
question he calls the prime reality question.
Technical philosophers call that the subject
of metaphysics.
And that prime reality question is this, what
is the thing or the entity from which everything
else comes?
Now, can you see that what was going on in
19th century science was in effect giving
an answer to that foundational worldview question?
So when you’re looking into these questions
of origins, you’re looking at questions
that are scientific, but they’re also incorrigibly
philosophical at the same time.
The 19th century scientific answer to the
question of the prime reality was, well in
the beginning were the particles, and the
particles became complex stuff, and that complex
chemical stuff eventually arranged itself
and became a living cell, and that living
cell evolved by undirected, unguided Darwinian
processes and produced more complex forms
of life.
And eventually one of those very complex forms
of life, namely human beings conceived of
the idea of God.
In other words the materialist worldview is…
it has God in the system, but God is an illusion,
the God delusion.
God is only an idea in the mind of man.
What’s fundamentally real, what is the thing
from which everything else has come is matter
and energy.
It’s the material stuff of which the physical
universe is made, which has been here in the
materialistic way of thinking from eternity
past.
In fact, we shouldn’t say in the beginning
were the particles.
If we’re going to be consistent scientific
materialists, we should say from eternity
past were the particles.
There was no beginning.
Okay.
Just as Christians and Jews believe that God
is the eternal, self-existent thing from which
everything else came, the materialist believes
that matter and energy are the eternal and
self-existent thing, from which everything
else comes.
Now the point is that by the end of the 19th
century, elite opinion in science and philosophy,
leading intellectuals were coming around to
this materialistic worldview and they believed
that the materialistic worldview had the support
of science itself.
It was all these origins theories that seemed
to underwrite this way of looking at the world.
So in a real sense, in an important sense,
the new atheism is not new at all.
The new atheism is actually repackaged late
19th century scientific materialism to make
best sellers.
It’s an old ideology, which is though I
must acknowledge very much still with us.
The dominant thought form on the college campus
today at the university levels, research universities,
I would say the dominant thought form in the
most of the elite, media culture and information
culture in the elite media, the law schools,
the courts, even many seminaries is this either
we sometimes call it naturalistic world view
or materialistic worldview.
And many things… many things follow from
it.
If you hold that there is no…
If you hold that the fundamental reality is
matter and energy, and that there is no God
independent of the universe that bought it
into existence, it’s very hard to also hold
to an objective morality because there is
no standard above us all to which we can appeal.
Instead we just do what we’ve been programmed
to do by the particles in motion, by the deterministic
material forces that affect us.
We don’t have freedom of choice, and we
can’t even begin to talk about what the
oughts are that are implied in moral statements.
So the worldview that you hold ends up affecting
your view of ethics, your view of the sanctity
or lack thereof of life, and many, many other
issues.
And this materialistic worldview is the dominant
way of thinking today, especially in the universities,
but because the universities are so central
to our culture, in many, many other spheres
of the elite culture.
And when students go off to college, guess
what happens to them.
They come from a religious home where they
believe in God.
Well, they very quickly encounter this very
opposite way of viewing everything.
And a lot of kids feel like they didn’t
get the memo.
All these smart professors are thinking one
way, and it’s so opposite to what they were
raised with.
And Del Tackett, who is here with us today,
will tell you that that freshman year in college
can be a killing fields for faith, alarming
statistics on the number of… of Christian
students who lose their faith in the very
first year of college.
They’re encountering a cognitive dissonance,
and it’s very acute.
Well, so far I’ve been giving you in a way
a lot of bad news, okay, that this materialistic
way of thinking is the dominant way of thinking.
And up until recently, it has had the support
of modern science.
By the way, I have a… the picture on the
screen is a worldview… a diagram depicting
the materialistic worldview.
It might help you to see it pictorially.
The circle represents the physical universe.
The pendulum represents the laws of nature.
Everything else in the circle represents all
the different aspects of physical reality.
And the key thing in the materialistic worldview
is the assertion that there’s nothing beyond
that physical sphere.
There’s no God, no Creator, no purposeful
Designer who brought the universe into existence.
The universe is eternal and self-existent.
So that’s the picture of reality that’s
very much still with us in the academy, very
much still with us in the culture.
It came from developments in 19th century
science.
The exciting news is that the testimony of
science has shifted dramatically since the
19th century when this worldview became dominant.
And so even though this worldview still is
culturally pervasive, even dominant in the
universities, the basis for the worldview
has evaporated.
That is to say, there have been a series of
discoveries in modern science, in very recent
science that undercut this way of thinking
altogether, that challenge the materialistic
worldview, and in fact I’m going to argue,
support a theistic worldview, suggest the
reality of a Creator beyond space and time
who is intelligent and also active.
Now I’m going to give you a quick survey
of some of these scientific discoveries.
The first on occurred in the field of cosmology,
and it’s often associated with the work
of Edwin Hubble, a Belgium priest named Father
Lemaitre, and other scientists working in
the nineteen teens and twenties.
Hubble is famous now, even today, because
there’s a telescope named after him.
Somebody chuckled when I said that because
if you followed the news, that poor Hubble
telescope was always broken when they were
trying to get it up and running.
How do you like that?
Make a great discovery in science, get a telescope
named after you, and then it’s always in
the news because it doesn’t work.
But anyway, Hubble came into astronomy in
the 1920s at a very propitious time.
It was at just the time that astronomers were
gaining access to these large doomed telescopes
that were able to resolve very tiny pinpoints
of light in the night sky.
Prior to Hubble and the scientists who were
looking into the night sky in the 1920s, there
was debate among astronomers as to whether
or not the Milky Way galaxy, in which we…
in which our solar system resides, was the
only galaxy, or whether there might be others
beyond it.
Hubble resolved that issue, as he also resolved
these points of light.
Because as he looked through this great doomed
telescope at the Palomar observatory at Mount
Wilson in southern California, he was able
to determine that little points of light that
had been viewed through ordinary telescopes
before and just looked like little points
actually revealed galaxies, whole galaxies
with hundreds and millions of stars.
And so the picture behind us a spindle nebula,
a type of galaxy.
And he saw spiral nebula, and many different
galaxies in every quadrant of the sky, such
that today astronomers have something they
call the Hubble deep field.
And it’s a picture of the night sky.
And if you take a little picture of any part
of the night sky – on the picture behind,
you’ll see a little square box, a little
quadrant.
Now the next slide is going to be that quadrant
amplified further, magnified further with
telescopic magnification, and you see that
even in the tiniest little square in the night
sky, there are galaxies galore.
And so the first thing that Hubble determined
was that we live in an immense universe.
It was grand in scope beyond our wildest imaginations,
galaxies in every direction.
Now that was just awe inspiring.
But there was also a very theoretically and
philosophically significant discovery that
he made that was closely associated with this,
and that is the discovery that these galaxies
are moving away from us.
In every direction of the night sky, the galaxies
are receding.
And the evidence for that came from something
called red shift.
It was light…
It’s that the light coming from these distant
galaxies – like this auditorium is a great
visual aid if you look up at just the canisters
of light, you could imagine them as galaxies
in every direction – but the light coming
from those distant galaxies was redder in
its hue, in its electromagnetic spectrum,
in its color than it would otherwise be if
the galaxies were stationary in relationship
to us.
How many have heard of the Doppler Effect?
You know of that from if you have a train
moving away from us, the sound of the train
whistle, it will drop in pitch.
Well, the drop in pitch corresponds to a shift
in wave length.
Up in Seattle we have these – I don’t
know if you can talk about beer commercials
in a church, but why not – we had these
beer commercials for Rainier Beer, and they
had these guys dressed up as beer cans that
rode around on motor bikes.
And when they… when they would at the end
of the commercial they would ride off into
the sunset saying, “Rainier Beer,” and
you had the Doppler shift happening.
[laughter] I’m probably the only person
that watched that and thought Doppler shift
rather than let’s go get a brewski, you
know.
[laughter]
Anyway, the same thing – what was my point
– yes, the same thing happens with light.
That was the point.
If you have an object receding away, the light
coming from that distant object will stretch
out and get longer wavelengths, and those
longer wavelengths of light correspond to
the red end of the ultraviolet spectrum.
If you pass that light through a prism, the
red light is longer in wavelength and indicates
a recessional velocity when it’s coming
from a distant object.
But this was an amazing discovery.
And in every direction of the night sky where
they checked this out, it was the same thing.
Every galaxy was moving away from us.
Now what do you infer from that.
Well, I have a visual aid, and it’s not
a beer can, okay.
It’s a balloon.
And this…
Hubble, you know, got to thinking about this
and he realized that if the galaxies, and
I’ve drawn these little spirals on the balloon.
Okay, so think going forward in this forward
direction of time, what’s happening?
If all the galaxies are moving away from us,
that means the universe must be expanding
outward in a kind of spherically symmetric
expansion.
So as you go forward in time, you get the
universe getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger.
Now what happens if you wind the clock backwards,
like the Saturday morning cartoons where they
make the characters go backwards?
Okay.
What if you… the technical term is back
extrapolate in time.
Well, if you go back a thousand years, if
the universe bigger or smaller?
Okay, did you go back, and go back, and go
back and back and back.
The further you go back in time, the universe
gets smaller and smaller and smaller, until
eventually you reach the beginning point of
the expansion where everything was congealed
together.
And Hubble realized that an expanding universe
implied a finite universe, a universe that
actually has a beginning, a beginning in time.
Now this was a really significant discovery
because at the very same time on the other
side of the country, there was this physicist
with bad hair named Albert Einstein.
And Einstein had come to the same conclusion
that the universe must have a beginning, but
then he said, “No, no, no, no, no, that
cannot be right.”
And Einstein came to it on the basis of his
theory of general relativity, which was a
theory of gravitation.
And the equations of his theories suggested
that… that the universe must be expanding
outward and decelerating in order for all
of the math to work out.
But when he realized that if it was expanding
outward, it must have had a beginning, he
said, “No, that can’t be right.”
So the force of…
So then he posited an arbitrary force that
was meant to counteract the force of expansion
in just the right measure so that the universe
would be static, and therefore could have
existed eternally without expanding or contracting.
This arbitrary force was called his cosmological
constant.
He picked a very precise value so it would
counteract the force of expansion that he
thought must be happening to make his gravity
equations work out.
So he by a long process of theoretical reasoning
in advanced physics, Einstein had come to
the conclusion there must be a beginning,
and then said, “No, that can’t be right,”
and then he introduced an arbitrary factor
to try to eliminate the implication of a beginning
from his own theory.
When I was a physics student, we used to call
this dry labbing, where you know the professor
gives you an experiment to do, and you know
what the answer is supposed to be, but you
do the thing with the hockey pucks on the
air table, and it’s not coming out right.
And it’s getting near the end of the period,
and you want to go to dinner, and so what
do you do?
Now, I’m not saying I ever did this, okay.
But I know some people who did.
You know, you take the… and you… you adjust
the values so they match the theory, okay.
That’s called dry labbing.
That’s essentially what Einstein, one of
the greatest physicists in the world, that’s
essentially what he did.
He fudged.
He fudged, okay, because he had a preconceived
idea that the universe must be eternal, and
that was so strong, it was such strong philosophical
predilection that he adjusted the science
to try to meet with that.
Then Hubble comes along and discovers that
the universe actually is expanding.
There must have been a beginning, and so he
invites Einstein out to California to view
the evidence that he’d been viewing through
this grand telescope.
And there’s some famous newsreel footage
where Einstein comes out and he looks through
the telescope with Hubble in the background
smoking his pipe.
And he comes out and meets the media and says,
“I now see the necessity of a beginning.”
That’s the German accent.
That was a little better, didn’t you think,
“of (auff) a beginning.”
I have an actor friend who coaches me on these
things.
It’s really pathetic.
Okay.
In any case, Einstein gets it and later says
that his cosmological constant, his little
fudge factor, was the greatest mistake of
his scientific career.
In essence, the heavens talk back, and the
testimony of the sky was that there was a
beginning to the universe.
Now, this has just set in motion a whole series
of really interesting debates and discussions
in the field of astronomy and cosmology.
And alternative theories were proposed.
One astronomer, a famous British astronomer
named Arthur Eddington, said this.
He said, “Philosophically, the notion of
the beginning of the present order is repugnant
to me.
I should like to find a genuine loophole.
I simply do not believe the present order
of things started off with a bang.
The expanding universe is preposterous.
It leaves me cold.” [said with accent -- laughter,
applause] Sorry.
I’ll stick to the science for now.
I’m sorry.
Anyway, this is in psychology a theory known
as denial.
[laughter] Do you notice how he started this
statement?
“Philosophically,” I don’t like it.
It’s not the evidence says thus and so.
It’s philosophically I don’t like it.
What’s the philosophy that makes the discovery
of a finite universe repugnant?
It’s this materialistic view we’ve been
talking about, or naturalism, the idea that
it’s matter and energy from eternity past.
If Hubble’s results are correct, they are
suggesting that matter and energy are not
from eternity past.
There was a beginning to the expansion.
Now that issue was even further clarified
by another famous physicist named Stephen
Hawking.
And writing in 1968 a famous scientific paper,
he and another physicist from Oxford – you
know Stephen Hawking, the physicist with the
Lou Gehrig’s disease in the wheelchair,
okay – and he’s at Cambridge.
Roger Penrose is a colleague at Oxford.
In 1968, the two collaborated and wrote a
famous paper showing that not only was a beginning
to the universe in time, but there was also
a beginning to space itself.
They did something, and there won’t be a
test on this afterwards, so don’t worry.
But they solved the field equations of general
relativity.
They solved some of Einstein’s equations
about how gravity works.
And you can kind of imagine this as you go
back further and further in time, there would
be more and more matter.
You see Einstein’s theory was that as matter
gets bunched together, a concentration of
matter causes a curvature of space.
That was Einstein’s theory of gravitation,
and causes preferred lines of trajectory around
concentrated matter.
So if you are thinking that way, and you think
as you go back and back in time, as matter
gets closer and closer and closer to being
all bunched up, space is going to get curved
more tightly and tightly and tightly.
And what Hawking and Penrose showed is that
the curvature of space time approaches an
infinite as you go back in time a finite amount
of time.
As you get back far enough, the curvature
of space becomes so tight that it’s infinitely
curved, infinitely tightly curved.
Now, an infinitely tightly curved space, a
not so curved space, you’ve got a big sphere,
a little tighter, a little tighter.
It keeps going tighter.
Eventually an infinitely curved space corresponds
to zero spatial volume.
Let me ask you a question, Mr. Scientific
Materialist.
How much stuff can you put in no space?
[laughter] It’s funny, but it’s also a
profound question.
I mean, it raises… the Hawking-Penrose Singularity
Theorem, as it’s called, has posed I think
a very formidable challenge to the whole worldview
of scientific materialism, because its implication
is that if there’s a zero point for time,
a singularity in time and space, it also implies
that the universe comes out of literally nothing
physical.
It’s like the view of the Medieval theologians
who believed in the doctrine of creatio ex
nihilo, creation out of nothing physical.
And that’s what we’re coming to in modern
physics and cosmology.
It’s profound.
I think it also creates the basis of a reformulation
of an ancient argument called the cosmological
argument, because if you want to explain the
origin of the universe, the cosmological argument
was the argument that… it’s the first
cause argument.
Nothing that begins to exist…
Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist; therefore, the
universe must have a cause beyond itself.
We call that cause God.
It’s an ancient argument.
During the Enlightenment, the philosophers
questioned this because no one was sure about
the second premise that the universe began
to exist.
If the universe began to exist in time and
space and matter and energy, then to explain
the origin of the universe, to give a causal
explanation for the origin of the universe,
we need to invoke a cause that transcends
matter, space, time, and energy.
And of the possible entities we could think
of that has that profile, God kind of comes
to the top of the list, okay.
We need a transcendent cause of great power
to bring the universe into existence.
So the cosmological argument is back on the
table as a result of these new developments
in cosmology.
Obviously, there’s a connection to the biblical
point of view as well.
The first words of Genesis are after all,
“In the… (beginning)” not in the eternity
past, okay.
So very interesting.
One other thing, connection, if you’re a
Christian, in the New Testament you have the
idea that the plan of God existed from before
the beginning of time, which implicitly – and
this is referred to twice – which implies
that time itself is a created entity, which
is kind of what physics and cosmology is now
indicating as well.
Time itself had a beginning.
So profound stuff – now that’s discovery
number one.
Let me give you two other things here.
These…
I won’t take quite as much time on these,
but they’re equally exciting.
So we have evidence of a transcendent cause
and a definite beginning for the universe.
But in physics there’s another discovery
that’s been made that gives us more information
about that transcendent cause if you will.
It’s the discovery of what’s known as
the fine tuning, the fine tuning of the laws
and constants of physics, as well as the initial
conditions of matter at that first micro,
micro, millisecond after the origin of the
universe.
Let me explain.
If we think about…
Here’s an illustration of what the physicists
are talking about.
Let’s just take the expansion rate of the
universe.
It turns out if the universe were expanding
even a little bit faster or a little bit slower,
we would either have what’s called – if
it was a little slower, we’d have a gravitational
recollapse, where everything would fall back
onto itself.
If it was going a little bit faster, the matter
in the universe would dissipate too quickly,
and we would end up with what’s called the
heat death of the universe.
And it further turns out that the expansion
rate of the universe is exquisitely, finely
tuned, to about one part in 10 to the 60th
power.
That’s one part in a trillion, trillion,
trillion, trillion, trillion.
Okay?
Now, I grant you, not much in comparison to
the federal budget deficit, but pretty impressive
none the less.
And if you’re an engineer and you’re familiar
with the notion of tolerances, the fine tuning
of this one parameter that makes life possible
is with an exquisite finely tuned tolerance,
a very small tolerance for error.
It’s got to be right on the bull’s-eye,
okay?
Now, I may not have made this point clear.
Why is the fine tuning important?
Well, because if things were even a little
bit different, a little too fast, a little
too slow, the universe would not be a suitable
place for life.
Life depends on these fine tuning perimeters.
Think of it as the Goldilocks universe – not
too hot, not too cold, not too fast, not too
slow, not too big, not too small, forces not
too strong, not too weak.
Everything delicately balanced to make life
possible, okay?
And there are about three dozen of these fine
tuning parameters that have been discovered
at the fundamental level in physics – things
like the strength of gravitational attraction,
the gravitational force constant as the physicists
refer to it, the speed of light, the ratio
of other fundamental forces.
And on and on it goes.
So there are lots of these parameters, and
one physicist has likened this to a… he
asks you… to get a handle on what’s going
on, he asks you to imagine that you’ve gone
into the universe creating machine.
You’re out in space traveling around with
the Starship Enterprise or something.
Do they still do that?
I think that’s old.
Anyway, you’re out in space, and you come
across this space station, and it says Universe
Creating Machine.
So you’re a physicist.
You want to know how it was done.
You’re curious.
You go inside, and you find there’s this
panel with all these dials and knobs, and
each one of them is set to a very precise
value for all these fundamental forces and
parameters of the universe.
And so you whip out your pencil.
You’re a physicist, and you make some calculations,
and you realize that if you changed any one
of those dials or sliders or knobs by one
click either way, for various reasons life
would be impossible in the universe.
And this physicist John Polkinghorne in Great
Britain says, he says, “What do you make
of that?”
He has an understated British answer.
He says, “Well, I don’t say that the atheists
are stupid.” [said with British accent - laughter]
“I just,” he says, “I would say that
the theistic design hypothesis provides a
more satisfying explanation.”
[laughter] Okay.
Another British physicist that I had the good
fortune to meet when I was a graduate student,
Sir Fred Hoyle, put it this way.
He said, “A common sense interpretation
of the data suggests that a super intellect
has monkeyed with physics and chemistry to
make life possible.”
[laughter] I like the way the monkeys always
make it into the origins debate [laughter]
even in physics.
Okay.
So that’s another huge development in modern
science that was completely unforeseen in
the 19th century.
The very fabric of the universe, the laws,
the fundamental laws and forces and constants
of physics are exquisitely, finely tuned to
make life possible.
And a common sense interpretation of that
suggests design, suggests not just a transcendent
cause but an intelligent cause that operated
from the very beginning.
Okay.
Now, the next area is the area that most fascinates
me, and that is the area of… well, the evidence
of design in biology.
You may have noticed I skipped over just a
couple slides.
The slides I skipped are concerned… all
the nanotechnology, the little machines inside
cells.
And if you want to know more about that, I
would commend to you my colleague Michael
Behe’s famous book, Darwin’s Black Box.
But in the interest of time, I want to get
to the part of the design in biology question
that I work on.
And it’s the whole question of the origin
of information.
If you want to give your computer a new function,
what do you have to give it?
Code, code, yeah, very good, code, information,
software.
Well, it turns out that the same is true in
life, and we’ve come to appreciate this
since the discovery of the structure of double
helix by Watson and Crick in 1953, and all
the amazing discoveries that happened in the
immediate wake of that.
Along the spine of the DNA molecule are four
chemicals called bases or sometimes called…
technically they’re nuclei tied bases.
And Francis Crick, who was the co-discoverer
of the structure of DNA suggested in 1957
that the… something he called the sequence
hypothesis.
And the idea of this is that these four chemicals,
the nuclei tied bases, convey information
for building all the proteins and protein
machines that our bodies need to stay alive,
that every cell in every living organism needs
to stay alive.
The machinery of life is made of proteins.
The proteins are built, Crick suggested, in
accord with instructions that are stored on
the DNA molecule, that the DNA molecule is
literally storing digital code.
And those bases that store the information
are functioning much like alphabetic letters
in a written language or digital characters
in a machine code, which is to say it’s
not the chemical properties of these chemical
sub-units in DNA that matter.
It’s their arrangement.
Think of Scrabble letters on a board.
If you’ve got a pile of them, they don’t
do you any good, but if you arrange them properly,
you can get the triple word score, you can
convey a meaning.
Well, if the nuclei tied bases along the spine…
on the spine of the DNA molecule, and they’re
represented… chemists actually represent
them with the letters A, C, G, and D. If they
are arranged properly, they provide instructions
for the cell, so that it knows how to build
these important proteins and protein machines
that the cell needs to stay alive.
Closest analogy is to something that goes
on up in Seattle where I’m from at the Boeing
plant.
And engineers will be familiar with this as
well.
It’s a technology called CAD/CAM, computer
assisted design and engineering.
A computer engineer, or an electrical or mechanical
engineer will sit at a console.
Maybe he’s trying to design a wing for an
airplane.
He’ll make some selections of some parameters.
Those selections will be literally codified
into digital form.
That digital information will be sent down
a wire.
It will be translated into a machine language
that can be read by an assembly arm and then
that information will direct, for example,
maybe the rivet… the riveting arm to put
the rivets on the right place on the airplane
– digital information being used to direct
the construction of mechanical parts.
Ford uses it.
All kinds of companies use this technology
now.
Guess where else it’s being used?
Inside the cell, even in little bacterial
cells.
We’ve got high tech in low life.
It’s incredible.
So this is the big discovery of late 20th
century biology, is that information is running
the show in life in even the simplest cells,
and that the information revolution that we
talk about in our own high-tech world has
been already at work since the beginning of
life itself.
So now, what do we make of all of this?
And this is… it turns out that the discovery
of information in living systems is… creates
a huge mystery.
And it’s not the mystery of the structure
of DNA.
Watson and Crick solved that problem.
I call this mystery, by the way, the DNA enigma.
And the DNA enigma is not the structure of
the DNA molecule.
Watson and Crick figured that out.
They elucidated the structure of DNA.
It’s not where the information for building
proteins resides.
We know where that information is stored.
It’s stored in the DNA molecule.
It’s not even what that information does.
We know what the information does.
Like the CAD/CAM plant, the information directs
the construction of the protein parts.
What’s the mystery surrounding that information?
It’s the mystery of where it came from.
It’s the mystery of origins.
It’s the mystery of the ultimate origin
of that information.
And so the discovery of the information in
DNA is closely linked to another mystery in
science, another issue in science, and that’s
the question of the origin of life itself,
because to build life, you’ve got to have
the information in DNA to build the parts
that life needs to survive.
Just like with your computer, you want your
computer to have a new function, you need
to provide it with code.
If you want to build a living cell in the
first place, you’ve got to have the information,
the instructions for building the parts of
the cell that it needs to stay alive.
So you want to explain the origin of life,
you’ve got to explain the origin of information.
And the quote up behind me is from a scientist
saying this.
Now, I first encountered this DNA enigma in
1985.
I was a young scientist, and I was working
in the oil industry at the time, and I went
to a conference where there was a scientist.
It was discussion of the origin of the universe,
the origin of life, and the origin and nature
of human consciousness, some of the big worldview
questions that arise in the scientific disciplines.
And there was a scientist there who had written
a book called the mystery of life’s origin.
And at this conference, all the scientists
discussing the origin of life were agreed
that no one had an adequate evolutionary explanation
for the origin of the first life.
Now this shocked me.
I was under the impression that the evolutionary
biologist had this question all sewn up.
I’d read the textbooks after all.
But the leading people in the field were openly
acknowledging that this was a profound mystery.
Now as it happened, I got to know one of the
scientists who was there, a mutual friend
introduced us.
His name was Charles Thaxton.
He’d written a book called The Mystery of
Life’s Origin, in which he laid out chapter
and verse the difficulties attendant attempts
to explain the origin of even the simplest
living cell by undirected chemical evolutionary
processes.
And the biggest difficult of them all was
the problem of the origin of information.
All attempts to account for it from purely
physics and chemistry, undirected natural
forces, had failed.
And Thaxton had begun to entertain the idea
in the epilogue to this book that perhaps
the information in the DNA at the foundation
of life was actually an indicator of what
he called an intelligent cause.
After all, information is the kind of thing
that minds produce.
It was an intuitive connection for him, but
one he thought he needed to propose.
Now I began to get to know him better.
He mentored me.
And a year later I was off to grad school,
and I had a burning question in the back of
my mind, and that was, could you make an argument
for this idea of an intelligent cause or the
design hypothesis or what later became known
as the idea of intelligent design?
Could you make an argument, could you make
a rigorous scientific argument for the design
hypothesis?
And as I embarked on my graduate studies,
I eventually came to the works of Charles
Darwin.
And Darwin’s work was very important in
helping me answer this question, because Darwin
said or Darwin was using a method of scientific
reasoning that helped scientists investigate
events in the remote past.
The origin of life was, after all, an event
in the remote past.
And Darwin’s method suggested that scientists
because we can’t observe what happened a
long time ago, we have to infer it.
And what we want to infer is that possible
explanation which would best explain the data.
It’s a method called the inference to the
best explanation or sometimes called the method
multiple competing hypotheses.
But that led me to another question, which
was what constitutes the best explanation
when you’re trying to explain an event in
the remote past?
And one day I was reading one of the scientists
who had been an influence in Darwin’s life,
and the light went on.
This scientist was named Charles Lyell.
He was a famous geologist.
And he said that when you’re trying to figure
out what happened a long time ago, we should
– and he was talking specifically about
geology, but the method applies to all the
historical sciences – he said we should
be looking for causes that are now in operation.
In other words, we should explain events in
the remote past by causes that we know from
our present experience have the power to produce
those events.
If you’re in eastern Washington, and you’re
a geologist and you find a layer of white
ash, well, you could posit that it was an
earthquake, or that maybe a flood did it,
or maybe a volcanic eruption.
Which one of those three is best?
Obviously the volcanic eruption.
Why?
Because of what we know from our present experience.
We know that volcanoes produce layers of ash,
and we’ve never seen an earthquake or a
flood to that.
So using this same method of reasoning, I
suddenly realized that it was possible to
make a rigorous scientific argument for intelligent
design, rather mischievously actually using
Darwin’s own method of reasoning, because
if you begin to think about what we know from
our ordinary and repeated experience, from
our present experience about what it takes
to create information, it turns out that there’s
only one known cause of the origin of information.
And that is intelligence.
It’s mind, not an underactive material process.
Another scientist I was reading at the time
put it this way.
He said, “The creation of information is
habitually associated with conscious activity.”
Well, that’s right if you think about it.
Bill Gates has said that DNA is like a software
program, only much more complex than any we’ve
ever written.
How do they build software at Microsoft?
Not by wind and erosion.
No, some people have issues with (Word)…
or you know, but never mind that, okay.
It takes a…
Generally it takes a programmer to make a
program, right?
In fact, more generally whenever we find information,
and we trace it back to its ultimate source,
we always come to a mind, not a material process.
Whether we’re talking about a hieroglyphic
inscription or a newspaper headline or information
imbedded in a radio signal or information
in a software program, whenever we trace it
back to its ultimate source, we always come
to an intelligent designer, to a mind, not
an undirected material process.
So the discovery that at the foundation of
life there is information, and that to get
life going in the first place you have to
have information points to an intelligence
at the foundation of life.
It points to the need for intelligent design
as the best explanation for the origin of
life itself.
And now notice in reasoning that way, I’m
using Darwin’s own method of reasoning to
come to a decidedly non-Darwinian conclusion,
which is that there is actually evidence of
design in biology.
And that’s the argument I make in Signature
in the Cell in much more detail.
Now, what do you get when you pull all these
strands of evidence together?
Well, we see that there’s evidence of a
definite beginning to the universe, which
seems to point to the need for a transcendent
cause beyond matter, space, time, and energy.
We also see that there’s evidence of a designing
intelligence, of design from the very beginning
of the universe with the fine tuning of the
laws of physics and chemistry.
But we also see that there’s evidence of
design that arises well after the beginning
of the universe in the history of life, suggesting
that that designing intelligence also is active
in the creation, not a deistic intelligence
or a deistic Creator that only acted at the
beginning, but an intelligent who acts at
the beginning, but also in time as well.
And so when you pull those strands of evidence
together, I argue that the best explanation
is actually a theistic design hypothesis or
the idea that God exists.
The reality of God explains the cosmological…
the evidence of the definite beginning, the
cosmological and fine tuning, as well as the
origin of information in DNA.
In other words, I hold to intelligent design,
but I also upon further deliberation about
the whole ensemble of evidence that science
is now presenting us believe that the best
explanation for the identity of the designer
is a designer who has the attributes that
Jews and Christians and the Bible itself has
long attributed to God Himself – transcendence,
intelligence, and imminence, activity within
the creation.
So I think it’s a very exciting time to
be a person of faith who is also into science.
Far from the testimony of the new atheists,
who say that science makes belief in God untenable
or delusional, I think that Saint Paul was
right, that the things that are made do reveal
the reality of the Creator.
And it’s interesting even many secular scientists
and historians of science are now acknowledging
this.
One, Frederick Burnham, a historian of science,
says this.
He says, “The idea that God created the
universe is a more respectable hypothesis
today than in any time in the last hundred
years.”
I don’t think it’s just a respectable
hypothesis.
I think it actually provides the best explanation
for this ensemble of evidence that has come
from physics, chemistry, and biology, from
as Saint Paul says, “the things that are
made.”
And so the God hypothesis is back.
And I thank you very much.
[applause]
