Dr. Hugh Ross and Dr. Faz Rana on Coast to Coast AM (Feb 16, 2000) argue that science and biblical faith align—God’s design is evident in the universe’s fine-tuning, requiring ~100 billion trillion stars for life’s chemistry, while human spiritual responses transcend mere biology. Ross dismisses most UFO claims as misinterpretations or hoaxes but acknowledges fallen angels’ potential role in supernatural phenomena, though he rejects demonic abductions as psychological. Skeptical of near-death experiences, he insists salvation hinges on accepting God’s universal revelation through nature and redemption, not evolutionary perfection or human error, suggesting divine purpose even amid imperfection. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening or good morning wherever you may be across this great land of ours, from the Hawaiian and the Haitian Islands in the West, eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, south into South America, north, all the way to the Pole, and worldwide on the internet.
At this hour, we were due to, and I think we are about to interview Dr. Hugh Ross and Dr. Fuzrana from Reasons to Believe.
Dr. Hugh Ross launched his career, he's known worldwide, at age seven when he went to the library to simply find out why stars are hot.
That's a good question in itself.
Physics and astronomy captured curiosity and never let go of them.
At age 17, he was the youngest person to ever serve as director of observations for Vancouver's Royal Astronomical Society.
With the help of a provincial scholarship and a National Research Council NRC of Canada fellowship, he completed his undergraduate degree in physics at the University of British Columbia and graduate degrees in astronomy from the University of Toronto.
NRC also sent him to the U.S. for post-doctoral studies.
At Caltech, he researched quasi-stellar objects, or quasars, if you will, some of the most distant and ancient objects in the universe.
However, not all of Hughes' discoveries had to do with astrophysics.
He observed with amazement the impact of describing for people the process by which he came to have personal faith in Jesus Christ.
So, obviously, you can tell the bent the program is going to take this morning.
With us also this night is Dr. Fuzz Rana, and I hope that I'm saying that correctly.
I doubt I am.
He is the newest executive to the staff of Reasons to Believe, the organization represented by these gentlemen, a non-profit, non-denominational organization that provides research and teaching on the harmony of God's revelation in the words of the Bible and the facts of nature.
He is vice president for science, apologetics.
Apologetics.
Interesting.
Dr. Rana attended West Virginia State College, then Ohio University, where he earned a Ph.D. in chemistry.
His post-doctoral work was conducted at the universities of Virginia and Georgia.
He was a presidential scholar, elected in two honor societies, won the Donald Klippinger Research Award, that would be two different years at Ohio University.
The good doctor worked for seven years on product development for Procter and Gamble before joining Reasons to Believe.
So it should be a very lively debate indeed, if in fact we have them both.
And we've had a little trouble with telephones, but we're going to do the best we can.
I guess we're going to begin with you, and at the bottom of the hour, we'll attempt to make the connection once again, seem to be having problems holding that connection.
At any rate, welcome to the program.
Many, many, many people, Doctor, have emailed me and faxed me and communicated that you ought to be on the show and that your organization reasons to believe is probably the most credible organization in this country to argue the kind of faith.
Is that the right word?
No, argue the facts that you believe represent and hold up the pillars of the faith you have.
I guess I would like to begin, since I've got somebody of your caliber on the phone, by challenging you with something that's occurred on this radio program over the last several months.
We've had a young man who wrote a book called Matthew Alper is his name.
And he wrote a book, Doctor, called The God Part of the Brain.
And I'm sure you're familiar, if not with that book, then certainly similar research that has been going on recently, in which a certain area of the brain is stimulated, and those people engaging in the experiments inevitably report either near-death type experiences, out-of-body experiences, or some sort of religious revelation.
And this young man contends that mankind's greatest fear is our own mortality, that our greatest fear is death, and that through the process of evolution, he contends, our brain has constructed in its own self-defense an area called the God part of the brain that virtually wires everybody on the planet to believe in something beyond
the physical life that we have now.
And indeed, if you go into the Amazon and you find, unlikely as it is, some untouched group of natives, they believe in something.
The sun or the weather or the wind or something that mankind, in essence, is wired to believe.
Well, I mean, the Bible tells us that we are body, soul, and spirit.
And so it makes sense that the spirit part of us would operate through the physical part of our body to express itself.
So in that sense, there's got to be part of the brain that's tied in with spiritual expression.
However, what's interesting is that people that are very severely retarded with different parts of the brain malfunctioning are still able to express themselves spiritually.
I mean, just like with strokes.
The part of the brain that's best adapted for that communication breaks down, it's wiped out.
Other parts of the brain shift over and take over that responsibility.
So it seemed to indicate that there's more than a biological explanation to the spirit expression of everyone.
I mean, all of us are compelled to express ourselves spiritually in one way or another.
I mean, it's like the same mistake people make when they say, well, you really can't come into a relationship with God unless you've got a certain amount of education about God.
When the truth is that education is not the big factor, rather, it's our humility to the one that's beyond us that really counts.
So intellect and education aren't what's critical.
They're helpful.
But they're not what's critical because we see that people without that also have the same responses.
There are also at, I interviewed a doctor last night, very interesting doctor, physician, internal medicine physician, who has begun to follow a kind of a different path.
And they are conducting experiments now at Duke University regarding the power of prayer.
Yes.
And they've done double-blind studies in which Christians as one group and Muslims and Buddhists and so forth and so on have prayed for individuals who are ill.
Inevitably, an incredible percentage of the individuals in the control group who were prayed for recovered so much faster with very few side effects, i.e.
prayer worked.
The catch is that it worked equally well for the Buddhists and for each different religious faction that engaged in prayer.
Just academically, however, for the sake of this conversation, let us assume the information is accurate and each group was able to get this positive response.
In what way would that bother you or would you find it reasonably easy to explain?
Well, again, I'd like to see the details of the actual study.
I mean, who was involved?
How did they identify these people?
But, you know, one aspect is that Jews really do pray to the same God as Christians.
They may have different doctrinal beliefs.
You know, Islam is a monotheistic religion.
If you look at the Quran, for example, you'll find about 25,000 words that have been borrowed from the Bible and incorporated it.
So, you know, when I'm talking to a Muslim, I say, well, I'm not critiquing that part which you borrowed from the Old and New Testament.
And there are certain elements of truth that are common to all faiths.
You know, a thing I've noticed as I've traveled around the world and say I talk to an audience that's exclusively Buddhist or exclusively Hindu, you always find within the audience a rather large fraction who know that the doctrines they've been taught within their faith don't fit with reality, don't fit with physical reality.
Something's not coming together.
And they're looking for something beyond what they've been taught.
And in fact, what I've done in coming back from overseas is saying, you know, we all have to do that.
All of us have been taught things about our belief system that are not true.
And the thing that I've noticed is it's much easier to preach the Christian faith, say, in Asia or Africa, than it is here in the United States because we're so close to the truth here, whereas you're more distant from it, it's easier to spot the errors and pull together those things that you know are true.
As it tells us in the Bible, God reveals his message to us through the record of nature.
He's written his law upon the heart of every human being.
So in that sense, God's spiritual truth has come from a single source, and that explains why there's a lot in common with the different religions of the world.
I guess what's unique to the Christian faith is that we are definitely falling short of God's standard, but we're not going to make it through human effort alone.
We need God's help, and God's help alone is what's going to get us across that barrier of imperfection that divides us from God.
I'm far from being an expert in religion, Doctor, but if a Buddhist group of Buddhists were to pray, who don't, I don't think they pray necessarily to a specific entity as such.
No, I would expect that prayers coming from individuals who have a correct perception of who God is and what God can do and would have more effective results from their prayers than those who would deny that.
I'm simply making the point that watch the label.
I know a lot of people who say, I am X, when in fact they really don't believe what the teachers of the religion teach.
They believe something quite different.
The fact that we're all held accountable to individually examine these things and see what is true.
So yeah, I would expect that there would be better results than those people who really do believe those things that are more correct about the one that created the universe.
How do we know he's the one who created the universe?
How do we know Christians, after all, are the minority, I know that because that was a question on who wants to be a millionaire the other night, are the minority in the world with regards to the world.
That would be correct, but it would also be correct to say that that word has already gone out to every living human being on the planet.
One thing the Bible says is that God clearly reveals himself through the record of nature so that everyone on the planet is without excuse because they've all been exposed to his truth.
Dr. Hugh Ross and Dr. Fozrana of an organization called Reasons to Believe, known worldwide, are my guests.
We've got them both on the line now, and we will continue in a moment.
I've been told by countless people that the website for this organization, which is linked on my site right now, which is actually www.reasons.org, is one of the best in the world with very, very convincing scientific evidence and reasons to believe.
The name of the organization, Reasons to Believe.
And Dr. Hugh Ross, we are honored to have you here along with Dr. Fazrana.
Let's back up a little bit since we have Dr. Rana here.
We were talking, Doctor, about double-blind studies involving prayer.
And I have recent information to indicate that several religious groups were invited in the blind to pray for some people that were very sick.
The results were absolutely spectacular in every case, with the people recovering at twice the rate and all kinds of impressive statistics regarding the apparent power of prayer.
Now, the doctor I had on last night, a doctor in internal medicine who has been involved in this, said that Buddhists and others had also prayed for patients who were ill with equal results.
And we're kind of tossing that around, and Dr. Ross sounded as though he was not impressed until he saw the hard data.
I interview frequently some of our nation's best physicists, theoretical physicists, people like Dr. Michio Kaku and others.
And they're very good telling us what's going on in the world of physics until we back them up to the Big Bang.
And when we get there, they get stumped.
In other words, when you ask them what was one second prior to the Big Bang, which is supposedly, I am told, something smaller than a quark, which we've not fully identified yet, expanding into everything we now know to be, which is incredible enough as a concept.
But prior to that, one second before that explosion, that Big Bang, they get stumped.
They stop, and they admit it.
And they don't know what the heck happened or how it happened.
Well, there's a small handle we can get on what happened before.
I mean, one reason why you're stumping them is that the Big Bang, based on the theory of general relativity, tells us that time is created when the universe begins.
So in that sense, before the beginning of the universe, there isn't time as we would know it and experience it.
On the other hand, the space-time theorem of general relativity does state that if there is mass in the universe and if the different objects in the universe, if their dynamics is governed by the equations of general relativity, then there must exist a cause independent of matter, energy, space, and time that's responsible for bringing into existence matter, energy, space, and time.
And since we can state with great certainty that the universe does contain mass, and due to recent experiments that indeed the equations of general relativity reliably describe the dynamics of the universe, then through pure physics alone we can establish what did exist before the Big Bang, namely the causer that was responsible for bringing into existence matter, energy, and the ten space-time dimensions along which matter and energy are distributed.
Well, the Christian faith is the one religion in the world that explicitly mentions the existence of dimensions beyond length, width, height, and time.
It does that by telling us that time is created and that God is operating through cause and effect before the existence of a time dimension of our universe.
Now by definition, time is that dimension or realm in which cause and effect phenomena take place.
Therefore what we have in the Bible is a claim that the creator of the universe, the causer of the universe, has the capacity to operate in at least the equivalent of two independent dimensions of time.
You can also deduce that from the biblical claims that from God's perspective, time can be arbitrarily shrunk or arbitrarily expanded.
Also, the Bible makes the statement God has no beginning, no ending, is uncreated.
Those statements that you see in the Old and New Testament could only be true of a being that has access to at least the equivalent of two dimensions of time.
It would be better to describe it as infinity to the infinity power.
In other words, in a single line of time, you can have an infinite number of cause and effect events sequentially strung out.
But in a plane of time, you can have an infinity of an infinity of those kinds of cause and effect expressions.
Now, it's not just time, it's also space.
There are places where the Bible speaks about the equivalent of several dimensions of space beyond length, width, and height.
The Bible is also the whole, only holy book that explicitly describes God's attributes in a way that are impossible to fit into just length, width, height, and time, but are easily conceived within 10 space-time dimensions or more.
Man's appearance on earth, if you were to appeal to a biblical date, would be very roughly 10,000 to 60,000 years ago.
The genealogies in the Bible are not complete.
If you're looking for scientific dates, we've published a book, The Genesis Question, which lists six independent dates you can use through scientific investigation to get the origin of human beings.
And they fall from 30,000 years ago to about 50,000 years ago.
Yes, but we need to understand that a literal reading of the six days of creation could be six 12-hour periods, six 24-hour periods, or six long periods of time.
All three of those are a literal reading of the text.
We believe because of what you see in the Genesis text, it can only be six consecutive long periods of time.
If there was, and I'm still struggling with this prior to the Big Bang thing, if there was no time and matter and space, well, there must have been space.
You're going to get silly layman's questions right now.
I mean, the fact that the Big Bang explosion must be so incredibly designed in order to have the universe containing life, and the fact that through general relativity, it points to a transcendent creator.
When I get a scientist on the air, which is fairly frequently, I inevitably ask them if they were in the chair that Jodi Foster was in and they were required to make a declaration of the sort that she was required to take the trip, that she was unable to give, inevitably, the scientists, the physicists, all, even after long pauses and hemming and hawing, they say, I would have to, I would have said the same thing.
No.
So I would not have had a chair on that machine.
I could not have gone to represent to another alien race that God is, that God of the Bible is the thing that I must carry forth and what is real and what I believe is real.
Well, there are lots of scientists that would espouse to the God of the Bible.
We're networked with hundreds of them across the world.
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In fact, Nature magazine published maybe about two years ago now a survey in which based on their results over 40% of scientists believe in a personal God.
Well, science by its very nature requires demonstration, evidence, proof, repeatability, all of those things that are very, very difficult in terms of reasons to believe for somebody used to pinning something down.
So how do they do that?
How do they get to their to be able to grasp and embrace?
unidentified
Well, I mean, the fact of the matter is, you know, in science you have absolute proof of nothing.
All we really ever have is practical proof or operational proof of the existence of many phenomena.
As a chemist, I've never seen an electron.
But based on operational proof, I'm convinced that an entity such as an electron must exist.
And likewise, the evidence, the circumstantial evidence, the operational proof for the existence of the God of the Bible is sufficient that I'm willing to accept the fact that there must be the God of the Bible, and I choose to conduct my life accordingly.
But what, from a scientific point of view, what specific thing or what even group of things, doctor, led you to that final incredible moment when you were able to believe?
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Well, I didn't grow up in a Christian home.
In fact, my father was Muslim and he wasn't a strict adherent to Islam, but he was committed to the Islamic faith in his own way.
I remember him praying every day to Allah and reading from the Quran.
My father also was highly educated.
He had a Ph.D. in nuclear physics.
And my mom was a non-practicing Catholic and had a master's degree in education.
She taught science and math.
So I grew up in a home that was inundated with science and in which the Christian faith was not held in very high regard.
Now, when I went off to graduate school and was studying biochemistry specifically, once I began to really appreciate what was happening inside a living cell with respect to the chemistry, there's no way in my mind could I see how the laws of chemistry and physics could account for that type of specified complexity that you see inside a living cell.
And at that point, I knew that there had to be something supernatural behind the chemistry happening inside living cells, behind the origin of life.
Now, and through a number of unrelated events, ultimately came to the point that I was open to reading the Bible for myself, objectively, seeing if it was true or not, for the first time when I was 23 years old.
And through that experience, accepted the words of the Bible as being true.
But since then, I've continued to evaluate and examine the interplay between science and the Christian faith.
And to me, the evidence is overwhelming, and it's a weight of evidence.
It's not a single observation or a single fact, if you will, but it's everything as a collective whole.
How do you account for a transcendent beginning to the universe?
How do you account for the fine-tuning you see in the universe?
How do you account for the fine-tuning you see with respect to our galaxy, our sun, our solar system, our Earth, our Earth-Moon system?
How do you account for the rapid appearance of life on the surface of the Earth under conditions in which it should not have originated?
How do you account for information in biological systems?
How do you account for the Cambrian explosion?
How do you account for the nature of the fossil record where we don't see gradual evolutionary transformations?
Well, I was going to ask about that, and I was going to ask how do you account for the dating and the fossil record that would seem to indicate hundreds of thousands, millions of years of mankind, as opposed to the much shorter amount that you believe?
And we were talking about the fossil record, I think, and how many years, hundreds of thousands or millions of years, and you don't think that man as we know him now, or even remotely as we know him now, has been around that long?
Yes, something that I think is a common misperception is that paleoanthropologists use the term human in a very different sense than you and I would use the term human.
When they refer to humans, they're not only talking about the Australopithecines, but also the more primitive bipedal Homo primates.
Wherein you and I use the term human, we are thinking about modern humans, if you will, Homo sapiens sapiens.
And so oftentimes when one picks up a magazine article or a newspaper article and you read about the latest discovery that paleontologists have made regarding humans at 2.5 million years ago, what they really are talking about is an Australopithecine find more than likely.
Not what eventually became all of us having this discussion.
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Well, you know, I mean, the question that really I think you're asking is, can we declare human evolution to be a fact?
And I've written a piece that's on our website that addresses that particular issue.
And what I think most people also are not aware of is how incomplete the data set is that paleoanthropologists are using.
And this is not meant to be a criticism towards these particular scientists.
What they're doing is exciting work.
It's very challenging work where they're trying to piece together the natural history of these particular animals on the surface of the earth.
But really, in most cases, these scientists are working with a partial skull or a partial jawbone or teeth, or occasionally they might get some post-cranial fossils, such as a partial humerus or femur or tibia, things along those lines.
But for the most part, they're looking at a very incomplete data set, and the fossils oftentimes are deformed as well.
And so from this incomplete data set, they're trying to reconstruct, quote-unquote, an evolutionary relationship between these different animals and modern humans.
But what they're assuming is that evolution indeed happened as they're interpreting the data.
So there is a presupposition that's coming into play.
Now, when you have an incomplete data set, if all you have, in fact, in some cases, some species of these Australopithecines or the Homo bicatal primates are actually only known from a single fossil.
And if you only have a handful of fossils that define a species, you really don't have a clear understanding of the variation that happens naturally within that species across time or across geographies.
And so if I have two fossils, one dated at 2.5 million years, one dated at 1.8 million years, and I see some differences in these two fossils, is that really due to a difference in species?
Am I seeing evolution at work, or am I looking at what's the natural variation?
And in fact, if you look in the paleoanthropology literature, oftentimes you will see this very debate taking place among two different philosophies in paleoanthropology known as lumping and splitting.
And lumpers tend to group everybody together as a common species, and splitters tend to break out different fossils and assign them to different species based on even subtle differences in the fossils.
And with that type of incomplete data set, paleoanthropologists cannot agree on clear phylogenetic relationships or what are the evolutionary relationships.
And so to me, you can't declare evolution a fact if each paleoanthropologist essentially has his own evolutionary tree.
And as new discoveries are made, these paleoanthropologists run out and redraw their trees.
Let's examine then modern evidence, some more modern evidence that we can get in hand readily, and that is the difference between genetically, between, say, a chimpanzee and a human being, is so small, genetically, so small, so tiny.
I mean, trying to get that 2% in a brief period of time is just not going to happen through natural causation.
Moreover, we would expect a great degree of similarity.
I mean, here are three propositions.
No creator at all, one creator, or many creators.
If you've got no creator, many creators, we'd expect a lot more differentiation of genetic material.
The similarity we see demonstrates that we're looking at a creator that conserves his miraculous input.
So he uses templates for a variety of different life forms.
So we would expect, for example, that primates would share a lot in common.
The big question is, can you explain the differences without appealing to the supernatural?
And that's where we're bringing out data to the effect that that's not going to work.
You do have to bring in the supernatural to explain the differences that we see between, say, the three large primates and human beings on the face of the earth today.
In other words, that one species existing a long time ago naturally split into a number of different arms, which explains the species we have on the face of the earth today.
One thing Fuzz and I are doing is working with a team of biologists and chemists to develop mathematical models on when and how you would expect natural speciation.
And the bottom line is it can happen through natural process alone.
Without invoking the supernatural, if you're talking about a species that's got more than a quadrillion individuals, a body size less than one centimeter, and a time between being able to give birth and be born, that's less than three months.
And what's interesting is you see field observations support for significant change for those species.
However, for the rest of the species, all we're seeing under real-time observations are extinctions.
And these same models would tell us the smaller the population, the larger the body size, the longer the generation time, the greater the likelihood for extinction before any significant change takes place through natural causation.
I've got an article here from Science and Ideas in Physics.
It's a brand new article, and it's entitled Taking a Whiff of the Primordial Soup, Recreating the Big Bang in the Laboratory.
In a tunnel near Geneva, Switzerland, scientists may have recreated the stuff of the newborn universe.
Last week, scientists from CERN, Europe's particle physics lab, announced that by flinging beams of lead atoms into a metal barrier at close to the speed of light, they may have fleetingly created a hot soup made of matter's simplest constituents.
This sub-nuclear soup, scientists believe, is the same form of matter that existed just millionths of a second after the Big Bang, 13 to 15 billion years ago.
It says all of this then coalesced into more familiar kinds of matter, the protons and neutrons found in stars, planets, our own bodies, and so forth.
Your reaction to such a discovery should it prove out?
And what's thrilling is that through these powerful particle accelerators, we can go back and duplicate those conditions that existed very early in the history of the universe and put to the test our different particle creation models.
And what's coming out of all of this is that indeed we are getting a particle creation model that's consistent with the biblical creation story.
Well, I mean, what's amazing is that we now have the capacity to look back in time and see what the Creator did as early as 10 to the minus 18 seconds after the creation event.
So we can get within a millionth of a trillionth of a second of the actual creation instant.
It would make sense, would it not, that from the instant of the Big Bang, material began to flow outward at a speed, at whatever speed.
And that material continues to expand and flow outward today.
And the laws of physics, it would seem to dictate that it would begin to expand at a slower and slower, barely detectable, albeit, but slower rate all the time, until finally collapsing back in upon itself.
Well you have two factors governing the dynamics of the universe from the creation event.
You've got gravity which is slowing down the expansion of the universe through the attractive force of different massive objects within the universe.
And so gravity acts as a break on the expansion of the universe.
But what that article is referring to is a discovery made by 31 astronomers.
They published their results last June to the effect that there is a property of the space fabric of the universe.
It's something that Einstein hypothesized decades ago, that the space fabric has within it energy to sustain self-stretching of that space fabric.
And what's unusual about this space energy is that the larger the space fabric of the universe becomes, the more energy it gains to sustain that self-stretching.
So what this means is that when the universe is much younger, when it's smaller in size, gravity will be the dominant aspect governing the dynamics of the universe.
The second factor that they call the cosmological constant at that time would be quite weak because the smaller the universe is, the weaker that it expresses, that self-stretching.
But as the universe gets bigger and bigger, the effect of gravity becomes weaker and weaker because the different massive bodies in the universe get farther and farther apart.
But as the space fabric stretches more and more, it gains more and more energy to continue that self-stretching.
The other by these particular scientists is, going on with the article, looking for a way out of this perplexity, several cosmologists are now suggesting that the cosmic acceleration may be an effect from some other universe.
Well, what came out of the discovery paper in the astrophysical journal is that these two factors have been identified as being responsible for the expansion history of the universe we observe.
They did speculate that there might be a third factor.
But I think what made the paper exciting for those of us from a Christian perspective, they were able to establish that if there are only these two factors, both of them must be profoundly designed in order to explain the existence of the right planets and the right stars to make physical light possible.
If there's a third factor, that third factor too must be designed.
Now they were not saying that they had identified a third factor.
In fact, their opinion was there were only these two factors.
But they said their measurements were not yet sufficiently accurate to eliminate the possibility of a third factor.
But if that third factor exists, it too must be very exquisitely designed in order to sustain the planets and the stars that are necessary for life.
Now trying to appeal to another universe really doesn't wash because once you get observers in, say there are two universes.
Once you've got observers in universe A, the space-time envelope of that universe cannot possibly overlap the space-time envelope of a second possibly existing universe.
What that means is if God made three universes, those other two can have no effect on our universe today because their space-time manifolds would be isolated.
Not long ago, in our time, the Vatican in Rome went whizzing by every environmental objection that would normally be made and established an observatory on a mountain in Arizona.
I mean, they just went whizzing right through.
The Vatican, as you know, has a great deal of political and financial power, and so they got the observatory where they wanted it in conjunction with the University in Arizona.
And they're looking for something, looking really hard for something out there.
Well, the Vatican for decades has been pumping money into observational astronomy.
There's always been a Vatican Observatory.
I think what's a little bit different about the current Pope is that he's trying to encourage a lot more of his direct scientific research.
So, for example, the Vatican Observatory has been sponsoring conferences where astronomers can get together and discuss issues that pertain to faith and scientific investigation.
So that's a new wrinkle where they're getting a little more aggressively involved in interacting with the scientific community.
But the truth is, for decades, even centuries, they've been involved in astronomical research.
Well, King David said 3,000 years ago, the heavens declare the glory of God.
And therefore, those coming from a biblical perspective have got some extra motivation to go out and look at the heavens to see what they can see of God's glory.
And I think that's where the Vatican is developing a lot of their initiative.
And hey, it's not just the Vatican.
There are many within the Protestant persuasion and also Eastern Orthodox that have a strong motivation to study astronomy.
Do you think there's any possibility that they are looking for A sign or an object that they believe for some reason may be headed toward Earth or interact with Earth in some manner?
Well, I photographed these because in dealing with people who see UFOs, I wanted to show them some examples of how things that they think are flying saucers really are nothing of the sort.
One of them, for example, is a chandelier effect.
You get inside a restaurant and take a shot at the distant horizon.
There's a pane of glass between you and that horizon, and reflecting off that glass is a chandelier behind you.
What you see in the photograph is a cluster of spaceships dangling over the horizon.
And so a lot of UFO photographs are like that.
Another one I took while I was in the Canadian Rockies, you got really dark, damp conditions, kind of misty.
You're on that last shot of your roll of film.
You stretch the emotion a little bit and you get what you call the flying carpet effect.
You get this beautiful picture of the scene in front of you, but on top of that scene would be this looking like a flying carpet or some kind of a saucer effect in the atmosphere.
So it just shows you you can't always believe what you see or interpret it as you think as you're seeing it.
Actually, I would say that probably 90% or even more of the photographs or even reports of unidentified flying objects seen at distance or even very closely are probably as you suggest.
It was seen by many, many people in the same valley where I am located.
A week later, a newspaper article appeared, and in fact, the newspaper had contacted Nellis Air Force Base, we're out here in the desert, and asked for an explanation.
Nellis's explanation was that, yes, indeed, on that on the evening in question, there had been a secret mission which may have overflown the Perump Valley, that's where I live, and that the aircraft in question was a C-130.
Now, I was in the Air Force, and I flew in C-130s, and I can assure you that that was nose of C-130.
A C-130 at 150 feet above your head would have rattled your teeth.
I mean, if you're living in Pahrump, Nevada, you're rather close to some test sites where And, you know, maybe it could be an aircraft, but they're telling you it's a C-130 so that you don't chase any deeper.
I mean, I had that same experience as an astronomer up in Canada, and we were observing on a telescope that was close to NORAD headquarters.
And this is back in the early 70s.
We had an aircraft overfly our telescope.
It's a radio telescope, so it's 150 feet across.
It's in the middle of the Canadian wilderness.
So I can imagine a pilot flying over it would get rather curious.
But the thing we noticed is that this fast-flying craft would stop over our site and hover, and that was messing up our observations.
And so figuring, well, we're just 60 miles from NORAD headquarters.
Let's call them and see if we can discourage them from having their pilots fly over our site.
And they denied that they were flying any such aircraft.
We don't have any aircraft with that kind of capability.
But the flights continued.
So we were able to get rid of it by calling the Ottawa newspapers because, you know, there you got the Russian embassy.
And very quickly, we did not have any more flights over our telescope.
And of course, today we realize that at that time, the American military indeed did have aircraft of that kind of capability.
They just didn't want to talk about it.
So, you know, that does explain a number of UFOs, strange craft under development by our governments, on purpose, secret.
And when they're discovered, they'll say, well, you know, we don't have such items, or what you're really seeing is X, when in fact, you're sitting there in the ground and saying, well, I know it's not X, it's got to be Y, but nobody wants to tell you that.
Doctors, when you look into God's firmament and all the stars, and now we are finding out planets are more likely than not revolving around these stars.
Despite the recent announcement by some scientists that they believe there may be no life out there, that is very recent, is it not logical, as was suggested again in Contact by Jodi Foster, I think, that if there are not others out there, what a giant waste of space, I think she said, and that seemed logical.
How do you come down on this subject of extraterrestrial life?
Well, Carl had the different actors and actresses.
I'm talking about Carl Sagan in that movie Contact.
Repeat that line.
It's all such a waste of words, the only ones.
Well, actually, astronomers have known for some time that if you want a planet like Earth, it's not going to happen without the existence of 100 billion trillion stars in the observable universe.
And that's because the elements that you have in the universe, like carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, depend on the mass density of the universe.
So if the universe were to contain fewer than those 100 billion trillion observable stars, you would only have the element hydrogen.
Or if it had more than those 100 billion trillion stars, then that hydrogen would have been fused into elements heavier than iron.
If you want carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, so that life chemistry is possible, that can only take place in a universe where we have approximately 100 billion trillion observable stars.
So if you want one Earth, that's what it's going to take.
So it's not all a waste.
In fact, we realize the Creator had so much care and love for the human species that it wasn't too expensive to create 100 billion trillion stars and carefully shape and craft them for 15 billion years so that in this narrow window of time, we could all have a nice place to live.
Now, concerning extrasolar planets, over 30 have been discovered so far.
Bearing in mind that the only way they've been able to detect planets so far is the flicker of the light as the larger of the planets would pass between the sun and our point of observation.
So it's entirely possible there are smaller planets as well that we cannot detect.
Well, certainly within our solar system, if for no other reason than that billions of tons of Earth-like material have been transported throughout the solar system.
But keep in mind this.
The transport of life material only works over interplanetary distances, not interstellar distances.
And we really are talking the remains of life.
I don't really expect NASA to find a bacterium on Mars, but I do expect them to find the remains of a bacterium just because so much of that stuff has been moved from the surface of the Earth to the surface of Mars.
Well, I highly doubt it if we're talking about natural process alone.
I mean, I don't put it past the Creator, for example, to create life on several planets instead of just one.
But if you go to our website, for example, you'll see posted there a probability calculation on the possibility of finding a planet that has the capacity to support physical light.
Less than one chance in 10 to the 120th that you're going to find a planet like that.
And the maximum number of planets the universe could sustain by the most optimistic estimates is 10 to the 22.
That's 10 billion trillion planets that we could have within the universe.
But we're looking at 120 zeros after the one for the probability of having just one of those 10 billion trillion planets having the capacity to support any conceivable kind of physical life.
If he did, academically, for the sake of the discussion, would you expect when we found, or when they found us, whichever way it might occur, if it could occur, that they would have a belief system similar to ours.
They would be aware of a creator, of a God, of Jesus even?
The only thing the Bible rules out on that is God creating a spiritual, intelligent, physical species, like our human species, that has rebelled against God's authority and is in need of a Redeemer.
So, for example, a Bible leaves open the window that God made dolphins on another planet.
He's left open the window that God may have created human-type beings on another planet that remained in fellowship with him rather than choosing to rebel against his plan and his system.
So, from a Christian perspective, you have a lot of options.
Now, I would want to make this point clear.
The Bible is silent on the issue of extraterrestrial physical life in our universe.
It says a lot about angels, but that's not physical life confined to our space-time continuum.
So, it could be, it could not be.
But one thing the Bible is clear about is it's out there.
It didn't happen through Darwinian evolution or some premortal suit.
As I look around the planet, and I'm sure you see the same things, as we hear about the Arctic with 40% less ice, as we hear about the Antarctic with ice fields falling off into the water, as we hear about the ozone hole enlarging and more cancers and more disease, emerging diseases from the rainforest and so forth and so on.
Well, I'd be willing to give some credibility to the ozone problem because there we got very good measurements that shows a connection between human activity, industrial activity.
I mean, yeah, there are some good models out there, but it's not definitive yet whether we're really seeing a larger effect from natural causation or from a human activity.
I mean, there are hints within the Bible, for example, that God would disturb things in such a way to get people's attention in order that more of the population may come to know him.
And it's kind of based on the principle that God wants as many people as possible to come to know him in a personal way.
His preference is that we would come to know him through seeing the benefits of getting a good relationship with him, submitting to him.
But there are always those individuals that aren't going to make any movement until they see the consequences of their not submitting to God's authority.
That's why it tells us the word of God is a two-edged sword.
One side of that edge is the benefits of obedience.
The other side are the consequences of disobedience.
And I don't want to make this sound legalistic.
Really, it's a recognition that we need to recognize that we can't do it ourselves.
Well, I think all you've got to do is have some children in your household, and you can see that we all have this innate nature to live lives for ourselves rather than some altruistic purpose beyond us.
Then stay right where you are, and we'll be right back.
A very, very, very interesting program.
Two very learned gentlemen with perhaps a different point of view than yours.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM, where that happens.
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You'll listen to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from February 16th, 2000.
Her hand will never cold.
She's got better days.
She's kind of usually condemned.
You won't have to think twice.
She cared new young snow.
She's got better days.
If she hears you, when I need you, I'll be better with you.
She's so close, yeah.
And she knows that why it's...
Take a long way home, take a long way home Never see what you wanna see Rare things have got a new Take a long way
home, take a long way home Rending up what you're taking, oh, unbelievable Oh, unbelievable Oh, unbelievable When you're watching to see The love of the battery The love of the battery The love of the
battery The love of the battery Oh, unbelievable The love of the battery
You're listening to Art Bell Summer in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an on-course presentation of Coast to Coast AM from February 16th, 2000.
Representing the internationally known, well-respected Reasons to Believe, my guests this morning are indeed an interesting pair, Dr. Hugh Ross and Dr. Fozrana.
And they'll be back in a moment, and we're about to open the phone lines.
Just one little question before we do that.
All right, once again, Dr. Hugh Ross and Dr. Fozrana.
Gentlemen, welcome back.
Just one quick question.
Going back to this factual matter that Christians are, in fact, the minority, the biggest minority, I concede, but nevertheless, a minority in terms of religious belief among the current population of 6 billion plus on the planet.
It's a simple and a complicated story all at once.
It's a wonderful movie.
It might be disturbing for you, but it follows some Christians who go into the Amazon jungle to convert heathens.
And skipping across a lot of important plot, the end of the story is they end up infecting them with a flu which ends up killing them.
Now, they thought they had converted them, but in fact they really had not converted them at all, and their beliefs at the time of crisis as they died of this flu remain their original beliefs.
So we do make some mistakes when we try to bring the word elsewhere.
Coming from the rainforest recently has been a number of emerging diseases that would seem to be, or I guess you could look at it as, a kind of chronic reaction to our plowing down through the rainforest.
We need to realize, however, God had another option.
If he wanted to, he could send one of his sinless angels to give a perfect presentation of his gospel message to every human being.
God could have done that.
He chose not to do that.
He chose instead to send people who he knew would make mistakes, would mess up, as we all do.
But the thing I get from reading my Bible is that when I go out as a representative of the Creator, it's not so much for God's benefit.
It's not so much for the benefit of the people that are going to hear my message.
It's more for my benefit.
In that process of obeying God to take his message to the uttermost parts of the earth, that gives God the opportunity to transform my character.
And if necessary, I think God's going to tolerate a few mistakes.
Kind of like how we raise our children.
You have to let them fail a few times before they really get the training that's necessary.
So I think if we realize that we're going not so much to save those souls, not so much to make ourselves look good in God's eyes, but to realize that this is going to benefit me in terms of transforming my character into that of Jesus Christ, then we'll have a less likelihood to make some of the catastrophic errors that you're reporting.
Why if he creates an animal, would he also create an animal to destroy that animal or be a parasite to that animal?
Well, keep in mind that God is creating a planet.
His purpose is to maximize the biomass and biodiversity of the planet.
So when we human beings come along, we have the maximum wealth at our disposal, the maximum biodeposits.
And to make that work, a system of predators and parasites really is the ideal way to go.
Now keep in mind that this is not God's ultimate plan.
I can't understand.
I mean, it just doesn't make sense, at least to my mind anyway, why on one hand he would create one animal and then on the other hand create other animals that would prey upon the lesser of the animals, destroying its life.
And I guess giving it a terrible death to be eaten or diseased.
Well, given the laws of physics, if you take away the predators, is life better for the herbivores?
What you discover is that's not true.
The herbivores really need the predators in order to maintain their quality of life at an optimal level.
It's also necessary in order to have human beings rewarded with the maximum resources to sustain their civilization.
I mean, we're talking 4 billion years of life history upon the face of the earth.
And this is why we've got so much oil and coal and natural gas, topsoil.
And, you know, ultimately, it's simply a matter of degree.
When animals eat plants, the plants are the prey.
I mean, we are the predators.
So as vegetarians, we're predators as well.
But keep in mind that this whole system of life on planet Earth for the last 3.86 billion years is enabling us human beings to sustain the very high standard of living that we do.
The other point I was going to make is that God does not declare this creation perfect.
He says it is good, but that it's not perfect.
The perfect creation will come in the future.
In other words, this whole system of predators and parasites and death over 3.86 billion years is all preparatory to the perfect creation that will come.
These laws of physics and this system of predatation and parasites enables us to set up a means by which God can work through us human beings to rapidly conquer the problem of evil.
Once evil is conquered, as you'll see in the pages of the Bible, we have a promise of different laws of physics, different dimensionality, and a perfect creation that will replace the good creation.
I have noticed, as many others have, doctors, that during just about every war, every side Holds up their work and their God as being on their side in that war to kill others who believe in another God.
Another appellation you'll find in the literature is dimensions E F G H I J K. So this is such a new development in physics that we've not developed any names like length, width, height, and time.
We really don't need to.
Just to work up the mathematics, it's simply necessary to put subscripts or superscripts on these dimensions.
I mean, actually, I would argue that the seraphim, the cherubim are angels.
You know, God created, he says, hundreds of millions of these angels, and there is a hierarchy of them.
As far as their physical characteristics go, there's nothing definitive in the Bible that different angels take on different properties from one another.
Well, when you look at the atomic chart of elements, you discover that you've got rather limited options if you want complex chemistry.
Boron's a possibility, silicon's a possibility, carbon, but as Fuzz can tell you, when you run the experiments, you quickly discover that boron and silicon only get you so far.
You've got to go with carbon.
That's something that was established 30 years ago.
Carbon's the way it's got to go.
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Right.
Only carbon of all the chemical elements is capable of forming long chain-like molecules and complex ring structures.
Boron and silicon cannot do that.
So regardless of the atmosphere or the physical conditions, it's really a fundamental limitation of the chemistry that those particular elements can be involved in.
I've seen the doctors, or one of them at least, on the Trinity Broadcasting Network.
I think he's a genius.
I completely agree with the idea of blending the theology with the science, because I don't think that there's as many contradictions as the two sides would like to think.
I mean, first off, the book of Genesis, the entire process follows evolution.
And with phrases like a day of like a thousand years, I think people nitpicking about the exact time perception to us, it doesn't seem like that has to be so important, and these people shouldn't be fighting with each other.
But I have a question for the doctor, and it has to do with when you say there is evil in the world, now are you referring to Nephilim, fallen breeds of angels that had taken the daughters of men and had wives and had giants and freaks,
and then, of course, through these cleansing processes, it seems like this process seems to be being repeated with alien abductions, mirroring succubus and incubus sexual molestations from the Dark Ages.
It seems like it just keeps continuing, and quite possibly that this impurity is in the men, and it's being bred into the men by fallen angel scientists or God's forces.
Yeah, we've written about that in a book called The Genesis Question.
It's just come out a few months ago and addresses these subjects.
Our position is that the Nephilim were here.
They're not here now.
I mean, there are some Christians running around making the claim that the Nephilim have returned.
We're highly skeptical of that claim.
There's no evidence.
There's certainly no biblical support for that.
What you find in the pages of the Bible is that the last of these Nephilim disappeared at the hand of David's mighty men.
So once you get past David's mighty men 3,000 years ago, we no longer see the Nephilim on the face of the earth.
unidentified
You wouldn't say that you wouldn't give any credence to the flood of reports of abductions, the sightings, etc., to possibly think that Satan's researched.
He's using the same old methods, the same ships that Gabriel came up with.
I believe that he is a number of fallen angels working with him, and that these fallen angels are busy trying to supernaturally manifest themselves to peoples of the earth in a variety of ways.
I think that explains that 1% residual, the UFO phenomena.
I think it explains what goes on in seances and occult practices.
So yes, there are supernatural beings beyond our space-time dimension that are attempting to communicate with us.
On the other hand, as a pastor and as a scientist, I will say that probably 90% of the claims I hear for some supernatural manifestation of that nature are simply psychologically induced.
The night featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from February 16, 2000.
The night featuring a replay of Coast AM from February
The night featuring a replay of Coast AM from February 16, 2000.
16, 2000.
I see trees of green, red roses, too.
I see them blue, spot me and you.
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world I see skies so blue and clouds of white,
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night, and I think to myself, what a wonderful world.
The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky, are also on the faces of people going
by you're listening to Artfell somewhere in time tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from February 16th 2000 Doctors Hugh Ross and Clazrana are here for reasons to believe Never to step on that line.
Doctors, I'm not going to say this the way she said it, but I was in the other room talking to my wife.
And without going into any detail, because it's really not necessary, we have been dealt in our life some really serious tragedies, some of which my audience is aware of, some of which they're not aware of.
I mean, really serious, terrible stuff, doctors.
And at the same time, we have been dealt some blessings.
But really, truly at both extremes.
And so the temptation at times is to think that God doesn't give a damn, that he took the human race and just sort of threw us up in the air.
And some of us landed on our head and got concussions.
Others died.
Some picked themselves up and blasted their brother till they got rich.
But I think we can draw some comfort from the fact that we see how very carefully engineered and designed the universe is, life is, and we realize there's got to be a God out there that really cares.
And we see the way he has maximized our environment for our enjoyment and standard of living.
That's an additional piece of evidence.
But for me personally, what's the strongest piece of evidence is that as I commit myself to follow God's leading in my life as I see revealed in the pages of the Bible, I see God working supernaturally behind the scenes.
And I realize, you know, he not only cares for the universe, he not only cares for the human race, he cares for me as a personal individual being.
And yes, he is going to take us through some tough water.
I mean, we're told that this life is a life of discipline and preparation so that we can enjoy the maximum possible reward in a new creation.
And that we're taking this very short course where we get exposed to evil and suffering, but it's going to prepare us for something far superior to anything that was possible in the Garden of Eden, what the Christian faith and all other faiths referred to as paradise.
Then I will ask you what many who have lost their faith would ask, and that is, when an F5 tornado plows into a church and kills women and infants along with others, strong believers, so many say, what kind of God, even casually observing what's going on here, could allow such a thing to occur?
Well, as I go through the Bible and look at the whole question of death and suffering, what I found helpful is to develop four categories.
One category is good people dying young, dying before their time.
Evil people that die at an early age.
Wicked people who live to be 90 or 100.
And then people who are righteous who also live to be 90 and 100.
And what you see is the Bible is filled with insights as to why God brings about different circumstances for different people.
And it's all predicated on the information we have in the Bible that the new creation, the place for the righteous, is a place with different levels of reward.
God works to protect that reward.
I mean, it tells us in Isaiah, for example, that people ponder, why do good righteous people die when they're 10 years old, 20 years old, 30 years old?
And then what it tells us in the next verse is that God knows the future of that individual.
And if he sees in that future a lot of torment, he says, you know what?
This person has already proven himself or herself.
I will deliver that person from this future torment so they won't have to face all that.
There's an interesting story in the Bible about a wicked king, and he had a large family.
And God came to him and said, because of your wickedness, everyone in your family will live on and see torment.
But your little boy, he was probably only about six years old, he said, he will die in the next few days on his bed because he's the only good one in your whole family.
I will take him and deliver him from the torment that you and the rest of your family will face.
And the whole point is that little boy went on to a heavenly reward.
And as Paul points out in his writings, no matter how good it is here on planet Earth, it's far better in the kingdom of heaven.
And so he says, for that reason, I would desire that my Creator take me right now.
But I also realize he's got a job for me to do here on Earth.
He's got training he wants me to go through.
And so he says, I will stay here as long as he wants me to stay here.
I had a question about the commonality between a free will, that we think we all acknowledge that we have free will as humans, and that angels, the Bible teaches explicitly that angels have the free will to choose to follow God or not.
And that's kind of the predicament we're in, is based on choices made by first angels and then us.
And I think that we all kind of walk around, especially a lot of Christians, and they don't really think about that on a day-to-day basis, how this battle is being played out.
And I just wanted to ask him about your guess about in the Gospel it says, Jesus says, but as the days of Noah were, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be, the second coming that he's talking about.
And I wanted to make that reference to the days of Noah as in the fallen angels coming to earth.
Yeah, I take the position that the Nephilim were here, but they disappeared at the time of David's mighty men.
And there's a number of scriptures in the Bible that point out that the demons are being restrained from doing that kind of thing again.
So it's not happening now, but it was happening then.
The reference to the fact that in the days of the coming of the Lord, people would become as wicked as they did during the days before the flood.
Hey, if you want a little piece of chilling evidence, in the days before the flood, the murder rate had to be at least 19 out of 20 people dying death from murder.
Today, that murder rate is 1 out of 3, if you take into account abortions.
It's the first time in human history where murder has become the number one cause of death for the human species.
In other words, if we were moving toward the final days and the signs we were seeing would be increased death by murder, then it should be pretty much across the board, shouldn't it?
I mean, the truth is, most murders are committed by young men, and we don't have the same proportion of young men in the population that we had 10, 20 years ago.
One category of murder, though, that is not down is children killing children.
right on the other term this is just plain inexplicable of the tragedy in colorado and so many other places it's impossible to comprehend why children would slaughter other children and then take their lives as though their own life
And he said, I don't give a damn about my own life, so you can imagine how I feel about yours.
Look how many people have died in wars and civil wars in that century compared to previous centuries.
So I think certain believers have a point when they say that things really are getting worse from a spiritual perspective rather than better.
Although perhaps a more balanced way to put a spin on that is that we're seeing a polarization.
At the same time, we're seeing wickedness rise to a level we've never seen before.
We're also seeing righteousness rise to a level it's never had before.
I mean, people all over the world are repenting of their rebellion against God and receiving Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and people's lives are being transformed.
So I think we're seeing both phenomena take place simultaneously.
But there's another one, Doctor, is going on right now that I'm sure deserves your comment, and that is not embracing the Lord and Jesus, but rather embracing a new spirituality that seems minus the Lord, as you would describe him, and more of what is called a new age philosophy.
Well, I think that fits in that the evidence scientifically today for the existence of God is so compelling, and yet people's rebellion is still there against God's authority, they're going to express that in different ways than people did 50 years ago.
You know, as I speak on university campuses, I'm discovering that atheism and agnosticism doesn't have the attraction it once did.
The scientific evidence is just too compelling.
And so what they're doing instead of going in the Christian faith is saying, let's go with a new age thing.
And I asked some students why they were doing that.
They said, well, Christianity has a higher price.
We want to get our spirituality as cheap as possible.
Do you really think that's being fair to those who really do believe that they're able to be spiritual and are, in fact, very spiritual within themselves?
And I think what we're trying to do is encourage people to be skeptical, as it tells us in the Bible, everything must be tested.
My criticism of New Age philosophy is it doesn't pass the rigorous scientific tests.
It doesn't pass the historical tests either.
And so we're trying to encourage people to move away from spiritual laziness where they just kind of take anything that comes by and let's say, let's really check it out.
Let's scrutinize it.
Let's test it.
Make sure it's true before we go out and follow it or invest any resources in it.
I interviewed Dr. Is for a long time a really wonderful man, Father Malachi Martin.
You may have heard of him, a Catholic priest, an exorcist, and he wrote a series of books, but one of the things that he contended was that evil in the form of the devil is in the Vatican.
Pretty radical stuff from a priest, but he wrote books about that.
And there are many others who believe that as well.
You want to stick your necks out and comment on that at all?
That's what I said, yes, because we have evil and suffering existing in this creation.
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Well, the reason I ask, and I'm not trying to nitpick with doctrine, this is just so interesting to me, I've never heard any other Christians explain it that way.
I've heard the evil coming as a result of the fall from the Garden of Eden, as opposed to creation in the beginning.
But you notice in the Bible it tells us that evil was here before God created Adam and Eve.
Satan went into rebellion against God before that.
Right.
And I look at the Christian faith as a message of deliverance from paradise.
I mean, if I wanted to make a very broad generalization, religions outside of Christianity promise the restoration of paradise.
Christianity promises deliverance from paradise.
So our hope is much better than what we had in the Garden of Eden.
And God had the option of keeping Satan out of that garden.
He could have kept the human species in that paradisical situation for all of eternity if he wanted to.
Instead, he decided to let Satan invade.
But he used that invasion of Satan to engineer a means by which evil could be conquered once and for all, and we human beings could be trained to receive a reward far superior to anything possible in the Garden of Eden.
unidentified
Interesting.
So it's deliverance from paradise as opposed to restoration to.
Doctors, we are at a juncture where I always ask, I have one more hour of show, but many people have things they have to do in the morning and be up early, so I always ask whether the guests would like to stay on or head to bed for duty in the morning.
And with us this night, we're honored to have a very prestigious group, coupled, Dr. Hugh Ross and Dr. Kozrana, from Reasons to Believe.
And if you want to read more about it and read more about their approach, it's all on their website, which is available from mine, of course.
A link is there.
You can just hop right over at www.artel.com.
in a moment I've got a kind of an interesting facts that I want to read.
Actually, there are two faxes here, and then we'll get back to the calls.
One from Bud in rainy San Diego, he says, sounds like your guests, that would be you two, are saying that God isn't Smart enough to create an ecosystem that is self-sustaining without predation well that's a good point, but the predation is there, realizing this is God's good creation and preparation for his perfect creation.
I mean, Matthew Albert, the gentleman I referred to that wrote the book, The God Part of the Brain, is indeed a devout atheist and would say, prove to me that God exists.
I mean, what Buzz said earlier, there's no such thing as absolute proof for anything.
You know, I married my wife, for example, with less than absolute proof.
But the practical evidence that she existed I deem to be very high and substantial.
Likewise, we can argue that there is substantive scientific and historical evidence for the existence of God that's stronger than my own personal existence.
Well, I look at that evidence and say that that is certainly adequate.
It could be that Matthew simply hasn't examined the depth of the scientific and historical evidence for the God of the Bible.
unidentified
You know, something else that's important to remember, too, is that proofs oftentimes are very person-specific.
And just because something is a good argument doesn't necessarily mean that someone would accept that as proof for something, even though the logic may be sound.
A person may not see the logical connections in your argument.
They may not understand, appreciate, or agree with the assumptions going into your argument.
Or there may be some, if you will, psychological commitment to a certain conclusion that will keep them from accepting a proof that is offered no matter how good the arguments are.
Not too many anymore, but yes, there is a society who claims to believe that.
Let me give you a good person-specific argument and see how you deal with this.
I'm sure you're well aware of the reputation of this program.
I do a lot of shows on ufology.
I do a lot of shows on ghosts.
I'm going to do one of them next week.
And when I do shows like that, I get overwhelming numbers of people who will call with stories, not just frightening stories, gentlemen, but very loving stories.
So many people who have seen their partners die, leave the physical existence, and yet have been contacted by them later.
And nothing negative, nothing evil, generally a very soothing message that all is all right and there is a hereafter and on and on and on and on.
I would assume you would deny any such communication as being authentic.
Well, I would agree that a lot of that is psychologically induced, but there's also a warning in the Bible that angels, tell me that Satan and his demons will appear as angels of light.
So, I mean, after all, their motive is to deceive us.
You know, my own father had that kind of experience where his dead father, quote, came and visited him and had a little conversation with him.
I don't believe that that was my grandfather.
I believe it was a demon taking the form of my grandfather and communicating to my dad.
Now, years later, we look upon that and say, yeah, there is deception going on in that visit.
But at the time, my father explains it as a very pleasant, warm experience, comforting experience he had.
It was only years later that he recognized that this was not something that was benevolent.
Well, I mean, for one thing, there was contradictions.
My quote, grandfather was saying that he was visiting from the other side, but one of the things he told my father, if anybody tells you there's anything like life after death, don't believe him.
Well, I mean, there's an internal contradiction going on there.
Not to backtrack, but a while ago there was a conversation about someone who had called in about why there was a predatorial aspect here on the earth.
And it got me to thinking.
And I was listening to the response during the conversation of one of the doctors.
And I could almost finish the thought.
He was interrupted.
It almost sounded like he started to say that this was not the way it was created to be, and I agree with that.
This is a phenomenal show, by the way.
I've gone to fundamentalist type of churches before, and I believe wholeheartedly in God and the creation, but have also had seen incredible proof from the science side.
Another question that I also had was that we've got geological proof.
North and south poles are no longer aligned.
We're off magnetic north.
We've got some sort of a polar shift that had happened.
The Panthea aspect about the continents that have gone through some disruption.
And you can see how South America, in fact, I'm looking at a map right now on my wall, fits right into Africa and etc.
And I've had discussions with theoretical discussions with people about how the spiritual aspect fits into that.
Not to wax too superstitious or too out, sounding like I'm way out there.
But Satan being thrown and his angels being thrown to earth, I've heard that theory.
I think it's quite clear in the Bible that God has not granted Satan that kind of power or to any of Satan's allies.
They can't create.
I believe that continental drift is all part of God's creation plan.
I mean, it tells us in Genesis chapter 1, let there be the great land masses.
And so these land masses appeared above the surface of the waters through plate tectonics and volcanism.
And that's been going on over the last few billion years.
And so, yeah, at one time, Alaska wasn't as far north as it is today.
We have coal in Antarctica.
That's because Antarctica has moved considerably over the past history of the Earth.
And we can also recognize that this continental drift that we're observing has imperfectly designed to maximize the quantity and diversity of life on planet Earth over the last three and a half billion years.
And so if it wasn't for that continental drift, then it'd be impossible for advanced life to live on the land masses.
I mean, we know, for example, that in the Arctic they have pulled from the ice the woolly mammoth with the green stuff still in its mouth and undigested in its belly, proving that at one point that animal died very, very rapidly in a climate that grew green stuff and is now buried in the ice, preserved for us to study.
Now, if that happened once, why should we not presume that could occur again?
I mean, the caller is calling from Anchorage, and I've been up there, and I've been up in northern Canada, and hey, there are conditions where the temperature will drop dramatically in the space of a few minutes.
It doesn't happen where I live now in Pasadena, California.
But hey, in those northern latitudes, you can get very sudden shifts in temperature.
I'm talking like 80 to 100 degrees in just a few minutes.
And so you could have this woolly mammoth enjoying his lunch, and Suddenly, the temperature drops to a point where he's frozen in place.
Well, yes, but if such a thing should occur today, for example, I mean, you would have to presume the green stuff was growing, so the temperature was obviously much warmer, and it got colder fast and stayed cold for a long time.
Now, if a similar condition were to occur today, This is not something that's happened only in the past.
With President's Day coming up, a question comes to mind.
There have been numerous biographies of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in the last few years.
In fact, a couple of new ones just last year.
And in discussing the religion of both of these men, these biographies make the point that neither of them, for various intellectual reasons, could accept Jesus Christ as their personal Savior.
And in particular, Lincoln, where even quotes from some of his letters, intimate letters to family, make that point.
Would you say then, in view of that fact, that Abraham Lincoln and George Washington would be suffering in hell now or some sort of eternal punishment?
Well, Wayne, there's a lot of debate over the spiritual state of both Lincoln and Washington.
You can pick up books that claim that they were Bible-believing Christians.
You can pick up books like that you've noted, which said that they were simply deists or theists.
They weren't really Christians in the way that the evangelicals would define them.
So in that sense, this becomes a debatable point.
I think probably a more principled question to ask is if people die in a state of rebellion against their Creator, do they go to heaven or do they go to hell?
And the Christian message is they do not go to heaven.
They get to go to the place that they choose.
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Would you define rebellion against the Creator as not accepting Jesus Christ?
Well, not accepting Jesus Christ as the Creator of the universe and as the one who sacrificed himself for all of your shortcomings against God and others.
Now, keep in mind that you have in the book of Acts that no one can come into this relationship but through Jesus Christ.
But hey, in the Old Testament alone, Jesus has 88 different names.
So it's not really essential for some savage in New Guinea, for example, living 100 years ago, to really come up with a knowledge of the life and history of Jesus of Nazareth.
What's essential for that savage is to come to the recognition that, number one, a God exists, that God is extremely powerful, extremely wise, and very loving towards the human species.
He would look at the conscience that's been written on his heart and realize that God is also just.
And as he tries to live up to the dictums of that conscience, he would discover that he falls miserably short of God's perfect standard.
But if God is so powerful, loving, and wise, he must have made provision.
God himself must have been the one who provided a bridge between our imperfection and his perfection.
And hey, you can read the book of Job.
He lived before any scripture was written down, and he was able to establish by that line of reasoning that his Redeemer exists, and if he puts his faith and trust in that Redeemer, he will see God himself in the flesh on the last day.
All right, Doctor, hold on.
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You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
The night featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from February 16, 2000.
Music Something down on your favorite weekend It's fine, you've been creeping down my back there Something down on your favorite weekend It's fine, you've been creeping down my back there Music She's been looking like a queen in a sailor's dream.
She's going to say what she really needs.
I've got to tell you, I've been racking my brain, hoping to find a way out.
I've had enough of this continued.
Changes are coming, no doubt.
It's been a too long time.
No peace to fight.
I'm ready for the time to get ready.
You seem to want from me what I cannot give.
I feel too long for my life.
I have a dream that I wish I could live.
It burning hold in my mind.
You're listening to Arkbell Summer in Time on Fremier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an oncore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from February 16th, 2000.
There may be some angels left on Earth, and this certainly would be one of them.
Her name is Crystal Gale.
Good morning, my guests from Reasons to Believe, Dr. Hugh Ross and Dr. Fozrana.
And we'll get back to them in a moment with a couple of very, very, very, very, very interesting questions.
Don't touch that dog.
All right, once again, back to my guests, Dr. Hugh Ross and Dr. Fozrana.
Gentlemen, the following question, I bet you would be familiar with the tribe that I'm going to talk about now.
There is one in South America in which it is believed that if one of the people in the tribe dies for whatever reason, keels over from a heart attack or whatever the cause may be,
the medicine man in that tribe goes into a kind of a trance situation and he will inevitably blame that death on another member of the tribe who is then ritualistically murdered for having been the reason for that other life being takenly having without seeming reason.
Now, in every other manner, in every other way, this tribe may lead within its own boundaries, an ethical, moral existence.
But they have this belief.
Are these damned souls until you reach them, are they damned souls when they die?
Okay, a guy who has served on our board of directors, Don Richardson, has served for many years as a missionary to such tribes.
His area was New Guinea.
But he's written a book on primitive tribes all over the world with different belief systems.
And his point is that these tribes are coming to grips with the fact that evil does exist and that evil is supernatural.
And so they're developing means to deal with that.
But he also says in each of these primitive cultures, you find redemptive analogies.
In their cultural system will be these analogies to the redemption of the Creator that we see described in the pages of the Bible.
And so he's been busy training missionaries on how to spot those redemptive analogies and make a link with the message that we see in the Bible to great effect.
He's also telling stories how numbers of these tribes, without any contact with the West, with missionaries, or the Bible, you'll find segments of those societies where they figure it all out.
And so he says, just like what you see in the book of Job, you've got this righteous, humble individual who looks at the evidence around him, the redemptive analogies that God has placed in the culture around him, and they put two and two together and figure out it as four.
So he says it's very interesting how in many of these tribal situations, it's like God has gone ahead of the missionary and already planted the message, and there are people there that already believe it.
The Gospel of John points out that God sends his light, which is defined as his truth, his life, and his love, into the heart, the spirit of every human being that's ever lived, man, woman, and child.
And that those who receive that light, accept that light, will be saved and will be rewarded accordingly.
Those who reject that light will be condemned.
So everyone is held responsible on what he or she does with the light that God has given him.
The other promise that we see in the Bible is if you accept the light that God gives you, he will give you more light.
And so there's a promise that if you receive, more will be given to you.
But there's a flip side to that too.
If you reject what God has revealed to you, then there will be less revelation coming into your life.
Well, I guess since the Bible suggests that Armageddon will indeed occur in the Middle East, it is entirely possible, is it not, that anybody who would bring peace to the Middle East, improbable as that may seem at any given modern moment, that person would be viewed as the Antichrist?
I mean, a careful reading of the Bible on this point makes the statement, this will not happen until Israel disarms, and it will lead to all the Jews settling in the land of Israel.
There's also a statement in Ezekiel to the effect that Israel would gain some kind of control over the ancient lands of Edom, Ammon, and Moab, which is now structured in the nation of Jordan.
If none of that has happened yet, I don't think the Antichrist is here.
So, I'm not going to be too concerned about these things until I see a total disarmament taking place in the land of Israel.
I have frequently, as I told you, this program talks of all sorts of paranormal things and things that I'm sure you think are probably evil-based.
And so it has long been my contention that if extraterrestrial life would arrive and a little green guy would walk down the plank, he would be so full of lead before he got to the bottom of the steps that nobody would be able to pick him up.
In other words, the fundamentalists out there would regard any such creature as evil and fill them full of lead.
There are about 16 different English translations of the Bible that I'm comfortable with, but hey, when push comes to shove, you go to the original languages, the Greek and the New Testament, the Hebrew and the Old Testament.
unidentified
Okay, so do you think most of the English language ones are translated properly or not?
Well, it depends what you're trying to read it for.
If you want to get all the satire and humor, then I would recommend the Living Bible, but I wouldn't recommend it for getting the doctrinal points of the Trinity correct.
So, you know, different translations have a different focus.
The beauty of being an English language reader is that you have the luxury of getting so many different translations, you can cover all the bases.
It's not the three persons, one essence that you see in Christianity.
unidentified
And one more question.
Why do some fundamentalists think anyone that's non-Christian is, or not anyone, but a number of non-Christians are anti-Christian when they basically try to accept anybody that's good?
Well, I do see that going on where certain groups of Christians look at all non-Christians as an enemy to be destroyed.
But we're taking the perspective and reasons to believe that that's a mission field to be won, and therefore we're to treat them with respect and gentleness.
In 1988, I've known God and Lord Jesus since I was a little girl.
Ashley, God, but Jesus introduced himself to me, actually, and I understood the reason for him being in my 20s.
But I knew God as a little girl, and he spoke to me in dreams, and I was an abandoned child by mother and father, so I had, he was my sanity.
He was my everything.
In 88, I asked him a question.
I prayed, and I fasted, and I wanted to know, and I wasn't going to let up until God gave me an answer.
What I wanted to know was what the pivotal point of mankind's, of his history was that changed mankind forever.
And what he showed me in spirit, and then I researched it, was that when man harnessed lightning, which as Satan was thrown as lightning to the earth, and being that he's the prince of the power of the air, and once that door was opened and man began to harness that and electricity was introduced, which came into all the technology that we now know, which is Satan's realm of existence,
because Satan wants to see all, know all, hear all, and be as God on earth, that through this realm of existence and through satellite and through the computer chip and everything coming...
Well, that too, I guess.
It's all of technology combined, that Satan will be able to be his God on earth through the power of the air, which is his realm of existence.
And I wanted to ask your guests if they had thought about that and what they think of that profound revelation.
Well, just Satan will have the ability to be able to hear All, see all, know all, and track every single human being on the earth, and the government will be his on the earth.
All right, well, then let's translate this into all modern communication and this wonderful web of transfer of information, instant transfer of information.
Well, that's all true, that Satan is capable of using our technology to further his ends.
But I think he's got the short end of the stick because there are lots of good organizations, good people out there that are getting a positive message of redemption through this high technology.
Hey, you know, right now people over the world are able to tie into what we're talking about.
So technology can be used for good.
It can be used for evil.
But I think the benefits outweigh the evil problems.
At least that's been true of what we've seen through reasons to believe.
These ten dimensions define the realm for the operation of matter and energy and the laws of physics.
Beyond the ten space-time dimensions, different physics, different dimensionality.
That's the realm of God, hell, heaven, etc.
but the scriptures make it clear that the physics and the dimensionality is very different from what exists in our universe but you do say that there's molecular molecular No, no, I'm saying the opposite.
In fact, molecules are impossible unless you live in a universe described by three very large, rapidly expanding dimensions of space.
unidentified
Okay, I have a theory called dialectical checks and balance.
And, you know, one thing happens as a result of another.
So that if there's molecular expansion, that there has to be creation outside of because one thing happens as a result of another.
I'm not denying that there's creation beyond the 10 space-time dimensions.
I'm simply saying that it's not molecular.
It's not like atoms and molecules or planets and stars because those kinds of entities do require three, very large, rapidly expanding dimensions of space.