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June 28, 2022 - Babylon Bee
30:54
God, UFOs, and The Physics of Star Wars with Hugh Ross | A Bee Interview

Astrophysicist Hugh Ross, the founder of Reasons To Believe, talks to The Babylon Bee about extraterrestrial alien life, UFOs, and the reasons from science to believe in the God of the Bible. They also talk about how faster than lightspeed travel would completely kill you dead. Check out Reasons To Believe and Dr. Ross' new book coming out soon: Designed To The Core.

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Hey everyone, welcome to the Babylon Bee Interview Show.
I'm Kyle and this is not Adam Yanser.
I'm Jarrett.
This is Jarrett and we are today talking to Dr. Hugh Ross.
Being a follower of Jesus Christ, you're joining a party that's way more fun than any non-theistic party could ever think of.
I'm not worried about supervolving.
Well, I mean, they happen every 700,000 years.
Yeah, and the last time one happened was 700,000 years ago.
Check out his new book, Designed to the Core.
Let's welcome Dr. Ross.
All right, well, thank you for coming in, Dr. Ross.
It's great to meet you.
We've met a lot of your colleagues already, and we kept saying we need to get the big cheese.
All right.
That's what they call you around.
That's what they call you.
They don't at our office.
They got other names.
Do they have other names?
The Grand Eagle.
That's right.
Well, it's great to have you.
So how long have you been doing apologetics at this point?
Well, probably since I gave my life to Christ, which was, gee, a few years ago.
1964.
Yeah.
So a few years ago.
That was a good year.
That was a good year.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm a Gideon convert, so I've studied a Gideon Bible for 18 months.
And I realized if I give my life to Christ, I have to commit to share what I've discovered with other people.
So in that sense, apologetics was there right from the middle.
So you had that burden right from the beginning.
Right.
Yeah.
How has the apologetics landscape changed since the 1960s till now?
Do you find it's similar arguments, similar worldviews, or as the shifting well, the basics are similar.
They've been similar for the past 2,000 years.
I think the biggest shift I've seen is that, particularly in my discipline of astronomy and physics, is that the evidence for a causal agent beyond the universe creating matter, energy, space, and time is now so rigorous and compelling.
What I'm seeing from my atheist peers is they appeal to things that we can't measure.
So rather than trying to defend their atheism on what we can see and measure and test, they're appealing to things that can't be seen or tested.
What's a good example of that?
A good example is that they'll say, well, we can measure the characteristics of the universe back to when it was a 10 millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old, but we can't determine what's going on before that.
So maybe before that, quantum mechanical space-time fluctuations might be so extremely large that they basically compete with gravity for the dynamics of the universe.
So maybe these space-time theorems that are based on general relativity don't hold.
And so they think maybe there's an escape hatch.
But what's happening is that for the first time, we now can penetrate what's called that quantum gravity era.
And the penetration basically sustains the space-time theorems.
So the atheists are being backed into a smaller and smaller corner of speculation.
But I run into a lot of them and say, I'm not going to believe in your God until all possible speculations are eliminated.
And I said, we humans will never know everything.
I mean, I married my wife without absolute knowledge that she actually existed.
I had high probabilities, but I didn't have absolute proof.
My wife is probably a thing, too.
You think?
She probably exists.
Yeah, I thought that.
Yeah.
You too.
We have something to talk to you about.
Well, hopefully the more you observe her, the more confident you become that she exists.
That's right.
Pretty confident, yeah.
And that's something I like to ask apologists.
You can make the most perfect argument, and someone might not necessarily believe.
Where do you find that These that reasonable arguments, arguments from logic have their limits.
Is it just the heart of the person that God either influences or doesn't, or can you be convincing enough to convince everybody, you know?
What I tell people is there's no silver bullet.
Every non-Christian is different from every other non-Christian.
So you need to have a treasure chest of different apologetic tools.
And don't throw at your tool right away.
Ask questions.
You need to find out who you're talking to, what are their issues.
And yeah, for some people, it's not intellectual at all.
It's not, I mean, you can give them a huge amount of evidences in which you realize, you know, maybe there is a hurt.
I mean, I got to do a major debate at the International Skeptic Society conference at Caltech a few years ago, 750 atheists from around the world.
And afterwards, I said, you know, I've gotten a new apologetic argument this weekend.
Because what I've observed is that the atheist scientists you invited, they all spoke very passionately about the non-existence of the God of the Bible, but they ignored all the other gods.
It was just the God of the Bible they were focused on.
And they were passionate.
I said, if they were really convinced that the God of the Bible doesn't exist, they'd be treating him like the Easter bunny or like the tooth fairy.
Their passion tells me they really do believe God exists.
They just don't like him.
And the response I got from the atheists around me was, it's not that we hate the God of the Bible, it's that we despise his followers.
And they all began to tell me stories how they've been wounded by an encounter they had with someone who claimed to be a Christian.
And, you know, it's irrational.
Why would you let a fallen human being get between you and a morally perfect God?
But the problem is we are emotional beings, and it's hard for us to let go of our wounds and hurts.
Yeah, I found anytime that I had a friend that used to be a Christian and converted to atheism, it was almost never, well, I looked at the logical arguments and I realized that what made the most sense is that this all came from nothing.
It was always, you know, something and someone in the church hurt me or how can a good God, I mean, which are questions that are legitimate.
You know, they're good questions to ask.
How can a good God allow evil?
The problem of evil is a big one.
It's always so emotionally driven.
Not that there's anything wrong with their emotions or that that's not a legitimate objection, but I found it was rarely a logical objection.
Yeah, on the other hand, what I've discovered is until you address their intellectual objections, they're not going to trust you with what's really going on in the heart.
So you've got to gain their trust first.
They have to realize that you've got integrity, that you're going to treat them with compassion, and then they'll tell you what the real reason is.
Yeah, that's interesting.
I've had experiences where I've used your books and a couple of friends that have deconstructed, which then becomes deconversion, in a lot of our, like that's a lot of what's going on in our society.
But I've had conversations with folks and I'm like, every argument I come up against, it's like, well, this is really, really strong evidence that God does exist, that these things are true, and they will just continually go back to their other resources.
And you can either like track it to some kind of sin they want to continue in, or a lot of times it's that too.
If you find, I find people just want to continue in the lifestyle that they want to continue in, and they will try to come up with some intellectual argument to justify those things, or it is an emotional hurt or something.
And maybe it's a combination of both.
But have you run into that too?
Where people are just like, especially with Christians.
Often they say, you Christians are so serious, you don't have any fun.
So it's like we need to reveal ourselves to them as real people that can enjoy life.
That, hey, being a follower of Jesus Christ, you're joining a party that's way more fun than any non-theistic party could ever think of.
So it's important that they see us really having that sense of joy when we fellowship with one another.
And I've run into that where I'll meet someone overseas, first time meeting, and non-Christians see we immediately have a bond.
We immediately have a love for one another, and it gets them asking questions.
Have you guys met?
No, this is the first time we've met.
It's like, what's going on here?
It's like the deep calling to the deep.
People accuse us of being too serious.
Yeah, the bee.
Very serious.
No jokes here.
No jokes at the beach.
No jokes.
No jokes at the bee.
No jokes at the Babylon B.
Well, I think that's where the Babylon Bee is making a major contribution.
It's like, hey, if you can't laugh at yourself, you're taking life way too seriously.
And so, and means you're really not open.
So we have an internal debate here at the office that's tearing the office apart and we're going to settle it for that.
Did the dinosaurs have feathers?
Did the dinosaurs have feathers?
They may have.
That's an unanswered question.
Okay.
So still being engaged.
Do they have feathers?
I mean, look at birds and dinosaurs.
They both have scales.
Fish have scales.
And it's not the biggest step to go from scales to feathers.
So it's like, and there is evidence out there that the dinosaurs may have had feathers.
Right now, it's not compelling.
So I think you're going to have to continue this a little bit.
This debate.
Yeah.
Well, it seemed like when Jurassic Park came out, they made this.
Have you seen Jurassic Park?
Oh, yeah.
Great movie, right?
Did you like Jurassic Park?
As long as you can ignore the laws of physics.
Yeah, yeah.
That's what I'm interested in.
I want to hear more about that.
Well, a T-Rex can't run that fast.
Yeah.
Okay.
How fast would a T-Rex run?
Well, a T-Rex could conceivably run that fast, but any slight trip, it would do itself serious injury.
Like a toddler, because it's top heavy.
Well, it doesn't have the arms.
Yeah, but like that's what toddlers are.
They have the big head and they run and they just topple.
Oh, that's.
Well, I mean, just take us human beings.
The taller you are, the more likely you are to damage your body when you fall.
And so if you've got a creature that tall and that heavy, it's going to quickly learn, hey, I better not go too fast, because if I go too fast, I'm going to trip and fall.
Or, I mean, just like us, there's a difference between your probability of tripping and hurting yourself when you're walking compared to where you're running.
If you're running fast, you hit a little rock, you could spin over and do yourself some harm.
And so that T-Rex is not going to be chasing a Jeep at 45 miles an hour.
It's good to know.
Well, the other thing that bugged me is that they were so relentless about trying to eat the humans.
Like there was other dinosaurs to eat.
There were probably better sources of meat, and they were just like stalking one person all the way across the island.
Yeah.
Your thoughts?
Well, I did think that where they showed that scene of this very overweight lawyer being eaten.
So that makes sense.
There's a lot of calories there.
It's because he was a lawyer, yeah.
High cow.
But you know, if you watch sharks, when they grab a human being, they typically spit it out right away.
Why?
We don't have enough fat in our bodies for them to spend the energy to kill us and consume us.
That makes sense.
Man, that makes me look at Jurassic Park in a whole new way.
Yeah.
That's good.
Do you believe in aliens?
Well, I do believe in what I think you're talking about, extraterrestrial aliens, because the Bible speaks about them.
They're called angels.
But the big difference is, unlike us, they're not subject to the laws of physics or the space-time dimensions.
Right.
And so do I believe that there's aliens like us that are subject to the space-time dimensions and the laws of physics?
From a biblical perspective, it's wide open.
You know, God could have created whatever he wants anywhere else he wants.
The Bible doesn't really put much in the way of restrictions on it.
So little green men show up in a saucer that doesn't debunk the Bible or something.
Doesn't debunk the Bible, but it would disturb the astrophysicists.
Right.
Because everywhere we look in the universe, we see conditions that are hostile for advanced life except planet Earth.
I mean, I just got a book coming out called Design to the Core, where I make the point, tens of thousands of super galaxy clusters, but ours is the only one that has a structure that makes possible advanced life.
And, you know, we're in the local group within that super galaxy cluster.
It's the only local grouping of galaxies we have found that has the conditions that make advanced life possible.
And the argument goes all the way down.
We're living in the only region in our Milky Way galaxy.
We're living in the only bubble within our galaxy.
We're living in the only fluff in our galaxy where advanced life is possible.
And we astronomers have been scouring our galaxy for over 60 years, trying to find a star that's sufficiently like our star to the sun that it could be a candidate to have a planet orbiting it in which advanced life is possible.
We found lots of stars that are twins of one another, but no adequate twin of the sun.
And likewise, we now know that for advanced light to be possible on the planet, it must be accompanied by a moon just like our moon.
You need a planet just like our planet Earth, a moon just like our moon, and it has to form as a result of two planets merging together so that you get a hot enough core in both the moon and the earth.
And then you need the two bodies initially very close together so that the tidal forces they exert on one another circulate the liquid iron inside the cores of both bodies.
So both bodies have a magnetosphere and need to be close enough that the magnetosphere couples.
If you don't have an early coupled magnetosphere, the radiation from the host star, the particle radiation, will sputter away all the planet's water, all the planet's atmosphere.
So that's the latest habitability requirement for a planet.
It has to have a relatively small rocky planet orbited by a really big rocky moon that has a hot origin as a result of a merger event where they're close enough together, you get that tidal interaction, and where they're orbiting a star where the particle radiation will only be a problem for the first half billion years.
So we live in that.
We live in that, but the probability of finding another one like that without divine intervention is utterly remote.
So on that basis, unless God intervenes somewhere else, we are alone.
We're alone in the universe.
With an early coupled magnetosphere.
A magnetosphere is my favorite word.
That broke on my car.
Had to go with that.
The flux capacity.
It doesn't rule out microbes, but it does rule out people like us, or beings like us.
Advanced life, is what you're saying.
Advanced carbon-based life.
Right.
Okay.
That's really interesting.
So what about people that say that they've been abducted by aliens?
There's like thousands of people that claim it.
Well, I don't know whether you've interviewed Ken Samples, but he and I co-authored a book, Lights in the Sky and Little Green Men, where I've talked about my experience processing UFO reports.
And you say, how did I get that job?
I was an amateur astronomer before I became a professional astronomer.
So every institution where I worked as an astronomer, they said, you handle the UFO reports.
You know the night sky.
So I wrote those chapters, but Ken is a cult expert.
So he wrote the chapters on UFO religions and people who claim to have been abducted.
And I agree, I'd run into people who claim to be abducted too in my processing of these UFO reports.
I don't doubt their experience.
But I don't think they had a physical encounter.
It was more of a spiritual encounter.
So think of it as some kind of vision they experience.
And they'll claim that they've been touched, that they've been injured.
But when you look on their body groped, yeah, you can't find any evidence on their body of what they claim.
But again, unlike one of the professors I had, Carl Sagan, who said none of this is real, well, from his worldview perspective, he didn't believe in non-physical reality.
I do.
I believe God created spiritual beings that are non-physical.
And what we document in Lights and Sky Little Green Men, that's what's behind what we call the residual UFOs.
The UFOs that do not have a natural explanation, explanation as military activity or a hoax.
And that's about 1% of everything that people report as UFOs.
Did you see the Area 51 stuff that they released recently?
Do you have any opinions, any comments on that?
Well, I've seen what our government is.
They're going to be releasing more, too, because we're talking tens of millions of UFO encounters in the nations around the world.
So this is a huge database.
But what they've released is no different than what we reported on in our book almost 20 years ago.
It's just more of the same.
And one reason I'm convinced this UFO phenomena is real is when you look at the residual cases, there's clear evidence that it is real, but simultaneously there's evidence that it's not physical.
So for example, there's about 2,000 cases where observers see a UFO going through the atmosphere and it crashes into the earth.
You go to the crash site, you can see a crater.
You can see damaged vegetation.
If there's snow, the snow has melted.
But when you go to the crash site, there's no debris, there's no artifacts.
We all know that physical craft crashes into the earth, you're going to recover artifacts and debris.
In this case, there's nothing.
Moreover, when the observers see it going through the atmosphere at 15,000 miles per hour, no sonic boom and no heat friction.
Have you ever watched the shuttle go through the atmosphere?
You see this bright glow behind it because of all the heat that is generated by going through the atmosphere.
With UFOs, no heat friction, no sonic boom.
But the fact that you got a crater with damaged vegetation tells you something real was going on, but it's not physical.
So if it was a carbon-based life, which is what I guess people are contending, that it would be something that's physical, carbon-based.
If you're going 15,000 miles per hour in an atmosphere and you're changing directions all over the place, would it just kill you?
Yeah, it would kill you.
I mean, that's the other thing you see with these UFOs.
They make sharp right-angle turns at 5,000 to 15,000 miles per hour.
No carbon-based life form can survive that kind of acceleration.
An angel could.
An angel could.
Yes.
They're interdimensional.
So are you saying they're demons?
Is that what you're arguing about?
Well, fallen angels.
I think I take that conclusion because when you look at what are called the close encounters of the first, second, third, and fourth kind, the experiences are always deleterious.
The best you're going to come away with when you have a close encounter with a residual UFO is recurring, terrifying nightmares.
Say, what's the worst case scenario?
People have been killed by the encounters.
Sometimes their animals are killed by the encounters.
So it's not a pleasant experience.
But what we document in our book, if you're having these kinds of experiences, if you close the doors to all the alt cult in your life, that'll be the end of your UFO experiences.
And if you open those doors, don't be surprised if this stuff starts to happen.
Because often what happens is people have these close encounters, it's repeated encounters.
It's kind of like hypnagogic hallucinations or like night terrors and similar to all that?
Similar to all that.
And there's cases where people claim that they were put into a trance by these beings and even where they're on a computer and they begin to, you know, they're totally in a trance.
But it's called automatic writing, where this spirit being takes control of a human and writes out what the spirit being, namely the fallen angel, wants him to write.
The most famous example of that is the Arantia book, which is kind of a Bible for four different UFO religions.
And it's almost 4,000 pages long.
A third of its content is denying the deity of Jesus Christ.
Interesting.
So I'd like to give you an idea of the source.
Yeah, like why it's a...
Yeah, why it's so focused on designing the deity of Jesus Christ.
Isn't that what Joseph Smith said happened to him, too?
Isn't he kind of like...
Well...
I've been on some Muslim podcasts, and it's interesting.
And I studied Islam and Mormonism before I became a Christian.
I looked at all the different world religions.
But I noticed an eerie similarity between Islam and Mormonism.
They both are founded on the Old New Testament.
So in both religions, there's an exhortation, hey, these are spiritual books you need to study.
But they have a latter-day revelation.
So there's an extra book or books.
In the case of Islam, you got the Quran.
In the case of Mormonism, they got three books.
And notice that both Joseph Smith and Muhammad claim that they were visited by this angelic being that gave them these scriptures.
I don't doubt that.
But it tells us in the epistle of 1 John, be wary when an angel approaches you, appearing as an angel of light.
So in my opinion, both Joseph Smith and Muhammad had an angelic visitation, and I believe it's the same angel.
Wow.
And that explains to me just how incredibly similar the doctrines are.
I mean, the doctrine of women is eerily similar.
The doctrine of heaven is eerily similar.
So you said Carl Sagan was your professor.
I had him for a week in a summer in a course at the University of Toronto.
That's what I loved about my graduate career there.
Every summer they would bring in four world-renowned astrophysicists.
Each of them would teach a short course.
But to me, the highlight is having dinner with the four or just sitting around watching the four debate one another.
So you have any cool stories about Carl Sagan?
Yes.
I mean, he was supposed to give a course on the formation of planets, and he did talk about that.
But he also talked about extraterrestrial intelligent life.
And I remember one of the lectures he gave, he said, you know, we humans are in real trouble.
We're going to exterminate ourselves.
Our only hope is that we make contact with an extraterrestrial civilization more intelligent than us that has solved our problems.
And for sure, they've communicated an Encyclopædia Galactica.
If we can just tune our radio telescopes to read that Encyclopedia Galactica, it will solve all of our human problems.
I was sitting in the second row, and I was saying to my fellow graduate students, don't we already have an Encyclopedia Galactica?
And maybe Carl just needs to read that.
And Carl overheard me.
He says, I know exactly what you're talking about.
No one can live up to the moral standards of that book, so forget it.
And it's like, that's the whole point of the book.
Wow.
So, and my colleague at our office, Dave Rogstad, he knew Carl better than I did.
And when Carl got the diagnosis of cancer, he contacted Carl and said, hey, I've known you.
You've only got two years to live.
What about if I give you the exam questions ahead of time that you might have to answer when you die?
And Carl said, well, this will be fun.
And so they had a two-year back-and-forth email correspondence.
And the last six months of Carl's life, Dave asked Carl, do we have your permission to pray for you?
There's a number of Christians I know that would like to pray for you.
And he said, by all means.
So where Carl wound up at the end of his life, I really don't know.
So Neil deGrasse Tyson recently tweeted, lunar eclipses are so unspectacular that if nobody told you what was happening to the moon, you'd probably not notice at all.
Just saying.
Agree or disagree?
Oh, I would disagree because I mean, if you go back even thousands of years, people just with their naked eye were looking at these lunar eclipses and saying, wow, isn't it interesting that the shadow we see on the moon has got curvature to it?
It looks like some kind of spherical body is blocking out the light.
Maybe that's our planet.
And so that's when they began to say, well, you know, that makes sense because when we travel south, we see different stellar constellations than we do in the north.
And that would only be the case if the Earth was a sphere.
And they set about measuring the sphericity of the Earth by looking at the shadow of an obelisk at one point, latitude, at another point.
They actually measured the circumference or the diameter of the Earth to 1% precision, which is not bad for people without telescopes.
Then they looked at that shadow of the lunar eclipse on the moon and also examined the shadows of what happens when you get a solar eclipse.
And by that means, they determine the size of the moon, the distance of the sun.
They determine the size of the sun and the moon and the distances to both bodies and figured out that, hey, the Earth must be orbiting around the sun.
So heliocentrism goes back thousands of years.
The reason why people think, oh, well, nobody believed in that until Copernicus, they couldn't predict the future positions of planets given the math that they had at that time.
They didn't have algebra.
So it told me, he said, well, if we do it from an Earth-centered perspective, we can make the math work and we can predict the future positions of planets.
Once they had algebra, they no longer needed to do that.
And, you know, people credit Copernicus.
What Copernicus did is he left his home of Poland, went down to Italy, and went through the major libraries there and discovered what the ancient astronomers had determined thousands of years earlier.
They were heliocentrists, so Copernicus just basically copied what they had come up with.
And these days we give Copernicus the credit, but it really dates back much earlier.
But it makes the point.
Hey, these lunar eclipses, and by the way, I don't know whether you saw the lunar eclipse of a couple nights ago.
I was impressed just of how dark tells me the fires that are going on on Earth, the pollution we see, so the sunlight that was being bent by the atmosphere of the Earth, it's the darkest total lunar eclipse I've ever seen.
Because usually you get kind of a nice bright red color.
And at least here in the LA basin, it didn't come out that way.
So that kind of gives you some insight what's going on in our atmosphere.
But where I would agree with what I think Tyson would say is solar eclipses are much more spectacular than lunar eclipses.
They're way cooler.
So in Star Trek, they reach light speed by going through warp, which I don't quite understand.
In Star Wars, they do hyperspace, and then in some fictional universes, they do, in Dune, they do space folding.
Is light speed possible?
Piece of paper.
Which of these fictional works gets the closest to how it might work?
Well, a friend of mine who's the chairman of the physics department at Baylor University, Gerald Cleaver, he and a couple of his colleagues said, let's actually figure out what it would take to go faster than the velocity of light in a spaceship.
And he said, yeah, nothing physical can go faster than the velocity of light unless you bend the space-time fabric of the universe.
Because general relativity does not put a limit on how fast the space fabric of the universe can expand.
And in the future, it will expand faster than the velocity of light.
But to do it locally, you have to expend a lot of energy.
So he published a paper basically pointing out in order to bend the space-time fabric in front of your spaceship so that you can actually travel faster than the velocity of light, you would need to convert the mass of Jupiter into pure energy every second.
And he concluded the paper by saying the chances of that being funded any time in the near future are relatively remote.
That seems hard.
I was going to say that seems really hard to do.
So the Millennium Falcon would need that much energy.
Would need that much energy every second.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
This is our one chance to get detailed information on a planet outside of our solar system.
I remember watching a Martian movie with my two sons, and I said, Matt Damon cannot run like that on Mars.
Yeah, are you annoying to watch movies with?
Yeah.
Well, those kinds of things.
I can handle science fiction movies where they only violate the laws of physics at a rate of about one a minute.
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