March 30, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
06:26
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| That there was a beginning. | |
| By the way, I assume the answer is yes, but I'll still ask you, did you read God and the Astronomers by Robert Jastrow? | |
| Oh, absolutely, yeah. | |
| I heard Jastrow speak in the mid-80s when I was a young scientist at a conference in which he and Alan Sandage, a previously agnostic Jewish astronomer, announced that he had become a believer in God. | |
| Because of, not in spite of, the evidence from science, and one of the key things that he cited was his own work verifying the expansion of the universe. | |
| He was one of Edwin Hubble's graduate students, and Sandage and Jastrow both had come to this position that the evidence from cosmology had clear and obvious theistic implications. | |
| Sandage embraced belief in God. | |
| Jastrow... | |
| It was a kind of agnostic who wrestled with God, to quote my friend Brian Keating, who describes himself that way. | |
| So very, very interesting developments in astrophysics and cosmology that kind of came into the public awareness beginning in the 1980s. | |
| I knew Robert Jastrow very well. | |
| He came to my home on a number of occasions. | |
| He was one of the kindest human beings I have ever met. | |
| Aside from being, I mean, he was the head of the Goddard Space Center for NASA. I mean, this is a major scientist. | |
| Extraordinary scientist, absolutely. | |
| I just want people to know. | |
| So, I really adored that man, and I adore Brian Keating, and I adore you. | |
| So, I really feel involved in your lives and this whole issue. | |
| Let me just ask you, this has nothing to do with God. | |
| There are two things that I think the human mind cannot understand. | |
| We cannot understand that there was no beginning, that something always was, but we also can't understand that there was a beginning, because the obvious question is, what happened ten minutes before that? | |
| Do you have an answer to that, or is it unanswerable? | |
| Well, two observations about it. | |
| One is, in the Hebrew Bible, in the book of Ecclesiastes, The writer of the book says that God has written eternity on their hearts, but they can comprehend it not. | |
| It's the one thing we can't quite get our minds around. | |
| But when we think philosophically, we always end up positing something from which everything else came. | |
| People who do worldview studies call that the prime reality question. | |
| More technical philosophers call it the question of ontology. | |
| What is the thing or the entity or the process that gave rise to everything else? | |
| And there are two basic choices in Western philosophy going all the way back to the Greeks. | |
| One is matter and energy, and the other is a pre-existing mind that gives rise to matter and energy. | |
| And the dominant view coming into the 20th century in an era that was dominated by the philosophy of scientific materialism coming out of figures like Darwin, Marx, and Freud... | |
| That matter and energy were eternal and self-existent. | |
| We now know that's not a very good answer, and that suggests instead that something that transcends matter, space, time, and energy is necessary to give a causal explanation for the origin of all that is. | |
| And it is for that and other reasons that many of these astrophysicists and astronomers who were involved in discovering the beginning perceived the clear theistic implications of these discoveries. | |
| Arno Penzias, who discovered the I love that juxtaposition of those two quotes because that sets up the issue. | |
| Does the universe look as it should if theism were true or if materialism were true? | |
| And I think the answer, based on these three big discoveries that I've examined in the book, is that it looks as it should, as we would expect, if there was a pre-existing creator, a conscious mind with purposes and design for the universe. | |
| The book is Return of the God Hypothesis. | |
| Three scientific discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe. | |
| It is up at DennisPrager.com. | |
| Okay, what's the second? | |
| The second one is one that I know you know well because you've written on it, and it is the discovery that the laws of physics and the basic parameters of physics have been finely tuned to allow for the possibility of life, and that many of those fine-tuning parameters have been set from the very beginning of the universe. | |
| Many physicists will tell us now that we live in a kind of Goldilocks universe, in which the expansion rate of the universe, for example, and the force driving that are very precisely finely tuned. | |
| That is to say, the forces at work in physics lie within very fine tolerances, such that if they were a little stronger, a little weaker, if the masses of elementary particles were a little lighter, a little heavier, if the speed of light were a little A little faster, a little slower. | |
| If the configuration of matter and energy at the very beginning of the universe were a little less ordered in one way or another, we could not have life. | |
| We could not even have stable galaxies or even basic chemistry. | |
| So to get a universe with all the exquisite specificity and order and design that we see in it, it had to be a setup job from the very beginning. | |
| And the physicists call this the fine-tuning. | |
| And many have concluded that the fine-tuning points most naturally, most logically, to a fine-tuner. | |
| Sir Fred Hoyle, who was a great astrophysicist at Cambridge University, was initially an atheist. | |
| He was a profound skeptic of the Big Bang Theory. | |
| All right, hold on. | |
| Tell us what happened with Hoyle, because I want to tell everybody about the book, Return of the God Hypothesis. | |
| Stephen Meyer, the author, up at DennisPrager.com. |
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