Transcription
So, Chuck, yes, we haven't talked about God in a while. Oh, there's a reason for that. Yeah.
It's just that the history of civilization, anytime people had gods, gods that they revered, they're in high places. The heavens have been associated, right, with deity. Correct. From the beginning. Right. Okay. And so my field, astrophysics, directly confronts many people's questions regarding our existence, right? For that reason. "Mommy, where's heaven?" "Oh, it's up there." No, it's not because I have a telescope. It's not up there, Mommy. Right.
So, you have that intersection, right, of people's curiosity, what actually happens in modern astrophysics. Okay. And if you are religious or or prone to be religious, right, it's you think everyone is, perhaps. Yeah. We're human, prone to human. It's a human thing, given how prevalent it has been. Exactly. Throughout our entire existence. Exactly. And some of the earliest recordings of communication involved exactly that. Correct. The burial rituals of Neanderthal, for example. Right. Right. You can only have done that if you thought there was an afterlife or a supernatural force. Yes, there's an urge, I think, to see that which is unknown in the universe. You hear of it, big unknowns like dark matter and dark energy. Two hugely mysterious pieces of modern astrophysics that are unresolved, right? And they're not little, they're big, okay? You add them together, it's 95, 96% of what is driving this universe. And we have no clue what it is. That's insane. No clue. That makes me feel like we're the mistaken. I'm just saying, 'cause we're not the majority. Yeah. When 97% of the stuff that's there is not you, you probably don't belong there. Damn, Chuck. Yeah, I'm just saying.
Anyhow, so we can measure them. It's not a mystery that it's there. That is there. All right. We can measure their existence. We don't know what it is. What it is. All right. And there's precedent for that. We knew about the spectra of stars as soon as we were able to bring a spectroscope to the telescope. So there's interesting information here. We don't understand it, but we know it must be important. It's different for this star than that star. Oh, these two stars match. Let's make a catalog of all the spectra. Later, we would learn quantum physics and we could then interpret what was going on. And thus was the birth of our modern understanding of stellar evolution. The first steps are the measurements. So it's not so weird that we have measurements and don't know what it is.
So there's not only that, there are other questions that are just simply yet to be answered as opposed to mysteries. So one of them is, what was around before the Big Bang? It might have been a multiverse. But if even if there is a multiverse, what was around before the multiverse? Okay. And we don't yet know how Earth went from organic molecules to self-replicating life. Right. All right. Earth figured it out. We haven't figured that out yet, right? Granted, Earth took a couple hundred million years. All right. Yeah. And we're trying to do it in the lab overnight, right? But still, that's a mystery. I knew who knows how many failures over that couple hundred million years Earth had. Good point. You know, 'cause they they ain't left there. They're not there. They didn't survive.
So, if you lean religious, you will see these mysteries as where God might reside. Yes, God is operating there, right? And there's a long tradition of this actually, but philosophers got wise to it and they came up with the term for it. We'd mentioned it on a couple of other, absolutely, of our explainers. God of the gaps. God of the gaps. The god of the gaps. It's a very powerful concept and it's got the alliteration. So, it kind of stuck with people. So, it's the urge to declare that if there's something you don't understand about the universe, that God must be there with the with the with the puppet strings or with the forcing of what's going on, right? And my favorite God of the gaps moment, can I tell you that? It was Tommy. Okay. Claudius Ptolemy, AD 150, in the in the margin of his greatest work, the Almagest. Right. Okay. Actually, just Almagest, right? Which is Arabic for math. Hi, I wrote a book called Math. Guess what's in it? Math. Almagest is the greatest. It's an Arabic translation of the greatest. That's so cool. And he masterfully codified the epicycles that he was sure planets traced in the sky. Really? With Earth in the middle of the known universe. Oh, there's no other way to account for planets going backwards with retrograde. We have words for it. Even goes back was retrograde. They think the planet's actually doing that. That's why your washing machine's not working 'cause Mercury's in retrograde. Your phone stopped working. It's not gremlins. It's Mercury in retrograde. I don't think Mercury cares about inanimate objects. I think he only cares about people. He speaks so highly of you. How could you say that? So he does this, but it's still kind of a mystery. Why would all that happen? He's just doing it. I can account for it with my little epicycles. And he wrote in his margins, "As I trace the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus himself. Take my fill of ambrosia." Damn, he was just wrong on many accounts. He didn't even get the right god. He went with Zeus. He's Greek. He's Greek. Okay. Yeah. No. Give the man his religion, right? Don't take away his religion, right? And so that for me was the crowning moment of God of the gaps, right? All right.
So, there are people who to this day, which by the way, I mean, before we go further, that's another iteration of how we experience God. He understood something was going on, but it inspired awe within him. And whenever somebody feels that sense of awe, they often want to attribute that to God. Correct. Because it's beyond their their grasp, right? So, this is it's been going on forever, right? This urge. Yeah. Okay. My caution there is if that's how you define God where science has yet to tread, right? Then God to you is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance. Oh, that's sad. That, I mean, that's if you define God that way, it's an if statement, right? So, round two. Ding, ding, ding. Round two. All right.
There are people who they're not falling for the God of the gaps, right? To them, God is everything. Yeah. Gaps and no gaps, right? Okay. So, that God, that's a different God. Okay. That's not just a God who lurks, right? Where because science is an ever-moving frontier, right? One day we'll figure out dark matter, dark energy, and what happens to your God if that's what it was. All right? Okay. So the people who say God is everything, that resembles greatly Spinoza's God. He suggested that the very order of the universe, the operations of nature, everything we see, feel, and experience is God. Okay. And now I know a lot of people who feel that. Exactly. Exactly. So that would be Spinoza's God. And when Einstein was asked, "Does he believe in God?" He said, "If there's a God I believe in at all, it's," I'm paraphrasing, "it's Spinoza's God." Okay? Right? That's a different God from a God that is paying attention to your behavior. So, as you come from that posture to gods that are more engaged with you and your existence, personally involved, personally involved, then these would be gods you pray to. Okay? You wouldn't pray to Spinoza's God. I just want to make it clear to people that when they say God, God has very different meanings to different people. There's a tiered even throughout history of God. Even throughout history. Wow, that's great. Okay, I like it so far. This is great.
So, a common God manifesting today in people's beliefs is a God that cares about them and their health, wealth, and well-being and their prayers, uh, and the like. Okay. So there is a point of view that says this universe is so amazing. There had to be a God, an intelligence behind it. The intelligent design people. So in that case, they're not looking at a rock and saying there's intelligence behind it. They're looking at something more complicated than they can understand, right? And saying, "There's the intelligence." Right? All right. They look at the operations of a cell. Yes. All that going on. And something that's microscopic. They're just amazed by it. They're in awe, in awe of it. And so surely God is at work right around here. Yeah.
Now, so one of them that went around for a while and I, I found it very unconvincing, it was, "The laws of physics are exactly the way they need to be for us to be alive." Really? Okay. Okay. If they were slightly different, then we wouldn't be here. Like if the charge on the electron, or the value of the gravitational constant, or the speed of light, you know, things like that. And they all configure to make matter and energy come together such that we can be alive in that universe, right? I mean, there are some people that even on a macro level, they're like, "We live in the Goldilocks zone of these planets," and the other planets are dead as far as we're concerned. As far as we know. That's right. So with all of these parameters in just the right way, in just the right place, people who are, uh, lean religious refer to it as the fine-tuning argument. Interesting. Okay. Everything's fine-tuned to produce life, human life. So he's a god of precision that has placed things in this perfect synchronicity. All the gears mesh and everything works so that we get life and we pop out. And we pop out. Exactly.
I don't argue the fact that we have constants of nature that if they were slightly different, we wouldn't be here. I, I don't have an argument against that. I mean, that's. But my argument, however, is if whoever created the universe, if there's such an entity that did, why make a universe where we didn't show up for 13 billion years? Billion years? Not only that, Earth was not born until the universe was already 8, 9 billion years old, right? And then life begins, single-celled organisms. Is this the god of that life? Okay. But that was 3.8 billion years ago. Humans in our current form, last, you know, 100,000 years or so. Go to a million, million years, which is a drop in the bucket relative to the billions. Four billion, billion, right? Millions to billions. Okay. It seems like if you really wanted to make a universe that favored us, we would have shown up much earlier. Much earlier. I'm just thinking, just if you. The argument against that would be that there is no, because God exists outside of time and space, that what we see is 13.8 billion years is not measured by God. Yeah. However, my issue there is not how long that is, but how long that is relative to us. That's that could be short to God, right? But that means we're even shorter. Okay. So it doesn't, it does not look, it does not look like the universe cared much about us for most of its existence. Right? That's that's my only point there. I got you. Okay.
So, the multiverse, each universe would have slightly different laws of physics. Quantum physics tells us this. Right. Okay. And would you exist in a universe where life could not exist? I'm waiting for your answer. Well, I'm going to go with no. No, you're going to go with no. I'm going to go with no. Okay. So, we are alive in a universe among the infinitude created in a multiverse. We're alive in a universe for which life can happen as we have come to know it. Life as we know it. Right? So, we should not be surprised that we're having this conversation in that universe and not any of the other infinity universes. And this multiverse wasn't invented in response to a religious argument. It comes out of the math. Comes out of quantum physics. When what comes out of quantum physics, you're trying to shotgun marry it to general relativity and the early universe, and you see what comes out of it, and a multiverse comes out of it. What makes that less appealing if you're going to do a put God in the equation? Mhm. Is generally those gods have certain, uh, powers ascribed to them. Well, they have to. Okay. Yeah. All right. They're all-powerful, all-knowing, right? All good. Right. All right. These are common terms invoked. All I can say is that when I look at the universe and asteroid strikes rendering, you know, you know, 66 million years ago, 75% of the species of life on Earth went extinct. That's 'cause they were atheists. Atheist dinosaurs. Exactly. So, what am I saying? I'm just saying the universe doesn't look like anyone is in charge of anything. The randomness of the universe. The randomness of 100 years ago. 100 years ago, before our telescopes were good enough to reveal asteroid strikes and stellar collisions and galactic collisions and all this, it was, "Oh, the beauty and the majesty of this ordered universe." I have books that talk about the ordered universe. And then you look closer, and it does not look like what people wanted it to be to match their expectations of the God they're ascribing its handiwork to be. So it starts out as looking up like, "Look at this beautiful, ordered universe," and then you look closer and you're like, "They're shooting at us. It's a shooting galaxy. I'm just trying to kill us." Earth plows through several hundred tons of meteors a day, the leftovers of the solar system. Yes. Okay. Plus, on Earth, if I drop you butt-naked in a random spot on Earth, you're probably going to die. You're going to die within a half hour. Drop you in the ocean, you're going to die. Two-thirds of Earth, and three-quarters is ocean. Shark is going to take a bite out of you. You dead. Okay. Might drop you in the Arctic. There's not even land there. You're just, you just, or dwarves for polar bears. So, we say, "Oh, Earth is a haven for life," after you've built cities and heat and air conditioning and clothing. And they say, "Oh, look how beautiful Earth is," right? So, we did a lot of work to make Earth comfortable for us, right?
And so, I remain agnostic on this. I'm happy to listen to and look at information, evidence, data that might support an almighty, all-powerful being, right? But the distinction is, if you want to say there's a being responsible for the universe, is that the same being who tells you how to pray, who to pray to, what day to pray on, what food to eat, what food to not eat, and who to sleep with? And why, why can't it get it right? The fact that there's no uniformity in it is is kind of a problem. Well, it's not a problem for the people who are certain that their God is the one true God. Well, that's the, the problem. That is the problem. Everybody's sure that their God is the, not everybody, but many people who are deeply religious in their tradition, right? Are, listen, I used to be one of them. I'm not, I mean, I don't, I don't, I have a great deal of compassion for people who are devout. And because, Oh, so do I. I got, I know you do. We've never had this conversation offline thing. I just want to openly have a conversation. First of all, let me just say this, and I'm going to say this in your defense in front of everybody. This is a conversation you and I have had offline. People don't think that you have compassion for those who believe. They think that you're hostile to it. And what they don't know is that nothing could be further from the truth. And I've asked you point blank, "Is it possible that you could ever believe in God?" And your answer was yes. And then you gave me the criteria for doing so. It wasn't all that deep. It really wasn't all that deep. I was like, and guess what? And all I could say was, "Oh, yeah, no, I gave one example like, okay, uh, there's an elevation above which all plane crashes have ended in 100% dead people, right? Okay. The distance that the plane falls out of the sky, okay, there's an elevation above which no one has ever survived. Okay, imagine a plane where it crashes above that level and only the Christians survive and everybody else is dead. That that things that make you go, "Huh?" Only the Muslims survive? Only the, you know, the Zoroastrians survive. Exactly. So I could easily come up with a set of that you want to test it several times. Once would not be sufficient as in any scientific experiment, but I can come up with it's not hard to do that. And so I, so all my only point is an emergent sense of spirituality in people because religions have been losing their adherence, their, yeah, people are not following religion as much, but they'll still say that they're spiritual. And these are people who are feel that there's some force out there, something greater than themselves, greater than themselves. But it doesn't come with all the all of the rules and regulations and and baggage, if dare I call it that, that comes with so many religions, right? So I'm, I'm simply saying that the universe, if you want to say there's a God involved, ask yourself, is it because there's something you don't yet know how to explain? Right. Right. Like the person writhing on the floor, frothing at the mouth. So you go to your priest in a town where churches are walking distance, and they come and they just enough time to get the holy water, perform the exorcism, and the person comes out of it. And that's called a coincidence 'cause that's when the seizure was over. The seizure. That's correct. So that's an example of something that we didn't have an explanation for, right? Quote, a natural explanation, but we had a supernatural explanation. You were inhabited by the devil. Right? So every example of that throughout history where science has given attention to that phenomenon, it has yielded to scientific discovery. That's including the spread of disease, everything. You cannot argue with that statement. And I'm just, right. And and so today, if there's something that amazes you or is mysterious to you, I just take my cue from the history of this exercise and say, "I'm going to stick with the science, right?" Because I'm not compelled to throw my hands up and say, "This is God. God must be in charge." Be it Spinoza's God, right? Or or or Pocahontas's God or anybody's God.
Well, I'll tell you for me, what I don't appreciate is sports stars who thank God when they win, don't blame God when they lose. I tweeted that. Did you? And people got angry with me. Oh, get out. Yeah, I was just joking. And by the way, just to offer some street cred here. Okay. At home, I, I own multiple shelves this wide of religious books, publications, everything that Jehovah's Witness has ever left at my door. There's a shelf of that, right? I have, uh, there's the Quran multiple times. I have a Quran, and I have, I have the Bible. I have the Torah. I have, I don't have the Torah. Yeah. Okay. It's mostly the Old Testament. Mostly in the Old Testament, the law. So, so I, it's there. And I have large, uh, King James Bibles from the 18th century. I have several Bibles. Yeah. Yeah. So, so I think about this often and I think about what passages have affected people in civilization and the like. In most conversations I get into with religious people, fact remains, I own more religious books than they than they own science books. And you probably know more about their religion than they do. No, I would, I wouldn't assert that, but I'm just saying, I own more religious books than they own science books. M. That's true in essentially every case. True. Yeah. And so, so I'm not coming from nowhere. I think about it and I care about it. What most people know about their religion, and I don't care if you come at me or not. Okay. What most people know about their religion is what somebody told them. That's true. That's what most people know about their religion. It's filtered. Got filtered. It's filtered. And so that's why I say you probably know more because you went straight to the source. I was read the text. Correct. Most people do not read the text. I read the text. Okay. That's what I did. That's all I'm saying. Be mad at me if you want. Okay. Used to be one of you. That's how I know, right?
That Joan of Arc, who's one of my heroes for for standing up for what she believes, trying to get England out of France. She was trying to defend France and they caught up with her, handed her over to the Burgundians. The region was under control by the Brits, and then the Brits tried her and burned her at the stake. But like, for what? It can't be because she wasn't religious because she was. Anyhow, go read the transcript of the trial. There's like, was it a third of it? A fourth? There's some large fraction of the conversation about how and why they should burn her that cites the fact that she was a crossdresser. Wow. And where's that in the Bible? I got the quote. "It is a man should not dawn the clothes of a woman, nor the woman a woman the clothes of a man, lest it be an abomination unto the Lord thy God." So people say, "Oh, they get their moral code." Generally, it's a cherry-picked set of codes. And you, you're using rational, really secular thought to say, "That's messed up. I'm not going to do that." Right. But this is pretty good. Let me do some of that. Yeah. And then you bring that forward, and then that becomes your your your code. Yeah. And I don't mind your code. I think it's great, uh, for the most part. Just, you know, don't make me have to live by your code. That's all I'm saying. If if it's the weird parts. I mean, some code is feels universal. Yeah, some of it does.
Here's an interesting fact. In Christianity, generally, there's a the ethos that you're kind to your neighbor. You, you're reflecting a lot of the teachings of Jesus, of course. "Turn the other cheek." Absolutely. This sort of thing. This fueled Martin Luther King. It's radical. I love it. Yeah. It was. It's. That was not in the Old Testament. No, it's not in the Old Testament. He's an angry old white dude in the Old Testament. "Get off my lawn or I'll smite you." Guess what? Your wife, she's now a pillar of salt. I told that broad not to turn around. Okay, you going to listen to me. I'm God and you going to listen to me. No, you better build a boat 'cause I'm gonna drown all these. You're all dying. Okay, I'm mad. I'm old and I'm white. Okay, I'm God. Damn it. Chuck as God. If Chuck were God, that's how he would describe it. Yeah. But the New Testament is lovely. Oh, yes. Very, very gorgeous. It's just gorgeous. But all of Christianity, for those of you who think that it's political or it's stopping gay people or it's stopping this person or don't do this or don't do that, all of Christianity comes down to this: Love God with all your heart, soul, and might. Love your neighbor as yourself. How do you love yourself the way God loves you? Love God with all your whole your soul, heart, and might. That's how you love your neighbor. So first he tells you what to do. Then he tells you how to do it. You love him with all your heart, soul, and might. Love your neighbor as yourself. How do you do that? The same way you love God. And that means up and across. It's all your heart, soul, and might wrapped up in love and given to another person. That is Christianity. Anything else is heresy. And you've been fooled.
Chuck, sometimes you sound like a preacher. You know, I'm gonna come out of the closet, Neil. I'm gonna just come, I'm gonna come on out of the closet. Wait, you've been on this show for 14 years. Something's coming out of the closet. Believe it or not, I've never said this and I'm going to say it. Okay. I used to be a Pentecostal minister. What? I was on my way. I, I was studying. I'm technically ordained. I have not, um, I did not fi go through with it. I didn't finish up. But, um, yes, if there was a time where I stood in a pulpit and I preached the gospel of Jesus Christ, I was the guy on the street with the bullhorn. I was the person handing you a tract. That was me. When I say I was one of you, when I talked to the religious people, I, I was beyond one of you. You were more than one of them. I was a zealot. I was beyond. And so, yeah. Uh, okay. So you got, I've never, religious street cred, you know. I never talk about it. Um, I don't, it's a part of my life that in many respects bought me a lot of good. It's a part of my life that was also, I think, damaging in some respects. And, uh, I guess I don't know. I'm still conflicted about it. People ask me if I believe in God and I will not tell you the answer. Got to leave something on the table. Right. Are we done here? You know what? I'm ready to. Let's take up a collection. I need some money. We need to take a collection right now for this sermon. That's right. Yeah. Pastor Chuck needs a Mercedes. B. So, this was just an explainer just to catch you up on what might be the latest thinking along the lines of how the universe got here. Or was it divine providence or some other way? Those are cool questions, some unanswered. Anyhow, until next time, as always, keep looking up.