The Origin of the Universe (Physics of Eden, the Ice Age, & Fine Tuning) w/Hugh Ross & Fuz Rana

We look at the fossil record, you notice it testifies of multiple mass extinction events, quickly replaced by mass speciation events. And it happens about once every 30 to 35 million years, which is exactly the frequency you need to compensate for the brightening of the sun.

Adam is made from the dust of the earth. He's not created in the Garden of Eden. He's created, and then God causes the garden to grow. And when you look at the language in the original Hebrew, that language suggests normative growth.

An eighth day is coming when God creates again, but that's not until God eradicates evil.

The flood happened during an ice age. And how you know that is Genesis 8. It took a whole year for the floodwaters to recede.

When you look at God's goal to prepare the universe for us human beings, unless each step happens instantly, you run out of time to bring human beings upon the scene. Each step must happen instantly, or we don't get here.

We need to be constrained to three dimensions of space and one dimension of time and the four laws of physics in order for evil to be eradicated by God's hand.

There's quite a big elephant in the room that I feel like no one's addressing. I'm about to ask you about it. Nobody knows how to define life. We can describe what is common among living systems, but we can't actually produce a workable definition for life.

God gave Adam and Eve a command: multiply and fill the earth. The command was repeated twice. And the story of Genesis 10:11 is humanity rebelling against that. So he forcibly scatters humanity all over Africa, Europe, and Asia.

How are you thinking about the future knowing that people are trying to live forever? At the end of the day, AI is never going to be like us. But the problem is people are going to probably think of AI as being like us.

When people come up as atheists and they're studying evolution, what are the odds that we would have the finetuning from 3 billion years? It's indistinguishable from winning the California lottery 200 consecutive times where you only buy one ticket each time, or where you don't buy any tickets at all.

Hey, wait, wait, wait, wait. Before you get into this episode, we—I'm like, nerded out for 3 hours. We have two gentlemen in our office today. One is a biochemist, one is an astrophysicist. They've written a lot of books that we'll talk about, but this episode in particular, uh, we go into, um, the foundations of the universe, how God built everything. We go into, uh, the intelligent design, the finetuning of the human species. We, we are rabbit trailing on some of this, but it is absolutely, uh, phenomenal. And when you have two studied men who have devoted their lives to uncovering the secrets of how God built everything. Uh, and I always will preface people this way: If, if you ever get to a point in this episode where you don't understand, um, what's being said, good news, that means you're learning. Uh, so don't get frustrated or judge yourself. Most of this episode, I was trying to understand the words that they were using. But this is a phenomenal discussion. Uh, if you're interested in, uh, not just defending your current worldview or paradigm, but discovering, um, a new paradigm in regards to how the gospel story integrates seamlessly into our time right now, into the time before right now. Uh, it's rich with scientific literature and facts and pieces of data that I never heard before. It's one of my favorite episodes that we've ever done, but it might take you a little bit to get through it. Um, enjoy the process. If it takes you three days, great. If you go through it in three hours, you are smarter than I am. So, congratulations. Uh, but I, I loved this conversation. I just want to warn you beforehand that it is a pretty high level in terms of how they explain everything. So, thanks for being here. Let us know if you have any questions.

Everyone wants to get to the high places, but if you want to go high, you first have to go deep. What's up? Welcome to the deep end. How are you? Wonderful. We've got two incredible guests with you today, and I just got to meet Hugh and Fuzz. I'm going to give them some backgrounds on you guys before we get going so that they understand, sure, the room that they're about to step into. Um, it is, I tell people this sometimes, I'm like, sometimes I do get a little intimidated because based on who's in the room, I'll feel really silly and like a kid and kind of dumb. So with you guys, I was like, "Oh, I can't wait to ask you questions." But just understand, like, these guys are like the pinnacle of, um, what I would say, like intellect that validates the gospel and validates scripture. And so, uh, we have Hugh Ross right here. He is a senior scholar, founder, and former president of Reasons to Believe, which is an organization. Did you start this organization? Yes. So you, you started this organization dedicated to demonstrating the compatibility of science and Christian faith. You've written 24 books. Yes. And all of them are peer-reviewed, I believe. Okay. So, wild. Um, one day I will be able to sit in a room with you and not feel nervous. Thank you for being here. And then we have Fuzz Rana. Mhm. And, um, Fuzz Rana is the current president, um, and the senior scholar at Reasons to Believe. He's a biochemist. He holds a PhD in chemistry with an emphasis on biochemistry from Ohio University. You Ohio football fan? Um, well, if you're a Bobcat fan, you, you can't be much of a football fan. I see. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, we're Ohio University, not the Ohio State. So, good clarification. We're the other guys. Good clarification. Um, author of seven ground, uh, several groundbreaking books. How many? Um, did you say 10? I think about 10. Yeah, about 10 books. I don't know that I've ever sat down and counted them, but that's when you know somebody's in a different league. They're like, "I lost count 20 years ago." Um, the books include Humans 2.0, Creating Life in the Lab, and Fit for Purpose. Um, so we're going to have a wonderful conversation today about a lot of different things. Um, creationism, uh, how the world came to be, what it's designed to be, uh, the molecular structure of life, synthetic life, uh, transhumanism. We're just going to go off into the deep end. Anything you want to say before we get going? No, I'm just excited for the ride.

So, I have, I want to ask a personal question before we get going. Um, are you comfortable revealing your ages? So, you're, you said 80 years old. Yes. And 65. 62. 62. But going on 62 going on 18. There you go. Yes. Um, man, you look good for 62, man. You look great. You do. You do. It's that California sun. Yeah. It's good for you. Um, I've been thinking a lot about what the Apostle Paul wrote, uh, when he said, you know, "I finished my race to completion." And I'm 36, Jake is 24. Um, yeah, it's not like you all have lived four of my lifetimes or anything, but I'm starting to get to that point where I'm realizing that I really only have one goal. You know, when you start and you're young and you have these dreams to build empires and make money and all these things, and there's nothing wrong with that, but I'm, I think I'm at the point finally where it's starting to dawn on me that my one goal is really just to finish my race. Well, I don't want to fall away from God because it got hard. I don't want to sell out because there was an opportunity for wealth. How have you navigated 80 years, uh, and here you are, still sharp, still, you're traveling, doing podcasts, but you are sold out to the Lord. Like, what wisdom do you have for, you know, the next generation who's trying to do the right thing for God but is distracted by the world? Yeah, I think he mentioned Paul and he uses the analogy of the race and how he was finishing the race, but notice the end of his life, he was really going for broke. And so one thing that my wife and I really stress is staying physically fit so we can really finish the race, kind of like that, you know, that last lap. You want to be going full bore during that last lap. So, I'm looking at these later years of my life. These are the years where I want to go all out. No stopping, no slowing down, not going to retire. Uh, as long as I'm fit and mentally able, I'm going to go for it. Nice.

What, what are your goals like at this level? Like, do you have goals? Do you sit down and set goals? Or does it kind of become just like, I'm, I don't know, like, what, what drives you? Well, what really drives me is seeing people come to faith in Jesus Christ and realizing that so many people have not read the scriptures, but they've been exposed to the book of nature. So staying on top of the latest scientific discoveries, especially in my discipline of astrophysics, and basically using that, "The heavens declare the glory of God." A lot of people haven't seen that glory. Help them see that glory and use the book of nature to bring them to the book of scripture into relationship with Jesus Christ. Yeah. You know, when I was at Caltech, I discovered a lot of quasars, but quasars are only going to last for a few billion years. When you bring a human being to faith in Jesus Christ, that's eternal. Wow. And so, I get a lot more joy out of seeing someone come to faith in Christ than discovering a quasar at the edge of the universe. Do you know what a quasar is? I would have loved to know, actually. Well, a quasar is a giant galaxy, uh, where matter has collapsed to its core and created a supermassive black hole where the black hole is converting matter that it's sucking in into energy, which makes it incredibly bright, even at great distances. Wow. Yeah. Huh.

So, if, if the, if this is just an indication of how the show is going to go before we get to you, if the sun turned into a black hole, how long would the Earth be continue rotating before it got sucked in? Like, 8 minutes, 8 seconds, 10 minutes? Well, number one, the sun's not massive enough ever to become a black hole. So, don't worry about that. Got it. It's going to end up being a white dwarf and just cool down, and it'll take a good 100 billion years for it to completely cool down. Got it. Uh, but if it was a black hole, uh, you know, the orbit would gradually spiral in towards the black hole, and then it would get sucked in. And, yeah, depending on the distance, you can calculate how much time it will take to get sucked in. Uh, but in the case of our planet, it would literally take millions of years before it would get sucked in. Really? What? Cuz it orbits pretty far away. Wow. Okay. So, okay. Paul, we'll come back to you for a second to talk about the black holes. Um, Fuzz, same question for you. Um, you know, 78 years old now. I'm just going to make it older as we go through the episode. Uh, 62, 63. What, what has been like, have you ever hit a point in your life where you, you realized that all your goals were meaningless? And what did you do with that? And how, how have you gotten to the place now where you still have drive? Yeah. Oh, well, I, um, think I probably have more drive now than I did even as a young, a young man. There's just so many distractions when you're young, right? You have a family, you're trying to get your career started, you're trying to just get stable in terms of your finances, and, and, um, you're also, you're young as a Christian as well. But as you live life, you, you know, you inevitably are going to go through very hard and challenging circumstances. And, uh, eventually you reach the point where instead of, um, being, you know, upset, you know, with God that, hey, you, you have to go through this, you realize that each of those experiences are actually transforming you more and more into his image. Right? The writer of Hebrews talks about the father who loves his child disciplines him. And so you have to look at those circumstances that you're dealing with as really part of that disciplining process that really reflects God's love for you because you're, you soon realize that when you go through difficult circumstances, you're not going through it alone, right? That, that, um, that God, in his, in his kindness and his graciousness, through the Holy Spirit, is ministering to you through that process there. If you are part of a church community and you've got good relationships, there will be people there that God will use to, to minister to you. And then it, in turn, it develops in you, I think, a sense of compassion towards what other people go through. I probably was far more judgmental as a young man than I am now because I realize, look, people are, are struggling, and often times it's not because they lack character. They've made bad decisions. It's just life happens to you, and it's, I'm able to really provide genuine compassion towards a person without judging them or seeing that what they're going through is really their fault. Yeah, 100%.

All right, back to the black holes. Um, is Interstellar scientifically accurate from an astrophysicist? Like, does time really move different? I love that movie Interstellar. Yeah, of course, all the science was wrong in the thing, but the equations in the background were all correct. So that really thrilled me. Correct equations in the background mainly because they had, uh, you know, consulted with a Caltech black hole expert, Kip Thorne. So, and I had Kip Thorne as a professor when I was a grad student. So that excited me, even though the science was wrong, that I've actually written an article in a peer-reviewed journal called "Black Holes as Evidence of God's Care," making the point that we're living in a galaxy. You have to be living in a big spiral galaxy for advanced life to be possible. But the bigger the galaxy, the bigger the black hole at its core, and the more dangerous it is. But for a variety of reasons, our Milky Way galaxy's black hole is 40 times smaller than it should be. It's the only big galaxy that has got such a tiny, uh, central black hole. And it's because we've had no major merger event with a dwarf galaxy in the last 11 billion years that we have such a tiny black hole. And what's interesting too is you go back a million, two million years ago, it was consuming big asteroid and comet-like bodies. Today, it's consuming tiny ones. And so during the human era, we have a very quiet, small, uh, black hole in its core. And likewise, the Andromeda galaxy, which is another big spiral galaxy, its supermassive black hole is the right size, 40 times bigger than the one in our Milky Way galaxy. But currently, it's in the quietest phase it's ever been. And if it wasn't, we wouldn't be able to have this podcast, really. And likewise, you look at all the other supermassive black holes in the vicinity of our Milky Way galaxy. Uh, it's all designed in such a way, uh, that we can safely exist here on planet Earth. And yet, many of the elements in your body that are essential for you to live, they're only constructed when neutron stars merge together to become black holes. So if you don't get adequately exposed, our solar system, to black holes when it's forming, we won't have the heavy elements you need to have human beings. And so everywhere we look with black holes, we see it's all amazingly designed so that we can thrive at this moment in cosmic history here on planet Earth.

So does that mean that you don't, uh, believe that there is other, uh, humanistic life forms in other galaxies? Is this kind of like a slipstream that we've gotten into? Well, Christians have debated this issue. Uh, has God created life elsewhere in the universe? Has he created beings like us elsewhere in the universe? And you read Psalm 104 and say, "God seems to really enjoy creating. Why would he stop on one planet?" But other theologians will weigh in and say, "Notice how frequently Jesus refused to perform miracles when the crowd asked him or, you know, when Pilate asked him, uh, and Herod asked him." So it's like God performs just the miracles he needs to perform to achieve his purposes and no other. So for 2,000 years, Christian theologians have debated, is there life elsewhere or there isn't. What's happening today is that we astronomers are weighing in on this debate and say, everywhere we look beyond planet Earth, we see conditions that are extremely hostile to advanced life. We better take care of this planet. We're not finding any others. And you know, there's NASA saying, uh, I think our galaxy contains 40 billion habitable planets, but all they're looking at is the liquid water habitable zone. There's 16 other planetary habitable zones, and life is only possible if your planet simultaneously exists in all 16 of the known planetary habitable zones. And we've yet to find another planet that exists in even three of those 16 zones. Wow. We live in the only planet that simultaneously exists on all 16. And hey, that's just the start. You have to be in the right galactic habitable zones. You got to be in the right supergalactic cluster of habitable zones. So you look at the entire universe, you see at every single size scale, it's optimally designed to make possible our existence at this time.

So Mars is not a habitable zone. Uh, well, I watched the movie The Martian with my two sons. They're saying, "Dad, stop telling us how often this movie gets the science wrong." Cuz you know, it shows Matt Damon growing potatoes on Martian soil. It's like, hey, told my sons, there's 60 times as much sulfur in Martian soil as on Earth soil. You can't grow anything on Martian soil. It's going to have to be 100% Mad Damon poop if you want to get potatoes. Wow.

What is Elon going to do? So, I'm all for sending machines to Mars, but there's no way we're going to send people there without killing them. M. So, I mean, the radiation on the surface of Mars, I mean, if you want to have people on Mars, you better send machines, build a habitat 100 ft below the surface, have them get off the spaceship, immediately go into that underground habitat. But hey, you got the problem. How do you get them from Earth to Mars without killing them? So they've done experiments on mice and rats where they expose them to the radiation you would get from going to Earth to Mars. Within 3 months, their intestinal tracts stop working, and, uh, within 6 months, they're all dead. So it's like, uh, you got to find a way to protect them from the radiation, and, uh, you're going to need a really, really big spaceship for that to be possible. And of course, you got to give them gravity. You can't just send them there. Uh, you got to find some way. So, now we're looking at a gigantic spaceship. You say, "How big?" Well, to safely get people to Mars, you want it to be, oh, like a mile in diameter and 10 miles long. Oh my gosh. So, now, now you got a chance of actually get a chance, not a guarantee. How do you even get that? We, how do you even get that off the ground? Oh, you'd have to build it in space. Got it. That's okay. So for a few quadrillion dollars, you could pull it off. Wow.

So about getting humans to Mars, maybe that's where, uh, the synthetic transhumanism, do you think that they've thought through like, we would have to essentially, uh, warp the human genome to such a degree that they could survive there? Could we create a human that could survive on Mars? No. No, there's, I don't think you could do that at all. Um, uh, the, the only hope that you would have would be something, you know, that's akin to the singularity idea of Ray Kurzweil, where you would somehow put consciousness in a, put consciousness in a machine, right? And I don't think you're ever going to be able to do that simply because, uh, that, that whole model presumes that the brain is the mind, right? And if you take a, a dualistic perspective that, you know, I think most Christians would take, where there's an immaterial aspect to our nature and a material aspect, and that immaterial aspect is our soul, is our, you know, our spirit, right, where the mind is part of that soul-spirit, you know, conglomerate, if you will, um, you're never really going to be able to upload, you know, your, your mind or your essence or whatever into into a machine framework. So, you know, it's, it's a, a dream that, you know, you see transhumanists espouse, but it's all predicated on the, you know, the brain is the mind, you know. But, um, what's interesting to me is is something called the salvation paradox, is that if you think you're going to somehow save yourself by, let's say, hypothetically, uploading your mind into a machine framework, you're not really saving yourself. But what you're doing is you're creating a digital copy of yourself that lives in a machine environment. You still are going to die. Right? So that's the salvation paradox, is that anything you do to try to save yourself is actually going to save not you, but something, a copy of you, or something other than you. Wow. Yeah.

I, well, I don't know how, uh, the, so the soul, the spirit, was the mind seems to be a bit of a play, a connective tissue piece in the middle of like grounding that to the body, but the soul and spirit are kind of in a different realm. So I don't know how they would get that into the, the realm of a technology. Right? You're, I don't think you're going to ever be able to do that, right? You know, and, um, you know, it's, it's interesting, this whole idea of what is the relationship between the, the spirit, the, the, the soul, or the mind and the brain is a very fascinating, uh, question that I think is, is really being pressed on in interesting ways by the development of, uh, the, you know, brain-computer interfaces. You mentioned Elon Musk and his company Neuralink, but what he's doing at Neuralink is probably close to the state-of-the-art, but the idea of creating these brain-computer interfaces is really one of the hot areas in bioengineering. And it's, it's mind-blowing to me that you can implant electrodes into your brain and then convert the electrical activity in your brain to user intent, right, and then transmit that to a machine, and you're telling the machine what to do just like it's part of your body. And it goes the reverse direction where you can take electrical input from a machine and it transmits to your brain, and you can gain information doing that. That's to me, crazy. And, uh, and so I've been very interested in what is that relationship, you know, uh, and there's a, a guy named John Cooper, who one of our scholar community members at Reasons to Believe, at Reasons to Believe, which is the organization you and I work for, we're building a, a community of scholars from a wide range of disciplines. Got about 350 people that volunteer with us. And one of them, a guy by the name of Stan Wallace, uh, turned me on to this guy, John Cooper, who came up with this concept called holistic dualism, which he argues is the biblical view of the relationship between our material and immaterial nature. And his idea is that there's an integration, right? That yes, indeed, the, the, our immaterial nature, our soul and spirit, our mind is separate from our brain, right? But in our true human form, they're integrated with each other, where the brain and the mind are in this dynamic relationship. And you can bring in the spirit into that as well, right? And, and that means that, you know, your, what you do with your brain impacts the way you think, impacts your mind, and that can impact your spirit, right? You know, Paul says, you know, "Don't be conformed to the patterns of this world, but transform yourself by the renewing of the mind," which is interesting because it's saying that part of the way we become more like Christ is through disciplines in terms of what we think and those types of things. But there seems to be that, that, um, that integration between the, the brain and the mind and the spirit, which means that there are things we can do in our brain that influence our mind, influence our spirit, and vice versa, which I think is a great model for how we think about things like brain-computer interfaces. Love that. It reminds me of the, um, David, uh, Bohm's implicate, explicate order. So the implicate is like the wrapped-up possibilities that come from the immaterial that then almost un, they don't clone, they like unravel into the material. And so like, this, he's, he's talking about two realms. Like in one realm, I've never heard of holistic duality, but that's fascinating. In one realm, you have both the cause and the effect of the other realm, and in the other realm, you have both the cause and the effect of, and they, they're cyclical, almost recursive. Yeah. Right. That's very interesting. Yeah. Yeah. That's, you know, and it, it's really fascinating to think that you can think something in the immaterial and then affect it in the material. Yes. How, and, and how does that work? That's a giant mystery, right? But it's fascinating to to think about that. Yep. Yep. Even you can affect something in the material world that seemingly is disconnected, right? Uh, from the, Yeah, that's awesome. You, well, you know, if, if, Okay. Well, I don't want to, you know, take things off. We're following you. Okay. But following you, you know, uh, and then I'll, I'll be quiet for a while, but please don't, don't do that. But, you know, one of the things that along these lines that's really interesting is there's a growing number of anthropologists who are arguing that humans really are exceptional, that we're different in kind, not different in degree. This was part of the Darwinian revolution is that humans are really just glorified apes. We're no, we only differ in degree, not kind. And that, of course, raises real challenges to this notion that we bear God's image, right? That, but there's a small number of anthropologists, and the number is growing, that are saying, "Wait a minute, we think Darwin was wrong about this. We really think there's something special about human beings who are different in kind." One of them is a guy named Thomas Suddendorf, who's not a believer at all. He's an atheist, as far as I can tell. But he, he wrote a book called The Invention of Tomorrow, and this relates to what we were just talking about, where he said, "What humans have is a unique capacity to project into the future, and then we can also travel back in time and remember past events, and then we can change decisions that we make." Yep. In our minds, and then play out what it would be, what would have happened differently, and we learn from that, and we can then think into the future and saying, "This is the future that I want." And then through cause and effect, we can imagine what are the steps that we would have to take to go from now to the future that, that we desire, and that we literally can invent tomorrow." That's the title of book he wrote, is that we can invent tomorrow. And that's very much what you're talking about, right? Is, is that whole idea that we can conceive of things and then make them happen. And, and humans are unique in that capacity. No other creature is able to do that. Yep. Yep. And teleology would support the idea that not only can we do what he's saying, which is we can take the steps, but we can retrofit our own design to match that step. So our brain will change based on, to fit where we're going. Yes. Yeah. It's crazy, isn't it? It's wild. So on that note, the human, What's teleology again before you keep going? Teleology is like the, the theory that basically where we're going and where we are now has a collaborative effect. Got it. And so we're like, our, our present reality will begin to change and kind of warp, but in a, it can be a positive or a negative warping based on where our end point is in the future. Got it. So like, when something is teleological, it means that it's in the future and it's changing the present. Yeah. Gotcha. Human exceptional, uh, exceptionalism, when you talk about Darwin and you talk about like, how many species of the human code, I guess, were there? You, you've written about Neanderthals and, yeah, different species. Like, were, does that discredit the exceptionalism argument? Like, well, you know, this is really one of the, from a scientific perspective, one of the big debates that's going on in anthropology right now is, were Neanderthals like us or not? And, um, and often times when you pick up a newspaper or read something online, everybody just is adopting this position, Neanderthals were just like us. But when you actually go into the scientific literature, there's an intense debate as to whether or not Neanderthals were like us. And, you know, our view at Reasons to Believe is that the, the Neanderthals, or hominins in general, were creatures that were made by God. They existed. They were remarkable. They had intelligence and emotional capacities, but they were limited, and they, they weren't like us. They, they lacked the image of God, and they, they lacked our cognitive abilities. And I think that fits all of the data the best, is that really they, that we seem to even stand apart compared to Neanderthals. Got it. Yeah. So there's a, I could go through a long discussion of the science, and I'll, I'll spare you from that, but I think the, the science is really bearing that out.

Were there, how many, um, I guess I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this question. There were multiple different races that were not like us but looked like us. Correct. Yeah. Although in Neanderthals, you, you could tell, even though the, the story is, if you got a Neanderthal got on the bus with you today, you never be able to tell that it was a Neanderthal. I think that's not true. I mean, they, there are very clear differences. For example, in the Neanderthal skull, they had an enhanced brow ridge. Their skull shape was different than ours. It was elongated. They had an occipital bun. You would, right away from looking at their face, say that they're, were much more robust than we are. Uh, the, it's interesting, the human skull is really bizarre. When you look at all the other hominins and then you look at us modern humans, our skull is bizarre. It's, it's shaped like a globe. All the other hominins, it's, it's elongated, and that globular shape changes the shape of the brain. So you have an expanded parietal lobe, an expanded temporal lobe, and those are the parts of the brain that would be implicated in things like language and the capacity for math, things like that. Um, also Neanderthals had a much larger occipital lobe, which is, sorry, the, um, orbit, not the occipital lobe, but the orbit, and that's the, um, where, you know, the, the skull receives your eyes. Well, there's a correlation between the size of the orbit and the amount of the brain that's devoted to processing visual information. So, more of Neanderthal's brains were devoted to processing visual information than our brain, which means that something has to give, most likely advanced cognitive processing abilities. Plus, Neanderthals were more massive, which meant more of their brain was involved in controlling motor activity. So just from that alone, you can say, look, it doesn't seem like Neanderthals really had the, they were like us, that they really seem to be to be different. And there's other data that I could go through, but, um, you know, but to me, the, what clinches it is when you look at the archaeological record, Neanderthals were on Earth longer than we've been on Earth. You know, at Reasons to Believe, we take the view that humans have been around, modern humans, us, have been around about 100,000 to 150,000 years, some slop there. But, um, Neanderthals have been around, were around much longer than we were around before they went extinct, probably 250,000 years. Their, their technology remains static. We show up, we start with primitive technology, and we're talking about traveling to Mars, putting brain-computer interfaces in people. You know, that's what our technology has done, is exploded. And there are anthropologists saying, look, there's got to be an explanation for why you see these very different development trajectories for technology. And for Christians, it said, it would say that we bear God's image, and the Neanderthals didn't. Got it. Got it.

I have, are you good? I'm just, I mean, there's, there's quite a big elephant in the room that I feel like no one's addressing that I think, but also it's normal for you guys. I'm not, I'm about to ask, I'm about to ask you about it. All right. Um, 250,000 years. Younger Earth. Yeah, it's very different than it's just different. We're going there next, but I have a different question first. Um, have you ever read the book, um, The Three-Body Problem? No. Have you heard of this book? Yes. Have you read it? Not read the book, but we studied the three-body problem. I mean, that every astrophysicist has to go through that. Praise God for you guys. Okay, so I read these books. They were awesome, but they talked a little bit about what you're talking about, which is the amount of innovation and technological, like the speed of advancement of the humans, of the human species. Um, can you explain what the three-body problem is for just a second? Well, the two-body problem, you can solve it with utter precision as much as you want. You put a third body in the system. So, like you got the sun, you got the Earth, you got the moon, or you put a satellite in orbit around the Earth. Once you put a third body in there, you have to settle for an approximate calculation of the orbit. What's going to happen to it over time? If the third body is very, uh, small compared to the other two bodies, it's still very, very accurate. When the bodies become comparable in mass, then it gets a lot fuzzier. So you put a fourth body in, it's more challenging. And so this is where you got to get in the nonlinear mathematics to try to calculate, okay, it's going to range within this area. We run into that problem with the James Webb Space Telescope. We put it in the most stable third-body spot in the orbit of the Earth around the sun, but we know it's going to jiggle a little bit, but we can tolerate the jiggling to get the images we want. Beautiful. Okay. Amazing. What's the, the three-body problem? I'm butchering it, but I don't know what it is. Well, the two-body, like with two bodies, you can get accurate, uh, measurements with no error bars. You put a third body in or a fourth body, you got to settle for approximations. Okay, got it. Kind of. Okay. So, basically the way that I found out about it is there's a Chinese author who wrote a fantasy, like a sci-fi book called The Three-Body Problem. It's another species, and they had, uh, three big pro, they had, I think they had two suns and an Earth. So the size of it, it was messing everything up. So they couldn't predict anything. So every couple of generations, there would be a cataclysm and they would reset. But that ties into physics. For example, you can have a planet orbiting a binary star, but you're not going to have advanced life on that planet because of the three-body problem. Yeah. So, absolutely no application to this podcast, but I'm just going to leave it and let people Google on their own. You can leave that as an assignment for people. There you go. Here's your homework. Write a thesis on the three-body problem. Send it to Hugh, and he can give you a grade.

Okay, let's, let's talk about the, the young earth theory. And, uh, cuz I think most Christians are programmed to believe that the earth has only been around for 6,000 years. Um, and nothing existed before that. And so, um, when you throw around words like 120,000 years, 250,000 years, people probably immediately go like, eh, like no way. So, can we talk about the theory on on this? Because you're obviously a, a Christocentric worldview, like Jesus is your north star, but then you're also getting into the, uh, the data, like this has been around for much longer. So, can you help us connect the threads? And can I ask one thing on top of that? We've talked about on this show multiple times the gap, the age, basically that there was some unknown period of time between God created the heavens and the earth, like it seems like there was probably a gap somewhere in there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like, we don't know how long that gap is. So I think in my mind currently, my paradigm is, human race has been around is like, kind of like since Adam and Eve fell, 10,000-ish years, give or take. That's my current paradigm. Then before then, I'm like, could have been hundreds of thousands, millions, billions of years. I have no idea. So, okay, that's my, that's a little bit of our paradigm and probably some of our audience as well. Understand, we're raised in a Christian home. Um, and, you know, for me, I was a really nerdy kid. I got into astronomy and physics when I was 7 years of age, reading four or five books in astronomy and physics every week. By age 16, wow, I knew the universe had to have a beginning. So it says, I need to find the cosmic beginner. Had no idea where to look. Said, I'm going to read the great philosophers. So I read Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Says, this guy doesn't have the goods. I'm going to start looking at the world's religions. Looked at Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and finally, I picked up a Gideon Bible and given to me in the public school, began to go through it. And of course, I wanted to start on page one, Genesis chapter one. And, uh, you know, not knowing any Christians or having been to church, it's like I just read the text and, uh, right away I realized, okay, there's time between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, and between 1:2 and 1:3. Mhm. Uh, because of the verb structure, uh, that allows for a passage of time. Uh, and then looked at these days of creation. I said, "Okay, I knew that biblical Hebrew had a smaller vocabulary than English." So I said, "Is it possible that the word day, it's got more than one literal definition?" And just in the first hour of going through, uh, Genesis, realized it's got to have at least three literal definitions because three are used on the first page. On creation day one, it uses the word day for the daylight hours. Creation day four, it's contrasting seasons, days, and years. That's day is 24 hours. But Genesis 2:4 uses the same word day to refer to the entirety of creation history. That's day as a long period of time. And then I notice that each of the creation days ends with an evening-morning phrase. Evening was, morning was, day 2, 3, 4. You get to day seven, there's no evening-morning phrase. I said, "Oh, maybe the day is not finished." And I noted that both Psalm 95 and Hebrews 4 say that we're still in God's seventh day. So, okay, day seven has to be an extended period of time. The other thing the text says that's the day when God stops creating, you know, and as a young scientist, I realize, okay, uh, there's all these biologists who say, "We see no evidence, uh, for God's creative handiwork." So, well, of course, they're doing their research on day seven. God's not creating. Astronomers see it everywhere because their data comes from the six days and before the six days. And so that's when God's creating. So this all makes sense. For six days, God's creating, seventh day, not. I went into Genesis chapter 2 and said, "Okay, Genesis 1 says the human male and the human female are both created on day six." But you get to Genesis 2, Adam's created first, and a long time later, Eve gets created. I mean, Adam has to go through three careers before he gets introduced to Eve. So, it says the sixth day also must be a long period of time. Therefore, I saw no contradiction whatsoever between the time scale of Genesis 1 and 2 and the time scale we see in geophysics and astrophysics. It all made sense. Also explains why we see humans coming on the scene recently. That's the last of God's creation activities. Once he creates Eve, he stops creating. Although we read to the end of the Bible, an eighth day is coming when God creates again. But that's not until God eradicates evil.

How long do you think that those days are? Do they change? Are they approximate or? Well, if you look carefully at the scientific record, uh, what you notice is that the first day is the longest period of time. The sixth day is the shortest period of time. So, the days get progressively briefer as you go from creation day one to creation day six. God is moving towards his ultimate creation at the creation of us human beings.

Is this why the universe is speeding up? The universe is speeding up. Uh, the reason why we see the expansion of the universe accelerating, the universe must expand at a very precise rate at different times in the history of the universe in order for humans to possibly exist here on planet Earth. Even 50 years ago, atheist astrophysicists were saying, "Change the rate of expansion by as little as one part in 10 to the 55th power. There is no possibility for life at any time in the universe." The reason why is the expansion of the universe determines, first of all, what elements you get in the universe. If it expands too slowly, all you get are heavy elements. Expands too rapidly, we only get hydrogen and helium. And also the rate at which the universe expands determines what kind of stars and galaxies you get and how far apart they are when you have human beings enter the scene. So, yeah, the cosmic expansion rate is one of the most fine-tuned features we see in all of the sciences. Got it.

So it sounds like what you're saying is it's not speeding up. It's, Oh, it is accelerating. It is. Okay. Yeah. Your waistline is going to be bigger next year than this year because of the expansion rate of the universe expanding. But bad news is, you can only blame a quadrillionth of a centimeter, uh, of the expansion of your waistline on the acceleration of the expansion rate of the universe. Expanding faster than that, there's another cause. Got it. Okay, good to know. We'll stay clear of that. At this point, Americans need every quadrillionth of a centimeter they got. Um, okay, so back to the, to the more like old earth creation. Um, do you have, have you studied back to like the beginning of creation? And can you, like, can you help us, I guess, wrap our heads around this? This is a new idea for a lot of Christian people. Like, can you help us wrap our heads around like what, um, you think was happening? Have you studied what you think was happening before humans got here? How much time was that? Do we have any idea how much time went by before Adam showed up? Yes. So, for example, you need a minimum of 3 billion years of bacterial activity on the face of the Earth to chemically transform the environment of Earth's surface so that we humans can exist. So, yeah, when I say my prayers at night, I thank God for those billions of years of, you know, sulfate-reducing bacterial activity and how they chemically transformed the planet. So the prayers of an astrophysicist are different. They are different, but it basically makes the point that God was carefully preparing creation for the entry of us human beings. I mean, it says in the Bible that God began his works of redemption before he created anything at all. Which means that everything he created, um, including the entire scope of the universe, had redemption of billions of human beings in mind. I mean, one of the books I've written, Design of the Core, basically makes the point, whatever size scale you look at, you know, the cosmic web, uh, the supergalactic cluster, all the way down to fundamental particles, at each cosmic size scale, we see it's been explicitly designed to make possible the redemption of billions of human beings from their sin and evil in a relatively brief period of time. Or to get back to the time scale issue.

God was willing to take 13.8 billion years of carefully planned creation so that he could redeem us from sin and evil in thousands of years rather than billions of years. He wanted us to be redeemed quickly, not slowly. So he was willing to take his time on the physical creation so he could speed up the spiritual goals that he had. Got it.

Is it also is it like is it possible slash what do you say to the people who would wonder like is it possible that God just started the earth at that billions of years point rather than waiting for it like he just created it at that point. Uh, well, the problem with that is God could have created everything, say, with an extra 10 billion years of appearance of age in it. Yeah. But if that were the case, when we astronomers look at galaxies and stars, we would see that everything measures to be 10 billion years plus or minus 10,000 years. That's not what we see. Uh, we see stars and galaxies that appear to be brand new, newly formed, and we see a continuous spectrum all the way up to 13.8 billion years. And you say, "If God did that and yet the whole thing was only 10,000 years old, that would be deceptive." And eight times it tells us in the Bible, it's impossible for God to lie or deceive. And people will argue, "Well, didn't God create Adam with the appearance of age?" Only if you assume Adam came from the womb of a woman; he didn't. He's the exception. God made him brand new, five or six feet tall. His size would be no indicator of his age because he didn't come from the womb of a woman. I would argue God never creates anything with a false appearance of age. That would be counter to God's character. Wow.

Moreover, the Bible's clear. The book of nature is just as reliable revelation as the book of scripture. God gave us two books, and our ministry, Reasons to Believe, is founded on the two books doctrine that God gave us the book of nature, which is an utterly reliable revelation from God. He gave us a book of scripture, which likewise is an utterly reliable. And I could use a legal analogy in the court of law. If you've got two independent witnesses that corroborate one another, you've got a conviction. And so God gave likewise gave us two independent witnesses that corroborate one another so that we can all know, as it says in Romans 1, we've all been exposed to the book of nature. Therefore, we are without excuse. But our goal is to use the book of nature to bring people to the book of scripture and thereby into a relationship with Jesus Christ. Wow. That's what I was going to say. We're aligned. That's amazing. People, I want to make sure people don't throw either one of you into because when when you start throwing out billions of years, um, you are not talking about the uh amount of time it would take for us to go from a primordial bacterial soup into a human. Hey, we're only talking about 3.8 billion years. That's a ridiculously brief period of time for any naturalistic explanation for the origin of life or to go from the first life form to human beings. I mean, the thing I notice when I engage evolutionary biologists, they never take into account the physics of the sun. The sun is getting brighter and brighter as it gets older and older. And life can only tolerate a 1% change in the brightness of the sun. Which you see in Psalm 104, it's a property of all life to die off. But God recreates and renews the face of the earth. So only a mind that knows the future physics of the sun would know which life to remove from planet Earth and which new life to create. Because happening over the history of life on planet Earth, as the sun gets brighter and brighter, life on planet Earth becomes progressively more efficient to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. So the temperature of the surface of the Earth remains optimal for life. But you need a mind that knows the future physics of the sun to know which life to remove, how frequently to remove it, and which new life to create to replace it. And we look at the fossil record. You notice it testifies of multiple mass extinction events quickly replaced by mass speciation events. And it happens about once every 30 to 35 million years, which is exactly the frequency you need to compensate for the brightening of the sun. Wow.

You know, Taylor, you you you know, ask, hey, you know, for somebody who's new to this position that we're presenting here, how do they position it relative to maybe what they understand from a young earth, you know, perspective? And I think it's the view that we hold is sometimes called old earth creationism. Uh, and specifically, we hold to what's called a day-age view, right, of Genesis 1. But where our view aligns with the young earth view is that we both would look at Genesis 1 as being historical. There's a a growing number of Christians who argue, well, maybe it's poetic or it's an apologetic against the ancient Near East or allegorical, allegorical, right? You know, or mythical that it's shaped by the ancient Near East. So both an old earth creationist and a young earth creationist say, no, this is a historical description, historical and literal. Yeah. Of what God did. Yeah. And that's a good point, Hugh, is that we would say that the word translated as day literally can mean a period of time. So we we take that view. We both positions are highly skeptical of at least the grand claim that evolutionary processes can explain, you know, the totality of life's history. We express skepticism about evolution. And we also hold to a historical Adam and Eve who were made in God's image, who were the first human beings that God created that gave rise to all humanity. So really, the primary difference is how do you understand what the word day means, right? Is it a period of time or is it 24 hours or a calendar day or an ordinary day? That's really the the point of difference. And yeah, you know, and our view is that if you want to read scripture and preserve biblical inerrancy, that you really need to read day as a period of time. You know what, you know, Hugh gave some reasons why he thinks that day is a period of time. The one reason that I find to be really compelling, and I wish I came up with this reason, but it's the the Old Testament theologian, um, Gleason Archer, who died a number of years ago. This was his point, which I find very compelling, is that if you look at Genesis 2 as being an expansion of the of really the the part of the sixth day of creation where it's focusing on the creation of humanity. Well, you look at uh what's described in in Genesis 2. Adam is made from the dust of the earth and God breathes the breath of life into him. It's interesting. He's not created in the Garden of Eden. He's created, and then God causes the garden to grow. And when you look at the language in the original Hebrew, at least according to Gleason Archer, that language suggests normative growth. That God isn't doing anything miraculous. That this is what you would expect to experience. And then Adam is placed in the garden to work the garden, right? That means that the garden's been around for a while. That he's participating in the growth and the maintenance, the cultivation of the garden. Then, you know, he's God says, "Well, name the animals." Right? And in in the original Hebrew, that meant that Adam had authority over the animals. That means he had dominion over the animals. Uh, but the name that he was giving them should reflect their character. That's how names work in Hebrew. So he had to study the animals to give them the appropriate name. So he was, you know, in a sense, the first zoologist, and it was through that process that he realizes that none of these are suitable for me, right? And that's when he's put into a sleep and Eve is created from his side. And he says, "Now, at long last." So when you look at all of what happens on day two, and and that is summarized on the sixth day of creation where male and female are made in God's image. There's no way that all of that activity could fit into part of a 24-hour period of time, right? It it really to maintain biblical inerrancy, you have to see day as a period of time for for that reason alone. Yeah. Love that. That is healthy on many levels because I think there's a lot of deception that is kind of been created even around the idea of time. Um, so I don't know how we would use a modern uh invention to prove or disprove uh something in the past for they were on a lunar calendar. So even our concept of time now has shifted. Um, and so sometimes people have to realize like even what we call a day or what we call a month or what we call a year, those definitions of there have been wars that have been fought over calendar placements and the definitions of time. So, I'm like, I'm open. I'm already open to the idea because I'm like, we don't even know what time means. Yeah. We if you can't figure out what time means, you can't really like create create an intelligent thesis about what something means. But there are a lot of people who have to sort of warm up to this idea of does does this disprove the gospel? No, it doesn't. Not even a little bit, you know, which is what you're trying to ask. Yeah. It's great. I'm I'm thinking the same way as you. Yeah. It just makes it just it makes sense. It adds up. Did you have anything you want to add to that? Yeah. Well, you know, I think it's um it's really important particularly for evangelism because we live in a world where non-Christians just say, "Look, look at the antiquity of the earth, the antiquity of the universe. Look how long life has been on Earth. Look how long humanity has been on Earth." And now you're telling me that the Bible teaches that this is only 6,000 years old. That right away creates a barrier to somebody actually entertaining the gospel. But when you are able to say, look, there's this actually by reading Genesis 1 from a day-age perspective, that actually now reconciles Genesis 1 with everything else. And what's remarkable is the sequence of events that you see in Genesis 1 correlate in a remarkable way to uh the scientific record. You know, I I as Hugh mentioned, I didn't grow up in a Christian home. I came to faith in Christ as a grad student studying biochemistry. When I was an undergraduate student, I was an agnostic. In fact, I bought into this whole idea that evolution can explain everything in biology. What role do you need for a creator? God isn't necessary. That was the mindset I had. But I had a friend whose father was a Methodist minister, guy named David Flynn. And so he, I'm not sure where David stood in terms of his faith, but he and I would get into these conversations. He we became friends and we would get into these conversations that we probably had no business getting into, like was Jesus hloid or diploloid, right? You know, things like that, right? And and so one day we were we were talking about Genesis 1, and we both said, "Look, if day could be a period of time, isn't it amazing the sequence of events here and how it stacks up with, you know, Earth's history and life's history?" Well, it's the only creation text in all the religions of the world that put the order of events in the correct order. Yeah. So now, you know, for Hugh, that had a big impact on him, but for me, it didn't, you know, because I think there were other issues going on. I wasn't convinced there was a creator, right? But I was amazed at at how remarkable Genesis 1 was. So, you know, that conversation, you know, was part of the that the seeds that God was planting that led to my conversion. But, you know, um, it just goes to show you that you can adopt approaches to scripture that can uh really turn off people who would otherwise be open to the gospel. Yeah, absolutely.

One more question, then we can pivot into more of like transhumanism and things like that, unless you have anything else to add. Sounds like fun. What from a statistical, just to kind of put a bow on this, from a a statistical probabilistic standpoint, um, what are the odds that that um when you when people come up as atheists and they're studying evolution, what are the odds that we would have the fine-tuning from three billion years? Is it even possible? Well, we I've personally written seven books on fine-tuning. And what is that? Huh? What's fine-tuning? What do you guys mean by that? Fine-tuning means that uh when you look at the physical universe, it has to be exquisitely designed with very little tolerance in order for life to exist, especially for human life to exist. And our website reasons.org/finetuning, that'll pop up for you. 300-page paper you can read where we give the mathematical calculation. What are the odds? And the odds of having the universe and the earth designed so that humans could possibly exist on the earth. We don't know all the features because we haven't discovered them all, but just the ones we've discovered, less than one chance in 10 to the 1600 that we would be here without God's divine miraculous interventions. To put that in a context, you can imagine that'd be like winning the California lottery 200 consecutive times where you only buy one ticket each time. Or as one mathematician said, it's indistinguishable from winning the California lottery 200 consecutive times where you don't buy any tickets at all. It's the same probability. Wow. So, okay. Incredibly remote. So it's like there's no way this happened by natural process. There has to be a god beyond nature. And one of the things we've seen in astrophysics, we now have space-time theorems that prove that space, time, matter, and energy were created. So naturalism fails on that alone because there's actually a beginning to all of nature. Uh, so it came from something beyond nature. So there has to be a realm beyond the natural realm. You know, as a life scientist, I don't necessarily think all the time in mathematical terms. I'm not afraid of math, but I just don't think mathematically just because of the complexity of the life sciences. It's very difficult to really do mathematical characterization of living systems. But you know, when when I look at the history of life on Earth, uh, every time there's a key transition, that's when the evolutionary paradigm fails. So when it comes to the origin of life, the very first appearance of cells on Earth, there, even people that work in that discipline as atheists will agree, we have no explanation for the origin of life or what's called the origin of eukaryotic cells. Our bodies are made up of cells that have a nucleus, and so it's indeed they're distinguishable from bacteria, which don't have nuclei, and that the origin of eukaryotic cells is a is a scientific mystery. Or how do you explain the origin of body plans where you have now multicellular organisms? How do you go from a single cell to a multicellular organism? That's a huge mystery. How do you explain consciousness? How do you explain novelty? Nobody knows how to to do that with evolutionary mechanisms. Or when you come to human origins, nobody can explain where our language capacity comes from or our ability to appreciate art. So every place there are there these key events in life's history, that's where evolution falls short, and the people that work in that area are, you know, very much will acknowledge that. But these are also the places in life's history where these events happen explosively. So the origin of life seems to happen as soon as the earth can sustain life. Boom. And the very first bacteria are incredibly complex. They're not they don't go from simple bacteria to more complex. They just show up and they're metabolically complex. Or when it comes to eukaryotic cells, there's something called the eukaryotic big bang where out of nowhere, there's this proliferation of all kinds of of these, you know, single-celled organisms. Uh, the when you talk you deal with the origin of body plans, you have something called the Cambrian explosion where in a geological instant, you suddenly see virtually every phyla that has ever existed showing up explosively, and then from that point, there are no new phyla that appear. Or you know, every time there's innovation in life's history, there are they're called radiation events where they happen explosively, where there's massive diversification in a near a window of time. Or when it comes to the origin of humanity, there's something called the sociocultural big bang. Suddenly, out of nowhere, when modern humans show up, there's this very sophisticated toolkit that shows up with us. The ability for symbolism shows up right away. And people that work in paleolinguistics trying to understand the origin of languages marvel at the fact that the very first language probably was as complex as modern-day languages. There's no evolution of language. There's no evolution of art. It just shows up. And you know, you think of cave art as being unsophisticated, but it's incredibly sophisticated. The more we understand about cave art and and its potential function uh for the very first humans, the more sophisticated it appears to be. You know, this is called the hard steps problem in the scientific literature. And, you know, Fuzz mentioned a few. There's over 20 of these hard steps that are incredibly unlikely to happen. There were four physicists who wrote a rebuttal to this as atheists, and they said, "We don't think these steps are hard. We think they're soft." And their argument was, "Notice, they all happen instantaneously." But then they happen instantaneously. It's got to be an easy step. The problem is when people like Fuzz look at it and say, "It's not an easy step." The fact that it happened instantly makes it all the more makes it more hard. And moreover, when you look at God's goal to prepare the universe for us human beings, unless each step happens instantly, you run out of time to bring human beings upon the scene. Each step must happen instantly, or we don't get here. So again, as evidence, there's a mind behind this who's got the power to make it happen instantly, even though the step is so hard, we can't imagine how hard it is. But yeah, even atheists trying to struggle with this are basically recognizing we're stuck. Yeah.

What's a phyla? A phyla refers to it's a biological classification or category, and it refers to body plans. Okay. So, um, and there's a number of different parameters that determine a body plan, but that is the most basic categorization for an organism is or animal is what is its body plan, right? Okay. So, got it. We if you're interested, as humans, we have what's called bilateral symmetry. We have a tube within a tube design. We have cephalization, meaning we have a head. Um, so there's a number of other like all vertebrates are part of the chordate phylum. We have metamerism where you have a a spinal cord that has segments. So the so those are different parameters, but there's um I think at one point somebody did a calculation as to what are the skeletal designs. That's not quite the same thing as a body plan, but what are the skeletal designs that you that could conceivably work based on the laws of physics? An estimated about 180, something like that, and almost all of them show up in the Cambrian explosion. Yeah. So it's so it's like, and so when you talk about it's not, you know, the origin of phyla, there's about 30-some phyla that we know of. They probably, I don't know if anybody's done this, but they probably are what are allowed by the laws of physics, would be my guess, and they show up all at once. You don't you don't see this, you know, slow macroevolutionary. They show up simultaneously 538 million years ago. Right. Okay. Cool. Yeah.

To to geek out this, let me just kind of maybe give a little bit more uh concreteness to the the problem here. Um, we are we are called deuterostomes. That has to do with the way our embryos develop. So, um, and uh, the evolutionary model for deuterostomes is that you had uh some kind of uh echinoderm. Those would be like sea stars that gave rise to something called a tunicate, right? And then that uh tunicate would have given rise to chordates and hemichordates, and then chordates would have given rise to jawless fish. That's the kind of the evolutionary sequence or the relationships. All of all of those show up all at once in the Cambrian explosion at the base. Yes, you don't see a a sequential appearance of echinoderms, tunicates, hemichordates, chordates, jawless fish, but it's like boom, all at once. So, that's the that's, you know, the the problem. Wow. Okay. I have I was going to put a bow on this, but now I need to keep going. Now, we're just here. We're at the origins of Earth and mankind. That's what I've got so far. Are you okay? Yeah. We could ride We could ride this the whole episode if you want. The origins of Earth and Mankind. We're probably going to have to do two. Yeah. Letting you guys, are you having fun? Yeah, we are. Yeah, you guys are good. So, okay, you said something earlier that is now I have to talk about it. You said space-time theorems. They all had to show up, space-time, gravity, or like what what had to show up at the same time? Yeah, this is what made Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose famous is that uh they said, okay, uh if the universe contains mass, and all four of us here evidence that it does. Mhm. And uh uh if the equations of general relativity describe the dynamics of bodies in the universe, and we can now prove that to 16 places of the decimal. Uh, then space and time have a beginning. Space and time are created, which implies that the cause of the universe must be an entity outside of space and time. Now, we also know that the universe begins with only space and time, but it's extremely compact. So you have all this space-time curvature in an infinite decimal volume, but is created with a property of ongoing expansion. And as that space-time ball expands, space curvature is released. The release of space curvature in the universe is a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old produces energy. That's when you get photons. And then when it's about a 100 billionth of a second old, you get massive particles. So it begins with only space and time. And the release of space-time curvature first produces energy, then it produces mass, but implies there must be a causal agent outside of space-time matter and energy that created it all. So when you energy defined as this is that defined as like potentiality or is that what is your definition of heat and light? Okay. Got it. Well, in addition to that, you've got what's called dark energy, which is energy embedded in the space surface of the universe. And as that space surface gets bigger and bigger, it becomes more and more energetic to expand the universe, which is why the universe expands at a faster rate as uh we get farther along in cosmic history. Okay. Is dark energy different than dark dark matter? I'm assuming? Yes. What's the difference? Okay. You and I are both made up of what we call ordinary matter. Matter made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Uh, but there's more than five times as much dark matter, which are massive particles that have the property they either very weakly or not at all engage with photons. An example being neutrinos. Trillions of neutrinos go through your thumbnail every second, but you don't notice it because they don't interact with photons. So, they go through without doing any damage at all. Um, and we know about 5 1/2 times as much dark matter as or as ordinary matter. And if that weren't the case, you would not have stable spiral galaxies. So, for example, a Milky Way galaxy uh has 10 times as much dark matter as it has ordinary matter. The dark matter halo extends out 1.9 million light-years in diameter. The ordinary matter only goes out 100,000 light-years, the stars that you see, the spiral arms. So you see this little disc and it's surrounded by this gigantic halo of dark matter. But that gigantic halo is what stabilizes the spiral structure, keeps the spiral structure symmetrical so that we human beings can live on a planet without our orbit being disturbed and without radiation events that would wipe us out. What's what's in that dark matter? Is that like energy? Does that explain like what's in it? Well, it's made up of particles that have mass, which means they exert gravity. And that's how we discovered this dark matter. We discovered it by its gravitational influence. We have yet to discover the particles that make up most of that dark matter. Ah, it's going to be extremely difficult because they interact so very weakly with photons. That's how you detect it with photons. We found the neutrinos because they have a weak interaction with the photons. So, we can detect a few of them. And so we have these neutrino detectors, huge balls filled with water or different fluids. And so which means that of the quadrillions of neutrinos going through it, one out of a quadrillion will interact with a photon. That's how we know that it's there. Uh, so if it doesn't interact with a photon, how do we you're not going to see it. Got it. So we believe that the particles uh that make up uh dark matter are predominantly made up of particles that don't interact at all. But we do believe they decay. And so we astronomers are looking throughout the universe to see if we can see the decay properties of these particles. And I think we're close because we're seeing some binary neutron stars. These are stars that are cooling because they've run out of nuclear fuel, but they're cooling a little more rapidly than we would expect. And we think that extra cooling is dark matter particles that are decaying. Likewise, there's a few stars orbiting the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy. And those stars should already be burnt out. They're not. And so, we're thinking what's keeping those stars bright to at least some degree is a decay of dark matter particles. But we don't yet have a detection that's publishable. I mean, the for a publishable detection, your signal has to be more than five times above the background noise, and we're sitting around three or four. Got it. So the Nobel Prize isn't going to be handed out until they get above that five uh ratio uh determination. Got it. But I wouldn't be surprised if we're there within 10 years. Nice. Okay.

How does gravity interact with time? Gravity will interact with time if you have extreme gravitational density. So, for example, you were talking about the movie Interstellar. Mhm. And the movie Interstellar, you're basically the center of a black hole, uh, where there's intense gravity, and according to Einstein's theory of general relativity, if you get an intense enough gravity, it slows down the passage of time. So that's called gravitational time dilation, which is different from the velocity time dilation, which is easy to measure. Gravitational? No one's yet detected it because we've yet been able to make measurements where we have that strong of a gravitational uh density. But we know at the center of black holes, you do get enough. And so in that movie, time literally slows down to zero. Mhm. Uh, but that's where you have infinite uh, you know, gravitational force. Is there a case to be made that eternity is just a realm where there's it's there's no um there's no matter and so if there's no gravity or gravitational pull, could time just cease to exist? Well, what the space-time theorems tell us is that there is an agency outside of time that created time. Now, because of the space-time theorems, I think we can conclude what the Bible says. God's got the power to create space-time dimensions at will. He can remove them at will. And what you notice in Revelation 21, it tells us there will be no marriages and no families in the new creation. And, you know, as a minister, I officiate weddings. And I tell the couple at their wedding, this day, you're committing yourself to say yes to one person and no to the rest of the human species. It's the only way you can experience the intimacy God wants you to enjoy because we're constrained to one dimension at time. If you really want that ultimate intimacy, you've got to shut everybody else except that one person. But we need to be constrained uh to three dimensions of space and one dimension of time and the four laws of physics in order for evil to be eradicated by God's hand. But once evil is no more, we no longer need to be so restrained. So I believe in the new creation, we're going to be able to enjoy fellowship with one another, not in one time dimension, but the equivalent of two or more dimensions of time. And so I won't have to wait in a long line to have a private meeting with the Apostle Paul. God's going to grant him the capacity to have billions of simultaneous private conversations because he's no longer going to be constrained in one dimension at time. I won't be so constrained in one dimension at time. And I know some of the people in our scholar community have been experts in near-death encounters. Mhm. I had a cousin who was dead for five minutes. When he told me when he recovered, it's like I thought I'd been dead for days because I had all these wonderful conversations with Christians I knew that died ahead of me. There's no way that could have been squeezed into five minutes. And so I said to my cousin John, "Well, for a moment you were outside of being constrained to one dimension of time, so you could have all those relationships compressed, which in our time was just five minutes." Yeah. I've read the same thing around people who have been uh in comas when they come out of comas, they're like, it was 70 years. Yeah. Like it was three days. Yeah. Um, same same effect, which might be a near-death, but like something about the consciousness escaping uh whatever realm we're stuck in right now changes everything. Yeah. Well, the idea that we're going to be delivered from thermodynamics and gravity in one dimension of time, to me, that's just a thrill to look forward to what God's got promised for us. Yes. Yeah. Okay.

Can we talk about thermodynamics? Sure. For a second. This is this is amazing. By the way, this is just like my brain's just going. I've already had like a mini panic attack during this episode. No one saw it, but I was like freaking out just trying to consider eternity again. And I was just I had to stop it and calm down. But anyways, uh time and thermodynamics. Let's go. All right. Unpack the second law of thermodynamics, because this is a this seems to be a major blow against the just everything randomly happened. What is it to start with? That would be helpful. Well, notice what Jesus said at the end of uh chapter 16 of John. "In this world, you'll have tribulation, but take heart. I've overcome the world." As a scientist, I like to paraphrase that: In this world, you'll have thermodynamics, gravity, and electromagnetism. But take heart, a time is coming where there will be no thermodynamics, gravity, and electromagnetism. And just think about this, because of gravity, the older you get, the farther towards the floor your chin and other body parts sag. No gravity, that's not going to happen. And likewise, because of electromagnetism, your skin basically deteriorates as you get older and older. But the new creation, none of that will happen. And like with thermodynamics, things decay. As it says in Revelation 21, in the new creation, there'll be no death. There'll be no decay. Uh, you won't have to maintain anything. No more yard work because it won't have to be maintained. Uh, but we need thermodynamics and gravity and electromagnetism because of what you see in Genesis chapter 3. The moment that Adam and Eve rebelled against their creator, he said, "From now on, you were experiencing pain, but you're going to experience more pain. And you were working, but now you're going to have to work harder." And what you see in the book of Ecclesiastes, it's now going to take more time. And the point is, the more you sin, the more work you have to do, the more pain you experience, and the more time gets dissipated in undoing the damage of your sin, which is a powerful motivation for every human being to avoid sin because, hey, it means less pain in my life. It means I won't have to work as hard, and I'm not going to waste so much time. But in the process, you discover I really don't have the resources to do what physics tells me I need to do. But there's one that created me who's willing to do for me what I can't do for myself. So even in the laws of physics, you see the elements of the gospel. I mean, obviously, the way the universe is designed, someone behind it all has great love and care for me. But I'm not able to do what I know I need to do to overcome the sin of my life. But He is so powerful. He's so loving and so wise. He must have done for me what I can't do for myself. You actually see that explicitly taught in the oldest book of the Bible, the book of Job. Job looked at the natural realm and drew those conclusions. "My Redeemer lives." "My Intercessor lives." And if I put my confidence in Him, I will see God on the last day in my own flesh. I mean, amazing to me. He declared not only his salvation, but the assurance of salvation without any scripture. Just looked at nature, looked at the physics, and figured it all out. Yeah. And when you engage atheists, the only positive argument they've got for their atheism is the problem of evil. They say, "If there's an all-loving God, he's all-powerful. Why would he subject us to all this evil and suffering?" Well, the Christian response is God is using the evil and suffering to bring about something way better than what Adam and Eve had in the Garden of Eden. All they had was paradise. It was wonderful. Mhm. But God wanted something for us humans way, way better than paradise, which required a brief exposure to evil and suffering so we can enter a realm where we can experience love to an unimaginable degree, experience it, and be able to give it. As Paul says, "No one can think or imagine how great it will be." But it's also the same. Apostle Paul says, "Every day, spend a few moments thinking how great it's going to be and realize whatever you come up with, it's better than that." Yeah. Wow. So many tie-ins we could go on that. Um, is it possible to reverse entropy? Yes, you can reverse entropy as long as you increase entropy by a whole lot everywhere else. So, I mean, that's what we humans do. We build these machines, these engines, and basically we're reversing entropy, you know, burning a lot of gasoline uh so that we can get our car to go from place A to place B. Uh, but we have to really up the entropy enormously to get a reduction in entropy in the direction we want it. But because of our ingenuity, we're able to build these entropy reversal machines. If you look at the human body, it's the same way. Uh, you eat a hamburger, and that hamburger allows you to do some useful work. But notice the energy in the hamburger is way, way more than the energy you get from eating that hamburger. And so when you consume food, it's only about a tenth of a percent efficient. You know, it it's um very easy to to think of entropy in negative terms. Uh, but as a a biochemist, I see entropy as actually part of the necessary design of this creation for life to even be possible. So as Hugh mentioned, you know, you're not going to have any kind of metabolism if you don't have entropy. That's the the entropy is actually what makes metabolic processes even happen. And um, there's this really weird effect uh that you see in biochemistry that involves water called the hydrophobic effect. And that's all built around entropy. And because of that, I actually see entropy, at least in biochemical systems, as a organizing and ordering force. So DNA doesn't adopt the double helix. Proteins won't fold into the right structure. Cell membranes won't form if you don't have entropy. So I see entropy as part of fascinating God's design. And um, it it's what, what you probably are familiar with the idea that water is a really bizarre liquid, right? Uh, a bizarre substance in that when it is solid, it actually is less dense than in the liquid form. And that's necessary for life to be possible, right? Because uh, the ice will float to the surface of a body of water and form a layer of insulation that keeps the the liquid layer below it uh warm enough that, you know, the the in total body of water doesn't freeze. Because if ice was more dense, it would settle to the bottom, and that that body of water would freeze, and you wouldn't have liquid water on the planet eventually. Right? But and the reason why ice is less dense is because you get this lattice structure. So water will have four other molecules of water interacting with it. And when it forms ice, it or when it forms ice, it forms this really rigid lattice that's less dense than liquid water where you have water molecules interacting, but they're kind of more condensed and and collapse. And so what happens is when you add materials to water that are like oil, that aren't soluble in water, they for force the water to adopt in the local environment an icelike structure, which is vi which violates the laws of entropy. It's more ordered, right? Yeah. And so in order to uh in order to avoid that from happening, those materials that are like oil will cluster together and will separate themselves from water. And that's why cell membranes form, that's why proteins fold, that's why DNA adopts a double helix. So I see entropy as being part of the the design of creation. So to me, it's it's remarkable when I hear Hugh talk that this what I see to be this force that reflects design in the creation is also something that God can use through that process of decay, which makes metabolism possible, but that process of decay then has this overarching redemptive value. So the the the level of design is really crazy when you think about it in those terms, right? There's this hierarchical level of design that God is both are ultimately designed and the autumnal design is identical. Yeah, that's incredible. Yeah.

Just freaking love you guys. Um, one of one of the toughest things I'm learning as a new dad is how to explain things to a six-year-old. So like she'll ask me, you run into a language barrier. So she asked me a couple months ago, she said, "Dad, what's a gentleman?" I said, "Well, someone who is chivalrous." And as soon as I said it, I was like, "She doesn't know what chivalrous means." Sure enough, she's like, "What does chivalrous mean?" And I was like, "How do I explain this to a six-year-old?" But it's funny that you mentioned oil and water, because I was picking her up from school yesterday and she said, "Dad, isn't it amazing that water can be on fire?" And I said, "Uh, I'm not sure if water can be on fire." She said, "Yeah. I saw I saw a movie and on top of the ocean it was on fire." And I was like, "Oh, that's because probably oil was." And then I got stuck where I was like, how do I explain this to her? And now I'll just have her watch this podcast and be like, "Yeah, I don't know what those words mean either. Just listen to Fuzz and he'll tell you." So fascinating. Okay. Um, the flood is fascinating to me because the more um you get into biblical history, all of these different cultures have the same thing. Yes. That seems to show up cataclysmically. Yes. Um, and from what I understand, there's a lot of data that supports it. Yes. There's over 300 flood stories in the ancient cultures of North and South American people alone, and another 300 on Africa, Asia, and Europe. And the farther you get from the Middle East and Near East, and also the farther separated you get in time, the more distorted the story. But what they all have in common is there's this single event that had an enormous impact upon humanity. And so it's like, you know, the Bible tells us uh that God gave Adam and Eve a command, multiply and fill the earth. The command was repeated twice. Adam and Eve and their descendants did not obey it. After the flood, God repeats the command again twice in Genesis 9 to Noah, but in much stronger terms. "You must multiply and fill the earth." And the story of Genesis 10 and 11 is humanity rebelling against that. We're going to stay in one place. We're going to build this big city and this tower so that we will not be scattered over the face of the earth. And God says, "I'm going to have to force them." So he forcibly scatters humanity all over Africa, Europe, and Asia. And uh, you know, knowing about this decades ago and really what motivated me to write the book, it's the number one reason why people outside the church reject the Bible as God's word. They look at the flood story and they say, "There's no way this can be true. This has to be fantasy." And so they wind up rejecting the entire Bible. Really? Yeah. And so for that reason alone, it says I need to do this. Uh, and I've been wanting to write this book for decades, but it's like I waited until we had the goods on Genesis 10 and 11. And it's only in the last few years that we've been able to use scientific tools to actually verify what Genesis 10-11 states is actually true. And we got that nailed down. We can go back and nail down the flood. And I gave a talk at this to a bunch of scientists in late July, Christian scientists and theologians. And the response just blew me away. They said, "This solves all the problems." Because what you have in Genesis 10:11 is God scattering humanity or the whole face of the earth. And I refer to it as antitrust legislation. God knew if they stay in one place with one language, one nation, one capital city, one set of rulers, there will be oppression upon humanity. And what's going to happen after the flood will be just like what happened before the flood. God's goal, multiple nations competing with one another for citizens. So if one nation oppresses their citizens, they can get up and leave and go to another place. Also, the multiple languages, the multiple languages help keep people separate from one another. Hey, if I move from the United States and uh, you know, I go to Uganda, uh, I'm going to have to learn another language. So, although I think it's mostly English-speaking now anyway. So, uh, but that was the principle. But what's interesting is that we now have four different tools for dating when humans left the Near and Middle East and Eastern Africa and migrated to Southern Europe and Northern Europe and colonized both places. Four different independent dating tools. They all give the same dates and show that Northern Europe was inhabited the same time as Southern Europe, the same time as Eastern Asia, the same time as Western Africa, the same time as Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Borneo, and Tasmania. Now, what made that all possible is that the flood happened during an ice age. And how you know that is Genesis 8. It took a whole year for the floodwaters to recede. Well, if you got 40 days and 40 nights of torrential rain, and you got water being pulled up from the underground aquifers, that rain's going to flow into the ocean. And it's going to happen fairly quickly. But we know from a flood event here in North America, the Mississippi Valley 30 years ago was flooded 50 feet above the banks for four months. The reason the flood lasted that long was that as the water flowed down the Mississippi River, it was being replaced by melting snow and ice off of the Rockies. So, as fast as the water flowed out, it was being replaced. Well, if you got the flood happening during the last ice age, the water flowing out into the oceans would be replaced by melting snow and ice. And the previous ice age is unlike any other ice age. It was characterized by really massive melt and refreezing events. And we're not talking just a few. It happened dozens of times where literally hundreds of feet of thickness of ice over huge ice sheets would melt quickly because temperature

went jumped up. Then the temperature fell and the ice sheets would reform. So you got ice sheets melting, reforming, melting, and reforming. And a dozen times it happens quickly. So if you got Noah's flood happening during one of those melt events, but we explain why the flood lasted a whole year. And if we can nail down the dates for the great migrations, we know there are multiple migrations recorded in Genesis 9:101 before those migrations happen. So, it means that Noah's flood would have to predate that by several thousand years, maybe even several tens of thousands of years.

Well, here's what the dates show. And only the last few years have we had dates this precise and this consistent. 42 to 49,000 years ago, northern, southern Europe, Eastern Asia, Western Africa, all of Australia, New Zealand, uh uh New Guinea, and Tasmania were inhabited. Simultaneous migrations. And we actually see from the DNA evidence where the migration routes were basically along the coastlines.

So, and then you got in Genesis 10:5, the world was divided in the days of Peleg. This is considerably after the first great migrations because there was a land bridge joining Asia to North America, but it was frigidly cold until about 12,000 years ago, 12 to 16,000 years ago. It warmed up. The sea levels were still quite low, so the bridge was intact. And so 16,500 years ago is when the first humans migrated out of Asia into North America. They got into Alaska and less than a thousand years at the south tip of South America. Reason why the west coast is a very easy migration route and so the whole world got inhabited. But if you got those great migrations at 42 to 49,000 years ago, that means you got Noah and the flood thousands of years earlier than that, which solves a big problem because, you know, Buzz here was referring to we have genetic tools for coming up with at least approximate dates when we're all descended from one man and one woman. And those dates come in like at 98 to 196,000 years ago. And so that's where you kind of have Adam and Eve. Although I argue the systematic errors haven't been considered. So there's some uncertainty. Those dates could shift a little more towards the present or a little back towards the past. But it means you got Noah between that. But if you got Noah between say 100 to 150,000 years ago and 60,000 years ago, you now remove the genetic challenges to humanity being descended from eight people. You got Noah and his family early enough that you eliminate that problem. And so that's why these scientists and theologians were saying this interpretation of the text, it's literal, it's historical, and there are no scientific challenges and it fits the latest scientific measurements.

So we're hoping that this book is basically going to remove this challenge where people say the flood story, it's too fantastic. I mean, the other thing that was very funny is people are saying Noah couldn't have built a boat that size. Well, just two months ago, a paper was published where they found the remnants of really thick long rope uh in southern Indonesia uh basically just miles from Australia and said this rope had to be a means for shipping. So, it basically indicated that 40,000 years ago, humans were building really big steerable boats. And of course, with Noah's Ark, it doesn't have to be steerable. So, it's easier to make it bigger. I also argue it wasn't made out of oak. It had to probably be made of acacia wood or something stronger because you can't make a boat that big unless it's made out of very high tensile wood. The text says go for wood. Uh, but I put in the book here are 12 different woods that would be strong enough for Noah to make a wooden boat that big where it would be safe for a whole year of journey with a massive flood. And uh Noah would have had access to that wood. I also argue forget about trying to find the remains of Noah's Ark. The wood would have been way too valuable for people to leave it lying around. It would have been raided after the flood. So, if you want to find the remains of Noah's Ark, best place to look, the ashes of Nineveh. Uh, because Nineveh is just south of the mountains of Ararat. And again, I say it can't be Mount Ararat. The text says mountains of Ararat. And the word for mountains also includes foothills, hills. So, it didn't come to rest up high, it came to rest down low. And uh two physicists wrote a paper saying, "Hey, you wonder why the Ark didn't go downhill during a massive uh melt event. You get these giant cyclones in the Indian Ocean and the winds would have pushed the Ark up against the foothills. The Ark wouldn't have gone downhill." So it literally does solve all the problems.

Fascinating. Yeah. So I have two questions for you. First, um, is it the current uh belief based on what we know that only Noah and his family survived and that that's what multiplied civilization past that point or were there other humans that? Yeah, I well, you see in the New Testament, second Peter 2:5, the world of ungodly people was completely wiped out, but because people are only living in a region, not the whole globe, the flood didn't have to be global. I had to argue in a book that people studying the flood and drawing the flood models where it's global, it takes care of all the geography, they've only read Genesis. There's more texts on Noah's flood outside of Genesis than in Genesis. So, for example, there are five creation psalms. And Psalm 104 takes you through the days of creation, but not in a chronological order, but when it addresses creation day three, that's when God transforms Earth from a water world to where he got oceans and continents coexisting. And uh that's Genesis, pardon me, Psalm 104, 6, 7, and 8. Verse 9 says, "Hey, once we got the continents, never again will water cover the whole face of the earth." So, it explicitly rules out the global flood. But what you see in second Peter 2 and 2 Peter 3, it's a universal flood. The entire world of ungodly people got wiped out and all the animals that were in relationship with them. And that's key because a lot of skeptics say the Ark is too small to house a pair of every land animal. But that's not what Genesis 7 and 8 teach. It teaches that all the nephesh-basar were wiped out. Those are two Hebrew words for animals uh that are so in nature which means they can relate to humans. They can be tamed by humans. All birds and mammals are in that category. uh and when they're in a relationship with us, they can be impacted by our behavior. I used to train people in door-to-door evangelism and basically would tell our people, look, when you see the pets, that's a clue to who you're going to encounter with the pet owners. If the pets are very affectionate and warm and welcoming to you, that's probably how their owners are going to behave. If their pets are wanting to chew you to bits and kill you, then you're not going to have a good time with the owners.

That's fascinating. That's kind of like your dogs, Taylor. What? Maya's ready to kill people. Yeah. And then she snuggles up to you once she trusts you. Yeah. Accurate. Well, it's in the book of Leviticus where it says that if a cow has a habit of goring other animals or people, the owner of the cow is to be rebuked. M. If a cow continues in the behavior, the cow is to be killed and the owner is to be killed with the cow. Wow. Basically saying the fault is not with the cow, it's with the human owner. Which is why God says in the flood account, not only must the humans be wiped out, all their animals have to be wiped out, but only their animals. I don't think there's any emperor penguins on board the Ark because none of them had contact with humans. So none of them were damaged. When God judges, he only takes out the malignant evil. Reprobation is where evil becomes so uh extreme that the people around the evil person get infected. Their animals get infected uh to a degree where they can't be uh repaired. So that's why God said, "Hey, not only the humans, but all their animals, 'cause all their animals have been infected uh by the behavior of the human owners." Wow. But that means that we're probably looking at maybe a few hundred at most pairs of animals on board the Ark. Because the animals that have no contact with humans or the animals that are unable to relate to humans, no need to bring them on the Ark and no need to wipe them out. Got it? No. Cockroaches aren't on the list of animals that need to be wiped out 'cause no matter how much you sin in front of a cockroach, it behaves the same way. Uh, but your dog is very different. The way you behave in front of your dog determines the behavior of that dog. Genius.

Okay. How are the timing technologies working? Like when we date something, how accurate are those dating models and how do they work? Well, I again, I waited till the science had been done. And so, for example, until recently, we didn't have the remains of human bodies that have been dead long enough. But they're now finding human bodies in Borneo and Japan that date back 40 and 45,000 years ago. And so, and you can use carbon 14 to date those. And carbon 14 is a radiometric clock, which means we know what the systematic errors are. Therefore, we can come up with a fairly accurate date that's not based on erroneous assumptions. Or likewise the artifacts that are left behind by these people that we know are related to anatomically modern humans. If there's carbon in them, we can get a carbon 14 date. So, and uh, you, we're talking about Neanderthals and humans. Neanderthals have a very powerful jaw structure, very powerful jaw muscles. We humans don't. That uh, our muscles and our jaw structure means that the first humans had to be preparing and cooking their food 'cause if we weren't, we weren't going to be able to get the calories we need. But because of our brain, we were able to come up almost immediately with that technology. Well, we now have findings where we're able to show that people 40, 42,000 years ago were gathering grains that were poisonous uh, but grinding them up and uh, roasting them and boiling them. And so when you do that with vetches, which no other animal can eat because it's poisonous when consumed raw, when you do that, you get calories and they're no longer poisonous. And so we now have findings where we find these vetches uh that have been uh, you know, harvested, ground up, roasted and boiled. And again, because of the carbon, we can carbon 14 date that 40 to 42,000 years ago. We have evidence that people living say in Japan, Borneo, Tasmania, they were doing that. So we got that. So it gives you a third independent way of doing it. Then you got the genetic tools where you look at the genetic diversity and basically had to trace back in time. You know, Fuzz is the expert on that. I consulted him on that chapter in the book and basically took the three best mathematical genetics models and said, "Hey, if you use the three best that we have, you get approximately similar dates uh to when these people were living in that region." And what's interesting is that you can contrast those dates with carbon 14 and they're coming in at the ballpark. And I would argue those are the least reliable because we don't know the systematic effects. However, I would think the systematics would be less of a problem 40,000 years ago than they would be at 100,000 years ago. So again, four independent tools. We can use them in North Europe, Southern Europe, Western Africa, Tasmania, Japan, Borneo. We're getting the same dates with all four methods, which means for the first time we can be confident that we got the science to nail down Genesis 10 and 11. We got that nailed down. We can nail down a lot of what's going on in Genesis 7 and 8 and basically demonstrate, hey, the Ark is not fantastic. It's now proven to be within the realm of scientific possibility and likewise the dates are early enough that we eliminate the challenges uh from genetic research and it fits the ice age that we have that is now well studied.

So can't wait to read that book. Well, what's interesting about that is, you know, these great migrations, Mhm. they're able to demonstrate that rats were also migrating at the same time that humans were migrating. Basically showing there is a narrow window of time that greatly facilitated this great scattering because it was not only we humans that took advantage of these conditions, rats did as well. So, and of course, wherever you got humans, you got rats, right? Yeah. Glad they made it. Follow us around, don't they? Um, how is there anything else you want to know on this? I'm actually good right now. Yeah, I'm good. Um, I just have a random question that might seem random, but it's it's what's coming to mind and then I want to end us on um some of what you guys are seeing in terms of like AI transhuman. What's the goal? What are you personally like how looking at as a risk and how do you think about it? Before we get to that, when you were throwing around 45,000 years and 250,000 years and all this stuff, it's just this is a giant timeline. Um, it reminds me of the verse when David is saying like, remind me that my life is so short, I'm just a vapor. Uh, and I think that that is because we forget. We kind of come into the world and it's all about us and it's all about our lifetimes. How do you guys have a practice or anything to remind yourselves that like our lives are just this? It's just a a moment in time to keep your perspective on like that Colossians 3, like keep your perspective on heaven, not on earth. Uh, 'cause the numbers are thrown out at me. I'm like, my life is just not even a thing. Uh, it confronts you. But most of our days we don't live like that. We live like we're going to be here forever. Um, and it can sometimes feel hopeless if all we're thinking about is what we're facing right now. How do you guys keep an eternal perspective?

Well, there's a chapter in the flood book where I talk about how our lifespans are optimized. Pre-flood, God allowed people to live 800, 900 years. Didn't go well for humanity. You allow people to live that long, the serial killers are going to kill a lot of people off. M. I mean, I think it was merciful that God allowed Hitler to live only 56 years and Joe Stalin to live only 63. It limited the amount of evil that they could commit in their short lifespan. And so you see in Genesis 6:3 that after the flood, human lifespans were going to be set at a maximum of about 120 years. Basically, the Bible is telling us, living 60, 70, 80, 90 years, that's more than enough time for you to discover God and establish a pattern of righteous living with a purpose to serve God. And hey, when you die as a follower of God, you get to go to a way better place. Why spend any more time here on earth than you need to? I mean, the future is way better. And so allowing us to live longer uh actually works to the advantage of the evil, not the righteous. And just saying, well, maybe God could have shortened our lifespans, but I'm convinced he's given us the optimal lifespan so that we can do, you know, it's like what Paul says, I'm eager to go to be with the Lord, but I know my mission here on earth is not yet finished. I'm grateful that God has given me time to serve him in spite of the pain I'm going through. You know, he had that thorn in the flesh. He says, I'm willing to spend more painful hours here on earth in order to, you know, fulfill everything that God wants me to do. But we're talking decades. We don't need centuries, right? It's just decades, right? And so, uh, we need to live our lives in that context. And you know, we're throwing around numbers like 45,000, 100,000 years ago. But hey, when you live in a universe that's 13.8 billion years old, a few tens of thousands of years seems like just a few seconds. Yeah. Perspective. So, you know, we look at uh, you know, Adam and Eve as being incredibly recent upon the cosmic scene because we're talking only, you know, maybe uh, a few tens of thousands, several tens of thousands of years ago. What's that compared to 13.8 billion years, right? Right.

Well, you know, you asked us earlier about what, what's the benefit of being older, right? Mhm. And I and I think being older really does give you a much more eternal perspective on things because as when you're younger, you know, you think, wow, I might have 40 or 50 years and you you think that that feels like an eternity and suddenly you wake up one day and you realize, oh, I may have 10 years or I may have 15 or 20 if I'm really lucky. And how many of those years towards the end am I even going to be able to really do the things I want to do. Right? So, it forces you to start thinking eternally. And uh this past summer, the pastor at the church I go to was saying, you know, the truth of the matter is in a in probably a generation after you die, nobody will know that you ever even existed. Right. That's, you know, a little bit sobering. Yeah. But there are ways that you can have um an impact even beyond the time that people remember that you lived and that's by thinking about legacy, right? And how do I do things in such a way that I am setting in place a structure or a system so that the effort that I invested now ripples into the future for particularly for the sake of the gospel. Right? And so people may not remember you, but you're leaving a legacy that will have an an eternal impact if again, it's it's for the gospel. Yeah. You know, but uh, I mean, the, of course, the great news is that we are going to live eternally, right? Yeah. That that's really our hope is you know, in the new creation. Yeah. It's like they may not remember your name or your address, but the effects of your life. Yes. Will not go unnoticed. Reminds me of the, I think the Roosevelt quote. He said, "It's amazing what humans can accomplish if they don't care who gets the credit." And it's like, well, when I hear you gentlemen speak, I can tell like it's you're not obsessed about whether your names get the credit for things, but the effects of your lives will last a really long time, which is motivating. Yeah.

You um two final questions. Different questions. We'll start with you unless you have anything that needs to be wrapped up. Good. Um, in the age of AI that has just come on the scene rapidly, when people are trying to, we talked about this earlier, take consciousness, Ray Kurzweil, all this stuff. Do you view AI as a risk or do you view it as a tool? Like how are you thinking about the future knowing that people are trying to live forever? Yeah. Well, I mean, it it's definitely a tool and you know, I think all of us are trying to figure out how to use it as a tool well and effectively. It's a moving target. I mean, things are developing so rapidly. So, on one hand, I don't think we want to be afraid of AI. Um, when we realize this is just again an advance that's happening that's going to be transformative and we want to be as Christians really uh early adopters and shape how that technology is being used. But I do think the, to me, the big concern would be, what is it going to do to how we as a culture think about who we are as human beings? Because if AI becomes sentient or at least it appears to us that it's it's sentient and self-aware, um, does that mean that there's nothing really fundamentally special about us as human beings? I think to me that's the place where I have the biggest concern and I, you know, I think at the end of the day, AI is never going to be like us, but the the problem is people are going to probably think of AI as being like us. I mean, you know, AI is at the end of the day, you know, a computer, computer software, right? And it's um, the the machine learning algorithms that are part of AI are very similar to assoc, what the mechanisms of associative learning, right? Everybody's familiar with Pavlovian response, right? And the whole idea is that in associative learning, that you train behaviors where the animal knows that if I do certain things, I'm going to get a reward. If I do other things, I'm going to get punished, right? Well, that's the same thing that's going on in AI. You know, you you go to Grok or Bard and you type in an an a question, you get an answer, you vote thumbs up or thumbs down. That's associative learning. You're either giving the AI a reward or you're punishing it, right? So, fundamentally, that's what's going on with with AI. And there's an an um animal behavioralist named Johan Lind from I think Sweden or it's either Sweden or Switzerland. I apologize, I don't remember which. And he uh was trying to explain really sophisticated behavior that is observed in um animals. Animals are capable of doing some pretty impressive problem-solving, particularly chimpanzees and and, you know, crows, corvids. And so he he raised the question, could it be that these animals are not behaving like us, right? Where they're using abstract reasoning to solve problems, but rather it's associative learning. And he developed these computer models. And if you take into a fact into account the fact that animals have short-term memory, that means they can daisy chain together uh uh um behaviors that then they correlate with a reward or a punishment and that allows them to do problem-solving. And he developed these computer models that could basically simulate the the the behaviors of animals that engage in complex problem-solving. So, you know, I think that's what's going on with AI and that's what always will happen with AI. But given enough computational power, I think AI is going to do some really sophisticated things and are is going to be trained to mimic human behavior. And, you know, we were talking earlier about human exceptionalism. And one of the things that makes us exceptional as human beings is what's called theory of mind. Like I recognize that you have a mind like I do and I can anticipate what you're thinking, what you're feeling, and that we desire to kind of link our minds together, right? Mhm. Uh, as human beings. Well, the problem is is we don't know how to turn that off. So, we personify inanimate objects. We talk about our car as if it was a person, that that it has a personality, a temperament, right? Yeah. Or we uh when animals do something, we interpret their behavior through the lens of of what it means to be a human. So we impart theory of mind and we attribute motives to animals that they don't necessarily have. So when it comes to AI, are we going to be doing the same thing? Yes. Even though it's going to be fundamentally different, we're going to say this is like me and therefore it needs to have rights or humans maybe aren't that exceptional. Aren't that, you know, um aren't unusual, right? That and so that to me is the real threat is that we may actually uh undermine our own view of ourselves through what ironically what makes us exceptional. That to me is is the the real concern that I have is what does it do to human identity? I mean, I think we want to be very careful about, can we grant AI systems so much control over our lives that it could actually be problematic, problematic. So, we want to be thoughtful about that. But I think that's something particularly as Christians who are operating from the standpoint of being redeemed people that we have that wherewithal to manage that very powerful technology. Well, um, we just need to be willing to step up to the plate culturally to help do that. But, um, but, you know, it's interesting because, um, you know, we, when you think about AI, I always think about Elon Musk, right? And and Elon Musk, interestingly enough, has become what I would call a reluctant transhumanist. I don't know that inherently he's a transhumanist, but, you know, his whole motivation for Neuralink isn't humanitarian or isn't commercial, even though that's those are objectives of the company. His big fear is existential. He thinks that AI that we create is going to either subjugate us or do us in. And his argument is the only way we can compete with AI that we create is if we use these brain computer interfaces to oops, to to it, you know, it um to um connect our brains to computer systems, augmenting our computational power and our capacity for memory. And so he's a actually advocating literally kind of creating human cyborgs in order to to survive, you know. And the irony is that the brain computer interfaces that he's building rely on AI technology to interpret the complex electrical activity in the brain and correlate it with user intent. So, you know, I don't know that I've got any more answers about AI than anybody else does, but I think we really want to be careful. Yeah. Right. And and um, you know, I I think we also want to keep in mind, you know, the, you know, the book of Revelation for example, and and where is our future as humanity going, right? And and could AI factor into the what we what we read about being prophesied? See it factoring in, you know, a book, another book I just finished is on extraterrestrial life, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, the Drake equation. And, you know, one of the factors is, well, how long can a high-tech global civilization last? And a team of astronomers said, we think it's only about 200 years. And basically, he's talking about the technology we had at the end of World War II. How long can we sustain that? And the argument is that a global high-tech civilization inevitably will find AI. And he said, you know, humanity has always come up with these amazing tools that can be used for harm or they can be used for good. But up until now, our technologies have been advancing at a pace where we can put in the ethical tools where we basically make sure we're getting more benefit than we are harm. A good example of that is nuclear weapons. I mean, World War II ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs. And, you know, that terrified the world. Hey, we could wipe ourselves out. Uh, but the technology, even though we went on to develop the H-bomb, happened at a slow enough pace that at least some degree of controls were put in place. These astronomers are making the point, hey, notice how fast AI is advancing. As Fuzz points out, it can't reason like we can, but boy can it sure analyze data that we feed into it. So, it's dependent on us to give it the data, but it can analyze it literally millions of times faster than we can. The problem that they perceive is that AI has a potential, and they argue a high potential, of advancing so rapidly it's going to outstrip the ethical constraints. Mhm. And it'll be inevitable that there'll be humans that'll use it for evil intent and literally threaten the human species or at least uh limit the advance of human technology. Quote, "Send us back to the Stone Age." And that is reminiscent a lot of what you see in the book of Revelation. How, you know, the love of the world grows cold. AI could actually facilitate that. Put AI in the tools of hands of people who have no love for their fellow man. Look what can happen given the pace at which it's advancing. And they actually end their paper by saying, if we want our civilization to last more than 200 years, and likewise if you're talking about extraterrestrial civilization, the ones that are going to last are the ones that are able to slow down the advance of AI. So they're actually finishing their paper saying, you know, as wonderful as AI is and how excited we are about its potential to do good, the only hope for humanity, we got to slow it down. You know, the one thing that gives me some hope and some encouragement is that the technology itself may become so powerful that it limits itself because the amount of energy that's required to run AI systems is so enormous that eventually the you're not it's not going to be able to be sustained unless there's some kind of radical change in technology. Now, this is something that's a little bizarre, but hey, this is the deep, the deep end. Let's go, man. But there, you know, a a lot of the AI um systems are built around neural networks, right? Which are kind of designed to mimic the the neuronal interconnections in the brain. And so there are these guys that have this idea of essentially creating kind of an organic AI system. They call the they call this organoid intelligence. This is one of these really weird things that you're able to do with stem cells. But under certain culture, culture conditions, you can take stem cells and get them to develop into these three-dimensional cell cultures that are called brain organoids or cerebral organoids or mini brains. And they're, you know, they're maybe about the size of your fingertip, right? But they they as you culture them under the right conditions, you can get them to develop uh a large population of neurons that then interconnect and now you can use that as a neural network. So instead of an electronic neural network, you're now using an organic one. And people have actually shown that you can train these these brain organoids uh just like you would train an AI system and have been able to use it to power um, you know, simple robotic systems, right? By again, just by doing these machine learning algorithms, which is really weird. Now, where this is interesting is that the amount of energy that it's you need for an organic neural network to operate is just a a small, small fraction of what it takes for an electronic system. And this highlights just the the incredible design of the human brain is that for just like a microwatt of energy, so efficient. It's so efficient. It far outstrips what you can do with a with a, you know, an electronic AI system. Example, the world's most powerful AI system can give it 100 grade nine algebra problems to solve. It can get about 60% right uh because they feed in millions of algebra problems that they kind of go through and copy and they get a 60% score. Uh, a grade nine algebra student can get a 90% plus score and he can do it by eating one hamburger. Wow. Uh, the AI system that gets a 60% score, it's consuming 10 million times as much energy as that grade nine student. So, this is making Fuzz's point. Hey, if you go the organic route, we can significantly lower the energy. But getting back to this paper written by these astronomers are saying, one of the reasons why we're scared about the future of humanity is that we're seeing AI advance exponentially. We're also seeing our ability to get cheap energy expanding exponentially. So, you know, like thorium nuclear power, you know, the idea that we can get fusion power, this has a potential to produce thousands of times more energy for one-tenth the price we're paying now. If we turn that loose in AI systems, we could be in trouble. But you couple that with these ideas like organoid intelligence and that, you know, is reason to be concerned. And now you're in this really bizarre netherland where you're you're somehow coupling the organic and the, you know, inorganic. We're really talking about like throughput. If you can get the throughput high enough, then there's a threshold that we seem to cross where we cannot keep up with the constraints necessary. So, yeah.

Well, that's great. That's terrifying. Thank you for that. Um, well, but, you know, this is really, I think, a clarion call for Christians. Yeah. Is that we don't have the luxury of just saying dismissing something as that's just technology, not gonna worry about it or nobody's really going to ever be able to do that or just operate with this idea that we're just going to condemn it. But we've got to to step into the cultural arena and engage these technologies, you know, recognizing that our worldview as Christians has a lot to contribute to to guiding our our culture. And I don't think secular ethical systems have the framework to deliberate, you know, effectively about what to do with this emerging technology. I um, in the process of working on a book called "Should We Play God?" And and part of the the argument in the book is that the system of ethics that comes out of the Christian Christian theological framework that was developed, you know, 2,000 years ago, right? In a pre-scientific age where nobody could have even dreamed of the things we're confronted with, is so robust that it actually allows us to responsibly navigate emerging technologies where the Christian system of ethics, because of the Christian mandate, right, to promote human flourishing, to care for the planet, is very friendly to science and to developing technology, but it also recognizes that we're sinners as human beings, that we lack wisdom, that we have to protect human beings, right? That we need to respect the dignity and the sanctity of human life. And then when we realize that as Christians, we are redeemed, that we have that ability to transcend the effects of sin because of the power of the Holy Spirit, the wisdom we get from, you know, um, from the Holy Spirit, from the scriptures, that we can actually step into the cultural arena and say, "Here are the good things we can do with this, and here are these are the safeguards we need to put in place, and these are the places that we can't go beyond." And so we've got to come to the table being knowledgeable about the technology, being, you know, um, we need to encourage young people to go who are Christians to go into those disciplines and be embedded missionaries to be salt and light in those communities. And we we have to courageously step up to the plate as Christians and demonstrate to people that we have a voice worth listening to. You know, Fuzz, what makes me super excited about this book you're working on? You're basically making the point, "Should we play God?" The technology is coming whether we like it or not. Yes. And who do you want playing God? Righteous people or unrighteous people? We Christians have to be up on what's happening in the technology. And we better be involved because if we're not involved, humanity is going to suffer and suffer greatly. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. 100%.

Okay. Final question. Take your time on this if you don't have a, if nothing comes to mind immediately, but um, there's a verse in the New Testament where Paul talks about basically being stewards of the secrets of God, the mysteries of God, if you will. And um, that's what you guys are doing. You're discovering the mysteries of God in language that people can understand and you are uh guarding them well. And so my question for you is, after the career you've had and the things that you have discovered about God and about creation, what is your um, what's your favorite mystery that you've discovered that has pushed you closer to Jesus?

Yeah. Well, one of the books I wrote years ago is called "Beyond the Cosmos," which is basically understanding why did God make the physics of the universe the way he did? Is to prepare us for the physics of the creation that's yet to come. And yeah, one of the mysteries that really thrills me is to what degree can we nail down what this future physics is like and really get prepared for the careers we're going to have in the new creation. We're not going to be sitting on clouds playing harps. God's going to employ us to rule over his creation and the angels. The more I can get a little bit of a a picture of what that new physics is going to be like, the better I think I can live my life to be prepared. 'Cause it's like God has got a career for me in this creation. But the really thrilling thing is the career he's preparing for me in the new creation. And so as an astrophysicist, I'm doing everything I can to really try to understand the physics of the new creation, the dimensionality of the new creation, and how that helps me understand what scripture is teaching and helping us prepare for the life that's yet to come. So, uh, these last few years of my life, that's where I really want to go. To what degree can I nail that down? I see Paul commanding us to do that very thing. The thrill about living in the 21st century, we got the technology and the knowledge base where we can go a lot farther than we've gone before.

Amazing. Thank you guys. This has been amazing. Um, many paradigms have shifted today. I just think this is such a special episode for people that need a paradigm to get opened. We just, there's so many facts that we just were like, "Oh, yeah. This is what I've always thought." So, I'm just going to leave it at that and I'm not going to ever let it be challenged again. But this was this was so helpful. Um, and also I would just want to say thank you for not only the information but in the way how you present it. We talk about this all the time on the show. Like, doesn't matter the information you have if you don't know how to present it well, respectfully, and in a way that is healthy. And you guys have really done such a good job of that. Um, even just on this show. So, thank you guys so much.

That's super encouraging because what we tell our scholars is people will listen more to your demeanor than they will the knowledge that you have. Yep. And so, we're really stressing in our community, hey, always display gentleness, respect, humility, compassion, and courage. So, the fact that you guys see that, that's super encouraging. Fruit of the spirit. Yeah, you got it. Cool. Love you guys. Let us know if you have questions.