Transcription
All these infinite universe cosmologies come at a very high cost for scientific materialism. They invariably invoke unexplained fine-tuning or inputs of information which provide evidence for theism on other grounds.
Today I'm going to tell you a story which may seem very strange. Galileo, Kepler, Newton each tried to explain events in the history of the universe. Has the universe always been here or is it finite?
Is there something else that would lay these questions to rest? It reopens that question of ultimate meaning. How in the world did this start?
The simulation theory, the multiverse. You can't trust what's in front of your eyes. Come on. That's that's ridiculous. That belongs in the movies. We want to take our metaphysical hypotheses and see what they point to. And I can remember him saying, "Here is evidence for what can only be described as a supernatural event."
He himself made a discovery that shook his personal philosophy. The fact the universe sprang into being at a definite moment seems to me theological. And it is science that has revealed this. We dealing with a system of manifold complex design.
Force compared with a weak nuclear force, 10 turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. We associate information with a rational intelligence behind it. It had an uncanny resemblance to a digital bit string, very much like an information carrier. You can read the same segment forward to get one protein and backwards to get another. It struck us with a tremendous impact.
Without guidance, we would get a life unfriendly universe. Many organisms have beauty beyond anything that's relevant for their survival value. The concept of life as a cosmic phenomenon should have many consequences. The question then was what does one do about it? It strikes you in a way beyond what even a verbal description does. That's why we wanted to bring it to life. Pictures worth a thousand words and a moving picture that's accurate to what we know scientifically worth many orders of magnitude more.
And what's so powerful in our time is that with the fine-tuning of the the the parameters of physics and especially the information information processing systems and miniature machines and cells, we're looking at the distinctive hallmarks of design systems, each of which exhibit features that we recognize from our own high-tech digital world and from our own engineering. We are being confronted with things that we recognize are clearly the products of intelligence. And so we yes, we are absolutely seeing evidence of the of of of God's divine nature, his divine in earlier translations, it was often rendered wisdom, you know. So we're seeing we we're seeing evidence of the the wisdom of the creator. So and that's that has the same logical and epistemological structure as any other inference you'd make in science from observable to unobservable. You you infer it based on its superior the youer the unobservable entity based on its superior explanatory power. If that thing exists, if dark matter exists, if the quark exists, if an intelligent designer of information exists, we can better explain the phenomena we see than on any other competing hypothesis.
What's so interesting about this as well is that the most common sense view that has been held for as long as humans have existed is you walk out and you just see the creation and you go, shucks, this really looks like it was created. And I know that's totally unscientific, but that is how humans have understood it. It's not it's not scientific actually. It has the same inferential structure. It may not have as much, you know, the the intuitive or reflexive conclusion that nature bears witness to a creator um has been a persistent perception of human beings throughout history, certainly throughout Western history. You find it in pre-Christian history in the Greek philosophers. You find it in Cicero. In fact, the opening we have an opening uh quotation from Cicero as the film opens uh and it's it's quite you know he's a Roman author he's a Roman philosopher but but he perceived that there must be a great mind behind the universe as well and people perceive that for different different reasons different things that they're observing it might be the orderly concourse of the planets it might be the order the orderly concourse of nature generally it might be the beauty of nature But now we have a kind of specificity of revelation in in in the interior of the cell to start with just just to name one thing that that is is confronting us with a shocking degree of engineering precision that is reflective of our own high-tech environments and things that we've created. you know, we've got a we have a rotary engine inside the the uh the the cell uh uh the the cell membrane of a bacterium. Um it it has a rotor, a stator, drive shaft, bushings, O-rings. It's this is this this looks like something Mazda would have designed, but it's been in bacteria for 3.5 billion years. So, uh, it seems to point to a pre-existing engineer before we came on the scene.
One of the things I love about, uh, the story of everything is it helps the viewer to have a perspective of that we are the byproducts of this very narrow window of time when that baseline assumption of people was brought into question and the kind of materialist paradigm reigned. And it was like, okay, now we've got scientific instruments and now we're asking the questions and there's sort of this conflict of foot. But the more that we inquire and experiment and investigate, the more that the God hypothesis, if you will, presents itself as true. I mean, going all the way for the last 150 years, you can imagine any of these bake breakthroughs going in the opposite direction. Einstein could have gone, "Hey, this uh the way that I fudged the numbers, actually, I didn't make it up. it actually was a true thing and the universe is static."
He simply chose an arbitrary value for this outward pushing force. One that was exactly balanced to the force of gravity to suggest that the universe was static, neither expanding nor contracting and is therefore eternal and self-existent. or uh there's not an increase in entropy or I mean you you know all this so much better than me but I just want people to understand that like every one of these breakthroughs was also a testing point of material, yes, of materialism and of intelligent design.
Right. There's a lovely quotation from Richard Dawkins. I I disagree with him metaphysically, but he has a wonderful talent for framing issues and he says that um the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if at bottom there is no purpose, no design, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. Blind pitiless indifference is shorthand for undirected material processes. So he's saying that what we observe is completely consistent with the materialistic metaphysical hypothesis. And I love that because it implies that metaphysical hypotheses every bit as much as scientific ones are testable against the evidence. In fact, it's very hard sometimes to distinguish metaphysical and scientific hypothesis because metaphysics is just this the subdiscipline of philosophy that's concerned with being with what is. Is science concerned with what is what is the case reality? Yes. So when you're talking about these origins theories, they are both metaphysical and scientific at the same time. There's not a firm line of demarcation. But in any case, um, Dawkins says that materialism and theism are testable by observing the properties of the universe. But what the film shows and what my book Return of the God Hypothesis shows is that the great discoveries of the last 100 years, late 20th century and early 21st century science, um, in fact going back to the 1920s with cosmology, is that the great discoveries about biological and cosmological origins, biological and physical and cosmological origins have been completely unexpected from a materialistic point of view. And you see that when you see the kind of double back flips and convoluted uh pretzels that materialists are are folding themselves into in order to try to explain things that were not expected from materialistic worldview. The first of which was that the the evidence that the universe has a beginning, completely unexpected um suggesting the need for an external creator to bring the material universe into existence in the first place. The second thing, the big big discovery we address in the film is the discovery of the fine-tuning of the parameters of physics. And this was the the fine-tuning parameters that Sir Fred Hoyle discovered in his state at the time as a staunch scientific atheist were so shocking to him that he completely changed his worldview and affirmed a uh the the idea of intelligent design, a kind of rudimentary theism because uh as he put it, the best evidence we have um suggests that a a super intellect has monkeyed with physics and chemistry to make life possible. U so you've got you have fine-tuning he said clearly suggest a super intellect a finetuner and then in biology nobody expected the complexity inner workings of the cell Darwin's contemporaries Thomas Henry Huxley Ernst Haeckel who were attempting to extend his model of evolutionary thinking to explain not just the origin of new forms of life from a pre-existing simple form but they were trying to explain the origin of the first life itself from simpler non-living chemicals what your video was uh was depicting or attempting to depict at the at the top of the hour and they but the reason they thought this was plausible was that they thought that the cell was a simple homogeneous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm I think that's a quote from Huxley maybe Haeckel I can't remember but in any case that was the view and so everything that's been discovered about the interior workings of the cell has been completely unexpected from the standpoint of the first chemical evolutionary theorists who thought that explaining the origin of life would be very simple because they thought that life was simple in its essence. It was a protoplasmic jelly, a goo. And if you think that's what life is, a few simple chemical reactions are are inevitably going to produce it. But it it has not turned out that way. And as James T has eloquently pointed out multiple times recently, the more we learn about the interior workings of life, the further uh does the hope of any u undirected chemical evolutionary theory recede into the distance that the problem gets harder and harder and harder as we learn more and more and more about the nature of life.
So this is so interesting because and and maybe if if we have do we have time for it? Yeah, we probably have time for it. Um if if this is what I want I want people to understand is that in the same way and maybe you can tell this story, but in the same way that Einstein kind he called it the biggest blunder of his career and you described this in the documentary. Uh I was listening to Brandon I I misqued him and oh did you? He said the the fiddling of the value of the cosmological constant to try to get gravity the the inward pull of gravity and the outward push that's creating the expansion of the universe to match. Yes, he he so he he fine-tuned that he fiddled that uh in order to try to obscure the implication of a dynamic expanding universe. And it was he was later uh shown wrong to be wrong not only in the in the equa his own equations weren't as stable as he thought but also the observational astronomy showed that the universe was in fact expanding. And he later said that that his fiddling with the value of the cosmological constant to obscure the the uh implication of a beginning was the greatest blunder of his life. He said it wasn't of his oh of his career. It was of his life. So, oh, so it's even more dramatic. It was worse than his divorce. You know, it was, you know, it was like, wow. Yeah.
Okay. So, this is where I wanted to go with that though is we have that is, you know, one example of obviously extremely prominent scientist. Uh basically admitting that he, you used the phrase earlier like cooked the books or kind of fudge the numbers in order to kind of support what he wanted to be true and kind of avoid what he didn't want to be true. Maybe something like that. you were talking to Justin Brierly and you described how when it comes now to quantum cosmology and it comes to um Stephen Hawking and some of like that that arena now where to me it seems like there really honestly it seems like materialism has been squeezed into a gap that is so small it exists only from t0 to what is it point oh that that micro that micro 43rd of a second or that's the Planck time or you can also think of the Planck volume the the tiny recess of of space that where where uh quantum effects would become uh relevant or predominate. So what you're referring to is um there's a debate about something called the singularity theorems of Hawking and Penrose and in the 1960s during Hawking's PhD thesis he was thinking about black hole physics but then he also began and black holes are places where the where the uh concentration of matter is so dense that according to Einstein's theory of general relativity his his theory of gravity which is the accepted and dominant theory today that that the massive bodies will curve space or spacetime and in a black hole the the concentration of of matter is so dense that the space is curved so tightly that not even light will get out that's the idea of a black hole well Hawking began to think about that in terms of the expanding evidence of the expanding universe if the universe is expanding in the forward direction of time that matter is getting more and more diffuse as you move in move forward in time. But then if you wind that backwards in your mind's eye and say, well, what would the universe been like a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago, a billion years ago, however far back, you eventually get to a point where the matter is getting more and it's it's at every point it's getting more and more densely concentrated, in which case the the curvature of space is getting more and more tight. And you eventually as you go far enough back get to a point where you reach a limiting case where you can't go back any further where the curvature of space collapses to an infinite or near infinite tightly tight curvature. And the near infinite is the caveat that comes when you you bring into consideration that that um in the when when the universe would have been very very very small. It would have been uh subject not just to classical physics but to quantum the quantum effects would have been been significant. And at that point we don't really know how gravity would have worked is the is the um observation of many physicists. And so we can't back extrapolate to an absolute zero point. We can get back to um 10 to the minus 43rd of a second. And this is where where Hawking in his when he first was u developing the singularity theorems he had a a book um called the large large scale structure of spacetime written co-authored with George Ellis and they they noted this quantum caveat said well it's not a singularity but it's it's a near singularity it's it's as good as and and that it's effectively marking the creation of the universe But subsequent to that, that was in the early 70s, Hawking in 1983 developed something he called quantum cosmology with another physicist, James Hartle. And the idea there was well maybe maybe we could depict the universe as uh if not he had a something he called a no boundary proposal where there was um it it uh it wasn't infinite but it didn't it didn't have a classical beginning. And so that that eliminated the need he said for a creator. The the real proposal the the sort of that was a popular way of presenting it in his technical papers. The idea of quantum cosmology was that is that in that early period of time that you would you could depict the universe as as being in superposition with itself. that there were you could depict the universe as as having multiple possible manifestations with different spatial geometries and configurations of matter simultaneously existing as represent as represented by something that was called the universal wave function. So it was quite unclear as to whether this was a physical state or more of a a a description of mathematical possibilities. Um either way, the idea was that you would only get you would only be explaining our universe if our universe was one of the the un the possible universes depicted by that psi function. That universal wave function represented with the Greek letter psi. And you would only get to know that if you could solve a prior equation that was kind of the analog to the classical Schrodinger equation in quantum mechanics. I know this is getting very heavy, but here's here's the payoff.
No, this is actually what I wanted you to dig. That's a that's a differential equation, right? So, it is a functional differential equation that has an infinite number of solutions. So, in order to uh solve that would be our best representation of what a quantum theory of gravity would look like. This was the idea of the Hawking Hartle model. And and so it's they're trying to bring they're trying to merge quantum mathematics with you know with with um with our best understanding of gravity when you but to solve that equation you have to restrict degrees of mathematical freedom. There are boundary conditions that have to be restricted in order for it to be soluble. And if you want to solve it so that it gives you a wave function that includes a universe like ours so that you can claim that you've explained the origin of the universe mathematically from quantum uh in quantum mechanical way in a quantum cosmological way you have to you have to restrict the degrees of mathematical freedom in that original equation. So you have to say I want all of these possibilities excluded and this possibility elected with this boundary constraint. And in in the in return to the god hypothesis I actually I have a a figure with the equation and I show the choke points the places where you have to restrict mathematical freedom with these boundary conditions.
Well, what are you doing when you're doing that? If you elect one thing and eliminate a bunch of others, you're imparting a bunch of information into your mathematical system into your mathematical apparatus. But who's doing the imparting? Well, it's it's the theoretical physicists who are modeling the origin of the universe. So what's actually being modeled? It's the same thing as with these origin of life experiments. It's the intelligent agent is modeling an input of information in order to depict an output which is our which includes our universe. Okay. So to to model the origin of our universe with its specificity, you have to restrict degrees of of freedom in the mathematical apparatus that allegedly gives rise to the universe. And then secondly, if you're talking about a mathematical apparatus giving rise to matter, space, time, and energy, what are you talking about exactly? Math is conceptual. It's not physical. It exists in minds. And one of the the other cosmological quantum cosmological um proponents of a great physicist named Alexander Vilenkin in the in the last page of his book Many Worlds in One reflects on this. He asks this rhetorical question. He says if before there was matter, space, time and energy, what tablet could these physical laws have been written on? You know the the psi function and the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. What could tablet could they have been w written on? Uh if there's no matter there then the laws are purely they're they're they're purely mathematical. They're purely conceptual. Yet mathematical concepts exist in only one place. They exist in minds. And then he goes on to ask he says are we therefore saying that the universe emerged from a mind and he never answers the question. But I argue that that is the implication of quantum quantum cosmology that a that matter, space, time and energy are coming out of a purely conceptual realm of mathematics which implies the existence of a mind. And secondly, to get a a universal wave function that includes a universe like ours so that we can claim that quantum cosmology is explaining the origin of the universe, you have to impart information into the mathematical apparatus exogenously. And that is done in these mathematical simulations or mathematical modeling always as a result of an input from an intelligent physicist who is essentially modeling the activity of God in creating the universe. He's modeling intelligent design of the of the physical system that makes our universe a a possibility to emerge from the from the wave function.
So yeah, it's it's the isn't that called like the hand of God fallacy or something like that where it's like I don't know if that's the real name, but it's basically that name, but that's what's going on, Brandon. And and uh the point here is that if you want to circumvent a straightforward cosmological argument based on the multiple indicators we have that the universe had a beginning. I don't say proof, but I do say strong pointers. Uh you can do that. You can model an infinite universe cosmology if you like. And there are many attempts to do that. Now I just had a debate with a man named Phil Halpern about this science writer who's written a book with um Iranian cosmologist named F. Sharifi and they they provide a very nice exposition of 25 some new infinite universe cosmologies. But what I argue and what I've shown in the case of quantum cosmology in print and what we will be showing in a series of of blog posts is that all these infinite universe cosmologies come at a very high cost for scientific materialism that they invariably invoke unexplained fine-tuning or inputs of information which provide evidence for theism on other grounds. So they may circumvent a straightforward cosmological argument based on evidence for a beginning. at the cost of that is to reinstate grounds for theism that that are just as strong um in another way. So this is by the way what Einstein did. It was the same move he did. He he fine-tuned the cosmological constant and in so doing he could redepict the universe as infinite but he didn't explain where that fine-tuning came from and where it came from in his modeling was his own mind. So you have this kind of repeated pattern where the attempt to circumvent the beginning can be done in modeling because modeling is nothing more than imaginative thinking. But the cost of of that epistemically is the reaffirmation of something that provides support for theism on other grounds. So it's a kind of a pick your poison problem for for philosophical naturalists. either they they they have the problem of an ultimate beginning uh which is what I think the evidence points to or if they want to circumvent that they have the problem of unexplained inputs of information or or fine-tuning that that's that suggest a transcendent intelligence for other reasons.
That's fantastic. I'm so glad that you remembered the Einstein reference to because that was that was the dot I was trying to connect is that in the same way as Einstein did that and they called it the biggest mistake of his life, it seems like there's similar constraints or like arbitrary inputs of information by the mathematicians and scientists in order to get to the model that they're hoping for or aiming at. And I think that that's sort of just telling as well in terms of like how how do I put this? How objective is that if you have a specific target in mind versus
Yeah, it's not they're trying to get to a model they're trying to get to an outcome that they're modeling okay and end directed teleological process they say that to explain the origin of the universe we want to say that that the wave universal wave function that describes that pre-Planck time state whether it was existing infinitely or whether it had a finite beginning in fact it's interesting in the in the Hawking Hartle model and I and in the Vilenkin model both they don't get rid of the singularity at the beginning they presuppose it. Uh some of the newer cosmological models are attempting to to reinstate an infinite universe kind of depiction but but in the in the the original attempt to ex to um utilize the the the the loophole if you will of the of the Planck time. the quantum cosmological model still presupposed a beginning. Uh but in any in any case, however you conceive of that that early state, it um it the the idea is that you can't get to an early state that will allow you to explain the origin of our universe unless you first show that that state is a logical consequence of our best theory of quantum gravity which is depicted as this this Wheeler-DeWitt equation which is kind of the analog to the Schrodinger equation. I went into this in probably much too much detail in chapters 17 and 18 late in the book, but I wanted to show that that uh that the case for God from cosmology does not rest solely on a proof of the beginning. I think there are uh there are there is a near proof in the in the singularity theorems of of Hawking and Penrose and Ellis. I think there's what I say is they provide a strong pointer to the beginning. Um I think there is a a more robust proof in the in the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem which doesn't isn't based on general relativity but based on special relativity but any any proof is always predicated on certain conditions that have to be met and if you model u if you come up with a cosmological model that that um that obviates those conditions you can obvious you you can circumvent the proof. But the the models may themselves be uh deeply implausible. And uh in fact, in addition to the unexplained fine-tuning, what we're finding in these these other models is that they very often posit things that violate known known and very well established principles of physics. They're sometimes they sometimes involve mathematical slight of hand and they invariably in addition to the unexplained fine-tuning posit numerous um or at least a few significant purely ad hoc uh theoretical entities pure theoretical postulates that have no other role in physics other than saving the idea of an infinite universe cosmology. So they're they're they're commit fairly gross violations of Occam's razor. They're they're they're they're epistemically baroque. They have lots of lots of add-ons that so that the the claim that we're making and and the we are here is my colleagues Bruce Gordon and Brian Miller. Brian Miller PhD in physics from Duke. Bruce Gordon first rate philosopher of physics did his PhD at Northwestern under Arthur Fine. And we have a series of blogs coming out showing that there's a very high epistemic cost to these infinite universe cosmological models that are being spun out. In fact, one other thing to say about them is that that just going back to, you know, sort of history of science, Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, uh Imre Lakatos, these these scholars who have characterized scientific research programs uh in their kind of um study, they show that a proliferation of models is not a sign of a healthy research program. that we've we've found 41 new uh infinite universe cosmological models. The community can't agree that any of them really work. One one of them, one of the the the co-authors of the the book by Halpern says of his own model, he said, "Well, it may seem implausible, but it's no worse than any of the other models." You know, that that doesn't commend it. You know, I think the most straightforward interpretation of both the observational astronomy and uh the theoretical physics is that the universe as best we can tell had a beginning. And if it didn't um positing a a beginning, if it didn't, then the the alternative models that depict the universe as having uh uh p being past eternal themselves require fine-tuning that would point to theism for other reasons.
I guess as we work to land the plane here, I want to run two two things by just to I want the point the subtext of this to be clear to the listener. And tell me if I'm getting this wrong because I often do that. Um but if ever there was a point where there was nothing, there would still be nothing. And so the fact that
Yeah, it's an old old basic principle of logic from nothing nothing comes right so uh the the problem is is is I I think another another way to look at this is to say well the best explanation of the evidence that we have is that the universe had a beginning not a proof but it's the best explanation it's kind of an abductive inference to the best explanation there's nothing in the observational astronomy that suggests a past steady state that existed for eternity past. And there's certain sorts of paradoxes for naturalism that arise if you pos if you if you posit that. Um so if you take the beginning as as a a data point, what best explains the beginning? Well, if what begins as matter, space, time and energy, ala Einstein's understanding of the interconnectedness between matter, space, time and energy, then um then you you need a cause you need to posit a cause which is independent of matter, space, time and energy, which is to say is not matter itself. It's not energy itself. Something that transcends those domains. And the postulation of a theistic God, an unobservable, yes, but the postulation of a theistic God, I think, provides the best explanation of what could cause matter, space, time, and energy to come into existence a finite time ago. A deistic God, I think, would also be a good candidate, but I think theism has other problems that that arise when we look at other sorts of evidences that arise down the timeline.
How would you articulate in order to help someone make sense of that who isn't there yet? You know, um like if there's no time, then when is God prior to that? If there's no space, then where is God prior to that? Um if there's no matter, then what is God? If not something material and I'm just trying to articulate what I hear often, you know, about about that. If there's no space, time or matter, then what do you mean? It's it's a critique of the maybe the definition of God or like what what exactly do you mean by God or something like that?
Well, God's own self-revelation to human beings as recorded in the Bible is uh an interesting concept that I don't think anyone would have come up with. And that is the idea when Moses asks uh who should I say has sent me uh the response from the the the voice in the bush the burning bush is tell them that I am that I am has sent you and God reveals himself as the eternal self-existent uh um conscious agent capable of speaking a person but eternal self-existent and um and unchanging. He's he's not bound by time in some way. Um and that time itself had a beginning, I think, renders that concept even more plausible. Um because if time had a beginning, it suggests that something uh separate from time is possible, right? Um there must be some realm that is non-temporal if time itself came into existence. So, and this is and it's an odd thing about biblical revelation. You get this you get this in the New Testament as well. Jesus Christ is referred to as the same yesterday, today and forever, a timeless person. Um, and you have in the epistles of Titus and Timothy the affirmation that um the plan of God existed before the beginning of time. And there are different concepts about you know, what kind of time might have whether God was in a timeless realm or whether he was in a different type of time or a different domain of time. Um but the the other the other objection that you often hear is the idea that the causality is is meaningless apart from time that unless it's a a sequence of A followed by or you know B follows A uh C follows B D follows C there can't be causality. There are a lot of very very simple illustrations that get across the idea of a timeless cause. Just think of someone sitting on a log and depressing it in in the water, you know, or uh or or a log sitting in the water, displacing water that's taking place on an ongoing basis. So, it's not it's not not a strict temporal sequence as much as it is a a constant application of of of causal sufficiency. The the logically a cause is you break it down. I mean, this was part of my PhD thesis. I'm sorry, I'll get a little technical for a second, but
I like technical.
So, philosophers thought for a long time causes were necessary conditions and then they realized, no, that wasn't true. Um, birth is a necessary condition of death, but um it's not the cause of any particular person's death. Okay. So, then they thought it might be um a sufficient condition and well uh that's closer but not quite right. Right. And what what came out of it was a a model of causation where where a cause is that member of a set of jointly sufficient conditions which accounts for the contrast between between why something happened that you expected and why it didn't. So there's both a logical and a contextual aspect of identifying causation. And there's a whole bunch of it'd be too too dense to go into on an interview, but the point is that that a God existing outside of time does qualify both logically and contextually as the cause of the origin of the universe. God's action accounts for why the expansion of the universe began wh rather than uh either nothing existing or some material state that was prior to that expansion that hadn't begun to to u uh to expand. So the the universe uh there were there were go God was both jointly sufficient and accounted for the contrast the he answered the his action could answer a contrastive why question that philosophers would require as a condition of causality. So his existing in time is not a necessary condition of or of his being able to function as a cause of the universe. So there a lot more to be said about this. It gets a bit probably a a 20-page philosophical technical paper on this that I've got in my mind. But anyway, uh I don't think there's there's a I I think if we can conceive of a domain before the beginning of the universe that was not well before whatever if the un began a finite time ago and there needed to be a cause for the origin of the universe. There wasn't a cause for the origin of the universe. we undermine one of the fundamental principles of all of science, the principle of sufficient reason, the principle causality. Um, we we can I I think it's perfectly coherent to imagine a a timeless realm in which God exists or the idea that God might have existed in a in a in a parallel time that's not connected to our time.
One one last thought. I know we are landing the plane. the wheels are bumping on on
getting really heavy here. Yeah.
No, no. It's it's really it's really amazing though because I think about you were talking about math and how math is mental and how people are kind of open to the idea of math being, you know, like the the universal wave function is sort of, you know, before the, you know, the singularity or something like that. And to me, it's like, well, then are you open to math as prime reality or math being something eternal? Because again, in light of existence itself, something has to be eternal. The problem, it seems to me about that thing being math is that it doesn't have any causal power. So it it it doesn't meet the principle of sufficient reason. It doesn't it doesn't seem like it's a uh a sufficient explanation for M in the same way as, you know, I've got a chess piece here. The rules of chess can't create this chess piece. They they just they don't have the ability to manifest. a good analogy actually or the the longitude and latitude lines on a map don't account for the great height of the Himalayas. They're descriptive rather than causal. Um and math in the same way is the same. I did an interview recently with Peter Robinson and uh the great mathematician Sergei Klevanerman and our mutual colleague David Berinsky who's no slouch either a great great philosopher and mathematician and writer about math and we were dis we we all came to the conclusion that that math itself is a is a poses a great challenge to materialism and Sergei and I I think were both quite sympathetic to the idea that might even be pointing to God in the sense that um if all great almost all mathematicians end up as a kind of neoplatonist who believe that mathematical objects or structures as they call them. Think of the quadratic equation or any mathematical the quantum wave function that they they have uh or a circle a geometric pro u object they all have objective properties that are that are uh mind independent independent of our minds and if the properties they have are are conceptual they're not physical they're not material and yet again concepts exist in minds they don't exist independent of minds. So the the kind of pure platonism of of of mathematical concepts existing in the heavens has no analog in our experience. There's no no precedent in our experience of of uh a a concept existing independent of a mind to think it. So if there's a mathematical if mathematical realities are conceptual but they are they have properties that are independent of our minds in what mind do those properties exist? uh it seems that they must exist in some mind since they are conceptual and so this is this is another argument for theism and in fact when I met Sergei Klevanerman for the first time he had he had read my book and surprised me by by saying he liked it he's a prominent mathematician at Princeton and he said but you he said you said three uh three um uh discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe he said you forgot one and I said he said the math you know the math mathematics. Now, in our interview, he qualified that by saying this really wasn't a recent discovery. We've had math for thousands of years, but reflection upon math does arguably lead in a theistic direction.
Yeah. And I mean I I'm anyone could probably say I'm stretching this too far, but I would add a fifth of consciousness and a sixth of the experience of love and a seventh of morality and an eighth you know
Well and for me the the the argument that persuaded me of theism in university was the argument from epistemological necessity. The whole question of the reliability of the mind is is has beeled philosophy from the enlightenment period forward and and I think every deep reflection on it raises the fundamental question which is on what basis can you justify the reliability of the mind. If the mind was designed by a benevolent creator who wanted us to know the world that he also made um you have very good grounding for epistemological realism. The attempt to ground that on evolutionary basis or on any kind of naturalistic basis generally has I think been a complete failure. And so I I think theism provides the best explanation for our ability to know the world at all and therefore for the possibility of science itself. And I think I think strict naturalism or materialism underlines that undermines that and even unstrict materialism undermines that. And I think this is this is the the grainman of the the great work by Alvin Plantinga in his uh his three volume set Warrant and Proper Function. But this argument from epistemological necessity I think is very powerful and I I I sketch it in the last chapter of Return of the God Hypothesis because it was it was so dispositive for me in coming to believe that there must be a God.
If someone's curiosity at the very least has been peaked by all of this discussion, where can they go to watch the story of everything?
Well, um there's now a story uh I think it's story.org story of everything. It just if you Google story of everything now it's it's the the trailer is up online. Uh you can go to the Fathom uh website. That's the distributor and and you can purchase tickets. purchase tickets are already on sale through Fathom and um I thank you for asking. So, uh and a lot of a lot of people are buying bulk tickets for their local theaters to to get groups out to to watch and it's been a pretty good response so far. So, come it comes out April 30th. It will it has a guaranteed seven night run. So, April 30th through May 6th, it'll be in theaters all over the country. You should consult your local theater guides to see if it's playing in your area. And if it's not, you can uh reach out to the people at Fathom and urge them to add add theaters in your area.
Immediately after college, I made a documentary that was full of good ideas and had William Lane Craig and Lee Strobel and all these people in it, but visually it was horrific because I didn't know how to do cinematography yet. I want to say to the audience, this documentary is beautiful. It's it's such an enjoyable viewing experience. It literally has some of the best animation I've ever seen. Probably definitely the best animation I've ever seen depicting what is going on inside of the cell. And that alone, you're just kind of, like I said, it just hits you in a different way. You're kind of just marveling at what you're looking at. It it feels like you're watching like a Pixar anim. Like you're like, "This can't be real. This can't be actually happening in my body right now." It it it's truly mind-blowing. Uh as an experience, it
be great to see it on the big screen. And the the producers uh just achieved really high production values. They take you way out into space, deep into the cell. And the storytelling is fabulous. It tells the the the story that I wanted to see told, which is the story of the rise of modern science, the loss of the theistic in a theistic context, the loss of that context in the in the 20th and the 19th century and early 20th century, and now the return of that through all these different discoveries. But it also tells the stories of the scientists whose minds have been changed be because of not in spite of these scientific discoveries and who have come to embrace either intelligent design or some sort of mind behind the universe or out and out uh theistic uh belief. So it's it's a it's a I think they did a fantastic job and we're very proud to be associated with it.
Well, I'm very proud to have been able to spend the last hour and a half with you. Thank you. Thank you so much for your time. This was a real pleasure.
Yeah. Excellent. Excellent conversation.