Ep 214 | Christian Scientist DESTROYS Darwin, Provides PROOF of God | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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You're alone.

It's at night, clear sky, wide open field.

You look up.

You see all of the stars.

What are you thinking about?

Staring into space has a way of reminding all of us just how little we know about the universe and how small we each are.

It makes us ask questions like:

where are we?

What is our purpose?

This planet is so amazing, just floating in space.

How did this all happen?

Now,

imagine you're an astrophysicist, and starry nights are your business.

Don't you think all of that time looking at the cosmos

may just make you ask a question or two about how we all ended up on this big rock

today

my guest is an astrophysicist who has spent his whole life looking at the sky not so surprising that's where he found going right back down on him

since then he's been on a mission to rebuild the bridge between faith and reason faith and science We're together today

because of an ex

a potentially explosive topic.

I just want to find out how the Earth was created.

No big deal.

Welcome, astrophysicist Dr.

Hugh Ross.

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Welcome, Dr.

Ross.

How are you?

Doing well, thank you.

May call you Hugh.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

So

I'm fascinated by you because

you found God through science.

Yes.

Explain.

Well, I was one of these nerdy kids.

When I was seven years of age, our school teacher took us to the Vancouver Public Library.

I wound up getting a card.

I brought home five books on physics and astronomy that day.

Wow.

And every weekend, that's what I would do.

I would go to the library and get another five books.

And every year I would study a different sub-discipline of astronomy.

So one year was stellar atmospheres, another one was stellar interiors, galaxy formation.

At age 16, I devoted that year to studying cosmology, the science of the origin and history of the universe.

And that's when there is a major debate.

Is it steady state?

Is it an oscillating universe or a reincarnating universe, hesitating universe or Big Bang?

But I could see that the observations were heavily favoring the Big Bang.

So hang on just a sec.

Cosmology, that is Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan as well.

Weren't they cosmologists?

They were theoretical cosmologists.

What's the difference between theoretical and

what you were doing?

What I was doing was actually doing the observations of the distant universe that the theoreticians had used to develop their models.

Okay, okay.

And I did a little bit of theory work myself.

Okay.

So when you started studying this, what happened?

Well, when I realized that the evidence was heavily favoring the Big Bang, I said, that means the universe has a beginning.

If the universe has a beginning, there must be a cosmic beginner.

I want to find that cosmic beginner.

I had no idea where to look.

I mean, I wasn't raised in a Christian home.

There weren't Christians in our neighborhood.

They're hard to find in Canada.

I tell you, my father, when I asked my dad, I was young,

Dad, I want to talk about God with you.

And he said, okay, the first thing we have to do is get rid of the word God because it means too many things, has too many traps around it.

I can talk about God and you'll have a different view than me.

So let's agree on terms.

He said, I think we should call him first cause.

And I said, well, that's what's interesting.

I spoke at a government lab and the director says, look, this is the U.S.

government.

You can't use the word God here.

And I said, I don't see that in the Constitution.

But I said, how about this?

How about if I talk about the causal agent beyond space and time?

Correct.

That created the universe and designed it for human beings.

Right.

He says, Yeah, you can do that.

Well, it's, but it's true because his first question was, Do you believe in the Big Bang?

And I said, I think so.

And he said,

Does that disagree with God or help prove God?

And I said,

I

don't know.

I mean, I was a teenager.

I'm not sure.

And he said,

What was it before

and what lit the match?

Yes.

And

so

I started looking in the great philosophers, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

I looked at Renee Descartes, discovered that they didn't have the correct concepts of the universe or space and time.

And I went to a high school.

It was filled with refugees from all over the world.

And so they were saying, hey, you need to read these books, Hindu Vedas, the Quran, the Buddhist commentaries.

So I began to go through them.

And when I read the Vedas, I says, oh, this is where the oscillating universe model comes from.

You know, Hinduism is based on reincarnation, that the universe reincarnates.

But I knew that their time scale was incorrect.

They said you get a new birth every 4.32 billion years.

And that number clearly was wrong.

I also realized the universe had way too high of an entropy measure to allow for any kind of restart.

And the Buddhists said essentially the same thing.

When I looked at the Quran, it says there's three accounts of creation, but they contradict one another.

One of them claiming that the planets are more distant than the stars.

You don't need a telescope to realize that's incorrect.

Now, I didn't meet Christians or get to know them until I showed up at Caltech to do post-doctoral research.

But I did see two Christians from 30 feet away when I was 11 years old.

These were two businessmen that came into our public school and made available Gideon Bibles.

This is the Gideon Bible that I started reading at age 17.

So the cover is gone because our dog chewed it off.

But I started reading that Gideon Bible at age 17.

And that was also the same time that physicists in South Africa and Britain were developing the first of the space-time theorems.

which basically proved that space and time have a beginning.

Space and time are created.

And what I notice about the Bible is that it stood alone in making the claim that space and time are created entities.

What I saw in the Eastern religions, space and time are eternal, and God or God's create within space and time that always exists.

So seeing that the Bible said something different that was being affirmed by the space-time theorems, I said, maybe this book really is from the one who created the universe.

So can you take me through Genesis and the creation and show me the science?

Well,

I was taught the scientific method in grade 1, grade 2, grade 3.

We got it all 12 years.

And so when I picked up this book, the Bible, I looked at the first page, Genesis 1.

I said this perfectly follows the scientific method.

It took me nine years to discover why it so perfectly followed the scientific method.

That's where it comes from.

It comes from the creation texts in the Bible and Reformation theology.

But I looked at

Genesis 1, 1.2.

The Spirit of God is hovering over the surface of the waters of planet Earth.

And it gives you four initial conditions.

It's dark everywhere in the surface.

The water is everywhere.

And the planet Earth is unfit for life and empty of life.

Well, steps 1 and 2 of the scientific method are do not interpret until you establish the frame of reference.

The point of view is the surface of Earth's waters.

And don't interpret to also establish the starting conditions.

Well, it's all laid out in Genesis 1.2.

And I keep running into scientists who say Genesis teaches scientific nonsense.

I say, well, Galileo said the biggest mistake you can make in Bible interpretation is to get the wrong point of view.

And when they say it's scientific nonsense, they think God is above the earth looking down on the earth and telling us what he did.

Instead, it's God on the surface of the earth looking up at the clouds and telling us what he did.

did.

Makes a huge difference in how you interpret the six days of creation.

And so.

But, you know, nobody was helping me on this.

I just saw this in the text and said, okay.

At 18.

17.

17.

Yeah.

So I said, okay.

Creation day one, let there be light.

And I said, well, that's when the atmosphere goes from opaque.

to translucent.

I knew enough about astronomy to realize Earth had to begin with an atmosphere 200 times thicker than it has today.

An atmosphere that thick will not let any visible light through.

The sun and stars existed, but there was no light on the surface of the waters of planet Earth.

Day one is when the atmosphere was thinned out sufficiently that light could come through.

And it says the Spirit of God was brooding over the surface of the waters.

That implies the origin of life.

So I saw life being originally at the beginning of creation day one.

And then you go into creation day two, water above and water below.

I really didn't have an idea what that meant.

But when I got to the book of Job, it devotes one and a half chapters to creation day two and basically describes it as God cycling water in the atmosphere above.

to the streams and lakes and oceans below and then back again.

Oh my gosh.

And actually describes six distinct forms of precipitation in Job 37 and 38.

It mentions, for example, that there will be dew and mist and rain and then snow and frost and hail.

And again, I had enough science under my belt to realize that's the only way you can have billions of people living on the surface of the earth.

Because the earth's water cycle is designed to ensure no matter where you are, there is both frozen forms of precipitation and liquid forms, so we can have rivers and streams that flow all years round and we have abundant food that can be growing everywhere.

You need all six to make that possible.

Then you get into creation day three and this is when land masses show up for the first time, when God transforms the earth from a water world to one with continents and oceans.

And

at 19, I got to take a course on plate tectonics.

As far as I know, it's the first course in the world that was taught on plate tectonics at a university.

That's because two of the three physicists who launched the discipline were at the University of British Columbia.

Somehow I managed to get into that class as an undergraduate, and that's when they said, oh, the continents haven't always been here.

It's plate tectonics that builds up the continents.

And they thought it was a linear relationship from zero to where it is today.

Today, we know that it takes deep oxygen cycle events to really accelerate the growth of the continental landmasses.

And so in 2018, they basically showed, yeah, for about the first billion years, you've got nothing but water, and then plate tectonics kicks in.

But at the first great oxygenation event, two and a half billion years ago, about 90% of the continental landmass forms.

Wow.

And so basically it shows that the more we learn about the past history of the Earth, the tighter and tighter fit we get with what the Bible taught about these landmasses thousands of years ago.

And then it talks about vegetation on the landmasses.

And I've debated the executive director of the Skeptic Society four times in university campuses.

He always jumped on Genesis no matter what we were talking about

because he saw that as the Achilles heel of the Christian faith.

So he would always say, well, the fossil record shows us we got animals before we got vegetation on the continents.

I said, well, obviously, animals have skeletons and shells.

That's going to be easily preserved.

That's not the case for vegetation.

It's going to decay.

But what happened in 2009 and 2011, two papers were published in Nature saying we now have the isotope evidence and in 2011 the fossil evidence that vegetation was abundant on the continental landmasses 600 million years before the first animals show up.

So again, it shows, hey, as we learned more, it basically gives you a tighter and tighter fit.

What would they have eaten if there was no vegetation, if there was no...

Well, I think Michael Shermer was saying, yeah, there would have been vegetation in the oceans, but the biblical text says vegetation on the land masses.

He said, we have no fossil evidence of that.

Well, we didn't during my first debate, but we do now, and we do have that evidence.

And then creation day four

is when creatures on the surface of the Earth for the first time can see the sun, moon, and stars.

And we now know the second great oxygenation event turned Earth's atmosphere from a dense haze to transparent.

It's oxygen that determines how transparent the atmosphere is.

And so experiment was done where they took the atmosphere of the Earth, started with less than 1% oxygen, and pushed it up.

While the second great oxygenation event, the oxygen level suddenly goes from 2% to 8% for the first time in Earth's history.

That's enough to make the atmosphere transparent.

Unbelievable.

That's exactly the same time that the first animals appear.

Animals can't function if they don't know where the sun, moon, and stars are in the sky.

They need a transparent sky.

But what we see in the fossil record, the very moment oxygen hit that minimum level for animals, animals suddenly appear.

You go from nothing but microbial life to animals as big as two meters across.

And then in creation day five you also have God creating the sea mammals and the birds.

Only the second time it uses the word create.

The word create in Hebrew bara is for something brand new at God's hand.

And what was brand new was animals that are not just physical but soulish.

in that they have mind, will and emotions, a capacity to form relationships with one another, their offspring, they sacrifice for the offspring.

They also are endowed with a capacity to form relationships with a higher species, namely us human beings, and to serve and please us.

Then you get into creation day six.

It doesn't talk about the first land mammals.

It talks about the three categories of land mammals that are essential for launching human civilization.

And Job 38 and 39 goes into that in great detail.

And it's the short-legged land mammals, the rodents that we need for the clothing that humans were critically dependent upon when they first appeared.

Because we humans, unlike the Neanderthals,

are not adapted for a cold climate.

We're fine in a warm climate, but not a cold climate.

The rodents enabled us to go into cold climate zones.

Then two different kinds of long-legged land mammals, those that are easy to tame, the herbivores we use for agriculture, those that are difficult to tame.

the carnivores that we use for household companions.

And last of all, God creates human beings, and only the third time does it use the word create.

Because what's brand new about us, we're not just physical and soulish, we're spiritual.

As these birds and mammals were designed to relate to a higher species, we are designed to relate to a higher being, the one that created everything.

First of all, that's the best explanation of Genesis I've ever heard.

I love that.

Let me go back.

Where would the dinosaurs come in?

Well, the Bible is written for all generations, so it avoids vocabulary that only modern generations would understand.

So it doesn't mention dinosaurs because they weren't discovered until the 1850s.

It doesn't mention protons or neutrinos either.

But yeah, it doesn't mean that they didn't exist.

They would have fit in in the middle of creation day five, and where you see them implied is Psalm 104, the longest of the creation Psalms.

And Psalm 104's theme is that God is packing our planet with as much life as possible and as diverse as possible.

And so when our planet has conditions suitable for dinosaurs, he creates the dinosaurs.

They're not suitable now because we don't have shallow seas to provide the water buoyancy that these huge creatures need.

But when the continental landmasses were filled with vast shallow seas, there you got the water buoyancy to make possible animals as big as T-Rex and Brontosaurus.

I mean, I laughed at the Jurassic Park movies because it shows this T-Rex on land chasing a jeep at 45 miles an hour.

It wouldn't have happened.

The T-Rex would have injured itself one little trip and it's gone.

The Jeep has no hands to do this.

Well, the biggest land animal you can have without water support is an elephant.

Anything bigger than an elephant is going to injure itself because of the law of gravity.

It's the same law you see in the NBA.

The really tall basketball players, when they trip and fall, they do themselves a lot more injury than someone who's only five feet tall.

You know, gravity always wins.

I've never seen that even portrayed with dinosaurs, that they're always around water.

Well, the ones that are weighing 80 tons, they need water buoyancy to support that huge body mass.

T-Rex was probably, I mean, it was long-legged.

T-Rex was probably swimming around in shallow seas and preying on, you know, huge herbivores.

I mean, with those giant jaws, it wasn't eating small creatures like lawyers.

It was eating something bigger than a lawyer.

So the other thing, and I just,

I want to say this because there's a lot of people that have different views of creation and everything else.

I personally don't think how God created the universe is essential to my salvation.

So, and I don't know.

You don't know, but we're...

That's who creates that's essential.

Yes, right.

So when and how,

that's less important.

Because I have some friends who claim, no, the earth is only, you know, five or 10,000 years old.

And you're like, dude, that doesn't, I mean, no, why couldn't God's creation

happen?

I don't want to say in an evolution.

Well, you say it's a progressive creationism, right?

Well, I claim that God performs creation miracles.

He uses the word Bara and Asa in the Hebrew.

That means that God is supernaturally intervening.

Sometimes it uses the word Hayah, which means that it could be through natural process.

So it's not either or, it's both and.

Right.

So, but it is over a significant passage of time.

In fact, just reading the Bible on my own at age 17, I immediately recognized these days have to be long time periods

for the simple reason that you see see the word day

being used with three different definitions.

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 for the entirety of creation history.

The other thing I noted is that the first six days end with an evening-morning phrase.

Evening was, morning was, day X, which told me each day has a definite start time and a definite end time.

You get to day seven, there's no evening-morning phrase, implying we're still in God's seventh day.

And both Psalm 95 and Hebrews 4 explicitly declare we're still in God's seventh day.

And for me, at age 17,

it answered the fossil record enigma.

For some reason, my parents thought I was being obsessive about physics and astronomy.

I don't know why, but they were worried.

Did you kiss a lot of girls at all?

No.

What a surprise.

I mean,

I was saving up pop bottles and cashing them in to build a telescope.

That's amazing.

I began doing research on T-Tari stars, wound up entering the BC Science Fair and winning the fair.

So I was a real nerd growing up.

I really enjoyed my astronomical research.

But my family was worried that I was being too narrowly focused.

When I was 11, my parents bought us a big thick book on evolutionary biology.

I was the only one in the family that read it.

But I remember telling my parents that numbers don't work.

You have all these new families and orders and classes and phyla showing up before humanity, and none of that happens after humanity.

They said, go ask your science teachers.

They had no clue.

They told me to talk to the professors I knew.

And I didn't get an answer for them either.

But the first time I picked up the Bible, read Genesis 1, I said this answers the fossil record enigma.

For six days God creates.

On the seventh day he ceases from his work of creation to focus on his work of redemption.

And I also realized that's the principle of the Sabbath.

For six days we work, on the seventh day we focus on the most important issues of life.

And as I read through the creation texts, I was surprised to discover God begins his works of redemption before he creates anything at all, which implies everything that God creates is for the purpose of redemption, and it made sense of the seventh day when God stops creating and redeems.

It also explained to me why so many astronomers believe in God and so few field biologists believe in God.

Their research is on different days of creation.

In astronomy, our data comes from the past because it takes light time to reach our telescopes.

The field biologists are doing their research in the present era.

So the field biologists say, we see no evidence for the miraculous handiwork of God.

Well, they're looking on the wrong day.

Day seven, God stops at.

But before humanity, you got the six days when God.

Where do you say he tips his hand that

he is worried about salvation or redemption before he creates?

Well, you got passages like 2 Timothy 1.9.

The grace of God that we now experience was put into effect before the beginning of time.

Or Titus 1.2, the hope that we share in Jesus Christ was granted to us before the beginning of time.

Then you got Hebrews 11.3.

The universe that we can detect did not come from that which we can detect.

We can detect matter, energy, space, and time.

So, and that's unique to the Bible.

You won't find that in the other holy books.

So I says, this book gets all the cosmology right.

I mean, mean, what astounded me in going through the creation text not only talks about a space-time beginning, it talks about how the universe expands from that space-time beginning, the stretching out of the heavens, how it happens under laws of physics that never change.

And Ecclesiastes and Romans speak about one of those laws as a pervasive law of decay.

And hey, If you know high school physics, that implies that the universe gets colder and colder in a highly predictable way.

And astronomers have actually got measurements of the past temperature of the universe, and they perfectly fit what the Bible predicted thousands of years ago.

Unbelievable.

Yeah, so it gets all the science right.

It predicts future science.

Can you help me out with something?

Because I've said this, and I don't do what you do, so probably very ineloquently.

But I've said this to people who

believe in evolution.

Everything in our world decays.

Yes.

It becomes more chaotic.

Nothing in our world starts as chaos and ends up like this.

There's no example, is there?

Well,

my colleague Fazal Rana, who's our staff biochemist and I, we regularly attend origin of life research conferences.

And it's interesting, each successive meeting is more depressing than the previous meeting because they keep running into these intractable roadblocks.

However, I think what motivates them, they do these these experiments in the lab and say, hey, we're able to put some amino acids together and get a short sequence of amino acids.

Maybe we're on the way to making a real protein, or they're able to come up with some way to make RNA.

The problem is it takes a highly skilled team of biochemists, well-funded, with real technical equipment, where they make sure we're going to ensure that there is no contaminant chemicals that would degrade the reaction.

So they're using pure samples.

And there's one...

That would imply

there's a creator.

It implies you need something smarter,

more intelligent, more knowledgeable, and better funded than those biochemists to do it in the first place.

But they think they're making progress.

And I say, yes, what you're doing in the lab is remarkable.

But notice, it's only the baby steps.

You can't solve the fundamental problems like how do you get all the amino acids left-handed?

How do you get all the ribose sugars right-handed?

That's an easy thing, that there is no naturalistic process that does that.

And so, and if you go to these conferences, they admit that their naturalistic explanations don't work.

None of them work.

Well, that would imply that there's someone, again, more intelligent than us that did it in the first place.

And then you look at the fossil record.

I mean,

evolutionists will claim, well, how it all works?

You've got natural selection, mutations, gene exchange, and epigenetics.

And that's going to cause species to differentiate and produce more species if you wait long enough.

If you wait longer, you might get a new genus.

If you wait longer, the new genera might produce a new family, and on all the way up to the phylum.

The problem is when you look at things like the Avalon and Cambron explosions of life or the mass speciation events, it's the opposite.

The phylus show up first, the species show up last.

It's the exact opposite of what you expect from a naturalistic perspective.

And the leading paleontologists, who are agnostics or atheists, can see that in their papers.

They can see that they're seeing the opposite of what their models would predict.

First of all, talk about the Cambrian explosion for anybody who doesn't know what that is.

Well, it's an event where the oxygen level suddenly jumped from 8% to 10%.

What would cause that in nature?

Again, the deep oxygen cycle, something called the

Great Unconformity, which is basically an event where you got huge landslides coming off the continental land masses, being deposited in the oceans.

It forms the continental shelves, which is an ideal environment, shallow continental shelves for sea life.

And so the Avalon explosion is where you've got 8% oxygen, not enough for a circulatory system or digestive tract, but enough for filter feeders.

But when it hits 10%, and again you get another geological event that suddenly jumps up to 10%,

now you've got enough oxygen that you can have digestive tracts, you can have a brain, you can have a heart, you can have various kinds of organs, hearing, eyesight, all that's possible.

But it all shows up immediately.

and simultaneously.

So you get about 50 phyla.

A phylum is a basic body plan.

So for example, we humans are part of the chordate phylum, which means we have a long neural cord.

It includes all the vertebrates and a lot of the invertebrates are in that phylum.

And I remember when I was first reading this in my teenage years, they were saying, well, the chordates show up at the end of the Cambridge event.

We now know that they're the beginning of the Cambridge event.

Even the vertebrates show up at the beginning of the Cambridge event.

50 phyla showing up simultaneously and immediately when the oxygen permits them to exist.

And when you say simultaneously and immediately, how many years is that over?

Well, that's been a problem trying to measure that precision.

Yeah.

Two years ago, they were saying within a five million year window, because that's what the air bars are.

Now the air bars are down to 410,000 years.

So we know it happens in less than 410,000 years.

Wow.

So

that would,

I mean, it goes kind of for and against evolution, right?

Because some animals do kind of evolve, right?

Well, for example, we humans are significantly taller than we were 2,000 years ago.

Right.

What's our appendix for?

Well, the appendix does serve a useful purpose.

There are no useless organs in the human body.

The problem was they thought the appendix was part of the digestive tract.

It's part of the immune system.

So

we now know it serves a purpose.

They used to think the tonsils and adenoids are useless organs.

We know they serve a useful purpose.

We're looking in the wrong area for the purpose.

So

the human body is marvelously designed.

In fact, I just participated in a book with about a dozen medical researchers who are just, the book's going to come out soon.

basically talking about how the human body is the most amazingly designed animal we see on the face of the planet.

I sat in it was just, my father just passed away, and I sat in the hospital room

and he was hooked to a,

oh, what do you call it?

When you have the kidney failure and

dialysis.

He was hooked to this amazing machine that slowly over 24 hours cleaned all the blood.

Yeah.

It was remarkable, but it was almost the size of like a small refrigerator.

Yeah.

And I sat there and I looked at that and I thought, that's the best we can do for an organ that doesn't have any wires or any, we don't even know.

It's only the size of a human fist.

And it's the size of a fist.

How do you, I mean,

how do people dismiss the miraculous machine?

Right that we are that we can't even get close to.

We don't even understand it yet.

Well, for example, we humans have have about four times as many heartbeats in our lifespan as any other mammal.

I mean, turtles live longer than us, but they don't do much.

We get to have high activity for seven, eight, nine decades.

I mean, we're unique amongst the life forms.

Our brain is as big as it can possibly be.

Make the human brain any bigger, that would cook itself to death.

And so, I mean,

nothing in the animal world matches the capability of the human brain.

Okay, so tell me the the,

because I, I believe Lucy exists.

Sure.

Um, you know, I believe in Neanderthal man,

but I don't think they're connected.

We've never come up with a link.

We've never, doesn't mean that we won't someday, but I don't think

if I believe in God,

God created

well, one of the books we've written is Who is Adam, where we basically meet the point, yes, there are but a dozen species of bipedal primates that preceded human beings, But we see no evidence that they are evolving towards us because what we notice is the brain size goes up and down as you go over the past six million years.

The bipedal capability goes up and down.

We don't see a linear progression.

And the human brain structure is different.

We have a much higher density of neurons.

It is true.

Our brain is about the same weight as a Neanderthal brain.

but the Neanderthal had to manage a much larger body.

So we have a higher encephalization ratio.

We also have a much higher density of neurons.

And then the way the brain is structured is different.

The Neanderthal brain is basically like a cylinder.

Ours is like a basketball.

It's globular.

And we have a huge parietal lobe.

That's the lobe that allows us to have the show.

It allows us to do mathematics, philosophy, theology.

You know, symbolic capability.

You know, we alone invent symbols and use symbols to do amazing things.

No other animal does that.

At best, it makes some claw marks on a tree maybe or a piece of rock.

But we actually invent symbols.

I mean,

in mathematics, we keep inventing symbols to help us do our calculations.

Alphabets.

I mean, that's what's unique about human beings.

But it's our anatomy that makes that possible.

In fact, one of the talks I give is how God designed us all to be thinkaholics.

We're all capable of thinking non-stop throughout our whole life.

No other animal animal can do that.

The Neanderthals couldn't do that.

Only we humans were capable of doing that.

So let me play devil's advocate here and just say

everybody says that dolphins are wildly intelligent animals.

And they don't do the alphabet because they don't have hands.

Well, they are intelligent, but they're not the most intelligent non-human animal.

Darwin claimed that the most intelligent non-human animal is a chimpanzee because it looks the closest like us.

And he also said to his colleagues, prove me wrong by doing field experiments.

It took 150 years before any scientists actually did what Darwin recommended.

Wow.

But the paper that was published had an interesting title, Darwin's Mistake, because experiments show that the smartest non-human animals are Caledonian crows and ravens.

They far outperform the intellectual capability of any of the apes.

I mean, chimpanzees can do a one-step tool use.

These birds can do eight steps and they do it without any training.

You can go on YouTube and watch video clips of what these

Caledonian raws.

Caledonian crows and ravens, incredibly smart animals.

What we now notice is they have a brain structure that's similar to the human brain structure.

And very different from what you see in chimpanzees and gorillas and orangutans.

So when you call somebody a bird brain, you're actually giving them a problem.

Let me go back to the Big Bang for a second because the Big Bang was originally

something that was meant as an insult, right?

Well, it was Fred Hoyle that coined the term Big Bang as a way of deriding the Big Bang.

He was promoting the steady state theory.

He didn't like Big Bang cosmology.

He didn't like the theology behind it.

He was well aware that it had a biblical connection.

So he said, we got to get rid of this.

So wait, say that again, because I don't think anybody knows that.

That it had a biblical connection.

Well, the very first time the Big Bang was proposed in the 1920s, you had people like Sir Arthur Eddington saying, this is philosophically repugnant.

We have a beginning to the universe.

I don't like that.

And so what you saw in the early part of the 20th century...

First cause.

It goes back to the first cause, and it talks about space and time having beginning, just like the Bible teaches.

And so

because it spoke of this being beyond the universe, they said, we got to get rid of this.

But over the course of the 20th century, the evidence just got stronger and stronger and stronger that the Big Bang model indeed describes the origin and history of the universe.

How was it taken as proof?

From the original people saying, I reject this.

Scientists, I reject this because it's a God model to no well one thing they didn't like is that it made the universe too young it made the universe only billions of years old and the astronomers in the early part of the 20th century recognized if it's only billions we can't save Charles Darwin's theory that theory needs a lot more time than just billions of years in fact in the early part of the 20th century you had astronomers like Sir James Jean saying the stars are able to burn for trillions of years so the universe must be quadrillions of years old.

And with quadrillions, maybe we can save Charles Darwin.

But what happened in 1956 is astronomers actually figured out how elements are fused inside stars.

And that's when they realized, oh, it's only billions.

It's not quadrillions.

The universe is a lot younger than we thought.

And yes, that's bad news for evolutionary biology.

But hey, that's what the universe tells us.

And yet, there are now

people who believe the Bible who say,

I guess, that it's all wrong, that it's only five or however many thousand years old.

I know a lot of young earth creationists.

I debate them frequently on podcasts like this.

And I point out, notice how frequently the Bible says the laws of physics don't change.

And every young earth creationist model critically depends on altering the laws of physics by factors of millions or billions of times at the fall of Adam and the flood of Noah.

The Bible explicitly rules that out.

Moreover, as an astronomer, every time I look at the spectrum of a star or a galaxy, I'm measuring the laws of physics.

And from zero all the way out to 13.5 billion light years, we see this is no change in the laws of physics.

Right.

The Bible got it right.

I'm sure you are.

And I know this guy got a lot wrong, but

ever heard of Velikovsky?

Oh, yes.

Okay.

I met him personally, actually.

Did you really?

At the University of Toronto.

I had this gigantic office because my research was highly voluminous.

And he said, can I borrow your office for a day?

So he used my office at the University of Toronto to do his stuff.

But I said, yeah.

So I got to talk to him.

But

even before I met him, I knew what he was saying about the history of the solar system was provably incorrect.

So, but his his world's in collision, I was so fascinated by because he was the first scientist that said, that I know of,

let's not throw the Bible out.

Let's look for things that are natural that would explain

what they were trying to document.

Well, that's where I think he was on to something.

Yeah, you got the parting of the Red Sea, you got Noah's flood.

So he said, we should expect to find some evidence of this.

But the evidence he was citing doesn't work.

I mean, he was claiming, for example, that there was a comet that swung by the Earth and became Venus.

Well, Venus is not a comet.

And if that had happened, all life on planet Earth would have been wiped out.

But is there anything to his

theory, not his facts?

Well, his theory.

He is correct that there are statements in the Bible that

need explanation.

I guess what I'm really asking you is

scientists should get along with God because he had to be the greatest mathematician ever.

And he created physics, and everything is so tight and precise.

He set up a system where he wouldn't violate

physics.

He did it through whatever system is.

Well, something you see in Psalm 19, God gave us two reliable books, the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture, which implies that two books will always agree.

Right.

And that's how we figure out where we misinterpreted things.

If we see what looks like a disagreement between understanding the book of nature or the book of Scripture, we know we've misinterpreted one or both.

And the fact that we see the book of nature cooperating the book of Scripture and the Book of Scripture cooperating the book of nature tells us God has given us two faithful witnesses.

That's the core of the organization I've founded, Reasons to Believe, is basically showing how the two books do cooperate one another and basically we use emerging discoveries in the Book of Nature to bring people to the Book of Scripture.

So show me some of those examples.

You showed creation.

Well, I put out a blog called Today's New Reason to Believe.

And if I had the time, I could write a dozen such articles every day just because of what's being published in the scientific literature.

But basically, I pick the highlights and say, look,

the principle we see in Job and Psalms is demonstrable.

The more we learn about nature, the more evidence we'll uncover for the supernatural handiwork of God.

And the fact that we can document that on a daily basis from the scientific literature.

And so I tell skeptics on university campuses, you're not persuaded today, wait one month.

See how much stronger the evidence becomes.

And if you see it mounting at that dramatic of a rate, perhaps you need to seriously consider what the Bible says you need to do about your life.

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I mean, he's fascinating, and

obviously science is something that I love, but he understands it and it's all math.

And math

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So what do you think of quantum mechanics?

Oh, I love quantum mechanics.

You can't have life without quantum mechanics.

I mean, your body is filled with proteins that act like transistors.

And what's interesting is the uncertainty in quantum mechanics must be fine-tuned for life to exist.

So make the uncertainty bigger, those proteins will fail to operate.

Make it smaller, they will fail to operate.

I mean it was a big debate between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein.

Does God play with dice?

We now know that God does play with dice, but he carefully designs the dice to get exactly what he wants.

So uncertainty is a crucial factor, not just in quantum mechanics, but in statistical mechanics.

You also need the uncertainty to get the Brownian motion to work.

Again, there's engines inside, you know, molecules inside your cells that operate in Brownian motion.

So the statistical uncertainty you get in thermodynamics is crucial for life to exist.

So tell me, and again, I am sorry, you're talking way down here, but

the idea of like quantum computing is that it takes everything all at once, right?

Takes all of the possibilities at once, which leads you to fiction of parallel universe and everything else.

Is any of that

real?

Well, the thing about quantum computing is you have to deal with the quantum uncertainties that are involved.

And so how they make quantum computing viable is you have tens of thousands of quantum computers all working in parallel.

which reduces the uncertainty you get from the quantum effects.

So yeah, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, we have to take that into account.

And our human brain basically is a huge parallel processor.

And so yeah, there's a goal.

Can we make quantum computing able to launch the next advance in computer capability?

Where we know we can make good progress is getting better storage.

And so there's actually a serious effort.

DNA stores information at the smallest possible level level within the laws of physics.

And so they're actually saying maybe the next flash drive is going to be a bunch of DNA that stores information for us.

So maybe we can get another factor of a thousand or a million times storage capability in small devices.

Quantum computing is going to be a little more challenging.

What do you think about AI?

I just gave a talk on AI last week at a university, Marshall University in West Virginia, basically making the point

that AI can do things far more rapidly than we human beings, but it's totally dependent on the diet that we feed it.

It can't produce new databases.

It can't reason.

But boy, is it ever effective at going through huge databases and spitting out the answers we want quickly?

However, if you ever use ChatGTT,

you need to guide it.

If you let it loose on its own, it's like letting a toddler loose in a toy store.

Things will happen that you don't want to happen.

But if you appropriately guide it, you can get really good results.

I mean, it can write a 40-page review paper in 15 seconds.

No human's capable of that.

ChatGP can do that, but you really need to be careful what it's analyzing.

And so I love what ChatGPT does right now.

Do you like the answer I gave you?

And if you say no, it'll take a different algorithm

to try to give you what you want.

But it works even better if you say narrow your search to here.

And what you need to do is help the AI system not to go off on tangents.

So what do you think, though, that, I mean, the AI

scientists and creators are now

saying that, well, that's because it's young, it's like a child, and it will start to learn.

It will get better.

Right.

But it's always going to be dependent on the databases you feed it.

It cannot produce brand new databases, and it can't reason.

It can copy your reasoning steps.

There's a much bigger AI system called Minerva, and all they feed it is math textbooks and math papers and examples of the solutions of math problems.

But here's how well it does on Grade 9 algebra problems.

It gets 50% correct.

This system is three times bigger than ChatGPT.

Why?

Well, because it can't reason.

Now what they've done to try to see ChatGPT gets 26%

on freshman algebra tests.

Minerva does much better, 50%.

The reason why it does much better, it's not distracted.

It's only analyzing mathematical databases.

And basically, it's being fed, hey, here's some sample algebra problems.

Here are all the reasoning steps.

So it's basically copying these reasoning steps and integrating to see what typically works best on these problems.

That's why it gets 50%.

But you know, a grade nine algebra student gets 50%.

That's a failure.

Right.

So

have you ever read Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kerzwell?

No, I haven't.

Okay.

Yeah.

So

you wouldn't agree.

You wouldn't agree on all that.

Well, I'm familiar with this stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So he wrote this back in the 90s, and it fascinated me because

I think we are playing God.

I think we think we're God and we're playing God and

we have no idea what we're doing.

Well, one of the problems with AI is you got people thinking we can duplicate human consciousness.

That's because they think human consciousness is purely physical.

I got 50 books in my library written by people trying to come up with the origin of human consciousness.

What they all have in common is they end up by saying, we don't have a clue.

Right.

So it's because they're looking in the wrong area.

The Bible tells us our mind and our consciousness is not physics.

It's not chemistry.

It's not biology.

There's something non-physical that controls our brain.

I like to think of our brain as like a computer interface.

It's something our consciousness uses to be able to communicate with the physical world.

You know, I've watched people

undergoing severe dementia in the latter years of their life.

You can see the conscious person struggling to communicate and frustrated that they can't.

Yes.

The interface is not working.

The physical interface is failing them.

But it doesn't mean the consciousness is gone.

It's there.

Ray believes that, I mean, he's collected all the information on his father, everything he can.

I really believe he's kind of a modern-day Frankenstein in a way.

He believes he can recreate his father, at least the intelligence and

the

intellect, he believes, of his father.

And he told me one time, there won't be any death after 2030 because we'll be able to download you.

And I've said to him, but that's not life, Ray.

That's a copy of how I think and what I know, but that's not me.

You can download the information storage that you've accumulated in your brain.

That's feasible.

The conscious, no.

Right.

Because the conscious isn't physical.

And part of that is, I've been pondering that ever since we had this conversation of

one of the things that makes me nervous about AI is if we start treating it as

alive,

it doesn't have...

My life changed because of a spiritual connection.

Right.

I would have gone off the path.

What keeps me on the path of positive growth and everything else is a spiritual connection,

a healthy fear of God, an understanding that we are all connected on things that science can't prove.

So if he collects everything that I am and then puts me up and says, well, here's your grandpa.

And grandpa never died,

I feel like grandpa would become a monster after a while because it wouldn't take in any of the

spiritual guidance that you get.

Does that make sense to you?

It does.

And I would say science has a way of actually proving that because the space-time theorems tell us there's a causal agent beyond space-time, matter, and energy.

So yes, there is something that does transcend physics, chemistry, and biology.

So if God is in that spirit realm, why can't we be in that spirit realm, especially when the Bible explicitly tells us so?

I mean, you've got the proof of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

You have people coming back from the dead.

You've got near-death experiences.

I mean, there's a lot of evidence that there is something beyond this physical realm.

And it tells us in the Bible and Ecclesiastes, eternity is written on the heart of every human being.

You know, I debate atheist physicists.

on university campuses, and yet they all claim they've got ultimate purpose and destiny.

And I say, well, if the world is purely materialistic, you don't.

You know, I debated the particle physicist Victor Singer at Caltech at the International Skeptic Society.

I talked to them afterwards because I gave him the last word of the debate.

And what he told the audience, remember one thing, you are all cold nothing.

So I talked to him afterwards and says, you're the only honest atheist scientist who's been at this conference.

The rest of them are claiming they've got purpose, they've got destiny, they got meaning.

You're saying all that is untrue.

And he says, Yes, I agree with you.

If there is no God, then indeed we're no better off than a rock or a piece of dust.

But nobody really believes that.

And the fact that we see this, even in the hearts of you know, very intelligent atheists, that there is some ultimate purpose and destiny, tells us there is a realm beyond the physical.

This is what

I think this is, you know, darkness has always been in the heart of man and

man's inhumanity, man, is not new.

But Darwin

codified the follow the science, not science, follow the science.

Right.

And he codified

subspecies.

of humans.

You know, we had racism, but then he said, science, there is the

preservation of favored races.

And

with that is born eugenics.

And

when you don't have

a God

and your God is science and you think that there's no meaning for people,

you know, that we can make better people and there's no,

you end up doing

horrific,

horrific things.

There's no value.

Yeah.

So, I mean,

even if that were right, it's extraordinarily dangerous.

Well, we see that in the personages of Adolf Hitler and Joe Stalin.

They didn't value human life.

So, and look, look at the consequences.

Are we repeating

the same old, I mean, the same story over and over again?

Because you look at what we went through in the turn of the 20th century with science.

Now I feel like we have all the tools that

they were hoping they could find.

We have all of these tools now at our disposal to do all kinds of things to make the perfect species in their mind.

Well, we actually have the technology today to, you know, we can make artificial limbs that the mind can control.

It's like having a real limb.

So I'm in favor of those kinds of advances.

Where I'm basically drawing a line of saying the attempt to build a superhuman is a mistake.

There will be unintended consequences.

I mean, it is true, for example, our backbone is not optimized for sitting at a desk 12 hours a day.

But our backbone was designed so that we could run, we could walk, we could stand, we could sit, we can sleep, all for long periods of time, which means the backbone has to be compromised to some extent for one of those activities, because God designed it for multiple activities.

It'd be easy for people to say, hey, we can improve the human body here and ignore the fact that it damages the human body in other areas.

Do you see that?

You take drugs.

You take any kind of drug that will help you.

Right.

It's a chain of events that

destroys.

University campuses, they now have what are called intellectual steroids.

They're pills that you can take that really enhance your memory and allow you to do phenomenally well on college exams.

Wow, I'd like some of those.

Well, there are consequences.

It works well for people who have a damaged memory.

It'll help them recover their memory, but if you give it to a healthy

person,

now they're no longer able to forget.

And not being able able to forget is damaging.

They're not able to forget.

They're not able to forget.

Moreover,

they lose their ability to emotionally connect.

And so as people say, hey, look how much better I do on this test at the college.

And then they discover for the next 10 years, they have significant social handicaps.

So we're trying to improve on what God did.

And whenever we do that, we find out, hey.

Yeah, I got to tell you,

I feel bad for the people who have perfect recollection.

I think that's what hell is.

Perfect recollection of everything you've done wrong.

There's a genetic disorder where people can't forget.

They don't do well.

They don't do well.

I mean, they're always thinking concretely, never abstractly.

They have a hard time analyzing figures of speech.

They come back.

You give them a date.

They come back and they're reliving the emotion of that day as if it's happening.

They make phenomenal journalists because they don't have to take notes.

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So let's

let me let me go on AI.

What happens to us?

How do do we judge?

Because there are already people who are saying this.

Chat GPT, I mean,

it's a sentient being.

No, it's not.

It's not.

But we're getting so good at tricking humans.

I see a time where...

Well, they're actually thinking of passing a law that when you engage an AI system, the AI system has to tell you in advance that it's AI and not a human being.

And it's all based on the fact that they've designed an AI system to do Rogerian therapy.

You know, Rogerian therapists basically ask you questions so that you come up with the answer on your own.

And so it's very easy to program an AI system to ask you, you know, meaningful questions about what's going on in your life.

The problem is there are records of showing that people thought they were engaging a real human being rather than a computer system.

And the most dramatic case, one guy divorced his wife and tried to marry his computer therapist and then found out, oh, it wasn't a real human being.

And so they're saying, hey, this has happened more than once.

We need to tell the human that's being interviewed, you're talking to a computer.

But I believe that there will come a time, probably not too far away, where

once everyone has access to an AI assistant

who listens to everything, can write your emails, can like you, is programmed to watch for your needs and your wants and

to protect you or to suggest, you know, I'm really, man, I'm having a bad day,

blah, blah, blah.

It will remember that your favorite spot in the world is some beach in Hawaii and it will say, you know what?

I cleared your schedule and you're going.

And

people

will

bond with that and they will claim that that is their best friend because they know everything about them and they never have to listen about how bad their day is.

They don't.

But it also means they disengage with real human beings.

Yes.

And, you know, because of AI, notice today we have a loneliness epidemic.

You know, we got a relationship deficit epidemic, an anxiety epidemic.

I mean, we now know the one reason why COVID hit America so hard.

One of the factors that really exacerbates COVID is anxiety.

Americans are incredibly anxious.

But our AI technology today basically spawns that.

But I think one thing that's going to protect people, we all realize these systems need to make money.

And so what we see online is, yes, AI basically figures out what you want, but its motivation is to get you to buy more stuff.

Correct.

So, and hopefully people are smart enough to realize, hey, I'm being tricked into spending money I don't need to spend.

Oh,

the father of propaganda,

Brene, said,

we just have, you know, the problem with this country is, is it's a nation of

needs, not of wants.

Right.

Our goal is to change that to a nation of wants and not needs.

And they were pretty darn effective.

They were.

You know, and we didn't know.

What do you think about

bringing things like the woolly mammoth back?

Well, I wrote an article years ago saying that, you know, we benefited from the extinction of the woolly mammoths because just before they went extinct, they were basically destroying all the Siberian Canadian forests.

And if that had happened, it would have been devastating to the ecosystems.

Fortunately, they went extinct, and maybe we humans had a big hand in that because that's a really easy meal.

Kill one mammoth, you got food for 4,000 people for several days.

Jeez.

So,

but I think there is the possibility of bringing the woolly mammoth back.

Why would we do that?

Well, you can put them in a zoo.

I talked to the guy who's working on it, and he said he's bringing it back for global warming reasons that they will have a positive impact on

global warming.

And I'm like, I'm sure their farts are enormous, all that methane gas.

And

they were destroying forests.

Don't things go extinct for a reason.

Yes, but I think you got people saying, hey, if there is no God, we have to do everything to preserve the species.

The thermodynamics is going to cause species to go extinct.

Although I do agree we humans certainly are hastening it.

So we're a big reason why species are going extinct.

So I think that's motivating people, hey, maybe we can bring some species back that we drove to extinction.

The technology is basically looking at, okay, we've mapped the genome of the woolly mammoth.

Maybe we can alter the

egg of an elephant so that basically it has the embryo of a woolly mammoth and have the elephant give birth to the woolly mammoth.

That's basically the technological path they're seeking.

So it will be a woolly mammoth.

It will be a woolly mammoth if everything works like the way they think it is.

And within a decade, we may have woolly mammoths in zoos.

That's a possibility.

But yeah, I would recommend we don't turn them loose in the tundra or the taiga.

I mean, it just, I mean, I hate to bring it to this, but does anybody watch Jurassic Park?

It will completely change everything.

It will.

I mean, Jurassic Park is a bit of of a stretch.

Right.

I mean, the woolly mammoth, they were running around just 3,000 years ago, so they haven't been extinct that long.

And because they've been flash frozen in various ice regions of Canada, we've been able to recover the genome and get an accurate picture of that.

That's hard to do once you get into the millions of years ago.

How were they flash-frozen?

I mean, they had buttercups in their stomachs.

Yes.

Well,

my father grew up in Alberta, and they have these Chinooks, where within one or two hours, the temperature rises by 80 to 100 degrees.

You also got the reverse Chinook, where the temperature drops by 80 to 100 degrees in an hour or two.

Oh, my gosh.

And when it drops that fast, you're basically flash-freezing live animals in place to such a degree that there are occasions when the Canadian government serves...

mammoth meat at their state dinners because the meat is still good to eat.

You've got to be kidding me.

I mean,

it takes a special invitation to get to one of the things.

I'm sure it does.

And I don't know if I would want to.

I wonder what it tastes like.

Probably chicken.

Do you believe in extraterrestrial life?

Well, that's something that Christians have been debating for 2,000 years.

Because you look at Psalm 104, it's like, God seems to really enjoy creating.

Why would he stop on one planet?

What a waste of space, as Sagan said.

Yeah, what a waste of space.

And I had Sagan as a professor when I was at the University of Science.

Do you really?

Well, you know what was fun about that?

He kept saying the only hope for humanity is we tune our telescopes towards these distant planets.

Maybe we can find an intelligent civilization.

And surely they've written a book that will solve all the problems that we humans face.

He called it the Encyclopædia Galactica.

Well, I think I was the only Christian in the room, but I said, don't we already have an Encyclopedia Galactica?

And isn't Carl's problem that he's not willing to read it?

He overheard me.

Oh, boy.

And he says, I know about that book.

Nobody can live up to its moral standard.

It's like, but that's the point of the book.

No one can live up to its moral standard.

We need God's help to be able to pull that off.

That's what's unique about the Christian faith.

Wow.

But yeah, so there's a major effort.

Let's see if we can find, I mean, even today, SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life.

And

there are passages in the Bible that say we're probably alone, because we notice in the Gospels, Jesus frequently refused to perform miracles, which implies he only performs those miracles that are necessary to achieve his purpose.

And there are theologians who argue God only needs one planet.

As an astronomer, I can tell you, Unless you have a universe with two trillion galaxies, where that makes up only a quarter percent of the totality of the universe

that's what it takes to get one planet so if God wanted one planet on which we

yeah

we're really talking about God having to create a universe of a huge size so it's not a waste of space the universe's mass must be exactly what it is to get the periodic table of elements And without all those elements, you can't have life and you can't have advanced civilization.

So we're here because of how precisely tuned the mass of the universe was and its age was to make all this possible.

But I can share this with you from an astronomical perspective.

Everywhere we look beyond Earth, we see conditions that are very hostile to the existence of advanced life and maybe any life at all.

However, having said that, I've been on public record since the 1980s.

We will find the remains of life on almost every solar system body.

Because it started started and died out.

No,

because

Earth has been exporting microbes for billions of years.

Every time a meteorite strikes the Earth of sufficient size, you get microbes traveling through interplanetary space.

But I have friends who've calculated how much Earth soil exists on the surface of the moon.

20,000 kilograms for every 100 square kilometers.

There's a lot of Earth soil on the Moon.

One ton of Earth Earth soil has a hundred quadrillion microbes in it.

And I'm actually spoke at NASA Houston saying we got to go back to the moon.

We don't need to send people, we can do it in machines, but we need to go with a different mission.

Not to recover pristine lunar rocks, but to recover that Earth-transported soil.

Because we'll be able to solve the origin of life problem.

Because Earth's geology has destroyed the fossils of Earth's first life.

But the moon is geologically inactive.

The fossils of Earth's first life are in pristine form on the surface of the moon.

We can go there and figure out who got the original life model right.

The theists or the atheists.

And I'll close that message.

It says, this is a no-brainer.

Last time I checked, atheists and theists made up 100% of the U.S.

taxpayers.

Wow.

So yeah, NASA could actually determine, hey, did the theists get it right or did the atheists get it right?

We can find out.

Why is the dark side of the moon so important?

It's very important, especially.

I'm a radio astronomer.

It's especially important because radio pollution on the Earth is huge.

Silence.

It's like a giant hole of silence, right?

So if we go to the back side of the moon, it blocks out all the radio noise from the Earth.

In fact, there's a

mission in 2026.

to put four radio telescopes in the back side of the moon.

Like the SETI-size telescopes?

Big ones?

No, these would be small ones, because what they're realizing is the ionosphere and the atmosphere of the Earth permits extremely low frequency radio observations.

But if we go to the backside of the moon, there's no ionosphere, there's no atmosphere, so we can actually make measurements of 100 meters of wavelength.

And that wavelength is crucial to understanding the physics of the firstborn stars in the universe.

So that mission is scheduled for 2026, and they're going to robotically assemble the radio telescopes on the backside of the moon.

And I wrote an article basically saying we need to protect the backside of the moon because it was people who want to send up hundreds of satellites orbiting the moon.

They do that.

You wreck it.

They wreck it.

Yeah.

So it's

the Sierra Club on that one.

Yeah.

That's a good mission for the Sierra Club.

It wouldn't be.

Protect the moon.

Um,

uh,

I can't, I can't can't thank you enough for coming in and talking to me and

giving

a different look at

faith.

I have never understood why science, reason, and faith are at war with each other.

Well, the war isn't as intense as people think.

I mean, there's a lot of believers in God on university campuses and research facilities.

I mean, there was a philosopher back in 1916 who said, with the advance of science, they're going to see an exponential decline in scientists who believe in God in an afterlife.

Well, they redid the survey 80 years later.

They got the same percentages.

Really?

Well, 45% of research scientists believe in God in an afterlife.

That's higher than I thought it was.

Well, it's especially high amongst research mathematicians.

There it's over 80%.

What you see in math, there's an elegance and a beauty and a symmetry of math that tells us the one who set up all that math likewise must really enjoy beauty and symmetry and elegance.

Right.

So, and a lot of astronomers are believers in God.

Now, where you do see a very low percentage is in the social sciences.

So sociologists, you know, cultural anthropologists.

Yeah.

But it's because the data doesn't constrain them like it does in chemistry and physics and astronomy.

I mean, if you've got enormous error bars, you've got lots of room to speculate.

But if the error bars are tiny, it basically forces you to certain conclusions.

Love talking to you when you come back sometime.

Oh, yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah, this is great.

Thank you.

Just a reminder.

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