Pints With Aquinas - How Science Proves God! w/ John Bergsma

Episode Date: August 1, 2024

Dr. John Bergsma is Professor of Theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. A former Protestant pastor, Dr. Bergsma entered the Catholic Church in 2001 while getting his Ph.D. in Bible from the University of Notre Dame. A close collaborator of Dr. Scott Hahn, Bergsma speaks regularly on Catholic radio and at conferences and parishes nationally and internationally. He has authored over a dozen books on Scripture and the Catholic faith, including Bible Basics for Catholics (Ave Maria Press), Stunned by Scripture: How the Bible Made Me Catholic (Our Sunday Visitor), and A Catholic Introduction to the Bible: Old Testament (with Brant Pitre; Ignatius Press). Dr. Bergsma’s talks and studies are available on CD and mp3 from catholicproductions.com. He and his wife Dawn reside with their eight children in Steubenville, Ohio. Support the Show: https://mattfradd.locals.com Show Sponsors: Exodus: https://exodus90.com/matt Hallow: https://hallow.com/mattfradd Strive21: https://strive21.com/matt Sources: https://mega.nz/file/zmZ2mAoR#EdbhoUvU5IKdPZ4Evja1dtOIoOjn4FVHB1GDz-QwZFI  

Alright, you ready? Yeah. Dr. John Bergsmuth, thank you for bringing a library of books with you. It is my pleasure. And Josiah is just gonna walk around on the ground like this. The best was when Jordan Peterson was here and he was doing this. It's like a very subservient kind of position. I make him get on his hands and knees.

That's part of it. Oh, I didn't do the thing. That's what I'm talking about. How's that for casual? I'm really impressed with keeping all this professionalism. That's right We need another we need someone else. We need someone prettier. No offense than you to kick that Yeah No, it's okay. No, we're good. We're good. It's hot but it's Okay, I gotta ask, why this many books?

They're kind of like memory jogs, and it's like a comfort thing. Comfort blanket. Yeah, comfort blanket. Some people have a comfort blanket, you have 50 books. I have them, they remind me of where to go in case I have a Biden moment.

Yeah, okay. And... Yeah, yeah. And some of them I want to wave around, like if, you know, because yeah, I want to, I want to, you know, I view myself as a facilitator and I'll say this to you during the show. Oh, this is the show.

Oh, this is the show? Yeah. Oh, okay. Isn't this great? That's what I said, stupid cash show. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So I this great? That's what I said, it's super casual. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So if you have myself as a facilitator,

so like I'm not an expert in all these different areas, I'm a generalist. I can read them with appreciation and understanding, but then I wanna direct people to useful resources. Many of our viewers are gonna be strong in different areas of science and probably out of my depth. So it's like, go to these experts. Well, I said this to you earlier before we were here

that it's only experts who realize they're not experts in certain areas. Yes, this is true. Like people like me, like lay people, like we're pretty sure we know everything about everything. Right, right. That's not true, but it's usually the people with a PhD in something who realize just how difficult it is

to be an expert in a particular area. And then you realize just how much you mustn't know about these other things. Right. I think I heard some joke about, you know, when an Australian man goes into a bar after a couple of drinks, he's an expert. A couple pints. He's an expert. I think that just applies to Australians. Quantum physics. Yeah. Sit down. Buckle up. Yeah.

I think it's true of the British as well. And the other. Not Americans? Oh yeah, probably, probably. Yeah. But we don't have the cool accent. So today we're gonna be talking about the existence of God. You teach a class on this or something like this? I do, yeah.

I teach a course on religion and science. Sometimes it's called faith and science. sometimes it's called Faith and Science, sometimes it's called, yeah, every other year up at Franciscan. And I got into it because when I went to the University of Notre Dame to get a doctorate in scripture, they said, okay, you've got to take a major in Old Testament, because that was my preferred field. Your minor has to be in New Testament. And then you have a free minor to do in anything you want.

It could be psychology, could it be biology if you want. And I was like, great, I'm gonna do philosophy. So our good friend. Plantinga. Alvin Plantinga. Please tell me a story about your time with him. Alvin Plantinga. So, yes, Alvin Plantinga went to the same

Dutch Calvinist church that I did when I went to Notre Dame, because I came as a Dutch Calvinist and left as a Catholic. He was actually one of the elders at the church. And so, and yeah, so he kind of observed my, you know, movement into Catholicism from a distance. And we've had a few delicate conversations about it. I think he asked me once why I became Catholic. And I said, you know, well,

it's a testimony of the church fathers. And he said, that sounds like a good reason. He said, yeah. So he was always a kind of an avuncular figure for me, a grandfatherly character and a mentor. Let me think, a story about planaga. In philosophy, there are these problems in epistemology, which is a theory of knowledge called Gettier problems,

where your belief is justified and true, but the justification that you think your belief has is actually false, and there's a different justification that is valid. And so the question is, does that constitute knowledge? Because the classic definition of knowledge and philosophy is justified true belief. And yeah. Just real quick, so if I said there's an even number of stars, that might be a true belief, but it's not justified. Right.

You'd have to count them. Right. But if you found some kind of mathematical formula that determined that there can only be an even number of stars, then it would be justified tree belief and it would be knowledge. So at the time I was taking this course in epistemology with Plantinga, I was also raising children. I had four of them at home. And there's a whole sequence of semi-comical children's books called the Moon Bear series,

where this bear character goes through experiences where he has surreal experiences which he interprets in the wrong way. So for example, in one of the Moon Bearer books, he has conversations with the moon. And it just so happens that the echoes of his own voice make sense such that he can interpret his reality in such a way that, yeah, the moon is actually communicating to him. And in another episode, he wakes up one morning and gets his friend and he thinks he's dreaming. And they see this big kangaroo, which is like this monstrous mouse.

He interprets it as monstrous mouse and so on. So he thinks he's in a dream world. So since he's in a dream world, he messes up his whole home and he says, well, we're just gonna wake ourselves up and the home will be cleaned up. Well, the big mouse turns out to be a kangaroo, the zookeeper finds a kangaroo and then notices that the whole house is a mess.

So, the zookeeper cleans up the whole house. They wake themselves up, they go back, and the house is all cleaned up, saying, it was a dream. Okay? So, all the evidence that they're getting fits their interpretive paradigm, even though reality is different. So that's actually not quite a Gettier problem, but it's an interesting kind of epistemological difficulty where you have a false interpretive paradigm that keeps getting confirmed. Yes, that is. Yeah, you begin with false

premises and you're led into this, as as you say paradigm and everything's justifying it It would be like if I you know if I had the belief that every time I woke up I was a new person or something right There's probably a way to make that very coherent or if I believe that the universe was created five minutes ago with the appearance of Age food in my stomach. I never ate. Yeah, that's that's coherent that that works There you know, yeah good reason to think it true or not. So when it comes to God, I think a lot of atheists would say something like, yeah,

you've made your story coherent, congratulations, but Star Wars is coherent. So appealing to different things within that kind of epistemological paradigm, all you're doing is showing that it's coherent, you're not actually showing that it's true. You're not actually showing that it's true. Right, yeah, that's true. But, you know, and this becomes a question in epistemology

because, you know, you've got, you know, Thomas Kuhn, right? You're familiar with Thomas Kuhn? Okay, so paradigms, right? You have this interpretive paradigm. Those Moon Bear books are good for that because he has this interpretive paradigm that's false but keeps getting confirmed. And so, you know, in the philosophy of science, you get radical coonians who say that all there is is paradigms. And this is what you

see in postmodernism, like in various forms of wokeism, where, okay, gender is just a paradigm, right? There isn't really male and female, you know, a woman is, whatever you define it to be, etc. And then they seek to try to make coherence within this ideology. Right, but then you get a phenomena that's called nature pushing back. So you adopt this paradigm that gender is just a construct. You try to make it work, but then you find that, all the surgeries and the hormones. You keep running into reality.

You keep running into reality, exactly. And so that's interesting. So I did a doctoral minor in philosophy focusing especially on religion and science and epistemology under Plantinga. And that got me into reading widely in scientific literature, and we looked a lot of the flash points between religion and science, things like creation, the fine tuning of the universe, evolution and its implications,

quantum mechanics, out of body experiences and so on. So we looked at all those things from a philosophical perspective and read people on different, we read people on both sides. So that's where I first read say Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, these guys that were part of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse back when the new atheists were really cool, maybe 15 years ago. Yeah. So I first read those in Planege's class, and going into the class, Matt, I was frankly scared because I knew we were going to read these guys, and I thought, what if I read Richard Dawkins and lose my faith? Or what if I read Daniel Dennett and he persuades me not to be a Christian anymore?

But it was such a liberating experience because we read these guys and we analyzed them. And as you know, Plantinga is an analytical philosopher, so he's all about breaking down arguments. And so we'd look at these guys and actually break their arguments down. And as we did that, the arguments would dissipate. And that was such a liberating experience, I felt, wow, I can be an intellectually self-confident Christian. I find I have this analogy, Josiah,

would you bring me that printed page at some point too? I have this analogy that arguments for atheism are sort of like, what would you say? Thank you. Arguments for atheism are sort of like, like, what would you say? Thank you. Maybe I'm getting this backwards, but think of a seagull or a flock of seagulls on a beach. You know, you run through them as a kid and they scatter.

If they were to turn on you, you would be terrified. And I think it's something like that with like theistic beliefs, you know, like where all you got to do is turn around and like actually face the objections head on, like the seagull faces the child. Right. I mean, it's not a very good analogy now that I'm saying it. I'm realizing that. But the point is, as I turned and looked at these arguments, I was I was like you too.

I remember feeling really afraid to read Dawkins. Right. Yeah, I felt very destabilized because he would use this graphic heated language like teaching your children religion is child abuse. Right. And you're like, oh gosh, I don't want to do that. It's intimidating. Right, it's rhetorical intimidation. Yeah. But I did find that when I read him, I thought, oh my goodness, this is it. Right. Now, to be fair to atheists, even atheists look at his book and say that. So yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he's maybe not the best proponent. But yeah, I got one of his books here, you know, blind watchmaker and just was reading through this. And if you know the science already,

and aren't simply getting your science from him, you realize he's making mistakes. Okay. Or, and has weak arguments. And like, oh, you know, in fact, I thought maybe to write to him and say, hey, you know, a couple different pages here, you gotta fix your facts, just in charity. But anyway, so yeah, that's the point is, you know, and so having had that experience underiga, I've always wanted to share that with my own students. And what I find is, you know, I'm a Bible scholar, I love Scripture,

you know, I do biblical apologetics and defend the Scriptures, etc., but oftentimes I find that with certain individuals I can't even get to square one because they don't want to read biblical revelation because they think that the very idea of God is irrational to begin with. So I have gotten into the area of religion and science, the area of evidences for God as a preparation for talking about scripture. So when I'm dealing with, and also to teach my students, and I try to work these arguments and these evidences into even my courses on scripture,

because they're gonna be in situations in the parish when they've got a bunch of high schoolers, right? And some of those high schoolers are gonna be usually male, and they're gonna be science ge male, and they're going to be science geeks. And they're going to have that attitude like from Nacho Libre, I believe in science, right, that scene. And have you seen the movie?

I have. I love that movie. Yeah, I love that movie. I believe in science. Okay. So they're going to have, you know, you're going to have high schoolers in your youth group who maybe parents are making them come, et cetera, that are gonna have that attitude.

And you need to have something to offer them. You need to have a little bit of depth so that you don't find that intimidating and that you can offer them, hey, what about this line of argument from natural science or this, not a good explanation for that, just in terms of matter and energy. Don't you think that points to an intelligence, a non-material actor in the universe, etc.?

Mason- This is tough, eh? To go back to what we said a moment ago, we're both in these, what do we call them, something paradigms, like epistemological paradigms, that we're all trying to make coherent, but the thing is with any worldview, there's always going to be things that don't fit quite as well as you would like to have them fit. Consciousness for the atheist, the problem of evil for the theist. So we're kind of in these two bubbles trying to tell the other person why their paradigm doesn't work, and so you've got two people in two epistemological paradigms. That's a difficult thing to do.

The atheist might think the Christian is as nuts as the man who says, no, Star Wars actually is real. That's how it appears, maybe. And the Christian feels likewise. He looks at the atheist and just thinks, yeah, you're dead wrong here. Like, yeah, I see how you're trying to make everything fit. You're using evolution, maybe, as a substitute for the word God, and then you've got the Christian who appeals to mystery and the atheist berates him, and then you say, well, what about like the beginning of the universe? Isn't it the case that matter, time, space, and energy came into being? Well, maybe, the atheist says, and then the atheist appeals

to mystery. We don't know enough yet. We may one day. Maybe there's a multiverse. And so we've got both people, two different intellectual paradigms appealing to mystery, to make up for the gaps in their worldview. So how do we even have a common conversation? Is that the idea? How does reality hit one of us in the head then? You know, to use that analogy we used earlier. Yeah. Well, nature does push back. And does push back and that's why I like this field and that's why I got all these books here, because many of these books are from people who are not believers. And so the most powerful testimonies that I find are where

somebody confesses that a hard fact, a hard piece of data, doesn't work with their paradigm. And that's called testimony against interest in legal terminology. So this is where you can get somebody whose sympathies are really for, I don't know, the prosecution, but he confesses that, oh yeah, the defendant really is an honest guy or something like that. And so, one of my favorite books, Robert Jastrow, Jastrow was kind of a rocket scientist among rocket scientists, right? So he's had a Goddard,

I think it was the Goddard Institute for Space Studies or something like this. And arguably America's top rocket scientist from maybe say 1960 to 1980. And to his dying day, he was an agnostic. Like he refused to embrace theism. And yet he writes this book about the theistic implications of the Big Bang. Yeah.

And he can sound like an outright theist in certain chapters, and you might think that he was, but then you check out some of the interviews of him that are on YouTube, and you know, till his death he was kind of like, well, you know, I'm caught between... Do you remember the quote from that book where he talks about pulling back the final boulder and you find the a Band of theologians who'd been sitting there. Yes, I do as a matter of fact and and to just give that context What Jaster is talking about is? Yeah is is no I know where it is. It's, it's, it's right before the epilogue. Yeah. Here's the, he talks about the Big Bang coming to the point where it looks like a point of creation, you know,

God spoke and there was light. It's kind of an adequate, a semi-adequate description of the Big Bang. So that's what it looks like, okay? That's a common sense interpretation, right? Any remarks on it? So this is an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by all but the theologians. And he goes on to talk about how they had always accepted God's Word in Genesis at a moment of creation. And then he comes back and he says, now we would like to pursue that inquiry farther back in time, the inquiry about the origins of things, but the barrier to further progress

seems insurmountable when you hit the Big Bang. It's not a matter of another year, another decade of work, another measurement, or another theory. At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance. He is about to conquer the highest peak. As he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians

who have been sitting there for centuries." Wow! What a confession. As an agnostic. As an agnostic. You think, you know, when I first read the book, I think I was 12 years old or something when I first read that. It doesn't surprise me that 12-year-old Bergsmur was reading that book. It's amazing. I was barely reading comic books at 12. Yeah, I remember being in Walden Books and picking it up and slowly reading pretty much the whole thing without ever buying the book. But yeah, so you know, so when I first read it, I thought, oh, well, he's a theist, maybe he's a Christian. I find out, no, he's not. So what an amazing

confession. So I love, you know, I got a bunch of other, you know, Stephen Hawking's makes some very revealing confessions. Richard Dawkins makes some really, really revealing confessions. So I don't agree that we're in two bubbles and that we can't communicate with each other. I do think that hard facts like big bang cosmology, which implies that space, time, energy all had a beginning, and therefore if they have a cause, which is kind of demanded by logic, that cause has to be outside of space, time, and energy. And then, you know, we can talk about what else can we know about that cause. Well, the universe seems incredibly well designed,

so the cause must be very intelligent and the universe is very big, so the cause must be very powerful. So it seems like we have a highly intelligent, all-powerful cause, which is outside of space, time, and energy. Sounds like the classical definition of God, okay? And somebody might say, well, you only think that because you're a Christian, you're raised in the church, but no, non-Christians can feel the force, the theistic force of that argument. So Jastrow was an agnostic to his death. He felt the theistic force of Big Bang cosmology. He writes a whole book about it. Others felt the force as well. Sir Fred Hoyle,

the greatest astrophysicist in Britain in the 20th century, he was knighted for his contributions to astrophysics. He resisted Big Bang cosmology because he did not want a universe that had a beginning. Einstein didn't want a universe that had a beginning. And maybe you know the story of the origins of Big Bang. But share them. Yeah, yeah. So in, you know, early 1900s, Einstein is mathematically modeling the universe. He's coming up with his theories of general relativity and special relativity.

Relativity. And you've got Father Georges Lemaître, a Jesuit priest in Belgium, who takes Einstein's math and starts working on them and realizes that his mathematics imply that the universe is expanding. So Lemaître calls this the primeval atom. He points out that if you regress the universe according to Einstein's math, it means like rewind the clock on the universe, everything contracts down to a beginning. So Lemaître, this Jesuit Belgian priest, begins to publish papers showing that it looks like, according to Einstein's mathematics, that the universe expanded from

a point, and that's the beginning of Big Bang cosmology. So Lemaître starts publishing those things in the 1920s and in the very early 30s you've got Edwin Hubble, an American astronomer at Mount Wilson Observatory in California. He's looking out at the stars and he begins to realize, oh, all the galaxies are moving away, they're all expanding, so the universe looks like it's expanding. And it's expanding at the rate that Lemaître's calculations predict. Okay, so these two things come together. Now in the meanwhile, Lemaitre and Einstein

were in communication. And Einstein famously said, or at least he's attributed to have said to Lemaitre, your math is great, but your physics are abominable. It's like, yeah, I see that your equations work, but the idea of the whole universe going back to a point, that's just like, you know, there's like a visceral rejection of that, you know?

And so Einstein took Lemaître's mathematics and introduced a constant into the formula to keep the universe from expanding because Einstein wanted a steady state universe. He wanted a universe without a beginning. Because a universe without a beginning enables you to say that the universe is the one necessary being, which you and I know about from working

with Thomas's proofs, you know, this is the first proof, the second proof from motion, from causality. They both lead you back to an unmoved mover, an uncaused cause. Father Spitzer calls this the single unconditioned reality, right? So if you have an eternal universe, you can just say, oh, I don't need a God. The universe can be my unconditioned reality. The universe can be my unmoved mover. Bedrock. Bedrock, right. And Einstein wanted that. So Einstein resisted Lemaître's arguments and introduced a constant into his formulas to keep the universe stable.

Now, when Hubble had these observations that matched Lemaître's math, then Einstein gave up and started to be open to what we now call Big Bang cosmology. Now, where do we get the term Big Bang? Big Bang was actually a term of contempt invented by Sir Fred Hoyle. He was on a BBC interview, I think in the 50s, and he said something to the effect of, I don't like this Big Bang cosmology, this idea that the universe had a start, a beginning. And so he came up with that term, but the term stuck,

as often happens in science. And so what began as a term of contempt, but the question is, why did Hoyle have such contempt for this idea? And the answer is ultimately philosophical and religious. He didn't like a universe with a beginning either. He wanted the steady state universe, which he maintained to his death, no beginning, no end, therefore the universe can be your necessary being, you don't need a God.

And Hoyle, interestingly, struggled with theism all his life, and it's unclear what exactly he believed about God. Maybe somebody knows, maybe somebody's got a biography on him. I've read a lot of stuff on him without ever reaching clarity on what did he go to his deathbed believing. But he also made these fantastic confessions. I mean, later in this interview maybe we'll talk about cosmic fine-tuning, but he looked at all of the mathematics behind the universe and he has this famous quote that he gave at an address once where he says, �A common sense interpretation of the facts would suggest

that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the laws of physics and chemistry and that there are no blind forces in the universe. I mean, what a great confession from a guy who, again, that's testimony against interest. He was not a Christian, not a practicing religious person, resisted theistic implications, and yet was kind of forced by the data to admit that, and I really like the way he phrases it, a common sense interpretation. Because one of the things I wanna communicate in our discussion together, Matt, is that what I try to impart to my students

is the sense that the common sense interpretation of reality when we look at the scientific evidence is that there is a crater. That's what everybody kind of perceives intuitively. And it's not Christians who run away from common sense into abstract argumentation, etc. It's actually atheists who end up fleeing from the evidence into a refuge of abstract mathematics and wild theories like the multiverse and so on to

get away from the testimony of common sense. So, again, Hoyle, Britain's greatest astrophysicist, you know, what is it? A common sense interpretation that means kind of the prima facie impression that you have, the initial intuition that human reason that's working properly, you know, like Plantinga would talk about the proper- Yeah, cognitive functioning.

Yeah, proper cognitive functioning. When you look at all this evidence, you would come to the conclusion that there's an intellect behind this, a super intellect behind this that's designing everything. So that was quite a rant that I just wanted to- It was a very interesting rant. Modern cosmologists and astrophysicists

making claims that are against self-interest today? Or have we learned a lot more since Robert Jastrow lived and wrote such that the Big Bang Theory really doesn't provide as good evidence for the beginning of the universe as we perhaps once thought. Because that's the objection, hey? Like that's the objection that the atheist gives. They say, all right, look, we used to think that thunder or lightning was God angry with us or something like this. All right. So in 100,000 years, if humanity still exists, we might look back on what we consider the beginning of the universe to be as silly. And to say, well, that was evidence for God's existence, as silly as saying that thunder is God being angry. Yeah, yeah. No, that argument doesn't work at all. It's just completely fallacious because in the, you know, what, you know, Darwin is what, 1850s, right, roughly, okay. So we're, it's 2024. So however many years that's been,

I don't do good mathematical calculations in real time, but it's been, you know, hundreds of years since Darwin, what is that, 175 years, I think, roughly, right? I'm not even gonna try to. I'm not even gonna try to, yeah. I'm gonna screw it up. Yeah, okay. So.

It's been a minute. Whatever, yeah, it's been a minute. Yeah, it's been a while. It's been over a century. And actually in that time, the growth of our knowledge has improved and refined the arguments for theism so that they're much stronger today

than they were in Darwin's day. So our growth in knowledge has not led us to away from theistic thought, it keeps bringing us back to theistic thought. But in appealing to Darwin, it sounds like you're getting into the territory of the fossil record, the origin of life, but what I'm trying to do is I want to stick on the Big Bang theory, and then we'll move from there. So do you are you familiar with modern cosmologists? Yeah. Oh, yeah. You know, are they still saying this sort of stuff? Is it still an awkward fact? It's oh, yeah. Or is it does it seem less awkward

because the theory of the multiverse has become more sophisticated and therefore seemingly possible? Right. Right. Well, I was reading Jastrow the other day and I was surprised at how everything that's going on in the contemporary conversation is pretty much anticipated already in his book. So already he writes this in 78 and he's already talking about the possibility

of a multiverse and he also talks about why it probably doesn't work. And it's pretty much the same thing today, okay? the possibility of a multiverse, and he also talks about why it probably doesn't work. And it's pretty much the same thing today, okay? So an update, I would really recommend this book to our viewers. New proofs for the existence of God by Father Spitzer. Yeah, Father Robert Spitzer. Wonderful book, very dense, very tough reading at parts, but worth working through.

And so if people wanna go do a deep dive into why doesn't the multiverse work? Why not an oscillating universe? Why not different possibilities? Spitzer does that deep dive and can give you all that data and all that evidence. And so in another book I'd recommend is Stephen Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis. He goes into some of that material as well. And I would say no, you

know, Jastrow's initial reaction to the Big Bang, it holds true to this day. Yes, Stephen Hawking went to his grave, resisting the theistic implications of Big Bang cosmology and trying to come up with a mathematical explanation of how it could be that despite the fact that Einstein's mathematics, special and general relativity, go back to this point, but Hawking was working on theoretical math that would allow, you know,

some kind of pre-existent universe, okay? He never pulled it together by the end. It's kind of like, it reminds me of laying a carpet. You know how when you're trying to lay a carpet and it's too short on one side, so you get that carpet kicker, you know, and you pull it over there, but then that pulls up on the other side. A lot of times when you're trying to get math to work, it's like that

It's like I can get the math to work over here, but it's pulling up the math over there And so Hawkins was trying to lay the carpet of mathematical theory that would get get around and he never succeeded And and right now Let's see Roger Penrose is trying to do that, you know, trying to come up with a mathematical explanation for kind of an oscillating universe that would be like a universe that has a beginning and then expands, but then somehow becomes the cause of another universe that lasts thereafter. Kind of like when you blow a bubble and a bubble comes out of it.

Yeah, something like that, but a whole chain so that we're just in one eon of a continually oscillating universe that had no beginning and has no end. Or there's also the idea, correct me if this is different or not, but the idea of the big crunch. So we have the expansion of the universe, which will eventually crunch in on itself and then just keep going back and forth. Right. Yeah. And the problem with that is we're not crunching. In fact, the newest evidence shows that we're actually expanding even faster than we thought. So the current evidence shows we're never gonna crunch.

We came from apparently a point, and it's gonna continue to expand, and the math and the evidence does not point to an eventual recalapse. It didn't in Jastrow's day. Already people were proposing that back in 78. And Jastrow in this book says, "'No, there's not enough gravity to pull everything back.

"'Looks like everything's gonna expand "'and we're not going to come back.'" Because that would be nice for some people. Some people like to have bang, crunch, bang, crunch. Okay, Spitzer explains- Then you've got an infinite universe. Yeah, yeah, and Spitzer explains why that doesn't work. Okay.

Because you still got the second law of thermodynamics, and so things are gonna wind down. Yeah, yeah. And even before, even apart from Big Bang cosmology, even just based on the second law, and the second law states that as matter and energy go through time, entropy always increases.

Entropy is disorder. Okay, so you're always moving from a state of more order to less order. And some people think that that's what time is. Time is the moving of things from order to disorder. But anyway, we don't- Yeah, my body agrees with that. Yeah, I feel that very much.

Yeah, so I wanna ask two questions that I think will help people understand what cosmologists talk about when they talk about the Big Bang. And the two questions that don't work, but it shows what we mean when we talk about the Big Bang. What happened before the Big Bang? Yeah, well, a good question. I don't think it's a bad question. But Einstein's math points that

there's no time before the Big Bang. So it's like asking what's north of the North Pole. Yeah. Yeah, you reach this point and that's it. So whatever is before the Big Bang is outside of time. Okay? And that's how we have traditionally thought about God. So again, you know, you want to, you know, the Big Bang really lends itself to the Kalam argument. Did William Lane Craig do the Kalam argument when you had him on? Of course. Actually, you got to watch this. I had Jimmy Aiken debate William Lane Craig on the Kalam argument, but they focused solely on the philosophical evidence Okay, Jimmy strenuously disagrees with Craig. He agrees with the Kalam argument

I mean agrees with the premises and the conclusion, but he doesn't think the philosophical version gets you there Oh interesting, which is interesting. I'd love to get the two of you talking together Yeah, yeah, I'll have to look at them, but certainly from a scientific point of view, right? Right, so, you know anything, you know So the Clom argument is anything that comes into existence has to have had a cause other than itself. That's the first premise. The minor premise is the universe has come into existence.

That's what we know from the Big Bang. And so the conclusion is, well, then the universe had to have a cause other than itself. All right, so again, Einstein's math shows before the Big Bang, if you wanna even use that term before, okay, there is no space, time, matter or energy. Okay, so if there is a cause of the universe, then it's, again, it's gotta be very powerful,

it has to be very intelligent because- Immaterial. Yep, and it has to be outside of space. It has to be immaterial. So, I mean, this is our classic. This is the way we've conceived of God in the Judeo-Christian tradition. So, again, very strong evidence. But what's fascinating about the Kalam argument is obviously the Kalam argument predates all

of this understanding of Big Bang cosmology. It's something that Bonaventure was a proponent of, that Aquinas engaged with. So if you are one of these people who hold the Kalam argument based on philosophical grounds and then this scientific argument comes along, it just makes the argument all the stronger. There's two strands now. It lands in your lap. Yeah, yeah.

It makes it very strong. And again, it's not just people that are predisposed to be religious or to believe in God that feel the force of that. You know, you have Einstein and Hoyle trying to avoid. And another thing I wanna mention, when we read about the history of science, you see that non-scientific motivations come into play and motivate how scientists go about their work. And Jastrow documents that. It's not me saying this, you know. Jastrow documents

how a lot of astrophysicists didn't like the way things were going with the development of Big Bang cosmology and set out right. I find this reprehensible or I really don't want this to be true, et cetera. So I think that's a very important point to get across, especially to students, et cetera, and people who are getting formed and trying to make sense of the world,

that the scientific enterprise does not consist of a bunch of people that are completely unmotivated and completely objective and just follow the truth wherever it leads. Now, I'm not criticizing people in natural science, but I am saying they're humans like the rest of us, and we all have ulterior motives. We all have views of the world that we would like to reaffirm, and we all have to be conscious of that and try to avoid just believing things that we want to believe

and try to follow the truth where it leads, as it were. And then at the same time, realizing that just because I want something to be true, doesn't mean it's false. That's true. Yeah. So I might like I might find the idea of atheism comforting. Yeah, because I'm afraid of hell. And maybe atheism is true. And I might like the idea of a providential all good God.

And that brings me comfort. But just because it brings me comfort doesn't mean I go, well, therefore I have to hold that in a great degree of skepticism. Right, right, absolutely. Yeah and I think that we can communicate. I think that as I said nature pushes back, nature gives us data that we can struggle and talk about. Yeah and I hope that that this conversation leads to further conversations. And I would love people, hopefully people watching this will wanna converse with me about some of these things. And we can converse about them as Catholics.

And some of the things that we may end up talking about are controversial even within Catholic academic circles. But I think that we should be able to converse about them with charity and seek the truth together. And where the church has not declared, you know, dogmatically something to be the case, we have the freedom to talk about it and seek truth together. But, you know, trying to cancel one another, going ad hominem on one another, this is not helpful. But I see that happen even in Catholic academia, and it's unfortunate.

Before we move on to, say, evidence for fine-tuning, well, and what that might indicate, namely a fine tuner, quick question. Should Catholics be putting much stock in scientific evidence since science being a matter of induction is always open to revision? And so if you were to perhaps rely too heavily on the scientific evidence for the beginning of the universe and say that points to God Well, if if that's one day overthrown and you wouldn't sit here and say that's not possible, would you? Well any any scientific theory that we have about the universe is going to end up showing that it has a beginning of the material universe

I don't anticipate that that being overthrown right? But that's different saying it's impossible that that being overthrown. Right. But that's different to saying it's impossible that it be overthrown. It seems to me that we have more, like we can take more refuge in philosophical arguments than scientific arguments, because philosophical arguments can be deductive. You can have an argument for God's existence based on science that's deductive, but science by its nature is always open to revision, isn't it? Because the more evidence we find, the conclusion might then vary. Yeah, sorry. Sorry, but it sounds like what you're saying is no, but listen, the arguments towards the beginning

of the universe are such that the idea of being overturned is extremely unlikely. Yeah. Okay. That's true. Yeah. And I grant your point, yeah, science should always be open to revision, etc. But how much stock should we put in it? I think it's helpful to our faith to realize that, as Hubble says, a common-sense interpretation of the facts would suggest that there is this super intellect. I think that is a support. I wouldn't want to hang my faith on that. My faith is in Jesus Christ and the resurrection, right?

But at the very least, the Christian can say, where are the ones going with the evidence here? Yeah, yeah. It is helpful to faith to recognize that there's a lot of evidence that supports it. And also, it's helpful in evangelism, it's helpful in apologetics. It's helpful to remove false impediments, right? Because there is that teenager in your youth group or in your high school class. And in your own mind.

Right. Or just. Exactly, yeah, or yourself. You know, when you're, you know, we talked about this before the show, when we're in situations of suffering, there's a temptation, you know, it's a stress in our faith and One one light of clarity that that has helped me in in at times a personal struggle is I really you know

When I'm in the throws of personal suffering, I sometimes am tempted to believe that God is not good But I never doubt that God exists because I think the alternative is just irrational trash. And that's from working through all the arguments. I have strong confidence that reason leads you to, one necessary being, all powerful, intelligent. See a lot of a lot of rational vectors that lead you back to that and and that's helpful to remind myself of you know that yeah, okay, there is a god, you know, and

There there are there are evidences external to my personal experience that point to this, you know It's not just you know, kind of wish fulfillment. Yeah, all right Let's move on to cosmic fine-tuning. What is that? What have we learned from it? And what does it suggest? Yeah, well we've alluded to that already Cosmic fine-tuning is this remarkable fact that The mathematical formulas that describe the universe, as well as the numbers that are associated with them, okay? So there's a number associated

with the attractive force of gravity, for example, we call that the gravitational constant. There's a number associated with how fast the universe is expanding. There's a number associated with the speed of light, for example, that is the speed of light. There's numbers or values associated with the forces that are at work in the center of an atom. For example, the force that holds protons and neutrons together so they don't repel each other

and that makes possible an atom in the first place, et cetera. Those are called strong and weak nuclear forces. So there are numbers associated with all these forces. And as Stephen Hawking himself says in this book, Brief History of Time, at one point in the book he says, the remarkable fact is that all these forces seem to be fine-tuned to allow a universe that can support life. And that's quite remarkable. And Hawking admits that you could take this as evidence for a creator. And interestingly, he doesn't even

bring up arguments against a creator. Just kind of offhand, oh, you could take that as evidence for a creator. So I'm like, okay, thank you for that. But many others have seen that as really quite strong evidence. And in fact, one of my favorite books, Anthony Flew, he was the world's most famous atheist before Richard Dawkins kind of took that mantle. So when I was in my adolescence, he was the notorious bad boy. There's a debate online. I think you can still find it where Flu debates Dr. William L. Craig. Yes.

So it's wild to see his turnaround. It is. And a very influential book that I read in my youth was a debate between Flu and Gary Habermas on the resurrection. Did the resurrection happen? And Hormas got the better of Flu in that discussion for a number of reasons. And that was very impactful for me. I think it was like 13 or something like that.

But then Flu comes around in the last couple of years of his life, and it was largely the fine tuning argument that Flu eventually found persuasive. So let's go back to the fine-tuning argument, though, and just give our viewers a sense of what that's all about. So we talked about these cosmic forces and formulas and the math associated with them. So all of these cosmological constants,

that's not quite the right term, but all of the values of these constants that contribute to the mathematics that describe our universe have values that, so to speak, have to be what they are, neither too much nor too little. So it's kind of a Goldilocks phenomenon. Initial conditions?

Yeah, initial conditions as well, right? That's one of the factors. Okay. So yeah, like initial conditions would be how much mass is in the universe and how much, you know, how powerful is the initial force that sends everything out into expansion and so on. And then you have constants that operate thereafter, like the speed of light. So let's take the speed of light because that's something that we can all

relate to. Well, we can at least relate to light. Maybe not in speed. But if you tweak the speed of light up just a tad, and by a tad I'm talking about something like a factor of 1 in 10 to the 37th or something like that. So that's one part in a sea of parts of 10 followed by 37 zeros. This is a very, very large number. We can't even comprehend numbers that big, and that's why you have to use scientific notation and just note the number of zeros after them.

So 10 to the 37. So it's like a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, you know, whatever. Some unbelievably large number. So if we tweak light up by like a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, whatever, some unbelievably large number. So if we tweak light up by just a tad, then you get a universe that's too hot and too bright for life. Everything gets sterilized.

You tweak it down just a tad, and you get a universe that's too cold and too dim to support life. So we discover kind of unexpectedly, because going into it, our prior expectation would be, eh, we could probably play it, make light a little brighter, make it a little dimmer, and probably we'd get along. We could probably stand with the sun being a little dimmer than it is, and a little brighter than it is, and so on.

We wouldn't think initially that that would make such a big difference, but actually it does. You work out the physics implications of a slower speed of light or a faster speed of light and you find, no, it basically has got to be just what it is. Otherwise you get a universe that doesn't have any life in it. Let's take another force. Let's say the force of gravity. If you tweak gravity up by just a tad, and I mean it's very, very, very sensitive, okay, then you get a universe that expands with

a big bang and then immediately goes back and crunches because gravity is too strong. You tweak it down just a little bit, and then everything expands before you can even get planets or stars. So the force of gravity isn't enough to pull the matter back into clumps that can become planets and stars. Without planets and stars, we don't have any life. So this repeats itself with all of these constants.

And again and again, we find, as Father Spitzer points out, and he's very good on this, and I think he's got some discussion of the fine tuning in this book, but as Father Spitzer points out, with all of these values of these different constants, like the speed of light or the force of gravity, they are all such that they can neither be more than they are or less than they are. So there's always a Goldilocks phenomena, which each of them, and for each of them, it's a very narrow band.

Now, for each one of them, that's remarkable and highly unlikely. And then you take them all together and there's about, cosmologists count up about 40 of these things. Initial mass, the strong and the weak, nuclear force, I haven't even started talking about those because I don't, you know, kind of, I haven't mastered that area of what exactly is going on with that.

But I know from people who do know that they say those forces have to be exactly what they are, et cetera, et cetera. And then you multiply all the probabilities together. And if you say, hey, the chance of light just by accident being exactly what it has to be for life, and you multiply that by the chance of- Gravity. Gravity, et cetera, and so on,

then you end up with an extremely, extremely low number. So life is all balancing on a razor's edge, essentially, mathematically. So getting a life-supporting universe is very difficult. There's virtually infinitely more ways to have a non-life-supporting universe than a life-supporting universe than a life-supporting universe. And the fact that our universe has, you know, surprise, surprise, just all the right forces, all the right constants such that we can be here, that is surprising. That is odd.

There's so many ways that things could go wrong. So, you know, some people have used this analogy. It's like standing in front of a firing squad of 500 marksmen and you're about to be executed and they all fire and they all miss and you're like I'm still here you know there were so many ways that this could go wrong and you would suspect you know some some kind of conspiracy has to be going on here somebody paid them all off this has to be going on here somebody paid them all off This has to be organized that is too low a probability

Occurrence that's a good response to an objection I've heard and was about to offer you namely if the initial conditions and constants, etc wasn't fine-tuned for the For rational life, then we wouldn't be here to ask it. So it's kind of like if you crashed in an airplane and walked out and then someone came up with the probabilities that you're still alive. Well, it's like, well, yeah, if I wasn't alive,

I wouldn't be here to wonder at the initial condition. So how is this really an argument for going? Right, yeah and that is the executioner mental experiment is really the best answer to that. And many, you know, it's not just one marksman, right, yeah, it's not somebody who's never shot a gun before. Right, yeah, and really it's more like 50,000 or 5 million when you look at the math. The probabilities are so low. So it's like having this immense number. 5,000 experts are all training their guns on you, and they all fire, and they all miss. And Dawkins concedes that there's force to the fine-tuning argument. Like I said, Flu concedes, and it eventually convinced him.

But doesn't this argument only work if you presuppose that intelligent life is a good and the end of these initial conditions? Does that make sense? Like, why think that we're anything special? Like maybe the world should have been conditioned for the predominance of cockroach life where they ruled the world. Right. And the fact that they don't is maybe an argument against fine-tuning for their life. We're assuming. Well, no, no, no. I mean, cockroaches need, well, in the broader picture of things,

cockroaches need the same set of conditions that we do. So a universe that could support cockroach life is very, very, very, very similar to a universe that can support human life. All right, so forget life. What about, what if it should have just been? Well, all the other options are just- Freezing cold.

Maybe that's what it should have been, but we're presupposing that life is a good, and is that a problem? We are, I don't think that's a problem. I think that's a deep intuition that I think that very few of us really don't feel. And, you know, again, I would say, it seems to me like that's another way of you asking, isn't it just our kind of bias, maybe, maybe our religious bias towards human life, this tendency to think that it's in the image of God and therefore

it's valuable, and then we put value on it. But I think it's a common human intuition because, again, when you look at the response to the fine-tuning argument, on the atheist side, you can see that they feel the force of it. Right. They're not saying, no, who cares? Yeah, they're not saying that, oh, well, yeah, whatever. And I have an article that I always share with my classes when I teach on this from Discover Magazine 2008.

We can probably get a picture of it for B-roll here. But the title of the article is, it's on the multiverse, and the title is something like, The Multiverse Sciences Alternative to a Creator. And you get into the body of the article, and the byline of the article is, our universe is finely tuned for life. This could be evidence for God or for a multiverse. So we still, we think there ought to be a cause. Right. Yeah. It's just not God. Right. And here you have an atheistic magazine, you know, a magazine with an atheistic editorial bent of people that buy into this culture of, I believe in science and science disproves God,

that kind of thing. Confessing that, this evidence does look like there's a creator or a mind behind it. Everybody missed, it looks like a conspiracy. I need to come up with a really good alternative for this. And so the rest of the article is about different physicists and cosmologists who are experimenting with different kind of mathematical models of how a multiverse might operate.

And it's all theoretical math. So again, look at what's happening. As Hoyle said, a common sense interpretation is there's a super-intellect, okay? But we don't like that for whatever reason. And so we take refuge in theoretical mathematics that might allow for there to be all these different worlds. You know, there's so many problems with the multiverse, though. that might allow for there to be all these different worlds. There's so many problems with the multiverse though.

First of all, you would appreciate the value of Occam's razor, I'm sure. It is the most egregious violation of Occam's razor, probably in the history of thought. And that's not really facetious. It might be the greatest violation, Wacom's razor probably in the history of thought. That's not really facetious. It might be the greatest violation because what you're doing is believing in anything and everything, right?

I think an infinite multiverse is by definition anything and everything. So you're willing to believe in anything and everything rather than the common sense and to just a God, okay, just a necessary being. It makes things worse. It's like stopping a nosebleed by cutting your head off. Yeah, exactly, right?

So you're really violating Occam's razor, the principle of parsimony in logical discourse. Okay. And, and, and, and then you're proving too much because if you're saying, and okay, maybe I should go back and explain why a multiverse is, is motivated in the first place. So the idea of the fine tuning argument is all these

parameters, the probability is so, so, so low. It seems unlikely that if there's only one universe that it would hit this spot by chance, that we would just pull the arm of the one-armed band at once and it would all come up cherries, okay? That seems highly unlikely. So maybe if there's been lots of lever pulls, okay? Maybe there's been lots of lever poles, okay? Maybe there's been lots of universes

and really to overcome the mathematical barrier, you really do virtually need an infinite universe because you got, you know, we didn't talk about the Penrose number, but you know, Roger Penrose calculated the likelihood of the initial state of our universe such that it would allow for life.

Technically what it was is the initial state of low entropy. Based on the organization of the universe at this point in its development, if you retroject out into the past, you discover that the initial state of the universe had to be extremely, extremely, extremely highly ordered. Ordered such that the chances of achieving that order by chance are one in 10 to 10 to I believe it's the 123rd. But you know, it doesn't at that point, it doesn't make much difference. But when you're putting exponents on your exponents, okay.

And you know, the total number of fundamental particles in the universe is only somewhere in the order of like 10 to the 90th. So when you're saying the chances of hitting this highly organized universe according to the Penrose number is 10 to 10 to 150 or 123, we can find, the exact number can be found easily. But that's the Penrose number. So, you know, to overcome the Penrose number, to overcome the

cosmic fine-tuning, you really do need like an unimaginably large number of universes. But, you know, people are willing to believe that. But that proves too much, because if there's this unimaginably large number of universes such that it makes it likely that one of them would have the conditions for life, then it's like, well, all possible conceivable conditions are met in one of these many universes, right? So there's theoretically a universe out there where the South won the Civil War, and there's a universe out there

where Hitler won World War II, and there's a universe out there where Islam is true, and there's a universe out there where Christianity is true. And so the multiverse can be used to confirm anybody's personal beliefs. It reduces to solipsism. It's like, well, you know, say you, Matt, are an atheist and you're attacking my Christianity.

I can say, well, hey, there's a multiverse, and so all conditions are met in one of these many universes, and I just happen to believe that in one of these universes Christianity is true, and this happens to be the universe that I'm living in. Well, to push back on that, it would seem to be that contradictions would still not exist. Even if you have an infinite number of universes, it doesn't mean that a contradiction could exist. There's no universe where there's a square circle, right? Yeah. So it might be the case that Christianity is inherently

contradictory and if it is, then it wouldn't exist on another planet. Right, but then you'd have to demonstrate that somehow inherently contradictory. Right, but if it's not, then yeah, you would have to say it exists on one planet. Yeah, then you'd have to say it's possible. And you could even say, well, you know, there could be a universe where Christianity is true, but it doesn't look like it's true. Yeah. Maybe it's this one. Yeah, maybe it's this one or something like that. Yeah, and not that I would encourage that kind of thought because obviously I think that's, you know,

it's a bunch of nonsense. It's wild the degree that we'll go to, to avoid what just kind of seems apparent. I was listening to Joe Rogan recently and he was interviewing a fella who unironically believes we are living in a computer simulation. And he's like, well think about it, you know, like a thousand years from now, like just think of the advancement in technology over the last 50 years and a thousand years from

now isn't it the case that we could create these virtual worlds where we could live and act and therefore like it's, we're willing, I don't know if it's that it's a novel idea that we're willing to latch onto it because there was a sense in which he shared it. I'm like, oh don't know if it's that it's a novel idea that we're willing to latch on to it because there was a Sense in which he shared it. I'm like, oh my gosh, maybe he's right. Yeah, but then you bring in God. Yeah Yeah, whatever that old thing we've done with that. No, you haven't well, you know, this is this is interesting Why is it permissible to believe anything no matter how wild as long as it's sciency? Yeah, right and and what the example you just gave, I think plays into that. You know, why does, why does the idea that we're living in a computer

simulation have any traction at all? Yes. Well, because it's sciency. That's true. And so it has this, this Elan because science has this prestige. Right. So this is the irony when I find when I'm talking to somebody who believes in the multiverse,

it's like, why is it so glad that I believe in God? You know, I believe in a heaven and a hell and purgatory in this reality. That's only four states. You're believing in an infinite number of universes. Like, but it's sciency. I wonder if we described God as a sort of the great motherboard. Yeah. You know, that was developed in 10,000 or 10 million years from now that and then we invented a time machine and went back and put it like people like, OK, I'm with you. I'm willing to accept this. Right. I'm going to be open to this. Right. Right. If we if we just like reinterpreted Christian faith and in

sciency terms it would maybe make it more appealing. Yeah, maybe you know, maybe that's what's behind. I think Scientology as a cult you know partakes a little bit of that in in terms of trying to present a religion and in scientistic you know a kind of terminology. And that's why it's had some traction in some places. Interesting. But yeah, anyway, so where are we going with this? The multiverse, right. So it's a violation of Occam's razor.

It proves too much because it could end up just confirming anybody's preference. You know, you could... Talking about Al Plantinga. Oh, a story about Al Plantinga. When Al Plantinga would talk about the multiverse, he would say, how well would this go over in a poker game in the Old West?

He said, so the poker player is sitting there in the saloon and he keeps pulling out four aces every time they play a hand. And finally, somebody gets sick of it, obviously he's cheating, so pulls out his shooting iron. It's going to kill the guy. He's like, wait, wait, you know, there's a multiverse, and we just happen to live in the multiverse in which I continually am dealt four aces every hand you know so you know anyways so that's kind of a

redux you out of Serdom right this this this trajectory of thought would lead to just a self-confirming situation but then but then you know what I regard is even more serious issues with the multiverse is the multiverse which proposes all these different universes, infinite number, we just happen to live in the right one. Well, you've got to have a universe generator behind that. You have some cause that's pumping out the universes. And as Spitzer points out, and others do as well, not just Spitzer, but several cosmologists point this out, that universe generator that you've got would have to itself be finely tuned.

Because it is very possible that you could have a universe generator that just, for example, continually spits out the same universe, A universe with the same parameters, the same dead, dark, empty universe keeps pumping out. In fact, that's kind of what you would expect, you know, without having any previous knowledge. If you're just going to set up a universe generator, it's going to pump out the same universe every time. You would have to have a universe generator, it's going to pump out the same universe every time. You would have to have a universe generator which would systematically search through all the cosmic parameters and constants and continually be producing universes with different values for these and kind of search that design space until it hit as it were the right

one that could support life. And then you'd have to ask the question, why is it the case that we have not only a universe generator but one that is systematically searching cosmic design space to hit exactly the right spot? That would look contrived. Right. You know? And then there would be other factors, like your universe generator would have to spit them out at the right intervals and at the right places in multiverse space such that they wouldn't negatively interact with one another and just like destroy one another, like collide and smash and like kill everything. So you have to have them, you know,

spit out at regular intervals in the right places. So as it were, the bubbles don't mutually destroy one another and so on and many other factors and spits or goes into that. So, so you end up doing what I, what we call kicking the can down the road, right? You kick it to a different level. So instead of having to argue about why this universe is fine-tuned, you move the question to why is the universe generator that's generated this

multiverse that we're in? How or why is it that that's finely tuned? Why not just say it's just like, I guess, are there people who Why not just say it just like I guess are there are there people who? Say fine tuning is not evidence for the existence of a fine tuner who don't appeal to a multiverse. And if so, what do they say? I would imagine all they could say is it just is this way. That's it. Yeah.

Yeah. A brute fact. Yeah. And I think there are people that do that. It's just, this is a brute fact. Yeah, and I think there are people that do that. It's just, this is a brute fact. Not many people find that satisfying, okay? And that's why I have all my students read the Discover article, because what it points out to, you know,

Discover Magazine, which I used to subscribe to, and I would like to subscribe to it again. It's a great magazine. I love it. Growing up, I just waited with bated breath for it to arrive every month. And I just read all the articles with zeal and found them so interesting.

But anyway, but Discover magazine represents a popular community within the United States of people who like science and are into science and so on. And the fact that they have to write an article that addresses the question of fine-tuning and provides an alternative. And it's interesting the way they phrase it, you know, science is alternative. Like why does science need an alternative to God? You know, that's a question that I would like to ask.

Why is science allergic to God? What is the philosophical objection? And a lot of these writers in Hawking's and others as well. I guess Dawkins maybe explicitly talks about the reasons why he doesn't like the idea of God, but most other scientists don't actually present an argument against God, they just take it as a given. I really think it's a matter of pride. Yeah. Because science, at least how we understand it today, not in

Aristotle's sense or Aquinas's sense, has to do with what we can observe, what we can control in a way. Right. It has nothing to say whatever about what can't be observed. Right. And then so you'll see people saying things like you ought not to accept something is true unless it can be shown true by science, which, of course, is the fallacy of scientism. That's a proposition that that cannot be validated by science. It's self referentially incoherent. Right. And so I wonder if there's part of us that hates the idea that there is something we

cannot observe, cannot measure, cannot determine as true for ourself using the tool that we're so proud of, or something like that. That's almost exactly the argument that Jastrow makes in Chapter 6 of God and the Astronomers. All the more powerful because, again, he wasn't a religious person. But he calls that chapter the religion of science. And he says outright, scientists are very uncomfortable with something that they can't explore, can't explain. And when you say can't explain, what he means by that is can't explain in terms of matter and energy.

You know, it can't explain. I'm going to use a very crass analogy. It might be why a man prefers a prostitute to his wife or pornography to a loving relationship. One I can control. One I can't. Like to have another's heart, to have another's affection is not within my control. And it's frustrating. I know that again, here I am with my bad analogy,

Dr. Bergstrom, but that seems to me something like that, where, you know, like you see this in relationships where people come to resent men or to resent women. And I think it not always, but sometimes might be an issue of pride. I think you've hit on something very deep there and actually I point this out when teaching on the wisdom literature of scripture, the wisdom literature consistently across several biblical books portrays the way of wisdom as a spousal relationship with lady wisdom. And lady wisdom is not only presented

as an attractive woman, but specifically as a wife. What's the difference between a wife and a woman? Well, a wife is a woman with whom you are in a covenant relationship, right? And so the message of Proverbs, for example, which has that beautiful song of the valiant woman in Proverbs 31, that people don't understand often how significant that final poem is, but when you look at the Hebrew poetry there, that woman in Proverbs

31 is actually being presented as the embodiment of Lady Wisdom, as God's wisdom, okay? And she's the ideal wife, and so what's the appropriate response? Well, you're supposed to look for her and marry her, okay? Enter into a covenantal relationship with her. Ultimately, that's pointing forward to God's wisdom, who is Christ, where we can understand as the Holy Spirit, with whom also we want to enter into a covenantal relationship with, right? But as you point out, when you're in a covenantal relationship with a person, you can't control that person. It's a dynamic and loving relationship. Now, what I find absolutely mind-blowing is that in the beginning of the Republic, Plato uses a similar analogy. He describes the true philosopher as a spouse of wisdom, but he says that either himself or through his,

well, it would be through one of the characters in his dialogue, right? Cause the Republic is a dialogue. But through his characters, Plato says that in his own day, philosophy has fallen on hard times because those who ought to have married wisdom have not, and they've left her to be abused by, you know, basically boyfriends who sneak in and impregnate her and are not faithful and raise bastard children, you know? and are not faithful and raise bastard children.

So Plato, much like the biblical wisdom tradition, contrasts the path of true wisdom as spousal and covenantal entering into dynamic relationship where you don't seek to control the other versus folly as a relationship with truth that seeks to dominate or control, and when you can't, you abandon. And I find that profound. And when I look at these different thinkers represented by these different books before me, I can think of some of the characters here, treat truth like a girlfriend, or even worse, as a prostitute, that they can hire for a time while they enjoy her, but when truth starts to make demands,

they leave her on the curb. You know? Thank you for salvaging my bad analogy. That was excellent. Yeah, that's really good. Oh Say that again. That was excellent. So I like that a lot because I pursue the path of truth, right? It's okay So long as it doesn't make demands upon me and then it does oh, I don't like that kick her out, right?

Find another yeah, and and I would you know say that Dawkins does that for example, you know Truth is acceptable as long as it's supporting his Darwinian paradigm. But when, say, the fossil record doesn't agree, we're going to sweep that under the rug. We're not going to talk about that, or we're going to evade that using reasons that really I think Dawkins himself knows aren't good ones.

And so yeah, so the question is, are we going to follow truth where it leads? And to do that, you need to be in that covenantal relationship with truth. And I think that's really what the Christian faith is calling us to do, that say ultimately that truth has become incarnate, lived among us as a person, our Lord Jesus Christ, and he is our spiritual spouse and we follow him. But the message of John chapter 1 is Christ, the truth incarnate in his historical ministry, is mysteriously the same as the truth which is at the bottom of the physical universe,

the logos through which God created. In the beginning was the Word, the words were with God. There is nothing that was created apart from Him, etc. So, so, yeah, so these are the two books of revelation, Nature and Scripture. They ultimately lead us to the same truth. I want to tell you about a course that I have created for men to overcome pornography. It is called Strive21.com slash Matt. You go there right now or if you text STRIVE to 66866, we'll send you the link. It's 100% free and it's a course I've created to help men to give them the tools to overcome

pornography. Usually men know that porn is wrong. They don't need me or you to convince them that it's wrong. What they need is a battle plan to get out. And so I've distilled all that I've learned over the last 15 or so years as I've been talking and writing on this topic into this one course. Think of it as if you and I could have a coffee over the next 21 days and I would kind of guide you along this journey. That's basically what this is. It's incredibly well-produced. We had a whole camera crew come and film this. I think it'll be a real help to you. It's also

not an isolated course that you go through on your own because literally tens of thousands of men have now gone through this course. As you go through the different videos, there's comments from men all around the world encouraging each other, offering to be each other's accountability partners and things like that. Strive 21, that's Strive21.com slash Matt, or as I say, text Strive to 66866 to get started today. You won't regret it. Let's talk about the origin of life, if that's okay. Yeah. Can we move on from fine tuning?

Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I want to begin with maybe a much more difficult question, or maybe a difficult question. What is life? I don't even know if I know what that is. I sometimes wonder why we're so quick to assume that fire isn't alive. It has a beginning, it consumes, and as it consumes it grows, and it can reproduce, it can die. What is life? Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, it can die, what is life? Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, you can... You didn't expect me to ask that question.

Right, no, I didn't expect you to, but it's a good question. And you can look up definitions that are given of it, you know, in the standard textbooks. And I'm just doing this on the fly, so I'm trying to... While you do it on the fly, I'm gonna ask chat GBT. Yeah, yeah. So some usual features that are included

in the definition of life is, you know, something that has homeostasis, which is a stable chemical equilibrium within itself. Okay, that's necessary for life. A stable chemical equilibrium within itself. Okay, that's necessary for life. So if you look at any cell, you don't have runaway reactions going on inside of it. It's kind of chemically stable there, and that's, you know, homeostasis.

Another characteristic of life is metabolism, which means we're burning fuel to get energy. Another characteristic of life is responsiveness to the environment. So I move towards light or I move away from light, depending on whether it's helpful for me. Well, you mentioned some some the ability to reproduce. So anyway, so what do you got out there?

We're rewatching. Tell me what you think of it. Life is the existence and experience of living beings encompassing their physical, emotional, intellectual and social activities. It involves growth, reproduction, adaptation and interaction with the environment. Good job.

Life is often characterized by the pursuit of meaning. Well, that's human intelligent life, isn't it? Meaningful filming and connections with others as well as inevitable challenges. Yeah, yeah. So immediately, I think it was better than Chad GPT. Yeah, I mean, they kind of was self-referential there or or begging the question because they said life is something about living beings, right? And they yeah, you're right. I didn't catch that life is the existence and experience of living being. Well, yeah. Yeah. But was that? Yeah, right. That's that's begging the question is a living being. A living being or organism is an entity that exhibits the characteristics of life These characteristics typically include here we go

organization Composed of one or more cells. I don't know what a cell is which are the basic units of life. Okay. Thank you, Chetri Buti now I do Metabolism the ability to convert energy matter etc growth. That's a reproduction response to stimuli right Interesting the ability to perceive and react to environmental changes Yeah, I feel like there's a bunch of exceptions that we would still say this is life and yet It doesn't fit into this criteria, but all right the point is I think to stimuli Describes my children at various times. Uh-huh. They don't respond

describes my children at various times. They don't respond. I don't think that they've stopped living because they're not responding. The point is just that I think that the topic of what is, because I mean, actually one of the questions in the Summa is, is God alive? Right. It's a good question.

It's kind of an ineffable question. I don't think that we can nail it down. That doesn't mean that we can't say anything about it. I think it's helpful to say metabolism. Well, when we're talking about biological life or physical life, I think it is helpful to say growth, reproduction, metabolism, response. I think those things are helpful, but you're right.

Probably there are some exceptions, probably there are borderline cases. With viruses as an example, there's a debate, are viruses really alive? I don't consider them to be alive, but it depends on how you define life. But admittedly, that's another question. Reminds me of who was it? Was it There's a great jazz artist who was once asked What is jazz and his response was if you don't know I can't tell you

It's something like that or a Potter Stewart Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart when asked to give a definition of pornography says well I know it when I say I know what I see it. Yeah. Yeah, exactly but when asked to give a definition of pornography, he says, well, I know it when I see it. I know it when I see it, yeah, yeah, exactly. So, and that's really true. You know, on the origin of life, I think this is a good book, Stephen Meyer. You said you might want to get him on the show sometime. Yeah, Stephen, if you're watching.

Awesome, if we could. Yeah, Signature in the Cell is his discussion about the mystery of the origin of life and many other things. So, yeah, so let's talk about origin of life. So it is hard to define life, but we do have a sense of what we mean when we say a living thing.

That's not a vacuous statement. Right. So, and then the question is, where do living things come from? How do they arise? And this is a big conundrum, because essentially when we recreate the conditions of the early Earth under which presumably life arose, and we know that life appeared, but when we recreate those initial conditions, they do not

conduce to the chemistry that is necessary for a living thing to come into existence. So, you know, we can recreate the atmosphere of the early Earth, we can recreate what we think the early oceans might be, we can do that in a, I don't know, in a laboratory and create this artificial environment. And then we just leave it and watch it. And what happens? A whole lot of nothing. Okay. And so like, well, nothing's happening. So let's create some excitement. So let's stimulate lightning, right? Let's create some lightning zaps. And lightning also creates a whole lot of nothing. Now, folks might say,

well, I thought we could get amino acids from lightning. Well, okay, this goes back to a famous experiment called the Stanley, I'm sorry, the, oh, I'm sorry, the Uri Miller experiment. Miller and Uri created what they believed to be the atmosphere and the conditions of the early earth. And then they put electrical pulses through it to stimulate electricity, to stimulate lightning.

And they got a bunch of amino acids, not all the amino acids that we need, but they got a bunch of them and and that was really cool and that that is basically the last advance that we've had in origin of life research to this day when we simulate the conditions of the early earth and maybe shoot simulated lightning through it or whatever we can't get beyond amino acids. Now I probably should explain what amino acids are. Okay, so amino acids, there's roughly 20 of them and they are the bricks that make up proteins.

So proteins are like nanomachines or sometimes the parts that make up nanomachines in our Cells and if you look at a cell under, you know electron microscope, you know, it's it's really amazing What's going on down there and there are simulations of this or? visualizations of this Drew Barry is a famous visualizer and maybe we can put up for our viewers some of his animations of what's going on inside a cell. But it's really amazing when you see that and Drew Barry has gone around and done like

Ted Talks and so on and show his illustrations of what's actually going on inside of a cell. And his little videos produce gasps and just awe in audiences, because we tend to think of a cell as, oh, it's just a moving blob of jello or something going on. That's not very sophisticated. But those that actually work in this area say that an individual cell is as complicated as say New York City. So when you go down and you get down to the molecular level, you've got all these transport mechanisms going on like trucks moving things around within a city and you've got these

complicated information transfers happening and energy is coming in and energy is being produced or as I should say fuel is coming in and energy is being produced or as it should say fuel is coming in energy is being produced and chemicals are coming in and chemicals are being expelled all to you know keep that homeostasis that that that equilibrium that a living thing needs so that it stays alive so all of this is is absolutely amazing so So how close can we get to that? How close can we get to creating a cell? Well, okay, we can recreate the conditions

of the early Earth, and when we do that, at most all we get is amino acids. What are amino acids? If you think of a protein as like a, you know, making a little robot with legos, with legobricks, then the amino acids might be analogous to the individual legobricks. So a little part with two bumps on the top, you know, or something like that. Okay? So you take a bunch of those, like roughly 20 different kinds of amino acids, and you put them together, and you can make a protein which has a function. And it gets its function from its three-dimensional shape, how it moves around. Maybe it can cut things, maybe it can join things, and it does that in the cell to support life.

So really amazing. But we can't get to the proteins because the proteins require information. Okay, the way proteins are actually made in the cell is that the cell itself pieces amino acids together one at a time, the way a child or you would piece bricks of Legos together one at a time to make a machine. So they piece them together, the amino acids together in a very long string.

And then once the string is ready, there's other organs in the cell that take the string and fold that string up into a kind of like a biological origami. And when it comes out, it's in a three dimensional shape that can cut or splice or attach or transport things or do any number of different things for the cell. So that's all very amazing, but organelles that construct a protein within the cell have to do that from a script that's provided by the DNA in the cell.

And the DNA contains the script for what amino acids to attach to each other in a chain in order to get a protein of whatever function. So just like you get the box of Legos and you pull it out and it's got the instruction thing like, oh, I got to attach this, I got to attach that, and you follow along and then you get your little shark or your airplane or whatever it is that you were building. And so that requires information. What can we get from the conditions of the early earth? Well, we can get some Lego bricks and nothing beyond that.

We can't get carbohydrates, which are sugars, which are burned for fuel. We can't get lipids, which are fats that create the cell wall that protect it from the exterior environment. We can't get ribonucleic acid or any nucleic acids either, because, well, for a number of different reasons, they're too complicated to be formed under ambient conditions, but also there's a water problem. Proteins and nucleic acids are linked together by a process that's called dehydration synthesis. They're joined by removing a water molecule. We imagine that the early Earth was very watery. So this is not going to take place in water

because if you submerge proteins and DNA and RNA and so on in water, unprotected by a cell wall and unmanaged just in the ambient environment in the ocean, they're going to break down from a process called hydrolysis, which means degradation by water or breaking apart by water. So this creates in origin of life research what's called the water problem, which is kind of a catch-22, which is if you're trying to get a living thing, all living things need a lot of water in order to live, but unfortunately the molecules that you need to build a living cell typically break down in water. So that means that the usual scenario that's presented to high school biology students and to people who visit a museum of natural history. We all know this, right? You go to the Museum of Natural History, you walk into their film room or their amphitheater, and they're going to show you a film about life, the mystery of life. And it always begins

like, on the early earth there was a pool of organic soup, you know, and like, you know, a pool of organic molecules. They never explain where these organic molecules come from. That's a whole problem in itself. But then, and then, you know, so like there was a strike of lightning or something like this, or they don't even say it by the, the narrator doesn't even say it, but you see lightning zap the pool, you know, and then, and then maybe they animate some kind of single-celled creature or amoeba, kind of emerge from the pool. And oftentimes, they try to have the narrator not say a whole lot, because they know that this is a false scenario.

They know the scientific problems with this. And really, that whole scenario, and that really comes from a letter that Charles Darwin wrote to a friend. In Darwin's entire Origin of Species, he never deals with the origin of life. He didn't write a book called The Origin of Life. He wrote a book called The Origin of Species. He just presumes life from the beginning. He never tackled how life could arise from the beginning.

But in a letter to a friend, he said, oh, maybe on the early Earth there could be a pool of organic molecules, and blah, blah, blah, like that. And we've taken that and run with it. But let me explain why that's pseudoscience, why these films that play in so many museums around our country and that scenario that's presented in images and in biology textbooks,

that is pseudoscientific. Folks that work on origin of life know that you're not going to get life forming in a pool of water. And that's because of the water problem, because water is gonna break down. Okay, so contemporary scenarios, we can talk about them in a minute,

but they don't include having it in a pool of water. All right, Fred Hoyle said there was no pool of organic soup, either on this planet or any other. He had done a lot of research on this in what we call astrobiology. But anyway, that's not going to happen. The molecules that you need are going to break apart. They're not going to aggregate. They're not going to form in a pool of on the early earth. Secondly, if you strike them with lightning, since when does lightning bring things to life? I'm thinking of the flash. It's interesting. A lot of our superheroes have these origin

stories where chemicals are spilled, supernatural gifts are imposed. And I wonder if this idea kind of comes from right from this sort of scientific idea. Well, it's all like like our superheroes are exposed to radiation that kills you. Okay. Radiation makes you sick. It doesn't give you superpowers, you know, or they're exposed to toxins. Well, toxins like kills you, you know, so we have the it's all magical thinking is behind our sci fi. And to your question, the lightning. The lightning, lightning is hotter than the surface of the sun.

Lightning is, you know, I don't have the exact figures, but the amps and the volts and lightning are, you know, crazy large and you just unleash all of that electricity into a pool, it's gonna kill anything. It's gonna sterilize the pool you know it's not gonna bring a living organism into existence and so why are we showing this to our children a scenario that we know to be false okay the molecules aren't gonna form in water and if you zap them with huge amounts of

electricity that you're gonna sterilize them or blow blow them apart, and yet this is what's presented. So, on this whole, I'm not an expert in researching origin of life, but I can understand the works of those who are. And I'd really recommend James Ture. James M. Ture, he's a synthetic chemist at Rice University. He's got his own YouTube channel and hours and hours and hours of class instruction essentially

on Origin of Life where he exposes this. But he points out the fact that there is no science behind this pool of organic soup model. And that in fact we can't get the four classes of biomolecules that we need for life, we can't get them in a recreated environment of the early Earth, we can't even get them in contrived environments in a lab. So what are those carbohydrates, lipids, nucleic acids, and proteins?

Those are the four classes of compounds that you need for a living cell. And we can't make any of them in a lab using prebiotic ingredients alone. Okay, now you might say, oh we use proteins or nucleic acids all the time in a lab. Yes, and we're always deriving them from things that are already alive. If we limit ourselves to the chemistry that's available on the early earth, even with all our you know laboratory apparatus, we can't produce usable glucose, for example. We can't produce a whole string of proteins. Sometimes we can do high-energy experiments where we produce a whole mass of compounds

and bury it in there as some carbohydrates or bury it in there as something else useful, but not in a form that we could ever use or do further chemistry with it. So we're really at a standstill. One of the things about origin of life research, I want to emphasize, Matt, is that the question of the origin of life is not the question of can we, as human beings, recreate a cell? Can we ever figure out how to make life, make some kind of synthetic life ourselves? We're at a standstill at that, even that point.

But really, origin of life is not about us making a cell, it's about how a cell just happened by chance on the early Earth. How do the ambient conditions of the early Earth just give rise? So we know, we can recreate the conditions of the early Earth, and we know what happens. Nothing, okay?

A whole lot of nothing. All right, so this, well then how did it get there? Well, this is like the question of the big bang. Okay, living things do not naturally aggregate under ambient conditions, under natural conditions. So the laws of physics and chemistry on the early Earth alone will not pull the molecules together and do this. We know we've tried, we know they don't. If our viewers want a good expert to follow in this area, Dr. Brian J. Miller. He contributed

a chapter or two to this book, which I also want to advertise. It's God's Grander, The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design. I've got a chapter in scripture, on scripture in this volume. Dr. Miller has a couple of chapters in there as well. He's an expert on thermodynamics, and he can explain why thermodynamic law prevents the spontaneous formation

of the very complicated molecules that you need for a living thing under, you know, just undirected conditions and make it difficult even under directed conditions. So anyway, so getting back to this, what do we know about life? We know that life arose. We know that it can't happen by natural means. We know that laws of physical chemistry alone won't do it. We know that life requires a lot by natural means. We know that laws of physics and chemistry alone won't do it. We know that life requires a lot of intelligence. This is the argument that Meyer makes in this book.

We need those instructions. We need those LEGO instructions. And then we need something also to follow the instructions. And this is like a terribly intractable chicken and egg kind of catch-22 problem. We need the instructions, and we need something that can follow the instructions, and we need a whole lot else.

We need something to protect the whole process from water, but we do need water, but only in very controlled amounts. I never knew this, but our cells are very good at handling water, and they handle water carefully, because unrestricted water in the cell can do bad things, so it's gotta be carefully controlled. And so every living cell has to manage the water intake and out go very, very carefully. So anyway, so what is this suggesting?

Well, natural processes can't do it. This is looking like we need intervention from outside. We need some kind of force and that force needs to be intelligent and it's a force that we're not aware of and it's not accounted for by you know the matter and energy and the laws of nature that we can see. So again it's looking like the big old, the big man. All right. All right. Very good. Let's turn to evolution. The fossil record. First, I want to say if evolution is true,

macro evolution, no pushback on the whole original life thing. I don't understand it to push back on it. I don't understand it. Yeah. What didn't you understand? Well, I'm being a little hyperbolic maybe, but yeah, I understood very little of that. I mean, it seems to me that if well, again, maybe it's because I've confused myself by trying to understand what life is. But if I take a sort of basic layman's understanding of what we mean by

life, and then I think of a lifeless world. Yeah, it seems bizarre to me how life could originate from non-life. That seems like, yeah. How does life originate from darkness? I mean, that's kind of like the whole principle of sterilization and pasteurization. And it seems like we've put to rest the whole idea

that life can come from non-life a long time ago. Yeah. So, I mean, other than these ideas of soup and lightning hitting it and things like this, I mean, what is the basic response to people like Meyer from the atheist perspective? The response is silence. I mean, this is really interesting. Really? The response is silence. I mean, this is really interesting. Over the past two years, you're unaware of this probably, but for the past two years there's been a huge debate raging on the internet and on YouTube between James Tuer and a blogger named Professor Dave. Yes! Man, he is a condescending fella.

Yeah, yeah. And Tuer points out that we're getting nowhere with origin of life research, because this is just impossible, the chemistry is impossible, and has called out by name the 10 top origin of life researchers in the world and challenged them on YouTube to contradict him. And it's been crickets. It's got no response at all.

What is Professor Dave, who badly embarrassed himself by the way when he tried to respond to Matt Walsh's What is a Woman? It was hopeless. So bad that he had to shut off the comments because he got so much blowback from it. Yeah, yeah. But okay, so what is Professor Dave's sort of response? Professor Dave has done a variety of things, gone ad hominem, simply quoted. There's a lot of studies, I think a lot of what Professor Dave has done is quoted the titles and the conclusions of a whole lot of research that goes on in Origin of Life,

where both the titles and the conclusions are way inflated in order to get funding. But then what James Tuer does is he goes and says, OK, yeah, they claim to have done whatever. Let's actually look at it. And then Tuer goes in with his trained synthetic chemist mind. He says, this chemistry is not replicating the early Earth. What they're doing is buying chemicals

from a chemical provider and then doing highly contrived experiments in the lab under conditions that you could not achieve on the early Earth, conditions of sterility, conditions of purity, et cetera, that you're not going to have when you've just got, like, just the Earth, right? And then what they're doing is maybe doing one chemical reaction in a string of 10,000 chemical reactions that would be necessary to move from non-life to life.

And so they make this one little step under contrived conditions using chemicals bought in a lab, and then they exaggerate the success of the results and say, we're very close to coming up with, you know, the solution to the origin of life, because they need more funding, right? And who's gonna fund a study that, you know, that is just doing what I just described, if described. So that's what TUR has been demonstrating.

And he's just been getting silence from the other side. And that tells me something as an external observer. I can follow the arguments. I can't reproduce the arguments or reproduce all of Tuer's chemistry. But I can follow what he's saying. And the fact that the other side isn't coming back and saying, oh, yes, we can. And here's a simple reaction. You can reproduce this reaction in your lab. That tells me that they don't have a response to Tuer. And Professor Dave is just kind of an internet troll

kind of figure, making personal attacks and not himself being able to manage the chemistry. So anyway, that's what's been going on. So that's been going on for the past two years. And people that wanna go deeper into this, like just, I've spent about 40 hours watching Tours explanations of abiogenesis, following his explanations of the chemistry. And so if people want to do that, I think they're going to find he's the real deal. And he's an honest man.

I haven't looked into him, so I couldn't speak to that, but I'll take your word for it. It seems to me then that, you know, given what we've looked at, you know, Big Bang Theory, cosmic fine-tuning, origin of life, I'm sure there are, you know, I don't want to eliminate the possibility of there being like intelligent atheists who have goodwill, because of course they exist, trying to find solutions to this, but it seems like the easiest way to respond to these as an atheist would be to say, we just don't know enough yet Right do you see so like big bang theories like we don't know enough yet And that might mean we were wrong about the origin of the universe and it is eternal It might mean that there is a multiverse

Or even if there is maybe there's something prior to the big bang and we just don't know that yet Cosmic fine-tuning something similar we could appeal to the multiverse again there. Origin of life, give us time. This is something I keep hearing Dorkin say, give us time. We don't know. We've had a lot of time. Yeah, well maybe we need more. But that just seems, I mean sure, there's some truth to that, right? We know a lot more about the universe today than we used to. Yes, but the more that we know, it's actually pushing us toward God, not away. That's what I was about to get to, because the atheist will accuse the Christian of God

of the gaps arguments, meaning we put God in the gaps where we don't know. But what you're saying is the opposite is true. The more we're learning, we don't believe in God, we don't have more confidence in the existence of God based on science because of what we don't believe in God. We don't have more confidence in the existence of God based on science because of what we don't know. We have more confidence in the existence of God because of science because of what we're discovering. But we do know, right. Yeah. So a great example is in Darwin's own day, under the primitive microscope that they had, primitive by our standards, okay, you look at a single-celled creature in 1850 whatever, okay, and what you see is a

blot, it looks like a blob of jello on your, in your, uh, uh, under your microscope, right? Yeah. So it's not hard to believe that kind of an animate blob of jello could arise from lightning striking a pool of organic soup or whatever. But now that we know and you know you know now that we understand the cell to the point that we have these Drew Barry animations and we can enter the cell and we see all the like mind-blowing DNA replication that's going on at speeds that are unimaginable using geared mechanisms that are like worrying away and so on. Now that we understand all that, the idea that, oh, that arose from a lightning strike,

like that's absurd, okay? So our increase in knowledge, you know, Darwin had the gap in, it was a kind of an atheism of the gaps. Like he didn't know what was going on in the cell and it was easy to impute it to chance. Now that we know what's going on in the cell, it's absurd to impute it all to chance. It all has the marks of design, it has the marks of purpose, has the marks of intentionality. Something, this thing wants to live, this thing wants to live and it wants to reproduce, and yet the thing itself does

not appear to be conscious and does not appear to have these strong desires, and the thing itself doesn't appear to have the intelligence to design itself. And so that intelligence, purpose, intentionality that is evident in this single-celled creature seems to be coming from the outside, creature seems to be coming from the outside. It seems to be coming from elsewhere. And this is the fifth way. This is the way of design. And then let me say that being that is placing the design

and the purpose there is what we commonly call God. I wanna do a shout out for my own book here. This is a book that does exist, a Socratic dialogue on the five ways of Thomas Aquinas. Basically, I wrote it as Lucy, the theist and AJ meet in a coffee shop. He's wearing a shirt that says, I'm an atheist, debate me, they get into a conversation.

They look at the arguments Aquinas gives for atheism, and then they look at the five ways. And I think it's a very charming back and forth. I submitted it to the publisher and he said great let's go ahead and print it and I said wait I don't know what I'm talking about there's a great chance that I've not understood Aquinas at all. I said let's run this by Atomist. So they sent it to Dr. Robert Delfino who very graciously took the time to review this book. He made some suggestions. He said, this is good, but you got this wrong. Oh, thank you very much. And then he kept adding suggestions. I said, why don't you co-write this with me? And so he did. So I'd highly recommend people get this book. It does got to exist a Socratic dialogue on the

five ways of Thomas Aquinas, because I think it's really accessible. And we got very nice endorsements from Dr. Peter Craeft and Dr. Ed Faser. You can get it on Amazon. How was that for a advert? That's great. That was an awesome ad. Thank you. I totally echo that.

Now, I want to talk about evolution here, because you is it all right? Yeah, yeah. That's fine. You talked about life having design purpose and intentionality. Is that what you said? But though it would seem like, well, how is that the case?

Or why should that be so, I don't know, overwhelmingly convincing to us as an argument for God's existence when I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, I'm nowhere near being competent in this area. But isn't the idea of macro evolution that there is no design, there is no purpose, there is no intentionality. Right. Yeah. So even if what we see today is appears to have those things, didn't it originate from chaos and this chaotic? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's a great question.

And yeah, illustrated by the title of Dawkins famous book, the blind watchmaker, why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design. Yeah. That's so untrue. And, and when I read this book now, you know, having had some experience and having read things like

Darwin's Doubt or Meyer's Signature in the Cell and so on, you realize that Dawkins is kind of running from the evidence. He admits at the beginning of this book that biology is the study of things that look designed. And I say, thank you Richard for admitting that everything does look designed. Because that gets back to Hoyle's statement, a common sense interpretation of the facts. I think that's the same. When Dawkins says it looks designed, he's saying a common sense interpretation would

be it's designed. And so throughout all these different discussions of these different areas, whether it's Big Bang or fine tuning or biological development, et cetera, in all these cases, the common sense reaction to the data is simply, wow, this looks designed, looks like there's a designer. Looks like it's fine-tuned, the universe seems to be fine-tuned for life by a fine-tuner, life has all these qualities, looks like it's from a creator and so on.

So the question is, can evolution provide an alternative to a designer? And that, of course, was what Darwin was attempting to do. Now I started with these other questions, like the Big Bang, because in those cases Darwin's evolution doesn't help at all. With the initial conditions of the Big Bang, you don't have life yet. With fine-tuning, evolution doesn't help at all, because evolution initial conditions of the big bang, you don't have life yet. With fine tuning, evolution doesn't help at all because evolution is a biological phenomena. With origin of life, evolution doesn't help at all

because you can't begin to evolve until you have reproduction going on. And then natural selection, after you have reproduction happening, natural selection presumably can work on mutations to, as it were, select the ones that are more fit, and then you can go from there. But...

So even if evolution did occur, it's not an argument against the origin of the universe, fine tuning and... Or the origin of life, yeah. It only works once you have life up and running men Have you checked out Exodus 90 lately if you've heard of Exodus 90 before you're probably thinking of cold showers and Lent But the Exodus 90 app offers so much more It's a daily companion to help you grow closer to God and to become the man you want to be this summer

I'm following along with the apps daily scriptures reflections and prayers I'm following along with the app's daily scriptures, reflections and prayers. It's awesome. On the app you can join the enthronement to the Sacred Heart, the Exodus 90 Summer Book Club and St Michael's Lent, which starts August 15th and leads up to the feast of St. Michael the Archangel on September 29th. St. Michael's Lent is an ancient tradition of prayer and fasting, popularized by St. Francis in the Middle Ages that's been lost in our time. Let's bring it back. Join the men of Exodus 90 and Father Carlos Martins, Catholic priest, exorcist and host of the exorcist files who will serve as our spiritual guide for St. Michael's Lent this year on the Exodus 90 app.

We will awaken to invisible realities and enter into the spiritual battle that rages around us all the time Go to Exodus 90 comm slash Matt for a 14 day free trial to the Exodus 90 app and to learn more About st. Michael's lent that's Exodus 90 comm slash Matt to join us for st. Michael's lent starting August 15 All right, good to be back with you. Yes, we needed that break. We had our espresso's. We do. Big espresso fan.

You know, how do you say espresso in Australia? Blood and Manatee. You say espresso. So I was just in what? I was just in Italy. OK, all over Europe.. You're always all over. Yeah, just a world traveler this

Even when you go to the gas station in the afternoon There's a espresso bar and like 10 15 people all they're shooting their espresso Yeah, it'd be so it's really cool. I would never sleep. Yeah, but it's it's funny how picky people are in Italy. Yeah, this happened to me. I said, yes. Hi, can I have a cappuccino? No, it's the afternoon. Right.

But I mean, can I pay you? No, no. All right. I'll have an espresso. No, that happens in Italy. If you're from Italy, tell me I'm not lying. Here's another thing that happened I like my coffee strong, okay, so if I get a cappuccino or a flat white these words mean different things in different countries I learned but if I get a flat white and I want an extra shot of espresso, so this is what happened Can I have a flat white with an extra shot of espresso? No?

What I mean, I'll pay extra. No, this is not possible. Okay, I really love Italians. It's like coffee religion. It's like, no, that's against the dogma. I don't think they're rude. I think they're just extraordinarily direct. Yeah. No.

Yeah, yeah. This is stupid. No, get out of the way. This is not done, right? So my wife works really well in Italy because she's like that naturally. Okay. So she was trying to get the kids into a bathroom by the Vatican and the guards said no. And my wife and him got into a yelling match. I wasn't there. in the colorful uniforms? No, it wasn't a colorful uniform, but anyway she won. Oh. And then when she came out, like he was all friendly to her and she was friendly to him.

This is how clerics work. Clerics aren't put off by like strong confrontation. Yeah, yeah. I wish I was like that. I wish I was more like that. I'm a melancholic, what are you? Melancholic cleric. Oh, okay.

What are you, melancholic? Yeah, I'm a melancholic cleric too. So so I'm in it. Yeah, I'm I'm depressive until you push me and And I'll push back. Yeah Something I'm not gonna say on here All right. Well, that was a nice little break there. So let's do this Just little minor light topics. We're, light topics that we're talking about. I think one thing you'll find among atheists when you push them on things that we've discussed today – Big Bang, cosmic fine-tuning, origin of life, or whatever else – I mean, look,

to be fair, just like the Christian says, well, it's a mystery. We actually don't know, and that's okay. But the atheist often retreats, I would would say in the face of modern scientific findings I've heard this a lot from Dawkins and again, I don't want to put him up as the poster boy I know there are much more intelligent atheists And and more articulate and you know, whatever Who's the Australian fella the Australian atheist that everyone says he's the best Hmm. I don't know Gary. What's do you want to look at him up Thursday?

Australian atheist this is the guy asked William Lane Craig No, not Dennett. He's he's first of all not not with us anymore. We pray for the repose of his soul And I'm pretty sure he was American. Yeah. Yeah, then it was American Gosh, what is his name? I asked Dr. William Lane Craig, like who is the smartest atheist? Who would it be an atheist? You wouldn't love to debate. And he said this guy. So point is, I know there are really bright atheists,

but it seems to me that I often hear people saying, giving a similar response whenever you talk about these modern findings is, look, we just, we don't know enough yet. Um, give us time. It's something I hear Dawkins say. We will figure these things out. You, as the Christian, what you're doing is you're short-circuiting the scientific endeavor by trying to insert God too soon. Okay. You know, you're actually like getting in the way of this beautiful human endeavor that we call

science. And if we just had, when we will figure these things out, you don't need to posit a God, Getting in the way of this beautiful human endeavor that we call science Yeah, and if we just had when one we will figure these things out. You don't need to posit a god Yeah. Yeah, what do you say? Well, first of all Graham Oppy, thank you very much. Graham Oppy Graham Oppy. Yeah Good. So Graham Oppy if you're watching I want you to debate Trent Horn or Jimmy Aiken on my podcast We would love to have another Aussie on the show Good. So, Graham Oppie, if you're watching, I want you to debate Trent Horn or Jimmy Akin on my podcast. We would love to have another Aussie on the show.

Okay. So yeah, like I said, one response I would have to say that is, as time has progressed, the evidence for theism has strengthened rather than diminished. So if you're saying, give us more time, and in one sense I'm saying, yeah, I'll give you more time

because it's just getting better for my side, okay, the argument. So the sudden appearance, the phenomena of sudden appearance in the Fausse record has only gotten sharper since Darwin's day. The argument against the possibility of undirected origin of life has only gotten stronger. But the other thing I'd say about that is, I agree with you, that's a response that I often see in the literature is, we'll get this figured out, we're working on the math, Hawkins was working on the math, Penrose was working on math to try to have an eternal universe, and I'll get it someday,

etc. But that's a phenomena that's often called promissory materialism. Now, let me break that down. Promissory means I'm making you a promise. Materialism is all I believe in is matter and energy. So promissory materialism is, well, I have this philosophical position. This philosophical position is contradicted by the facts as they stand, or the evidence as it stands, however you want to phrase that. But give me time, and we're working on explanations, and we'll eventually be able to solve all of the anomalies that don't fit with our materialist paradigm.

And in my response to that, you know, maybe several responses is, you know, first of all, okay, well, why don't you get back to us when you've got the theory in hand, okay? Because right now it looks like we've got a finite universe with a beginning. Right now when we look at the fossil record, we see these sudden infusions of information at different points. We don't see the gradualism that Darwin predicted. So when you have a

materialist explanation for this phenomena, why don't you get back to us. In the meantime, is it okay if we be theists over here? But this is the thing. In the meantime, it's not okay for us to be theists. That's the thing. You know, Dawkins wants to, you know, he said this outrageous thing about putting Baptists in the zoo at some point in his writings, and so I think he softened on that quite a bit. I don't want to hold him to some rash statements that he said earlier in his career. But in the meantime, it's really not okay. In the academy, especially in certain fields, you're really hounded out if you are a believer

in God. And so why should that be the case? Why is believing in God so bad when you're a professional academic? Why can't you teach at Harvard or Yale and believe in God? All of the evidence that we have as it stands now supports that. I mean present cosmology, fine-tuning, origin of life, so on. It's all pointing to that as the field stand now. So is it okay if we just, you know, take the common sense interpretation of the facts, as Hoyle said? So that makes sense.

It does. I wonder why that is the case. I don't know if it's just prejudice against Christians because of the moral commands that follow, or if it's because they believe that positing a Christian God will circumvent the scientific endeavour. And the reason I think it might be one of those things is I would imagine if you were like a high-up cosmologist or biologist and you were a pantheist and you had a vague notion of this kind of eternal cause, but you didn't give it any kind of characteristics that looked like the Christian or Muslim or Jewish God. I think you'd be okay, right? Like if you were a pantheist. Yeah, I think so. Because that's a lot, that's very malleable. Yeah, I think a little poking around and we'd find several pantheists that are doing fine and don't get any kind of persecution. What is it about the personal God that bothers us?

Again, to give the atheist a due, maybe it is just that. Maybe it's like, look, if we were to take you guys, you would say to us there's no need to do any of this exploration because we already have the answers. Now, the history of science would seem to refute that because the history of science is replete with excellent, brilliant Christians

who precisely because they believe that the universe is intelligible began to try to understand it. Right. Wouldn't you say? Yeah, I would agree. Yeah. So the the evidence is contrary to that. Yeah, this idea, you know, I don't know if you ever watched the Ken Ham Bill Nye debate from 2014. No, I would rather put my hand in a blender. from 2014. No, I would rather put my hand in a blender. I watched the whole thing. Okay.

And the aftermath, because I thought it was an interesting, I did find it very interesting, even though, you know, not, you know, buying into either of their paradigms. But it was an interesting cultural phenomena, but Bill and I kept trying to say that you have to believe in evolution, otherwise you can't do good science.

And I think he got the worst end of that argument, because Ham kept pointing out young Earth creationists in this instance. And I'm not saying anything about young Earth creationism, but Handkept pointing to these guys, they were brilliant scientists. Like, their beliefs in a young Earth didn't affect their ability to do great technology, great science in the present.

And so after a while, it got to be pretty old. And I thought, you know, Bill Nye isn't helping himself with this argument because it's obviously not the case. I would see why people take issue with the young Earth creationists. Sure. Yeah. And I wouldn't quickly say that they're able to do good science. If you're in the grip, if you're like ideologically captured as it were, to some view that seems to have been disproven that the Earth is several thousand years old or whatever. Yeah, well they would disagree with you that it's been disproven, that the Earth is several thousand years old or

whatever. Yeah, well they would disagree with you that it's been disproven. But I mean, if you're working for an oil company and oil exploration or if you're creating data, you're showing the paperwork. Yeah, or if you're creating medical technology or something, it really doesn't affect. There's so much, very, very little is dependent on our view of origins in terms of modern engineering and so on. But anyway, so the response to the time thing is, one response is, look, time has been helping

the theistic argument. Another response is, look, you're giving us promissory materialism. In other words, you're saying, I don't have the goods now, but I should extend you a line of credit, apparently indefinitely, until you have all the arguments together to support materialism. And what if you never do? Is it okay if I'm a theist? Yeah, because I've got like 20, 30, 40 more years here. I'd like to figure it out. Yeah, in the meantime, the common sense interpretation is, you know, there's a God. Yeah.

Yeah, anyway. So yeah, I'm glad we... That's really helpful. Is that helpful? Yeah, super helpful. Promissory materialism. I'm never going to forget that. Thank you. You've referenced Darwin a few times. I'm not sure where you stand on this, but let's talk about the fossil record. You alluded a couple of times that the fossil record may itself be somehow evidence for a designer, but surely it's the case, surely Catholicism allows for the case that one can

believe in evolution and be a good Catholic, yes? Sure, yeah. The church allows a wide range of views, and I think that's a good thing to point out because in a lot of the discussions of evolution, many people, from both a Christian perspective or an atheistic perspective, go into the discussion assuming that there are only two possible camps. One is full-out atheistic Darwinism, old earth, common ancestor, random mutation plus natural

selection explains everything, or biblical literalism and young-earth creationism and so on. So these are two, and you see that in Dawkins writings, like in Blind Watchmaker, many of the statements that he makes seems to assume that his only opposition out there comes from people that insist on a young earth. And that's not the case. There are, when we talk about evolution, there are several things, several issues that are in motion that are engaged

here. And Plantinga pointed this out to us so many years ago when we studied under him at Notre Dame. But Plantinga would say, when you're talking about evolution, we've got to distinguish different issues. One issue is the age of the universe and the age of the earth. Is it young? Is it old?

That's a separate question actually from whether evolution is true. So you've got that. That's a question. Then when you get to evolution, evolution is when it's used in common discussion, it's usually indicating a combination of two ideas. One idea is common ancestry, that like all living things come from the amoeba. I know it's not an amoeba, right?

But whatever it was, you know, the first single-celled thing, amoebas are rather complex. But anyway, the first simple single-celled thing, you know, last common ancestor gave rise to all life. So that's common ancestry. And then apart from common ancestry, there's also the mechanism that's thought to explain why things develop from that common ancestor into all the diversity that we see.

And that mechanism is usually phrased as random mutation plus natural selection. So random mutation means that living things for unexplained reasons. I think nowadays we think we know some of the explanation, but sort of exhibit different varieties. So we have a whole litter of puppies and some of them are black and some of them are white different varieties. So we have a whole litter of puppies and some of them are black and some of them are white, et cetera, so that's randomness, so to speak. And then you have this process called natural selection that's supposed to operate on the random mutation.

And so we have a litter, some puppies are black, some puppies are white, and then they all go out to hunt. And guess what? The black ones are much more effective hunting at night. And so happens that we live in a part of the world where food that dogs can eat tends to come out at night. So guess what? All the black puppies survive to adulthood,

and the white puppies that are easier to spot at night, they all starve to death. And after a couple of generations of this, all dogs are black. So natural selection is that process of favoring the black puppies over the white puppies. So random mutation plus natural selection is supposed to be. And that's often what Darwin is credited with having done, is it's claimed that he proved that natural selection plus random mutation is sufficient to explain

everything that we see. Now, all three of those things are separate. So you can have somebody, for example, who believes in an old Earth, in an old universe, but does not believe in common ancestry. He thinks that, no, the different branches of life were created individually and are not related to one another. And you can have somebody who doesn't believe in common ancestry and doesn't believe in random mutation and natural selection. Says, no, that at best can explain why some puppies are black

or why there's more black puppies in a certain place, but it's not gonna explain the origin of dogs. Okay, does that make sense? Yeah. They're pretty complicated. Thursday, would you mind bringing the water, Josiah? Sorry, I left it out there and I'm noticing that your thimble of espresso is almost out. Yeah

See how attentive I am. Do you want my wife's so happy very solicitous. Thank you very much welfare Cheers Thank you. Yeah black puppies. So, okay, so so you can have any combinations so you have you do have in fact I know several people that believe in an old Earth but don't believe in common ancestry or a random mutation natural selection. I know others who believe in an old Earth and they believe in common ancestry but don't believe in random mutation natural selection. And I suppose there's other theoretical mixtures of that.

So it's not, you know. It's not binary. It's not binary. There's a spectrum across. And so it's helpful to realize that. And also when we're talking about evolution, the distinction is often made. And I think it's a useful one, even though I

have some quibbles about some of the terminology. But usually microevolution is distinguished from macroevolution. So microevolution is usually described as the variation of characters within a kind of animal. And so over time, and I think this is, nobody has a problem with this, I don't think. Even if you go to say Ken the Ken Ham's Noah's Ark, which I went there with my mom one time.

And it's interesting there, the animals that they have in the ark don't look like animals that we have today. So even kind of hardcore young earth creationists would agree that by their chronology, 4,000 years ago, animals didn't look like they do. But they're the same kind of animal. They're hoofed animals or they're dogs or whatever. So that's microevolution, which is the changing of features

as we progress through time within a species or maybe a genre of animal. Macro evolution is the whole story. That's from single-celled animal all the way to human being and all the transitions in between are by these, as Darwin describes it, like insensibly fine-graded transitions. these, as Darwin describes it, like, insensibly fine-graded transitions.

So, you know, the way Darwin describes it and the origin of species is, you know, the steps from one species to another are so small that they're almost minuscule, almost insensible. You know, like, you wouldn't even notice them. But they all add up, you know, like you wouldn't even notice them, but they all add up, you know, and over thousands and thousands of steps, eventually you go from a bear to a whale, you know.

And there's legitimate question about whether, is that really? Is that really possible? It can do like small steps, you know? Cause some of these transitions are pretty huge. And then the other big problem is we don't see those steps in the fossil record. We have, as it were, kind of a film rule of life on earth.

And that's in the fossils. Much like old style film where you had individual frames, right, you can look at the different layers of the fossil record as frames in a movie that are shot and then some motion happens in another frame, and so on, all the way up the fossil record. And so what Durham predicted and what is not the case, and he knew it wasn't the case, but what his theory predicts is that you should start with a single-celled animal, and then it should diversify, and you get some different species of single-celled animal, and then they diversify some more,

and they should diversify into different families and different orders and up the hierarchy of biological classification. And then after a long, long time, finally, you should get the very distinct differences between even completely separate body plans, which is characteristic of what we call phyla. Phyla are clades or groups of organisms that all share the same body plan. So arthropods would be a good example. Those are animals that have an exoskeleton, basically, so insects and shellfish and so on. Vertebrates, or really chordates, animals that have a backbone, would be another phyla.

It's like a body plant. Okay, so that's what Darwin predicts. So does that make sense? You start small and you get a little bit of difference, more difference, more difference, and then a huge difference. And your point is, if that were the case, which we should expect to see this in the fossil record. We should see this in the fossil record. But we don't. But we don't.

Therefore, something different must have occurred. Right. What do the evolutionists say in response to that? Is it that we haven't found them yet? Is it that they've been destroyed? Is it what? Yeah. Yeah, well first let's just talk about

the fossil record for just a second. So for most of the fossil record, we just have single-celled animals for billions of years, according to standard chronology. And then around 600 million years ago, we get a blast of what's called the Ediacaran explosion or the, yeah, just call it the Ediacaran explosion. That's sufficient. And we get these strange life forms that just look like plants. And they don't have any organs. They don't have any limbs.

They don't have any eyes, et cetera. It's a very simple pincushion-like, pillow-like organisms. And they last for a while. And then around, say, you could put it at different points. Let's say maybe 543 million years or so ago, you get what's called the Cambrian explosion. And that's a big explosion where suddenly almost all the phyla, the body plans that are still in existence suddenly appear at once, examples of all the different body plans of animals.

Bang! There they are. That's why it's called the explosion. No transition. In fact, the transition from the Ediacaran, which are these very simple animals, to the Cambrian with all these different body plans is so abrupt. There are studies that put only a window of half a million years between the last time in the fossil record that you see these very simple precursors, and then boom, when

you get the Cambrian animals. And the Cambrian animals are amazingly complex. They're as complex as lobsters or many modern. Fish appear for the first time in the Cambrian. And some of these creatures, most of them don't look like things that are around today, but they're very complicated and wonderful and amazing and so on, so that's really kind of awe-inspiring. And they just all appear at once, okay? And Dawkins admits that.

In The Blind Watchmaker, he admits that. He has a famous line where he says, "'They all appear as if they were just planted there "'without any evolutionary precursors, "'and creationists are delighted by this.'" where he says they all appear as if they were just planted there without any evolutionary precursors, and creationists are delighted by this. And you know, I don't know anybody who disputes that this is a reality of the fossil record. By the way, I want to give a shout out to Stephen Meyer in Darwin's Doubt, because this is an entire book about this phenomena of the Cambrian explosion. Okay, yeah, the subtitle is The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design.

Right. Yeah, yeah. So folks are dissatisfied with my kind of lay level explanations. They can read Meyer, okay? And he goes very methodically through this whole process of thought and looks at all the different options. So you asked what evolution is saying in response. To not having this...

To the slide. Toss the record. Okay. So Dawkins says, oh, this is a true gap. So we need the fossils. The theory demands transitional fossils. They've just been all washed away or they've been eroded away. Right.

It's just a gap, okay? That is a minority opinion among paleontologists. Folks that actually work with the fossils probably by and large don't agree with that. Let me give an example. Simon Conway Morris, very, very well respected biologist paleontologist. I don't know what exactly his home base would be,

but worked at Cambridge for much of his career. He's retired now. Has made some important contributions to the understanding of the Cambrian, wrote an important paper documenting fossil fish, for example, already in the Cambrian. And Simon Conway Morris gave a virtual talk at Franciscan University a couple of years ago.

They were Skype, you know, zooming them in, and Q and A afterwards, and you know, I got in line, and I wanted to ask him about the Cambridge explosion. So Cambridge trained and high up, don't get much higher than that kind of expert in this field, interviewed and written on this subject. So I asked him, Dr., Dr. Morris, you know, about the Cambrian explosion. Do you believe it's an artifact of the evolutionary record or the

fossil record? That means it only appears to be explosive because we're missing the fossils below. And if you don't believe it's an artifact, what do you believe is the explanation? And he said, first of all, he doesn't believe it was an artifact, it was a real event. Okay, so that's interesting. So that kind of contradicts Dawkins. Yeah. And then he said, and he was very honest,

he said he doesn't know the explanation, but he thinks that an increase in oxygen plus the Ediacaran animals, these simple animals that came before, play into the role of the explanation. Well I found that very interesting and I don't fault him at all. He's a lovely man and a fellow Catholic and God bless him, only wish him the best. But that's not much of an explanation. Rise in oxygen levels in the Ediacaran animals.

The problem with the Ediacaran animals, that's these simple animals that came before the Cambrian ones, a lot of folks don't believe they're related at all to the animals that come later. They believe they just went extinct. And if there is, which most people believe, whatever evolutionary trajectory led to the animals that we see in the Cambrian, it went around the Ediacaran and are just not captured.

So the Ediacaran aren't helping much. And then the latest evidence shows there wasn't actually a rise in oxygen levels that, you know, and that, so therefore that wasn't a cause of, you know, the explosion of information. Aside from the fact that rises in oxygen levels at best would be a sufficient, I'm sorry, excuse me, might be a necessary precursor for an explosion of life, but it wouldn't be sufficient to explain why we have all this biological information that suddenly

appears at a certain point in the fossil record. So I mean, we can do experiments. We can put animals into high oxygen environments and see if they suddenly have a huge explosion of information in their DNA. And I can tell you right now, it's not going to do it. It's not going to help. So it really told me that Dr. Morris doesn't have an explanation.

I've asked many other people. And really for me, what I've wondered is, why is this not a defeater to the whole theory? This gets back to Alvin Plantinga, studying under Plantinga in the philosophy of science. Plantinga employed this idea of a defeater. A defeater is like a brute fact that is so anomalous to your paradigm. The cosmological paradigm.

Yeah, that you just have to abandon the paradigm. And I've asked many scientists this, okay? Point blank. I'm like, look, you know, this is what the Fausse record shows. Why is this not a defeater to the whole Darwinian paradigm? And nobody answers me. Okay? I mean, you've got a book here, Why Evolution is True.

Presumably he addresses it in that book. No, he doesn't. And yeah, let me hold this up. I've read this through carefully and I assign this when I teach religion and science because I don't want to be somebody who just indoctrinates towards one idea, right? So I tell my students we're going to read both sides. So we're going to read this and I've read it carefully like page by page All right What Jerry coin's arguments are and it was really reading?

Coins book that helped persuade me that evolution is not true. At least not in the Darwinian sense, right? Okay and and what Why is that? Well, I went into reading his book knowing that one of the biggest problems for Darwinian theory is the Cambrian explosion. So I go in reading, eager to see how he's going to treat it. And he gets to the chapter where he's talking about the fossil record, and he gives a description of about a page, and about a page, maybe a page and a half, he recounts the history of life. And when he's recounting that history of life, he completely omits to mention the Cambrian explosion. To mention the Cambrian explosion. However, even though in his text,

the body text of the book, he doesn't mention it, he does have a graph. And in the graph, it says Cambrian explosion. Can we talk about that a little bit? No, okay. No, apparently not. And, you know, Matt, I don't know if your kids, are your kids involved in the debate club in Steubenville? No. They debate me a lot.

Okay. Well, there's a very popular home school debate club in Steubenville, you probably know, and many people are involved, almost all my kids are involved in that. And through my kids being involved in debate club, I learned some of the principles of argumentation of formal debate. One of the things I learned was that if your opponent raises like a killer issue for your case and you don't respond to it, you lose the debate. And when I would go and watch my kids debate, oftentimes I wouldn't pick up on this because I'm kind of a lay observer and most lay observers of debates aren't following the logic that's going on.

They're allowing them to be, allowing themselves to be swayed by emotion. Yep. The charm of the people presenting the rhetoric. The rhetorical, yeah, ability. And so you can get to the end of the debate and like, boy, and oftentimes I would be in this as a parent and I feel like oh that side clearly won because they persuaded emotionally and their rhetoric was better and then the judges do the adjudication and surprise surprise The other team actually gets awarded. Why is that? It's because the judges are actually keeping careful track of

whether the different pieces of evidence and argument are being responded to adequately. And if you, it's called dropping an argument. If the other side raises something very important and then you don't address it and you just drop it, you lose the debate. Or at least the point, wouldn't you? You wouldn't lose the debate, maybe, but it would be a mark against you. Yeah, it's a mark.

It depends on the weight of, you know, possibly if you drop something that's kind of only modest significance. But if it was of great significance, and you refuse to engage with it, then you probably would lose the debate from dropping it. Right. So when I saw that coin drops the question, drops the issue and did not address, I'm like, oh my gosh, Meyer, Darwin's doubt here, he's really onto something that the other side is afraid to engage.

A quick objection maybe here that might help clarify this for me. If the Cambrian explosion is an argument against Darwinian evolution, how is it not also an argument against the Bible? Because we have six days of creation. You're telling me that there was a stage and then after I don't know how long there was a... So like what is the kind of biblical fundamentalist, let's to use that, I know that's a pejorative term. What's he saying then, if he thinks this is an objection to Darwinian evolution?

Is he saying that God created and then after a long time he created again? Like what do they think the explosion is? Are you saying like young earthers? Yeah, good point. I don't know. I guess somebody who wants to reject macroevolution entirely. How do they view, is that what Maya does, by the way?

Does he reject? Yeah, Meyer rejects macroevolution. All right. So what would he say it is then? What's his hypothesis? Meyer says, look, this is the infusion of intelligence. Right. So that's my so that gets back to my point about the six days of creation. We have man created on the sixth day. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So it wasn't like a period before something else.

Right. So so Meyer and those who would argue with him would say, yeah, the creation narrative is primarily theological, not scientific in our sense of it. Yep, yep, yep. So that we're seeing the creation of a temple for the worship of God, that's the logic. Have you seen like, I've got a graph in Bible basics.

Day one, day two, day three. Yeah, yeah. The habitats are created. Yeah. Four, five, six. So yeah, so what the creation story is not, is not showing us a literal history of... See, there I go with the binary thing again.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? Even me, I'm like, okay, so he's denying Darwinian evolution, therefore he must believe 24 hour periods. Right, right. That's good, that's helpful. Yeah, yeah, no, that's's denying Darwinian evolution. Therefore, he must believe 24-hour periods, right? That's good. That's helpful Yeah, yeah, no that that's and thank you for the chance to clarify that so

right, so You know that the Cayman is really is on to something, you know, and Dawkins again He says well all the fossils were washed away or eroded The problem is though that in several locations around the globe And the problem is, though, that in several locations around the globe, we do have the rock layers that precede the Cambrian, and that's where we find the Ediacaran. That's where you find these simple animals that don't look related at all. Maybe for our viewers, we can pull up some images and I'll give some to Josiah so they can kind of see and contrast what these pre-Cambrian Ediacaran biota, we don't even

know if they're animals or plants, they're so mysterious, what they look like contrasted to Cambrian, which are so much more complex. And again, no transition in between. So and another person I want to give some call out to is, well, you had him on the show, Gunter Beckley. Gunter is awesome at this because he is a professional paleontologist, so he knows this stuff back and forth. And when I get into it, I'm worried about mispronouncing

my terms and getting the dates off of it. His mind is like a steel trap. But not only does he point this out, but he points out that it's not just the Cambrian explosion, but this is a pattern that recurs throughout the history of life. We keep getting these explosions. So we have the flowering plant explosion, for example, angiosperms. We kind of take them for granted, but flowering plants are a kind of plant life. And they just explode onto the scene with no precursors at a certain point in geological history. We have the bird explosion, you know, you get a few, few kind of, you know, quote unquote, early birds, and then all of a sudden, bang! There's all the birds called the avian explosion. And several others. Where's my book? Go ahead.

Well, you're looking for that. So would Maya... Anyway, my book, God's Grander, not my book, but the book I contributed to. Yeah, Beckley's got a chapter in there on the fossil record and it's a great succinct read for anybody who wants to become aware of all the explosions, the sudden bursts of new life that the fossil record show. And was that Emmaus? That was Sophia Institute. Is Maia saying what the Big Bang is for God, the Cambrian explosion is to Genesis?

Is that the kind of... Is that where he's leading us? To animal life. To animal life. Yeah, the Cambrian is the Big Bang of animal life. But the reason I say to Genesis is that Genesis is that... Is he saying that the Cambrian explosion is kind of more in keeping with how Genesis is described than how Darwinian evolution is laid out?

What Meyer doesn't have a dog in the fight about the interpretation of scripture. Okay. And he works for the Discovery Institute and the Discovery Institute is in part, it fosters, it's not the only thing it does, but one of the things the Discovery Institute is in part, it fosters, it's not the only thing it does, but one of the things the Discovery Institute does is provide funding for continued research

on intelligent design theory, which is the idea that certain aspects of the natural world are best explained by an intelligence rather than by undirected causes, right? And so Meyer would say, Meyer's only interest is to say, look, this is pointing to an intelligence. And that's about as far as he goes.

And then you can take it from there. It's a modest claim. Right, it's a modest claim. It's a modest claim, and therefore it can be a big tent movement. So a lot of people are agreed that it represents an intelligence. In fact, curiously, Fred Hoyle,

the great British astrophysicist, he agreed that life shows the signs of intelligence. He just appealed to aliens to explain it. So that's where he ended up at the end of his career. He said that he explained the origin of life in that the earth was seeded with life from outer space. Didn't Dawkins say something similar? Well either way, Fred Hoyle did. Fred Hoyle did. Yeah, I don't think Dawkins says that. Wow, how wild that you have to appeal to

extraterrestrial life to explain life on earth. It seems wild, but then, you know, if he's wrong, he's wrong for the right reasons, because he's recognizing just the incredible odds against the spontaneous formation of life on earth without direction. Okay? And Hoyle was so impressed by that. I mean, he did all the calculations himself, and he came up with a number of 1 to 10 to the 40,000th. And he said, you know, the odds against the spontaneous formation of life on earth is just like astronomical. He has a quote where he says, that's a number so big it can bury,

you know, all of Darwinism in. And so that's Fred Hoyle, who was kind of like, didn't know what he thought about a god, et cetera. But he and his disciples, and his disciples are still around, go with, it's called directed panspermia. It's that aliens exist somewhere and they seeded life on Earth. On the one hand, I'm kind of sympathetic

because at least he's recognizing that life on Earth had to be formed by an intelligence. It really bespeaks the need for an intelligent designer. On the other hand, I feel like he's just kicking the can down the road because then you have to explain what's the origin of aliens. I see. So whereas Dawkins would say the fossil record was somehow washed away, that's the

only reason we don't have it. You're saying that's a minority position. And people like Fred Hoyle, their other explanation would be something like aliens seeded the planet. Is there some other explanation that materialists point to to justify these explosions? For the, like the Cambrian explosion? Okay, the two options are I would say too many options that I've seen argued in print are Dawkins position that oh the transitions were there. They just weren't captured by the fossil record either because they've they've eroded away or The animals were soft bodied and they weren't the fossil record, either because they've eroded away

or the animals were soft bodied and they weren't preserved. There's a real problem with that argument because- Yeah, because that sounds reasonable to me. Yeah. So what's the problem? Oh, because a lot of the Ediacaran biota living things, we say biota when we don't know whether they're animals or plants. Okay. They're just living things. That's what biota means. Oh, okay. Thanks.

So the the Ediacaran organisms that show up in the fossil record in the few places on the planet where we have those sedimentary layers that are pre-Cambrian, many of those appear to be soft bodied. And we have like sponge embryos, which are very delicate. Those are fossilized in that layer. So we do have soft- Oh, okay. Yeah, we do have a lot of very soft bodied things that are preserved, but none of them are

what we would expect to be transitional fossils to the Cambrian. So we do have snapshots of that period of life. And the Ediacaran itself just kind of appears suddenly, right? And these other explosions like the bird explosion or the angiosperm explosion, they just appear suddenly. So anyway, so we have these sudden explosions of life. And okay, back to what do atheistic evolutionists appeal to, one is, well, we just don't have the transitions. That's problematic. That's a problematic view because we do have fossils below, but they just aren't transitional

fossils. Okay. So that seems to be kind of special pleading. Okay. Does that make sense? fossils below, but they just they aren't transitional fossils, okay? So that seems to be kind of special pleading, okay? Does that make sense? Yes, it does The other possibilities they appeal to non Darwinian mechanisms, okay? possible like Mutations that might change the whole character of an organism very quickly. And the problem with that is, you know, we do know of some mutations that will change the body of an animal very quickly in rather dramatic ways, but almost all of those ways are lethal. So maybe you've seen like these

fly experiments where they mutate the hawks genes on fruit flies. But what you get is these, you know, grotesque things where like the fly will grow legs out of its head, you know, or his body parts will be in the wrong order. It's like, oh, you know, that looks painful. And it is painful. And usually they're born dead. Or if they do survive, they don't reproduce. So and ironically Dawkins comes to my defense here. In Blind

Watchmaker Dawkins argues multiple times that fast evolution doesn't work. Okay, you can't get rapid changes. Evolution must be slow. It must be gradual. One of the reasons that he gives for evolution needing to be gradual is that if you make a big biological jump, if you think of the possibilities of biological form as being a big space, like this big playground is all the possible things that you can be as a living organism.

So here you are over here, you're a squirrel, and you wanna jump over to being a whale. Yeah. Okay, if you make that leap, you're very liable to land in a spot where you're dead. Yeah. Okay. Because there's a lot more ways of being dead than there are being alive.

And Dawkins himself makes the argument. And so he says, you can't have these big jumps. These big jumps are liable to be lethal. So some of the scientists who have responded to Meyer's book, Darwin's Doubt, have said, oh, well, it's the reorganization of gene regulatory networks, or maybe it's the mutation of Hawke's genes. I won't take the time to go into all those, but what those would be would be massive mutations that would affect the whole way that the organism develops as an embryo.

But when we try those things experimentally, they almost invariably end up with a dead animal. And when you look at living beings, they don't vary in those ways. Like, we don't... Animals aren't born with variation in their body plan, okay? That would kill them. So dogs all have the dog body plant, etc. And if they don't, it's lethal. So random mutation in such a fundamental characteristic of the organism's way of being would be lethal and basically don't happen. So natural selection doesn't have anything to work with. It's not like personifying natural selection for a moment. It's not like natural selection can say,

oh, I've got puppies that have the body plan of an arthropod, and I've got puppies that have an echinoderm body plan. That's like a sea urchin body plan, you know, and so, so I can select among them, you know, in order to develop. Yes, you don't need it because you don't get that variation. Yeah, you know, that doesn't occur in nature. So it's a real conundrum. It's much like the conundrum of the origin of life. It's where I mean, have you a surely Catholic, I mean, thinking of a father, Nick andriaco, who's a Dominican, who I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, holds to

Darwinian evolution? Right. Is that right? He's a proponent of it? I think he is. I mean, what does it mean to hold to Darwinian evolution? Because obviously, it's not like to be a Darwinian evolutionist is to think that Darwin got everything 100% correct. I mean, science doesn't work like that. He's not infallible. So one can hold to his view of things while modifying them. So I'm not sure where he's on the spectrum, but I mean, have you looked at Catholics who hold to this? How have they?

I have looked at, yeah, well, the Catholics that I've looked at don't deal with the issue. Or they will, okay, maybe point to, there's one or two ediacaran organisms that you could press into service as a transitional form to the Cambrian. But the problem there is, you don't need just one or two.

You need like thousands, you know, and then you need them in a sequence. So just pointing just one or two, you need like thousands, and then you need them in a sequence. So just pointing to one or two organisms that may be possibly, and there's dispute about it, a transitional form, that doesn't help a whole lot. The other thing that I've seen Catholic theorists appeal to is again, these non-Darwinian explanations. Like, they will point out, for example, that a lot of the genes that we use for the proteins of our body

are already present in single-celled organisms, and that's true because we're composed of single cells. So it kind of stands to reason, right? So, but that, and the suggestion is, oh, because we share a lot, even with single-celled organisms, I guess the implication is supposed to be, oh, that would make it easy and rapid

to move from a single-celled organism to a complicated, like, Cambrian animal that's like a shellfish, like a lobster-like shellfish or something like that. But that is a very circuitous path that includes a lot, a lot of biological data. And when you look at what's called the waiting time problem, which is how long do you have to wait around

for a beneficial mutation, you're just not gonna get enough beneficial mutations in the very narrow window that the fossil record permits to you between, say, the Ediacaran and the Cambrian, which is very, very, very, very short. But I mean, folks that wanna go into it, what I respect about Meyer is he very carefully, I mean, to the point of making for slow reading,

it's like, please, can we hurry this up a little bit? I get it. But he is crossing every T and dotting every I because he knows that this is gonna be, this is gonna undergo great scrutiny. So I'm not doing him justice here, but for those who want more and want to run down every possible alternative explanation for how we could get this explosion of life in the cavern, he does follow every track down to its end, which is why I respect him.

That's why I look at how thick these books are. Right, and these are his layman books. These aren't dissertations. These are for lay readers. Right. Exactly. So, you know, I'd refer folks to that. All right. Can we move on from the fossil record? I want to tell you about Halo, which is the number one downloaded prayer app in the world. It's outstanding. Halo.com slash Matt Fradd. Sign up over there right now and you will get the first three months for free.

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It even has an entire section for kids. So if you're a parent, you could play little Bible stories for them at night. It'll help them pray. Fantastic. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd. This has been so fascinating. I wanted to talk to you about maybe what quantum mechanics

and quantum physics has to say about a creator. And then if we have time, I'd like to talk about out of body experiences, exorcisms, I mean there's other things that would seem to point to a creator. Yeah, yeah. Or near-death experiences, these sorts of things. Right, absolutely. So let's begin with quantum mechanics which is the science of the very very small when we're dealing with individual electrons, individual photons, which is like a single particle of light. And the amazing thing that was discovered in the early 20th century when researchers

like Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, Denmark, began to work on this science. One of the things that was discovered very early on was that conscious observation appears to influence the behavior of these subatomic particles. And this is mind blowing and it was unanticipated and it was really resisted. Okay, so Everybody when we talk about quantum mechanics most folks, you know go first to a famous experiment That was first done in the early 20th century

Called the double slit experiment. Yeah Yeah, you for well, I'm familiar with it from the first episode of the Big Bang Theory. Okay I never watched the it from the first episode of the Big Bang Theory. Okay. I never watched the Big Bang. It's not worth watching, but there's a lot of trash in it, you know, a lot of, but it's extraordinarily well written. And they talk about this at the beginning. So what is the double slit experiment?

Okay, so the double slit experiment was an experiment where researchers decided to shoot photons through two slits in a barrier. And what they expected was photons, which they imagined to be particles, are going to be shot through the slit. And so- So you've got like a photon shooter for like a bit of work. Yeah, you've got a photon shooter, right. And you're trying, what are they trying to shoot it through one slit and then shoot it through the other?

Yeah, right. And you know, there's a great animation of this on YouTube. I think it's called Dr. Quantum. Okay. And you know, we can put the link in the program notes and folks can look at it. But it does a great job. And I think it's one of the best heuristic devices to kind of understand this. But yes, absolutely. So in the animation, that's precisely what they do. They've got a photon shooter here, just to think about

it simply. And you've got a barrier with two slits in it. And then you've got a screen behind the barrier that's going to receive the impression of the photon. It's going to be hit by it. So you shoot the photons at the two slits and the expectation was that you get two slits on the screen from where the photons hit them. Where the photons hit them. That's not what they got. Instead they got what's called an interference pattern,

which is a series of bands that you get when two waves interfere with each other when they're coming from two sources. So if you have, for example, if you have a basin of water and you put two vibrating objects onto the surface of the water that are creating waves. So you've got waves emanating from two sources. The waves come together, and where their crests meet, you get a high amplitude, a double the amplitude, and where their crest and trough meets, they cancel itself out and you get nothing.

And then if you put a screen on the other side and allow the waves to hit, you get a classic pattern that scientists recognize usually immediately, which is a kind of characteristic series of bands that represents an interference pattern. A light band and a dark band, a light band and a dark band, and that's from the waves either combining to increase their amplitude or to cancel it out. So these quantum mechanics, these scientists working on the science of the very small, they shoot the photons through the two slits and they get a wave pattern on the other side. Why does it have to be two slits? Why can't they just, what happens if they

short through one? Well that's a good question. So the problem with shooting it through just one is, well let's get back. Shooting through just one creates some interesting dynamics as well. But let's just stay with the two slits for a moment. Because the two slits would create and would be expected to create an interference pattern if you were sending a wave through, but not if you were sending a particle through. Okay, so we're kind of learning about the properties of light. So the pattern that comes on the screen

from shooting photons through the two slits suggests that the photon is acting like a wave. And that's counterintuitive, because it was thought that, you know, a photon was just this little particle of light, a single quantum, a single unit of light. So they decided to watch. Let's put an observational mechanism right at the slits and kind of observe the photons

coming through and see if we can figure out what happens. And they found that when they did that, when they observed the photons, even through an instrument, it's not like with the naked eye, but through instrumentation, basically creating a knowledge path, a knowledge path from the behavior of the photon to their mind, then the photon stopped acting like a wave and started acting like a particle.

And you got the two what yeah Yeah, yeah, you get the two slits on the screen that showed the impression of two photons. Yeah, once it was observed Well, they shoot many photons and on the other side you get you get two strips as if you shot bullets Yeah, yeah, like like a like a so you're saying that when they shot the photons and people can be watching this and they already Know this but this is blowing my mind. So it turns out Big Bang Theory didn't educate me sufficiently. So you're saying when they shoot the protons through the two, sorry, sorry, thank you, thank you. Photons through the two slits without a mechanism to observe it, it appeared as a wave, whatever the hell that is. Yeah. But when they shot the photons through the double slits and had a mechanism that did

observe it. Right. They behaved like particles. They behaved like photons? Yeah. Like photons were expected to believe. Like particles of like... What the hell is that?

Yes. Yeah. Excuse my language, but what does that... That's been the question ever since. And I think the Dr. Quantum videos that I recommend people watch on this, I think it's part of a larger video that's called something like, What the Bleep is Going On.

So this is mysterious. So it's showing us that reality is much weirder than we think. You're not kidding. In fact, I think it's Werner Heisenberg You know people may have heard of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and stuff like that, but very famous quantum Physicist I think he said at one point that not only is nature Weirder than we think it's weirder than we can think

But okay, so I understand that the photon is not accessible to the naked eye. But what happened if they tried to observe between the slits and the screen? I mean, why wouldn't it behave like a photon at that point? Why did it need a specific, whatever it was that picked it up right for it to act like a well basically basically both instances something's observing it you're a human or you got a camera right yeah so the okay the screen at the back you know they're shooting the photons through the slits okay to the screen at the back, you know, they're shooting the photons through the slits, okay, to the screen at the back, and this screen is just picking up the energy, okay, from

the photons that are being shot. And again, when the path, okay, when the path of the photons was not being scrutinized, okay? Yeah, I see. Like, you're looking away, you're not keeping track of the information the path act like a wave then it acts like a wave But what I'm saying is what if the human tried to tried to see it between the slits and the screen he can't I understand He can't but there's still an observer there, right? Well, if if who's not observing right if you if you able to observe, it would behave as a particle.

Jiminy Cricket. But basically what they found, they played with this experiment, tried to do everything they could. They thought, oh, there must be something else causing it. But all the different ways that they would set up the experiment, what they discovered is, whenever there was an, excuse me if I use the language

of philosophy, but in planning, he's an epistemologist, right? So whenever there was an epistemological chain between the behavior of the particle to the knower, then it would behave as a particle. And whenever you smeared that out, or either destroyed or didn't record or didn't look or didn't observe or whatever so that there was no Epistemological chain between the particle in the knower then it would behave as a wave

So if you put a camera that wasn't sophisticated enough to detect it, so it's still right. It's not gonna It's not gonna do it crikey. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it is pretty crazy stuff It's pretty crazy stuff And you know here's a good time for me to to to appeal to people who know this stuff much better But I recommend the works of Henry P stop. Okay stop worked with Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg Under them at Key gone and these are famous guys, you know folks that you know

No the field will recognize that those are famous guys and stop worked right under them and these are famous guys, you know folks that you know Know the field will recognize that those are famous guys and stop worked right under them And and stop has written popular books on this. This is called mindful universe quantum mechanics and the participating observer And and basically what stop argues and he knows many of the original players in the development of this field. Yeah I'll read it. What are you talking? Yeah, talking. Yeah, so it's quite a book to swallow. But what Stop argues there is he says, look, the original researchers that established the field of quantum mechanics,

and they're generally called the Copenhagen School, okay? Because they are all associated with Niels Bohr and his lab in Copenhagen, Denmark and so on. But there's the one that set up the formulas. And these formulas do work. Like you can do the math and you can predict, you can do statistical predictions about the behaviors of these subatomic particles. But the interesting thing about the behavior of these subatomic particles. But the interesting thing about the behavior of these subatomic particles is their behavior is influenced by the decisions of the observer. So what and how the observer

decides to observe is going to... it doesn't like make just anything happen, right? But it does decide within a narrow possibility of occurrences which of those is actually manifest. So in other words, the experimenter is influencing the behavior of matter and energy. And the experimenter is part of the equations. And this is mind blowing because up until the discovery of quantum mechanics, we were dealing with what's now called a Newtonian or a classical view of reality,

which is that all of reality goes down to fundamental particles, atoms or whatever, and they behave like billiard balls bouncing around and striking one another. And that's all there is, essentially. That's all what matter reduces. And so if you knew the mass and the momentum and the vector of every single particle, you could predict the future and it's all deterministic. Yeah. That's how free will sounds and it's all deterministic. That's how free will sounds like

it's explained by materialists. If we just had all the info, we would know what you wanna do. We would know, right, exactly. And so that view of the universe, that's often called a Newtonian view of the universe, or now it's called a classical view because it's a pre-quantum view, okay,

does lend itself to material determinism. And the funny thing is, even though it's a hundred years since quantum mechanics was developed, you still find probably most philosophers, as well as natural scientists, looking at the world through a classical lens, through a lens where material causality is determined, and so you don't need any ghosts in the machine. And there's nothing for mind to do, there's nothing for God to do, etc. And that's a false view. As Stop emphasizes time and again, that mechanically deterministic view of the universe has been disproven by quantum mechanics. Actually in Heisenberg,

under whom Stop worked, Heisenberg is famous for what's called his uncertainty principle. That you don't know the behavior of these subatomic particles. You can't know both, I mean technically I think Heisenberg's uncertainty principles, you can't know both the, I think it's the momentum and the position of a particle at the same time. The specifics of it are kind of inconsequential, but there's an inability for us to know everything about these fundamental particles. Can't be known, and to a certain extent, oftentimes it's not known because they exist

as waves of potentiality, and until they are are observed they won't take a single location. But when they are observed, when you create an epistemological link between the particle and the knower, the consciousness, what happens is what's called the collapse of the wave function. This realm of possibilities will collapse onto a single possibility and and will be manifest. This machine that's observing the photons. What is it like a camera some kind of? Yeah, so yeah, that's it's yeah, so some kind of camera. So when the camera observes the photons, there isn't necessarily an observer.

there isn't necessarily an observer. There's not a, like, I presume that we can have a camera take a video of this and it changes the... Right, well it records, okay? Yeah, it records, but my point is that even if no one watches the video, presumably they're acting like particles. Yeah, if it's recorded in such a way that the knower can find out, can find out, can find out. Yeah. So it's not a direct link between. Yeah, no, it's not like your naked eye. There's a change, a chain of instruments. Yeah. But if. But even that.

But yeah, yeah, it is it is truly mind blowing. Yeah. And for the specifics, you know, you know, it gets really, yeah. Oh, golly. I don't know. Don't ask me exactly what kind of. So I'm not gonna read that book. Yeah, yeah. But. That's wild.

Yeah, it is pretty crazy. I mean, all right, so what? So the upshot of that is, look, many times the argument that's made against Christianity or other theistic religions is that we don't need mind, we don't need God, we don't need spirits, we don't have free will, it's just this closed shop, okay? It's a closed system, a closed system of material determinism. And stop us saying we got to stop thinking like that. We've known that's been false for a hundred years.

Well, we've actually known that's false for like thousands of years. For more than that. It is interesting, isn't it? It's sort of like when people come up with these very complex arguments for why, like, the self, traditionally understood, doesn't exist, a la Hume, right? Or the latest atheist telling me that I don't have free will. And I'm like, you know what, I'm pretty sure that even if all the arguments are on your side, I'm still within my rights to reject what you're saying because of my immediate experience of my free will and myself. Same is true with God. I think Plantinga did a lot to make theistic belief respectable in philosophical circles and universities,

but prior to him it seems like the theist is within his rights even in the face of atheistic arguments for a similar reason for accepting free will and the self traditionally understood, to say, yeah, no, I know that God exists. And yeah, you're right, those all sound really complicated. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, Planting it has this category that he calls basic beliefs, which you might call them beliefs that are kind of self-evident. More than that.

Not just, yeah. So I think you've got a few here. You've got incorrigible, self-evident, but more than just that. Because if the only beliefs that could be properly basic are those that are self-evident, that proposition isn't self-evident, therefore that's a self-defeating proposition. So it seems to me, yeah, like the existence of other minds and things like this.

Yeah, yeah, and memory beliefs, you know, what I had for breakfast and so on. So, yeah, you don't have to have an argument for everything, and the existence of God falls into that category of basic beliefs that you don't need to necessarily have an argument. The reason he calls them proper basic beliefs are justified. I think that's the distinction, because you can have a basic belief that isn't proper. That is to say, you're not within your epistemic rights to accept it. But then you can have basic beliefs that are proper, that is to say, justified, I think

is what he means. Yeah, yeah. I would agree with that. Yeah. So, yeah. So, this is to say justified, I think is what he means. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would agree with that. Yeah. Yeah. So this is mind blowing. And this is why, you know, I'm a generalist, right? And in a layman, and I got to stand on the shoulders

of these great scientists whose stuff I can read, and I can understand what they're saying, but they're the ones doing the research. But the value in being a generalist and looking at the whole picture of this, you know, we talked about cosmology all the way, you know, from the very big, that's the whole universe, right, to the very small, you know, individual photon, is you see kind of the chorus of what nature is trying to tell us. You know, so the Big Bang points to a god, fine-tuning points to a god,

the fossil record points to a creative intelligence, and then quantum mechanics is saying, yeah, consciousness is involved in the behavior of these fundamental particles. And Stop makes the argument that that means that consciousness had to have existed from the beginning of creation, because certain material interactions are only going to take place in the presence of an observer. So you need the observer to collapse the wave of potentialities so that the wave becomes a particular point. And obviously, human observers weren't present at the Big Bang, so you have to have some

kind of other consciousness that's, hmm, I wonder who could that be? So we're seeing that far from our belief in God being contrary to the cutting edge of modern science and so on, there's a lot within the cutting edge of science that's actually supportive of that across a broad range of fields. But what I found, Matt, is that even when you get a say, when you get a doctorate in chemistry, for example, you don't need to study the fossil record to do that.

You don't have to take courses in logic to do that. In philosophy, you don't have to study the history of science, actually, to get advanced degrees in chemistry and stuff like that. So you can come out and you can, well, you just basically know your field, okay? And we're all like that. That's true of biblical studies as well.

And even in biblical studies, I find fellow biblical scholars who only really know, say, the Pentateuch. That's right, because as science advances, it's not that you know your field, it's that you know a one square millimeter as the field continues to expand. Right. And so what I'm saying is you could take a person who has a doctorate in philosophy and a person who has a doctorate in physics, and the person in philosophy might know more about the fossil record than the guy who has the doctorate in physics, because the physicist never took time to study it.

There's no more education than the philosopher necessarily. Right. But there's a common impression that if you've got a degree in natural science, you're somehow omniscient across the whole field. And that's not the case. And once any one of us get out of our silo, where we are most of us, on the level of an undergraduate education, okay?

So if I, as a Bible scholar, talk to my friend who is, say, a biologist, and we talk about cosmology, which is like, you know, Big Bang Theory, then I and he are both relying on our personal reading and what classes we may have took at the undergraduate level or something like that. Yeah, that's right. And so we're talking as, you know, and the fact that, you know, he knows how to do something in a lab and I know how to read Greek really doesn't come into play. Right. And the fact that this bring in a third party, the fact that Dawkins is a

biologist doesn't mean he knows anything about cosmology. Right. And even in biology, you can get a doctorate in biology without ever seriously studying the fossil record. If your degree just takes you in a direction that doesn't really relate to, if it's in like say medical technology or something. And so that is why I think for example,

Dawkins misdates the Cambrian explosion in Blind Watchmaker. And I don't fault him for that because, you know, when you're writing a book, it's hard to master all that, but he does. This is not really his wheelhouse, you know? So but we're forced, you know, when as human beings, we're forced to get out of our wheelhouse in an attempt to make sense of it all. Well, we're not even forced. That's just what humans do.

Right. Like I'm not an expert in anything, but I have to navigate the world, and it's within my interest to come up with opinions. And so we all do that, and we all speak as if we're infallible when it comes to things like politics. We all are pretty sure that Australia is an island.

We all hold views. Right. And no one expects us to be experts or to have firsthand knowledge of these things. It's just what we do. We can't not do it. The difference is you're relying on experts, whereas most of us don't even do that. You know, we're relying on like four steps down from the expert. But then, but yeah, but then when. But then when you do this broad survey, I think the testimony coming from all these different lines of research converge and say, hey, no, this is true.

That's what the catechism says. I was just going to look that up about these converging proofs, right? Yeah, yeah. That's fantastic. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, so for folks that want to go deeper on the quantum stuff and I know like all over YouTube there's there's there's a lot of resistance to

Understanding the quantum relapse the quantum dynamics as involving consciousness Because it's counterintuitive and there's a lot of people that like the deterministic worldview. And they want to say, no, no, quantum mechanics doesn't challenge the classical view. It doesn't challenge Newtonianism. Mason-Evans Well, yeah. I mean, they're different. This gets us full circle to the beginning of our discussion, talking about these different epistemological paradigms. Like, you know,

you can explain everything away if you refuse to let it within the size you'll grant it. You know what I mean? If you reduce everything, like Daniel Dennett tried to do this with consciousness. Right. If you don't, yeah, yeah, depending on how you're looking at something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Reductionism. Reductionism. Yeah, reductionism is dangerous because you don't get the broad scope of what's going on. But in terms of minds being involved with bodies or material reality, as Christian believers, when we have believed as Catholics in, for example, the presence of evil spirits,

the presence of evil spirits who can, you know, who in the phenomena of exorcism, which has been very well documented, you know, and Father Gabriel Amorth has, you know, a couple of books. You've had exorcists on the show. Father Lambert, who's written for the St. Paul Center or the M.A.S. Road. Yeah, yeah. So this is a phenomena that happens and obviously, you know, we don't like videotape these things for the, out of respect for the dignity of the persons involved.

But we know that disembodied consciousnesses have been observed to inhabit bodies and control their emotions, so that's a mind over matter kind of thing. One case that has been highly documented was an exorcism that took place in the Diocese of Gary, Indiana, that was documented by the Indianapolis Star, known as the Indy Star for short. And it was a mother and her two sons and a grandmother, and they were living together in a home that you and I would probably agree was what we would call haunted. And they were living in this home and they were getting supernatural manifestations from the children.

And the mom and the grandma were both interviewed on camera later describing how the children would be writhing in pain as their bodies would be distorted from the movement of whatever was controlling them, et cetera. And the mother and the grandmother who had custody of these two boys were worried that the boys were ill with something beyond what they knew, and if they didn't get them help, they might get taken away from Child Protective Services. So they took the boys to the hospital and there in the triage room in the presence of the mother, the grandmother, and as I recall there was a nurse and an orderly and maybe a security guard present. And in the presence of these adults, these boys were seen to walk backwards up

the wall and stand on the ceiling, and then jump from the ceiling to the floor. So this is observed. And the adults did what you expect of medical professionals. They ran out of the room screaming and tried to find a priest. So in any event, maybe I'm not doing justice. But anyway, the whole thing has been documented. And there's a video that the indie star produced interviewing some of the characters in this whole episode, including the mom and the grandmother and the landlord and the priest, who's from the Diocese of Gary, who ultimately performed the exorcism of the boys and the mother that granted them freedom, and that's all documented. So why am I bringing that up?

I'm saying this is a phenomena that is apparent to our senses, that's been documented by third-party observers that we're not religiously motivated, etc. And you have a phenomena that only lends itself to the interpretation of disembodied consciousnesses taking over a human body and controlling its movements. So that is in accord with the effect of consciousness on the behavior of particles, for example. It's all testifying to us that there is non-material reality out there, and that mind can exist apart from a body. So we would say as Catholics a demonic mind that can take control of a body in the case of possession. And again, documented.

But then there's other instances of minds existing apart from bodies or functioning apart from bodies. So another favorite book of mine, Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven. This is, Eben Alexander was his, I believe he's still alive, a neurosurgeon who taught brain surgery at Harvard Medical School. Okay, don't get much more exalted than that, right?

So he taught brain surgery and and then I believe I believe he retired as I understand from from Harvard Medical School and was Practicing in Virginia and he contracted an illness himself a very rare illness One of these so-called brain eating bugs very rare illness, one of these so-called brain-eating bugs, okay? And it ate the cortex, as I remember, off of his brain, which is usually fatal. For Alexander, what happened is he went into a coma, basically brain death, for a week. But while he was, you know, medically brain dead, or there wasn't any neurological activity taking place in his brain, he had an experience of what he calls heaven.

He went into heaven, he was greeted by this woman that escorted him around in the life to come, if you will. He encountered what he believed to be God, etc. He had all of these mental experiences, right? And then his family, sorry, a little choked up here, his family who were, I believe they were Episcopalians, were just praying for him, and they, so to speak, prayed him down, okay?. He recalls this experience. He got called back down to inhabit his body and he writes about it, and he writes about the whole experience. So he's having these mental experiences while he

was medically, you know, no brain activity going on. And he himself was like a scientific medical skeptic. He did not believe in out-of-body experience. He didn't believe in any of this stuff. Was not a practicing religious person himself. I believe his wife was a kind of nominally Episcopalian, but he didn't practice. But he had this experience himself. And again, I refer people to the book.

And so that's, and that, many people have had out of body experiences and near death experiences. And for more information on that, I'd refer to the work of, again, Father Spitzer. I'd also point people to Jimmy Akin's work, Mysterious World, he's done recent episodes on near death experiences. Yeah, okay, great. World, he's done recent episodes on near-death experiences.

Yeah, okay, great. Yeah, so there's many that are documented and really kind of mind-blowing, especially the ones that I believe Father Spitzer uses the language of veridical experiences. That means that the person comes back from the experience with information that can be verified. That they shouldn't have known.

That they should not have known. Like, you know, I know there's a famous case where... There's a roof on the... Yeah. A shoe on the roof of the hospital. A shoe on the roof of the hospital, kind of. Yeah, exactly. And so you have that.

So again, that's another piece of evidence. Like, why should we ignore people's testimony? Why should we tell everybody that has these experiences that they're crazy? Thousands of people have these experiences. Are they all liars? I don't think that's right. And so to have a... Epistemic humility in the face of what we don't understand

that goes contrary to our worldview, our epistemological system. Sure. It does seem like arrogance to adopt a view of reality that requires you to then say to all these people that, oh no, you're either lying or you're mistaken or this is an illusion. Religious quack.

Yeah, all of this. And what is it testifying to? It's testifying to, among other things, the presence of spiritual realities, of minds that operate apart from the body. So when we come back to this and we're doing brain research and so on, so many people working in brain research just think that, well, it's just that the mind is nothing but an epiphenomena

of the brain. That means like a worthless byproduct of the brain. So you've got the brain is doing chemical things here and it produces this illusion, which we call the mind, but the mind doesn't actually do anything. It's just the brain. Well, in light of all this other information, like quantum mechanics and out-of-body experiences

and demonic possession, it's like, why are we going into brain studies with this assumption that the mind is nothing other than an illusion created by matter and energy? That doesn't seem to me to hold water. So when you line this all up, everything from out of body experiences to the Big Bang, it's coming together to make a strong case

that there's consciousness outside of material reality, that consciousness doesn't depend on matter for its existence, that there's intelligence and purpose in the universe. Yeah. What's interesting is in the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas obviously has two arguments against God's existence. One of them isn't really an argument, right? So he's got the problem of evil, and then he has the God hypothesis as superfluous because we can account for things through, right, which he disagrees with both.

The reason I say that's not a good argument is like even if it were superfluous, it wouldn't show that it's false. Right. Kind of thing. Even if you could account for all natural things, that doesn't show that God doesn't exist doesn't seem to me. So it does. It is interesting because the more I think about it, the more I'm pretty convinced that

there is not a lot of good arguments Against God's existence. I think of things like maybe the problem of the hiddenness of God But I seem to me that's like a subset of the problem of evil But then you'll have atheists it seems to me in the face of this evidence Kind of grasping at straws because I'll say something like yes Okay, there have been near-death experiences like the ones you're talking about, but their views of heaven differ and they don't necessarily say they see Jesus and some people may even see something that's contrary to what you expect in heaven. It's like, yeah, well, so what? I mean the one thing that doesn't prove is atheism. So what does it prove? It proves that, you know, that they're interpreting their experience in different ways.

Yeah, another thing is when people say well, there are miracles that occur in other religions, why don't you give them a fair shake? Fine. I'll accept them. That's fine. Now what? Right. Yeah.

And the sorcerers of Egypt did things that I don't doubt at either because spirits can affect physical reality. So yeah. So I agree with you. But yeah, so I think when you look at the overall evidence, if you're gonna take the atheistic materialist worldview, you have to flee all this evidence. You know, you have to not explain things,

you have to explain everything away. You've gotta explain away the evidence of the Big Bang. You gotta explain away the fine tuning. You gotta try to explain away the dynamics of quantum physics. And the original life explain away the dynamics of quantum physics. And the original life. And the original life and everything. And so you're fleeing from the evidence,

making moves like the promissory materialism is like, give me time and I'll find a way to explain it. Yep. You know? And I found this in conversation. I had a long email conversation with an atheist in Virginia who lived quite close to the University of Virginia, which is in, let me get this right, Charlottesville,

I believe. And the University of Virginia is interesting actually, because they have like an institute for like near death studies or something like there. It's one of the few institutions of higher learning in the country that actually studies this kind of phenomena. And I kept presenting these kind of veridical experiences

where the person comes back with information that can be verified and so on. And I said, like, how do you explain this from an atheist materialist? And he was just very honest. He said, I don't know. Okay, fine. All right.

And that's acceptable. We cannot understand things. And we can just be honest that some data doesn't fit our paradigms. But then don't impose your paradigm on somebody else. Don't get all in my face and tell me I'm a bad person because I believe in a God. You know what I mean?

Then if you're gonna take the out that I just don't know and so on, then please, please, Bill and I too, take a live and let live approach to folks that don't share your view of reality. Does that make sense? Of course it does. Yeah, okay.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if I'm... I mean, I understand why atheists are weary of Christians in this sense. I think an atheist would be happy to say, look, you believe whatever the heck it is you want to believe. You can believe that this book that was written over the course of thousands of years is the inspired word of God, whatever. I don't think that's what they object to. I think in fairness to them, what they object to is they know that what we believe is going to eventually Interfere with them, especially as we gain political power, right? Yeah. Yeah, they're not wrong. Yeah. Yeah, that's right

It's it's the realm of politics when we have to all get together and say hey We're a community and we have to come up with rules for the community Yeah, and then if you do believe that there's a God you have a different it usually ends up And then if you do believe that there's a God, you have a different, it usually ends up influencing you to take a different view of morality, and that includes public morality. Which again, this gets back to what we said earlier,

this is why pantheists are maybe permitted. Yeah, yeah, pantheism rarely commits you to a certain moral view. Yeah. But usually personal theism typically does, because there's a sense that you're gonna have to give an account to this God. You know, there's an analogy here.

We talked about running away from reality, or at the beginning of this discussion we talked about being hit in the head with reality, and how many times does that have to happen before you realize, all right, there's something there, I've got to change how I think. This is true in the realm of morality, too. I mean, how many of us have done egregious, shameful things and then sought to, you know, justify that. Right. Like it's your fault, it's not my fault. And I mean, and even if you're not willing to say that you were guilty of that, haven't you known people, haven't you read stories of people who maybe went to their grave, you know, thinking

that they were right all along. And the point is they came up with this sort of epistemological paradigm that within it, it did make sense. Like they were the victim. They were justified in how they reacted. It's like, well, what's going to get you out of this insanity? Well, reality. There's going to be some sort of repentance. And it seems to me that there's something similar if I'm within this sort of insane atheistic worldview That it's more than just putting God up on the chalkboard until the evidence sways more in the direction of God I think the Christians are right that there has to be some sort of repentance Moral yeah laying down my arms and confessing I'm a sinner.

Yeah, I agree with you. I think oftentimes our resistance to belief in God, and resistance to belief in God doesn't need to take the form only of formal atheism. It can be true among us as Catholics, you know, in a sense of not trusting God or not taking him at his word or not really believing his word, etc. So it's kind of a, you know, so there's degrees of resistance to God's existence and his, and what he has communicated to that, to acknowledgement of his presence and his will is ultimately rooted in the will and not the intellect and it's moral, right?

But that's a sobering thought for all of us. And unfortunately, I think that many of us have probably witnessed people who have gone to their deaths not being willing to acknowledge some of the wrong and the hurt that they have done to others. And that is, you know, that's scary. Because it's like when you stand before Jesus, you're gonna have to agree with him about what the truth is, right?

And you can't stand there in front of Jesus and keep insisting that it was your wife's fault that the marriage broke up and not, you know, the fact that you had an affair or something like that, or any number of examples that we could give, right? And so, you know, and so this, it frightens me because if you can see somebody else, you know, he's kind of living in a cocoon, you know what I mean? Yes.

And then I say, boy, am I in a cocoon? Oh, that terrifies me. Right. And that's why I'm thankful for the resources of the Catholic faith. I'm thankful for the sacraments. I'm thankful for confession. I'm thankful for spiritual direction. I'm thankful for all these like- The writings of the saints. Right. The sanest people who ever lived. Right. And then the anchoredness of this universal church. And our universality helps us, even apart from all the graces that God gives to

His one true church, just the fact that we're so many different cultures and we can kind of balance each other out so if one culture gets into like a collective cocoon, right, and I think it's like, hey, you guys are nuts, okay? Yeah, like the Germans. Right, exactly, all right. The rest is because, hey, come on, get with reality, right? And I was like, hey, you guys are nuts, okay? Like the Germans. Right, exactly. All right. The rest is, hey, come on, get with reality, okay? And so that helps us. And of course, there's obviously the graces and the promises of our Lord is ultimately because we could get in one common human group think, and that's what happens at the Tower of Babel, right? All of humanity gets into a group think in Genesis 11, right?

But God breaks through to that. But Matt, what I'm saying is that we need to really lean into the sacraments, especially the sacrament of reconciliation. We need to take advantage of the opportunities for spiritual direction, for fraternal correction that are present in the universal church as well as in the local church. And like you said, the writings of the saints, the catechism, okay?

And try to live and believe in communion with the rest of the church, because it's an antidote to the danger of the bubble, right? Yeah. Of not allowing reality to break in, yeah. This has been so great, and I'm so grateful for your time and all that you've shared. What are, I've already mentioned my book,

Does God Exist, A Socratic Dialogue and the Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas. I mean, you've got mentioned my book does got exist, a Socratic dialogue in the five ways of Thomas Aquinas. What, I mean, you've got a million books here, but give us just a couple. You've written a book here. Yeah, I've written a book. So this book, yes, there is a God and other answers to life's big questions. Obviously you can see a little bit of inspiration from flu's book. But I was taking is, is try to, you know, flu's conversion and break it down into stick figures.

And that's my level. Thank you. Yeah. And make it just easy and lighthearted, deal with some very, very serious subjects in a lighthearted way. So that book deals with heaven and hell, you know, how good a good God send Send anybody to hell but but basically the book asks three questions. Why God?

Why Jesus why the Catholic Church and? Knowing that I only have people's attention for a few moments in this, you know social media internet age This looks wonderful. Yeah, I try to break the basic arguments down into like a single page, a page and a half. And I know that folks that are, you know, deep into different areas of science and philosophy aren't gonna be satisfied with just a page, a page and a half, but I gotta keep things moving, right?

It's not gonna satisfy them. I need to present the trajectory in a quick way. There's value in going quickly through the stages of thought and not getting bogged down too much at any one level so you can see it all in one grasp. But I eventually try to make the argument that there's good reasons to think there's a God. There's a good, once you believe that there's a God,

there's a good reason to think that Jesus is the best spokesman of God in human history. And once you believe that Jesus is the best spokesman for God in human history, there's a lot of good reason to think that the Catholic Church has done the best job of retaining fidelity to his teaching. Sheldon Van Ocken. Familiar? He has a beautiful poem, probably has many, and there's this one stanza that comes to mind between the probable and proved their yawns a gap afraid to jump we stand absurd then see behind us sink the ground and worse our very standpoint crumbling desperate dawns our only hope to leap into the shuttered word which to leap into the word which opens up the shuttered word, which to leap into the word, which opens up the shuttered

universe. I love that. That's beautiful. Isn't that lovely? Oh, allow me to applaud. Yeah. That's very, yeah, just this idea of like, where am I going to go? Like, what are my options? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's, you know, that's gotta be a leap. Like we're talking about on the, on the face, on the cover of the book, there's, there's two people, one's my alter ego and then the end of the reader. And we're on the planet earth. We're on the cover of the book, there's two people, one's my alter ego and the reader, and we're on the planet Earth, we're on the third rock from the sun hurtling through space.

We have limited time, we've gotta make a decision. Yeah, that's right. That's the point, and so what I'm trying to say is, common sense interpretation of the facts, but I'm trying to say that, common sense does lead us though, I think, to the Catholic Church, actually. All right, we should wrap up. This has been so fun. Thank you very much. Thank you, Josiah. All right. Thanks, Matt.