The Eric Metaxas Show - Sarah Salviander (Encore)

Episode Date: September 7, 2022

Astrophysicist Sarah Salviander provides a fascinating conversation about the intersection of science and religion and how recent discoveries overwhelmingly point to an Intelligent Designer of the universe. (Encore Presentation) 

Folks, welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m. Investments.com. Eric Mettaxas show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Hey there, folks. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. We like to talk about everything on the show. It's called the show about everything. And everything includes a lot of stuff. stuff. For example, science, I love to talk about science to scientists. My new book coming out in the fall called Is Atheism Dead has a gigantic section. I mean, most of the book almost I think is about

faith and science. And I've discovered astonishing things, things that most people have no idea about. And in the course of my research, I stumble on various scientists and things that I had known before. One of those scientists is Sarah Salvander. She is an astrophysicist, but who isn't? Let's be honest. And she is in Austin, Texas. She, it is, who is my guest today. Sarah Salvander, welcome. Thank you so much. Am I pronouncing your name correctly? Yeah, you are. Right on. Okay. That's really my goal in these interviews. You're an astroviathan. You're an astrovis. Not many people that I know of can can legitimately say, yes, I am an astrophysicist. So anybody who's an astrophysicist, you want to say, how did that happen?

But especially if it is a woman to whom I'm talking to, I'm all the more intrigued because, as we know, women tend to be underrepresented in the sciences, at least so I've been told. So what is your story? Where did you grow up? and how did you find your way into being an astrophysicist? And then later on we'll talk about God and black holes and all that amazing stuff. But tell us your story. Okay, yeah, I grew up in Canada. I'm actually American, but my parents moved us up to Canada at a young age.

They were atheist, socialist, kind of political activist types. They wanted us to grow up in a more secular atmosphere. And so we were raised, atheist, my brother and I. And at a young age, I became a space junkie. I'm going to credit Star Wars and Star Trek. This is the stuff that I grew up with. Just absolutely fell in love with space. And for a long time, I wanted to be an astronaut.

But when I realized that actual space travel involved very uncomfortable conditions and wasn't at all like being on the Starship Enterprise, I kind of gave that up. You said I'd rather wait 500 years until they work out those kinks because I don't want to be cramped in a capsule, right? Yeah, so it's incredibly uncomfortable conditions, not glamorous and exciting at all like you see in the movies. And so I decided that I wanted to explore space in a different way, which is through science. And so I became dedicated to the idea that I was going to become some kind of a space scientist, either an engineer or a scientist. Tried engineering first, didn't really like it.

And then majored in physics and just absolutely fell in love with it. And I was lucky enough to get a summer intern position at UC San Diego, working for the center of astrophysics and space sciences, got to do some cosmological work. Big Bang, astrophysics just loved it. I knew that's what I wanted to do. So I went to UT Austin, got my PhD in astrophysics. Wow. So you were at UT Austin for a while then? Yes.

Yeah. So I got my PhD there. and then I stayed for another nine years as a research scientist. Okay, so I'm just fascinated. You know, when you say that you were fascinated yourself, you were fascinated with space. So this was at a fairly young age. Oh, yeah, yeah.

I think I was, you know, nine years old. And did you have friends or was that part of your family culture or was this just you? It was just me. Nobody else in my family had any interest in that. My brother was totally fascinated with airplanes, and he became an aerospace engineer. I was the only space junkie in my family. But that's still sort of close.

At least it's kind of interesting because, you know, aerospace engineer and space and all that kind of stuff. But it's just fascinating to me. And you said God was not part of your upbringing. So you were a secular scientist. So yeah, completely. You mentioned off the air that as a scientist, there was science that somehow led you to faith.

I'm particularly interested in this because I was mentioning in my upcoming book, Is Atheism Dead? I couldn't believe how much in science in the last, let's say, 40 years, has been shattering of the secular materialist paradigm. I just was so amazed that the more we know, the less we're able to have faith, that there is no God, so to speak. So how did that happen for you?

You know, Eric, you're completely right about that. It's the opposite of the God of the Gaps thing. It's the atheism of the Gaps. And really, it started when I was an undergraduate. There were various things that were starting to chip away at my atheistic worldview. And one of them was as an undergraduate student, I tried to reason my way to a moral system that looks kind of like the one that we have now, you know, just what I didn't realize was the Christian morality.

And I tried to reason that from first principles from just an atheistic, naturalistic worldview. Couldn't do it. Found that very disturbing. But really, the crack came when I was at that internship at UC San Diego. And I'm doing this cutting-edge research. You know, this is the stuff that takes you out of the center of massive science. You know, this stuff we all learn in school that we've known for hundreds of years. And now I'm learning things that nobody has ever.

learned before. And it occurred to me that it just seemed very improbable to me that a naturalistic universe would be this easy to study, that it would yield up its secrets like this, that we could ask sophisticated questions about it. You know, because we're looking at stuff, trying to answer the question, how much normal matters in the universe as opposed to say dark matter, exotic things like that. And the fact that we could ask these questions and expect to find an answer just blew me away. And I remember I was walking across that beautiful La Jolla campus and I stopped dead in my tracks when I realized that the best explanation for this is that there is a God. And right on the spot, I became a Theist, just not even expecting it. Okay, obviously Theist means you believe that

there was some creator God. But was that uncomfortable for you because you came, you know, out of a Canadian socialist, atheist background. Was it also, let's face it? Also, let's face it, the scientific community is famously leans secular, and it's often uncomfortable for people in that community to talk about any kind of faith, even something as anodyne as theism. Did you feel that at all? No, as a matter of fact, I just felt like a thousand pounds

have been lifted for me. I was filled with joy at the idea, I think partly because any good scientist, It's going to be happy when there's an explanation that makes sense. So it not only solved, for me, the scientific problem, the problem that Einstein talked about, that it's a miracle, that the universe is intelligible. What explains that? Well, God explains that.

But also, the morality issue that I've been struggling with, it answered that as well. I felt happy. You know, I didn't even consider, I was naive at this point. I didn't even consider that this was going to be in odds with much of the scientific community. I was just happy. Sometimes it's really helpful to be naive. Just want to point that out. Yes.

But, well, I want to come back to this at some point, but I want to get back into your study of the discovery of black holes and some of the science. When you said you got involved in cosmology, you major in physics. At what point do you get into cosmology? And for my audience, who doesn't know exactly what that is, what is cosmology? Cosmology is the study of the overall structure and development of the universe over time. So you probably know my friend Hugh Ross or know his work. Yes. I've met him several times. Yeah, he's a dear friend, and he was the first person that made me understand the meaning of the word cosmology.

And so what kind of work were you doing in the field of cosmology? As an undergraduate researcher, I was studying the chemical complex. position of the very early universe because this is a sensitive test of the Big Bang model to figure out how much normal matter there's in the universe, how much processing of these elements has occurred since the early days after the Big Bang. So that's kind of where I cut my teeth in scientific research. Let's hit pause there. Folks, I'm talking to Dr. Sarah Salviender, astrophysicist. We'll be right back. It's the Eric Mattaxas show. In case you haven't been paying attention, the Biden administration has caused a financial crisis and they have no clue how to fix it. Oil prices have skyrocketed. And when oil prices go up, the cost of transportation and shipping spikes leading the prices of goods to rise. And when we're already seeing record inflation, that's the last thing we need. Our economy is in trouble and you need to take steps to protect yourself.

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You've decided to stop shopping or doing business there, but did you know that you most likely own stock in those companies through your 401Ks, IRAs, and other investment accounts? Folks, this is a huge problem, and we need to do something about this to send a message to Wall Street through our investments. You need to go to inspireadvisors.com slash Eric and get a free Inspire Impact Report. This biblical investment analysis will educate you on what's really in your investment accounts, like companies paying for abortion travel. You need to go to inspireadvisors.com slash Eric to connect with an InspireAdvisors financial professional who can run your report and help remove companies paying for abortion travel today. Go to inspireadvisors.com slash Eric. That's inspireadvisors.com slash Eric. Advisory services are offered through Inspire Advisors LLC, a registered investment advisor with the SEC. Hey there, folks. Welcome back. I'm talking either to Vanessa Redgrave or Jolie Richardson or perhaps to Dr. Sarah Salviander astrophysicist.

Sarah, if I can call you Sarah, my producer, Albin, when he heard you talk about cosmology, he thought it was cosmetologies. Because I know what that is. And I said, no, no, it's not cosmetology, Albin, it's cosmology. But the great Greek root, cosmos is the same for both because cosmos refers to the material and to appearances and the surface and whatever, but we don't have time to get into that. So you're, you get into cosmology and you start, break this down for my audience because I just learned this fairly recently about how, for example, our son has to be a third generation star and for the elements that we have, which are, you know, sophisticated, complex elements, they couldn't have existed initially after the Big Bang. It took several generations of them being created in the

furnaces of these stars, which then exploded. I mean, because a lot of people just aren't aware of that, and I'm only recently aware of it. Yeah, it's fascinating. You know, I love all of this stuff, and this is something, and Hugh Ross has addressed this, this idea of why do we need a universe that's so vast and so old to give rise to human life. So old, that's actually the key, isn't it? Like, if it hadn't taken three generations of stars being formed and exploding, there's no way for us to have these complex elements. I mean, what are some of the complex elements that we have that we take for granted

that didn't exist in the first generation of stars? Okay, so you think about there's this acronym that we learned in college. It's honk, H-O-N-C. These are the elements necessary for life. hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon. And so hydrogen, of course, we get very quickly after the big bang, but these other heavier elements necessary for life. And certainly the metals and all of these things like calcium and magnesium and things

like this, you're not going to get that until you get these later generations of stars. These stars that process the lighter elements into the heavier elements than the stars either explode or through red giant winds will expel this heavy. your material back into the universe. The next generation of stars is born from this material, and this is how we get the stuff that we're made out of. You know, like Carl Sagan said, you know, we're star stuff, and we literally are. I love that idea.

I love that idea, but I make fun of the way Carl Sagan kind of glosses over. In other words, he believes there's only the material universe, therefore there is no meaning. But his PBS audience couldn't swallow that infinitely bleak. idea. So he makes it sound magical. And he says, we're, you know, we're made of the stuff that the stars are made of. But he doesn't say that the stars are just gassy orbs. It's just gassy. He doesn't say that. He kind of makes it sound magical. But for us, there is magic in it. But, you know, that idea that all of the things that we take for granted, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, they're complex. We know they didn't exist in the early the universe and it took several generations of stars to form. And you know, you think, yeah,

why couldn't God just create the universe? And I guess he could have, but he chose to do it this way. And it took billions of years, literally before the Earth and our solar system could form. You know, most people don't learn this. Or if you learned it in school, you forgot about it. But you're studying this on a very deep level. Oh, yeah, yeah. And I find it fascinating, too. And there was this movement, hundreds of years. and I think Isaac Newton was part of it called volunteerism, which is this idea that God could have created any sort of universe he wanted. He chose this one. And so as scientists who believe in God were kind of obligated to study the universe to learn more about God, why did he choose this universe?

And I don't really have an answer for that, but it's still fascinating. So where did cosmology take you? And how did you get into the study of black holes and the discovery of black holes? And I guess I also want to ask if you can describe for my audience, because a lot of times we say, oh, it's a black hole in the universe. What's a black hole? You know, since the 80s has been part of pop culture. But talk about that for a moment. Okay.

What are black holes? They are literally holes in space time. So you can think of space time. It's kind of difficult to picture this, but it's a three-dimensional, actually four-dimensional, flexible fabric. It's the whole stage in which the actions of the universe are set. And so you can imagine something like the sun being embedded in the space time, and its mass creates kind of a warp. It creates some curvature, and this is what leads to gravity.

Now, you can imagine something that becomes more massive and more compact and dense, and it's going to create even more of a severe warp. Well, what if you get something that is infinitely dense? Well, you're going to get something that creates pretty much, just a hole in space time that i've not heard it put that way and that takes it to the next level and makes me understand it better so thank you but let's skip let's skip time for a second and let's just talk about space we have something like our son or some giant star and i guess uh i'm to understand that over time which means over billions of years that star will collapse

in on itself so talk about that so a state so a star like our sun isn't going to end in a spectacular way like that. It's going to become a white dwarf and just puff off its outer layers. But something like a more massive star, like Beetlejuice, which we think could go supernova any day, very massive star. Its core is going to collapse. It's going to become very dense. It's going to become a neutron star for a while, at least.

And so this is something that's got all of the mass of several suns compacted down to the size of a city, like the size of the city of Austin. Okay, so this is incredibly dense. This is really just amazing. So you're saying that the gravity of a star, so we can picture our sun except much bigger than our sun. The gravity, of course, is so powerful that it's inconceivable to us. And you're saying at some point that gravity of the mass

begins working on that star itself. In other words, we're not talking about it's attracting things from a distance into its orbit, but it's sucking itself down into its core. And this process has been observed and it happens. And so that process means what? First, it's a super giant or what did you refer to it? I'm sorry. Yeah, so a star, when it starts to reach the end of its life,

it becomes unstable. A normal star during its lifetime is really just a very exquisite balance between gravity trying to crush it inward and the radiation pressure from the inside pushing outward. And for most of its life, it's an almost perfect balance. When it runs out of material in the core to fuse, to create that outward energy, gravity starts to get the upper hand and crush it down.

So gravity starts to win that battle. And so you get something that's more and more dense. It becomes absurdly dense. I mean, it was so crazy that scientists at the beginning, beginning of the process of discovering black holes literally could not believe it. They just refused to believe that something like that exists. Yeah, I think I was reading in my research that Niels Bohr and some companion, some grad student were just doing the math. And that's when they came upon this idea. So this is like in the 30s or something like that. And they were themselves

blown away at that idea. And they began postulating this. And as you say, common sense rejects it. it's just, it's too much to believe that the sun could be crushed down, you know, to the size of whatever, a few buildings or something like that. You think, how dense, how dense is that? And is it so dense that the atoms themselves begin to be crushed? Yeah. And so it was actually Chandra Sakear, an Indian scientist who came to the United Kingdom to work on this with Arthur Eddington. And so first he started with white dwarf stars, which is what will be the end project. of our sun and very compact.

And then if you crush something like that down even further, yes, you get the protons and the electrons effectively combining to create neutrons. And so you get just a giant ball of neutrons. And this was what happens if a much more massive star reaches the end of its life. But I mean, this is fascinating to a non-scientist, the idea of atomic structure being crushed. It's not conceivable to me. and you're saying that you no longer have protons and electrons, just neutrons. So when you say neutrons, we're talking helium, hydrogen, what is it?

Is it not even that? A neutron, it's a nuclear particle. So you have protons, neutrons, electrons. Protones and neutrons are nuclear particles. They're in the nucleus of the atom. The proton, a number of protons is what determines what kind of element you have. So hydrogen is just one proton, helium is two protons. And you can also have neutrons in that nucleus.

And so that will determine what kind of isotope you have. So you can have helium three, which is one neutron, helium four, which is two neutrons. And so a neutron is just a neutrally charged particle, unlike a proton or an electron. But you squish a proton and electron together. You can get a neutron, a zero-charged particle. It's just a massive nuclear particle. Okay, so it's just particles. It's not even any kind of simple atoms anymore.

Right, it's just a particle. Okay, you're freaking me out, Sarah. I think we better go to a break, Albin. I'm going to get some smelling salts, and we're going to attack this, folks. We're going to do this together. Don't go away. Swinging down the street so fancy free, nobody you meet could ever see the loneliness there. Inside you need a dead Georgie girl.

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Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Sarah Salviander, astrophysicist. Sarah Selvianer, you were just describing to us the process of how these massive, massive stars suck themselves down, their own gravity crushes them down, down, down, down, down, to become neutron stars. But some of the largest ones keep going. This is where it gets inconceivable. So gravity, there's no way around it. The mass is the mass. The mass doesn't change. So the gravity doesn't change.

But the power of the gravity of something like this to do this, eventually, as you said, goes past neutron stars down to what we call black holes. So do we know how many black holes are on the universe, roughly speaking? Yeah, I did the calculation for this chapter in my book. and quintillions is my estimate. If you estimate how many massive stars there are in a typical large galaxy like our own that will end up as black holes, and then not to mention the supermassive black holes are at the core of each of these galaxies and how many galaxies out there host them.

It's about in the quintillions, in the observable universe. Quintillions. That's kind of a big number. So we'll just skip past that. This is amazing stuff. So at what point did your study of black holes and the discovery of black holes, that history, lead you to be thinking about God? So I actually study the big, big brother of these stellar mass black holes, super massive black holes. These are even more mysterious because nobody knows how these things form.

they are millions or billions the times the mass of our sun they lurk at the cores of most galaxies that we've observed and sometimes when they become really active they're kind of like volcanoes they can be dormant or they can be active and when they have material to feed on

shredded up stars gas that gets dislodged from somewhere in the galaxy and they spiral down and feed this monster and it lights up and it becomes so bright that we can see them from billions of light years away. These quasars, as they're called, are what I became really fascinated with. So, so quasars are a version of black holes? Is that what I'm picking up?

They are super massive black holes that are actively feeding on material. And basically, they're the exploding cores of galaxies, super extreme. This is, but you're saying we don't quite know how they formed. Is that what you're saying? We don't know how they formed. They're so massive, they're so large, and we see them at such early points in the development of the universe that there's not enough time for them to build up gradually from smaller black holes. They just seem to show up. We don't know where they came from. That's actually, I've not heard that. That is really amazing. I mean, the term quasar has been around at least since the 60s. I only remember that because we had a TV that was Quasar by Motorola.

That's right. And so Quasars were kind of popping up, you know, in our cultural vocabulary, you know, over 50 years ago. But you're telling me that even now, we don't know how they formed. In other words, the basic idea of how a monster star begins to shrink down. It takes billions of years. You're saying that these quasars are so big that we can't even comprehend. In other words, do we know the original object? Can we postulate the original object from which,

it evolved, so to speak? One idea is that you get what are called seed black holes that are hundreds of thousands of times the mass of the sun that just sort of develop very early in the universe of I don't know by what mechanism. It's not really known. We haven't figured it out yet. That's pretty amazing that we don't know that. I'm amazed just to hear that because I thought we kind of figured this stuff out. So you were studying those things, which do. sound just beyond our comprehension. They are behind our comprehension at this point, but it was

studying that that somehow made you think about God. What was it in that process? So we were trying to study the chemical abundances of the universe very early, not long after the big thing. What that requires is for us to look at a light source. You can think of a cosmic light bulb behind these primordial gas clouds that we're trying to study that'll light it up so that we can see what's in there chemically. And so we use quasars because they're even more distant than these primordial gas clouds. They're extremely light.

And I was just thinking all of the things that had to fall into place in order for us to answer this question, that we can identify chemical elements by their spectra, that we can find these cosmic light bulbs that are just the right distance, the right brightness for us to see them. To me, it just seemed highly improbable that this all happened by chance. Why is the universe so intelligible?

Why is it so orderly? Why is it so beautiful? And to me, immediately, the answer that came to mind was God. That makes the most sense. When you talk about quasars as being essentially supersized black holes, but you say that they give off a lot of light, I thought that black holes were so strong that they sucked light into themselves. How are Quasars different?

That's a good question. I get asked that all the time. The really interesting thing is that you have to get super close to a black hole before you cross that point of no return, the event horizon. Now, as material spirals down onto this black hole, you can think of, say, water going down to drain and your sink, it just spirals down and then it goes in. Now, because the gravity near a black hole is so extreme, this material gets super sped up almost to the speed of life as it's spiraling in. It's very viscous. These layers are just kind of rubbing up against each other. It becomes superheated to the point that it shines very brightly just before it plunges into the black hole.

And that's what we see. Yeah, this is so amazing. Folks, we're talking to Sarah Salviander, astrophysicist. And by the way, I'm not an astrophysicist. We'll be right back. My Pillow is having their biggest sheet sale of the year. You've all helped build My Pillow into the amazing company it is today. Now Mike Lindell, inventor and CEO wants to give back exclusively to my listeners.

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Click on the radio listener square and use the promo code Eric. This offer will not last very long. They're known to sell quickly. So order now with promo code Eric at mypillow.com. promo code Eric at my pillow.com. Hey, gang, we're talking science. It's the Eric Metaxis show. My guest is astrophysicist Sarah Salvander in Austin, Texas.

Sarah Salviander, you were talking about growing up in a atheist home. And then through your study of science and the universe as a physicist, astrophysicist, cosmologist, coming to faith in a god. Did that startle your parents initially? Did you share that with them? Yeah, in fact, it startled my dad a lot. I had the sense that my mom was drifting back to her faith. Both of my parents were raised Catholic,

and I had the feeling that my mom was going back to that with time, but my father was still very staunchly atheistic. And, yeah, it surprised him a lot, but he was intrigued. And so we talked about it quite a bit over the years as I developed in my religious beliefs. And I'm grateful for that. We got to talk about that. And at what point do you make the leap from believing in a creator god like Anthony Flew or others? They say the science leads me to believe that there had to be an intelligent designer somehow,

but I don't know who it is or whether it's even a who. At what point did you make the leap into who it might be? Okay, yeah, that's a good question. I purely by chance walking for a bookstore, found a book called The Science of God by Gerald Schroeder. And I remember looking at the title thinking, well, I'm into science and I believe in God now, so maybe I should read this.

I love Gerald Schroeder. I can't believe you're mentioning him. Yeah. Tel Aviv, scientists, Jewish. We've had him at Socrates in the city, and he's written some amazing books. The Genesis and the Big Bang was the one that I bumped into first. But so you just stumbled.

on the book by a man who doesn't believe in Jesus, but he does believe in the God of the Bible. Yes. And so I have one of my lecture titles is how a Jewish physicist brought me to Christ. This book was amazing. So he's an applied theologian. He's an MIT trained physicist, so I respect his credentials,

and I'm reading this book. And it explains how you can take the Genesis account of creation very seriously from a scientific point of view. And the way that he reconciled the age issue and then also showed that the events that Genesis 1 lists are scientifically testable and they're true. And I spent probably a good two years studying this. I tracked down every source that he listed. I really went through this.

And by the end of it, I realized that not only was God the best explanation for the universe, but the biblical God was the best explanation. And it was at that point, you know, this idea that when you're ready, the teacher appears, and I met a pastor just completely randomly. And we're talking and I explained to him, I'm a graduate student at UT. I'm becoming an astrophysicist. I believe in God. You know, I'm starting to read the Bible. And he said, well, are you interested in becoming a Christian? And I said, you know, I'm open to it.

And he invited me to his church to come and take some classes and to start reading the New Testament. And that was the turning point. And I did. I read the New Testament. I was very compelled by it. Very compelled by the Gospels. I read Lee Strobel's book, The Case for Christ. And I realized that just leaped out.

And I realized that I was very compelled by the story of Jesus, by this idea of forgiveness, of redemption. I realized I believed it, that the account of it was credible. And I thought at that point, I really have no choice. but to become a Christian because all of this is true. That's when I became a Christian halfway through my doctorate. So did you get any pushback from colleagues? Because, again, that's a startling thing in some scientific circles.

I didn't talk about it very much with my colleagues. I didn't hide it, but I didn't really advertise it because at that point, I had lost my naivety and realized that I was in very much a secular atmosphere. and I was concerned because I still had this idea from my childhood that people perceive Christians as being kind of anti-intellectual, you know, a little bit backwards in their thinking. And I knew at that point that wasn't true, but I didn't want people thinking of that, thinking that about me. And so I really just didn't advertise it very much at that point.

Well, you mentioned, I think, before that it was your study of Genesis that helped you believe, that the Bible was an accurate account, scientifically speaking. And I guess you're referring to the first chapters of Genesis and the creation account. Is that what you mean? Genesis 1. Genesis 1. Talk about that. It's amazing.

You look through there, and people fixate on such small details in there, not realizing. What you really need to do is read other mythological accounts of the creation of the universe. So like the Anoumi Lish, the Babylonian account, completely different, filled with accounts of warring monsters and gods and horrific violence. And then you compare that with the austerity and the matter-of-factness of Genesis 1 talking in a very stepwise fashion about how God created and developed the universe. And it's in the correct order. We start with the creation of the universe. You start with an initial state of chaos and undevelopment, and then God very gradually causes these things to form.

You get the development of the earth, the oceans, the continents, marine life. I think there's plant life first, then marine life. Then you start to get land animals, you get mammals, and then you get humans. That is absolutely the correct order. How could somebody thousands of years ago, without the benefit, without all of the scientific knowledge that we have, how could he possibly have known that? I mean, this is about when Homer was writing the Ili and the Odyssey.

It's kind of, or actually, no, it's the time of the events of the Ili. It's before that. It really is. This is a major argument. You rarely hear this, but that in all of the various creation accounts, you mentioned the Babylonian, there are scores of these creation accounts of how the world coming to being. Half of them involve, you know, flaming serpents coming out of eggs and, you know, Tammuz eating his children or whatever it is. I mean, is these crazy mythological stories that we all

know are somehow have nothing to do with science. But you're describing in Genesis a series of things that are perfectly consonant, amazingly consonant with what we now know and didn't even know 150 years ago. That's correct. How could somebody during this age, thousands of years ago, have possibly know this information. This is when I realized that Genesis is a legitimate miracle. Folks, you want to see a miracle? Anytime you want, open it up to the first page of the Bible. It's a living miracle.

But what do you know? You're just an astrophysicist. We want to get somebody qualified on here. Alvin, get us some scientists on the program to discuss this. Or I think actually astrophysicists, are they scientists? They are. I apologize. Folks, we'll be right back with astrophysicist and scientists, Sarah Selby and Derr. Folks, I'm talking to astrophysicist. Sarah Salviander, Sarah, it's really amazing to hear you talk about some of these things because you are yourself a scientist.

You're a lifelong scientist dedicated to the study of science. You tell us how your study of science led you to believe there's some creator and then eventually to believe it's the God of the Bible. You just talked about Genesis 1. Why do you think we don't hear about this more often? because this is a kind of slam dunk argument, and it strikes me that people who are dedicated atheists have to be wriggling uncomfortably at this point.

Oh, they do, and I encounter this on social media all the time. I'm quite active on Twitter, and this is something that I like to just bring up over and over, because I think we've been kind of spellbound to not see the miraculousness of Genesis 1. And so I bring this up. It's the only account, it's the only mythological account, that list these events and list them in the correct order.

And I've actually calculated the odds of that. I've counted 27 separate testable statements in Genesis 1. You want to know the odds of someone just guessing that in the correct order by chance? It's one out of 10 billion billion. In other words, not by chance. It was not luck. Wait, billion billion, is that quintillion? That is, I don't know what that is.

A billion billion. I think it's septillion. It's even more. It's crazy. It is one followed by 18 zeros, ladies and gentlemen. Kind of a big number. Wow. So honestly, this is taking you on the path that you're on where you talk about faith and science.

Where can people find you? I'm on Twitter. That is my main hangout. Just look me up, Sarah Selbyander, on Twitter. But you do have a website, I think. I do. Sarah Salvi-under.com that leads to different portals. I've got my blog, which I have not been actively maintaining because I've been writing a book.

What book? Tell us about this book. So this is a book. It's mostly aimed at high school and college students, but obviously it's going to be something that's readable by anybody. And it's how to defend your Christian faith against the most common scientific attacks. when will that book be coming out since you're writing it now i've got to submit the manuscript in a few months so hopefully within about a year yeah well we've got to have you on uh to talk about that and because this is just all very important the more i've studied it the more i've become

absolutely astonished at how clearly science is leading us to faith and it's the anti it's the opposite of the narrative we've been fed, you know, all of our lives, basically, and, you know, going back to Darwin, practically, that the more science teaches us, the more it pushes out the need for God. And then something flipped and suddenly it's going in exactly the opposite direction. And I don't even think, I don't even think it's logically contestable, which is a strange thing to say. But the evidence is so overwhelming. I only think that it's an issue of getting that information out to the public, which is why I wrote my book, because I said, most people don't know about this. And it is just something that's developed rather recently. That's correct. Absolutely.

It is astonishing and people need to know about this. Well, it's just wonderful finally to get to meet you, even if it's via Skype or Zoom. We'll have to have more conversations. This is very important. I want to get the word out. I'm glad you exist and people can find you, sarasalviander.com, or you can follow her on Twitter or you can follow me on Twitter and I retweet Sarah Salviander. Sarah, once again, thank you for coming on the program and for all you're doing. Food for the Poor is an amazing Christian nonprofit relief organization. They go where there is a need. And I just want to tell you right now, they are helping families who have fled the Ukraine. These are people that are suffering. We want to help them. God bless you as you give.

844-863 hope, 844-863 hope. These are people that are struggling, and we need to do what we can to help them. 844-863 hope, 844-863 hope. Metaxistalk.com. 844-863 hope or go to metaxus talk.com. God bless you.