Truth Unites - Why Joe Rogan Is "Sticking With Jesus"

Episode Date: September 10, 2025

Gavin Ortlund looks at Joe Rogan’s comment about "Sticking with Jesus" and shows how the Big Bang, fine-tuning, and science itself point beyond naturalism.Truth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/X: https://x.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

In this video, I want to argue that science not only hasn't replaced God, but by its very nature, it never could. What started me thinking about this recently is some comments that Joe Rogan made. Terrence McKenna out of a great line about the difference between science and religion is that science only asks you for one miracle. I want you to believe in one miracle, the Big Bang. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a good one. It's a great line. It's because it really is true.

And it's funny because people would be incredulous about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. but yet they're convinced that the entire universe was smaller than the head of a pen, and for no reason than anybody's adequately explained to me makes sense. Yeah, no. It instantaneously became everything. Yeah, yeah. Okay. I can't buy that.

I'm sticking with Jesus on that one. Yeah. Jesus makes more sense. And I find very sensible here this sentiment that believing in the supernatural, for example, believing in Jesus looks more coherent than thinking of. a naturalistic explanation for the origin of the universe. Of course, you could think of other options other than Jesus as a possible, you know, like a different religion or something like that. But let's talk this through. Fascinating sentiment there, and I think Joe is on to something.

Here's the quote from Terence McKenna that he gave. Every model of the universe is hard to swallow. There's always a place where the argument cannot hide the fact that there's something slightly fishy about it. The hard to swallow part that's built into science is the Big Bang. Then he discusses the Big Bang. Then he discusses the Big Bang for a while and says what the philosophers of science are saying is give us one free miracle, and we will roll from that point forward from the birth of time to the crack of doom. Well, I say that then if science gets one free miracle, then everybody gets one free miracle. So what he's opposing here is this idea that science explains the world with reason and evidence and empirical data, whereas other worldviews like religions, for example, have to invoke the supernatural. And McKenna is basically saying, no, every worldview has to invoke the supernatural. No worldview on the market is entirely explicable in terms of empirical observations,

rational deductions, cause and effect that's observable, and so on and so forth. Let's put these words back up and remember these as we go. Every model of the universe is hard to swallow. Now, I've thought about this in relation to the fine-tuning argument, because the biggest response to the fine-tuning argument is the multiverse theory, but we don't have any empirical proof for the multiverse. So either way you go there, you've either got the universe fine-tuned for life because of design, or the universe appears that way because there's this unfathomable number of parallel universes that you can't observe. Either way, you're not just looking through a telescope

to see the whole of reality. Either way, you have to posit things that you don't have empirical scientific evidence for. Again, every model of the universe becomes hard to swathe. at some point like this. There's no non-mysterious way to look at the world. I have a video that goes through that on the fine-tuning argument more. But here, what Joe Rogan is bringing up, and McKenna brought up, is the Big Bang. If you want to try to look at the world just through science, you hit a wall when you get to the Big Bang, because you have this question of why did it pop into being to begin with. I'll never forget when this was impressed upon me, when I can't remember when I, maybe a college student, and I was reading Stephen Hawking's book, A Brief History of Time.

And at the very end, I was blown away by this. I couldn't believe it. He's talking about the grand unified theory that's going to explain the entire universe. And he basically says, to paraphrase what you see on the screen here, even if you can get that, what breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? Final sentence, why does the universe go to the bother of existing? That question is still on the table. In other words, words, even if we knew everything about the physical universe, that wouldn't explain why it's here to be known in the first place. So like McKenna said, you still need to sneak in one miracle to get to that point. Now, I don't personally like to argue for God from the Big Bang, because you have to get

into these other possibilities, and it gets really technical. The idea that maybe the universe was produced by another universe theories about a self-creating universe and all of that, you get, it gets really dense. There are three main kinds of what we call cosmological arguments or arguments for God is the first cause. The Kalam argument is what most people are familiar with. And that comes from medieval Muslim philosophers. That has to do with the origins of the universe. In our day, we see the Big Bang. And then there's the Leibnizian arguments from the philosopher Godfreyed Leibniz, and this has to do with the principle of sufficient reason. Don't worry about that for now. And then you get Thomistic arguments, especially the first three of his famous five ways of proving God.

And my favorite is Thomas's third way, which has to do with contingency. Because what this shows us is that even if the universe came from a different universe, even if you had big bang after big bang after big bang, universe from universe from universe going back on and on and on, it doesn't take the problem of contingent being off the table. You still need to explain why is that which is not necessary here. And this is why a lot of people who even though they do believe in an eternal universe that's always been here still find the need for an unmoved mover. And that's Aristotle's view. Aristotle thinks there's an eternal universe and you still need an unmoved mover. Nonetheless, I still like thinking about the Big Bang. Even if it's not the best way to put the focus in a technical cosmological argument, it's still worth seeing why this was such a disturbing idea in the history of science as it's bubbling up in the 20th century. The term Big Bang was first coined by one of its opponents, Fred Hoyle, famous astronomer. He was giving a radio address in March 1949. He's trying to account for the

fact that, you know, this amazing discovery going back to the 1920s that our universe seems to be expanding. And he's advocating for a steady state model in which new matter is continuously being created as galaxies are moving away from each other. And he sets that theory in contrast to one of the major rivals, which he described as the view that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past. And that's where this label, the big bang, starts to get traction. And Hoyle hates this idea.

For him, the idea that the universe had a beginning is pseudoscientific and irrational. and it's too similar to creationism. Obviously, it kind of, you know, it's going to bring to mind things like Genesis 1-1 and so forth. And for several decades there in the mid-20th century, you have this competition between the Big Bang Theory, steady-state theory, other ideas. Eventually, despite Hoyle's protests, the Big Bang theory wins out. And this leads to all kinds of theories about an initial singularity, which represents the boundary of space-time itself.

In 1970, Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose proposed one model, becomes very popular, that is contested, and there are other various models, and I try to work through this a little bit in my book, why God makes sense in a world that doesn't. But the core claim that our universe traces back to an absolute beginning, and therefore has a finite history, has been pretty standard since the 1960s, even if it's sometimes contested. And you get into these conversations like Lawrence Krause's book, a universe from nothing, I have a whole video on that book as well, and you get to the end of the book, to summarize my video there, you get to the end of that book and you realize you're not really talking about nothing when you say a universe from nothing,

but watch my full video for the case on that. Here I just want to observe how devastating it was to so many scientists in the history of science, you know, because what this discovery does is it reinforces McKenna's point that Joe Rogan was emphasizing that everybody has to sneak in, at least one miracle. Let me explain this. In his book, God and the Astronomers, the distinguished physicist and astronomer Robert Jastro, talks about how disturbing the discovery of the origins of our universe was in the 20th century, because many felt that it sort of violates our trust in the sufficiency of natural causes. Because science is trying to explain the world in terms of natural laws, but natural laws are formulated in relation to space and time, and therefore they can't apply to the singularity at which space and time

break down. The Big Bang opens this possibility of reality outside of the purview of what you can explain by science and even what could be explained by science. And Jastrow talks about how if any scientist really examined the implications, he would be traumatized. Now, Jastrow is an agnostic. He doesn't any belief in God, but note how he closes the book. You may have heard this quote. 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. In order to appreciate this point, what we have to understand is what the Big Bang really represents.

it doesn't mean, the Big Bang doesn't represent, you know, some prior physical reality, like a cosmic vacuum or a state of minimal energy and then matter starts exploding outwards. We sometimes conceptualize it like this. Here's how the physicist Paul Davies puts it, and he's helping us think that's true. He's also an agnostic, by the way. He's got a great book on these things. He says, people often misconstrue the Big Bang as if it were the explosion of a concentrated lump of matter located at some particular place in a pre-existing void. And this is why it is so hard to wrap our minds around this. The Big Bang is not the beginning of matter within space and time. The Big Bang represents the beginning of space time itself. And at least on the standard model, I know all these points will get contested

here and there, but in the big picture, on the standard model, before the Big Bang, there was literally nothing. And therefore it is, you know, it's almost impossible. In fact, I think it is impossible to try to conceptualize this, because we can't imagine nothing. When I try to think of nothing, my mind goes to blackness. I just think of a bunch of empty black space. But that's something. Blackness is something, opposite of whiteness. And blackness requires space in which to exist and time in which to exist. And the different of conceptualizing pure nothing, what philosophers actually mean by nothing, can help us understand how mysterious is, it is, how provocative it is, how disturbing it was for scientists

to imagine the universe coming into being from nothing. Paul Davies, like Robert Jastrow, is an agnostic himself, but listen to how he puts it. The significance of this result cannot be overstated. People often ask, where did the Big Bang occur? The Big Bang did not occur at a point in space at all. Space itself came into existence with the Big Bang. There is a similar difficulty over the question, what happened before the Big Bang. The answer is there was no before. Time itself began at the Big Bang.

As we have seen, St. Augustine long ago proclaimed that the world was made with time and not in time, and that is precisely the modern scientific position. A lot of people look at this and they say, you can understand why people are looking at at this and saying, this kind of sounds like the old idea of a creator God makes a lot of sense. Like that seems like one candidate on the table that would have an explanatory power for what we're looking at here. And that's my sense as well. The Big Bang does not prove that. There's number one there, as I'm trying to leave allowance for here, there are competing models. And that's difficult to rule all them out. It gets really complicated. But the point is, it seems like everybody

needs a miracle. It seems like no worldview on the market is reducible to just naturalistic causes, as McKenna put it, every model of the universe is hard to swallow. Final question. Some might say, okay, but why do you need God per se? Why can't you just say the universe itself is the miracle? Granted, we all have to have something supernatural, something miraculous, something that is to say, using these words colloquially, something that we can't explain purely in terms of natural cause and effect and so forth. But why does it need to be God per se? And I have a whole video that tries to address this. It's about the objection, if everything needs a cause, what caused God, which is, I think, a common misunderstanding. Briefly to summarize here to finish this video, the answer here has to do

with what we mean by the word God. The universe is a hugely complicated array. of different entities, characterized by highly specific laws and conditions that seem like they could have been different. And it looks like it did have a beginning point in the finite past. God, by contrast, is held to be a singular, simple, necessary being. He is held to be infinite, lacking any limitations, and absolute. And therefore, by his very nature, he's a better candidate for the one miracle that everybody needs, for the stopping point of explanations. He's a proposal that makes reality itself less arbitrary than any other possibility. Everybody has got to have a brute fact somewhere or some way, but this is the one that's going to be

the least arbitrary. I like how Josh Rasmussen puts this in a slightly different context. I find his words helpful here. He says, theism helps us identify a relevant difference between explained things and the unexplained foundation of reality. Theism says that the supreme reality is fundamental in virtue of having a supreme nature. Otherwise stated to reiterate, everybody needs a miracle, everybody needs something unexplained that you cannot explain in terms of other things. It's just there. But the best candidate for that kind of entity is an infinite and simple and

necessary being, basically what we call God. By the way, this is one reason why the doctrine of divine simplicity is so important and why I continue to advocate for that. I think sometimes we don't realize just how important that is. So my summative conclusion and appeal would be, I think theism out-competes any alternative at explaining reality itself. And that is why, at least comparing it to a naturalistic alternative, I'm with Joe Rogan. I'm going to stick with Jesus too.