We are looking at the Kalam argument, and we are on page 298 in the book here. I'm going to sort of repeat what we went through last week in terms of looking at the scientific confirmation. And we began, but we didn't really get into it. And so it bears repeating. The philosophical arguments for the origin of the universe are sound, as we've argued. But the main reason why most people believe that the universe had an absolute beginning is because of the scientific evidence. And so I look at this evidence as confirmation of what we've already concluded. So that even if the scientific evidence started going in a different direction, that wouldn't keep me from believing the universe had a beginning, what you would have to do is debunk the philosophical arguments to get me to think that the universe was eternal. But of course, it's always great to have scientific confirmation. And this is our first foray into science apologetics. Up to this point, we've looked at no real scientific facts which point to God's existence or an origin of the universe or anything like that. And I'm going to repeat this quotation from Craig and Sinclair. where they summarize sort of where science has come and sort of where it's heading. But this is what they say, prior to the 1920s, scientists had always assumed that the universe was stationary and eternal. In other words, the clumb argument was just not persuasive to most people in history. And we've even looked at that too. Tremors of the impending earthquake that would topple this traditional cosmology were first felt in 1917 when Albert Einstein made a cosmological application of his newly discovered gravitational theory, the general theory of relativity. In so doing, he assumed that the universe is homogenous and isotropic and that it exists in a steady state with a constant mean mass density and a constant curvature of space. To his chagrin, however, he found that general relativity would not permit such a model of the universe unless he introduced into his gravitational field equations a certain fudge factor, lambda. in order to counterbalance the gravitational effect of matter and so ensure a static universe. Einstein's universe was balanced on a razor's edge, however, and the least perturbation, even the transport of matter from one part of the universe to another, would cause the universe either to implode or to expand. By taking this feature of Einstein's model seriously, the Russian mathematician, Alexander Friedman, and the Belgian astronomer, Georges Lemaitre, were able to formulate independently in the 1920s solutions to the field equations, which predicted an expanding universe. So the point is, is that as early as 1917, we're starting to feel the pinch of quite possibly a universe that does have a beginning. And I say this, Einstein's general relativity sans his cosmological constant, which he would later say is the biggest mistake of his career, predicted the expanding universe, the implications of this being deduced by Friedman and Lemaitre. On this Friedman-Lemaitre model, as time moves forward, the distances separating the matter of the universe become greater. And this is what Craig and Sinclair go on to say. They say, it is important to appreciate that as a general relativity-based theory, the model does not describe the expansion of the material content of the universe into a pre-existing empty Newtonian space, but rather the expansion of space itself. You have to get that in your heads and think about that for a minute. When we talk about the origin of the universe, we're not talking about, well, let me back up and just say, most of us have a picture of the universe that goes like this, the picture of the Big Bang. You're looking out into this black, empty space, and then you see a light, and that's the Big Bang. It's not the right way to look at it. Because space itself began at the beginning, and therefore it doesn't begin in a pre-existing space. It is the beginning of space. It is the beginning of time. So it's not like God is looking at his clock going five, four, three, two, one. That takes time. And there is no time before the beginning of time. So the fact of the matter is you cannot imagine the beginning of the universe because in order to do so you have to do it just like I said, look into sort of some black empty space and see it appear. But it doesn't do that. The black empty space appeared too. So there's no way for you and your mind's eye to picture this happening. And this is where abstract thinking comes in. You have to think about mathematical models for this. That's all we can do. But picturing it in your mind is just not going to work. This, according to John Wheeler, marked a tremendous turning point in science. And this is what he says. Of all the predictions that science has ever made over the centuries, was there ever one greater than this? To predict. and predict correctly, and predict against all expectation, a phenomenon so fantastic as the expansion of the universe. Now, I'm not going to follow Craig and Sinclair's very technical treatment at this point, and you're welcome to read their essay. This chapter will prepare you for it. What I'm going to do is I'm going to follow Robert Jastrow. I believe he died an atheist. He was an atheistic astronomer. He had no religious acts to cry on, obviously, when he wrote his book, God and the Astronomers. In fact, he says this, His personal views on the question of God's existence are close to those of Darwin who wrote, my theology is a simple muddle. I cannot look at the universe as the result of blind chance, yet I see no evidence of beneficent design in the details. But Jastrow does go on to demonstrate that five independent lines of evidence, the motions of the galaxies, the discovery of the primordial fireball, the laws of thermodynamics, the abundance of helium in the universe, and the life story of stars point to one conclusion all indicate that the universe had a beginning. And so we're going to look at his presentation in this book, God and the Astronomers, as we go through this. So we're going to first look at the motions of the galaxy. What does it mean to say that the galaxies are in motion, and how does that imply the beginning of the universe? Now, Just over 10 years after Einstein introduced his fudge factor and all of that, and then you have Lemaitre and Friedman in the early 1920s coming up with their models, we finally have empirical confirmation of the expanding universe in the late 1920s when Edwin Hubble observed through a 100-inch telescope that the light from every galaxy in the observable universe is redshifted. Now what that means is that light, like sound, has a Doppler effect. The next time you stand on the side of a road, notice that the sound of an automobile coming towards you has a high pitch. You've heard that, right? And then it passes you, it shifts to a low pitch. Yeah, that's the Doppler effect. Light behaves similarly. As light moves towards you, it is blue shifted toward the color spectrum. and as it moves away from you, it is redshifted. Hubble observed that the light from every galaxy in our universe, Andromeda is the exception, is redshifted. In short, Hubble saw what Einstein's general relativity had predicted, namely, the universe is expanding. Simply put, this means that the universe today is bigger than it was yesterday. The most reasonable explanation that could account for such a phenomenon is the same one we give to bits and pieces of shrapnel leaving a grenade after it detonates. In other words, the cosmos exploded into existence about 14 billion years ago in an event now known as the Big Bang and has been expanding ever since. If we were to travel through the past in a time machine, We would see the universe getting smaller and smaller until the whole cosmos is shrunk into an infinitely dense point called the singularity, where all natural laws governing the cosmos break down. Such a discovery has made the idea of the universe coming to existence from nothing very probable, if not undeniable. So y'all see what he saw. Y'all understand this argument. It's just an empirical observation that the light from all the galaxies is redshifted on the color spectrum. And therefore, the conclusion is that we live in an expanding universe. And this is one of the great confirmations of general relativity. So, OK, I understand you're saying that it's redshifted. What does it mean? What is the shifted part? That's the part. Sorry, I mean, you're saying? Yeah, as light moves towards you, it has a blue tint. And as it moves away from you, it has a red tint to it. So it's just a red, we call it the red shift. Except Andromeda. Yeah, Andromeda's heading towards us. It should collide with us in about a couple billion years. And everything else is moving away from us. Yeah, everything's just... By the way, it's funny, isn't it? Because that means that, in a sense, our galaxy is the center of the universe. Because every galaxy is the center of the universe. It's really easy for people to just kind of not think about this, and they just go about their day. But if you really think about it, it cooks your noodle for a while. I've spent many a night really just thinking about all this and going, wow. Physics has really demonstrated that something incredible happened. The universe came into existence. Now, what is the alternative to this? Well, the first alternative to the origin of the universe was the steady state hypothesis. The discovery of the expanding universe immediately called for an explanation that avoided an absolute beginning of the cosmos. By the late 50s, three astronomers, Thomas Gold, Herman Bondi, and Fred Hoyle, offered an explanation of how the universe could be expanding and still remain eternal. Their solution is now known as steady-state cosmology, which postulates new matter being continually created out of nothing and by nothing in an unknown region in space. As newer bits of matter are brought into existence, they eventually condense into clouds of virgin matter, which then evolve into stars and galaxies. These new galaxies fill in the void left by the movement of the other galaxies, implying that the cosmos is constantly renewing itself. And so our universe is never going to die. So how are we doing so far? By the way, it was Fred Hoyle that gave the alternative view, the name the Big Bang. So he was making fun of the theory. He goes, ah, you just believe that it all just popped into being like a Big Bang. We believe in the steady state theory. And so in the early 1950s, it was sort of up in the air as to which one was right. Is it the Big Bang theory or is it the steady state theory? Alexander Vilenkin, professor of physics at Tufts University, notes several reasons why no one now believes the steady state model. And this is what Vilenkin says. He says, the Cambridge physicists, Gold, Bondi, and Hoyle, admitted that they had no evidence for the spontaneous creation of matter, but the required creation rate was so low, a few atoms per cubic mile per century, that there was no evidence against it either. They further defended their theory by pointing out that continuous creation of matter, in their view, was no more objectionable than the creation of matter all at once in the Big Bang. Let me go to the footnote at that very point and point this out. Some proponents of steady state cosmology, such as Fred Hoyle, believe that there is a cause of the existence of matter, namely previously existing matter. At this point, as this points to the initial implausibility of the theory, this does point to the initial plausibility of the theory, at least for those who accept our philosophical arguments for a beginning of the universe. For steady state cosmology leads us back to the problem of an actually infinite number of events occurring. Matter from eternity bringing matter into existence. This, as we have seen, is impossible. Fractional infinities cannot exist, or at least does not adequately describe the universe we live in, for it's impossible to traverse an infinite number of moments to reach the present. Hence, Hoyle and his colleagues were wrong to suggest that the theory was no more objectionable than the Big Bang theory. This is where philosophy would have helped in this discussion. Indeed, there were philosophical difficulties entailed by it even before the scientific problems began to surface. So going back to the Lincoln quote, he says, in fact, the term Big Bang was coined by Hoyle as he ridiculed the competing theory in a popular BBC radio talk show. It did not take long, however, for the steady-state theory to run into serious problems. The most distant galaxies are seen as they were billions of years ago, because that is how long it takes for their light to reach us. If the steady-state theory is correct, and the universe at that time was the same as it is now, then these distant galaxies should look more or less the same as the galaxies we now see in our own neighborhood. With more data, however, it became increasingly clear Far away galaxies are actually quite different and show distinct signs of their youth. They are smaller, have irregular shapes, and are populated with very bright, short-lived stars. Many of them are powerful sources of radio waves, a trait much less common among the older, nearby galaxies. There seemed to be no way in which the observations could be explained in terms of the steady-state theory. As Sherlock Holmes used to say, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. The prospects of the steady-state theory were getting dimmer, and with no other viable alternatives in sight, attitudes began to shift. Physicists were gradually coming to terms with the picture of an evolving universe that started with a bang. And then finally, a second, more devastating piece of evidence surfaced, which not only refuted the steady state hypothesis, but gave further support for the Big Bang theory, which is the discovery of the primordial fireball. So this is our first line of scientific evidence is the empirical observation that the universe is expanding. The steady state model is offered as a competitor to this, and we've already seen that there are big problems with it. Then a devastating, refutation of the steady state model. This is why this next line of evidence, this primordial fireball, is the reason why you don't have steady state cosmologists anymore. Because even when they were observing these older galaxies and they were having a hard time with it, you were kind of like, well, we're having a hard time with this, but that doesn't mean it refutes the theory, right? But this was the fact that overturned steady state. Just after World War II, physicists Ralph Alpher, Robert Herrmann, and George Gamow predicted that if the universe really did come into existence from a gigantic explosion, the radiation produced from such an event would resemble fireballs that form whenever a hydrogen bomb explodes. While the brilliance of the fireball would decrease as the universe expands, There would always be an imminent, or excuse me, a remnant of such a fireball as long as the cosmos remained in existence. Okay, so that's the prediction. Now, this is an important point because when you give a scientific theory, your theory has to make future predictions about the way we're going to observe the universe. That's one of the hallmarks of a scientific theory. All right, so the Big Bang theory, Or you can even say at the time it was given, it was just a hypothesis. But they said, OK, well, what we do is we predict that in the future, we will somehow discover remnants of this explosion that occurred billions of years ago. Well, some 20 to 15 to 20 years later, In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, two physicists at AT&T Bell Laboratories, detected the cosmic fireball radiation that Alpha and Hermann predicted, thereby making one of the greatest discoveries in 500 years of modern astronomy. Their discovery revealed that the Earth is bathed in a faint glow of radiation coming from every direction in the universe. The discovery of Penzias and Wilson was further confirmed a few years ago when a satellite measured the radiation spectrum again. The satellite showed that the spectrum of background radiation detected by Penzias and Wilson agrees perfectly with the predictions postulated by Alpher, Herriman, and Gamow. And it confirms a picture of the beginning of the universe with remarkable scientific and philosophical implications. By the way, Penzias and Wilson got the Nobel Prize in physics, or science, one of the sciences. I guess it's physics. And one of them was interviewed, and I can't remember which one it was, Penzias or Wilson, but this is really great. They just stumbled across this. They didn't go out looking for it. In fact, there were physicists at Princeton trying to find it. They were trying to find the background radiation. And when the guys called Princeton, they actually called the physics team at Princeton to come check out what they were experiencing, that's when the head of the department says, boys, we've just gotten aid because they beat us to it. They beat us to the punch. Well, they did it by accident, whereas the physics team was trying to find it. And so it was really, it was a really interesting story. And this was the discovery that led Hugh Ross, who is one of the leading Christian apologists in the world today, Hugh Ross became a theist in the wake of this discovery. This was the discovery that confirmed the Big Bang theory. By the way, there is a contribution that steady state cosmology did give to our understanding of the universe. The steady state model suggests that all of life comes from stars. And it's true. That's what you and I are just, we're all stardust. So when a star comes into existence, when it explodes, it sends out all those heavy elements all across the universe. And then gravity pulls itself together again to create another star. That star exists for billions and billions of years. And then it cooks up everything it has. And then when it runs out of all the helium and hydrogen, we start seeing the creation of iron and all the heavy elements. And then those are exploded out again. So you have to go through the life story of stars on several rounds before you can even have life in this universe. This is why the universe has to be billions of years old. It has to be, given the laws of physics. Now the question is, why all the irregularities? One of the questions often posed by critics of the Big Bang is that if the cosmos expanded or exploded into being, would we not expect an even distribution of matter and energy throughout the universe? And is it not the case that Penzias and Wilson's discovery of the background radiation guarantees the expectation to be true? How do we explain the incredible unevenness of matter and energy if the background radiation is evenly distributed throughout the cosmos. In other words, far from a smooth distribution, our universe consists of clumps of matter here and there, separated by empty space. And so while the cosmic background radiation is the proverbial nail in the coffin for steady-state cosmology, it has sometimes been thought to have had the same effect on Big Bang cosmology. For if the Big Bang cannot explain the uneven distribution of matter throughout the cosmos, than it is, at the very least, a questionable hypothesis. Then I say here, enter the greatest discovery of all time. Some scientists say that what I'm about to discuss with you is the greatest discovery of all time. The great conundrum of the Big Bang doubters was answered in 1992 when the Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite, the COBE satellite, revealed that the background radiation, though extremely even, had just enough irregularities of an extremely minute amount to account for the formation of the clumps of hot matter that formed into our universe's galaxies. These irregularities are called wrinkles by those who led COBE. And these wrinkles in time are responsible for the formation of the galaxies and solar systems that make life possible. Now I'm going to read for you the observations of George Smoot. And I'll make comments here and there, but George Smoot who led the COBE team makes this observation. And this is a very interesting thing. He actually gives you kind of the history of our universe from its beginning to when the Earth is about to form. And so what we're getting at here is that we actually know the story of our history all the way from just a millionth of a second after the Big Bang happened all the way up to now. We pretty much know the history of the universe. We know the story. That's incredible. That's incredible that we know this. And, yeah. Oh, really? Yeah, the Big Bang. I don't watch that show, but at least I don't watch all the episodes. So on Big Bang Theory, Somebody mentions George Smoot. He has a cameo. That's awesome. All right, this is George Smoot. He says, for me, the moment marked the culmination of an 18-year search, and for cosmology, a major milestone on the long journey to understanding the nature of the universe. Very simply, he says, the discovery of the wrinkles salvaged the Big Bang theory at a time when detractors were attacking in increasing numbers. In fact, a year before this, Eric Lerner wrote a book called The Big Bang Never Happened. Yeah, so Eric Lerner, a physicist, he writes this book, The Big Bang Never Happened. The Big Bang Never Happened. That's a pretty bold title. But he thinks he's got the evidence against it. And one of the arguments is, you would expect a smoother distribution of matter if the Big Bang were true. He says, the result indicated that gravity could indeed have shaped today's universe from the tiny quantum fluctuations that occurred in the first fraction of a second after creation. When Stephen Hawking commented that we had made the most important discovery of the century, if not all time, he may have been exaggerating, but it was still momentous. Before the discovery, our understanding of the origin and history of the universe rested on four major observations. First, the darkness of the night sky. Now let me comment on the darkness of the night sky. This is an interesting thought. Have you ever wondered why the night sky is dark? Most of us are like, well, the sun goes down, of course. The light bulb goes and disappears in the horizon. Well, I'm going to read what I have in this footnote. As we have indicated throughout this chapter, the majority of scientists and philosophers in history, or throughout history, have insisted that the universe is eternal. Indeed, it is infinite in space and time. The only serious objection brought against this idea before the 20th century was the paradox of the night sky. As astronomer Hugh Ross explains, Edmund Halley in 1715 calculated that the night sky would be bright, not dark, if the universe contained an infinite number of stars. So if the universe really is infinite in space, then the night sky would not be dark. That's an interesting point Yes, they're just there's an infinite number of stars out there and so eventually they would just They would just flood the lights. There'll be no darkness ever Why? Because the apparent brightness of any light source diminishes by four times for every doubling of its distance. Assuming evenly spaced stars, every doubling of distance increases the volume, and hence the number of stars, by eight. Thus, the received starlight doubles with each doubling of distance. Continued indefinitely, Haley reasoned, the accumulated starlight must be infinite. So why is our night sky dark instead of bright? In 1744, P. L. de Chazot, and then in 1823, Heinrich Olbers, presumably resolved this paradox by hypothesizing the absorption of light in an interstellar medium. When the first photographs of the Milky Way taken late in the 19th century revealed dark, cloud-like structures next to dense clusters of stars, their hypothesis seemed confirmed. Final proof that starlight indeed was dimmed appreciably by these interstellar clouds was given in 1930 by Robert Trumbler. But Trumbler. So that was the way to resolve the paradox. But that is an intriguing paradox, right? Why is the night sky dark? I mean, this is great. This is what physicists, this is why we need these guys, right? The scientists are thinking about things in a way that we would never think of them. So that was the first major observation. The night sky is dark. Second, the composition of the elements with the great preponderance of hydrogen and helium over the heavier elements. Now let me go to the footnote there. Where do all the heavy elements in our universe come from? Why is there carbon and iron? Why isn't the universe wholly composed of hydrogen and helium? There is a sense in which both the Big Bang Theory and the Steady State Hypothesis are correct. For the Big Bang tells us that the light elements, most notably hydrogen and helium, came into existence at the Big Bang. while the heavier elements were cooked in their nuclear reactions of stars. And so it is correct to say that some of the matter in our universe is currently being created, as long as we mean by matter the heavy elements. It is being created in the stars. To be sure, elements heavier than hydrogen and helium only make up less than 2% of the matter of the universe. The history of our universe is one in which stars have lived out their lives, cooked up all the heavy elements in our universe, and then going supernova, thereby exploding all of these heavy elements into space. Had this process not occurred for billions upon billions of years, I would not be here to write these words, and no one would be around to read them. Alright, so that's the great preponderance of hydrogen and helium in the universe. So, what are our first two observations? The darkness of the night sky and the preponderance of hydrogen and helium over the heavier elements. The third observation is the expansion of the universe. And that was discovered, predicted by Einstein, discovered by Hubble. And then fourth, the existence of the cosmic background radiation, the afterglow of a fire creation. That's Penzias and Wilson's discovery. The discovery of the wrinkles that were present in the fabric of time at 300,000 years after creation becomes the fifth pillar in this intellectual edifice and gives us a way of understanding how structures of all sizes, from galaxies to superclusters, could have formed as the universe evolved during the past 15 billion years. The evolution of the universe is effectively the change and distribution of matter through time. moving from a virtual homogeneity in the early universe to a very lumpy universe today with matter condensed as galaxies, clusters, superclusters, and even larger structures. We can view that evolution as a series of phase transitions in which matter passes from one state to another under the influence of decreasing temperature or energy. We are all familiar with the way that steam on cooling condenses. This is a phase transition from a gaseous to a liquid state. Reduce the temperature further, and eventually the water freezes, making a phase transition from the liquid to the solid state. In the same way, matter has gone through a series of phase transitions since the first instant of the Big Bang. This is incredible. At a ten millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, after the Big Bang, that's 10 to the negative 42 seconds after the Big Bang, the early moment about which we can sensibly talk, and then only some suspension of disbelief, all the universe we observe today was the tiniest fraction of the size of a proton. Space and time had only just begun. And then he says this, remember, the universe did not expand into existing space after the Big Bang. Its expansion created space-time itself as it went. The temperature at this point was 100 million trillion trillion degrees. That's 10 to the 32 degrees. And the three forces of nature, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces were fused as one. Matter was undifferentiated from energy and particles did not yet exist. By a ten billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, inflation had expanded the universe at an accelerated rate a million trillion trillion times. So at 10 to the negative 34, The universe expanded 10 to the 30 times, and the temperature had fallen below a billion, billion, billion. It had fallen below 10 to the 27 degrees. The strong nuclear force had separated, and matter underwent its first phase transition, existing now as quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons, electrons, and other fundamental particles. The quark is the smallest thing we've ever discovered. And so quarks began to exist at 10 to the negative 32 seconds after the Big Bang, or I should say 10 to the negative 34 second after the Big Bang. The next phase transition occurred at a 10,000th of a second when quarks began to bind together to form protons and neutrons and antiprotons and antineutrons. Annihilation of particles of matter and antimatter began, eventually leaving a slight residue of matter. All the forces of nature were now separate. The temperature had fallen sufficiently after about a minute to allow protons and neutrons to stick together when they collided, forming the nuclei of hydrogen and helium, the stuff of stars. This soup of matter and radiation, which initially was the density of water, continued expanding and cooling for another 300,000 years, but it was too energetic for electrons to stick to the hydrogen and helium nuclei to form atoms. The energetic photons existed in a frenzy of interactions with the particles in the soup. The photons could travel only a very short distance between the interactions. The universe was essentially opaque. When the temperature fell to about 3,000 degrees at 300,000 years, a crucial further phase transition occurred. The photons were no longer energetic enough to dislodge electrons from around the hydrogen and helium nuclei, so atoms of hydrogen and helium formed and stayed together. The photons no longer interacted with the electrons and were free to escape and travel great distances. With this decoupling of matter and radiation, the universe became transparent and radiation streamed in all directions. to course through time as the cosmic background radiation we experience still. The radiation released at that instant gives us a snapshot of the distribution of matter within the universe at 300,000 years of age. Had all the matter been distributed evenly, the fabric of space would have been homogenous, resulting in a completely uniform cosmic background radiation. Our discovery of the wrinkles reveals that matter was not uniformly distributed, that it was already structured, thus forming the seeds out of which today's complex universe has grown. All right. Well, how do you explain this? Well, I mean, if you don't want to say that the universe had an absolute beginning, how do you explain this? This is an incredible story of how we all came into existence. It sounds like it dovetails with natural selection. How so? Well, the quarks are going to bind with the protons and the neutrons, and it starts from there. I mean, you end up with a lot of the, you know, you're starting with matter. Well, we're starting with an origin of matter. So matter comes into existence. Right. But there's no survival value in this. The natural selection is a law of biology that says that things will seek their own security and survival. And so the law of natural selection, as some people want to call it, the theory of natural selection, is that the reason certain biological features evolve in any species is due to survival. Whereas those things that are useful for my survival will continue, and those that are not will fade away. But this is all impersonal. And there's nothing living here. So if you want to use that as a metaphor, that's fine. But that would imply, would it not, that there's a creator guiding the process? I think it makes a better argument for a fine-tuning of the universe. Because if you look at how all this is going to happen, any of these calculations change in any way. And then everything's completely different. And probably non-existent. Yeah. So. You're right. I guess I'm trying to follow the process to where we are now. If we're going all the way back to quarks and the beginning of time, space, and matter, and it takes billions of years to form these planets before we're even here, then you know, I guess in thinking about the way I grew up, you know, God created the heavens and the earth, and it popped out was a totally different, you know, way that I was raised. I was raised to think that, you know, hey, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and here it is, and now we're showing, you know, that there's a long line of things that happened before around it, and I guess I'm using natural selection as the words to describe how this process has happened until we get to the point where there's humanity. Right. And then you start to ask those questions about why, you know, are we here and all of those things. And I can see, maybe you got bored, but you don't just matter if you wanted to create somebody in his own image, you know? Right, yeah. I don't know, because it doesn't the Bible say in Genesis that it was in the beginning, which was not a beginning. I don't follow that interpretation. I believe that Genesis 1 is actually giving the very first event in the universe. That's what Moses is trying to convey in those words. I don't want to deviate too far from where we are. There's some people who try to say that since there's no definite article there in the phrase, in the beginning, it could be translated in a beginning. And so the idea is that, well, God never had a beginning, so he's just going to arbitrarily call this the beginning. Yeah, Dawkins wants to take natural selection, which is a law of biology, and just transport it into a cosmic law. Yeah, the cosmos is not found as Darwin. So he thinks that we can just sort of magically take natural selection, which by definition can't exist until life exists. And he wants to just extrapolate from that and just transported it to the development of the universe. And that's just unwarranted. I mean, he's going to have to come up with all kinds of reasons other than that his atheism demands it. I mean, Smoot, I have no idea what his religious views are. I'm taking everything he says at face value, not only because it's so compelling, not only because he's cited the evidence for it, but also because I don't know of any physicist that would deny what I just read to you. I mean, what Smoot is giving you is the basic story of the universe's evolution from its absolute origin to to now, and smoothed himself a saying, space and time began to exist. Now this is an incredible thing, I mean, and forget the design of it and all of that, we know the story. The very fact that we can sit here and talk about this is amazing, but we know the story of how the universe began to exist. Yeah, if we have a beginning, then that's a starting point. Very good. So between Smoot and Dawkins, there's the distinction between science and scientism. Right. And now again, I don't, Smoot may personally hold to the philosophy of scientism, but your point is well taken. Smoot is just like, hey look, we discovered this and it's amazing. Dawkins seems to have an agenda now to find the cosmos as Darwin. Maybe I should use the word evolution as opposed to internationalism. What I'm giving you is evolution. It's stellar evolution. That's what we're looking at right now. The evolution of the universe. But that doesn't bring into play biological evolution. I mean that, you would still have to, that is an open thing to talk about. But clearly we see stellar evolution going on. Can you go from stellar evolution to biological evolution? That would be a question to raise. But before I go forward, questions? Any other insights? We're on page 305. And so having read that long quotation of Smoot and he gives that basic story of the hot Big Bang model and how it's been vindicated by the COBE discovery. It sounds like a lot when you look at the fractions of time involved. Yeah. And how fast it happened. It was almost instant. Yeah. The coming into it didn't take time because it was the coming in of time. What he basically just talks about is the first 300,000 years of the universe's existence. The COBE background satellite basically gives you a picture of the universe as to what the universe looked like when it was a mere 300,000 years old when it was just a baby. And it basically shows the structure, how the background radiation was. If you watch, by the way, if I'll back up, if you watch any documentary on this that's well-informed and all that, Neil deGrasse Tyson has a series on the origin of the universe, which is excellent. But you can just see this. You can just see the picture of the universe as it was and how the background radiation was already being distributed, wrinkled, if you will, so that the distribution of matter would be the way it is. And so what this did is it saved, it basically answered the great question, why isn't the universe more homogenous? Why are we dealing with clumps of matter? When I was in seminary, I ran into young earth creationists all the time who would say to me, you can't believe in the Big Bang because, you know, clumps of matter, et cetera, et cetera. And I would cite this and they would look at me perplexed and walk away angry at me. Um, sometimes, and sometimes they would just yell at me. One guy in particular just really got mad at me for saying, I believe to the big bang happened. And, um, Oh, one of your fellow theology students. Yeah, yeah. That was a two-hour conversation that I would never want to repeat. It was torture, because evidence didn't really seem to wash with him. And he had this reputation. He was the guy that would, if you were a professor advocating a certain theory of textual criticism, He actually held to one of these very obscure views of textual criticism. And he would argue with the professor over it. Everything was a battleground for him. Because if any little thing fell out of the way, then his whole theology crumbled. And he had that kind of outlook on life. He missed the point of apologetics. Yeah, well, apologetics was not really his cup of tea. like that divisive spirit that's so combative is a little out of line with what we see in Scripture as well. I agree. I agree. What drove me to pursue this was 1 Peter 3.15. And you know, I always got the first part of that, but you know, you have to read on. Sure, yeah. You can't get the second sentence because without it, you know, it's like you're just going to get out there and you're going to, you're going to fight for your point, but you're not going to change anything. Right. And the first rule of any seeker for truth is to follow the evidence where it leads. And if this is where the evidence is, then we should embrace it. So here's the question. If you're an atheist, or if you don't want to be a theist, you can do two things. You can just do your science and not think about the theological implications or philosophical implications of what we're talking about. That's fine. That's one way to do it. But I don't want to do that. I want to talk about, well, what does this imply about what's real? And so what do you do? What do you do with the fact that the universe had an origin? Well, back to Hindu cosmology. Even before COBE made its great discovery, there were astronomers who, in their desire to avoid an absolute origin of the universe, postulated the so-called oscillating model of the cosmos. The idea was first proposed by William or Willem de Sitter in 1935 and came into prominence through its promulgation by men like John Gribbon, Robert Dickham, and James Peebles as the steady state hypothesis fell into disfavor. The oscillating model teaches that the universe is a closed system that will one day reach a point where it can no longer expand. When the universe reaches this point, it will then collapse upon itself only to bounce back again. Theoretically, this Big Bang, followed by a Big Crunch, where the universe collapses upon itself, followed by yet another Big Bang, could have been an eternal process. And so the universe could be eternal in the sense that it has gone through an infinite number of Big Bangs. So it's just replaying and repeating itself. Exactly. This is the myth of the eternal return. Nietzsche said there's only so many ways the universe can be and therefore the universe that is now has already repeated itself millions upon millions, infinite number of times. This is why you have deja vu. I've been here before. Well, you have been here before. We had this conversation trillions of years ago, and now the universe's matters rearranged itself in such a way that now here we are having this conversation again. And it's just the... You're right. This is the myth of Sisyphus. It's just rolling up the rock, and it's rolling back down, and I just, I can't, it's just all meaningless. When Woody Allen talked about Nietzsche's myth of the eternal return, he said, oh great, now I have to watch the Ice Capades again. But when I was in high school, my chemistry teacher, and I didn't have much to say because I failed his class. I was in honors chemistry. Why they stuck me in honors chemistry is beyond me. Hopefully I've become, I'm really just an armchair scientist. I'm a layman totally, but I love reading this stuff. But at that time, I had no inkling as to why science was important. I was an idiot. But I'm sitting in class and my professor, my teacher, my chemistry teacher was an atheist. And of course, I was intimidated by him. I didn't have any thought to even argue with him. But one day, some of the students got in an argument with him about God's existence. And he pointed out, he goes, and one of the things he pointed out was, he was asked, where does the universe come from? And he says, well, the Big Bang. And he goes, and of course, there have been many Big Bangs. Why did he say that? Well, because in the mid to late 80s, the oscillating model was still kind of a hot item. Steady state had fallen away. And for the next 20 years or so, you had these people playing with the oscillating model of the universe.