Sermon GodWhy? The Journey Week 1 February 16, 2023
2 Stories -
Story 1 - My research from our 22 years at GodWhy to raise questions, and breaking them down into the fundamental questions.
Story 2 - Your reflections on the fundamental questions to build your personal journey.
I am not going to give you answers, Only possibilities, I cannot promise that I will not allow some of my leanings to influence the information, but I will do my best to limit that.
We can never speak in definitive terms of what ALL Christians, Jews, scientists, or atheists believe because in all these categories there are vast differences of beliefs within the categories themselves.
This series has the goal of challenging everyone to be open-minded and think about those questions which are fundamental to our existence, to our happiness and well-being, and to our understanding of life and faith.
THE CHALLENGE - What I Already Believe
Once a human being has accepted something as truth, changing that position is extremely difficult.
Fighting against this most basic element of our humanness requires an immense amount of focus and awareness as to how biased we are by nature.
Confirmation Bias - the powerful human tendency to look for information that confirms what I already believe, and to reject anything that challenges our current beliefs.
“Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity suggested that the universe must be either expanding or contracting. But Einstein was not a cosmologist and he accepted the prevailing wisdom that the universe was fixed and eternal. More or less reflexively, he dropped into his equations something called the cosmological constant, which arbitrarily counterbalanced the effects of gravity, serving as a kind of mathematical pause button. Books on the history of science always forgive Einstein this lapse, but it was actually a fairly appalling piece of science and he knew it. He called it “the biggest blunder of my life.”
(Excerpt From: Bill Bryson. “A Short History of Nearly Everything)
Political Candidates - Even in the face of hard facts and evidence, people still deny or minimize the issues of their candidate.
THE CHURCH has been one of the worst…
Flat Earth - Heliocentric Universe -
Nicholas Copernicus and Galileo Galilei - Earth orbited the Sun
The ongoing struggle about the age of the earth and evolution
Me Personally - I do not consider myself to be an expert in a major portion of what we will look at as we explore these questions. So… I will lean heavily on books, research studies, insights from psychology, cosmology, sociology, human behavior specialists, physicists, astronomers, and a host of other experts in fields that we must honestly look at to gain insight and understanding about the questions posed in these messages.
The overwhelming majority of the resources and books that I will draw from are not written by Christians and do not have any specific religious overtones. When I do quote from any book that is written primarily for a Christian audience, I will note that it is from a book written for the Christian community.
Book List:
Bill Bryson. “A Short History of Nearly Everything
Michael Brooks - 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time
Stephen Hawking - A Brief History of Time
Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species
Collins, Francis S.. The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.
Weekly challenge: There are unending numbers of people who want to influence you, in this series we want to challenge you to…
Be open to new ideas
Resist the overarching human drive to justify what you already believe
Force yourself to look at issues from all sides
Develop a position “You hold” (even if it may be refined or adjusted in the future)
I hope you do research outside Sunday morning but look for facts and information, not simply other people’s opinions. Be as objective as possible.
A PRIMARY GOAL: Learn to respect people with different opinions and value convictions that differ from mine.
Definitions:
Atheist - a person who disbelieves or lacks belief in the existence of God or gods.
Agnostic - a person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God or of anything beyond material phenomena; a person who claims neither faith nor disbelief in God.
Deist - Belief in God based on reason rather than revelation or the teaching of any specific religion. Deism is essentially the view that God exists, but that God is not directly involved in the world. Deism pictures God as the great “clockmaker” who created the clock, wound it up, and let it go.
God Followers - Believe that God exists, and is actively involved with our human experience.
Blind faith:
Belief with little or no supporting evidence.
Belief in something in spite of overwhelming evidence, to the contrary.
Informed Faith:
Belief is based on the best understanding of evidence or facts that can be known, even though they cannot be completely substantiated.
So the question “What do I believe?” let’s begin…
GodWhy Question - Do you really expect me to believe there is an eternally existent God who never had a beginning, just always was, who spoke and poof brought everything into existence?
Rene Descartes: ‘I Think Therefore I Am’
To begin we have to ask how did the world begin?
Reflection point:
Was there a time when there was nothing, and there had never been anything, ever, at any time, and in any place. THEN from nowhere everything that is, came into being from nowhere.
Or…
Is there something that is eternal? (matter, alien intelligence, God) that is eternal, has always been, without ever having a beginning, and through whatever this eternal “something” or “substance” is, all things derive their existence.
1935 - Bertrand Russell’s Book “Religion and Science” Said at a subatomic level classical nuclear physics had explained the mysteries of the atom. And quantum physics had taken it a step further. At the cosmic level, Einstein’s theory of relativity was expanding Newton’s explanation of the workings of the universe. At a planetary level, Darwin had explained the existence and development of life. Some even declared that science has neared the end of it’s journey. THAT was 1935….
Newton’s (1643-1727) explanation of the workings of the universe.
Darwin (1809-1882) had explained the existence and development of life
Einstein’s (1879-1955) theory of relativity
Some of the most brilliant people of our time and continue to lead the majority of our understanding of scientific endeavors.
Steady State Theory
The understanding that matter is eternal, and given the unlimited amount of time that eternity provides, small, random changes can bring about any possibility… even life as we know it on earth.
The theory of the Expanding Universe, the “Big Bang”
“The singularity has no around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can’t even ask how long it has been there—whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good “idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn’t exist. There is no past for it to emerge from.” “And so, from nothing, our universe begins.”
“In a single blinding pulse, a moment of glory much too swift and expansive for any form of words, the singularity assumes heavenly dimensions, space beyond conception. The first lively second (a second that many cosmologists will devote careers to shaving into ever-finer wafers) produces gravity and the other forces that govern physics. In less than a minute the universe is a million billion miles across and growing fast. There is a lot of heat now, ten billion degrees of it, enough to begin the nuclear reactions that create the lighter elements—principally hydrogen and helium, with a dash (about one atom in a hundred million) of lithium. In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe. It is a place of the most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful, too. And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.”
A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition
Bill Bryson
“There is of course a great deal we don’t know, and much of what we think we know we haven’t known, or thought we’ve known, for long. Even the notion of the Big Bang is quite a recent one.”
1965 Big Bang is established by discovery of background radiation at Bell Labs’ Holmdale New Jersey.
“All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as T = 0. We were on our way.”
This will be the first of many realizations… That in science the most unbelievable thing, turns out to be the truth.
Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow wrote “At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
A genesis event, which seems so ludacris suddenly turns out to be scientific.
We will discover on our journey that scientists and Christians often teach the masses with great simplicity, things that are actually very complex, and teach as fact things that are still disputed among learned scholars.
(they both at times say… We will just tell you what to believe)
Mathematical calculations and the big bang.
“Goldilocks effect”
Cosmologists, in their lighter moments, referred to the “Goldilocks effect”—that everything in the cosmos is just right.
(Excerpt From: Bill Bryson. “A Short History of Nearly Everything:)
BUT… how “Just Right”?
Stephen Hawking - A Brief History of Time
Hawking writes: “Why did the universe start out with so nearly the critical rate of expansion that separates models that recollapse from those that go on expanding forever, that even now, 10 thousand million years later, it is still expanding at nearly the critical rate? If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even 1 part in 100 thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size. On the other hand, if the rate of expansion had been greater by even 1 part in a million, stars and planets could not have been able to form.”
“The existence of a universe as we know it rests upon a knife edge of improbability.”
“In fact, if one considers the possible constants and laws that could have emerged, the odds against a universe that has produced life like ours are immense.”
“It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”
(Stephen Hawking book “A Brief History of time”)
Did Stephen Hawking believe in God?
Collins, Francis S., The Language of God (heavier elements)
The same remarkable circumstance applies to the formation of heavier elements. If the strong nuclear force that holds together protons and neutrons had been even slightly weaker, then only hydrogen could have formed in the universe. If, on the other hand, the strong nuclear force had been slightly stronger, all the hydrogen would have been converted to helium, instead of the 25 percent that occurred early in the Big Bang, and thus the fusion furnaces of stars and their ability to generate heavier elements would never have been born. Adding to this remarkable observation, the nuclear force appears to be tuned just sufficiently for carbon to form, which is critical for life forms on Earth. Had that force been just slightly more attractive, all the carbon would have been converted to oxygen.
Collins, Francis S.. The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (pp. 73-74). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
Carbon -
The life span of this excited state is 10-17 seconds. In other words, a helium nucleus has .000000000000000001 seconds to find, collide, and be absorbed by a beryllium nucleus. And at this excited state, it has to match perfectly with the ratio of the strong nuclear force to electromagnetism, a coincidence scientists call “astonishing.”
(Sigmund Brouwer book “The Unrandom Universe”)
1935 - We had infinity for Random changes to take place making anything possible. Today science knows… it was a little over three minutes.
Biologist J. B. S. Haldane once famously observed - The universe is not only more unbelievable than we suppose, it is more unbelievable than we are able to suppose.
Famous astronomer Fred Hoyle (who coined the term Big Bang) admitted that his atheism was greatly shaken when he calculated the chances of all this happening by accident. He wrote this in the November 1981 issue of Engineering and Science: “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”
(Fred Hoyle November 1981 issue of Engineering and Science:)
Fred Hoyle also said “An explosion in a junkyard does not lead to sundry bits of metal being assembled into a useful working machine”
Superintellect:
Fred Hoyle dedicated much of his effort to the “Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence” SETI
Stephen Hawking - A new $100 million, 10-year search for intelligent life in the universe was announced today (July 20, 2015) by famed scientist Stephen Hawking and other researchers.
Richard Dawkins - Video Clip
Essentially, there are three possible responses:
Principle:
1. There may be an essentially infinite number of universes, either occurring simultaneously with our own or in some sequence, with different values of the physical constants, and maybe even different physical laws. We are, however, unable to observe the other universes. We can exist only in a universe where all the physical properties work together to permit life and consciousness. Ours is not miraculous, it is simply an unusual product of trial and error. This is called the “multiverse” hypothesis.
There is only one universe, and this is it. It just happened to have all the right characteristics to give rise to intelligent life. If it hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here discussing this. We are just very, very, very lucky.
There is only one universe, and this is it. The precise tuning of all of the physical constants and physical laws to make intelligent life possible is not an accident but reflects the action of the one who created the universe in the first place.
Collins, Francis S.. The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (pp. 74-75). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
Reflection point: Both require Faith
I have faith that the complexity of the universe randomly ordered itself.
Or
I have faith that there has to be some designer to have such a creation.
Next Week - Evolution and the origins of all Life.
Week three - The Origins of Morality