Evidence of Eternity | Week 6 | Message

Hi, good to see you all. It's fun to get into a series like this. And if you're in this room and you're built a little bit more like me, where, skepticism is like your default, right? And you're more left brain, you're more cerebral,

you struggle with being skeptical of kind of everything, right? It's difficult as a pastor because you interact with people at I'm from San Diego, so at my church in San Diego, we've a ton of young adults who are right by San Diego State. So you get a lot of people walking in talking about like supernatural experiences or things that they felt or God told me stuff or I had this vision of whatever. And my first thought always is like, well, maybe you just had bad pizza. You know, like maybe you ate something you shouldn't have eaten. Maybe you're allergic to almonds and didn't know it. Right? Like, this is kind of, this is how I was built. And the interesting thing is that growing up in a church context, the church is full of a lot of different kinds of people.

Even when it comes to science and evidence and faith in those things. And some people grow up with like a,

God said it, I believe it that settles it. And it's kind of that sufficiency for them. Right? Like if the Bible says it, I know it's God's word. I know it's God's word because the Bible says it's God's word. And if it's God's word then I believe it. It's like, that's it. It's this circle of faith and it's powerful.

I don't work like that, right? Like when

I was a kid and you got me a toy train, broke it apart and want to figure out why. You know, like why does this thing work? Where's this little fake steam coming from? Like how in the world and I that never left me. And it's and I don't think it's some brokenness of who I am. I think God built me that way very specifically, but then it led to a season of not believing because I would go to church and I would talk to my youth pastor and God bless him, I would walk in and be like, okay, so hold on. We're talking about the cosmological constant today in our science class. What do you think about that? And the guy was like, Chris, can we just play dodgeball?

Like, Always, always. And if God is so good, why is there evil in the world? If God does miracles, how come he never lets people regrow their arms when they lose him in battle? Like, I had all these specific questions. Like, why? Why? Why? Why? Why? And one day, I think he was just sick of it. And he said, Chris, if

God gave us all of the evidence, then we would there'd be no room for faith. So God withholds

evidence and proof to increase our faith. And at the time it sounded very flowery and Christianese and stuff like that. So I kind of bought it hook line and sinker. But then I also thought, that's exactly if I was a charlatan or if I was trying to lie to you or I was creating a hoax, that's what I would tell you too. I would say, don't worry about it. The evidence isn't gonna line up with reality but

it's perfectly in accord with God who wants you to have faith. And so for me, almost became this like stop gap for everything. Everything I didn't understand or that seemed at odds with what I understood about the world, It was just this big slap on, it's faith, don't worry about it, that's why God wants you to have it. But when you open up the text of scripture,

what you find out is that's not at all what scripture refers to. Scripture never says, have blind faith. In fact, over and over again, I think of John chapter 17 where Jesus is he's speaking to his father out loud. It's the only prayer that we have of him and his father where it's very specifically

a cry of his heart. We've got the Lord's prayer in the book of Matthew. We've got the John chapter 11 when he's praying for Lazarus. But in John 17, here's his prayer for the church. I would I pray that they would know me

and that they would know you. The one who you whom who has sent me. And and so his his prayer for his church is a knowledge of him

And when you continue on inside the gospels and even outside of it in John chapter 12, Jesus talks to all the people and he says, I know you don't believe that I'm God but look at what I can do. He keeps pointing at evidence. He doesn't take us away from it and the Bible is full of names, dates, times, places that are you're supposed to check. Right? Luke chapter two, the beginning of the Christmas story. In those days, Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor over Syria and everyone went to his own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea to Bethlehem, the city of David because he belonged to the house in the line of David. And the whole Christmas story right there, you have about 20 falsifiable claims within the first few verses of the book of Luke.

And as Albright, who's one of the most famous

archaeologists of all time, who went over to prove that Luke didn't know what he was talking about and he came back and said, now that I've investigated these things, Luke is a historian of the first rank. Most of what he said about Asia Minor and those different areas, he he he is to be believed above everything else even though he went over with a skeptical mind.

And I didn't know this. I I didn't actually know that there was evidence for what we believed.

And so as I kind of moved into atheism and started reading Sam Harris and Dan Dennett and Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and all these heroes of thought I thought they were, I found that that was bankrupt too. That there it was it was fraught with tautologies

and atheism was and and we're starting on third base. We're talking about evolution but don't know where life came from. We're talking about cosmology but don't know where the beginning was. We talked about everything but didn't ask the question, why is there something rather than nothing? The bigger questions no one was answering for me and so I just found myself almost in this state of limbo until I came back and I said, instead of buying what my youth pastor is saying, I'm gonna look into it for myself

and I was overwhelmed. I was overwhelmed

with the truth of what Paul writes about in Romans chapter one. Here's what he says, in Romans chapter one he says, the wrath of God is being poured out against all kinds of godlessness and wickedness of people who have suppressed the truth of God for a lie. So in Paul's language, Paul's the second most influential man who's ever lived based on a time survey a few years back and he planted or he wrote 13 books in the New Testament. If you're of European descent, he is likely why you're sitting here today.

And in one of his letters, which we recognize the whole Bible is inspired by God, it's breathed out by God.

This is what second Timothy three sixteen, all scripture is God breathed, which means God writing through Paul penned this in Romans one. People have suppressed the truth of God for a lie. As much as you and I want to just be brains, we're not. As much as you and I want to be creatures of reason, we're not.

Reason plays into it But how can two people look at the exact same set of facts and come to two remarkably different conclusions because we're not just reason. We are social, we are relational, we are emotional,

we are fractured, we have different things that play into it. So as I was addressing this, I had this idea that the reasonable people were in science and the unreasonable sycophantic brainless people came to church. And so if you wanted someone

like me in church, I had to check my brain at the door and what I found is inside of the church were people infinitely smarter than I was. And they had better answers for stuff than I ever found in atheism. And I just

had to get around the idea that God wants us to believe everything on blind faith. That's not what the text tells us. It goes on in Romans chapter one to say this,

for since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities and his divine nature have been clearly seen from what has been made so that man is without excuse. So from the lips of God through the Apostle Paul, here's what God's postulation is to mankind.

I my fingerprints are so over everything that if you meet me face to face after you die and you say there was not enough evidence, you need to add another word, not enough evidence for me because the evidence is everywhere.

That's a bold statement to make. I'm not saying it's not. If you're new to church or you're new to faith or someone dragged you here because you heard that someone was gonna talk about evidence for God, I'm not saying that makes it true. I'm saying that's prediction.

His prediction is people suppress the truth of God for a lie and his second prediction is if you're willing to look with neutral glasses, you're gonna find God everywhere. Which a hundred years ago didn't seem like a very

apt thing to find in the sciences. A hundred years ago, what we understood about the world is that it was it almost had a basicness to it. Right? Almost like a dial. We look at the world and we're like, yeah, why? All of our cells were just these protoplasmic

goo. Huxley and Darwin says, everything in the cell was just this kind of goo like substance. So it was easy to understand how that goo like substance could come about easily. It's so simplified, it's so easy and we're all made of this little goo like stuff called cells.

He could have never imagined that one day we'd be able to open up that little piece of goo and find a factory inside of the cell that was infinitely complex in and of itself. A hundred years ago you had these arguments from genetic traits and from the recognition that a mom and a dad got together and the kid was just kind of like a mix of the two of them. Almost like a can of paint, two different colors and we'll see what comes on the other side. Genetics was extremely simplified.

Einstein was going out of his way. Einstein went out of his way to make the universe eternal. He actually inserted a fudge factor in his theory of relativity that made the universe static. Why? Because if the universe is static and had no beginning, then it doesn't require an explanation. It's an eternal thing.

He knew this as a Belgian priest named George LaMatra came forward and recognized after Penzias and after the red light shift of Hubble's telescope in 1929 and other discoveries, George LaMatra discovered that the universe is actually expanding. And if the universe is expanding

and you pushed reverse, it would all come to one point. He called the primeval Adam. And you wanna know who hated the idea of a cosmic beginning at first? Scientists did because they understood this concept. This is what Einstein said about George Lemaitre's

discovery. He said, I reject your hypothesis because it smacks of creation. So he didn't do it on science. In fact, in his theory of relativity, he built in a fake fudge number called the cosmological constant to make the universe eternal even though it wasn't true.

After George Lamontre came forward again in 1933 and did a presentation at Caltech that Einstein was a part of, he came up and said, I'm so sorry. I called your physics absurd but you are right and I was wrong. This is what Einstein would later call the greatest blunder of his life. He faked a number to make the universe eternal because a point of inception of the universe would smack of creation

until Lemaitre and the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation and all these things just showed us poignantly

that the universe at one point was in one spot. In fact, the first time we used the term big bang, it was a guy named Sir Fred Hoyle who was a president of the Royal Astronomy Society was making fun of Lemaitre's discovery and he said, oh yeah, the Christians are saying the big bang thing.

But here's what we understand as Christians, we don't need to be afraid of that. What would you expect to happen if the God of the universe told nothing to become everything? It's

exactly what would happen. Right? This cosmic explosion of light and heat in our universe and that begins the process. This is exactly what Genesis one tells us. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Borod, Blanken and Guth prove this theorem in 02/2017

at Stephen Hawking's seventieth birthday party, they paid this guy a ton of money to give a state of the universe address and at Stephen Hawking's birthday party, which I'm sure was a real rager, Alexander Blanken gets up and he says, essentially we've once again found

in the course of discovery in science that there is no way to get to our universe without the kickstart from something transcendent. Why? Because Einstein's theory of relativity was that all space, time and matter came into existence at a point in history. It was a continuum.

A continuum means they need each other, okay? So if you have space and time but no matter, what is it? If you have space and matter but no time, when is it? If you have time and matter but no space, where is it?

The only way you can have anything cogent or reasonable is all three of those things started at the exact same time. And if we have a point where space, time and matter all came into existence then before that there was nothing.

And what's the first rule of astrophysics? I'm sure you know, ex knee heel, knee heel fit. Out of nothing, nothing comes.

So this got people postulating, hold on, if before there was the continuum where there was space time and matter, there was only nothing before and something transcendent had to start, this is what Blanken is saying, it had a beginning, then what could possibly have started everything that's space time and matter? Well, we know that it can't be in space, so it must be spaceless.

It must be timeless. It must be immaterial. It must be powerful enough to create worlds, intelligent enough to know how to do so and personal enough that it's able to make decisions like a person would.

It has to decide to start something. So we're looking for a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, extremely powerful, extremely intelligent personal mind. Bible is much, right?

Before any of these things had really any meaning to mankind when God talks about himself not being inside of space or not bound by time, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. Outside of all of it. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

We're finding the same conclusion and this is now an unavoidable principle. So much so that scientists are postulating multi verses and multiple different universes that all have different rules and a foaming galaxy cluster and everything all to avoid a cosmic beginning.

Because we understand what that means. And as our science has been able to open up the cell and realize that cells are not the most simple things. You've got atoms and atoms have molecules and molecules organelles and organelles into cells.

It's actually infinitely more complex. We know that there's subatomic particles small in the atom to the ninth tenth and eleventh dimension now.

You see it's not that science killed God like Nietzsche said, God is dead and we have killed him. It is that science hasn't caught up with how intelligent God is and as we are catching up,

somewhat of a resurgence is happening where people are going, woah, woah, woah. A leading classification specialist at a classification convention just a few years ago in evolution, which I'm sure you've heard about this, super fun times. Imagine going to an evolutionary classification expo,

right? Is that on your to do list? One of the leading classification specialists in America went to this expo, stood up and he said, let's be honest, after all of our study in all these years, can anyone here, all you evolutionary biologists, show me a single piece of evidence for macroevolution?

And when no one said anything he said, why is my audience silent?

And he goes on to basically postulate, we need a new theory. Why? Because when we discover the complexity that we're not just these little blobs but we're infinitely complex and inside of the cell there's irreducibly complex simple machines. There's things that you couldn't have evolved because if these all parts weren't all together they wouldn't do anything. They'd have no evolutionary advantage. This is Darwin's black box. This is Darwin's doubt. This is what Michael Behe and and Stephen Jay Gould. They're all talking about the same thing but even scientists who are atheists from Berlinski to Jastrow are going, y'all, we've been fed a lie and no one's talking about it.

And God's sitting here the whole time going, Romans one,

I told you, if you're willing to look. And today I could give you 12 different arguments for God's existence, that's part of what being an apologist is, getting to go to different conferences and do these things. Today for the sake of time, I'm just gonna present one to you. Is the complexity and the design of the universe

evidence for God or is it possible that it came about by chance? The axiomatic phrase goes like this, the complexity in our universe is either due to necessity. I'm gonna throw that one away real quick because the only necessary

things that we can see in existence are things like data sets and numbers and they don't have powerful value. Numbers can't do anything. Like have you ever seen seven start a universe before? Seven's an idea. So it is a necessary idea but it's an abstract necessity, not worth talking about. We're gonna throw that one out, okay? We can go into a whole philosophical debate on it but at the end of the day, seven has never done anything, especially not create you.

So it can't be necessity. So there's two reasons our universe is complex. It's either really complex because we lucked out in random chance and all of these dials are so perfectly set or someone did it on purpose. So the axioms go like this, the complexity and fine tuning of our universe is either due to chance or design.

Point two, it is impossible that our universe's complexity is due to chance. Therefore, our universe has been designed. That doesn't mean that's true, I have to prove that to you. But

it's a very simple argument, it's modus ponens. If the first two premises are true, the conclusion follows rightly from it. So if we can prove one and two, then three is an obvious conclusion. So the question becomes, when we look at our universe, are our dials simplified like that or are they more complex like this?

What we find when you start understanding the complexity of our universe is that in order for you and I to be here right now, there wasn't one or two dials that were just set correctly between one and two. There was a multiplicity of dials. And those dials didn't have one or two possibilities,

they have millions and millions of possible figures. And on all that dial, the dial, if you imagine a dial with 50,000,000 little dots on it, the dial is set to one dot and if you turned it one dot to the left or one dot to the right, we'd all be dead. When you start doing it, it kind of brings this like

haunting suspicion you have in your heart where you go, wait a minute, you're telling me that we just lucked into this?

And you might be thinking like, well, I could imagine one in eight million chance. You've got a better chance of all of us surviving than winning the lottery. If this is all it is, one in eight million, I could see, I mean,

crazy things happen all the time. And what you're gonna get caught in right now is we accuse Christians of being the God of the gaps but scientism,

meaning all we believe is that science can explain everything, uses the time of the gaps argument, right? Well, with enough time and chance eventually, well, here's the problem. How many times did our universe get made? How many times did our universe come into existence? The once. And the once,

all the laws of physics and all the planetary systems and all the nebulae and all the black holes, all of the forces and constants of our universe were only created once. You don't get a whole bunch of chances.

That means this dial was set one time and if it was one notch off in either directions, none of us would be here. But looking at this dial you might go, one in 8,000,000, it's improbable, sure, is it impossible? No. But you're already borrowing from God because you're already assuming

that this something is there. That our universe is there. You don't have a reason for why. Out of nothing, nothing comes. There was nothing. Where did it come from? Let's just agree that somehow our universe came into be without God. We'll just argue that it's there.

Now how complex is it? Is it possible this was all due to chance? Because our universe does not have one dial on it, these are eight dials. It does not have eight dials. This is 120 dials. It does not have 120 dials. In fact, for you and I to exist, for you and I to exist right now, you need 140

features of the cosmos, laws of physics, gravity, all those things. You also need nine twenty two characteristics of a galaxy and planetary system that we need for physical life And then four zero two quantifiable characteristics of a planetary system and its galaxy that must fall within a narrow range for the possibility of advanced life's evidence.

That's you and I. We don't need to just explain how there could be a rock, we need to explain how you and I got here. And so just the laws and constants of nature, there's a 140 dials. Then you got 922

of a galaxy system for there to be any physical life. 402 additional ones for complex life and that's just to create the environment where complex life could exist. We haven't even gotten into the dials for there actually being complex life. Complex protein synthesis, a replicating genome,

a passing on of the evolutionary We haven't even gotten to that. Let's just talk about the conditions for you to be here. For me to be here. We'll look at some of these numbers and let you come to your own conclusion. Let's talk about the force of gravity. Okay, here's an equation we work with all the time, right?

The force of gravity is set like this, 6.674 times 10 to the negative eleventh power. That is what is inserted inside of that formula in order for everything in our universe. Everything in our universe has a relationship one to another, right? But gravity is so perfectly set that the proportion

of pulling on from one thing to another has to be extremely perfect. Inside your cell, gravity is working. Inside your body, from you to the person next to you, there's actually gravity. From you to the floor, there's gravity.

But to understand how minutely that is set, that if it was a little bit stronger, here's what Martin Rees, physicist Martin Rees, not a believer, he wrote a book called Just Six Numbers. He said, If gravity were a tiny bit weaker, we'll talk about how weaker, stars would not form, we'd all be dead. If there were a tiny bit stronger, stars would burn out too fast, we'd all be dead. In either case, there would be no complex organisms. So he's just using stars.

But even on another level, if gravity was much weaker, your body would just start to go, everything inside you wouldn't hold together, you would just die immediately. And if it was stronger, you'd combust. You'd close in on yourself.

I bet you don't wake up and go, thank you God for keeping gravity the exact same constant that it was yesterday. But you need it to survive today. So it's something to be grateful for. If you're like, I don't have anything, just wake up every day and go, gravity, still the same, thank you so much. Okay?

We call that the sustainability principle. To understand this number, odds are one in 10 to the fortieth power. So if you have 10 to the fortieth possibilities, it's set at one and if you miss it, there's no life anywhere. That's what it means by one in 10 to the fortieth power. But that number is so astronomical,

we struggle with it. Let me give you a couple of ideas. If someone dumped 10 to the fortieth power pennies evenly over the entire earth, they would create a stack 6.72 miles high. That is over 1,000,000 light years tall. If that escapes you a little bit, light travels at a speed of 186,000

miles every second. That means if you say the word moon, you could travel to the moon in the time it took you to say the word moon if you were traveling at the speed of light. You would die because you can't travel that fast, your body would blow up. Okay, anyway,

if you say the word light and you shot a speed of light bullet, by the time you finished the word light, that bullet would have gone around the earth seven and a half times. That's how fast light moves. So if you started on the surface of the earth and you pointed that gun up and shot it, it would take you a million

earth years traveling at that speed to reach the top of that penny tower and that's every square inch of the earth. Now imagine I put you on top of that penny tower, 6.72 miles high and I said, somewhere in all of this 6.72

miles of pennies, can you feel how high we are? We're so far, we're a million light years from the surface. I painted a penny red. Now I'm gonna blindfold you, we've stirred up all the pennies so you can't find where they are. And at some point you might need to dig. You could dig for forty

million years and not reach the bottom because you dig a lot slower than them. And at one point you just stop, grab a penny and if you find the red one randomly, then you'll know how improbable it is. It's infinitely more probable that you pick up one that kills everyone.

Different forces of gravity, little bit different, little bit little bit different, everyone's dead. You pick up any other penny, we're all dead. You've got one shot, the force of gravity is set one time, you gotta grab that red penny, you gotta be blindfolded. You do that and you'll understand the force of gravity, how uniquely it's set.

And if you're nuts, you might think to yourself, well, it could happen. First of all, that's crazy talk. Secondly, is there one dial that the universe depends on? No. So if I need two dials both to be perfectly set in order for us to be here today, mathematically what must I do to two different probabilities

in order to conclude what the probability of both of them being true is? Where are my math people? What are you gonna do to those two things? I gotta multiply them by each other.

So are there Well, maybe this is just the biggest number, so this one's the most astronomical but maybe the other ones are smaller like one and two, one and three, one and four. The speed of light is set at one in 10 to the fortieth power as well.

This constant is extremely important. It satisfies almost all those equations, equals MC squared where C is as constant. The speed of light must be set perfectly or else we wouldn't be here. I want you to imagine a ruler that spans our entire universe. That's 13,750,000,000

light years across. That's how big our universe is, okay? So if you start on one side of our universe and you travel at the speed of light across it, it would take you 13,750,000,000 times three sixty five days to get from one side to the other if you're traveling at light speed

but it's actually longer than that because our universe is expanding at 68 kilometers per second per mega per second. So if you start on one side, by the time you get to the other side, it would actually take you longer because our universe is getting It's running away from you while you're running towards it. Whatever.

If you had a ruler that spanned the entire thing, an inch ruler, gravity is set to one inch on that 13,750,000,000 light year long ruler and if you moved it one inch to the left or one inch to the right, there'd be no life anywhere in our universe. Certainly no complex life. It's pretty perfectly set. That's

pretty finely tuned. Now, we need both the speed of light and the relational constants of gravity to both be in cahoots in order for us to exist. So you need to take one in 10 to the fortieth times one in 10 to the fortieth to reach one in 10 to the eightieth. What's one in 10 to the eightieth? There are approximately

10 to the seventy eighth atoms in our universe. An atom is to an orange when an orange is to planet earth. Atoms are small. Think of every planet, every system, every star, its nuclear density and how many atoms make up each of those things. There's only 10 to the seventy eighth atoms in our entire universe.

That means in a 13,750,000,000 light year across universe, I paint an atom in the entire cosmos red and you blindfold go find that one. That's for two of the constants. Are there two constants? No. Let's play with another one. Because you go, well these are the most dramatic examples, we're not even close. We're not close.

This is called the cosmological constant. Now, Einstein fudged this number to try to make it equal to the force of gravity to make our universe stable. The truth is that it's not the exact same. If you think about a balloon, if you're blowing into a balloon, that's like our universe's expansion.

But at the same time you're blowing into a balloon, every room has air pressure on the balloon and so you're able to blow up the balloon at a certain rate. Imagine if our universe was expanding and there was no gravity, what would it do? It would just send all out. As soon as the big bang happened, it would have gone everywhere

gone. And by the way, the big bang was penned by that British physicist or that Belgian physicist, priest physicist named George LaMatra and Sir Fred Hoyle made fun of him and

he said, oh he's got his big bang model which is now the working theory in all of science. It doesn't really matter. But the point is, science originally rejected it because it smacked the creation and a Belgian priest who's a theist was the first one to accept it and say, this is what's actually happening. Then through discovery we realized this is actually the beginning of the universe. And we don't mean big bang in terms of this cancels out God, it actually brings forth a question of how could you get a big bang without someone who began the big bang that actually smacks of this is why Einstein and these other guys were trying to get rid of it because they knew what it meant.

So in this, as the universe is expanding, gravity keeps it from flying apart too fast at a very particular number. But then there's also this thing called the cosmological constant.

It's the idea of it's like the blowing into the balloon. There's something that's pushing the universe apart. And so the relationship of what's pushing it apart versus what's holding it together, what's pushing it apart is called the cosmological constant. It's this very specifically set rate of expansion

that takes place for our universe to continually expand because if it didn't, if it was static, it would go. Has to be doing this for us to exist. How uniquely is the cosmological constant set? One in 10 to the 100 power. I want you to imagine throwing an atom sized dart

at the earth and trying to hit an atom sized target. Once again, an atom is to an orange when an orange is to planet earth, proportionally speaking. Said another way, there are more atoms in a drop of water than there are drops of water in all the oceans of the earth. Atoms are small.

So if you're blindfolded on the moon and you take a dart with an atom sized tip and you throw it at the earth, blindfolded. For some reason we blindfold people a lot in this church. You blindfold throw that at earth and if you hit your atom sized target, just remember, if you're off by a foot,

you're off by hundreds of billions of atoms. If you're off by an inch, you're off by billions and billions of atoms. Because an atom is to an orange or an orange is to planet earth. So if you are gonna say the odds of the cosmological constant happening by chance,

which is what you would have to have if our universe is an accident, you'd have to say it's the same as someone, you being on the moon, blindfolded, chucking a dart at the earth and an atom sized tip hitting an atom sized target. But I'm not done.

You would need to throw that 7,500 times without missing. Actually that's not true, sorry. Not one throw, not 7,500 times, but 7,500 times every second since the beginning of time, 13,700,000,000 years ago. That means every second for the last thirteen point seven five billion years, you need to be throwing 7,500

darts each of those seconds, which is 143,000,000,000,000 seconds. And in each of those 7,500 throws, in each of the seconds of 143,000,000,000,000, you can never miss once. Then you understand what one in 10 to the one hundred and twentieth power is. That's not the most crazy number.

But in order for that to be the case, for you to exist,

cosmological constant must be perfect, gravity must be perfect, speed of light must be perfect. Those are three of 140 of just constants, not to mention planetary systems of nine twenty two and not to mention the exhibitions of a galaxy in order to create complex life, which is four zero two. And we haven't even gotten into how life came to be

in the first place.

The fact that we live in a low entropy universe, an atheist named Roger Penrose did the math on this and he said that the odds are one in 10 to the 10 to the one hundred and twenty third power. These are exponents on exponents. These become like fictitious numbers.

This is the best I could do and this doesn't even do this justice. Imagine numbering every grain of sand on earth. Okay, that'd be a while. Right, you pick up a handful

of sand, it would take you fifty five hours to number it if you were able to number one per second and you didn't sleep. It would take you fifty five hours.

You have a microscopic thing and it would just one, two, three, every grain of sand in your hand, it would take you fifty five hours just for that. Now think of all the grains of sand on all the beaches in the bottom of the ocean, the Sahara Desert in Arizona, right? All that together. You had numbered all of them,

one through the end of all of the sand numbers. And then you mixed all that up on earth. Then we blindfolded you again, right? Cause we'd like to do that, right? Now imagine I said, we're gonna die. You said, oh no. I said, it's okay, you can save us. Just pick up the grains of sand in order, blindfolded.

If you don't, we don't exist. And after this is done, we've got a lot more things that you're gonna have to do because we gotta get light and the constants of gravity and all those other things. But anyway, let's just start with this.

And you traverse the earth and finally decide you're gonna pick up a handful of sand and you finally pick up one of the pieces of sand in your handful of sand and you went this. I bet this is number one. The odds of you grabbing just number one, you're more likely to win the lottery 25,700,000,000 times than to find one.

And that wouldn't understand the idea of low entropy. That would just be to start the process. You would need to then pick up all of the sand in order. One, go somewhere else on the planet, grab number two, go You don't get to see this, this is all chance. That's what chance indicates.

And you would need to do that repeatedly for millions of years, every second and you wouldn't even touch this number. And this is an atheist Roger Penrose going, no, no, no, no, This isn't a thing. The idea that this was random chance, it's just not a thing.

Here's a few more of those things. These are just the dials for the setting. Hubble's constant electron proton ratio. This is for our earth. It needs to be tilted at 23.5 degrees on its axis to have the cooling and the heating that's necessary for our earth to be sustained.

For the right amount of sun, solar energy to hit our planet, 23.7

degrees, no life on planet earth. 23.3 degrees, life on planet earth. Must be an elliptical orbit, not a perfectly round orbit which is highly unlikely. We need to have planetary protection from a gaseous star like Jupiter to absorb all the asteroids so we don't constantly have asteroid storms killing us at all moments. We need a proper star which is a G2 red dwarf star which is the exact star that our sun is. If you just say we need this particular type of star, a G2 red dwarf star, the vast majority, 99% of all stars are immediately kicked out of the race. They're all gone. And we need the kind that we have. We must be in a perfect galactic location, we call it the galactic habitable zone or the Goldilocks zone, which is on an arm of a spiral galaxy protected by certain things and planetary winds.

We have to have plate tectonics as a part of our thing and these are a few of nine twenty two that are necessary for a planet to be able to have complex life. We're not even saying there is life, these are just the setting to platform them.

The odds of a planet like earth being able to support life existing by chance, this number is from a non believer, one in 10 to the one thousand and thirty second power. That's a planet like earth being able to support life. Not complex life, just any life.

Now you've got the uniqueness of life itself. And all these numbers have to be fictitious because they're all actually right now impossible. No one has done this. No one has created a sustaining self replicating molecule.

No one has ever even proposed a theory of the chance DNA. So you're taking these scientists and you're just taking their word for it and the life of any kind arising by random chance, although right now it's actually impossible, he said, okay, let me make up a fake number. One in 10 to the forty thousandth

power Complex intelligent life, that's just amoeba life or single celled organisms. Complex intelligent life is 10 to the trillionth power. This is what Sir Fred Hoyle who penned the term big bang making fun of the

Belgian priest. He said, The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. So what he says is, evolution's fine, great but you just started on third base with, well first we had life. One of the leading theories of how life came to be because it's so crazy is called panspermia.

Aliens from other dimensions jumped into our universe, seeded life on the back of crystals and caves and that started the evolutionary process.

I'm not joking, this is There are scientists who will tell you that is one of our leading theories. It's so difficult to come up with these numbers that the best postulation is, well there's an infinite number of universes and so we hit the jackpot because we're one of the lucky ones. But if there's an infinite number of universes and therefore a universe has to look like ours because there's a universe that looks like everything, that means there

is a planetary system out there where there are 400,000,000,000,000 dogs with 300,000 heads on all these planets. Why? There has to be. There's an infinite number of planets. There's a planet made of cotton candy somewhere.

How do we know that? There's an infinite number of them. So there has to be one made of cotton candy. You see how silly this becomes? And it doesn't ask the bigger question of digression which is where did those planets come from? What is this universe generator machine that's spitting things out and it rejects Blenken's theorem which is to recognize that any universe which is

average expanding is finite in the past. Doesn't even begin to touch the idea of infinity, An infinite past time, an infinite number of yesterdays before today, how is that even possible? Okay, how many yesterdays would there need to be before today?

An infinite number. So would you ever get to today? No, it's not possible. You would need an infinite number of years in the past to ever get to today. So today is actually impossible even theoretically. Infinity isn't real in real number sets or real understandings. It's only figurative.

When you start talking about infinity you become absurd. So an infinite regress in the past, none of these things are incalculable. They don't make any sense.

Here's what the guy making fun of the big bang said, a common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics. I love it. As well as with chemistry and biology. There are no chances or blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seems to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion beyond

question. Hawking writes, The odds of a universe like ours emerging out of something like the big bang are enormous. I think clearly there are religious implications whenever you start to discover the origins

of the universe. So you think to yourself, well then does that make him a believer in God? No, because we're not just reason based creatures. We don't just have that going for us. Francis Collins who mapped out the human genome, he's getting the presidential

medal of science from Barack Obama. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome, Francis writes. He can be worshipped in the cathedral or the laboratory. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate and beautiful. This scathing review by agnostic cosmologist Robert Jastrow, director of NASA says,

the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts is the same. So here's what he's saying, you just gave Alexander Blanken the Nobel Prize in Science for coming to this conclusion, in the beginning and God's going, what? Nobel Prize? I wrote that so long ago.

You see, it's not that science has buried God, it just hasn't caught up with how intelligent he is. We're trying to get there but we're way, way, way behind. But the closer we get, the closer, as one scientist put it, when you start to understand the complexity, specifically they were talking about the Higgs boson principle and the ripples in the early universe, you don't care. He said, it's like looking at the face of God.

For the atheist scientist, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he's able to conquer the highest peak, he pulls himself over the final rock and he's greeted there by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

This leads us to only one conclusion, which is worship. You were made, you're not an accident. You go to school, they're gonna tell you you're an accident. You engage in public discourse, you're nothing but a random chance. Your ancestors were asteroids. Your most immediate cousins were chimpanzees, you're wrong.

It's all wrong. It's a lie. It avoids God but it doesn't do so through science. It does through presuppositions. When you come to understand the numbers, you would write something like,

we've suppressed truth of God for a lie. For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities and his divine nature have been clearly seen from what has been made so that man is without excuse. His fingerprints are all over creation and most importantly, they're all over you. You're made on purpose, by a purpose, for a purpose. The Psalmist writes this, what a powerful Psalm here. Psalm eight:one begins like this, O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.

Down to verse three, When I consider your heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, which is what we did today, we considered them. It should bring you to this next position. Hold on, what is mankind that you think about us? Make it personal, who am I that you,

the God of all of this would think about me? The scripture says not only does he think about you but he knows you by name. He knit you together in your mother's womb, you are fearfully and wonderfully made. And if no one's ever told you that before, if you think your life doesn't have reason or purpose, you're wrong.

Our purpose is derived from creation And so you need to appeal to the one who created you to say, what am I here and what am I here for? He is your source of value, He is your source of identity, He is your source of future, He is your origin, your meaning, your morality and your destiny even if you don't know Him.

Who am I that you are mindful of me? What is mankind that you would think about us?

Maybe some of us in here, you're built more that way. God hardwired you towards science and those things. I want you to know that this church and the church in general is a place where you can come and be comfortable. You are sitting along people that do not check their brains at the door to come and engage in worship of the God of the universe. In fact, you're gonna need your brain to love Him perfectly. This is what the Old Testament says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, your

mind and your strength. We would do well to continue to understand these things so we can sit in awe at the feet of the God of the universe who's made you on purpose, by a purpose, for a purpose. Would you pray with me? Father, I know there's likely some people in here or who are watching online

but they've always rejected you because they just felt this intellectual hang up and God maybe today for the first time they've been asking for a long time, would you reveal yourself to me God, would you show yourself to me, would you make yourself known?

And I know that when I was younger I had all these stipulations. Well, he would need to show up like this and he would need to do that but God I am that's me playing God and you playing servant.

And you made it very clear, you have set the stars and the moon and you've hung them all in place and you are the God of all of it and we have suppressed the truth of God for a lie because since the creation of the world, your qualities have been seen all over nature. So Father, my prayer is that if there's someone listening

who wants to then surrender their life to you because they've always had this hang up but now they understand and they see

that that person would right now just say, Lord, you are my God, you are the king, I give you my life. I'm sorry that I've rebelled against you and I've sinned against you in thought, word and action even in my attitudes.

But I believe that Jesus Christ paid the price for my sin on that cross and I wanna follow you all the days of my life. I trust in you and you alone. You are worthy. Your moon and the stars, you are worthy of my worship, you're worthy of my affection and you're worthy of my praise. I give my life to you this morning.

Lord, we pray all this in your name. Amen. Thanks friends. Amen. Amen. Could we just thank pastor Chris for joining us this weekend? So

good. Talk about math in church. Pretty awesome, right? Hey, and before you go too, can we also just take a moment and celebrate together those who gave their life to Jesus this morning? God's doing something amazing. We can put our hands together for that.

And if that's you in this room, we don't want you to walk through that decision alone. And so you can go ahead and scan the QR code in front of you so that we can just connect with you and give you some next steps in your faith journey. Hey, if you guys need prayer, we have a prayer room over on your left with an amazing team ready to pray with you and for you. But with that, have an amazing Labor Day weekend, and we can't wait to see you guys next week. Thanks so much.