Apologetics Session 34 - Origins and Evolution - Part 1

Open us up today? Dear Lord we just thank you for this time to come together Lord and to learn more about the apologetics class we've got. We thank you for Matt's preparation. We just pray that you would open our eyes to see and open our ears to hear and we just give you this time and we ask you to bless it in Jesus name.

All right so we are going to attempt to cover a very light, not very heavyweight, not very deep topic about the origin of the universe. And once we've covered that then we're going to get into evolution and you know the origin of man and so forth.

So this image right here is actually not the Milky Way that's actually the Andromeda galaxy which is I guess our close neighbors. Only 2 .5 million light years away. Exactly very close neighbor. M16. Yeah and so we I thought it was a fitting representation for sort of the the cover slide here for for this.

But I wanted to take a poll to start about who in here, I think I know how the answers are going to go, but who in here thinks the universe sprang from nothing? Absolute nothing. Do you believe the universe is a cosmic accident?

No. Do you believe the universe had a creator? Yes. Why do you believe the universe had a creator? Because the Bible tells me so. It's not a bad answer. It's not a bad answer. The order and the design that required for what creation was.

Yeah so we're going to get into a bunch of that. But I thought it would be fitting to start with Genesis 1 1 through 3 which says in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters and God said let there be light and there was light.

So there's a variety of beliefs about the origin of the universe. We're going to talk about some of them. Certainly won't cover all of them. Some believe the universe was eternal and for a while that's what people thought the universe was eternal.

It was static. Some believe that it has essentially always existed for all of eternity. So infinite into the past. Some believe it sprang into existence somewhere in the distant past. Some believe that we live in a cyclical universe.

A universe that sort of is created and collapses in on itself and is created again and collapses in on itself and has been doing that for all of eternity. So that it expands and contracts over eons of time.

Some believe in a multiverse which we'll talk a little bit about. And the idea of a multiverse is that there are multiple universes that are existing simultaneously in their own sort of bubbles, their own spheres.

We'll talk about why that theory has has kind of come into existence. So there's essentially an infinite number of universes and some of this is to try and justify some of the argumentation around why life exists in our universe.

And then there are those of us who believe that not only did the universe have a beginning but it had a creator. We believe that creator is God. Some people believe that the earth or that the universe had a creator and don't believe necessarily that it's God but that there is some creator.

Now what I wanted to start with was essentially I'm going to skip to this slide. What I wanted to start with was a... Oh no. Let me stop sharing. Pause this. You see that now. Okay so this is a website that was created to try and demonstrate the scale of the material universe.

And I thought that it was fitting for us to essentially kind of try and visualize that because I think some people think about the universe and they don't necessarily really think about the size and scale of the universe.

And so I thought it was fitting for us to kind of take a look at that and really understand when we talk about big, the big that we're talking about. And when we talk about small, the small that we talk about which we'll get more into in evolution.

But you can see over here on the left-hand side this is meant to represent essentially a meter and a human. And as you start to scale out you can start seeing that you get things like elephants, Japanese crab spiders, yeah giant earthworm, yeah the T-Rex, right.

These are all things that we can kind of envision in our minds. We watch movies, right. Average root, average size of a house, size of a blue whale, Boeing 747. These are all things that are Statue of Liberty, Titanic, right.

We get to something you know around a kilometer in size, right. These are all reasonably understandable numbers. But then you start to scale out really, right. You start to look that's the size of a marathon, right.

26 miles, the size of Rhode Island, right. You're starting to get to some of the moons of some of the planets, start seeing some of the sizes of countries. We're still not in like kind of, we're like in one megameter size range.

But now you're starting to get to things like Pluto. Everybody knows what Pluto is, right. Mickey Mouse's dog, yes. Exactly, that's exactly right. Right. Ganymede, right. Still moons, Mars, size of Earth.

And then we start getting into some of the stars, Sirius B, the Minecraft world, that's an important one. Saturn, right. Proxima Centauri, distance from the Earth to the moon there. We're at a gigameter, right.

Then we get to the size of our Sun, right. And as we continue to scroll out you start seeing that our Sun is actually quite tiny compared to a lot of these other stars, right. Polaris, Arcturus, right.

We're getting to a terameter, right, in size. That's that circle there is a terameter. And we have Antares, right. Distance from Neptune to the Sun, Kuiper Belt. You start getting into some of the nebula, right.

Stingray nebula. Now we're at a petameter. We keep scrolling out, you've got a light year. That's, that's, that light year, that's how long it takes. That's, that's the distance that it would, where it would take you a year to travel at the speed of light.

That's how far that distance is. You start getting into some of these other nebulae. Now you remember where the human was? You remember where our Sun was? Right. We're still, we're still going. You got the Cone Nebula.

We're at an exameter in size. That is one with that many zeros meters. Cave Nebula, Barnard's Loop, Tarantula Nebula. Now we're starting to get into galaxy size. So you have a Leo II dwarf galaxy, right.

Sagittarius dwarf galaxy. These are small galaxies. You've got the Triangulum Galaxy. We're at a zetameter in size. You have the Milky Way, right. That's us, but our Milky Way is not that big, right. You've got other galaxies that are bigger than our Milky Way, right.

Now you're starting to get into sections of space. So the local group, that's the local group of galaxies that our galaxy is a part of, right. So there's, they call it the local group. And so they're all of these, now all of these things are not actually stars.

These are actually galaxies which have billions of stars in them, right. Billions of stars, bigger, smaller, the same size as our Sun. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has about 400 billion star systems. You have the Virgo cluster.

That's another cluster of galaxies. The Fornax cluster is another cluster of galaxies. So now you've got a yodameter in size, right. And now you're starting to get further and further. You have parsecs and gigaparsecs, right.

And now you're getting to the size of the observable universe. And then if we were to scroll back, all the way in. So now you scroll all the way back into a human. And so when you think of big, right, we're talking about another level of big, right.

But that's not the, that's not the extent of what we view as creation. There's also small. So as you scroll in, you start getting down to things like mice, coffee beans, seeds, ants, pencils, right. Grain of salt, millimeters, right.

Scrolling down into infrared wavelengths, mist droplets, white blood cells, right. Mitochondria, red blood cells, X chromosomes, down into a micrometer, right. Viruses, ultraviolet wavelengths, right.

You're getting even, even further and you're starting to get into the size of DNA. Start getting into atomic level stuff, right. Celsius atom, carbon atom, and there's an angstrom, which is a distance that they use as a hydrogen atom, a helium atom.

Then beyond that, you get down into gamma ray wavelengths, pico meter, right. Scroll in, scroll in, start getting the uranium nucleus. Then it goes even further, although they start to say that the sizes get a little fuzzy when you get too small.

But you think about the complexity of the universe, not just in its size, but also in the small, you start getting into atoms and nuclei and electrons and protons. Quarks, yeah. Actually, if you keep going down, it gets down into charm quark, bottom quark, high-energy neutrino, this is a zeptometer, top quark, right.

You're in a yacto meter, which is neutrinos, keep going, keep going, keep going. So the smallest thing that it, that it measures is actually a plank, what they call a plank.

I need a dramamine.

Yeah, what's called a plank and string, that's where like string theory comes from. But you can see that there is just an enormous amount of complexity in the universe, right. So I wanted, I wanted to start off because some people, when we talk about the universe, we kind of throw the term around.

Talk about stars and things, we throw these terms around and we don't really visualize what it is that we're talking about when we think about the sheer scale of the universe when we talk about it. We kind of think of sort of the bubble we live in, we maybe think about the earth, we maybe think about the solar system, but we don't go much beyond that to the size of the Milky Way galaxy.

Now I'm a sci-fi nerd, so I'm always looking at stuff like this. I actually played a game called Elite Dangerous where they tried to procedurally generate the Milky Way galaxy. And there were 400 billion star systems that you could travel to because they had the ability to warp to them.

But when you start looking at this, and they have they have these galaxy interactive tools, not like this one, but that actually had like the star systems that you can like drill into and stuff. Where they'll actually, there's programs you can buy where you can actually look at things in the Milky Way galaxy that we that we can see.

But I just wanted to start start off with kind of, you know, the scale of what it is that we're talking about. So with all of that said, let me go back to presenting. So the prevailing scientific theory of the origin of the universe is something called the Big Bang.

Who's heard of the Big Bang? Everybody's heard of the Big Bang, and I'm not talking about the TV show The Big Bang Theory. That's a funny show though. But there's something called the Big Bang. So the Big Bang posits that the early universe was small, very small, like pinhead needle small, and unimaginably hot and dense.

And that the the singularity, which is what they call that sort of hot ball of matter and energy, exploded at some point in what they call the Big Bang, very scientific, and began to expand outwards in all directions.

And scientists arrived at this theory due to a number of interesting scientific discoveries. But the Big Bang, I have a representation here, I have a couple of representations here, where it talks about the sort of phases of the Big Bang.

How they know all of this, I'm not entirely sure. So you have this like singularity where time begins, right? And then that's at 10 to the negative 43 seconds. And then at 10 to the negative 32 seconds, there's a post-inflation, and that that soup of electrons and quarks and other particles begin to expand.

About one second in, it's still too hot to form into atoms, so forth and so on. Then at about 300 ,000 years, electrons combine with protons and neutrons to form atoms, mostly hydrogen and helium. Light can finally shine.

At a billion years, gravity makes hydrogen and helium. Gas coalesce to form giant clouds that will become galaxies, and small clumps of gas collapse to form the first stars. And then at about 15 billion years, the galaxies, this is kind of like our present day.

So this this Big Bang came along basically, prior to the Big Bang, there were people that thought that the universe was sort of static and eternal, right? Had existed for all of time. And then, and that the bodies within it, the galaxies, the planets, and everything within the universe, kind of just moved around within this sort of bubble of the universe.

But then in 1927, there was a guy named George Lemaitre. Let me see if I can put his name up there. He was actually a Catholic priest, but he he posited that, he was also a brilliant physicist, he posited that the universe itself was the thing that was expanding.

That bodies weren't actually moving within the universe, but the universe itself was expanding. The way I, a good illustration I've seen in like high school science classes is, you take a balloon, right, that's partially filled up, and then you draw dots on the outside of the balloon, and then you blow the balloon up, and it starts to expand.

The dots themselves aren't moving. The balloon itself is moving, and so the dots are moving away from one another, not because they're moving, but because the balloon itself is expanding. So you can imagine that if we have a whole bunch of things inside that balloon that are essentially tethered to the outside of it, as you would expand that balloon, those things, those balls or whatever you have inside there would start moving away from one another, but it's not because those things actually are in motion, it's more that the universe, or in this case the balloon, representing the universe is expanding, pulling them sort of away from one another.

So he posited that the universe itself was the thing expanding, and that's why we, when we look out at galaxies around us, we see them all moving away from us. And so the universe itself is getting larger, and everything is moving away from us in all directions.

So two years after 1927, there was an astronomer named Edwin Hubble. Anybody heard of Edwin Hubble? Probably have heard of his last name at least, right? The Hubble telescope. So he actually was able to observe and notice that galaxies were in fact moving away from us, and the farthest galaxies were moving away faster than the ones closer to us.

And they did this through something they called redshift. So there's redshift and blueshift. So redshift is when they see there's like a hue of red on something, that's because it's actually moving away from us, and so you see that sort of light spectrum shift because of the movement.

And if something's moving towards you, you get what's called blueshift, which actually gives it sort of a blue hue. And so that discovery basically confirmed that all of these galaxies are moving away from us in all directions.

So it sort of confirmed the idea of an expanding universe. So this was sort of revolutionary, right? Because if you can explain that everything is moving away from you, then what happens when you hit the rewind button, right?

Everything starts coming closer to you, right? To a point where if you rewind back far enough, everything will sort of collapse in on itself, right? Everything will start to start colliding, it will start getting sucked in.

And so based off of the the rate with which things are moving away from us, they were able to postulate that if you rewound 13 .8 billion years, everything would be back into a single point, which is where they get the date of the Big Bang, or the date of the beginning of the universe, right?

Now this is actually, we're not going to talk about evolution a lot here today, we'll talk about that next time, but this actually was a huge problem for evolutionists. Because if you have a static and eternal universe, you have an infinite amount of time to deal with the sort of random chance that you needed to create life from from non-life, right?

To create a living single celled organism from, you know, a bunch of random chemical particles. But if you have a beginning, now you have a clock, right? There's only a certain number of rolls of the dice that you can throw within that time window, and unfortunately 13 .8 billion years, while being a long time, actually presented them with some issues with regard to whether it was enough time for the variety of, you know, species that we have just on planet Earth.

So this is where the Big Bang theory came from, and this is essentially still the most prevalent and accepted scientific view that we have today. And while it did explain what we see, I think one of the things I think, now this is my opinion, that it didn't explain is where did those tiny hot particles come from, right?

Because again, right, if you if you look at the second law of thermodynamics, right, you know, you've got you've got a bunch of, you know, things that tend toward chaos, right? Things don't tend towards order, they tend towards disorder.

That's essentially what the second law of thermodynamics is. So again, you don't, you don't actually explain where did the matter and energy come from that could have created this universe, right? Even if you, even if you postulate that that stuff existed, and that it was, and that it exploded, and it, you know, and the universe is expanding out, you still don't explain where matter and energy came from that could have created that.

So that's one flaw that I see in the argument around the Big Bang. What the, and again, there's some people that believe maybe that there was a creator of the universe that created those things and then utilized the Big Bang to, to actually, you know, birth the universe into existence.

Yeah, it was Jesus's.

Voice, it was so loud it sounded like a Big Bang. It sounded like a Big Bang, exactly. So this.

Leads us into, and just, here's another image that I usually see around Big Bang expansion, 13 .77 billion years, you know, it's 14 .8, 13 .77, where it talks about, you know, the inflation of the universe, which sort of expands out to what we see today.

So I just wanted to show some of these, these diagrams. We got to George, but the first thing that I actually want to talk about is something called the cosmological argument. So this is something William Lane Craig pushes a lot, and I'm a big fan of William Lane Craig's debates.

I don't agree with him on a number of theological and doctrinal issues, but I do like his, the brilliance that he has around arguing for the, the reasonableness of faith in Christ and the reasonableness of faith in God.

And so this is a cosmological argument that he pushes a lot, and I'm going to show you guys two videos around this, this argument that talks about both the, the sort of scientific reason why it's more believable or more reasonable to believe in a creator, and then also a philosophical argument for why it's more reasonable to believe in a creator.

So the cosmological argument just has three simple parts. Everyone can remember this. Whatever begins to exist has a cause. We know this, right? So this is, these are two premise. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

The universe began to exist. The Big Bang shows that the universe began to exist at a point in time. Therefore, the universe has a cause. Pretty simple argument. It's very difficult to refute that argument.

Let's watch a video that talks a little bit about this particular argument and why it's, I hate the fact that I have to end the show, but, and why it's more reasonable to believe this argument. I guess it's not a link video or audio background.

Does God exist? Or is the material universe all that is, or ever was, or ever will be? One approach to answering this question is the cosmological argument. It goes like this. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause. Is the first premise true? Let's consider. Believing that something can pop into existence without a cause is more of a stretch than believing in magic.

At least with magic you've got a hat and a magician. And if something can come into being from nothing, then why don't we see this all the time? No, everyday experience and scientific evidence confirm our first premise.

If something begins to exist, it must have a cause. But what about our second premise? Did the universe begin? Or has it always existed? Atheists have typically said that the universe has been here forever.

The universe is just there. And that's all. First, let's consider the second law of thermodynamics. It tells us the universe is slowly running out of usable energy. And that's the point. If the universe had been here forever, it would have run out of usable energy by now.

The second law points us to a universe that has a definite beginning. This is further confirmed by a series of remarkable scientific discoveries. In 1915, Albert Einstein presented his general theory of relativity.

This allowed us, for the first time, to talk meaningfully about the past history of the universe. Next, Alexander Friedman and George Lemaitre, each working with Einstein's equations, predicted that the universe is expanding.

Then in 1929, Edwin Hubble measured the redshift in light from distant galaxies. This empirical evidence confirmed not only that the universe is expanding, but that it sprang into being from a single point in the finite past.

It was a monumental discovery, almost beyond comprehension. However, not everyone is fond of a finite universe, so it wasn't long before alternative models popped into existence. But one by one, these models failed to stand the test of time.

More recently, three leading cosmologists, Arvind Bord, Alan Guth and Alexander Vilenkin, proved that any universe which has on average been expanding throughout its history cannot be eternal in the past, but must have an absolute beginning.

This even applies to the multiverse, if there is such a thing. This means that scientists can no longer hide behind a past eternal universe. There is no escape. They have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.

Any adequate model must have a beginning, just like the standard model. It's quite plausible, then, that both premises of the argument are true. This means that the conclusion is also true. The universe has a cause.

And since the universe can't cause itself, its cause must be beyond the space-time universe. It must be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, uncaused, and unimaginably powerful, much like God. The cosmological argument shows that, in fact, it is quite reasonable to believe that God does exist.

So, I thought that that it was way better to show that video than to try to describe that video. There's another video that I'm going to show that talks more about the philosophical arguments, but I thought it was interesting, and we're going to talk a little bit about timelessness.

But, spaceless, timeless, immaterial, uncaused, and unimaginably powerful, right? So, for the universe to have been created, it had to be created by something that's outside of the universe.

That's so funny, Matt, because I think that's very close to the definition of.

Aristotle's immovable movement. Yes, unmovable, yep.

Way before these guys. Yes, way before these guys.

I don't know that any of us are actually reinventing a lot of these arguments. The next, I'm going to apologize ahead of time for the next video, and the reason I'm going to apologize is because this one actually made my brain hurt.

And so, I think it might make your brain hurt as well, because it talks a little bit about the sort of... Isn't that a Monty Python reference? Yes. So, this one is going to talk a bit about the philosophical reasons why believing in an eternal universe, or believing in infinity, is a little bit ridiculous.

Does the universe have a beginning, or has it existed from eternity past? If it did have a beginning, this raises a question. Did the universe have a creator? In part one, we explored this question scientifically.

Now, let's look at it philosophically. Aristotle believed the universe was eternal in the past, but Alcazali disagreed. He pointed out that if the universe did not have a beginning, then the number of past events in the history of the universe is infinite.

But that's a problem, because the existence of an actually infinite number of past events leads to absurdity. It's metaphysically impossible. Why? The mathematician David Hilbert illustrates the problem by imagining a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, all of which are occupied.

There's not a single vacancy. Every room in the infinite hotel is full. Now, suppose a new guest shows up and asks for a room. The manager says, sure, no problem, then moves the guest who was in room number one to room number two, and the guest who was in room number two to room number three, and so on to infinity.

As a result of this shuffling, room number one becomes vacant, and the new guest happily checks in, even though all the rooms were already full, and nobody has checked out. And it gets even more absurd.

Suppose an infinity of new guests show up at the front desk. No problem, says the manager. Then she moves each person into a room with a number twice that of his own room. So the person who was in room number one moves into room number two.

The person who was in two moves to four. The person who was in three moves to six, and so on. Since any number multiplied by two is always an even number, all the odd-numbered rooms become vacant, and the infinity of new guests gratefully check in.

And yet, before they arrived, all the rooms were already full. It gets even crazier when the guests start to check out. Suppose all the guests in odd-numbered rooms check out. In that case, an infinite number of people have left the hotel, and yet there are no fewer people in the hotel.

But suppose instead all the guests in rooms numbered four and above check out. In that case, only three people are left, and yet exactly the same number of people left the hotel this time as when all the odd-numbered guests checked out.

Thus, we have a contradiction. We subtract identical quantities from identical quantities and get different answers. These absurdities show that an actually infinite number of things cannot exist in the real world.

Here is a second argument Ghisali offers against the past eternal universe. Suppose that for every one orbit Saturn completes around the Sun, Jupiter completes two. The longer they orbit, the further Saturn falls behind.

Now, what if these two planets have always been orbiting the Sun from eternity past? Which has completed the most orbits? Strangely enough, the number of their orbits is exactly the same, infinity. But that seems absurd, for the longer they orbit, the greater the difference becomes.

If the universe has always existed, then an infinite series of past events has been formed by adding one event after another. It's like a sequence of dominoes falling one after another until the last domino, today, is reached.

The problem is that the final domino could never fall if an infinite number of dominoes had to fall first. So today could never be reached. But obviously, here we are. It's today. So the number of events leading up to today could not possibly be infinite.

The infinite is no way to be found in reality.

It neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought.

The role that remains for the infinite to play is solely that of an idea. What objections might be raised to these arguments? Some people object that, unlike the rooms in Hilbert's hotel, the events of the past don't all exist at the same time.

But we can easily tweak the story to get rid of this objection. Suppose the hotel has been under construction from eternity past, one room being added each year. How many rooms would there now be in the hotel?

An actual infinite number. So if the past is infinite, that would imply that Hilbert's hotel could exist, which is absurd. Others have objected that an actually infinite number of things do exist, namely numbers and other mathematical entities.

However, this objection presupposes that numbers really exist. But this is a highly disputed assumption that most philosophers reject. So if Ghazali's two arguments are right, then the universe is not eternal in the past.

It must have a beginning. And we know intuitively that whatever begins to exist requires a cause of its existence. Thus, we are led to conclude that the universe has a cause of its existence. So what caused the universe?

Atheist Daniel Dennett says the universe caused itself. But this is incoherent, because in order to cause itself to come into existence, the universe would have to exist before it existed. The cause of the universe must therefore be outside of the universe, spaceless, timeless, immaterial, and enormously powerful.

Much like God.

Does your brain hurt? My brain hurts, thinking about infinity. So, thinking about actual infinity is actually difficult. So, in this one, you have to think about an infinite amount of time. If there's an infinite amount of time in the past, then we couldn't possibly get to today, because the past would go on forever.

And so, you can't really think about infinity. Infinity is not like a real thing, it's more of a concept. And so, that brought up the question for me, has God existed for all time? Is God infinite? So how can God be infinite if infinity can't really exist?

In our world.

So this brings up the question, does God experience time? And if so, how does he experience time? So, in the cosmological argument, we said that the cause of the universe must be timeless. So what does timelessness mean?

And so, there's an article actually, believe it or not, there's something called the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. And it talks about some of the views of God and time. I don't know the source of where this encyclopedia comes from, but the arguments I found compelling.

So this is the view that they posited for timelessness. Did I put that in here? No, I didn't. And it says, the claim that God is timeless is a denial of the claim that God is temporal. So timeless, meaning outside of time, versus temporal, meaning inside of time.

First, God exists, but does not exist at any temporal location, so no position in time. Rather than holding that God is everlastingly eternal, and therefore he exists at each time, this position is that God exists, but he does not exist at any time at all.

God is beyond time altogether. It could be said that although God does not exist at any time, God exists at eternity. This would be the idea of eternity being a position outside of time. So eternity is not meaning forever, it's meaning, this is saying that eternity is a place, right, that is outside of time.

So that is, eternity can be seen as a non-temporal location, as any point in time is a temporal location. Second, it is thought that God does not experience temporal succession. So this is things happening one after another.

God's relation to each event in a temporal sequence is the same as his relation to any other event. God does not experience the first century before he experiences the 21st century. Both of these centuries are experienced by God in one timeless now.

So while it is true that in the 13th century Aquinas prayed for understanding and received it, God's response to his prayer is not something that also occurred in that century. God, in his timeless state of being, heard Aquinas' prayer and answered them.

He did not first hear them and then answer them. He heard and answered in one timeless moment. In fact, he did so at the same timeless moment that he hears and answers the prayers offered in the 21st century.

So the way I kind of envision this, has anybody seen the minority report? So you know that they had like the hologram and they could like view time and they could swipe their hand and they could scroll forward and they could scroll backwards and they could kind of see.

I kind of think of God being outside of time and able to kind of like just, you know, scroll back and forth to see any point in time. This is a very primitive view, but it's a way to kind of envision God as being something that's outside of time.

Time is something we experience. It's something God created. Not something that he necessarily is controlled by. We're controlled by time. We can't stop it. We can't slow it down. We can't reverse it.

We can't speed it up. But God is all powerful and outside of time and therefore time doesn't actually have an impact on him. It doesn't control him. He's not beholden to it. So I actually like this explanation of this timelessness, the timelessness of God, God essentially existing outside of time and being able to see all things all at once.

In a simplistic sense, like anybody who builds something or makes something as a creator, even a house, the house is bound by the design that the builder made it and it can't go beyond that design or realm.

But obviously the one who built it is free to go way beyond its limits.

Absolutely. And time being sort of a fourth dimension for us is something that we're bound by but God being the creator of isn't bound by it. So it really comes down to a quantitative versus qualitative difference.

So God is an infinite being but not a composition of an infinite number of things. So that is to say he is not eternal in the temporal sense but he is outside of time and the creator of time.

Well, Matt,.

It's often been said that he created time. In Genesis 4, you know, God separated light versus darkness and that was time. That started the beginning of that.

Yeah, when he created night, yeah. So there's another argument for the creation of the universe and it's called the fine-tuning argument. Now this goes really deep but I'm going to show you a quick video about the fine-tuning argument and then we're going to actually talk about some of the fine-tuned parameters of our universe.

So there's an agreement in the scientific community that the universe and the conditions of the early universe were exquisitely fine-tuned.

That's a good one.

And the question is why? As Christians we believe we know why. We believe that God is the creator and he created it with man in mind, with our form of life in mind and that is why the universe has been fine-tuned to support us.

The reason that our solar system is where it is in the Milky Way galaxy. It happens to be kind of out on a radial arm of the Milky Way galaxy where there's not too much radiation, there's not too much activity happening that could impact our planet.

There are a number of things that have to be just right for us to survive and for us to exist at all. And so we believe that that's because the creator of the universe, God, has actually monkeyed with the numbers.

He's the one that set up the laws the way they are, the physical laws the way they are so that we could exist in this universe. So some people believe though that that is not the case. They believe in the appearance of design and that things just are what they are and part of the problem that they have is around the probabilities of why our universe exists the way that it does and the likelihood that our universe would be one that would spring up.