 Yeah, there is still spaces for the AMP conference, so if you want to sign up, you can do that. I won't be here next Sunday, because they have me speaking at the church that's sponsoring the conference, and they have five services, and I was volunteering to do five separate messages. They said, no, no. We want one message. So it will be the same message at all five of the services, and that's why we have to end the AMP conference shortly after three o'clock, because there is an evening service right there on Saturday. Ross Houglund's not with us. He's actually next door teaching a class on fine-tuning design, how it shows evidence for God, and that's kind of interesting, because our scientists get together for lunch every Monday and Tuesday, and we set the Tuesday lunch we're talking about. Would it actually be possible to develop a fine-tuning design argument on carbon that late people can understand? Everybody's saying, it can't be done, it's way too complicated, but you know what? I gave it a shot, and what I love about this class, you let me field stuff, field test stuff, has never been heard. So this is a talk I literally developed, it's a short talk, 20 minutes, so let me give that, and we'll jump into Isaiah, where we picked up last time. Those of you new to the class, what we're doing is we're going through all the creation texts in the Bible, and Isaiah has more material on creation in science than any of the book of the Bible, with the exception of the book of Job. And so we do have study questions that we'll distribute if you don't have them. I got them up here, and we're actually now on question number one. We're really moving along here, right? Okay. But we're also engaging in an interesting exercise, how to speed read through a book of the Bible on a particularly focused topic. I'm thrilled with all of you, because you've read through the entire book of Isaiah in under 15 minutes, and pulled all the verses out that are relevant to question number one. And we're going to be finishing up that little study after I talk about carbon. Okay. Please raise your hand, and pardon me, no, no, no. So no one has had a chance to look at this, but it actually came out of an interesting discussion. Could this actually be communicated to a lay audience? A lot of you here are engineers and scientists, so. But I want feedback, and that's what I love about this class. I can field stuff in front of you. You'll give me feedback. All of you that are participating through MP3s and virtual screening, yeah, please let me know what you think, post comments and questions on my Facebook and Twitter pages. I appreciate that feedback. But I've got a question for all of you. Please raise your hand if you are a carbon-based life form. Okay. Raise your hand if you're not a carbon-based life form. Okay. They really are aliens. No, they really are. Because no matter where you are in the universe, if you're alive, you must be carbon-based. There is no other element in the periodic table that has a necessary bonding stability and bonding complexity to permit life to exist. There used to be a debate 40 years ago. Maybe we could make life based on boron or silicon or arsenic. We now know that's simply not possible. You can't get long enough protein chains or DNA and RNA unless it's based on carbon. Now, the very first book I read on astronomy was when I was seven years of age. Our elementary school had just bought some new books. And one of the brand new books they purchased was the first book that really got attention from Fred Hoyle. It was called Nature of the Universe. And that book actually got me started barely on trying to find a relationship with God. It took a while. But I remember reading in that book this comment, there's a good deal of cosmology in the Bible. It is a remarkable conception. And when I first picked up a Bible 10 years later and began to go through it, I realized what he said, indeed, was true. But maybe one reason I didn't pick up a Bible for 10 years, two chapters of that book, we have Fred Hoyle railing against the Bible and Christianity. His conclusion is Christianity is despicable and it's false. Okay. There's an irony in what he said there. Now, you wrote this in 1952. And I'll be showing you a little bit later what he wrote in 1981. He changed his position all because of carbon. Okay. So carbon has brought him to recognize there must be a God behind the universe. That's why I call carbon the miracle element. It's a miracle that there's any carbon at all in the universe. Okay. Typically, when I engage scientists who are atheists or agnostics, one of their challenges is, okay, if there is a God that wanted a place for human beings, then I can see why you might want a star like the sun and a planet like the earth and maybe the moon, but everything else just seems to be a total waste. Why are there 200 billion useless galaxies in the universe if this was all created by God? I got another question for you. How many have ever heard that one? Okay. Yeah, quite a few of you. I mean, I hear that frequently from people, not just scientists, but for lots of people. Okay. If there's a God, why all those galaxies? And keep in mind, your typical galaxy has got two or 300 billion stars. So that adds up to a whole lot of stars when you think all we need is one star. Why all these other stars and all these other galaxies? Incidentally, if you add up all the stars and galaxies, that's only 0.27% of all the stuff in the universe. There's a whole lot more stuff. Why is that all there? The answer is the universe's mass determines what elements you get in the universe. The initial, pardon me, let me pull this back here for you. Okay. The mass of the universe determines how much of the initial hydrogen in the universe is transformed into helium during the first few minutes. Because it's happening with the universe. We have a beginning to the universe where the universe is infinitesimally small. And if you take something big and make it smaller, it gets hotter. Okay. The universe today is about three degrees above absolute zero. But we know the universe began infinitesimally small, which means nearly infinitely hot. But as it expanded, it cooled. And it was a few minutes when it passed through the temperature range of 150 million degrees to about 17 million degrees. That's centigrade, not Fahrenheit. Okay. And went through that temperature range. That was a temperature where hydrogen could be fused into helium, nuclear fusion. So the universe started off with only one element hydrogen. But as the universe expanded from its initial creation event, a small amount of the hydrogen was transformed into helium. Now, the greater the mass of the universe, the more hydrogen is transformed into helium. So if you make the universe bigger than what we see, you get more helium in those first few minutes. If you make it smaller, you get a little less helium. The greater the cosmic mass density, the more hydrogen is fused into helium during the first few minutes after the cosmic creation event. Now, if the universe were to have fewer than 200 billion galaxies, you say, well, how much are we talking about? Make the universe less massive by about one part and a quadrillion quadrillion, a couple more quadrillions. And this is what happens. You get so little helium being transformed from the hydrogen that the future stars are not able to make anything beyond helium. Which means that the universe would forever just have hydrogen and helium. That'd be the periodic table. Boy, that would be a really easy first elementary school children, right? They'd look at the periodic table, hey, there's only two there. So, no, it wouldn't be enough for any kind of life at all. So, but yeah, that would be the permanent state of the universe. You'd only have hydrogen and helium. So, that's why you need a universe with enough mass to make 200 billion galaxies because it is any less all you get is hydrogen and helium. On the other hand, if you're to make the mass of the universe slightly more, what happens is you make so much helium from hydrogen in those first few minutes that the future stars quickly convert all that hydrogen and helium into elements that are heavier than iron. Which case, the periodic table looks like this, okay? It starts at cobalt and goes all the way down to plutonium. By the way, there are actually 94 naturally occurring elements in the universe. It stops at uranium today, but netinium and plutonium also are made by stars, but because they have half lives of only a few tens of millions of years, the universe now is old enough that stars like the Sun and the Earth don't have any of that. But yeah, 94 elements. The universe must have a mass density that's exquisitely fine tuned in order to get this full set of elements. Now, notice that if the universe is either slightly smaller or slightly bigger by as little as one part in a quadrillion, quadrillion, quadrillion, quadrillion, you're missing all the elements that are critical for life. In particular, you're missing these guys. Carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. I mean, that's what we're made of, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. And so make the universe even the tiniest bit more massive or less massive, you have a universe with no carbon at all, no nitrogen at all, no oxygen at all, and no possibility whatsoever for life. Now, that's miracle number one. Yes? Would that be applicable during the early, early inflation period, not after that? Okay, the inflation period happens when the universe is about a tenth of a second old. So, at the universe at that point is way too hot for nuclear fusion. It has to be old enough that the temperature drops to 150 million degrees. So, when it's that temperature, now you can get hydrogen fusing to helium, and that happens a little bit after the universe is three minutes old. So, typically all this stuff happens between the three and four minute window. Now, if you make the universe a little bit less massive or more massive, you can extend that by about two minutes. But, yeah, those two minutes is where all this stuff happens and the future stars make everything else. But, depending on how that ratio of hydrogen to helium, it's basically the universe's 24% helium by mass and 76% hydrogen. And if you were to make it even 25% helium, you wind up converting all the light stuff into heavy elements. And if you make it just 23%, you just get hydrogen and helium. So, it's got to be very sensibly fine tuned to get that, yes. You're statistic. Another way, if I understand correctly, is that all the mass at the beginning of the creation of the universe is the same amount of mass as we have now. It's just more expanded. Yes. At that time, in the very early universe, you were to remove one dime's worth of mass out of all matter in the universe. No earth at any time. Yeah, that's that one part in a quadrillion, quadrillion, quadrillion, quadrillion, etc. Now, I'd be cautious about using that number today because that's on the assumption that the only factor governing the expansion of the universe is its mass. You know, there's a second factor, dark energy. And because of dark energy, we don't have to have the mass quite as fine tuned as one dime's worth out of all the mass of the universe. However, we have to fine tune the dark energy much more exquisitely than that dime's worth. So yeah, the fine tuning is actually more spectacular than what we knew before we discovered dark energy. But yeah, because of dark energy, you can relieve some of the fine tuning. That's the point. Because often unbelievers will say, well, you know what? The fine tuning is not as big as what you thought. We can lower it here. They never get rid of the fine tuning, but they're able to move it around. So in other words, you can lower the fine tuning of one parameter, but you wind up raising it even more another parameter. So what's important in the fine tuning argument is to say, okay, let's look at the total fine tuning. The evidence for supernatural fine tuning design goes up rather than down, and that statement has always been true. It consistently goes up. Yes. I can see I'm not going to get through this in 20 minutes, but go ahead. The start matter form with the Big Bang? Yes. Yeah, okay, you know, the universe starts off with the same cosmic mass density that it has today. So that part doesn't change. Dark matters included then? Dark matters included. Yeah, so you've got ordinary matter and dark matter. We'll go into the details. Let me take you to miracle number two. Okay. So we wind up with the universe having precisely the right amount of helium being fused from the initial hydrogen. And the future stars convert all that into heavier elements. It doesn't work, however, unless you have another fine tuning. Here's fine tuning number one. Okay. That GEL doesn't stand for glue. That stands for ground state energy level. Now, I'm not going to go into the details of that. That's what our scientists, my colleagues were saying. I don't get into that. You're really getting into the weeds. So I'm not going to avoid the weeds, but here's the point. Because of the camera, sorry. The ground state energy level of the helium nucleus, two of those roughly equals the ground state energy level of beryllium. And those of you who are familiar with your chemistry, helium has two protons and two neutrons. Beryllium, at least its most common form, has four protons and four neutrons, which means that you can take two helium atoms and make a beryllium atom or nucleus. However, you will not get very much beryllium unless the ground state energy level of the helium is half that of beryllium. So those have to be equal, otherwise you don't get beryllium, and guess what? If you don't get beryllium, you get nothing heavier than beryllium. With hydrogen, in helium, a little bit of boron, a little bit of lithium, a very tiny amount of beryllium and nothing else. You would have no carbon in the universe unless this equation is correct. Number two. It's critical that the ground state energy level of beryllium and the ground state energy level of helium equal the excited state energy level. There are physical details again. If you're interested, you can take a graduate level course in nuclear synthesis. Just willing to take my word for it, okay? But those two ground state energy levels must come very close to weakling the excited state energy level of carbon. If this is not the case, again, you wind up with the universe with no carbon within carbon. Not only would the universe be devoid of carbon, it would be devoid of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, iron, and everything else. Unless this is the case. So you need these two very careful fine tunings to get carbon in anything beyond carbon. So not only is it necessary that the universe have exactly the total mass that it has, these two equations must be true. These two principles must be very carefully fine-tuned in order to permit stars to actually take that pre-mortial hydrogen and helium and make beryllium and make carbon. Okay. Now for life to be possible, we need not just carbon, we need oxygen, we need nitrogen, we need phosphorus, and a bunch of other things. Okay. The ground state energy level of carbon must have a value that's not equal to that of oxygen. But we're very close to being equal to that of oxygen. Know what would happen? Stars would convert all the carbon into oxygen. We'd have lots of oxygen, but no carbon. And in that universe, no life would be possible. Now, if you're going to make the differences greater than what you see here, what would happen is you'd have lots of carbon and no oxygen. These two numbers must be exactly what they are in order to get a universe where you've got a rough balance between carbon and oxygen. And that's what life requires. We need lots of carbon. We also need lots of oxygen. If you don't have oxygen and carbon, you're not going to have proteins, DNA, and RNA, and no possibility for life. And this is something that was studied at Caltech back in the late 1950s and early 1960s. And what happened is a physicist by the name of Willie Fowler began working on the physics of how stars make elements heavier than helium. And he needed some help. So who did he recruit? He recruited Fred Hoyle. So Fred Hoyle left Britain and spent a few years at Caltech working with Willie Fowler. And they also realized we need to get some other astronomers involved so they brought up Jeffrey and Margaret Burbage. They were in the San Diego area so it wasn't that far for them to come. And the four of them worked on what is now recognized as probably the most seminal and most cited paper in all of astrophysics. But one of the things these four physicists and astronomers worked on was these two numbers. And basically what they concluded changed those numbers by as little as one tenth of a percent. You will not get a universe with the quantities of oxygen and carbon that would make life possible. And many years after this team of four came up with this we have Fred Hoyle writing in not as a journal but it's not as technical as other journals. It's a journal called Engineering and Physics and this is how Fred Hoyle concluded this article. Incidentally, it's available for free online. So you can just put engineering and science. Fred Hoyle will pop right up. This is how the paper ends. Hoyle comments on these two numbers and he says this a common sense interpretation of the fact suggests that a super intellect as monkey with the physics as well as with the chemistry and biology and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts referring to these facts in these so overwhelming as to put this conclusion beyond question. So he went from being an agnostic to a theist thanks to just looking at the energy level states for helium, beryllium, carbon and oxygen. So aren't you excited about what happened there at Caltech back in 1956? Now it's interesting none of those four were believers stunned by what they had discovered here. Okay. So that explains why we have a universe with roughly equal amounts of carbon and oxygen. However, yes. Okay you told us why we believe carbon the number for carbon and oxygen are what they are. Okay that goes back to Fowler. Right. The numbers you gave us for the quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion that number as far as the difference in the mass of the universe where does that go back to? Okay where that goes back to is that unless the cosmic mass density is very precisely fine tuned you won't get the ratio of hydrogen to helium during those first few minutes of the existence of the universe. But my question is what people, what discoveries does that go back to? Okay well the one who really got the ball rolling was another ACS astronomer Guy at Princeton and trying to think of his name Robert Dickey Robert I'll write about him in a couple of my books and he was the one who basically got the whole anthropic principle thing going. He published a paper in 1961 basically making a point that the expansion rate of the universe must be tuned to within one part in 10 to the 56 power otherwise you don't get any stars, planets or galaxies and he says that requires the mass of the universe to be exquisitely fine tuned so he got the ball rolling that paper got published in nature it got a lot of attention and a number of other physicists and astronomers jumped in and said let's study this at more depth and that's really able to come up with the more precise fine tuning numbers the number that you'll see in the literature today taking into account both the mass of the universe and dark energy the fine tuning must be better than one part in 10 to the 120 second power and what's interesting is since 1961 that number of one part in 10 to the 56 they've been keep adding more and more numbers to the index as they study this in greater and greater detail but yeah Robert Dickey gets the credit for getting the ball rolling and there's no well known astrophysicist that objects those numbers no even the leading atheists even someone such as Lawrence Krauss wrote a paper in the astrophysical journal saying this is the most spectacular fine tuning evidence we can measure anywhere in science now I firmly believe we're going to find more spectacular numbers but he is right to date it ranks as the most spectacular one that we can measure and the point is in astrophysics we can make good measurements I would argue that we're going to find even greater fine tuning in biology but the measurements are just too difficult to make but where we can make the measurements one part in 10 to the 120 second power I think you've heard me speak before you compare that to the very best example of our capacity to do fine tuning design what we see at the hand of the creator ranks about 10 to the 98 times superior which means he's got to be at least that many times more intelligent and knowledgeable and better funded than we mere human beings okay let me move on with this because I'm now at the 22 minute mark here on my computer I do want to get to the book of Isaiah here okay so what this does this is the fine tuning you need to get carbon and oxygen however all this fine tuning winds up producing a universe with too much carbon and oxygen and so if you really want to have life we have to have some fine tuning beyond these first few minutes of the universe and beyond what the stars are able to do and beyond the fine tuning of these nuclear ground state energy levels in order to take all this abundance of carbon and oxygen and reduce it to a level that's appropriate for life okay we've covered literally in the last few years and it's through astronomers finding planets beyond our solar system and probably you've heard for the past 20 years astronomers have been on a quest to find analogues of planet earth they've not found a twin but they've found lots of earth analogues planets that are roughly like the earth and a few of those planets they've been able to actually get where they can actually determine how much water, carbon and nitrogen those planets have and what they've discovered for example on those earth-like planets they come in with 1200 times more carbon abundance than our planet earth 1200 times as much carbon which got astronomers thinking okay that's the norm how did earth wind up with so little carbon and you say well what's wrong with carbon we're all carbon based but little extra carbon shouldn't hurt us here's how it hurts you if you were to pack our atmosphere with 1200 times more carbon than what it has right now you'd have a really thick atmosphere so thick your lungs would not be able to operate make the air pressure a factor three times higher we all die our lungs would not be able to push against all that extra air pressure incidentally there you go all carbon based lung dysfunction and it goes the other way too any of you who climb high mountains recognize if you drop the air pressure by a factor of three likewise you die and so that's what makes climbing mountains like Mount Everest so challenging because you're right there at the one third level and so they tell you if you're going to climb Mount Everest please only spend a couple hours at the top and then get down where you get enough oxygen enough air pressure that your lungs can function well again so however you can say there's lots of life forms that don't have lungs how about the mere bacteria that run around well if you put 1200 times as much carbon or atmosphere that means you're going to have lots of methane and lots of carbon dioxide you know what those are? Greenhouse gases that are going to trap way too much heat that a planet like Earth the surface temperature will be on the melting point of lead that will be beyond the melting point of iron and of course life would not be possible so this began a quest on the part of my peers how can we solve the problem of how Earth went from having all that carbon and incidentally we also have as much nitrogen nitrogen is also greenhouse gas so if you have the nitrogen content by 2400 we're all in deep trouble so how is it that we began with all this carbon oxygen nitrogen and reduced it down to a point where everything is still in the right balance relative to how much carbon you got the oxygen and nitrogen but it's at a low enough level all three of them that we can actually have complex life like you see here in this room okay so what astronomers discovered were very well to determine the only way you're going to be able to knock the carbon content down by factor 1200 is to have the pre-mortial atmosphere of the Earth basically blown away and they said okay what kind of objects can blow away that much carbon they said ah, wolf riot stars you've all heard of wolf riot stars right? okay probably not wolf riot stars are really giant stars you know 10 to 20 times the mass of our star of the sun many then end up a supernova but even before they go supernova they blow out these powerful winds moreover they not only blow out these powerful wind, star winds they actually produce a lot of aluminum 26 aluminum 27 is what you've got in your kitchen aluminum 26 is radioactive aluminum and as a very short half-life there's no aluminum 26 left on the Earth it decayed away long ago it's half-life is on the order of a million years however when the Earth was really young it was sitting next to these wolf riot stars so it basically determined that this is probably like the birthplace of our star of the sun now this is a big dense open cluster of stars but actually this is toned down this is one of the denser ones we can see in our galaxy right now but when our galaxy was much younger when the sun was formed it had much bigger open clusters than what you see here and astronomers have determined our star of the sun would have had to be born in a cluster of stars with at least 10,000 member stars so a really big cluster where the stars are jammed quite tightly together and where there's lots of these wolf riot stars that are blasting out this wind in this aluminum 26 and then where they become supernova and then blast us with other elements like uranium and thorium that we need to make continents and so the birthplace is critical this is where we got super enriched with all these heavy elements that we need to make out of the outer world to world the continents and oceans but it's also where we need to be born to be blasted with enough aluminum 26 that will blow away virtually all our water and all of our carbon and oxygen and nitrogen just leaving us with a very thin layer of this stuff now if we had remained in that cluster we would have been in big trouble but you're going to be continuing to be irradiated with this nasty radiation and more heavy elements too many heavy elements would be a problem and so what astronomers are able to determine is that yes, you need exposure to all these wolf riot stars and supernova eruptions relatively close but you don't want to be there too long you'll be there too long the planet will be permanently to be uninhabitable it must be ejected now if you eject it too quickly you don't get enough stuff being blown away and you don't get enough enrichment of the elements heavier than iron so you want to remain there for a fine tuned time if you get ejected too early or you get ejected too late then the solar system is permanently uninhabitable and you need to be ejected in a particular direction and so astronomers have determined that the birthplace I'm supposed to go over here you'd want to be born about there because that's where you're going to get these really big star clusters where you're going to get these big wolf riot stars jammed closely together but you don't want to stay there you stay there then you're going to have permanent conditions that will make our planet uninhabitable you want to be ejected out to this spot here and by that spot that little red line you see there is what's called the co-rotation distance in our galaxy so we have stars obeying Newtonian mechanics the stars orbit around the center of the galaxy and just like with a planet center solar system the farther away they are from the center the more slowly they go around the center of the galaxy and so being born here you'd be making a much faster tripper than the center of the galaxy than out here and you see this spiral arm structure it's rigid it actually rotates so what you want this co-rotation distance is a distance from the center of the galaxy where stars go around the center of the galaxy at the same rate that the spiral structure rotates what does that mean? it means that that distance is very infrequently now if you're exactly at the co-rotation distance you won't cross spiral arms because you'll be going around it at exactly the same rate however if you're exactly at the co-rotation distance you get something called mean motion resonances you see what on earth is that I won't go into the technical details bottom line is you're going to get kicked out you're going to go this way or this way and you're not coming back the only place it's safe is just inside the co-rotation distance sufficiently inside you avoid those dangerous mean motion resonances but you now wind up crossing spiral arms only once every billion years now when's the last time we crossed a spiral arm? half a billion years ago where are we right now? we're in between two dangerous spiral arms we're in between the Sagittarius and Perseus spiral arms last time we crossed was just before the Cameron explosion when animals showed up on planet for the first time that was basically the first time was safe enough to have animals on the earth where they could survive and so a half billion years from now we're going to cross a spiral arm again and that's going to be deadly for life but the other thing we notice is that this zone that we're in right now it's called the carbon poor zone of our galaxy so in this particular graph we see the abundance of elements heavier than helium with respect to distance and what you notice in this graph we were born our solar system at that distance from the center of the galaxy where the abundance of heavy elements was maximal and we wind up at one of the minimal points and we're at one of the minimal points that means you're going to be relatively safe from nearby interruptions from things like supernova events encounters with massive stars so we were literally born in the most dangerous part of our Milky Way galaxy but by being born there all of that carbon got walked out of way as well as the oxygen nitrogen reduced from having 1200 times more to much lower level and then we got moved into the safest spot now here's where physicists have struggled with this it takes a particular orientation a supermassive stars to eject a star and its planets like ours unless you get precisely the right orientation there is no ejection it's got to be precisely fine tuned to get it to eject and you want it to be ejected in the right direction and so what stops the ejection? another very carefully fine tuned orientation of stars breaks the ejection velocity and stops us right in the safest part of the Milky Way galaxy does that sound like someone engineer was setting this all up making sure that we got enriched with these heavy elements sufficiently and had enough carbon, nitrogen and oxygen blown away from our atmosphere and surface ocean and then ejected us out I think you're getting the right conclusion however this still does not reduce the carbon to a low enough level for advanced light to be possible perhaps low enough to make primitive light possible but not advanced light we need another carbon eradicating event in order to get us down to the sufficient low level and that's where we have the moon forming event and so our solar system began with ten planets one which got ejected a planet about ten times the mass of earth got ejected and fact astronomers think that we might be able to find that ejected planet about fifty times farther away from us than where Neptune is but yeah it was much closer it got ejected and then there was a tenth planet that merged with a premortial earth and so these two planets merged together and that winds up forming the moon it literally made the earth a little bit bigger and that merger event actually enriched our planet with a little more uranium and thorium more heavy elements than what it had from its birth cluster and got rid of virtually all of our atmosphere and ocean now we got a thin layer of water in a thin atmosphere that was replaced through a later bombardment of comets and so that's how our planet began with all that carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and water and wound up with so little incidentally as we look at these earth-like planets they come in with about five hundred to five thousand times as much water as what we have here and so I find it ironic that NASA's quote let's chase the planets with water water is the third most abundant molecule in the universe right after Hydrogen II and Hydrogen III the universe is soaking wet but we need to tell NASA's look for the dry planets well there's lots of dry planets there are plenty of planets that have no water at all and there's lots of planets that have got five hundred plus times as much water as we have so far we've found only one that has this tiny amount of water that right amount of water to make advanced life possible the right amount of carbon, oxygen and nitrogen to make life possible so I think that what Fred Hoyle wrote back in 1981 is even more applicable today than it was when he penned this in that magazine back in 1981 indeed a common sense interpretation of the facts doesn't merely suggest it establishes that a super intellect as monkey with a physics I would say designed the physics as well as the chemistry and the biology there are no blind forces we're speaking about in nature the numbers overwhelmingly calculate that this conclusion is beyond question so okay I'd appreciate feedback and we're going to jump into the book of Isaiah yes can you just clarify what is the primary danger of crossing spiral arms? the primary danger of crossing spiral arms is spiral arms are populated by super giant stars and they go supernova and when they do you can kiss advanced life goodbye so you can read improbable planet one of the amazing miracles is the property of the past 10,000 years we typically get a supernova oh every couple of thousand years that's closer to us than a thousand light years that won't kill you but it sure destroys your agricultural productivity and that was common during the last ice age with the end of the last ice age we stopped having these nearby supernova we've had about 10 supernova in the past 10,000 years but none of them have been closer than 5,000 light years so but yeah when you cross a spiral arm in fact what we notice is that crossing spiral arms is when you get these mass extinction events and the other thing you're going to run into are giant molecular clouds and they're massive and they disturb the orbits of the planets so that's not a nice thing for at least advanced life on planet earth either incidentally crossing a spiral arm won't do much damage to microbes they're simply bad for plants and animals so that explains why we haven't had plants and animals until the past half billion years because before that we would have been in big danger incidentally when our galaxy gets older and older it gets safer and safer for life because you have less and less radiation from the decay of uranium and thorium and when life was first created on planet earth the radiation from radiometric decay was five times higher than it is today so another reason why our crater waits before he puts us on the face of the earth okay feel free to send me comments I'm going to hear plenty from my wife so she's been taking notes, I've been watching her you got comments, yes yes if you get the debate over there I had with Victor Stanger at Caltech he brought that up, he said all this fine tuning design assumes carbon base life it assumes that we have gravity and electromagnetism surety with different physics and would forget about all these elements we wouldn't have to have all this fine tuning and I said well Victor you must be talking about the angels they live in a different dimensional realm under different laws of physics and carbon isn't the same issue for them as it is for us but guess what, their realm is fine tuned like ours you could change the laws of physics but you're going to still have fine tuning if you want something as complex as a sentient of beings what did he say? he basically conceded the point I mean you can watch the DVD that yeah you still got fine tuning but his whole point was it would be a different fine tuning why conceded that point it would be a different fine tuning but it raises an issue why the laws of physics and that's a question I took on why the universe is the way it is and incidentally we have this class that's being taught by Mark and Vel what's it called a God made universe why God made the universe the way it is and what they're being exposed to in that small group of video series is that the laws of physics not only must be fine tuned to make carbon baselight possible they must be fine tuned to make the eradication of evil and suffering possible and so that's what's unique about Christianity unlike the other religions it's a two creation model God creates his universe as a tool in his hands to eradicate evil and suffering while enhancing our free will capability that to me is an amazing paradox that God is going to eliminate the possibility of evil and suffering while at the same time he's going to release us into a greater expression of our free will but the only way it can happen is that we free will beings in the universe with gravity electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear force with the universe having precisely the dimensions and age that it has and so yeah you can read I think it's chapter 12 and 13 of the book as to why physics must be fine tuned in order to have the possibility in God's hands for rapid efficient conquest and removal of evil in the new creation there won't be gravity there won't be electromagnetism there won't be the strong and weak nuclear force there won't be stars it's going to be a completely different kind of realm why? because there isn't even a possibility of evil ever being expressed by the free will beings that God has there how is that possible for free will beings because the only way you get there is you're subjected to the most challenging tests and I use the analogy in the book as a PhD I've got a PhD degree basically a guarantees that never again will I have to be tested for my competency in astronomy based on the myth that I've been subjected to the most difficult test possible in astronomy therefore it's useless to test me again likewise God sees fit to put us through the most challenging tests in the context of evil notice notice no one gets to the new temptation without being exposed to the temptations of Satan the most powerful being that God created probably the most definitive biblical text that emphasizes that is the text in Revelation 19 and 20 that talks about the thousand year reign of Christ here on earth during the thousand years Satan is locked up he's not allowed to test people but at what does it say at the end of the thousand years God releases Satan from his prison to go out into the world and to test all the children that have been born during the millennium and it tells us the majority will fail the tests but those that pass the tests get to go with the rest of us into the new creation so just like I didn't get my PhD without being tested none of us gets that guarantee of being totally delivered from evil and suffering unless we're exposed to being tested so in that sense we can thank God for creating Satan and we can thank God that Satan was the first free will being to rebel against God because it opens up a pathway where we can be delivered from sin and suffering and evil and have our free will enhance yes talk about these various processes that the solar system went through from birth until now but what would that in those same processes is that consistent with how we see the other planets in our solar system how they ended up? well the other planets in our solar system likewise were stripped of a lot of their carbon, oxygen and nitrogen and other elements like sulfur but because they didn't experience this moon forming event that we did they weren't stripped to the same degree so for example if you go to Mars you'll find that the soil on Mars has 60 times as much sulfur as the soil here on Earth which means Matt Damon couldn't grow potatoes with Martian soil he wouldn't be able to grow anything with Martian soil the only way you're going to be able to grow food on Mars is to bring earth dirt with you so that's another expense that NASA needs to take into account in trying to set up a colony on Mars so the other planets are not habitable because they didn't have the same experience as Earth but they're in a lot better shape than the planets that we're discovering outside of our solar system I mentioned the ones where we can measure 2400 times as much nitrogen at least 500 times more water and 1200 times more carbon and what we've discovered also is that every one of the other 7 remaining planets in our solar system must be exquisitely fine tuned in their physical and orbital features to make advance life possible here on Earth but their current conditions is consistent with these processes that we've gone through well it's one reason why our community of astrophysicists are so confident that indeed the solar system is in this very dense large star cluster because it's consistent not only with the features of the Earth and the Moon but consistent with the features of the other 7 planets and especially with the features of the asteroids and comets and meteorites I mean, as you look at other planetary systems they either have comet and asteroid belts that are 1000 to 10,000 times bigger than ours or they have none at all and the chemistry is different so a different chemistry again sustains this particular interpretation so and this is all what we were discussing at lunch last Tuesday and they were all kidding me saying Hugh, there's no way you're going to be able to package all this where late people can understand it well if I only tell you part of the story I think I can get away with it but maybe you don't think so that's why I'm waiting for some feedback from all of you but you know let's jump into the book of Isaiah let's take a 5 more minutes ok, let me do 5 minutes ok, so he's going to shut me down a little bit alright ok, let me turn this off and turn the next one on it's one of those Sundays where I brought two keynote messages ok, Job has the most but Isaiah ranked second for content on creation and science and particularly when you go through chapters 40 through 48 or 51, 40 to 51 and this is what we've been doing in the class basically I had all of you get into small groups and read through the book in 15 minutes with the goal of collecting all the passages that pertain to the beginning of the universe and God's involvement in the beginning of the universe and we came up with 30 different passages while these are the passages we discussed last week you notice we erased quite a few because what we did is we had you all come up here one at a time and read the passage then we had a class discussion does this passage really pertain to the beginning of the universe or God's involvement in setting up the beginning of the universe the way he did now, as you see we stripped a few out but that was on purpose I told you when you read through Isaiah if you have doubt include it in other words you want to make sure you come up with all the passages that are relevant and so on purpose I had you include those that you thought could conceivably be relevant then we actually had a class discussion is it really relevant or not these are the ones that remained and the ones we discussed last week actually we only got down to chapter then to chapter 40 so we need to go to 41-42 and these are all the other ones we need to look at as well but guess what we're going to wait until next week to figure out and kind of where we're going we're going to come up with a list of all the Isaiah texts relevant to question one in your study sheet then we're going to go through each passage and see exactly what does that text tell us about the creation of the universe the beginning of the universe and how God was involved in that beginning of the universe that'll be in two weeks that'll be in two weeks and then we've got another question on how God's going to bring the universe to an end that's what's exciting about Isaiah it tells you how God got it started it also tells you how God's going to end it and you can see from the study questions there's eight more topics that are addressed in the book of Isaiah including something that's going to help us resolve the big debate that's going on now whether you're living on a flat earth or a spherical earth I'm shocked that that debate is even happening but it's come back in big way it's all over the internet but basically the book of Isaiah settles that debate conclusively and incidentally so conclusively that Christians living 1500 years ago said this is a done deal it's got to be spherical yes and the last cast would have knocked everything off the edge cast would have knocked everything off the edge that's what I haven't used yet so I'll try to come up with that one that's a good one let me bow in prayer father in heaven we thank you for this time we've had thank you lord for your revelation the book of nature and the book of scripture we want to thank you for this man Isaiah that you raised up lord how your spirit spoke to him over six decades and lord a very troubling time in the history of Judah and lord the scriptures that he's given us that have blessed generation after generation of unbelievers and believers alike and father I pray you would help us in our study of these texts to become better equipped to share your word with people don't yet know you as the lord and savior that they may receive your light your love and your truth in Jesus name amen thank you if you don't have the study