 Thronomers, and it's titled the Formation of Mini-Neptunes. And what they're discovering, there's now over 3,700 planets that have been discovered outside of our solar system. And the one that's the most common are what we call Mini-Neptunes. They used to be called Super-Earths. They're basically planets between one and ten times the mass of the Earth. But they're now calling them Mini-Neptunes. Neptune is 14 times the mass of the Earth. And the reason they're calling these Mini-Neptunes rather than Super-Earths is that they have a much lower density than the Earth. The density is typical of that of Jupiter, which means they're dominated by gases. And this paper is trying to explain why it is that these Mini-Neptunes are so abundant in other planetary systems and so rare in our solar system. Our solar system doesn't have any as zero. And yet these are very much abundant in other planetary systems. The other thing this paper addresses is why is it that our solar system has planets like Neptune and Uranus and no other planetary system does? I mean, for example, you can go to the catalog that's maintained of extra solar planets. It's easy to find. Just put an exoplanet catalog that pops right up, gives you a complete list of all the planets that have been discovered and their characteristics. But what you find is that for planets that are in the mass range of Uranus and Neptune, none of them are any farther away from their host stars than 80% of the Earth's distance from the Sun. It means they're all orbiting really close to their star, whereas Uranus and Neptune orbit far out like 30 times the distance that Earth orbits the Sun. So we're literally finding no analogs to Uranus and Neptune. And what's interesting too is we're finding lots of planets that are one to ten times the mass of the Earth, and many of them orbit more distant than Earth orbits the Sun, but we have none that are the size of Neptune Uranus that orbit that distance. That's important because until recently people said, well, the bigger planets are the easier ones to discover, and that's true. But what we notice is we see the big ones, pardon me, the small ones far away, but not the big ones far away. Well, this paper basically explains why it is that we're not seeing these kinds of planets and other planetary systems and why they see them in ours. And in order to get planets like many Neptune's to form, you have to have a protoplanetary disk that is rich in what we call volatiles. That's a term astronomers use for molecules and atoms that are lighter than water. So water would be a volatil, methane would be a volatil, ammonia and then hydrogen and helium would all be in that category. And that's what we notice is most protoplanetary disks are dominated by those kinds of compounds. And so when they form planets, they form lots of planets like Neptune and like many Neptune's. But what we notice is they form beyond what's called the ice line. The ice line refers that distance from the star where water is in a permanently frozen state. And yet the only way these gas-rich planets can form is if they form beyond the ice line, but then they migrate inwards towards their star. And that's also what's another feature that's unique about our solar system is that we see a few planetary systems where the gas giants and the Neptune-sized planets don't migrate at all. But the majority of where they see very significant migration. What has happened in the case of our solar system, the gas giants and Neptune-sized planets migrated a little bit inwards towards the sun, stopped in reverse direction. It's what's called the grand tack. Let me actually show you a slide of this. Here we go. So this shows the history of the movement of Neptune, Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter where they migrated towards the sun, especially Saturn and Jupiter, very slightly Uranus and Neptune, then they changed directions and migrated outwards. We don't see this in any other exoplanetary system and we don't understand why. But this paper mainly goes into the fact that, hey, the vast majority of protoplanetary systems are volatile rich and therefore they're going to form lots of these mini-Neptunes. But because our solar system is very poor in these volatiles, it doesn't have them. And we understand why. It's because of the migration of our sun from being very close to the center of our galaxy to its current position right here. And what we notice is that, where do you see the peak of that curve? Let me bring it out. You're not seeing anything. Sorry. Let me pull this up for you here. So this shows you the migration of our solar system from a position that's quite close to the galactic center where the star density is very high and then it moves out to where the star density is very low. And the interesting thing here is that the abundance of the heavy metals, metals of heavy metals reaches a peak about 4 kiloparsecs out from the center of our galaxy that translates into about 13,000 light years. That's where the abundance of these metals is the highest. And we now know that our solar system formed in a dense star cluster with a minimum of 10,000 stars. And because of that density of stars, it was surrounded by supernova eruptions and we've just recently discovered two neutron stars merging together to make a black hole. That was announced on October 16th, the first ever discovery of the merging of two neutron stars to make a black hole. We now know that those kind of events are responsible for all the platinum group metals. Gold, silver, osmium, palladium, platinum are made when neutron stars merge. That's also where the uranium and thorium comes from, almost all the uranium and thorium. And all those metals are crucial for advanced light to be possible here on planet Earth. So when you go home today, you might thank God for a neutron star merging events that made all that gold and silver and platinum. And incidentally, it's not just jewelry, it's those kinds of metals that are crucial for chemotherapy drugs. So any of you who've had to deal with relatives who had cancer, you might want to thank God for a neutron star merging event that makes those chemotherapy drugs possible. However, if we had stayed in that cluster, the radiation from those supernova eruptions, especially neutron star merging events, would have permanently wiped out any possibility of life. What happened was after the Earth got enriched and also it got surrounded by what are called wolf-rayed stars. I won't go into the technical details, but they literally bathed the emerging solar system with aluminum-26. That's a short-lived radiometric isotope. It has a half-life of just a couple of million years. But the solar system got so heavily bombarded with aluminum-26, it stripped away virtually all the volatiles. So all the light stuff was blasted away and explains why when our solar system formed, it was extremely depleted in those light elements and light gases, light molecules, and quite rich in the heavier stuff. And then we got kicked out of that star cluster and we wound up where that dotted line is. And notice it's a place where you've got a minimal abundance of these heavy metals, a minimal abundance of these supernova eruptions and neutron star merging events, which is exactly what you need if you want life to survive. You don't want Sirius, for example, to go supernova. If Sirius goes supernova, we're all in serious trouble. It's only eight light years away. And that would definitely wipe us out. So that's one of the unique things of our solar system. The other unique thing is that we've had this grand tack thing where instead of the gas planets moving inwards towards the sun, interior to the orbit of the Earth, they got to within about two or three Earth distances from the sun and changed direction and moved outward. And the reason for the directional change is another unique feature of our solar system is that it has very small asteroid and comet belts. Again, as we look at these other solar systems or the planetary systems, they either have no comets and asteroids at all or they got asteroid and comet belts that are a thousand times bigger than ours. We are orbiting the only star that has five small asteroid belts. And what makes us all possible is that thanks to Jupiter and Saturn, what happened is that Saturn migrated inward at a faster rate than Jupiter did. You see that here? And it reached a point where Jupiter was making exactly two orbits around the sun for every single orbit that Saturn made around the sun. And that one-two resonance destabilized the comet and asteroid belts and got rid of about 99% of our asteroids and comets, but left enough that there was this change in direction and the gas giant planets moved outward. I won't go into any more of the details. If you want the technical details and documentation, they're in a book I wrote called Improbable Planet, which is over there at the table. And if you want to look at this paper, I'll have it up here. It basically shows you why it's so easy to make many Neptune's if you got lots of volatiles and why it's so hard to make Neptune and Uranus-type planets like we see in our solar system. And the bottom line is 20 years ago when we first started to find these planets, we thought they'd all be just like the planets in our solar system. What's interesting, we've yet to find a twin of any one of the eight planets in our solar system. And that discovery led us to the conclusion every one of those eight planets, we now know plays a crucial role in making advanced life possible here on planet Earth. We used to think you just had to fine-tune Earth, but we now know you've got to fine-tune the characteristics of all eight of the planets in order for advanced life to be possible. Again, if you want the details, it's an improbable plan. If I see we've got people lined up already, so I'm going to stop talking and take your questions because this is an open forum, which means it's not my content, it's your content. So Dave, go for it. Yeah, the very first question, this was before these people got in line, so I'm not cutting in front of them. The very first question is a Bible question. First Peter 2.5 says you are also a living stone being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices. And the question is, what is a spiritual sacrifice, the definition in this context? Yeah, the definition of that context, it's referring to the fact that we human beings are spiritual. We are physical, but we're also spiritual. And God has created us to do acts of service in the spirit realm. And so what we mean by making a sacrifice, a spiritual sacrifice is basically putting aside your physical desires and needs and ministering to other people's spiritual needs. Their need to form a relationship with a creator, for example, that would be in that category. And if you read the rest of 2 Peter 2, it flushes that out more detail. Again, so tempted to ask astronomy questions. But my question is, I listen to some of the archives of your paradox class and the very first one I listened to when I umzipped it, long ago you were talking about your encounter with witches. I don't know if you want to talk about that tonight, but I remember you said in that talk that you encountered some warlock that knew the Bible by memory and could say a reverse backwards. But he didn't understand the meaning of it. And you said there was, he could go like that and a little girl would do cartwheels. I was wondering if you could explain that. Well, I'll give you the story. Okay, thank you. This goes back a couple of decades, where there were a number of witchcraft covens in Pasadena. There was a street that had several of them. And there was a lady that escaped from that and came here. And so we wound up paying a visit at the coven. And it turns out the warlock there had quite a few women under his control in the house. And they were virtual sex slaves. And he tried to just say, hey, you know, I know you guys are Christians, but you got nothing on me. I've got all this power. I know the Bible better than you do. In fact, I got every verse of the New Testament memorized. It says, give me any verse and I'll repeat it back to you. In fact, I can repeat it back to you forwards and backwards. And indeed he could. But I just asked him a question. He said, OK, how about you pick a verse, your choice, any verse of the New Testament and tell us what it means. He couldn't do it. He had to memorize, but he couldn't tell you what it meant. But yeah, he had some real powers. In fact, he told us to see that little girl outside there on the street. I can make her do cartwheels anytime I want. And indeed he could. But when he couldn't explain the meaning of a single Bible verse, when the women and I was realized this guy isn't as powerful as he claims and they all managed to escape. Now what we did after that is we had days of prayer and fasting. Basically say, you know, this street with all these coffins, this isn't appropriate. And so we got to get together a group of about a couple of dozen people and we had several days of prayer and fasting. And result was all those coffins were gone. And I don't know if anything like that has returned since. But just shows you the power of prayer. That when something like that comes into your neighborhood, you can get that taken care of. So go ahead. Are there any side effects of the earth when the sun has made the movement all the way across from its original location? Well, this is one of the amazing things. Here we have the sun with its nascent planets being kicked out of its birth cluster. And how that happened is the sun would have had a close encounter with several super giant stars and the gravitational interaction caused the solar system to be strongly ejected from its birthing cluster. And then when it got to the safe zone, let me bring this up again here for you. So it was born relatively close to the center of our galaxy. It got kicked out of that dense star cluster and was shot out at high velocity, outwards through the galaxy. And that little circle you see there, that's what's called the co-rotation distance. That's the distance from the center of the galaxy where stars revolve around the center of the galaxy at the same rate that the spiral structure rotates. And that's the safest place to be for advanced life because that means that you're not going to be crossing spiral arms very often. If you're exactly at the co-rotation distance, you don't cross them at all. However, if you're exactly at the co-rotation distance, you get mean motion resonances, which will actually cause your solar system to be ejected inward or outward. The safest spot to be in our galaxy is slightly inside the co-rotation distance. You will cross spiral arms, but you only cross them once every billion years. And you're close enough away from the co-rotation distance, you don't get the mean motion resonance, the galactic mean motion resonance. So it's literally the safest place for life to be anywhere in our galaxy. And somehow when the sun got to that zone, it was slowing down by a gravitational interaction. Another set of super-giant stars had managed to stop at the ideal spot for advanced life. So I've run into astronomers that say, well, getting kicked out like that, that's just a coincidence, but then you've got another coincidence that happened to stop at just the right place. And in either case, these kinds of gravitational encounters are extremely rare. I mean, we only see a few stars that are experiencing that kind of outward movement and they don't stop at the safe spot. So, but yeah, because this happened very early in the Solar Systems history, we're literally talking the first percent of the Earth's histories when all this took place. There was no life on planet Earth, so nothing was disturbed. And the Earth's atmosphere remained intact, although at that time Earth had an atmosphere a hundred times thicker than it does today. And that's another whole story, how we wound up with the thin atmosphere. Okay, you're next. Dr. Ross, a couple of years ago, I was made aware that there was a lot of controversy with scientists about the beginning of life. And I just wonder, is there any update, or has that been, you know... Yeah, I can give you an update because my colleague Fazzal Rana, he's our staff about chemists, he and I attended the last Origin of Life Research Conference. We go to every Origin of Life Research Conference that's in North America. They held it every three years, and this year it was in San Diego, so we went. And what's interesting is that each Origin of Life Conference we go to, the mood is more depressing than the previous conference, because of the fact that the new data is telling them that things are a lot worse or materialistic explanation of the Origin of Life. In fact, the highlight at this conference back in July was Wednesday night where they had five of the world's leading Origin of Life researchers on a panel answering the question, do we understand where the building blocks of life come from? Where the proteins, the lipids, the DNA and the RNA. And each scientist was allowed 10 to 15 minutes to speak, and then the rest of the evening was a panel discussion. All five of them said, not only do we not understand where the building blocks come from, we don't even understand where the building blocks of the building blocks come from. And then they said, we don't even understand where the building blocks of the building blocks of the building blocks come from. Because I mean, the building blocks would be things like amino acids, things like nucleobases in the sugars. And yes, we don't understand where they come from, but even how you get those things is not well understood. Although we can make them in the lab, the challenge is, how does it happen in an interstellar molecular cloud? And attending that conference, most of the lectures were about the incredible advances they've made in the lab. But the whole point is, it simply testifies, if you're going to make this work, you need a lot of technology, a lot of funding, and you need very bright and intelligent biochemists to pull it off. Which means that someone a lot smarter and better educated and better funded than those biochemists must have done the deed in the first place. Although I will say this, as an astronomer, I did that there are chemical processes operating in these dense molecular clouds that will make a few of the simplest of the amino acids. Not the complex ones, but the simple ones like glycine. But we get to detect glycine. And that's because there's also processes operating in these dense molecular clouds that destroy the building blocks almost as fast as they're being made. But I would predict that eventually we'll find them at a few parts per billion. Right now we know they don't exist above one part in 10 million. And if they don't exist above one part in 10 million, you have no naturalistic model for the origin of light, because you have to have them in concentration. And what's really interesting is we got to have a conversation with a lady who's the world's top expert on what's called the homo-chorality problem. And that's the whole idea. You can't put the amino acids together unless they're all left-handed. And you can't put the sugars together unless they're all pardon me, all the amino acids have to be left-handed. The ribose sugars all have to be right-handed. And everywhere we look, we see that they tend to be mixed up ratios of left and right-handed. And the only mechanism we know of for making them all all the amino acids left-handed is circularly polarized ultraviolet light. And in the lab we've been able to get about a 30% excess. However, to make it work for the origin of light it's got to be 100%. And there's a very interesting paper given at the Origin of Light Conference where they said what we've noticed is the more success we get in making them towards 100%, the less of the sample we have. And basically concluded if you want a 100% left-handed amino acids you have zero amino acids left. Because the way you get them towards a greater preference for left-handed you destroy the right-handed ones at a higher rate than the left-handed ones. But you're basically destroying both. You just destroy the right-handed ones at a faster rate. And to get a 100% left-handed you basically wind up with nothing left. And the same thing with the ribose sugars. So that's the latest on Origin of Light research. And we have a podcast at reasons.org where we give you a much more detailed update on what's happening in Origin of Light research. I don't think we got the book here but you can also get a book from us, Origins of Light. Which incidentally I got peer reviewed. Our book on the Origins of Life we got a phone call from David Deemer. He was actually one of the five panelists that was there. It wasn't at this conference but a previous one where he said I hear you guys that come up with a book on the Origin of Life. Do you mind if I review it? And are you okay with me publishing it in Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere? And he said by the way I'm not a Christian. I'm an atheist. I'm going to be very critical. And we said well we can only benefit and please be as critical as you can. It can only help us find you in our model. Well it did get published and if you read the article he basically says that our book Origins of Life was the most comprehensive and scientific analysis of the state of Origin of Life that was interdisciplinary. He said I like everything about the book except that Jesus Christ part. Okay next question. Hugh I have a question and I have to put a preface before this question because I don't think it's a very good question but somebody asked it so I will put it to them and I'm putting the preface on there as I've been actively sharing my faith for 32 years and I hear Christians a lot of times question and judging the salvation of other people's hearts as they're living or as they die and from my experience talking to people and from Scripture I really need to be careful about judging the heart of other human beings because it's only something God can see and we've talked about bedside confessions and so like when people tell me do you think that person is going to go to hell I said well unless I was there or somebody I trust and I know the person was accustomed to swearing at Jesus Christ as they die that's about the only person I could guarantee is probably going to hell. Anybody else it's an unknown commodity would you agree to that? Well I'm running into a lot of people how do I know if I'm really a Christian how do I know that I'm going to be with God for the rest of eternity what we see in the book of Philippians chapter 2 is that when you give your life to Christ the Holy Spirit comes into you and one way you can know for sure that the Holy Spirit has taken up permanent residence in you is that the Holy Spirit gives you the desire and the power to obey the commands of Christ and therefore we shouldn't measure someone's Christianity by how often they go to church how often they pray, how much of the Bible they know do they have desire to read the Bible and to pray and to follow God that's beyond what they had before and that can be really reassuring because people can say well yeah my desires have changed well if your desires have changed regardless of your actual performance what you really are in the hands of the Creator and what I tell people is okay who do you want to spend rest of eternity with I mean do you really want to spend the rest of eternity in a relationship with God submitting to God's authority then that's where you're going to go but if you want nothing to do with God and want to be as far away from God as possible for the rest of eternity then God's got a place for you where you want to spend eternity I tell people God does not send people to hell, people choose hell it's the best possible place if you want nothing to do with God but if God's the best thing you can think of yeah I'd really like to spend eternity with him and as it says in the Bible if you seek after God he will find you and are you seeking after God or are you running away from him nothing to do with God and that's fine God's going to give you the desires of your heart that's an excellent frame of reference for this question I'll pose the question now that we have the frame of reference so the question is if someone is a true seeker they've received a little bit of light but maybe have not accepted Jesus Christ and while they're seeking something happens and they die what do you think they will go to hell or heaven or can we even say very good question in this chapter of the Gospel of John which basically says God sends his light out to every human being and if you go to John's first letter first John he defines that light he says God's light is a combination of his truth his life and his love and that's gone out to every human being in one form or another and it says if you want that love and that truth then God will make sure you get more and you'll proceed to salvation but if you reject the light that he gives you say I want nothing to do with that then you proceed towards condemnation so you'll be judged based on what you do with the light that God gives to every human being and a lot of people tell me well you can't be saved unless you understand the Bible and therefore you have to be literate in order to be a Christian no God sends his light out in a variety of ways and so it's not just the Bible where God reveals himself it tells us repeatedly in passages of the Bible God reveals himself through nature as well as through the Bible everybody has received God's light now it does say that some have received more than others I stand by the promise if you accept the light that God has given you he'll see to it that you get more and you'll see to it that you proceed towards salvation it's the direction you're headed that counts not exactly where you are right now go ahead what's the latest on the search for life on Mars? the latest for the search for life on Mars is that they're hoping you the taxpayer will fund several more missions to Mars some are already scheduled so there's going to be more missions to Mars with the goal of trying to find the chemical sources of life and I've been on record since the 1980s that eventually they will find those signatures for the simple reason that we know that a significant quantity of earth life has been transported from the earth to Mars now it's not a lot I mean meteoritic impact of the earth over the course of life's history on earth has deposited about 200 kilograms of earth soil on every 100 square kilometers of Mars now keep in mind that 1 ton of earth soil contains 100 quadrillion microbes and so the biological material of the earth is present on Mars it's also present in every other solar system body however 200 kilograms spread over 100 square kilometers that's a pretty thin layer so it's not going to be easy to find the remains of earth life in Mars but eventually if we keep sending missions eventually we'll find it now I've spoken at NASA Houston where I said there's a better place we can go to find the remains of earth life and that would be the moon because in the moon we're not talking just 200 kilograms we're talking an average of 20,000 kilograms and so I think it'd be relatively straightforward to go to the moon with a different mission than the Apollo program the Apollo program's mission was to recover pristine lunar rocks so I've been arguing we need to go back to the moon with a different mission to recover earth transported soil and the advantage there is that on planet earth the remains of earth's first life has been destroyed by the geology of the earth however the moon has virtually no geological activity and most of the earth's soil that's been transported to the moon happened during the first few hundred million years of life on planet earth that's when the meteoritic impact was the most intense and so we have a really good chance of finding the fossils of earth's first life on the moon and it's a worthy investment of our taxpayer dollars because we're not going to find it here on earth the best place to find the fossils of earth's first life is on the moon and I think it's exciting because we can go to the moon and see who got the origin of life model right the theus or the non theus because the theus and the non theus have very different models of what that earth's first life should look like and as I told the astronomers and the astronauts there at NASA Houston last time I checked if you add up all the non theus and theus in the United States it makes up 100% of the US taxpayer base so everybody should be excited about going to the moon and seeing who got it right but you could also go to do it on Mars it's just going to be a lot more expensive and a lot more challenging to do it on Mars and to do it on the moon and incidentally you don't have to send people whether it's the moon or Mars it can be done for a whole lot less money with machines so no need to send astronauts we can send machines up there for probably one tenth of one percent of the cost I have the privilege of working at JPL when we landed Viking on Mars the very first lander to land on Mars and I personally I'm very disappointed in JPL because all of their press releases and NASA's probably downplay how hostile Mars is to current life when people come and talk to me about Mars they think it's kind of like lush green or something because they don't talk about how dry it is, they don't talk about how cold it is, they don't talk about how poor the soil is and I've talked to school children they said they found water on Mars they're picturing those ponds and streams and stuff and because of this pursuit for life has downplayed how hostile I mean just for example obviously if you took a cup of water and a robot uncovered that water four feet off the ground and you poured it the water would be gone before it hit the ground that's how dry Mars is and people just don't know how bad it is there it is really, really not a hostile hostile environment what's driving it is that we do know that if you go back about four billion years there is a brief moment in time when Mars was wet now not as wet as the Earth but there was a time when you had liquid water on the surface of Mars however we know that that liquid water quickly disappeared because unlike Earth there wasn't a carbonate cycle I mean what happened is the moment you get liquid water on Mars it sets up a chemical reaction that converts that water into carbonates and the carbonates remain as carbonates they don't get recycled like they do here in Earth back to water and carbon dioxide so the water and carbon dioxide will immediately react to make the carbonates which quickly turns Mars cold and dry and that's one thing that's well established yes there was a time when Mars was warmer and wetter but very quickly became cold and dry because of this quote carbonate crisis and that happened literally four billion years ago and ever since then Mars has been cold and dry but even when it was wet and warm you still had the problem that the soil content had 60 times as much sulfur as Earth's soil does I don't know how many of you saw that movie, The Martian which shows Matt Damon living on potatoes that he grows on Martian soil you can't grow potatoes on Martian soil the sulfur content the problem with that much sulfur is it's very acidic basically would make any life form other than acidophiles impossible and acidophiles all we're talking about are these very slow growing microbes and certainly not something you can evolve life from even in the most optimistic evolutionary model so far they haven't really been able to understand human consciousness in the scientific community or really even to define it I think I'm wondering if there's any materialistic aspects that you've ever read about consciousness in the human soul if it has a weight well the best I've seen in an attempt to try to explain human consciousness from a materialistic perspective would be they were claiming that the microtubules inside the cells that there is some unknown quantum physics phenomenon working in there that might explain human consciousness that was proposed by Roger Penrose the famous British physicist however in the same books where he was making the speculations very clear just saying that's the only thing I think of that could possibly do it he says you know I have no idea how it would work but he also made a point in that book Shadows of the Mind and the emperor's new mind I think the two books are called is that when you look at the human brain the physics of the brain explains the hardware features of the brain but it doesn't explain the software features and he says that's the big mystery how do we explain the software that's present in the brain where does that come from but he says there's more than that when you look at the human brain or the human mind what we see is not just hardware and software we see a programmer and so that's he says that's the ultimate problem of trying to explain consciousness from a materialistic perspective how do you explain the programmer how do you explain the control and my what do you do with the software between the two of us we got over 50 books written by scientists who are non-theists trying to explain consciousness and when they're talking about human consciousness they basically conclude every one of them we have no idea what they're trying to do is say well we see something conscious like in other animals but it's really debatable whether we can claim that an ant is conscious maybe dogs and cats one thing we recognize is that humans are the only life forms on planet earth that are conscious of the point where we ask questions like why am I here what's going to happen to me after I die I mean even the most intelligent non-human animals never engage in that kind of philosophical activity that kind of self inward inspection now some of the people have argued well some of the non-human animals must be conscious like we are because they have theory of mind and theory of mind is the capacity to read the mind of somebody else and but what we notice is that happens when you've got a more intelligent animals that are bonded to you as pets and so for example I saw that and my son's dog because I would come home from work and a dog loved to give me a great greeting and I would smile back at the dog well dogs in the wild when they smile it's a form of an expression of aggression they're showing their teeth and basically they do that to scare off other dogs that are trying to muscle in their territory or to scare off other predators but what happened with my son's dog it basically would show its teeth as a form of greeting and basically what's happening is a dog realizes okay I smile at him it must be something I like so the dog figures that out and smiles back at me that's a limited form of theory of mind but it's nothing anywhere as sophisticated as we see with human beings where we look at one another and we figure out what we're thinking and some people are very good at that they can just look at you and know exactly what you're thinking and my dog might realize that I want a greeting but that's about as far as it goes and then with humans we see a level of consciousness where we communicate with symbols that's something that's unique to human beings only humans communicate with symbols with numbers and with letters you know in a book I wrote on this Hidden Treasures in the Book of Job I made the point that you can take the smartest non-human animal and train them over 20 years to be able to figure out and respond to a stop sign can't do it even something as simple as a stop sign is beyond the capability of the response mechanism of the smartest non-human animals and yet you can take a one year old child and they're able to figure out what the numbers mean and they're able to engage in complex conversation I mean parrots are able to mimic us but they're not able to engage in a paragraph type conversation they can just simply repeat after us something we said to them over and over again and what I said yesterday too the world's leading research institute on artificial intelligence and the attempt to achieve a conscious machine that's MIT the phrase out of MIT is we're 10 years away from actually making a conscious machine and always will be okay you're next what was this extra solar object that came into our solar system circled around our sun and then exited a few days ago yeah a few days ago astronomers announced they found the first ever object that they know for certain came from outside of our solar system and we didn't get a good enough measure on it to see whether it was a comet or an asteroid we do know it was about 400 meters across so we know it's size but because we couldn't get its composition we don't know whether it's a comet or an asteroid but its orbit told us it came from outside the solar system now this is something astronomers have understood is definitely probable because we've seen lots of other stars with word clouds let me define the term the biggest cloud of comets and asteroids orbiting our solar system is the word cloud it's the most distant and it extends from about 20 billion miles from the sun out to 2 trillion miles and to give you some idea the closest star is 25 trillion miles away so it goes up pretty far 2 trillion miles and some have speculated maybe the word cloud goes out as far as 4 to 6 trillion miles well given that other stars also have clouds similar to our word cloud it means as the sun gets close to another star it could steal comets and asteroids away from the word cloud of another star and our star is more massive than 85% of all the other stars that exist so if we make an encounter with another star given the fact that we're one of the heavier stars one of the more massive stars we're more likely to steal comets and asteroids from the star than they are to steal one from us but we also know that this kind of exchange of between intercounters with stars means that there's got to be lots of asteroids and comets that are running in between the stars and so as our stars moving around the center of the galaxy it's inevitably going to bump in to what we call these bachelor stars and bachelor asteroids unattached stars and asteroids it may be one of those or it may be one we captured from another star system it's the first one we've seen but we know that there are probably many more just like it and it's thanks to the fact that we got powerful telescopes today that we got the potential of detecting these but yeah just a few days ago they announced the first one that they know for certain came from outside the solar system go ahead a study that was just done in 2014 where some scientists were trying to study dog DNA and wolf DNA to see if they could get a date via that method for when humankind first started domesticating animals because they in the theory the dog was the first animal domesticated perhaps even before pasture animals and some people will tell you that the gray wolf species was a species that was captured by humans and because it was under human control that when it had mutations that diverged it into what we know today as dogs that that's the origin of our dogs is the gray wolf species but this 2014 study showed that that can't be the case can't look at a modern wolf species and figure dogs came from it that the differences in DNA as they were studying the DNA clocks told them that indeed you can't say that any modern wolf species was a progenitor of today's dog species that they therefore to follow the evolutionary model they had to have a common ancestor at least 12 to 16 thousand years ago that no longer exists but that's quite an article of faith to me to say there's a dotted line somewhere in the past that's a species we have no fossils for that was the progenitor of two different species lines that we see today I wondered if you'd heard anything about that I've heard about that and there are papers out saying that it's more complicated than dogs coming from a single species that they actually come from a combination of species so foxes, coyotes wolves, dingos and other like African wild dogs that all of these would have played a role in the different dogs that we have today and what's interesting is all those different species that can interbreed and so the fact that we have such a broad spectrum of dogs to really nail it down you got to figure out the date for when humans began to domesticate these species and we don't have a good date you're right that we know it happened early but exactly how early we don't know so but I mean you can see components of the fox DNA in certain dog breeds today as well as the wolf so we know for sure the wolf played a role the fox played a role and possibly African wild dogs and coyotes dingos probably not much at all so seems like picking into you Hugh the point on this obviously is that's the answer to every single species when you ask biologists where does something come from there are empty lines to almost everything they make this tree but there's no evidence to connect the dots for anything what you just said is true for humans it's true for just about every single animal you know so we have no dotted line another previous species and link the two together Neanderthals were from humans so we have no dotted line back for humans the same answer for almost every species would you agree I would agree with that one of the reasons I don't believe evolution anymore because there's no evidence and they're also thinking that the first domesticated animal is a goat so because that's the earliest evidence we have for large scale domestication it's for goats and goats are a whole lot easier to tame than wolves so may I know that by personal experience I've run into wild goats that you can tame within under one minute they're probably the easiest to tame animal of all oh yeah they like humans so they follow you and they're very sociable and they like hanging around humans and seem to have no fear of us although they like to eat your clothes so watch out whereas a wolf is difficult I mean see that in Genesis 1 how the carnivores are difficult to tame the herbivores are easy to tame go ahead I have a Christian friend she's 53 years old and she was telling me about her six children one of them being adopted and seven more in heaven because she had miscarriages seven miscarriages from fetus to full term and she says I'll see them in heaven and I thought well you know how you talk about even the fetus can see the light or not and the Bible is saying being passed down from generation to generation is the most likely that all those miscarriages with the children more likely will see the light because coming from Christian parents maybe you can't give a clear answer to that because yeah it all depends what those seven fetuses did with the light that God gave them and certainly there are advantages to having Christian parents but it's not a guarantee a lot of people read 1 Corinthians 7 and treat it as a guarantee 1 Corinthians 7 just says that God will bestow protection on the relatives of Christians the same protection is bestow on the Christians but there is no guarantee that if you're a Christian mother all your children will be Christians it all depends what they do with the light that God gives them and with fetuses you're basically speculating go ahead one second again on the drawing it's this time to turn in your card and have somebody collecting them here so if you've got a card ways up your card so we can collect it go ahead I've read some of what you said about probabilities and these amazing figures of 10 to the 57th power and then on way beyond that but one thing is missing at least in my mind not perhaps by not reading enough of what you said is kind of a listing of so I can have kind of a listing of okay there's this probability on top of this one on top of this one and I'm not sure what most of those are a lot of it has to do with distances from the sun and many things and then there's probability and then there is faith the key to it so well there is a resource that you can access for free it's at reasons.org slash fine tuning without a dash between fine and tuning if you go to that it'll pop up a 300 page compendium for you which lists all the fine tune characteristics it also shows you a calculation of the dependency factors between them because they're not all independent some are but not all and then the bottom line calculation and what the probability is for getting all those characteristics within the necessary fine tune range without invoking super intelligent, supernatural intervention and yeah that the probability is less than one chance in 10 to the 1,050th power so and that's roughly equivalent to you winning the California Lottery 150 consecutive times one ticket each time or as one mathematician friend of mine put it it's the same probability if you buy no tickets at all I'm going to read a scripture from Romans the 18th chapter no it's Romans 8 18 I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us creation awaits an eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed for the creation was subjected to frustration not by its own choice but by the will of the one that subjected it in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God so my question is kind of two part is what happens when we die and where do we go is it another dimension we probably don't know and then you've talked a lot about a new heavens and a new earth is this talking about the physicality or the physics that we have today will no longer reply or is this talking about something different Romans 8 18 to 23 that you just read basically is stating that God has subjected the entire universe to a pervasive law decay and we can observe that no matter where you look you see that the second law thermodynamics is operating everything is decaying and sometimes I tell audiences if you don't believe that look at the person sitting next to you everything is subject to decay so moreover the decay is quite high Romans 8 is also giving us a promise a day will come when the creation will be liberated from its bondage to decay but that will not happen until the full number of human beings that God intends to redeem have indeed been redeemed and the reason for that is that for humans to be redeemed you need the law of decay to be in operation I explained in my book why the universe is the way it is that it's the second law of thermodynamics that keeps the expression of human evil in check it works in the following way the more evil you commit the more work you gotta do to undo the damage of your evil the more time you gotta waste and the more pain you experience and because we human beings don't enjoy extra pain extra work and wasted time it acts as a motivation for us to avoid those kinds of activities and so that law of decay is gonna remain in effect as long as evil is a threat to humanity but we have the promise in the Bible that God is working to eliminate evil once and for all and once that is achieved then there's no longer a need for a universe with the second law of thermodynamics or a universe with a law of gravity or a universe with electromagnetism and that that's when God replaces the universe with its laws of physics with a brand new creation and so you read about that in Revelation 21 and 22 the new creation the new earth, the new universe where you have completely different physics and where evil and suffering will never exist for the rest of eternity but that state will not come into existence until the full number of human beings that God intends to redeem have indeed been redeemed so he's basically saying you may not like this law of decay but it's for your own good that I'm suggesting the whole universe and you to this law of decay and now when I'm done with it then I'm gonna replace it where nothing will decay from that point onwards I mean that's gonna be exciting where you won't have to maintain anything because nothing decays where is the realm where people go now okay the Bible tells us that when a redeemed human being someone who actually has a relationship with Jesus Christ has repented of the rebellion and has asked the Holy Spirit to come into their life receive the forgiveness of their offenses against God and others that when they die they go to a different realm they're not in this universe they go to a completely different dimensional realm and they go into a state of sleep now in that state of sleep they're aware of what's going on here on the earth so they can observe what's happening but they can't interfere they're spectators only and so you see different Bible authors speaking about how the dead in Christ are part of this cloud of witnesses that watches what's happening here in the face of the earth one way to put it while you're alive you're on the football playing field when you pass you go up into the stands and become a spectator so you will be able to observe now the Bible is not clear to the extent with which we can observe but their passages for example making it clear that the dead in Christ are aware of when people repent their lives to Jesus Christ they're aware when people commit evil deeds and they actually experience emotions so they grieve for example when they see people committing evil deeds so you're not only observing your feelings are intact your spirit is intact but you're not able to interfere what's going on here you're a passive observer well it's not heaven it's a waiting place once the full number of human beings that God intends to redeem have been redeemed this is in Revelation chapter 7 it says God will wake up all the spectators they'll be standing before them they'll receive brand new bodies bodies that will never decay you won't get old you won't get injured you'll be getting an incorruptible body a body that can't be destroyed and then you're going to be given a career God's got a job for you in the new creation and depending on how you've lived your life here you'll get an appropriate career and I think that's important for Christians to realize in this life here on earth you're in training for a future career and basically you've got both the apostle Paul and the apostle Peter saying take your training seriously it has eternal consequences and so just realize you're in the equivalent of some kind of advanced college course getting you prepared for a future career and don't blow off your education this is the one chance to get things ready they were going to do the drawing books we have first we'll do it like we did yesterday right all three we have three books they're going to be given away the old earth or evolutionary creation yeah that's a two views book it's a dialogue between scientists of biologos and reasons to believe and the controversy of the ages that's two theologians doing a critical analysis of reasons to believe biologos and answers and genesis and improbable planet that's my latest book on the fine-tuning design of the earth that makes possible the redemption of billions of human beings so I've shuffled these up you got them all shuffled? very good I'll grab one at random oh you'll pick the one that you want okay we got Cara DeCarol alright you get your choice okay Doug McComb McComb yeah this is Helen K-O-U-G alright very good Jocelyn wanted me to announce those what are the rocks that you got from from shells and okay some shells in that little basket over there because you got from South Dakota right? oh I see so fossils and interesting minerals all free for the asking so Bible question for you this is about whom should we fear and what power does the devil have in Matthew and Luke and in Hebrews I read what seems to say we should fear only God God the Father I suppose or Jesus in the judgment but then in Hebrews also it says it talks about the devil having the power of death so the question is what power does the devil have should we fear him at all is the Bible telling us don't fear the devil only fear God is it God who has the authority to cast into hell and if the devil does have the power of death as Hebrews chapter 214 says what exactly is that power how is it related to the power to cast into hell I would argue that Satan the most powerful of the demons has got two strategies one strategy is to get you to fear him a whole lot another strategy is to get you to fear him not at all and I think these Bible passages you're quoting are basically trying to bring some sense of balance to this realizing as powerful as Satan is the most powerful creature God made he can't create and so he's limited in what he can do and there's other limitations upon him as well and these demons and Satan can only attack you if you give them permission and I think that's what these passages are saying be careful how you live your life because Satan is powerful his demons are powerful and if you allow them to attack they can do you significant damage but they need permission to be able to do that and how do they get permission by you trying to find truths of some other means rather than pursuing it from God mainly by going after all-cult instrumentation that's basically what the all-cult is all about trying to get power and knowledge apart from God you know and I gave a whole list of that in my book, Hidden Lights in the Sky and Little Green Men and so we're more warned all the way through the Bible to avoid idolatry, to avoid astrology to avoid witchcraft to avoid trying to make contact with spiritual beings because that's basically giving them permission to invade your life and if you do that they can do you serious harm how serious? well they can injure you they can even kill you however they need permission you don't give them permission, they can't touch you so but yeah I know a lot of people think demons don't exist and that can be a problem and other people think they got overwhelming power that's also a problem so just keep it all in perspective Hi I'm a hospice volunteer I've been a hospice volunteer for about 34 years I have noticed that people that are atheists have the worst deaths and I believe it's because they believe in nothingness and I have seen a man that had his faith was so strong that he refused any kind of medication because he wanted to see our father with his eyes wide open but in hospice there is a lot of faiths where people come in with different faiths and I feel that my job there is just to love them through their process but I also have a question on the sense that when Jesus said that my father has many mansions I was just wondering whether that's got to do with levels of faith that people have thank you and you know it's a hospice worker I think you've noticed that people are particularly receptive when they know the end is near it's interesting how we can live our lives when life is good and we got good health we got money we have lots of distractions and we just don't think about the fact that our life is going to end but it's something the doctor telling you you've got three months to live that makes you wonder, gee I guess you're thinking about the most important issues of life and I've personally seen that myself is that I managed to talk to a guy who is two days away from death he's been an atheist all of his life but once he realized that this is the end he very much wanted to talk and wound up in those last few hours giving his life to Christ so that can happen I've even seen that happen with a guy who was in a coma interesting story where I got a call from a nurse like you and basically said I've got this atheist that I'm taking care of and he's in a complete coma but would you come and talk to him and I said yeah I'll come and talk to him well when I got there the wife and the daughter were there and the wife was a very aggressive atheist he says no I don't want you to talk to my husband I says don't disturb him he's made up his mind and I said well tell you what let me tell you what I want to share with him and if you say don't share with him I won't but if it's okay then I'll go share with him and she says okay tell me what you want to say to him well I said it loud enough that he could hear it and she was the mother wife was about 20 feet away from her husband but the daughter was holding his hand and the daughter kept saying to her mother he's squeezing my hand and she says he hasn't squeezed anybody's hand in two weeks he says there's no way so you must be dreaming that and then when I actually got to the gospel presentation the daughter said he just opened his eyes and blinked and the wife said you must be dreaming he's never opened his eyes in the past two weeks so and then I got a call from the nurse the next day she says you know when everybody was gone I went and repeated everything you said to him and the same thing happened so he said I think he just gave his life to Christ so it can happen even when people are in a coma I tell people that too you're probably telling that as a hospice nurse just because someone is a coma don't presume they can't hear what you're saying they probably can and so take that into account but even in a coma they may be very spiritually receptive so because they know they're at death's door and you know I heard from there's a pastor here at the church, Richard Anderson he's no longer here but he was here for 40 years and he really liked to visit people that were on death's door that was kind of his special thing to do but he told me that he had been with Christians at 300 different instances where they were lucid at the point of death and he says consistently what I heard from them when they were lucid right up to the moment of death is I have to say goodbye he's calling me he's calling me by name and they would basically walk and he says you know I heard that so frequently that it made me realize Psalm 23 is right on target that when you cross that threshold of death you get a personal escort across that threshold I'm with you, my rod and my staff all comfort you and he says I've seen that over and over again but he also said I got to watch atheists dying who are very committed to their atheism and he says when they were lucid up to the point of death they would actually rejoice in the fact that they were going to hell and they'd be screaming and yelling and cursing God as they were dying and he says it was just horrifying for me to hear that and I said well how often did you hear that he says dozens of times now most often when people at the point of death they're not that lucid and so they'd pass quietly and you really don't know what's going on but this isn't interesting where you really do know what's going on you see those two extremes so thank you for coming up and sharing and people like you we need to be in prayer for you're at people's greatest need so that's one thing I've noticed it seems like the last day of your life is when you're most spiritually receptive go ahead yes there was a program in Netflix I talked to you about it one time I think it was called is Genesis scientific well there's one thing in there that is it Genesis history? yeah Genesis scientific they interviewed you and they never put anything into their Netflix program well I'm debating the producer on November 11th in this I think the Hebrew word for day is yom correct and you have always said that yom can mean many four different definitions they had a quote Hebrew scholar very dignified with his little silver finger reading Hebrew saying yom can only mean 24 hours period is he just being stubborn or and I don't mean this badly but if you were up there next to you we'd probably believe him because he looks so dignified so not that you don't that's a wrong terminology but I mean he just looked extremely scholarly but I've always used your example that yom can mean many things many time periods well what are you probably saying I mean I'm going to be watching the video in preparation for this debate but I'm guessing what's going on there as you say in the context of Genesis 1 it can only mean 24 hours I've never heard a younger theologian say it has only one definition of 24 hours it's in all the lexicons that it's got four distinct definitions but they'll argue if you look at the context it's got to be a 24 hour period my response to that is look at the context and you can see without any knowledge of Hebrew that the word day must have at least three distinct definitions because three are used in the first page so for example it talks about creation day one it's contrasting days and nights that's the word day referring to the daylight hours creation day four it's contrasting seasons, days and years that's day referring to 24 hours and in Genesis 2.4 it uses the word day to refer to the entirety of creation history that's day as a long period of time now there's a fourth definition which means part of the daylight hours like from noon to 3 p.m but yeah, every lexicon will tell you it's got those four distinct definitions and the Bible uses all four of those definitions in different passages and so I'd be surprised if any younger scholar would try to dispute that but a lot of them will claim in the context of Genesis 1 these days have to be six consecutive 24 hour periods and you know when I first picked up a Bible at age 17 it's like well you got an evening and a morning telling you that the first six days had a start point and an end point but there is no evening and morning for the seventh day and you got three passages John 5, Psalm 95 and Hebrews 4 that tell us we're still in God's seventh day so that I think seals it these days must be six consecutive long periods of time that may come up when I debate them on November 11 we'll see I don't remember him talking about context he was this very dogmatic at 24 hours period I can't mean anything else my friends have watched the DVD and they said Hugh is going to upset you the most as they bring all these scientists on who claim all the scientific evidence proves that it's young none of it proves that it's old so it'll be interesting to see how that debate goes it's going to be in the moody radio network at 11 o'clock on November 11 Hugh in context I had this same conversation with a Hebrew scholar just a few days ago and the context that I think that was left out was that these people that are claiming it only could be 24 hours leave out the context that they're saying anytime Yom is used with a number that it must be 24 is what they're saying and since in Genesis there's a number attached to it it must be 24 do you have a response to that that it must be 24 if there's a number there that's the context well there's two responses number one there's a passage in Hosea chapter 6 where numbers of days and the days are long periods of time so the idea that every time it's attached to a number is 24 hours is falsified just within the Bible itself the second point is those hundreds of instances where days are numbered elsewhere in the Bible is describing human history the only place in the Bible where it uses numbered days to describe natural history is Genesis 1 so they're comparing apples to oranges and yeah because it's human history we've been here a lot less time than the earth has been here but Hosea 6-2 basically prophesies that the Jews as a people as a nation will be without a king for one day a second day and then the king will come and that's a reference to the diaspora where the Jews were ejected from the land and had no nation for 2,000 years but today they have a nation they have a ruler but it was a 2,000 year period and Hosea 6 describes that as 2 days go ahead it's interesting because I just want this book that talks all about this the arguments between the two camps but my question is going back to evolution all the different forms of evolution they have different theories right how would genetic we talked a little bit about this after class but I'd like to get a fuller answer how genetic entropy disproves that if it does disprove any type of naturalistic evolution I'm a little cautious using genetic entropy as an argument against evolution just because genetics is really complicated and we don't understand all the systematics that go into genetics one paper I cite is how genetics is a useless tool for discerning an ancestral population that's where a lot of these debate center so however there's no doubt that the genes do experience entropy they decay over time and therefore we would expect that species have been here for a long time will show the greatest amount of genetic decay and you do see that the longer they've been around the more that you see what the difficulty is discerning in the genome what is a useless mutation as opposed to something that's been designed by God to serve a purpose because a lot of what we think are mutated genes that serve no purpose we later discover have a function and that's important because I've run into geneticists so we'll say well we see useless genes in the human genome the most useless genes that we see in the chimp genome therefore evolution explains that that's an argument against creation but what you discover is that what they thought was a useless gene actually has a purpose giving example they'll say that chimpanzees and humans have lost their ability to manufacture vitamin C and it is true that we share that with the chimpanzees that we can't manufacture vitamin C and you'll find materialistic evolution is saying that's proof of the evolutionary process and proof that we humans weren't designed because if we were designed we would have the capability of manufacturing vitamin C what they don't realize is that it's a really good thing that we don't manufacture vitamin C the creatures that do manufacture vitamin C basically flood their organs with so much vitamin C that it would do damage that they were to live as long as we do particularly the brain and so God wanted us human beings to be able to live 90 or 100 years or 110 years and that requires that we take small doses of vitamin C and actually what you see in the human body and the gym body is the capacity to recycle small amounts of vitamin C which animals that make their own vitamin C like rabbits don't do they don't recycle they just manufacture their own they manufacture it in large quantities but we have a very sophisticated recycling mechanism which is something that these other creatures that make their own vitamin C lack so it's like yeah we don't make our own vitamin C that looks like a defect but it's not a defect it's actually essential to keep the human brain functioning for 80, 90, 100 110 years so yeah so that often happens when we think of defects really aren't defects at all the human genome project is a really good evidence for that we used to think that 98% of the human genome was junk we now know that over 90% of it serves a purpose and the more we research the genome the higher that percentage grows well there's nothing we can identify as junk on the other hand entropy would tell us there's going to be at least a small amount of junk because I mean once God creates human beings that human species is now subject to the second law thermodynamics so you anticipate that there would be some genetic decay for the generation but it seems to be at quite a low level go ahead okay X 1348 says as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed so does that mean that some people are predetermined to be saved and others not yes and probably an even more explicit passage would be one you see in Romans 9 where there's a reference to Esau and Jacob and it tells you there in Romans 9 but before the boys were born before they had done anything evil or virtuous God had predetermined that he would love Jacob and hate Esau and so that's a pretty strong statement about how God actually before he created the universe determined who would be saved and who would not be saved on the other hand that the Holy Spirit made delivers you from the responsibility of seeking after God because there's several places in the Bible that make the point in a single sentence it's all up to you where you wind up for all of eternity and the same sentence says it's all up to God where you wind up in all of eternity I'll give you an example Joel 2 32 says all who call upon the Lord will be saved all whom the Lord our God calls besides in the same verse that's the paradox of human free will and divine predestination you've got 1500 passes in the Bible that tell us it's all up to you where you spend eternity but you've got another 1500 passes in the Bible that says it's all up to God where you spend eternity both are simultaneously true don't try to resolve it in length with height and time it can't be done if you don't believe that I wrote about that beyond the cosmos but also wrote if you allow God to be as big as these proven to be by the latest physics then God can predetermine before the world is created who's going to be saved and who won't be saved at the same time he can give all the responsibility of human beings to determine who's going to be saved and who's not going to be saved both are simultaneously true and that's one of the evidences that persuaded me the Bible came from a transcendent being because what I notice is every other religion denies that both are true only Christianity says both are true but that tells me these other religions were invented by human beings because they show the constraints of the limits of human visualization the Bible defies that not just with that doctrine like the trinity you're not going to be able to visualize the trinity in length with height and time but you can in the extra and trans dimensions and so yeah repeatedly the Bible says that God is chosen but also says the choice is up to you well I was thinking of sharing an interesting report I've come across the Lord would know for sure and I think it's based on what I call reasonable evidence and that is that Yasser Arafat's chauffeur came to the United States several years ago or many years ago and he expected to corrupt American culture and advance Islam and all but he met a Jew and he was very surprised the Jew was not at all like he expected and after some several years the chauffeur eventually became a Christian and he had regular contact after that with Yasser Arafat he would often go back to visit him and he present various issues in the Bible that were related to the gospel or led or were pointing to the gospel and he reported that Arafat did not refute anything he listened very rationally and later Arafat became ill was in the hospital he never confessed to the the chauffeur that he had been converted but the chauffeur reported that about a week after several weeks in the hospital an Egyptian pastor came to visit him and he reported to the chauffeur that Yasser Arafat accepted the Lord and died a Christian about a week before I mean it's there's no way to absolutely confirm it but I can believe that it's true yeah those kinds of things do happen okay next mine's not a statement but it's probably a real quick question since I was reading in your book on Job talking about the animals best to tame and it just was kind of striking me as somebody had brought up the goats and I saw how well you had done but I've seen so many other people in humanity with those very same animals seeming to do I saw those animals as just like the worst for instance my grandfather somebody gave him a couple of goats lived by a small lake on a farm and he was like oh okay put them in the ice house to his sons that's a fish house where you put it on the ice and tomorrow we'll have the corral built for them and open up the door the next day and they had eaten the entire there was no walls left on the inside all the insulation was gone so we said put them out on the island to figure out what to do and they never saw them again so if you could talk a little bit in the book or joke any tips since you did so well yeah I mean I argue that you see three origins of life in Genesis one creation day one God creates life that's physical creation day five he creates life that's physical and soulish a reference to birds and mammals and how they are endowed with mind will and emotions will form a relationship with a higher species namely us human beings and then last of all he creates one species that's body soul and spirit that can form relationships with a higher being namely God himself and you see in the book of Job it says look to the birds and look to the beasts of the field a reference to land mammals they will teach you how to serve a higher species we've been designed to serve a higher being and so he endows them with the capacity to form relationships with us and what's interesting is how many of these animals can form very strong bonds with us the other thing you notice is that when they form a strong bond with us they outperform the wild animals they can do things when they're bonded to us that they can't do when they're in the wild and likewise there's a lesson that when we're bonded to a higher being we can do things that we can't do if we weren't bonded to a higher being the other thing you notice is that these creatures that bond to us will also bond to one another for example cats and dogs don't get along in the wild but if you bond to a cat and bond to a dog in your home they will bond to one another it takes time for them to happen and it's that common bond with us that makes them bond to one another to a degree that when one is lost they'll actually mourn so for example one of our cats literally mourned for 40 days when our dog died it was just that strongly bonded to that dog that was remarkable we would take the dog for a walk the cat without a leash and you know they would actually play together they both sit up in their haunches and they would box one another they would never hurt one another but yeah we'd watch this boxing match go on and that would happen night after night but that doesn't happen in the wild it takes that bond with the human being for that to be manifested so and I think it's a special joy that God gave because people say it's to such a degree that people think that these creatures are going to be with them in heaven because of how powerful they bonded with us but it's like God wanted us to see how much He cares for us we get to see how these animals and what's interesting about these animals are not sinners and so there's basically an unconditional love they show towards us and I think there's a lesson in that as well so and what I've noticed too is that the atheists I've debated they're urbanites they're people who've been cut off from these lessons and not referring to our pets because they tend to be overbred but what I find interesting is going out to places of the world where you're engaging wild animals that have had no contact with human beings there you can actually witness directly how these animals have been designed to bond to us and relate to us the reason we don't see that is because we abuse them and so these animals are trained to run away from us but if they've never been abused by human beings you see their natural desire to come to us through late to us and bond to us and I told stories in the book of how I've actually seen that in person purposely went to places in Canada where I knew humans hadn't been in 50 years just to see how the animals behave yeah it's remarkable how they they're drawn to you in fact I got a collection of photos where there was this one of woolly marmot and they get to be 25 pounds in Canada they're big creatures but this one was in his little hole he saw me coming got up out of his rock hole got on top of the rock and basically entertained me with a dance for about 10 minutes allowing me to get within three feet to take photos so I got photos of him doing this little dance now this is an animal that had no contact with a human being before so just a summer and a half two summers ago I was out hiking at 10,500 feet and this 450 pound bear came out they shouldn't be at this elevation but it was a place to see me stopped in his tracks moved off the trail sat down and just waited for me to come close and take photos so yeah I figured hey as long as it's sitting down it's not a threat I'd be worried if it was standing but it just kind of sat down and took a picture so I did you can even find that in California when I was hiking and stopped for dinner and I just finished my dinner and a mule deer came right up to me within just a couple feet just looked and stared at me and I stared at it you know five minutes it disappeared and I'm like okay it's gone a few minutes later it comes back with it's a doe and prompts the doe to come up to just within a couple feet with me and both of them just stood there and just stared at me for a while and then walked off so you can find that I got to have an internet question obviously I'm going to preface that with a joke my wife one time came to me and said hey how come you haven't taken me anywhere in a while and I said what are you talking about I said right now we're traveling a thousand miles an hour around the earth and that's whipping around the sun at thousands of miles per hour and that's whipping around the universe the center of our Milky Way galaxy just like this picture shows and with the expansion of the universe we're traveling even more than thousands of miles of that and so what do you mean I never take you anywhere and this relates to the question so the question from the internet was considering how fast all these things are moving which the earth is part of it how is it that obviously we don't feel any of that motion why does everything here have enough gravity to stay there or how does that work well the reason we don't feel the motion of the rotation of the earth we're rotating at the same velocity as the earth so it's zero velocity likewise here's our solar system whipping around the center of the galaxy at 250 kilometers per second but because we're moving at exactly the same velocity we don't feel it you only feel differential velocity so you've got to be walking at a different speed than the earth is rotating before you notice and the question there was does gravity relate to that or not relate to that though it's just because we're all moving at the same speed yeah it's all a matter of frame of reference walker just in case back to animals I seem to have a lot of animal lovers here it says here in Psalm 156 you know tbn's big slogan verse let everything that has breath praise the lord and I'm just thinking about horses being in heaven and animals have breath so it seems like they have an awareness of God but yet we're saying that we alone can understand God so I was wondering if you could maybe explain that verse and comment a little bit on that well that same thing it's Psalm 136 you're quoting from but it also refers to how inanimate objects also praise the rocks praise God the stars praise God everything praises God after all God made everything so all of it test they don't have breath no but horses have no awareness of God the only species of life that has an awareness of God is us human beings well I mean he wrote on a donkey it doesn't mean that the donkey was aware of God but the donkey did carry God when he comes again he'll be riding on a horse again the earthly horse will have no awareness that God is riding on him and incidentally there's a symbol there and the Jews caught the symbolism the fact that he came on a donkey meant he was coming in peace and they were expecting him to come to conquer the Romans and when he came on a donkey they realized that's not what's going to happen when he comes on a horse that means he's coming to conquer that happens in a second coming in the second coming he rides a horse because that's a symbol of conquest well I think yeah he's going to be riding you know I don't know which breed of horse he's going to be riding but it'll be a horse here on earth that he'll be riding just like it was a donkey here that he was riding well it's interesting how horses and donkeys are mentioned in Job 39 and basically it says God they're very similar to one another that says they're very different in how they relate to us human beings the donkey is motivated to keep you safe the donkey wants peace so if a donkey sees any kind of threat to you it's going to go in the opposite direction a horse loves adventure and so what it tells you in Job 39 when the horse smells the scent of battle it's all eager to go into battle and that's an amazing feature of the horse that the horse actually desires to take you into very dangerous situations but the other thing is that horse will do anything once in battle to keep you safe I mean my grandfather my father's side was a Calvary man and he says five times his horse saved his life five different horses literally gave up their life to keep him alive I've been a Christian for 39 years and you're 40 right? 14 but I don't know anything and what can I do at this point to have a closer relationship with Jesus well I love what it says in 2nd Corinthians 4 it says we are human here on earth and as a human being we witness our bodies gradually decaying away but as a Christian we can rejoice in getting old because the spirit renews day by day and that's the wonderful thing of being around people been walking with the Lord for four, five or six decades it's almost a spiritual glow about them because literally they've been renewed on a daily basis so it might take you a year to realize your body is a little more decayed than it was but on a single day you can see spiritual growth and that's a beautiful thing so it answered your question I would say pursue that spiritual growth I mean when your husband realizes you're different today than you were yesterday that's pretty exciting I've been studying the scriptures for the last 20 years and I came across and I started with your book on the word yam and days and I came across a word it's aion a-i-o-n it's a Greek word and the commentary is that it's normally translated either eternity or forever but it doesn't necessarily have to mean that in the context of God it means forever but it could also mean age so even hell could be like an age or you can go it doesn't have to be eternal so have you ever come across that word? oh yeah big time because there's a major debate in the Christian community is this universe going to last forever or just a long time and you'll find a passage in the Psalms that indicates that the stars are going to burn forever they're going to shine forever but it's that word and it could mean forever or it could mean a long time and that's why I say in fact in Biblical Hebrew there's no single word that means only eternity it could be the word eternity in the Old Testament or forever in the Old Testament you need to look at the context to see does it mean a long time or does it really mean eternity giving an example there's also a passage that says the erotic priesthood will last forever it's the same word it doesn't mean it'll last forever because obviously there's no erotic priesthood today it just means it'll last a long time and so in the context of the stars there's this important look of all the texts in the Old Testament that refers to the future of the stars you've got that one passage but you've got eleven other passages that say the stars will burn out they'll disappear, they'll stop shining they'll be no more and so the conclusion is that that word olem in the context there where it talks about the stars shining forever it's simply saying the stars will shine for a long time and all these other passages let's say the stars are going to disappear they will end there'll be a time when there are no stars yeah well I mean like most Hebrew nouns they have multiple literal definitions so yeah it can mean a long time it can mean an age or it can mean forever and so just like the word day has four different definitions the word arrests it's translated as earth it's got five different literal definitions you say well how do you tell which one look at the context look at how it's used elsewhere in Scripture and you say well you know why didn't God use a language well it's the interesting thing about Hebrew is that it's got a very small vocabulary size and you know the biggest challenge is translating the Old Testament Hebrew into English because English is the biggest vocabulary language that ever existed and Hebrew is one of the smallest and it probably explains why these debates tend to be English language debates rather than debates by people who speak French or German or other languages because in these other languages they too have words that take multiple literal definitions they did while in Greek you do have a word that does mean eternity and only eternity but in Hebrew you don't have a single word and that's what threw me I first picked up the Old Testament I expected to find the word universe somewhere in the Old Testament you won't find it there is no Hebrew word for universe but they have a phrase that means a universe you know and I studied French because I was raised in Canada and Hebrew is a lot like French in the sense that in English we have a single word in French they have a phrase that means that well likewise you see the same thing in Hebrew they'll have phrases or idioms that mean things that we have a specific word for in English so the phrase the heavens and the earth that means the whole universe it's nine times in the Old Testament and yeah a lot of atheists make the mistake of thinking Genesis 1.1 is speaking about planet earth as well as universe it's only referring to the universe it's not talking about the earth the heavens and the earth means the universe one of the online questions of a topic was talking about the importance of gravity if you could briefly discuss the difference between the gravity between earth and Mars and why they look different well earth has a surface gravity about 40% of the earth and that's why it would be much more challenging to walk on Mars and to walk on the earth the amazing thing about our human bodies is how easily we are to be able to move on two feet I mean when you think about it take a pencil and try standing it up on its eraser it's quite unstable yeah here we are a human being six feet tall and we're standing on these little small feet and we're quite comfortable standing we're quite comfortable walking and running but it's because of our muscles and our skeleton the fact that we live in a planet with 1g gravity and you know some of you NASA has these places you can go to a space camp and they actually let you feel what 4 tenths gravity feels like lunar gravity feels like and I took my son to one of those places it's incredible how unstable you are in different gravity than 1g and so when you see Matt Damon walking 20 miles on Mars nah that's not realistic he's certainly not going to be able to do it that fast so thank god for gravity we all curse gravity when we're trying to go up a steep hill but the very fact is thanks to that 1g gravity we can go up steep hills and we've got a mountaineer right here at the microphone she can testify what it's like going up a mountain yes I can but this question has to do with how can you tell maybe older versus younger is the basis of it but how can you tell that the sun used to be there and now it's here and all the migrations that Jupiter and Neptune and all the how can you tell that they've migrated in and out how can an astronomer tell that well how astronomers figured this out is that let me bring this back here for you the grand tag only with this very specified migration pattern are you going to be able to have Mars the size that it is the distance it is from the sun so for a period of 30 years astronomers struggle with what they call the Mars problem because all our planetary formation models basically predicted that the terrestrial planets would get more massive the farther you get from the sun and you know Mercury and Venus and Earth fit that mold but not Mars Mars is only one ninth the mass of the Earth and so for 30 years they said how can we get this small planet at the distance of Mars is they also struggle with how do we explain the characteristics of Mercury and Venus well after 30 years they figured the only way you can do it was the grand tag and they also said you're able to figure out the physics of the grand tag which causes a planet to migrate is its gravitational interaction with comets and asteroids and the reason why the majority of the planets we discovered are orbiting close to their stars is that they're in planetary systems that have asteroid and comet belts that are a thousand times bigger than ours and so there's very aggressive migration that's not reversed and then we see lots of planetary systems where there's no migration at all those are planetary systems that have no asteroids and comets ours has five small asteroid and comet belts and it's that unique characteristic of asteroid and comet belts that causes this migration inward, reverse and moving back outward and it requires a special interaction of Jupiter and Saturn and so where Jupiter and Saturn form where Jupiter is more massive than Saturn by a factor of three and they interact with these Kuiper belt objects where Saturn migrates faster than Jupiter they hit that one-two resonance that one-two resonance scatters 99% of the asteroids and comets which results in a reversal of the migration pattern we see we see it nowhere else but this was all done theoretically but it's the only theoretical model that explains the present features of the solar system and actually it's more complex than this to actually get the eight planets we see today the solar system has to begin with 10 planets so one of those planets merged with the Earth and that was important to form the Moon and get rid of our heavy atmosphere and our very thick ocean our primordial ocean was thousands of miles deep today it's only four miles deep and it was thanks to that merging event and then there was a third planet the size of Neptune and so we originally had three ice giants that fifth one either got ejected out of our solar system or tossed about 50 times far as the way the Neptune is in fact there's a group of astronomers trying to find that planet but without a fifth gas giant planet you can't get the configuration of Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury so oh okay you're not talking about the grand tack you're talking about both okay well I'm going to be brief because I'm running out of time here if you want a detailed answer there's two whole chapters on this in the book Improbable Planet but yeah what happened to the solar system when it was extremely young it was born in this gigantic cluster of stars more than 10,000 members it got super enriched with these heavy elements and then got stripped of all of its material and once that happened it got kicked out by a gravitational interaction and so for example when we send a spaceship to Saturn we wait for a certain configuration of planets where the gravitational interactions of planets will actually kick the satellite out so we don't have to use as much fuel to get it out there and it gets there a lot faster same thing if you want to make a fast trip to Mars if you get a special configuration of planets where the gravity will basically give you a big kick so typically it takes three and a half years to go from Earth to Mars if you get the right gravitational kick you can do it in six months and so obviously if you're going to send human beings you want to send them where they got that gravitational kick well likewise our solar system was gravitationally kicked out of its birthing cluster and it stopped by another gravitational interaction with a different set of stars so it went from the most dangerous part of our galaxy and ended up in the safest part of our galaxy how old is this idea no Galileo didn't come up with this no well the group that's primary is called the Nice model because there's a group of astronomers from Nice France that launched this study and they've literally been working on it for a 25 year period and every year they publish two or three papers and so right now they're trying to fine-tune the model to explain in detail all the characteristics of the Trojan asteroids this is two families of asteroids that are associated with Jupiter and so they come up with a very detailed model and predicts the features of those of those asteroids associated with Jupiter okay it began to take shape in terms of solving the Mars problem that was solved about four years ago so that's relatively new and as far as explaining in detail the configuration of all eight planets orbits that's about a year and a half old it's very recent however they've been working on it for 25 years so the advent of the computer probably has enhanced this bit oh yeah this couldn't be done without supercomputers it took supercomputer computers to do this likewise to figure out how the moon was formed and how our solar system got ejected from the dangerous spot to safe spot that's all thanks to literally dozens of astronomers using supercomputers this is fairly new knowledge although they've been making progress towards it for some time so we had a rough idea of how the model was being shaped so this grand tack has been around for about 16 years but in terms of giving us a detailed explanation we're only talking the last year and a half and what's interesting is some of the scientific reaction some of the scientific reaction from the unbelievers is this model's got to be wrong because there's way too much design involved to make it work the problem is there's no alternative there's no other way we can explain the features and so yeah the people in Nice, France says well we don't like all this design either but we're stuck with it and the more they try to fine tune it the more the design comes into it there's two other reasons they don't like it which you didn't mention obviously as this also shows why our solar system is the only solar system with circular orbits and thus this model has proved that there is no other light anywhere in the universe because this is so unique you must have circular orbits you must have the right star and if you take in just those two parameters by studying the thousands are extremely unique well that's true all eight planets have circular orbits Mercury it's kind of the exception but it's a very small planet close to the Sun and we do see planets outside the solar system with circular orbits but they're all orbiting really close to their stars yeah and that's the thing if they drift in where you've got big comet and asteroid belts those will circulate the orbits but now we live in a solar system or a planetary system where you've got circular orbits far from the host star and that's exceptional they're not tidally locked Neptune has a lot to do with why the gas giants have such circular orbits okay you've got Venus I'll tell you what I can't answer the question because we're out of time but it is answered in improbable planet I have some good news about news it's time to end