 And it says, what's not what I hear at Origin of Life conferences? It's quite the opposite, is that it's getting more and more intractable at each conference. And I was tempted to say, and by the way, I've never seen you in any of these Origin of Life conferences, but I didn't do that. But yeah, it was clear he wasn't up on the literature. And so the debate went back and forth on the Bible, Big Bang Cosmology, Origin of Life. Our humans were really exceptional. And if you want to listen or watch the debate, it was both video and audio recorded. And it's going up on the British television, but we will get a link. So as soon as I get a link, I'll give you that link. But I love the way that Justin ended it. He said, well, we spent an hour talking about the evidences. He says, Hugh, what would it take scientifically for you to abandon your Christian worldview and walk over to Peter's side? And I says, well, if you were to show me beyond any reasonable doubt, scientifically, that we human beings are no different than the plants and the animals. There's nothing exceptional about us. We're not distinct in any way. I said, that would be catastrophic to my Christian faith. And he could show me the universe never at a beginning. And there was no creator for the universe. That would be catastrophic to my Christian faith. Or if you can show me that Jesus of Nazareth didn't rise bodily from the dead. And by the way, that's right in the book of Corinthians where Paul says that that didn't happen. We are to be pitied amongst all men because we believe a lie. And we're dead in our sins. You've got one of those that might actually work. Go ahead, Kenny. Let's see. Well, it's right here. I'll get that on. Here we go. And let's get this one on. Hugh, when you said television, you mean to the public, this is going to be broadcast to the public? Yeah, it's radio and TV. It's called Premiere, yeah, Premiere TV, Premiere Radio. It's a... Is it a Christian? Justin Briarley is a Christian. He never lets people know that he's a Christian. He's a very fair moderator. But his show is basically where he has a Christian and an atheist debate one another on the topic. He's always a scientist, helping his philosophers, theologians, and so on, do that kind of thing. Is Premiere Radio and TV a Christian network? It is. And it broadcasts throughout the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Belgium, parts of Canada. And we will get the online link. So I'll be able to give you the link once it's available. But yeah, I love the way you ended it saying, okay, Hugh, what would it take for you to abandon your Christian faith? Then he turned to Peter Atkins and said, what would it take you scientifically to abandon your atheism and become a follower of Jesus Christ? And he basically said, there is no evidence that would ever cause me to change my position. And he said, well, for the last hour, Justin jumped in at the very end and said, well, I started telling him how we have to base our case on evidence. And now you're saying no amount of evidence would ever cause you to change your position. That's how the debate ended. So yeah, but Peter is also part of the British Humanist Association. So that probably explains what's going on there. Hey, I'm actually going to be able to show you some stuff here. This is great. Okay. Oh, maybe not. Let's see if I can actually get this up and running. Hmm. Come on. Okay. I thought I had this worked up. Let me make sure everything's connected here. Hey, that's connected. Now too, this should work. Up at the projector. No, it's on. Well, maybe you can figure this out. Okay. While we're trying to get that up and running. Okay. Harry, what the service dog can do? Okay. What I hope to be able to share with you is a paper that got published just this past Wednesday in the British Journal Nature, which is considered to be the host's prestigious science journal in the world. And it's basically a study trying to determine the date in which shales began to form. And the significant part there is that's the signal for the formation of continents. So if you've got water falling on the land masses and that's being wrote in the oceans, you get shales. And so what they did is they looked at 290 different shale sites around the world, dated the shale sites, and basically for the first time performed triple oxygen isotope analysis of what's going on there. Well, they looked at oxygen 18, oxygen 17, and oxygen 16. And previously, researchers had done studies on oxygen 18 to 16, but never included 17. And it's based on the old studies that they were able to determine the dates for the building up of the continents. And based on what they did years ago, they were able to determine that the buildup of continental land masses looked a particular way. And this is where I need to show the slide. Okay. Tell you what, why don't I put this to sleep and put this back up and see if that will work? Hopefully it didn't crash my computer. Okay. So looking just at oxygen 16 to 18 ratios of the shales around the world, this is work that was done, gee, 10, 15 years ago. They're able to determine that this is the history of the buildup of the continental land masses. And it basically is in sync with what you see in Genesis chapter 1, where it talks about Earth beginning as a water world. Genesis 1, 2, water covers the whole surface of the Earth. And so what we see here is that you begin indeed as a water world, then you get tiny volcanic islands, and then plate tectonics kicks in, and you can see these shales giving the signature that you have aggressive continental land mass buildup when the Earth is about 2 billion years old, and then it gradually increases thereafter. Now, Genesis 1 puts the formation of the continents at the beginning of creation day 3. So you've got 6 days of creation, beginning of creation day 3, and notice that the timing here is consistent. Basically telling us that a little less than half of the Earth's current age, we have this dramatic buildup of continental land masses. Okay, this new research basically changes this graph. And so this is what the new graph looks like. Yeah, basically saying, and that's the title of the paper, rapid emergence of continents. Go back one. Okay, so that's what we thought the buildup of continental land mass history was a week ago. And then now, thanks to this paper, we realize it needs to be adjusted roughly the same, but this is now done with much more precision. So this is very accurately determined, thanks to the fact that they did a study with 3 oxygen isotopes, not just 2, but it shows that there's a much more dramatic emergence of continents than we thought just a week ago. And it's kind of the wording you see in Genesis chapter 1, that beginning of creation day 3, we see this rapid emergence of continental land masses all over the Earth. Now, what's really fun is that their study was sufficiently detailed. They were actually able to determine what the continents looked like before this great drum jump up and what it looked like after, and also what they determined would be the cause of this. And so here's the map that they produce. You can see it in their paper. So that's kind of a before and after. So what's the time scale separating those two events? Less than 130 million years. And I shared that with my wife, she said, that's really a long time. I said, well, not if you're looking at 4,562 million years. This is really just a brief whisper of time, by the way, it's that or less. But notice, you go from just a small amount of continental land mass to continents being almost as big as they are today. Incidentally, they got a name for that supercontinent. It's Kanora land. It's the first of the supercontinents that showed up. And what you see thereafter is basically the supercontinent cycle where planet Earth goes from having one big continent where it splits into small continents and it comes back together into one big continent and splits up into continents and then comes back together again. There's been six cycles of the supercontinent. The last one being Pangea. I bet you everybody here has heard of Pangea, right? Okay, well Pangea is the last one. It was a quarter of a billion years ago. And this is Kanora land, which showed up about 2.2 million years ago. Yes. Well, it's because of the way plate tectonics kicks in. And you need life to really keep the plate tectonics going. So there's no accident that the origin of life is the same date as the origin of plate tectonics. Yeah, and the first, you get a couple of small volcanic islands and the first thing you see is what they call a single craton. Craton is a word for a small continent. And so you get this one small craton and then you get two and by the way, the two you get are basically Western Australia and South Africa. Those are the two first continental land masses to form. They still exist today. In fact, if you look at this map over here, this Australia hasn't changed much over the past 2.4 billion years. That's basically the same. And incidentally, it shows you there the first of the continental land. So the little craton in Western Australia is equivalent to what you see here in South Africa. So you get two small ones and then it really begins to kick in explosively. Now, the thing you notice here is they show some shaded parts here. That's basically stuff that's below sea level, but not a whole lot below sea level. So like there may be only 1 or 200 feet of sea above those spots. And so it only needs a little bit of tectonic activity to push them above the surface of the water. So here you've got a lot of potential continents that are not yet above sea level and suddenly they're all pushed up there. Okay, what they did is they linked into 290 shale boreholes. So it looked at shale all around the world. In fact, they basically said in the paper we went to all seven continents. Found shale in all seven continents, different places. And they're able to date the shales and able to determine that the shales appear explosively. That's what the addition of Oxygen 17 did. With Oxygen 18 they kind of get a temperature change and the temperature change tells them basically this is the same time that the temperature of the Earth drops by a big factor. And they basically said, well the reason why it's dropping by a big factor you're getting the formation of these continents. And they're able to determine that with Oxygen 18. Oxygen 18 gave them the temperature change over the history. But it wasn't able to give them the detail that you get here. It's the addition of the Oxygen 17 isotope that told them it was an explosive event, not a gradual event, and was sufficiently dramatic that you actually get a really big supercontinent canoral land. So you're able to come up with this detailed map. The yellow stuff is basically the new formation, the orange material is stuff that would have formed first. The other thing they're also able to determine was this is the first time you get mountain ranges. And so what you got here are basically little small continents or cratons that are like a thousand feet above sea level or less. But as you move into canoral land, you actually get big mountain ranges showing up. So yes. So is this all pretty much due to volcanism? It's basically due to the plate tectonic activity. So volcanism is a part of plate tectonics. Wouldn't that raise the temperature of the atmosphere? What's happening is that, you know, this is coinciding with what's called the Great Oxygenation Event. And so there's a wholesale change in the chemistry of the Earth and a wholesale change in the tectonics. This is something that I've written about in improbable planets. So you want the details that are in there. What there's new papers basically telling us is that it's much more explosive than what we thought. Rather than being something that was gradually occurring over a half billion years, it's really taking place over just a hundred million years. And rather than we're seeing the continental landmass go from 5% up to 20%, it goes from 2% up to 27%. So it's a much more... And we're at 33% now? Right now we're at 29%. So yeah, since this event, we've only increased the continental landmass coverage by 2%. And before that, it was 2% or less. So learning went from 2% to 27%, or to put it another way, the increase in continental landmass between this figure and that figure is 12 or 13 times. So in a very short window of time, the continental landmass is increased by 12 to 13 times. Why did the Americas start forming? Well, one of those mountain ranges is the Appalachians. I'm not sure which one it is, but one of those is the Appalachians. So, yes. How we did and the great oxygenation event, because when you pump oxygen in the atmosphere, it pulls carbon dioxide and especially methane out of the atmosphere. Those are powerful greenhouse gases. And so that caused the temperature of the Earth to plummet. Plummet so much, it initiated huge ice ages. And not ice ages like we've been having the last couple of many years. They're having what they call snowball or slush ball events. So what's the slush ball event? Well, a snowball event is when more than 90% of the planet is covered with thousands of feet of ice. A slush ball event is where it's more than 80%. And so you get kind of like a little thin line around the equator where it's not frozen over everywhere else it is. But yeah, there were several big slush ball and snowball events that took place when the oxygen jumped up. And by the way, the oxygen jump, they call it the great oxygenation event. It's when the oxygen content in the atmosphere goes from one 10,000th of a percent up to 2%. Okay, today is 21%. But that's the next big oxygenation event is what happened at the Canberra in explosion and that's where it jumped from 1% up to 8% and 10% and 20%. Those are called minor oxygenation events. This first one is called the great oxygenation event. They say, gee, it's only 2%. Yeah, but they're looking at the number of decimals. They're looking from one 10,000th of a percent up to 2%. So that's like five orders of magnitude greater oxygen in the atmosphere. And that had a dramatic impact on the chemistry of the atmosphere and paved the way for what we call eukaryotic life forms. So what kind of life forms are those? Those are life forms where the cells have a nucleus. They've got a Golgi apparatus in there, basically getting complex cells which enables complex life to come into existence. Yes, Doug? Well, like the... Yeah, I mean, they're looking like Eastern South Africa. There's a craton there that dates back before this time. And likewise, in Western Australia, there's a craton that dates before this time. Okay, so it might come from identical life. This is a part that you probably should know. I know. Well, prokaryotic life has been around for 3.825 billion years. That's life based on cells that don't have a central nucleus. But this event led to the emergence of more complex cellular life. So, okay. Any other questions before we jump into the lesson? Hey, I'm going to be writing a blog on this. It'll be up in the middle of June. I write a blog every week on some new scientific discovery. And incidentally, there's actually a second paper I'll talk to you about next week which actually identifies and affirms what happened on Creation Day 4. So, yeah, in one week, we have these two papers that give us stunning new affirmation of what Genesis 1 has been claiming for thousands of years. Isn't this a wonderful time to be alive? Okay, go ahead, John. Well, that's difficult to say, John, because there are no seismographs around there to measure it. And, I mean, we do know that the tectonic activity was much stronger back then than it is today. However, tectonics is complicated. Sometimes you get plates moving against one another where you get thousands of small movements of the Earth, and hardly anybody notices what's happening. Other times the plates get locked, but there's stress there that builds up and then suddenly it shifts like this and you get a massive earthquake. What we do know is that there was plenty of tectonic activity going on back then, more so than today, but exactly what kind of tectonics we don't have the seismographs to tell you. So, I mean, volcanoes are part of that as well, but, you know, so plates can move slowly and then they can lock and cause big earthquakes. It's probably safe to say you wouldn't want to see them. Well, I'll give you an example. If you go a little bit north here in California, you're running into something called the pentacles. Have you ever been to the pentacles? Okay, a few you have. Okay. The pentacles is a mountain range here in California that sits right on top of the San Andreas Fault. And it actually split this mountain range into two pieces. And so, one side of the mountain went this way, the other side went this way. Guess how far apart they are today? More than 200 miles apart from one another. But they call them the pentacles because the San Andreas Fault literally sheared the mountain range right in the middle. So, you've got a cliff base on this side and a cliff base on this side. So, you've got a gradual incline up and it just sharply drops down. A matching side. Yeah, matching side. So, you actually put the two pieces together, you can fit them in like a jigsaw puzzle. But most of that movement was not as a result but it's the most of the movement as a result of just having lots of little movements taking place gradually over time and literally pushing those two pieces of the mountain apart from one another by more than 200 miles. Hey, if you've never been to the pentacles, that's a great place to go because, yeah, you just see this gradual incline up and then you're just going to get a cliff base on the other side. It's fun to climb up and kind of look out over the valley. It's only 2,000 feet high. That's a good place to go. Yes, one more comment? No, okay. Let me exit this and pull up our lesson in Isaiah. Oh, and one thing I was able to do for you is all of Isaiah passages that speak about the cosmic beginning. I actually typed them all up here so you've got this as a nice little collection. Unfortunately, this morning the toner on my printer ran out so I've got maybe 12 copies here. That's it. It's two pages. Next week I'll bring enough for all of you but you might want to share and someone can find a photo copy or we could actually get some for all of you. So that's a list of all the scriptures and for those of you who are new here to the class, kind of what we did, we spent 15 minutes in the class breaking up into small groups of four and we went through an entire book of Isaiah and gathered up all the verses that pertain to the beginning of the universe and wound up with about 30 verses that we whittled down to about 24 verses and those are the passages and yeah, it's two pages by the way so you're going to need two pages but these are the passages we wound up with after we edited it out a few and now we're kind of going through these texts and basically seeing what they got to say about the beginning of the universe and we're spending some time on this because of all the books of the Bible the book of Isaiah says the most about the beginning of the universe. Now of course there's the famous passages in Genesis 1-1, Hebrews 11-3 Jeremiah jumps into this the book of Job jumps into this but Isaiah gives the most complete description of the beginning of the universe and I'm going to just rapidly go through the ones we've already covered and then we'll kind of slow down and we get to the ones we haven't covered yet okay begins in Isaiah 6-3 Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts as glory fills the whole earth namely every part of God's creation reveals God's glory none of it is wasted everyone of it communicates something about the glory of God and actually we're going to look at passages to talk about how every component actually tells something about its plan of salvation Isaiah 14-24 the Lord of hosts is sworn as I have purpose so will be as I have planned it so it will happen bottom line there are no accidents or random outcomes every outcome, an event in the history of the universe has a purpose and we need to look for that this is actually something we discussed in the debate I had with Peter Atkins because he was trying to make the claim that hey most of what we see in the universe has no purpose no benefit, no value and so I was able to challenge him on that and say no I think everything we see in the universe has purpose, has value has a plan, we just need to look for it it's not gratuitous Isaiah 14-27 the Lord of hosts himself has planned it therefore who can stand in its way it is his hand that is outstretched so who can turn it back and nothing stands in the way of God's purposes and plans Isaiah does talk about a supernatural being who's opposed to God's plans was basically making the point not even Satan has any capacity to stop God's plans and purposes in creation Isaiah 37-16 the Lord of hosts God of Israel who is enthroned above his cherubim God you alone of all the kingdoms of the earth you made the heavens and the earth God is the only agency of creation there's no other factor notice the reference to the cherubim an excellent cross-reference here is Hebrews 1 because in the book of Hebrews the author of Hebrews is basically addressing this idea that the angels were with God and partners with him in creation incidentally we put note in Jewish Bibles to that effect of Genesis 1 because there's a text in Genesis 1 referring to God creating humans where it says let us create them, male and female and it said well the reference to us and to we that's the angels and so God's not the only agency in creation the angels are involved that's basically how Jews get around the fact that the Old Testament is the doctrine of the Trinity but notice Isaiah here is saying the cherubim the cherubim are the highest angels and it says no God sits above them only God is involved in creation yes John right well this text is consistent with that well I mean as you know we've had some Jews participating here in the class and the big debate is okay Christians get this doctrine of the Trinity and what we're going to see in our study of Isaiah the Old Testament teaches the doctrine of the Trinity more explicitly and extensively than the New Testament does but that's something that Jews really struggle accepting because Jewish theology is that God is one and only one one person not three persons and so they have to deny what it says there in Genesis 1 and say well yes it's not that God is two persons or three persons it's the angels but this text is making say no the angels aren't part of it Hebrews chapter 1 goes into that more explicitly only God himself is able to create God as the only agency of creation I mean we probably remember some of the discussion with Jews that were here in the class if you look at Genesis 1 the only word it uses for God in Genesis 1 is Elohim interesting word for God basically means the one who is singular and plural the uni plural one and there's the doctrine of the Trinity right there in the first sentence of the Bible and in case you don't miss the point when it talks about the creation of human beings God uses the singular pronoun and he uses the plural pronoun back to back sentences one sentence uses singular pronouns the other sentence uses the plural pronoun so right up up the back but we're going to see here in the book of Isaiah it identifies the Holy Spirit as a creator of the universe the Son as a creator of the universe the Messiah and the Father as a creator of the universe and look how many times it tells in the book of Isaiah there's only one creator three people are named as a creator but there's only one creator okay that's one of the study questions we'll get to it moving on Isaiah 45 the glory of the Lord will be revealed that all mankind together will see it for the mouth of the Lord has spoken this is right out of the Handel's Messiah basically making the point Handel included it in the Messiah making the point God's glory everyone all have heard and so it's not just those who have been exposed to the Bible if you've seen the sky at night you have seen God's glory and that's why it tells us in Romans everyone is not excused everyone's been exposed to God's revelation through nature the book of nature Isaiah 40-12 who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand or marked out the heavens sorry for the typo there with the span of his hand who has gathered the dust of the earth that he measured making the point that even a speck of dust even a single drop of water is purpose determined and measured by God now if he's so fastidious about a single speck of dust how much more do you think he cares about you as a human being and so basically it's making the point hey even every speck of dust every drop of water is measured by God and somebody when I went over this a couple weeks ago said how much water is there in the universe well there's a lot of water in the universe a lot of dust in the universe it's very dusty and it's very wet I made the point that water is the third most abundant molecule in the universe right after hydrogen 2 and hydrogen 3 and so the universe is soaking wet it's kind of ironic when you have NASA saying we need to follow the water because where we find water we're going to find life well they're going to find water everywhere in fact the earth like planets we're finding have way too much water 500 to 1000 times more water in the earth and if you got that much water that discovery I talked about earlier wouldn't happen the continents would never break the surface of the earth and one thing I did mention by the way in this discovery is that when the continents jump from just a very tiny percentage 1 or 2% of the earth up to 27% that's set in motion the cycling of nutrients from the continents to the oceans and back to the continents if that hadn't have happened there would be no advanced life on earth that nutrient recycling is crucial to sustain plants and animals and so that was all set up at the great oxygenation event okay Isaiah 4022 this is where we ended up last time I was here very famous passage God is enthroned above the circle of the earth its inhabitants are like grasshoppers he stretches out the heavens like thin cloth and spreads them out like a tent to live in so basically making a point God is able to take care of things here on earth from a perspective so far away we look like grasshoppers and yeah we got into a little discussion we have flat earth creationists trying to claim this text as proof that the earth is a circular disk but hey the whole point here only a sphere looks like a circle from all perspectives above and so this text is actually cited as one of the biblical texts supporting a spherical earth it's not for a flat earth then we ended with he stretches out the heavens like a thin cloth that we tend to live in this is the first of several passages we'll be looking at in Isaiah that speaks about the expansion of the universe there's seven passages in Isaiah that use the verb natah with respect to the Hebrew verb natah with respect to the universe translated here stretching out of the universe the verb natah if you look it up in the lexicon really means the expansion of whatever is being described and so it would actually be better translated he expands the universe it expands like a thin cloth and spreads them out like a tent to live in just this past week while I was in London I got all kinds of questions of both my twitter page and my facebook page saying okay I've heard that the universe is expanding what is expanding into is it expanding into empty space that I had to explain to and well no space only exists on the surface of the universe and they said well what's this surface, what's got three dimensions not two help me visualize this as I can't okay you can only visualize dimensional properties in the dimensions you personally experience but to give you an analogy it's kind of like planet earth earth has got three dimensions and we humans live on the two dimensional surface of the three dimensional earth and so people also ask me a question, where is the center of the universe I said well that's like asking someone who's constrained to the surface of the earth say where is the center of the earth of all you can access is the surface nobody is at the center well all the stars, galaxies, planets, moons even the space time dimensionality is constrained to the three dimensional surface of the four dimensional expanding universe and again don't try to visualize it it's something we can prove but it's something we can't visualize and say gee that's kind of a inconvenient well the universe is basically a four space time dimensional system and yeah I mean trying to visualize four dimensions geometrically can't be done but it can be tackled with mathematics I think I gave this example a couple years ago in the class about when I took a sophomore mathematics class in complex variables at the University of British Columbia the professor showed us a video clip of a basketball in four dimensions of space being turned inside out and the amazing thing is if you've got four dimensions of space you've got that basketball inside out without making a single cut or slit in the surface of the basketball he didn't show it to us in four dimensions he did kind of what a real estate agent does he shows you your new home in two dimensional slices from different perspectives and that's what this clip did he showed us the basketball being turned inside out in two dimensions and so we said hey it definitely works and then the professor had the audacity to say okay you've got a week to prove it mathematically that was our assignment for the week so yeah it was a bit of a challenge but we were able to determine hey this really happens if you've got four dimensions now if you want to really pack oranges close together if you've got one million independent dimensions of space put them in spherical oranges and put them in a one dimensional box where there's zero space between the oranges that's a little more complicated math problem that you can take home and work on so strange things happens when you do that and that's why I'm saying the universe has those strange features however this actually has a apologetic value if you're going to come up with a religion as a human being you're going to think about that religion in a way that you can visualize with your mind and notice that's the case with every holy book outside of the Bible if you look at the Quran everything it writes is something you can visualize from a human experience perspective same thing with the Hindu Vedas that's why their discussions about heaven for example are so different than what you see in the Bible and this actually had a factor that Jesus Christ is realizing that this book we call the Bible contains things that we can't visualize from a human perspective which was a clue to me that comes from a mind that can visualize those perspectives someone from beyond the universe the Trinity is one example and this is one reason why Jews for example in their study of the Old Testament reject the doctrine of the Trinity because they're wanting to have a God that can visualize but God being beyond the universe has properties that can't be visualized however there are things we can prove that the text actually sustains so both the New Testament and the Old Testament sustains a description about God that's impossible for us to visualize and you've heard me say this before in a class and I've got a blog article on this science only makes sense that God is triune and in the end of the Bible we can establish that God is the Trinity and I've actually tried that on friends that are Muslims basically saying okay if you trust science notice that from an Islamic perspective you wind up with a God that's contradicting what we can see revealed in science but in Christianity there is no contradiction it fits because God is triune yes Doug that only what we can see is real to me seems like a really silly notion and there's a lot of thoughtful scientists that would probably admit that right at the end well the wonderful thing about the physical sciences we're confronted with all kinds of things that we can't visualize but we know must be true a good example is quantum mechanics a lot of stuff in quantum mechanics I mean that's the thing when you're teaching students physics quantum mechanics I'm going to understand quantum mechanics I've got to visualize all the phenomena going on here saying that can't happen if that's your goal then you're going to have a real hard time passing this course just simply be satisfied with understanding that it's true you don't have to be able to visualize it well that was evidence for me that the Vedas and the Quran the writings of the Zoroastrians the Buddhists came from a human mind and were not inspired by the one that transcends the universe because they showed the limitations of human visualization whereas the bible has all kinds of doctrines that defy what we human beings can visualize and yet we can show just like with quantum mechanics we can't visualize it but we know it's true likewise with the universe okay back to the thin cloth it doesn't look like a tent to live in okay lots of questions go ahead sorry oh one from the virtual audience great okay I think I get the question and thank you Eric we always love participants from the virtual audience with the cosmic background radiation look any different if you're in a location say 45 million miles or light years away from where you are right now well 45 million light years that gets you about a third of the way to the Virgo super cluster the center of the Virgo super cluster and the basic answer is it would not look a whole lot different I mean there is some structure that we can see in the cosmic background radiation relative to the position in the sky but the amazing thing about the cosmic background radiation it's smooth to four orders of magnitude I mean yeah we have these maps that show these hot spots and cold spots in the cosmic background radiation but that's only because we're now able to make temperature measurements to one part in a million actually able to make measurements of one millionth of a degree and there we can see some variation in the hot and cold spots of the cosmic background radiation but I remember when we were first making these measurements the map basically just showed one smooth color we couldn't see any difference it was the same temperature all the way across but that's because we can only make temperature measurements to one ten thousandths of a degree the Kobi satellite was the first satellite in the late part of the 20th century that can make temperature measurements to one one hundred thousandths of a degree and there they saw the subtle variations now we're down to better than one part in a millionth of a degree and so we see some detailed maps I can pull it up here in the computer but it would take too long if you go to the Plank website P-O-A-N-C-K you'll see the best map that's been produced so the cosmic background radiation but to answer the question yeah if you go far enough away from here you'll see that the positions of the hot and cold spots have changed and the map will look the same it just kind of moves it's kind of like looking at Canada from an airplane when you're over the west or the east it's still Canada but you get to have a different perspective on it but he has remarkably smooth okay we have another question you asked 45 billion years but the universe is only 18 point okay I thought he said billion sorry okay I think the question he's getting at is the universe is only 13.8 billion years old but astronomers talk about the universe being many tens of billions of light years across or even bigger maybe even infinite well there are different perspectives on this but one thing we know for sure is that the universe that exists today must be a lot bigger than the universe we see through our telescopes because the universe we see through our telescopes were forced to look back in time so for example when we look at the sun we see it as it was 8 minutes ago we look at the Andromeda galaxy as it was 2.5 million years ago and the universe is expanding as this text here speaks about and so if the universe is expanding it's getting bigger and bigger it gets older and older and since the universe we see through the telescope pardon me and it's accelerating it expands faster at a faster rate with every year that goes by well it's very close to approaching the speed of light and that's that's another whole issue we're right at the speed of light right now in the future the universe will expand so rapidly we won't be able to see all the way back to the cosmic creation event but yeah you'd think that the universe since we as only 13.8 billion years old must be a maximum of 28 billion light years across but in fact it's much bigger than that because the universe that we looked at say 10 billion light years away is a universe very much smaller than the universe we see today so the universe of today is bigger than the universe we see through the telescope or as I tell my wife all the time since I'm an astronomer I can't be held accountable for the present I have no access to the present I can only be held accountable for the past so right so billions of years ago I can tell you what was happening but today no I really don't know what's going on okay but there are also models of the universe where you because of the cosmic inflation event where the universe would even be bigger than that and so people say well how big is the universe of today the figure that's bandied around most is probably somewhere around 8 or 900 billion light years across it could be smaller it could be bigger some models even say it could be infinite now it's finite in age but some models actually permit the space to go out and it's basically on the geometry measures to be flat if the universe is flat the space goes out to infinity if it's spherical then it's finite if it's hyperbolic it goes out to infinity as well and it measures to be flat to about four places the decimal and actually that's what you want if you want life in the universe so yeah it's bigger than the billions of light years that we can see but back to this question about the analogy of everything in the universe constrained to the three dimensional surface of the four dimensional universe I find it interesting it talks about how he stretches out the heavens expands universe like a thin cloth and spreads them out like a tent to live in now people have made the point maybe this isn't exactly what the text is saying but it is consistent with the idea that the reality of the universe is a surface and just like a tent is a surface material the reality of the tent is a surface now it's inside now it's outside and people say well what's the universe expanding into it's expanding into nothing beyond the space surface of the universe is nothing inside the space surface of the universe is nothing you say well what's out there well just wait the space surface will expand and get there but beyond the space surface is nothing interior there's nothing it really is kind of like a thin cloth like a tent spread in such a way that human beings can live within the universe so it's possible that you might even take this beyond just a mere metaphor to literally speaking about the shape of the universe yes you in all the places that talks about the heavens being spread out are those words in continuing present tense no the 11 texts that talk about expanding show up in all three Hebrew verb forms this has come up in a number of debates I've had especially with Michael Sherman the skeptic society not far away from here he's been making the point that they're all in the present tense they're not that's all three Hebrew verb forms and basically making the point that God created the universe with the property that would guarantee that it would continue to expand so the fact that we see it in all three Hebrew verb forms means these are more than just figures of speech the Bible literally is speaking about the universe expanding incidentally this came up in my debate with Peter Atkins he said well you're just reading this into the Bible because you know this stuff is true from your knowledge of astronomy who said this before a big bang came along and I said well lots of Jewish theologians actually saw big bang cosmology in the Old Testament 8,900, a thousand years ago so it's not just 21st century astronomers that are reading this into the text okay got a few more minutes let's go on to another passage yes I was to consider the verb forms and as you know the part of the simple form here that is and in normal context what's really important and what I appreciate is that we're talking about the predictive nature of God beyond the ability of math the same thing I don't think this verse for the other seven foot into that I do think Genesis does because Natal itself as its participle form I think again you have an article in June 2002 on the RTB website that is used as a noun it's substantive and it's he who stretches and with participle they have no aspect or equivalent tense but depend upon context and in this verse it's especially interesting that Natal itself is important to what is stretching and what I have found in looking up Natal we also have other things in the verse it's a very wonderful verse for a lot of things to come together what I've found about Natal is it is associated to turning or to stretching out in the arm or to roll the sky back as a scroll to turn morally or to be inclined one way or another not to turn from the left or to the right and here I'm pretty convinced based upon other scriptures that it is talking about a person or anyone looking at the heavens from the left to the right from horizon to horizon even stretching out an arm and saying God stretches this out but not and we can't even read into Natal a continual expansion that's ongoing and as we discuss this that's what I think I'll bring to the discussion is what do we do what do we do with Bob Consecrate of Earth attach this participle and how do we look at syntax and semantics and really etymology of Natal itself to stretch I think God is a stretcher but He keeps it stretched He actively holds the universe in place just as He sits on the circle of the universe and this verse is wonderful in that all of the action words and so part of the circle they become very important but even more important and I'll sort of summarize this is that God expanding to expand even the past to Rockia or is it God stretching a limited left to right that's hard to tell from the part itself and it really is but when we look at the word Natal and its etymology not many people have done that and it's surprising how Tom will do it yeah one of the articles we have on our website you'll see John Ray's name along with my name on it that's the one that goes I think I included that in the fourth edition of the creator of the cosmos I put that one in because it's the more technical article on these 11 texts and I was reluctant myself to I saw this in the text when I was reading as a teenager how far can you push it in terms of Big Bang cosmology but it was John Ray who came to me and said I've done a big study on this it's a lot more secure than you may think and he's the one that worked with me to write the original piece where he talked about the verb Natal how it's used in all 11 texts and if I recall the details nine verbs are in the active participle form the others are in the perfect or the imperfect form and he was the one that worked with me and said it's the fact that it shows up in these three different forms that tells us that yes God designed the universe with the property cosmic expansion but in addition to that is something that on goes so yeah you can take a look at that text because he's the one that basically works through all the Hebrew details and so and also the fact that it's not just people in the 21st century that saw this but I will concede this is debated I mean we have a debate with our friends of biologos for example they insist this has got nothing to do with the expansion of the universe but it's the same group of people that say we don't think the Bible says anything about cosmology whatsoever and so I think it's pretty clear I think you would agree it is saying something about cosmology there's a debate about how far we can push it I think there's a debate for example on what can we do with this tentanalogy where do they have that here good guy translator of the Bible yeah I mean he's a good Hebrew scholar passed on one day you will but I do contact other people by email and gone before a call participle which is active and we must for people here who are not in the Hebrew or linguist we must know that call active participle talks about voice not about cancer perspective it's a voice that the subject is active now that can be in any past present or future and so we need to look at what active means it doesn't automatically mean that it's ongoing in Spanish well that's true because unlike English Hebrew doesn't have the equivalent of English tenses a lot of scholars point out it's not tenses like the way the English language is so you're right John Ray is not available to talk to you right now but when I did meet with him I was impressed that he was fluent in biblical Hebrew and he is a very good Hebrew scholar and he's not alone in drawing these conclusions with a number of his peers at Grace Theological Seminary and the fact is I mean there are people long before the 20th century who saw the same point in the text his comment to me was it was only one verse I'd be hesitant but the fact that we have 11 texts he finds that very compelling but yeah I do admit it's being debated as part of the debate we're having with our friends in Biologos oh yeah okay let's at least make progress on this passage look up and see who created these who brings out the star he hosts by number he calls all of them by name because of his great power and strength not one of them is missing now for those of you who have been with the class for a while do you remember another passage we've looked at at Creation Texts that talked about God numbering the stars anybody remember that songs right no it wasn't song 19 song 4 song 147 basically making a point that God knows the name of every single star this is basically making the same point he calls them by name because of his great power and strength not one of them is missing while stars are like human beings they form they burn for a while and then they die but this point is making God knows what each star is going through and yeah stars that are quote stop burning they're still around God knows where they are none of them are missing and how many stars are there in the universe or I should ask you another question have you ever heard of the star registry for $54 after a loved one okay I'd probably counsel you not to spend the $54 because the truth is you could name 7 trillion stars after every human being and not run out and here's another question how many stars on the star registry are recognized as legitimate names by the international astronomical union zero so you're spending $54 for nothing but they do give you a nice little map that shows you where your star is so but I think you can come up with a map for a little less than $54 so if you really want to impress your honey just tell her I can name 7 trillion stars after you okay not just one star let's go all out here okay but the whole point here is God has a name for every star this smells making a point God has a purpose for every star evidently everyone serves a particular person he cares for each star and I tell people a star is simply a giant ball of hydrogen and helium gas a human being is a lot more than a giant ball of gas okay a human being is not just I shouldn't have gone there without sorry I slipped into that one so right I got in trouble once and somebody was misunderstanding what I said about gas giants so we're out of time good thing let me wrap this up father in heaven we do thank you that you're a god that knows every little speck of dust in the universe every drop of water every star Lord each one of them is something you care for each one of them plays a role making possible our existence here on planet earth and father if you know the name of every star if you care for every speck of dust in the universe every drop of water in the universe how much more we should care for each of us human beings thank you lord that you created this for this universe so that we can be here today help us lord to find the purpose you've put in place every star every speck of dust where we drop the water but more than that lord help us to discover the purpose for why you created us and what role we need to serve in the few decades we have here on planet earth thank you lord for giving us such an incredibly fulfilling career as a follower of you I pray that you would assist us throughout these next few days and weeks to bring many to know you as lord and savior so all of us can find purpose in a meaningful eternal life with you in Jesus name amen thank you thank you