Why This Astrophysicist Left Atheism & Found Jesus

[Music] so tell me about your Origins your your family and what was your initial view of life the universe the answers to the big questions I don't know just help me understand your mindset at onet well I was born in Montreal Canada but when I was four years of age uh family moved out to Vancouver British Columbia and so I was born raised and educated in Canada and when I was seven years of age uh I looked up at the stars and I said Mom Dad are those Stars hot and they said yes son they're

hot I said can you please tell me why they're hot and they said well for that you'll have to go to the library well it was and when I was age seven our school had a field trip to the OU Public Library which at that time had more than 3 million volumes and uh I was given we were all given a card so I came home with five books on physics and astronomy and every weekend I would go back and check out another four or five or six books on physics and astronomy from the age

of eight onwards I knew my future career would be in astrophysics now I was not raised in a Christian Home in fact I didn't know of any Christians growing up uh but my parents believed in Morality and so they gave us moral training uh but neither one of them believed that there was a God that created the universe uh but every year uh growing up I would focus on a different subdiscipline of astronomy and so when I was aged 16 I spent a year studying cosmology that's the science of the origin and history of the

universe and at that time there is a debate going on is it a hesitating universe is it an oscillating Universe a steady state universe or a big bang universe but even at that time the astronomical evidence was heavily favoring Big Bang cosmology and I knew if it was Big Bang then the universe had a beginning if it had a beginning there must be a cosmic beginner so as at age 17 I began to search for that Cosmic beginner Ry didn't know where look but I thought a good place to start would be Emanuel Kant uh

he's the father of cosmology so I read his critique of pure reason and some of his other writings and recognized that uh things were not consistent with what I knew to be true in astronomy I looked at renie Dart a couple of other philosophers and I said I think I'm going to have to look at the world's holy books to try to get some understanding I began with the Hindu vas and I says oh this is where the oscillating Universe model comes from Hinduism is founded on the idea of reincarnation and fundamentally on the principle

that the universe reincarnates but as I read the vas I realized they got the number wrong because every cycle of reincarnation for the universe they said was 4.32 billion years and I knew the universe was older than that uh and I also knew that the Universe had way too much tropy for there to be any mechanism to rebound the universe so I put Hinduism aside I next looked at Buddhism and as I read the Buddhist commentaries realize that they have the same cosmology as Hinduism then I looked at the Quran and that there's three creation

texts in the Quran but they're not consistent and I was particularly Disturbed that it claimed that the stars were closer to us than the planets it's like you don't need a telescope to know that that's incorrect I looked at Zoroastrianism I looked at several other religions but finally I picked up a Gideon Bible that was given to me uh in our public school and when I went through that Gideon Bible you know just looking at the very first page Genesis 1 I was astounded that I perfectly followed the scientific method now I was naive I

didn't know where the scientific method came from years later I discovered it had its origins in the Bible's creation text uh but as I used that scientific method I recognize that all the events in Genesis 1 were correctly described and the correct chronological order the best I'd found outside of the Bible was the en numaish which got two out of 14 correct uh but the Bible got a 10 for 10 score on the order and the description of the creation events and four for four on the initial conditions of planet Earth and so that's what

motivated me to say you know what this book The Bible deserves serious study and I spent 18 months reading and studying the Bible uh anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half a day uh looking for provable error contradiction because I felt if this is from the one that created Universe there will be no erors there will be no contradictions and by the time I went got to revelation 22 I realized I'd not found a single provable error contradiction instead I found over a hundred places where the Bible had accurately predicted future scientific

discoveries in fact at that time I was a sophomore physics student at the University of British Columbia and when I came to that conclusion it was the same week our physics professor said here's an assignment calculate the probability that one of the students in this class will be killed by a sudden reversal of the second law thermodynamics within the next seven days that probability is roughly one part in 10 the 80th it's so extremely remote that we realize such an event has never happened anytime anywhere in the universe but what I had just determined is

that these predictions of future scientific discoveries showed that the Bible was at least 10 to the 220 times more reliable than the second law thermodynamics and since I trusted my life and the reliability of the second law thermodynamics I said the only rational thing to do is put at least that much confidence in the message of the Bible so that's what motivated me to sign my name in the back of a Gideon Bible at age 19 committing my life to Jesus Christ receiving his gift of forgiveness uh for all of my offenses against God and

other people and also realizing it only makes sense to put Jesus in charge of my life he knows better than I do what's best for me so now we have to spend the next hour unpacking your intro there because you covered so many different things that I want to drill into Let's uh I I don't know if this is too much sort of off the top of your head or whatever but I am so fascinated what those 10 criteria were that you had in mind and then what those four criteria were so I don't know

if that's better just to tell people to go to a certain article or whatnot but that's I want to point right point to that I could do that okay I Do cover it in detail in my book navigating Genesis but like step one of the scientific method do not interpret until you first establish the frame of reference or the point of view and for the six days of creation in Genesis 1 Genesis 1 tells us the spirit of God is hovering over the surface of the Waters of planet Earth underneath the cloud layer not above

the cloud layer and that's also clarified in Job 38 where it says that God had blanketed uh the Seas of the ear Earth with clouds that kept the Seas dark so that's the frame of reference Genesis 1:2 also gives you the four initial condition s that it's dark everywhere over the surface of the waters the waters cover the whole surface of the Earth and the Earth is formless and empty it's unfit for life and it's empty of life but now the spirit of God begins to work and what you see in the six days of

creation is God step by step filling the Earth with life and preparing the Earth physically uh for his creation of human beings 10 specific creation events and as I mentioned they're all correctly described relative to the established scientific record and they're all in the correct chronological order now when you were talking about the different contradictions that you experienced within the other world religions prior to you're seeing the consistency that you found within the biblical worldview you talked about within Islam that there was what did you say there was three different cosmology occurr three different major

texts on creation okay one of which is looks like has been borrowed from the Bible then you got two others uh but one that Disturbed me is where it talks about how the universe can be described by seven spheres and there's different objects on those spheres uh but they actually have the planets on a sphere above the sphere that has the Stars so it's like uh I knew that wasn't correct I knew the description of the seven spheres wasn't correct either so uh that's that's just one of many things the other thing that bothered me

about reading the Quran it's incredibly repetitious and its language is quite vague and it looks like uh the author of the Quran is going overboard to make it sound spiritual and so there's all these references to the Great and Powerful God but it's repeated so many times it's like you know what are you trying to prove and that's something I also saw in the Buddhist commentaries and in the uh the Hindu vas this highly repetitious and overly esoteric and spiritual sounding language and you when I read the Bible I noticed that Jesus made the comment

do not make repetitious prayers God hears you you don't have to repeat over and over again and so we need to be specific about our prayers uh but to go into repetitious ritual is not something that God wants and I says that sounds very reasonable for someone who created the universe and wants a relationship with each individual human being I've been coming up against this comment on this channel a lot where and it's sort of it sort of comes out of I've been doing some sort of debate commentary when it was like John Linux and

Richard Dawkins debate and you know the big question comes out of is it an uncreated eternal universe or an uncreated eternal God and there's sort of is almost like this false equivalency if you believe that those are both equally theoretically feasible I want to zoom in on what you were saying about the actual science regarding the universe and because I think a lot of people it seems like still believe that it could be Eternal e even even uh even before getting into multiverses and all of that uh it seems like people still a lot of

people hold a steady state type of model in their in their mind and I'm just wondering if you can actually kind of talk the audience through what like what are the what are the options at this point and what is almost like the development of thought around the origin of the universe and where are we actually at today to try to clear up you know some of this confusion well what bothered me about reading the great pH philosophers is that they talked about time and space being Eternal I also saw that in the Eastern religions

what I saw in the Bible was that space and time are not Eternal God creates space and time when he creates the universe so that's a key factor that separates the Bible from the non-biblical religions of the world and I was doing this study at the same time that physicists in Britain and South Africa were developing the first of the space-time theorems we now have over 30 of these space-time theorems and they're based on two fundamental assumptions the theorem is true if the universe contains mass and you and I are living proof that the Universe

indeed contains Mass the second condition is that the equations of general relativity reliably describe the movements of massive bodies in the universe now when I was first exploring this in my teenage years astronomers could only prove that to be correct to about 1 or 2% percision we can now prove that that's correct to better than 15 places at the decimal so today there's no basis for doubting these two conditions and what the theorem States is that space and time have a beginning space and time are created which implies that there must be a causal agent

outside of matter energy space and time that creates our universe of matter energy space and time and so the space time theorems basically establish it's the god of the Bible that created the universe a God who has the power to create space-time Dimensions at will and remove them at will and so this is what distinguishes the god of the Bible from the gods of the non-biblical religions now I think some people here are going to say how do you how do we know that it's not uh in other words how do we know that it's

a personal being as opposed to some sort of force or I've heard people talk about I don't even know what people are making up Quantum winds or just you know some idea of a of a of a power that's capable of this but that's not necessarily you know Yahweh or or even a God who has manifested himself in any particular way well you're correctly describing what's happening in the community of atheist scientists if you are a parent with kids and they're spending any amount of time in front of a screen there's a certain level of

risk that they are being exposed to and for that reason I wanted to introduce you to an app that I learned about a couple weeks ago and I've been looking into called true play essentially what true play is trying to do is to provide an alternative to the often mindless often soulless sometimes questionable content that your kids are exposed to if they're on their phone or tablet or whatever so the true playay app has games Comics animated shorts all designed to be safe wholesome and true to the word of God I want to be clear

this is definitely not an alternative to family time to prayer time to play time Etc but if you have kids that are already in front of a screen in some capacity the idea here is that this would give you peace of mind knowing that there's no ads no inapp purchases no chat rooms and that all the content is aimed at being Redemptive and truth-telling so save 30% today with an annual subscription check out the link in the description now back to Dr Ross I mean I've got many books written by atheist scientists in my library

but what I've noticed in the last five years books produced by atheist physicists and astronomers are conceding deism I mean even Lawrence Krauss is saying on page 173 of his book a universe from nothing that we cannot take deism off the scientific table the force of the SpaceTime theorems established there must must be a causal agent beyond space and time that creates our universe the debate has really shifted is this God this deistic God a theistic God is this God a personal being and that explains why I've written seven books on Cosmic fine-tuning uh over

my career because that is the go-to evidence to establish we're dealing not just with Transcendent causal agent but a personal being because what you notice in the Bible it makes the point repeatedly that God began his works of redemption before he created anything at all which implies that everything that God created is for the purpose of making possible the Redemption of billions of human beings from their sin and evil so in my latest book on fine tuning designed of the core I make the point that the universe as a whole and all of its size

scale subcomponents going from the cosmic web down to our Super Galaxy cluster our galaxy cluster our local group of galaxies our galaxy The Local bubble in which we're existing the local fluff our solar system I mean our star the planets the asteroid and Comet belts our planet uh the interior of our planet the Moon the interior of the Moon every bit of it is uh designed to make possible the Redemption of billions of human beings from their sin and evil and we actually are able to establish numbers on the degree of fine tuning if people

want to see that uh we have at reasons.org finetuning a 300 page compendium which gives all the calculations of the degree of fine-tuning that's necessary for example just to get human beings on one planet in the universe and that probability is less than one chance in 10 to the 1600th power that's 1600 zeros after the one and I compare that with the very best examples of human inventiveness and design and there we get like one chance or you know one part in 10 to the 25 or 10 to the 26 so we're getting with the

one that created the universe is not 26 zeros after the one we got, 1600 zeros after the one which makes the point that the one that created the universe at a minimum is 10 to the 1500 times more intelligent more knowledgeable more creative more powerful more caring than we human beings and those are only attributes that a personal being can manifest but the degree to which we see these personal attributes again isolates the god of the Bible from the gods of the other major religions of the world you know it's the god of the Bible

that is so intimately related with his creation Playing devil's advocate for just a second because I know that someone is going to hear what you said and and have a knee-jerk response to to say well this is just the privilege that we have as the winners of this Lottery and so we have the Fe feeling that it's designed for us when really probab you know probabilistically we just are at this place now and so we're looking back and we have this feeling that it's so unlikely sort of the anthropic principle idea how how would you

address that type of push back to say no this isn't just that we got lucky and things played themselves out but like what do you make help me help that person to see why it's more reasonable that this is actually designed rather than just lucky I'm not the first one to deal with this uh the British philosopher Richard swinburn more than 30 years ago responded to that objection and he came up with an analogy I mean they're about to be executed by a firing squad and so they have you stand blindfolded and uh there are

20 Sharpshooters with high powered rifles uh standing 30 ft away and they're told to shoot and kill you and so the 20 of them shoot their guns and somehow you survive and you look out at the 20 Sharpshooters after they take the blindfold off and said wow they all missed Richard swinburn makes the point the only reason that they would have all missed is either somebody put blanks in all of their guns or all 20 of those Sharpshooters wanted you to live there's no way they would have not have killed you at had the intent

of murdering you or executing you and likewise they say when you look at these incredibly remote probabilities the only rational conclusion is there's somebody out there who wanted us to live and that wanted us to get the victory over the sin and evil uh in our life it makes no sense that we're just here by a product of pure chance now what some atheists have done is to propose what's called the Multiverse fact I've been speaking on fine tuning since the 1970s and I remember telling audiences in the 1980s that the evidence for fine-tuning the

points of the god of the Bible is getting a minimum of a thousand times stronger with every month of new scientific discoveries it's exponentially increasing in the degree of evidence and eventually uh the case uh for a personal God is is going to become so overwhelming that atheists will have nowhere else to go but to propose there's an infinite number of universes where they're all different from one another and we happen to live in the one lucky Universe where everything is just right but what I told audiences in the 1980s whenever any skeptic appeals to

Infinity they've got nothing and basically explain to lay audiences infinity plus infinity is infinity infinity times infinity is infinity infinity to the Infinity power is infinity so by appealing to Infinity you can explain anything you want now what I've done in my book The Creator in the cosmos fourth edition is to give you an analogy that drives home that point if there really is an infinite number of universes where they're all different from one another you'll of an infinite number of planets identical to our present planet Earth and on those infinite number of planet Earth

you're going to have an infinite variety of birch tree species and birch trees have the property that they peel thin white pieces of bark but if you get an infinite variety of birch tree species one of those species at least one will peel thin white pieces of bark that are perfectly rectangular that measure 8 and a half by 11 in and these pieces of bark will fall on soils with random chemical in them that'll make random markings on those pieces of birch bark which will duplicate every equation every photograph every paragraph every diagram and every

scientific research paper that's ever been published so those millions of scientific research papers they did not come from the minds of scientists the Multiverse did it so you're basically exposing the philosophical fallacy of appealing to a Multiverse to get around the design if you do that there is no design anywhere all of our human designs are negated at the same time that's fascinating I need to chew on that but I really I really I've never heard that before and I really like that analogy that's very interesting let's get back for a second to your personal

story because I'm curious now so far everything we've covered is is very much sort of in the realm of your truth Quest and I'm curious at what point did did this kind of come home for you and at what point did you actually um enter into a relationship with this God that you had been searching for and studying about well while I was going through the Bible over that 18mon period trying to determine is this the inspired inherent word of the one that created Universe I was also fascinated by the morality I was seeing promoted

in the Bible and realize it's moral message is incredibly beautiful and elegant it's unlike any other moral message I saw in any other religion I was very attracted to it and said I want to live that way so I remember during those 18 months doing everything I could to live up to the moral standard that I saw in the Bible but the harder I tried the more I realized I don't make that standard I'm falling short uh but as I read through the Bible I realize that's the message of the Bible that every human being

falls short of God's standard he's written as law in the heart of every human being the conscience that's within it and all of us have failed to live up to our conscience and so it told me God does not great on a curve he demands moral perfection I don't have it but as I read through the 66 books of the Bible I kept seeing repeated over and over again God wants to do for me what I can't do for myself he wants to trade my moral imperfection for his moral perfection and he even sent the

creator of the universe God the son the planet Earth to live a life of moral perfection in front of us and when I read the gospel accounts What impressed me Jesus of Nazareth in front of a large crowd that included his mother and his brothers and his sisters said can any of you accuse me of sin or a moral failing no one could I mean you're not going to fool your mother you're not going to fool your brothers they all agreed he was morally perfect and so I said this is the one and then Jesus

as it tells us in the gospel accounts willingly took upon himself the penalty for all the offenses of every human being that ever lived and basically said uh I will pay for you which you can't pay for yourself I said that's a that's a a that's an offer I can't turn down and as I mentioned earlier also realizing he knows better than I do what's best for my life and so becoming a Christian is receiving God's offer forgiveness through his payment on the cross but also realizing I need to make him the master of my

life and take direction from him and what you see in the gospel account says if you do that God will say send you as Holy Spirit and your Holy Spirit step by step day by day uh will transform you into the character of Christ and I've experienced that process that's the proof that this has really taken home in my life because I realize the character attributes I manifest today are not what I manifested before I gave my life to Jesus [Music] Christ m