Video Transcript: The Limits of Knowledge

In this last lesson, I want to just kind of reflect on some of the things we've learned, but also introduce a couple other new ideas that really probe the limit of our knowledge; what are we able to learn about our universe and what is beyond what we're able to learn?  So let's just start with a little science and then we'll get a little more philosophical.  So let's start with that very beginning of the universe.  

We talked about how astronomers want to get all the way back not just to a billionth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang.  They want to get back to that very moment - what started the Big Bang?  And to a secular astronomer, and even to a Christian astronomer, we have to ask the question, we have to say, everything in our universe has a cause.  I mean, when we observe something, something caused that thing to happen. And so something must have caused this initial expansion.  Something must have caused it.  So what is that?  And here's the best idea that's been put forth.  I mean, the short answer is we don't know.  We don't know.  

The best idea that has been put forward that scientists sort of grab on to and say that’s probably what happened is something called quantum fluctuations.  So the picture kind of illustrates, that picture in the gallery, which is, if you zoom in at the smallest scales of the universe, this you know, the very limit of space, like tiniest, tiniest scale, smaller than a fraction of the nucleus of an atom, these tiny, tiny scales, energy and matter become a little fuzzy.  And so, energy, we said before, can kind of turn into matter.  And in principle, you can have situations where even if there's no energy, you could get a little bit of matter and antimatter, which when they collide with each other, kind of blow each other apart and give off a little energy.  But you can kind of borrow energy from empty space, and create something.  So the idea is, if you borrowed a little energy from empty space, where there was no energy, you could create some mass and as long as those things flew apart from each other fast enough, they wouldn't annihilate one each other.

This is fuzzy, alright?  This is fuzzy, it's fair to say.  We don't know that this happens, it's more or less impossible to measure anything about whether it did happen or not.  But for a secular astronomer who needs an explanation, who can't let it be a mystery, this is what many of them would grab onto.  They'd say, yep, this is how it happened.  And we probably can't prove that, but this is probably what happened.

Okay.  But what do we as a Christian say?  Would we say, well, this is where God acted?  God said, make it happen and it did.  That’s entirely, I think, how we would respond.  But the question is, is that where the action stops?  Did God just kick the can and get it started and then let it run?  I sure hope not because it sure seems like He's involved today, in the ongoing creation of our universe.  So let's be careful not to just say, oh, that's what God did.  He just got it started. 

Another question that's plaguing all of science and that has no good answer is How did life begin?  You know, in astronomy, we cover the whole universe.  How did the universe begin?  We cover how our planets formed.  We talk about stars, their life, their death, how they are related to each other, where the elements come from, but we never really talk about life.  Life is here on this planet.  Where did it come from?  

Well, a famous experiment was done; it's called the Miller Urey experiment, and the idea is basically to take gases that would have been present on the early Earth before there was any life here, and then you put some energy into those with some electricity and you kind of see what comes out.  Now this experiment was done and the whole idea is you've got nonliving elements,  I mean, hydrogen, helium, carbon, oxygen, these things are not alive, but yet my body is composed of just those things put together in a particular arrangement.  So how does living things come from nonliving things?  And so what this experiment showed was that when you take these basic gases and you put energy into them under certain circumstances, what you can get out are organic molecules.  Organic molecules.  Now what is an organic molecule?  

It's basically a complicated molecule.  It's not life of any kind.  It's just a molecule, like a chain of elements that contains carbon.  So some organic molecules maybe would be like sugars are organic because they have carbon in them.  So it's one example. The point is, organic molecules are not the same as life.  Organic Molecules are the building blocks of life.  So the argument that's made by this experiment is to say, okay, we can start with gases that should have been prevalent in the early solar system, on Earth, in the atmosphere.  And we can turn those into organic molecules.  But then how do you turn those organic molecules into life?  

So these questions have not really been answered.  The connections have not conclusively been made.  Nobody knows how living material came from nonliving material.  Now that question, many people are trying to answer that question, we may someday find the answer to that question, but we don't yet have that answer.  And much like the very beginning of the universe, many secular scientists would say, well, the answer is apparent, because we've seen that we see the pieces and it, I don't know for sure, because it hasn't been shown in the lab, but it's probably this organic material kind of formed this and this, and it probably is that.  That's probably how it happened. 

Now, again, the temptation for us is to say, no, see, it required a special act of creation, where God said, this, “I'm going to make this right here. That's the step that I do.”  And then just let the can keep rolling down the hill, and let it keep happening.  But again, we can't just invoke God to explain the things we don't understand.  And that's what I'm trying to get at with this whole thing. 

There's an idea called the God of the Gaps philosophy, or approach, or argument.  And this is the danger that we as Christians can fall into when we encounter new discoveries in science.  So as I've shared with you throughout this course, I've shared with you examples of things that we don't yet know, things like how did the universe begin?  Or, you know, I've shared with you a number of examples; where did life begin?  The point is, we can't just say, or, you know, what is dark matter? What is dark energy? We can't just say, well, that, Oh, God, God answered that.  God answered that.  Because if we limit God only to the things we do not understand, we're missing the point.  Just because we have a scientific description doesn't mean that God is not a part of that. 

And there's a beautiful story a professor once told me.  He was feeding his son some soup.  And it was onion, onion soup, and it had little chunks of onions in it.  And he was pouring it through a, what do you call it - like a colander, a drain a little bit, to drain out the bits of onion because his son didn’t like to eat onion.  He just wanted the soup.  So this physics professor, you know, the son was maybe four years old, wanted to kind of probe you know, what does he understand?  Does he understand that these chunks can't fit through the holes because they're too big?  So he's thinking, I want to see if my son understands the mechanics of this, that these big chunks are too big.  So he says to his son, you know, why, hey, why don't the onion pieces fall through the strainer?  And the son says, because I don't like them.  Right?!

So while the adult was thinking, well, there's a natural physical explanation of why the onions don't fit through, the child was thinking, well, there's a higher level explanation here.  And that higher level is that I don't want to eat those onions.  And that's why they don't go through the strainer. 

And both are true.  And that's the way we have to be thinking about scientific descriptions, and spiritual religious understanding of the natural world.  The scientific description provides a mechanical description, in a sense a reductionist approach where we say it's these basic building blocks that cause this to happen.  But the spiritual description is at a higher level.  It gets more at the ‘why’ of what's happening and the ‘who’ of what's happening.  And that's the part that fits in with our story that God is telling us in His scriptures.

If we have this God of the Gaps, the danger here is that as science continues to progress and answer these questions, perhaps someday it answers this question of how nonliving material becomes living material.  Well, then, what are we as Christians going to do? We're going to be like, well, I guess God didn't do that. No, of course He did. God's doing all of this.  So we really must not relegate God only to the things we do not understand.  

In many ways, it's the things we're most familiar with, that God is so heavily involved with, I mean, think about the grass growing, I used this example a number of times, eating food, and that turning into the flesh of my body.  That is a miracle that happens.  And we have scientific descriptions, but it doesn't make it any less of a miracle.  It's amazing that God is using nonliving material and turning it into my living body. Astounding.  Okay.

I want to spend just a minute on this question of higher dimensions, because it's such a profound idea, particularly as we try to mesh our understanding of the physical world with the spiritual world that's described in the Bible.  And one of the coolest things, all right, this is amazing, but Einstein's theory of general relativity has a profound explanation of gravity.  But, later scientists took those same equations and they said, You know what?  That equation was initially written for three dimensions of space, and one dimension of time.  But if you add one more dimension of space, so that you would have four dimensions of space, and one of time, then those equations describe more than just gravity.  They can also predict and explain electromagnetism, which is how electricity works, how magnets work, and how light works. The equations of electromagnetism just fall out of general relativity, if you say there's another dimension to space.

So now, why is that powerful?  That's powerful, because it's kind of like a prediction.  It's like these equations, which were designed and written for gravity predict, even though we already know it's there, electricity and magnetism, if there's another spatial dimension.  And there are other pieces of evidence, mathematical, theoretical physics, where we say, wow, these equations make even more sense if we add one more dimension, if we add five more dimensions.  And so there is kind of a mounting view among scientists that there are more dimensions in our universe than what we experience and interact with. 

Now, I want to tease that out.  I know I mentioned this, but I want to tease out just a little bit.  One way that these are talked about sometimes are branes.  Like these other dimensions are, can be thought of as branes.  But now here's the aspect I want you to think about.  If you've got pieces of paper, so again, this is a two dimensional analogy, our whole universe is this first piece of paper, and this is the fourth picture in the gallery.  This is our whole universe.  If you add just one dimension, only one dimension, that means by moving over just a little bit, moving over a few centimeters, you can have, in that dimension, you can have a whole other universe that's completely independent.  So by adding one dimension to our reality, there can be many different universes.  That's insane. That's insane. 

And now what some theoretical astronomers, theoretical physicists suggest is that these branes may touch and interact with one another at certain times.  So that one universe may actually bump up against another one.  But I would suggest, to me, this just kind of like fits with a spiritual view of the world.  I mean, viewing that there is a spiritual reality that we cannot see or perceive yet is everywhere around us, and that can interact with us in some way, it just fits and makes sense.  And what's so profound to me is that there is evidence.  Even if it's just the first hints of evidence that this may be the type of universe we live in.  That is amazing.  It reminds me of those first discoveries of infrared radiation.  Wait, it's like, there's light we can't see with our eyes?  So there's a whole other world to explore.  And that's what this makes me think of.  So it's absolutely profound.  Okay.

So here we are.  You've stuck with me.  Thank you so much.  We've made it to the last slide of the last video of our course.  So let's take a deep breath.  Big picture.  I mean, we've been talking big picture this whole class, but really big picture. What's it all about?  

The very first thing we said in this whole course is that even though this is a course in astronomy, the purpose of this course, is about knowing God.  About knowing God.  And we said, there's more than one way to know God.  We can know God through His Holy Word, and we can know God through the world that He created.  And I wanted to emphasize knowing God's through the world He created, because I'm assuming that you're watching this video, you are familiar with the Scriptures, you know, God, the God of the Bible.  And particularly you know Jesus Christ.  And you know, how much there is to learn about God through Jesus Christ.  Really, so much to learn.  

And as you reach the end of this astronomy class, you see what we've been able to learn about God through His created world.  He's faithful.  He's creative.  He's powerful. He's enormous beyond imagination.  But really, what we don't necessarily see through the created world are those core attributes that we see in Jesus Christ.  That God is a loving God; that God sacrifices himself for us.  And so I didn't want to say this in the very first video, but I'll say it in the last one, and that is, as cool as the universe is and as much as it helps us learn about God, it really can't compare with what we learned about here. And in particular, I just want to share a couple verses to kind of conclude our class, because I really do think the purpose of this class and of our life is knowing God.  It's being in relationship with God.

And so I love, this is from 2 Corinthians 4:6.  It says, this is the verse before, you know, “we have this treasure in jars of clay.”  That's probably a familiar passage.  This is the verse right before that.  It says, “For God who said, Let light shine out of darkness. For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness, made his light shine in our hearts, to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Christ.”

Wow.  There's so much there.  The same God who said, “Boom, make this universe happen, and keep it happening, and do this.”  That God is making his light shine in us, His glory through the face of Jesus Christ.  And what is that telling us?  It's telling us something about how we know God.  To know God means to know Jesus. 

And this is from Jesus' own words.  John 14, this is when Jesus said, Hey, I'm about to leave. And I'm going somewhere, you guys can't go with me.   And they're like, Well, where are you going?  And tell us how to get there.  And we'll go with you.  And Jesus says, Thomas said, “Where are you going?  Lord, we don't know where you're going.  So how can we go there?”  Jesus says, “I'm the Way the Truth and the Life.  No one comes to the Father, except through me.”  And this is the part I wanted to highlight. “If you really knew me, you would know my father as well.  From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”

That's an amazing statement.  This God, this mysterious God who made the universe, who interacted with these people throughout history in such mysterious ways, He was standing right there.  And we have his words.  And He was saying, “if you know me, then you know him.”  And I tell you, from what I know of Jesus, He’s a pretty awesome God.

All right. Well, thank you so much for sticking with me throughout this course.  It's been a true pleasure to share this time with you.  And I wish you the very best in your future studies.  We'll see you later.