Faith and Science: Unveiling God's Design in Nature

The first on occurred in the field of cosmology, and it’s often associated with the work of Edwin Hubble, a Belgium priest named Father Lemaitre, and other scientists working in the nineteen teens and twenties. Hubble is famous now, even today, because there’s a telescope named after him. [00:26:55]

Hubble resolved that issue, as he also resolved these points of light. Because as he looked through this great doomed telescope at the Palomar observatory at Mount Wilson in southern California, he was able to determine that little points of light that had been viewed through ordinary telescopes before and just looked like little points actually revealed galaxies, whole galaxies with hundreds and millions of stars. [00:28:15]

And Hubble realized that an expanding universe implied a finite universe, a universe that actually has a beginning, a beginning in time. Now this was a really significant discovery because at the very same time on the other side of the country, there was this physicist with bad hair named Albert Einstein. [00:33:12]

And Einstein had come to the same conclusion that the universe must have a beginning, but then he said, “No, no, no, no, no, that cannot be right.” And Einstein came to it on the basis of his theory of general relativity, which was a theory of gravitation. [00:33:40]

And the equations of his theories suggested that… that the universe must be expanding outward and decelerating in order for all of the math to work out. But when he realized that if it was expanding outward, it must have had a beginning, he said, “No, that can’t be right.” [00:34:37]

Then Hubble comes along and discovers that the universe actually is expanding. There must have been a beginning, and so he invites Einstein out to California to view the evidence that he’d been viewing through this grand telescope. [00:36:12]

And he comes out and meets the media and says, “I now see the necessity of a beginning.” That’s the German accent. That was a little better, didn’t you think, “of (auff) a beginning.” I have an actor friend who coaches me on these things. It’s really pathetic. [00:36:49]

In essence, the heavens talk back, and the testimony of the sky was that there was a beginning to the universe. Now, this has just set in motion a whole series of really interesting debates and discussions in the field of astronomy and cosmology. And alternative theories were proposed. [00:37:03]

One astronomer, a famous British astronomer named Arthur Eddington, said this. He said, “Philosophically, the notion of the beginning of the present order is repugnant to me. I should like to find a genuine loophole. I simply do not believe the present order of things started off with a bang. The expanding universe is preposterous. It leaves me cold.” [00:37:19]

What’s the philosophy that makes the discovery of a finite universe repugnant? It’s this materialistic view we’ve been talking about, or naturalism, the idea that it’s matter and energy from eternity past. If Hubble’s results are correct, they are suggesting that matter and energy are not from eternity past. There was a beginning to the expansion. [00:38:17]

And the biggest difficult of them all was the problem of the origin of information. All attempts to account for it from purely physics and chemistry, undirected natural forces, had failed. And Thaxton had begun to entertain the idea in the epilogue to this book that perhaps the information in the DNA at the foundation of life was actually an indicator of what he called an intelligent cause. [00:55:14]

After all, information is the kind of thing that minds produce. It was an intuitive connection for him, but one he thought he needed to propose. Now I began to get to know him better. He mentored me. And a year later I was off to grad school, and I had a burning question in the back of my mind, and that was, could you make an argument for this idea of an intelligent cause or the design hypothesis or what later became known as the idea of intelligent design? [00:55:59]