Mark Clark [00:00:00]:
Hey, everyone. Mark Clark here. Welcome to the Mark Clark podcast. We are doing a series for skeptics and for christians in affirming their faith in the big questions of life that we have and the big challenges that we have. In today's episode, we're diving deep into the question of, does God exist? Kind of the arguments for the existence of God. And as a former skeptic, I know how crucial evidence is when it comes to actual belief. We don't want to just believe things for the sake of it. So we're going to explore the compelling reasons that point to a creator, the intricacies of the universe, to moral laws that we feel, and a whole bunch of stuff.
Mark Clark [00:00:33]:
So whether you're a believer or a skeptic, this episode is for you and your friends. So let's challenge some doubts and explore all of this evidence together in this episode. Super excited about this one. Hope you enjoy it. Got a lot of work to do as we go today at the question of God's existence. And so we're going to jump into this because it's actually pretty foundational that if the rest of this series is going to make any sense that Christianity is the most legitimate idea in the marketplace of ideas that we have on offer to us, then it's going to kind of foundational that we believe that God exists. Because if God doesn't exist, then the whole conversation is kind of useless to talk about Christianity. Hey, that's a really good idea.
Mark Clark [00:01:11]:
You should accept that. Verses atheism, verse agnosticism, verse Hinduism, and so on. It's kind of pointless if God doesn't exist. So we got to come at this and really wrestle with this question. And really, at the end of the day, the question about God's existence comes down to an issue of evidence, a question about evidence. Is there evidence to actually believe that there is a goddess in the universe? And I've always been someone, if you're anything like me, I've always been someone who doesn't believe anything unless there's evidence to support it. That's the way I've always been. Just died in the world.
Mark Clark [00:01:47]:
Doesn't matter. We can't believe ideas simply because our parents handed them down to us or our grandparents or because an idea feels good. You know, it's a crutch during a difficult time in my life. And so what I'll do is I'll believe in God because I'm going through a difficult thing. We can't really construct a worldview based on those ideas. Our worldviews have to actually connect with the evidence of history, philosophy, science in order to believe them. And so I've always been someone to go at evidence pretty hard and say what actually is evidence for things. We got this dog a few weeks ago, and recently my wife said, hey, we should, you know, we gotta get out of the house once in a while without the dog.
Mark Clark [00:02:24]:
And so we said, okay, kind of maximum 2 hours without the dog. Cause I'm terrified that this little boxer is gonna hurt herself or destroy our house. And so what are we gonna do? And she's like, don't worry about it. When we leave, the dog kind of hangs out for a little bit thing in the kitchen or whatever, and then she'll go to sleep, and I'm like, I don't believe this. What is our dog actually doing? I need evidence for this kind of stuff. I don't just believe what people think. And so I set up a video camera, all right? It's called a little. It's called a nest.
Mark Clark [00:02:56]:
And the nest, you've set it up in a room, and you watch, and then if somebody passes by the video camera, a thing pops up on your phone, a notification, and it says, someone's in your house, and you can sit on your phone, be anywhere, and watch what's going. Going on in your house. All right? So I set this thing up, and I said, okay, I bought this. We got to do this. And so a couple weeks ago, I was already at church, and Aaron set it up in the kitchen and put our dog, unbeknownst to me, in the kitchen, all right, and then blocked the dog into the kitchen so the dog, you know, wouldn't go around and hurt itself or whatever. And so there's this thing in the kitchen, and she's got it in the kitchen, and she's got her little play toys and her little crate. And I was. A couple weeks ago, I went up to the Langley north site, and I'm sitting in the movie theater at the back, and I'm watching it, just kind of taking notes.
Mark Clark [00:03:49]:
How do we do things? Whatever. And this notification pops up on my phone. You know, there's a movement in your house. And so I swipe it, and I'm watching my dog, all right, in my kitchen, locked into it, and I'm like, what's the dog doing? Bark, bark, bark, bark. And then she starts to paw up at our oven, and there's all these, like, you know, the oven buttons, and her paws are going right back beside them. And I'm like, oh, my gosh she's gonna burn my house down. My house is, like, made of wood. It's, like, made of tinder.
Mark Clark [00:04:19]:
It's like, it's gonna go up in flames, no problem. So I'm like, oh, my gosh. What's going on here? And so then I see there's these. It's like, my wife set the thing up so my dog would hurt itself. All right? It's like, I see in the camera there's scissors hanging off the edge of the table, all right? There's, like, a cloth on top of the open flame oven so that if she hits one of those buttons and turns it with her paw, boom. So I freak out. I leave the theater watching this dog get in my car and just book it home. I drive 45 minutes.
Mark Clark [00:04:58]:
Like, I'm sitting there on the highway watching the dog pawing at the oven, going, oh, my gosh. My house is going to be burnt down by the time I get home. I'm like, no, no. And then I remembered that you can press a button and you can talk. And so my dog, literally, we have the footage of this. It's pawing at the oven about trying to burn my house down, trying to grab scissors so it can stab itself in the face. And I'm watching it, and all of a sudden, I go, Kenzie, stop it. And she goes.
Mark Clark [00:05:31]:
And then she, like, gets down, and she just looks at the thing, and she stands. And then all of a sudden, now she's zoned in on that thing, and it's. I'm like, kenzie, don't worry, baby. I'm coming home. I'm coming home. She doesn't know what all those words mean. Now I get home, and I pull up, and finally I open that back up. Cause I'm right in front of the house.
Mark Clark [00:05:51]:
Now I'm about to barge in so the house doesn't get burned down, and she's sleeping, and I'm like, oh, evidence. My wife was right. All she would do was clamor around a bit, and then she'd go to sleep. But I don't believe stuff unless I have evidence. You come at me and tell me that God exists. I need to know. I need to investigate it. I need to see this thing myself.
Mark Clark [00:06:14]:
I need to get down in the weeds and the details. And so what evidence do you actually have? Or do you just believe in something for the sake of believing in it? And I remember the first time, and here's the basic premise of this message, is that there is a ton of evidence as philosophy and science go forward, that God is actually becoming more rational, not less rational to believe in the existence of God as science and philosophy go forward than that if God didn't exist, and I remember 1718 years ago, the first time I ever got exposed to philosophy and science around the debate of God's existence, I watched a guy, ardent atheist, Oxford professor, a guy named Anthony flew, and he argued. He was in a debate against another christian guy, William Lane Craig, and made a mockery of Christianity. He said, theism's dumb. The belief in God is dumb. Don't you understand that? For all these scientific reasons, for all these philosophical reasons, for all these psychological reasons, you shouldn't believe in God. Anthony flew went hard on him. And I remember going, man, this guy is brilliant.
Mark Clark [00:07:09]:
I got to study this guy. I got to figure out what he believes. A bunch of years later, just before he passed away a few years ago, he actually wrote a book saying, there is a God. That was actually the name of the book, there is a God. And he retired his atheism. And he actually said this atheism is no longer a logical, tenable or defensible position to hold. Right? And it's because the deeper he went into the data and the philosophy and the science of it, he began to realize that it pointed toward the existence of God, not away from the existence of God. And he said, listen, the problem is, here's the position you and I are all in.
Mark Clark [00:07:44]:
We have to follow where the evidence leads, not where we want it to lead. So we might have written lots of books saying God doesn't exist, and lectured around the world and debated people for our whole lives, building an entire industry around the idea that God exists, doesn't exist like Anthony flew did. But at some point he said, I got to believe where the evidence points, not what I want to be true. Some of you say, I don't want there to be a God in the universe because that's an authority structure or whatever. Listen, you got to follow where the evidence actually leads you. And for some things in life, really, when it comes to the question of God, we're doing a detective thing. It's forensics. It's trying to get into something that's already happened that we got to sift through evidence to figure out what's logical.
Mark Clark [00:08:20]:
Just like a murder scene, right? We weren't there. You can't redo it. So you got to figure out where does the evidence point? And sometimes you have a murder where there's a little bit of evidence and you always wonder to yourself, I don't know if this is true, if that's true. And there's other times you have, like, OJ level of evidence where it's like, I don't think anyone's really debating who killed those people, all right? The evidence is pointing in one direction. I don't think anyone's really out looking for the people who murder those people. It's like, okay, we kind of know, you know, between me and you, OJ did it, all right? So it's not like there's a lack of evidence, all right? It's just like the evidence is insurmountable. And so sometimes that's the way it is, and we deduce these things about life. And when evidence points in a certain direction, then the challenge for you and me is we have to adjust our life in light of it.
Mark Clark [00:09:07]:
What is the evidence actually saying? So now let's get into a bit of this. And our hearts and minds have to be ready to at least give it a shot. This idea that God may exist. Of course, I was raised in an atheist home, so this was nothing. The conclusion of my family, no prayer, no Bible, no church, no God. And so I had to come to a lot of this on my own through investigation. And so let me give you, there's a ton of things that philosophers and scientists are finding today that point to the existence of God. Alvin Plantage, said to be the greatest living philosopher, he's a Christian.
Mark Clark [00:09:38]:
He talks about the fact that there's probably two dozen or so proper evidences for the existence of God. Pointers, clues that God actually exists. I'm just gonna boil them down to two or three for you, okay? And both of them come from the idea of morality and the universe. All right? What Immanuel Kant, the 18th century philosopher, talked about, the moral law within, and the starry hosts above are the two biggest explanations for why God would exist. So let's start with the issue of morality. The evidence from morality that you and I believe in, the difference between right and wrong. You and I know that there's right or wrong. The philosopher, CS Lewis, talked about the idea.
Mark Clark [00:10:19]:
He was an Oxford professor skeptic most of his life. He starts out one of his books by saying this. Everyone has heard people quarreling. They say things like this. How do you like it if anyone did the same to you? That's my seat. I was there first. Leave him alone. He isn't doing you any harm.
Mark Clark [00:10:38]:
Give me a bit of your orange. I gave you a bit of mine. Come on, you promised. People say things like that every day. Educated people as well as uneducated and children as well as grownups. Now, what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of law or rule or fair play or decent behavior or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed.
Mark Clark [00:11:15]:
See, the question starts to get stirred up the minute you and me socially agree that there is right and wrong, that rape is wrong, that dropping napalm on babies is wrong, that beating innocent children and women is wrong. There is something then that asks the question, where did you get that idea? And it doesn't mean that people have to necessarily know where they got this idea. It's stitched into history, it's stitched into cultures. It's straight across what they're called objective moral values. My kids have them. Yesterday we were driving down to the aquarium. My buddy and I said, let's take five of our kids. One of my daughters stayed home, go down to the aquarium.
Mark Clark [00:11:55]:
So there's all these kids under the age of eight years old and two dads going down to the aquarium with these kids. And so somehow, I don't know why, my buddy started handing out loonies, all right? By the time I got in the car, every one of the kids had a loonie. By the time we were halfway down there, one kid was crying out of their minds because another. I said, what's going on? And they said, well, that one was given a loony, then it was taken away. So then he gave them two, because my buddy, I don't know, one of them stole this kid's loony. And so my buddy gave the other one two loonies. So now there's one kid with two loonies. Another one's lost, and they're freaking out because the one kid's got two loonies, and they have one.
Mark Clark [00:12:30]:
And they started saying, my goodness, it's not fair. What do you mean? What's not fair? I shouted, by, what's not fair? He's got two loonies. We all have one loonie. We should all have the same amount of loonies, right? Sounds like socialist government. We should all have the same amount of money. I'm like, where did you get this idea? Where does my six year old get off instructing me about moralism. One loonie equals equality. That's what matters.
Mark Clark [00:12:59]:
My other daughter. And so we got down there, she wanted to buy a stuffy. And so she's like, please give me this stuffy, daddy, please. And I'm like, I'm a bad father. Okay, all right. So I bought her this stuffy. But before I did, I went to my other daughter and I said, listen, I don't have enough money to get you both the stuffies, but I'm going to get her the stuffy. Is it okay if I get her the stuffy? You don't get the stuffy.
Mark Clark [00:13:19]:
And then another day you'll get a treat from daddy. She's like, yeah, that's fine. Dad didn't really think. I said, well, that's good. So I went and got her the stuffy. We're on our way out of 20 minutes later, and the daughter who didn't get the stuff, he goes, so when are we getting my thing? Can we go today? I'm like, what? Talking about? She's like, it's not fair. And all of a sudden she where are they getting this? Who's telling them that everyone should have the same loonies? Who's telling them that if one person gets a stuffy, it's only fair? Is the universe constructed this for them? Who has actually told them what fair is, that this is right and this is wrong, that rape is wrong, that robbery is wrong. There's something called objective moral values.
Mark Clark [00:14:02]:
And philosophers say, if objective moral values exist, and I believe they do, because we know it's not that we dislike. It's not that robbery's wrong because we dislike it. It's actually we dislike it because it's wrong. There's something in us that doesn't appreciate murder and genocide thinks it's. And people who think murder and genocide are okay, we don't look at them and simply say they're wrong. What do we say? We say they're wicked, that they actually have a moral. They're sociopaths. They have a moral construct that's actually not connecting with what we believe is right and wrong.
Mark Clark [00:14:41]:
Now, this is what makes us different than the animals. And this is why evolutionary theory does not have a really good explanation for morality, because that's what the skeptic would say we don't need. See, here's what the philosophers say. If there's such thing as objective moral values, there has to be a moral law giver, a moral value giver. Who gave you those moral laws as romans two talks about that. God stitched them into your conscience. He put right in wrong so that you can actually be accountable in the end. Even people who've never got a bible, who'd never told this is adultery is wrong.
Mark Clark [00:15:15]:
God stitched it into your heart, stitched it into your mind. But here's where evolutionary thinking falls apart. Because what they say is, no, no, no. Our cognitive faculties, our morality, only came from decisions we had to make when we were animals. But the problem with that is that, listen, when a zebra kills a giraffe, that's not called murder. It's called a zebra killing a giraffe. When a shark forcibly copulates with another shark, that's not called rape. It's a shark forcibly copulating with another shark.
Mark Clark [00:15:47]:
But at some point, it tips over, where did our species all of a sudden go, okay, hold on. Now it's rape, and there's a moral attribute given to it. Now it's murder, where you can't just imagine you and I were actual animals. See, this is where the worldview falls apart. You could just sleep with whomever and say, sorry, I'm just starting to. I'm trying to spread my seed, get my seed in the next generation, because that's how I function. I'm like a shark, baby. I can do whatever I want.
Mark Clark [00:16:16]:
And if you just took. If I was at the aquarium and looked at someone like a lion looks at a zebra and just grabbed them by the neck with my teeth, threw them down and ate them, we wouldn't go. I was hungry. It's instinct. You would say I'd done something. What? Decisively. What? Wrong. You can't, though.
Mark Clark [00:16:42]:
If all of our morality only developed through evolutionary development, you would never come to the conclusion that things that you hate, things that grate against you, genocide, racism. We see people right now down in the states, and they're protesting, and they're saying not. That racism was simply. Is simply not good for our advantage and our development as a species. They're saying racism is what? Wrong. That it's, like, decisively wrong. But that's not a thing. That's not a category.
Mark Clark [00:17:17]:
And because we would never get that category if all of our morality was simply a conclusion and a product of nature, we actually. Because it wouldn't. One tribe. You should actually. Genocide is not a bad thing according to nature, because you need your tribe to survive. So eliminating the weaker tribe is actually not a bad thing. The Holocaust, purely by a natural worldview, wouldn't be something to bemoan. That's nature working itself out.
Mark Clark [00:17:46]:
If you have a weaker people group and you can eliminate them to save your tribe and get more food, then that's nature. There's no moral attribute to these actions. But you and I don't agree with that. We begin to go, no, no, no. I actually think there was a debate years ago from Richard Dawkins and a guy named justin Brierly. And they were debating in Britain, and brierly pointed out Dawkins evolutionary thinking around morality. And he said this to him, when you make a value judgment, don't you immediately step yourself outside of this evolutionary process and say that the reason that this is good is because it's good. Dawkins said, but my value judgment itself could come from my evolutionary past.
Mark Clark [00:18:31]:
Brierly goes, yes, so therefore it's just as random in any sense as any product of evolution. Dawkins said, well, yes, you could say that, but nothing about it makes it more probable that there's anything supernatural, that there's a God. And then Brierly says, okay, but ultimately your belief that rape is wrong is as arbitrary as the fact that we've evolved five fingers rather than six. And Dawkins said this hauntingly. You could say that, yes, the fact that. But no one lives like that, that the fact that you have five fingers and not six is the same as not raping people. No one lives like that. But you have to take a worldview to its intended sociological implications in your life.
Mark Clark [00:19:15]:
You have to say, if I believe this, what are the implications? It was years ago, and I tell this story in my book, where years ago, a woman, a young girl by the name of Melissa Drexler, was at a dance, a high school dance in New Jersey. She was pregnant, but nobody knew it. She went into the bathroom, had the child, strangled it to death, and threw it in a garbage bag and went back out and danced with her class. New York Times ran a story. Everyone freaked out, said it was immoral. The evolutionary thinker Steven Pinker wrote an article a couple days after. He said, this shouldn't baffle us and we shouldn't morally look down on Melissa Drexler. And here's why.
Mark Clark [00:19:52]:
Because for hundreds of thousands of years, our great grandmothers and great great grandmothers have had to make the difficult decision of infanticide, the killing of a child, because you have to kill the weakest in the litter so that the older ones can actually survive. This has been stitched into our brain wiring from hundreds of thousands of years of making this decision. So you and I can never judge what Melissa Drexler did. Now, there's a reason that you and I are repulsed by that, but you would never be repulsed by that if your morality was only a product of nature. You actually have to have something above nature to tell you to be repulsed. And so Tim Keller says this. How could that trait have come down? By a process of natural selection? Such people would have been less likely to survive and pass on their genes, people who would think against these things. There is some supernatural standard of normalcy apart from nature.
Mark Clark [00:20:48]:
That's the key word by which we can judge right and wrong. There's something aside from nature. There's something else that came in and said, no, no, no. You don't get to decide these values just by nature. Humankind trends, transcends just the product of being a result of nature. Over and over and over again, we transcend that. And so Richard Dawkins was actually asked in a debate he was doing, somebody said, so if you're just an animal and you make moral choices just by, why don't you just sleep around? Why are you married? Why do you have a relationship that you've committed to and you refuse to cheat on your wife? Because naturally speaking, most people would say, huh, cheating on your spouse, that seems like fun. That's something we could kind of delve into.
Mark Clark [00:21:32]:
And it's a way to kind of spread, you know, my genes around and so on. That'd be, you know, not a bad experience. And Dawkins said, well, the reason I don't sleep around and the reason I just stay, you know, married to my wife is because I'm making an un darwinian decision. See, but here's the irony of that. If you know anything about evolutionary theory, there's no such thing as an undarwinian decision. You can't actually make. You can't step outside the matrix and look at the matrix and judge it. You would never know you're in the.
Mark Clark [00:22:01]:
You can't step outside. Well, that's un darwinian. Even that comment has to then be, it doesn't work. It doesn't make any sense. And so someone said, well, where Richard Duck is, do you get the idea? Where humankind has this very distinct thing from the animals called consciousness, self awareness, where horses don't tend to wonder where their place in the universe is, they don't tend to bemoan. I did a funeral this week, and I looked out at the people and I said, you just lost a 58 year old friend of yours and you feel like this is wrong. You feel like it's the universe is disjointed. But what are you comparing that to? If you have an appetite in you, one philosopher has said that nothing in this world can actually meet that appetite.
Mark Clark [00:22:41]:
Then it means you were made for another world. Humankind is the only species that has consciousness, that says to itself, I pine and yearn for something else. And someone asked Dawkins, why is that? Why do humankind actually have consciousness and self awareness? And his answer was, I don't know, but one day, because of computer science, we will figure it out. So basically what he's saying is, we have a faith position. I have a faith position of something I can't prove. But I've decided this about consciousness and the fact that we appreciate beauty, whereas the Bible comes along. Listen, remember, you and I are supposed to be the most rational that we can be in this debate, in this discussion about the marketplace of ideas. I want to be the most rational.
Mark Clark [00:23:19]:
Follow the evidence. The Bible has a way better explanation than I don't know, but maybe one day computers can figure it out. It's that God stitched this in you. You're made in the image of God. Or read Genesis two, where he takes what is made, he takes the dust, the clay of something that was already there, and he breathes spirit into it. He breathes morality, he breathes consciousness. Romans two, which says it's stitched into us. These are rational explanations of why you and I actually have morals, of why we know it's something right and there's something wrong about the universe, and we experience this every day.
Mark Clark [00:23:54]:
I've told this story before when I was new to BC, and I didn't understand the nexus lane, and I learned about morality really quickly, by the way, that all these atheistic, secular people who don't, you know, who believe we're all animals, you know, I pulled the lineup, was 3 hours long, and I said, oh, there's a lane over there that's empty. And I just drove down that, and I got to the end of it, and I realized, oh, this, I don't think this is for me. I don't have this nexus pass. So I just kind of two cars away from the front, I just kind of put on a flicker, went through the cones. I'm like, yeah, well, the guys in front of me were the three big, bulky dudes who'd clearly been hunting or something. Like, they had muscles, right? And, I mean, I have muscles two. What? Why are you laughing anyways? So I'm like, okay, I'm a skinny guy. You know, the only play I have is to chop people in the throat, run away.
Mark Clark [00:24:54]:
That's the only real thing I got. And so I said, my only play. And they're getting ticked. Like, they're behind me, and I can see them in my rear view, like, what the. And they're all like, meathead, beefed up dudes. I'm like, oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. I said, the only play here is crazy, man.
Mark Clark [00:25:09]:
That's. That's what skinny people do. So I put the thing in park, and I got out of the car, and I walked up to them before they can walk up to me. And I got up to their car, and I started going crazy. Like, I was like, what are you talking about? I see you guys talking to me. What's the deal? We got Nexus. What's going on? I look like crazy eyes killer. I'm like, all right.
Mark Clark [00:25:27]:
And these dudes started just winding up the windows. They're like, holy crap. What's going on? This guy's gonna kill us. All right? I'm like, yeah, you better write. And I got it. Now you have all these people honking at me. Where did they get the idea that I can't cut in line? Who told them that? All of a sudden, 500 cars agree with the same premise, that it's wrong, decisively wrong? Where did they get this? We've got to answer that question. And evolutionary theory is not a good answer.
Mark Clark [00:25:56]:
I'm just saying that. So come up with a different one. Theism comes along and offers a really good one. Now, that's the evidence of morality. Let's move to the other two things. The second one is the evidence of the universe. All right, the evidence of the universe. Now, here's the evidence of the universe as science has delved into ever since Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, there was always this idea called causality.
Mark Clark [00:26:20]:
And causality was always a philosophy that if something begins to exist, it has to have a cause. Right? Everybody agrees with that to this very day. If something begins to exist, it has to have a cause. It's cause and effect. All right? Even the 18th century scottish skeptic David Hume said, I would never say such an absurd proposition that something began to exist without a cause. Most atheistic person said, of course, if something begins to exist, have another cause. So then everybody, well, what's the thing? What's the thing that never began to exist? What's the. The infinite, uncaused, unmoved movement? What's the thing that never began? It was just always, well, people would say, well, it's God.
Mark Clark [00:26:57]:
It's God. And for thousands of years, people say, no, no, no. You don't need God. It's the universe. The universe is the uncaused infinite thing. That's just been around forever. It never began to exist. And that was a fine philosophical position until 1929, when Edwin Hubble discovered his hundred inch telescope.
Mark Clark [00:27:15]:
In California's laboratory. In that the universe was actually expanding. And that if you did the work and you put it back, all matter, all time, all energy, all galaxies were flung apart at some point in the past. That's why they were moving like that. And so he did this mathematical equation, and he brought it back. And he said 15 billion years ago, there was an explosion that actually happened. And so we know that the universe actually had a beginning. One writer puts it this way.
Mark Clark [00:27:45]:
The number of stars involved in this galactic dispersal. Suggested an astoundingly vast universe. Some galaxies were millions of light years away. Hubble noticed that planets and entire galaxies. Were hurtling away from one another at fantastic speeds. Moreover, space itself seemed to be getting bigger. The universe. This is crazy.
Mark Clark [00:28:07]:
If you want your mind blowing, listen to this. The universe was not expanding into background space. Incredibly, space itself was expanding along with the universe. It's not as if a galaxies are moving. They're actually in place. What's happening is the universe is expanding into what? I don't know. It's like it's a balloon. And the galaxies and the universe.
Mark Clark [00:28:39]:
All the galaxies and the planets and the stars are buttons on a balloon. And what's happening is the buttons aren't moving. The balloon keeps expanding. The universe is moving, expanding. And so he says this scientists realized right away. That the galaxies were not flying apart. Because of some mysterious force thrusting them away from each other. Rather, they were moving apart.
Mark Clark [00:29:00]:
Because they were once flung apart by a primeval explosion. And so here's the thing that happened. We know when the universe began to exist. So here's the equation. Whatever begins to exist has to have a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause. It has to.
Mark Clark [00:29:20]:
There's no use saying, well, the universe is eternal. That's the non conti no, we know it had a birthday. So you have to have something which is not matter. Because matter doesn't create mind. Mind has to pre exist matter which is beautiful. Because Genesis one and John four teach that God is spirit. God existed before anything existed, and he actually created the universe. The other thing that scientists tell us, and we know that the universe is not eternal.
Mark Clark [00:29:48]:
It's called the second law of thermodynamics, which is basically that there's a limited amount of energy in the universe, and the energy is running down. And so if energy is running down, it's like a flashlight and it's running out of batteries. And so if the universe was eternal, it would have already run out of energy. So there's actually a limited amount of energy in the universe. In one day, it's all going to run out, and the sun is going to explode and kill everybody. Praise God, be encouraged. And so people look and they say, in fact, as I mentioned last week, it was the scientific community that actually pushed back against the bed. Big, Big Bang.
Mark Clark [00:30:28]:
It wasn't a religious community. And the reason they did is because, as one writer said, associate professor of physics at Auburn University, he says this, to give into the jude, to accept the Big Bang was to give in to the Judeo christian idea of the beginning of the world. And it also seemed to have to call for an act of supernatural creation. It took time, observational evidence, and careful verification of predictions made by the Big Bang model to convince the scientific community to accept the idea of a cosmic genesis, a successful model that imposed itself on a reluctant scientific community to the point where even Einstein said, hey, I'm going to do a steady state theory and believe the universe is not expanding, because my math equations earlier, before Edwin Hubble came out, told me that the universe is not expanding. And he hung onto that until he went to Edwin Hubble's place, his observational deck, in California, and he sat with him, worked with him, and Einstein, at the end of his life, said his biggest regret was actually sticking to the steady state theory when Hubble made his predictions and actually came out with his conclusions. And he ultimately came over to his side and said, you're right. The universe is actually expanding. And I held on to steady state because of my early math equations, but you blew them all up.
Mark Clark [00:31:41]:
But I had an agenda. So the reality is, it's theists that looked at the big bang said, of course. You mean all time, energy, matter came into existence in a moment. Genesis one. One is true. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. You mean that's the thing. Force, matter, energy, time.
Mark Clark [00:32:10]:
People go, oh, why didn't God? You know, and this is what's fascinating. Out in the schoolyard or in university, people go, yeah, but then who created goddess? And people go, oh, shoot. I was so strong until they pointed that out. Listen, you don't have to ask the question of who created God, because there's no evidence that he began to exist. The only thing you have to do is figure out the cause of the thing that began to exist. The universe began to exist. We know that there's no evidence that God began to exist. And if we find evidence that God began to exist, then we ask the question, who created goddess? But until that point, all we have to ask is, who created the universe? That's like.
Mark Clark [00:32:48]:
Let's just agree we're trying to be rational. We're trying to follow the evidence. We're not being dumb. We're not like some podunk people. I believe in God because, I don't know, it helps me when I have nightmares. That's not this. Now, how did this actually happen? We have to come up with a reasons that this would have happened. The most popular hypothesis of what happened at the big bang is what's called the nothing hypothesis.
Mark Clark [00:33:18]:
It's very deep. It says, what created the big bang? Nothing. Which we all got to agree is the most irrational of the two options. A little bit ago, my alarm went off in my house, and I ran downstairs thinking there was a robber. And so I woke Aaron up and said, you go, go. Go down and. Or I'll do the crazy eyes killer thing. Maybe I'll do.
Mark Clark [00:33:44]:
So I went down. Who's in my house anyway? She was. I said, what set the alarm off? And she said, nothing. Now, we all know that ain't true, like saying nothing, like maybe the thing propped open or maybe some alarm system, you know, something happened. Something caused the alarm to go off in the house. Nothing is an answer that tired people say to go back to sleep. And so to say, yeah, we know the universe began to exist. But what caused it? Nothing.
Mark Clark [00:34:20]:
Come on, man, don't be tired. Don't just want to go back to sleep. Let's engage this a little bit. What is actually the most rational explanation for what we're actually seeing? Building your life on a theory that says nobody times nothing equals everything is not an equation to build your life on. So Francis Collins, who's an award winning scientist, says this. The big bang cries out for divine explanation. It forces the conclusion that nature had a defined beginning. I cannot see how nature could have created itself.
Mark Clark [00:34:52]:
Only a supernatural force that is outside of space and time could have done that. Let me give you really quickly the third evidence for the existence of God, which is the evidence of design, which is basically the idea, the design of the universe. I talked a little bit about this last week, so I won't belabor it, but the idea that when we see something that is of nature, we don't really ask the question of whether there could have been mine behind it. But when we discover something like the pyramid, if we just saw rocks hanging out, we'd say volcanoes were there. But when we see the pyramids, there's a new Discovery Channel thing every week about how the pyramids were actually constructed and whether there's aliens that constructed them and other. Why? Because the pyramids, the way that they're built and the way that they're designed to connect to the systems of the stars and so on, people say there was a mind behind it. So the minute you get into biology and you find a single celled organism that has 30 encyclopedias worth of coded intelligent information, you have to say to yourself, was there a mind behind it? And so the design of the universe was such that it actually seems set up. Actually, Carl Sagan put it this way.
Mark Clark [00:35:57]:
He said the equivalent of 20 million books is inside the heads of every one of us. The neurochemistry of the brain is astonishingly busy, the circuitry of a machine more wonderful than any devised by humans. And the reality is, it's so complex that it's not just going to come over time. By chance and randomness, you give something more time. What happens, actually is it becomes more random, not less random. Information doesn't gather into intelligent systems. Given.