Ankerberg Show

Guest (Male): Welcome to our program. For centuries, people have wrestled with one of life's greatest questions: does God really exist? And if he does, can we know him through truth, science, and history? Today we hear many voices in our culture insisting that truth is relative, science has made God unnecessary, and history cannot be trusted.

University professors, media personalities, and social influencers often tell us that faith belongs in the realm of personal opinion, not objective reality. But what if the evidence points in another direction? What if the universe itself reveals signs of design? What if the laws of science actually point beyond themselves to a creator? And what if the historical evidence for Jesus Christ is far stronger than most people realize?

My guest today is Dr. Frank Turek, co-author of the best-selling book, "I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist," who has spent decades answering some of the toughest questions asked on university campuses around the world. Together, we're going to examine whether truth really exists, whether science and reason point to God, and whether the evidence for Jesus and his resurrection can stand up to historical scrutiny. If God exists and Christianity is true, that changes everything about who we are, why we are here, and where we are going. I invite you to join us for this edition of the John Ankerberg Show.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Welcome to our program. Let me ask you a question: do you think that God exists? I'm talking to a fellow that wrote a book, "I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist." He was one time a doubter and didn't believe that God existed, but he looked at evidence that we're going to talk about today that showed him that God did exist and Christianity is true. If you'd like to listen to the evidence that caused a fellow who was a skeptic to write it all up in a book, we're going to give you that evidence.

We're going to start off with something like this: did Albert Einstein in his theory of general relativity, which most people don't know what that means, it was a mathematical equation that showed how the universe began and why the universe is expanding. Scientists took that general relativity theory, but they really didn't have much more proof than just the mathematics until Hubble came along with the space telescope in California and he invited Einstein to come to him. Can you tell me the rest of that story?

Dr. Frank Turek: Sure, John. Early in the 1900s, Einstein put his general relativity equations down. The problem with it for him was it showed an absolute beginning to space, time, and matter. In other words, an absolute beginning to the universe, and he didn't like it. He wanted the universe to be static and eternal. He fudged his own numbers. He put a fudge factor in there, a cosmological constant, to keep the universe static and eternal, to keep the universe in a state of what was known as the steady state.

He was then invited by Edwin Hubble back in about 1931 to go to the Mount Wilson Observatory past Pasadena, California, because Hubble was witnessing through his telescope what Einstein's original theory of general relativity said, which was that the universe had a beginning. What Hubble was witnessing were the galaxies moving away from us. This is known as the redshift in the light. When you look at a galaxy, if it's redshifted, it means the galaxy is moving away. If it's blueshifted, it's coming toward you. He said just about all the galaxies I saw were moving away from me.

So he invited Einstein to Mount Wilson, and after Einstein looked at the redshift for himself, the galaxies moving away, he said the cosmological constant, the fudge factor he put into his equations to keep the universe static and eternal, was the greatest blunder of his professional career. He said all he was interested in now was to find the mind of God; the rest are details. He knew the universe had a beginning. Einstein was not a Christian, but he knew at that point the universe had a beginning.

Ironically, Einstein was right about a cosmological constant, just not the one he put into his equations back then. But he showed beyond any reasonable doubt that the universe had a beginning. So in the book "I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist," we have an acronym that helps people remember the scientific evidence that the universe had a beginning. It's SURGE: S, U, R, G, E.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Before we get to SURGE, let's talk about the philosophers who took that evidence and they made a simple argument. It actually appeared in the Middle Ages: everything that had a beginning had a cause. The universe had a beginning, therefore the universe had a cause.

So if you had a cause, what was big enough to create the entire universe, a fine-tuned universe? The Christians immediately said that's God. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. People had to admit there was a similarity, but they wanted more. So they started testing things and you've got an acronym here that talks about what they did and it's called SURGE. What does the S stand for?

Dr. Frank Turek: S stands for the second law of thermodynamics, which says things are running down. The universe is running out of energy. As time goes on, the amount of usable energy in our universe is running down. The total amount of energy is constant, but the amount of usable energy is running down. You can think of the universe as sort of having a gas tank.

If you get in your car and you have a finite amount of gas in your gas tank, if you're driving your car right now, you couldn't have been driving your car from all eternity, otherwise you would have run out of gas a long time ago. Think of the universe as having a gas tank. If the universe was eternal, we should have no energy right now. We should be at complete heat death. But the lights are still on, we still have energy, which implies the universe had to have a beginning.

If it had a beginning, it must have had a beginner. The second law of thermodynamics is considered one of the most established laws in all of science. If your theory somehow contradicts the second law of thermodynamics, as Arthur Eddington said, who was an astronomer a hundred years ago, I give you no hope. It's like a guy winding up a clock. He winds up the clock, and if the clock rolls along, when it gets down to the spot of zero, it stops. You have to wind it up. Who wound it up?

U is the universe is expanding. That's what Edwin Hubble discovered. Why was that of concern to the scientists? Take a movie. If we put the movie up here on the screen and it's showing you the expanding universe, and it starts from nothing, and all of a sudden boom, it starts and the universe is expanding in all different directions. The stars, the galaxies, planets, all that is out there.

But if you roll the film back, they come back to a point and there's nothing. There's no space, time, or matter. Space, time, and matter go to zero. People think that space is out there infinitely. It's not. Space is actually going along with time and matter. They're all connected together. As the universe is expanding right now, it's not expanding into space; it's creating space as it goes.

A good analogy we have in the book, if you want to picture this, picture a balloon and put a whole bunch of dots on it. As you blow the balloon up, the dots, which are representing galaxies, are going to get further and further away from one another. That's sort of like what you're seeing when you look through a telescope and you see the galaxies moving away from us.

That's what Hubble saw, and he deduced that if you went back in time, all those galaxies, instead of expanding, would collapse back to a point. Not the size of a basketball, not the size of a pinhead, but literally space, time, and matter go to zero. Once there was nothing, and then suddenly there was something, and it created space as it went. This is what they call the Big Bang. People will say, "We're Christians, we don't believe in the Big Bang." I say I believe in the Big Bang, I just know who banged it. There's a cause out there that created all this.

Dr. John Ankerberg: R in our word SURGE is radiation from the Big Bang. Tell me about Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson who found some strange radiation on their antenna at the Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey.

Dr. Frank Turek: I grew up right near there and in 1965, they had these antennas and they couldn't figure out why they were getting this strange static no matter where they turned their antenna. It was coming from the universe somewhere. Long story short, what they discovered was the radiation afterglow of the Big Bang. In other words, the remnant heat that's still out there.

It's just a couple of degrees above absolute zero, but they found it. This is called the smoking gun of the Big Bang. They discovered it by accident. They weren't looking for it, but then they won Nobel Prizes for basically discovering the remnant heat from the initial explosion. Even people who were believers in the steady state at that point, the idea that the universe was static and eternal, they gave up that theory.

In fact, Robert Jastrow, an agnostic astronomer, wrote a book called "God and the Astronomers" and he has a quote where he says something like that the last doubting Thomas has been convinced that the universe had a beginning because of this theory, the R in SURGE, the radiation afterglow.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Let's keep rolling along. The Great Galaxy Seeds. This is the G in SURGE. If the Big Bang actually occurred, scientists believe that we should see slight variations or ripples in the temperature of the cosmic background radiation that Penzias and Wilson had discovered, and they put up a little satellite called COBE. I remember that baby going around the world and measuring what the radiation was close up. What did they find?

Dr. Frank Turek: They found, according to their theory, that there should be very fine temperature variations in the radiation afterglow, the remnant heat from the initial explosion. They couldn't measure it from the ground, so they put a satellite up called COBE, Cosmic Background Explorer. In 1989, by 1992, they had their results. They measured this background radiation, the variations in the background radiation.

Their theory was these ripples in the background radiation would allow the galaxies to form in the early universe, and they had to be very precise. The leader of the expedition, a man by the name of George Smoot from UC Berkeley, said when he saw this background radiation, if you're religious, it's like looking at God. We found the machining marks of the Creator.

At that point, Stephen Hawking, the famous physicist, said this has been the discovery of the century, if not the discovery of all time. I think he was exaggerating, but the point was that the precision with which the ripples were discovered show that there had to be some sort of design to this. Not that Hawking would believe in God, but he detected design, and so did George Smoot.

Dr. John Ankerberg: E is Einstein's theory of general relativity, which continued to confirm it.

Dr. Frank Turek: Let me just say one thing about that, because the only people that really understand Einstein's theory of general relativity was Einstein and Arthur Eddington, who was a contemporary. But a simple way of thinking about it is that the theory of general relativity found that space, time, and matter are co-relative, that they came into existence together, that you can't have one without the other. They're all connected. When you think about this, how could you have matter without space? You can't. There's no place to put the matter if there's no space. What Einstein is saying is that space, time, and matter came into existence together.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Robert Jastrow, who's an agnostic himself, said, "Now we see how the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same. It laid to rest any lingering suggestion that the universe is an eternal steady state." He went on to say no explanation other than the Big Bang has been found for the fireball radiation at the present time. The Big Bang theory has no competitors.

Dr. Frank Turek: He said that 40 years ago and it's still true today. Let me just show you how he ended his book "God and the Astronomers," John, because he goes through all this evidence, the SURGE evidence we just mentioned, which is in the book "I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist." I love this quote. Keep in mind, he's an agnostic on whether God exists or not, but he said this after he goes through all the evidence:

"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he's about to conquer the highest peak. As he pulls himself over the final rock, he's greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries." No doubt reading Genesis 1:1. The best explanation for the beginning of the universe is, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."

Now this technically is called the cosmological argument. But I want to add one other piece of evidence that's not scientific to this, John, that I think is irrefutable, and it's this: time had to have a beginning. If time didn't have a beginning, then the day that we're in now never would have gotten here. If there's an infinite number of days before today, then there always has to be another day before we get to this day.

But this day has arrived, which means there can only be a finite number of days before today, which means that time had a beginning. If time had a beginning, what could have caused time? Only something timeless. This answers the question of who made God, because people will say, "Well, who made God?" Nobody made God because if you're outside of time, do you have a beginning? No.

If you don't have a beginning, you don't have a cause. God is the uncaused first cause. God is what Aristotle might call the unmoved mover. God is the uncreated creator of all things. It's important to point out that from this argument, the cosmological argument, we don't get all the way to Jesus. We don't know if this is the Christian God or not. We have to see if Jesus rose from the dead to see if this cause is the God of the Bible.

But we can say this: from just this one argument that the universe had a beginning, we know that the cause has to be spaceless because it created space, has to be timeless because it created time, has to be immaterial because it created matter, has to be powerful to create the universe out of nothing, has to be personal in order to make a choice to create the universe, and has to be intelligent to have a mind to create a universe. It has to be supernatural.

Let me give you a quote from Einstein's buddy, his contemporary Arthur Eddington, who didn't like any of this. He said, "The beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agree to look on it as frankly supernatural." And Robert Jastrow later said, "What I or what anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact."

Because if all of nature had a beginning, John, it can't be a natural cause. It can't be a natural cause if all of nature had a beginning. If nature had a beginning, space, matter, and time had a beginning, it can only be something outside of nature that brought it into existence. What we mean by supernatural is something outside the natural. So it has to be a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal, intelligent cause.

The only question is, is that Allah, or is that Jesus, or someone else? For that, we've got to look at more evidence, like did Jesus rise from the dead? I just think that people need to realize that the scientific evidence for the beginning of the universe is there. Even the scientists themselves would say, "We've painted ourselves into a corner with our own scientific instruments," and they're kind of stuck with it.

The universe did have a beginning, and you have to say why. Does that point to a creator? It certainly looks that way. It's fine-tuned. There are so many things that are fine-tuned in our universe, from ourselves. You've got trillions of cells in your own body that are absolutely designed perfectly and intricately. How did that happen? We're going into that next week when we talk about divine design.

But for those of you that have been listening to this and you say, "You know what, that kind of makes sense to me that God did create the universe and there was nothing before he did that." He made the decision and he brought it into existence, and he also brought us into existence at a certain point in time. He knows all about us. The Bible says that God actually knows what you think, your motives that you have, everything you've ever done in your life.

He's looking at you right now, and he's looking at everybody on earth. He knows everybody that has lived, is living now, and will live. He knows everything. And it says we're going to stand before him. The reason that he did all this is because he loves us so much that he wants to bring us to heaven when we die, and he wants to spend all eternity with us, making us happy, having a great time, fellowshiping together.

He wants people to know him. We've invited Christ into our lives; we know him personally. How can they know the Creator, the one that did all that? He made it possible for them to have a gift, namely he's holding out a gift: "I'll forgive you of all your sins." He did that because Christ, his son, came into the world, went to the cross, died on that cross, and while he was on that cross, God picked up all the sins of the world, past, present, and future, and put them on Christ.

Christ paid for all of our sins. God says, "Look, I'm holding out a present to you." If a guy holds out a gift to you, you still have to take it. How can they take it? First of all, you know that there has to be a cause out there. You know this intuitively. If there's an effect and the universe is an effect, there has to be a cause of that effect. You know intuitively that there's a creator.

You also know intuitively that this creator is moral because you have this moral law written on your heart. You know that there are certain things that are right and other things that are wrong. You haven't completely lived up to that moral law, and neither have I, neither has John, neither has anyone except one person. The one person that did live up to that moral law came from God himself.

In fact, God added humanity to his deity. He came to earth, he lived a perfect life in our place, and he allowed us, the creatures that rebelled against him, to torture and kill him so he could take our punishment upon himself. You see, God is infinitely just and he can't allow injustice to go unpunished. And you and I have both been unjust. So what's he going to do?

The only thing he can do if he's going to remain infinitely just is to take the punishment that we deserve and put it on an innocent substitute. The only way he can find an innocent substitute is for him to come to earth and be the innocent substitute. That's what Jesus did, and now Jesus is offering you forgiveness and righteousness if you repent of your sin. So let's pray. If you would like to accept what Christ has done to take your punishment upon himself, pray this:

Father, I'm a sinner. I've fallen. I don't live up even to my own standards, much less yours. I pray that you will take my sins from me, that you will place them on Jesus, and then you will give me a new heart so I can better serve you and bring others into the kingdom. I ask this because I know you exist, I know Jesus died and rose from the dead, and I know he is the sacrifice for my sin. In Christ's name, amen.

Thank you. Folks, if you did that, the Bible says whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. You just called; God says he saved you. We're going to talk about this more. "I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist" contains this information we've been talking about and a lot more. Stay tuned because I've got a personal word for you in just a moment. Stay tuned. John will be right back.

Guest (Male): Now, thank you for listening to the John Ankerberg Show. We're a listener-supported ministry, and your gifts help us continue to share the gospel with millions of people worldwide. To learn more about our resources or to support our mission, visit jashow.org or please call us at 1-800-805-3030.

If you're in Canada, please visit jashow.ca or call us at 1-866-746-5803. Or you can subscribe to us on YouTube. Your support makes a difference in spreading God's word. Thank you.