Ep 214 | Christian Scientist DESTROYS Darwin, Provides PROOF of God | The Glenn Beck Podcast
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 17 minutes
Words per Minute
156.7034
Summary
Glenn Burna is an astrophysicist who has spent his whole life looking at the sky. Not so surprising, that s where he found God. And since then, he s been on a mission to rebuild the bridge between faith and reason, faith and science.
Transcript
00:00:20.260
Staring into space has a way of reminding all of us just how little we know about the universe and how small we each are.
00:00:37.960
This planet is so amazing, just floating in space.
00:00:47.280
Now, imagine you're an astrophysicist, and starry nights are your business.
00:00:53.380
Don't you think all of that time looking at the cosmos may just make you ask a question or two about how we all ended up on this big rock?
00:01:04.800
Today, my guest is an astrophysicist who has spent his whole life looking at the sky.
00:01:13.640
Not so surprising, that's where he found God, looking right back down on him.
00:01:19.980
Since then, he's been on a mission to rebuild the bridge between faith and reason, faith and science.
00:01:25.840
Because we're together today because of a potentially explosive topic.
00:01:35.400
I just want to find out how the earth was created.
00:01:44.580
Before we get to Hugh, let me tell you about Burna.
00:01:48.920
The founders of this country understood that freedom is never more than a moment away from vanishing from an unarmed population.
00:02:00.340
You know, we hired police to protect us because we were so busy.
00:02:05.360
We have our rights to protect and defend ourselves and we loan that to the police.
00:02:18.840
But not every emergency situation calls for lethal force.
00:02:40.340
It fires powerful deterrents like tear gas and kinetic rounds.
00:02:45.180
Government agencies, police all over the country are starting to use Burna as their go-to less-than-lethal option.
00:02:52.640
Sometimes you have to choose between life and death, but that is in every situation.
00:02:58.120
Once that bullet leaves your gun, you can't take it back.
00:03:00.820
But with Burna, your safety comes at a much lower price.
00:03:32.420
So, I'm fascinated by you because you found God through science.
00:03:45.080
When I was seven years of age, our school teacher took us to the Vancouver Public Library.
00:03:51.440
I brought home five books on physics and astronomy that day.
00:03:56.900
I would go to the library and get another five books.
00:04:00.600
And every year, I would study a different sub-discipline of astronomy.
00:04:07.640
Another one was stellar interiors, galaxy formation.
00:04:10.080
At age 16, I devoted that year to studying cosmology, the science of the origin and history of the universe.
00:04:20.920
Is it an oscillating universe or a reincarnating universe, hesitating universe, or Big Bang?
00:04:26.920
But I could see that the observations were heavily favoring the Big Bang.
00:04:32.540
Cosmology, that is Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan as well, weren't they cosmologists?
00:04:41.880
What's the difference between theoretical and what you were doing?
00:04:45.080
What I was doing was actually doing the observations of the distant universe that the theoreticians had used to develop their models.
00:04:55.700
So, when you started studying this, what happened?
00:05:00.700
Well, when I realized that the evidence was heavily favoring the Big Bang, I said, that means the universe has a beginning.
00:05:07.200
If the universe has a beginning, there must be a cosmic beginner.
00:05:21.380
I tell you, my father, when I asked my dad, I was young.
00:05:27.860
And he said, okay, the first thing we have to do is get rid of the word God, because it means too many things, has too many traps around it.
00:05:37.800
I can talk about God, and you'll have a different view than me.
00:05:42.380
He said, I think we should call him first cause.
00:05:48.880
I spoke at a government lab, and the director says, look, this is the U.S. government.
00:05:55.580
And I said, I don't see that in the Constitution.
00:05:59.880
How about if I talk about the causal agent beyond space and time?
00:06:03.720
That created the universe and designed it for human beings.
00:06:07.660
Well, but it's true, because his first question was, do you believe in the Big Bang?
00:06:15.820
And he said, does that disagree with God or help prove God?
00:06:27.500
And he said, what was it before, and what lit the match?
00:06:35.900
And so I started looking in the great philosophers, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
00:06:42.620
I looked at René Descartes, discovered that they didn't have the correct concepts of the universe or space and time.
00:06:49.020
And I went to a high school that was filled with refugees from all over the world.
00:06:53.360
And so they were saying, hey, you need to read these books, Hindu Vedas, the Koran, the Buddhist commentaries.
00:07:01.800
And when I read the Vedas, I said, oh, this is where the oscillating universe model comes from.
00:07:06.340
You know, Hinduism is based on reincarnation, that the universe reincarnates.
00:07:13.900
They said, you get a new birth every 4.32 billion years.
00:07:19.200
I also realized the universe had way too high of an entropy measure to allow for any kind of restart.
00:07:26.760
And the Buddhists said essentially the same thing.
00:07:29.680
When I looked at the Koran, it says there's three accounts of creation, but they contradict one another.
00:07:35.720
One of them claiming that the planets are more distant than the stars.
00:07:39.980
You don't need a telescope to realize that's incorrect.
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Now, I didn't meet Christians or get to know them until I showed up at Caltech to do postdoctoral research.
00:07:50.440
But I did see two Christians from 30 feet away when I was 11 years old.
00:07:55.040
These were two businessmen that came into our public school and made available Gideon Bibles.
00:08:00.580
This is the Gideon Bible that I started reading at age 17.
00:08:04.260
So, the cover's gone because our dog chewed it off.
00:08:10.660
But I started reading the Gideon Bible at age 17.
00:08:15.020
And that was also the same time that physicists in South Africa and Britain were developing the first of the space-time theorems.
00:08:22.260
Which basically proved that space and time have a beginning.
00:08:27.960
And what I noticed about the Bible is that it stood alone in making the claim that space and time are created entities.
00:08:36.560
What I saw in the Eastern religions, space and time are eternal.
00:08:40.520
And God are God's creed within space and time that always exists.
00:08:44.960
So, seeing that the Bible said something different that was being affirmed by the space-time theorems.
00:08:50.700
I said, maybe this book really is from the one who created the universe.
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Can you take me through Genesis and the creation and show me the science?
00:09:00.740
Well, I was taught the scientific method in grade 1, grade 2, grade 3.
00:09:08.300
And so, when I picked up this book, the Bible, I looked at the first page, Genesis 1.
00:09:14.120
I said, this perfectly follows the scientific method.
00:09:17.460
It took me nine years to discover why it so perfectly followed the scientific method.
00:09:23.140
It comes from the creation texts in the Bible and Reformation theology.
00:09:32.840
The Spirit of God is hovering over the surface of the waters of planet Earth.
00:09:43.580
And the planet Earth is unfit for life and empty of life.
00:09:47.580
Well, steps 1 and 2 of the scientific method are, do not interpret until you establish the frame of reference.
00:09:55.200
The point of view is the surface of Earth's waters.
00:09:58.360
And don't interpret until you also establish the starting conditions.
00:10:05.500
I keep running into scientists who say, Genesis teaches scientific nonsense.
00:10:09.780
And I say, well, Galileo said, the biggest mistake you can make in Bible interpretation is to get the wrong point of view.
00:10:18.300
And when they say it's scientific nonsense, they think God is above the Earth, looking down on the Earth and telling us what He did.
00:10:25.580
Instead, it's God on the surface of the Earth, looking up at the clouds and telling us what He did.
00:10:32.120
Makes a huge difference in how you interpret the six days of creation.
00:10:37.100
And so, but, you know, nobody was helping me on this.
00:10:51.520
And I said, well, that's when the atmosphere goes from opaque to translucent.
00:10:57.420
I knew enough about astronomy to realize Earth had to begin with an atmosphere 200 times thicker than it has today.
00:11:05.540
An atmosphere that thick will not let any visible light through.
00:11:09.560
The sun and stars existed, but there was no light on the surface of the waters of planet Earth.
00:11:15.200
Day one is when the atmosphere was thinned out sufficiently that light could come through.
00:11:20.200
And it says the Spirit of God was brooding over the surface of the waters.
00:11:27.340
So I saw life being originated at the beginning of creation day one.
00:11:32.020
And then you go into creation day two, water above and water below.
00:11:39.920
But when I got to the book of Job, it devotes one and a half chapters to creation day two.
00:11:45.720
And basically describes it as God's cycling water in the atmosphere above to the streams and lakes and oceans below and then back again.
00:11:56.700
And actually describes six distinct forms of precipitation in Job 37 and 38.
00:12:03.600
It mentions, for example, that there will be dew and mist and rain and then snow and frost and hail.
00:12:12.740
And again, I had enough science under my belt to realize that's the only way you can have billions of people living on the surface of the Earth.
00:12:21.500
Because the Earth's water cycle is designed to ensure no matter where you are, there's both frozen forms of precipitation and liquid forms.
00:12:29.760
So we can have rivers and streams that flow all year round and we have abundant food that can be grown everywhere.
00:12:43.360
And this is when land masses show up for the first time.
00:12:46.240
When God transforms the Earth from a water world to one with continents and oceans.
00:12:51.680
And at 19, I got to take a course on plate tectonics.
00:12:57.980
As far as I know, it was the first course in the world that was taught on plate tectonics at a university.
00:13:04.440
That's because two of the three physicists who launched the discipline were at the University of British Columbia.
00:13:11.140
Somehow I managed to get into that class as an undergraduate.
00:13:14.160
And that's when they said, oh, the continents haven't always been here.
00:13:18.600
It's plate tectonics that builds up the continents.
00:13:21.480
And they thought it was a linear relationship from zero to where it is today.
00:13:25.840
Today we know that it takes deep oxygen cycle events to really accelerate the growth of the continental land masses.
00:13:35.480
And so in 2018, they basically showed, yeah, for about the first billion years, you got nothing but water.
00:13:45.260
But at the first great oxygenation event, two and a half billion years ago, about 90% of the continental land mass forms.
00:13:53.900
And so basically it shows that the more we learn about the past history of the Earth, the tighter and tighter fit we get with what the Bible taught about these land masses thousands of years ago.
00:14:05.680
And then it talks about vegetation on the land masses.
00:14:09.720
And I've debated the executive director of the Skeptic Society four times in university campuses.
00:14:17.040
He always jumped on Genesis, no matter what we were talking about, because he saw that as the Achilles heel of the Christian faith.
00:14:25.020
So he would always say, well, the fossil record shows us we got animals before we got vegetation on the continents.
00:14:33.420
And I said, well, obviously animals have skeletons and shells.
00:14:42.100
But what happened in 2009 and 2011, two papers were published in Nature saying we now have the isotope evidence.
00:14:52.240
And in 2011, the fossil evidence that vegetation was abundant on the continental land masses 600 million years before the first animals show up.
00:15:01.700
So, again, it shows, hey, as we learn more, it basically gives you a tighter and tighter fit.
00:15:08.320
What would they have eaten if there was no vegetation, if there was no?
00:15:13.040
Well, I think Michael Shermer was saying, yeah, there would have been vegetation in the oceans, but the biblical text says vegetation on the land masses.
00:15:22.440
Well, we didn't during my first debate, but we do now.
00:15:27.300
And then creation day four is when creatures on the surface of the earth for the first time can see the sun, moon, and stars.
00:15:36.320
And we now know the second great oxygenation event turned earth's atmosphere from a dense haze to transparent.
00:15:44.500
It's oxygen that determines how transparent the atmosphere is.
00:15:48.160
And so, experiment was done where they took the atmosphere of the earth, started with less than 1% oxygen, and pushed it up.
00:15:57.060
While the second great oxygenation event, the oxygen level suddenly goes from 2% to 8% for the first time in earth's history.
00:16:05.940
That's enough to make the atmosphere transparent.
00:16:09.280
That's exactly the same time that the first animals appear.
00:16:13.740
Animals can't function if they don't know where the sun, moon, and stars are in the sky.
00:16:20.440
But what we see in the fossil record, the very moment oxygen hit that minimum level for animals, animals suddenly appear.
00:16:27.800
You go from nothing but microbial light to animals as big as 2 meters across.
00:16:33.180
And then in creation day five, you also have God creating the sea mammals and the birds.
00:16:41.720
The word create in Hebrew, baraz, for something brand new at God's hand.
00:16:48.240
And what was brand new was animals that are not just physical, but soulish.
00:16:52.600
And that they have mind, will, and emotions, a capacity to form relationships with one another.
00:16:58.600
Their offspring, they sacrifice for the offspring.
00:17:01.640
They also are endowed with a capacity to form relationships with a higher species, namely us human beings, and to serve and please us.
00:17:15.240
It talks about the three categories of land mammals that are essential for launching human civilization.
00:17:22.460
And Job 38 and 39 goes into that in great detail.
00:17:25.780
And so short-legged land mammals, the rodents that we need for the clothing that humans were critically dependent upon when they first appeared.
00:17:35.880
Because we humans, unlike the Neanderthals, are not adapted for a cold climate.
00:17:41.340
We're fine in a warm climate, but not a cold climate.
00:17:44.180
The rodents enabled us to go into cold climate zones.
00:17:46.960
Then two different kinds of long-legged land mammals, those that are easy to tame, the herbivores we use for agriculture, those that are difficult to tame, the carnivores that we use for household companions.
00:18:02.920
And only the third time does he use the word create.
00:18:06.340
Because what's brand new about us, we're not just physical and soulish, we're spiritual.
00:18:10.760
As these birds and mammals were designed to relate to a higher species, we are designed to relate to a higher being, the one that created everything.
00:18:20.860
First of all, that's the best explanation of Genesis I've ever heard.
00:18:30.860
Well, the Bible is written for all generations.
00:18:34.420
So it avoids vocabulary that only modern generations would understand.
00:18:38.800
So it doesn't mention dinosaurs, because they weren't discovered until the 1850s.
00:18:43.940
It doesn't mention protons or neutrinos either.
00:18:46.680
But yeah, it doesn't mean that they didn't exist.
00:18:49.160
They would have fit in in the middle of creation day five, and where you see them implied is Psalm 104, the longest of the creation psalms.
00:18:58.060
And Psalm 104's theme is that God is packing our planet with as much life as possible and as diverse as possible.
00:19:05.520
And so when our planet has conditions suitable for dinosaurs, he creates the dinosaurs.
00:19:12.320
They're not suitable now because we don't have shallow seas to provide the water buoyancy that these huge creatures need.
00:19:19.420
But when the continental land masses were filled with vast shallow seas, there he got the water buoyancy to make possible animals as big as T-Rex and Brontosaurus.
00:19:31.280
I mean, I laughed at the Jurassic Park movies because it shows this T-Rex on land chasing a Jeep at 45 miles an hour.
00:19:49.980
Well, the biggest land animal you can have without water support is an elephant.
00:19:55.620
Anything bigger than an elephant is going to injure itself because of the law of gravity.
00:20:02.980
The really tall basketball players, when they trip and fall, they do themselves a lot more injury than someone who's only five feet tall.
00:20:13.800
I've never seen that even portrayed with dinosaurs, that they're always around water.
00:20:20.700
Well, the ones that are weighting 80 tons, they need water buoyancy to support the huge body mass.
00:20:26.840
T-Rex was probably, I mean, it was long-legged.
00:20:30.060
T-Rex was probably swimming around in shallow seas and preying on, you know, huge herbivores.
00:20:36.420
With those giant jaws, it wasn't eating small creatures like lawyers.
00:20:43.860
So the other thing, and I just, I want to say this because there's a lot of people that have different views of creation and everything else.
00:20:52.440
I personally don't think how God created the universe is essential to my salvation.
00:20:59.080
So, and I don't know, you don't know, but we're.
00:21:07.820
Because I have some friends who claim, no, the earth is only, you know, five or 10,000 years old.
00:21:15.220
And you're like, dude, that doesn't, I mean, no, why couldn't God's creation happen, I don't want to say in an evolution.
00:21:25.700
Well, you say it's a progressive creationism, right?
00:21:29.560
Well, I claim that God performs creation miracles.
00:21:34.160
I mean, he uses the word bara and asa in the Hebrew.
00:21:36.720
That means that God is supernaturally intervening.
00:21:39.200
And sometimes it uses the word haya, which means that it could be through natural process.
00:21:47.120
So, but it is over a significant passage of time.
00:21:50.500
In fact, just reading the Bible on my own at age 17, I immediately recognize these days have to be long time periods.
00:21:59.180
For the simple reason that you see the word day being used with three different definitions.
00:22:06.780
Creation day one, it uses the word day for the daylight hours.
00:22:10.280
Creation day four, it's contrasting seasons, days, and years.
00:22:15.980
But Genesis 2, 4 uses the same word day for the entirety of creation history.
00:22:21.580
The other thing I noted is that the first six days end with an evening morning phrase.
00:22:26.860
Evening was, morning was, day X, which told me each day has a definite start time and a definite end time.
00:22:35.060
You get to day seven, there's no evening morning phrase, implying we're still in God's seventh day.
00:22:42.080
And both Psalm 95 and Hebrews 4 explicitly declare we're still in God's seventh day.
00:22:48.900
And for me, at age 17, it answered the fossil record enigma.
00:22:53.800
For some reason, my parents thought I was being obsessive about physics and astronomy.
00:23:07.240
I mean, I was saving up pop bottles and cashing in to build a telescope.
00:23:13.460
I began doing research on T-Tari stars, wound up entering the BC science fair and winning the fair.
00:23:25.180
But my family was worried that I was being too narrowly focused.
00:23:29.960
When I was 11, my parents bought us a big, thick book on evolutionary biology.
00:23:38.960
But I remember telling my parents that numbers don't work.
00:23:42.600
You have all these new families and orders and classes and phyla showing up before humanity.
00:23:59.160
But the first time I picked up the Bible, read Genesis 1, said this answers the fossil record enigma.
00:24:08.420
On the seventh day, he ceases from his work of creation to focus on his work of redemption.
00:24:14.780
And I also realized that's the principle of the Sabbath.
00:24:19.380
On the seventh day, we focus on the most important issues of life.
00:24:23.400
And as I read through the creation text, I was surprised to discover
00:24:27.180
God begins his works of redemption before he creates anything at all,
00:24:32.740
which implies everything that God creates is for the purpose of redemption.
00:24:37.260
And it made sense of the seventh day when God stops creating and redeems.
00:24:42.820
It also explained to me why so many astronomers believe in God
00:24:50.360
Their research is on different days of creation.
00:24:56.440
because it takes late time to reach our telescopes.
00:25:05.120
we see no evidence for the miraculous handiwork of God.
00:25:19.260
that he is worried about salvation or redemption
00:25:30.840
was put into effect before the beginning of time.
00:25:38.400
was granted to us before the beginning of time.
00:25:57.580
So I says, this book gets all the cosmology right.
00:26:26.400
that implies that the universe gets colder and colder
00:26:36.180
and they perfectly fit what the Bible predicted
00:26:53.140
but I've said this to people who believe in evolution.
00:27:16.040
we regularly attend origin of life research conferences.
00:27:23.620
because they keep running into these intractable roadblocks.
00:27:36.620
and get a short, you know, sequence of amino acids.
00:27:41.380
Maybe we're on the way to making a real protein
00:27:43.600
or they're able to come up with some way to make RNA.
00:27:48.140
The problem is it takes a highly skilled team of biochemists
00:27:56.880
we're going to ensure that there is no contaminant chemicals
00:28:29.560
how do you get all the amino acids left-handed?
00:28:32.040
How do you get all the ribosugars right-handed?
00:28:36.060
that there is no naturalistic process that does that.
00:28:42.720
they admit that their naturalistic explanations don't work.
00:28:47.420
Well, that would imply that there's someone, again,
00:28:50.680
more intelligent than us that did it in the first place.
00:29:06.300
And that's going to cause species to differentiate
00:29:09.580
and produce more species if you wait long enough.
00:29:15.540
If you wait longer, the new genera might produce a new family.
00:29:47.600
First of all, talk about the Cambrian explosion
01:14:41.100
But if we go to the backside of the moon, there's
01:14:49.300
And that wavelength is crucial to understand the
01:14:53.100
physics of the firstborn stars in the universe.
01:15:04.440
And I wrote an article basically saying we need to
01:15:07.240
protect the backside of the moon because there's
01:15:09.740
people who want to send up hundreds of satellites
01:15:28.400
I can't thank you enough for coming in and talking
01:15:41.660
I have never understood why science, reason, and
01:15:50.880
Well, the war isn't as intense as people think.
01:16:00.920
I mean, there was a philosopher back in 1916 who
01:16:04.860
said, with the advance of science, they're going to
01:16:07.980
see an exponential decline in scientists who believe in
01:16:17.100
About 45% of research scientists believe in God in
01:16:28.220
What you see in math, there's an elegance and a
01:16:31.700
beauty and a symmetry in math that tells us the one
01:16:35.740
who set up all that math, likewise, must really enjoy
01:16:42.160
So, and a lot of astronomers are believers in God.
01:16:45.780
Now, where you do see a very low percentage is in the
01:16:50.080
So sociologists, you know, cultural anthropologists.
01:16:53.700
Um, but it's because the data doesn't constrain them like
01:16:57.900
it does in chemistry and physics and astronomy.
01:17:01.320
I mean, if you've got enormous error bars, you've got lots
01:17:04.660
of room to speculate, but if the error bars are tiny, uh, it
01:17:15.420
Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the
01:17:25.120
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