Faith and Reason: Understanding the Declaration's Divine Intuition

At Arizona State University, I was asked to speak to a large philosophy class. The professor asked me what my topic would be, so I said, how about if I speak on the basic assumptions of the Declaration of Independence? He said that would be splendid. I said, then I could ask the students to ask me questions. He said, I'd be delighted.

So I began with the well-known words, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. My students, I said, you notice that the Founding Fathers in their wisdom attributed our human rights to God. I pointed a hand right away. Are you trying to tell us, sir, that a man has to be religious to be patriotic? Wouldn't an atheist fight for these rights? I said, of course he would, but that's not the point. The point isn't, did we fight for them? The point is, are we entitled to them?

There was once an Irishman cutting across the estate belonging to an English duke. Whom should he encounter but the duke himself? And the duke said quite pleasantly, you're trespassing, my man. This is my property. The Irishman said rather boldly, where did you get it? He said, from my father. He said, where did he get it? He said, from my grandfather. He said, and where did he get it? The duke was losing his patience. He said, from my ancestors, you impertinent bander. The Irishman said, where did they get it? He said, they jolly well fought for it. He said, the Irishman, I'll fight you for it.

You see, if we say we have these rights and they're based on force, because our forefathers fought the War of Independence, for example, that's an invitation to some other power to fight us. No, no, the Founding Fathers didn't say that. They said, we hold these truths to be self-evident. All men are created equal, that they're endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. In other words, they trace our rights to God. So the Founding Fathers begin with God. What's more, they say, this is a self-evident truth.

What do we mean by a self-evident truth? Well, may I illustrate? There was once a Chinese philosopher who dreamed he was a butterfly. In the morning when he awakened, the dream was so vivid, he didn't know whether he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a man. Now, you may smile at that, but in any philosophy class, you can have a good debate on the question of existence. Is it a self-evident truth? Can it be proved? After all, we're prisoners of our five senses, aren't we?

One of our planes crashed at Morotai. I went to bury the dead and pray with the dying. One poor boy was wrapped in bandages to the tip of his nose. I didn't know whether he was Jewish, Roman Catholic, or Protestant, but I wanted to offer him some spiritual comfort. I knew he was dying. So I said, do you mind if I read to you the 23rd Psalm? He didn't answer me, so I began reading. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. Right in the middle of my reading, he called out loudly, hurry, doc, open a window, doc, it's awful stuffy here. The poor boy was out in the open air under a tarpaulin. He was totally blind, he'd lost his sight. He was totally deaf, he'd lost his hearing. Presumably, he'd lost a sense of taste and a sense of smell. He still had a little sense of touch, but he was under such heavy sedation, he was losing it, and he was lapsing into a coma. While he lay in that coma before he died that evening, what did life mean to him? Nothing. Therefore, you could say we are prisoners of our five senses.

And some students like to give you a run for your money. At the University of Oregon recently, a girl said to me, well, I don't accept the fact of existence. She said, all could be a dream. I didn't want to expose her to ridicule, so I said, what do you see here? She said, a lampshade. I said, what color? She said, pink. I said, what have I done? She said, you turned the light on. I said, what have I done? She said, you turned it off again. I said, now, I concede that you may be dreaming a dream, but isn't it strange that I'm dreaming the same dream? And all these people are dreaming the dream. Therefore, we assume it to be true. You could argue and say, well, even your proofs are, you're dreaming your proofs. Well, you could say that. But here's the strange thing. This young lady went down to the cafeteria and ordered lunch just like everybody else, although she said life could be a dream. Of course, maybe she dreamed she went down to order lunch at the cafeteria. You end up nowhere.

The point is this. We assume self-existence to be true. And the Founding Fathers said that faith in God is likewise a universal intuition. They were no fools. Thomas Jefferson, of course, who was primarily responsible for the wording of some of these things, was a deist, not an active Christian. But Thomas Jefferson made a very simple statement, included among the self-evident truths, our intuition of God.

Now, this was too much for one of the students in the front seat. He said, well, then why doesn't the savage have this intuition? I said, he does. When the European first landed on this continent, he found a noble savage. He was noble. Everyone concedes the Red Indian was brave. But he was savage. They all concede he was savage, too. He was cruel. He tore off their scalps. He tore out their tongues. He poured burning lead down their throat. Yet he had some consciousness of the unseen. He worshipped the sun and the moon and the stars, the wind and the weather. But he had a word for God. He called God the Great Spirit.

I worked among the savages in Papua. I've been on track for three days in the darkest jungles of Papua with cannibals. And yet, depraved as they were by their customs, they had a word for the Supreme. If you go to India, you'll find in the Indian Hindu pantheon there are 33 million gods. Yet they have a word for God. And as a Hindu said to me the other day, the further I go back in my own religion, the purer is the monotheism in the Vedas. And when the Apostle Paul went to Athens to speak to the faculty club on Mars Hill, he said to them, I see you're a very religious people. You've even got a temple to the unknown God. So I think I can say that faith in God is a universal human intuition.

Another student raised his hand and he said, well, what about the scientist? Why doesn't he have it? I said, well, now science of necessity is agnostic. Some may wonder why I make a statement like that. Well, let's look at it this way. Supposing I said God is in the next room. Better still, God is in this room. What scientific test? What empirical test is there to check on this fact? Should we use litmus paper? Would it turn purple or pink? Or maybe a Geiger counter? Or a spectrograph? Telescope? Microscope? There is no test. Science of necessity is agnostic. But that does not mean that scientists are agnostics. Quite the contrary. There isn't a fact. I use the word deliberately, a fact of science. Known to me that contradicts the idea of God. Not one.

I asked my professor of geology at Northwestern University when I was doing my master's degree in that field, is there anything in geology keeps you from believing in God? He said geology is a study of the crust of the earth. You wouldn't expect to find God among sedimentary rocks. I asked a chemist much the same sort of question. He gave me the same kind of answer. It's rather interesting. The attack on 19th-century Christianity was led by the physical scientists. But today in the 20th century, the physical scientists and the mathematicians are on the whole very friendly to the Christian faith. And most of the attack and criticism is coming from the non-empirical sciences, the philosophers of the various disciplines.

I was talking to a leading mathematician in Illinois just last week, the week before last. He said, well, all I can say is, whatever you call it, the ground of being, God, nature, whoever brought this universe into being is a genius of a mathematician. I mean, I just humbly bow my head. I said, well, how do you feel then about atheism? Well, he said, I feel sorry for atheists. He said, you look out there and you see that building? He said, supposing some kid comes to me and says, I don't believe that building's there. I said, well, can't you see it? No, I can't see it. I said, well, I just give up. Well, then do you just leave the student? As you see, it doesn't make much difference if that happens to be a building in which he's not interested. But if that happened to be the cafeteria, it'd be very important. So I find that physical scientists today are very friendly to the Christian faith. Scientists of necessity are not agnostics. You say, well, why aren't they all believers then? Well, they have freedom of choice like the rest of us. You can choose to believe. You can choose not to believe. By the way, the new president or director of the InterVarsity Movement is a Dr.

John Alexander, head of the Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin, was asked how he manages to convey a Christian witness while respecting the separation of church and state. He said, "I try to play the game. When I give my introductory talk on geography, I explain, for instance, that the Earth is 23 degrees off the vertical in its axis, and I explain how congenial to human life this is, and all the rest. Then I wait. I generally make this statement just about two minutes before the bell rings. Then I say, 'Well, you see, students, there are only two possible ways to explain this. One is by chance, and the other is by providence.' The bell rings. At least 12 students come up and say, 'What do you mean by providence?' So I say, 'Well, are you going for coffee at the lounge?' So we go down and have a cup of coffee, and I talk to them about providence in my own time."

A scientist is neutral when it comes to the Christian faith. Isn't it strange how people will swallow a fallacy if it's stated in scientific or philosophical terms? There was a fellow down in Los Angeles who wrote his doctoral dissertation on alcoholism. To get a good PhD, you must make a definite contribution to the field of knowledge. It won't do to rehash somebody else's term papers unless you're writing on term papers of the 20th century or something like that. So he began to regret the choice of subject. Why did I let them choose alcoholism? Why, that's such a common phenomenon that what new thing can I discover? Then he had a brainwave. If I could discover, he thought, the common denominator in drunkenness, perhaps I could discover the cause of alcoholism. And that sounded like a pretty good proposition.

He found an old fellow on Skid Row who was willing to do all the research for him for nothing but the raw materials. On Monday, he got drunk with whiskey and soda. On Tuesday, he got drunk with brandy and soda. On Wednesday, he got drunk with gin and soda. On Thursday, he got drunk with rum and soda. On Friday, he got drunk with vodka and soda. My friend said, "What makes him get drunk? The common denominator, the soda." That's what we call a fallacy. But when you try and think it through, what was wrong with his setup? You see, there was a hidden common denominator. It's called alcohol. And he missed that point in his generalization.

I find so many people who think that science contradicts the idea of God. I'll say it again. I don't know of one established scientific fact or proposition that contradicts the idea of God. Not one. I know of many scientific facts that contradict the interpretations of certain Christians. That's not the point. A student at this university class said, "Well, what about the atheists? Why doesn't the atheist have it? Why doesn't the atheist have this intuition of God?" Well, I have yet to meet an atheist who didn't have an intuition of God. He may vehemently deny it, but he still had the intuition.

So I turned to the student. I said, "May I ask you a personal question?" He said, "Certainly." I said, "Did you ever believe in God?" "Oh, yeah," he said, "when I was a kid." I said, "Well, why did you change your mind?" "Well, sir," he said, "I'm a lot smarter now than I was then." I said, "Really? I have a friend in Los Altos, California. He works for IBM. He has an IQ of 208. Einstein's IQ was 209. This man's name is Gerhard Dirks. He's paid to think. He thinks up the computers that the engineers build. And I said, he's a devout believer in God, a member of the Christian Businessmen's Committee of all organizations. But I said, I take it you have left him a long way behind." The student apologized quickly. "Sir," he said, "I didn't mean to give a wrong impression." "Well," I said, "I know you didn't. Is it just this, sir?" he said, "I can't believe in some of the things that I was taught when I was a child." "Well," I said, "seeing that I'm speaking in a classroom and not in a church, may I say that I've had to give up my faith in some things that I was taught when I was a child? For instance, Santa Claus. I don't believe in Santa Claus anymore. Why? It doesn't make sense to me anymore. But I still believe in God after 12 years of university work. And what's more, I find first-rate men who do believe in God. So I said, you see, son, it's this way. You say you believed in God when you were a child. Maybe you were right then and you're wrong now. You've talked yourself out of it."

I have a friend in California called Michael Balester. He was born in Russia. His mother was deaf, so he learned to lip-read Russian. He told me he had the time of his life lip-reading Mr. Khrushchev on television during his tour of the United States. He said it was fascinating. If Khrushchev said in Russian under his breath to his interpreter, "Who's the big fat fellow over there? Am I supposed to know him?" he didn't realize he was being read loud and clear 2,000 miles away. But Balester said to me, "The thing that amazed me was how often that man referred to God." Someone shouted in Russian, "How is your health, Mr. Chairman?" He replied, "Praise the Lord, pretty good for a man my years." Someone shouted, "What do you predict in Russian-American relations in the next 10 years?" He said, "Well, God only knows. But the way things are going," and he gave his point of view. He even said on one occasion, "May I quote an old Russian proverb? Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." If you think I'm exaggerating, do you remember, I think it was just December a year ago, the Chinese communist called Khrushchev a Bible-quoting buffoon. Now, if the John Birch Society was able to call President Eisenhower a communist, don't you think it's possible that Khrushchev was a fundamentalist in disguise? Maybe planted by InterVarsity over there and was run out for that very reason. They caught him on. Now, that's a little far-fetched. But I insist that Khrushchev has a concept of God.

Now, in this class that I was describing to you, some of the kids wouldn't take this. One fellow says, "Are you trying to tell me that I've got a concept of God?" I said, "Yes." He said, "I don't." "Well," I said, "would you tell me what is your position?" He said, "I'm an atheist." "Well," I said, "I'm a theist. I say there is a God." We went on exchanging for a little bit. I said, "Just a moment, hold on a moment. What God are you talking about? I was talking about Neptune. He lives at the bottom of the ocean off La Jolla, California. He's got seaweed in his hair." He looked at me blankly. He said, "Oh, I'm not talking about Neptune." He said, "What are you getting at, sir?" "Well," I said, "what are you talking about?" And suddenly it dawned on him. We were both discussing the same concept. He denied it. I affirmed it. But we both had it. He said, "Yes, but this doesn't prove anything." I'm not saying it proves anything. But I say this. I knew of a young scientist who was so absorbed in his science that he had no time for church. He let his wife go to church. He even drove his children to Sunday school and picked them up when they were through. But he had no use for it. He was so absorbed in his science. But when the house burned down and he lost both wife and children, he walked around the block. And he said, "Oh, God, how could you let it happen?" I find that in times of stress, all men pray or blaspheme. I insist it's an indication of the depth of that conviction that they have.

Now, I'm just setting forth, first of all, the fact that the universal intuition of God makes the Christian declaration of God credible. But where do we get our Christian declaration of God? Well, I suppose we'd have to begin with a definition of what we mean. I'm not here to discuss life force or Mother Nature or things as they are or the ground of all being or some such thing like that. Oh, by the way, I heard a very good grace benediction from Harvard, what you call an ecumenical benediction. You know, we've got Paul Tillich on the one hand and Billy Graham on the other. So the new benediction is, "May the ground of all being bless you real good." I think that's ecumenism, of course, carried a little far. I'm not here to discuss people's definitions. I would simply say this, that the Christian consensus would be that God is the only infinite, eternal, and unchangeable spirit in whom all things have their beginning, continuance, and end. You say, where do you get that? That is what you might call a distillate from the teaching of the New Testament. I think we could also say from the teaching of the Old Testament. In fact, I think that definition of God would be accepted by not only Christian but Jew and Muslim. Probably by Mormon too. All right then, we begin with the definition. Where do we get our concept of God? Well, I've said science can tell us nothing about God.

We have to find out about God some other way. And the Christian view is this, that God has revealed himself. God is spoken by prophets who are God conscious. I believe, of course, there's a revelation of God in every religion. There's truth in every religion. But I think the unsurpassed revelation is in the New Testament. If anyone differs with me about this, you write your question. We can talk about it in the afternoon. We have to find out in what way any other revelation exceeds or surpasses the divine revelation we have in the New Testament.

Now, a girl raised her hand in one of my classes and said, well, just a moment, sir. I'm from Hawaii. My folks are Buddhist. And she said, I don't know what I am, really. But she said, I know that there are certain legends about the Buddha. For instance, that his mother was an Indian princess, but that his father was a white elephant. Well, she said, now one I can believe, but the other presents difficulties. I said, I would agree with you. I couldn't believe that the Buddha's father was a white elephant. Well, she said, this is what we call legend. She said, Buddhists know these things, but we don't believe in these things. She said, some Buddhists may, but my parents don't. Now, she said, how do I know that what we read about Jesus Christ in the New Testament is true?

I said, well, we have the Gospels. Yes, but somebody told me in class the other day that the Gospel of John was written 300 years after Christ. Well, I said, I was taught that 30 years ago. I didn't accept it, but I was taught that. As a matter of fact, I remember crossing the Aegean Sea from Piraeus to Haifa with a student just out of Harvard. I was traveling fourth class. That means I was sleeping on a newspaper on the deck. And I found an American student with a sleeping bag. He was traveling fourth class also, so we got into conversation. By the way, he's now the minister, I think, of the First Unitarian Church of Boston. I'm not quite sure, but I think that's the church he's at just now.

Well, he had been studying theology. I hadn't done any theology at all. I was simply a young layman then. And he said, well, or my dear fellow, he said, everyone knows that the Gospel of John was written in the third or fourth century. I said, that's funny. I said, I've read it so many times it strikes me whoever wrote this must have known Jesus Christ. Oh, he said, this man wrote what he thought Jesus Christ was like. Now, today that's laughable, that position. William Albright, brought up in a liberal school, the man who's working through Johns Hopkins University to produce the Anchor Bible in cooperation with Roman Catholic and Jewish scholars, perhaps the greatest living American archaeologist, he says he's satisfied that the Gospels were completed by 85 A.D. Therefore, in the lifetime of those who knew Jesus Christ.

There are certain problems with the other theory. For instance, if the Gospel of John was written 300 years after Christ, how come St. Polycarp, 135 A.D., was able to quote from it? Did they arrange for him to get advance copies 150 years ahead of time? What about the Tetratessian? Perhaps you've noticed a New Testament brought out, I think produced for Christianity Today, showing Phillips, RSV, the King James, and one other translation. Well, you've got the Tetratessian of the middle of the second century. Scholars are quite agreed, quite agreed, that the Gospels were produced in the first century. I heard Bishop Stephen Neal of the World Council of Churches on the radio in Toronto just recently, in which he said there's still debate about the dates, but we're satisfied that the Gospels were produced in the first century. So we date them before A.D. 100.

I have a friend in Australia who is, or was, I'm not sure if he still is, secretary of the World Council of Churches Australian section, Dr. Malcolm Mackay of Scots Church, Sydney. He got his PhD for a thesis meant to establish that the Gospel of John was the first one written. I don't accept his thesis, but it's interesting he could get a PhD for that from a first-class university, University of Sydney.

The American Association for the Advancement of Atheism takes this attitude. Well, it's true that Jesus Christ made these claims to something supernatural, to deity, but so did the founders of every other religion. I find a lot of people will swallow that. I'm not satisfied with that. For instance, did Mohammed, the prophet Mohammed, a man of religious genius, did he claim pre-existence? The answer is no. Did Moses claim pre-existence? The answer is no. Did Gautama Buddha claim pre-existence? The answer is no. The Roman emperors made the Christians worship them as gods, but did any Roman emperor claim pre-existence? The answer is no. Did the followers of any Roman emperor claim that the emperor had risen from the dead? The answer is no. But whether you believed or not, you have to admit that Jesus Christ did claim deity. He said, before Abraham existed, the Greek is, I am, I continue to be. And we have the story of the resurrection to examine.

The other thing is the question of character. Now, I hitchhiked on one occasion from Tokyo to Oxford, 24,000 miles. It took me six months. I would be in a difficult position to prove certain stages of the journey. For instance, it's quite conceivable that instead of hitchhiking west, as I insist I did, that I went back by troop ship from Tokyo to San Francisco and by train to Chicago and took my leave of the military services there. But I didn't. I hitchhiked west. I wrote a book about it. I doubt if I could get back into Shanghai to prove my case. But now, am I credible? Is my story credible? The fact that I could have gone the other way doesn't mean that it didn't go this way. Now, on what do you base my credibility? If David Brew had introduced me as Edwin Orr, the Irish humorist, who was the biggest liar that ever left his native sod, then you'd begin to wonder if my stories were true. If, for instance, you discover I've been an awful liar, and, as a matter of fact, had served term for perjury, you would doubt my credibility, wouldn't you?

But now, when you take the character of Jesus Christ, and remember he made these claims, and his apostles, and they made these claims, and the impact these good men made upon the world, in a court of law it establishes credibility. There's many a case that's been settled in court and rightly settled without scientific proof. If you only get the point, the Christian faith is not based on scientific proof, because science is incapable of testing it. The Christian faith is based on a divine revelation, but that divine revelation makes sense. In fact, I would insist it makes more sense than any other possible explanation of our universe.

All right, then. Having said this, I would like to mention a couple of the arguments for the reasonableness of our Christian faith. Now, keep in mind what I said. I must say it again. I don't think that the arguments for the Christian faith, the historic arguments are the cosmological argument, the teleological argument, the anthropological argument, the ontological argument. These all are simple terms. The cosmological argument is the argument from origins, that there must have been a beginning, there must have been a beginner or a prime mover. The teleological argument is the argument from design. There's order in the universe. Where did it come from? The anthropological argument is the nature of men. Where does he get his moral nature? The ontological argument is the argument of being. It's a very subtle philosophical argument. These arguments do not prove the existence of God, but they support the divine revelation on which we base our faith.

I saw a cabinetmaker, a woodworker. I did some woodwork in a technical college. I saw him making something. I said, what are you making? He said, something to sit on. He had four chair legs. So I said facetiously, those won't be very comfortable. He said, don't be silly. I'm not going to sit on the point of a chair. But he said, these four legs are going to fit into a seat and I'm going to sit on that. Now the seat of the Christian faith is the divine revelation and the four arguments are supporting that seat. We don't base our faith on a philosophical argument. We base our faith on a divine revelation. I do hope I've made my point clear. I'm not asking you to accept it. I'm simply stating it. You can think it over and come up with your questions in discussion.

Now this question, first of all, of the reasonableness of faith. I'm going to mention, first of all, the argument of origins. What would you say is the argument of origins? It's simply this. Everything owes its existence to a producing cause of some sort. The universe as we know it owes its existence to an ultimate cause which must be greater than the cause it produced. Now your atheist gets around this by saying, just a moment. The word universe means everything that there is. Therefore it must include God. Therefore how do you explain the origin of God? All the Christian can do is say, excuse me, that's not our definition of God. Our definition of God is this, that God is the only, infinite, eternal and unchangeable spirit. The being in whom everything had its beginning, continuance and end. Therefore God is not part of the material universe. You know what I mean by an improper question?

If I asked one of the professors here a yes or no question: Have you stopped beating your wife? If he says yes, he admits that he's beaten her. If he says no, that means he's still doing it. That's not a proper question. And this is not a proper question. The Christian definition of God is a definition of a transcendent God. You say, what about Paul Tillich's definition of God? I accept that as an aspect of God, the ground of all being. The apostle Paul says, in him we live and move and have our being. But that's not all that he is. In other words, God is greater than the material universe.

All right then. What would we say about the argument of origins? Are scientists agreed that the universe had a beginning? Now there's a lot of healthy debate on the origin of the universe. But if you take the latest article in Encyclopedia Britannica, which gives the source material, you'll find that the consensus of opinion among scientists is that the universe began about five billion years ago. And this is in keeping with the law of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics.

Now, when we have a bull session or a hen party, some of the girls ask me, what's the second law of thermodynamics? And I haven't done any physics. Well, perhaps we just simply say the first law of thermodynamics is the principle of conservation of energy. In non-technical language, that in a closed system you don't get anything out that you don't put in. That's the first law of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics is that energy is always breaking down into non-recoverable forms. Our sun is a huge furnace; it's burning out. Perhaps some of you still say, well, that's not non-technical enough. Have you ever shoot craps or play any gambling games? I won't ask the InterVarsity fellows. But maybe you'll get the idea. The first law is that you don't get something for nothing. The second law is you don't even break even. That's about the best way I can explain those two laws.

Now, you say, well, what about Bondi and Gold? What about Fred Hoyle? Fred Hoyle has a steady state cosmology theory. Encyclopedia Britannica simply says it's not proven. They took Einstein's proposition about the bending of light and they put it to the test and they proved he was right. But they haven't proved Fred Hoyle right. I asked one of my astronomer friends and he said, well, we asked Fred, now Fred, your theory is worth explaining, but if matter is being created in the universe, where is it being created? He says, well, it could be created from somewhere or other. They say, well, where? Well, he says, couldn't it be? They say, well, it could be. All right, we'll say it could be, but where? He doesn't know. So then they discover these new quasistellar objects, the quasars they call them. So they're trying to find out maybe that's where it comes from. That is broken down too. In other words, it's just a case of not proven.

Now, in credibility, you see, you can still say, well, it's still possible there may be some theory to bring into consideration, but the consensus of opinion is that the universe did have a beginning. You say, well, how did they get this figure? The non-science students may say. Well, first of all, we've got the age of the oldest rocks. We've got the age of meteorites. We've got the radioactivity of uranium isotopes. We've got the distance of the moon from the Earth. We've got the speed and distance of the galaxies. Just let's take that one case in point. Do you know anything about the Doppler effect? If a train is coming towards you and it puts on its whistle, it comes to you in a rising crescendo of sound. And then as it passes, it suddenly drops away, like, vrooom, like that. That's called the Doppler effect. You say, why does it do that? Well, when it's coming towards you, it's coming at the speed of sound plus the speed of the engine. When it's past you, it's coming to you at the speed of sound less the speed of the engine, and that causes the apparent drop in tone.

Now, the same thing is true of color. Astronomers discovered that the galaxies are exploding, expanding, racing away at unbelievable speeds, none of them at the speed of light, of course, but at unbelievable speeds. And they've made calculations. Well, when were they together? They find the same thing, about 5 billion years ago. Actually, in the article that I read to check up on quite recently, it said that these calculations today are agreed, it's agreed among scientists, that they are in harmony with the latest geophysical and astrophysical phenomenon.

All right, then. Whom do we quote? Have you ever heard of Enrico Fermi? He's called the father of chain reaction. He was the man of whom the telegram was sent, the Italian navigator has reached the new world when he got chain reaction. Enrico Fermi states, stated boldly, that the universe, the material universe, was created in a super thermonuclear explosion about 5 billion years ago, and that all the elements were created in the space of the first 30 minutes. I'm not a physicist, but that staggered me. But then it said, this calculation is made easier to digest when we realize that in a thermonuclear explosion today, all the fallout matter, strontium-90 and the like, is created in a microsecond.

Well, then, George Gamow carries the theory further. He said that there were clouds of gas. Fermi's point was that 99% of the material of the universe was hydrogen and helium, and only 1% heavier material. But these gas clouds with some dust began to expand with this force of the explosion. And for a quarter of a billion years, there was no aggregation of matter. Then George Gamow carried it further by saying that radiation and gravitation caused the condensation of stars.

When it comes to the theory of the formation of the planets, Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, said that they owe the solar system to a spinning disk of matter that broke into planets. But that was rejected because they discovered that a spinning disk wouldn't break up that way. So Sir James Jeans brought in a new theory called the collision theory, that a wandering star had come too close to the sun and torn pieces off. But in 1944, that's just barely 20 years ago, just a little over 20 years ago, Weizsäcker disposed of that theory and said that it's based on a wrong premise. It was based on the assumption that the material of the solar system was uniform, whereas actually, we know that the Earth has got a very heavy iron-nickel core, we know that the planets have a heavy core, whereas the sun's a ball of fire, and therefore it would break up into planets. So they're back to the Immanuel Kant theory once again, and it's been refined by a man called Gerhard Kuiper. You say, I don't know the name. You do know the name. You saw the moonshots, didn't you? He was the man who explained them. He's the leading astronomer in the United States today. And here's the interesting thing. He says that the Earth was formed in total darkness before the sun was strong enough to emit light. And the first two verses of Genesis say, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the chaos. No wonder William Albright, already quoted, says, are beginning to catch up with the Genesis cosmogony.

By the way, I know some of you are interested in this. I wish I could have a bowl session with you, or one of these discussion groups on Genesis and the scientific consensus. I'd like to talk to you about that. Now, the point is this. It's true that the idea of a creation of a universe, science doesn't talk about a creator, but it does talk about a creation, is being beat around. But most of the opposition is not coming from the physicists, but from the philosophers. It's a strange thing today.

The other argument I was going to mention in passing is the argument of order. Cosmology. I mentioned Gerhard Dirks, my German friend with the IQ of 208. When he talked to me he lowered the hay considerably. I'm glad he did that. He got a paper napkin when I was talking to him and gave me a few diagrams to explain things. He said, now Orr, what do you know about automation? Well, that's just a layman's knowledge. There was a businessman sitting in with us. I didn't know he was an atheist. He had come up to this conference to visit his daughter who was married to a missionary. But he himself was an unbeliever. And he sat in on my conversation with Dr. Dirks.

The reason I went to see Dr. Dirks was this. I had read in an engineering magazine that to build a machine capable of building another machine exactly like itself, reaching into a bin and taking a bolt here and up here, a piece of wire here and so forth, a piece of asbestos here and the like, a machine capable of building a machine like itself would take bits of information on the binary mathematical principle to raise to the 1500th power, which is a staggering figure. If you have any mathematical friends, ask them to tell you what that means. I also read in a physics magazine that a protein molecule floating in a bath of nutrients capable of building itself by deriving these nutrients and making another protein molecule would need bits of information on the computer system to raise to the 1500th power. I thought, well, why did they get the same figure?

So I went to see Dr. Dirks about this. He said, that's von Neumann. I said, von Neumann? He said, one of our greatest mathematicians. Oh, yes, that's quite good. Now, he said, what do you know about automation? Well, I said, I'll give you a layman's illustration. My wife has a dishwasher. She can tell me when it's sudsing, when it's rinsing, and the like. So she calls it the cycle. I got curious. I opened it up, and I found this little metal wheel with teeth cut in it. And that makes it do these things. The bits of information were built into the machine.

Let's take another illustration. The rocket traveling in the direction of Mars received instructions, change 15 degrees. But that was built into it before it left the Earth. It would never have worked. If that had been a big ball of putty, it wouldn't have turned 15 degrees. You get the point. The instructions had to be there. Now, I said, Dr. Dirks, supposing you want to build an automated plow. You can design a plow that will plow a field without a human hand. You have to have a motor power, a little gasoline motor would do. You need a blade that will lower and raise. You have to have direction-finding equipment. You have to have a gyroscope, for example. These can all be built. But he said, not much good if you have to send a man around the other side of the field to turn it around. So he said, you design the plow so it will turn. But that requires more information to be built into it.

Now, he said, you've got a plow that goes back and forth across the field plowing furrows, but it hits a rock. You can't very well hire a transient worker to follow it and dig out rocks. You're trying to save a man's labor. So you design a rock ejector. You have to lift the blade. You have to stop the motor. You have to put in the rock ejector and eject the rock. But he said, now you've got a plow that will go back and forth across the field ejecting rocks as it goes along. But he said, it hits a root. You can't eject a root. So you design a root ejector. You get the point, but you have to have more machinery and more instructions for it. He said, then it runs into a flooded corner of the field. What can you do then? Well, you can't go on designing things forever, for every possible exigency. But you can design something that will make it stop at something like that and send back a signal to headquarters and you can give it an order, back away and start another furrow.

He says, all can be done. But he said, the more complicated, the more sophisticated the machine, the more the bits of information in geometric multiplication we have to put into it. Now he said, I tried to work out the mathematical probability or the bits of information we would need for the finest machine we have, the human being. He said, it's staggering. At the point of conception, a single cell of living matter, the ovum, receives instructions that set the course of that living being for life. The first instruction is divide in two. That's remarkable in itself. The next instruction is divide in four. It follows a mathematical pattern. It multiplies until it's thousands, millions, and then billions of cells. But then specialization sets in. Some of these cells are told to become as hard as wood and to join up one with the other and form bones. A group of these cells are told to cluster together and form a television camera to convey television electrical impulses to the brain. We call it the eye. He said, these cells are even told what color to form the eye. For instance, some young fellows begin to lose their hair when they're 30. That is decided at the moment of conception. It's inherited. All these things are taken in like this.

Or he said, I try to work it out. He said, it's staggering. Now he said, if I have to choose between that fantastic chance and the idea that it's following a pattern set down for it, as a computer expert, he said, I'm all in favor of the fact that the bits of information were placed there for a purpose. He said, I lost my faith. I worked for Hitler, he said, during the war. I lost my faith. He said, this is how I got it back. I said, well, that's very interesting, Dr. Dirks. Why, then, aren't Soviet scientists getting converted by the thousands? He said, I can answer that, too. He said, I worked for Hitler, I told you. He said, I minded my own business. He said, when you're a scientist doing something you like to do, he said, it's a very engrossing thing. One day I visited Berlin. I saw a man with a yellow Star of David. So I said to my friend, what's that? He said, he's a Jew. He said, something struck me. He said, it's true. He said, I'd heard rumors of the persecution of the Jews, but I didn't believe it. He said, the thought occurred to me, they're in the concentration camps. Well, he said, I lost my faith.

But, however, when I talked to my colleagues back at Peenemunde, they said, now, look, Dirks, you've got a good job, you've got good pay, leave the politics to Hitler. If a Soviet scientist is busy, engaged in working on a rocket to reach Mars, he's not likely to give it up to join the First Baptist Church of Moscow. He knows he won't be promoted if he does. If you don't believe me, look at the grip Lysenko had upon genetics in Russia, to the detriment of Russian agriculture. So, you see, these arguments may be believed or rejected. You say, but this is very unsatisfactory. Why didn't God make it so that I would have to be convinced? Well, the scripture simply says, it is by faith that we understand the worlds were framed by the word of God. And without faith, it is impossible to please him. For he who comes to God must first believe that he is. He says, but how can I come to a God I don't believe in? Well, that's just too bad. You can't until you're ready to go at least halfway and say, oh, God, if there is a God, help me to find you. And once you say that, he'll meet you halfway.

A sergeant said to me, rather angrily, you Christians really get my goat. He said, a mathematician can take you to the blackboard, an astronomer to his telescope, but you Christians, you always talk about faith. Faith, faith, faith, faith. He said, why don't you prove something? I said, don't you realize that faith is an insight? No, he said, I don't. I said, what do you mean then? He said, what's the difference between faith and credulity? Well, I said, faith is agreeable to reason. Superstition is contradicted by reason. That's the difference.

Supposing this whole group were blind from birth, and I've been invited to give a lecture on the beauty of color. I begin by saying, ladies and gentlemen, color is a manifestation of light. Up goes a hand, sir, what is light? You've never heard of light? Sir, we've learned these definitions in our textbooks, but what is it like? I said, light is radiation, part of the spectrum of energy. But what's it like? Well, do you know what heat is? Yes, sir. Well, I said, heat is part of the spectrum of energy too, but just as heat radiates warmth, light makes things visible. Up goes another hand, what is visible? That means so that you can see it. Well, we've never seen anything. Well, I said, would you let me go on with my lecture? If you let a beam of light in the wind and it strikes a prism of glass, the prism of glass will break it into a spectrum of color in the wall like a rainbow. Up goes another hand, what's a rainbow? Well, I said, that's caused by the sun's reflection of the sun's rays in a rain cloud. I'm getting nowhere with them. What's it like? Well, I said, it's red and blue and green. What is green? I said, green is a secondary color, a mixture of blue and yellow. Up goes another hand, what is blue? I said, blue is a primary color. Well, what's it like? That's the color of the sky. We've never seen that. Somebody said, what's the characteristic of blue? I said, it's bluishness, I suppose. Well, we've gotten nowhere, haven't we?

Is it possible to describe color in scientific language without referring to this emotion? The emotion? Yes, well, this color perception you talk about must be an emotion. It's not an emotion, but a feeling, yes. Just as a nerve in your leg will convey a sensation of pain to your brain, so the optic nerve conveys a sensation of color. Yes, it's a feeling. Well, could you describe color for us without referring to feeling? I said, oh, yes. A Swedish scientist called Ongstrom measured the wavelength of color. Red is 7,000 Ongstrom units, blue is 4,800 Ongstrom units. Think all the blind students will say, thank you very much, sir. Now we know what color is, and we don't have to depend upon feeling. A poor old washerman who's never been to school in their life knows more about color than a blind mathematician. In the same way, faith in God is an insight into the spiritual, and we find that it works when we put it to the test.

Thank you for your rapt attention. Thank you.