I was doing a little channeling surfing last night after my wife and I watched Episode 4 of the first season of Foyle’s War, a British detective drama television series set during World War II, using Amazon’s “Prime” service, when I came across a couple of cable shows dealing with cosmology.
Two items immediately came to mind. The first one was a comment made to an article I had written where I claimed that evolutionary scientists are left with the awkward premise that the cosmos is a something from nothing premise. He disagreed.
The second item was news that Frank Pastore was in a severe motorcycle accident and as of this writing is still in a coma. Pastore is a former professional baseball pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds (1979-1985) and the Minnesota Twins (1986). A line drive that shattered his right elbow ended his major league career of a pursuit for fame and fortune. Pastore is a Christian. In 2004 he became the host of The Frank Pastore Show on KKLA 99.5 FM in Los Angeles, the largest Christian talk show in the United States. Several years ago Frank interviewed.
I’ll bring these two stories together in a moment. Let’s begin with the cosmology issue. The biggest gap in the theory of evolution is where did all this stuff come from? One of the first lessons a student in biology class learns is that something cannot and does not come from nothing. Spontaneous generation has been disproven so many times that it is no longer seriously considered, unless you’re a die-hard Darwinist and you need to “prove” the theory.
Physicist, evolutionist, and atheist Stephen W. Hawking argues that the laws of physics allow for the universe to have created itself. In his latest book, The Grand Design, Hawking states:
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.”
This is science? Laws don’t create anything. It’s like saying that economic laws made Warren Buffett a billionaire. If they did, then why isn’t everybody a billionaire?
C. S. Lewis gets to the point when he writes that laws “produce no events. . . .Bookkeeping, continued to all eternity, could never produce one farthing. . . . Bookkeeping needs something else (namely, real money put into the account . . . before any income . . . can exist.”
Hawking is speculating, but because he is a noted scientist whose speculations fit with what atheists need to believe, some people are willing to believe him.
“Stephen Hawking said it; I believe him; that settles it.” This is religion not science. A number of scientists are not buying what Hawking is selling, and yet it didn’t stop the Discovery Channel from showcasing Hawking’s new religion. It doesn’t matter if there is any empirical science behind anything Hawking says on the subject, as long as they hear him say, via a voice synthesizer designed and created by someone, “I think Science can explain the Universe without the need for God.” Consider these comments from Ervin Laszlo writing on the very liberal Huffington Post site:
“In saying this, Hawking doesn’t speak like a scientist: he speaks like a (speculative) philosopher. . . . To say that [the universe created itself] spontaneously is not an answer: it’s an excuse for an answer. When Hawking says that the spontaneous self-creation of the universe ‘out of nothing’ is evidence that a creator was not involved, he is not speaking as a scientist. He is not making a scientific statement. His statement is pure theology — of the negative kind typical of atheists.
The shows I watched on cosmology don’t give one scrap of meaning to life. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is a large-scale physics experiment that was built to detect gravitational waves. In 2002, it cost $365 million. LIGO's mission is to observe leftover gravitational waves of cosmic origin. And once they find what they’re looking for, then what?
Now back to Frank Pastore and his motorcycle accident. On “the night of the accident, Frank had a segment on the show with a professor from APU (Asuza Pacific University) and Frank was talking about the reality of the soul,” Gina Pastore said. “He often talked about this because he was a Christian philosopher. He mentioned on the air, he said, ‘that if I were to be killed on the freeway tonight and my body parts are all over the freeway I'm not on the freeway because I'm my soul and I would be with the Lord.’”
If an evolutionary scientist came upon Pastore’s broken body on the highway, the only thing he could comment on, given his materialistic assumptions about the origin of the cosmos and the evolution of man, would be a description of the broken body. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ways to capture a gravity wave does not explain who man is. In fact, the reason to build these scientific devices is to prove that there is no God, the soul does not exist, and the afterlife is as elusive as a gravity wave and its kissing cosmic cousin, dark matter.