The creator of the YouTube Channel, Science Uprising, does a good job with the production of Big Bang: Something from Nothing, both in the technical aspects of the video and its content. The mask is a nice, dramatic touch.
The mask has taken on a the meaning of standing up to tyranny in countercultural circles, and that meaning is not lost in the video. Popular science promoters of the atheist stripe in the last 20 years have been aggressive in trying to squelch the idea that faith and science can live together. This YouTuber is having none of it!
Indeed, the effort seems to have awoken and inspired many believing scientists in recent years like some of the people who appear in this video, pushing back against the New Atheist mantra. Not only do science and faith fit together like a hand in a glove; non-theism seems to be pulling at the fringes of credibility to walk back the determination that the universe had a beginning a finite time ago.
The so-called “Big Bang” or “singularity”, as Hawking called it, has proven problematic for the scientist who wants to remain a materialist. The implication of a Beginning from the fact that there was a beginning to matter, space, energy and time is a conclusion that Einstein didn’t want to face, though his theory of relativity suggested it.
He came around, and so have almost all scientists today, albeit reluctantly for many who thought that science buried God years ago. Hawking, who proved singularity mathematically, spent much of the rest of his life trying to avoid the inevitable conclusion that his math confirmed. Multiverses would be his answer, though they are no more provable by science than a creator.
Science, though, didn’t bury God. Science is increasingly being seen as the study of the universe God created. I know a handful of atheists who became believers through science. The dogma of the New Atheists is turning brittle as time wears on.
These are just some of the things I think about as I view this short, but well done, video:
Stephen Meyer describes the existential angst he experienced in his early teens in the interview with Sean McDowell that is embedded in its entirety at end of this article. Meyer majored in physics and geology, but he accumulated a minor in philosophy on his way to an undergraduate degree. His interest in philosophy was driven by the existential angst he felt as a young man.
Meyer wanted to be popular and good at sports, like most teenager’s, but that wasn’t going well for him. A couple of nights before a planned ski trip with his father, some “weird questions” started “popping” into his mind: “What’s it going to matter in a hundred years?” He was initially troubled by it, but anticipation for the ski trip distracted him for the time being.
On the skiing trip, however, he broke his leg badly. He woke up from an operation with a full leg cast. Several days in the hospital and limitations on his mobility stirred his active teenage brain to dwell on the questions that haunted him before the trip.
While he was in the hospital, his father brought him a book on the history of baseball. As he read the book, he began to notice that the stories all ended the same way. The great prospects were scouted. They came up to the majors with budding promise. They had a fantastic career. They accumulated records, and they retired… and, “Then what?” He wondered.
In his 14-year old mind, baseball was the greatest thing a person could do, but he wondered, “In a hundred years, would anyone remember those accomplishments?”
His own mundane routines of life – getting up in the morning, taking the bus to school, coming home, doing his homework and chores, and getting up in the morning to do it all again – led him to fear “that nothing I was doing was going to amount to anything”.
He added the routine of hobbling to the mailbox each day to get the newspaper to read the baseball box scores. As days went by, he became conscious of the dates on the newspapers. Each day a new date, one after the other, with each one passing into his memory. Snap your finger one moment, he realized, and the next moment you are remembering the moment you snapped your finger, but it was gone.
He became aware of the ephemeral nature of time, and began to wonder, “What is it that is the same all the time and is the basis for binding all these passing sense impressions together?” these questions led to the conclusion, “Unless there is something that doesn’t change, everything that is constantly changing has no lasting reality, let alone meaning.”
He had no reason to believe, at that time, that there was an answer to this angst. There was no reason to believe there was anything that was always the same, that was unchanging. There was nothing evident to him to tether the ever changing world of his experience.
I recall early in my life a time of deep unsettling angst. I was maybe around 5-7 years old, when we watched a reel of home movies of my father and grandparents and me as a younger child. This was, perhaps, my first awareness of the passage of time.
I don’t know if I dreamt this, or imagined it, or whether it was a “vision”, but what I recall was “real”. I still remember it, though the immediacy of the feelings that went with it have faded. I experienced the sensation of floating in the unimaginably vast emptiness and expanse of space – alone – not connected to anyone or anything.
Terrifying is not the right word for the feeling I felt, but I can’t come up with a better description. I imagine now that the same or similar gnawing feeling is what Meyer experienced as he wrestled with the questions whirling in his young mind.
Meyer realized one day, as he had a strong urge to ask his parents, that his parents could offer him no better solution, that there was no sense even asking. Stephen Meyer remembers looking at his windowsill in his leg cast and staring at the pattern in the wood. He wondered, “How do I know that what I am seeing is really there and not just something that is going on in my brain?”
At that point his next thought was, “I wonder if this is what it means to be insane?” Then arose the fear that led to a new fear that the questions meant there was something wrong with him. If his parents had taken him to a psychologist then, he might have been diagnosed with anxiety leading to a panic attack.
In college, though, Meyer was able to find some clarity and context for his experience in the study of existentialism: “Without an infinite reference point, nothing finite has any ultimate meaning or value.” (Paraphrasing John Paul Sartre). Meyer realized, “That was what was bothering me!”
Everything is in flux from our human vantage point. Everything is passing, passing, passing….. Nothing has any lasting meaning or value from the position of a finite being. The anxiety he felt was a “metaphysical anxiety”.
Stephen Meyer’s journey is somewhat similar to mine, except for the details. This journey is common to human experience, and it has ancient roots. Anyone who has spent any time reading Ecclesiastes knows what I am talking about.
I am reblogging this post as I have the distinct impression that most of the world, including most of the academic world, don’t realize that the Theory of Evolution, which seems to be accepted more like a fact in modern society, is still not completely settled. While the official face of the scientific world continues to bow in homage to Darwinian Theory, doubts of its ultimate viability and explanatory scope are increasing.
This is not to say that doubts about evolution, generically, are increasing. Evolution can mean any number of things, including the adaption of species over long periods of time. Garden variety evolution is not seriously in question (to put a layman’s spin on it).
Rather, evolution as an explanation of the origin of life and which defines the entirety of the biological process, from beginning to end, is still in some flux. If you don’t believe me, listen to Stephen Meyer and Perry Marshall debrief the Royal Society meeting of eminent biologists last November. (See Unbelievable? What happened to evolution at the Royal Society? Stephen Meyer & Perry Marshall)
Their report (as well as others) reveals a Neo-Darwinian theory in crisis. Many scientists are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain the old paradigm, even with a face lift, in light of ongoing research and discovery. The old model is straining under the pressure.
It isn’t any wonder, then, I suppose, that the number of scientists willing to sign a petition expressing skepticism about the contemporary theory of Darwinian evolution has risen ten times since 2001.
Skepticism About Darwinian Evolution Grows as Over 1000 Scientists From Around the World Declare Their Doubts About Darwinism WASHINGTON, Feb. 5, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Over 1000 doctoral scientists from around the world have signed a statement publicly expressing their skepticism about the contemporary theory of Darwinian evolution, according to Discovery Institute. The statement, located online at http://www.dissentfromdarwin.org, reads: “We are […]
