GYC Conference 2024: Wherever He Goes

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Questioning Faith: Making Sense of God, the Universe, and Eternity

Anthony Bosman

01 Has Science Disproven That There’s a Creator?

And my understanding is we have 1 hour beginning now, right?

The goal of this series is to ask some questions, questions that you may have asked before, questions you maybe haven't asked before, questions maybe your friends have asked or others have asked as you've wrestled with faith.

We're gonna be asking questions about faith.

And particularly we're gonna try and make sense of God, the universe, and eternity.

So not ambitious at all, very humble goal, right?

No, this is gonna engage some big, big topics.

Before we jump in, I'm just gonna tell you a little bit about my background, maybe try and make some points of connection.

So I grew up in the beautiful state of Florida.

And then I went off to university at Stanford University in California, anyone here from California?

Yeah, a couple, fantastic, great state, you're my favorite.

And in California, studied mathematics at Stanford University.

And then I went on to Texas, Anyone here from Texas?

And studied, got my PhD in mathematics at Rice University in Houston.

And then I landed at Andrews University in Michigan.

At Andrews University, where I'm now a professor of mathematics and chair of the mathematics department.

It's also a little bit about me and my background.

After all that sunshine, I decided I needed some snow in my life, so I moved to Michigan.

But Along the way, especially in university years, but also when I was a high school student, still today, even as a professor, I came up against some really tough questions.

Questions about God, questions about the universe, questions about how it all fits together.

I wrestled a lot with these questions, and I wanna share with you today some of the questions I've wrestled through.

Now, I don't necessarily have full, complete resolutions to all of them, so I'm gonna be asking questions and raising topics, and hopefully I'll have time for some Q&A, and I may not have the final word and everything, but as I've wrestled with them, I think I've ended up with what I found to be a really compelling and beautiful picture of our God.

In this first session, we're just gonna talk about has science proven or disproven that there's a creator?

So that's going to establish our first session for us.

Then the next session from Miele Follerit is the question of what was God doing before the universe?

You think back into eternity past, what was God doing before the universe?

That will round out today, and then tomorrow we'll take up some more questions, questions about miracles, questions about God knowing the future and free will, questions about what it would be like to live forever.

So that's how we round out the session tomorrow.

So today we're talking about has science proven or disproven that there is a creator?

Yeah, this is the first image released of the James Webb Space Telescope.

So the James Webb was launched on Christmas Day of 2021.

This image was then released to the public.

James Webb is our new, a super powerful telescope.

So we had the Hubble, but it's beginning to fail.

So we launched this James Webb, has a lot of new capacities, most powerful telescope we've ever launched.

And the James Webb released this image to the public the summer of 2022.

If you take a grain of sand, pick up a little grain of sand, hold it arm's length away, and you point at the sky, a piece of the sky the size of that with a little grain of sand, it's all just blackness, right?

But what James Webb does is it zooms into a portion of the cosmos, a portion of the night sky.

Okay, that's a little bit too dark for the night sky, but that's nice to see what he did there.

It zooms into the night sky and it reveals that what we thought was just darkness is actually full of not just stars but galaxies, right?

And so when I saw this image, I was reminded, can we get a little more light, a little bit more light?

Maybe we can do 50-50 or something, that'd be great.

Genesis 15, God speaks to Abram, and God says to Abram, look up at the sky and count the stars if indeed you can count them.

Now if you look at the night sky with your naked eye, you can see something like 5, 000 stars.

Okay, can someone work on the light situation?

If you look at it with a naked eye, you can see something like 5, 000 stars.

And if you've had the experience to get out of the city into, that's great, that's perfect.

If you have the experience to get out of the city to a place where you can just see the night sky unpolluted, you've maybe had that experience.

But what James Webb is revealing is there's a lot more than just 5, 000 stars, right?

With a best estimate today is it's something like 200 billion trillion stars.

What I find incredible about this verse is God invites Abram to look up at the sky.

Perhaps God gives Abraham a visionary experience, seeing some of the images like we see from James Webb's space telescope.

And in response to Abram looking up at the sky, being overwhelmed with God's creation, it moves Abram to the position of belief.

Abram believed the Lord, and he credited to him as righteousness.

It is a significant verse that the New Testament quotes about a half dozen times.

It's really the gospel in that verse, right?

Abraham believes the Lord and God recognizes that belief.

He honors that faith and credits it to him as righteousness.

Yeah, What's incredible here is we often miss that Abram believing the Lord comes immediately as a response to this visionary experience of looking up and seeing God's created world.

And so by God inviting Abram to study the cosmos, it produced in Abram gospel faith.

And so what I want to suggest today, what I want to argue today, is that through our study of the universe, we too can have faith awakened in us.

It doesn't need to be the case that when we study the universe, you become skeptical or you become atheistic.

Just like how God invited Abram to study the cosmos and it produced faith in him, I believe for us today, when we study the cosmos, it can produce faith in us as well.

In particular, what I want to do today is I want to look at some features of the universe, some features of the universe that have been the object of recent scientific study, and argue that recent scientific discoveries help confirm and strengthen our belief in God.

And so the very first attribute or feature of the universe I want to look at is the fact that the universe has a beginning.

02 What Was God Doing Before the Universe?

Okay, what was God doing before the universe?

So just as the briefest of recaps, what we did in our last session is we looked at the universe, what science tells us, and we saw that rather than science leading us to atheism, actually there's good reasons, good compelling scientific evidence for belief in God.

1 of those is the fact that the universe has an origin.

It has a beginning, which leads us to ask the question, what caused the universe?

And we reviewed some of that in the last talk.

What I want to emphasize though right now is that while we have various cosmological models of how the universe expanded from some initial state, none of those models explain what caused the universe.

Sometimes you ask people like, well what caused the universe?

And they say, oh, the Big Bang caused the universe.

Well, that's just a misunderstanding of the science.

We don't have any science that explain what caused the universe.

Rather, even the Big Bang, that just refers to how the universe developed from an initial state.

When we go back to that initial state, all of our physics breaks down.

All of the particles and fundamental forces, they all break down.

So we have no scientific understanding of what caused that initial state.

I think there's good reasons to believe that Genesis 1-1, in the beginning God created, that that's the explanation.

But there is no, no 1 can offer a scientific explanation for what caused the universe.

So there's good reason to believe that the cause is an all-powerful, eternal, personal cause, that it's God, but science cannot tell us.

Which means the only way we can know about what existed before the universe isn't by going out and studying the world God created, it's not by studying the book of nature, to use Ellen White's language.

Instead, it's by studying what God has revealed to us.

The only way for us to have any idea of what happened before the universe is if God has revealed it to us.

And in scripture, most of scripture isn't focused on before the universe existed.

Most of scripture is focused on the here and the now, how to live practical godliness, how to honor God, how to share the love of God.

But I think there are some places in scripture that give us some clues, a point to a reality that existed before God created the universe.

So we want to approach this with great caution and great humility.

We want to recognize we're dealing with topics that are far greater than our comprehension, right?

But we wanna see what has God revealed and how can we be faithful to that?

And so in that spirit, I'm just gonna pray to invite the Holy Spirit to guide our study right now because we'll be diving into what God has revealed in scripture about what happened, what existed before God created.

Father God, we want to thank you that we are free, free to believe that you are not only an awesome and powerful and mighty God, a God that can create everything out of nothing, but you're also a good God, a loving God, a God who's revealed yourself to us.

And so as we spend some time today wrestling with the question of how and what you reveal to us, I pray that our eyes might be opened to better appreciate and comprehend you and your love and your plan for our lives.

We looked at this briefly in the last presentation.

Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world.

From everlasting to everlasting, You are God.

Now, when I put these lines on the screen, I put a particular structure to it.

Does anyone know the name of this structure?

It's a chiastic structure, it's a chiasm.

If you notice, there's a parallelism that's going on here.

The first line, Lord, you have been our dwelling place, parallels the last, you are God.

The second, in all generations, parallels from everlasting to everlasting throughout all time.

And at the center, before the mountains were brought forth, Before you had formed the earth in the world is before creation, right?

So it's a chiasm focused on how God has been God since before creation.

He's been God from everlasting and he'll be God to everlasting.

And so scripture, the first moment in scripture isn't actually the beginning.

Yes, Genesis begins with in the beginning, but there was something prior to the beginning.

In the beginning, God, God already existed in Genesis 1 verse 1, and here in Psalm 90 verse 2, we're told God has existed from everlasting.

And so the mental picture you might have is something like this.

We have our universe, we have the history of the universe, from the beginning of the universe, But prior to the universe, from everlasting, God existed.

God has always been, even prior to creation.

Now, when I drew this on screen, it looks like the history of the universe has taken up quite a bit of the screen, but if we take from everlasting seriously, however old you think the universe is, if the universe is 10, 000 years old or 13 billion years old, everlasting is a whole lot longer, right?

So maybe the picture should be more like this, right?

Like the life of God is God existed from everlasting, and it's quite recent, and from God's perspective at least, that he created and that the universe exists.

God existed from everlasting prior to God's choice to create.

If we go on in Psalm 90, right after proclaiming that God is from everlasting to everlasting, notice what it says about God.

For God, a thousand years in your sight is but as yesterday when it is past.

So for God, it's like the last thousand years is like, oh yeah, yeah, that's what I had for lunch yesterday.

A thousand years are as but yesterday when it has passed, or as a watch in the night.

And this makes sense if God has existed from everlasting.

Maybe you've noticed this phenomena that as you get older, a year seems to go by a whole lot faster.

Like when I was a kid, it's like, oh my goodness, so long until the next Christmas.

But now it's like, my goodness, we have Christmases like all the time now, they just keep happening, how is it already a new year?

Well it's like when you're 6 years old, you only have living memory of like 3 or 4 Christmases.

Now I have living memory of 30-some Christmases.

So 1 year is a much smaller fraction of my life than it used to be.

When you're 5, a year is like 20% of your life.

And most of that life you weren't even really remembering.

But now a year is, you know, just a couple percent of your life, however old you might be.

If you're 20, a year is no longer 20% of your life, it's only 5% of your life.

And when you become 50, a year is only 2% of your life, right?

So years seem to go by faster because you have that incredible history.

Your perception of time changes as you age.

There seems to be something like that going on here.

For God 1000 years is but as yesterday, God has existed forever.

And so God has this grand perspective, or as but yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night.

Second Peter picks up on this language from Psalm 90.

So in his epistle, Peter writes in Second Peter 3, verse 8, Do not overlook this 1 fact, beloved, that with the Lord 1 day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as 1 day.

Now this is gonna be a little bit of a tangent from what I want to accomplish today, but in the context of these verses, sometimes people come up with different theories.

If a day is like a thousand years for God, maybe we can come up with some kinds of different theories.

And 1 of those theories has been the theory of the cosmic week.

That if for God 1, 000 years is like a day, then maybe the 6 day creation week corresponds to 6, 000 years of salvation history.

And what some people have tried to do is use this to actually figure out Jesus is coming back.

Jesus is gonna come back in 2020, whatever the year is, because they've done this calculation, and they're like, okay, there's 6 days of creation, so there's 6, 000 years of history, 4, 000 before Christ came, 2, 000 after, so from the ministry of Christ to, oh my goodness, Jesus is coming back next year, right?

Some people have advanced these theories.

I'm going back to Irenaeus, 1 of the church fathers in the second century.

03 Given the Laws of Nature, Are Miracles Possible?

So we're continuing this seminar on questioning faith, and I think we can jump in.

So maybe as we're getting started here, I'm curious, who here is your first GYC?

Your first time at GYC, that's incredible.

Okay, keep your hand up if you've been to at least 5.

Okay, so if you're here for the first time or for the eighth time, I hope you're having a good experience here at GYC.

Have they announced what's going to be next year?

OK, they're going to announce it tomorrow.

OK, this is we've been talking about questioning faith, questions about faith, questions I've wrestled with, questions perhaps you or your friends have wrestled with, trying to make sense of God, the universe, and eternity.

Yesterday we talked about faith in science, has science proven or disproven that there's a creator, and what was God doing before the universe, talked about God as Trinity and what God was doing in his eternal nature.

Today we want to talk about God's interaction with the world, are miracles possible given the laws of nature?

We have scientific world follows law and order, are miracles possible?

And then right after that, our next presentation will be on if God knows what we're going to do, are we really free?

God has foreknowledge, if he knows what's going to happen, do we have free will?

I think it's the time for testimony, then we have lunch, and then we'll come back with the last session on won't we get bored living forever?

Right, forever is an awfully long time, and other questions about eternity.

Really excited about where we're building up to with that.

I'm a professor of mathematics at Andrews University, chair of the mathematics department.

And this is session 3, Given the Laws of Nature, Are Miracles Possible?

Last week I was listening to a little snippet of a Christmas message someone was giving talking about Christmas And as they were going through the Christmas story, they got to the part of the story that talks about the angel coming to Mary, the angel saying to Mary that you will give birth, the angel and Mary going, how is this possible?

The angel saying the Holy Spirit will come upon you.

And the speaker, when talking about the Christmas story, they said, of course now we know better that virgins don't give birth to babies.

And I just thought it was such a curious comment for someone to make.

But it expresses a sentiment that maybe you've heard in some form before, that the authors of the Bible, they were superstitious, everyone back then believed in all kinds of things like virgins giving birth, or the dead coming back to life, or people walking on water, or that water could be turned into blood, or into wine, or that animals talk, snakes or donkeys or whatever it is.

So back then, people were superstitious, had all these superstitious beliefs.

But now, thanks to science and reason, we know better.

Have you come across a sentiment in any forum that back then they were kind of superstitious, had all these myths?

What's curious about this sentiment is when you look at the account, Mary being told that she's going to give birth, what was Joseph's reaction?

This wasn't something that everyone's like, oh, okay, I guess virgins just give birth.

This is a thing that happens in the world.

This isn't a discovery of modern science people have known for thousands of years that someone who, you know, how babies are made, right, this isn't a new discovery.

Yes, you know, we've had lots of great advances in medical science the last couple of decades.

But it's no mystery, no surprise, that when someone's dead, they stay dead.

So this sentiment that now we know better, my goodness, for all of human history, people have known these things, that the dead stay dead, that you can't walk out on water, that animals don't talk, right?

These are not surprises, these are not recent discoveries of science.

So there's something suspicious about this account of now we know better.

So what I want to do today is I want to examine where the sentiment came from.

Where do we get this idea that now we are so much more enlightened, that now we know better than the biblical authors, and then examine the possibility of miracles.

So what I want to do is I want us to engage with an influential philosopher who wrote in the 1700s, 18th century, David Hume.

What David Hume was doing was he was writing in the Enlightenment and he really led the charge against miracles.

He had a chapter of his book, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, where he made an argument against miracles.

And it really shaped the West to think, well, maybe David Hume's right, Maybe miracles are not as plausible as we once thought.

David Hume writing, he says, a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature.

And as firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle from the very nature of the fact is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.

He's just saying to summarize, 1, he's defining a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature.

But 2, the laws of nature cannot be violated.

A huge impact on the West and people thinking about the plausibility of miracles.

What is your reaction to this argument of David Hume's?

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Questioning Faith: Making Sense of God, the Universe, and Eternity

04 If God Knows What We Are Going to Do, Are We Really Free?

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Questioning Faith: Making Sense of God, the Universe, and Eternity

03 Given the Laws of Nature, Are Miracles Possible?

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