#170 – Putting together a new Christian worldview

Recovering Evangelicals

A retrospective that spotlights a provocative thread with huge theological and existential implications: the primordial cosmic ‘egg’ was fine-tuned, preprogrammed, and front-end loaded!

In this Season Finale, we look back at an incredible series of episodes — most of them in the past few months, but many others from as far back as four years ago — and tease out a thread that’s central to the re-building of our Christian faith. In contrast to the traditional Young Earth Creationist version of the origin of the universe and life, we look at a narrative that has grown out of on-going work done by scientists. Millions of scientists, working over many centuries, many of them self-identifying as Christian, pursuing a divinely-inspired search for truth.

The primordial cosmic egg that ‘exploded’ in the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago — estimated to be “the size of a grapefruit” — was packed with an amazing array of ingredients. Over the past couple months, several world-class astrophysicists, mathematicians, and philosophers talked about those ingredients including quantum mechanics, relativity, string theory, atomic properties, and a couple dozen physical constants (such as the cosmological constant, gravitational constant, speed of light, weight of an electron, and many more). But we also heard in Season One about other ingredients: thermodynamics, entropy, randomness, probability, order, predictability, determinism, massively large numbers, dynamic complexity, chaos theory, and biological evolution.

Those conversations had us repeatedly using three provocative descriptors of that primordial cosmic ‘egg’, descriptors that have huge theological and existential implications.

(1) that ‘egg’ was fine-tuned. Among scholars who are properly trained to weigh in on this aspect of astrophysics, there is little disagreement that this ‘egg’ was incredibly fine-tuned to produce a universe full of ‘useable stuff’ … stars, planets, and a Periodic Table full of elements (from cell-building blocks like hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon and oxygen … all the way up to biochemically-reactive inorganic metals like iron, nickel, copper, manganese, selenium and zinc). The delicate balancing of the various physical constants is often compared to balancing a pencil on its sharpened tip.

(2) that ‘egg’ was preprogrammed to produce life. Other scholars who are properly trained to weigh in on biology and biochemistry will agree that “life hit the ground running.” In the cosmic equivalent of the blink of an eye, almost as soon as Earth formed, thermodynamics, deep-sea hydrothermal vents, and inorganic metals began churning out the building blocks of life, forming ever more complex organic structures, biochemical synthetic pathways and “prebiotic entities” which eventually produced living organisms. The latter then embarked on a journey of inventing and exchanging newer genetic solutions to physiological and environmental problems, until we see the rich, diverse ecosystems of today.

(3) the ‘egg’ was front-end loaded to produce agape-capable beings, and the cognitive machinery in our heads evolved to point us toward something much bigger than ourselves. No one can deny that humans are a religious species. It’s built into our brains. Why?

This episode had us reminiscing over the many conversations we had with dozens of scientists and philosophers, and we called out the episode numbers that each of them featured in so that you can go back and unpack the claims they made.

In the end, we feel that in trying to make sense of how we humans came to this point in space and time, it comes down to a choice …. a leap of faith. One either believes in some kind of a Divinity, or believes that we’re a computer simulation in some multi-dimensional hypercosmic experiment, or believes that we are the product of a mind-breaking stroke of luck, a freak cosmic accident. What’s at stake in that choice? … meaning, purpose, fulfilment, self-actualization.

Once again, this is the end of Season Five. If you want to be notified when future episodes will start coming out, you’ll need to subscribe. In the meantime, check out our archive of 170 episodes: they’re listed chronologically, thematically, and by name of our guest experts. Tell your friends, family, and followers about this rich resource made freely available to anyone who wants to explore aspects of science, theology and philosophy from an exVangelical point of view.

Yet another novel creation by Andrew, to whom we give a huge thank you for your many other contributions over the course of this podcast!

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