Excepted from our series “The New Scientific Evidence that Points to the Existence of God – Part 1.” Edited for publication. See our store at jashow.org to order this entire series.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Let’s talk about some of the big discoveries of the 20th century. You claim that these discoveries are not what scientific atheists should expect to find. One of those discoveries is that the universe had a beginning. How did astronomers first come to suggest this?
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, this is a fascinating story. It’s a kind of astronomical detective story. And it starts in the beginning of the 20th century. There was an American astronomer named Vesto Slipher.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Right.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: And Vesto is looking at the nebular structures in the night sky through his telescope. And as he’s analyzing the light coming from these distant nebulae, he realizes that the light is redder than it should otherwise look. The spectral lines have been shifted in a way towards the red end of the electro violet spectrum. So, for your viewers, they probably know that if you shine light through a prism, it will separate into different colors, from red to violet. And the red light corresponds to light with longer wavelengths. So if an object in the night sky is moving away from us, then the light would get stretched out, and it would look redder than it should otherwise look.
Dr. John Ankerberg: So when you saw the object it would have a redshift on it.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: It would have a reddish hue, if you will. Now, there’s different ways the scientists detect that. Now, at the time, no one knew whether these nebular structures were just clouds of gas around stars within our own Milky Way galaxy, or whether they were, in fact, separate galaxies beyond our own. And this was debated right up into the 1920s. But after the 1920s another astronomer came along, named Edwin Hubble. And Hubble began to use these great domed telescopes, the 100-inch Hooker Telescope in particular, in Southern California. And he was able to also see these nebular structures. But he began to use new methods of estimating distance that were a product of the work of the Harvard astronomer Henrietta Leavitt. And she had worked with observing strange kind of stars called Cepheid variables, and on the basis of her work, astronomers were able to develop a method of estimating distance. And one of the things that Hubble discovered was that the Andromeda Galaxy, or the Andromeda Nebula as it was called at the time, was 900,000 light years away, whereas the whole scope of the Milky Way was only 300,000 light years across.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Which is what the scientists before that time, they thought that was the entire universe was right there.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, some did and some didn’t; it was debated. But what Hubble was able to do was to settle the question and show that this particular nebula was a galaxy beyond our Milky Way.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: And as they measured distances to many of these other nebular structures, it became apparent that we live in a vast universe. In fact, the estimate is now that we have 200 billion, or maybe even two trillion galaxies in the observable universe. But here’s the thing that was even more important. As the astronomers began to analyze the light coming from these distant galaxies, they discovered that nearly all of them were redshifted. The light was redshifted. Another illustration of this idea is the Doppler shift that your science teacher may have told you about, how the pitch of a train whistle will drop as the train recedes. And that’s because the sound waves also stretch out as a result of a receding object.
Dr. John Ankerberg: But if it’s coming at you,…
Dr. Stephen Meyer: The sound waves would bunch, and the pitch would rise. Or in the case of light, it would go to the violet end of the spectrum. But with the exceptions of some very, very close at hand galaxies, the galaxies throughout the universe are propagating light which is redshifted in relationship to us. And Hubble further found that the further away the galaxies are, the more redshifted the light is, the faster they’re moving away from us.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Right.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Now, the only way to explain that is with something like a roughly spherically symmetric expansion, like a balloon blowing up.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Right.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: And so the implication of the redshift evidence was that the universe is expanding outward in all directions of space in a spherically symmetric way. Now, that’s pretty mind-blowing. We live in an expanding universe. But then it gets even more intriguing when you begin to think in your mind’s eye what the universe would have been like at any finite time in the past. If you go back 100 years,...
Dr. John Ankerberg: If you roll it back.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Yes, like those cartoons where suddenly they make everybody go backwards. So if you go back 100 years, the universe would have been smaller; or 1,000 years, smaller; or a million years, still smaller; or a billion years. However old you think the universe is, eventually you’re going to go back to a point where that expansion would have had to start; you can’t back extrapolate any further. There’s a beginning point to the expansion, and arguably therefore a beginning to the universe itself. And so the observational astronomy of the 1920s, and the evidence provided by Hubble, another colleague of his at Caltech named Humason, implied an expanding universe that was expanding outward from a definite beginning point.
Dr. John Ankerberg: And that blew everybody’s mind.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: It did. Because throughout the 19th century, and really going back to Aristotle, the assumption of most philosophers and many scientists was that the universe was eternal and self-existent. And one of the leading astrophysicists of the time, Sir Arthur Eddington, who actually informed Einstein about the redshift evidence, still didn’t like the idea that the universe had a beginning.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Right.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: He said, “Philosophically, the notion of the universe starting with a bang,” he said, “is preposterous. It leaves me cold.” And a later astronomer explained why this was so upsetting to so many astronomers. He said, “An infinitely old universe,” this is Robert Dicke from Princeton. He said “An infinitely old universe would relieve us of the necessity of [explaining] the origin of matter at any finite time in the past.” But if the universe has a beginning, we have to look to something beyond matter, beyond the material realm, beyond the physical realm of matter, space, time, and energy, as a cause of that beginning point.
(continued in Part 2)