Neil DeGrasse Tyson Archives - DOES GOD EXIST? TODAY

November 8, 2021November 7, 2021

Are We in a Matrix or Base Reality?

When speaking on evidence for the existence of God, John Clayton often begins by saying that first, you must believe that you exist. He says, “If you don’t believe that you exist, you have more problems than I want to deal with.” Some people today are suggesting that we do not exist in reality. The question we need to consider is, “Are we in a matrix or base reality?” Let’s examine what that means.

Philosophers have often contemplated the question of whether there is any reality. A philosophy professor I once learned from said that some of his associates begin their philosophy class by suggesting to their students that nothing is real, including the walls of the lecture hall. However, he pointed out that the professor always exits through the doorway at the end of the lecture. Are the walls real? Is anything real? Are we in a matrix or a base reality?

In 1999, there was a movie titled The Matrix in which people were made to believe that they lived in a surreal world where they could have superhuman powers and face life-threatening dangers while all the time being strapped to a chair with electrodes connected to their bodies. The idea must have found a sympathetic audience because it spawned three sequels, with a fourth scheduled for next month.

Now, some scientists are suggesting that we are in a simulation. According to one analysis, the chances that we are living in a “base reality” (meaning not a simulation) are about 50-50, with a slight edge to base reality. So people from scientists such as Neil deGrasse Tyson to entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk have suggested that we could be merely characters in a massive video game. To further that concept, we have quantum theory with its “spooky action at a distance” (Einstein’s quote), such as quantum entanglement and superposition.

In 1948, American mathematician Claude Shannon introduced the concept of the bit as a basic unit of information. Computers work with bits, which can have a value of either 0 or 1. By combining millions, billions, or trillions of bits, we can perform complex calculations and create sounds, images, or even videos. That is how modern cameras, televisions, telephones, and computers work. So the question is, “If the universe is a giant computer simulation, a matrix rather than base reality, how many bits would it take to create the simulation?”

Melvin Vopson, a physicist at the University of Portsmouth, England, estimated that the minimum number of bits of information in the visible universe could be around 10⁸⁰. (That is 10, followed by 80 zeros.) If you include dark matter, which we can’t see or detect, it could be ten-trillion times that number.

So, do we believe we are in a matrix or base reality? If we believe that this universe is a computer simulation and we are only a relatively few bits in that matrix, you would have to believe that an infinite intelligence wrote the code for the program. However, it seems to me that a more reasonable explanation is that we are living in a base reality created by an infinite intelligence. The most incomprehensible thing is that the omniscient Creator cares about each one of us. (Read Matthew 6:25-34.)

References: LiveScience.com and Inverse.com

February 22, 2019February 21, 2019

Sex Abuse: A Universal Problem

One of the challenges that all groups face is the problem of sex abuse. My files are full of letters and notes from people from every religion and philosophy including atheism giving personal testimony of sex abuse.

In 2016 we made a series of videos with Jimmy Hinton titled: Sexual Warfare: Safeguarding Churches from Child Predators. It has been interesting to see the response to this series as church leaders have watched it and said, “But we don’t have that problem in our Church.” In reality, all congregations of any size at all in all denominations have a problem that for the most part has gone unrecognized. Our Catholic friends have gotten most of the attention on this issue, but now our Baptist friends are facing the same publicity.

On February 10, 2019, the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News published articles exposing 380 Southern Baptist church workers who have been accused of sexual misconduct over the past 20 years. The 380 include ministers, youth pastors, Sunday school teachers, and church volunteers. Of that number, 220 have been convicted or took plea deals, and dozens more are still in court. More than 700 victims are involved, and leaders at the Southern Baptist Convention are accused of concealing or mishandling victims’ allegations.

We want to emphasize that this is a universal problem. Three women have accused atheist/agnostic celebrity scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson of sex abuse, so the atheist community also struggles with this issue. Of course, the same can be said of politicians.

Our DVD series by Jimmy Hinton is available on loan or at cost to anyone. We encourage leaders of churches, philosophical study groups, and public assistance groups to spend some time profiting from Hinton’s expertise on this subject.

March 7, 2018April 16, 2019

No-Boundary Proposal and the Big Bang

No-Boundary Proposal and Big Bang
The universe had a beginning. For over two thousand years from the time of Aristotle until the twentieth century, the accepted view was that the universe was eternal. It took much of the twentieth century for the evidence to compel scientists to concede that there was a beginning to the cosmos. Finally, in the twenty-first century, it was fully confirmed by observations in space. A thousand years before Aristotle, Moses wrote, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Some scientists are still trying to get around the problem of a beginning with the No-Boundary Proposal.

Why was science reluctant to accept the fact that the universe is not eternal? The simple reason is what that implies and the questions that it creates. If the universe had a beginning, that implies that there is something beyond the material world that we observe. The big question then becomes, “What (or Who) brought everything into being?” This leads to the questions, “Why are we here?” and “What is our purpose?” Those are questions that science is afraid to handle. Indeed, those are questions that science cannot handle.

If there was a beginning, there must have been a beginner…a Creator. That Creator, whether personal or impersonal, would have existed “before the beginning.” Science now suggests that the beginning, or the “Big Bang” as it was derisively dubbed by atheist astronomer Fred Hoyle, was not only the starting point for matter and energy, but also for space and time. It was even the starting point for the laws of physics. So how can science explain the beginning? Brilliant scientists have been working on that problem and some have settled on the No-Boundary Proposal.

Last Sunday on Neil deGrasse Tyson’s National Geographic Channel TV show StarTalk, Stephen Hawking said that he knows the answer. Hawking is probably the world’s best-known living physicist and cosmologist. The heart of Hawking’s proposal of what came before the beginning is the No-boundary Proposal. This proposal, according to Hawking, is that before the Big Bang, time was “bent.” According to Hawking’s earlier statements, if we could go back before the Big Bang, we would find that time (and I presume space and matter/energy), “was always reaching closer to nothing but didn’t become nothing.” In other words, there never was a point where something was produced from nothing. There was never nothing. It just seems that way from our perspective. (*You can see the further explanation by Stephen Hawking on the StarTalk show below.)

In a previous lecture, Hawking stated: “Events before the Big Bang are simply not defined because there’s no way one could measure what happened at them. Since events before the big bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory, and say that time began at the big bang.” This seems to me like a clever way of getting out of speculating on what caused the beginning. It is like saying that the beginning was going on forever and so the beginning never really had a beginning.

Maybe we should call the No-Boundary Proposal the No-Beginning Proposal. It seems to me that this takes us back to Aristotle’s concept of an eternal universe. The difference is that this new proposal says the universe was much more compact before the “beginning.” Is this just a way of getting around the simple statement of Moses in Genesis 1:1?
–Roland Earnst © 2018

*These are Hawking’s words in his interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson, “According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, space and time together form a space-time continuum or manifold which is not flat but curved by the matter and energy in it. I adopt a Euclidean approach to quantum gravity to describe the beginning of the universe. In this, ordinary real time is replaced by imaginary time which behaves like a fourth direction of space. In the Euclidean approach, the history of the universe in imaginary time is a four-dimensional, curved surface like the surface of the Earth but with two more dimensions. Jim Hartle and I proposed a “no-boundary” condition. The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary. In order terms, the Euclidean space-time is a closed surface without end, like the surface of the Earth. One can regard imaginary and real time as beginning at the South Pole which is a smooth point of space-time where the normal laws of physics hold. There is nothing south of the South Pole, so there was nothing around before the big bang.”

December 30, 2017December 4, 2018

Flat Earth Movement Still Alive

A Newsweek article for November 30, 2017, reported that more Americans scoured the internet looking for proof that the Earth is flat in the past 12 months than ever before. The first “Flat Earth International Conference” in September drew 500 “believers.” I put the word believers in quotes because there is no way to tell how many of these folks view the whole thing as a joke, and how many people truly believe in a flat Earth.

Atheist and popularizer of secular humanism Neil DeGrasse Tyson got into the act by “sharing a photoshopped image of the moon on Twitter to undermine Flat-Earthers.” The image shows what a lunar eclipse would look like with a flat Earth. Tyson frequently equates belief in God with the flat Earth mentality. We may shake our heads in wonderment at this whole scenario, but it brings to mind the old proverb, “If people don’t believe in something, they will believe anything.”

While the Bible doesn’t discuss this issue directly, there are passages like Isaiah 40:22, Proverbs 8:27, and Luke 17:30-35 which infer that the Earth is round with daytime and nighttime activities taking place simultaneously. Unfortunately, we see some Christians taking positions on scientific issues that are similar to the Flat-Earthers. When the Bible is put in the same arena with flat Earth believers the Bible’s credibility suffers.

You can intelligently and logically believe that “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” There is massive evidence to support that statement. The same is not true of those who believe the Earth is flat.
–John N. Clayton © 2017