[00:00:04] Speaker A: Id the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to id the future. Im Andrew McDermott. On this episode were pleased to share a recent conversation between astronomer doctor Guillermo Gonzalez and author and teacher Doctor Ken Boa on the Explorers podcast. The topic is Doctor Gonzalez's passion for astronomy and the wonders of the cosmos.
In this discussion, Doctor Gonzalez explains how the gift of a telescope at eight years old kicked off a lifelong passion and career in astronomy.
Gonzalez argues that everyone has a natural born curiosity about the wonder and beauty of the night sky, even if it can get stifled sometimes by higher education or atheistic philosophies.
Gonzalez talks about his recent young adult novel, the Farm at the center of the universe, and his hope that it will encourage youngsters to look at the world with a fresh perspective.
He also touches on some of the arguments he makes with Doctor J. Richards in the privileged planet.
Before closing, the conversation turns to the importance of having what host Ken Boa calls epistemic humility, the openness and curiosity to follow the evidence wherever it leads as we seek to understand the world around us.
Now let's listen in to Doctor Guillermo Gonzalez and Doctor Ken Boa.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: Welcome to explorers. I'm Ken Boa and I'm with my guest Guillermo Gonzalez. And Guillermo and I both share a lifetime love of astronomy.
We were talking about this just a moment ago where my own love for these things was stimulated by a book that I read when I was 14. But welcome though to our time together.
[00:02:00] Speaker C: Thanks Ken. I'm happy to be here with you.
[00:02:02] Speaker A: Yeah, thank you. When I was 14 years old, I was given this book that came out, LaRouche's Encyclopedia of Astronomy. It was a massive piece of work and I'm just looking at some of the old photographs and things of this nature. And it was kind of cutting edge at the time and the idea of what the moon would be like and Mars and so forth. And it was, it was quite an extraordinary experience for me because it created a real love for the subject. So this images of the moon and things of this sort like that. So it was massive undertaking for me as a boy to go through this thing, but it stimulated such a love for the topic. I had my own telescope and began to explore things. I still remember my first look at the ring nebula in Lyra and some of these extraordinary things that I'd never seen before. But seeing them through a telescope and having moments as well of a sense of wonder, a sense of awe, a sense of almost a kind of a terror as it were, when I came to realize I'm not looking up.
I'm looking down. There's no up and down. And that I'm surrounded in this sea of mystery. And those were ineffable experiences that created in me a kind of a longing for something that would be rich and profound. But that's what stimulated my going to case Institute of Technology, which at that time was called, that later became western reserve University, but to study astronomy. So we have a little bit of similarity in our early background.
[00:03:40] Speaker C: I didn't realize you went to case Western. Did you know Earl luck?
[00:03:46] Speaker A: No, I don't think I did, no.
[00:03:48] Speaker C: Okay. He was an astronomer there at Case Western.
[00:03:51] Speaker A: Yeah, I may have been there earlier than him. I was there. I'm an old guy.
[00:03:58] Speaker C: Well, I think we share some history, because I grew up also loving astronomy. I grew up in a large, light polluted city, Miami, Florida.
But nevertheless, there was still enough visibility of the stars, especially when I was growing up. It wasn't quite as populated as it is now that I was fascinated. I probably got my first small refracting telescope for Christmas when I was around, I don't know, eight, seven or eight years old. And even that little tiny thing, I was fascinated to look at the stars. And like you, I felt an awe and a wonder. And my love for science, especially astronomy, started at that early age. And also I felt strongly there was something behind this.
This stimulated a response on my part of a strong belief that there had to be a mind behind all this.
So I think we share very similar experiences.
I then went on and became an amateur astronomer. Started with astrophotography early on, taking pictures of the planets, the sun, the moon. Built an observatory in my backyard with my dad's help. Roloff roof with an eight inch s of a Newtonian. I got used.
And then I eventually ate.
That was a bit more portable.
[00:05:38] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:05:40] Speaker C: But then I went on and got undergraduate degrees in astronomy and physics and eventually a PhD in astronomy. And so I feel really blessed. I was able to pursue my lifelong passion in astronomy. And ever since then, I've always had this same kind of belief or idea that I had a fascination for science, a love for science, and a belief that there had to be a God behind all this, a mind.
And those were kind of parallel tracks on my life, each supporting the other, you might say.
[00:06:20] Speaker A: Yes. So they reciprocally interacted. Did you ever have a time of doubt or wondering because of the narrative, that is the narrative, materialistic narrative, certainly.
[00:06:31] Speaker C: Through college I had. It was probably the years where I had the most out. I went to a secular university, University of Arizona, in Tucson.
Tucson being the astronomy capital of the world.
[00:06:46] Speaker A: What a wonderful place for the sky.
[00:06:48] Speaker C: That's right.
[00:06:49] Speaker A: I. I mean, I was out there speaking, and I couldn't. I was just absolutely astonished by what I saw. And I was at a conference, and it was interesting because it was a christian conference, FCCI, but I noticed nobody ever was looking at the night sky. It was. No one ever went out to behold the wonder that was there.
[00:07:07] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
So, yeah. So I think this fascination with the night sky with a. The starry heavens is something, of course, that's been, not just a few people experienced. I think many, many people experience this. And of course, you have David writing in the psalms 19, one, that the heavens declare the glory of God.
And so it goes back to ancient times and other cultures, not just jewish christian cultures, but pagan cultures, with Aristotle in particular, and the stoics also saying that just the beauty and the wonder and the grandeur of nature and the heavens in particular point beyond themselves. Yes, of course, as pagans, they believed in many gods, but they believed it pointed to deity, basically. So it's a universal experience throughout history that people have had this response to seeing the starry heavens. Unfortunately, today, with bright lights and cities, fewer people are experiencing that.
But I think at least when people go out to the country and camping and such things, they can experience it for at least for a little while.
[00:08:30] Speaker A: Now, that makes good sense. I have found that one antidote for the arrogance that sometimes comes upon us. When you want to get a better perspective of your orientation in this world, a good way to do that is to spend 20 minutes looking up at the sky from a hammock or something like that, on a bright, starry night in an area that's not light polluted, and that'll get you rather humble in a short order of time. Have you noticed that?
[00:09:01] Speaker C: Yes. I don't think I've met anybody who, after looking up at the night sky on a clear, very dark location, windless night, I don't think I met anybody who just shrugs their shoulders and says, so what? No, so what? They're all enthralled. Even atheists, you know, feel attracted to this. There's some kind of response in them, you know, like Neil degrasse Tyson, atheist, astronomer, and others.
The wonder, even the beauty in nature and the starry sky is probably the. Probably one of the most obvious aspects, that is the beauty of nature and the grandeur. There are others, of course, where people universally would say, oh, that's beautiful looking out at nature.
[00:09:50] Speaker A: Yes, we're creating this exploring, encountering beauty app now. It's kind of a platform for both a mobile and a desktop platform with 288 journeys looked at the microcosm, the MidI cosm, the biosphere, and then the macrocosm. And considering we've broken into twelve categories and then breaking into 24 journeys within each of them, so what I'm wanting to do with that app is to draw people back to a greater acuity of appreciation and an imagination of the glory of the wonders that they behold that transcend their grasp. I can't even understand if I put. I remember grabbing a hibiscus just the other day, just now. Today I was looking at this day lily and just feeling the texture and looking at the anther on it and the beautiful structure of this real. I can't even understand this flower, let alone an insect, let alone a bird and so forth. Am I going to understand the mind of God?
[00:10:57] Speaker C: That's right. I think young people in particular are drawn to, they have such a curiosity about the world around them, and they're drawn to study things like this, flowers and insects and looking at the stars and so on, I think it's something that has to be kind of forced out of them, or maybe when they go to college, but they're naturally born with this curiosity in this world.
[00:11:22] Speaker A: I think that's right. I think they have that fundamental curiosity that somehow is lost often when we gain a sense of critical realism, or so we suppose, we put away childish things. And I understand that. And Paul talks about putting away childish things. But I think there's a second naivete, Guillermo, that is what's called the second naivete, or the childlikeness, going from childishness to childlikeness. And in that respect, one becomes more curious, not less, and becomes supple and fluid and amazed and astonished by beauty that they hadn't even noticed before. And they begin to create kind of an acuity.
I'm seeking to amplify people's apprehension of God by means of the beauty of the created order. Even though fallen, it redounds and we're immersed in splendor and wonder. Is that something you're trying to get people to do more?
[00:12:20] Speaker C: Yes.
And in fact, I just wrote a book for children, for young adults called the Farm at the center of the universe.
And it doesn't promote geocentrism. It has nothing to do with that. But the book really follows a 13 year old boy as he spends a week at his grandpa's farm in Iowa and his grandpa teaches him different things from the book of nature, one page at a time. That book of nature being the world around us and looking through a microscope, looking through a telescope, examining different kinds of rocks and what they teach us and so on.
And so it's a book that's meant to encourage youngsters to have this wonder about the world around them again and look at the world with new eyes and learn how to read this grand book and think of it as a book that's teaching us something, teaching us lessons.
Yes. Yeah.
[00:13:27] Speaker A: No, no, that's exactly right.
That, to me, is a way of seeing a vision of the greatness of the created order. And when you think about Jodie Foster, remember that the film that came out. Yeah. With contact. You remember the argument that was used in that? I want you to address yourself to that, because that was the fundamental argument that what a waste of space.
[00:13:53] Speaker C: Oh, yes, yes.
[00:13:55] Speaker A: Remember that notion that. Yeah. And they were using the Drake equation at that time, remember, when they were only about 50, 20 components that could qualify. So the illusion would be that it would be populated by vast numbers of these.
[00:14:08] Speaker C: Yeah. How could the universe be so vast and exactly empty and not have other life out there?
[00:14:14] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:14] Speaker C: And it's also, you know, so even if we are the only inhabited planet, that could be the case, if the designer and creator of the universe is God. And the concept of waste really has no meaning there. No.
So it's not even a relevant argument or criticism. If it's God that we're talking about, waste is nothing relevant. I mean, and of course, we don't know all the purposes of the creation from a theological perspective. We might, you know, might know a couple of them, but we don't know all God's purposes. And if he wanted to make a universe with only one inhabited planet, that's not wasteful and it's part of the his purposes.
But, you know, I also wrote another book called the Privileged Planet.
[00:15:11] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:15:12] Speaker C: In which I explore the physical sciences, in particular in astronomy and cosmology, and show how our place in the universe is particularly well suited to learn about the universe around us, to learn in all the scientific fields, it seems to be optimal. And I think of the universe around us as an arena for discovery.
[00:15:35] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:15:36] Speaker C: That's one of the purposes of the universe. So God created this vast universe with this tiny earth in it for us to discover its vastness and the power behind the cause that must have created it, and also to learn that it had even a beginning.
[00:15:55] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:15:56] Speaker C: That's how I first learned about beginner.
[00:15:58] Speaker A: It has. It has to have a beginning, and it has to have a beginner, because it has to be infinite and eternal to be the one who is the wellspring of all that is matter, energy, science.
Matter, energy, and space and time. That whole thing, he had to speak it into being, but he cannot be a part of the created order. He has to transcend that. So those implications.
But that's how I first learned about you, is from reading the privileged planet. You and Jay Richards. And I have used your book a lot in that respect. And just this mindset of seeing that it took something this vast, something this impressive, this complex and rich, for us to even have this conversation.
[00:16:49] Speaker C: Right.
I mean, science, the fact that we have science, there's so much that has to go right. I mean, just we were talking about the starry night sky, the starry heavens. It doesn't take much for us not to be able to see those stars, to have nights. We have to have a planet that rotates so that we have days and nights. We have to be in a planetary system with not too many other very close planets or moons, or in particular, a multiple star system where we would have perpetually bright skies.
We have to have an atmosphere that's at least partly cloudy to clear. We can't be living on a completely cloud covered planet like Venus, or the giant planets or the moon Titan.
And so there's a lot, really, that's to go right. We have to be around, or there has to be stars sufficiently close to us and sufficiently bright that we can actually see them with our unaided eyes.
So a great deal has to go right.
[00:17:56] Speaker A: A great deal has to go right.
You mentioned the galactic habitable zone as well, and then the idea as well, of being not though, in that gas. And so that you're able to see through. So, as you say, a privileged place to be able to observe the cosmos. It's more than just a chance collocation of random components, but so many things work together in concert.
[00:18:24] Speaker C: That's right. To give us the best overall platform for making discoveries in the nearby and distant universe.
[00:18:33] Speaker A: How many of these fine tuning parameters would you now list if you were to kind of do a guesstimate of them?
[00:18:40] Speaker C: I haven't tried to list them.
Well, and you have to separate them. You have to separate, of course, what I call local fine tuning, which are the particular parameters of a planet.
[00:18:54] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:18:55] Speaker C: Orbit around the star. The star orbits where the star is in the galaxy, what kind of galaxy you orbit, and so on. Those are what I call local parameters because we know they can vary. There are different kinds of stars, different kinds of planets, and then there are the cosmological parameters, the physical constants. It's like the masses of the fundamental particles, the quarks, the electron, the strengths of the fundamental forces, the initial conditions, how fast the universe started off expanding, the initial entropy of the universe, and then even the very forms of the laws themselves.
I like to separate those two different categories of the physical laws and constants and initial conditions versus the local parameters. And as far as the local parameters go, there's probably, I don't know, it's hard to put a number on it. But the important ones, two to three dozen of important parameters like the mass of the Earth, the composition of the crust, the thickness of the atmosphere, the distance from the sun, the kind of star we orbit has to be a main sequence star that's roughly one solar mass, the place in the galaxy, and so on. So all those local parameters, I'd say it's hard to put a number but two, three dozen. And then for the physical constants there, there's something like, in terms of the total number of constants, I heard a number not too long ago, it's something on the order of 25 or so, 26.
And several of those require fine tuning. Cosmological constant, the masses of the quarks, the strengths of the four fundamental forces, all those need to be fine tuned, and some of them are quite impressive, like the initial entropy and the cosmological constant value.
So, yeah, and an expert in that area that I would recommend is Luke Barnes, who's written a book with his co author, Geraint Lewis, who's an atheist, was a great collaboration. Luke Barnes being a Christian, Geraint an atheist, and the book on the fine tuning of the physical constants and the initial conditions of the universe.
[00:21:26] Speaker A: Did they have a dialogue about the implications of those constants?
[00:21:30] Speaker C: Yeah, they did. Yeah, they have. Later, towards the end of the book, they get into the implications and does it imply a designer? And so of course Bluetooth Barnes thinks it does.
But they had a friendly dialogue exchange, and the book is really a fun read.
[00:21:51] Speaker A: The whole area as well, of math being a fundamental part of nature rather than just something humans came up with, seems to be an intriguing growing issue as well. The dynamics of the fractal systems and so forth, the Mandelbrot and all these other components that we can see in all kinds of aspects of wonder that you see.
And then there's been a debate as to whether some of these things were actually just imposed upon it, or whether we were discovering that.
[00:22:28] Speaker C: That's the debate. Yeah. Between the two sides. Do we discover it or do we invent it? And I'm not a philosopher, so my opinions on this are not very valuable. But, you know, I just. In the physical sciences, I know that there's been writings, people saying how it's kind of remarkable how the world is very mathematical.
And Eugene Wigner, in particular, remarked how there's the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:23:05] Speaker C: Back around 1960.
And it just seems that you develop these mathematical models, and just they seem to often have an application in nature that's very direct, and that's kind of surprising. And how the simplicity of the laws, like the law of gravity, one over r squared law, made it easy to discover and easy to parameterize the laws. The important laws tend to be rather simple, simple dependencies or relations. And that was something that Robin Collins has written about philosopher at Messiah College, how the laws, the mathematics of the physical laws themselves, the way they are, is helped, and they're just us discovering them.
[00:23:53] Speaker A: Yes, there's a kind of an elegance to that. I was reading Jonathan Witt on the periodic table of the elements, for example, and just the progressive development where each insight led to another insight. And it was almost as if there was hints that were there, provided for us. And once we got that hint, we were ready for the next one. And it was almost like journeying down and down and down until we realized we're not just looking at a pattern, we're looking at a symphony.
[00:24:20] Speaker C: That's right. It's like if somebody's kind of a patient teacher, and he's giving a simple example to start off with, and then he's giving us more challenging examples later on as we learn those first levels.
And just with the law of gravity. And start off with Kepler coming up with his three laws of planetary motion, the most complex of which is the third one, there's a square of the orbital period is proportional to the cube of the mean distance from the sun. And then Newton showed, hey, I can, using my law of gravity and laws of motion, I can confirm that third law of Kepler. And then Einstein came along and said, well, we need to reconceptualize gravity. It's not really newtonian, but we can tell there's a difference in high gravity situations. And so he came up with yet another conceptualization of gravity.
But, of course, for Einstein to do his reconceptualization, he needed the easier Newton's version before him to get going on his general theory of relativity.
[00:25:30] Speaker A: Yes. And it appears that each time we discover something new, it raises new questions we weren't able to ask before. And so it's not as if we're now solving all the problems, but actually learning enough to know how little we know. And it becomes actually an exercise in what I would call epistemic humility, that the best scholars are the ones who seem to know how little they know.
[00:25:51] Speaker C: Yeah, that's true. Right. And each step along the way, as I discussed in the privileged planet, our solar system and our universe has accommodated us to discovering these laws, especially gravity, with the solar system. I call it a planetary playpen.
[00:26:06] Speaker A: That's a nice way to put it. Planetary play pen. Did you use that in your, in your book? Yes, the former at the center of the universe. I like that, a planetary playpen.
But it seems to me, though, that we're looking at, again what's often described as inference to the best explanation, the idea of abduction and the idea of a turtle on a fence post. There aren't many options that you have there. And what would be the best inference?
[00:26:39] Speaker C: That one.
It probably didn't climb up on that fence.
[00:26:45] Speaker A: It probably wasn't a gust of wind that blew it up there either.
[00:26:48] Speaker C: I should have used that example in my children's book. Instead, I used a somewhat more violent example to discuss in first the best explanation of detective finding somebody in a room who had been stabbed in the back. So is the best explanation an accident or suicide or somebody murdered him?
[00:27:09] Speaker A: Yeah, that's more dramatic, but it works. But that's what you're doing. You're kind of doing a cosmic sleuthing. And it's a sort of a thing that if a person, person likes mystery, and I wouldn't be surprised that you like good mysteries, because we're dealing with mysteries and we're dealing with a solution, elegant solutions sometimes, that come out of these complex possibilities.
[00:27:28] Speaker C: That's right. Because we're looking at nature around us as a kind of artifact. The whole thing is like a giant artifact with many parts. And we want to try to figure out where did all this come from, what caused it, and we got to put all the clues together.
[00:27:47] Speaker B: That was Doctor Guillermo Gonzalez discussing his love for astronomy and his books, the Privileged Planet and the Farm at the center of the universe. The interview originally aired on the Explorers podcast. We're grateful to Reflections ministries for permission to share it here.
We'll include links to Doctor Gonzalez's books in the show notes for this episode. You can also hop over to privilegedplanet.com to learn more about a newly revised and updated 20th anniversary edition of the Privileged Planet. That's privilegedplanet.com.
for id the future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:28:27] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org dot this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
