Think it Through: #4 In Science - Romans 1:18-19 Dr. Matt Cassidy interviewing Dr. Walter Bradley

Transcription

1 Think it Through: #4 In Science - Romans 1:18-19 Dr. Matt Cassidy interviewing Dr. Walter Bradley Well, good morning everyone. My name is Matt Cassidy and I am the senior pastor here. We are in a series right now called Think It Through. We are looking at different ways of viewing our faith. We are asking different people to join us to talk about how they are integrating their faith and their vocation, sometimes their experience, sometimes their profession. Today the song we just sang served as a great lead in. We sang, With all creation we sing praise to the King of kings. Today we will talk about how God reveals himself in creation. It is often said that God had revealed himself in two books, the book of nature and the book called the Bible. Today we have a friend, Dr. Walter Bradley, who has degrees in the book of nature. He went to the University of Texas and earned an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering. Later he earned a doctorate in that same field and went on to teach at various places. He will tell you more about that. Dr. Bradley has spoken all over the world. I think the first time I ran into him was in the early 1990 s when I was in Russia teaching the Old Testament. He was over there introducing the idea that God created the heavens and earth to a country that was completely ignorant of the existence of God for 70+ years. It was quite the time to be there. Dr. Bradley, tell us a little bit about yourself to the church. Well, I enjoyed seven wonderful years in Austin going to the University of Texas back in the 1960 s and then went on to teach for eight years in Colorado. I taught for 24 years in College Station at Texas A & M. I now teach at Baylor. I actually took the opportunity to go to Baylor because I wanted to do some different kinds of research, which I will be talking about later in this program, which I could have done at A & M but I thought it was a better fit at Baylor because I wanted it to be something that was explicitly Christian and not just implicitly Christian. I have a wonderful wife of forty-five years, a daughter and son who are both married, and seven grandchildren. Some of them are here if they will stand up. I told them they had to stand up on cue. Today we are going to be looking at this: Romans 1:20 For since the creation of the world, God s invisible qualities -- His eternal power and divine nature -- have been clearly seen, being understood what has been made so that men are without excuse. Think it Through.4.Science.docx Page 1 of 22

2 The idea there is that God has revealed Himself, His invisible attributes, His divine nature in creation. You could even see in the writings of Socrates that he comes to a pretty strong understanding of God s divine nature by studying philosophy and the creation around it. But you are going to talk to us today specifically about how faith and science work together, how they support and supplement one another. Let s begin with a cover story in Time Magazine in December, 1992, What does Science Tell Us About God? There were so many things that had been going on in the area of science for about forty years at the time this was written that were sort of surprising because I think many people, including some scientists, had the idea that the more we study the natural world, the more we will understand how to explain everything and that it will not make belief in God impossible, simply unnecessary. I think there has been a surprise over that period of time as what we in fact found in many cases seemed to point much more clearly to the need for some sort of an intelligent creator to account for what we were actually discovering in the natural world and that the natural laws alone seem to be inadequate to account for some of the things we found in nature. This was the beginning of a whole series of magazine articles. Newsweek did one in Other magazines have done them since. I think Time has actually done other articles on this since that time. As the story unfolds, it becomes for me equally intriguing and exciting because it really tells us that science is discovering things about the universe that I believe show the fingerprints of God many, many places in His physical world, which is not surprising. Romans 1:18-20 actually promises that in fact is the case. Let me make an important disclaimer before we get into this. One cannot ultimately scientifically prove or disprove the existence of God. So the claim this morning is not that we are going to prove the existence of God but that we are going to look at nature and see if in fact the nature of nature is one that makes it more reasonable to believe that there is some sort of an intelligent creator or whether the universe seems to be perfectly understandable in terms of just natural laws alone and I think it will be a very interesting journey to see what in fact nature does see. Are there real fingerprints there? Or do we just imagine them because we want to? Right. And that has to do with the limitations of science. The question about the existence of God is a philosophical question. Science has its boundaries; it needs to be Think it Through.4.Science.docx Page 2 of 22

3 repeatable; it is contained usually within something we can feel, touch, or taste. All we can do now is look at evidence and make statements of faith but some things require more faith than others. That is the journey we will be on today. Absolutely and points to the most reasonable explanation. So, let s look at six major platforms of evidence. There are in fact more than six but we are going to spend our time briefly looking at six different places where I think the fingerprints of God are very evident. But I will leave it to you to judge for yourself as we go through. We will talk a little about: Big Bang Cosmology Mathematical form that nature takes Fine tuning of the universal constants Remarkable requirement for initial conditions Planet earth: a highly improbable occurrence even in our own universe; hostile as it is in most places for a place like planet earth which is remarkably unique and ideally suited for complex conscious life The amazing origin of life We will do all of these briefly. I am going to send Matt a chapter that covers all of this in great detail that he can make available to those of you who say as Paul Harvey would, I would like the rest of the story. We can t do it all in 30 minutes. To set expectations, we are going to fan through these slides rather quickly. Dr. Bradley said he won t be teaching anyone anything new because we don t have time for that. We will be reminding some of you some things that you might have learned in high school or college. So, if you get it, you will get it. If you don t, you won t today but you will see some pieces of puzzles come together rather nicely. I would say that there are two levels of understanding. Those of you who have the right background, I will put up a few equations which you will fully appreciate. For those of you who don t, don t worry about it. You can understand it without the math, just in a different way. So nobody is going to get left out. Think it Through.4.Science.docx Page 3 of 22

4 Big Bang Cosmology Let s start with Big Bang Cosmology and how important that has been for the nature of God. I think if you go back to the early part of the 20 th century, the dominant theory of the universe was that it was a universe that was infinitely old and infinite in expanse. It simply existed forever. This was a position that was very satisfying to the average atheist because they like the idea of a universe that eternally existed. If the universe eternally existed, it didn t need to have a first cause. It didn t have to have some explanation for that huge first effect. They also like the idea that in an infinite universe makes that which would otherwise seem quite improbable in fact probable. So for both reasons, this was a position that was enthusiastically supported by atheists and, I think, accepted by many scientists at that time. Carl Sagan was a big promoter of billions and billions of years. You need that to make some things happen. Yes. Now, in 1929 a new theory was proposed and it was because of some observations that had been made. When people were doing astronomy, they would look in many different directions and no matter which direction they looked, they saw the universe receding, moving away from them. It would almost imply, at least in a simple sense, that they were at the center of the universe. But they knew that was not the case. If I brought a round balloon this morning, if I had put many small dots on it, and then I began to blow that balloon up, as the balloon expanded, the dots would all recede from each other. So each dot is getting farther and farther from adjacent dots as the balloon stretches and becomes larger and larger. Somebody came up with this idea that maybe this is why the universe appears as it does to us. We are sitting on one of those dots and as the balloon expands, everything moves farther away from us. Sure enough, this ultimately became formalized into a much more elegant theory, but that is the kernel of the idea. It was hypothesized, if the balloon is expanding and over time getting larger, then if you go back in time, you would assume at some point it must have been at one place, at one point in time. In fact, the idea of the Big Bang was that the universe did indeed begin at Think it Through.4.Science.docx Page 4 of 22

5 essentially a point in which it began in a fiery explosion and it was blown into existence -- created as best we can tell out of nothing. This also suggested two critically important things philosophically. One was that the universe is not infinite in its existence. It is very finite. It also suggested a second important thing -- it is not infinite in its expanse. In fact, it has been expanding and we can sort of see the size of the universe. We can determine roughly how big it is and how old it is. These were ideas that were going to completely confound the idea of the Steady State Theory. These were at loggerheads for about thirty-six years. In 1965, with the discovery of the background radiation, which had been predicted by the Big Bang, you might think of this as the afterglow of this big cosmic explosion. The Big Bang became essentially universally accepted, I think, by cosmologists and the Steady State Theory pretty much died a quick death at that point in time. Now, what are the philosophical implications of the Big Bang? Stephen Hawking, one of the famous cosmologists of our time and also a very famous agnostic, puts it this way in his book A Brief History of Time : So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. --- In his book, A Brief History of Time, he goes to a lot of trouble to try to figure out how we can rationalize some alternative to a universe that began, which is what the Big Bang basically implies, and does it very unsuccessfully. As he himself later admitted, he made too many really kind of wild assumptions in that book, trying too hard to prove his point. Robert Jastrow, one of the most famous astronomers of our time, the original director of the Goddard Space Center, a professor at Columbia University, was invited to give a keynote address at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in This is the most prestigious scientific meeting in the world each year. An invited speaker can speak on whatever they choose. Jastrow shocked people because he is a well-known agnostic by choosing to talk on God and the Astronomers. In this talk he goes through and shows that the early evidence for the Big Bang was really far better than for the Steady State Theory for the universe but that many scientists were unwilling to go there because they did not like the philosophical implications. He goes on to explain how finally with the discovery of the background radiation, the evidence became overwhelming and people sort of reluctantly had to accept that this idea, even though they didn t like the philosophical implications. The concluding line in his speech, which has also been published as a classic Think it Through.4.Science.docx Page 5 of 22

6 book, same title, God and the Astronomers [it is a great read, about 50 minutes long because it is a 50-minute long talk]: For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story (of the Big Bang) ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. Isn t that great? Obviously, scientists had every expectation that the more we learn in science, the more we render belief in God quite unnecessary. Yet the Big Bang did just the opposite. In his presentation and in his book, he also said: It is funny. As you look back at some of the ancient writings such as the book of Genesis, in Genesis 1:3 God says, Let there be light. It is the first creative act. He said, it is interesting: the Big Bang tells us that the universe began in an explosion which created electromagnetic radiation, a portion of which would be light in our spectrum, and that it later condenses into matter. In a way it is sort of interesting to think that the early creative act of God was indeed as we would understand it from what we are learning through astronomy, something that did begin in a fiery explosion with electromagnetic radiation. For those of you who don t know anything about that, don t worry about it. It is not critical. In a subsequent interview with Christianity Today, Jastrow says the following: Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover. Let me summarize the evidence from the Big Bang Theory. Scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports the Big Bang cosmology and Big Bang cosmology clearly, unequivocally supports deism or theism. Because if there is a beginning, that means matter is not eternal. It also means that it is a caused being. In other words, it is not an uncaused cause that is the philosophy for something had to bring it into existence. The fact that it has a beginning means that something had to come before it to cause it into existence. That is a threatening thing for a scientist who needs infinite amount of time and infinite existence for, if nothing else, the Think it Through.4.Science.docx Page 6 of 22

7 odds of things to happen but also for it to be a version of a god. Since there is a beginning, that is taken away from them. If you think of the Big Bang as the first big, big, big effect, then it has to have a bigger yet first cause. That leaves the person who is a committed atheist in a real dilemma. Mathematics Our next one is mathematics. Just looking at the clarity of mathematics does not make sense in a universe that should be random. Correct. The second slide on this is Matt s favorite and you will see that in a minute. If you go back to the early writings of the early most famous giants of the advent of modern science: Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton, all wrote admiringly, as Christians, but also as scientists, about our orderly, mathematical universe. If you take their writings and synthesize them, what they were essentially saying was the following: They believed that God designed the universe, and it was to be expected that all phenomena of nature would follow one master plan. The universe was orderly and thus described by mathematics because God fashioned it that way. Some people might have thought it was a big puzzle. But these people thought no, that is exactly the kind of universe we would expect if there is an infinitely intelligent creator. We would expect Him to do something that has the elegance that we see, the uniformity that we see with the laws of nature. It should be emphasized that the orderliness in nature that makes it possible to describe it with mathematics and it is not the mathematics that makes it orderly. It is the orderliness in nature itself that lends itself to that in the same way that a poet can use words to write some sort of beautiful, creative piece of art so to speak in poem; math is the way that we describe in some sense what God has ultimately created. Here is Matt s favorite slide. I thought I would let him explain this one to you before we move on since it was the one he thought was most interesting. Think it Through.4.Science.docx Page 7 of 22

8 I said, please, please don t explain that. Okay, we won t explain this slide. Either you know it or you don t know it. We are not going to change that this morning. But, here is what is interesting. What is written on this slide are the five Fundamental Laws of Nature. I sat down with my good friend Martin Scully who is a National Academy of Science physicist at Texas A & M and four of his friends. We spent a pretty long night trying to decide what we thought were the most fundamental laws of nature and we came up basically with these five. Now, other things then flow or follow from that. What is interesting is that in a universe of incredible diversity and complexity, you can go back to what I think of as first principles, the fundamental principles, and they are so simple and so elegantly stated in their mathematical form and in their simplicity. You can write all of them on one side of one sheet of paper. Who would have imagined the universe that would have that kind of simplicity to produce the kind of complexity that we see that you could reduce it to math and it can be written on one side of one sheet of paper. Modern physicists have also taken note of this. Eugene Wigner, a Nobel prize winning physicist in an interestingly enough journal of mathematics, some years ago, wrote an Think it Through.4.Science.docx Page 8 of 22

9 article entitled The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in Physical Sciences [1960]. Here is what he had to say in that article: The enormous usefulness of mathematics is something bordering on the mysterious. There is no rational explanation for it. Why is the universe like this? The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. Isn t that great? That is the universe that God has made for us. Math is a gift that we don t deserve. [laughter] That is another interesting point that you might make with regard to this. That is what I heard him say. Albert Einstein, Nobel Laureate in Physics put it this way: The most incomprehensible thing about our universe is its comprehensibility. To put it in simple language, who would have thunk it. Who would have expected a universe that can be so elegantly described in such simple mathematical form? Yet, that is what we have. He goes on in the same article to say one would have expected a universe that was totally chaotic, a universe that could not simply be described period. The fact that it is so neat and tidy and simple and elegant and fully integrated is quite remarkable. Why does the universe assume this elegant mathematical form? Obviously, a rhetorical question but the answer clearly must be that there is a very, very good mathematician behind it who put it together to have this form. It is very satisfying. So the Big Bang gives us a beginning. The mathematical form gives us this certainty that could not be a complex and random act. Universal Constants Now we will go on to your third point, universal constants and what does that mean? This is also something that will be familiar to some of you and all of you, if you have taken any chemistry or physics in high school or in college, if you look in the front or the back of your textbook, on the inside flaps, they always have numbers like the speed of light, Planck s constant, Boltzmann s constant, the unit charge, the gravity force constant, the rest masses of the neutron, the proton, the electron, and a few others. Think it Through.4.Science.docx Page 9 of 22

10 Now, here is a question. Why are these what they are? What would happen if they were different? Originally, people thought well, suppose the speed of light had been 2.0 x 10 8 m/s rather than 3.0? What difference would it make? Was this a lucky guess or are there lots of combinations that work just fine? Or why wouldn t it just be random? Yes, why couldn t it be anything? What they were surprised to find as they began to do cosmological modeling was that small changes in any of these constants produced rather Draconian changes in the nature and the character of the universe, rendering it unsuitable, not just for life as we know it, but almost life of any imaginable type. When you say a small variance, there was a formula up there, 10-27, if it were power, that small of a change, then nothing would exist. Precisely. Here is a simple example. We won t go through the details but let s simply say that I have got to have energy from the sun that is in photons, little packets of energy, that must be exactly the right size so that it facilitates organic reactions and does not destroy organic molecules. It turns out, to meet this requirement from the sun needs to be of exactly the right time, the energy from the sun, to go with the chemistry. In fact, what we find is that it takes six constants, very carefully prescribed, to give us the right balance so that energy packet from the sun is not too big, not too small, just right and just right is a pretty small window. It turns out that there are many, many requirements like this and there probably have been fifteen books written in the last twenty years where people have gone through and showed many, many examples of how small changes in these different constants makes it difficult to imagine how the universe could possibly support life with its different character. Here is what Arno Penzias, Nobel Laureate in Physics, says with regard to this: Astronomy leads us to a unique event, That would be the Big Bang. a universe which was created out of nothing, and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life. The delicately balanced here, he is talking about the fine-tuning of these universal constants. Think it Through.4.Science.docx Page 10 of 22

11 In the absence of an absurdly-improbable accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say supernatural, plan. One might say One might say. Initial Conditions So, now we are looking at the initial conditions that must have been necessary for life to exist or things to exist. We are working our way into the realm of improbability, is what is happening in our outline. Okay, initial conditions for those of you who know differential equations [and there must be at least three of you here this morning], this has to do with what we call boundary conditions. We describe everything in the physical world in terms of differential equations. You have to get the initial conditions right or you don t get the outcome that you have in mind. Here is one simple example out of Scientific American, 1999 the ratio of the gravity [potential] energy and kinetic energy [and the instant after the Big Bang] have to be balanced to 1 part in 100,000. What we are saying is that the universe, after the Big Bang, expands too quickly, it never condenses into matter. If it expands too slowly, it will go a little and then re-collapse under gravitational attraction. So there is a very thin razor edge. It has got to be exactly right. You can say Well, you know, it could have happened. We just got lucky. If it didn t happen, we wouldn t be here to worry about it. For an explosion to happen at the exact speed. Precisely. Here is what Stephen Hawking, the famous agnostic that I quoted a minute ago, who is a very famous cosmologist from Cambridge, says: Why is the universe so close to the dividing line between collapsing again and expanding indefinitely? If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been less by one part on the universe would have collapsed in a few million years. If it had been greater by one part in 10 10, the universe would have been essentially empty Think it Through.4.Science.docx Page 11 of 22

12 The universe would be empty. There wouldn t be any physical matter whatsoever. Interesting observation. The universe would not have had planets. It would not have had stars and so forth. So Stephen Hawking s agnosticism is based on the luck of this explosion happening at this exact rate. Yeah, he would say that We can t imagine how this could have happened. And maybe he would say that there is some other physical principle that will explain it in the future. But given right now, he says that it is remarkable. How could it have happened? Amazing Origin of Life That moves us to the next point the origin of life and the rareness of the earth, the remarkable nature of the earth. There are many things in our earth that are really quite remarkable. There is a wonderful book that was written in about It is not that technical for those of you who are interested in this topic. I would highly recommend it. Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee. The two fellows who wrote it are very, very well known scientists who are also religiously agnostic but they entitled their book Rare Earth because as they have studied for the last twenty years, not just their work but everybody s work, on the unique characteristics of the earth, they have become overwhelmingly astonished at how many things have to be exactly so for our planet to develop to be a place where life could exist. It turns out that is a very torturous journey with many, many places where you could go down a cul de sac and be finished. Let me share with you their introduction as they start this journey in their book. This is Ward and Brownlee from the University of Washington: If some god-like being could be given the opportunity to plan a sequence of events with the expressed goal of duplicating our Garden of Eden, that power would face a formidable task. With the best of intentions but limited by natural laws and materials, it is unlikely that Earth could ever be truly replicated. Too many processes in its formation involved sheer luck. Earth-like planets could certainly be made, but each would differ in critical ways. When you read the book, this is not an over statement. Think it Through.4.Science.docx Page 12 of 22

13 Too many processes in its formation involved sheer luck. If you are an agnostic, that is your choice. You don t have many other options. So, again we are getting to a place of improbability where we are claiming some kind of faith in sheer luck. When we look at the details, especially in that last book, the luck is getting bigger and bigger. Some of this has to do with the power of microscopes as opposed to 100 years ago. These electron microscopes that you handle every day, they are showing us that it is getting harder and harder. You even brought a video that animates what we would call a few years ago a simple cell, isn t so simple any more. Correct. I think in the past, people used to think that a simple cell really was simple. I would say it is simple compared to a big organism but if you look at single-cell organisms, they are in fact themselves extremely complex. We are going to do a 2-minute video to let you see exactly what the simple cell looks like operationally. [video] Okay, we will have to move on. Sorry we can t see the rest of this wonderful movie but we will just whet your appetite and I will send Matt the details of where you can get one of these if you are interested in the rest of the story. A famous author of textbooks and a famous scientist in this area, in his book which is the most widely used AP textbook for biology, says this with regard to the origin of life, and you have just seen what he is describing here: The largest stumbling block in bridging the gap between nonliving and living still remains. All living cells are controlled by information stored in DNA, which is transcribed in RNA and then made into protein. This is a very complicated system, and each of these three molecules requires the other two either to put it together or to help it work. DNA, for example, carries information but cannot put that information to use, or even copy itself without the help of RNA and protein. This is Kenneth R. Miller and Joseph Levine, in his Biology: The Living Science. This is a little bit of a description of irreducible complexity. If one of these things is missing, nothing is alive. Exactly, they all need each other to be functional. Think it Through.4.Science.docx Page 13 of 22

14 A recent big news splash came in December, 2004, when it was announced that one of the world s leading atheists now believes in God, more or less, based on scientific evidence. This was the by-line for the Associated Press. This was on every major news network. It was in every major newspaper as a prominent story. AP New York, December 9, 2004 "A British philosophy professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a half century has changed his mind. He now believes in God more or less based on scientific evidence, and says so on a video released Thursday. At age 81, after decades of insisting belief is a mistake, Antony Flew [I think one of the three most prominent atheist philosophers of the 20 th century] has concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the universe. A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, Flew said in a telephone interview from England. What he did is that he went with the odds. He did. He just looked at the math and the statistical probabilities and said Well this is a good illustration of probability. There are too many things that you just can t account for with natural processes. I am going to illustrate the thing that Flew also came to conclude, looking at the origin of life. But we are seeing it in a much bigger venue today in every different place we look we see the same kind of fingerprints. If you are a young lady driving home at Thanksgiving from the university, and you drive into your driveway and lo and behold, you look at the trees there and you see Oh my gosh, those leaves fell off in a rather peculiar way this Thanksgiving. It seems to have left an impression of a young lady. If you look carefully, you say it is not just any young lady but it is me. She is quite shocked. Now, what are the explanations that she might come up with about why this happened? Well, the first one would be What a remarkable accident? Is that a possible explanation? The answer is yes. Is it a reasonable explanation? The answer is of course not. It must be a loving father, a mischievous brother, a secret admirer somebody carefully picked the leaves off of that tree and left behind ones to leave a portrait of you. Think it Through.4.Science.docx Page 14 of 22

15 I think as we look at the universe today, we have exactly the same enigmatic impression. As we look at it, we can say Well, could this have all happened by chance? The answer is well I suppose but is that a reasonable explanation? The answer is well, of course not. The more we look at the universe through the eyes of science, using telescopes and microscopes and the many wonderful tools we have to enlarge our vision so to speak, the more we see a universe that is marvelous and magnificent and complex in every way. I would say that to think of an intelligently designed universe is to understand that intelligent design is not primarily an alternative explanation to evolution. It is an alternative to materialism. It claims that natural processes alone are simply inadequate to explain the complexity and wonder of the natural world. To believe in an intelligently designed universe requires much less faith than to believe in an accidental universe. I have lots of colleagues that I have worked with over the years -- I spent 32 years teaching in public universities who are agnostics or atheists and they would often tell me that it takes a lot of faith to be a Christian. I just can t do that. I don t have enough faith. I Think it Through.4.Science.docx Page 15 of 22

16 would try to help them understand that really it takes a lot more faith to believe what you believe as an agnostic or an atheist about the universe and how it came into being. So you brought us a video to help us culminate all of your talk so far and put it in a little nutshell and it will look something like this for me to understand. * * * [Video: Dumb and Dumber, Jim Carrey asking Lauren Holley about the possibility of their having a relationship.] Lloyd: I want to ask you a question. Straight out flat out I want you to give me an honest answer. Would do you think the chances are of a guy like you and a girl like me ending up together? Mary: Well, Lloyd. That is difficult to say. We really don t Lloyd: Hit me with it! Just give it to me straight. I came a long way just to see you Mary. The least you can do is level with me. What are my chances? Mary: Not good. Lloyd: You mean, not good like 1 out of a 100? Mary: I would say more like 1 out of a 1,000,000. Lloyd: So you are telling me there is a chance. Yeah!! * * * A day in the lab, right? A day in the lab. Well, that is the first part of our time together. I wanted you to explain how your education and your instruction have led you to where you are. But I also wanted Dr. Bradley to tell us about this part of his life. A foundational verse for us at Grace is: Eph. 4:11, 12 It was Christ who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up. For what purpose? To prepare God s people for the work of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up. A short phrase we use around here quite often is that Every believer is a minister. When we say that here, we mean that people are given gifts and abilities, like Dr. Bradley, Think it Through.4.Science.docx Page 16 of 22

17 and every one of us have different gifts and different abilities to be a priest to the people around them, to take the gifts that God has given them, not just in the church but outside the church and to use those. Dr. Bradley has been doing that quite often, certainly in the last phase of his life, and I wanted him to tell us how engineering and his experience with his students has led to the application of every believer is a minister. When I went to Baylor, I went partly because I wanted to do something that was very focused on helping poor people in developing countries, both materially and spiritually. But my work at Texas A & M had been primarily on high performance composites for the Air Force and NASA and not something that was going to very easily be of any use to people who are sort of at the end of the financial spectrum, at the bottom of the pyramid. So, I spent two years looking around for a place where I could get involved and through the input of a very, very wonderful former PhD student of mine, John Pumwa (sp.?) from Papua, New Guinea, I came to understand the problem that poor coconut farmers have around the world. [Slides of two families of about 6 children each; one in front of a frond-construction type house on stilts; another in front of a hill of empty coconut shells.] This is an example of a bunch of children from one family in Indonesia where I visited several years ago and took their picture. They were delightful little children. Here is a picture of a different family which includes a father. These people make $500 per year and they have families of this size. Can you imagine what kind of a challenge that would be just to survive? And there are 11 million families like this. Now, one of the things that I found interesting is that I got to know more about coconuts. The main product that you get out of a coconut is actually the oil that comes from the white copra, or the coconut meat. But the shell is by and large discarded and the husk is also by and large discarded. So there is a huge amount of agricultural waste that these coconut farmers own. But the problem is that it isn t worth anything. That is why it is agricultural waste. Think it Through.4.Science.docx Page 17 of 22

18 So, we set out about 4.5 years ago to actually try to find if there were properties that these materials had that would have some significant, commercial value. So let me share with you what we have found along the way that has been so very exciting. We call this our trash to cash program. Everywhere you go in the developing world where there are coconuts, you will find huge piles of coconut husks just sitting out there, slowing rotting. Our idea was to convert the coconut fibers from the husk [you don t see the husk at the store because they only ship the nut] which has lots of fibers. We were trying to figure out if we can use those to make parts for automobiles. It goes something like this. We start out with a coconut, take the husk off, strip the fibers out, combine the fibers with a little bit of polypropylene, make a mat, and then we can compression mold that mat into automotive parts. The kind of parts we are talking about are parts like, when you open the trunk of your car, everything that you see in there is a non-woven fabric composite made out of two synthetics, typically polypropylene and Think it Through.4.Science.docx Page 18 of 22

19 polyester, both made from oil. I think automotive companies and many other companies are interested in trying to use more renewal, sustainable kinds of materials in developing their products. So our idea was to replace about 70% of the synthetics with coconut fiber from the coconut husk. We have found that it works remarkably well and is stronger, cheaper, and it is renewable, sustainable. It has good properties and we are so excited because we have found tremendous interest on the part of major automotive companies. I think in the next six months, you will hear some national advertisements as one of the companies begins to put these into their car and you will know that is the stuff we have basically been working on at Baylor to try to create big markets for poor people. But we are finding many, many others as well. There are people who are extremely interested in using this for building materials. We have found applications for the coconut shell; it makes a remarkably good filler for injection molded plastics or extruded plastics. We have toy manufacturers who are really excited about making their Christmas toys next year out of this material. There are so many interesting properties that the shell and the fiber have that we are just finding a huge number of really exciting opportunities. How will that change a village? That will change the village because we think that with the value that these products will give to these feed stocks, that we will be able to create income in the next few years, maybe 3 or 4 years, of up to $10,000,000 a year and in the long run maybe as much as $100,000,000 per year to developing villages. We are working with committed Christians who are in these countries that are indigenous Christians to help commercialize this in a way that will also maximize the Kingdom building potential and it is just a terrific opportunity to be able to meet people s immediate felt economic needs while at the same time laying a foundation to be able to at the same time meet their spiritual needs. So, it is one example of the kinds of things that we can do as we really pray and ask God to show us some really creative outside-the-box ideas of what we might do. Let me share with you a couple of others briefly. Here is a bridge that we built in Kenya. People say What is the difference between a Christian bridge and a non-christian bridge? The answer is this one is built 20 miles from the nearest road in the middle of nowhere. We were there because we were Christians. Think it Through.4.Science.docx Page 19 of 22

20 Non-Christians could have built it but they probably would not have gone to the trouble to build it where we did. We have been helping people in Armenia who live in discarded rail shipping containers and replacing those with very, very warm homes [because this place is like North Dakota in the winter time] using Styrofoam blocks. We developed a system for building houses that allows you to make houses that are very warm and very inexpensive for poor people in developing parts of the world. [slide of square home made out of rebar and Styrofoam blocks] It saves lives because they are not freezing to death. Exactly. Children, especially, freeze to death in the wintertime. Here is a house that we actually built with some students from Baylor and one other university. We are also trying to help develop better clean-burning cook stoves so that people don t live in this kind of environment. The fourth leading cause of death among children in the developing world is in fact respiratory problems because they cook indoors over open fires and the environment is just horrible. Here is an example of the kind of cook stoves that we are helping to develop, looking at materials that have long-term durability. [slide of house with open indoor fires for cooking and another slide of cook stove being developed] You must be thinking your life is like an Esther moment here where it is for such a time as this. The many years, the education, then your teaching, and your involvement with NASA and the Air Force, all for this sweet time in life. Absolutely. What a blessing. What if I am no good at hammering or driving nails or being an engineer? What can a businessman do in these kinds of situations? It is a good question. I have two friends, as a simple example, who work in the area of real estate and their companies are involved in doing things that have to do with title insurance and securing a title. In third-world countries. Well, they do that here in the United States. But they went on mission trips to drive nails and do some building. They looked around and said Man, no body in this whole poor village has title to their land. Somebody could easily come along and steal it from them. And that does happen often. So one of them actually went to the government and Think it Through.4.Science.docx Page 20 of 22

21 said I would be willing to help set up a title program for your whole country if you would like to have that. The government said Wow, that is a really great idea. Private ownership of property? That would really be terrific. So then people would invest in their land if they knew it would not be stolen from them. They would build stuff on it. They would accumulate it and take care of it better if they really had real ownership. So he was able in an African country to set up a title program for the whole country which is now making it possible for everybody, including poor people, to own title to their land. I have another friend in the Dominican Republic, where we are getting some of our coconut fiber, who has done the same thing there. He has helped 1300 people in one area to get title to their land so that nobody can come and steal it from them at a later time. These people are so excited that now they are building more on their land because it really is their land. They may have lived there for 50 years but there was no ownership because there was no title. When you think, how could you use somebody in title and title insurance to advance the Kingdom, here is an example. Think outside of the box. I think probably all of us do things that God could potentially use if we will just pray and ask Him to help us see opportunities either here or over seas. Dr. Bradley, thank you very much for joining us this morning. Thanks, Matt. It has been great being here. Well, very quickly, let me say that faith and science are not in conflict with one another, especially some of you who are in the university system or still in school and you might think they are an assault. They are the Hatfield s and the McCoy s and that is not the case. You are just hearing one side of the story. There is another side. In each field, every field of science, there is someone who is standing there saying that they love Jesus Christ and they are not compromising their intelligence for their faith. The other thing I wanted you to hear today is that God might be preparing you right now for a sweet moment where God will use all of the things you have been through, experienced, studied for a purpose that is greater than maybe just producing an income for you and your family. Maybe today, you could stop and think Maybe God wants me to be doing something else, expanding the assets He has given me into the Kingdom of God, either down the Think it Through.4.Science.docx Page 21 of 22

22 street or around the world. That could be an interesting thing. It could make an adventure out of your life. So let s pray with that in mind and we will have the offering and a song and then call it a day. It has been a great day to be with you guys. Dear heavenly Father, We are grateful for Dr. Bradley and his submission to you, his desire to love You with all of his mind. Because of that, he has been able to stand up for You and help other people, especially young students to not compromise their faith because they did not have to compromise in their intelligence. God, I ask that You would help us see the place You have placed us, right here and right now, for this very purpose, that You would give us a vision for how we might serve You not just at work or in our neighborhoods but maybe in some other part of the world, if we would choose to dare and follow You. God, take this meager offering as a response in gratitude for You for saving us, for making us, and for giving us meaning and purpose. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen Think it Through.4.Science.docx Page 22 of 22