Not a Chance

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Have you ever wondered why there's such vehement opposition to that opening declaration in the Bible? There's a reason why the guns of materialists and naturalists are aimed at Genesis 1. If you can get rid of Genesis 1, the whole of the Christian faith falls, and that's where the point of attack has been against the idea of creation. And how are they trying to get rid of Genesis 1? By telling us that the universe came about purely by chance. But that raises the question, does chance have any power to create anything?

The simple answer is not a chance. That, by the way, is the title of a book Dr. R.C. Sproul wrote in 1994. The revised version was released 20 years later, and that provided me the opportunity to sit down and talk to R.C. about why this book is so important in countering those who've aimed their guns at Genesis 1. Dr. Sproul, welcome to the studio. Thanks, Lee.

It's good to be with you. Before we get into the why of the book, I'd like for you to share with our listeners the how of the book, how this book came to be. Well, actually what happened was that I had just finished a three-book contract for a particular publishing company, and I experienced a gigantic sense of relief to have that pressure gone for my life. And so I thought I would be able to take a brief vacation from the arduous task of writing books. But as I was enjoying my free time, I was reading voraciously on this particular subject of the role of chance in scientific inquiry, and I just was constrained to have the opportunity to write on a subject that I wanted to write on rather than one that a publisher had assigned it to me. And so out of my enthusiasm and my study on that particular subject, I decided to write this book without a contract in advance and just to have a little fun with it. It eventually got picked up, right? Yes.

It did. Well, since the title of the book is Not a Chance, I think it would be wise for us to have a good understanding of what chance is, and I'd like for you to define it. But before you do that, let me do a little experiment here in the studio. Since you're a big football fan, you can play the captain of your team, which I assume is the Steelers. I'm the referee, and I've got a quarter in my hand. I'm going to flip it and have you call it in the air. All right, heads. All right, I put it on the back of my hand. It's tails. I lose.

So is that chance? Well, before I answer that specific question, let me put a context to it, Lee. One of the things also that provoked my wanting to write this book, well, there were several things, but a couple of them were these. One, I had a conversation with a professor from Harvard University who was teaching in graduate degree programs there in the field of philosophy of science, and we were having a discussion of the origin of the universe, and he said to me that the universe, in his opinion, came into existence through space plus time plus chance. And then he went on to say that he believed that the universe came into being by chance.

And at that point, I did the same thing you did to me right here. I took a coin out, and I flipped it in the air, and I said, what are the odds that this coin will come up heads or tails if it doesn't stand on its ends? And he said, 50-50. And I said, okay, how much influence on the outcome of the coin toss was caused by chance? And he kind of looked at me puzzled, and I said, for example, if we knew exactly where I started this process of flipping the coin and whether I started with the heads up or tails up, how much pressure I exerted with my thumb, what was the density of the atmosphere through which it turned, how many revolutions it made in the air, and did I catch it here, here, or here, and did I turn it over after I catch it? All of those variable factors that go into whether it comes out heads or tails. I said, and if I knew precisely all of those variables in advance, could I be able to predict the outcome of the coin toss with a greater percentage than 50-50? And he said, well, yes, of course.

I said, but because we don't normally have a scientific examination of the atmospheric pressure or how many times the coin flips and all that stuff, we simplify it. We cut the Gordian knot. We say, it's got to come up either heads or tails. So we say, it's 50-50. I said, but how much influence did chance have on this actual event? And I said to him, absolutely none. I said, because chance has no power to do anything, because chance is not a thing.

Chance is a perfectly good word in our vocabulary that describes mathematical possibilities, and we use it in a reasonable way in that degree. I said, but we can't slip into this subtle change of meaning of the term and use the word chance as if it were something that could influence or exert power over anything else, because chance is not a thing. And I say it this way, it's no thing. I'll say it faster, it's no thing. It's nothing. It has no being, and if it has no being, it has no power, and if it has no power, it can't influence anything. And when I said that to this professor, he took the palm of his right hand and smacked himself on the forehead. I said, of course it doesn't have any power. So he changed his view right there?

Well, right there. I mean, he just realized that he had gone to sleep for a couple of seconds by attributing power to chance as if it were something that could influence real events. David Hume says, chance is a word we use to describe our ignorance over anything else.

What actually produces certain effects in the world. And the other thing that caused me to want to write this, Lee, was that when I was teaching seminary in Philadelphia, I taught a course in atheism. And in that particular course, I made the students read the primary sources of some of the most formidable atheists in the history of Western civilization. And we saw a common pattern for those who denied the existence of God and came up with an alternative to God's existence. And virtually all of them came up with the idea that the universe somehow had created itself out of nothing.

And that's the popular view that we hear today and where the word chance is imported into the discussion and assigned this not only ability to determine the outcome of a coin toss, but have the ability to bring a whole universe into being. In case you're just joining us, this is Renewing Your Mind with Dr. R.C. Sproul, and we're talking about the book that he wrote in 1994 called Not a Chance. The subtitle is God, Science, and the Revolt Against Reason. This book is being re-released in an expanded version. And also joining us here in the studio is Dr. Keith Matheson, professor of systematic theology at Reformation Bible College. And he collaborated with Dr. Sproul on this revised and expanded version. Dr. Matheson, welcome to the studio. We're glad you're with us today as well.

Thank you, Lee. Tell us your interest in this. And you jokingly said that you write about nothing in this book.

Absolutely. Yes, I was asked a while back to help with the revision of this book and decided that what I wanted to talk about was something I'd been running across a number of times in the writings of several science popularizers, this idea of the universe creating itself from nothing. Stephen Hawking, famous scientist, talks about that in his book.

A book came out in 2012 by Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing, Why There's Something Rather than Nothing. And so I'd been reading on this quite a bit. And so when I was asked to help with the revision and expansion of this book, I thought that's the topic I really want to address because Dr. Sproul had touched on that somewhat.

And I just wanted to expand on that and see what direction that would take us. Well, you mentioned that book by Krauss. Would you read a couple of things in there that really drive home the point that you're making here that a lot of this is just nonsense? Well, Krauss's book, the cover copy is Why There's Something Rather than Nothing. On the back cover, Krauss describes the staggeringly beautiful experimental observations and mind bending new theories that demonstrate not only can something arise from nothing, something will always arise from nothing. And the book has an afterword by Richard Dawkins, who in his typical understated manner writes, If on the origin of species was biology's deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see a universe from nothing as the equivalent from cosmology.

The title means exactly what it says and what it says is devastating. So when I saw this book, I'm thinking, OK, let's see what he has to offer and started reading this book. And the first thing I noticed was in the table of contents.

I'm scanning through there. Chapter nine, nothing is something. That's what every one of these guys ends up doing, whether it's Stephen Hawking or Peter Atkins or Lawrence M. Krauss. Every one of them solves this problem.

This grandiose idea, we can get something from nothing by redefining nothing is something I can do that I can prove that two plus two equals five if I'm allowed to redefine five is four. So that's what I wanted to touch on. And that's what I wrote about. That's great. Well, Dr. Sproul, as folks listen to this interview, you want to point out that you're not a scientist and you're not writing this as a science book per se. Is that correct?

Yes, that's right. After the first edition came out, I did get some complaints from certain people saying I didn't understand quantum physics and the indeterminacy principle and that sort of thing. And I had labored in the book telling the people that I am not qualified to call myself a physicist, quantum or otherwise. I said, but what I am trained in is in philosophy and the philosophy of science, and particularly with respect to linguistic analysis.

And if you have a Ph.D. in physics, that doesn't necessarily qualify you to speak in meaningful language. What Keith has just talked about where people say the universe came from nothing, but all of a sudden that nothing becomes a little something. And what we can critique at that point is the nonsense quotient of their linguistic affirmations.

And that's what my analysis was designed to do. When you people say I don't understand quantum physics, I say, well, I can understand it when I hear you describe it in meaningless terms. If you understand it and can articulate it to me in a logical way, then I think I'll be able to grasp it. But don't tell me that something is nothing and nothing is something and expect me to be impressed by that. Are we seeing Romans 1 played out in these attempts by these supposedly learned scientists to explain the existence of things? Is this just their foolishness and their attempt to suppress the truth? Well, once you've rejected the idea of God as the creator and you have to come up with some explanation for what's here and this seems to be the best they can do at the moment, defining nothing as a little something and claiming more than it is.

But I'd also like to comment on what you asked about. I'm not a scientist either, and I don't claim to understand quantum physics. I read a quote this morning that encouraged me a little bit. Richard Feynman, the famous physicist, once said that he didn't think anybody understood quantum physics, so I don't feel terribly bad about that. But I do think, as Dr. Sproul said, we do, but even as laymen, scientifically, if they're going to write popular science books for laymen, they need to write in language that makes some sense and not define words in contradictory ways. This fellow does address the oldest question ever, why is there something rather than nothing? And if there is an axiom in science, it's this, Ex nihilo, nihil fit, out of nothing, nothing comes. And that's what these men are trying to challenge. They're trying to say, not only does out of nothing something comes, but out of nothing everything comes ultimately.

And I try to reduce this to logical formulae. And I say, for example, if there is nothing and out of nothing something comes, that which comes can be called self-created. And that is a formally invalid affirmation, because for something to create itself, it must be before it is. It would have to pre-exist its own existence.

It would have to be and not be at the same time and in the same relationship. And even Hamlet understood the impossibility of doing that. And so what it reduces to is magic. You have something coming out of nothing without, only without a magician. You have the rabbit out of the hat, but there's no rabbit, there's no hat, there's no magician, there's nothing. Just poof, something comes.

And one Nobel Prize winning scientist on the West Coast wrote an essay a few years ago in which he said we must abandon the idea of spontaneous generation, that is, something coming out of nothing. Because for something to come out of nothing, it may take eons of time, billions of years. It doesn't happen quickly or immediately. So if you want to get something out of nothing, you have to be patient.

You have to wait for it. I mean, this is madness. And the point is, people are impressed by this kind of thinking when we should really be laughing at it. You mentioned the scientist that said that we've got to reshape our thinking. Are you encouraged that some people or some scientists are finally getting it?

Well, at least he got part of it. He understood the impossibility of what was called spontaneous generation. And you know back in the Enlightenment, the big conclusion of the atheists during the 18th century was that the God hypothesis is no longer necessary because now we know scientifically that things come into being through spontaneous generation. That was the big discovery. It's the same thing that we're hearing now with these scientific popularizers, what I call the journalistic phase of science and philosophy.

These people are just substituting different language for spontaneous generation until the man from the West Coast said, well, we can't have spontaneous generation anymore. He sets it out the front door. He sends it packing. But then he goes around to the back door and he opens up the back door and he says, well, you can have generation from nothing if you wait for it. You know, it takes a long time. Which explains why so many of the evolutionists want to claim that the earth is billions and billions of years old, that the only way they can pay the time.

You need the time. Voltaire wrote that what we call chance can only be the unknown cause of a known effect. Voltaire was not a believer, but you give him credit in this book, Dr. Sproul, for recognizing some certain truths, right?

Well, certainly he understood that. Again, these were people who were trying with the new science at that time to be rational, not irrational. The Hawkins and these other people, they don't shrink from being utterly and completely irrational.

It's okay for them to be irrational. But Voltaire said, no, you can't do that. It's just like in analytical philosophy when they talk about the existence of boogems. And what is a boogem? Boogem is a word that signifies nothing.

There is no such thing as a boogem, but we have boogems all over the place in this kind of discord. Dr. Matheson, you make the point in the chapter that you write in this expanded version of Not a Chance about how easy it is to point out the fallacy and the nonsense of what these scientists are proclaiming. Would you give us an example of that?

Yes. It doesn't even take a Voltaire or somebody with that level of intellect. I had just read Stephen Hawking's work with Leonard Mlodinow and was driving to Jacksonville to take my son to a statewide violin competition. And he was eight or nine years old at the time. He's sitting in the back seat and I had just read Hawking's book.

So it was fresh on my mind. And I asked him whether he could spot the error in a particular sentence. And I read the sentence from Hawking to him where Hawking says, because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Without missing a beat, he said, gravity is something.

Gravity is not nothing. And it just illustrated to me, Stephen Hawking is recognized as one of the most brilliant scientists in the world. But my nine year old son, who has not been trained in logic or philosophy or science, can spot this self-contradiction without even blinking. And that's one of the things I hope this book will encourage people to do is not just accept these statements because they come from somebody of the stature of a Hawking, but to think about it. Dr. Sproul, we've talked about science.

We've talked about philosophy. What do you want Christians to pull from this book? I want them to see the bankruptcy and the vacuous lack of significant content of those who are speaking with such great opposition against the biblical doctrine of creation. There's a reason why the guns of materialists and naturalists are aimed at Genesis 1.

If you can get rid of Genesis 1, the whole of the Christian faith falls. And that's where the point of attack has been against the idea of creation. And, you know, going back to Cosmos with Carl Sagan, I had discussions with him about this.

And he started out his book and his TV series with this statement that the universe is not chaos, it's Cosmos. And then he goes back to the Big Bang theory and everything, and he goes for the nanosecond beforehand, and he gets off the train. And I asked him, I said, how can you explain if for all eternity all of matter and energy were reduced into a point of singularity and in a state of, as I say, organization and inertia, and all of a sudden, one Thursday afternoon at 5 o'clock it exploded.

You've got to answer the question, what is it that produced that effect? You say that the law of inertia is that things at rest tend to remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. I said, what's this outside force?

He says, I don't want to go there. I said, you can't stop where you're stopping without going there. If you're a scientist, you have to give a sufficient reason, an explanation for your theory to be credible. But you want to just posit this magical moment in space and time where everything that was reduced to a state of singularity for eternity suddenly was altered without any outside force introducing the change. And so then you retreat to words like chance and words like that, which again are words that are just merely expressive of ignorance. And so this is a critical point.

We have to stand here and say no from a Christian perspective. If anything exists now, there was never a time when there was nothing, which means there's always been something. Something is eternal. Something is not dependent on a predecessor. That which is eternal must have the power of being within itself.

It does not receive it from something antecedent to it. And so that which is self-existent and eternal is what the Scriptures call God. And you see, we go back to things like Bertrand Russell saying, why I'm not a Christian. He writes this little book on why I'm not a Christian. And the biggest argument he gives is that when he was sixteen years old, he believed in God. By the time he was eighteen, he was an atheist.

And what made the difference? He read John Stort Mill, and he read in Mill where Mill said, if the law of causality is true, if everything requires a cause, then God requires a cause. And so the law of causality gets rid of God.

And this was an aha moment for Bertrand Russell that kept him in its grip for his whole life. He said, again, if everything has a cause, then God has a cause. And you can listen to your nine-year-old son on his violin trip to respond to these geniuses at that point because the law of causality never said that everything requires a cause. What the law of causality says is that every effect requires an antecedent cause. That doesn't mean that everything out there is an effect.

In fact, if there is not something that is not an effect, if there's not something that is an uncaused cause and not something that is self-existent and eternal, nothing could possibly be. And so what Mill did and Bertrand Russell did was turn the law of causality upside down and completely misrepresented it and misspoke it because the law of causality is what we call a formal truth. It's simply an extension of the law of non-contradiction. A formal truth is a truth that is true by definition. A bachelor is an unmarried man. I've said nothing in the predicate that's not already in the subject because a bachelor, by definition, is an unmarried man. And so it is with the law of causality to say that every effect must have a cause or every cause must have an effect is tautological.

You're not saying anything new. It's true by definition. It's just the same as the law of non-contradiction.

But again, this fundamental principle of logic and of knowledge was tripped over by men as brilliant as Mill and Bertrand Russell. Peter tells us to be prepared, to give a reason for the hope that is within us. And our hope is that this book, Not a Chance, will help you be prepared to give a reason for the hope that is within you. Dr. Sproul, Dr. Matheson, thank you for being with us and sharing this great insight into a book that, you know, it might make your head hurt a little bit because it's talking about things of eternal significance and philosophical ideas and scientific ideas, but it is important and we hope that many people will read this book so that they are prepared to give a reason for the hope. Thank you for being with us. Thank you. Thank you. Well, Dr. Sproul and Dr. Matheson's arguments against chance creating the universe are powerful, aren't they?

And the information we've shared today is just the tip of the iceberg. Dr. Sproul's book, Not a Chance, is 256 pages and exposes the undercurrent of irrationalism in modern science. We'd like for you to have a copy of this book for your own library. If you're the parent of teenagers or college students, it's critical reading for them as well, as many of them are bombarded with faulty thinking in their science classrooms. So request the paperback edition of Not a Chance with your donation of any amount to Ligetier Ministries. You can give your gift and make your request online at renewingyourmind.org, or you can call us.

Our phone number is 800-435-4343. Building a biblical worldview requires diligent study. We need to understand what God says in His Word if we're to understand the world around us. With that in mind, let me also recommend Table Talk magazine. Every month you'll read articles by leading Reformed theologians, and looking ahead to next month's issue, it focuses on the doctrine of justification. If you're not a subscriber, I hope you'll check it out.

Just go to tabletalkmagazine.com. Well, tomorrow Dr. Sproul picks up where we left off today as we air a message from his series, Creation or Chaos. The crisis today between theology and science is not so much a crisis between faith in theology and reason in science. I'm convinced that the crisis has to do with the relationship between faith and reason. I hope you'll join us tomorrow for Renewing Your Mind. I hope you'll join us tomorrow for Renewing Your Mind.