Episode Details

A retrospective that spotlights a provocative thread with huge theological and existential implications: the primordial cosmic ‘egg’ was fine-tuned, preprogrammed, and front-end loaded!

In this Season Finale, we look back at an incredible series of episodes — most of them in the past few months, but many others from as far back as four years ago — and tease out a thread that’s central to the re-building of our Christian faith.  In contrast to the traditional Young Earth Creationist version of the origin of the universe and life, we look at a narrative that has grown out of on-going work done by scientists.  Millions of scientists, working over many centuries, many of them self-identifying as Christian, pursuing a divinely-inspired search for truth.

The primordial cosmic egg that ‘exploded’ in the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago — estimated to be “the size of a grapefruit” — was packed with an amazing array of ingredients.  Over the past couple months, several world-class astrophysicists, mathematicians, and philosophers talked about those ingredients including quantum mechanics, relativity, string theory, atomic properties, and a couple dozen physical constants (such as the cosmological constant, gravitational constant, speed of light, weight of an electron, and many more).  But we also heard in Season One about other ingredients: thermodynamics, entropy, randomness, probability, order, predictability, determinism, massively large numbers, dynamic complexity, chaos theory, and biological evolution.

Those conversations had us repeatedly using three provocative descriptors of that primordial cosmic ‘egg’, descriptors that have huge theological and existential implications.

(1) that ‘egg’ was fine-tuned.  Among scholars who are properly trained to weigh in on this aspect of astrophysics, there is little disagreement that this ‘egg’ was incredibly fine-tuned to produce a universe full of ‘useable stuff’ … stars, planets, and a Periodic Table full of elements (from cell-building blocks like hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon and oxygen … all the way up to biochemically-reactive inorganic metals like iron, nickel, copper, manganese, selenium and zinc).  The delicate balancing of the