← Apologetics Profile
Apologetics Profile
Episode 296: Design in the Universe Helps Lead an Atheist to Christ - Filmmaker Michael Ray Lewis - Part One
00:55:07
God's creation shows us His invisible attributes. He uses His creation to lead us to Christ, thro...
Loading summary
Transcript125 lines
- [00:06]
Narrator/Host
Jesus therefore, was saying to those Jews who had believed him, if you abide in my word, then you are truly disciples of mine, and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. Jesus said to him, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me. This is Apologetics profile.
- [00:34]
Michael Ray Lewis
And so I started hitting her with hard questions. Why would God allow evil and suffering? What about evolution? Hasn't evolution disproven Christianity? Science and Christianity don't mix. There's no good reasons to believe in a God. And these were questions that she wasn't able to answer. But she was still adamant that this was all real. And so she ended up buying me a Bible. I remember I opened it up, I read through the first few pages of Genesis, closed the book and said, this is ridiculous.
- [01:04]
Narrator/Interviewer
That is former atheist Michael Ray Lewis describing an attempt he made at convincing his wife that the Bible isn't true and that God does not exist. Michael had only been married a year at that point, and during their first year of marriage, though his wife, herself a Christian who had for many years neglected her faith, sensed Jesus calling her back to church. Michael dutifully went with her for some time, but then grew tired of it and decided to make a concerted effort to show his wife that Christianity simply was not true. But that is precisely when things started to change for Michael. After reading a book by the late pastor Timothy Keller and seeing a YouTube video featuring Dr. Hugh Ross talking about the days of Genesis, Michael began to reconsider things, especially the fine tuning and design of these universe.
- [01:57]
Michael Ray Lewis
And I went and looked at Genesis again and I said, well, maybe there is a little something to all of this. And that started me on a three year journey of just nothing but reading apologetics books, really getting wrapped up in the evidence surrounding like the teleological argument, the design of the universe was one that really struck me.
- [02:23]
Narrator/Interviewer
You'll hear the rest of Michael's testimony of how Jesus took him from atheism to Christianity this week and next on the broadcast. You'll also hear quite a bit about Michael's soon to be released apologetics film about how the universe and its wondrous design leads us to Christ Himself. The film is called Universe Designed and it features many prominent Christian apologists, cosmologists and philosophers talking about the marvels of the universe. You can find out more about the film at the website universedesigned.com that's universe. Here is a clip from the film featuring a philosopher of science, Dr. Stephen C. Meyer of Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington, talking about how he became interested in the faith and science discussion and how the question of the origin of the universe led the late secular cosmologist Alan Sandage to the God of the Bible.
- [03:21]
Dr. Stephen C. Meyer
I was always interested in the big questions that intersect science and philosophy, the worldview questions, if you will. And as a young scientist working as a geophysicist in the 1980s, a conference came to Dallas where I was working called Christianity challenges the University, an international conference of atheists and theists. I had heard about the conference just the night before from a friend, decided to attend, came in off the street, was blown away by what I heard. Alan Sandage, great astrophysicist who made his first public profession of faith in God and then explained how the evidence that he had helped to acquire not only a beginning to the expansion of the universe, but a beginning to the universe itself. At one point he said, here is evidence for what can only be described as a supernatural event. There's no way this could have been predicted within the realm of physics as we know it. And then he proceeded to explain how this had tried to troubled him so deeply because he had been long and well known agnostic of a materialistic bent in his worldview. He realized where the evidence was pointing and he realized there was something in him that didn't want to go there, that didn't want to consider the idea that there might be a creator beyond the universe that would explain this creation event.
- [04:43]
Narrator/Interviewer
Overlaid with an original music score, original artwork and masterful cinematography, Universe design rival resembles anything you would find produced by National Geographic or the Discovery Channel. Except this film is intentionally and unashamedly Christ centered. There is simply nothing else out there like it today. It is a much needed counter to Carl Sagan's immensely popular Cosmos series, Two recent remakes of which have been hosted.
- [05:11]
Interviewer/Host
By the popular astrophysicist Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
- [05:15]
Narrator/Interviewer
A visual masterpiece in its own right, Universe design, however, doesn't just feature stunning images of the heavens and earth. It also thoughtfully addresses the problem of how secular science has led many younger people away from Christianity. Here again is a clip from the film featuring Steve Meyer.
- [05:34]
Dr. Stephen C. Meyer
There's a recent Gallup poll that shows that belief in God in the United States has dropped to an all time low. Young people in particular in the age group from 18 to 31 are generating that trend away from religious belief. One of the factors that is most commonly cited is science. The particular finding of science atheists and agnostics cite most is the idea of undirected evolutionary change, that life arose by an undirected evolutionary process that's cited more than worries about death or disease or suffering. So evolutionary ideas about origins have played an outsized role in convincing people that that God does not exist. That God, as Richard Dawkins put it, is a delusion. And yet we live in a time when such unbelief is not only unnecessary as the result of science, it's actually contrary to what science has discovered over the last 100 years. The idea that the universe has a beginning, that it's been finely tuned against all odds and for no underlying physical reason from the beginning, and that the living cell is chock full of miniature machines that doesn't just rival, but it vastly exceeds our own high tech digital technology. These are discoveries that I have argued point to designing intelligence and indeed a designing intelligence with the attributes that traditional theists, Jews and Christians for example, have long ascribed to God. Transcendence, intelligence, great power, and a willingness to be involved in the creation. This is not a time to give up on religious belief. Instead, I think science is now pointing us back to God and helping us rediscover what I call the God Hypothesis.
- [07:34]
Narrator/Interviewer
Back in 2021, I had the privilege of interviewing Steve Meyer myself, talking about his latest book, the Return of the God Hypothesis. Here in the clip from our interview, Steve spoke at length about the wonders of deoxyribose nucleic acid, or DNA, the sequence of amino acids that are chock full of information, the origin of which current neo Darwinian evolutionary constructs are at a loss to explain. Steve tells us here that it was just a few years after DNA had been discovered by Watson and Crick in Cambridge in 1980 that another remarkable discovery about DNA came to light.
- [08:21]
Dr. Stephen C. Meyer
Francis Crick, working on his own, proposed what he called the sequence hypothesis, where he suggested that the chemical subunits of the DNA molecule running along the interior of the twisting helix, the twisting helix, is made of the made of sugars and phosphates. So that's the sugar phosphate backbone. But on the inside of the molecule are what are known as the bases. And the arrangement of those bases, he proposed it provides information for building the protein machines, the proteins and protein machines that keep cells alive. So he, he essentially proposed that the bases are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written text, or we would maybe say today, the digital zeros and ones in a section of software. Which is to say it's not the physical or chemical properties of these chemical subunits that give DNA its function, but rather it's their arrangement in accord with an independent symbol convention later discovered and now known as the genetic code that allows the DNA to store and transmit information through for directing the construction of the proteins. So we have something in the cell. This hypothesis was not the kind of thing that could be confirmed with a single experiment. It took seven or eight years as scientists working on both sides of the Atlantic were able to elucidate the larger what's called gene expression system or the system of protein synthesis. But in fact, what they discovered was that DNA is, it does contain information in a digital or alphabetic form, and that information is directing the construction of protein machinery. So that would be something like our contemporary CAD CAM technology where called computer assisted design and engineering, where an engineer might sit at a consult console, write code.
- [10:12]
Code will go down a wire, be.
- [10:14]
Translated into a machine language that can be read at a manufacturing apparatus, and then used to construct an airplane wing or a section of an automobile or a garage door or whatever it is. So information directing the construction of mechanical parts, that's what's going on inside the cell. It's a complex information storage, transmission and processing system and even the simplest living cell. And that's what has to be explained if you want to explain the origin of life. Because you can't get life going without that information. That digital co.
- [11:09]
Narrator/Interviewer
In 1928, British scientist J.B.S. haldane proposed an origin of life scenario where ultraviolet radiation somehow ignites the first chemical form of life somewhere in a warm, viscous ocean or pond. This idea that life began through a few simple chemical reactions gained a lot of traction in the 20th century. But given what science has now uncovered about the complexity of the cell itself, including information within DNA, sunlight hitting the surface of water is in no way capable of arranging the kind of sequential, complex, specified information found in the DNA of all living cells. During my interview with Steve, I mentioned how I saw similarities between origin of life research today and the alchemy of the medieval era. Alchemy is the belief that sunlight, among other things, had the power to transform base metals like tin and lead into precious metals like silver and gold. But as Steve told me, sunning your metal is not magically going to rearrange the structure of molecules into precious metals. Nor is mere energy like that coming from the sun sufficient by itself to create new information in cellular organisms.
- [12:28]
Dr. Stephen C. Meyer
That sunlight onto lead is not going to rearrange the atoms to produce gold out of lead. To do that, you need to rearrange things and rearranging matter or configuring matter in specific ways is another way of thinking about or, or talking about information. The technical term in origin of life research is the problem of configurational negative entropy. How do you rearrange things? How do you rearrange simple nonliving chemicals so that they produce the complex information rich biopolymers that are a necessary condition of producing life? And there are these models in origin of life studies called self organizational models, where the idea is that either the bonding process properties between the constituent parts of the, say, DNA will determine the arrangement of the of the individual constituent parts of the DNA, or that some sort of external source of information passing through a system will cause things to self organize. Energy alone does not produce configurational negative entropy or also known as functionality, information or specified complexity. That's to configure things properly in a specific way to achieve a particular outcome or function requires information.
- [13:55]
Narrator/Interviewer
And the very origin of that information is what presently eludes the best minds in the field of origin of life research. But what do we presently know about information? From where does it come? We know beyond a shadow of doubt that information is a byproduct of an intelligent agent, a mind. So in short, it follows that DNA reveals the mind of a creator God. Curiously, the twisted double helix strand of DNA found in every living cell nicely mirrors the text of Psalm 139 where David says that he is fearfully and wonderfully made by God, knit together in his mother's womb. So we might look at DNA as the thread of life that God uses to knit us together in our mother's wombs.
- [14:43]
Michael Ray Lewis
I think this is why it took three years to convince me of all this, because the argument for God's existence, and specifically for the Christian God's existence, it's a cumulative case. It's almost as if every direction that you go, it all points to one, it all points to, to God.
- [15:09]
Narrator/Interviewer
During our interview, Michael told me that Universe Design is the film he wished he could have seen when he was examining all the arguments for God's existence. The film essentially is a summary of Michael's intellectual and spiritual journey toward Christ. As Colossians tells us, everything in the cosmos was created through Christ, and for Christ. The film Universe Design does a masterful job of reminding us of that very simple yet profoundly awesome truth. The film features easy to understand summaries of many of the traditional apologetic arguments for God's existence, set within the beautiful thematic tapestry and awesomeness of the cosmos itself. Here is another clip from the film featuring popular Christian apologist Dr. Frank Turek and astrophysicist Dr. Jeff Zwierink describing the unimaginable size of the cosmos.
- [16:02]
Dr. Frank Turek
How big is the universe? Researchers at the University of Hawaii tried to figure it out. And they estimate that the number of stars in the universe are about equivalent to the number of grains of sand on all the beaches on all the Earth times 100,000. And just in our galaxy. The average distance between those stars is 30 trillion miles. If you could go space shuttle speed, which when it orbited the Earth, it was going at about 5 miles a second, it would take you over 200,000 years to go 30 trillion miles. If you got in the space shuttle at the time of Christ and started traveling from our star, the sun, to another star, an average distance away, you've been going five miles a second for 2,000 years. You would be less than 100th of the way there right now. The heavens are awesome.
- [17:11]
Dr. Stephen C. Meyer
You get across our galaxies about 100,000 light years. You get to the closest large galaxy beyond us, that's 2.5 million light years. In other words, that light has been traveling from the Andromeda galaxy to us for two and a half million years, traveling at 200,000 miles per second. That's just mind blowingly vast when you try and think about it.
- [17:50]
Narrator/Interviewer
Again, the film isn't just a visual masterpiece, though. It tells a story from beginning to end that ultimately draws the audience toward the cross and presents the gospel with a very down to earth and inspiring solemnity from the film. Again, this is apologist and author Alisa Childers.
- [18:08]
Alisa Childers
Christianity has a lot of very robust evidence that demonstrate its truthfulness. The arguments for God's existence are intellectually satisfying. They're robust, they match reality, they make the best sense of what we see in the world. All those big questions. But beyond that, it's healing for the soul because it really cures the root problem of everything that's wrong with the world. God has provided an answer through his son Jesus, and what he accomplished with his sacrificial death on the cross.
- [18:48]
Narrator/Interviewer
Michael hopes that this film will help unbelievers who are seeking answers to questions.
- [18:52]
Interviewer/Host
About the truth of Christ.
- [18:53]
Narrator/Interviewer
Christianity as he once was. He also hopes the film will inspire believers to equip themselves to fulfill the Great Commission.
- [19:00]
Michael Ray Lewis
That's what we're commanded to do, is go out and share Jesus with other. We're commanded to go out and make disciples. And I think partly it's because they're either too scared that they'll get asked a question that they don't know, or they just don't have Jesus as a priority. I mean, if we love him, you want to talk about him, he's all you want to talk about.
- [19:25]
Narrator/Interviewer
As we pick up here in Part one, Michael will share with us how God started working in his life eight years ago. Here's Michael Ray Lewis.
- [19:41]
Michael Ray Lewis
Well, I've been a believer now for eight years. I didn't grow up in the church. My family did say that they believed in God, made a Bible under the bed, but we never touched the Bible, never talked about God, definitely never talked about Jesus. So naturally, growing up, the only real interactions I had with Christians were the ones that were on the street corners yelling at me that I'm going to hell. And that didn't leave a very good taste in my mouth. So I leaned more towards the fact, well, God doesn't exist. There didn't seem to be any evidence for Him. Anyways, I would get into watching documentaries making fun of Christianity and videos making fun of Christianity. I would accept the slogans like, why would God allow evil and suffering? I would accept the slogans like fact. The fact of evolution has disproved Christianity. And I almost became, in my atheism, I was a little aggressive with it. I would make fun of Christians. There was actually a girlfriend that I had that I broke up with because she tried to bring me to church. That's how against it I was. And a lot of it had to do with the interactions I had with Christians. But really, I think it mainly had to do with the fact that I just didn't think it was true. Yeah, well, I ended up getting married to my wife, Christina, and we were together for about a year. And to put things in perspective, she did grow up in the church, but she was pulled away from the church. So at this point, I was doing nothing but pulling her further away. We'd been married for a year, and she came home one day and she said, I feel like Jesus is calling me back. And in her saying that, I thought to myself, here we go. Because remember, I had broken up with a girlfriend just for trying to take me to church. But I was married to my wife. I loved her. I said, all right, I'll go to church with you and I'll see what all this is about.
- [21:27]
Interviewer/Host
Now, when you were dating and engaged, this never came up.
- [21:32]
Michael Ray Lewis
I don't think it did, to be honest. If we did, looking back, I don't remember her bringing it up very often. And if she did, I probably just dismissed it.
- [21:42]
Narrator/Interviewer
So it wasn't until after you're married.
- [21:43]
Interviewer/Host
You discovered her Christian background. Yes, wow.
- [21:46]
Michael Ray Lewis
Exactly.
- [21:47]
Interviewer/Host
Oh, my gosh.
- [21:48]
Michael Ray Lewis
And I think I knew her family was believers, and even when we got married, when we were saying our vows, we even did the Christian vows. And what I would do is I would just kind of pretend to go along with it, even though I didn't believe it. So I was outspoken to some, but not outspoken to others in my atheism. So after she told me Jesus is calling her back, I decided I'd go to church with her and see what all this is about. I remember looking in and I looked around at the congregation and I thought to myself, all right, I get it. I mean, it gives people something to hope in. It's just not true. Well, we started going quite often and I got tired of going. And so I figured, well, all I need to do to stop going to church is to show her that none of this is real. And so I started hitting her with the hard questions, why would God allow evil and suffering? What about evolution? Hasn't as evolution disproven Christianity? Science and Christianity don't mix. There's no good reasons to believe in a God. And these were questions that she wasn't able to answer. But she was still adamant that this was all real. And so she ended up buying me a Bible. I remember I opened it up, I read through the first few pages of Genesis, closed the book and said, this is ridiculous. There's no, I mean, there's, there's nothing in this that makes me think that it's real. But she was adamant about it and I figured I would give it a second look. I remember the first book I bought was a book by Timothy Keller called Reasons for God. And then after that book, There was a YouTube video that popped up on my feed and it was Atheist turns Christian. And it was Hugh Ross going over his perspective of the creation days. And I remember hearing that, that video. And I went and looked at Genesis again and I said, well, maybe there is a little something to all of this. And that started me on a three year journey of just nothing but reading apologetics books. Really getting wrapped up in the evidence surrounding, like, the teleological argument, the design of the universe was one that really struck me. Just the fact that we literally shouldn't be here, yet here we are. And after all these arguments, then I started shifting gears into biblical questions and starting hammering her with, well, how do demons work? How does all this work? What is heaven? Why do I have to give my life to this guy, Jesus? Why is that the reason for me going to Christianity? What I Would say to myself is that I can't believe in a God who would send me to hell just because I have a little trouble believing in him. That was my objection.
- [24:21]
Interviewer/Host
That's a common, very common one.
- [24:23]
Michael Ray Lewis
It is. And I went, met with this guy named Tom. And I remember I had five pages full of questions that I was just going to hammer this guy with.
- [24:31]
Interviewer/Host
Tom was somebody that. You knew it. Who was Tom in this?
- [24:35]
Michael Ray Lewis
So Tom is a friend of the families. After I had hammered my wife with all these questions she wasn't able to answer, she kind of threw her hands up and said, let me find someone you can talk to.
- [24:43]
Interviewer/Host
Gotcha.
- [24:44]
Michael Ray Lewis
And so this was the guy that she sent me to talk to.
- [24:46]
Interviewer/Host
All right. And you had never met Tom until this point?
- [24:48]
Michael Ray Lewis
I hadn't.
- [24:49]
Interviewer/Host
Okay.
- [24:50]
Michael Ray Lewis
So we went. I sat down with him. I just hammered him full of questions. And I remember at the end of the conversation, it was almost a blur, But I remember at the end of the conversation, he had answered every single question I had, and he did it using the Bible. And he asked me. He just looked straight at me and he said, so do you believe that it's true? And at this point, I mean, this is three years of me looking into it. I didn't have any more objections. I couldn't even think of another objection to raise at that point. And I said, I think I do. I said, but I don't know. And then it was that drive home was when it really clicked. And I realized at that point, it wasn't the evidence that was holding me back. It was the fact that I didn't want it to be true. And when I realized that was what was holding me back, I threw my hands up and said, all right, Jesus, what's next? That was me giving my life to Christ. And almost instantly after that, it was as if a fog left my mind and I could finally see things for the way they actually were. Everywhere I look, you see design. It's. It's. It was so obvious that God existed. And the only thing I can attribute that to is the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. Which is funny, because I would never use that in my conversations with people, because I don't tend to trust experiences. Yeah, I trust the facts.
- [26:03]
Interviewer/Host
That's a big question in religious, especially interfaith dialogues between different religious groups. Like Mormons have the burning in the bosom. And, you know, most people that you talk to who believe in some kind of God will attest to some kind of supernatural experience. So that. That's a tricky One and one that atheists like to. Like to drive home. Okay, you Christians, you, you've had this experience. Well, so did your Muslim friend, so do your Mormon friends, so do your Jehovah's Witness friends, you know, But I like to say that when you listen to atheists who deconvert, they have an experience. And so I will say, well, how do you know your experience is true? Because you will say to me that for the longest time, the voice that you heard, for all those years you were a Christian, you thought was God's voice, and now suddenly you realize you have an epiphany, that it's not God's voice, but it's still a voice. Why are you listening to that voice.
- [27:05]
Narrator/Interviewer
If it deceived you for so long?
- [27:07]
Interviewer/Host
Why is that voice now suddenly telling you the truth? So the atheist who leaves Christianity, Michael, is in no better position to be subjectively or objectively over the whole idea of human experience. It's a very integral part of this. So how did you explain or how did you reconcile for yourself this experience that you had given that this is such a, a widely debated issue within religious discussions? How did you, how did you finally come to the place where you realized that this experience was, was true?
- [27:40]
Michael Ray Lewis
That wasn't until probably a few years after. At that point, I still didn't even trust the experience because like I said, I. Because you hear stories all the time of people, well, I prayed and my, my aunt was healed of cancer, and that's why I became a believer. Like, all right, well, what about the person who prayed and their aunt died of cancer and that's why they're not a believer.
- [28:00]
Interviewer/Host
What about the Mormon who prayed and their family was healed?
- [28:03]
Michael Ray Lewis
Exactly. So at that point, I didn't. I. And even in conversations with people, I don't use that particular. That's not an argument to me for the existence of God. My experience does. I have no evidence for that experience. And so therefore, I don't utilize that when having conversations with non believers. I utilize the facts. The facts, the evidence that point to the existence of God. However, that experience, it did have this sense of, in me, of me going from believing that it's true to knowing that it's true. And that's the only way I could, I could really describe. Wasn't this God speaking to me, saying, I exist. It was just this sense of awareness from, from going from belief that it's true to knowing that it's true. And like I said, that's based on scripture. The only thing I can attribute that to is the inner witness of the Holy Spirit, affirming to me that it was true. However, you're right, because you hear that, that same explanation from Mormons, from the. Like you said, the burning in the bosom. And so then the question becomes, well, why should I trust that? Well, I should trust it because the evidence supports it. Not the evidence for the experience, but the evidence for the existence of God, the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. All of these only further confirm that experience.
- [29:25]
Interviewer/Host
So it's, it's. It's similar to what I've experienced. I'm an adult convert myself, and I tell people now unashamedly, I believed before I understood. Kind of like I think what Anselm says, I believe in order to understand, or Augustine says that. But that is, I think that is, I didn't come through a mound of apologetic arguments. I didn't even know what apologetics was when I became a Christian. I knew at some point as I was examining this, I had a girlfriend hand me a Bible and say, you need to read this. And it went from wanting to read it for the sake of my girlfriend to wanting to read it because it seemed like God was asking me to read it. I can't tell you how that happened, except that as I started reading the Bible, it started reading me. I think that was the first. First jolt, if you will. This is not a regular book. This book is meddling in my life. So that started the flame, if you will. And then about six months later, I got baptized. But I totally understand having swimming in the cults and the other religions for a profession. I understand the dynamic of the personal experience. But I think one thing I could say that the religious experience, whatever tradition you end up in, I think is a. Is an affirming piece of evidence that there is a supernatural agency in the world.
- [30:50]
Michael Ray Lewis
It's just that piece of the evidence.
- [30:52]
Interviewer/Host
It's a piece of the evidence. It's not the single piece of the evidence, as it seems to be in Mormonism. For when you have the burning in the bosom, that's it. That's the ground of all being right there in terms of your epistemology. But I think that the overall human experience of a God or of an experience with a supernatural entity at least is one bit of evidence that attests to the reality of the Creator. But as you said, and maybe we can get into this, that as you unpacked your experience and looked at it in light of the physical universe, you started to see things that align with Scripture and I know a lot of our guests are familiar, our listeners are familiar with a lot of apologetic defenses and arguments for Genesis. So why don't we just begin at the beginning? Michael, how did you begin to see Genesis, the creation account? This will lead into the wonderful movie that you're doing. How did you begin to see that the creation account in the Bible was in line with or in accordance with what we see in the physical world today?
- [31:57]
Michael Ray Lewis
Well, it really starts with. With the philosophical question of, if there is a day that is called today, then there cannot be a past number of events. There must be a cause or a beginning in order for time started.
- [32:14]
Interviewer/Host
Times started, right.
- [32:15]
Michael Ray Lewis
And then when you look at, like, big Big Bang cosmology, we see that all of space, time, and matter at a beginning, they had a cause. And that's where that the cosmological argument comes in. Like, if the universe had a beginning, there must be a cause. Well, Genesis explains what that cause is, and it explains that all of space, time, and matter had a beginning. And then I learned later down the road the fact that, well, scientists used to think the universe was eternal, and they did that in light of the objection of Christianity, because Christianity claimed that the universe had a beginning. And if they could show that the universe was eternal, existent in the past, well, then that dismisses the need for a God. But then we run into a predicament because we found out that the universe does have a beginning. Well, then you move from what do we do now? Well, we must come up with something like the multiverse theory, because the multiverse theory, if there's an infinite number of universes with an infinite number of possibilities, that also gets rid of the need for the design of the universe, for example. But explanations like these are explanations that we can't even really test. And so rather than basing what we believe on what we don't know, let's base what we believe on what we do know. And what we do know is that the universe had a beginning, it must have a cause. But we also know that the universe seems to be designed. I learned a lot from. From reasons to believe. And just how many parameters have to be exactly right in order for us to have a planet that we can live on? But not only a planet that we can live on, but a planet where we can witness the entire creation event. We can look in the past when we look at the stars. We can see the cosmic background radiation because of the location that we happen to be in in the universe. So not only is this planet completely perfect for us to exist. It's completely perfect for us to be able to witness all of the creation event. And why is that? And then he comes to the question, well, why are we able to even reason or come to that conclusion? The fact that we're able, we have the ability to reason. This suggests that there must be actual reasoning going on in our minds and it's not just a product of chemical reactions happening.
- [34:32]
Interviewer/Host
Right.
- [34:32]
Michael Ray Lewis
We're actually coming to conclusions.
- [34:34]
Interviewer/Host
CS Lewis and many others have argued that if, you know, our mind is just a compound of. Of chemicals, there's no reason to trust any particular thought as being any more true or false than any other thought.
- [34:47]
Michael Ray Lewis
Right?
- [34:47]
Interviewer/Host
If we're just chemicals, then the thoughts that we have are untrustworthy, you know?
- [34:51]
Michael Ray Lewis
Exactly.
- [34:52]
Interviewer/Host
So it seems that. It does seem that there is something true about the universe. We can understand it and we can reason, as you say. And how strange it is that our reason, this internal epistemological tool set that we have, seems to fit lock and key into the universe itself. That why would minds that accidentally came about in the bubbling and froth of the cosmic microwave background radiation many billions of years ago. Why would all that froth turn into sentient beings who can actually understand something objective about all of this? Doesn't make any sense.
- [35:27]
Michael Ray Lewis
It doesn't.
- [35:27]
Interviewer/Host
You could make this all up in your head, but it just doesn't seem like that this is something that we would make it up. That the mathematics of the universe itself, just what physics uncovers, the mathematical relationships seem to be. Well, I mean, I think it's Alexander Vilenkin, who's a Russian cosmologist. He's not a theist. Many Worlds in One is a book that he wrote. And he's musing at the end there. He's saying, what is the. The medium of mathematics? It's mind, okay. And he says, well, the universe seems to be composed of laws, or at least we understand the universe in terms of laws, and laws as we understand them in physics are mathematical in nature.
- [36:09]
Narrator/Interviewer
But these laws needed.
- [36:10]
Interviewer/Host
Seem seemingly needed to be there. Air quotes before the beginning, right? And so if there's laws before the beginning and laws are mathematical and mathematics is the medium of the mind, Blanken wonders, does that mean there's a mind that predates the universe?
- [36:28]
Michael Ray Lewis
Right.
- [36:29]
Interviewer/Host
I think it's a great question. Now, Vilenkin doesn't land on the side of the theistic side of the equation, but that's the kind of logic that is obvious even to the most erudite secular physicists. Right? The Math, it's a universal acknowledgment objectively that the universe can be understood mathematically.
- [36:47]
Narrator/Interviewer
Why?
- [36:48]
Michael Ray Lewis
Right?
- [36:49]
Interviewer/Host
Why does math work? It's incredible. And I think, to me, this is one of the most fundamental solid pieces of evidence that we have.
- [36:59]
Michael Ray Lewis
Well, I think this is why it took three years to convince me of all this. Because the argument for God's existence and specifically for the Christian God's existence, it's a cumulative case. And it's almost as if every direction that you go, it all points to one, it all points to God. And then when you have so many of these different arguments that just, just come right alongside each other and keep pointing in the same same direction, that was my problem. I was trying to disprove it. But every, every, every argument that came up, well, God best explains that, God best explains this. And the next one comes along, well, God best explains that too. Now I'm stuck with that predicament that no matter where you go, it all points to God. Even when you get, like you said, to the foundational levels of mathematics, the foundational levels of reason, even those point to God. And when you have a case that strong, it really is overwhelming. In looking back at it now, it makes sense when it talks about me that I was suppressing the truth. Because looking back at it now, that's exactly what I was doing. I think we all have this conscious awareness of God that we get distracted by and we just suppress. And we do it to such a point that it's not as though we know God exists and we're just denying it, but it's that we've convinced ourselves that he really doesn't exist. Because I was in the position as an atheist, I genuinely just didn't think any of this was true.
- [38:27]
Interviewer/Host
Right.
- [38:28]
Michael Ray Lewis
I didn't have a sign up yelling at Christians saying that I know God and I hate him.
- [38:37]
Interviewer/Host
Yeah, right.
- [38:39]
Michael Ray Lewis
It didn't feel that way when I was an atheist. It just felt like it wasn't real.
- [38:42]
Interviewer/Host
And it doesn't feel like that to a lot of non believers. I don't hate God. I'm open to the possibility that God exists. Well, that's kind of a narrative we tell ourselves. I mean, I would say that then.
- [38:53]
Michael Ray Lewis
You deny every possibility that goes on.
- [38:54]
Interviewer/Host
Exactly. I would say that I believed in God before I was a Christian, but in truth, I had this mocking attitude about believers.
- [39:02]
Michael Ray Lewis
I did as well.
- [39:03]
Interviewer/Host
And internally I wouldn't go around saying it necessarily, but you know, you were talking about, I wanted to read this really quickly. The verse In Romans, it's for since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood through what has been made so that they are without excuse. And that's Romans 1:20. And so God is saying that from the beginning my invisible attributes, my power, divine nature have been clearly seen. I remember I had a conversation with an atheist once. How do you see invisible attributes? But I think the cosmos is exact is a perfect example of that. Because if let's just presuppose there is a God and we look at what he has made, what does what he has made say about the kind of being that would have made it? I mean, our son, right, is 109 Earths across in diameter. You could fit a million earths inside of it. And yet scientists call it a yellow dwarf because it's not in terms of the stars that are out there, it's not very big. And you say, well, how, how is 864,000 mile diameter not very big? Well, inconceivably there are stars that are 10 times 100 times larger than that. So Michael, when you look at the cosmos, as you have done over the last several years, what kind of attributes of God, and even in your coming to understand more clearly the, the Bible and the revelation in nature, what are some attributes of God that impressed you as you're looking at the physical creation?
- [40:40]
Michael Ray Lewis
I think, and this is, this is a conversation I have a lot with believers. It helps me put him, helps put to put in to perspective just the gravity of how large God really is. Because I think what we do as Christians is we tend to put God in a box and limit him. Not intentionally, but we tend to say that we know what God's plans are in our lives. We kind of can see the direction he's going and we tend to see him as this guy and this guy that we can pray to and ask for things. But when you look at the universe and just the gravity of, of really how vast it is, it helps you to put in perspective that this God that exists is a God that literally knows every particle in this universe, where it's at, what it's doing, he's in control of it, moving it, holding it all together, as the scriptures say. And then when you learn just how large the universe is, it's, it's something that we can put down on a piece of paper but we can't possibly comprehend. And I think that helps you to put in perspective that's how big God is. God is something you could explain the Trinity. You could talk about Jesus being God and the hypostatic union. But when it comes to the gravity of what's really going on there, we have no clue.
- [41:56]
Narrator/Interviewer
Yeah.
- [41:58]
Interviewer/Host
The way I like to see it is the universe reminds me of God's otherness. How can you look at something like Jupiter and Saturn? You have nothing to compare this to.
- [42:07]
Michael Ray Lewis
Exactly.
- [42:08]
Interviewer/Host
I remember it's Neil degrasse Tyson. A while back, I was listening to him talk about the difference between Earth and Jupiter. It's like the word planet doesn't encapsulate the radical difference between Jupiter and Earth. There's nothing like Earth. I mean, it's spherical and it goes around the sun. Maybe that's all we have in common, really. But when it boils down to it, Jupiter and Earth are radically different entities. And then you take Saturn and then. And Neptune and Pluto and Uranus, and that's just our solar system. And then you look at these galaxies and it's just. It's like. It reminds me of Exodus and Moses when Moses wants to see God. Show me your glory, God says. And Moses says. And God says, well, you can't see my nobody. No man can see my face and live. And he puts him in a rock and hides his hand and he passes by. And Moses only sees a part of him. But, you know, as the Bible says, the heavens declare the glory of God. And so we can only see God in part. And so the gloriousness of the universe still, despite all the strangeness and otherworldliness and the majesty of it all, it's still only a part of who God is. It is so the. I love looking at planets and the different things in the universe because it. Just like you said, Michael, it's a sobering reality of just how different God is and the holiness. I interviewed Charlie Duke, who was an Apollo astronaut a couple years ago, and he was on Apollo 16 in July of 19, April of 1972. And he was telling me the story about how he and John Young, his late friend, who they walked on the moon with him. They were messing around on the moon. I mean, Apollo 16, this is. This is the next to the last successful mission of Apollo. So the guys were getting a little, Charlie says, getting a little careless, you know, getting a little carried away with what we can do on the moon. So he and John decided to do something called Lunar Olympics. And they. The first event was the lunar high jump. And so John went up and he went up as far as he could to see how high he can jump. And then Charlie went up, and as Charlie came down, he started falling backwards and he landed on his safety pack. And John says, charlie, that wasn't very smart. And you can hear Charlie on the radio going, yeah, that wasn't very smart. NASA canceled their Lunar Olympics. But to Charlie's point, he's like, your suit breaks your dead. You know, there's this idea that we can get comfortable with, and Charlie's a Christian, so he makes the analogies like the spacesuit is being clothed in God's righteousness. And we cannot take that for granted and just play around with it because the moon's atmosphere is deadly and you have to wear the clothes in order to experience the lunar. Well, there is no lunar atmosphere, but the lunar environment. But the whole point, the analogy is there, that you're going to go out there and explore the cosmos, you got to be dressed for it.
- [44:46]
Michael Ray Lewis
Right.
- [44:46]
Interviewer/Host
And that's the same thing with Christianity. If you're. You're just. It's not messing around with God. You have to be clothed in the righteousness of Christ to be able to comprehend.
- [44:55]
Michael Ray Lewis
I really like that analogy because I usually use the analogy of, like, the entire intention for Jesus coming was to bring. For God to bring us to himself. Right. And so you're right if you think of God as. As that you can't survive in his presence in the way that the astronaut can't survive without a suit. But what Jesus does is he comes, clothes us, as you said, and allows us to be in God's presence in a way that we otherwise wouldn't have been able to. Yeah. That's why when I, like when I said earlier, I said the reason I can't believe in God or as an atheist, was because I couldn't believe in a God who would send me to hell just because I have a little trouble believing in Him. Well, that's because I completely did not understand what was really going on. What was really going on was God was standing right there in front of me with his hand open. Jesus is standing right there in front of me, and all I have to do is take his hand. And I didn't want to take his hand. And so he was the only one that solved the problem of my separation. And yet I was pushing that solution away. And so it wasn't as though he was sending me someplace just because I had a little trouble believing in him, is that he's right there in front of me and I was choosing not to give my life to Him.
- [46:03]
Interviewer/Host
Yeah. And I think that's. That's It's a sobering reality, I think, in terms of our fragileness. You know, a lot of secular cosmologists will say that we're in. We're insignificant in the cosmos. And I understand what they're saying. I mean, we're small. You look at Earth from space and it's a. It's a pixel on a computer screen. And, you know, they say we're insignificant. Of course. Now the problem is that significance is not derived from size.
- [46:31]
Michael Ray Lewis
Right. That's where God's.
- [46:33]
Interviewer/Host
That's the fallacy of that argument. But to the. I can understand what they're saying in the sense that we're small. And if you look at the universe, it should humble us that we're so small. But the size the universe doesn't really have. The. The universe itself can't humble us. Only God can. Can truly humble us. And so, you know, yes, we are. In terms of our size, we do seem cosmically insignificant. But this is the place where Jesus came. He became one of us, became a human being and came down to this little blue dot and, and died for us and loves us and gives us his life so that we can. We can apprehend his holiness and have eternal life. We are created for a purpose. And, you know, even. Even I find this interesting. Even people that are not believers, when they're doing something, they find a job or they find something that they love to do, and all they can talk about is what they love to do. And I think it's regardless of whether they acknowledge God or not, I think that shows you that. That we are created for a purpose, to do something. And when we're functioning in that purpose, it doesn't even seem like work. You know, Jesus says, my burden is easy and my yoke is light. And. And that's not. It's so. It's not just saving us from sin and bringing you into a religious system of thought. It's giving you a full way of life. Jesus says I'm the way, the truth and the life, and that. I remember before I was a Christian, I used to think that Christian stuff was weird. I don't want to do Christian things because Christians are weird. Yeah, I don't want to. Christian music is bad and Christian movies, Christian movies are bad and Christian books are bad. It's like, I don't want to do Christian things, Lord. But he has patiently cultivated a delight in showing me what he has called me to do.
- [48:26]
Michael Ray Lewis
And I didn't even want to be called a Christian at first.
- [48:29]
Interviewer/Host
Yeah, I mean either, because I knew.
- [48:30]
Michael Ray Lewis
What came along with that title.
- [48:31]
Interviewer/Host
Right. The connotations are unfortunate. Maybe sometimes they're deserved in a sense. But. But really, as you're talking about this, the nature of recognizing, it's not just having some intellectual difficulty with Christian doctrine. It's an entire way of life. It's, it's finding your purpose and your calling and what, what you've been created to do to love God and to love others. Right. In a way that glorifies God. And so that's, that's truly. It's not just. I mean, apologetics can make Christianity look like it's just an intellectual argument.
- [49:06]
Michael Ray Lewis
Right.
- [49:06]
Interviewer/Host
But it's far more than that.
- [49:07]
Michael Ray Lewis
It really is. And I think a lot of people misunderstand that about apologetics, especially when I have conversations with people. I mean, when I became a believer, to be honest with you, I just assumed this was the path that every Christian took. I thought they went through this, this, this study in their life where they tried to figure out if God exists or not. They come to the conclusion he exists, they give their life to him, and I just assume that's how it was. But I quickly realized after becoming a believer that that's not at all the case. Most of the responses that I get from Christians when I'm talking to them and asking them why they believe it. And of all the things for me to ask them, like the hardest questions for a Christian to answer is, why do you believe in God?
- [49:45]
Interviewer/Host
Yeah.
- [49:46]
Michael Ray Lewis
And I don't know, like in my mind, coming the way the path that I came in my mind, I'm like, what do you mean you don't know why? But the reasons. I get it because I was raised that way because I have faith and it's all they know. And so they've. It doesn't mean they didn't. Haven't genuinely given their life to Jesus. It just means they only know how to. How to. They only know that they believe. They don't know how to show why they believe it.
- [50:08]
Interviewer/Host
Yeah.
- [50:08]
Michael Ray Lewis
Or show that it's true.
- [50:09]
Interviewer/Host
We neglect the love your. I mean, we neglect everything. But one of the most often neglected things I think you encounter is how. What does it look like to love God with all our heart, soul and mine.
- [50:23]
Michael Ray Lewis
Right.
- [50:23]
Interviewer/Host
A lot of people are okay with the emotional side of things. I'm not a very emotional person. I never have been my whole life. I, all my brothers got the affection gene or whatever you want to call it. I've got the stoic sort of, sort of on the Spectrum of, like, I have no emotions. Sometimes my emotions are inappropriate.
- [50:41]
Michael Ray Lewis
I'm the same way. I actually got told because I did the cross examined the CIA training. One of the things my instructor told me when I was done, he was like, you know, you just seem kind of bland.
- [50:54]
Narrator/Interviewer
Well, I mean, look at your chief president here.
- [50:57]
Interviewer/Host
Frank is Mr.
- [50:58]
Michael Ray Lewis
Personality, you know, and so it's. But yeah, that's, I mean, that was the biggest thing is that when I realized that Christians were not equipped like that, it kind of shifted my perspective and I really wanted to help other Christians understand how to define their faith. And you're right, but that's not. Apologetics isn't just the intellectual side of things. It's, I mean, apologetics is just a defense for the faith, whatever that defense may be. And so when you're having conversations with people in other worldviews that already believe in the existence of God, well then your, your defense kind of shifts to what? Like what do you believe about God? And so it's using those questions to kind of draw out their worldview and figure out what it is that's, that's keeping them from Jesus. And that's kind of my, my go to is, is Jesus? Because you either have given your life to Christ or you haven't. And most other world views will deny the, the deity of Christ.
- [51:52]
Interviewer/Host
Yeah, yeah. We work at Watchman. We're constantly dealing with all these false doctrines and false beliefs. All center, all go astray.
- [52:01]
Michael Ray Lewis
Yeah.
- [52:01]
Interviewer/Host
You want to find out if something is a cult or whatever, look at their doctrines about Jesus.
- [52:06]
Michael Ray Lewis
Exactly.
- [52:06]
Interviewer/Host
Because every cult, every religion, most every cult, most every religion has something to say about Jesus.
- [52:12]
Michael Ray Lewis
Exactly.
- [52:12]
Interviewer/Host
And so that's the epicenter of what we're talking about in Colossians. All things have been created through him and for him. And so when you look at the universe, you're talking about Jesus. You look at the Book of Mormon, you're talking about who's Jesus. You look at the Quran, who is Isa, who is Jesus. You look at the Jehovah's Witness, they deny Jesus is the Logos, is God. So that does get down to the fundamental basics of this, that we're not just talking about science or emotionally how we feel or just having no emotion at all intellect or all intellect and no emotion that it really just hinges upon whatever your emotional state, whatever your intellectual state, it all hinges upon our hope in Christ. And how can we defend it? Because I know in this dialogue a lot of things that turn off. Atheists are Christians, that as you said, a minute ago aren't giving a defense in a rational, intelligible way. It's more of an emotional, not, not denying that it's real, it's emotionally fulfilling for them. But intellectually they just say, well, that's just an argument. That's just an intellectual argument. And, and that doesn't. I just know, I just believe. I just know. I believe.
- [53:26]
Michael Ray Lewis
And it's more personal for them, right? They, so they, they when I talk to a lot of Christians, it's more of, well, I believe it. And that's good enough. And they have, because they, they can't defend the faith. They're not out talking to people about Jesus.
- [53:39]
Interviewer/Host
Right?
- [53:39]
Michael Ray Lewis
And that's what we're commanded to do, is go out and, and, and share Jesus with others. We're commanded to go out and make disciples. And I think partly it's because they're either too scared that they'll get asked a question that they don't know, or they, they just don't have Jesus as a priority. I mean, if we love him, we want to talk about him. He's all you want to talk about.
- [54:15]
Narrator/Host
Apologetics Profile is a production of Watchmen Fellowship Incorporated, Arlington, Texas. For more information on apologetics, cults, world religions and other non Christian ideologies and practices, visit watchman.org today. That's watchmen.org.
- [54:45]
Narrator/Interviewer
Sa.