Are We Alone in the Universe?

Tom: Thanks, Gary. You’re listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth, to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to Him.

We’re going through Dave Hunt’s book—new book, by the way—Seeking and Finding God. And as we’re going through it, Dave—we’re up to chapter 3—I forget that people don’t track with us every program, so we may have some new listeners, some who, just by chance tuned in to us and, Dave, what could you tell them about the book in a couple of sentences?

Dave: Well, a couple of sentences, Tom. You make it pretty tough. But I meet people all over the world, and the Lord opens the door, we have some terrific conversations. I mean, I’ve met so many people just recently who are open to the gospel. I want to follow them up with something. What book am I going to give them? What tape? And so forth. This is really what I wanted to have: Seeking and Finding God. It starts out—I think it’s intellectually challenging; it’s scientifically accurate. And it’s biblical, and it really challenges people to recognize that they are nonphysical beings. When the body is dead, you go on forever—you’d better be sure of where you’re going, okay?

And the existence of God…I think it’s a terrific book. I am going to pass it on to people, and that was why it was done.

Tom: Right. Seeking and Finding God. Dave, in our last two programs, there was a verse that you had that we didn’t talk about, and I wanted to. It’s Psalm 92: “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hast formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.”

Now, for somebody—the Bible declares it: God is eternal!

Dave: That’s a bit different from what the other religions say. Of course, nothing like that is said about Allah in the Qur’an. And you know the Pagan religions, there’s not just one god—many gods. They quarrel and so forth. Some people think God came into existence—the Mormons, as you know, talk about the God of this world, which actually is the title of Satan, and he once upon a time was a man, a sinner on another planet, redeemed by another Jesus, who then through eons of time pulled himself up by his bootstraps—that’s their language—and through initiation and so forth, became a god, like trillions—an unlimited number of gods before him. So the Mormons have more gods than the Hindus. They only have about 330 million.

But the God of the Bible, “From everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.” You’re either God or you’re not God. You can’t become God! And you don’t get to be God. Well, God, how’d you get to be God? I mean, what were you before?

No, God is. And there is no way scientifically, philosophically—we’ve talked about it: matter, energy, is not eternal. It wears out. There was a time when it wasn’t here. You don’t get everything out of nothing. Some one, not some thing—because things wear out—some one without beginning, without end, always is. He created it out of nothing.

Tom: Dave, you just said, “You don’t get something out of nothing.”

Dave: That’s right.

Tom: But didn’t we spend last week talking about God creating everything out of nothing.

Dave: That’s right. But God did it. If you just had nothing—no God, nothing—you get nothing. So something does not somehow evolve or spontaneous generation—spring out of nothing.

Tom: Okay.

Dave: God must create it. But He doesn’t create it out of Himself, because the universe is not an extension of God. We went through that last week. If it were, God would be subject to the second law of thermodynamics. That’s the problem with the “Star Wars Force.” It’s part of the universe, all heading for destruction. If there were not a transcendent God who is totally other than the universe, totally outside the universe—if all you had was the universe, which is pantheism, you know, everything is god—we’d know what’s going to happen. This universe is heading for destruction. How many billions of years it will take, we don’t know. But one day, it will all be as though it had never been, and all the schemes and dreams and plans and ambitions of mankind or whoever will be like sandcastles washed out into a cosmic ocean of nothingness. It just never happened. It’s meaningless.

But God is outside the universe. He created it out of nothing. It is being brought to destruction by Him. He will bring it to destruction one day. And He will create a new universe. That’s the difference between—I guess we’re going to get into that a bit—the difference between resurrection and reincarnation. Reincarnation, you’re recycling this dead and dying thing. What’s the point? You keep coming back to this, the same world, same universe, that is going downhill. Resurrection—God makes a new creation. He brings new life.

Tom: Dave, you know, that brings us up to chapter 3. In chapter 2 we talked about the second law of thermodynamics. We talked about God creating everything out of nothing. And we talked about faith—that it’s a rational step that follows, really, evidence that God has provided. But then, you know, we’re finite beings, fallen finite beings, so our comprehension is certainly not infinite, and God—you know, there’s a point where we have to step out in faith—not a leap of faith, but stepping out in faith, going in the direction, as you’ve said, that the evidence and reason point.

So God says, “Come, let us reason together,” He wants us to use our heads.

Dave: He proves Himself in many ways—prophecy fulfilled, and so forth—and then when He asks us to trust Him for something we can’t understand, then we do it, and it makes sense! It’s rational.

But, Tom, the atheist has all the same evidence. He takes a leap of faith in the opposite direction. Well, all the evidence points to a Creator, to design. You cannot escape it, but He doesn’t want that, because then he would be accountable to God, so he takes 189-degree turn from the direction the evidence is pointing, and he takes a leap of faith in the opposite direction and says, “But I choose to believe there is no God, there is no purpose, it’s all meaningless. Somehow—there’s no reason behind it. How did it come into existence? We don’t know.” That’s rebellion!

Tom: Mm-hmm. Dave, we dealt with matter in many ways. Matter could not have produced what we have. It can’t produce thought. It can’t produce intelligence. It can’t produce information that—you have a…you quote Einstein that matter cannot organize itself into information, so there has to be something else.

Dave: And, of course, that relates to DNA, because we all began…we all start life as a single cell about the size of a period at the end of a sentence. How does that single cell know how to build trillions of other cells? Get them all functioning properly? Operate the chemical nano-machinery that is so intricate? Linus Pauling said, “A single cell is more complex than New York City,” okay?

Well, it does it because it’s all written on the DNA—the instructions to build it and to operate it. Incredible, Tom! It’s beyond our comprehension. We don’t have computers that can do that.

So, it’s information. It’s written out. Now when you see information on a piece of paper written in ink, you don’t think that the ink and the paper originated the information. An intelligence separate and distinct from the information itself and from the means by which it is communicated initiated that, put it there. Who would that be? God! We are driven to this conclusion. God exists.

And as you quote Einstein, matter can’t arrange itself into information. It’s not there! So matter could not have created us. Energy couldn’t have created us.

Tom: Dave, the Bible says that we are body, soul, and spirit. We’ve established that we couldn’t just be matter, we can’t just be physical, there’s something else that’s beyond that.

Dave: We can’t just be a body.

Tom: Right. And that the spirit and the soul, once the body, which is dying—even those of us who are living, the body is going through a death process—but once the body dies, there’s nothing that would say that the soul and spirit cease—they end.

Dave: We have no reason to believe that. There’s no scientific reason, and certainly the Bible says the contrary. And we noted that Paul said, “Things that are seen are temporary. Things that are invisible are eternal.” And our soul and spirit are invisible—invisible only to physical eyes. And they’re eternal. Man goes on forever. The thinker who made the decisions, made the choices, who’s accountable to God, when the body is laid in the grave, he doesn’t cease to exist. We talk about it in this chapter, I think, that science has come to the same conclusion. Remember, we have a quote of Robert Jastrow. He was the founder and for many years director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which played a key role in Pioneer, Voyager, and Galileo space probe. And…

Tom: And it was the Voyager that had the record on it introducing us to alien beings.

Dave: Right. And he said, “Life that is a billion years beyond us may be far beyond the flesh and blood form that we would recognize. It may be disembodied and has escaped its mortal flesh to become something that old-fashioned people would call ‘spirits.’ Maybe it can materialize and then de-materialize. I’m sure it has magical powers, by our standards.”

Well, come on! Matter is going to evolve into spirit? Hardly. Matter doesn’t think. Spirits think. We must have a spirit within us, within this body, or we don’t think, okay? We’ve gone through that.

So I’m sorry, Robert Jastrow is a brilliant man, but he was an agnostic and did not want to accept the existence of a Creator. He’s driven to it, but he won’t accept it.

Tom: Right. But recognizing at least some form of spirit survival…

Dave: That’s right, nonphysical beings. There is a nonphysical part to this universe. We know that.

Tom: Yeah. Dave, the Bible addresses eternity, big time. For Christians, for those who know the Lord, we’re to set our priorities with regard to eternity, not with regard to our temporal state.

Dave: Exactly. People spend a lot of time planning their retirement, their retirement fund, their bank accounts, their insurance policies, and so forth. How long does that last? Not very long. Eventually, you’re in the grave.

I don’t know, Tom, did I…how long since I told the story—or did I? One of my favorite authors about almost 300 years ago, remember, who talked about the man who…

Tom: Right.

Dave: …spent his life…

Tom: William Law.

Dave: Yeah….

Tom: A couple weeks ago… (chuckling)

Dave: No, now, Tom, come on… Talked about the man who spent his lifetime planning his retirement home, remember? Swimming pool, sauna, tennis court, and all of this…and people say, “Well, you know, he’s spent his life well. I mean, he’s saved up and he’s gotten it.”

Well, what about a man who spends his life saving up for the retirement home he’s going to build on Mars! Well, you’d think the guy was crazy.

No, says William Law, they’re both crazy. The difference between their insanity is just a few years. The one man is planning to build a retirement home on a place where he will never be. And the other man is planning his retirement home on a place where he cannot stay.

I think that’s pretty powerful, Tom.

Tom: Right.

Dave: It’s something worth thinking about.

Tom: Well, this is the exhortation of the Scriptures: “Lay not up for yourself treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt and where thieves break through and steal. Lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through and steal.” These are the words of Jesus.

Dave: Mm-hmm. Amen. Something worth thinking about.

Tom: Yeah. Dave, as we push on with going through chapter 3—again, we want people to ask themselves, “Where will I spend eternity?”

Dave: There is no question more important than that, Tom.

Tom: I want to get back to the business of “body, soul, and spirit.” And particularly “spirit survival.” You mentioned Jastrow—a scientist and astronomer—but you also have some interesting people in this chapter: Terence McKenna; this generation doesn’t know Timothy Leary, but in my generation, he was the avant-garde of doing drugs for supposedly educational purposes, right? But Terence McKenna, he experimented with drugs all over the world, and he found something interesting related to spirit entities.

Dave: Yeah, he’s…well, he’s a scientist. He wanted to find out what effect do drugs have? And he thought it was just something involving our brain, or whatever. But he found out that you get into these psychedelic drugs—whatever it may be, from around the world—you’ve made contact with spirit beings. Now, is this just a hallucination? Well, you find out that people all over the world, independently of one another, if they’re getting hallucinations, they’re all getting the same hallucination! Because there is an underlying philosophy that these entities are teaching, and it rather shocked him. He said, “They are trying to teach us something.”

We could quote many other scientists, as we have in other books, who are really trying to communicate with nonphysical beings. Well, Robert Jastrow says they could have evolved. They’re out there. And this would be a big challenge: Let’s get in touch with them.

Tom, a lot of people think they’re doing this, as you know, through channeling. You’ve got about 1,000 channelers in Los Angeles alone. We’ve seen some of them on TV. They think they’re in touch with people who have died some years ago and moved on into a higher dimension, are getting wiser and wiser, so we want to get in touch with them. Or they may think they’re in touch with Extraterrestrials. We’ve got some pretty serious guys out there.

Tom: Ascended masters—all kinds of ideas.

Dave: We’ve got some pretty serious scientists out there who think that there are ETIs—Extraterrestrial Intelligences—who are nonphysical, or, even though they’re physical, they can communicate with us by this means, psychically.

And this is serious business because, as Terrence McKenna says, they’ve got a message for us, and amazingly, the message is the same.

I was in Australia reading a New Age magazine, and I saw one of the New Agers himself said, “Isn’t it remarkable that all over the world—whether a person is in a yogic trance, or whether they’re under hypnosis, or whether they’re on drugs—they’re getting basically the same message!” Well, I would say that indicates there is a common source.

Tom: This is not just one individual’s imagination.

Dave: No, this is not an hallucination. There’s a design behind it, because it’s not just a newsy little bit of information about yourself, but it follows, amazingly, the four lies that the Serpent initiated Eve into in the Garden of Eden, and I think that indicates Satan is still communicating. The Bible says he communicated through a serpent, a talking serpent. People say, “Oh, that’s obviously a myth.” We’ve got serious scientists trying to communicate with porpoises, right? Claiming that they can teach chimpanzees the alphabet. I saw recently about a dog that supposedly has a vocabulary of 200 words, and it learns new words, you know. Amazing! Well, for Satan to communicate through a serpent, that wasn’t so unusual. Rather clever.

You will find serpents everywhere in this world. They’re worshiped everywhere, and we don’t have time to go into that, but people are trying to communicate with animals, and, “Well,” they say, “we originated with animals. We’re just more highly evolved than they are.”

And Satan had a definite purpose in mind. He wanted to turn Eve—and Adam, eventually—away from the true God, their Creator. He wanted them to believe that they’re just a part of nature, and that nature really brought them forth. Well, that’s a nice idea, because nature is not going to condemn you for anything. “Whatever comes naturally, let’s just do it!” Okay?

There are no morals. And we have people who hug trees, and we’ve got to get back in touch with nature. Well, I don’t know how you cozy up to an erupting volcano! Do you pray to a hurricane? It’s not going to work. I think everybody knows that. And nature can be very cruel. You get up in a blizzard at a high elevation, you know—I’m thinking of the Donner party right now. I don’t know how many people even know that story, but this caravan of covered wagons coming out to California—they got up in the Donner Pass (now named the Donner Pass after them), and they got bogged down. They couldn’t get anywhere. Many of them died. They ended up eating one another. That snow got so deep and so cold…

So, “nature is cruel!” No, nature is not cruel. Nature is impersonal. It’s neither cruel nor kind. But this was the idea that Satan wanted to communicate to Eve, and there were four basic lies, which I guess we won’t have time to get into—maybe we can come back later, but Number 1: “God is not personal, but God is a force.” You know how popular that idea became through Star Wars.

Tom: It’s the most popular religious idea in the world.

Dave: A force, being impersonal, isn’t going to judge you. “I’m not going to tell you you’ve done wrong.”

The next one was, “There’s no death.” You don’t really die, you just get recycled. You think you die, but…the body dies, but that’s not the end. The spirit survives, and so forth.

The third one: “We are evolving into gods.” What’s the point of coming back again and again in reincarnation if you’re not going somewhere? We’re getting ever higher. We’re evolving into gods, and Jastrow says, “Well, these critters could have—they could have powers that would seem like…godlike, miraculous powers to us.”

And then finally, the fourth one, “The process can be accelerated through secret knowledge,” initiation, you know. Practice yoga. Look deep inside, and find that infinite potential that’s down there inside of each of us. There’s so many lies! “You only use 10 percent of your brain,” say the psychologists. “Well, if we could tap into that other 90 percent…”

So basically, what happens is, man becomes his own god. That was the lie of the Serpent in the Garden. And this is being taught today, and of course, it’s the foundation of Mormonism! Brigham Young said, “The devil told the truth. I don’t blame Mother Eve for eating the forbidden fruit. That’s how we become gods!” So Mormonism is founded upon the belief that the lie that the Serpent told Eve, which destroyed the human race, is really the secret to our advancement into godhood.

Tom: Dave, we’ll have to come back. We’ve got about a minute left, but there might be a little confusion here. You see, the second point, that there is no death—we don’t die but survive in the spirit world—in the first couple of chapters, weren’t we trying to establish that? Now…so, is there a contradiction here or not?

Dave: Well, there is death. And death means you don’t come back. You get out there, you don’t come back. Now spirit survival attempts to say you don’t need to come back. In fact, it’s better that you don’t come back, because you’re moving on to a higher dimension—graduate school. You continue to learn your lessons, and so forth. We’ll have to come back and talk about that, Tom.