When we read a paper¹ published a couple years ago by last week’s guest — Dr. Chris Barrigar — we felt his idea was a perfect book-end to our recent discussions about Young Earth Creationism and Intelligent Design.

We’ve often referred to an image of God rolling certain ingredients — thermodynamics; entropy; quantum mechanics; biological evolution — into a cosmic egg and setting that on the stage of the pre-universe … and watched with delight as that exploded into the universe we see now in front of us.

Our guest now adds more detail to that image: those ingredients might have also included randomness, probability, order, predictability, determinism, massively large numbers, dynamic complexity, and chaos theory.

And in the process, he tells us he’s found the meaning and purpose of the universe itself: it’s been front-end loaded (the cosmic egg above) to create agape-capable beings like ourselves.

We’ll warn the listeners in advance though: this could be the most intellectually challenging episode we’ve done so far. We’ll be putting some of the most recent advances in science, philosophy, and theology on the table. We still believe you’ll be able to keep up with the discussion, but you’ll need to stay focused!

Let us know what you think, and share this with a friend.

1. Barrigar, C., “God’s Agape/Probability design for the universe.” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 70(3):161-174, 2018.

If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic.

If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook.

Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page