August 24, 2025 • 27 mins
Douglas Ell joins Rodney Olsen on Bleeding Daylight to share his remarkable journey from committed atheism to evidence-based faith. With degrees in mathematics and physics from MIT and a successful legal career, Ell brings scientific rigor to one of humanity's biggest questions: Does the evidence point to God?
In this fascinating conversation, Ell reveals how examining DNA as digital code, understanding the fine-tuning of universal constants, and grappling with the origin of matter itself led him to conclude that science overwhelmingly supports the existence of a divine creator. He discusses his books "Counting to God" and "Proofs of God" sharing how he hopes to help others who struggle with the perceived conflict between science and faith. This episode offers compelling evidence that may change how you see the relationship between scientific discovery and spiritual belief.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:08):
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Hello, I'm so thankful you've joined me today.
You'll find many more Bleeding Daylight episodes at bleedingdaylight.net.
Please help others discover stories of hope and transformation by sharing Bleeding Daylight with others.
(00:33):
We've been told we can have one or the other, science or faith, but do they actually exclude each other?
Can we take a rigorous look at the scientific evidence that surrounds us and see it pointing towards a divine creator?
Today's guest is a former atheist who found that the evidence he examined pointed him towards the face of God.
(01:08):
Today I'm thrilled to introduce a guest who's taken a fascinating journey from skepticism to faith, all through the lens of scientific inquiry.
Douglas Ell.
is a former atheist who spent over three decades diving deep into the relationship between science and God, refusing to accept faith without solid evidence.
(01:29):
With degrees in math and physics from MIT, a master's in theoretical mathematics, and a successful career as a prominent attorney, he brings a combination of scientific rigor and legal analysis to one of humanity's biggest questions.
He's the author of Counting to God, bridging the often contentious divide between science and faith.
(01:51):
Douglas, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Rodney.
I'm very delighted to be here with you.
I want to jump back to the days that you would have seen yourself as an atheist.
Where did a stance like that originate?
Was there any faith background within your family?
There was a faith background.
I was brought up in a congregational New England church, and I felt really good about faith when I was young.
(02:16):
And then, of course, they made me go to school.
I read in some book this theory that life came from some dirty pond.
If you want a technical name for it, which you don't need, but it's the Miller-Urey experiment of 1953.
They'd stirred some chemicals together and zapped them with electricity and got some amino acids, and there's amino acids in life.
(02:39):
So they said, presto, we've shown how life can start.
I mean, it's been totally repudiated countless times, but when I read that, I thought, wow.
It's in a science book, so it must be true, right?
So if I'm from pond scum, God doesn't make any sense.
I think I got conned by the prevailing skepticism, atheism of our popular culture.
(03:06):
Looking back at it now, I think I was bullied into giving up my faith because of some belief that it was irrational or stupid.
Almost an embarrassment.
Losing my faith for a while, it hurt my life.
So my story is, I want to help anybody else who might have that same barrier to faith, because I've found overwhelming evidence for God.
(03:31):
It's interesting that you say that losing your faith hurt your life, and I'm wondering if you can help explain that.
I know that when we don't believe that there's something bigger than us, when we don't believe that there is a reason beyond just being, we can take different choices.
So how did it particularly hurt your life to have no faith at that time?
(03:54):
Well, it made me very self-centered, for one.
So I became an attorney, making money and successful.
It didn't hurt me in that way, but there was an emptiness in my life, and I didn't realize that until my son was born in my early 30s.
My wife said, we've got to get the kid baptized.
(04:15):
I thought about that for about 10 seconds, and I said, yes, dear.
Who needs that kind of marital fight?
Sprinkle a little holy water on the kid, knock yourself out.
But we went to church, and I realized that those people had so much more.
They had a peace and a grace.
I could just sense it.
I think when you're around someone with strong faith, you can really sense it.
(04:39):
I wanted that, and I was missing that.
And that's what this false idea that science is contrary to God, that's what it took out of my life.
You noticed within the people in that congregation that they had something that you had left behind years ago.
And oftentimes, we hear people saying, well, that's just a crutch, and it's okay if you want to believe in that, and that helps you.
(05:04):
But you obviously saw something deeper than just a fanciful belief, didn't you?
I did.
I did.
At the time, I wanted what those people had.
But at the same time, being a real stubborn kind of guy, I told myself, well, you can't believe, Doug, unless there's some scientific evidence for that.
I mean, you're an MIT guy, math, physics.
(05:26):
You've got to check it out.
So then I started reading, and I've been reading still for 40 years now, and it's more overwhelming all the time.
I was doing long-distance commuting, so I spent a lot of time on airplanes.
So I'm sitting on one airplane once, reading the Standard Treatise on Molecular Biology, which I would not recommend to anyone unless they were having trouble sleeping, frankly.
(05:51):
It's actually pretty incredibly heavy to carry it around, even.
And I realized that the chance of getting the code of life correct by chance were banishingly nonexistent.
At that time, my math brain grabbed onto that, and it's been quite a journey ever since.
(06:14):
So there were a number of things, obviously, in what you were reading that drew you back to say, hey, there could be something in this.
But we do know that faith comes from a heart place, that there is that calling of the Holy Spirit on our lives.
So where did the evidence and that call of the Holy Spirit collide for you?
When was that moment?
(06:35):
I think it was on that airplane when I finally decided I'm all in on faith.
I had been reading cosmology books and such.
So I kept reading, and I have a friend who was head of physics at MIT, which is a pretty important scientific position.
We would talk about God, and I said, Peter, you know, I'm doing a lot of reading here, and this stuff is pretty amazing.
(07:00):
Somebody should write a book on all this evidence for God.
And he said, well, maybe it could be you.
And I thought, oh, no, God.
You know, I'm an attorney.
I'm really busy.
I got small kids.
I can't do this.
But it took about 10 years, and then I put a fair chunk of evidence into my first book, Counting to God.
Like I say, it's been coming together more and more every year.
(07:22):
When we start to look at evidence, as you say, there's so much there to say that it's incredibly improbable that life just started.
In fact, the evidence is almost nonexistent.
And yet, people continue to believe that this is the way that life began.
So it must be more than just the evidence.
(07:44):
There must be a battle there of ideologies that goes beyond just what the evidence can show.
Because if it was down to the evidence, you'd be able to hand someone your book, and suddenly they would believe.
So where is that disconnect for people?
Well, that's a great question.
You know, I was lecturing once in a room with a couple hundred adolescents.
(08:05):
And when one woman raised her hand and said, if what you're saying is true, why doesn't everybody believe?
I think it's pretty much what you just said, right?
Yeah.
And so I opened the floor, and I think a lot of people don't want to believe.
They don't want there to be a God, to say there's a higher moral authority.
They don't want to be told they really have to be nice to people, that maybe they shouldn't do some things, that maybe they should take better care of themselves.
(08:32):
They don't want that.
I am not an expert on why people refuse faith, but I think that's one of the reasons.
The Bible also says that God puts blinders on people.
I wish I could explain it, but it's not logical.
It's more, I think, atheism is a much, much greater thing to accept than faith, if you really look at the evidence.
(08:57):
You're saying there that people don't want to believe that there's a God, because it does change their life.
It does take them away from a self-centered life.
But I've also heard people say, I wish I could believe.
Yes.
But they believe that the evidence is pointing the other way.
So what are some of the simple proofs or simple evidence that you would start to talk to someone about if they said, oh, I wish I could believe, but isn't all the evidence pointing the wrong way?
(09:24):
What would you say to them to start them on their journey of discovering faith?
Sure.
I think what I would start them with is the most important discovery in biology, perhaps ever, but certainly in the last hundred years.
And that's the discovery that life runs on digital code, which we all know as DNA, although we don't really process the significance of that, I think.
(09:51):
So DNA is a digital code.
It comes in discrete groups of atoms.
You and I are talking over digital code.
Computers run on digital code.
Books are a different kind of digital code.
There's more symbols and spaces and letters.
A book is a digital code.
But human beings have advanced digital code.
(10:13):
And there are these four letters that in DNA that the body reads three letters at a time.
This was discovered.
And not just human beings, all life runs off this digital code.
OK, let's stop for a minute and process that, because I don't think people really do.
So how do you get digital code by chance?
(10:33):
OK, all the code we know, every app on your phone, every website that was designed by a mind.
But we run on digital code.
It's undeniable.
And the code is, I mean, Bill Gates, who knows a little bit about code, said that it's far, far more advanced than anything humans have ever made.
(10:54):
And let's look at that digital code.
In 2011, something called the ENCODE project, 400 scientists, absolutely top caliber scientists working worldwide, trying to figure out what the heck's in human DNA code.
We have 3.2 billion, billion with a B, letters of code in almost every one of our maybe 30 trillion with a T cells.
(11:19):
Huge numbers, huge amounts of code.
If you put all that code into very thick books, it'd be about a thousand of them.
Well, these 400 scientists found that basically the code's all fully functional.
We don't quite figure out exactly how it all works, but it's not junk.
It's real code.
Second of all, it has at least two layers of information.
(11:41):
Now, how can that be?
Think about that, all right?
These are scientific facts.
I'm not making this up.
My analogy there is think of a Bach fugue where the music's going in different directions simultaneously.
Okay, there's layers on top of layers of information in the code.
And then just the simple facts.
On the front page of the New York Times when this ENCODE study was released, we human beings have 4 million switches in our bodies that turn our systems on and off.
(12:10):
How do you get digital code by chance?
How do you get life by chance?
To have life, you have to have the digital code.
You have to have machines that can read the code.
You have to have machines that can copy the code.
And you've got to have machines that can take the code and turn out parts.
(12:33):
It's like 3D printers.
Our bodies have 3D printers, and the code tells them what part to build, when to build the part, and how to put the parts together, and then how to operate the system.
And this is all proven science.
There is no atheist rebuttal to any of these facts.
(12:54):
I don't think this is hard, but I think a lot of people just don't want to look at it like that.
There are many people who would say that as we discover more and more in science, it explains the way that things work, and therefore there's no longer a need for God.
And yet others would say, well, actually, all we're doing is we're starting to learn just some of how God operates.
(13:17):
The level of complexity at which God works.
And so I guess that's a switch in thinking for a lot of people too, that we're not actually discovering something new.
We're discovering how a master creator has put some of our code together and some of this planet together.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
You know, modern science, I believe, took root with Christianity, with the belief that there's an orderly universe.
(13:44):
And all the great scientists of centuries ago were Christians, and they did science to figure out how God did it.
How did God build the universe?
How did God build light?
Because certainly other cultures have had a lot of brilliant people, but when it's all about the emperor, the Egyptians, the Chinese, whatever, they didn't develop modern technology.
(14:06):
It developed in a Christian basis.
How did God do it?
Science is telling us more and more about it.
People think, again, that science can explain everything.
It can't.
I'll give you another example from physics.
We have these new space telescopes.
There's the Hubble Space Telescope, and if you're keeping up on it, the James Webb Space Telescope that can even see further.
(14:30):
They do these things, they call them deep field views.
It's the most amazing pictures.
They turn these telescopes on something that's about a grain of sand at arm's length.
That's a pretty tiny piece of the sky that they think is empty, and what they see within that little grain of sand at arm's length is tens of thousands of galaxies.
(14:54):
So there's a lot of stuff out there.
I'm going to be technical and call all that stuff, all right?
So we can agree that the universe is big and has a lot of stuff, I hope.
So here's my question.
Where does stuff come from?
There's only logically two answers.
Either stuff always existed, right, or it was created.
Now we're going to apply some laws of physics.
(15:16):
The first most important law of physics, many would say, is the first law of thermodynamics, which says you can't create or destroy matter-slash-energy.
Under the right conditions, you can melt a little matter, and that's an atomic bond.
You've got a tremendous amount of energy, but overall, you can't create or destroy.
This is a fundamental law of physics.
(15:39):
So that would tell you, you think, that, well, the universe has always existed, right?
Well, we've known for a century now that's wrong, that the universe was created.
If the universe had always existed, then under the second law of thermodynamics, which has a fancy name called entropy, but it's basically everything goes downhill, okay?
(16:02):
If you don't keep your office, your home, your garden, whatever, tidy, it's going to get messy.
And from a technical sense, the phrase is the universe is headed toward heat death.
It can't have an infinite past.
Something outside of space and time created space and time.
I think that's an undeniable scientific fact.
(16:23):
Okay, so all of a sudden, we've got a lot of room for God in the basic first two laws of physics.
Atheists will tell you, well, some will tell you that there's this thing called this multiverse.
Maybe you've heard that term.
You know, there's lots of universes out there.
They just keeps, you know, generating baby universes in some way we don't understand.
(16:45):
But, well, in 2006, three prominent astrophysicists showed that that doesn't work.
At some point, there had to have been a first universe.
So where did that come from?
If God didn't create it, who did?
I mean, who lit the spark if not God?
I think of our universe as a fishbowl in a way.
(17:06):
We can't see out of it.
We can only know what's outside the fishbowl by reading the Bible, in my view.
The Bible says 11 times God made the heavens and spread them out.
Where does stuff come from?
You quickly see there's a lot of room for God.
You know, there was that Russian astronaut who went to space and said, I didn't see God there.
(17:26):
That was a long time ago, but what a stupid comment.
Like God's hiding behind some planet out there, you know, like he's some monster.
I mean, he's outside of time and outside of space.
And I think that comes from basic laws of physics.
You mentioned your first book, Counting to God.
Tell me about the title of that.
Where does that lead us?
(17:47):
Counting to God is kind of a play on my journey to faith.
I always thought if you look in the dictionary, you looked up the word nerd, they should have my picture there because I was a very odd duck.
Maybe still am, but I just love numbers.
And what I've done in that book is I've counted through seven different areas of science that all point to God.
(18:09):
When I launched that book in 2014, my friend let me lecture.
I gave a lecture at MIT, which is on YouTube, by the way.
So if you put Doug L.
MIT into YouTube, you'll get my lecture.
And I thought, well, let's just go through this one by one.
I've given you the first one, creation.
You know, why is there something rather than nothing?
(18:32):
There's no, quote, scientific explanation without God for that.
That's for sure.
The second count is the fine-tuning of the universe.
Okay, all these things that we can measure, like the speed of light or the strength of gravity, that's all exactly, I mean, beyond measure, almost perfectly set for life to exist in this universe.
(18:56):
It's like you walk into a control room for the universe and all the dials are set exactly right.
Again, coming back to your point about blindness towards this, I mean, Stephen Hawking, a noted atheist and a very smart man, he proved that the force of gravity is fine-tuned to one part in a number with 60 zeros.
(19:17):
Now, getting that right by accident is like picking a grain of sand out of a pile that extends to the nearest stars.
Unimaginably unlikely.
So that's another.
I counted how did life get started, the technology of life.
I don't want to bore you or the listeners, but, Ronnie, it just gets overwhelming.
(19:40):
Think of the human brain, which is, in my view, probably God's greatest technological achievement.
We have as many neuron cells in our brains as stars in a galaxy, 100 billion or so.
They connect through light and sound, and they have as many connections as stars in 1,000 galaxies.
(20:03):
They have more processing units than all the computers in your brain alone, my brain alone, than all the computers on Earth.
They allow us to do so many fantastic things.
We have unique code that builds the human brain.
If you go back to the DNA sections, it goes on and on.
The Earth is a special place.
I'll save you from my talk on quantum physics because that puts everybody to sleep, but that's my final count.
(20:27):
Of course, you didn't stop there.
You've continued to look at the evidence, and what have you produced since that book, which is a great one to get hold of if people are wanting to examine the evidence, but where did you go from there?
I was very proud of that book.
It only took me 10 years to write, on planes and whatever, but my minister said, Doug, it's too complicated.
(20:48):
Put in some pictures.
So my second book is called Proofs of God, and it's a dialogue between two characters, one I call faith and one I call reason.
It's sort of modeled against a dialogue between my younger self, a snotty know-it-all kid who doesn't believe in God, and the person I am today who's got some facts behind him.
(21:11):
So I hired a cartoonist.
It was aimed at a younger audience.
I've turned that into a graphic novel with a slightly different name called The God Proofs because I found that that reaches a certain younger audience.
The God Proofs is published by the Discovery Institute.
They're out of Seattle.
They're the world's number one leading organization promoting design in life and in the universe.
(21:35):
The God Proofs came out maybe a year ago.
We're doing videos out of it.
I think that'd be great to get on social media.
And then in between, I wrote a novel.
I figured, okay, and I came up with a plot.
There's a very rich old guy who has terminal cancer, has a vision of God, and he decides to give his money to God, and the kids all come home for Christmas immediately and try to talk him out of it, including his daughter, an MIT math professor, and her husband, a Harvard physics person, and that leads to some twists and turns.
(22:12):
I think right now what I want to do most of all is I want to rewrite my first book.
I think a mistake I made, a very big mistake I made in my first book was that at that point, I felt for this billions of years.
I now believe the universe is about 7,500 years old, which I know is going to make a lot of people look at me squirrelly, but I could get into another 100 areas of science that would support that view.
(22:38):
Carbon dating is a rigged game, and so on and so on.
So how can I, how can we get the word out?
I mean, that science strongly supports a creator.
I don't see it as close, but then again, I've always been an odd duck.
You speak of people like Stephen Hawking, very intelligent man.
He almost showed the evidence himself, as you say, in proving the unlikelihood of gravity being a thing, and yet he still refused to believe.
(23:07):
And so I suppose the start of it is being open to look at the evidence, to be open to faith, if that's the way that the evidence points.
How do we put ourselves in a place that we are open to what the universe suggests to us about God?
It's a good question.
All of us have various pain in our lives.
(23:30):
Many turn away, many noted people have turned away from God because of the injustice of the world, the pain.
But we can't understand God's plan.
The Bible says in this world you will have suffering.
I think we have to get beyond our pain and embrace the wonder.
We have to ask God for faith.
(23:51):
I think faith is a gift.
It doesn't come easy for a lot of people.
It didn't come easy for me.
So there is that point at which we can actually call out and say, OK, God, I'm looking at the evidence.
If you do exist, give me that gift of faith.
If you do exist, show me that you're there.
It's not really an arrogant prayer.
It's just, God, I want to know.
(24:13):
I've looked at the evidence, and I want to know.
I'm wondering for those who have read your book over the years, have you had responses from some of those people that have got in touch to say, thank you, this is just what I needed?
I've had people come up to me with tears in their eyes, thanking me so much.
(24:34):
My books lose money, that's fine.
But that kind of thank you, I mean, that makes it for me.
People say, well, I gave your new book, The Graphic Novel, to my grandkids, and they've changed now.
People say that with as heartfelt thanks as they can.
You know, it's interesting.
Nobody has ever challenged any of the science in my books.
(24:55):
I do find it interesting that people will challenge on the basis of opinion.
I've even seen within your social media, people who are just making claims against you that you don't have the proof, and yet I strongly suspect they haven't actually read the book to see what proof you're offering them.
Again, it's a matter of if you decide that you will not be convinced, that that's where you'll stay, and it comes back to that open-hearted position of saying, okay, I'm ready to see where the evidence takes me, and yet many people are not prepared to do that.
(25:28):
But for those who do, and as you say, there have been some that have read the book, some that have read The Graphic Novel.
They are starting to see that the evidence does support the fact that there is a God, and that must be incredibly empowering for you to know that you're able to just play a small part in people coming to realise that there isn't a roadblock to faith.
(25:52):
Science isn't a roadblock, but rather it's a pointer towards faith.
Yes, my new book, The Graphic Novel, one woman posted a review that she gave it to her 11-year-old son.
He read it in one sitting, and he sleeps with it at night.
And he was starting to lose his faith because of the pressures of our modern society.
(26:14):
If I can just provide that kind of comfort to a few people, it's all worth it.
And I feel called by God to do that, if I may say.
This has become my calling now.
Douglas, the details for your books, or for people to be in touch with you, are in the show notes at Bleeding Daylight, so that people can get hold of that book, that first one, that heavy tome that will take them through the evidence, but also those ones that have the pictures that are going to lead a younger audience to understand the scientific reasoning that you've taken.
(26:48):
I just want to say thank you for writing those books, for providing that evidence, for being honest enough to take yourself on that journey of faith, but also to be leading others towards it.
And thank you so much for your time today on Bleeding Daylight.
It's been a privilege to be here.
Thank you for inviting me.
(27:09):
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net.
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Hello, I'm so thankful you've joined me today.
You'll find many more Bleeding Daylight episodes at bleedingdaylight.net.
Please help others discover stories of hope and transformation by sharing Bleeding Daylight with others.
(00:33):
We've been told we can have one or the other, science or faith, but do they actually exclude each other?
Can we take a rigorous look at the scientific evidence that surrounds us and see it pointing towards a divine creator?
Today's guest is a former atheist who found that the evidence he examined pointed him towards the face of God.
(01:08):
Today I'm thrilled to introduce a guest who's taken a fascinating journey from skepticism to faith, all through the lens of scientific inquiry.
Douglas Ell.
is a former atheist who spent over three decades diving deep into the relationship between science and God, refusing to accept faith without solid evidence.
(01:29):
With degrees in math and physics from MIT, a master's in theoretical mathematics, and a successful career as a prominent attorney, he brings a combination of scientific rigor and legal analysis to one of humanity's biggest questions.
He's the author of Counting to God, bridging the often contentious divide between science and faith.
(01:51):
Douglas, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Rodney.
I'm very delighted to be here with you.
I want to jump back to the days that you would have seen yourself as an atheist.
Where did a stance like that originate?
Was there any faith background within your family?
There was a faith background.
I was brought up in a congregational New England church, and I felt really good about faith when I was young.
(02:16):
And then, of course, they made me go to school.
I read in some book this theory that life came from some dirty pond.
If you want a technical name for it, which you don't need, but it's the Miller-Urey experiment of 1953.
They'd stirred some chemicals together and zapped them with electricity and got some amino acids, and there's amino acids in life.
(02:39):
So they said, presto, we've shown how life can start.
I mean, it's been totally repudiated countless times, but when I read that, I thought, wow.
It's in a science book, so it must be true, right?
So if I'm from pond scum, God doesn't make any sense.
I think I got conned by the prevailing skepticism, atheism of our popular culture.
(03:06):
Looking back at it now, I think I was bullied into giving up my faith because of some belief that it was irrational or stupid.
Almost an embarrassment.
Losing my faith for a while, it hurt my life.
So my story is, I want to help anybody else who might have that same barrier to faith, because I've found overwhelming evidence for God.
(03:31):
It's interesting that you say that losing your faith hurt your life, and I'm wondering if you can help explain that.
I know that when we don't believe that there's something bigger than us, when we don't believe that there is a reason beyond just being, we can take different choices.
So how did it particularly hurt your life to have no faith at that time?
(03:54):
Well, it made me very self-centered, for one.
So I became an attorney, making money and successful.
It didn't hurt me in that way, but there was an emptiness in my life, and I didn't realize that until my son was born in my early 30s.
My wife said, we've got to get the kid baptized.
(04:15):
I thought about that for about 10 seconds, and I said, yes, dear.
Who needs that kind of marital fight?
Sprinkle a little holy water on the kid, knock yourself out.
But we went to church, and I realized that those people had so much more.
They had a peace and a grace.
I could just sense it.
I think when you're around someone with strong faith, you can really sense it.
(04:39):
I wanted that, and I was missing that.
And that's what this false idea that science is contrary to God, that's what it took out of my life.
You noticed within the people in that congregation that they had something that you had left behind years ago.
And oftentimes, we hear people saying, well, that's just a crutch, and it's okay if you want to believe in that, and that helps you.
(05:04):
But you obviously saw something deeper than just a fanciful belief, didn't you?
I did.
I did.
At the time, I wanted what those people had.
But at the same time, being a real stubborn kind of guy, I told myself, well, you can't believe, Doug, unless there's some scientific evidence for that.
I mean, you're an MIT guy, math, physics.
(05:26):
You've got to check it out.
So then I started reading, and I've been reading still for 40 years now, and it's more overwhelming all the time.
I was doing long-distance commuting, so I spent a lot of time on airplanes.
So I'm sitting on one airplane once, reading the Standard Treatise on Molecular Biology, which I would not recommend to anyone unless they were having trouble sleeping, frankly.
(05:51):
It's actually pretty incredibly heavy to carry it around, even.
And I realized that the chance of getting the code of life correct by chance were banishingly nonexistent.
At that time, my math brain grabbed onto that, and it's been quite a journey ever since.
(06:14):
So there were a number of things, obviously, in what you were reading that drew you back to say, hey, there could be something in this.
But we do know that faith comes from a heart place, that there is that calling of the Holy Spirit on our lives.
So where did the evidence and that call of the Holy Spirit collide for you?
When was that moment?
(06:35):
I think it was on that airplane when I finally decided I'm all in on faith.
I had been reading cosmology books and such.
So I kept reading, and I have a friend who was head of physics at MIT, which is a pretty important scientific position.
We would talk about God, and I said, Peter, you know, I'm doing a lot of reading here, and this stuff is pretty amazing.
(07:00):
Somebody should write a book on all this evidence for God.
And he said, well, maybe it could be you.
And I thought, oh, no, God.
You know, I'm an attorney.
I'm really busy.
I got small kids.
I can't do this.
But it took about 10 years, and then I put a fair chunk of evidence into my first book, Counting to God.
Like I say, it's been coming together more and more every year.
(07:22):
When we start to look at evidence, as you say, there's so much there to say that it's incredibly improbable that life just started.
In fact, the evidence is almost nonexistent.
And yet, people continue to believe that this is the way that life began.
So it must be more than just the evidence.
(07:44):
There must be a battle there of ideologies that goes beyond just what the evidence can show.
Because if it was down to the evidence, you'd be able to hand someone your book, and suddenly they would believe.
So where is that disconnect for people?
Well, that's a great question.
You know, I was lecturing once in a room with a couple hundred adolescents.
(08:05):
And when one woman raised her hand and said, if what you're saying is true, why doesn't everybody believe?
I think it's pretty much what you just said, right?
Yeah.
And so I opened the floor, and I think a lot of people don't want to believe.
They don't want there to be a God, to say there's a higher moral authority.
They don't want to be told they really have to be nice to people, that maybe they shouldn't do some things, that maybe they should take better care of themselves.
(08:32):
They don't want that.
I am not an expert on why people refuse faith, but I think that's one of the reasons.
The Bible also says that God puts blinders on people.
I wish I could explain it, but it's not logical.
It's more, I think, atheism is a much, much greater thing to accept than faith, if you really look at the evidence.
(08:57):
You're saying there that people don't want to believe that there's a God, because it does change their life.
It does take them away from a self-centered life.
But I've also heard people say, I wish I could believe.
Yes.
But they believe that the evidence is pointing the other way.
So what are some of the simple proofs or simple evidence that you would start to talk to someone about if they said, oh, I wish I could believe, but isn't all the evidence pointing the wrong way?
(09:24):
What would you say to them to start them on their journey of discovering faith?
Sure.
I think what I would start them with is the most important discovery in biology, perhaps ever, but certainly in the last hundred years.
And that's the discovery that life runs on digital code, which we all know as DNA, although we don't really process the significance of that, I think.
(09:51):
So DNA is a digital code.
It comes in discrete groups of atoms.
You and I are talking over digital code.
Computers run on digital code.
Books are a different kind of digital code.
There's more symbols and spaces and letters.
A book is a digital code.
But human beings have advanced digital code.
(10:13):
And there are these four letters that in DNA that the body reads three letters at a time.
This was discovered.
And not just human beings, all life runs off this digital code.
OK, let's stop for a minute and process that, because I don't think people really do.
So how do you get digital code by chance?
(10:33):
OK, all the code we know, every app on your phone, every website that was designed by a mind.
But we run on digital code.
It's undeniable.
And the code is, I mean, Bill Gates, who knows a little bit about code, said that it's far, far more advanced than anything humans have ever made.
(10:54):
And let's look at that digital code.
In 2011, something called the ENCODE project, 400 scientists, absolutely top caliber scientists working worldwide, trying to figure out what the heck's in human DNA code.
We have 3.2 billion, billion with a B, letters of code in almost every one of our maybe 30 trillion with a T cells.
(11:19):
Huge numbers, huge amounts of code.
If you put all that code into very thick books, it'd be about a thousand of them.
Well, these 400 scientists found that basically the code's all fully functional.
We don't quite figure out exactly how it all works, but it's not junk.
It's real code.
Second of all, it has at least two layers of information.
(11:41):
Now, how can that be?
Think about that, all right?
These are scientific facts.
I'm not making this up.
My analogy there is think of a Bach fugue where the music's going in different directions simultaneously.
Okay, there's layers on top of layers of information in the code.
And then just the simple facts.
On the front page of the New York Times when this ENCODE study was released, we human beings have 4 million switches in our bodies that turn our systems on and off.
(12:10):
How do you get digital code by chance?
How do you get life by chance?
To have life, you have to have the digital code.
You have to have machines that can read the code.
You have to have machines that can copy the code.
And you've got to have machines that can take the code and turn out parts.
(12:33):
It's like 3D printers.
Our bodies have 3D printers, and the code tells them what part to build, when to build the part, and how to put the parts together, and then how to operate the system.
And this is all proven science.
There is no atheist rebuttal to any of these facts.
(12:54):
I don't think this is hard, but I think a lot of people just don't want to look at it like that.
There are many people who would say that as we discover more and more in science, it explains the way that things work, and therefore there's no longer a need for God.
And yet others would say, well, actually, all we're doing is we're starting to learn just some of how God operates.
(13:17):
The level of complexity at which God works.
And so I guess that's a switch in thinking for a lot of people too, that we're not actually discovering something new.
We're discovering how a master creator has put some of our code together and some of this planet together.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
You know, modern science, I believe, took root with Christianity, with the belief that there's an orderly universe.
(13:44):
And all the great scientists of centuries ago were Christians, and they did science to figure out how God did it.
How did God build the universe?
How did God build light?
Because certainly other cultures have had a lot of brilliant people, but when it's all about the emperor, the Egyptians, the Chinese, whatever, they didn't develop modern technology.
(14:06):
It developed in a Christian basis.
How did God do it?
Science is telling us more and more about it.
People think, again, that science can explain everything.
It can't.
I'll give you another example from physics.
We have these new space telescopes.
There's the Hubble Space Telescope, and if you're keeping up on it, the James Webb Space Telescope that can even see further.
(14:30):
They do these things, they call them deep field views.
It's the most amazing pictures.
They turn these telescopes on something that's about a grain of sand at arm's length.
That's a pretty tiny piece of the sky that they think is empty, and what they see within that little grain of sand at arm's length is tens of thousands of galaxies.
(14:54):
So there's a lot of stuff out there.
I'm going to be technical and call all that stuff, all right?
So we can agree that the universe is big and has a lot of stuff, I hope.
So here's my question.
Where does stuff come from?
There's only logically two answers.
Either stuff always existed, right, or it was created.
Now we're going to apply some laws of physics.
(15:16):
The first most important law of physics, many would say, is the first law of thermodynamics, which says you can't create or destroy matter-slash-energy.
Under the right conditions, you can melt a little matter, and that's an atomic bond.
You've got a tremendous amount of energy, but overall, you can't create or destroy.
This is a fundamental law of physics.
(15:39):
So that would tell you, you think, that, well, the universe has always existed, right?
Well, we've known for a century now that's wrong, that the universe was created.
If the universe had always existed, then under the second law of thermodynamics, which has a fancy name called entropy, but it's basically everything goes downhill, okay?
(16:02):
If you don't keep your office, your home, your garden, whatever, tidy, it's going to get messy.
And from a technical sense, the phrase is the universe is headed toward heat death.
It can't have an infinite past.
Something outside of space and time created space and time.
I think that's an undeniable scientific fact.
(16:23):
Okay, so all of a sudden, we've got a lot of room for God in the basic first two laws of physics.
Atheists will tell you, well, some will tell you that there's this thing called this multiverse.
Maybe you've heard that term.
You know, there's lots of universes out there.
They just keeps, you know, generating baby universes in some way we don't understand.
(16:45):
But, well, in 2006, three prominent astrophysicists showed that that doesn't work.
At some point, there had to have been a first universe.
So where did that come from?
If God didn't create it, who did?
I mean, who lit the spark if not God?
I think of our universe as a fishbowl in a way.
(17:06):
We can't see out of it.
We can only know what's outside the fishbowl by reading the Bible, in my view.
The Bible says 11 times God made the heavens and spread them out.
Where does stuff come from?
You quickly see there's a lot of room for God.
You know, there was that Russian astronaut who went to space and said, I didn't see God there.
(17:26):
That was a long time ago, but what a stupid comment.
Like God's hiding behind some planet out there, you know, like he's some monster.
I mean, he's outside of time and outside of space.
And I think that comes from basic laws of physics.
You mentioned your first book, Counting to God.
Tell me about the title of that.
Where does that lead us?
(17:47):
Counting to God is kind of a play on my journey to faith.
I always thought if you look in the dictionary, you looked up the word nerd, they should have my picture there because I was a very odd duck.
Maybe still am, but I just love numbers.
And what I've done in that book is I've counted through seven different areas of science that all point to God.
(18:09):
When I launched that book in 2014, my friend let me lecture.
I gave a lecture at MIT, which is on YouTube, by the way.
So if you put Doug L.
MIT into YouTube, you'll get my lecture.
And I thought, well, let's just go through this one by one.
I've given you the first one, creation.
You know, why is there something rather than nothing?
(18:32):
There's no, quote, scientific explanation without God for that.
That's for sure.
The second count is the fine-tuning of the universe.
Okay, all these things that we can measure, like the speed of light or the strength of gravity, that's all exactly, I mean, beyond measure, almost perfectly set for life to exist in this universe.
(18:56):
It's like you walk into a control room for the universe and all the dials are set exactly right.
Again, coming back to your point about blindness towards this, I mean, Stephen Hawking, a noted atheist and a very smart man, he proved that the force of gravity is fine-tuned to one part in a number with 60 zeros.
(19:17):
Now, getting that right by accident is like picking a grain of sand out of a pile that extends to the nearest stars.
Unimaginably unlikely.
So that's another.
I counted how did life get started, the technology of life.
I don't want to bore you or the listeners, but, Ronnie, it just gets overwhelming.
(19:40):
Think of the human brain, which is, in my view, probably God's greatest technological achievement.
We have as many neuron cells in our brains as stars in a galaxy, 100 billion or so.
They connect through light and sound, and they have as many connections as stars in 1,000 galaxies.
(20:03):
They have more processing units than all the computers in your brain alone, my brain alone, than all the computers on Earth.
They allow us to do so many fantastic things.
We have unique code that builds the human brain.
If you go back to the DNA sections, it goes on and on.
The Earth is a special place.
I'll save you from my talk on quantum physics because that puts everybody to sleep, but that's my final count.
(20:27):
Of course, you didn't stop there.
You've continued to look at the evidence, and what have you produced since that book, which is a great one to get hold of if people are wanting to examine the evidence, but where did you go from there?
I was very proud of that book.
It only took me 10 years to write, on planes and whatever, but my minister said, Doug, it's too complicated.
(20:48):
Put in some pictures.
So my second book is called Proofs of God, and it's a dialogue between two characters, one I call faith and one I call reason.
It's sort of modeled against a dialogue between my younger self, a snotty know-it-all kid who doesn't believe in God, and the person I am today who's got some facts behind him.
(21:11):
So I hired a cartoonist.
It was aimed at a younger audience.
I've turned that into a graphic novel with a slightly different name called The God Proofs because I found that that reaches a certain younger audience.
The God Proofs is published by the Discovery Institute.
They're out of Seattle.
They're the world's number one leading organization promoting design in life and in the universe.
(21:35):
The God Proofs came out maybe a year ago.
We're doing videos out of it.
I think that'd be great to get on social media.
And then in between, I wrote a novel.
I figured, okay, and I came up with a plot.
There's a very rich old guy who has terminal cancer, has a vision of God, and he decides to give his money to God, and the kids all come home for Christmas immediately and try to talk him out of it, including his daughter, an MIT math professor, and her husband, a Harvard physics person, and that leads to some twists and turns.
(22:12):
I think right now what I want to do most of all is I want to rewrite my first book.
I think a mistake I made, a very big mistake I made in my first book was that at that point, I felt for this billions of years.
I now believe the universe is about 7,500 years old, which I know is going to make a lot of people look at me squirrelly, but I could get into another 100 areas of science that would support that view.
(22:38):
Carbon dating is a rigged game, and so on and so on.
So how can I, how can we get the word out?
I mean, that science strongly supports a creator.
I don't see it as close, but then again, I've always been an odd duck.
You speak of people like Stephen Hawking, very intelligent man.
He almost showed the evidence himself, as you say, in proving the unlikelihood of gravity being a thing, and yet he still refused to believe.
(23:07):
And so I suppose the start of it is being open to look at the evidence, to be open to faith, if that's the way that the evidence points.
How do we put ourselves in a place that we are open to what the universe suggests to us about God?
It's a good question.
All of us have various pain in our lives.
(23:30):
Many turn away, many noted people have turned away from God because of the injustice of the world, the pain.
But we can't understand God's plan.
The Bible says in this world you will have suffering.
I think we have to get beyond our pain and embrace the wonder.
We have to ask God for faith.
(23:51):
I think faith is a gift.
It doesn't come easy for a lot of people.
It didn't come easy for me.
So there is that point at which we can actually call out and say, OK, God, I'm looking at the evidence.
If you do exist, give me that gift of faith.
If you do exist, show me that you're there.
It's not really an arrogant prayer.
It's just, God, I want to know.
(24:13):
I've looked at the evidence, and I want to know.
I'm wondering for those who have read your book over the years, have you had responses from some of those people that have got in touch to say, thank you, this is just what I needed?
I've had people come up to me with tears in their eyes, thanking me so much.
(24:34):
My books lose money, that's fine.
But that kind of thank you, I mean, that makes it for me.
People say, well, I gave your new book, The Graphic Novel, to my grandkids, and they've changed now.
People say that with as heartfelt thanks as they can.
You know, it's interesting.
Nobody has ever challenged any of the science in my books.
(24:55):
I do find it interesting that people will challenge on the basis of opinion.
I've even seen within your social media, people who are just making claims against you that you don't have the proof, and yet I strongly suspect they haven't actually read the book to see what proof you're offering them.
Again, it's a matter of if you decide that you will not be convinced, that that's where you'll stay, and it comes back to that open-hearted position of saying, okay, I'm ready to see where the evidence takes me, and yet many people are not prepared to do that.
(25:28):
But for those who do, and as you say, there have been some that have read the book, some that have read The Graphic Novel.
They are starting to see that the evidence does support the fact that there is a God, and that must be incredibly empowering for you to know that you're able to just play a small part in people coming to realise that there isn't a roadblock to faith.
(25:52):
Science isn't a roadblock, but rather it's a pointer towards faith.
Yes, my new book, The Graphic Novel, one woman posted a review that she gave it to her 11-year-old son.
He read it in one sitting, and he sleeps with it at night.
And he was starting to lose his faith because of the pressures of our modern society.
(26:14):
If I can just provide that kind of comfort to a few people, it's all worth it.
And I feel called by God to do that, if I may say.
This has become my calling now.
Douglas, the details for your books, or for people to be in touch with you, are in the show notes at Bleeding Daylight, so that people can get hold of that book, that first one, that heavy tome that will take them through the evidence, but also those ones that have the pictures that are going to lead a younger audience to understand the scientific reasoning that you've taken.
(26:48):
I just want to say thank you for writing those books, for providing that evidence, for being honest enough to take yourself on that journey of faith, but also to be leading others towards it.
And thank you so much for your time today on Bleeding Daylight.
It's been a privilege to be here.
Thank you for inviting me.
(27:09):
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