Transcript: Episode 0041

“6000 Years and Counting”

This transcript:
  1. Was machine generated.
  2. Has not been checked for errors.
  3. May not be entirely accurate.
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00:00:30 – 00:00:45:	Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast, I am Corey J. Mahler, and I'm still woe.

00:00:45 – 00:00:48:	In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

00:00:48 – 00:00:54:	The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the Spirit

00:00:54 – 00:00:57:	of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

00:00:57 – 00:01:01:	And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.

00:01:01 – 00:01:06:	And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness.

00:01:06 – 00:01:09:	God called the light day, and the darkness he called night.

00:01:09 – 00:01:13:	And there was evening, and there was morning, the first day.

00:01:13 – 00:01:18:	And God said, Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the

00:01:18 – 00:01:20:	waters from the waters.

00:01:20 – 00:01:24:	And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse, from the

00:01:24 – 00:01:28:	waters that were above the expanse, and it was so.

00:01:28 – 00:01:32:	And God called the expanse heaven, and there was evening and there was morning, the second

00:01:32 – 00:01:34:	day.

00:01:34 – 00:01:39:	And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let

00:01:39 – 00:01:42:	the dry land appear, and it was so.

00:01:42 – 00:01:47:	God called the dry land earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called seas,

00:01:47 – 00:01:51:	and God saw that it was good.

00:01:51 – 00:01:54:	Today's episode of Stone Choir, as you might have guessed, is going to be about the six

00:01:54 – 00:02:01:	days of creation, as it intersects with theology today, and as it intersects with modern scientific

00:02:01 – 00:02:03:	understanding.

00:02:03 – 00:02:08:	This is a subject that we broached in episode six on the perspicuity of Scripture, where

00:02:08 – 00:02:13:	we discussed in some different detail that we're going to go into today.

00:02:13 – 00:02:20:	The fact that there are modern debates among Christians about to what degree do we believe

00:02:20 – 00:02:21:	the Bible?

00:02:21 – 00:02:28:	Do we believe that it is allegorical in some areas, or this is some sort of fictional genre

00:02:28 – 00:02:33:	of literature that isn't to be believed literally?

00:02:33 – 00:02:39:	What do you do when God is saying things that don't line up with our understanding of physics?

00:02:39 – 00:02:44:	For example, when you read through Genesis 1 and 2, light appears before stars appear.

00:02:44 – 00:02:49:	Obviously, as intelligent men, we know that's stupid because we know that light comes from

00:02:49 – 00:02:50:	stars.

00:02:51 – 00:02:57:	As Christians, we have one approach to these things, and then the world has another approach

00:02:57 – 00:02:58:	to these things.

00:02:58 – 00:03:03:	One of the reasons we want to tackle this subject today is that the question of how

00:03:03 – 00:03:09:	does scientific knowledge match up with or conflict with what's in Scripture is a stumbling

00:03:09 – 00:03:11:	block for some people who are coming to the faith.

00:03:11 – 00:03:15:	I know that lately we've picked up quite a few new listeners, particularly from the

00:03:15 – 00:03:17:	myth of 20th century appearance.

00:03:17 – 00:03:18:	Thank you again to Adam for that.

00:03:18 – 00:03:21:	That was a treat to be on there.

00:03:21 – 00:03:24:	One of the things that I mentioned, and it surprised me a little bit, was that I am

00:03:24 – 00:03:26:	a young Earth creationist.

00:03:26 – 00:03:30:	The reason that I am and the reason we're discussing this today is that it is the only

00:03:30 – 00:03:34:	possible Christian position.

00:03:34 – 00:03:35:	Today's episode is going to be in two parts.

00:03:35 – 00:03:39:	The first part is going to be the short part talking about theology, and then we're going

00:03:39 – 00:03:42:	to spend the rest of the time talking about some of the science.

00:03:42 – 00:03:46:	I know that a lot of you, if you're looking at Christianity, that you maybe want to believe

00:03:46 – 00:03:49:	it, you're trying to figure out what this stuff is about.

00:03:49 – 00:03:52:	The things that you know, the things that are scientific knowledge that you think you

00:03:52 – 00:03:58:	can have confidence in, if they're at odds with this Jesus stuff, you've got to keep

00:03:58 – 00:04:00:	your bearings.

00:04:00 – 00:04:05:	As Christians, for the majority of the audience, those who are fully engaged in the faith,

00:04:05 – 00:04:10:	what do we do with a world that's saying, no, that's nonsense, here's what we actually

00:04:10 – 00:04:11:	believe?

00:04:11 – 00:04:15:	Today, there are a lot of people in the church who want to split the difference and say,

00:04:15 – 00:04:21:	it's just kind of, it was flowery language, who knows what God really meant.

00:04:21 – 00:04:25:	One of the tricks that's played within the church is that you'll find guys today saying,

00:04:25 – 00:04:30:	well, if you look at the early church fathers, they debated whether the six days of creation

00:04:30 – 00:04:32:	was literal or not.

00:04:32 – 00:04:33:	It is true to an extent.

00:04:33 – 00:04:39:	There were some church fathers who disputed whether it was six natural 24-hour days.

00:04:39 – 00:04:44:	However, they were not doing that in defense of a universe that was millions or billions

00:04:44 – 00:04:46:	of years old.

00:04:46 – 00:04:51:	Their argument was whether it was 168 hours or whether it was less than that, because

00:04:51 – 00:04:56:	the other side of that argument was specifically saying creation was instantaneous, effectively

00:04:56 – 00:04:57:	the big bang.

00:04:57 – 00:05:02:	Then, after that, God put everything together.

00:05:02 – 00:05:09:	They were debating within a very small amount of time, was it a femtosecond or was it 168

00:05:09 – 00:05:10:	hours?

00:05:10 – 00:05:12:	That's not remotely the debate today.

00:05:12 – 00:05:16:	If you hear someone claiming to be a Christian who says, oh, that's an open question because

00:05:16 – 00:05:21:	the early church father had just debated, know that they're lying to you, flat out lying.

00:05:21 – 00:05:25:	None of the church fathers say what they were saying when they want to say who could not

00:05:25 – 00:05:26:	possibly know.

00:05:26 – 00:05:29:	It might have been a thousand years, 10,000 years, a million years.

00:05:29 – 00:05:30:	They weren't saying that.

00:05:30 – 00:05:35:	If they had, they would have been wrong because they were flawed sinful men just like you

00:05:35 – 00:05:38:	and me and everyone who's ever looked at these things.

00:05:38 – 00:05:40:	We have scripture.

00:05:40 – 00:05:42:	We have scripture to be confident in.

00:05:42 – 00:05:47:	That was episode six on the clarity of scripture, discussing the fact that as Christians, that

00:05:47 – 00:05:49:	is our frame of reference.

00:05:49 – 00:05:55:	When God spoke the universe into existence, as Corey just read, that's it.

00:05:55 – 00:05:58:	It appeared because he said it.

00:05:58 – 00:06:06:	He declared it and it became, that is power, that is the infinite power of the Creator.

00:06:06 – 00:06:08:	Creation began at that point.

00:06:08 – 00:06:14:	The six days of creation are when God was putting the universe together, when he was

00:06:14 – 00:06:18:	establishing the order that we see observable today.

00:06:18 – 00:06:19:	We see rules.

00:06:19 – 00:06:21:	We see constants.

00:06:21 – 00:06:24:	We see patterns emerge over and over and they tend to be very consistent.

00:06:24 – 00:06:28:	We don't see a lot of variation over time or if we do see variation, it's predictable

00:06:28 – 00:06:34:	based on rules inherent to the system.

00:06:34 – 00:06:38:	That is something that people want to soft paddle and say, well, I'm not going to talk

00:06:38 – 00:06:42:	about the Bible, but there's got to be an intelligent designer, don't you think?

00:06:42 – 00:06:47:	Well, yeah, that's true, but why be gutless as God?

00:06:47 – 00:06:50:	The second half of this episode, the majority of the episode when we're talking about the

00:06:50 – 00:06:56:	science stuff, we're going to be making the case that if you reject scripture or if you

00:06:56 – 00:06:59:	don't believe scripture yet, you say, well, that's faith-based.

00:06:59 – 00:07:00:	I'm fact-based.

00:07:00 – 00:07:01:	We will demonstrate.

00:07:01 – 00:07:06:	Mostly, Corey is going to be demonstrating because he's actually well-versed in science.

00:07:06 – 00:07:10:	I'm going to be your voice in this episode, just kind of being the dummy listening and

00:07:10 – 00:07:14:	asking questions because I'll tell you, my science education was utter garbage.

00:07:14 – 00:07:19:	I, the Lutheran high school I went to in Indianapolis, had the same science teacher

00:07:19 – 00:07:20:	in 10th and 11th grade.

00:07:20 – 00:07:23:	I very distinctly remember the first day of 11th grade.

00:07:24 – 00:07:30:	She said, hey, guys, remember last year when I told you what exothermic and endothermic

00:07:30 – 00:07:30:	reactions were about?

00:07:31 – 00:07:32:	I got those backwards.

00:07:32 – 00:07:38:	So I knew she was wrong at the time, but Lutheran schools are variable in quality.

00:07:38 – 00:07:40:	So I love science.

00:07:41 – 00:07:43:	I'm that guy, except I'm also Christian.

00:07:44 – 00:07:47:	But whenever I look at these things, it's always in view of, here's what I already

00:07:47 – 00:07:49:	believe based on scripture.

00:07:49 – 00:07:51:	What is it that we're discovering in creation?

00:07:52 – 00:07:57:	If you've gone back through the catalog of Stonequire episodes, you will find that Corey

00:07:57 – 00:08:05:	and I will very often point back to Job, chapters 38 and following, where God finally

00:08:05 – 00:08:11:	appears to Job to answer him, to answer his complaints and his demands for explanation.

00:08:11 – 00:08:13:	And what you find, please go read it.

00:08:13 – 00:08:13:	It's beautiful.

00:08:13 – 00:08:15:	It's, as I've said, is one of my favorite passages.

00:08:16 – 00:08:21:	When God appears to Job and talks to him, he doesn't coddle him.

00:08:22 – 00:08:25:	He doesn't say, oh, sorry, you're going through this or he doesn't, he doesn't try

00:08:25 – 00:08:26:	to make things better right away.

00:08:27 – 00:08:33:	His immediate response when Job is demanding explanations from the creator is, who are

00:08:33 – 00:08:37:	you, where were you when I formed the world?

00:08:38 – 00:08:44:	And he goes into great length for multiple chapters, describing his creation as testifying

00:08:44 – 00:08:44:	to his glory.

00:08:45 – 00:08:50:	So when I say I love science, it's not the Reddit atheist soyjack face.

00:08:51 – 00:08:55:	I love the fact that when I look at creation, every time there's something that we finally

00:08:55 – 00:09:01:	figure out a little bit more, it's a greater revelation of God's natural revelation.

00:09:01 – 00:09:04:	I see God in those things because I believe God, when he said he made them.

00:09:05 – 00:09:11:	And so as we get into some of the details, what we will establish is that it is also

00:09:11 – 00:09:15:	faith-based to believe the science, so-called, against Scripture.

00:09:15 – 00:09:18:	And it's, in fact, a much more absurd belief system.

00:09:19 – 00:09:24:	It might be helpful to point out before we get into more of the Scripture.

00:09:25 – 00:09:31:	The word that is underlying day there in Genesis, and the word is Heimera.

00:09:33 – 00:09:35:	That word just means day in Greek.

00:09:36 – 00:09:42:	From B-DAG, the first definition is the period between sunrise and sunset.

00:09:43 – 00:09:46:	Exactly what we would call a day in English.

00:09:46 – 00:09:51:	The second definition is the civil or legal day, which includes the night.

00:09:52 – 00:09:55:	Again, one of the main definitions we would use in English.

00:09:56 – 00:09:58:	This is a term that means day.

00:09:58 – 00:10:00:	It means 24-hour day.

00:10:00 – 00:10:02:	It means exactly what it says.

00:10:02 – 00:10:04:	This is not a figurative day.

00:10:04 – 00:10:06:	This is not a metaphorical day.

00:10:06 – 00:10:07:	This is not an age.

00:10:07 – 00:10:08:	This is not an era.

00:10:10 – 00:10:16:	That is an argument that has been raised many times because, just like English, most

00:10:16 – 00:10:20:	other languages have a figurative use of the term day.

00:10:21 – 00:10:23:	You know, every dog has his day.

00:10:23 – 00:10:25:	That doesn't necessarily mean a literal day.

00:10:26 – 00:10:27:	It could mean a period of time.

00:10:27 – 00:10:31:	The same thing can be true in Greek or indeed in Hebrew.

00:10:33 – 00:10:38:	But the core sense of the term, and if you read in the context, it is very clear the

00:10:38 – 00:10:44:	core sense is meant, the core sense of the term is the 24-hour literal day.

00:10:44 – 00:10:53:	So creation, 24-hour literal day, six days, and then resting on the seventh day.

00:10:54 – 00:10:58:	That is why when you look at the church fathers, many of them will have written

00:10:58 – 00:11:02:	something titled the hexameron, which is just on the six days.

00:11:03 – 00:11:06:	Because creation was a literal week.

00:11:08 – 00:11:14:	The modern attempt to hand wave away on the basis of, well, there could be

00:11:14 – 00:11:20:	this figurative use of this particular term is simply embarrassment at what

00:11:20 – 00:11:23:	scripture says in light of what science supposedly claims.

00:11:23 – 00:11:29:	And it is generally embarrassment by men who do not understand either scripture or

00:11:29 – 00:11:30:	the science.

00:11:31 – 00:11:35:	And we will get into those in that order in this episode.

00:11:37 – 00:11:42:	And God actually goes out of his way rhetorically in the first five days of

00:11:42 – 00:11:46:	creation to say each time and there was evening and there was morning the first

00:11:46 – 00:11:49:	day and the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth.

00:11:49 – 00:11:53:	God over and over again says, this is a 24-hour day.

00:11:54 – 00:11:55:	So thank you for bringing that up.

00:11:55 – 00:12:00:	That is a crucial point because as a Christian, if you actually believe

00:12:01 – 00:12:03:	scripture, it's necessary to believe that.

00:12:04 – 00:12:08:	And it's a small detail, but it's consistent with the rest.

00:12:09 – 00:12:14:	And as I said at the beginning, one of the things to understand when we're

00:12:14 – 00:12:20:	looking at the six days of creation before God finished, as he declared it to be

00:12:20 – 00:12:24:	finished and said, it's very good, is that everything was up for grabs.

00:12:24 – 00:12:26:	They said, you have light before you have stars.

00:12:26 – 00:12:31:	Like the order of operations doesn't make sense based on the way things exist today.

00:12:32 – 00:12:37:	And so if you're looking at a system evolving and building on itself internally,

00:12:38 – 00:12:42:	yeah, it doesn't make sense, but we don't need a system to make sense internally

00:12:42 – 00:12:44:	because God wasn't done making it.

00:12:44 – 00:12:48:	It was on the last day when he said it was very good and then he rested that it was

00:12:48 – 00:12:50:	complete. At that point, it was locked in.

00:12:51 – 00:12:53:	Before that, he was messing with things.

00:12:53 – 00:12:54:	He was changing things.

00:12:54 – 00:12:56:	He was moving parts around.

00:12:57 – 00:13:00:	So it's okay for the beginning not to add up.

00:13:00 – 00:13:04:	That's not illogical because God is doing stuff.

00:13:04 – 00:13:05:	He's working.

00:13:06 – 00:13:11:	Imagine you come to someone who's building a watch or a garden, whatever he's doing,

00:13:11 – 00:13:16:	some creative, as we call creative process, and he's in the middle of it.

00:13:16 – 00:13:18:	And you come in and say, well, you're missing this and this and this.

00:13:18 – 00:13:20:	And it doesn't make any sense.

00:13:20 – 00:13:20:	It's not going to work.

00:13:20 – 00:13:22:	And he said, well, I'm not done yet.

00:13:22 – 00:13:26:	Come back on the seventh day and I'll be done with the thing.

00:13:26 – 00:13:30:	The creative process involves a period of time where it's unfinished.

00:13:30 – 00:13:33:	And then at the end, it's finished personally as a perfectionist.

00:13:34 – 00:13:38:	It's something that keeps me from doing a lot of things because I start and I am

00:13:38 – 00:13:40:	simultaneously my own critic.

00:13:40 – 00:13:40:	I'm like, that's crap.

00:13:40 – 00:13:41:	That's not good enough.

00:13:41 – 00:13:45:	And so I never get very far in anything because I destroy it before there can be

00:13:45 – 00:13:47:	enough there for me to build on it.

00:13:47 – 00:13:49:	God doesn't have that problem.

00:13:49 – 00:13:53:	When he built the thing, it was all internally consistent.

00:13:54 – 00:13:56:	So that's a small point, but it's a crucial point for Christians.

00:13:58 – 00:14:02:	It's not necessarily going to convince you if you think that it's permissible to believe in

00:14:02 – 00:14:04:	old earth or something else.

00:14:05 – 00:14:11:	The things that we say next in these parts about theology are going to go directly at you.

00:14:11 – 00:14:17:	We're going to be very direct that if you believe in old earth, you are sinning.

00:14:17 – 00:14:19:	You're believing something contrary to scripture.

00:14:19 – 00:14:23:	The sixth day thing, it's true and it's correct.

00:14:23 – 00:14:25:	But you're not going to believe it until you believe this next part.

00:14:25 – 00:14:31:	So the crucial argument, the only argument, the only argument that's necessary for any

00:14:31 – 00:14:40:	Christian to understand is that every theory, every system of the universe, every system of life

00:14:41 – 00:14:46:	that is older than 6,000 years, that's millions of years or billions of years,

00:14:46 – 00:14:52:	any of those necessarily have death before death came into the world.

00:14:53 – 00:14:58:	So we're going to go first over the passages that make very clear that there was no death

00:14:58 – 00:15:02:	before Adam sinned and therefore nothing could die before Adam sinned.

00:15:02 – 00:15:07:	Nothing, not only people, but nothing in the universe could have died.

00:15:07 – 00:15:08:	That was also a change.

00:15:08 – 00:15:10:	There was a change to the universe.

00:15:10 – 00:15:13:	It wasn't only a change to a man or to humanity.

00:15:14 – 00:15:21:	All of creation fell with Adam because Adam was the head of the world.

00:15:21 – 00:15:22:	God had put him in place.

00:15:23 – 00:15:27:	God created the animals and then brought them to Adam and he named each of them,

00:15:27 – 00:15:28:	including Eve.

00:15:28 – 00:15:32:	That was an exercise of authority over all of creation.

00:15:32 – 00:15:34:	God put Adam in charge.

00:15:34 – 00:15:38:	So when Adam, the head fell, all the stuff fell, everything fell.

00:15:38 – 00:15:40:	The animals fell.

00:15:40 – 00:15:43:	There would not be death without Adam sinned.

00:15:43 – 00:15:44:	You and I die today.

00:15:45 – 00:15:46:	Our animals die, our pets die.

00:15:47 – 00:15:55:	Death that's today such a natural part of our lives and of the world was introduced by Adam sinned.

00:15:56 – 00:16:03:	So to begin, I'm just going to read a couple passages that use the word in Greek cosmos.

00:16:03 – 00:16:03:	Same word.

00:16:03 – 00:16:05:	It's where we get the word.

00:16:05 – 00:16:06:	And it means everything.

00:16:06 – 00:16:12:	It means it's more than simply limited to humankind or mankind.

00:16:13 – 00:16:15:	The first passage is from Romans 5.

00:16:16 – 00:16:21:	Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin,

00:16:21 – 00:16:24:	and so death spread to all men because all sinned.

00:16:25 – 00:16:26:	This is very clear.

00:16:26 – 00:16:32:	Romans 5 is saying, death came into the world, into the cosmos by Adam's sin.

00:16:33 – 00:16:36:	That's reiterated in John 1.

00:16:37 – 00:16:41:	The next day, John the Baptist saw Jesus coming toward him and said,

00:16:41 – 00:16:44:	Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

00:16:46 – 00:16:47:	Same word here.

00:16:47 – 00:16:51:	Sin of the world is the sin of the cosmos, meaning all the sin everywhere.

00:16:51 – 00:16:56:	Now this in particular is a passage that some of the reform must necessarily dispute if

00:16:56 – 00:17:03:	they believe in limited atonement because you must necessarily limit world

00:17:03 – 00:17:06:	down to not only humanity, but to the elect.

00:17:06 – 00:17:08:	Otherwise, you have to reject that verse.

00:17:08 – 00:17:13:	So these are some places where one of the reasons that's important to tackle this question is that

00:17:13 – 00:17:18:	when the six days of creation are undermined, when you start messing with

00:17:20 – 00:17:26:	the question of how God created things, it goes directly to the question of original sin.

00:17:26 – 00:17:32:	And that is fundamentally what is attacked by a denial of the six natural 24-hour day creation.

00:17:32 – 00:17:39:	It is fundamentally an attack on these passages, on the fact that the whole universe fell when

00:17:39 – 00:17:40:	Adam sinned.

00:17:40 – 00:17:45:	And the last passage to make this abundantly clear using the word cosmos is Colossians 1.

00:17:46 – 00:17:50:	He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

00:17:50 – 00:17:55:	For by him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible,

00:17:55 – 00:17:58:	whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities.

00:17:58 – 00:18:01:	All things were created through him and for him.

00:18:01 – 00:18:03:	And he is before all things.

00:18:03 – 00:18:05:	And in him all things hold together.

00:18:05 – 00:18:07:	And he is the head of the body, the church.

00:18:07 – 00:18:12:	He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent.

00:18:12 – 00:18:19:	For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him to reconcile himself to

00:18:19 – 00:18:24:	all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

00:18:25 – 00:18:31:	So when Colossians 1 says that Jesus reconciles himself to all things,

00:18:32 – 00:18:34:	that's also talking about the cosmos.

00:18:34 – 00:18:38:	In earth or in heaven, the earth in heaven, it's talking about all the stuff,

00:18:38 – 00:18:40:	all the universe, all of creation.

00:18:41 – 00:18:45:	Jesus' reconciliation on the cross is not limited to man.

00:18:46 – 00:18:50:	And forget the elect is not simply limited to man, it's limited to nothing.

00:18:50 – 00:18:54:	God reconciles and makes peace by his blood on the cross.

00:18:55 – 00:18:56:	All things.

00:18:57 – 00:19:03:	So this is the reason that this is such a crucial question for the Christian faith.

00:19:04 – 00:19:06:	Because see, it's a small fiddly point.

00:19:06 – 00:19:09:	If you want to just argue about six natural 24-hour days, okay, well, whatever.

00:19:10 – 00:19:13:	When you get to the fact that all the stuff we're going to talk about in the latter part

00:19:13 – 00:19:18:	of the episode, dealing with the so-called scientific evidence, all of it necessarily

00:19:18 – 00:19:23:	involves death existing before Adam's sin, which has to deny all this.

00:19:23 – 00:19:27:	It has to say that Adam's sin did not cause the universe to fall.

00:19:27 – 00:19:29:	There was no sin anywhere in the universe.

00:19:29 – 00:19:33:	And incidentally, these passages also preclude the existence of life anywhere else.

00:19:34 – 00:19:39:	There can only be salvation where this promise has been given.

00:19:39 – 00:19:42:	This is the only place where there's life, because it's the only place where God

00:19:42 – 00:19:44:	delivered his salvation.

00:19:45 – 00:19:52:	The existence of Adam as the head of this world necessitates that although the rest

00:19:52 – 00:19:58:	of the universe fell, there can't be life elsewhere that would not have access to this information.

00:19:59 – 00:20:04:	So, it's the root of the Christian faith.

00:20:04 – 00:20:10:	If you get rid of original sin, if you get rid of the fact that by whom all things

00:20:10 – 00:20:15:	were made through Christ is the same Christ through whom all things are reconciled,

00:20:15 – 00:20:17:	that's the whole shooting match.

00:20:17 – 00:20:21:	And see, this is one of those end runs that Satan loves to do.

00:20:21 – 00:20:25:	Satan doesn't go directly at stuff and say, well, Jesus didn't die for the whole world.

00:20:25 – 00:20:29:	He'll say, oh, well, there was death before Adam, and then it unwinds everything.

00:20:29 – 00:20:33:	Because if you believe there was death before Adam, well, then what did Jesus die for?

00:20:33 – 00:20:39:	Suddenly, Jesus propitiating death on the cross gets very limited.

00:20:39 – 00:20:45:	He is narrowed down to a sliver of the very creation that God himself said he was redeeming,

00:20:45 – 00:20:48:	because it was only through the death of the one through whom it was created

00:20:48 – 00:20:50:	that that redemption would have been possible.

00:20:51 – 00:20:56:	The other passage in Romans 8 that is perhaps the most clear on this point

00:20:56 – 00:21:02:	is one that doesn't use the word connos, it uses a different Greek word that also means creation.

00:21:02 – 00:21:08:	Effectively, it's related to the next ex nihilo creation of everything.

00:21:08 – 00:21:14:	So again, that is vastly superseding the elect or even mankind or even life.

00:21:14 – 00:21:16:	It's all the stuff.

00:21:16 – 00:21:22:	All the stuff, everything that was created in the six days is what is being referred to here

00:21:22 – 00:21:23:	in this passage in Romans 8.

00:21:26 – 00:21:30:	For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing

00:21:30 – 00:21:34:	with the glory that is to be revealed to us, for the creation waits with eager longing

00:21:34 – 00:21:39:	for the revealing of the sons of God, for the creation was subjected to futility,

00:21:39 – 00:21:43:	not willingly, but because of him who subjected it,

00:21:43 – 00:21:48:	and hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption

00:21:48 – 00:21:51:	and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

00:21:51 – 00:21:56:	For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth

00:21:56 – 00:22:02:	until now, and not only the creation, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the spirits

00:22:02 – 00:22:07:	groan inwardly as we wait we eagerly for the adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies,

00:22:07 – 00:22:09:	for in this hope we are saved.

00:22:09 – 00:22:13:	Now hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what he sees,

00:22:13 – 00:22:17:	but if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

00:22:18 – 00:22:24:	So here in this passage in Romans 8, Paul, in God's words, is explicitly contrasting

00:22:24 – 00:22:26:	the whole world with we the believers.

00:22:27 – 00:22:35:	So again, just to hammer this point home, there is no possibility that all of creation

00:22:35 – 00:22:41:	did not fall with Adam's personal sin, the very same sin that you inherit,

00:22:41 – 00:22:46:	the very same sin that causes you to yourself sin and to die.

00:22:47 – 00:22:50:	Adam's sin did that to everything.

00:22:51 – 00:22:56:	And so as we get into the things that will address the claims that, well maybe the earth

00:22:56 – 00:23:02:	is millions of years old, and it's okay to believe that because we're not really sure

00:23:02 – 00:23:07:	because the genre of Genesis 1 and 2, it could be anything.

00:23:07 – 00:23:08:	You don't have to read that literally.

00:23:09 – 00:23:14:	If you do that, you necessarily deny the death entered the world with Adam.

00:23:14 – 00:23:18:	And if you do that, you deny the faith, because if you deny original sin

00:23:18 – 00:23:23:	and you deny how God redeems the universe, that's a denial of God.

00:23:24 – 00:23:31:	So just by itself, the fact that original sin applies to the whole world as Scripture attests,

00:23:32 – 00:23:36:	necessarily negates the possibility of any sort of theistic evolution,

00:23:36 – 00:23:38:	any sort of theistic evolution.

00:23:38 – 00:23:45:	There's no possibility for any of the evolutionary macro scale processes that we're all familiar

00:23:45 – 00:23:45:	with from school.

00:23:46 – 00:23:48:	They cannot exist without death.

00:23:48 – 00:23:51:	So it's literally one or the other.

00:23:51 – 00:23:56:	Either death came into the world through Adam, as God says, or death has always just been a

00:23:56 – 00:24:04:	natural thing, and eventually God made people, or somehow people came to be.

00:24:04 – 00:24:06:	And then we're off the races.

00:24:06 – 00:24:08:	Then we have the period of human existence.

00:24:10 – 00:24:13:	To believe the latter is to deny God and to not be Christian.

00:24:14 – 00:24:16:	There's a very clear dividing line there.

00:24:17 – 00:24:21:	And that's why the lie that I mentioned earlier where guys will say,

00:24:21 – 00:24:26:	oh, the early church fathers debated over the six days, the Hexameron, they'll say,

00:24:26 – 00:24:28:	well, they weren't sure.

00:24:28 – 00:24:30:	Sometimes some said it was six, 24-hour days.

00:24:30 – 00:24:32:	Some said it was a different period of time.

00:24:32 – 00:24:35:	Yeah, the ones who said it was a different period of time said it was instant.

00:24:36 – 00:24:40:	They were debating inside of 168 hours how much shorter might it have been.

00:24:40 – 00:24:42:	Now, I believe they were wrong.

00:24:42 – 00:24:48:	But even if they got that right, it doesn't matter, because the very fact that there was

00:24:48 – 00:24:56:	a dispute in the historic church never, ever, ever opened the door for someone to believe

00:24:56 – 00:25:01:	that the earth or the universe is older than several thousand years old.

00:25:02 – 00:25:07:	And one thing that we mentioned in the episode six on the perspicuity of Scripture is that,

00:25:08 – 00:25:12:	yeah, the most obvious thing is when we take measurements of things, obviously,

00:25:13 – 00:25:20:	if you believe what Christians have believed throughout history, the earth is about 6,000

00:25:20 – 00:25:22:	years, maybe seven, it's somewhere in there.

00:25:22 – 00:25:24:	It's thousands of years old, certainly less than 10.

00:25:24 – 00:25:26:	Corey and I believe six.

00:25:26 – 00:25:29:	But if you want to be off by a thousand years, that's fine.

00:25:29 – 00:25:34:	That's fundamentally a question of some of the variations in the genealogies in Scripture,

00:25:34 – 00:25:36:	which is how we calculate those dates.

00:25:37 – 00:25:44:	The difference is that if you go back further than that, you can't believe anything that's

00:25:44 – 00:25:44:	in the Bible.

00:25:45 – 00:25:49:	And yet, say everything's inside 10,000 years.

00:25:49 – 00:25:55:	Well, that would mean that if there's any light coming to earth from any system more than 10,000

00:25:55 – 00:25:57:	light years away, it can't exist.

00:25:57 – 00:26:02:	It would mean that the furthest away that we could see anything would be 6,000 light years

00:26:02 – 00:26:03:	or 7,000.

00:26:03 – 00:26:07:	Nothing could be billions of light years away.

00:26:07 – 00:26:08:	That's impossible.

00:26:08 – 00:26:10:	That's absolutely true.

00:26:10 – 00:26:16:	If when God created the universe in the six days, He booted it up from scratch.

00:26:17 – 00:26:21:	And so the argument that we make in episode six is that that's not at all the case.

00:26:21 – 00:26:27:	Just as Adam was created as a full-grown sexually mature man with an age, Corey and I

00:26:27 – 00:26:29:	believe that he was 70.

00:26:29 – 00:26:33:	Because if Adam was created as a 70-year-old, that would make him an elder.

00:26:33 – 00:26:38:	It would mean that when he died at 930 years, he was effectively a 1,000-year-old man.

00:26:38 – 00:26:40:	It would make him the oldest man ever.

00:26:40 – 00:26:46:	It would make him living 1,000 years, which is a perfectly round scriptural number.

00:26:46 – 00:26:50:	And it would make him an elder over creation, which would have incidentally been necessary

00:26:50 – 00:26:54:	for him to have the very headship over creation that God had ordained.

00:26:54 – 00:26:56:	So if we're wrong about that, no big deal.

00:26:56 – 00:27:00:	But Adam was created with an age.

00:27:00 – 00:27:01:	He was an adult.

00:27:01 – 00:27:02:	He wasn't a child.

00:27:02 – 00:27:03:	He wasn't a baby.

00:27:03 – 00:27:05:	He wasn't an infant or a zygote.

00:27:05 – 00:27:06:	He had an age.

00:27:07 – 00:27:09:	The universe also has an age.

00:27:09 – 00:27:12:	And it didn't match because it didn't need to match because God had not yet

00:27:12 – 00:27:13:	established the order of everything.

00:27:14 – 00:27:20:	The things that we observe today as constants, as scientific universal constants,

00:27:21 – 00:27:22:	those are God's variables.

00:27:22 – 00:27:24:	They're whatever He set them to be.

00:27:25 – 00:27:30:	The comparison that came to mind when I was thinking about preparing for the show was

00:27:32 – 00:27:35:	when I was in school, a game came out from...

00:27:35 – 00:27:40:	Everybody knows today Halo from Bungie before Microsoft acquired them.

00:27:40 – 00:27:42:	Bungie's first game was Marathon.

00:27:42 – 00:27:46:	And one of the amazing things about Marathon, it was around the same time as Doom.

00:27:46 – 00:27:47:	It was a little bit newer than Doom.

00:27:47 – 00:27:50:	It was much more advanced in a lot of ways.

00:27:50 – 00:27:53:	One of the amazing things about playing Marathon, a first-person shooter, was that

00:27:54 – 00:28:00:	they... Bungie shipped the same map editors that they themselves used to make the game,

00:28:00 – 00:28:02:	which meant that anyone could make their own maps.

00:28:02 – 00:28:04:	And so people had a lot of fun playing with them.

00:28:04 – 00:28:08:	And one of the things that really kind of expanded my mind just from messing with that was

00:28:09 – 00:28:12:	in the level editor, you could mess with constants.

00:28:12 – 00:28:15:	So every level had a constant for gravity.

00:28:15 – 00:28:19:	And one of the most entertaining levels was when guys would change gravity.

00:28:19 – 00:28:21:	They would reduce it by 90%.

00:28:21 – 00:28:27:	So you could suddenly jump huge distances because gravity, the gravitational constant,

00:28:27 – 00:28:30:	there's just a variable in the table for the level editor.

00:28:31 – 00:28:33:	God did the same thing with the universe.

00:28:33 – 00:28:37:	He set these numbers seemingly in stone, but He ordained them.

00:28:37 – 00:28:38:	He set them.

00:28:38 – 00:28:39:	And so we're stuck with them.

00:28:39 – 00:28:41:	Like, we don't have the level editor.

00:28:41 – 00:28:42:	We can't mess with creation.

00:28:43 – 00:28:49:	But the point is that when God ordained those things that to us seem like constants,

00:28:49 – 00:28:51:	they're only constants because He liked them.

00:28:51 – 00:28:52:	We don't know why.

00:28:52 – 00:28:53:	He picked them and they work.

00:28:53 – 00:28:56:	And everything in the universe works because of them,

00:28:56 – 00:29:01:	because of how precisely tuned they are to the world that God created.

00:29:01 – 00:29:05:	If the numbers were different, we can tell in simulations that everything would go flying apart.

00:29:05 – 00:29:08:	So it's all a perfectly balanced system from our perspective.

00:29:09 – 00:29:13:	The important thing is that God set what He wanted.

00:29:13 – 00:29:16:	And so is the earth 6,000 years old?

00:29:16 – 00:29:17:	Yes.

00:29:17 – 00:29:19:	Is the earth 4.5 billion years old?

00:29:19 – 00:29:19:	Yes.

00:29:20 – 00:29:25:	God created a 4.5 billion-year-old earth 6,000 years ago.

00:29:25 – 00:29:29:	He created a 13.8 billion-year-old universe 6,000 years ago.

00:29:29 – 00:29:30:	You ever take?

00:29:30 – 00:29:36:	Again, not sticking to the 6,000 number, but the creation of an old universe and an old earth

00:29:37 – 00:29:41:	is entirely consistent with the belief of a God who can create everything from nothing,

00:29:41 – 00:29:43:	simply by speaking.

00:29:43 – 00:29:46:	So that is an article of faith, but it's no stretch.

00:29:47 – 00:29:52:	If you can't believe that, then you certainly can't believe any of the miracles in the Bible.

00:29:53 – 00:29:58:	And so the crucial point that I want the Christians in the audience to take home from this is that

00:29:59 – 00:30:04:	when we look at the evidence, when we talk about the scientific stuff for the rest of this,

00:30:04 – 00:30:05:	it's not to bolster our faith.

00:30:05 – 00:30:08:	It's not to justify what we already believe.

00:30:08 – 00:30:12:	It is that we have confidence in our faith that when God who created the universe says

00:30:12 – 00:30:14:	these things, we just believe him.

00:30:14 – 00:30:19:	And then as we understand creation better, as Christians have always done for thousands of years,

00:30:20 – 00:30:26:	discovery of God's creation as God testifies in Job testifies to God.

00:30:27 – 00:30:31:	God uses creation to testify to us about his own glory.

00:30:31 – 00:30:37:	So when we look at these things and we see how magnificently, incomprehensibly huge the world is,

00:30:38 – 00:30:39:	that testifies the God's glory.

00:30:39 – 00:30:42:	That doesn't make us small and insignificant.

00:30:42 – 00:30:43:	It makes God huge.

00:30:43 – 00:30:48:	The fact that the scale makes us seem small doesn't diminish the importance of humanity.

00:30:48 – 00:30:53:	It shows that of all the things in creation that testify to God's glory,

00:30:54 – 00:30:55:	he came as a man.

00:30:56 – 00:31:02:	We were made in his image and then he came as one of us to redeem us and all things because of Adam's sin.

00:31:03 – 00:31:04:	So there's no...

00:31:05 – 00:31:07:	It's either you believe the Bible or you believe Bill Nye.

00:31:07 – 00:31:12:	And unfortunately, we had a lot of people in the church today who want to believe Bill Nye and stay in the church.

00:31:12 – 00:31:15:	And it's like, what do you say?

00:31:15 – 00:31:18:	Like, there are two different approaches to this.

00:31:18 – 00:31:22:	And for people who are in the middle, I hope you take that contrast seriously.

00:31:23 – 00:31:26:	The I Love Science atheists, the Reddit atheists,

00:31:26 – 00:31:28:	they will believe any sort of absurdity.

00:31:28 – 00:31:34:	The same people who are adamant that we are stupid, that we're rubes for thinking that they're at the 6,000 years old.

00:31:35 – 00:31:39:	Also, today, I think we're rubes for thinking that a man is a man and a woman is a woman.

00:31:40 – 00:31:50:	Like, the idol of science, the false God of science that is in fact no science at all because Scantia means truth, knowledge.

00:31:51 – 00:31:55:	The absence of truth and knowledge, it means that there's nothing related to science.

00:31:56 – 00:31:58:	That's just, it's a false religion.

00:31:58 – 00:32:05:	And so, just as the church has been used as a cloak for a false religion that's Jesus flavored,

00:32:05 – 00:32:11:	the pursuit of knowledge of creation is a cloak that's being used by these atheists to be a

00:32:12 – 00:32:18:	cloaking device for them to twist the creation that was intended by God to testify to his glory.

00:32:18 – 00:32:23:	They tried to use it to testify to, I don't know what, to the absence of God,

00:32:24 – 00:32:28:	which, if facially, is absurd. And so, that's going to be the rest of this episode.

00:32:29 – 00:32:33:	You mentioned Bill Nye, and I always find him particularly amusing,

00:32:33 – 00:32:39:	because inevitably, the I Love Science crowd are credentialist in their leanings,

00:32:40 – 00:32:42:	and Bill Nye is a mechanical engineer.

00:32:43 – 00:32:50:	And they take his word as a sort of gospel on things about which he has no formal training whatsoever.

00:32:51 – 00:32:54:	It's just a little bit of hypocrisy from that crowd, not surprising.

00:32:56 – 00:33:03:	But before we dive into the science proper, I'll take the opportunity

00:33:04 – 00:33:09:	to critique the simulation theory, because you mentioned that if we change the constants

00:33:09 – 00:33:14:	in a simulation of whatever body it happens to be, things don't work so well.

00:33:15 – 00:33:19:	The fundamental problem with simulation theory, and I've mentioned this elsewhere,

00:33:19 – 00:33:27:	is that any evidence for us existing in a simulation is simultaneously evidence for a creator.

00:33:29 – 00:33:33:	And Occam's razor, or however you prefer to phrase it,

00:33:33 – 00:33:38:	it is more reasonable to conclude there is a creator than that there is a simulation.

00:33:38 – 00:33:43:	So it is actually impossible to prove simulation theory, because any evidence for it is simply

00:33:43 – 00:33:46:	proving a creator even more strongly.

00:33:51 – 00:33:56:	But at the outset of this segment, the balance of this podcast episode,

00:33:57 – 00:34:02:	there are five questions I want to highlight that are relevant here. These are questions that

00:34:02 – 00:34:08:	science simply cannot answer. And we're using science, of course, here in the lower case,

00:34:09 – 00:34:15:	since as it were the minor sense, the modern sense, not the proper Latin sense of the term,

00:34:15 – 00:34:19:	which as mentioned is just knowledge. And it is fair also to say that is truth,

00:34:19 – 00:34:24:	because what is knowledge, it is true warranted belief to use the philosophical definition.

00:34:25 – 00:34:31:	So the five questions. First, why is there anything instead of nothing?

00:34:33 – 00:34:36:	Science has no answer for this. Science has no way of answering this.

00:34:37 – 00:34:47:	Second, why do immaterial things exist and not just material? Or phrased another way,

00:34:47 – 00:34:54:	why is there immaterial, not just material? We'll get into that, the distinction there,

00:34:54 – 00:34:59:	why that matters. Third, why is there life instead of just matter?

00:35:00 – 00:35:07:	Science has no answer to bridge the gap from non living matter to living matter to life.

00:35:08 – 00:35:15:	This is a biogenesis, life arising from non life. This is one of the things for which

00:35:16 – 00:35:22:	the I love science crowd and others will often ridicule our medieval ancestors. Because they

00:35:22 – 00:35:26:	believed in a biogenesis of a certain kind, they thought, for instance, if you left meat out,

00:35:26 – 00:35:31:	it spawned maggots, which is more or less true from their perspective. They observed it. That's

00:35:31 – 00:35:36:	what happened. They did not have a vacuum chamber. They couldn't isolate the meat to prove that,

00:35:36 – 00:35:40:	no, you actually need to fly to come and lay eggs on the thing. And then it produces maggots. They

00:35:40 – 00:35:49:	didn't know that they had no way to test that. But modern theories of evolution rely on a biogenesis.

00:35:50 – 00:35:54:	The very thing they mock, and you can get them with this incidentally, you can

00:35:55 – 00:35:59:	start to describe a biogenesis and they'll laugh along with you. They'll think it's ridiculous.

00:35:59 – 00:36:04:	But then you point out that, no, I'm talking about the very basis of the neo-Darwinian evolution you

00:36:04 – 00:36:11:	believe. They turn bright red. It's good fun to watch. Fourth, why is there intelligent life?

00:36:11 – 00:36:15:	Because there is a fundamental distinction between something that is merely alive and

00:36:15 – 00:36:20:	something that is intelligent, something that has that inner life to a certain degree.

00:36:21 – 00:36:25:	And I say a certain degree because I distinguish between them in the next question,

00:36:25 – 00:36:32:	but there is a difference between broccoli and a cat. A cat is intelligent life. Broccoli is not.

00:36:34 – 00:36:43:	How do you explain that within the framework of science? And then fifth, why is there sapient,

00:36:43 – 00:36:50:	which is to say human, self-aware life? This is really two questions in one. There's the easy

00:36:50 – 00:36:57:	problem of consciousness and the hard problem of consciousness. The easy problem is the mechanics

00:36:57 – 00:37:06:	of cognition, objective experience. How do you explain the mechanic of human cognition,

00:37:06 – 00:37:12:	of self-awareness? How do you explain these systems? And then there's the hard problem of

00:37:12 – 00:37:17:	consciousness, which is the metaphysics of cognition. How do you explain subjective experience?

00:37:17 – 00:37:25:	Qualia, which is the personal subjective experience of something. A qualae is the singular, is a

00:37:25 – 00:37:33:	quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person. So these are the questions that

00:37:33 – 00:37:41:	it's important to contemplate when dealing with sciences, supposed explanations for everything.

00:37:42 – 00:37:45:	We won't go into each one of these in detail in this episode, but we will

00:37:46 – 00:37:49:	investigate at least two of them in a fair degree of detail.

00:37:53 – 00:38:01:	And so to start off, I want to start with a major problem for neo-Darwinian evolution. I'm going to

00:38:01 – 00:38:06:	use NDE or neo-Darwinian evolution because that's really a description of the modern

00:38:08 – 00:38:13:	version of evolution that is believed in the academy and the sciences. You could also call it

00:38:13 – 00:38:18:	the modern synthesis. There's technically a small distinction there, but I'll probably use them

00:38:18 – 00:38:24:	interchangeably because they effectively are. But the issue is irreducible complexity.

00:38:25 – 00:38:33:	And irreducible complexity is how we describe a system that is complex in a way

00:38:34 – 00:38:39:	where if you remove any particular part of the system, it no longer functions,

00:38:39 – 00:38:45:	or at least no longer functions at a level that makes the system useful. And there are many systems

00:38:45 – 00:38:50:	like this. There are many of them in your body. There are many of them out in nature.

00:38:51 – 00:38:57:	In these systems, any particular part of the system can be removed to make the system no

00:38:57 – 00:39:03:	longer function. And the problem with that is that if you believe the evolutionary explanation

00:39:03 – 00:39:10:	for these things, then all of these components have to evolve simultaneously and synchronously

00:39:11 – 00:39:16:	because if one appears before another, they don't inter-operate, they don't work together.

00:39:17 – 00:39:24:	Yes, in some cases, there are subparts of a system that may be useful in and of themselves

00:39:24 – 00:39:31:	separate from the system itself. And for those, you don't need to deal with this irreducible

00:39:31 – 00:39:38:	complexity for that part of the system. For the rest of the system, you still do. But there are

00:39:38 – 00:39:45:	also systems where the subparts are not useful, at least not in isolation. And so they are only

00:39:45 – 00:39:52:	useful in the system itself. And there are many of these in the body. In those systems,

00:39:52 – 00:39:59:	there is no evolutionary way to explain the evolution of any particular subpart

00:40:00 – 00:40:07:	without having to explain the entirety of the system evolving at once. Now,

00:40:09 – 00:40:14:	I've said that there's such thing as an irreducibly complex system. You'll see this all over

00:40:15 – 00:40:20:	a certain kind of literature. And you will see this also incidentally from evolutionists. They

00:40:20 – 00:40:26:	admit that this is a problem, to some degree. They try to dismiss it, but if you read their actual

00:40:26 – 00:40:32:	journals, the academic ones, they will admit there are problems here. But a fundamental

00:40:32 – 00:40:38:	point I want to make is that there is no such thing as a simple system. No system is simple.

00:40:38 – 00:40:46:	All systems are irreducibly complex. This is tautological. A system is an irreducibly complex

00:40:46 – 00:40:56:	set of things that interact in a particular way. Now, a given system may have ancillary or additional

00:40:56 – 00:40:59:	parts of the system that you can remove and the system will still function,

00:41:00 – 00:41:05:	but it is that core that is irreducibly complex. That is the core of the system.

00:41:05 – 00:41:10:	The other parts may be helpful, but if you can remove them, they are not part of the irreducible

00:41:10 – 00:41:22:	complexity. For example, some of the systems in your body that are irreducibly complex will go over

00:41:22 – 00:41:28:	two of them just sort of in a cursory fashion. We're not going to go into all of the chemistry

00:41:28 – 00:41:33:	for this. There's no reason to do that here. If you're interested, it's very easy to find

00:41:33 – 00:41:41:	papers or a YouTube video or what have you on these subjects. But vision, your visual system,

00:41:42 – 00:41:50:	is irreducibly complex. There are parts of your visual system that if you take them in isolation,

00:41:50 – 00:41:58:	they have no value. If you remove really any particular part of the complex system that results

00:41:58 – 00:42:04:	in you being able to see, you are no longer able to see. Yes, there are certain parts that

00:42:04 – 00:42:11:	you can impair and still see. Of course, some of you listening may be wearing glasses. You can

00:42:11 – 00:42:17:	still see with or without the glasses. Without the glasses, your vision is impaired in some way,

00:42:17 – 00:42:23:	otherwise you wouldn't need the glasses. But that isn't a removal of part of this complex system.

00:42:23 – 00:42:30:	It is an impairment and as you can see, it causes problems. But the visual system for

00:42:31 – 00:42:36:	human beings, for mammals more generally, but phototransduction, which is just a fancy way of

00:42:36 – 00:42:43:	saying taking the light that is outside external to you strikes your eye and translating it into

00:42:43 – 00:42:48:	a signal in the brain so that you can see, translating into a picture. Phototransduction

00:42:48 – 00:42:56:	has about 12 steps. These are complicated chemical processes. This is biochemistry,

00:42:56 – 00:43:02:	I said I won't go over the specifics, there's no need here. But that's just to transmit

00:43:04 – 00:43:10:	the fact that a single photon hit one of the receptive cells in your eye into your brain

00:43:10 – 00:43:16:	via the optical nerve to paint that tiny part of a picture of the outside world. And this happens

00:43:16 – 00:43:23:	on the order of single or double digit depending on the cells involved, millisecond resolution.

00:43:23 – 00:43:30:	And this happens millions of times every single day. This happens across the many receptive cells

00:43:30 – 00:43:39:	in your eye constantly. This system is incomprehensibly complex and delicate.

00:43:40 – 00:43:47:	And it has to have all evolved simultaneously and synchronously in order for it to make any sense.

00:43:49 – 00:43:55:	Now, some particularly Richard Dawkins comes to mind have attempted to raise the argument

00:43:55 – 00:44:01:	that there are precursor systems to the mammalian eye and therefore we can explain that we went from

00:44:01 – 00:44:08:	this to this to this and eventually got to the human eye. The problem is if you look at the biochemistry

00:44:08 – 00:44:12:	and this is a little game they play, I'll go over this in more detail in a minute.

00:44:12 – 00:44:18:	But if you look at the biochemistry, these simpler systems, supposedly simpler systems,

00:44:18 – 00:44:24:	they are in a sense simpler, but in a sense not because the idea that single cells are simple

00:44:25 – 00:44:30:	is archaic and wrong. Single cells are not simple, they are highly complex.

00:44:30 – 00:44:39:	But this idea that these supposed precursors are simple breaks down biochemically and it

00:44:39 – 00:44:45:	breaks down biochemically because they are not a biochemical precursor. And this is the issue.

00:44:45 – 00:44:55:	There are three systems for any given function that have to develop simultaneously and synchronously

00:44:56 – 00:45:00:	because it's not just one overarching system. So for instance, let's stay with the eye.

00:45:01 – 00:45:07:	There's the mechanical, which is of course the muscles that move the eye, the cells that comprise

00:45:07 – 00:45:13:	the eye, the lens that shields the eye, etc. There are many systems here. So that's the

00:45:13 – 00:45:22:	mechanical part of the overall system. There is the chemical, all of these various chemicals that

00:45:22 – 00:45:30:	are transmitting information from one step to the next, translating it from a photon eventually into

00:45:30 – 00:45:37:	voltage gated by calcium that transmits along the optic nerve into the brain.

00:45:38 – 00:45:43:	And then there are neurotransmitters involved. That's the chemical system. And then there is

00:45:43 – 00:45:49:	the neural system. The brain has to be able to interpret these signals. And the same thing

00:45:49 – 00:45:53:	is true of any other part of your body, your hand. You have fingers and a thumb, you have the nerves

00:45:53 – 00:45:57:	and the tendons, you have the chemicals that actuate the muscles, and you have the part of

00:45:57 – 00:46:00:	your brain that controls these things, that receives the signals and sends them back.

00:46:02 – 00:46:10:	These three systems have to develop together because no single system is of any use in isolation.

00:46:11 – 00:46:17:	If you have this sea of chemicals, but no surface with which they can interact,

00:46:17 – 00:46:22:	no mechanics, no machinery they can operate, they're useless. If you have the machinery and

00:46:22 – 00:46:28:	the chemicals, but no receptors in the brain to actually deal with them, the systems are utterly

00:46:28 – 00:46:35:	useless. In fact, they are detrimental because they incur an immense energy cost. These must

00:46:35 – 00:46:43:	develop simultaneously. It is incomprehensibly unlikely to the point of being mathematically

00:46:43 – 00:46:47:	impossible that this could happen. We'll get into the numbers a little later.

00:46:48 – 00:46:52:	But this is just for the vision system, or for the hand as I mentioned, and this is true of

00:46:52 – 00:46:57:	so many different systems in your body. Blood clotting is another one.

00:46:59 – 00:47:05:	Blood clotting is an excellent example because blood clotting again seems like something that

00:47:05 – 00:47:11:	could be simple, but then you start to read about it. It is extremely complex.

00:47:14 – 00:47:22:	Blood clotting is a cascade of chemical reactions that have to fire perfectly,

00:47:23 – 00:47:28:	and the reason they have to fire perfectly. Now, bear in mind when I say perfectly, I'm not saying

00:47:28 – 00:47:34:	absolutely perfectly is a different thing here. I'm saying they cannot misfire because if blood

00:47:34 – 00:47:43:	clotting misfires, they're a handful of options. If you cut yourself and your coagulation system

00:47:43 – 00:47:49:	doesn't fire properly, maybe it doesn't clot and you bleed out and you die. Or it triggers

00:47:50 – 00:47:56:	randomly somewhere in your body, forms a clot, causes you a stroke, heart attack, what have you,

00:47:56 – 00:48:06:	you die. And so this system not only has to be able to trigger at the right time in the right place

00:48:06 – 00:48:13:	for the right period of time and then shut down, it has to not accidentally trigger anywhere

00:48:13 – 00:48:21:	else in the body at the wrong time. Now, instead of going through the cascade of how

00:48:21 – 00:48:26:	blood clotting actually occurs, and there are actually two paths that trigger in a different

00:48:26 – 00:48:31:	way, there's some important reasons for that. There's still some research as to why exactly

00:48:31 – 00:48:36:	that is the case. But I want to read through just some of the factors, some of the chemical

00:48:36 – 00:48:44:	substances that are involved in blood clotting, just to give you a sort of idea of how complex

00:48:44 – 00:48:53:	the system is. There's factor one, fibrinogen, factor two, prothrombin, factor three, tissue

00:48:53 – 00:49:00:	factor, factor four, the calcium ion, factor five, pro-accelerin, factor six, factor seven,

00:49:00 – 00:49:07:	pro-converton, factor eight, antihemophilic factor A, factor nine, antihemophilic factor B,

00:49:08 – 00:49:15:	factor 10, steward-prower factor, factor 11, plasma thromboplastin antecedent, factor 12,

00:49:15 – 00:49:22:	the Hageman factor, factor 13, fibrin stabilizing factor. Then there's the von Villebrand factor,

00:49:22 – 00:49:28:	pre-calacrine, calacrine, high molecular weight kinogen, fibronectin, antithrombin three,

00:49:29 – 00:49:35:	heparin cofactor two, protein C, protein S, protein Z, protein Z-related protease inhibitor,

00:49:35 – 00:49:43:	plasminogen, alpha two anti-plasmin, alpha two macroglobulin, tissue plasminogen activator,

00:49:43 – 00:49:48:	urokinase, plasminogen activator inhibitor one, plasminogen activator inhibitor two.

00:49:50 – 00:49:56:	And these all interact. In a delicate dance that if it goes wrong, you die.

00:49:57 – 00:50:04:	And somehow we are supposed to believe that this evolved by chance. And I think this is a good point

00:50:05 – 00:50:13:	to highlight exactly what the evolutionists claim, because they will up one side and down the other

00:50:13 – 00:50:19:	in many cases say they do not believe in random chance, but they do. And here's why.

00:50:19 – 00:50:26:	Why? They will highlight the natural selection part of their doctrine, of their theory.

00:50:27 – 00:50:32:	What they will try to downplay for the common man when they are speaking

00:50:32 – 00:50:37:	to the laity as it were is the random chance part, because the issue is

00:50:38 – 00:50:47:	against what is natural selection acting? It's acting against mutations that arise randomly.

00:50:47 – 00:50:53:	And so all of this relies on random chance, and that's important when we get to the math in a

00:50:53 – 00:50:59:	little bit. I know we started with science and we'll get to math. It couldn't be more terrible,

00:50:59 – 00:51:04:	but it's important to have sort of a general understanding of some of this and why

00:51:05 – 00:51:13:	neo-Darwinian evolution is so utterly ridiculous. If you are relying entirely on random chance

00:51:13 – 00:51:20:	to produce the material against which natural selection can act, then the math becomes very

00:51:20 – 00:51:28:	important. Another example, not a human example, although I guess it is to some degree because

00:51:28 – 00:51:35:	you have them living in you, creatures that have them, the celia that bacteria or flagella in that

00:51:35 – 00:51:42:	case use to propel themselves around. We'll link to something on that. I won't go over

00:51:43 – 00:51:50:	it. It's another case of an extremely complex system that interacts to the point where you

00:51:50 – 00:51:54:	cannot have any particular part of it arise by itself because it would actually be harmful.

00:51:55 – 00:51:59:	If parts of that particular system arose independently of the system, they would

00:51:59 – 00:52:06:	actually tear the cell apart, which could hardly be said to be reproductively beneficial.

00:52:07 – 00:52:14:	I think as folks are processing this episode, the science stuff, keep in mind the recent episodes

00:52:14 – 00:52:20:	we did on the big lie and on conspiracy theories because the principles that we demonstrated

00:52:20 – 00:52:26:	in the first one and then outlined in the second one are a play here. In the conspiracy theory

00:52:26 – 00:52:30:	episode, we talked a lot about the moon landing. Some of the examples that Corey's given and

00:52:30 – 00:52:37:	some more he's going to give are similar in the sense that they're potshots at

00:52:38 – 00:52:45:	the facts that are claimed by the other side, just as the ones that Owen Benjamin uses for,

00:52:45 – 00:52:49:	well, how did they make a phone call from the moon and what about the Van Allen belts?

00:52:50 – 00:52:54:	The distinction that we made there that I want you to keep in mind as you're listening to these

00:52:54 – 00:53:01:	things is that, one, there was a very easy answer to both of those. It was a solvable

00:53:01 – 00:53:08:	problem. It was not a tricky problem. It's always easy to ask a question, but those are questions

00:53:08 – 00:53:14:	that in the case of the moon landing, the NASA guys figured it out. They solve that problem

00:53:14 – 00:53:20:	as part of the system. When Benjamin takes his potshots at the moon landing, it's fundamentally

00:53:20 – 00:53:27:	disingenuous. These are also potshots in the sense that they're easy. The difference is that,

00:53:27 – 00:53:33:	just as in the episode on the big lie of the 20th century, if these things are not true,

00:53:34 – 00:53:39:	then the whole thing falls apart. They're not potshots in the sense that they're cheap shots,

00:53:39 – 00:53:49:	that they're fake. It's that they're easy because they're just gimmies. If the complexity of these

00:53:49 – 00:53:55:	systems is to be believed, they never could have evolved in place as we're told they evolved.

00:53:56 – 00:54:02:	It's an internally inconsistent claim that falls apart when you actually examine it.

00:54:04 – 00:54:10:	They're the ones who are effectively resorting to faith. They're saying, well, then a miracle

00:54:10 – 00:54:14:	occurred. They won't call it a miracle obviously because their whole reason for going down this

00:54:14 – 00:54:20:	path of not glorifying God by what they look at, their purpose in their scientific inquiry is

00:54:21 – 00:54:27:	denying God. We'll say, given that there is no God, how then do we explain the system?

00:54:28 – 00:54:34:	As Corey's laying out, you can't explain an eyeball or cilia if you cannot

00:54:35 – 00:54:43:	account for God creating it in place as a whole functional thing, just like Adam. Adam was an

00:54:43 – 00:54:49:	entire man, had all his parts in all the right places, had 46 chromosomes, all the stuff was there.

00:54:50 – 00:54:55:	It wasn't finished until God said it was very good, but as God made the things, they were done

00:54:55 – 00:55:02:	and they were conceived in God's mind. I guess that's how Scripture says it, so we can say that.

00:55:02 – 00:55:07:	God doesn't have a mind. It's another one of those irreducibility problems, except it's the infinite one.

00:55:08 – 00:55:12:	You really don't want people messing with that because when you try to introspect how God works,

00:55:12 – 00:55:17:	as though he's an amoeba, you're going to become a very splendid heretic.

00:55:18 – 00:55:22:	But even just looking at the smallest things, the arguments fall apart. So part of the reason

00:55:22 – 00:55:27:	we did this episode after the big lie and conspiracy theories is that here's an example of when you

00:55:27 – 00:55:35:	apply proper scrutiny to the fundamentals of the claims fall apart. That's the distinction between

00:55:36 – 00:55:41:	somebody like Benjamin saying, well, that can't have happened because of x, y, and z, and us saying,

00:55:41 – 00:55:47:	well, that can't have happened because of x, y, and z. The x, y, and z, if you're not thinking about it,

00:55:47 – 00:55:52:	it will seem like it's just potshots. It's just, well, you said this and they said that, and so what

00:55:52 – 00:56:00:	can be true? If you can clearly demonstrate that the claim itself is falsifiable, then you're left

00:56:00 – 00:56:06:	with the rest of it. And in the case of these things like these evolutionary processes, so-called

00:56:07 – 00:56:12:	literally nothing is possible. If you believe what they are saying about how these things came

00:56:12 – 00:56:18:	about and you look at what we have, they couldn't have come about. So these questions are the important

00:56:18 – 00:56:26:	questions for, I hate to use word debunking, but that's really what it is for debunking the claims

00:56:26 – 00:56:32:	of evolutionists and the claims of those who say that, well, and particularly theistic evolutions,

00:56:32 – 00:56:38:	who say maybe they'll put Adam on the sixth day where it ceases to be metaphorical, but then you

00:56:38 – 00:56:43:	have this long period of time before that where other stuff was happening and then God kind of

00:56:44 – 00:56:50:	congealed mankind at the last minute and then it became real. But before that,

00:56:50 – 00:56:54:	we had Amoeba and we had evolution and all this stuff. Even if you ignore the death part from

00:56:54 – 00:57:01:	the scripture intro, the math still doesn't work, the physics and the chemistry still doesn't work,

00:57:01 – 00:57:08:	the biology itself is literally impossible in their own system. So I just wanted to point out that

00:57:08 – 00:57:14:	those episodes previously dealing with weighing evidence are, they're a crucial part of just

00:57:14 – 00:57:19:	being good at thinking. Like one of the overarching themes of Stone Choir, apart from the theology

00:57:19 – 00:57:24:	stuff, is we hope that anyone who's listening will get better at thinking because you don't have to

00:57:24 – 00:57:30:	be smart to be careful. You don't have to be smart to do a good job and not being hoodwinked.

00:57:31 – 00:57:35:	According, like I said, Cory knows a whole lot more about the science than I do. He could probably

00:57:35 – 00:57:41:	trick me, but I at least know enough that he would have to be doing a really good job. And so

00:57:41 – 00:57:48:	whether it's him or it's someone else, there was a post that came up a couple months ago on Reddit

00:57:48 – 00:57:55:	where someone was making an anonymous claim about biological aliens. And I read it and it

00:57:55 – 00:58:00:	checked out. It's consistent with my beliefs about so-called aliens, that they're demonic,

00:58:00 – 00:58:09:	that they're real physical manifestations using created material for evil for demonic purposes.

00:58:09 – 00:58:15:	And so I sent that to someone who has a PhD in this stuff and said, my smell test passes with this.

00:58:15 – 00:58:19:	I can't see anything obviously wrong with it, but I know that I could be tricked because I'm not

00:58:19 – 00:58:24:	that knowledgeable about it. And so I asked someone who knew a whole lot more about the specific

00:58:24 – 00:58:29:	claims in the article. He said, yeah, basically makes sense. So it's good to have someone you

00:58:29 – 00:58:35:	can refer to to help you with smell tests. But even at a basic level, just being careful about

00:58:35 – 00:58:40:	thinking and analyzing things can give you the foundation that it's going to be a lot harder

00:58:40 – 00:58:45:	for you to fall for stuff that's plainly dumb. And so the things that we're going to go over,

00:58:45 – 00:58:51:	although the scientific inquiries are complex, we'll link to some of the papers and some videos

00:58:51 – 00:58:56:	that go into a ton of detail on this stuff. And if you're excited about that, cool. I don't find

00:58:56 – 00:59:00:	that interesting because I don't worry about it. But if it's something that worries you,

00:59:00 – 00:59:06:	I would say go look at the data. But I would also say, if you're worried that the evidence

00:59:06 – 00:59:11:	is going to invalidate scripture, then it doesn't matter what evidence you find because

00:59:11 – 00:59:16:	you have a spiritual problem first. You have a spiritual problem of not believing scripture,

00:59:16 – 00:59:22:	even when it's irrational. Because sometimes it is. I mean, miracles are irrational to say

00:59:22 – 00:59:28:	that God did something that's outside the bounds of material creation. It's irrational. It's

00:59:28 – 00:59:33:	reason cannot explain the things why we call it a miracle. Something else that was in episode six.

00:59:33 – 00:59:38:	So it's okay for there to be miracles. And that's another reason why this episode is important

00:59:38 – 00:59:46:	because there are miracles. God does creative, impossible things that are not impossible for

00:59:46 – 00:59:51:	him because he's God. They're impossible for us to explain in some cases, particularly when we try

00:59:51 – 00:59:58:	to make up fairy tales like some of this stuff. And so these attacks on the six days of creation,

59:58 – 01:00:06
not only is it an attack on original sin and an attack on Christ's redeeming work in the world,

01:00:07 – 01:00:13:	but it's also just an attack on the supernatural, on whether or not God can do these things.

01:00:13 – 01:00:19:	Forget for a moment, did he? The fundamental denial of someone who's concerned that unless

01:00:19 – 01:00:26:	I see the fact I can't believe the Bible, that's not a question of did he? That's a question of

01:00:26 – 01:00:31:	can he? And if you believe that God can't do something, then we're not talking about the same

01:00:31 – 01:00:39:	God because the God that we as Christians hold to is infinite. He's omnipotent. He knows everything.

01:00:39 – 01:00:45:	He can do anything. Nothing is beyond his ability. That's literally the definition of God. It's

01:00:46 – 01:00:49:	another one of those systems where when you start looking at the definitions, they describe the

01:00:49 – 01:00:55:	thing inextricably. There's no way to remove or subtract. It all has to fit together.

01:00:56 – 01:01:01:	Just like these tiny examples. And I think, frankly, to me, I see that also as evidence of

01:01:01 – 01:01:07:	the existence of God. From the smallest to the largest, whether you're looking at the structure

01:01:07 – 01:01:12:	of an atom or the structure of a galaxy, they're shaped the same way. You get something really

01:01:12 – 01:01:17:	heavy and big in the middle, and you have a cloud of stuff circling around it. God loves these

01:01:17 – 01:01:22:	patterns, and they play out over and over in creation. Why? Because it's what he wanted to do.

01:01:23 – 01:01:26:	We're along for the ride, and that's how everything works, and we should enjoy it.

01:01:28 – 01:01:32:	If you're trying to figure stuff out, that's good. It's important to try to figure stuff out.

01:01:32 – 01:01:39:	Just be clear that if you're looking at evidence and weighing it to judge scripture, you've got it

01:01:39 – 01:01:45:	backwards. When we do these subjects about science and things like that, we never want to give the

01:01:45 – 01:01:51:	impression that we are subjecting scripture to our own reason or our own senses. That's never the

01:01:51 – 01:01:56:	point we want to make. We want to make that having believed in what scripture says is best we

01:01:56 – 01:02:02:	possibly can, with absolute faith, to the best of the ability God's given us. Then what? Then we

01:02:02 – 01:02:08:	look at these things, and it turns out that, as I said earlier, believing that God did this stuff

01:02:08 – 01:02:13:	is actually the easiest sell of all. It's far easier than believing the theories that are presented

01:02:13 – 01:02:19:	to explain the world without God. You mentioned tricking people, and that's actually

01:02:20 – 01:02:25:	exactly the point that I have here as my next item on this list, as it were.

01:02:27 – 01:02:36:	Evolutionists play fast and loose when it comes to three distinct concepts. These are

01:02:36 – 01:02:44:	all evolutionary concepts in the broader sense of the term evolution, not just in the biological

01:02:44 – 01:02:50:	sense, because you have evolution of, say, the pencil over time as it is refined in terms of its

01:02:50 – 01:02:58:	design. But the three distinct concepts are morphological evolution, conceptual evolution,

01:02:58 – 01:03:04:	and biochemical evolution, the last one being the most properly biological of all of them,

01:03:04 – 01:03:11:	although morphological is also biological in this sense. But the issue here is that

01:03:12 – 01:03:18:	scientists, evolutionists, particularly science apologists, so-called, will either deliberately

01:03:18 – 01:03:24:	or carelessly conflate these, and they are not identical. They are quite distinct.

01:03:26 – 01:03:35:	To give some examples to make this easier to understand, a bicycle is morphologically

01:03:36 – 01:03:43:	the predecessor of the motorcycle. It is also conceptually the predecessor. It is not biochemically

01:03:43 – 01:03:49:	the predecessor. We're dealing with mechanical systems here, non-biological mechanical systems,

01:03:49 – 01:03:53:	because, of course, they're biological mechanical systems. You are, to some degree,

01:03:53 – 01:04:02:	a series of biological machines. But morphologically is, just simply speaking,

01:04:02 – 01:04:09:	in terms of form, using the Greek there. And so you have something that is, with regard to its form,

01:04:11 – 01:04:17:	the antecedent of something else. And so that would be the case with various kinds of transport.

01:04:17 – 01:04:25:	You can go from the bicycle to the motorcycle, or from the bicycle to the car. These are similar

01:04:26 – 01:04:33:	in form, to some degree. They are also similar, to some degree, in concept. They are forms of

01:04:33 – 01:04:41:	transportation, using wheels to get you from point A to point B. Now, conceptually, if we expand the

01:04:41 – 01:04:48:	concept, a bicycle can be the conceptual antecedent of an airplane. It is not the morphological

01:04:48 – 01:04:53:	antecedent of an airplane, most certainly. And biochemical we've left aside, because it's not

01:04:53 – 01:05:02:	even involved in this realm at this point. But when it comes to biology, this becomes a major

01:05:02 – 01:05:08:	problem for the evolutionist. Because you can say that the eye spot, on some simple,

01:05:08 – 01:05:16:	relatively speaking, creature, is perhaps the conceptual antecedent of the mammalian eye.

01:05:17 – 01:05:22:	But it is most certainly not the biochemical antecedent. And so it is not an argument for

01:05:22 – 01:05:28:	evolution. The evolutionist is looking at it as an intelligent being from the outside and saying

01:05:28 – 01:05:33:	this is conceptually related to this. Well, that's actually proof of a creator of an intelligence

01:05:33 – 01:05:40:	relating concepts. They'll never admit that. But given that there is not that biochemical

01:05:40 – 01:05:47:	relationship, you cannot say that the one is evolutionarily the antecedent of the other.

01:05:48 – 01:05:52:	And so it's important to be careful when someone brings up these arguments

01:05:52 – 01:05:59:	to identify which one of these kinds of evolution is in play. Because evolutionists have to prove

01:05:59 – 01:06:05:	morphological and biochemical. They don't have to prove conceptual, although conceptual is a problem

01:06:05 – 01:06:09:	for them because if you prove conceptual, you're really proving there's intelligence involved in

01:06:09 – 01:06:16:	some way. But they'll play fast and loose because they expect you not to pay close enough attention

01:06:16 – 01:06:22:	and just say, OK, well, an eye spot detects photons and so it must be the antecedent of the eye.

01:06:22 – 01:06:28:	No, it's not. They are biochemically distinct and you cannot get from one to the other

01:06:28 – 01:06:35:	using the systems of the one. In this case, the eye spot getting to the eye. And so it is not proof

01:06:35 – 01:06:43:	for evolution. But before we get into really the last part of this episode, which would be the

01:06:43 – 01:06:47:	philosophical issues. And I don't know if we'll go over all of them. The episode might run a little

01:06:47 – 01:06:55:	long if we do that. There are a few major problems I want to highlight before we move on. I've touched

01:06:55 – 01:07:01:	on a couple of them to some degree. I touched on the issue of abiogenesis. How do you explain

01:07:01 – 01:07:08:	that we have life? How did it arise from non life? That's the issue of abiogenesis. There's no answer

01:07:08 – 01:07:16:	in the scientific literature. You may have heard of an experiment back in the 1950s

01:07:17 – 01:07:26:	in which some scientists set up a supposedly primordial soup that was theoretically the conditions

01:07:26 – 01:07:34:	of some primordial earth and then passed a very high voltage through it and wound up with some

01:07:34 – 01:07:39:	precursors to certain chemicals that are necessary for life. And that's possible. They did that.

01:07:40 – 01:07:46:	There has been absolutely no progress in 70 years on that front. They have not been able to make

01:07:47 – 01:07:53:	any progress toward creating more complex materials, molecules, etc. needed for life.

01:07:55 – 01:08:00:	And that's what the application of intelligence, which is of course a fundamental problem with

01:08:00 – 01:08:08:	all of these experiments, they all run afoul necessarily of the very sort of strictures that

01:08:08 – 01:08:15:	should be in place for any experiment designed to prove evolution because all of them have intelligent

01:08:15 – 01:08:24:	input. If you're saying that an intelligence can create conditions and then apply energy or what

01:08:24 – 01:08:30:	have you some outside factor to a system and create life, you haven't proved evolution. You've

01:08:30 – 01:08:37:	proved intelligent design. The only way you could prove evolution is if you were to find some sort

01:08:37 – 01:08:43:	of primordial planet out there that approximates earth and then watch it for millions of years.

01:08:45 – 01:08:50:	If life arises, okay, fine. Evolution is true. You have to make sure that you didn't have life

01:08:50 – 01:08:55:	arise on the planet because you contaminated the planet. But that's the only way to do it. If

01:08:55 – 01:09:01:	you are setting up an experiment as an intelligent actor, you have already violated what is necessary

01:09:01 – 01:09:06:	as preconditions to prove your conclusion. You've defeated yourself before you started.

01:09:10 – 01:09:17:	The other issue, one of the other issues of the four, is chirality. This sort of adds a level of

01:09:17 – 01:09:27:	complexity to the biochemistry. And two things, or a thing in two forms, is chiral if it is

01:09:27 – 01:09:33:	asymmetric in such a way that the structure and its mirror image are not superimposable.

01:09:34 – 01:09:39:	That sounds complicated, but stick your hands in front of your face and look at them.

01:09:39 – 01:09:44:	Your hands are chiral. And you know this because you've probably accidentally tried to put on

01:09:44 – 01:09:51:	the wrong glove at some point. You cannot, no matter how you orient it, put on the left glove on

01:09:51 – 01:09:57:	the right hand or vice versa, because your hands are chiral. They're not superimposable. You can't

01:09:57 – 01:10:03:	just reorient the one to be the other. And that's why your gloves are handed. They do not fit on

01:10:04 – 01:10:11:	the wrong hand. Many molecules, many of the building blocks of life, including

01:10:11 – 01:10:20:	amino acids, are chiral. Now they're about 500-some amino acids, but really the relevant ones are

01:10:20 – 01:10:25:	the alpha amino acids of which there are 22, 20 naturally occurring. These are the ones that form

01:10:25 – 01:10:31:	proteins. These are obviously very important for life. 19 out of 20 of them are L-chiral,

01:10:31 – 01:10:38:	which is to say left-handed. You cannot use the other. You cannot make use of the right-handed

01:10:38 – 01:10:44:	version. In fact, it's going to cause problems in many cases. This is also relevant in the

01:10:44 – 01:10:52:	pharmaceutical industry because, believe it or not, drugs, many of them are handed. The molecules

01:10:52 – 01:10:58:	in them are handed. They are either left-handed or right-handed. And if you use the wrong version,

01:10:59 – 01:11:05:	it may very well kill you instead of help you. That is how important chirality can be. The same

01:11:05 – 01:11:09:	is true of the naturally occurring compounds. The wrong one may very well destroy the cell.

01:11:11 – 01:11:16:	And so this is just an additional layer of complexity and leading into my next point,

01:11:16 – 01:11:21:	an additional problem with probability because it significantly decreases the probability

01:11:22 – 01:11:27:	of creating the molecule you want by chance anyway. If you have an intelligently designed system,

01:11:27 – 01:11:33:	it does it by design. If you have a randomly designed, as it were, system, well it has to do

01:11:33 – 01:11:38:	it according to probability. And the probabilities here simply don't work. I'll get into more of

01:11:38 – 01:11:46:	the specifics in the philosophical section of the episode, but even given the immense amount of time

01:11:47 – 01:11:53:	that, fine, I am willing to grant to the evolutionists that the universe is billions of years old.

01:11:53 – 01:11:57:	I also believe it's 6,000 years old. I have an article on that. I will put it in the show notes.

01:11:58 – 01:12:01:	But even if you take the billions of years old and give them that time,

01:12:02 – 01:12:08:	in order for life to evolve, well, you can't actually give them the 11 or 12 or 13 or however

01:12:08 – 01:12:12:	many billions of years they want. Give them 50. I don't care. You can't give them that because

01:12:12 – 01:12:18:	you have the age of the earth, which is four and a half billion supposedly. Even if you don't

01:12:18 – 01:12:24:	subtract the time from them for the earth cooling from the molten phase according to their cosmology,

01:12:25 – 01:12:31:	even if you give them four and a half billion, it doesn't work. The probability does not play out.

01:12:31 – 01:12:35:	There's not enough time. There are a lot of reasons for that. Some of them are very complicated.

01:12:35 – 01:12:40:	I'll give a couple examples that are very easy to understand in the philosophical section.

01:12:41 – 01:12:45:	But the final of the four major problems that I want to highlight before moving on

01:12:46 – 01:12:51:	is the information problem. This is the easy information problem. There's also a hard one,

01:12:51 – 01:12:56:	which is in the next section. The easy information problem, very simple to understand,

01:12:57 – 01:13:04:	but truly insurmountable to date for the evolutionist. Within a biological system,

01:13:04 – 01:13:10:	no evidence has ever been presented of the creation of novel to that system information.

01:13:13 – 01:13:19:	Now, you may think, how can that possibly be true? We have Darwin's finches. We won't get into some

01:13:19 – 01:13:23:	of the funnier bits of Darwin's finches. He mislabeled things and lost specimens,

01:13:23 – 01:13:31:	but other than that, that does not prove the creation of novel information,

01:13:31 – 01:13:34:	because that did not happen according to the creation of novel information.

01:13:35 – 01:13:39:	You're probably more familiar with dog breeds than you are with the various

01:13:39 – 01:13:47:	subspecies of finch or what have you. Dog breeds are created through selective breeding

01:13:47 – 01:13:55:	that results in the loss of information. A Pomeranian has less genetic information

01:13:55 – 01:14:03:	than whatever the original ancestor, dog or wolf was. From the original ancestor,

01:14:03 – 01:14:08:	the one that came off Noah's Ark, you could arrive at all of the current species through

01:14:08 – 01:14:16:	the selective loss of information over successive generations. You cannot get back to that original

01:14:16 – 01:14:22:	dog that original canid from what we have today, because the information has been lost.

01:14:24 – 01:14:28:	That is what we have been able to demonstrate through experiments and just through breeding

01:14:28 – 01:14:36:	animals. If you lose information selectively, you can create subspecies. That's what happened

01:14:36 – 01:14:44:	with human beings. Through the selective loss of information, we went from what was present

01:14:44 – 01:14:51:	in, depending how far back you want to go, Adam or the sons of Noah, to the various nations we

01:14:51 – 01:14:58:	see today. You cannot get back to them from us. The information has been lost. This is a fundamental

01:14:58 – 01:15:05:	problem for the evolutionist, because evolution necessitates it relies upon the ability to create

01:15:05 – 01:15:11:	novel information that has not been demonstrated. And if you cannot demonstrate that, then evolution

01:15:11 – 01:15:21:	is necessarily false. This leads into the philosophical section and the hard information

01:15:21 – 01:15:28:	problem. The hard information problem is simply this. Information can neither be created nor

01:15:28 – 01:15:34:	destroyed. Now, I said information can be lost. That's a different thing. You can lose information

01:15:34 – 01:15:43:	from a system. The information still exists in sort of a grand sense. The information itself

01:15:43 – 01:15:48:	is not destroyed. This gets into the difference between instance and form in the mind of God.

01:15:48 – 01:15:54:	We won't get into that. It's complicated. That's maybe for another episode. But the fundamental

01:15:54 – 01:15:59:	point is simply that information can neither be created nor destroyed. This is a hard information

01:15:59 – 01:16:05:	problem philosophically for the evolutionist. Because, again, evolution relies on the creation

01:16:05 – 01:16:10:	of novel information at least within a given biological system. And that has not been demonstrated

01:16:10 – 01:16:16:	to happen, as I mentioned before. Now, surely someone listening at some point or someone who

01:16:16 – 01:16:23:	has sent a clip of this episode, what have you, is going to say, aha, black holes, they destroy

01:16:23 – 01:16:32:	information and so information can be destroyed. Two problems with that. One, we don't know

01:16:32 – 01:16:36:	that black holes destroy information. There's the issue of hawking radiation and various other

01:16:36 – 01:16:43:	things. But two, and more saliently, the person raising this objection is undoubtedly going to

01:16:43 – 01:16:51:	be the I love science type. Beyond the event horizon, nothing is knowable, according to the

01:16:51 – 01:16:56:	best of our current science and certainly the best of our current technology. And so anything

01:16:56 – 01:17:03:	beyond the event horizon is purely conjecture. Therefore, it is not falsifiable. Therefore,

01:17:03 – 01:17:09:	it is not per the terms set by the scientific community itself science. It is conjecture.

01:17:09 – 01:17:14:	It is no more compelling in a hard sense than fiction.

01:17:14 – 01:17:23:	And so again, I would highlight that adaptation is driven by loss. And this is another facet

01:17:23 – 01:17:29:	of this information problem, because the information drops out of the system. It's not destroyed.

01:17:29 – 01:17:32:	It is simply no longer available to that biological system.

01:17:34 – 01:17:40:	The next philosophical issue that I would raise is this a relatively simple one, very easy to

01:17:40 – 01:17:46:	understand this one, get a firm grasp of it. But it is absolutely fatal to the evolutionist.

01:17:47 – 01:17:54:	And that is the difference between analog and digital information. Analog information is what

01:17:54 – 01:18:03:	it is because it is what it is. Digital information is what it is, because some intelligence defined

01:18:03 – 01:18:12:	it to be that. This is a fundamental distinction. So if we use the most basic example, pick up any

01:18:12 – 01:18:18:	physical object, it is what it is because it is what it is. There's information there in the broad

01:18:18 – 01:18:24:	sense of information. That's analog information. Digital is something entirely different. So the

01:18:24 – 01:18:32:	pen I'm holding is a pen. Analog information, it's a pen because of the pen. The word pen

01:18:32 – 01:18:40:	is digital. The word pen means this thing that I am holding. It references really the form,

01:18:40 – 01:18:45:	the concept of a pen, but it also references the specific instance that I do have in my hand right

01:18:45 – 01:18:54:	now. That is digital information. The letters PEN reference pen because we as human beings have

01:18:54 – 01:19:01:	defined it to do so. And intelligence is required for digital information to have meaning.

01:19:02 – 01:19:08:	Digital information does not mean what it means because it inherently means that.

01:19:10 – 01:19:20:	DNA is digital because DNA is a language. It is a language based on AGTC, or if you're talking

01:19:20 – 01:19:27:	about RNA instead, AGUC, uracil instead of thymine. It is based on these base pairs,

01:19:28 – 01:19:35:	which are used to construct the human and animal genomes, pretty much life on earth.

01:19:38 – 01:19:44:	If DNA is digital, which it in fact is, then you need an intelligence to have defined

01:19:44 – 01:19:52:	what these mean, why they mean that. PEN means pen because humans define that.

01:19:53 – 01:19:58:	DNA means human being in the case of our genome because God defined that.

01:20:00 – 01:20:06:	This is a fundamental problem for the evolutionist. You do not have analog information

01:20:06 – 01:20:11:	contained in the genome. You have digital information stored there. And that is why there

01:20:11 – 01:20:18:	is so much information stored in the human and other genomes because it's digital.

01:20:19 – 01:20:27:	And this leads into my next point. Many will say that there's a system or something in the

01:20:27 – 01:20:36:	world that has the appearance of design. This is a misnomer. Now, we do use it in a way that is

01:20:36 – 01:20:44:	fair, I will say. If you were to throw a bunch of marbles on the floor, and they formed what

01:20:44 – 01:20:49:	appeared to be a pattern, that is, to some degree, the appearance of design.

01:20:51 – 01:20:58:	But there is also design in play. And there is design in play because all of those systems that

01:20:58 – 01:21:04:	contributed to that appearance of design, that appearance of a pattern, were in fact themselves

01:21:04 – 01:21:12:	designed. Gravity is a constant set by God. The density of the marbles is a thing set by God,

01:21:12 – 01:21:17:	the way these interact, the way that kinetic forces interplay. All of these various things

01:21:17 – 01:21:24:	are design. And so the result is the result of design. And so we do a disservice to ourselves

01:21:24 – 01:21:28:	when we say that something has the appearance of design, and don't really think about what it is

01:21:28 – 01:21:35:	we're saying. It on a superficial level has the appearance of design. But on a fundamental level,

01:21:35 – 01:21:41:	it is still the result of design. This is a game that evolutionists play. They'll try to say that

01:21:41 – 01:21:46:	something has the appearance of design, and they'll use this to gloss over all sorts of things that

01:21:46 – 01:21:53:	very clearly do not have the appearance of design, but have the reality of design. So we could go

01:21:53 – 01:22:00:	back to the vision system or blood clotting or neurochemistry or any of 1000 different things.

01:22:02 – 01:22:07:	These are designed, very obviously designed, and they want you to disbelieve your lying eyes,

01:22:07 – 01:22:13:	as it were. They want to tell you that, well, obviously, it looks like it was designed, but

01:22:13 – 01:22:19:	you can't possibly believe that because it can't be designed. I'll get into that point in a little bit

01:22:19 – 01:22:27:	here. But just be careful. When someone is using this appearance of design argument, most likely,

01:22:28 – 01:22:33:	the person, if it's related to biochemistry related to biology evolution, is attempting to

01:22:33 – 01:22:40:	mislead you, is attempting to hand wave away something that very clearly has design, not just

01:22:40 – 01:22:49:	the appearance of design. And this leads into another argument that is often raised. This

01:22:49 – 01:22:55:	one is particularly popular amongst the Reddit set. And that is the argument that begins with

01:22:55 – 01:23:04:	giving enough time and then add whatever you want after that. Fundamentally, this works because most

01:23:04 – 01:23:12:	people are enumerate. And because most people are not going to analyze the problems that arise,

01:23:12 – 01:23:19:	regardless of how much time there is. And so, for instance, if you have

01:23:19 – 01:23:27:	a complex system, composed of, say, five parts, picked an arbitrary number,

01:23:27 – 01:23:34:	it doesn't matter for the example, composed of a number of parts. If all of these parts must arise

01:23:34 – 01:23:42:	together, and any one part arising by itself, not only causes the likelihood of the other parts

01:23:42 – 01:23:48:	arising to decrease, but makes it impossible in some cases, no matter how much time you have,

01:23:49 – 01:23:57:	you are never going to get to the complex system arising in total. And this happens in biology.

01:23:57 – 01:24:02:	This is not just an example that I'm picking out of nowhere. If you use the primordial soup,

01:24:03 – 01:24:09:	that biologists like to pretend existed. Let's say it did. Let's say you have the primordial soup.

01:24:09 – 01:24:17:	Let's say you get a reaction that produces one of the precursors needed for a certain biological

01:24:17 – 01:24:24:	system. That reaction in a biological system is probably mediated by enzymes. It almost certainly

01:24:24 – 01:24:32:	is. It will have various processes that spin it up, processes that spin it down. Just like

01:24:32 – 01:24:36:	blood clotting. If you didn't have something that stopped the clotting, you would just become

01:24:36 – 01:24:41:	one giant clotting dye, which if you want to experience that, you can go get a booster shot.

01:24:43 – 01:24:50:	But the problem with the primordial soup is that there's nothing to mediate this reaction.

01:24:50 – 01:24:54:	So even if you have the enzyme needed to start the reaction, or let's say it's a reaction that

01:24:54 – 01:25:00:	doesn't need an enzyme, it just happens very slowly, all of your precursors are going to turn

01:25:00 – 01:25:06:	into your product. The problem is that many of those precursors are shared by other parts

01:25:06 – 01:25:11:	of the complex system. If this particular part of the complex system arises first,

01:25:12 – 01:25:17:	it will use up all the precursors. There will be no precursors for the other parts of the

01:25:17 – 01:25:22:	complex system to arise. Your system has just defeated itself, and it doesn't matter how much

01:25:22 – 01:25:27:	time you have, because you have now made it impossible to get to the complex system.

01:25:28 – 01:25:32:	And this crops up everywhere. I've given just one simple example of this.

01:25:32 – 01:25:38:	This happens time and time again, regardless of how much time there is. And as we'll see,

01:25:38 – 01:25:43:	there's not enough time, even according to their arguments for billions of years.

01:25:48 – 01:25:54:	I guess briefly here, I should respond to an objection that will come up inevitably

01:25:54 – 01:26:03:	regarding, supposedly, transitional species. There are certain scientists, archaeologists,

01:26:03 – 01:26:09:	paleontologists, who will argue that we have discovered non-humid, hominid species.

01:26:10 – 01:26:15:	There are a number of responses to this. One response is that if you showed them the skull

01:26:15 – 01:26:19:	of the elephant man, they would probably identify it as some non-human creature,

01:26:20 – 01:26:23:	despite the fact that he was just a malformed man. And this is the case with

01:26:24 – 01:26:28:	many sorts of deformities we have. You could show them the skeleton of a dwarf,

01:26:28 – 01:26:33:	and they might tell you that it's an ancient hominid that was of short stature.

01:26:34 – 01:26:40:	No, they're just deformities that happen to human beings. If you find a deformed skeleton you haven't

01:26:40 – 01:26:47:	found another species, you've found a deformed skeleton. We have those today. But as we mentioned

01:26:47 – 01:26:54:	in a previous episode, Europeans have Neanderthal DNA, Asians have Denisovan, and Africans have

01:26:54 – 01:27:04:	the so-called ghost DNA. Are these extinct non-human species? No, they are no longer

01:27:04 – 01:27:16:	extant subspecies of the human species. The evidence of non-human hominids is not only

01:27:16 – 01:27:22:	incredibly thin, it doesn't actually prove any of the supposed things they claim it proves.

01:27:23 – 01:27:27:	And the more you look into it, the less convincing it becomes.

01:27:31 – 01:27:36:	On a related note, to that, there is the issue of radiometric dating.

01:27:37 – 01:27:41:	Radiometric dating, very simply, I'm sure many listening already know this,

01:27:42 – 01:27:52:	but it is simply based on the fact that certain forms of atoms naturally decay over time. It may

01:27:52 – 01:27:57:	be a very long time, it may not be relatively speaking that long of a time. There are different

01:27:57 – 01:28:04:	pairs that are used for different lengths of time. And so carbon-14 is probably the one

01:28:04 – 01:28:09:	you've heard the most. It's not the most important one for science, but it's probably the one you've

01:28:09 – 01:28:16:	heard the most. There are other compounds that decay at various rates. There is a fundamental

01:28:16 – 01:28:24:	problem with radiometric dating, and that is that the starting conditions are unknown,

01:28:24 – 01:28:32:	necessarily unknown. The starting conditions are conjecture, which is not science, that's conjecture,

01:28:32 – 01:28:38:	it's a different thing. Science in the sense that those who advocate for evolution would use it.

01:28:39 – 01:28:46:	In order to say that we now have this proportion of this isotope,

01:28:47 – 01:28:54:	therefore this item is X years old, you must know the starting proportion of the isotope.

01:28:56 – 01:29:02:	We will go ahead and say that, yes, probabilistically you can say that if you know the starting

01:29:02 – 01:29:06:	proportion and you know the ending proportion, you can calculate the time. That's fine,

01:29:06 – 01:29:11:	that's simple statistics that that follows. The problem is you can't know the starting proportion,

01:29:12 – 01:29:16:	and you can't know the starting proportion because in many cases the claim is that it was

01:29:16 – 01:29:24:	millions or billions of years ago. No one was there to measure. And so it is based on conjecture.

01:29:25 – 01:29:31:	Being based on conjecture, it really isn't even persuasive. And not only that, there have been

01:29:31 – 01:29:37:	many cases where objects of known age have been taken and radio dated,

01:29:39 – 01:29:45:	and they have wound up with wildly different results that were wildly wrong. One particular

01:29:45 – 01:29:52:	example of this is they have taken fresh rock produced by volcanoes to various labs to date it,

01:29:52 – 01:29:57:	and they've returned completely inconsistent results. A million years, eight million years,

01:29:57 – 01:30:06:	four million years turns out it's 12 years old. So radiometric dating is not very convincing.

01:30:07 – 01:30:14:	Really, it's not convincing at all. It's the same sort of problem that we have with a lot of the

01:30:14 – 01:30:21:	climate data today, where they will say it's some amazing new record and it's many percent off

01:30:22 – 01:30:31:	norms. When the satellite data goes back 10, 15, 20 years, the instrumented data in some cases may

01:30:31 – 01:30:37:	go back 100 years or so. And if you happen to be on the oceans, then you'll have some records from

01:30:37 – 01:30:43:	the 1800s, where ship captains were recording as best they could with obviously non-calibrated

01:30:43 – 01:30:51:	instruments. You can have some vague sense, but for us to claim today that what we are observing

01:30:51 – 01:30:58:	is normal, and then to extrapolate back in time. As Corey just said, that's not science. It's

01:30:58 – 01:31:03:	scientific inquiry. It's fine to try to model stuff. That's intelligent, but you don't make

01:31:03 – 01:31:12:	absolute claims when you put garbage in. You don't then swear by it, and you certainly don't browbeat

01:31:12 – 01:31:18:	people who think something different when your evidence is functionally no better than their

01:31:18 – 01:31:26:	evidence. Again, that's why we began with Scripture, because as Christians, the word of God is our

01:31:26 – 01:31:34:	evidence. It is the standard by which we evaluate reality. And so Scripture says that the sun rises

01:31:34 – 01:31:40:	in the west, and we see the sun rising in the east. I'm going to believe the Bible as a matter of faith.

01:31:41 – 01:31:48:	The thing is, we don't have to believe things that are counterfactual, because what we're told in

01:31:48 – 01:31:55:	Scripture never ends up being in opposition to what we find in creation. There are things where we

01:31:55 – 01:32:02:	can't maybe come up with a scientific explanation. Obviously, if the rocks on the earth appear to

01:32:02 – 01:32:11:	be millions of years old, it's an inconsistency, but it's not an inconsistency that undermines

01:32:12 – 01:32:16:	Scripture. It's something that should be addressed, and that's part of the reason that we're doing this

01:32:16 – 01:32:22:	episode, is that Christians should have sound answers to this. I don't want Christians to

01:32:23 – 01:32:29:	be shrieking about Darwin and just being completely incoherent. That's what happens to

01:32:29 – 01:32:36:	Cori and I when we try to talk about race. Race is genetic. It's genetic in a way that's explainable

01:32:36 – 01:32:42:	in Scripture, going back 6,000 years, and going back to the Flood. Everything, all the variation

01:32:42 – 01:32:48:	that we see today, is explainable both in scientific terms and in scriptural terms. The two are not at

01:32:48 – 01:32:55:	odds. The mention of dog breeds, most of the variations of dog breeds today are less than

01:32:55 – 01:33:02:	200 years old. Some of the primary forms go back 3,000 and 4,000 years, but when you look at the

01:33:02 – 01:33:08:	incredible variety of either, I saw one list that showed 450 distinct dog breeds. Most of those are new,

01:33:09 – 01:33:16:	and they're new in very substantially obvious ways. As Cori was saying, if you were an alien

01:33:17 – 01:33:23:	who landed on earth and you dug up a Parsons Russell Terrier and you dug up a Great Dane,

01:33:24 – 01:33:30:	you might, if you're pretty good at it, you might be able to determine morphologically they were

01:33:30 – 01:33:35:	similar at some point. You would never necessarily conclude that they were the same species from

01:33:35 – 01:33:40:	those two examples, because he said either one is a very tiny amateur version of the other,

01:33:40 – 01:33:45:	or one is a mutant version or deformed or something. You would never think they were both dogs.

01:33:45 – 01:33:51:	We, because we know the time periods, they're both clearly dogs. We can analyze their genes,

01:33:51 – 01:33:58:	and we know the history of the breeds. When we look at data and then we look at scripture,

01:33:58 – 01:34:03:	as Christians, we have to believe scripture. Then I hope that the data accords. It's easier for

01:34:03 – 01:34:10:	me as a Christian, as a young earth creationist, when I point to these things and it's consistent

01:34:10 – 01:34:15:	with what I already believe. That doesn't undermine my faith that it doesn't, but it's easier in this

01:34:15 – 01:34:20:	world, especially in this day, to be credible to someone who's also intelligent and they believe

01:34:20 – 01:34:25:	they're well-informed based on the cutting-edge version of the knowledge that they're given.

01:34:26 – 01:34:28:	If you have an explanation that doesn't make you look like you just say,

01:34:28 – 01:34:34:	you have to believe my crazy Sky Daddy religion, and you have to take all these articles of faith.

01:34:35 – 01:34:40:	At the beginning, it turns out that when you go down this path of theistic evolution and

01:34:42 – 01:34:47:	long periods of time, it turns out that you have to have a greater degree of faith in

01:34:48 – 01:34:52:	the theories presented by modern scientists than you would if you simply believed in the

01:34:52 – 01:34:59:	six days of creation. In the case of some of the time periods necessary to achieve some of the results,

01:35:01 – 01:35:06:	even conceivably, even for some of the results where it's completely a random process,

01:35:07 – 01:35:11:	and they say, well, given along, it's the million monkeys at a typewriter,

01:35:12 – 01:35:19:	may eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. That level of absurd speculation requires a

01:35:19 – 01:35:26:	duration of the existence of the universe that's orders of magnitude beyond what we know to be

01:35:26 – 01:35:32:	true based on all available data. I saw some of the latest speculation was maybe the universe is

01:35:32 – 01:35:39:	26.7 billion years old or something. I don't care. It doesn't concern me if the 13.8 billion,

01:35:39 – 01:35:44:	which is a number I've used in the episode six. If that turns out to be wrong, who cares?

01:35:45 – 01:35:49:	I'm always glad when we're learning more about how God put creation together,

01:35:49 – 01:35:54:	because it's cool. It's interesting. Every week, I tune in to look at the latest James Webb

01:35:54 – 01:36:00:	telescope pictures and data, because they're looking back to the very beginnings of the

01:36:00 – 01:36:05:	creation of the universe. What's funny is they're finding more and more impossible things. The

01:36:05 – 01:36:10:	further back they look, they're finding, for example, much more mature galaxies that, according

01:36:10 – 01:36:16:	to their current models, couldn't possibly exist. You couldn't have a galaxy as fully flushed out.

01:36:16 – 01:36:21:	In some of the galaxies, they're finding just a couple hundred million years after the Big Bang.

01:36:22 – 01:36:27:	That's not possible based on any other theories. It's possible based on my theory, because I just

01:36:27 – 01:36:32:	believe that God put the stuff together, and he set it in motion in six days. As we're looking

01:36:33 – 01:36:41:	through 13.65 or 4 billion light years of distance for that light to travel to us,

01:36:41 – 01:36:48:	that's one of the questions that I think we skipped over earlier. If the universe is only 6,000

01:36:48 – 01:36:53:	years old, how do we see in the light? Well, as we said at the beginning, God created light

01:36:53 – 01:37:00:	before he created stars. How does that work? I don't know, but the system was complete when

01:37:00 – 01:37:07:	he said it was very good. If there's light appearing, I think that's cool. It's a stupid

01:37:07 – 01:37:15:	response, but I think that's cool. God put a star 14 billion years away, and then he put all of the

01:37:15 – 01:37:22:	photons from that star all the way along, so that any human being at any point of observation

01:37:22 – 01:37:27:	would be able to see the light. Why? The star is there, and because it was a complete system.

01:37:28 – 01:37:34:	God didn't put the photons in transit just for our sake or for our sake at all. He did it because

01:37:34 – 01:37:39:	he wanted a complete system. When it's set in motion and everything just works,

01:37:41 – 01:37:48:	the scientists who deny God have to try to find some explanation for patterns. The explanation

01:37:48 – 01:37:54:	is in the system in the sense that all of it just works. I think it's the normalcy bias

01:37:54 – 01:37:58:	that is really completely overwhelmed modern scientific thought to think, well,

01:37:59 – 01:38:05:	this exists, so obviously this must exist. Sometimes they'll talk about the unlikeliness of

01:38:05 – 01:38:10:	the creation of life or whatever, in particular the fact that there's no evidence for life anywhere

01:38:10 – 01:38:16:	else in the universe. I don't think that's a strong evidence against the scientific arguments

01:38:16 – 01:38:21:	against Scripture for the simple reason that in my lifetime, we didn't have any proof that

01:38:22 – 01:38:28:	other planets existed. It's only in, I think, maybe Zoomer lifetimes, certainly millennial

01:38:28 – 01:38:33:	lifetimes, that we've actually found physical evidence for exoplanets before that was just

01:38:33 – 01:38:39:	theoretical. So we're always finding new things, but I can say as a Christian, we're not going to

01:38:39 – 01:38:44:	find life because this is where God put life. Everything else is dead. Will that be the case

01:38:44 – 01:38:47:	in the New Earth? I don't know. Personally, I think it probably won't be. I think there will

01:38:47 – 01:38:51:	probably be life elsewhere, and I think we'll probably take it with us. I think that God put

01:38:52 – 01:38:57:	all that stuff out there, including the planets, for us to actually explore. I don't think it's

01:38:57 – 01:39:01:	going to happen in this Earth, but I think in the New Earth, we're still going to have the urge

01:39:01 – 01:39:07:	to explore. God made us to fill the Earth and subdue it. All this space, I don't think we're

01:39:07 – 01:39:13:	just stuck in some corner of the Milky Way galaxy. I think that we will be able to travel.

01:39:14 – 01:39:18:	It's not a matter of faith. It's just my personal opinion, because when I see this stuff,

01:39:18 – 01:39:25:	it's cool. I think that people want to go see interesting stuff. Back to the prior episode,

01:39:25 – 01:39:31:	dealing with conspiracy theories, one of the worst things that's come out of the skepticism about

01:39:31 – 01:39:37:	the moon landing is people saying, space is fake and gay. It's not even real. The flat Earth stuff

01:39:37 – 01:39:45:	ends up reducing the immense beauty and splendor of creation, of God's creation,

01:39:45 – 01:39:51:	that testifies to his glory. I just don't want to rob God of the glory that he describes to himself,

01:39:52 – 01:39:57:	as he said in the ending chapters of Job, that the heavens testified to his glory, all of it.

01:39:57 – 01:40:03:	Everything we see in this world, everything that we see in the heavens, it's all God revealing

01:40:03 – 01:40:09:	himself as himself, not only us, but just for its own sake. He put all this stuff together,

01:40:09 – 01:40:14:	this stuff will never ever be able to understand. No matter how long we look or how hard we think

01:40:14 – 01:40:19:	about it, there's stuff that's too far away to see. It's not there for us. It's there because

01:40:19 – 01:40:25:	God wanted to do it. As a Christian, I take comfort in that. It never, when there's new

01:40:25 – 01:40:32:	discoveries, every time, as I said in the episode on scripture, it never undermines my faith,

01:40:32 – 01:40:37:	because it's always more of what I always knew. The Genesis passage we opened with,

01:40:37 – 01:40:41:	it's the very first thing that I personally read as a child, when my parents were teaching me to

01:40:41 – 01:40:46:	read the first novel thing that they said in front of me and said, go read this. It was Genesis 1

01:40:46 – 01:40:53:	and following. I knew the things that scientists are only now discovering, because I believed

01:40:53 – 01:40:58:	those simple words. They weren't scientific explanations. They were explanations that a

01:40:58 – 01:41:03:	four-year-old could understand, or that Moses could understand in an age where they had astronomy,

01:41:03 – 01:41:10:	but they didn't know the details we know. It didn't matter. God gave us what we need in scripture

01:41:10 – 01:41:17:	to believe in him, but it's not at odds with the revelation of God in all of creation.

01:41:18 – 01:41:23:	I think these subjects are important for us to be conversant in, because we're part of the world,

01:41:23 – 01:41:28:	we're part of being able to speak to others. In particular today, when we have a lot of people

01:41:28 – 01:41:36:	who are looking at the church for the moral questions, if we attack those people on the

01:41:36 – 01:41:41:	basis of our being bad at scientific explanations, that's going to undermine their ability to come

01:41:41 – 01:41:47:	to the faith. It truly will. As I said before, if you sound retarded as a Christian, when you talk

01:41:47 – 01:41:51:	about things that someone knows something about, they're not going to take you seriously. It's

01:41:51 – 01:41:56:	not that everyone has to be conversant in everything. As I said, Corey's going to do an

01:41:56 – 01:42:00:	infinitely better job of explaining some of the science than I could. I would give a much simpler

01:42:00 – 01:42:07:	version. That's fine. If you want to go in depth, the depth is there, but the anchor should not be

01:42:07 – 01:42:13:	perfect knowledge of scientific facts about creation. The anchor should be scripture,

01:42:13 – 01:42:19:	and what God has revealed in the Word, because when the revelation of the Word is consistent with

01:42:19 – 01:42:25:	the revelation of creation, which is always the case, that's something for us to give thanks for

01:42:25 – 01:42:30:	as Christians and for us to be excited about sharing with unbelievers. For those who are curious,

01:42:30 – 01:42:35:	we should be able to say, this book that's thousands of years old is consistent. It's

01:42:35 – 01:42:40:	constant with the things that you know and the things where there's an apparent disagreement.

01:42:40 – 01:42:46:	Let's talk through it because it turns out that your faith-based belief system in what you've been

01:42:46 – 01:42:52:	taught is actually a much bigger stretch than our faith-based belief system that God spoke the

01:42:52 – 01:42:57:	universe into existence 6,000 years ago, and everything just worked. I take comfort in that,

01:42:57 – 01:43:04:	and I hope to share that comfort with others as well. That's an important point, and you raised

01:43:04 – 01:43:10:	it previously as well, but it's one of the remaining five points I'd like to make in this section.

01:43:10 – 01:43:16:	It takes more faith to believe in science, so-called, than it does to believe in God.

01:43:19 – 01:43:25:	But fundamentally, it is important first to realize that both are based on faith.

01:43:27 – 01:43:28:	You have to have faith in the science,

01:43:30 – 01:43:34:	or you have to have faith in God. Now, you can have faith in both to some degree,

01:43:35 – 01:43:40:	but you cannot believe the science where it contradicts what God says, if you have faith in

01:43:40 – 01:43:47:	God. Alternatively, you can have faith in the science and say that God is wrong. I wouldn't

01:43:47 – 01:43:54:	recommend that, but those are the two options. Science likes to claim, and this is one of the

01:43:54 – 01:44:02:	other remaining points, but science likes to claim that it is entirely objective, that it is truly

01:44:02 – 01:44:09:	that it is truly empirical. It relies only on the senses and what can be measured and tested

01:44:09 – 01:44:18:	and falsified, can be reduced to data somewhere and then analyzed. But that's simply not true.

01:44:20 – 01:44:30:	For one, science largely focuses on induction, which is the inference of a rule from specific

01:44:30 – 01:44:37:	data points. So again, it's just empiricism, as opposed to deduction, which is the use of the rule

01:44:38 – 01:44:43:	to determine what will happen in individual cases. Now, science does both. It tries to go up to the

01:44:43 – 01:44:50:	rule and then down from the rule. But science is largely an empirical enterprise. But fundamental

01:44:50 – 01:44:58:	too, this empirical enterprise is really something taken, perhaps somewhat ironically,

01:44:58 – 01:45:04:	from philosophy, from David Hume. And that is the exclusion of miracles of God,

01:45:04 – 01:45:09:	of anything that is not to the mind of the scientist, empirical.

01:45:12 – 01:45:18:	Now, if you're ever in a trial, whether you're an attorney, a party, or a member of the jury,

01:45:20 – 01:45:23:	the beginning of the trial phase starts with what is called voir dire,

01:45:24 – 01:45:32:	which is just old French for speak truthfully. That is the interrogation, I guess you could say

01:45:32 – 01:45:38:	uncharitably, but is the interviewing of the potential members of the jury panel,

01:45:38 – 01:45:45:	members of the jury pool, to determine if they are suitable for the jury. During that phase,

01:45:45 – 01:45:54:	as the attorney, you have two kinds of ways to strike jurors from the pool and therefore not

01:45:54 – 01:45:59:	impaneled them, they will not be part of the eventual jury that hears the case.

01:46:00 – 01:46:05:	The first is a challenge for cause. You have an infinite number of these. And the reason you

01:46:05 – 01:46:10:	have an infinite number of these is because a challenge for cause is a challenge where you have

01:46:10 – 01:46:19:	a cause. So for instance, if you have someone in the jury pool who hates your client, or thinks that

01:46:19 – 01:46:25:	all people who have your clients hair color are guilty of crimes, or whatever it happens to be,

01:46:26 – 01:46:31:	some cause that is a legitimate reason to dismiss this person from the jury pool,

01:46:32 – 01:46:37:	you can dismiss for cause, as long as you can state that cause and the judge accepts it,

01:46:38 – 01:46:42:	which is to say that it's in the law. The other kind of challenge that you have

01:46:43 – 01:46:50:	is what is called a peremptory challenge. A peremptory challenge is for use where you do not

01:46:50 – 01:46:56:	have a cause that you can state. Now you can read into that whatever you please, but where you cannot

01:46:56 – 01:47:02:	state a challenge for cause, you can use one of your peremptory challenges. Now I say one of because

01:47:02 – 01:47:07:	you have a limited number depends on the venue and the kind of cases to how many you have,

01:47:07 – 01:47:14:	but you have to use them strategically and carefully. That's fine in a court of law. It has

01:47:14 – 01:47:22:	a place in certain venues. That should not be something that we use in scientific investigation.

01:47:23 – 01:47:29:	If you peremptorily exclude certain causes, certain explanations for phenomena, you have

01:47:29 – 01:47:34:	artificially limited yourself and crippled yourself quite frankly because you will not be able to

01:47:34 – 01:47:41:	arrive at a correct conclusion if the correct conclusion is contained with what you peremptorily

01:47:41 – 01:47:50:	excluded. If you peremptorily exclude something and it turns out that that thing is the cause

01:47:51 – 01:47:57:	of what you are investigating, there is no way for you to arrive at the correct conclusion.

01:47:58 – 01:48:05:	And that is exactly what modern science does because modern science as a peremptory exclusion

01:48:05 – 01:48:11:	says that miracles do not take place, says that God does not exist, says that design

01:48:11 – 01:48:19:	is not the explanation for life. And if you do that, you necessarily have limited your field

01:48:19 – 01:48:24:	of investigation. And so modern science isn't really science because it's not attempting to

01:48:24 – 01:48:30:	find true knowledge. It is attempting to find an explanation for everything that exists in the

01:48:30 – 01:48:38:	absence of God. That is what modern science actually is. Modern science is simply a long,

01:48:38 – 01:48:45:	convoluted, complicated attempt to explain away God because they don't want to believe in God.

01:48:46 – 01:48:51:	It's not because there isn't evidence for God. It's not because God doesn't have explanatory power.

01:48:51 – 01:48:56:	It's not because we can't look at creation and see that there was in fact a designer,

01:48:56 – 01:49:02:	that there is a designer. It's because they do not want God to be real,

01:49:02 – 01:49:09:	because they do not want to have to obey God. That is why science engages in the way that it does,

01:49:09 – 01:49:15:	and that is not properly science, that is an artificial construct that has no right to be

01:49:15 – 01:49:25:	called science. But that is what we have today. And one of the ways that science hand waves away

01:49:26 – 01:49:34:	very clear instances of something that is inexplicable according to their materialism

01:49:34 – 01:49:40:	or clearly shows design is they will call it an emergent property or an emergent phenomenon.

01:49:41 – 01:49:49:	Any time you hear either of those phrases, you should be on maximum guard. This person is probably

01:49:49 – 01:49:57:	or almost certainly trying to mislead you. One thing that some scientists have now started calling

01:49:57 – 01:50:06:	an emergent phenomenon is consciousness. They just hand wave away the problem of consciousness,

01:50:06 – 01:50:09:	which is one of the problems listed earlier, a serious problem that science

01:50:10 – 01:50:16:	using its methods cannot explain. They hand wave it away by saying, if you create the brain,

01:50:16 – 01:50:26:	that material, just as an effect of existing, produces the mind. What's the problem with that?

01:50:26 – 01:50:32:	Well, they don't give you any mechanism by which that happens. They don't give you a means,

01:50:32 – 01:50:37:	and not only that, it can't be falsified. It can't be tested. And so it isn't science by their own

01:50:38 – 01:50:43:	definition. But they constantly do this. They encounter a hard problem. They say, oh, emergent

01:50:43 – 01:50:51:	property emergent phenomenon. This is one of the ways they deliberately mislead you to make

01:50:51 – 01:50:56:	you believe that they have an answer for everything when they very clearly do not have an answer.

01:50:58 – 01:51:03:	And so the penultimate issue that I would like to address is I've said we would get into a little

01:51:03 – 01:51:12:	bit of math. And this is the little bit of math. We already mentioned DNA and RNA and the base pairs

01:51:12 – 01:51:22:	and those things. And really, very real, perhaps amusing sense human beings are fertilizer held

01:51:22 – 01:51:28:	together by sugar. If you don't get the joke, then you should look up the constituent parts of DNA.

01:51:28 – 01:51:37:	But the mathematics for this are very important. And here's why. In the human genome,

01:51:38 – 01:51:44:	there are three billion base pairs. If you give the diploid number, so not giving a gamete,

01:51:44 – 01:51:51:	giving a somatic cell instead, six billion base pairs total, including because you have two copies

01:51:51 – 01:51:57:	of each chromosome, except for the sex chromosome. If you are male, then you have one X and one Y

01:51:57 – 01:52:01:	as opposed to females who still have two copies, assuming nothing has gone wrong.

01:52:03 – 01:52:08:	But you have six billion base pairs in your diploid cells. The number is a little higher

01:52:08 – 01:52:14:	for females versus males because the X chromosome is larger than the Y, but it's close enough.

01:52:14 – 01:52:22:	It's a little higher than six billion. So let's say we have these six billion base pairs. The claim

01:52:23 – 01:52:30:	is that Earth is 4.5 billion years old. And again, we'll give them even the amount of time necessary

01:52:30 – 01:52:35:	for it to cool from a molten state. We'll give them those hundreds of millions of years, whatever

01:52:35 – 01:52:42:	it happens to be. Some of you will undoubtedly already see a problem here. You need to have a

01:52:42 – 01:52:51:	correct, which is to say a human word, mutation, more than every single year for the entire existence

01:52:51 – 01:52:59:	of the planet in order to get from nothing to a human being. This becomes a very serious problem

01:52:59 – 01:53:06:	when you start taking into account, well, higher life forms have gestational periods.

01:53:07 – 01:53:13:	And not every mutation is in the right direction. Some mutations, in fact, most mutations are

01:53:13 – 01:53:19:	deleterious. Some mutations result in death. There's war and famine and accident misadventure.

01:53:20 – 01:53:28:	The mathematics simply does not work. But let's look at some concrete numbers here so we can get

01:53:28 – 01:53:37:	a better idea of what is going on here in probability. When you speak of probability

01:53:38 – 01:53:45:	for things like this, and I will link an article that deals with this, it actually deals with

01:53:46 – 01:53:51:	copying and pasting passwords of all things, but it gives the math for this. It's an article I wrote

01:53:51 – 01:54:03:	some years ago. But the relevant numbers are the number of characters in your pool, which is to

01:54:03 – 01:54:10:	say the distinct characters, and then the number of characters for, we'll call it a word, for the word

01:54:11 – 01:54:16:	you need to create, you need to arise in this case by random chance.

01:54:18 – 01:54:26:	And so for the alphabet, you have 26 characters. For a one character word, that means if you do

01:54:27 – 01:54:36:	random chance, roll a 26 sided die say, you have a one in 26 chance. If you do this,

01:54:37 – 01:54:45:	every hour, you'll probably wind up getting the letter you want in just over a day.

01:54:46 – 01:54:52:	Doesn't take very much time. The same thing is true if you deal with the alphabet and basic

01:54:52 – 01:54:56:	punctuation. In this case, I'm just going to say space and period because that's what you need for

01:54:56 – 01:55:02:	just a basic sentence. But of course, that's not complete yet, is it? Because I've only included

01:55:02 – 01:55:09:	lowercase, we have to include uppercase so 54 characters. Now it takes about two days of rolling

01:55:09 – 01:55:19:	that die. Now a 54 sided die but rolling that die every hour to get that one character word that you

01:55:19 – 01:55:28:	need. Well, let's bump that up a little bit to five. A five character word will stick with our

01:55:28 – 01:55:36:	upper and lowercase and basic punctuation character set. Well, now the odds instead of being

01:55:38 – 01:55:53:	one in 54, are one in 459,165,024. It's now going to take you 52,416 years to get that string.

01:55:53 – 01:56:02:	Let's again bump things up just a little bit. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the

01:56:02 – 01:56:11:	earth. That's 56 characters in our character set. How long would it take us rolling that die

01:56:11 – 01:56:22:	once every hour to arrive at that string? And the answer is 1 times 10 to the 93rd years.

01:56:24 – 01:56:31:	That's an incomprehensible number. But in order to put it a little bit more in context, not entirely,

01:56:31 – 01:56:35:	because once you start getting into exponents that large, it's very difficult to grasp them.

01:56:36 – 01:56:41:	The number of atoms in the universe is estimated to be 10 to the 82nd.

01:56:43 – 01:56:46:	It would take you more years to create that simple string by chance

01:56:47 – 01:56:55:	than there are atoms in the universe, which is really just a long and complicated way of

01:56:55 – 01:57:02:	saying it is mathematically impossible. You will never get a human being by random chance,

01:57:03 – 01:57:08:	no matter how much time you give the evolutionist. And the problem for the evolutionist is that he

01:57:08 – 01:57:16:	only has about four billion years, which sounds like a very long time until you actually run the

01:57:16 – 01:57:25:	numbers and then suddenly it doesn't work whatsoever. And so I come to the last point

01:57:25 – 01:57:32:	that I want to make in this section. And this is a point that is a little different from the others.

01:57:32 – 01:57:37:	And the reason I want to make this point is that it is important for you to understand

01:57:38 – 01:57:42:	this specific point that I'm going to make, because in the years to come,

01:57:42 – 01:57:44:	it is going to become highly relevant to the Christian.

01:57:46 – 01:57:52:	Now, as mentioned earlier, there are irreducibly complex systems. There is no explanation

01:57:52 – 01:57:59:	for how you could go from something that does not have blood that clots to a creature that has

01:57:59 – 01:58:04:	the sort of clotting capabilities that a mammal does, that a human being has.

01:58:04 – 01:58:12:	There is no way to explain that. We cannot get from the non-existence of the system or some

01:58:12 – 01:58:18:	supposed simple version biochemically up to the complicated system that we have today,

01:58:18 – 01:58:23:	the one that we see, the one that exists, that must be explained by evolution if evolution is true.

01:58:24 – 01:58:25:	And here's the problem.

01:58:26 – 01:58:32:	In probably not too many years, we will see scientists devising so-called AI experiments

01:58:34 – 01:58:43:	to get from point A to point B, which is to say to get from nothing to get to the complex system.

01:58:44 – 01:58:50:	And they will say, well, look, the system found a path. The problem with this is that

01:58:51 – 01:58:56:	it will be impossible to replicate that properly, to analyze it whatsoever,

01:58:58 – 01:59:01:	and it will prove nothing. And the reason that it will prove nothing

01:59:02 – 01:59:06:	is that the scientist will have set the conditions for the experiment,

01:59:08 – 01:59:14:	and then the AI will have modified them undoubtedly. But the result will not be falsifiable.

01:59:14 – 01:59:19:	The result will not be science. The result will be pure speculation. But they will try to use this

01:59:19 – 01:59:24:	to say, look, we have proved that evolution is true, and they will have proved no such thing.

01:59:26 – 01:59:30:	It is vitally important to understand the game that they are going to play,

01:59:30 – 01:59:34:	because this is going to happen, and it will not be that long before they start doing it.

01:59:35 – 01:59:36:	Some of them are probably already trying.

01:59:39 – 01:59:44:	But there will be papers published that will say we have explained how blood clotting occurs,

01:59:44 – 01:59:48:	this supposedly, irreducibly complex system that we couldn't explain,

01:59:49 – 01:59:54:	in the context of neo-Darwinian evolution, we have shown conclusively with AI that it's possible.

01:59:55 – 01:59:59:	But again, they will have shown no such thing, because all they will have done

02:00:00 – 02:00:07:	is shown that if a scientist tells an AI to get from A to B, the AI will spit out something that

02:00:07 – 02:00:13:	supposedly gets from A to B. There will be no way to prove that that is true. There will be no way

02:00:13 – 02:00:18:	to falsify it. There will be no way to analyze it, subject to the very terms that science sets

02:00:18 – 02:00:23:	for itself, or any other terms, quite frankly. But this is something that is coming down the

02:00:23 – 02:00:30:	pipeline, and it will be used against Christians. It is a weapon from Satan, like much of the rest

02:00:30 – 02:00:35:	of AI, even if AI has certain promise in some areas, I think personally it is dangerous to the

02:00:35 – 02:00:42:	point that we should ban it. This is something that Satan will use against the Christian faith,

02:00:42 – 02:00:49:	and Christians have to be on guard against this. We live in an era where there are going to be

02:00:49 – 02:00:54:	novel challenges to the Christian faith, but at the same time they aren't novel,

02:00:55 – 02:00:59:	because it's just Satan sowing doubt. It's what he's been doing all along.

02:00:59 – 02:01:07:	He just happens to have a new and shiny tool. There's no reason to believe the evolutionists

02:01:07 – 02:01:12:	when they hand-wave away problems by ignoring them. There's no reason to believe the evolutionists

02:01:12 – 02:01:17:	when they conflate the morphological, the conceptual, and the biochemical. There's no

02:01:17 – 02:01:22:	reason to believe the evolutionists when they hand-wave away irreducible complexity.

02:01:22 – 02:01:26:	There's no reason to believe the evolutionists when they say that chirality, oh, that doesn't

02:01:26 – 02:01:32:	matter, life could have arisen in some other way. And there is no reason to believe them

02:01:32 – 02:01:36:	when in the not-too-distant future they come out and say, well, AI has proved,

02:01:37 – 02:01:41:	no it hasn't. They're just lying, as they've been doing all along.

02:01:43 – 02:01:51:	So we started this episode with five questions, and we didn't go into all of them in depth,

02:01:51 – 02:01:57:	because some of them are really beyond the scope of this episode. Yes, we delved into the philosophy,

02:01:58 – 02:02:04:	but really only insofar as it directly touches on the question of evolution, which is the topic

02:02:04 – 02:02:11:	proper of this episode. We'll get into the others in some future episode, but the takeaway

02:02:12 – 02:02:19:	for the Christian really, it isn't all the scientific information presented. It isn't

02:02:19 – 02:02:25:	the scientific information that will be in the show notes, where you can get further detail on

02:02:26 – 02:02:32:	many of these subjects in really as much depth as you'd like. You could very well get a PhD in

02:02:32 – 02:02:41:	many of these, if you were so inclined. I personally am not. That's not the point. The takeaway of this

02:02:41 – 02:02:51:	episode is really that you can choose between what God says and what godless scientists tell you to

02:02:51 – 02:03:06:	believe. And many come to this from the exact wrong side. They come at the question as if we

02:03:06 – 02:03:14:	should look at it from the way that really the evolutionists tell us we should. Look at all of

02:03:14 – 02:03:21:	these little shiny things we've collected and built up this system by excluding God. Because,

02:03:21 – 02:03:29:	again, that's what they do. They exclude God just as one of their preconditions, their presuppositions.

02:03:29 – 02:03:37:	They say there is no God. That is the exact wrong way to look at this. The way a Christian should

02:03:37 – 02:03:45:	look at these matters is if there is a God. That's the first question. Is there a God? If there is a

02:03:45 – 02:03:54:	God, then you look to the nature of that God. You look to what that God has said. Has he spoken to

02:03:54 – 02:04:03:	you? What has he told you? And so as a Christian, first and foremost, you trust God. And so when

02:04:03 – 02:04:08:	you look to God's word, you aren't looking to God's word to find ways that it disagrees with

02:04:08 – 02:04:15:	science or ways science disagrees with God's word. Because God is the fundamental foundation of truth.

02:04:16 – 02:04:23:	And God is the fundamental foundation of truth. We'll never lie. God is always true. Everything

02:04:23 – 02:04:30:	he says is true. Everything he says is reliable. And so we know as a matter of fact, as an absolute

02:04:30 – 02:04:37:	fact that God's word is true. And so you look to God's word, and it is not God's word that we

02:04:37 – 02:04:42:	subject to science. It is science that we subject to God's word. If the scientists come to a

02:04:42 – 02:04:50:	conclusion that is contrary to Scripture, there are two possibilities. One, we have misinterpreted it.

02:04:50 – 02:04:57:	That is entirely possible. Not with regard to things that are clear. So the six days of creation,

02:04:58 – 02:05:04:	literal days, very clear. Science, insofar as science supposedly disagrees, is wrong.

02:05:06 – 02:05:10:	But the other alternative is just that, that the scientists are in fact wrong.

02:05:11 – 02:05:16:	And so if the scientists say that Scripture says X and the scientists claim not X,

02:05:16 – 02:05:21:	we as Christians are bound to believe X and the scientists are wrong. Now we can investigate

02:05:22 – 02:05:26:	with the tools that science uses to prove the scientists are wrong. There are many

02:05:26 – 02:05:31:	great Christian scientists who have done this, particularly when it comes to genetics or when

02:05:31 – 02:05:39:	it comes to high level, say, synthetic chemistry. Those sorts of fields tend to find men who don't

02:05:39 – 02:05:46:	believe in the dogma of neo-Darwinian evolution because it does not square with what they know

02:05:46 – 02:05:53:	about the world. Now you'll find some biologists who believe it because they hand away the chemistry

02:05:53 – 02:05:57:	problems, the math problems, these problems about which the biologist doesn't know that much.

02:06:00 – 02:06:07:	But Christians can very well investigate these problems, can delve into them, can find ways

02:06:07 – 02:06:11:	in which they clearly agree with Scripture. We've gone over those in this episode

02:06:11 – 02:06:17:	on a number of topics. There are many more we could have addressed. We did not address everything

02:06:17 – 02:06:25:	because we didn't want the episode to run for 60 hours. But that fundamental takeaway

02:06:26 – 02:06:32:	is what it is vitally important, what we want you to hear in this episode, what we want you to

02:06:32 – 02:06:37:	remember from this episode. You can remember or forget the science as is useful to you in your

02:06:37 – 02:06:44:	life. It's useful to have a basic understanding of some of this stuff. You probably don't need to

02:06:44 – 02:06:50:	remember all of the various compounds that are involved in the cascade that is blood clotting.

02:06:50 – 02:06:53:	I don't remember them all. I have them written down. That's why I could read them.

02:06:56 – 02:07:01:	But fundamentally, take away and remember that God is true and what he says is reliable.

02:07:02 – 02:07:08:	And so we come at it from almost the exact opposite direction of the scientists. The scientists

02:07:08 – 02:07:16:	assume there is no God, and then try to explain his creation, which of course is an insane proposition

02:07:16 – 02:07:23:	that is impossible. We as Christians come at it from the exact opposite direction.

02:07:24 – 02:07:30:	We know there is a God, and so we look at creation through that lens, and we see his action in

02:07:30 – 02:07:37:	creation. We see his design in creation. We see creation as something that was built by an intelligent

02:07:37 – 02:07:44:	God, not as a clock from which he walked away after he spun it up, not with the deus claim,

02:07:46 – 02:07:51:	but as a God who is actively involved in creation, who is responsible for every cell division,

02:07:52 – 02:07:59:	every coming together or separation of atoms or molecules or what have you. Every last thing that

02:07:59 – 02:08:07:	happens in creation happens because God created it that way and permits it to happen or causes it

02:08:07 – 02:08:18:	to happen. Our God is an awesome God who is in charge of all things, who is king over creation,

02:08:19 – 02:08:24:	who is in charge of all things, who mediates all things. As Scripture says,

02:08:24 – 02:08:27:	in whom we live and move and have our being.

02:08:30 – 02:08:37:	And so contrary to what the scientists, the evolutionists, would claim, belief in God doesn't

02:08:37 – 02:08:43:	cripple the mind, belief in God doesn't preclude you from answering these questions, rather belief

02:08:43 – 02:08:49:	in God is the only thing that enables giving an accurate answer, that enables you to give a true

02:08:49 – 02:08:55:	answer. Because if you're the evolutionist, we went through a list of things you simply cannot

02:08:55 – 02:09:03:	answer. All of the questions with which we started this episode have answers for the Christian.

02:09:04 – 02:09:12:	Not one of them is answerable for the evolutionist. This is one of their key arguments, one of their

02:09:12 – 02:09:18:	key dogmas, particularly when you get into the philosophy of science. The explanatory power of

02:09:19 – 02:09:27:	a theory, of a belief, what have you, matters. If something has no explanatory power,

02:09:28 – 02:09:34:	then it's false. What use is it? If you came up with a theory that explained absolutely nothing,

02:09:35 – 02:09:40:	at the absolute best that theory is irrelevant. If on the other hand, you have a theory that

02:09:40 – 02:09:46:	explains everything. That theory is extremely powerful. That theory is very relevant. That theory

02:09:46 – 02:09:55:	is true. God explains, God gives an answer to each one of these questions. Evolution answers

02:09:55 – 02:10:02:	not one of them. Evolution has no explanatory power. God has infinite explanatory power.

02:10:02 – 02:10:10:	And no, it's not the God of the gaps that certain neo atheists, certain new atheists attempt to argue.

02:10:11 – 02:10:17:	Because each one of those questions is a key question, is a vitally important question,

02:10:17 – 02:10:20:	is a question that has relevant to your life and the life of everyone else,

02:10:20 – 02:10:26:	whoever has or ever will live. Because of course, it's important to know,

02:10:26 – 02:10:31:	why is there anything instead of nothing? How is there immaterial and not just material?

02:10:31 – 02:10:36:	How is there life and not just matter? Why is there intelligent life? Why is there sapient life?

02:10:36 – 02:10:41:	Why do humans exist? Why are we self aware? How are we self aware? What does it mean to

02:10:41 – 02:10:48:	have qualia? All of these things are answerable for the Christian and these are key matters of life.

02:10:50 – 02:10:56:	Why believe in a theory that cannot answer any of these? These aren't little gaps in knowledge.

02:10:57 – 02:11:03:	These are fundamental gaping chasms in human knowledge that science can never fill.

02:11:04 – 02:11:09:	And yet, for the Christian, we know the answer to each and every one. The answer ultimately is God.

02:11:10 – 02:11:16:	But there are, of course, answers leading up to that. I can give a concrete, firm answer to each

02:11:16 – 02:11:22:	one of those and undoubtedly we will do that. But the takeaway for the Christian, again,

02:11:23 – 02:11:30:	is that we come to these problems knowing that God exists and therefore there is an answer.

02:11:30 – 02:11:36:	There is an answer. There is a true answer. There is a right answer. And that answer is grounded

02:11:36 – 02:11:44:	in God as Creator, as we confess in the first article of the Creed. I believe in God the Father

02:11:44 – 02:11:53:	Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. God is the Creator of all things. He is the foundation of all

02:11:53 – 02:12:03:	things. He is the explanation. And as Christians, that means we have the only true answer. The

02:12:03 – 02:12:13:	scientists ultimately have nothing.