Transcript: Episode 0041

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Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast, I am Corey J. Mahler, and I'm still woe.

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In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

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The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the Spirit

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of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

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And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.

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And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness.

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God called the light day, and the darkness he called night.

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And there was evening, and there was morning, the first day.

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And God said, Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the

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waters from the waters.

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And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse, from the

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waters that were above the expanse, and it was so.

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And God called the expanse heaven, and there was evening and there was morning, the second

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day.

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And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let

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the dry land appear, and it was so.

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God called the dry land earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called seas,

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and God saw that it was good.

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Today's episode of Stone Choir, as you might have guessed, is going to be about the six

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days of creation, as it intersects with theology today, and as it intersects with modern scientific

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understanding.

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This is a subject that we broached in episode six on the perspicuity of Scripture, where

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we discussed in some different detail that we're going to go into today.

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The fact that there are modern debates among Christians about to what degree do we believe

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the Bible?

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Do we believe that it is allegorical in some areas, or this is some sort of fictional genre

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of literature that isn't to be believed literally?

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What do you do when God is saying things that don't line up with our understanding of physics?

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For example, when you read through Genesis 1 and 2, light appears before stars appear.

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Obviously, as intelligent men, we know that's stupid because we know that light comes from

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stars.

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As Christians, we have one approach to these things, and then the world has another approach

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to these things.

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One of the reasons we want to tackle this subject today is that the question of how

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does scientific knowledge match up with or conflict with what's in Scripture is a stumbling

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block for some people who are coming to the faith.

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I know that lately we've picked up quite a few new listeners, particularly from the

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myth of 20th century appearance.

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Thank you again to Adam for that.

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That was a treat to be on there.

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One of the things that I mentioned, and it surprised me a little bit, was that I am

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a young Earth creationist.

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The reason that I am and the reason we're discussing this today is that it is the only

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possible Christian position.

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Today's episode is going to be in two parts.

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The first part is going to be the short part talking about theology, and then we're going

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to spend the rest of the time talking about some of the science.

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I know that a lot of you, if you're looking at Christianity, that you maybe want to believe

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it, you're trying to figure out what this stuff is about.

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The things that you know, the things that are scientific knowledge that you think you

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can have confidence in, if they're at odds with this Jesus stuff, you've got to keep

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your bearings.

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As Christians, for the majority of the audience, those who are fully engaged in the faith,

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what do we do with a world that's saying, no, that's nonsense, here's what we actually

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believe?

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Today, there are a lot of people in the church who want to split the difference and say,

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it's just kind of, it was flowery language, who knows what God really meant.

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One of the tricks that's played within the church is that you'll find guys today saying,

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well, if you look at the early church fathers, they debated whether the six days of creation

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was literal or not.

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It is true to an extent.

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There were some church fathers who disputed whether it was six natural 24-hour days.

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However, they were not doing that in defense of a universe that was millions or billions

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of years old.

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Their argument was whether it was 168 hours or whether it was less than that, because

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the other side of that argument was specifically saying creation was instantaneous, effectively

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the big bang.

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Then, after that, God put everything together.

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They were debating within a very small amount of time, was it a femtosecond or was it 168

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hours?

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That's not remotely the debate today.

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If you hear someone claiming to be a Christian who says, oh, that's an open question because

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the early church father had just debated, know that they're lying to you, flat out lying.

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None of the church fathers say what they were saying when they want to say who could not

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possibly know.

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It might have been a thousand years, 10,000 years, a million years.

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They weren't saying that.

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If they had, they would have been wrong because they were flawed sinful men just like you

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and me and everyone who's ever looked at these things.

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We have scripture.

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We have scripture to be confident in.

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That was episode six on the clarity of scripture, discussing the fact that as Christians, that

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is our frame of reference.

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When God spoke the universe into existence, as Corey just read, that's it.

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It appeared because he said it.

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He declared it and it became, that is power, that is the infinite power of the Creator.

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Creation began at that point.

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The six days of creation are when God was putting the universe together, when he was

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establishing the order that we see observable today.

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We see rules.

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We see constants.

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We see patterns emerge over and over and they tend to be very consistent.

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We don't see a lot of variation over time or if we do see variation, it's predictable

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based on rules inherent to the system.

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That is something that people want to soft paddle and say, well, I'm not going to talk

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about the Bible, but there's got to be an intelligent designer, don't you think?

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Well, yeah, that's true, but why be gutless as God?

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The second half of this episode, the majority of the episode when we're talking about the

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science stuff, we're going to be making the case that if you reject scripture or if you

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don't believe scripture yet, you say, well, that's faith-based.

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I'm fact-based.

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We will demonstrate.

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Mostly, Corey is going to be demonstrating because he's actually well-versed in science.

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I'm going to be your voice in this episode, just kind of being the dummy listening and

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asking questions because I'll tell you, my science education was utter garbage.

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I, the Lutheran high school I went to in Indianapolis, had the same science teacher

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in 10th and 11th grade.

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I very distinctly remember the first day of 11th grade.

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She said, hey, guys, remember last year when I told you what exothermic and endothermic

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reactions were about?

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I got those backwards.

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So I knew she was wrong at the time, but Lutheran schools are variable in quality.

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So I love science.

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I'm that guy, except I'm also Christian.

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But whenever I look at these things, it's always in view of, here's what I already

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believe based on scripture.

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What is it that we're discovering in creation?

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If you've gone back through the catalog of Stonequire episodes, you will find that Corey

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and I will very often point back to Job, chapters 38 and following, where God finally

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appears to Job to answer him, to answer his complaints and his demands for explanation.

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And what you find, please go read it.

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It's beautiful.

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It's, as I've said, is one of my favorite passages.

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When God appears to Job and talks to him, he doesn't coddle him.

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He doesn't say, oh, sorry, you're going through this or he doesn't, he doesn't try

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to make things better right away.

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His immediate response when Job is demanding explanations from the creator is, who are

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you, where were you when I formed the world?

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And he goes into great length for multiple chapters, describing his creation as testifying

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to his glory.

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So when I say I love science, it's not the Reddit atheist soyjack face.

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I love the fact that when I look at creation, every time there's something that we finally

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figure out a little bit more, it's a greater revelation of God's natural revelation.

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I see God in those things because I believe God, when he said he made them.

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And so as we get into some of the details, what we will establish is that it is also

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faith-based to believe the science, so-called, against Scripture.

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And it's, in fact, a much more absurd belief system.

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It might be helpful to point out before we get into more of the Scripture.

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The word that is underlying day there in Genesis, and the word is Heimera.

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That word just means day in Greek.

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From B-DAG, the first definition is the period between sunrise and sunset.

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Exactly what we would call a day in English.

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The second definition is the civil or legal day, which includes the night.

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Again, one of the main definitions we would use in English.

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This is a term that means day.

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It means 24-hour day.

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It means exactly what it says.

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This is not a figurative day.

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This is not a metaphorical day.

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This is not an age.

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This is not an era.

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That is an argument that has been raised many times because, just like English, most

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other languages have a figurative use of the term day.

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You know, every dog has his day.

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That doesn't necessarily mean a literal day.

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It could mean a period of time.

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The same thing can be true in Greek or indeed in Hebrew.

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But the core sense of the term, and if you read in the context, it is very clear the

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core sense is meant, the core sense of the term is the 24-hour literal day.

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So creation, 24-hour literal day, six days, and then resting on the seventh day.

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That is why when you look at the church fathers, many of them will have written

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something titled the hexameron, which is just on the six days.

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Because creation was a literal week.

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The modern attempt to hand wave away on the basis of, well, there could be

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this figurative use of this particular term is simply embarrassment at what

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scripture says in light of what science supposedly claims.

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And it is generally embarrassment by men who do not understand either scripture or

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the science.

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And we will get into those in that order in this episode.

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And God actually goes out of his way rhetorically in the first five days of

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creation to say each time and there was evening and there was morning the first

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day and the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth.

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God over and over again says, this is a 24-hour day.

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So thank you for bringing that up.

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That is a crucial point because as a Christian, if you actually believe

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scripture, it's necessary to believe that.

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And it's a small detail, but it's consistent with the rest.

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And as I said at the beginning, one of the things to understand when we're

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looking at the six days of creation before God finished, as he declared it to be

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finished and said, it's very good, is that everything was up for grabs.

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They said, you have light before you have stars.

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Like the order of operations doesn't make sense based on the way things exist today.

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And so if you're looking at a system evolving and building on itself internally,

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yeah, it doesn't make sense, but we don't need a system to make sense internally

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because God wasn't done making it.

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It was on the last day when he said it was very good and then he rested that it was

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complete. At that point, it was locked in.

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Before that, he was messing with things.

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He was changing things.

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He was moving parts around.

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So it's okay for the beginning not to add up.

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That's not illogical because God is doing stuff.

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He's working.

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Imagine you come to someone who's building a watch or a garden, whatever he's doing,

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some creative, as we call creative process, and he's in the middle of it.

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And you come in and say, well, you're missing this and this and this.

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And it doesn't make any sense.

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It's not going to work.

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And he said, well, I'm not done yet.

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Come back on the seventh day and I'll be done with the thing.

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The creative process involves a period of time where it's unfinished.

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And then at the end, it's finished personally as a perfectionist.

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It's something that keeps me from doing a lot of things because I start and I am

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simultaneously my own critic.

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I'm like, that's crap.

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That's not good enough.

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And so I never get very far in anything because I destroy it before there can be

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enough there for me to build on it.

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God doesn't have that problem.

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When he built the thing, it was all internally consistent.

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So that's a small point, but it's a crucial point for Christians.

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It's not necessarily going to convince you if you think that it's permissible to believe in

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old earth or something else.

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The things that we say next in these parts about theology are going to go directly at you.

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We're going to be very direct that if you believe in old earth, you are sinning.

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You're believing something contrary to scripture.

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The sixth day thing, it's true and it's correct.

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But you're not going to believe it until you believe this next part.

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So the crucial argument, the only argument, the only argument that's necessary for any

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Christian to understand is that every theory, every system of the universe, every system of life

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that is older than 6,000 years, that's millions of years or billions of years,

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any of those necessarily have death before death came into the world.

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So we're going to go first over the passages that make very clear that there was no death

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before Adam sinned and therefore nothing could die before Adam sinned.

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Nothing, not only people, but nothing in the universe could have died.

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That was also a change.

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There was a change to the universe.

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It wasn't only a change to a man or to humanity.

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All of creation fell with Adam because Adam was the head of the world.

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God had put him in place.

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God created the animals and then brought them to Adam and he named each of them,

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including Eve.

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That was an exercise of authority over all of creation.

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God put Adam in charge.

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So when Adam, the head fell, all the stuff fell, everything fell.

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The animals fell.

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There would not be death without Adam sinned.

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You and I die today.

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Our animals die, our pets die.

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Death that's today such a natural part of our lives and of the world was introduced by Adam sinned.

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So to begin, I'm just going to read a couple passages that use the word in Greek cosmos.

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Same word.

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It's where we get the word.

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And it means everything.

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It means it's more than simply limited to humankind or mankind.

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The first passage is from Romans 5.

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Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin,

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and so death spread to all men because all sinned.

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This is very clear.

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Romans 5 is saying, death came into the world, into the cosmos by Adam's sin.

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That's reiterated in John 1.

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The next day, John the Baptist saw Jesus coming toward him and said,

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Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

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Same word here.

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Sin of the world is the sin of the cosmos, meaning all the sin everywhere.

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Now this in particular is a passage that some of the reform must necessarily dispute if

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they believe in limited atonement because you must necessarily limit world

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down to not only humanity, but to the elect.

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Otherwise, you have to reject that verse.

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So these are some places where one of the reasons that's important to tackle this question is that

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when the six days of creation are undermined, when you start messing with

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the question of how God created things, it goes directly to the question of original sin.

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And that is fundamentally what is attacked by a denial of the six natural 24-hour day creation.

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It is fundamentally an attack on these passages, on the fact that the whole universe fell when

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Adam sinned.

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And the last passage to make this abundantly clear using the word cosmos is Colossians 1.

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He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

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For by him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible,

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whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities.

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All things were created through him and for him.

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And he is before all things.

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And in him all things hold together.

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And he is the head of the body, the church.

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He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent.

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For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him to reconcile himself to

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all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

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So when Colossians 1 says that Jesus reconciles himself to all things,

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that's also talking about the cosmos.

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In earth or in heaven, the earth in heaven, it's talking about all the stuff,

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all the universe, all of creation.

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Jesus' reconciliation on the cross is not limited to man.

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And forget the elect is not simply limited to man, it's limited to nothing.

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God reconciles and makes peace by his blood on the cross.

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All things.

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So this is the reason that this is such a crucial question for the Christian faith.

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Because see, it's a small fiddly point.

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If you want to just argue about six natural 24-hour days, okay, well, whatever.

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When you get to the fact that all the stuff we're going to talk about in the latter part

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of the episode, dealing with the so-called scientific evidence, all of it necessarily

19:18.560 --> 19:23.120
involves death existing before Adam's sin, which has to deny all this.

19:23.120 --> 19:27.200
It has to say that Adam's sin did not cause the universe to fall.

19:27.200 --> 19:29.280
There was no sin anywhere in the universe.

19:29.280 --> 19:33.760
And incidentally, these passages also preclude the existence of life anywhere else.

19:34.800 --> 19:39.680
There can only be salvation where this promise has been given.

19:39.680 --> 19:42.800
This is the only place where there's life, because it's the only place where God

19:42.800 --> 19:44.160
delivered his salvation.

19:45.040 --> 19:52.240
The existence of Adam as the head of this world necessitates that although the rest

19:52.240 --> 19:58.400
of the universe fell, there can't be life elsewhere that would not have access to this information.

19:59.360 --> 20:04.080
So, it's the root of the Christian faith.

20:04.080 --> 20:10.160
If you get rid of original sin, if you get rid of the fact that by whom all things

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were made through Christ is the same Christ through whom all things are reconciled,

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that's the whole shooting match.

20:17.760 --> 20:21.280
And see, this is one of those end runs that Satan loves to do.

20:21.280 --> 20:25.120
Satan doesn't go directly at stuff and say, well, Jesus didn't die for the whole world.

20:25.200 --> 20:29.600
He'll say, oh, well, there was death before Adam, and then it unwinds everything.

20:29.600 --> 20:33.760
Because if you believe there was death before Adam, well, then what did Jesus die for?

20:33.760 --> 20:39.280
Suddenly, Jesus propitiating death on the cross gets very limited.

20:39.280 --> 20:45.520
He is narrowed down to a sliver of the very creation that God himself said he was redeeming,

20:45.520 --> 20:48.720
because it was only through the death of the one through whom it was created

20:48.720 --> 20:50.800
that that redemption would have been possible.

20:51.200 --> 20:56.560
The other passage in Romans 8 that is perhaps the most clear on this point

20:56.560 --> 21:02.320
is one that doesn't use the word connos, it uses a different Greek word that also means creation.

21:02.320 --> 21:08.720
Effectively, it's related to the next ex nihilo creation of everything.

21:08.720 --> 21:14.880
So again, that is vastly superseding the elect or even mankind or even life.

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It's all the stuff.

21:16.400 --> 21:22.400
All the stuff, everything that was created in the six days is what is being referred to here

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in this passage in Romans 8.

21:26.160 --> 21:30.080
For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing

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with the glory that is to be revealed to us, for the creation waits with eager longing

21:34.880 --> 21:39.920
for the revealing of the sons of God, for the creation was subjected to futility,

21:39.920 --> 21:43.120
not willingly, but because of him who subjected it,

21:43.120 --> 21:48.240
and hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption

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and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

21:51.600 --> 21:56.480
For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth

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until now, and not only the creation, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the spirits

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groan inwardly as we wait we eagerly for the adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies,

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for in this hope we are saved.

22:09.760 --> 22:13.680
Now hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what he sees,

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but if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

22:18.160 --> 22:24.000
So here in this passage in Romans 8, Paul, in God's words, is explicitly contrasting

22:24.560 --> 22:26.960
the whole world with we the believers.

22:27.680 --> 22:35.760
So again, just to hammer this point home, there is no possibility that all of creation

22:35.760 --> 22:41.200
did not fall with Adam's personal sin, the very same sin that you inherit,

22:41.200 --> 22:46.000
the very same sin that causes you to yourself sin and to die.

22:47.440 --> 22:50.240
Adam's sin did that to everything.

22:51.360 --> 22:56.800
And so as we get into the things that will address the claims that, well maybe the earth

22:56.800 --> 23:02.880
is millions of years old, and it's okay to believe that because we're not really sure

23:02.880 --> 23:07.200
because the genre of Genesis 1 and 2, it could be anything.

23:07.200 --> 23:08.480
You don't have to read that literally.

23:09.040 --> 23:14.880
If you do that, you necessarily deny the death entered the world with Adam.

23:14.880 --> 23:18.640
And if you do that, you deny the faith, because if you deny original sin

23:18.640 --> 23:23.600
and you deny how God redeems the universe, that's a denial of God.

23:24.240 --> 23:31.600
So just by itself, the fact that original sin applies to the whole world as Scripture attests,

23:32.560 --> 23:36.640
necessarily negates the possibility of any sort of theistic evolution,

23:36.640 --> 23:38.560
any sort of theistic evolution.

23:38.560 --> 23:45.040
There's no possibility for any of the evolutionary macro scale processes that we're all familiar

23:45.040 --> 23:45.920
with from school.

23:46.880 --> 23:48.960
They cannot exist without death.

23:48.960 --> 23:51.120
So it's literally one or the other.

23:51.120 --> 23:56.560
Either death came into the world through Adam, as God says, or death has always just been a

23:56.560 --> 24:04.000
natural thing, and eventually God made people, or somehow people came to be.

24:04.720 --> 24:06.320
And then we're off the races.

24:06.320 --> 24:08.800
Then we have the period of human existence.

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To believe the latter is to deny God and to not be Christian.

24:14.320 --> 24:16.800
There's a very clear dividing line there.

24:17.440 --> 24:21.520
And that's why the lie that I mentioned earlier where guys will say,

24:21.520 --> 24:26.720
oh, the early church fathers debated over the six days, the Hexameron, they'll say,

24:26.720 --> 24:28.080
well, they weren't sure.

24:28.080 --> 24:30.720
Sometimes some said it was six, 24-hour days.

24:30.720 --> 24:32.560
Some said it was a different period of time.

24:32.560 --> 24:35.520
Yeah, the ones who said it was a different period of time said it was instant.

24:36.240 --> 24:40.640
They were debating inside of 168 hours how much shorter might it have been.

24:40.640 --> 24:42.240
Now, I believe they were wrong.

24:42.800 --> 24:48.800
But even if they got that right, it doesn't matter, because the very fact that there was

24:48.800 --> 24:56.240
a dispute in the historic church never, ever, ever opened the door for someone to believe

24:56.240 --> 25:01.360
that the earth or the universe is older than several thousand years old.

25:02.080 --> 25:07.360
And one thing that we mentioned in the episode six on the perspicuity of Scripture is that,

25:08.800 --> 25:12.640
yeah, the most obvious thing is when we take measurements of things, obviously,

25:13.200 --> 25:20.080
if you believe what Christians have believed throughout history, the earth is about 6,000

25:20.080 --> 25:22.320
years, maybe seven, it's somewhere in there.

25:22.320 --> 25:24.960
It's thousands of years old, certainly less than 10.

25:24.960 --> 25:26.080
Corey and I believe six.

25:26.080 --> 25:29.920
But if you want to be off by a thousand years, that's fine.

25:29.920 --> 25:34.640
That's fundamentally a question of some of the variations in the genealogies in Scripture,

25:34.640 --> 25:36.320
which is how we calculate those dates.

25:37.280 --> 25:44.240
The difference is that if you go back further than that, you can't believe anything that's

25:44.240 --> 25:44.880
in the Bible.

25:45.440 --> 25:49.520
And yet, say everything's inside 10,000 years.

25:49.520 --> 25:55.520
Well, that would mean that if there's any light coming to earth from any system more than 10,000

25:55.520 --> 25:57.760
light years away, it can't exist.

25:57.760 --> 26:02.000
It would mean that the furthest away that we could see anything would be 6,000 light years

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or 7,000.

26:03.360 --> 26:07.120
Nothing could be billions of light years away.

26:07.120 --> 26:08.080
That's impossible.

26:08.720 --> 26:10.080
That's absolutely true.

26:10.080 --> 26:16.480
If when God created the universe in the six days, He booted it up from scratch.

26:17.200 --> 26:21.840
And so the argument that we make in episode six is that that's not at all the case.

26:21.840 --> 26:27.760
Just as Adam was created as a full-grown sexually mature man with an age, Corey and I

26:27.760 --> 26:29.120
believe that he was 70.

26:29.600 --> 26:33.040
Because if Adam was created as a 70-year-old, that would make him an elder.

26:33.040 --> 26:38.960
It would mean that when he died at 930 years, he was effectively a 1,000-year-old man.

26:38.960 --> 26:40.880
It would make him the oldest man ever.

26:40.880 --> 26:46.320
It would make him living 1,000 years, which is a perfectly round scriptural number.

26:46.320 --> 26:50.880
And it would make him an elder over creation, which would have incidentally been necessary

26:50.880 --> 26:54.720
for him to have the very headship over creation that God had ordained.

26:54.720 --> 26:56.720
So if we're wrong about that, no big deal.

26:56.720 --> 27:00.720
But Adam was created with an age.

27:00.720 --> 27:01.920
He was an adult.

27:01.920 --> 27:02.800
He wasn't a child.

27:02.800 --> 27:03.520
He wasn't a baby.

27:03.520 --> 27:05.040
He wasn't an infant or a zygote.

27:05.840 --> 27:06.640
He had an age.

27:07.360 --> 27:09.120
The universe also has an age.

27:09.120 --> 27:12.400
And it didn't match because it didn't need to match because God had not yet

27:12.400 --> 27:13.920
established the order of everything.

27:14.560 --> 27:20.400
The things that we observe today as constants, as scientific universal constants,

27:21.120 --> 27:22.960
those are God's variables.

27:22.960 --> 27:24.800
They're whatever He set them to be.

27:25.760 --> 27:30.720
The comparison that came to mind when I was thinking about preparing for the show was

27:32.080 --> 27:35.520
when I was in school, a game came out from...

27:35.520 --> 27:40.320
Everybody knows today Halo from Bungie before Microsoft acquired them.

27:40.320 --> 27:42.080
Bungie's first game was Marathon.

27:42.720 --> 27:46.320
And one of the amazing things about Marathon, it was around the same time as Doom.

27:46.320 --> 27:47.920
It was a little bit newer than Doom.

27:47.920 --> 27:50.080
It was much more advanced in a lot of ways.

27:50.080 --> 27:53.520
One of the amazing things about playing Marathon, a first-person shooter, was that

27:54.160 --> 28:00.320
they... Bungie shipped the same map editors that they themselves used to make the game,

28:00.320 --> 28:02.480
which meant that anyone could make their own maps.

28:02.480 --> 28:04.480
And so people had a lot of fun playing with them.

28:04.480 --> 28:08.480
And one of the things that really kind of expanded my mind just from messing with that was

28:09.360 --> 28:12.480
in the level editor, you could mess with constants.

28:12.480 --> 28:15.120
So every level had a constant for gravity.

28:15.120 --> 28:19.120
And one of the most entertaining levels was when guys would change gravity.

28:19.120 --> 28:21.840
They would reduce it by 90%.

28:21.840 --> 28:27.840
So you could suddenly jump huge distances because gravity, the gravitational constant,

28:27.840 --> 28:30.640
there's just a variable in the table for the level editor.

28:31.360 --> 28:33.200
God did the same thing with the universe.

28:33.200 --> 28:37.360
He set these numbers seemingly in stone, but He ordained them.

28:37.360 --> 28:38.160
He set them.

28:38.160 --> 28:39.280
And so we're stuck with them.

28:39.280 --> 28:41.120
Like, we don't have the level editor.

28:41.120 --> 28:42.640
We can't mess with creation.

28:43.280 --> 28:49.360
But the point is that when God ordained those things that to us seem like constants,

28:49.360 --> 28:51.200
they're only constants because He liked them.

28:51.200 --> 28:52.400
We don't know why.

28:52.400 --> 28:53.600
He picked them and they work.

28:53.600 --> 28:56.400
And everything in the universe works because of them,

28:56.400 --> 29:01.600
because of how precisely tuned they are to the world that God created.

29:01.600 --> 29:05.760
If the numbers were different, we can tell in simulations that everything would go flying apart.

29:05.760 --> 29:08.800
So it's all a perfectly balanced system from our perspective.

29:09.680 --> 29:13.120
The important thing is that God set what He wanted.

29:13.120 --> 29:16.560
And so is the earth 6,000 years old?

29:16.560 --> 29:17.200
Yes.

29:17.200 --> 29:19.120
Is the earth 4.5 billion years old?

29:19.120 --> 29:19.440
Yes.

29:20.240 --> 29:25.040
God created a 4.5 billion-year-old earth 6,000 years ago.

29:25.040 --> 29:29.520
He created a 13.8 billion-year-old universe 6,000 years ago.

29:29.520 --> 29:30.240
You ever take?

29:30.240 --> 29:36.880
Again, not sticking to the 6,000 number, but the creation of an old universe and an old earth

29:37.440 --> 29:41.680
is entirely consistent with the belief of a God who can create everything from nothing,

29:41.680 --> 29:43.200
simply by speaking.

29:43.200 --> 29:46.560
So that is an article of faith, but it's no stretch.

29:47.280 --> 29:52.560
If you can't believe that, then you certainly can't believe any of the miracles in the Bible.

29:53.440 --> 29:58.480
And so the crucial point that I want the Christians in the audience to take home from this is that

29:59.920 --> 30:04.000
when we look at the evidence, when we talk about the scientific stuff for the rest of this,

30:04.000 --> 30:05.520
it's not to bolster our faith.

30:05.520 --> 30:08.240
It's not to justify what we already believe.

30:08.240 --> 30:12.160
It is that we have confidence in our faith that when God who created the universe says

30:12.160 --> 30:14.320
these things, we just believe him.

30:14.320 --> 30:19.600
And then as we understand creation better, as Christians have always done for thousands of years,

30:20.320 --> 30:26.160
discovery of God's creation as God testifies in Job testifies to God.

30:27.360 --> 30:31.600
God uses creation to testify to us about his own glory.

30:31.600 --> 30:37.360
So when we look at these things and we see how magnificently, incomprehensibly huge the world is,

30:38.240 --> 30:39.760
that testifies the God's glory.

30:39.760 --> 30:42.000
That doesn't make us small and insignificant.

30:42.000 --> 30:43.440
It makes God huge.

30:43.440 --> 30:48.320
The fact that the scale makes us seem small doesn't diminish the importance of humanity.

30:48.960 --> 30:53.680
It shows that of all the things in creation that testify to God's glory,

30:54.560 --> 30:55.440
he came as a man.

30:56.160 --> 31:02.960
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.

31:03.520 --> 31:04.160
So there's no...

31:05.120 --> 31:07.920
It's either you believe the Bible or you believe Bill Nye.

31:07.920 --> 31:12.960
And unfortunately, we had a lot of people in the church today who want to believe Bill Nye and stay in the church.

31:12.960 --> 31:15.920
And it's like, what do you say?

31:15.920 --> 31:18.960
Like, there are two different approaches to this.

31:18.960 --> 31:22.480
And for people who are in the middle, I hope you take that contrast seriously.

31:23.040 --> 31:26.080
The I Love Science atheists, the Reddit atheists,

31:26.960 --> 31:28.720
they will believe any sort of absurdity.

31:28.720 --> 31:34.480
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.

31:35.120 --> 31:39.760
Also, today, I think we're rubes for thinking that a man is a man and a woman is a woman.

31:40.640 --> 31:50.400
Like, the idol of science, the false God of science that is in fact no science at all because Scantia means truth, knowledge.

31:51.120 --> 31:55.680
The absence of truth and knowledge, it means that there's nothing related to science.

31:56.240 --> 31:58.320
That's just, it's a false religion.

31:58.960 --> 32:05.360
And so, just as the church has been used as a cloak for a false religion that's Jesus flavored,

32:05.840 --> 32:11.280
the pursuit of knowledge of creation is a cloak that's being used by these atheists to be a

32:12.320 --> 32:18.720
cloaking device for them to twist the creation that was intended by God to testify to his glory.

32:18.720 --> 32:23.680
They tried to use it to testify to, I don't know what, to the absence of God,

32:24.480 --> 32:28.800
which, if facially, is absurd. And so, that's going to be the rest of this episode.

32:29.840 --> 32:33.040
You mentioned Bill Nye, and I always find him particularly amusing,

32:33.760 --> 32:39.440
because inevitably, the I Love Science crowd are credentialist in their leanings,

32:40.160 --> 32:42.560
and Bill Nye is a mechanical engineer.

32:43.600 --> 32:50.320
And they take his word as a sort of gospel on things about which he has no formal training whatsoever.

32:51.120 --> 32:54.800
It's just a little bit of hypocrisy from that crowd, not surprising.

32:56.720 --> 33:03.760
But before we dive into the science proper, I'll take the opportunity

33:04.640 --> 33:09.200
to critique the simulation theory, because you mentioned that if we change the constants

33:09.200 --> 33:14.400
in a simulation of whatever body it happens to be, things don't work so well.

33:15.600 --> 33:19.280
The fundamental problem with simulation theory, and I've mentioned this elsewhere,

33:19.280 --> 33:27.840
is that any evidence for us existing in a simulation is simultaneously evidence for a creator.

33:29.520 --> 33:33.120
And Occam's razor, or however you prefer to phrase it,

33:33.920 --> 33:38.160
it is more reasonable to conclude there is a creator than that there is a simulation.

33:38.880 --> 33:43.680
So it is actually impossible to prove simulation theory, because any evidence for it is simply

33:43.680 --> 33:46.320
proving a creator even more strongly.

33:51.520 --> 33:56.400
But at the outset of this segment, the balance of this podcast episode,

33:57.600 --> 34:02.960
there are five questions I want to highlight that are relevant here. These are questions that

34:02.960 --> 34:08.640
science simply cannot answer. And we're using science, of course, here in the lower case,

34:09.040 --> 34:15.200
since as it were the minor sense, the modern sense, not the proper Latin sense of the term,

34:15.200 --> 34:19.760
which as mentioned is just knowledge. And it is fair also to say that is truth,

34:19.760 --> 34:24.640
because what is knowledge, it is true warranted belief to use the philosophical definition.

34:25.440 --> 34:31.600
So the five questions. First, why is there anything instead of nothing?

34:33.280 --> 34:36.400
Science has no answer for this. Science has no way of answering this.

34:37.360 --> 34:47.120
Second, why do immaterial things exist and not just material? Or phrased another way,

34:47.760 --> 34:54.080
why is there immaterial, not just material? We'll get into that, the distinction there,

34:54.080 --> 34:59.920
why that matters. Third, why is there life instead of just matter?

35:00.400 --> 35:07.680
Science has no answer to bridge the gap from non living matter to living matter to life.

35:08.880 --> 35:15.360
This is a biogenesis, life arising from non life. This is one of the things for which

35:16.240 --> 35:22.160
the I love science crowd and others will often ridicule our medieval ancestors. Because they

35:22.160 --> 35:26.960
believed in a biogenesis of a certain kind, they thought, for instance, if you left meat out,

35:26.960 --> 35:31.520
it spawned maggots, which is more or less true from their perspective. They observed it. That's

35:31.520 --> 35:36.160
what happened. They did not have a vacuum chamber. They couldn't isolate the meat to prove that,

35:36.160 --> 35:40.960
no, you actually need to fly to come and lay eggs on the thing. And then it produces maggots. They

35:40.960 --> 35:49.040
didn't know that they had no way to test that. But modern theories of evolution rely on a biogenesis.

35:50.800 --> 35:54.480
The very thing they mock, and you can get them with this incidentally, you can

35:55.200 --> 35:59.680
start to describe a biogenesis and they'll laugh along with you. They'll think it's ridiculous.

35:59.680 --> 36:04.240
But then you point out that, no, I'm talking about the very basis of the neo-Darwinian evolution you

36:04.240 --> 36:11.120
believe. They turn bright red. It's good fun to watch. Fourth, why is there intelligent life?

36:11.120 --> 36:15.120
Because there is a fundamental distinction between something that is merely alive and

36:15.120 --> 36:20.080
something that is intelligent, something that has that inner life to a certain degree.

36:21.040 --> 36:25.440
And I say a certain degree because I distinguish between them in the next question,

36:25.440 --> 36:32.640
but there is a difference between broccoli and a cat. A cat is intelligent life. Broccoli is not.

36:34.080 --> 36:43.120
How do you explain that within the framework of science? And then fifth, why is there sapient,

36:43.200 --> 36:50.560
which is to say human, self-aware life? This is really two questions in one. There's the easy

36:50.560 --> 36:57.440
problem of consciousness and the hard problem of consciousness. The easy problem is the mechanics

36:57.440 --> 37:06.080
of cognition, objective experience. How do you explain the mechanic of human cognition,

37:06.640 --> 37:12.160
of self-awareness? How do you explain these systems? And then there's the hard problem of

37:12.160 --> 37:17.760
consciousness, which is the metaphysics of cognition. How do you explain subjective experience?

37:17.760 --> 37:25.440
Qualia, which is the personal subjective experience of something. A qualae is the singular, is a

37:25.440 --> 37:33.040
quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person. So these are the questions that

37:33.120 --> 37:41.520
it's important to contemplate when dealing with sciences, supposed explanations for everything.

37:42.240 --> 37:45.520
We won't go into each one of these in detail in this episode, but we will

37:46.800 --> 37:49.920
investigate at least two of them in a fair degree of detail.

37:53.360 --> 38:01.760
And so to start off, I want to start with a major problem for neo-Darwinian evolution. I'm going to

38:01.760 --> 38:06.960
use NDE or neo-Darwinian evolution because that's really a description of the modern

38:08.560 --> 38:13.840
version of evolution that is believed in the academy and the sciences. You could also call it

38:13.840 --> 38:18.000
the modern synthesis. There's technically a small distinction there, but I'll probably use them

38:18.000 --> 38:24.400
interchangeably because they effectively are. But the issue is irreducible complexity.

38:25.280 --> 38:33.120
And irreducible complexity is how we describe a system that is complex in a way

38:34.400 --> 38:39.040
where if you remove any particular part of the system, it no longer functions,

38:39.040 --> 38:45.760
or at least no longer functions at a level that makes the system useful. And there are many systems

38:45.760 --> 38:50.400
like this. There are many of them in your body. There are many of them out in nature.

38:51.280 --> 38:57.440
In these systems, any particular part of the system can be removed to make the system no

38:57.440 --> 39:03.280
longer function. And the problem with that is that if you believe the evolutionary explanation

39:03.280 --> 39:10.800
for these things, then all of these components have to evolve simultaneously and synchronously

39:11.600 --> 39:16.560
because if one appears before another, they don't inter-operate, they don't work together.

39:17.040 --> 39:24.640
Yes, in some cases, there are subparts of a system that may be useful in and of themselves

39:24.640 --> 39:31.600
separate from the system itself. And for those, you don't need to deal with this irreducible

39:31.600 --> 39:38.160
complexity for that part of the system. For the rest of the system, you still do. But there are

39:38.160 --> 39:45.360
also systems where the subparts are not useful, at least not in isolation. And so they are only

39:45.520 --> 39:52.800
useful in the system itself. And there are many of these in the body. In those systems,

39:52.800 --> 39:59.200
there is no evolutionary way to explain the evolution of any particular subpart

40:00.960 --> 40:07.600
without having to explain the entirety of the system evolving at once. Now,

40:09.680 --> 40:14.800
I've said that there's such thing as an irreducibly complex system. You'll see this all over

40:15.680 --> 40:20.800
a certain kind of literature. And you will see this also incidentally from evolutionists. They

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admit that this is a problem, to some degree. They try to dismiss it, but if you read their actual

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journals, the academic ones, they will admit there are problems here. But a fundamental

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point I want to make is that there is no such thing as a simple system. No system is simple.

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All systems are irreducibly complex. This is tautological. A system is an irreducibly complex

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set of things that interact in a particular way. Now, a given system may have ancillary or additional

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parts of the system that you can remove and the system will still function,

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but it is that core that is irreducibly complex. That is the core of the system.

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The other parts may be helpful, but if you can remove them, they are not part of the irreducible

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complexity. For example, some of the systems in your body that are irreducibly complex will go over

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two of them just sort of in a cursory fashion. We're not going to go into all of the chemistry

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for this. There's no reason to do that here. If you're interested, it's very easy to find

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papers or a YouTube video or what have you on these subjects. But vision, your visual system,

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is irreducibly complex. There are parts of your visual system that if you take them in isolation,

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they have no value. If you remove really any particular part of the complex system that results

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in you being able to see, you are no longer able to see. Yes, there are certain parts that

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you can impair and still see. Of course, some of you listening may be wearing glasses. You can

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still see with or without the glasses. Without the glasses, your vision is impaired in some way,

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otherwise you wouldn't need the glasses. But that isn't a removal of part of this complex system.

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It is an impairment and as you can see, it causes problems. But the visual system for

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human beings, for mammals more generally, but phototransduction, which is just a fancy way of

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saying taking the light that is outside external to you strikes your eye and translating it into

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a signal in the brain so that you can see, translating into a picture. Phototransduction

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has about 12 steps. These are complicated chemical processes. This is biochemistry,

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I said I won't go over the specifics, there's no need here. But that's just to transmit

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the fact that a single photon hit one of the receptive cells in your eye into your brain

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via the optical nerve to paint that tiny part of a picture of the outside world. And this happens

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on the order of single or double digit depending on the cells involved, millisecond resolution.

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And this happens millions of times every single day. This happens across the many receptive cells

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in your eye constantly. This system is incomprehensibly complex and delicate.

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And it has to have all evolved simultaneously and synchronously in order for it to make any sense.

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Now, some particularly Richard Dawkins comes to mind have attempted to raise the argument

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that there are precursor systems to the mammalian eye and therefore we can explain that we went from

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this to this to this and eventually got to the human eye. The problem is if you look at the biochemistry

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and this is a little game they play, I'll go over this in more detail in a minute.

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But if you look at the biochemistry, these simpler systems, supposedly simpler systems,

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they are in a sense simpler, but in a sense not because the idea that single cells are simple

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is archaic and wrong. Single cells are not simple, they are highly complex.

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But this idea that these supposed precursors are simple breaks down biochemically and it

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breaks down biochemically because they are not a biochemical precursor. And this is the issue.

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There are three systems for any given function that have to develop simultaneously and synchronously

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because it's not just one overarching system. So for instance, let's stay with the eye.

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There's the mechanical, which is of course the muscles that move the eye, the cells that comprise

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the eye, the lens that shields the eye, etc. There are many systems here. So that's the

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mechanical part of the overall system. There is the chemical, all of these various chemicals that

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are transmitting information from one step to the next, translating it from a photon eventually into

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voltage gated by calcium that transmits along the optic nerve into the brain.

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And then there are neurotransmitters involved. That's the chemical system. And then there is

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the neural system. The brain has to be able to interpret these signals. And the same thing

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is true of any other part of your body, your hand. You have fingers and a thumb, you have the nerves

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and the tendons, you have the chemicals that actuate the muscles, and you have the part of

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your brain that controls these things, that receives the signals and sends them back.

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These three systems have to develop together because no single system is of any use in isolation.

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If you have this sea of chemicals, but no surface with which they can interact,

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no mechanics, no machinery they can operate, they're useless. If you have the machinery and

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the chemicals, but no receptors in the brain to actually deal with them, the systems are utterly

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useless. In fact, they are detrimental because they incur an immense energy cost. These must

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develop simultaneously. It is incomprehensibly unlikely to the point of being mathematically

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impossible that this could happen. We'll get into the numbers a little later.

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But this is just for the vision system, or for the hand as I mentioned, and this is true of

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so many different systems in your body. Blood clotting is another one.

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Blood clotting is an excellent example because blood clotting again seems like something that

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could be simple, but then you start to read about it. It is extremely complex.

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Blood clotting is a cascade of chemical reactions that have to fire perfectly,

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and the reason they have to fire perfectly. Now, bear in mind when I say perfectly, I'm not saying

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absolutely perfectly is a different thing here. I'm saying they cannot misfire because if blood

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clotting misfires, they're a handful of options. If you cut yourself and your coagulation system

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doesn't fire properly, maybe it doesn't clot and you bleed out and you die. Or it triggers

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randomly somewhere in your body, forms a clot, causes you a stroke, heart attack, what have you,

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you die. And so this system not only has to be able to trigger at the right time in the right place

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for the right period of time and then shut down, it has to not accidentally trigger anywhere

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else in the body at the wrong time. Now, instead of going through the cascade of how

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blood clotting actually occurs, and there are actually two paths that trigger in a different

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way, there's some important reasons for that. There's still some research as to why exactly

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that is the case. But I want to read through just some of the factors, some of the chemical

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substances that are involved in blood clotting, just to give you a sort of idea of how complex

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the system is. There's factor one, fibrinogen, factor two, prothrombin, factor three, tissue

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factor, factor four, the calcium ion, factor five, pro-accelerin, factor six, factor seven,

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pro-converton, factor eight, antihemophilic factor A, factor nine, antihemophilic factor B,

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factor 10, steward-prower factor, factor 11, plasma thromboplastin antecedent, factor 12,

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the Hageman factor, factor 13, fibrin stabilizing factor. Then there's the von Villebrand factor,

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pre-calacrine, calacrine, high molecular weight kinogen, fibronectin, antithrombin three,

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heparin cofactor two, protein C, protein S, protein Z, protein Z-related protease inhibitor,

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plasminogen, alpha two anti-plasmin, alpha two macroglobulin, tissue plasminogen activator,

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urokinase, plasminogen activator inhibitor one, plasminogen activator inhibitor two.

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And these all interact. In a delicate dance that if it goes wrong, you die.

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And somehow we are supposed to believe that this evolved by chance. And I think this is a good point

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to highlight exactly what the evolutionists claim, because they will up one side and down the other

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in many cases say they do not believe in random chance, but they do. And here's why.

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Why? They will highlight the natural selection part of their doctrine, of their theory.

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What they will try to downplay for the common man when they are speaking

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to the laity as it were is the random chance part, because the issue is

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against what is natural selection acting? It's acting against mutations that arise randomly.

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And so all of this relies on random chance, and that's important when we get to the math in a

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little bit. I know we started with science and we'll get to math. It couldn't be more terrible,

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but it's important to have sort of a general understanding of some of this and why

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neo-Darwinian evolution is so utterly ridiculous. If you are relying entirely on random chance

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to produce the material against which natural selection can act, then the math becomes very

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important. Another example, not a human example, although I guess it is to some degree because

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you have them living in you, creatures that have them, the celia that bacteria or flagella in that

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case use to propel themselves around. We'll link to something on that. I won't go over

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it. It's another case of an extremely complex system that interacts to the point where you

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cannot have any particular part of it arise by itself because it would actually be harmful.

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If parts of that particular system arose independently of the system, they would

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actually tear the cell apart, which could hardly be said to be reproductively beneficial.

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I think as folks are processing this episode, the science stuff, keep in mind the recent episodes

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we did on the big lie and on conspiracy theories because the principles that we demonstrated

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in the first one and then outlined in the second one are a play here. In the conspiracy theory

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episode, we talked a lot about the moon landing. Some of the examples that Corey's given and

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some more he's going to give are similar in the sense that they're potshots at

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the facts that are claimed by the other side, just as the ones that Owen Benjamin uses for,

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well, how did they make a phone call from the moon and what about the Van Allen belts?

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The distinction that we made there that I want you to keep in mind as you're listening to these

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things is that, one, there was a very easy answer to both of those. It was a solvable

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problem. It was not a tricky problem. It's always easy to ask a question, but those are questions

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that in the case of the moon landing, the NASA guys figured it out. They solve that problem

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as part of the system. When Benjamin takes his potshots at the moon landing, it's fundamentally

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disingenuous. These are also potshots in the sense that they're easy. The difference is that,

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just as in the episode on the big lie of the 20th century, if these things are not true,

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then the whole thing falls apart. They're not potshots in the sense that they're cheap shots,

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that they're fake. It's that they're easy because they're just gimmies. If the complexity of these

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systems is to be believed, they never could have evolved in place as we're told they evolved.

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It's an internally inconsistent claim that falls apart when you actually examine it.

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They're the ones who are effectively resorting to faith. They're saying, well, then a miracle

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occurred. They won't call it a miracle obviously because their whole reason for going down this

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path of not glorifying God by what they look at, their purpose in their scientific inquiry is

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denying God. We'll say, given that there is no God, how then do we explain the system?

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As Corey's laying out, you can't explain an eyeball or cilia if you cannot

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account for God creating it in place as a whole functional thing, just like Adam. Adam was an

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entire man, had all his parts in all the right places, had 46 chromosomes, all the stuff was there.

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It wasn't finished until God said it was very good, but as God made the things, they were done

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and they were conceived in God's mind. I guess that's how Scripture says it, so we can say that.

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God doesn't have a mind. It's another one of those irreducibility problems, except it's the infinite one.

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You really don't want people messing with that because when you try to introspect how God works,

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as though he's an amoeba, you're going to become a very splendid heretic.

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But even just looking at the smallest things, the arguments fall apart. So part of the reason

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we did this episode after the big lie and conspiracy theories is that here's an example of when you

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apply proper scrutiny to the fundamentals of the claims fall apart. That's the distinction between

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somebody like Benjamin saying, well, that can't have happened because of x, y, and z, and us saying,

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well, that can't have happened because of x, y, and z. The x, y, and z, if you're not thinking about it,

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it will seem like it's just potshots. It's just, well, you said this and they said that, and so what

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can be true? If you can clearly demonstrate that the claim itself is falsifiable, then you're left

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with the rest of it. And in the case of these things like these evolutionary processes, so-called

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literally nothing is possible. If you believe what they are saying about how these things came

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about and you look at what we have, they couldn't have come about. So these questions are the important

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questions for, I hate to use word debunking, but that's really what it is for debunking the claims

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of evolutionists and the claims of those who say that, well, and particularly theistic evolutions,

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who say maybe they'll put Adam on the sixth day where it ceases to be metaphorical, but then you

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have this long period of time before that where other stuff was happening and then God kind of

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congealed mankind at the last minute and then it became real. But before that,

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we had Amoeba and we had evolution and all this stuff. Even if you ignore the death part from

56:54.720 --> 57:01.520
the scripture intro, the math still doesn't work, the physics and the chemistry still doesn't work,

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the biology itself is literally impossible in their own system. So I just wanted to point out that

57:08.560 --> 57:14.160
those episodes previously dealing with weighing evidence are, they're a crucial part of just

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being good at thinking. Like one of the overarching themes of Stone Choir, apart from the theology

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stuff, is we hope that anyone who's listening will get better at thinking because you don't have to

57:24.320 --> 57:30.240
be smart to be careful. You don't have to be smart to do a good job and not being hoodwinked.

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According, like I said, Cory knows a whole lot more about the science than I do. He could probably

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trick me, but I at least know enough that he would have to be doing a really good job. And so

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whether it's him or it's someone else, there was a post that came up a couple months ago on Reddit

57:48.240 --> 57:55.440
where someone was making an anonymous claim about biological aliens. And I read it and it

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checked out. It's consistent with my beliefs about so-called aliens, that they're demonic,

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that they're real physical manifestations using created material for evil for demonic purposes.

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And so I sent that to someone who has a PhD in this stuff and said, my smell test passes with this.

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I can't see anything obviously wrong with it, but I know that I could be tricked because I'm not

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that knowledgeable about it. And so I asked someone who knew a whole lot more about the specific

58:24.320 --> 58:29.040
claims in the article. He said, yeah, basically makes sense. So it's good to have someone you

58:29.040 --> 58:35.680
can refer to to help you with smell tests. But even at a basic level, just being careful about

58:35.680 --> 58:40.960
thinking and analyzing things can give you the foundation that it's going to be a lot harder

58:40.960 --> 58:45.280
for you to fall for stuff that's plainly dumb. And so the things that we're going to go over,

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although the scientific inquiries are complex, we'll link to some of the papers and some videos

58:51.520 --> 58:56.720
that go into a ton of detail on this stuff. And if you're excited about that, cool. I don't find

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that interesting because I don't worry about it. But if it's something that worries you,

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I would say go look at the data. But I would also say, if you're worried that the evidence

59:06.880 --> 59:11.520
is going to invalidate scripture, then it doesn't matter what evidence you find because

59:11.520 --> 59:16.560
you have a spiritual problem first. You have a spiritual problem of not believing scripture,

59:16.560 --> 59:22.000
even when it's irrational. Because sometimes it is. I mean, miracles are irrational to say

59:22.000 --> 59:28.160
that God did something that's outside the bounds of material creation. It's irrational. It's

59:28.800 --> 59:33.200
reason cannot explain the things why we call it a miracle. Something else that was in episode six.

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So it's okay for there to be miracles. And that's another reason why this episode is important

59:38.560 --> 59:46.160
because there are miracles. God does creative, impossible things that are not impossible for

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him because he's God. They're impossible for us to explain in some cases, particularly when we try

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to make up fairy tales like some of this stuff. And so these attacks on the six days of creation,

59:58.640 --> 01:00:06.640
not only is it an attack on original sin and an attack on Christ's redeeming work in the world,

01:00:07.760 --> 01:00:13.440
but it's also just an attack on the supernatural, on whether or not God can do these things.

01:00:13.440 --> 01:00:19.200
Forget for a moment, did he? The fundamental denial of someone who's concerned that unless

01:00:19.200 --> 01:00:26.160
I see the fact I can't believe the Bible, that's not a question of did he? That's a question of

01:00:26.240 --> 01:00:31.520
can he? And if you believe that God can't do something, then we're not talking about the same

01:00:31.520 --> 01:00:39.600
God because the God that we as Christians hold to is infinite. He's omnipotent. He knows everything.

01:00:39.600 --> 01:00:45.440
He can do anything. Nothing is beyond his ability. That's literally the definition of God. It's

01:00:46.400 --> 01:00:49.280
another one of those systems where when you start looking at the definitions, they describe the

01:00:49.280 --> 01:00:55.360
thing inextricably. There's no way to remove or subtract. It all has to fit together.

01:00:56.000 --> 01:01:01.920
Just like these tiny examples. And I think, frankly, to me, I see that also as evidence of

01:01:01.920 --> 01:01:07.040
the existence of God. From the smallest to the largest, whether you're looking at the structure

01:01:07.040 --> 01:01:12.400
of an atom or the structure of a galaxy, they're shaped the same way. You get something really

01:01:12.400 --> 01:01:17.360
heavy and big in the middle, and you have a cloud of stuff circling around it. God loves these

01:01:17.360 --> 01:01:22.640
patterns, and they play out over and over in creation. Why? Because it's what he wanted to do.

01:01:23.200 --> 01:01:26.720
We're along for the ride, and that's how everything works, and we should enjoy it.

01:01:28.000 --> 01:01:32.960
If you're trying to figure stuff out, that's good. It's important to try to figure stuff out.

01:01:32.960 --> 01:01:39.440
Just be clear that if you're looking at evidence and weighing it to judge scripture, you've got it

01:01:39.440 --> 01:01:45.040
backwards. When we do these subjects about science and things like that, we never want to give the

01:01:45.040 --> 01:01:51.440
impression that we are subjecting scripture to our own reason or our own senses. That's never the

01:01:51.440 --> 01:01:56.800
point we want to make. We want to make that having believed in what scripture says is best we

01:01:56.800 --> 01:02:02.960
possibly can, with absolute faith, to the best of the ability God's given us. Then what? Then we

01:02:02.960 --> 01:02:08.240
look at these things, and it turns out that, as I said earlier, believing that God did this stuff

01:02:08.240 --> 01:02:13.200
is actually the easiest sell of all. It's far easier than believing the theories that are presented

01:02:13.200 --> 01:02:19.120
to explain the world without God. You mentioned tricking people, and that's actually

01:02:20.080 --> 01:02:25.520
exactly the point that I have here as my next item on this list, as it were.

01:02:27.280 --> 01:02:36.960
Evolutionists play fast and loose when it comes to three distinct concepts. These are

01:02:36.960 --> 01:02:44.320
all evolutionary concepts in the broader sense of the term evolution, not just in the biological

01:02:44.400 --> 01:02:50.800
sense, because you have evolution of, say, the pencil over time as it is refined in terms of its

01:02:50.800 --> 01:02:58.720
design. But the three distinct concepts are morphological evolution, conceptual evolution,

01:02:58.720 --> 01:03:04.640
and biochemical evolution, the last one being the most properly biological of all of them,

01:03:04.640 --> 01:03:11.680
although morphological is also biological in this sense. But the issue here is that

01:03:12.240 --> 01:03:18.880
scientists, evolutionists, particularly science apologists, so-called, will either deliberately

01:03:18.880 --> 01:03:24.400
or carelessly conflate these, and they are not identical. They are quite distinct.

01:03:26.160 --> 01:03:35.200
To give some examples to make this easier to understand, a bicycle is morphologically

01:03:36.080 --> 01:03:43.760
the predecessor of the motorcycle. It is also conceptually the predecessor. It is not biochemically

01:03:43.760 --> 01:03:49.440
the predecessor. We're dealing with mechanical systems here, non-biological mechanical systems,

01:03:49.440 --> 01:03:53.920
because, of course, they're biological mechanical systems. You are, to some degree,

01:03:53.920 --> 01:04:02.080
a series of biological machines. But morphologically is, just simply speaking,

01:04:02.080 --> 01:04:09.840
in terms of form, using the Greek there. And so you have something that is, with regard to its form,

01:04:11.680 --> 01:04:17.840
the antecedent of something else. And so that would be the case with various kinds of transport.

01:04:17.840 --> 01:04:25.200
You can go from the bicycle to the motorcycle, or from the bicycle to the car. These are similar

01:04:26.160 --> 01:04:33.440
in form, to some degree. They are also similar, to some degree, in concept. They are forms of

01:04:33.440 --> 01:04:41.760
transportation, using wheels to get you from point A to point B. Now, conceptually, if we expand the

01:04:41.760 --> 01:04:48.880
concept, a bicycle can be the conceptual antecedent of an airplane. It is not the morphological

01:04:48.880 --> 01:04:53.680
antecedent of an airplane, most certainly. And biochemical we've left aside, because it's not

01:04:53.680 --> 01:05:02.080
even involved in this realm at this point. But when it comes to biology, this becomes a major

01:05:02.080 --> 01:05:08.880
problem for the evolutionist. Because you can say that the eye spot, on some simple,

01:05:08.880 --> 01:05:16.560
relatively speaking, creature, is perhaps the conceptual antecedent of the mammalian eye.

01:05:17.440 --> 01:05:22.480
But it is most certainly not the biochemical antecedent. And so it is not an argument for

01:05:22.480 --> 01:05:28.560
evolution. The evolutionist is looking at it as an intelligent being from the outside and saying

01:05:28.560 --> 01:05:33.760
this is conceptually related to this. Well, that's actually proof of a creator of an intelligence

01:05:33.760 --> 01:05:40.800
relating concepts. They'll never admit that. But given that there is not that biochemical

01:05:40.800 --> 01:05:47.920
relationship, you cannot say that the one is evolutionarily the antecedent of the other.

01:05:48.800 --> 01:05:52.240
And so it's important to be careful when someone brings up these arguments

01:05:52.240 --> 01:05:59.840
to identify which one of these kinds of evolution is in play. Because evolutionists have to prove

01:05:59.840 --> 01:06:05.280
morphological and biochemical. They don't have to prove conceptual, although conceptual is a problem

01:06:05.280 --> 01:06:09.520
for them because if you prove conceptual, you're really proving there's intelligence involved in

01:06:09.520 --> 01:06:16.640
some way. But they'll play fast and loose because they expect you not to pay close enough attention

01:06:16.640 --> 01:06:22.560
and just say, OK, well, an eye spot detects photons and so it must be the antecedent of the eye.

01:06:22.560 --> 01:06:28.400
No, it's not. They are biochemically distinct and you cannot get from one to the other

01:06:28.400 --> 01:06:35.280
using the systems of the one. In this case, the eye spot getting to the eye. And so it is not proof

01:06:35.280 --> 01:06:43.040
for evolution. But before we get into really the last part of this episode, which would be the

01:06:43.040 --> 01:06:47.680
philosophical issues. And I don't know if we'll go over all of them. The episode might run a little

01:06:47.680 --> 01:06:55.280
long if we do that. There are a few major problems I want to highlight before we move on. I've touched

01:06:55.280 --> 01:07:01.680
on a couple of them to some degree. I touched on the issue of abiogenesis. How do you explain

01:07:01.680 --> 01:07:08.240
that we have life? How did it arise from non life? That's the issue of abiogenesis. There's no answer

01:07:08.560 --> 01:07:16.960
in the scientific literature. You may have heard of an experiment back in the 1950s

01:07:17.840 --> 01:07:26.000
in which some scientists set up a supposedly primordial soup that was theoretically the conditions

01:07:26.640 --> 01:07:34.000
of some primordial earth and then passed a very high voltage through it and wound up with some

01:07:34.080 --> 01:07:39.200
precursors to certain chemicals that are necessary for life. And that's possible. They did that.

01:07:40.880 --> 01:07:46.880
There has been absolutely no progress in 70 years on that front. They have not been able to make

01:07:47.760 --> 01:07:53.200
any progress toward creating more complex materials, molecules, etc. needed for life.

01:07:55.200 --> 01:08:00.480
And that's what the application of intelligence, which is of course a fundamental problem with

01:08:00.480 --> 01:08:08.480
all of these experiments, they all run afoul necessarily of the very sort of strictures that

01:08:08.480 --> 01:08:15.280
should be in place for any experiment designed to prove evolution because all of them have intelligent

01:08:15.280 --> 01:08:24.320
input. If you're saying that an intelligence can create conditions and then apply energy or what

01:08:24.320 --> 01:08:30.480
have you some outside factor to a system and create life, you haven't proved evolution. You've

01:08:30.480 --> 01:08:37.440
proved intelligent design. The only way you could prove evolution is if you were to find some sort

01:08:37.440 --> 01:08:43.760
of primordial planet out there that approximates earth and then watch it for millions of years.

01:08:45.120 --> 01:08:50.640
If life arises, okay, fine. Evolution is true. You have to make sure that you didn't have life

01:08:50.640 --> 01:08:55.520
arise on the planet because you contaminated the planet. But that's the only way to do it. If

01:08:55.520 --> 01:09:01.200
you are setting up an experiment as an intelligent actor, you have already violated what is necessary

01:09:01.200 --> 01:09:06.400
as preconditions to prove your conclusion. You've defeated yourself before you started.

01:09:10.720 --> 01:09:17.120
The other issue, one of the other issues of the four, is chirality. This sort of adds a level of

01:09:17.120 --> 01:09:27.520
complexity to the biochemistry. And two things, or a thing in two forms, is chiral if it is

01:09:27.520 --> 01:09:33.440
asymmetric in such a way that the structure and its mirror image are not superimposable.

01:09:34.880 --> 01:09:39.360
That sounds complicated, but stick your hands in front of your face and look at them.

01:09:39.360 --> 01:09:44.320
Your hands are chiral. And you know this because you've probably accidentally tried to put on

01:09:44.320 --> 01:09:51.600
the wrong glove at some point. You cannot, no matter how you orient it, put on the left glove on

01:09:51.600 --> 01:09:57.440
the right hand or vice versa, because your hands are chiral. They're not superimposable. You can't

01:09:57.440 --> 01:10:03.600
just reorient the one to be the other. And that's why your gloves are handed. They do not fit on

01:10:04.160 --> 01:10:11.120
the wrong hand. Many molecules, many of the building blocks of life, including

01:10:11.760 --> 01:10:20.000
amino acids, are chiral. Now they're about 500-some amino acids, but really the relevant ones are

01:10:20.000 --> 01:10:25.520
the alpha amino acids of which there are 22, 20 naturally occurring. These are the ones that form

01:10:25.520 --> 01:10:31.360
proteins. These are obviously very important for life. 19 out of 20 of them are L-chiral,

01:10:31.360 --> 01:10:38.080
which is to say left-handed. You cannot use the other. You cannot make use of the right-handed

01:10:38.080 --> 01:10:44.480
version. In fact, it's going to cause problems in many cases. This is also relevant in the

01:10:44.480 --> 01:10:52.480
pharmaceutical industry because, believe it or not, drugs, many of them are handed. The molecules

01:10:52.480 --> 01:10:58.960
in them are handed. They are either left-handed or right-handed. And if you use the wrong version,

01:10:59.520 --> 01:11:05.120
it may very well kill you instead of help you. That is how important chirality can be. The same

01:11:05.120 --> 01:11:09.520
is true of the naturally occurring compounds. The wrong one may very well destroy the cell.

01:11:11.200 --> 01:11:16.640
And so this is just an additional layer of complexity and leading into my next point,

01:11:16.640 --> 01:11:21.760
an additional problem with probability because it significantly decreases the probability

01:11:22.400 --> 01:11:27.840
of creating the molecule you want by chance anyway. If you have an intelligently designed system,

01:11:27.840 --> 01:11:33.760
it does it by design. If you have a randomly designed, as it were, system, well it has to do

01:11:33.760 --> 01:11:38.320
it according to probability. And the probabilities here simply don't work. I'll get into more of

01:11:38.320 --> 01:11:46.720
the specifics in the philosophical section of the episode, but even given the immense amount of time

01:11:47.680 --> 01:11:53.120
that, fine, I am willing to grant to the evolutionists that the universe is billions of years old.

01:11:53.120 --> 01:11:57.600
I also believe it's 6,000 years old. I have an article on that. I will put it in the show notes.

01:11:58.160 --> 01:12:01.760
But even if you take the billions of years old and give them that time,

01:12:02.240 --> 01:12:08.880
in order for life to evolve, well, you can't actually give them the 11 or 12 or 13 or however

01:12:08.880 --> 01:12:12.960
many billions of years they want. Give them 50. I don't care. You can't give them that because

01:12:12.960 --> 01:12:18.320
you have the age of the earth, which is four and a half billion supposedly. Even if you don't

01:12:18.320 --> 01:12:24.480
subtract the time from them for the earth cooling from the molten phase according to their cosmology,

01:12:25.440 --> 01:12:31.120
even if you give them four and a half billion, it doesn't work. The probability does not play out.

01:12:31.120 --> 01:12:35.040
There's not enough time. There are a lot of reasons for that. Some of them are very complicated.

01:12:35.040 --> 01:12:40.480
I'll give a couple examples that are very easy to understand in the philosophical section.

01:12:41.680 --> 01:12:45.520
But the final of the four major problems that I want to highlight before moving on

01:12:46.080 --> 01:12:51.120
is the information problem. This is the easy information problem. There's also a hard one,

01:12:51.120 --> 01:12:56.640
which is in the next section. The easy information problem, very simple to understand,

01:12:57.440 --> 01:13:04.160
but truly insurmountable to date for the evolutionist. Within a biological system,

01:13:04.960 --> 01:13:10.640
no evidence has ever been presented of the creation of novel to that system information.

01:13:13.680 --> 01:13:19.920
Now, you may think, how can that possibly be true? We have Darwin's finches. We won't get into some

01:13:19.920 --> 01:13:23.760
of the funnier bits of Darwin's finches. He mislabeled things and lost specimens,

01:13:23.760 --> 01:13:31.120
but other than that, that does not prove the creation of novel information,

01:13:31.120 --> 01:13:34.320
because that did not happen according to the creation of novel information.

01:13:35.360 --> 01:13:39.360
You're probably more familiar with dog breeds than you are with the various

01:13:39.360 --> 01:13:47.040
subspecies of finch or what have you. Dog breeds are created through selective breeding

01:13:47.040 --> 01:13:55.760
that results in the loss of information. A Pomeranian has less genetic information

01:13:55.760 --> 01:14:03.040
than whatever the original ancestor, dog or wolf was. From the original ancestor,

01:14:03.040 --> 01:14:08.560
the one that came off Noah's Ark, you could arrive at all of the current species through

01:14:08.560 --> 01:14:16.240
the selective loss of information over successive generations. You cannot get back to that original

01:14:16.240 --> 01:14:22.960
dog that original canid from what we have today, because the information has been lost.

01:14:24.320 --> 01:14:28.800
That is what we have been able to demonstrate through experiments and just through breeding

01:14:28.800 --> 01:14:36.560
animals. If you lose information selectively, you can create subspecies. That's what happened

01:14:36.560 --> 01:14:44.080
with human beings. Through the selective loss of information, we went from what was present

01:14:44.720 --> 01:14:51.200
in, depending how far back you want to go, Adam or the sons of Noah, to the various nations we

01:14:51.200 --> 01:14:58.880
see today. You cannot get back to them from us. The information has been lost. This is a fundamental

01:14:58.880 --> 01:15:05.920
problem for the evolutionist, because evolution necessitates it relies upon the ability to create

01:15:05.920 --> 01:15:11.920
novel information that has not been demonstrated. And if you cannot demonstrate that, then evolution

01:15:11.920 --> 01:15:21.200
is necessarily false. This leads into the philosophical section and the hard information

01:15:21.200 --> 01:15:28.800
problem. The hard information problem is simply this. Information can neither be created nor

01:15:28.800 --> 01:15:34.480
destroyed. Now, I said information can be lost. That's a different thing. You can lose information

01:15:34.480 --> 01:15:43.200
from a system. The information still exists in sort of a grand sense. The information itself

01:15:43.200 --> 01:15:48.480
is not destroyed. This gets into the difference between instance and form in the mind of God.

01:15:48.480 --> 01:15:54.400
We won't get into that. It's complicated. That's maybe for another episode. But the fundamental

01:15:54.400 --> 01:15:59.120
point is simply that information can neither be created nor destroyed. This is a hard information

01:15:59.120 --> 01:16:05.840
problem philosophically for the evolutionist. Because, again, evolution relies on the creation

01:16:05.840 --> 01:16:10.960
of novel information at least within a given biological system. And that has not been demonstrated

01:16:10.960 --> 01:16:16.640
to happen, as I mentioned before. Now, surely someone listening at some point or someone who

01:16:16.640 --> 01:16:23.600
has sent a clip of this episode, what have you, is going to say, aha, black holes, they destroy

01:16:23.600 --> 01:16:32.720
information and so information can be destroyed. Two problems with that. One, we don't know

01:16:32.720 --> 01:16:36.960
that black holes destroy information. There's the issue of hawking radiation and various other

01:16:36.960 --> 01:16:43.040
things. But two, and more saliently, the person raising this objection is undoubtedly going to

01:16:43.040 --> 01:16:51.360
be the I love science type. Beyond the event horizon, nothing is knowable, according to the

01:16:51.360 --> 01:16:56.800
best of our current science and certainly the best of our current technology. And so anything

01:16:56.800 --> 01:17:03.440
beyond the event horizon is purely conjecture. Therefore, it is not falsifiable. Therefore,

01:17:03.440 --> 01:17:09.120
it is not per the terms set by the scientific community itself science. It is conjecture.

01:17:09.920 --> 01:17:14.720
It is no more compelling in a hard sense than fiction.

01:17:14.720 --> 01:17:23.760
And so again, I would highlight that adaptation is driven by loss. And this is another facet

01:17:23.760 --> 01:17:29.600
of this information problem, because the information drops out of the system. It's not destroyed.

01:17:29.600 --> 01:17:32.400
It is simply no longer available to that biological system.

01:17:34.400 --> 01:17:40.720
The next philosophical issue that I would raise is this a relatively simple one, very easy to

01:17:40.720 --> 01:17:46.160
understand this one, get a firm grasp of it. But it is absolutely fatal to the evolutionist.

01:17:47.440 --> 01:17:54.640
And that is the difference between analog and digital information. Analog information is what

01:17:54.640 --> 01:18:03.600
it is because it is what it is. Digital information is what it is, because some intelligence defined

01:18:03.600 --> 01:18:12.480
it to be that. This is a fundamental distinction. So if we use the most basic example, pick up any

01:18:12.480 --> 01:18:18.640
physical object, it is what it is because it is what it is. There's information there in the broad

01:18:18.640 --> 01:18:24.880
sense of information. That's analog information. Digital is something entirely different. So the

01:18:24.880 --> 01:18:32.000
pen I'm holding is a pen. Analog information, it's a pen because of the pen. The word pen

01:18:32.000 --> 01:18:40.720
is digital. The word pen means this thing that I am holding. It references really the form,

01:18:40.720 --> 01:18:45.440
the concept of a pen, but it also references the specific instance that I do have in my hand right

01:18:45.440 --> 01:18:54.240
now. That is digital information. The letters PEN reference pen because we as human beings have

01:18:54.240 --> 01:19:01.280
defined it to do so. And intelligence is required for digital information to have meaning.

01:19:02.720 --> 01:19:08.480
Digital information does not mean what it means because it inherently means that.

01:19:10.000 --> 01:19:20.560
DNA is digital because DNA is a language. It is a language based on AGTC, or if you're talking

01:19:20.560 --> 01:19:27.920
about RNA instead, AGUC, uracil instead of thymine. It is based on these base pairs,

01:19:28.800 --> 01:19:35.840
which are used to construct the human and animal genomes, pretty much life on earth.

01:19:38.800 --> 01:19:44.320
If DNA is digital, which it in fact is, then you need an intelligence to have defined

01:19:44.880 --> 01:19:52.640
what these mean, why they mean that. PEN means pen because humans define that.

01:19:53.440 --> 01:19:58.960
DNA means human being in the case of our genome because God defined that.

01:20:00.560 --> 01:20:06.000
This is a fundamental problem for the evolutionist. You do not have analog information

01:20:06.640 --> 01:20:11.760
contained in the genome. You have digital information stored there. And that is why there

01:20:11.760 --> 01:20:18.240
is so much information stored in the human and other genomes because it's digital.

01:20:19.120 --> 01:20:27.040
And this leads into my next point. Many will say that there's a system or something in the

01:20:27.040 --> 01:20:36.880
world that has the appearance of design. This is a misnomer. Now, we do use it in a way that is

01:20:36.880 --> 01:20:44.240
fair, I will say. If you were to throw a bunch of marbles on the floor, and they formed what

01:20:44.880 --> 01:20:49.840
appeared to be a pattern, that is, to some degree, the appearance of design.

01:20:51.920 --> 01:20:58.240
But there is also design in play. And there is design in play because all of those systems that

01:20:58.240 --> 01:21:04.480
contributed to that appearance of design, that appearance of a pattern, were in fact themselves

01:21:04.480 --> 01:21:12.560
designed. Gravity is a constant set by God. The density of the marbles is a thing set by God,

01:21:12.640 --> 01:21:17.520
the way these interact, the way that kinetic forces interplay. All of these various things

01:21:17.520 --> 01:21:24.560
are design. And so the result is the result of design. And so we do a disservice to ourselves

01:21:24.560 --> 01:21:28.960
when we say that something has the appearance of design, and don't really think about what it is

01:21:28.960 --> 01:21:35.360
we're saying. It on a superficial level has the appearance of design. But on a fundamental level,

01:21:35.360 --> 01:21:41.680
it is still the result of design. This is a game that evolutionists play. They'll try to say that

01:21:41.680 --> 01:21:46.880
something has the appearance of design, and they'll use this to gloss over all sorts of things that

01:21:46.880 --> 01:21:53.600
very clearly do not have the appearance of design, but have the reality of design. So we could go

01:21:53.600 --> 01:22:00.720
back to the vision system or blood clotting or neurochemistry or any of 1000 different things.

01:22:02.080 --> 01:22:07.680
These are designed, very obviously designed, and they want you to disbelieve your lying eyes,

01:22:07.680 --> 01:22:13.360
as it were. They want to tell you that, well, obviously, it looks like it was designed, but

01:22:13.360 --> 01:22:19.440
you can't possibly believe that because it can't be designed. I'll get into that point in a little bit

01:22:19.440 --> 01:22:27.520
here. But just be careful. When someone is using this appearance of design argument, most likely,

01:22:28.560 --> 01:22:33.760
the person, if it's related to biochemistry related to biology evolution, is attempting to

01:22:33.760 --> 01:22:40.320
mislead you, is attempting to hand wave away something that very clearly has design, not just

01:22:40.320 --> 01:22:49.200
the appearance of design. And this leads into another argument that is often raised. This

01:22:49.200 --> 01:22:55.280
one is particularly popular amongst the Reddit set. And that is the argument that begins with

01:22:55.280 --> 01:23:04.720
giving enough time and then add whatever you want after that. Fundamentally, this works because most

01:23:04.720 --> 01:23:12.240
people are enumerate. And because most people are not going to analyze the problems that arise,

01:23:12.240 --> 01:23:19.040
regardless of how much time there is. And so, for instance, if you have

01:23:19.360 --> 01:23:27.760
a complex system, composed of, say, five parts, picked an arbitrary number,

01:23:27.760 --> 01:23:34.080
it doesn't matter for the example, composed of a number of parts. If all of these parts must arise

01:23:34.080 --> 01:23:42.800
together, and any one part arising by itself, not only causes the likelihood of the other parts

01:23:42.800 --> 01:23:48.960
arising to decrease, but makes it impossible in some cases, no matter how much time you have,

01:23:49.520 --> 01:23:57.360
you are never going to get to the complex system arising in total. And this happens in biology.

01:23:57.360 --> 01:24:02.560
This is not just an example that I'm picking out of nowhere. If you use the primordial soup,

01:24:03.440 --> 01:24:09.360
that biologists like to pretend existed. Let's say it did. Let's say you have the primordial soup.

01:24:09.360 --> 01:24:17.200
Let's say you get a reaction that produces one of the precursors needed for a certain biological

01:24:17.200 --> 01:24:24.400
system. That reaction in a biological system is probably mediated by enzymes. It almost certainly

01:24:24.400 --> 01:24:32.000
is. It will have various processes that spin it up, processes that spin it down. Just like

01:24:32.000 --> 01:24:36.240
blood clotting. If you didn't have something that stopped the clotting, you would just become

01:24:36.240 --> 01:24:41.280
one giant clotting dye, which if you want to experience that, you can go get a booster shot.

01:24:43.760 --> 01:24:50.160
But the problem with the primordial soup is that there's nothing to mediate this reaction.

01:24:50.960 --> 01:24:54.960
So even if you have the enzyme needed to start the reaction, or let's say it's a reaction that

01:24:54.960 --> 01:25:00.960
doesn't need an enzyme, it just happens very slowly, all of your precursors are going to turn

01:25:00.960 --> 01:25:06.560
into your product. The problem is that many of those precursors are shared by other parts

01:25:06.560 --> 01:25:11.840
of the complex system. If this particular part of the complex system arises first,

01:25:12.640 --> 01:25:17.280
it will use up all the precursors. There will be no precursors for the other parts of the

01:25:17.280 --> 01:25:22.720
complex system to arise. Your system has just defeated itself, and it doesn't matter how much

01:25:22.720 --> 01:25:27.920
time you have, because you have now made it impossible to get to the complex system.

01:25:28.880 --> 01:25:32.880
And this crops up everywhere. I've given just one simple example of this.

01:25:32.880 --> 01:25:38.480
This happens time and time again, regardless of how much time there is. And as we'll see,

01:25:38.480 --> 01:25:43.840
there's not enough time, even according to their arguments for billions of years.

01:25:48.160 --> 01:25:54.640
I guess briefly here, I should respond to an objection that will come up inevitably

01:25:54.960 --> 01:26:03.280
regarding, supposedly, transitional species. There are certain scientists, archaeologists,

01:26:03.280 --> 01:26:09.040
paleontologists, who will argue that we have discovered non-humid, hominid species.

01:26:10.320 --> 01:26:15.200
There are a number of responses to this. One response is that if you showed them the skull

01:26:15.200 --> 01:26:19.600
of the elephant man, they would probably identify it as some non-human creature,

01:26:20.160 --> 01:26:23.920
despite the fact that he was just a malformed man. And this is the case with

01:26:24.720 --> 01:26:28.960
many sorts of deformities we have. You could show them the skeleton of a dwarf,

01:26:28.960 --> 01:26:33.200
and they might tell you that it's an ancient hominid that was of short stature.

01:26:34.560 --> 01:26:40.720
No, they're just deformities that happen to human beings. If you find a deformed skeleton you haven't

01:26:40.720 --> 01:26:47.280
found another species, you've found a deformed skeleton. We have those today. But as we mentioned

01:26:47.280 --> 01:26:54.800
in a previous episode, Europeans have Neanderthal DNA, Asians have Denisovan, and Africans have

01:26:54.800 --> 01:27:04.240
the so-called ghost DNA. Are these extinct non-human species? No, they are no longer

01:27:04.240 --> 01:27:16.560
extant subspecies of the human species. The evidence of non-human hominids is not only

01:27:16.560 --> 01:27:22.080
incredibly thin, it doesn't actually prove any of the supposed things they claim it proves.

01:27:23.600 --> 01:27:27.120
And the more you look into it, the less convincing it becomes.

01:27:31.120 --> 01:27:36.000
On a related note, to that, there is the issue of radiometric dating.

01:27:37.520 --> 01:27:41.360
Radiometric dating, very simply, I'm sure many listening already know this,

01:27:42.320 --> 01:27:52.000
but it is simply based on the fact that certain forms of atoms naturally decay over time. It may

01:27:52.000 --> 01:27:57.280
be a very long time, it may not be relatively speaking that long of a time. There are different

01:27:57.280 --> 01:28:04.080
pairs that are used for different lengths of time. And so carbon-14 is probably the one

01:28:04.080 --> 01:28:09.440
you've heard the most. It's not the most important one for science, but it's probably the one you've

01:28:09.440 --> 01:28:16.320
heard the most. There are other compounds that decay at various rates. There is a fundamental

01:28:16.320 --> 01:28:24.160
problem with radiometric dating, and that is that the starting conditions are unknown,

01:28:24.800 --> 01:28:32.320
necessarily unknown. The starting conditions are conjecture, which is not science, that's conjecture,

01:28:32.320 --> 01:28:38.640
it's a different thing. Science in the sense that those who advocate for evolution would use it.

01:28:39.520 --> 01:28:46.240
In order to say that we now have this proportion of this isotope,

01:28:47.840 --> 01:28:54.800
therefore this item is X years old, you must know the starting proportion of the isotope.

01:28:56.400 --> 01:29:02.880
We will go ahead and say that, yes, probabilistically you can say that if you know the starting

01:29:02.880 --> 01:29:06.880
proportion and you know the ending proportion, you can calculate the time. That's fine,

01:29:06.880 --> 01:29:11.920
that's simple statistics that that follows. The problem is you can't know the starting proportion,

01:29:12.720 --> 01:29:16.000
and you can't know the starting proportion because in many cases the claim is that it was

01:29:16.000 --> 01:29:24.240
millions or billions of years ago. No one was there to measure. And so it is based on conjecture.

01:29:25.040 --> 01:29:31.440
Being based on conjecture, it really isn't even persuasive. And not only that, there have been

01:29:31.440 --> 01:29:37.520
many cases where objects of known age have been taken and radio dated,

01:29:39.600 --> 01:29:45.520
and they have wound up with wildly different results that were wildly wrong. One particular

01:29:45.520 --> 01:29:52.320
example of this is they have taken fresh rock produced by volcanoes to various labs to date it,

01:29:52.320 --> 01:29:57.520
and they've returned completely inconsistent results. A million years, eight million years,

01:29:57.520 --> 01:30:06.160
four million years turns out it's 12 years old. So radiometric dating is not very convincing.

01:30:07.360 --> 01:30:14.160
Really, it's not convincing at all. It's the same sort of problem that we have with a lot of the

01:30:14.800 --> 01:30:21.440
climate data today, where they will say it's some amazing new record and it's many percent off

01:30:22.000 --> 01:30:31.440
norms. When the satellite data goes back 10, 15, 20 years, the instrumented data in some cases may

01:30:31.440 --> 01:30:37.120
go back 100 years or so. And if you happen to be on the oceans, then you'll have some records from

01:30:37.120 --> 01:30:43.360
the 1800s, where ship captains were recording as best they could with obviously non-calibrated

01:30:43.440 --> 01:30:51.680
instruments. You can have some vague sense, but for us to claim today that what we are observing

01:30:51.680 --> 01:30:58.000
is normal, and then to extrapolate back in time. As Corey just said, that's not science. It's

01:30:58.000 --> 01:31:03.760
scientific inquiry. It's fine to try to model stuff. That's intelligent, but you don't make

01:31:03.760 --> 01:31:12.640
absolute claims when you put garbage in. You don't then swear by it, and you certainly don't browbeat

01:31:12.640 --> 01:31:18.880
people who think something different when your evidence is functionally no better than their

01:31:18.880 --> 01:31:26.560
evidence. Again, that's why we began with Scripture, because as Christians, the word of God is our

01:31:26.560 --> 01:31:34.080
evidence. It is the standard by which we evaluate reality. And so Scripture says that the sun rises

01:31:34.080 --> 01:31:40.480
in the west, and we see the sun rising in the east. I'm going to believe the Bible as a matter of faith.

01:31:41.440 --> 01:31:48.480
The thing is, we don't have to believe things that are counterfactual, because what we're told in

01:31:48.480 --> 01:31:55.520
Scripture never ends up being in opposition to what we find in creation. There are things where we

01:31:55.520 --> 01:32:02.720
can't maybe come up with a scientific explanation. Obviously, if the rocks on the earth appear to

01:32:02.720 --> 01:32:11.360
be millions of years old, it's an inconsistency, but it's not an inconsistency that undermines

01:32:12.240 --> 01:32:16.240
Scripture. It's something that should be addressed, and that's part of the reason that we're doing this

01:32:16.240 --> 01:32:22.160
episode, is that Christians should have sound answers to this. I don't want Christians to

01:32:23.120 --> 01:32:29.680
be shrieking about Darwin and just being completely incoherent. That's what happens to

01:32:29.680 --> 01:32:36.560
Cori and I when we try to talk about race. Race is genetic. It's genetic in a way that's explainable

01:32:36.560 --> 01:32:42.800
in Scripture, going back 6,000 years, and going back to the Flood. Everything, all the variation

01:32:42.800 --> 01:32:48.400
that we see today, is explainable both in scientific terms and in scriptural terms. The two are not at

01:32:48.400 --> 01:32:55.440
odds. The mention of dog breeds, most of the variations of dog breeds today are less than

01:32:55.440 --> 01:33:02.560
200 years old. Some of the primary forms go back 3,000 and 4,000 years, but when you look at the

01:33:02.560 --> 01:33:08.960
incredible variety of either, I saw one list that showed 450 distinct dog breeds. Most of those are new,

01:33:09.760 --> 01:33:16.400
and they're new in very substantially obvious ways. As Cori was saying, if you were an alien

01:33:17.120 --> 01:33:23.360
who landed on earth and you dug up a Parsons Russell Terrier and you dug up a Great Dane,

01:33:24.320 --> 01:33:30.080
you might, if you're pretty good at it, you might be able to determine morphologically they were

01:33:30.080 --> 01:33:35.360
similar at some point. You would never necessarily conclude that they were the same species from

01:33:35.360 --> 01:33:40.880
those two examples, because he said either one is a very tiny amateur version of the other,

01:33:40.880 --> 01:33:45.120
or one is a mutant version or deformed or something. You would never think they were both dogs.

01:33:45.920 --> 01:33:51.200
We, because we know the time periods, they're both clearly dogs. We can analyze their genes,

01:33:51.200 --> 01:33:58.000
and we know the history of the breeds. When we look at data and then we look at scripture,

01:33:58.000 --> 01:34:03.760
as Christians, we have to believe scripture. Then I hope that the data accords. It's easier for

01:34:03.760 --> 01:34:10.240
me as a Christian, as a young earth creationist, when I point to these things and it's consistent

01:34:10.240 --> 01:34:15.440
with what I already believe. That doesn't undermine my faith that it doesn't, but it's easier in this

01:34:15.440 --> 01:34:20.240
world, especially in this day, to be credible to someone who's also intelligent and they believe

01:34:20.240 --> 01:34:25.440
they're well-informed based on the cutting-edge version of the knowledge that they're given.

01:34:26.240 --> 01:34:28.960
If you have an explanation that doesn't make you look like you just say,

01:34:28.960 --> 01:34:34.080
you have to believe my crazy Sky Daddy religion, and you have to take all these articles of faith.

01:34:35.120 --> 01:34:40.480
At the beginning, it turns out that when you go down this path of theistic evolution and

01:34:42.000 --> 01:34:47.680
long periods of time, it turns out that you have to have a greater degree of faith in

01:34:48.480 --> 01:34:52.800
the theories presented by modern scientists than you would if you simply believed in the

01:34:52.800 --> 01:34:59.920
six days of creation. In the case of some of the time periods necessary to achieve some of the results,

01:35:01.040 --> 01:35:06.480
even conceivably, even for some of the results where it's completely a random process,

01:35:07.120 --> 01:35:11.600
and they say, well, given along, it's the million monkeys at a typewriter,

01:35:12.560 --> 01:35:19.040
may eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. That level of absurd speculation requires a

01:35:19.040 --> 01:35:26.000
duration of the existence of the universe that's orders of magnitude beyond what we know to be

01:35:26.000 --> 01:35:32.720
true based on all available data. I saw some of the latest speculation was maybe the universe is

01:35:32.720 --> 01:35:39.200
26.7 billion years old or something. I don't care. It doesn't concern me if the 13.8 billion,

01:35:39.200 --> 01:35:44.160
which is a number I've used in the episode six. If that turns out to be wrong, who cares?

01:35:45.200 --> 01:35:49.760
I'm always glad when we're learning more about how God put creation together,

01:35:49.760 --> 01:35:54.880
because it's cool. It's interesting. Every week, I tune in to look at the latest James Webb

01:35:54.880 --> 01:36:00.400
telescope pictures and data, because they're looking back to the very beginnings of the

01:36:00.400 --> 01:36:05.680
creation of the universe. What's funny is they're finding more and more impossible things. The

01:36:05.680 --> 01:36:10.960
further back they look, they're finding, for example, much more mature galaxies that, according

01:36:10.960 --> 01:36:16.720
to their current models, couldn't possibly exist. You couldn't have a galaxy as fully flushed out.

01:36:16.720 --> 01:36:21.760
In some of the galaxies, they're finding just a couple hundred million years after the Big Bang.

01:36:22.880 --> 01:36:27.200
That's not possible based on any other theories. It's possible based on my theory, because I just

01:36:27.200 --> 01:36:32.720
believe that God put the stuff together, and he set it in motion in six days. As we're looking

01:36:33.680 --> 01:36:41.200
through 13.65 or 4 billion light years of distance for that light to travel to us,

01:36:41.200 --> 01:36:48.240
that's one of the questions that I think we skipped over earlier. If the universe is only 6,000

01:36:48.240 --> 01:36:53.360
years old, how do we see in the light? Well, as we said at the beginning, God created light

01:36:53.360 --> 01:37:00.160
before he created stars. How does that work? I don't know, but the system was complete when

01:37:00.160 --> 01:37:07.760
he said it was very good. If there's light appearing, I think that's cool. It's a stupid

01:37:07.760 --> 01:37:15.200
response, but I think that's cool. God put a star 14 billion years away, and then he put all of the

01:37:15.200 --> 01:37:22.320
photons from that star all the way along, so that any human being at any point of observation

01:37:22.320 --> 01:37:27.280
would be able to see the light. Why? The star is there, and because it was a complete system.

01:37:28.000 --> 01:37:34.960
God didn't put the photons in transit just for our sake or for our sake at all. He did it because

01:37:34.960 --> 01:37:39.440
he wanted a complete system. When it's set in motion and everything just works,

01:37:41.280 --> 01:37:48.320
the scientists who deny God have to try to find some explanation for patterns. The explanation

01:37:48.320 --> 01:37:54.720
is in the system in the sense that all of it just works. I think it's the normalcy bias

01:37:54.720 --> 01:37:58.240
that is really completely overwhelmed modern scientific thought to think, well,

01:37:59.520 --> 01:38:05.600
this exists, so obviously this must exist. Sometimes they'll talk about the unlikeliness of

01:38:05.600 --> 01:38:10.480
the creation of life or whatever, in particular the fact that there's no evidence for life anywhere

01:38:10.480 --> 01:38:16.560
else in the universe. I don't think that's a strong evidence against the scientific arguments

01:38:16.560 --> 01:38:21.040
against Scripture for the simple reason that in my lifetime, we didn't have any proof that

01:38:22.000 --> 01:38:28.160
other planets existed. It's only in, I think, maybe Zoomer lifetimes, certainly millennial

01:38:28.160 --> 01:38:33.120
lifetimes, that we've actually found physical evidence for exoplanets before that was just

01:38:33.120 --> 01:38:39.520
theoretical. So we're always finding new things, but I can say as a Christian, we're not going to

01:38:39.520 --> 01:38:44.160
find life because this is where God put life. Everything else is dead. Will that be the case

01:38:44.160 --> 01:38:47.760
in the New Earth? I don't know. Personally, I think it probably won't be. I think there will

01:38:47.760 --> 01:38:51.680
probably be life elsewhere, and I think we'll probably take it with us. I think that God put

01:38:52.320 --> 01:38:57.280
all that stuff out there, including the planets, for us to actually explore. I don't think it's

01:38:57.280 --> 01:39:01.680
going to happen in this Earth, but I think in the New Earth, we're still going to have the urge

01:39:01.680 --> 01:39:07.840
to explore. God made us to fill the Earth and subdue it. All this space, I don't think we're

01:39:07.840 --> 01:39:13.680
just stuck in some corner of the Milky Way galaxy. I think that we will be able to travel.

01:39:14.400 --> 01:39:18.000
It's not a matter of faith. It's just my personal opinion, because when I see this stuff,

01:39:18.560 --> 01:39:25.520
it's cool. I think that people want to go see interesting stuff. Back to the prior episode,

01:39:25.520 --> 01:39:31.520
dealing with conspiracy theories, one of the worst things that's come out of the skepticism about

01:39:31.520 --> 01:39:37.920
the moon landing is people saying, space is fake and gay. It's not even real. The flat Earth stuff

01:39:37.920 --> 01:39:45.200
ends up reducing the immense beauty and splendor of creation, of God's creation,

01:39:45.200 --> 01:39:51.520
that testifies to his glory. I just don't want to rob God of the glory that he describes to himself,

01:39:52.240 --> 01:39:57.920
as he said in the ending chapters of Job, that the heavens testified to his glory, all of it.

01:39:57.920 --> 01:40:03.920
Everything we see in this world, everything that we see in the heavens, it's all God revealing

01:40:03.920 --> 01:40:09.520
himself as himself, not only us, but just for its own sake. He put all this stuff together,

01:40:09.520 --> 01:40:14.640
this stuff will never ever be able to understand. No matter how long we look or how hard we think

01:40:14.640 --> 01:40:19.280
about it, there's stuff that's too far away to see. It's not there for us. It's there because

01:40:19.280 --> 01:40:25.280
God wanted to do it. As a Christian, I take comfort in that. It never, when there's new

01:40:25.280 --> 01:40:32.400
discoveries, every time, as I said in the episode on scripture, it never undermines my faith,

01:40:32.480 --> 01:40:37.120
because it's always more of what I always knew. The Genesis passage we opened with,

01:40:37.120 --> 01:40:41.440
it's the very first thing that I personally read as a child, when my parents were teaching me to

01:40:41.440 --> 01:40:46.000
read the first novel thing that they said in front of me and said, go read this. It was Genesis 1

01:40:46.000 --> 01:40:53.280
and following. I knew the things that scientists are only now discovering, because I believed

01:40:53.280 --> 01:40:58.160
those simple words. They weren't scientific explanations. They were explanations that a

01:40:58.160 --> 01:41:03.680
four-year-old could understand, or that Moses could understand in an age where they had astronomy,

01:41:03.680 --> 01:41:10.160
but they didn't know the details we know. It didn't matter. God gave us what we need in scripture

01:41:10.160 --> 01:41:17.120
to believe in him, but it's not at odds with the revelation of God in all of creation.

01:41:18.000 --> 01:41:23.280
I think these subjects are important for us to be conversant in, because we're part of the world,

01:41:23.280 --> 01:41:28.960
we're part of being able to speak to others. In particular today, when we have a lot of people

01:41:28.960 --> 01:41:36.160
who are looking at the church for the moral questions, if we attack those people on the

01:41:36.160 --> 01:41:41.680
basis of our being bad at scientific explanations, that's going to undermine their ability to come

01:41:41.680 --> 01:41:47.120
to the faith. It truly will. As I said before, if you sound retarded as a Christian, when you talk

01:41:47.120 --> 01:41:51.600
about things that someone knows something about, they're not going to take you seriously. It's

01:41:51.600 --> 01:41:56.000
not that everyone has to be conversant in everything. As I said, Corey's going to do an

01:41:56.000 --> 01:42:00.560
infinitely better job of explaining some of the science than I could. I would give a much simpler

01:42:00.560 --> 01:42:07.360
version. That's fine. If you want to go in depth, the depth is there, but the anchor should not be

01:42:07.360 --> 01:42:13.280
perfect knowledge of scientific facts about creation. The anchor should be scripture,

01:42:13.280 --> 01:42:19.360
and what God has revealed in the Word, because when the revelation of the Word is consistent with

01:42:19.360 --> 01:42:25.280
the revelation of creation, which is always the case, that's something for us to give thanks for

01:42:25.280 --> 01:42:30.640
as Christians and for us to be excited about sharing with unbelievers. For those who are curious,

01:42:30.640 --> 01:42:35.600
we should be able to say, this book that's thousands of years old is consistent. It's

01:42:35.600 --> 01:42:40.720
constant with the things that you know and the things where there's an apparent disagreement.

01:42:40.720 --> 01:42:46.640
Let's talk through it because it turns out that your faith-based belief system in what you've been

01:42:46.640 --> 01:42:52.400
taught is actually a much bigger stretch than our faith-based belief system that God spoke the

01:42:52.400 --> 01:42:57.760
universe into existence 6,000 years ago, and everything just worked. I take comfort in that,

01:42:57.760 --> 01:43:04.720
and I hope to share that comfort with others as well. That's an important point, and you raised

01:43:04.720 --> 01:43:10.640
it previously as well, but it's one of the remaining five points I'd like to make in this section.

01:43:10.800 --> 01:43:16.880
It takes more faith to believe in science, so-called, than it does to believe in God.

01:43:19.440 --> 01:43:25.280
But fundamentally, it is important first to realize that both are based on faith.

01:43:27.120 --> 01:43:28.960
You have to have faith in the science,

01:43:30.880 --> 01:43:34.720
or you have to have faith in God. Now, you can have faith in both to some degree,

01:43:35.120 --> 01:43:40.880
but you cannot believe the science where it contradicts what God says, if you have faith in

01:43:40.880 --> 01:43:47.200
God. Alternatively, you can have faith in the science and say that God is wrong. I wouldn't

01:43:47.200 --> 01:43:54.480
recommend that, but those are the two options. Science likes to claim, and this is one of the

01:43:54.480 --> 01:44:02.160
other remaining points, but science likes to claim that it is entirely objective, that it is truly

01:44:02.560 --> 01:44:09.680
that it is truly empirical. It relies only on the senses and what can be measured and tested

01:44:09.680 --> 01:44:18.640
and falsified, can be reduced to data somewhere and then analyzed. But that's simply not true.

01:44:20.480 --> 01:44:30.640
For one, science largely focuses on induction, which is the inference of a rule from specific

01:44:30.640 --> 01:44:37.760
data points. So again, it's just empiricism, as opposed to deduction, which is the use of the rule

01:44:38.480 --> 01:44:43.200
to determine what will happen in individual cases. Now, science does both. It tries to go up to the

01:44:43.200 --> 01:44:50.800
rule and then down from the rule. But science is largely an empirical enterprise. But fundamental

01:44:50.800 --> 01:44:58.240
too, this empirical enterprise is really something taken, perhaps somewhat ironically,

01:44:58.240 --> 01:45:04.160
from philosophy, from David Hume. And that is the exclusion of miracles of God,

01:45:04.800 --> 01:45:09.680
of anything that is not to the mind of the scientist, empirical.

01:45:12.400 --> 01:45:18.640
Now, if you're ever in a trial, whether you're an attorney, a party, or a member of the jury,

01:45:20.560 --> 01:45:23.680
the beginning of the trial phase starts with what is called voir dire,

01:45:24.400 --> 01:45:32.000
which is just old French for speak truthfully. That is the interrogation, I guess you could say

01:45:32.000 --> 01:45:38.560
uncharitably, but is the interviewing of the potential members of the jury panel,

01:45:38.560 --> 01:45:45.920
members of the jury pool, to determine if they are suitable for the jury. During that phase,

01:45:45.920 --> 01:45:54.640
as the attorney, you have two kinds of ways to strike jurors from the pool and therefore not

01:45:54.640 --> 01:45:59.040
impaneled them, they will not be part of the eventual jury that hears the case.

01:46:00.400 --> 01:46:05.680
The first is a challenge for cause. You have an infinite number of these. And the reason you

01:46:05.680 --> 01:46:10.080
have an infinite number of these is because a challenge for cause is a challenge where you have

01:46:10.080 --> 01:46:19.680
a cause. So for instance, if you have someone in the jury pool who hates your client, or thinks that

01:46:19.680 --> 01:46:25.600
all people who have your clients hair color are guilty of crimes, or whatever it happens to be,

01:46:26.880 --> 01:46:31.840
some cause that is a legitimate reason to dismiss this person from the jury pool,

01:46:32.560 --> 01:46:37.360
you can dismiss for cause, as long as you can state that cause and the judge accepts it,

01:46:38.160 --> 01:46:42.640
which is to say that it's in the law. The other kind of challenge that you have

01:46:43.200 --> 01:46:50.320
is what is called a peremptory challenge. A peremptory challenge is for use where you do not

01:46:50.320 --> 01:46:56.560
have a cause that you can state. Now you can read into that whatever you please, but where you cannot

01:46:56.560 --> 01:47:02.480
state a challenge for cause, you can use one of your peremptory challenges. Now I say one of because

01:47:02.480 --> 01:47:07.280
you have a limited number depends on the venue and the kind of cases to how many you have,

01:47:07.920 --> 01:47:14.880
but you have to use them strategically and carefully. That's fine in a court of law. It has

01:47:14.880 --> 01:47:22.160
a place in certain venues. That should not be something that we use in scientific investigation.

01:47:23.200 --> 01:47:29.600
If you peremptorily exclude certain causes, certain explanations for phenomena, you have

01:47:29.680 --> 01:47:34.800
artificially limited yourself and crippled yourself quite frankly because you will not be able to

01:47:34.800 --> 01:47:41.440
arrive at a correct conclusion if the correct conclusion is contained with what you peremptorily

01:47:41.440 --> 01:47:50.720
excluded. If you peremptorily exclude something and it turns out that that thing is the cause

01:47:51.360 --> 01:47:57.840
of what you are investigating, there is no way for you to arrive at the correct conclusion.

01:47:58.800 --> 01:48:05.840
And that is exactly what modern science does because modern science as a peremptory exclusion

01:48:05.840 --> 01:48:11.600
says that miracles do not take place, says that God does not exist, says that design

01:48:11.600 --> 01:48:19.120
is not the explanation for life. And if you do that, you necessarily have limited your field

01:48:19.120 --> 01:48:24.160
of investigation. And so modern science isn't really science because it's not attempting to

01:48:24.240 --> 01:48:30.560
find true knowledge. It is attempting to find an explanation for everything that exists in the

01:48:30.560 --> 01:48:38.160
absence of God. That is what modern science actually is. Modern science is simply a long,

01:48:38.160 --> 01:48:45.280
convoluted, complicated attempt to explain away God because they don't want to believe in God.

01:48:46.000 --> 01:48:51.840
It's not because there isn't evidence for God. It's not because God doesn't have explanatory power.

01:48:51.920 --> 01:48:56.560
It's not because we can't look at creation and see that there was in fact a designer,

01:48:56.560 --> 01:49:02.720
that there is a designer. It's because they do not want God to be real,

01:49:02.720 --> 01:49:09.760
because they do not want to have to obey God. That is why science engages in the way that it does,

01:49:09.760 --> 01:49:15.760
and that is not properly science, that is an artificial construct that has no right to be

01:49:15.760 --> 01:49:25.760
called science. But that is what we have today. And one of the ways that science hand waves away

01:49:26.400 --> 01:49:34.000
very clear instances of something that is inexplicable according to their materialism

01:49:34.000 --> 01:49:40.640
or clearly shows design is they will call it an emergent property or an emergent phenomenon.

01:49:41.600 --> 01:49:49.760
Any time you hear either of those phrases, you should be on maximum guard. This person is probably

01:49:49.760 --> 01:49:57.200
or almost certainly trying to mislead you. One thing that some scientists have now started calling

01:49:57.200 --> 01:50:06.000
an emergent phenomenon is consciousness. They just hand wave away the problem of consciousness,

01:50:06.000 --> 01:50:09.200
which is one of the problems listed earlier, a serious problem that science

01:50:10.160 --> 01:50:16.880
using its methods cannot explain. They hand wave it away by saying, if you create the brain,

01:50:16.880 --> 01:50:26.400
that material, just as an effect of existing, produces the mind. What's the problem with that?

01:50:26.400 --> 01:50:32.000
Well, they don't give you any mechanism by which that happens. They don't give you a means,

01:50:32.000 --> 01:50:37.440
and not only that, it can't be falsified. It can't be tested. And so it isn't science by their own

01:50:38.320 --> 01:50:43.840
definition. But they constantly do this. They encounter a hard problem. They say, oh, emergent

01:50:43.840 --> 01:50:51.680
property emergent phenomenon. This is one of the ways they deliberately mislead you to make

01:50:51.680 --> 01:50:56.080
you believe that they have an answer for everything when they very clearly do not have an answer.

01:50:58.960 --> 01:51:03.680
And so the penultimate issue that I would like to address is I've said we would get into a little

01:51:03.680 --> 01:51:12.400
bit of math. And this is the little bit of math. We already mentioned DNA and RNA and the base pairs

01:51:12.400 --> 01:51:22.080
and those things. And really, very real, perhaps amusing sense human beings are fertilizer held

01:51:22.080 --> 01:51:28.080
together by sugar. If you don't get the joke, then you should look up the constituent parts of DNA.

01:51:28.080 --> 01:51:37.040
But the mathematics for this are very important. And here's why. In the human genome,

01:51:38.240 --> 01:51:44.400
there are three billion base pairs. If you give the diploid number, so not giving a gamete,

01:51:44.400 --> 01:51:51.520
giving a somatic cell instead, six billion base pairs total, including because you have two copies

01:51:51.520 --> 01:51:57.920
of each chromosome, except for the sex chromosome. If you are male, then you have one X and one Y

01:51:57.920 --> 01:52:01.840
as opposed to females who still have two copies, assuming nothing has gone wrong.

01:52:03.040 --> 01:52:08.880
But you have six billion base pairs in your diploid cells. The number is a little higher

01:52:08.880 --> 01:52:14.560
for females versus males because the X chromosome is larger than the Y, but it's close enough.

01:52:14.560 --> 01:52:22.880
It's a little higher than six billion. So let's say we have these six billion base pairs. The claim

01:52:23.600 --> 01:52:30.400
is that Earth is 4.5 billion years old. And again, we'll give them even the amount of time necessary

01:52:30.400 --> 01:52:35.440
for it to cool from a molten state. We'll give them those hundreds of millions of years, whatever

01:52:35.440 --> 01:52:42.880
it happens to be. Some of you will undoubtedly already see a problem here. You need to have a

01:52:42.880 --> 01:52:51.680
correct, which is to say a human word, mutation, more than every single year for the entire existence

01:52:51.680 --> 01:52:59.920
of the planet in order to get from nothing to a human being. This becomes a very serious problem

01:52:59.920 --> 01:53:06.080
when you start taking into account, well, higher life forms have gestational periods.

01:53:07.840 --> 01:53:13.040
And not every mutation is in the right direction. Some mutations, in fact, most mutations are

01:53:13.040 --> 01:53:19.520
deleterious. Some mutations result in death. There's war and famine and accident misadventure.

01:53:20.240 --> 01:53:28.000
The mathematics simply does not work. But let's look at some concrete numbers here so we can get

01:53:28.000 --> 01:53:37.520
a better idea of what is going on here in probability. When you speak of probability

01:53:38.160 --> 01:53:45.840
for things like this, and I will link an article that deals with this, it actually deals with

01:53:46.800 --> 01:53:51.840
copying and pasting passwords of all things, but it gives the math for this. It's an article I wrote

01:53:51.840 --> 01:54:03.440
some years ago. But the relevant numbers are the number of characters in your pool, which is to

01:54:03.440 --> 01:54:10.480
say the distinct characters, and then the number of characters for, we'll call it a word, for the word

01:54:11.440 --> 01:54:16.400
you need to create, you need to arise in this case by random chance.

01:54:18.400 --> 01:54:26.960
And so for the alphabet, you have 26 characters. For a one character word, that means if you do

01:54:27.840 --> 01:54:36.320
random chance, roll a 26 sided die say, you have a one in 26 chance. If you do this,

01:54:37.280 --> 01:54:45.040
every hour, you'll probably wind up getting the letter you want in just over a day.

01:54:46.320 --> 01:54:52.240
Doesn't take very much time. The same thing is true if you deal with the alphabet and basic

01:54:52.240 --> 01:54:56.240
punctuation. In this case, I'm just going to say space and period because that's what you need for

01:54:56.240 --> 01:55:02.480
just a basic sentence. But of course, that's not complete yet, is it? Because I've only included

01:55:02.480 --> 01:55:09.680
lowercase, we have to include uppercase so 54 characters. Now it takes about two days of rolling

01:55:09.680 --> 01:55:19.040
that die. Now a 54 sided die but rolling that die every hour to get that one character word that you

01:55:19.040 --> 01:55:28.800
need. Well, let's bump that up a little bit to five. A five character word will stick with our

01:55:28.800 --> 01:55:36.800
upper and lowercase and basic punctuation character set. Well, now the odds instead of being

01:55:38.240 --> 01:55:53.440
one in 54, are one in 459,165,024. It's now going to take you 52,416 years to get that string.

01:55:53.760 --> 01:56:02.720
Let's again bump things up just a little bit. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the

01:56:02.720 --> 01:56:11.200
earth. That's 56 characters in our character set. How long would it take us rolling that die

01:56:11.760 --> 01:56:22.000
once every hour to arrive at that string? And the answer is 1.179 times 10 to the 93rd years.

01:56:24.240 --> 01:56:31.120
That's an incomprehensible number. But in order to put it a little bit more in context, not entirely,

01:56:31.120 --> 01:56:35.760
because once you start getting into exponents that large, it's very difficult to grasp them.

01:56:36.800 --> 01:56:41.120
The number of atoms in the universe is estimated to be 10 to the 82nd.

01:56:43.200 --> 01:56:46.960
It would take you more years to create that simple string by chance

01:56:47.920 --> 01:56:55.360
than there are atoms in the universe, which is really just a long and complicated way of

01:56:55.360 --> 01:57:02.400
saying it is mathematically impossible. You will never get a human being by random chance,

01:57:03.040 --> 01:57:08.960
no matter how much time you give the evolutionist. And the problem for the evolutionist is that he

01:57:08.960 --> 01:57:16.000
only has about four billion years, which sounds like a very long time until you actually run the

01:57:16.080 --> 01:57:25.440
numbers and then suddenly it doesn't work whatsoever. And so I come to the last point

01:57:25.440 --> 01:57:32.240
that I want to make in this section. And this is a point that is a little different from the others.

01:57:32.800 --> 01:57:37.520
And the reason I want to make this point is that it is important for you to understand

01:57:38.720 --> 01:57:42.320
this specific point that I'm going to make, because in the years to come,

01:57:42.400 --> 01:57:44.720
it is going to become highly relevant to the Christian.

01:57:46.400 --> 01:57:52.240
Now, as mentioned earlier, there are irreducibly complex systems. There is no explanation

01:57:52.800 --> 01:57:59.760
for how you could go from something that does not have blood that clots to a creature that has

01:57:59.760 --> 01:58:04.160
the sort of clotting capabilities that a mammal does, that a human being has.

01:58:04.720 --> 01:58:12.400
There is no way to explain that. We cannot get from the non-existence of the system or some

01:58:12.400 --> 01:58:18.640
supposed simple version biochemically up to the complicated system that we have today,

01:58:18.640 --> 01:58:23.120
the one that we see, the one that exists, that must be explained by evolution if evolution is true.

01:58:24.560 --> 01:58:25.520
And here's the problem.

01:58:26.080 --> 01:58:32.800
In probably not too many years, we will see scientists devising so-called AI experiments

01:58:34.160 --> 01:58:43.200
to get from point A to point B, which is to say to get from nothing to get to the complex system.

01:58:44.160 --> 01:58:50.720
And they will say, well, look, the system found a path. The problem with this is that

01:58:51.600 --> 01:58:56.960
it will be impossible to replicate that properly, to analyze it whatsoever,

01:58:58.320 --> 01:59:01.520
and it will prove nothing. And the reason that it will prove nothing

01:59:02.640 --> 01:59:06.480
is that the scientist will have set the conditions for the experiment,

01:59:08.000 --> 01:59:14.160
and then the AI will have modified them undoubtedly. But the result will not be falsifiable.

01:59:14.160 --> 01:59:19.840
The result will not be science. The result will be pure speculation. But they will try to use this

01:59:19.920 --> 01:59:24.800
to say, look, we have proved that evolution is true, and they will have proved no such thing.

01:59:26.160 --> 01:59:30.160
It is vitally important to understand the game that they are going to play,

01:59:30.160 --> 01:59:34.720
because this is going to happen, and it will not be that long before they start doing it.

01:59:35.280 --> 01:59:36.800
Some of them are probably already trying.

01:59:39.280 --> 01:59:44.400
But there will be papers published that will say we have explained how blood clotting occurs,

01:59:44.400 --> 01:59:48.480
this supposedly, irreducibly complex system that we couldn't explain,

01:59:49.120 --> 01:59:54.320
in the context of neo-Darwinian evolution, we have shown conclusively with AI that it's possible.

01:59:55.920 --> 01:59:59.680
But again, they will have shown no such thing, because all they will have done

02:00:00.240 --> 02:00:07.920
is shown that if a scientist tells an AI to get from A to B, the AI will spit out something that

02:00:07.920 --> 02:00:13.280
supposedly gets from A to B. There will be no way to prove that that is true. There will be no way

02:00:13.280 --> 02:00:18.640
to falsify it. There will be no way to analyze it, subject to the very terms that science sets

02:00:18.640 --> 02:00:23.680
for itself, or any other terms, quite frankly. But this is something that is coming down the

02:00:23.680 --> 02:00:30.400
pipeline, and it will be used against Christians. It is a weapon from Satan, like much of the rest

02:00:30.400 --> 02:00:35.680
of AI, even if AI has certain promise in some areas, I think personally it is dangerous to the

02:00:35.680 --> 02:00:42.640
point that we should ban it. This is something that Satan will use against the Christian faith,

02:00:42.720 --> 02:00:49.280
and Christians have to be on guard against this. We live in an era where there are going to be

02:00:49.280 --> 02:00:54.320
novel challenges to the Christian faith, but at the same time they aren't novel,

02:00:55.200 --> 02:00:59.440
because it's just Satan sowing doubt. It's what he's been doing all along.

02:00:59.440 --> 02:01:07.360
He just happens to have a new and shiny tool. There's no reason to believe the evolutionists

02:01:07.360 --> 02:01:12.720
when they hand-wave away problems by ignoring them. There's no reason to believe the evolutionists

02:01:12.720 --> 02:01:17.600
when they conflate the morphological, the conceptual, and the biochemical. There's no

02:01:17.600 --> 02:01:22.480
reason to believe the evolutionists when they hand-wave away irreducible complexity.

02:01:22.480 --> 02:01:26.800
There's no reason to believe the evolutionists when they say that chirality, oh, that doesn't

02:01:26.800 --> 02:01:32.640
matter, life could have arisen in some other way. And there is no reason to believe them

02:01:32.720 --> 02:01:36.400
when in the not-too-distant future they come out and say, well, AI has proved,

02:01:37.040 --> 02:01:41.120
no it hasn't. They're just lying, as they've been doing all along.

02:01:43.840 --> 02:01:51.280
So we started this episode with five questions, and we didn't go into all of them in depth,

02:01:51.280 --> 02:01:57.920
because some of them are really beyond the scope of this episode. Yes, we delved into the philosophy,

02:01:58.800 --> 02:02:04.880
but really only insofar as it directly touches on the question of evolution, which is the topic

02:02:04.880 --> 02:02:11.520
proper of this episode. We'll get into the others in some future episode, but the takeaway

02:02:12.400 --> 02:02:19.040
for the Christian really, it isn't all the scientific information presented. It isn't

02:02:19.040 --> 02:02:25.600
the scientific information that will be in the show notes, where you can get further detail on

02:02:26.560 --> 02:02:32.240
many of these subjects in really as much depth as you'd like. You could very well get a PhD in

02:02:32.240 --> 02:02:41.120
many of these, if you were so inclined. I personally am not. That's not the point. The takeaway of this

02:02:41.120 --> 02:02:51.360
episode is really that you can choose between what God says and what godless scientists tell you to

02:02:51.360 --> 02:03:06.240
believe. And many come to this from the exact wrong side. They come at the question as if we

02:03:06.240 --> 02:03:14.240
should look at it from the way that really the evolutionists tell us we should. Look at all of

02:03:14.240 --> 02:03:21.760
these little shiny things we've collected and built up this system by excluding God. Because,

02:03:21.760 --> 02:03:29.040
again, that's what they do. They exclude God just as one of their preconditions, their presuppositions.

02:03:29.040 --> 02:03:37.520
They say there is no God. That is the exact wrong way to look at this. The way a Christian should

02:03:37.520 --> 02:03:45.200
look at these matters is if there is a God. That's the first question. Is there a God? If there is a

02:03:45.200 --> 02:03:54.480
God, then you look to the nature of that God. You look to what that God has said. Has he spoken to

02:03:54.480 --> 02:04:03.280
you? What has he told you? And so as a Christian, first and foremost, you trust God. And so when

02:04:03.280 --> 02:04:08.560
you look to God's word, you aren't looking to God's word to find ways that it disagrees with

02:04:08.560 --> 02:04:15.360
science or ways science disagrees with God's word. Because God is the fundamental foundation of truth.

02:04:16.000 --> 02:04:23.040
And God is the fundamental foundation of truth. We'll never lie. God is always true. Everything

02:04:23.040 --> 02:04:30.720
he says is true. Everything he says is reliable. And so we know as a matter of fact, as an absolute

02:04:30.720 --> 02:04:37.600
fact that God's word is true. And so you look to God's word, and it is not God's word that we

02:04:37.600 --> 02:04:42.880
subject to science. It is science that we subject to God's word. If the scientists come to a

02:04:42.880 --> 02:04:50.320
conclusion that is contrary to Scripture, there are two possibilities. One, we have misinterpreted it.

02:04:50.320 --> 02:04:57.440
That is entirely possible. Not with regard to things that are clear. So the six days of creation,

02:04:58.080 --> 02:05:04.480
literal days, very clear. Science, insofar as science supposedly disagrees, is wrong.

02:05:06.080 --> 02:05:10.160
But the other alternative is just that, that the scientists are in fact wrong.

02:05:11.600 --> 02:05:16.000
And so if the scientists say that Scripture says X and the scientists claim not X,

02:05:16.640 --> 02:05:21.440
we as Christians are bound to believe X and the scientists are wrong. Now we can investigate

02:05:22.160 --> 02:05:26.560
with the tools that science uses to prove the scientists are wrong. There are many

02:05:26.560 --> 02:05:31.920
great Christian scientists who have done this, particularly when it comes to genetics or when

02:05:31.920 --> 02:05:39.600
it comes to high level, say, synthetic chemistry. Those sorts of fields tend to find men who don't

02:05:39.600 --> 02:05:46.480
believe in the dogma of neo-Darwinian evolution because it does not square with what they know

02:05:46.480 --> 02:05:53.280
about the world. Now you'll find some biologists who believe it because they hand away the chemistry

02:05:53.280 --> 02:05:57.520
problems, the math problems, these problems about which the biologist doesn't know that much.

02:06:00.960 --> 02:06:07.200
But Christians can very well investigate these problems, can delve into them, can find ways

02:06:07.200 --> 02:06:11.040
in which they clearly agree with Scripture. We've gone over those in this episode

02:06:11.040 --> 02:06:17.520
on a number of topics. There are many more we could have addressed. We did not address everything

02:06:17.520 --> 02:06:25.680
because we didn't want the episode to run for 60 hours. But that fundamental takeaway

02:06:26.720 --> 02:06:32.000
is what it is vitally important, what we want you to hear in this episode, what we want you to

02:06:32.000 --> 02:06:37.840
remember from this episode. You can remember or forget the science as is useful to you in your

02:06:37.840 --> 02:06:44.560
life. It's useful to have a basic understanding of some of this stuff. You probably don't need to

02:06:44.560 --> 02:06:50.800
remember all of the various compounds that are involved in the cascade that is blood clotting.

02:06:50.800 --> 02:06:53.280
I don't remember them all. I have them written down. That's why I could read them.

02:06:56.160 --> 02:07:01.520
But fundamentally, take away and remember that God is true and what he says is reliable.

02:07:02.240 --> 02:07:08.400
And so we come at it from almost the exact opposite direction of the scientists. The scientists

02:07:08.400 --> 02:07:16.320
assume there is no God, and then try to explain his creation, which of course is an insane proposition

02:07:16.320 --> 02:07:23.600
that is impossible. We as Christians come at it from the exact opposite direction.

02:07:24.640 --> 02:07:30.720
We know there is a God, and so we look at creation through that lens, and we see his action in

02:07:30.720 --> 02:07:37.760
creation. We see his design in creation. We see creation as something that was built by an intelligent

02:07:37.760 --> 02:07:44.800
God, not as a clock from which he walked away after he spun it up, not with the deus claim,

02:07:46.000 --> 02:07:51.440
but as a God who is actively involved in creation, who is responsible for every cell division,

02:07:52.160 --> 02:07:59.520
every coming together or separation of atoms or molecules or what have you. Every last thing that

02:07:59.520 --> 02:08:07.200
happens in creation happens because God created it that way and permits it to happen or causes it

02:08:07.200 --> 02:08:18.160
to happen. Our God is an awesome God who is in charge of all things, who is king over creation,

02:08:19.200 --> 02:08:24.880
who is in charge of all things, who mediates all things. As Scripture says,

02:08:24.880 --> 02:08:27.120
in whom we live and move and have our being.

02:08:30.880 --> 02:08:37.120
And so contrary to what the scientists, the evolutionists, would claim, belief in God doesn't

02:08:37.680 --> 02:08:43.120
cripple the mind, belief in God doesn't preclude you from answering these questions, rather belief

02:08:43.120 --> 02:08:49.200
in God is the only thing that enables giving an accurate answer, that enables you to give a true

02:08:49.200 --> 02:08:55.520
answer. Because if you're the evolutionist, we went through a list of things you simply cannot

02:08:55.520 --> 02:09:03.840
answer. All of the questions with which we started this episode have answers for the Christian.

02:09:04.960 --> 02:09:12.400
Not one of them is answerable for the evolutionist. This is one of their key arguments, one of their

02:09:12.400 --> 02:09:18.480
key dogmas, particularly when you get into the philosophy of science. The explanatory power of

02:09:19.360 --> 02:09:27.440
a theory, of a belief, what have you, matters. If something has no explanatory power,

02:09:28.400 --> 02:09:34.400
then it's false. What use is it? If you came up with a theory that explained absolutely nothing,

02:09:35.200 --> 02:09:40.880
at the absolute best that theory is irrelevant. If on the other hand, you have a theory that

02:09:40.880 --> 02:09:46.240
explains everything. That theory is extremely powerful. That theory is very relevant. That theory

02:09:46.240 --> 02:09:55.600
is true. God explains, God gives an answer to each one of these questions. Evolution answers

02:09:55.600 --> 02:10:02.320
not one of them. Evolution has no explanatory power. God has infinite explanatory power.

02:10:02.880 --> 02:10:10.400
And no, it's not the God of the gaps that certain neo atheists, certain new atheists attempt to argue.

02:10:11.440 --> 02:10:17.440
Because each one of those questions is a key question, is a vitally important question,

02:10:17.440 --> 02:10:20.880
is a question that has relevant to your life and the life of everyone else,

02:10:20.880 --> 02:10:26.000
whoever has or ever will live. Because of course, it's important to know,

02:10:26.000 --> 02:10:31.600
why is there anything instead of nothing? How is there immaterial and not just material?

02:10:31.600 --> 02:10:36.320
How is there life and not just matter? Why is there intelligent life? Why is there sapient life?

02:10:36.320 --> 02:10:41.600
Why do humans exist? Why are we self aware? How are we self aware? What does it mean to

02:10:41.600 --> 02:10:48.480
have qualia? All of these things are answerable for the Christian and these are key matters of life.

02:10:50.480 --> 02:10:56.800
Why believe in a theory that cannot answer any of these? These aren't little gaps in knowledge.

02:10:57.680 --> 02:11:03.440
These are fundamental gaping chasms in human knowledge that science can never fill.

02:11:04.160 --> 02:11:09.760
And yet, for the Christian, we know the answer to each and every one. The answer ultimately is God.

02:11:10.640 --> 02:11:16.560
But there are, of course, answers leading up to that. I can give a concrete, firm answer to each

02:11:16.560 --> 02:11:22.320
one of those and undoubtedly we will do that. But the takeaway for the Christian, again,

02:11:23.680 --> 02:11:30.640
is that we come to these problems knowing that God exists and therefore there is an answer.

02:11:30.640 --> 02:11:36.560
There is an answer. There is a true answer. There is a right answer. And that answer is grounded

02:11:36.560 --> 02:11:44.480
in God as Creator, as we confess in the first article of the Creed. I believe in God the Father

02:11:44.480 --> 02:11:53.360
Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. God is the Creator of all things. He is the foundation of all

02:11:53.360 --> 02:12:03.280
things. He is the explanation. And as Christians, that means we have the only true answer. The

02:12:03.280 --> 02:12:13.200
scientists ultimately have nothing.