Discerning Truth: Refuting False Claims Regarding Natural Selection - Part 2

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We expose some of the false claims and errors in reasoning of Randy Guliuzza in his recent webcast from ICR.Show more

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Hi folks,
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Jason Lyle here with the Biblical Science Institute and our webcast Discerning Truth. We have been looking at the topic of natural selection and in particular one person's misunderstanding of that topic, somebody who
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I think is well meaning, but who is very confused, namely Randy Galusa out of ICR.
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We found that Randy continued to repeat this claim that natural selection, nobody knows what it is, it has no definition, and we found that to be false.
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We found that in fact dictionaries, pretty much any college level dictionary, you can look it up and natural selection is perfectly well defined, it's perfectly understandable, namely that there are organisms that have certain traits and if those traits are conducive to survival in a given environment, those organisms will tend to reproduce in greater numbers than organisms that have traits that are less conducive to survival in that same environment.
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This is an observation, it's something that we do see around the world. You can look at environments where organisms are not at all suited to survival and you don't find them there.
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They do not reproduce well in that kind of environment, so we understand that. It's really important for us to use words properly so that communication can occur.
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It is an error in reasoning, it is illogical to try to make up different definitions of words or argue that they're not defined when they really are, and that's not something that we should engage in as Christians.
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As we ended last time, I suggested that perhaps Randy is confusing the definition of natural selection, which is pretty simple, it's just differential reproduction, with what some scientists believe that it can do or some of the nuances of it.
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I gave a comparison with gravity. Gravity is perfectly well defined and yet I can show you quotes of physicists who say, yeah, but we don't understand all the nuances of gravity.
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That's okay. That's the nature of science. There are things that we can define where we don't understand all the nuances of it, like the
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Trinity. The Trinity is perfectly well defined, but that doesn't mean we fully understand the relationship between the
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Father, Son, and Spirit, but we can still define it. We can still define there's one God, three persons who are
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God, and who are eternally distinct, and so on. So we wouldn't want to say, well, you know, people have misconceptions, people have some confusion about the exact nuances of the
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Trinity, therefore there is no Trinity. Well, that would be heretical. And likewise, we don't want to say, just because there's disagreement about what natural selection can accomplish, that differential reproduction does not occur.
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That would be just as illogical. And I think that's some of the confusion that Randy has.
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So let's take a look at this going forward as he quotes various sources and we'll see if they really indicate that there's no definition of natural selection.
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Another prominent evolutionist who's still alive, he's up in Canada now, Dr. Doolittle, he said in just 2015, just a few years ago, catch this, practicing biologists may be surprised that there is still debate about what kind of a force, or principle, or process natural selection actually is, and what sort of entities it might act on, and what is the meaning of fitness.
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We readily invoke, but often cannot easily explicate these concepts. Wow. Okay, so Dr.
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Doolittle thinks there's some questions about natural selection. Okay. But how is that in any way even remotely relevant to the issue of the definition of natural selection?
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Something can be perfectly well defined, and there can still be a mystery about it, like the Trinity. Would you say gravity is pretty well defined?
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I mean, you can look it up in a dictionary. Would you say gravity is something that, yeah, we should believe in? It's pretty obvious.
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Let me read you a quote from a physicist. This is Dr. Julian Sterling, guest researcher at NIST, the
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National Institute of Standards and Technology, says there's sort of a big debate.
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Is it that we really don't understand gravity as a theory? There's some small chance that maybe our understanding of gravity is wrong, and there's something slightly different about these experiments that causes the value to be different from other
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Big G experiments, which would be really interesting. Wow, there's some confusion about the exact nature of gravity.
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Does that mean we therefore can't define gravity? No. Does that mean we shouldn't believe in gravity?
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No. Let me give you another quote. This one's from NASA, and it's answering the question, what is gravity?
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And here's their answer. We don't really know. We can define what it is as a field of influence because we know how it operates in the universe, and some scientists think that it is made up of particles called gravitons, which travel at the speed of light.
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However, if we're to be honest, we do not know what gravity, quote, is, unquote, in any fundamental way.
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We only know how it behaves. Now, should
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I use that quote to convince people, hey, we don't even know what the definition of gravity is.
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In fact, gravity, it may not even exist, because hey, I mean, here's some brilliant scientists admitting that there are nuances of gravity we don't understand.
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No. There's a difference between a definition of a term, which is perfectly well defined, and then asking what the reference is capable of doing, what the reference, what are some of the nuances of it, and so on and so forth.
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And so we see here, I think, again, we're seeing Randy confusing a term with what it is alleged to do, or some of the nuances surrounding it.
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But the term natural selection just means differential reproduction. But that doesn't mean you can't ask, but what's causing the differential reproduction in terms of what are the environmental factors, what are the genetic factors, are there epigenetic factors that cause the difference in traits, right?
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Because natural selection just sort of posits that there are differences, that different organisms have different traits, but it doesn't say what causes that, in the definition anyway.
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So there are lots of questions you can ask, but that doesn't change the fact it's perfectly well defined. So you think you know what you're talking about, but here's a man who's trying to deal with it in the literature, and he says, we can't even define it.
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Now wait a minute. Did Dr. Doolittle say he couldn't define it? No, he wouldn't make that claim because he owns a dictionary.
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But rather he pointed out that there are some nuances about it that are a little mysterious, that we still don't understand.
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See, natural selection is simply differential reproduction. Organisms with different traits reproduce differently in different environments.
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What's causing the differences in traits? That's something that natural selection by itself doesn't answer.
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We have to go into genetics and maybe epigenetics, things like that, and what are the most important environmental factors, etc.
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Folks, you can have questions about the reference of something and still have it perfectly well defined. Just like we have questions,
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I'm sure, about the Trinity, and yet the Trinity is perfectly well defined, and it's a true doctrine. Likewise, differential reproduction, natural selection, does happen.
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It's easily observed, and the fact that there are some nuances about it that we don't understand is the same as true of gravity.
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There are some nuances of gravity. We may not understand how it operates at the fundamental level, but we shouldn't deny the existence of gravity.
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Practicing biologists would be surprised about this. And he not only mentions, as you see here, natural selection, but even a term like fitness.
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What does it mean to be fit? Is fitness survival? Is fitness the number of offspring you have?
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Is fitness the number of offspring that live to reproduce themselves? Here we need to do a little hermeneutics.
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Most words have more than one meaning, including fitness. How do you know what it means, then?
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You look at the context. If you're talking about an individual organism surviving, then it would just be whether that organism survives.
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If you're talking about a group of organisms that's going to endure over many generations, then they have to produce offspring that are also able to reproduce.
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This isn't hard. This isn't rocket science here. We use context to figure out what the meaning of a word is in a given situation.
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So nobody can really define fitness. It seems like everybody comes up with fitness to fit their own terms.
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This is the same kind of argument that the old earthers and the theistic evolutionists make when they say, hey, the word day in scripture, we don't know what that means.
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Sometimes it means a long period of time. Sometimes it means an ordinary day. Who knows? Context.
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You use context to understand the meaning. The word fitness is no different. It can be used in different contexts.
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And frankly, the meaning is pretty clear given the context. It's disappointing to see a young earth creationist make these kinds of very basic mistakes.
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And then finally, there was an excellent, excellent book, which Dr. Frank Sherwin recommended to me right when
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I started here, on definitions of terms that evolutionists use.
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It was published by Harvard Press. And this is a gentleman named Michael Hodge. He's a historian of science.
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He mentions this, in Key Words in Evolutionary Biology, a quite general issue has still received no canonical treatment.
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What kind of a thing is natural selection anyway? Is it a law, a principle, a force, a cause, an agent, or all or some of these things?
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Now I've heard physicists say exactly this kind of thing about gravity. In fact, I could say it with conviction.
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Is gravity a law, a principle, a force, a cause, an agent, or all of these things?
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Is it a curvature of space -time? Is it propagation of gravitons? Now I could ask that question in sincerity.
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Does that mean I'm confused? That I don't know what the definition of gravity is? That I just don't have any conception of it?
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Or that gravity is fictional because there's some mystery about it? Of course not. So let's, folks, let's not play word games here.
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We need to use words the way other people do so that we can communicate. And the dictionary helps us to do that.
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It helps us to understand what the definition of a term is so we can use it properly. That doesn't mean there's not going to be any questions about the referent.
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And so if you can't define the term, it's easy to throw around without a lot of thought on it.
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Well, first of all, we can define the term. Differential reproduction. We've seen that time and time and time again.
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But it's actually Randy who claims that there's no definition, which means, wouldn't that mean, logically, by his own reasoning, that he's throwing around the term without a lot of thought about it?
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In fact, I was on a blog this week and there was two gentlemen, each one forcefully taking a strong position on natural selection.
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One was insisting that it was a cause and the other was insisting, guess what? It was the effect.
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Students of logic will recognize that as the bifurcation fallacy, the either -or fallacy.
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Randy seems to think that either natural selection is a cause or it's an effect. It can't be both. And that's particularly silly when you realize everything in the universe is both a cause and an effect.
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The only thing that exists that's not a cause and an effect is God. God's a cause only. He has no antecedent cause.
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Everything else, cause and effect. The bat hits the baseball and that causes the baseball to change direction.
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So is the bat the cause? Yeah, the bat's the cause, but what's causing the bat to move? Well, the person holding the bat. So the movement of the bat is the effect of the person holding it and the cause of the change in direction of the baseball.
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This isn't hard. So nobody can really define this term. Well, again,
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Randy continues to repeat this false claim, but again, you can look it up in the dictionary. And by the way, don't take my word for it.
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Get out your dictionary, look it up, see if it's defined. If it is, then Randy's wrong. It's that simple.
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Now the fact that people have questions about the referent of natural selection in terms of maybe what's causing the variation and what are the more relevant environmental variables and so on, that's irrelevant to the definition of the term, just as questions about the nature of gravity are irrelevant to the definition of gravity.
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By Randy's logic, we'd have to say, hey, gravity doesn't have a definition because people have questions about whether it's a cause or effect or a force or curvature of space -time or what have you.
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You know, I feel so bad for people who are listening to this thinking that this is accurate because if you use this information in an argument, you say, you know what?
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There's no established definition. Nobody can define natural selection. And the other person, if they have their smartphone with them, they can
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Google it, they can look it up on a dictionary .com, Merriam -Webster dictionary, there it is. You're wrong, sir.
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It's just so easy to refute. And that makes it harder for those of us who use terminology properly to be effective in our efforts to defend the gospel because now the person says, ah, creationists, they don't use terms properly, they don't know what they're talking about, they claim that this word has no definition when in fact it's in every dictionary.
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Not the way to do it. Including its greatest proponents. That's really interesting. That's right.
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The people who are supposedly using it the most really can't nail it down. And Michael Hodge, he went on to say, it's quite remarkable how anybody can say that they've cornered the market on the definition of natural selection.
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Again, we have, I think, a faulty appeal to authority. Michael Hodge, not a biologist, he's a philosopher, and I kind of wonder what he actually said.
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Did he actually say the definition is unknowable? Because if he did, then he's wrong, because we can look in the dictionary.
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Facts are always better than what people say about the facts. On the definition of natural selection.
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So really what it is, it's a way of interpreting observations. Is natural selection a way of interpreting observations?
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No. According to the definition, it's the observations. It's the fact that we observe differential reproduction.
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We observe that organisms with different traits end up reproducing differentially in different environments.
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But interestingly, if there's no definition of natural selection, then how can Randy possibly say that it's an interpretation?
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If nobody knows what it is, then that means Randy doesn't know what it is. And so how can he claim that it's an interpretation?
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You see, that's a self -refuting argument. Okay. So with all of that in mind, you touched a little bit on this, but I kind of want to go more in depth with this.
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What are some of the greatest issues that natural selection presents, both to science and also to Christians?
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Yes. Well, one, it's an undefinable term. It's just a way of interpreting data.
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You see a population of organisms and some challenge of facism. Maybe it's a drought or something like that, and you see some of them live and some of them die.
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That is natural selection by the dictionary definition, right? See, here's the whole problem with this focus.
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If you say, yeah, you know, there's no such thing as natural selection. It's just that some organisms survive and others don't, depending on the traits they have and the environment they're in.
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And you've just both affirmed and denied. That is the definition of natural selection. You've both affirmed it and denied it.
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And that's a violation of the law of non -contradiction. And we're not supposed to do that. Scripturally, we're not supposed to say yes and no.
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We're not supposed to contradict ourselves because God doesn't. See, let's say that you try
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Randy's approach and you say the reason evolution doesn't happen is because it's based on natural selection, and natural selection doesn't occur.
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But you see, anyone who has the correct definition of natural selection, who's read a dictionary, or who has Googled the term, says, you know, but it's just differential reproduction.
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Some organisms survive better than others, depending on their traits and their environment, and are able to reproduce in greater numbers.
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That does happen. And so they're going to say, you're a flake because you're denying something that's directly observable. That's why we don't want to engage in trying to redefine terms and using them in ways that are non -standard.
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All it generates is confusion. Oh, that's a great challenge. Because that's the observation that we need to explain.
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You can't define your mechanism as that. And so in other words, maybe you define natural selection, somebody will come up and say, well,
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I think natural selection is just, you know, differential reproduction. Yep.
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That's how biologists who have studied the topic would define it. Uh, it's a concise summary of the dictionary definition.
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For that matter. So it's, that's just differential reproduction and that's natural selection. Well, this is a challenge.
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Differential reproduction is what we need to explain. Why is there differential reproduction?
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That's the biological observation. And if I were to ask you, if you're one of those proponents, why is there differential reproduction?
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You would say it's because of natural selection. Well, I've never heard anyone claim that natural selection is the cause of natural selection.
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That would be fallacious if somebody said that, but in any case, what is the cause of this differential reproduction?
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This natural selection, what the cause of it is, is ultimately God. Uh, and the proximate cause would be the fact that God created, uh, genetic differences in organisms and the way that sexually reproducing organisms are able to generate variety within a kind.
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And that certain traits are more or less conducive to survival in different environments.
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And so you end up with differences in the reproduction rates of different organisms, depending on their traits in the environment that they're in.
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That's the cause of this observed effect of differential reproduction. But you just define natural selection as differential reproduction, so it's very circular reasoning.
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So one of the biggest problems is that nobody comes up with a definition of it. Differential reproduction.
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Not the cause of the differential reproduction, but rather the differential reproduction is the natural selection. It's pretty simple.
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The second one we've already talked on as well, from a scientific sense, we don't like personifications of nature.
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Well, in fact, we scientists do sometimes personify nature or aspects of nature, you know, hydrophobic molecules.
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That is a personification, but we understand what it means. As long as you understand what it means, there's no problem.
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And I will grant that sometimes evolutionists will take the personification too far, and they'll try to make it do things that it can't really do.
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And that is a problem, but we ought to criticize that and not just a personification of nature in a generic sense, because it's not wrong to do that.
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And the Bible does that. Again, we read in 1 Corinthians 11 14, does not even nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a dishonor to him?
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Now, if personification of nature is just wrong, if it's something we don't like, then I guess the
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Bible's out. Randy may not like the personification of nature, but that's logically irrelevant to the fact that it is used.
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We do that sometimes. And since the Bible does that, it's apparently not wrong to do that on occasion, as long as we understand the underlying meaning.
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We don't like to turn nature into an agent, and particularly as a causal agent. Nature is a causal agent.
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It is. Nature is just the word we give to the way God normally accomplishes his will. And so when a tree falls in the woods, that's nature.
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Assuming no human being cut it down, if it happens of itself, that's nature. And it is a causal agent.
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It creates sound waves, even if nobody's there to hear it. It creates sound waves. And it does other things.
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There are all kinds of causes and effects in nature. In fact, 99 .99999 % of the universe and more is cause and effect happening all the time, and yet there's no mind in the objects that are happening.
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I mean, there's no mind in stars. There's a mind behind all of nature, and that's the mind of God. Causation scientifically is defined as necessary succession.
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So if A causes B, if B happened after A, and B had to happen after A, that happens all the time in nature, without any human mind being there to cause it or even to observe it.
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And many evolutionists have hit on that as well, that this is very, very misleading.
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In fact, there's an evolutionist named Stephen Talbott who, he's not fully on board with all the things that the
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Darwinians say, and he's a good thinker, and he's somewhat critical of it, and he has pointed out a problem.
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This is my last quote, and I won't have any more, but it's a very perceptive quote, and it's just a few years old.
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He said it in 2016, and he's pointing out a problem of what you're just exactly asking about.
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What's the problem in terms of science? And he says, evolutionary biologists routinely speak of natural selection as if it were an agent.
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That's exactly what Darwin wanted it to be. He wanted it to be a substitute agent. So when evolutionary biologists speak of it as if it were an agent, they're doing what
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Darwin wanted. He goes on to say, and many evolutionary biologists, in fact, assure us that the idea of a selecting agent is only a metaphor.
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So they say, well, it's only a metaphor, we're not really treating it like it's an agent. Even, he goes on to say, even as they themselves succumb to the compelling force of the metaphor.
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They think it's a metaphor, but they're using it as more than a metaphor. Yes, I fully agree with that quote, and I think
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Randy's understood it correctly. So we're going to agree on this issue. Evolutionists sometimes take the metaphor too far, and they'll give it, they'll give natural selection a power that it doesn't really have, the power to create.
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It doesn't have that. Natural selection refers to differential reproduction. It doesn't create new kinds.
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Nothing can create new kinds. New varieties will arise due to the genetic instructions that God placed in organisms.
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But you see, the fact that evolutionists themselves succumb to the metaphor, and I agree, they do that sometimes, they really do.
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That's the thing we should point out is the problem, not the term itself. Terms are just terms.
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They're not positive or negative. They're just words that we use to describe a referent, and it's important that we all use the same definitions of a given term in order to correctly communicate.
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And so here, see, here's the problem, because I agree with what Randy's saying here. He's right. Evolutionists just press a natural process to do something they cannot do.
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No doubt. The problem here is the way that Randy's saying things is inaccurate.
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He's claiming that natural selection doesn't have a well -defined, it doesn't have a definition. Nobody can define it. That's false. If you repeat that argument, you're done, because all somebody has to do is look it up on the internet or look in their home dictionary, and they'll say it's perfectly well -defined.
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The real issue is that evolutionists misuse natural selection and claim that it can do things that it cannot do.
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Okay, just the fact differential reproduction cannot create new life forms.
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It can't change one kind into another, and there's a reason for that. It has to do with genetics. So this is the point of battle that we ought to be focusing on, not arguing over words, something that we're not supposed to do according to scripture.
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And so are we to believe that natural selection, which is, quote, not an agent except metaphorically, manages to design artifacts, and the organism is not, after all, a creative originating agent?
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It, he's speaking of the organism's agency, has been transferred to an abstraction.
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That abstraction is what? Natural selection, whose causal agency or force is, amid intellectual confusion, both denied and universally implied by biologists, i .e.,
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they're speaking out of both sides of the mouth. Yes, evolutionists sometimes do that.
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They will attribute to differential reproduction a sort of creativity and intelligence that it cannot possibly have.
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And creation scientists have been pointing this out for a very long time, that evolutionists do, at times, speak out of both sides of their mouths.
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But you see, so is Randy, because on the one hand, he's affirming differential reproduction. On the other hand, he's denying differential reproduction, saying it's not real, it doesn't have a definition.
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When evolutionists take natural processes that are observed, like mutations and natural selection, and push them to do things that they cannot do, like create new kinds, turn one kind of organism into another, we point that out.
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We point out that you are not understanding the process, really. You're attributing it an intelligence it can't literally have.
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And again, astronomers sometimes do that with gravity. Gravity made solar systems. No, it can't really do that.
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But we don't deny the process. We don't deny that there are mutations. We don't deny that there's differential reproduction.
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And we don't deny that there's gravity. That would be absurd. We point out that it can't do the things that the secularists believe that it can do.
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They're using it as a cause, but they're saying it's only a metaphor. And he's saying that they don't even catch that they're doing this.
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Natural selection, he concludes, becomes rather like an occult power of the pre -scientific age.
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I would agree with that. And I want to give an analogy from my own field in astrophysics.
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Gravity. Gravity is very much in the same category as Randy is putting natural selection.
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In the astrophysical literature, gravity is, in some cases, personified to the extent that it is able to do things that it really can't do.
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It's said to create the planets and so on. Well, we know the planets were created by God. Gravity creates stars and it creates galaxies.
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It causes all of these things. And it really, I mean, I don't think it can really do that.
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Gravity certainly keeps stars together, but there's good evidence that gravity doesn't have the ability to make a star, let alone something like a planet, let alone life on planets and things like that.
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So, does that mean that we should deny the existence of gravity?
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Because secularists believe that gravity is the secularist alternative to God when it comes to creating planets, stars, and galaxies.
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Should we therefore deny the existence of gravity? How effective do you think that would be in a debate?
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Say, you know, we don't need God to make the solar system. Gravity doesn't. You say, I don't believe in gravity. It doesn't exist.
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And nobody can define it. Nobody can define what gravity is. Let me show you some quotes about people having questions about what gravity does, and therefore there's no definition for it.
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That's not going to go well in a debate. Now, hopefully that's very clear because everyone watching this knows what gravity is, and you've seen examples of it.
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Natural selection, not as many people are quite as familiar with that. So, that kind of argument might work, but it's equally fallacious.
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Natural selection is observed in the same way that gravity is. Differential reproduction occurs, and masses attract.
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They do. That doesn't mean that the secularists are right about what those things can accomplish.
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They're not. And so, we don't deny the observations. We don't, and we don't redefine terms.
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We don't, we don't deny the observation that differential reproduction occurs, and we don't redefine terms and say, well, that's not natural selection.
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Natural selection is causing that, or it's, or that's the effect of it or something. No, that's what natural selection is.
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Again, according to any dictionary or biology book you want to consult. We don't redefine words because all that does is lead to confusion.
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That's a problem for science. So, that's a huge problem for science. And then
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I think your second question was? Yeah, I was just asking about what are some of the key problems that natural selection presents to the church and to Christians?
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I could equally well ask, what are some of the problems that gravity causes the church and Christians? None. In fact, we're quite grateful that gravity exists, that it's the way that God upholds his creation.
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The fact that secularists misuse gravity and attribute to it things that it cannot do, doesn't, that doesn't give me a problem.
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That doesn't mean I should reject the existence of gravity. Likewise, the fact that secularists will attribute to natural selection things that it can't literally do, that's not a problem for me.
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It shouldn't be a problem for a Christian. We don't reject the process of differential reproduction just because some people misuse it.
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So, that really is a very bad question for anyone who understands terminology. Right, perfect question.
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Because you know from Romans 1 that one of the main general revelations of God to everybody is the fact that he demonstrates agency through the things that he's created.
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God does demonstrate agency through the things that he has created. Nature is
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God's agent. It is the normal way that he accomplishes his will.
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And Randy has expressed that more or less correctly here, but he's contradicted himself. Because earlier he told us that ascribing agency to nature was what
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Darwin was trying to do and that it was a replacement for God's power. Remember, he said, and you have to look at what
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Darwin was trying to do. If you're going to explain agency, God's agency with nature, you have to be able to get nature as an agent in some way.
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And now Randy contradicts that by saying, in fact, God does show his agency through his creation, through nature.
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The fact that he demonstrates agency through the things that he's created. Now that is in fact correct.
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God does demonstrate his agency through nature. Nature is God's agent. Nature is not a replacement for God's power.
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It is God's power. Okay. It's an example of God's power. But you can see here that when he contradicts himself, it shows that Randy's thinking in this area is really very inconsistent and very muddled.
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Randy here is referring to Romans 1 .20, I believe, where the invisible things of God, of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they're without excuse.
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But that verse comes after verse 19. Verse 19 is the reason why we're able to see design in nature, because God has shown it to us.
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And that comes in context in verse 18. Verse 18, the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth and unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God hath shown it to them.
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God has hardwired us to recognize that creation is his creation, that it's the result of God.
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It's not because we have some sort of neutral reasoning capacity to say, oh, there's a mountain, therefore there's
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God. No, God's hardwired us to recognize the world, the universe, as his creation.
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And he demonstrates that agency because we see corresponding features between creatures and man -made things that do similar functions.
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And we can almost see the same parts, and now that we can look molecularly, we can see the same systems there.
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Not that I necessarily disagree, but is that what Romans 1 .20 is talking about? Because a lot of the machines that we now enjoy, that we can compare to living organisms, did not exist at the time
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Romans was written. No, I would argue it's more along the lines of God hardwiring us to look at the beauty and the majesty of creation and recognize the power of God behind that.
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Don't get me wrong. The organisms are incredibly well designed, and there's no doubt that that is evidence of the mind of God.
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But keep in mind that a lot of people didn't know a lot of the details of that at the time.
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But they could still see the majesty and power and evidence of design and creation.
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So, for Christians, we believe that God demonstrates his agency through what he has created in those areas.
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And we believe that anything that takes the place of God as creator, we would call an idol.
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Well, Christians face the same problem that science does, and that's with the personification of nature.
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Nature being personified to act as if it's God. Okay, there's a lot to unpack here.
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Randy's talking about nature. He never defines his terms, but I presume he's referring to nature in the sense of the external world, which is one of the definitions of nature.
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So it's what God has created. Everything that's outside me is nature. And obviously, it would be inappropriate to worship anything that God has made as God.
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So that would be idolatry, certainly. But I do have a very significant theological difference from Randy in that, in terms of what we think about as nature or natural, the normal operation of nature, that's one of its definitions, as opposed to supernatural or miraculous.
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And Randy has indicated that the word natural, and I'm going to quote from him, this is a quote from one of his articles in 2011.
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He says natural, and he's got quotes around the word natural, natural indicates that God is not the source of this power.
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Okay. So in Randy's view, supernatural, God does it, natural, he doesn't.
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Now, in my view, natural processes and supernatural actions are equally demonstrations of God's power.
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And I believe that because I believe that God is constantly controlling everything in the universe, I believe that it is by the word of his power that the universe is upheld.
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And therefore, the reason that electrons orbit around the proton in the nucleus of an atom is because God is controlling them that way.
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And we say, no, no, there are natural laws to explain that. See, in my view, natural laws are not an alternative to God's power, but rather an example of God's power.
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So the electromagnetic attraction, that's the name we give to the way that God normally upholds his creation.
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He doesn't have to do it that way, but he normally does for our benefit. Gravity. I don't see gravity as an alternative to, you know, something falls.
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It's ultimately because God wills it to fall. Gravity is the name we give to the way that God normally does that.
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And so in my view, what happens in nature is a manifestation of God's power.
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I don't believe that God just created the universe and kind of stood back and it runs autonomously, and then
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God occasionally does something supernatural. In my view, God is constantly involved in the operation of the universe, and he's the one that's causing it to be as organized as it is.
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The reason there are laws of nature is because these are descriptions of the way God normally upholds his creation.
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And so, and I think I have the scriptures on my side. I really do. Because the Bible says in Job 37, verse 6, speaking of God, it says, for to the snow, he says, fall on the earth and to the downpour and the rain, be strong.
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God is the one that causes rain to fall and snow to fall. You say, but there, no, no, we, we know, we understand now that these are natural things.
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Yes, they are natural things, but that's not an alternative to God's power. It is God's power. And so, well, rain happens when the temperature drops below dew point.
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We understand these things. Yes, that's the way God causes the rain to fall, but God is still causing the rain to fall in an ultimate sense.
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Consistent Christians believe in dual causation. We believe that there's more than one cause for most things, but the ultimate cause is
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God. Why does this matter? Because it affects how we look at nature. When I look at something that's beautiful in nature,
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I don't worship the object, but I do worship the God who has made that and who is currently sustaining it.
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So I don't see natural selection as a replacement for God's power. I see it as an example of God's power.
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It's the way God normally selects, hence it's natural. Just the same way I don't believe that gravity is a replacement for God's power.
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I believe it's an example of God's power. It's the way God normally causes masses to attract. If he wants to defy that, he can, but it's the way he normally does things.
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And this will result in a very significant difference in the way that Randy and I perceive differential reproduction.
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And interestingly, Michael Hodge, the one I read earlier, who said nobody really knows what the definition is of natural selection.
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In the quote that Randy read earlier, Michael Hodge did not say that there was any dispute about the definition of natural selection.
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He was pointing out that there's questions as to whether it's a force or an agent, just like we can talk about the definition of the
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Trinity and yet we can still have questions about the exact nuances of the
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Trinity. It's really important that we represent people accurately in what they're actually saying and not try to pull more from that.
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He pointed out a really important observation. He said one of the early criticisms that Darwin faced was that he used natural selection as if it was a substantive governing a verb.
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And I read that and I thought, what is he talking about here? A substantive is something like you and me, real objects.
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And we can govern verbs. We can act, we can control, we can favor, we can do those kinds of things.
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And he said he's treating a concept, a thought, as if it was a real thing that could govern verbs.
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So is natural selection a real thing that can govern verbs? Or is it merely a conception, something that is a thought?
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Is gravity a real thing that can govern verbs? Or is gravity merely a conception?
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See, we can play these kind of word games with almost anything. But the fact is, gravity exists.
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It does. We observe it. That doesn't mean we understand all the nuances of it, what's causing it, things like that.
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Natural selection, differential reproduction, is observed. It's a real thing, therefore. We can talk about gravity, we can talk about the concept of gravity, and those are different things.
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Gravity is not the same as the concept of gravity. Both exist. Differential reproduction is not the same as the concept of differential reproduction.
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Can differential reproduction do things? Can we assign verbs to it?
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I think so, in the same way that we can with gravity. Gravity is what causes the planets to orbit the sun.
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Differential reproduction is what causes different populations to be different depending on the environment.
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And then he said people then criticized him that this seemed to reify, if not deify, natural selection as an agent.
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Natural selection is an agent by definition, right? Because it's differential reproduction, and that is the way that God achieves different organisms with different traits and different environments.
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Remember the definition of an agent, definition number three, a means or instrument by which a guiding intelligence achieves a result is differential reproduction.
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The instrument or means by which God, an intelligent agent, God, achieves the result of different organisms with different traits and in different environments?
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Yeah. Therefore, by definition, it's his agent. And again, we see Randy contradicting himself.
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He goes back and forth about whether or not nature is an agent. He affirms it and denies it.
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And that's his thinking in this area just is not consistent. No doubt, some evolutionists do deify natural selection.
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They attribute it, they give it characteristics that only God can have.
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Differential reproduction cannot result in anything new, really.
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The traits are already there. It's a question of which ones are able to reproduce most abundantly in a given environment.
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So it can't do what the evolutionists say it can do. And some of them really do worship it as an alternative God. There's no doubt about that.
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And that's the thing we should be criticizing, not denying differential reproduction in the same way that secular astronomers deify gravity.
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Gravity creates this. Gravity is real. It's a real phenomenon.
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That doesn't mean we understand the nuances of it, but we can recognize that gravity is the name we give to the normal way
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God causes masses to attract in the same way that we can recognize that natural selection is the normal way, hence natural, that God selects organisms in terms of their population, their ability to reproduce.
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We can recognize both of these as God upholding his creation without deifying either of them.
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And that's the way we should approach it as Christians. In other words, we could hold up a statue, and I could tell you this statue can act, this statue can favor you, this statue can select something for you, and you would immediately recognize it as idolatry because you know the statue has no ability to do those kinds of things.
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Uh, no. That's not idolatry.
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It would be silly. Idolatry would be worshipping the statue as God. That would be idolatry.
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Claiming it can do things that it can't actually do would be an error in reasoning, but it wouldn't be idolatry.
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And by the way, what if we said the statue can do things that in fact it can do?
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Like it can provide shade, or it can produce a slight gravitational force, which in fact it does.
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Would that be idolatry? Of course not. If we say this lottery machine can select six balls at random, would that be idolatry?
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Am I, well, am I bowing down and worshipping the lottery machine? No. I'm pointing out that it's part of the world that God created, and in this case humans contributed as well, and it can do certain things.
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That's not idolatry. It's a recognition that things happen in the universe. What's subtle about natural selection it's harder to get is
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Darwin's not holding up a statue that says it favored these creatures or it acted on these creatures.
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He's holding up something a little harder to see, nature itself. And he's saying nature can act, nature can select, nature can favor, and that's how he's reifying, in fact deifying, nature to act as the substitute creator.
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Did you catch the fallacies there? There were several. First of all, nature, if we simply refer to that as everything outside of myself, it can do things because in fact it does do things, right?
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Things happen in the universe outside myself. So yeah, it can act, and I would say that God's the one that's behind that, so natural selection would be the way
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God normally selects. When somebody passes away of old age, we say they died of natural causes, meaning that's the way that God normally calls people home, due to the fact that we've all sinned, of course.
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So this again is where there's a theological difference between Randy and myself. I don't see natural laws as an alternative to God's power,
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I see them as God's power. Now I do think that Darwin deified natural selection to some extent,
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I do think, because he wanted it to do more than it can do. Remember, it's just differential reproduction.
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That can do something, but it can't create new organisms and it can't drive evolution in the sense of Darwinian evolution.
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But there was another fallacy here at the end. You notice Randy equivocated, he made this argument that, you know,
47:17
Darwin's saying nature can do things. Well, nature can do things. It's not completely passive, there are actual forces in nature that do things, it's causal.
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But then at the very end, he switched it and said, as the creator.
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See, that's the problem. We recognize as Christians that God upholds his universe in a certain way that allows certain things to happen, and animals can diversify, and that's all part of his plan.
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But only God can create. And so the problem is when people take something that is an act of God, like gravity, and they claim it can do things that only
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God himself can do, that require a supernatural creation, the creation of the planets, the creation of the stars.
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Gravity really can't do that. That takes God to do that. And then gravity is the way he keeps those things held together today.
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Likewise, natural selection, it can't create anything. And so that was Darwin's problem, is thinking that it would lead to different kinds of organisms, that it could explain the diversity of life on earth apart from God.
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It can't do that. All it does is refer to the differential reproduction that is part of God's plan, especially in a fallen world.
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But even for the non -living organisms, microbes, and plants, for example, even before the fall, they would have had that cycle as well.
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That's part of God's plan. It's not idolatry to recognize that God uses means.
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In fact, it would be idolatry to deny that God uses means. Someone who says, oh, the universe just runs on its own.
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God just kind of steps in every now and then. That's a different God from the biblical God. You worship that God, that's idolatry.
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And that's why so many people are in love with Charles Darwin, because they think he hit on the way to explain why creatures look so incredibly designed without a designer.
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Yeah, that's right. There's no doubt about that. But we don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
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We don't deny differential reproduction simply because Darwin thought that it could be a replacement for God.
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Obviously, it can't. That's the error that we need to expose. We don't need to create our own errors to expose
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Darwin's error. So is there an alternative to this natural selection viewpoint?
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What would that look like? Well, of course, there's an alternative to it. One is we don't personify nature.
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Okay, we have a whopping big fallacy of irrelevant thesis here, because Randy has confused two very different issues.
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The question that was asked is, is there an alternative to natural selection, differential reproduction?
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But Randy's answer was, we don't personify nature. But that is, that refers to the language that we use to describe something.
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See, Randy's confusing what happens, differential reproduction, with how we describe what happens.
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We don't use figurative language. Now, if he wants to not use figurative language to describe things, that's okay.
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I don't have a problem with that. But keep in mind, the Bible personifies nature. We read the verses.
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The Bible does personify nature at times. So that means it's not wrong to do that. Now, if Randy says, I don't want to do that.
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Okay, that's fine. But you see, that has nothing to do with whether or not differential reproduction occurs.
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It has nothing to do with the observation of natural selection. It has to do with the terminology. Randy confuses those two issues.
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That's one of the things I pointed out in my technical paper refuting many of his claims. We can go about explanations where we are not going to personify nature in any way.
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But see, that doesn't actually change the explanation, does it? If I say this molecule repelled that one because this is a hydrophobic substance,
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I'm using figurative language. If I say this molecule repels that one because of the electrical charges on the surface, etc.,
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and I give a very hyper -literal explanation, that's fine. But it doesn't change the reality that the molecules repel.
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The underlying reality is unchanged by the terminology. So this is not an alternative to differential reproduction.
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He's talking about a different way of describing it. And I'm okay with trying different ways of describing things.
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That's okay. But let's call it what it is. It's not an alternative to natural selection.
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He's just saying, I want to use different terminology. And you can do that. But the danger is you run the risk of losing the ability to communicate with people that use the standard terminology.
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I pointed out earlier the term black hole. Black holes are not holes at all in any sense.
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I could call them something else. But that's kind of the term. And so if I want to communicate with other people,
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I got to use the term as they understand it. Otherwise, communication doesn't happen. We see the features of creatures that look like they were highly designed, and we explain them in terms of that.
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So we don't attribute any causal ability or any causal agency for that matter to nature itself.
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Well, that's just immediately false, because cause and effect happens in nature. There are natural causes for things.
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When something gets rusty, it's due to natural forces. And it's natural because it's the way that God normally accomplishes his will.
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Christians believe in dual causation. We can say, you know, the reason it rains, it has to do with the relative humidity and the dew point and so on.
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Natural forces. And yet, we can also say God causes the rain. The natural forces are simply the name we give to the way that God normally upholds his creation.
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Again, this comes back to that theological difference between Randy and myself. We also see, again, Randy contradicting himself.
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He can't decide whether or not nature, creation, is an agent. He denies it now.
53:18
But then earlier, he indicated that God works through nature, that God demonstrates his agency through what he's created.
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Remember, Randy said, the fact that he demonstrates agency through the things that he's created. And now he says, we don't attribute any causal ability or any causal agency for that matter to nature itself.
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Well, of course, the traits and organisms are designed. There's no doubt about that. But this is where, again, our theological difference comes into play.
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Because in my view, God can do what he wants. And if he wants to use nature to affect his organisms, he can do that.
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In fact, we have examples of that. The worldwide flood. God decided to destroy just about every air -breathing land animal on earth, except those that were on Noah's Ark and all the people as well.
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He can do that. And he used nature to do it. See, in my view,
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God not only designed organisms, he designed the entire universe. And he controls the entire universe.
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He upholds it by the word of his power. And he does whatsoever he pleases. If God wants, decides that, you know what,
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I'd like some people to have red hair, so I'm going to send a cosmic ray, zap somebody's DNA, and then they're going to have red hair, he can do that.
54:33
It's not a problem. We treat creatures as they really are.
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Highly designed, engineered entities. And that's what creation scientists have been doing long before Randy started talking about any of this.
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The difference is we recognize that God also created the environment. And that God has a role for the environment.
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The environment is not just this false agent, it is a creation by God that's upheld by God and controlled by God.
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And he does whatsoever he pleases. We don't ignore the environment the way that Randy really does.
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And when they face a challenging environment, and when some of them face that challenging environment and they are able to fill a new niche, or some of them face a challenging environment now after the fall and some of them die, and some of those creatures stay right where they are, we don't look to nature as supposedly mystically favoring some and favoring others or selecting some or not selecting others.
55:39
Students of logic will pick up on several fallacies in that segment. The question begging epithet, mystically selecting.
55:46
There's nothing mystical about differential reproduction. Nothing at all. Again, we have the bifurcation fallacy.
55:54
Either God designed organisms or there's this selection. God uses differential reproduction as one of the mechanisms to generate the variety of organisms that we see on the earth.
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All the information was in the original kind. Some has been lost over time. Mutations have happened, they do.
56:13
But God uses that to generate the variety that we see on earth. It's not an either or. That's the problem.
56:20
Either natural selection or God. No, no, no. Either gravity or God causes the planets to orbit the sun.
56:26
No, gravity is the name we give to the way that God causes planets to orbit the sun. Natural selection is the name we give to the way that God normally causes organisms to reproduce in a differential fashion.
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We would do what we would do with any engineered entity. We would look to the traits of the thing that was designed and see which traits had successfully solved environmental challenges and which traits didn't.
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In other words, you look at the design thing and see which traits are successful and which traits are not.
56:59
That's how we would approach creatures in analyzing why some creatures are in one environment and why creatures aren't.
57:06
It's always due to their traits. Always due to their traits. The success of an organism is due to its traits and the environmental conditions.
57:16
Randy continues to ignore that, but it's very easy to demonstrate. You can take two organisms that have identical traits and place them in very different environments.
57:27
One survives, the other doesn't, because of that environment. Both the traits and the environment are involved in the success of an organism.
57:36
Its ability to survive and reproduce. It is absurd to ignore either one of those. I think the reason that Randy tends to ignore the environment is because he's thinking that God must work in the same way that a human engineer would, and human engineers don't have much control over the environment.
57:52
When they build a probe that goes to Mars, they have to deal with whatever environment's there. God is not so limited.
57:59
God does whatsoever he pleases. He is in control of organisms and the environment. This is a huge theological difference between myself and Randy Galuza.
58:09
So the answer is we need to build a theory of biological design.
58:15
We need to build a theory of biological design. We need to start explaining creatures in terms of their features, just as we would explain why one man -made thing was successful or not.
58:30
And that's to go right back to where things are originally, and that is in terms of design. Creation scientists have long recognized that organisms are incredibly well designed, but we also recognize that they reproduce and that they have differences in traits, and that this is due to the genetics within them, and this is all by God's design.
58:49
We recognize that God, in his providence, causes some organisms to thrive in particular environments and not so much in others.
58:57
That's by his design, too. Creation scientists recognize, however, that God also made the external environment, and he controls it sovereignly, and he accomplishes all his will.
59:10
He says, I will accomplish all my good pleasure. God is not limited to human engineering principles.
59:17
He does whatsoever he pleases. In fact, the most God -honoring engineers look to see what
59:23
God did to try and figure out new ways of building things that work for us, rather than saying, hey, we did it this way, therefore
59:30
God must have done it that way. You got to be careful with that. God can do things sometimes the way we do, but he's not limited to that, and we need to recognize that.
59:38
Those of us who believe in a truly all -powerful, all -knowing, almighty God. You may notice, too, that Randy never really answered the question.
59:48
He didn't give an alternative to differential reproduction. He just said, here's the way we need to be describing things.
59:55
Well, you can do that if you want to, but my problem is Randy's insistence that you have to focus only on the organism at the expense of the environment, and the environment doesn't do anything, and so on.
01:00:06
That's contrary to scripture, ladies and gentlemen. Again, go back to the parable of the seeds.
01:00:13
Luke chapter 8, verse 6, other seed fell on rocky soil, and as soon as it grew up, it withered away because it lacked traits to be able to survive in that particular environment.
01:00:29
No, that's not what the Bible says. It says it because it had no moisture. The Bible attributes the withering away of those plants to an environmental condition, something that Randy says we should not do.
01:00:45
I'm not saying it's wrong to talk about organisms overcoming environmental challenges.
01:00:50
I mean, you can look at it that way if you want to, but don't ignore the environment, and don't claim that it's wrong to do otherwise because the
01:00:56
Bible does otherwise. Why does this matter? You say, you know, well, who cares?
01:01:03
Okay, yeah, Randy's using language a little differently. He's using terms a little bit improperly, but aren't there bigger fish to fry?
01:01:11
Here's the problem. If you take one of Randy's claims, no one can define natural selection, and you repeat that to somebody who owns a dictionary or has a smartphone and they can look up the word, you've immediately lost any credibility because they will say, no, you don't understand what the word means.
01:01:30
You haven't studied this. You're obviously uneducated on this issue, and they'd be right. It really is a straw man argument to say that evolutionists believe that, you know, nature is intelligently selecting these things because nature has a mind.
01:01:50
Evolutionists don't believe that, and we need to be truthful to that. Now, I agree sometimes they kind of import that into their conclusions about other things, but we need to be honest in the way that we represent our opponents.
01:02:03
I've tried to be honest in the way that I've represented Randy. I hope I've succeeded. You know, sometimes we're going to make mistakes.
01:02:11
That's the human experience, but we need to strive to be truthful in everything we say.
01:02:17
See, I don't believe we need to use word games to try and convince people that, you know, evolution is false.
01:02:24
I think we can use actual science and correct reasoning and truthful claims. One of the ironic things about Randy's approach of denying differential reproduction, natural selection, is natural selection is one of the most powerful arguments against evolution when you understand it.
01:02:42
When you understand what's happening, when you understand it's just differential reproduction, the traits, the organisms already have the traits.
01:02:50
It's just a question of whether or not they're going to be able to pass those on. The only result that could possibly, the only thing that could possibly result in would be a reduction of the genetic information over time, not an increase in it.
01:03:02
It's not going to turn one kind into another. When you understand natural selection, it is a very powerful evidence of creation, and it defies evolution.
01:03:12
And so, see, what happened historically is Darwin recognized the creationist concept of natural selection.
01:03:20
He had read Edward Blythe's articles. There's abundant evidence of that. He basically plagiarized them in portions.
01:03:27
It's not even debatable. But what he did was then he said, ah, this then, I'll link that to evolution.
01:03:33
And so, if I can get people to believe in differential reproduction, which is observable, then they'll believe in evolution, that one kind can eventually become another.
01:03:40
And he did that, I believe, as a replacement for God, not the selection part, but the evolution part.
01:03:47
And many people have fallen for that trap. They think that natural selection and evolution are the same thing, because Darwin promoted it that way, or at least natural selection as the mechanism of evolution.
01:04:02
And it can't do that. The other issue here that I see that is, that makes this so important, is the fact that all of these things that Randy has said, they've already been refuted in the literature.
01:04:19
Answers in Genesis has articles refuting these claims. Creation Ministries International has articles refuting these claims.
01:04:26
I've written articles, at least, well, at least one fairly detailed article that's in the
01:04:32
Answers Research Journal. I'm going to post links to these below so you can study these. Randy just ignores those.
01:04:37
He won't take correction. He just ignores that and moves on. And I think that's not a Christian approach to things.
01:04:43
If he thinks I'm wrong, he can make a counter -argument. But I think when he makes this claim that natural selection just doesn't have a definition, that's really easy to refute.
01:04:52
You can look it up in any dictionary or biology textbook, and that is a definition. I have to tell you,
01:04:58
I really don't enjoy criticizing young earth creationists who are using terrible arguments. But as a
01:05:05
Christian, I have to do that. And that's because God's called me to do that. He's called me to cast down arguments and everything that exalts itself against the knowledge of God.
01:05:15
And that includes bad arguments that are anti -biblical, even when the proponent of that argument is trying to use them to draw people to God.
01:05:24
I don't doubt Randy's intentions. I really don't. But anyone who is logical is not going to be persuaded by these kinds of arguments,
01:05:33
Randy might persuade people that are not good thinkers, because he confuses the term and the process.
01:05:42
But that's not going to work on people who are sharp, people who know something about biology, people who know something about scientific research, people who know something about definitions.
01:05:51
It's just not going to work. The strategy of, hey, I'm going to get everybody to believe in creation by getting them to deny differential reproduction, that is never going to succeed, folks.
01:06:04
The only thing that's going to accomplish is confuse a small fraction of Christians who are not good thinkers. That's all it's going to do.
01:06:10
It can't succeed long term, because it's not true. We can observe differential reproduction.
01:06:17
It happens. And God uses that as part of the means by which he generates diversity, along with the information he's planted in the genome and so on.
01:06:26
That's why this is important. The other reason I thought I needed to do this webcast is because in the past I worked at ICR, and I was promoting that ministry, and I was even promoting
01:06:35
Randy. I knew he had some problems, but I honestly thought that he would accept correction once it was explained to him logically that, well, you can't say there's no definition, because there it is.
01:06:44
And I regret that he just wouldn't take that correction. So then I tried to do it via a public article that would allow everybody to see these errors.
01:06:54
And then I thought, maybe he'll start thinking through some of these issues. But no, he's going to repeat the same stuff. That's okay.
01:06:59
He can do what he wants. But because I supported ICR in the past, I feel like I have to now tell you that it's not an organization
01:07:06
I would support anymore, because the leadership there, after I'd already exposed Randy's errors, the leadership decided that's what we want.
01:07:13
And they decided to make Randy the president of ICR. And I've seen those errors trickle into other articles.
01:07:21
They're just totally inaccurate. Speculation is replacing genuine research.
01:07:26
It's just, hey, here's the way it is. And there's no evidence for that. Evolutionists do that all the time. It's disappointing to see creationists do that.
01:07:33
So that's not to say that there's nothing good at ICR. I think there's still some good stuff happening.
01:07:39
There's good people there. Don't get me wrong. But it's not a reliable source of information. So make sure that when you read an article from ICR, you check it out with one of the more reliable creation ministries.
01:07:49
I actually founded the Biblical Science Institute as an intellectually honest alternative to what is now happening at ICR.
01:07:56
It breaks my heart to say that, because ICR was such a great ministry in the past. And their older stuff is great.
01:08:01
Go back, look at the rate research project. Wonderful stuff. But these word games, where we're just redefining terms and all that, there is no definition and such.
01:08:13
That's not the way to go, folks. That's not truthful. It's not honest. It's not theologically correct.
01:08:19
It's not biblical. We need to do better. So please check out the links below and read what creation
01:08:27
PhD scientists, PhD biologists have written about some of the problems with what
01:08:34
Randy's saying. Don't be fooled by this, folks. Because if you repeat this information, and somebody calls you on it, they say, oh,
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I know that's not accurate. Here's the proof. Then you've just made it harder for other creation scientists who are accurate to help encourage that person to trust in the
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Bible. I understand Randy's probably going to do some more promoting his speculations.
01:09:02
And we'll try to deal with that here at the Biblical Science Institute. I have to tell you, I hate doing this kind of stuff.
01:09:07
But it is necessary. And I hope it's been a blessing to you. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.