Darwin vs Design with Keaton Halley of CMI

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a master's degree in Christian apologetics from Biola University. Please join

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Creation Fellowship Santee in welcoming Hayley. All right, thank you very much.

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Well, let me just share my screen first. Appreciate it.

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All right. You should be seeing pyramids now and then now you've got my title slide there.

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Is that right? That is correct. Yes, we see it.

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All right. Okay, very good. Thanks, Robin. And thanks, Joyce. All right, well, thank you all for just being willing to take time out of your day to participate in this session.

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It's an honor for me to be with you guys. And I understand, you know, you guys meet regularly. So there are a lot of what

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I cover, maybe things you have heard before. But hopefully I'll give you a few new things to think about as well.

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I liked that you read about how you've had cartoonists come to your group as well as different smarty pants people.

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Because I live in both of those worlds as well. You know, as you heard from my bio, I have degrees in graphic design and apologetics.

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And so I actually wear both of those hats at CMI. So our ministry,

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Creation Ministries International, has been around for 40 years. And all of that time, we have been proclaiming and defending this message that the

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Bible tells us the truth about origins. That's the message we want to get out to the church and to the world at large.

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We want to show people that Genesis gives us real history, that you can trust what the Bible teaches about the beginning of all things.

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Yet, of course, that book of Genesis, the foundational book to the rest of scripture, is really fiercely under attack today from a skeptical world.

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So many people think that science discredits the Bible, right? They say, evolution is fact. How can you still believe those stories about Adam and Eve, for example?

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And so what we do is we employ nerds, or I like your term, smarty pants, nerds like me and PhD scientists we have on staff, all researching the challenges to the truth claims of scripture.

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And ultimately, we want to show that the Bible is trustworthy. So if you yourself believe that today, that the

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Bible is trustworthy, do you also know how to defend the Bible against attacks? Do you know, for example, how to answer some of the questions on the screen here?

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If somebody said to you, if your neighbor says, or your children ask you, how do we really know that God is real or that the

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Bible is true? If a loving God created the world, why is there so much death and suffering all around us?

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What about all that evidence for evolution from fossils and genetic similarity and natural selection in these things?

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How do we understand dinosaurs? Well, we're not going to cover all of these questions here this evening, but if this wets your appetite for more,

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I hope you will follow up with our ministry. Stay in contact with us and learn from us because we produce all kinds of information that will answer those questions for you and equip you to have a confident faith, a confident

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Christianity. And then it'll also equip you to ultimately share your faith with others and pass it on to your children and your grandchildren.

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So one of the easy ways to connect with us, to keep getting a steady diet of those answers long after tonight is over, is to sign up for our email newsletter.

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And this is a free tool that you can actually sign up for right now, as I continue the presentation. All you have to do is text, using the phone number that's on the screen there, text your email address and your zip code, and that will automatically sign you up to our email newsletter.

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And so you'll get your faith strengthened. About once a week, we send you emails and we don't sell your information to anyone else.

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So you can, of course, cancel at any time. So I'll leave that phone number up on the screen for the next few slides, just to give you a chance to do that.

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But what I really want to focus on this evening is living things. How did living things come about?

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You know, in our ministry, we also talk a lot about dead things like rocks and fossils and so forth. But tonight we're going to focus on life, animals and plants and so on.

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The phone number disappeared. Oh, there it is. Okay. Oh, yeah. It's on the bottom of the screen. I'm trying to get it into the chat.

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Okay. Sorry, didn't mean to interrupt you. Keep going. That's fine. All right. So talking about living things, we're going to ask this question.

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Were they engineered by an ingenious creator as the Bible teaches, or did they come about through some unguided naturalistic evolutionary process as Darwin believed and popularized?

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Well, it's always fascinated me that no matter who you're talking to, when somebody looks out at the world of living things, whether we're looking at the grandeur of one of nature's greatest beasts or the intricate details of the eye of a tiny insect, everyone's first impression is that someone must have made this.

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That's our sort of immediate reaction is that these things look like they're designed and design would imply that there's a designer.

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Now, of course, the Bible affirms that intuition that everyone has. In Romans chapter 1, verse 20, for example, we read that God's invisible attributes, specifically his eternal power and his divine nature are clearly perceived.

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That is, everybody knows that God exists. And how do we know it? Well, the verse says it's in the things that have been made.

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From creation we infer there is a creator. And in fact, this verse says that it's so obvious that God exists that people don't even have an excuse not to believe it.

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Nobody will be able to stand up on judgment day before their maker and say, I didn't have any evidence to believe in you,

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Lord. Because he can say, no, the evidence is all around you. I make it, I made it plain to all.

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But it's not only the Bible that teaches us that. As I say, even atheists, at least their first impression is that someone must have made the world.

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For example, you might have heard of Richard Dawkins, one of the leading proponents of evolution.

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And perhaps the most famous atheist in the world today. He does not believe that living things were designed.

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But look at the way he defines the science of biology. He says, biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.

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So he doesn't believe they were designed. And he spends, this is on page one of his book, The Blind Watchmaker. He spends the whole rest of the book explaining why he thinks design, the apparent design in nature is actually an illusion.

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And he says, evolution can explain the appearance of design. It's not real design at all. But at first blush, even to Dawkins, he says, it looks like things were designed.

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Or another brilliant scientist, Francis Crick. This is one of the two people that co -discovered the structure of DNA.

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He says that biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.

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So why do these brilliant men of science have to keep reminding themselves that evolution is true?

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Because even to them, the world. Keaton, Keaton, we can't hear you.

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Oh dear, I think he's frozen. Frozen in time, just like a dinosaur.

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Fly by and map out the same hillside. It looks like this from a different angle. And so really, it hardly resembles a face at all.

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So yes, we can be fooled into thinking design is present when in some cases, it's totally explicable by natural processes, you know, erosion and wind and so forth, gravity.

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But I submit that if the satellites had flown past this hillside and come back with photos that looked more like this, then it would be undoubtedly true that we had discovered an intelligence behind this hillside.

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Maybe the identity of the designer would be a mystery. But we would know that natural processes of wind and erosion aren't going to form a face like this.

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So what's the difference between those two hillsides? Well, one has much greater detail and sophisticated complexity.

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And I submit that when you look at living things, they're much more like the second example, not the first. It's not an illusion of design.

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When you get into the nitty gritty details of life, it becomes more and more clear that a designer must have been responsible.

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So what we're going to do as we proceed here is look at four different reasons that evolutionists give evidence, they say, that supports their theory.

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And we're going to see how those same four pieces of evidence actually, when you look at the details, they more strongly support creation, that there is a designer behind all of life.

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So we're going to look at vestigial structures. We'll talk about exactly what those are in just a moment here. We'll look at similarities in living things, changes that we can observe happening today, and then last of all, we'll look at the cruelty in nature.

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So let's take those one at a time. All right. So beginning with vestigial structures. Well, what are those exactly?

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Well, a vestige is a remnant or a trace of something that was once present. So vestigial structures are,

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I'm sure you've heard of these, things like the tonsils, the tailbone, the appendix, things in the human body that many evolutionists have historically claimed have no function or have a reduced function.

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They say they're broken things, just traces of our evolutionary history that prove we descended from animals that were related back to apes and other creatures.

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Well, first of all, the whole idea of a vestigial structure isn't necessarily incompatible with a biblical perspective, because it's certainly true that since sin occurred and since Adam and Eve fell back in the time of the

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Garden of Eden, the world has experienced brokenness. And so as generations have come and gone and our

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DNA has been passed from one generation to the next, certainly damaging mutations can occur and things can get broken and not work as well as they once did.

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And so in principle, the idea of a vestigial structure isn't incompatible with creation.

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And we do find some examples of these genuine vestiges. One good example are creatures that live in caves.

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Often after just one or two generations or maybe a few more in some cases, the offspring will be born sightless.

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They just are born with scar tissue where their eyes once were. And why does that happen? Well, because in a dark cave, it's no advantage to you to have eyes to see.

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It's too dark to see anyway. And so we're not always sure of the underlying reasons.

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Maybe it was natural selection and mutations that the mutations knocked out the ability to see.

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They just damaged the genes that were responsible for making these eyes. And then after a few generations, those are the ones that are selected for, or it could be that there's programming that actually switches off the ability to make these eyes.

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Eyes can actually even be a hindrance because if you bump into a cave wall in a dark cave, you can get your eyes cut and get an infection and so forth.

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So it's actually beneficial to have a loss of sight in these cave fish.

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So it's true that vestigial structures are real in some cases, but the problem is the evolutionary community has been overly enthusiastic about this idea.

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And for example, at the time of the Scopes trial, the expert witnesses who testified as to the scientific evidence that supports evolution, they claimed on the witness stand that there are no less than 180 vestigial structures in the human body alone.

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And yet since that time, we've discovered functions for nearly every one of these. And yet these claims still get circulated today.

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I was amazed back in 2017 when I visited New York the American Museum of Natural History.

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I encountered this sign speaking about the human coccyx, that's the tailbone, which is this little triangular shaped bone just at the base of your spinal column underneath your sacrum there, which is part of your pelvis.

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But look at what the sign says at this famous scientific museum. They say, look closely at the base of the human spine and you'll find a tailbone, three to five vertebra fused together.

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It serves no purpose, they say, except to remind us that humans have descended from ancestral animals with tails.

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Well, this just astonishes me that the tailbone has no purpose. Well, ask any expert in anatomy or physiology, they'll tell you that the tailbone has like more muscles and ligaments and tendons attached to it than almost any other bone in the body.

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It's an anchor point for many muscles and things that are doing all kinds of work in our body. As we're seated, the tailbone is like one leg of a tripod.

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We've got two bones in the front of our hip and the tailbone is the third leg in the rear. And as we lean back, it can help to support more of our weight.

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And that serves as an anchor point for muscles that perform a whole variety of other functions, including just forming like the pelvic floor of our bodies and keeping our internal organs intact and in place.

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Here's another example, the appendix that you've all heard of before. Now the appendix, obviously it's not critical to our survival, we can live without it as sometimes people have to have their appendix removed when it gets infected, right?

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The appendix is this little worm -like process that I've circled coming off of our large intestine.

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But just because we can live without it doesn't prove that it's useless. The same thing is true of our arms, right?

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Or our legs, we could live without them, but it doesn't mean that they don't serve a function.

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Now, I don't think that we know yet all the purposes that the appendix might have. It seems to be related to our immune system.

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But one thing that we do know that it does is it serves as a safe house for good bacteria. So for example, when we get certain types of illnesses, bad bacteria in our gut, then our bodies will expel them.

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And, but it gets rid of all the bacteria in our gut, both good and bad, and that's not what you want. You want those good bacteria present to help you digest your food.

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And so the good bacteria stored inside the appendix can actually help to repopulate your gut after you've been ill.

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But what's really amazing about this claim that the appendix has no function or it's just an evolutionary leftover is if you look up the article on the screen there, creation .com

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slash appendix dash shrieks dash creation, we have a great article that's, that talks about some research and some evolutionary scientists did.

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And what they discovered, they looked at appendixes in different types of organisms and realized that the pattern didn't match an evolutionary story.

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Because certain organisms have appendixes and others don't or they have a different type. And so what these researchers proposed is rather than saying the appendix evolved once, and then disappeared in certain later generations in different types of creatures as they evolved, they claimed that the appendix evolved over and over again in different branches of the evolutionary tree just by chance.

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In fact, they said it had to have happened a minimum of 18 times. So that really puts to rest this idea that the appendix does nothing because even according to the evolutionary story, it keeps evolving over and over again.

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Clearly it's serving an important function. But I think the

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Bible has the best explanation of the human body overall. It says in Psalm 139,

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I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works and my soul knows it very well.

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So we've looked at the first argument for evolution that's very common vestigial structures. Let's move on to another argument, the similarities in living things.

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Now, oftentimes in like high school biology textbooks, you'll find illustrations like this one.

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There's a certain pattern that we find repeated in the limbs of vertebrates. They have this five digit limb pattern where they've got one bone in their upper arm and then an elbow joint, two bones in the lower arm or leg and a wrist joint, and then five digits in the hand.

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Even though obviously a human arm is very different from a bird wing, very different from a seal, flipper and so forth.

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Now, the reason evolutionists point out these similarities is they say that the whole reason that organisms have this similarity is because they inherited that same pattern from their common ancestor millions of years ago.

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But of course, the creationists have another possible explanation. We can say, no, the similar pattern is not due to common ancestry.

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It's due to these creatures having a common designer. It was one God responsible for creating them all.

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And God could have many very good reasons for sticking with a certain theme, right?

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Artists repeat themes in their work. They use motifs over and over again. And human designers and engineers also repeat patterns because often they make good structural and engineering sense.

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So are we just sort of at a standoff here where the evolutionists have one explanation that works fine and the creationists have another?

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Well, no, I'd argue just like that Martian landscape, when we look at the details, the evolutionary story begins to fall apart.

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So take, for example, the human hand and the frog foot. If the reason for the similarity in their five digits is that they inherited the pattern from a common ancestor, then you would expect as these creatures develop as embryos that the fingers would be formed in the same sort of way.

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And yet the way they develop as embryos is radically different. The human hand actually begins like a plate and the material in between the fingers dissolves away.

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Whereas the frog foot begins like a fist and the digits grow outward from initial buds.

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And so that makes the evolutionary story a lot less compelling. I think maybe

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God did it that way on purpose just to cause difficulties for the evolutionary story.

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But there are lots of examples like these of similarities that don't fit the evolutionary stories.

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Here's another one that's well known. It's the similarity between human eyes and the eyes of all vertebrates and the eyes of octopuses.

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Now, octopuses are not thought to be closely related to humans, yet they have a camera lens system very similar to the human eye.

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So what's the evolutionary explanation? Is it that both humans and octopus, the common ancestor millions and millions of years ago, already had this camera eye lens system in place?

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No, once again, just like the appendix, the evolutionists believe that on separate branches of the evolutionary tree, long after they diverged, just by chance, octopuses and humans evolved similar types of eyes.

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And in fact, it's so common that people like John Rennie of Scientific American, the editor there, he says it now appears that in various families of organisms, eyes have evolved independently.

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Some have said as many as 60 different times. You folks thought it was a challenge to evolution even to make an eye once.

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Well, the evolutionists believe it happens over and over again by purely blind forces.

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But blind forces of nature can't make a seeing eye. I submit that once again, the

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Bible has the best explanation. In Proverbs 20, we read that the hearing ear and the seeing eye, the

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Lord has made them both. Really this whole argument from similarities in living things is not a strong evidence for evolution, even though it's probably one of the two most common ways that evolution is defended.

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Because the reason it's not a good argument is because we find even in manufactured objects, the same types of patterns of similarity.

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Think about in your kitchen, for example, you dump out a drawer full of utensils and you can arrange those into an evolutionary tree.

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You can form a nested hierarchy. You can do the same thing with automobiles or Mexican food.

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Here's the evolution of the taco from a tortilla over millions of years. Now, just because we find these patterns doesn't mean that one thing evolved from another.

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We find similarities all the time in objects that were designed. So, so far we've covered two supposed evidences for evolution, the vestiges, vestigial structures and similar structures in living things.

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Let's then talk about perhaps the number one way that evolution is argued for.

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This is how I was taught it in my high school biology classes. And that is the changes we can observe going on right under our noses.

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And we do see changes in living things, right? Bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics, animals adapting to their environments.

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But the impression that evolutionists often give is that creationists, those who believe in the Bible's history, deny any and all biological changes over time.

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That's not the case. Creationists actually do believe in change over time, changes in biology. Just look at all the dogs in the world, for example.

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Long before Darwin, people, creationists understood that all these different dog breeds are, were formed by human breeders.

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And they were formed by people choosing certain traits that they wanted to emphasize and only breeding certain types of dogs together.

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So we don't think all these very specific breeds of dogs, and all the different species that they're related to, we don't think that those have been around forever.

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There are modern varieties, like the Chihuahua, for example. It wasn't here back at the time of Adam and Eve.

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So creationists recognize that animals can change. And in fact, the expectation from our point of view would be to predict this based on our knowledge of the variety of animals that exist today.

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And the fact that the Bible teaches that all the land vertebrates, the land -dwelling, air -breathing animals in the world are descended from just a few animals, comparatively few, on board

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Noah's Ark. That's what the Bible teaches. There was a worldwide flood. Noah took at least two of each kind of animal on board, the land -dwelling, air -breathing types.

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And so all the dogs in the world probably came from just a pair of wolf -like creatures aboard the

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Ark. And all the potential for variety to form our modern dog breeds was rooted in, was built into those wolf -like creatures from the beginning.

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Now, the Bible would then lead us to expect changes in living things. But it's true, the

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Bible also does lead us to expect that the changes have limits. Because right in the first chapter of Genesis, it says that God created animals and plants according to or after their kinds.

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That phrase is used 10 different times in Genesis chapter one. God made them after their kinds. And some of the verses even speak about animals bringing forth after their kind.

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The idea seems to be just what's obvious from our everyday experience, right? That dogs produce dogs, cats produce cats.

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When mom goes to the hospital, you might wonder if it's gonna be a boy or a girl, the baby that she's gonna bring home.

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But nobody wonders if it's gonna be a chimpanzee this time, because we know that humans bring forth after their kind as well.

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And this is also emphasized by the whole account of the creation week, that God made distinct types of creatures on different days.

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So they had separate origins from one another. Not all animals are related back to a common ancestor millions of years ago, if we believe the history in Genesis.

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Mankind is not related to apes. God made Adam from the dust of the ground and Eve from his rib.

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But that raises a question. The Bible uses the term kind, right?

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It actually doesn't speak of this modern scientific term species. So how does a biblical kind relate to the term species?

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Are those the same thing or are they different things? Well, creation researchers have long realized, even again, prior to the time of Charles Darwin, creationists have realized that a kind is a broader biblical category within which you can have many different species.

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So take the cat kind, for example. Modern cats, even large cats, like lions, tigers, and leopards, these are classified as different species.

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And yet it's pretty clear that they all belong to one kind. One of the ways we know that is not just through their superficial resemblance to one another, but we can check that idea by seeing if we can mate them together and produce offspring.

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And you know what? That has been done in many cases. You can have hybrid cats where lions get together with tigers.

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And if you have a male lion reproducing with a female tiger, you know what you get? You get a liger.

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So these are real strong, healthy cats, not mythical beasts with magical powers. And they help to show us that all cats in the world, ultimately, because lions can't breed with your house cat, but your house cats can breed with a slightly larger cat, which can breed with a slightly larger cat, which can breed with a lion and a tiger.

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And so it's not just cats. We can look at many other groups, just among the mammals, to give you some examples here.

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If you cross a camel and a llama, you will get a kama. If you cross a cow and a buffalo, you get a beefalo.

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A zebra and a donkey makes a zonkey. A zebra and a horse makes a zorse. A goat and a sheep makes a jeep.

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Or I think that's what you drive, right? Jeep. Maybe it's pronounced geep. I don't know on that one.

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Here's a pig and a boar cross. A cross between a polar bear and a grizzly bear makes a pizzly bear or a growler, depending on which one's male and which one's female.

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And the most amazing one of all is, at SeaWorld one time, they had a false killer whale in the same tank as a dolphin.

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And the curators were surprised when one of them became pregnant, and eventually along came a baby walfin calf.

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And so that's just mammals, but the same thing is true with all sorts of different animals and plants as well, showing us the biblical kinds are broader than our modern day species.

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What were the two that make the walfin? A killer, a false killer whale and a dolphin.

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Okay, thank you. And you can look up articles on creation .com. Just type in walfin in the search bar and you'll have a couple of articles come up that describe that.

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All right, so from a biblical perspective, it makes perfect sense that we'd have lots of variety in the world today because God could pre -program that into animals, as well as defects that have occurred since the time of the fall.

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But this evidence helps to show that Noah didn't have to take millions and millions of species on board the ark.

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He just brought two of each basic biblical kind of animal. And then there was lots of potential for diversity within those kinds.

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But you see the way that evolutionary professors often confuse their students or themselves are actually confused on the subject, they seem to assume that any and all change is evidence for evolution.

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When it's really important to distinguish between the types of changes that we're observing. Lots of changes are consistent with creation and you need a particular kind of change to support the evolutionary idea that microbes turned into mankind over millions of years.

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So what types of changes need to be true if evolution is to be plausible?

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Well, we need new genetic information, the instructions in DNA to be produced by natural processes.

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You see, even secular scientists understand that the DNA molecule contains loads and loads of information.

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The DNA is of course, as you know, shaped like a spiral staircase, right? And what

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Francis Crick and his colleague discovered was that there's actually a genetic code, that there's a message written on those stairs.

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Each of the stairs is like a chemical letter and the order, the arrangement of those letters can spell out instructions to make the proteins in our body.

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And so atheists like Richard Dawkins recognize this. He says, there's enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the

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Encyclopedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over. Loads of information in living things.

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And so if those living things all came about by a naturalistic gradual evolutionary process, then you would expect that those changes we observe ought to be the kinds of changes that can write new genetic instructions to create new information.

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And so think about how important this is for the evolutionary account to be correct. At one time in this evolutionary tree of life story, say back at the time when there were only single -celled creatures that had somehow spontaneously emerged from non -life, according to that story, when there were just single -celled creatures around, there were not yet trees in existence, right?

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The information, the instructions on DNA to make a tree bark had not yet arisen.

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And so how did it come about? Natural processes had to write those instructions somehow over time.

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And then again, at the time when trees were around, birds had not yet evolved.

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And so where did the instructions to make bird feathers, for example, come from? And bird beaks and all kinds of other features that birds have.

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And so the challenge that creationists often pose to evolutionists is, when we look at those changes that you say are instances of evolution taking place right before our eyes, are those the kinds of changes that build up organisms, that add brand new information to the biosphere?

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Well, the typical examples do not. And there's almost nothing that evolutionists can point to you that they can even claim is an example of new information arising.

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So let's look at the common changes that they point to, things like natural selection and mutations, and we'll see how these degrade information rather than building it up.

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So natural selection, of course, is a process that creationists observe, just like evolutionary scientists do.

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And we agree that it's a fact of nature. And we can illustrate how this works with considering dogs.

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So we already talked about how our modern breeds of dogs, usually humans have been involved in breeding out certain traits to get the modern dog breeds that we have.

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But even our domestic dogs are related to wolves and to coyotes, to dingoes and jackals.

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And you can see how all these animals sort of look relatively similar to one another. It's not so surprising that they'd be related.

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But how did all this variation come about if we started with just a pair of dogs aboard Noah's Ark, or a pair of wolves, really, wolves?

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Well, let's use kind of as a simplified example to explain how the genetics works, and we're going to illustrate natural selection together.

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So let's say you have a pair of dogs that come off of Noah's Ark, and the genes that code for their fur length comes in two varieties, two flavors.

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And so let's say there's an L gene that codes for long fur, and then there's an S gene which codes for short fur.

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Now, sometimes genes work like this when you have two different flavors of the same gene, they can produce a blended effect.

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And so in this case of an animal like these wolves have an L and an S gene, then they'll have just medium length fur, not long or short.

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And so let's say you have a male and a female that breed together after they get off the ark, and they can produce offspring. And what happens is the offspring will take a random combination of one gene from mom and one gene from dad.

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And so that some of the dogs, some of their puppies will end up with two S's, right? And so those dogs will have short fur, some will end up with an

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L and an S, just like mom and dad, they'll have medium fur, and others will get just the L gene from each parent, and they will have long fur.

33:36

So now so far what's happened on the level of information, have we added any new instructions?

33:43

Have we evolved new information? Not at all. We started with L and S genes, and we just sorted that out in the offspring.

33:49

We still have only L and S genes. But here is where natural selection comes in.

33:55

So let's say after they multiply for its time, they experience a harsh winter, maybe even an ice age.

34:03

Now what sort of dogs are not going to survive in a very cold climate? It'd be the ones with the short fur, right?

34:09

So let's kill off the dogs that have medium and short fur. Only the long fur dogs survive this very harsh winter.

34:15

And so now we've selected away the dogs that are not adapted to the cold climate.

34:21

And what's going to happen when these long fur dogs reproduce? Well, they're of course only going to have dogs with L genes because we've gotten rid of the

34:29

S genes, right? So notice what's happened on the surface level. And evolutionists might point to this and say, this is proof of evolution because we look at the medium fur dogs changing into long fur dogs.

34:41

And there is change that's occurring. But is it evolution? No, because we've not gained information.

34:47

We've actually removed information. We've selected it away and it's limited the potential for future variation, right?

34:56

If you now have a really harsh summer, these long fur dogs are all going to die of heat stroke, right?

35:02

They're not going to evolve backwards if they've lost the instructions. They're not getting brand new information from natural processes alone.

35:11

They're just losing instructions that they previously had. So when we think about the transformation from something more robust than ancient ancestor, like a wolf, into our modern varieties of dog breeds, we're actually undergoing a process of losing information.

35:29

And you can get eventually to a point where you have very little information left at all. You might say that the

35:34

Chihuahuas are swimming in the shallow end of the gene pool. Not a whole lot of information in those guys, right?

35:40

All the genes for bigness have been bred out of them. So Chihuahuas breeding with Chihuahuas are only going to produce small little yappy dogs, aren't they?

35:51

So honest evolutionists who understand natural selection agree actually that it doesn't provide the raw material to give you new information.

36:01

But they say, oh, but you're leaving out the other half of the equation. And that is mutations.

36:08

Now mutations also do occur in nature. There's no question creationists can observe these and we believe in mutations.

36:14

But again, the question for the evolutionists is, are these the types of changes that produce brand new genetic information and build it up over time?

36:22

Or do they destroy and degrade information? Well, certainly overwhelmingly mutations are harmful.

36:29

Often they're copying mistakes. When a parent dog, for example, his

36:34

DNA instructions are copied and passed on to his offspring, you can have typos occurring. And instead of normal healthy legs, you might have a puppy born with short stubby little legs.

36:44

So it is very much like a typo. As you're typing out a phrase, for example, on your keyboard, you might accidentally hit a wrong key and change the word you into the word you knew, which is actually not a word in English.

36:59

So notice that a change has occurred, but it's not an example of new information gaining.

37:04

When it's just a random error, you've actually produced gobbledygook. And so just like in English, it's very likely that by hitting a random key by mistake, you're going to produce gobbledygook.

37:14

The same thing is true with our DNA. A lot of the instructions to build our bodies and to perform different functions in ourselves rely on a lot of complexity.

37:26

And so just to randomly swap out letters, you're going to degrade that information. Now, that's not to say that in principle, it's absolutely impossible that a random change could produce a new meaningful sentence in English, right?

37:42

For example, I came across this sign one time that says violators will be towed and fined $50.

37:50

Now, clearly there's a typo in that sign. Somebody left out an important E, right? And this changed the meaning of the sign.

37:56

It didn't lose meaning altogether. It has a new meaning than what it had before. But as you can sort of intuitively recognize, that would be exceedingly, exceedingly rare that just by chance, a mutation would cause a type of change that would be a gain of information.

38:13

And so when we look at nature, mutations are overwhelmingly destroying information.

38:19

Sometimes it's quite obvious that it's a loss. Like for example, this poor creature here is a rooster who was born with a mutation that destroyed his ability to make feathers.

38:29

So it's just his bare skin that you see. In fact, we call this the TNR mutation, which stands for totally naked rooster.

38:37

So this poor creature, obviously it's a loss. If a mutation has corrupted his ability to make feathers, that's clearly a loss of information.

38:45

But there are other instances where it may not be quite as obvious. For example, this creature is also a poor little mutant bird.

38:55

What they look like when they're healthy is this. It's a budgerigar, but he's got a mutation that causes his feathers to keep growing and growing and not stop growing.

39:06

Now, is this a good example of a gain of information? His feathers grow more than they did, than they're supposed to.

39:12

But no, because again, genetic instructions are very complicated. And so these budgies have a switch that's supposed to tell them to stop making feathers, to stop the growth at a certain point.

39:23

And that switch has been corrupted. And so it's a damage to the control mechanism that has not allowed him to switch off the growth of the feathers at a certain point.

39:35

And so he's certainly no better off than he was before. And most importantly, it's a loss of information.

39:42

Now, what about instances where information gets copied? You know, here's a mutant turtle. I don't know if he's ninja, but he's got two heads there.

39:51

And evolutionists like to point to duplications and say, well, see, this is clearly something is there that wasn't there before.

39:59

This is a good example of new information arising by mutations. But if you read two copies of the same newspaper, are you twice as informed as you were the first time?

40:10

Only if you didn't read carefully, right? Because the issue is we don't just want evolutionists to explain how you can get a second turtle head after you already have the instructions to make the first one.

40:22

That's not so hard to explain. What we want them to explain is how do you get the instructions to make a head in the first place?

40:29

And you can't simply get all the new machinery of life by duplicating things that were already here.

40:36

We want to explain how these things came to be in the first place. Now, all this is not to say that there's no such thing as a beneficial mutation.

40:47

I would say be careful, don't make that claim that there are no beneficial mutations. There are, what

40:52

I'm saying is that information gaining mutations, if they happen at all, are exceedingly rare. So what's a good example of a beneficial mutation?

41:00

Well, here's a real life example that Darwin observed. A lot of islands, small islands, are populated by insects that are wingless, beetles that have no wings.

41:11

They're actually born without wings. And yet if you compare those beetles to beetles on the mainland that look very, very similar, they've got wings.

41:19

And so Darwin speculated about why this might be the case. And it's been a debate over the years. He said, well, these islands are very windy and it seems like having wings on a windy island could actually be harmful to you.

41:34

Because if the animals, if the beetles fly around, they might be more likely to get blown into the sea and drown and not pass on their

41:40

DNA to the next generation. So it might actually be a help to have no wings on a windy island.

41:48

Now, from the most recent research on this, it seems that it's more likely, still due to the wind, but just that it takes too much energy to fly around.

41:56

It's much easier to walk along and find your mate on these windy islands. And so that's more likely the reason why these beetles, over time, they're born wingless, the whole population.

42:07

But in either case, it seems that having a loss of wings is actually an advantage to the beetles in this particular environment, the environment of the windy island.

42:19

So defects can actually be helpful, but they're still losses of information. We don't want evolutionists to tell us how beetles lost their wings.

42:28

What we need them to show is how those instructions to make wings came about in the first place.

42:36

So the bottom line here is that the changes we observe in living things are going downhill informationally, not uphill in the way evolutionists need.

42:46

So we've looked at three arguments for evolution, vestigial structures, similarities, the changes in living things, and the last one we're going to take a look at is the cruelty in nature.

42:58

Now, this one might not sound like a scientific argument, and that's correct. It's more of a theological argument for evolution.

43:06

And how does it go? Well, think about it this way. Have you folks ever watched nature documentaries on TV from Discovery Channel, PBS, Nova, and so forth?

43:17

A lot of these nature documentaries have the narration done by Sir David Attenborough, British naturalist.

43:24

And he is a thoroughgoing evolutionist. Now, a lot of Christians, maybe you yourself have felt this way, get frustrated when you watch these programs and think, why do they always give the credit to nature or the credit to evolution?

43:37

Rather than recognizing the amazing sophistication of the creativity in nature, it's clearly the handiwork of God.

43:46

Well, a lot of Christians have written letters to David Attenborough and asked him that very question. And yet Attenborough has a ready response that he gives on a number of occasions.

43:56

He says this, when you creationists talk about God creating, you always instance hummingbirds or orchids, sunflowers, and beautiful things.

44:06

But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in Africa that's going to make him blind.

44:15

And I ask those creationists, are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all merciful

44:21

God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God designed this parasitic worm?

44:27

You're saying he's the designer of all life, right? Did he design these parasites? Because that doesn't seem to me to coincide with a

44:34

God who's full of mercy. Now, I think that is a sobering challenge from Attenborough.

44:41

And it's something that Christians would do well to think about how we would answer. But I do think that Bible believing

44:49

Christians have a sound answer to this question because we are not only claiming that God designed the world and then went away like a deistic

45:00

God. No, we believe everything the Bible tells us about that early history of mankind.

45:06

And that is not just that God made a good world in the beginning, but also that God told Adam and Eve not to eat from a certain tree.

45:13

And if they did, they would surely die, right? And so it's a consequence of man's sin that God cursed the ground and said, now it's gonna bring forth thorns and thistles.

45:22

Now you're gonna return to the dust. Now you're gonna have to work by the sweat of your brow. Now pregnancy is gonna be painful and so forth.

45:29

And so the fall actually affected the world. It affected nature. And so if you take the history in Genesis as sober, real history, if you take it in a straightforward way, then you can answer

45:41

Attenborough's challenge. You can say that God didn't make things filled with parasites and disease and brokenness.

45:47

No, the world was made good. And it's a result of the fall that today it's groaning and travailing in the pains of childbirth, as it says in Romans chapter eight.

45:57

I like this illustration that another well -known creation speaker gives. He says he went to a museum one time where people were standing around this statue, a

46:05

Greek sculpture, and they were admiring it, saying it's magnificent, beautiful, incredible. But a little boy standing nearby said, what are you folks talking about?

46:12

It looks broken to me. And really both views are correct. There's a remnant of beauty in this statue, artistry that's there that we can recognize, but there's also brokenness.

46:24

And you realize the same thing is true about the world that we live in today. We live in a world that's marred by sin and the curse, a world that's longing to be redeemed, again, as Romans chapter eight says.

46:36

And oftentimes we as Christians want to point non -Christians to the beauty that we see in nature, that, oh, look at this majestic sunset.

46:42

Can't you see that there's a God of love? But the non -Christian looks at the same world and he realizes, no, the world is messed up.

46:49

It's a horrible place. It's broken. But you see, the Bible actually makes sense of both of those perspectives.

46:55

Both things are true. There is plenty of beauty and majesty in creation. And it points to a master designer of the universe, but the world is also broken.

47:04

And the Bible explains that as well. It's a consequence of our sin. Fortunately, the

47:09

Bible also tells us that God is not gonna leave the world in the state that it's in today. It teaches that not only is

47:15

God a creator, but he is the redeemer as well. And that's why he sent his son on a rescue mission from heaven to die on a cross, to pay for our own sins so that we could be reconciled to our creator, but also ultimately to restore all things in nature to himself.

47:30

As we read in Colossians one, that in him, in Jesus, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

47:45

So let's review what we've learned today about this question of, is there genuine design in nature or is it an illusion?

47:52

We've looked at four major reasons to accept evolution and seen that actually, when you look at those details, just like the

47:58

Martian landscape that we saw, the details help to confirm creation.

48:04

So we looked at vestigial structures and saw that in principle, they're not a problem for creation, but the vast majority of them are actually functional organs after all, not functionless vestiges of our evolutionary past.

48:17

We looked at similarities in living things and seen that these don't point to a common ancestor, they point to a common designer of all life.

48:25

The changes we observe happening in nature, in living things, aren't examples of new information increasing in the genome, they're examples of information losses and they're consistent with changes within biblical kinds.

48:38

And last, we looked at the cruelty in nature and saw that it's consistent with the creator having made a good world, but it being fallen as a result of our sin.

48:49

So the bottom line is that living things still shout design. We have every reason to recognize the handiwork of our majestic creator.

48:59

Now, I hope that's been encouraging to you and if you want to learn more about design or many other questions that you may have about whether Genesis can be trusted, how to reconcile science and the

49:10

Bible, well, that's why as a ministry, we produce all the resources that we do. We have, in fact, some special deals on offer just for our

49:19

Zoom calls like this one. So if you want to take advantage, one of our key resources, our best book, you folks are all probably creation junkies.

49:28

And so if you don't already have this book, then it really needs to be one that is on your bookshelf. And you can get it for a two for one deal.

49:35

It's $14. And so you can get two for the price of one. If you just write down the code that I've got on the screen there, go to our web store at creation .com.

49:44

And as you're checking out, put in the code CAB, creation answers book 241.

49:51

And so what this book does, it answers 60 of the most asked questions about creation and evolution. It covers, there's a chapter on dinosaurs.

49:58

There's a chapter on natural selection, one on carbon dating, one on distant starlight.

50:03

There's a chapter on how Cain got his wife since he wasn't able and so forth. Thank you if you're laughing.

50:11

I can't hear you. Grown, yeah, thank you. Thanks for the groans. Another important tool is our creation magazine.

50:19

Again, I think that every Christian home needs to have this. It's a great way to shore up your doubts, help to strengthen your faith and help you to pass it on to your children and grandchildren.

50:30

So you can order it there at the web link on the screen there, creation .com slash mag. It's full color, comes out four times a year.

50:38

There's a children's section in each issue. We interview PhD Bible believing scientists in each issue.

50:44

And we also feature an amazing animal that illustrates marvelous design.

50:50

For example, not that long ago, we had an article about the mimic octopus. Now octopuses are fascinating animals in general.

50:57

They're very intelligent and they can typically change their skin to camouflage themselves. But the mimic octopus in particular changes color, texture and shape to impersonate at least 15 different animals.

51:11

And so let me just run a quick little video of this creature in action. That's the mimic octopus.

51:17

He can sometimes put all his tentacles behind him and swim on the sea floor to impersonate a flatfish.

51:23

In other cases, he recoils into a hole and has a black and white striped pattern that imitates a deadly poisonous sea snake.

51:31

He can also imitate a lionfish, just sort of floating in the water, letting the current take him like this poisonous lionfish here, something that other animals in the ocean don't want to mess with.

51:44

And watch him undergo the transformation he undergoes right here. It's just incredible to see him rapidly change his texture at will.

51:53

And some of the things he does, we don't even fully understand, walking along the sea floor and so on. But anyway, that's the kind of thing we discuss in Creation Magazine in great depth.

52:05

But also it's easy to understand for laypeople, so it's not super technical. So the deal

52:10

I mentioned for Creation Magazine, if you'd like to subscribe today, you can get a two -year subscription and we'll throw in a whole bunch of extras as a bonus.

52:19

So if you just, it's $50 for a two -year subscription, but you'll also get a digital subscription for free and three

52:27

DVDs, sleeved copies of these DVDs you see on the screen here that we throw in. So all you have to do is go to creation .com

52:35

slash mag and then choose the option that says two -year print -only subscription.

52:41

It'll add the digital automatically later. So choose the print -only option and then enter the code that you see on the screen there, the 2yrcm, 2 -Y -R -C -M.

52:52

One of the resources that I'll mention briefly is we've got a lot of DVDs as well. And this is my favorite one,

52:58

Evolution's Achilles Heels features 15 Bible -believing scientists demolishing evolution from a scientific perspective.

53:05

And this video features lots of great animations and stuff to make it easy to understand and ends with a gospel presentation.

53:12

So our website again is creation .com. I hope you folks will take advantage of that. And I'll conclude with just one more verse from Hebrews.

53:20

Actually a pair of verses here. Hebrews 3, 4 says that for every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is

53:28

God. And hopefully that's the lesson that you've learned tonight that evolutionists often give the credit to nature, right?

53:34

But once we recognize that the design in nature is not an illusion, then we can give glory to the creator.

53:42

After all, the previous verse says the builder of a house has more honor than the house itself. So I thank you for your attention and I will leave it there.

53:52

And if Robin wants to unshare my screen, then I'd be happy to take your questions.

53:59

Can you go back three screens? Oh, sure. Yeah. To which one now? You want the like the

54:04

Creation Magazine one? Just before you got to that octopus at the end there, he looks like he's a clump of something walking on two legs.

54:19

At the end of that video, did you see that? Yeah. He was sort of balled up. Yeah. Yeah. I know what you're talking about.

54:25

I'm not sure if he was holding on to something, if he was like wrapped around a piece of coral or something, or if that was just him with most of his tentacles wrapped around his body.

54:35

But yeah, I'm not sure if he was trying to imitate something there or just, you know, just having a sort of strange behavior.

54:43

I don't know enough about it to really comment more than that. Okay. So this is our question and answer.

54:50

We don't have Terry here today. She usually asks the questions and I didn't,

54:56

I saw a lot of comments in the chat section, like the bengal cats are a new creation.

55:04

I didn't know that, or a new, you know.

55:10

The liger, are you referring to? Well, she was, somebody was talking about bengal. I did have a question about the liger, those hybrids.

55:19

I think it's still sharing my screen. Do you want to? Sorry, Robin, do you want to just share my screen?

55:25

And then I'll be able to see the chat as well. I'm not sure why it doesn't let me stop sharing.

55:31

Try it. My computer cut out during the presentation.

55:37

Okay, there, I think I just got it. Yeah. Okay. Then I just have to select the chat.

55:43

All right. Can those hybrids then mate or no? I like,

55:48

I heard like the zonkeys can't. Yeah, in a lot of cases, like a mule typically cannot.

55:57

But in rare instances, they have been known to. And with some of the others that I showed, like ligers can, they often are fertile.

56:08

So they can go on to have their own offspring. And some, if they're mated with another, you know, like tiger or something, they'll be called like, or a lion, they'll be called a lie liger or a tie gone.

56:19

And same thing with the wolfen went on to have more offspring.

56:27

But so the important thing here is, you know, sometimes people raise that as if to say, well, if they are sterile, then maybe they don't belong to the same created kind after all.

56:39

But I don't think that's the most relevant factor because for all sorts of reasons, things can get broken. And so you might not be able to reproduce any longer.

56:48

You know, like a lot of domestic dogs, even though they're classified as the same species, you know, a

56:55

Great Dane might not be able to mate with a Chihuahua just for physiological reasons.

57:01

Yeah, so there are lots of reasons why animals might not be able to produce offspring, might be infertile.

57:09

But if they can hybridize, if two species can hybridize in the first place, that would be a good indication that they did descend from a common ancestor, that their ancestor had more of the variety present in the

57:22

DNA. It didn't have all this, you know, like a purebred dog. Purebred is sort of an ironic term, right?

57:29

Because really purebred is the same as inbred, if you think about it, right? It's like selecting out, getting rid of all the variation, the potential for variation, and just making sure it has this very limited, very specific set of DNA instructions.

57:46

So it's just going to reproduce its type exactly, and a Chihuahua and a Chihuahua breed together, and they're going to have a

57:51

Chihuahua, you know. But the original wolf kind had more potential to diversify into everything from a

57:57

Chihuahua to a Dachshund, to a Dalmatian, and so forth.

58:03

Yeah, so I hope that answers that. Yeah, our regular

58:09

Diane has seen the Jeeps, and she said that they're in Italy, they're pronounced

58:15

Jeeps. Isn't that correct, Diane? Okay. No, they're pronounced Geeps. Geeps, all right.

58:22

Goat, sheep, Geeps. That makes sense, because goat has the G sound, not the

58:28

J sound. I heard in Italy, there was a herd of sheep, goats, and Geeps on the road.

58:36

It was really cool. Yeah, and so just a little more information on that.

58:48

So the way, sometimes it's not even just species that can actually produce offspring together, you know, animals from different species, but it's even higher taxonomic categories.

59:02

So the next level up from species is the genus, or plural genera. Sometimes two animals from different genera can hybridize and produce offspring.

59:12

And so we have articles on creation .com about that as well. So the biblical kind actually probably, you know, it doesn't exactly map on to our modern scientific classification system, but it probably, with many animals, it tends to fall around the family level.

59:30

And so it may have only been a few thousand, like two or 3 ,000 different basic biblical kinds, of animals that were on board the

59:42

Ark. If you take into account all the different land -dwelling, air -breathing vertebrates that have ever existed, including extinct ones like dinosaurs and so forth, you don't need millions of creatures on board.

59:53

You just need two of each kind. And if the kind corresponds to the family level, that would greatly, greatly reduce the number of animals that Noah had to fit on the

01:00:01

Ark. Definitely. Did anybody else have any questions? We had a little banter going on in the chat, but we didn't have a lot of questions.

01:00:13

Anybody? You can unmute and turn your cameras on. I'm going to, I can stop the recording right now.