Apologetics Session 9 - The Bible - Part 5

As Believers, should we have a problem with science? We shouldn't.

Because true science confirms the Bible. It's false science that contradicts it.

You would think, right? Because really it's discovering the world that's around us.

And if God has created this world, if God has also given us the Bible, we shouldn't find any conflicts between the two, right?

And there aren't any conflicts between the two, is going to be my presupposition here, or my statement.

But what we find is, because men interpret the Bible, and because men interpret data and experiments done in science, that's where the conflicts arise.

So, if we look at just this little chart here, we're seeing that, okay,

God has provided, through specific revelation, the knowledge of his scriptures, through the Holy Spirit, to every believer.

And through general revelation, God has provided nature. Is there a conflict between the two?

No. God's provided both, and he understands both. Man's interpretation of the scripture, however, theology, and the general revelation given by God, science, this is where we tend to have our problems.

But, we should be able to resolve these things. And we shouldn't be at war with science, but over the history, there have been various times that scientists have gone after the church, and different various times the church has gone after the scientists.

So, before we get into some specific things, first I want Phil to read my card here, and say, what's the title of my position at work,

Phil? Well, Chief Scientist. That's right,

I'm Chief Scientist at work. If you don't believe me, here's the card. I appreciated that title when they gave it to me.

Does that mean we trust the science? Right. But then I saw an org chart later, that had all my companies, you know, like managers, and who's under them, and everything, and my title was actually

Junior Chief Scientist. So, I was knocked down a few pegs there. I was like, how could you be a

Junior Chief Scientist? Is this your junior year now? Jumbo shrimp.

Military intelligence. Well, he who exalts himself shall be humbled, right? That's probably where that was.

But let's talk about some principles we should remember when we're trying to think about how science and the

Bible mesh and or collide. So, the first one is that the Bible was not written as a science textbook.

The Bible doesn't contradict science, but it also doesn't attempt to explain science in any great detail.

The Bible was written by God to explain Himself to His creation, to us.

The Bible is His letter to us, so that we may know Him. Now, at times, the Bible will provide some scientific truths to convey a message of the reader of the

Scripture, but the scientific truth isn't going to be explicitly the reason for the passage.

So, sometimes we've gotten in trouble here as Christians to say, well, you know, we try to fit something in and say, well, here's a scientific, you know, evidence of a passage, and, you know, because we do some abstract thing, we pull something out of context.

But the scientists do the same thing, because they sometimes will look at the Bible and say, oh, ha -ha, the

Bible says this. And they don't realize that, you know, they've taken something out of context, the particular passage they're looking at may be a figurative passage, and that gets into such importance with what

Ivan's going to go over, which is hermeneutics, which is, you know, context for sure, cross -references from Bible verse to Bible verse for sure, and then language, what kind of language is the author using?

Is the author using poetic language? Is he using prophetic language? Or, you know, some situation where we should consider, you know, the words that the author is using, and not necessarily jump to conclusions right away.

And we're going to see a lot of examples of that in what we look at. But when Ivan goes through hermeneutics, that's going to be really a study on how to study the

Bible, which will help us. So that happens. That's the first thing. The Bible is not necessarily written as a science textbook.

The second thing is, science often, and scientists, often display themselves as the authors of fact and truth, when in reality, science is a very progressive discipline.

And it often is not reaching an end goal. It's continually changing. I don't want to use that word, evolving, do

I? But what happens is, often the current theory of the day is listed as, this is fact.

But then as discoveries continue, we find out that that fact wasn't as solid as the scientists thought, so then they say, well, that was just due to a misunderstanding because of a lack of data.

But now, here is the truth, and this is where we are. And it continually changes.

We need to understand this, because when somebody says, there's something in the Bible that contradicts something that science says, do we know for certain that that scientific truth is really a fact?

Are we rock solid that something known for certain is to be a scientific fact? And even if it is, does it conflict with an interpretation of the

Scripture that is beyond all that, meaning that have they, or have we, interpreted the

Scripture correctly in the given situation? So that's the second point, that science is always changing.

Then the third issue with all of this, really, is that both sinful men are performing the scientific experiments, and sinful men are also interpreting the

Bible. So both are prone to mistakes. And in particular with scientists, but this can be true of the church men also, in an experiment there can be a bias, or a lack of thoroughness, or just an incomplete experiment.

There's a lot of things that can lead to false conclusions in the scientific world. So all these things need to be considered as we go forward.

But we shouldn't be afraid of science. I think as believers, we should be excited about the world that God has created, and we should be inquisitive in our minds.

When the Bible talks about us being created in the image of God, there's a lot of tremendous things that God has put into our nature about wanting to discover, wanting to create, wanting to find out.

We're inquisitive. We want to know things. And what a great opportunity we have to discover the worlds that He's created.

And some of the things we've discovered so far are just mind -boggling. It's amazing that God has allowed men to discover the things we have, and where we have progressed in technology, for sure.

We haven't progressed at all in a sense of trying to become better people on our own.

It's the moral nature, the sin nature, that sort of thing. But as far as the gathering of information and the ability to use the physical resources on this earth for communication and for experimentation and creativity, it's just fantastic.

And that should be just a thrill for any believer, really, to find out more and more about His world.

But let's talk about first some of the conflicts that we have seen over the ages with scientists and church people.

Oh, look at that topic. Flat earthers. Those church people are flat earthers.

Have you heard that somewhere before? You haven't heard that? I've heard a lot of flat earthers try to use the

Bible to prove their theories. Okay. Well, there's some interesting history with the flat earth stuff, for sure.

Was it really ever taught by the church? Well, in fact, it really wasn't. It really was never taught by the church.

I'll read some quotes here. Christianity has often been held responsible for promoting the flat earth theory.

And this was in the 1500s, 1600s, mostly, that they said it was prevalent. But then later on, that's when the accusations came.

Yet it was really only a handful of so -called intellectual scholars throughout the centuries claiming to represent the church who held to a flat earth.

Most of these were ignored by the church. Yet somehow their writings made it into early history books as official

Christian viewpoint. And you can look up the references on this. I'm going to get into some more quotes in a little bit.

This man, Stephen Jay Gould, stated, There was never a period of flat earth darkness among the scholars.

All major medieval scholars accepted the earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology.

You know, the Greek world knew that back in 240 BC. So this isn't necessarily something that was a big debate.

But it became a big debate later. So here's what happened. So historian

Jeffrey Burton Russell says that the flat earth flourished mostly between 1870 and 1920.

Well, there's some key things that happened during that period. And it had to do with the ideological setting created by struggles over biological evolution.

James Hanom wrote, The myth that the people of the Middle Ages thought the earth was flat appears to date from the 17th century as part of a campaign by Protestants against Catholic teaching.

And that was true. But it gained, this is where it takes off, but it gained currency in the 19th century.

So the 1800s, the late 1800s, thanks to inaccurate history such as John William Draper's History of Conflict Between Religion and Science and Andrew Dixon White's A History of the

Warfare of Science with Theology and Christendom. Atheist agnostics championed the conflict thesis for their own purposes.

But historical research gradually demonstrated that Draper and White had propagated more fantasy than facts.

They basically made it up. They made it up for their own purposes to show that Christians were unintellectual.

They ignored proper scientific revelation. And that the church was full of people who weren't using their minds.

Well, they had some help, too. True. Do you know when they actually confirmed that the earth was round?

Well, I think that was to the 240 BC, the Greeks, Aristarchus. I don't think the credit was given to Aristarchus in the things that I looked up.

I think it was, it might have been Aristophanes, maybe. Aristophanes, yeah.

But that was a, that was really a, they actually calculated the diameter here.

Pretty accurately. It was fairly accurate. The circumference, yeah. Oh, it was the circumference, yeah.

And you can get the diameter through that. So it really was never an issue at all.

But, because scientists were butting heads with Christians over evolution, scientists wanted to show that Christians were locked in some kind of a, you know, uneducated stupor that wouldn't allow them to, you know, actually look at science with a proper eye.

But they did get some help because there was a book written in the early 1800s called A History of the

Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. And you had to have heard this story because this was a book that was written that was mostly fiction.

But as you can see by the title, it says A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. Irving himself admitted he was apt to indulge the imagination.

The book concocted an argument between those who commissioned Columbus to go out basically saying, you're going to sail off the edge of the earth.

And, of course, we know that there were some famous things that came from that, which was

Kansas' album, The Point of No Return. We all learned that at some point.

We probably learned it in school. But that was what was taught, that this whole idea came from the church and the

Bible. Well, after all this misleading information, what does the Bible really say?

Okay. What happens is people look at verses like this in Job.

And it says, Listen closely to the thunder of his voice and the rumbling that goes out of his mouth. Under the whole heavens he lets it loose, and it's lightning to the ends, the corners of the earth.

Now, how many times in the Bible do we hear the four corners of the earth? A metaphoric description of the earth.

Quite a bit. Yeah. Right. Is the Bible speaking of a literal four corners of a flat, you know, plane?

Well, skeptics have argued that. But the Bible's use of this figurative phrase was never intent to mean that.

And if you think about just common everyday language, Shakespeare wrote, All the world desires her, from the four corners of the earth they come, to kiss this shrine, the mortal breathing saint.

This is from The Merchant of Venice. Now, no one assumes that Shakespeare was under the assumption that the earth was flat.

But he was using a metaphor, a poetic language, a figurative speech, to describe from the whole earth, from everywhere on the earth.

And the Bible does the same. It's using common everyday phrases that we all use.

Now, what about some other verses in the Bible? There's some other ones that say about the foundations of the earth never being shaken.

Because of that, people say, well, that means that people think it's like kind of something mounted on a plane and, you know, it's fixed in space and it doesn't rotate or move or anything like that.

Right. And the sun doesn't rise or set. Right. We'll get to that in a second. But right now we're thinking about the flatness of the earth.

So it says this, in Isaiah 40, 22, It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.

Now, we know the heavens aren't a curtain, and we know that a tent, you know, it's not a tent per se.

But when he says the circle of the earth, you know, this doesn't say like a circle of the earth.

It says above the circle of the earth. And that's the key, is you need to understand when we're talking about something that's poetic, something that's using like or as, and that's getting into the hermeneutics again.

So, you know, how to interpret a verse. So, where does he get this idea of the circle of the earth?

Why would he say that? If he thought the earth was flat. Other verses,

Proverbs 8, 27, also espouse around earth. And then there's an interesting verse, verses like in this in Luke 17, where it depicts the

Lord's return. And he says that the activity of the people on the earth during that time, some will be sleeping in bed, nighttime.

Some will be working in the fields, daytime. Well, how can it be both night and day if the sun is illuminating a flat plane?

You know, there has to be a concept of rotation and, you know, revolving around the sun, or the fact the earth goes around the sun.

So, the Bible isn't saying that it's a scientific textbook, but you need to be careful when you're looking at verses like this and making assumptions that, saying, well, the earth is never going to be shaken.

That means it's on some kind of a foundation that's fixed and not movable. You know, that's a mistake.

So, being careful with your language, not making assumptions, and then examining verses that actually say something, like above the circle of the earth, you know, is where we need to go when we're interpreting the

Bible and interpreting, you know, common everyday knowledge in science that we certainly readily understand.

So, I don't think there's any conflicts here. There were people that were pushing that flat earth like the church was teaching it.

I don't think the church teaches it today, and I don't think the Bible says it. But they certainly try to make a big deal out of it.

Now, this is a great one. I love this one. The stars falling from heaven. Did you know there was a big controversy over this verse?

Well, there is. Revelation 6, 13. And the stars of the sky fell to the earth as a fig tree casts its unripe figs when shaken by a great wind.

Stars falling from the sky to the earth. Okay. I am going to now talk about a blog, a science blog, between an atheist and Jimmy Carter.

Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter... I have a real problem with Jimmy Carter, okay?

I'm just going to say that right out the... He wasn't a scientist. A lot of people believe he's a genius because he's a nuclear physicist,

I believe, is his background. And a lot of people also believe he's a very dedicated born -again believer.

He may be a scientist. As far as him being a Christian, knowing what the Bible says, I don't think he knows very much at all.

I've seen a lot of interviews with this man. See, I don't mind as much people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and the people who are very clear about where they are and what they say.

A man like Jimmy Carter is more like a deceiver who mixes truth and error and tries to, you know, convince you of something that, you know, you can twist things the way you want them to be.

So let's read what's going on here. So the blogger says, Thank you so much for talking with me,

President Carter. As I warn, I'm going to ask you some tough questions. Did God write the

Bible? Answer. God inspired the Bible, but he did not write every word in the

Bible. We know, for instance, that stars can't fall on the earth. That's our verse. Stars are much larger than the earth, so the earth would be smushed, right?

It wouldn't work out. And again, well, we'll get to this in a second. That was a limitation of knowledge of the universe or physics or astronomy at that time, meaning that the writers didn't understand what they were writing down.

They just wrote down what they thought. And God didn't inspire it, and God didn't know how he created the heavens and the earth.

Basically, the Bible was made up by men. It's basically what he said. So let's go on with Jimmy here. Should we approach the

Bible literally or metaphorically? Well, sometimes, as we said, there is metaphoric language.

There's poetic language. But this is what Jimmy says. When we go to the Bible, we should keep in mind that the basic principles of the

Bible are taught by God, but written down by human beings deprived of modern -day knowledge. Again, they weren't smart enough to know what we know now.

So there is some fallibility in the writings of the Bible. There's errancy. It's an error.

Now, we know from what Matt already delivered to us, we don't think there's any error in the Scriptures at all.

And he says, but the basic principles are applicable to my life, and I don't find any conflict among them. Now, the blogger goes on and talks about the

Bible and errancy, which Carter denies, and then moral issues like homosexuality and other things.

At the end of this, the blogger states, the problem I have with Carter's approach, however, is that from his starting point,

I fail to see why you need the Bible at all. That is, if you must constantly use your own moral intuitions to correct what men wrote down and made mistakes, and correct scientific knowledge to understand which parts of the

Bible are to be meant literally and which require a more nuanced approach, then why bother with the

Bible at all? Why not just trust your own moral judgments directly and cut out the middleman?

The blogger is right. If the Bible is right, it is right, and let it speak for itself.

If it is wrong, it is wrong, and we should ignore it, and we can throw it out. There's no point in dancing around phrases or statements to make yourself comfortable and make the

Bible say what you want it to say. Both atheists and Christians should be able to agree on this.

So, with all that said, Carter made an assumption that says, well, the

Bible's in error because the stars fall from heaven. That's silly. That can't happen.

But should there be a controversy over this? Okay. Here's the lengthier verse.

Phil, could you read this just up here? And I looked when he broke the sixth seal, and there was a great earthquake, and the sun became as black as sackcloth made of hair, and the whole moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as a big tree casts its unripe figs when shaken by the wind.

Okay. So this verse in the book of Revelation is a prophesied event, and we see it several times in other sections of the

Bible. Rick, could you read Matthew 24 -29? Immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from the sky, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

And John, could you read Mark 13? But in those days after the tribulation, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers that are in heaven will be shaken.

So all three of these verses, these sections of Scripture, are very similar, talking about the same event.

And we should mention a few things at this point. First, Bible critics also say that because we're talking about stars falling from heaven, the only way that could happen would be if we believe in a flat earth again.

They think this is another flat earth verse. So let's just get that out of the way right off the bat.

But they also would say, oh, well, here's another problem for you Bible people.

The moon does not emanate light. It says right here, the moon will not give its light.

The moon does not emanate light. It reflects light. We all know that. But the Bible writers didn't know that.

And that's because God didn't tell them that. They weren't smart enough to know that. But what is the author trying to say here?

Is he trying to make a scientific statement about heavenly bodies, or is he trying to warn the listeners of a coming cataclysmic event that will involve extreme physical phenomena?

People in everyday language use things like the moonlight. And there's a song called

Dancing in the Moonlight. And if you look up moonlight in the dictionary itself, there is a word in the dictionary which says moonlight.

So the fact that the Bible uses light from the moon, we know what that means.

It's not like a mystery. But that's just a little aside in those verses, and we'll get to the meat of it right now.

I'm slightly different from moonshine. Yeah, moonshine. Some of that too, right?

So if we break down these verses, it says stars falling from heaven. Well, the Greek word itself will be falling or falling.

It is an accurate translation of this Greek root word, pythto. But we have to understand falling can mean a few different things.

The Bible says we can fall from grace. That doesn't mean a literal falling in elevation or altitude.

The Roman Empire fell. Earlier in the Book of Revelation, the apostle

John writes, Remember, therefore, from where you have fallen. He's writing to the church.

So the Greek word pythto can literally mean to fall in altitude. But sometimes it means a failure or a lessening from a previous state.

So how are we going to break this down? Let's look at the verses. It says the sun will be darkened. The moon will not give its light.

The stars will fall from heaven. The powers of the heavens will be shaken. Well, this event is also cataloged in the

Old Testament quite a bit. So the Old Testament is talking about a great day of judgment that the

Lord is going to bring. Let's look at these verses. Dave, could you read

Isaiah 13 for us here? Remember, the stars of heaven and our constellations will not flash forth their lights.

The sun will be dark when it rises, and the moon will not shed its light. Okay, Jacob, could you read

Joel 2 .10? Before them the earth quakes, the heavens tremble, the sun and moon grow dark, but the stars lose their brightness.

For the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision, and the sun and moon grow dark, and the stars lose their brightness.

And Dave, Joel 2 .31? The sun will be turned into darkness and the moon into blood before the great and awesome day of the

Lord comes. And it will come about that whatever calls on the name of the

Lord will be delivered. Now, I highlighted that last part in red for a reason.

Because this is a scary future prophetic event where the very foundations of the universe and the world are going to be shaken.

And this is going to be the great day of judgment for the Lord. But Joel throws in this sentence, this verse here, after that and says,

It will come about that whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be delivered. There is going to be mercy still for anyone who is willing to turn and repent.

This is a scary, scary day, a scary, scary time. But God is gracious even in that time if somebody is willing to turn.

And that's something I was just really excited to throw in there. Because that is going to be a very, very horrific time for those who dwell on the earth.

So there are also many other verses in the Old Testament I didn't quote there that actually talk about that same event and have the same similar wording.

And we can look at phrases like, what does it mean that the moon is going to be turned to blood? Well, based upon the context of the verses, we compare it with the other verses with the moon.

It says the moon is going to be darkened. So it apparently means that the moon is going to have a darkish color, maybe, possibly that.

It might be a miracle sort of thing. But it might be a reddish color, a darkish reddish color.

But it will not emanate its light anymore. It will not reflect the light of the sun. So something is going to happen to the moon.

It's going to be a visible change that the people on the earth are going to be able to see. Could it be an eclipse? Could be.

A lunar eclipse? There's going to be a lot of things. It's probably going to be more, it seems, like a very, very much a supernatural event,

I would say. Because a lot of things are going to happen at the same time. So it talks about the sun being darkened, the moon being darkened, not giving its light.

What about the stars of the Old Testament verses? It all says that they are dimming in light, similar to the sun and the moon.

All of them say that. So in the New Testament, when it talks about the stars falling, which could be a literal falling or a diminishing from their previous state, how should these verses be interpreted?

Well, if we cross -reference the same events and see that the stars will lose their brightness, it makes sense from a hermeneutical standpoint to determine that the meaning of the verse in a reasonable interpretation is that the stars of the heavens will also be dimmed as the sun and the moon are.

And that's just Bible interpretation. That's where a lot of these arguments get into trouble.

And, you know, it's not really... It's not hard for a believer to go down this path, but if you take a verse out of context and don't realize what's going on in the biblical statements, you take it as, like, well, that's a scientific error.

You know, you need to comb through. You need to find out what's really going on. And so there's no problem here.

There's no conflicts here. But there is a very great day of judgment coming, and I think that's the thing that people should be taking note of, not little scientific, you know, facts that they think are embedded in the

Scripture somewhere. So that was another controversy. How about that raspy rabbit? This one comes home to me, because after I was a born -again believer,

I wanted to tell everyone about Jesus. And there was a particular friend of mine who really wanted to mock me really badly.

He was in college at the time, and he was taking a philosophy class. And for some reason, his philosopher went into these two verses, one in Leviticus and one in Deuteronomy.

And we don't have to read these, but it basically talks about the rabbit chewing the cud. So it's like, well, what's up with this rabbit chewing the cud?

So my friend was hopping around the room like, rabbit's chewing the cud, rabbit's chewing the cud, Bible's wrong, Bible's wrong,

Bible's wrong. Because that's not the definition of what chewing the cud is.

And we can get into the definition of what this is right now. But his philosophy teacher, as many philosophy teachers in college these days, are trying to knock down the

Bible and knock down the faith of those people who go there. Which is a shame. And they're going to be held accountable for that, by the way.

But the Bible does clearly say that rabbits or hares chew the cud. Okay, it does say that.

Nobody's arguing that. And in the modern day scientific classification system, animals that chew the cud are called ruminants.

Okay, and here's a list of ruminant animals. They have four stomach compartments. They swallow their food in one stomach compartment, it's partially digested, then the food is regurgitated back up.

I'm glad you all had dinner. It's going to get better from here, believe me. And then they swallow it back into a different compartment.

They process it called rumination. We know that. We know what's going on there. But is the

Bible wrong? After all, rabbits are not considered ruminants. They do not have four stomach compartments.

How could they possibly chew the cud? What's up? What's up, man?

That rabbit's got his buffaloed again, just like Elmer Fudd, right? Oh my goodness. Well, we need to consider what rabbits do.

Again, we need to consider what the Bible's trying to teach there, and we're also trying to consider what rabbits actually do.

They engage in an activity called secatrophy. I'm not sure

I pronounced that right. But they actually poop out two different kinds of feces.

One's the more common, harder feces, but then there's a softer fecal pellet called secatropes.

And these are small pellets of partially digested food that are passed through the animal but then re -ingested. And it's part of their normal digestive process.

I don't want to get too into this, especially this pass -through -the -anus part. Basically, the rabbit re -ingests these things, and they serve as an important source of nutrition for the animal.

Is this the same as chewing the cud? Well, in the final analysis, it is. Because what they're doing is they're chewing or re -ingesting incomplete, partially digested food.

Why would it be strange to think that centuries ago, chewing of the cud had a broader meaning than the modern definition, classical, ruminant system?

Why would that be considered unusual? The key phrase in Hebrew is alagara, and ala is used extensively in the

Old Testament to restore, to take up, to collect, or regurgitate. Now, scientists say, well, in Leviticus, it obviously means to regurgitate, which is not what's happening.

The rabbits are not regurgitating it back up from a stomach compartment. And they say, well, therefore, it's a gigantic error in the scriptures.

And alagara is a less common word, so it's more difficult to know exactly what it means.

But what's clear is rabbits, like ruminants, make a constant chewing motion. Like ruminants, they re -digest their food, albeit through a different process.

We know that the description given is pretty easy to understand. Rabbits recover their food and make a constant chewing motion.

But since they do not have a split hoof, they are unclean. And that's the point of the whole Bible passage, is these animals are unclean.

Do not partake of them. And once you hear about maybe what their, you know, cleanliness habits are, maybe you wouldn't want to eat of them.

So is there a problem with what's written down in Leviticus and Deuteronomy? I don't think there is at all.

People are saying that, well, you know, this chewing the cud means they're ruminants. But that's a more, like, late, that's what science says lately.

Back in that day, chewing the cud just meant eating re -ingested food. It's not a problem, but people are trying to put on us, or put on the

Bible, this literal interpretation of Allah, meaning that it's regurgitation instead of meaning to restore or take up or recover, without any particular evidence to do so.

There's no real problem or conflict with these verses, but people have made this a big deal.

So, I'm okay with the bunny. I'm very much okay with the bunny.

Oh, now, what about these guys? Here's a problem. Copernicus and Galileo.

This one we do know about. Does the sun revolve around the earth?

No. Did people think that the sun revolved around the earth?

By appearance? By appearance. Did the church teach that the sun revolved around the earth?

You bet it did. You bet it did. And they called Copernicus the devil's agent.

The popes and bishops did, but also Luther and Calvin thought that the same

Copernicus had somehow undermined the integrity of the Bible. Copernicus and Galileo proved their position, though, and he also proved that the

Roman church's official teaching on the subject was wrong. What he did not prove, however, and this is important, is that he did not correct the teachings of the

Scripture. What he did correct was the misinterpretation of Scripture by the church. And that's, again, where we can get into problems, because sometimes the church will imply something or take something out of context in the

Scripture and make a doctrine out of it that doesn't exist.

So what happened here? During most of the 16th and 17th centuries, fear of heretics was spreading, and the church was getting fearful.

The church was trying to squash a lot of things. And you know about the Portuguese Inquisition, you know about the

Spanish Inquisition, you know about the Roman Inquisition. These were all inquisitions by the

Catholic church that were trying to suppress ideas and suppress anything that would come against the

Bible. And there was a lot of problems with the church and its teaching back then.

But remember, this is not problems with the Scriptures. This is problems with the visible church that was trying to stand for truth, but it was going off into bad directions.

So they persecuted scientists who formed theories the church deemed heretical. And there was a war between science and religion.

And it continues today. Copernicus and Galileo, they printed books who were later banned.

Copernicus, fortunate for him, he really didn't face any persecution when he was alive, because he died shortly after he published his writings.

So good for him. Galileo, on the other hand, took a lot of heat. And he was tried by that Roman Inquisition.

And his books were banned. And the church disapproved of this theory because they say that the earth is at the center, not the sun.

And they said that Copernicus and Galileo were sinners because they preached through their writing that the

Bible was wrong. Well, is the Bible wrong? What does the Bible say about this?

Okay. So, these were similar verses that we talked about with the flat earth, but this time we're talking about whether the earth revolves around the sun or whether the earth is fixed.

So, Joshua 10, 13. Kevin, can you see that? Could you read that?

Yeah. "...and the sun stood still, the moon stopped, until the nation avenged themselves of their enemies."

Now, that was in Joshua. Now, that was a miracle that happened, actually.

That was when Joshua was fighting the Amalekites, I believe, and the sun stood still in the

Valley of Aduan. Well, the sun never was moving anyway. And the problem that people have with that is, like, no, the earth must have stood still, not the sun.

And by the way, there's a great miracle in this, because some other things would have had to happen, too, for all this to work out.

But because the biblical writer said the sun stood still, which was the appearance to the naked eye, that, you know, the

Bible writers were saying, well, normally the sun moves. Okay. How about Ecclesiastes 1 .5?

Can you see that, Richie, or do you want Bob to go? Ecclesiastes 1 .5. And the sun rises, and the sun sets, and hastening its place, rises there again.

Is that right? Yes, it is. Good guess. You probably know it by heart anyway.

You realize it again, by the way. But there's your sun rising and sun sets version. Now, I'm looking at the time, and I'm really doing very badly on time right now, so I'm going to scoot ahead.

I'm not going to read those other verses. But based upon those verses, you would think that the earth is fixed and not moving.

And general observation in the world would say, yeah, we see the sun rise every day. It goes back to its place and goes across the sky, and we see it moving.

Well, from man's perspective, yes. But looking at these verses today, we understand

God's not speaking or communicating scientific theory about, again, planetary movements. God was not saying that the earth stays physically motionless and the sun orbits around it.

That's an assumption that's being read into the Scriptures, an interpretation that was added beyond what's being implied in the original communication of the verses.

God was simply using everyday common language to communicate the truth about the world. Everyday common language.

You know, let's think for a moment. Has anyone talked about the sunrise?

We can watch the news tonight. We know that every weather person on TV is going to say, sunrise is at 625 tomorrow.

Why do we use that kind of language? Because it makes sense to us. Because it's easy to describe our physical world in that sense.

And unfortunately, people have, you know, gone amok with these kinds of things and taken them too far.

In this case, it was the church that took it too far. The church was persecuting scientists who were very, very much exploring the truth that God had created and discovering his world, and the church tried to suppress it.

So that's very unfortunate, because those scientists were bringing to light the truths about God's wondrous creation.

So that was a problem, and that was a church versus science thing, but it was because the church interpreted the verses wrong and used them incorrectly, not the scientists in this case.

But, Drew, what's interesting about that is the scientists confirmed about the missing day. It has come around now, and they found through the calendars and looking back, the history, that there is one day.

Yeah, I've heard about that. Yeah, one day is missing. Yeah, I've heard about that. I have to read further about what the math was behind that.

Right, exactly. Very interesting stuff. And that's the thing, is we should be interested in God's creation, and we should have minds that really want to probe into some of these things.

And the key is we don't have to be fearful when people who claim to be intellects or scientists come after us and say, oh, the

Bible's dumb, and it has all these errors in it. Well, look at these situations. What are you assuming?

What are your presuppositions? What have you believed that the Bible says that it possibly doesn't say?

Or what do you believe in science that you think is fact, but in reality is a moving target, and science hasn't proven what you're talking about at all?

Now, in that case, we're going to get to this, the creation of the universe. Now, Matt is going to go into creation.

He's going to go into the theory of evolution and some other things later.

But I wanted to put this down because, basically, the concept of the

Big Bang is out there, and there have been a lot of statements about that.

What I'm going to say is, well, you know basically what the

Big Bang is. There's a model that describes the universe expanding from an initial state of high density and pressure and temperature and then it offers a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of observed phenomena.

It's everything like just a compressed singularity that just basically blew up and started to expand and started to accelerate.

And there's a picture of it right here. So this is the Big Bang right here.

And then there's some guesses about how it inflated. There was a dark period.

How luminaries came to be. The development of galaxies, planets, and all these areas.

How cosmic gases started to get compressed and all these things started to happen. And then here would be the latest rim of things.

This is where Brad Tomaszewski was born, right here. Right at that little dot right there.

That little dot, wow. And then lately there's been experimentation and an understanding, a scientific theory about dark energy.

So in order to make a model like this, a theory like this, there is assumptions stacked on top of assumptions stacked on top of assumptions.

Beginning with the little dot back here that is this compressed singularity. Where did that come from?

Well, science doesn't have an answer for that. So let's read it a little bit down here. And by the way, science doesn't say what's holding all this up and what's all out here.

What's going on with that? And why is it only going in one direction?

Well, that's just visually the best way they can describe it. One of the common misconceptions about the

Big Bang is that it fully explains the origin of the universe. By the way, I'm quoting from Wikipedia sites and scientific sites.

I'm not quoting from Bible sites on this stuff. However, the Big Bang model does not describe how energy, time, and space were caused.

Rather, it describes the emergence of the present universe from an ultra -dense and high -temperature initial state.

It is misleading to visualize the Big Bang. Okay, some other things in here. It says, so extrapolations to the most extreme conditions and earliest times are necessarily more speculative.

There is a lot of speculation and assumption. There's an assumption about expansion.

There's an assumption about accelerations. There's an assumption about how well we can accurately actually measure with the telescopes we have.

Assumptions about the formation of stars, creation of light. You know, assumptions, assumptions, assumptions.

Okay, science says there's a Big Bang. Science has a stack of theories, a huge stack of theories that describe all this.

You're going to have to take that stack of theories by faith, folks. But I'll tell you what.

We can agree on something. Science and scripture can agree on this. There was a

Big Bang. Except our hot Big Bang creation event was a little bit different than the one that they tried to describe.

But in the long run, we think our Big Bang was right here.

Genesis 1 -1. The universe had a beginning, and it was in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

And in addition to that, in Romans 1 -20, not only was there a beginning of creation, but God himself was outside of that creation.

And then Richie just said a second ago, Colossians 1, 16 and 17, God has not only created this universe, but as God who is outside of space and time, he can also step into the universe he created in the form of Jesus Christ, which is great news for us, because we can know him through his

Son. The science and the Bible agree that the universe does have a beginning, and that most likely started from a singularity, possibly.

And from there, things diverge. The power behind the Big Bang of creation is not explained by science, but the

Bible does explain it. The existence of matter and energy is not explained by science, but it is explained by the

Bible. Scientists and atheists argue that the answers given by theologians for unknown phenomena is always

God. God created it. God did it. He knows how to do it.

And you know what? They're right. God is the answer to the existence of the universe, the laws that govern the universe, and the purpose for its existence.

Now, as I said before in the final analysis, you're going to have to take one or the other of these views by faith.

We are not going to prove the Bible by scientific experiment or by any other means.

But neither are the scientists going to explain the creation of the universe by stacking theory on top of theory on top of theory, because they can't recreate the event, and they were not there to see it.

So that's the problem with historical events. It's all by faith. It happened by one time, and you're trying to piece together the puzzle.

Which is a reasonable model to believe? A model where all points are defined and explained?

Or a model that has assumption on top of assumption on top of assumption? You'll have to make that decision by faith.

And the Bible and science do conflict in this area. But you're going to have to make your choice, which is more reasonable to believe.

So I think there is no problem with science and the Bible here.

The problem is scientists have taken data that they have collected and generated a model that doesn't stand.

Now, just some interesting facts. I think I might be able to get through these. What about gravity?

Interesting verse in Job. Can someone read this Job verse? Bob Nichols, could you read this?

Sure. He stretches out the north over empty space and hangs the earth on nothing.

Well, that's an interesting statement. Job is written, most people think, about 2500 B .C.

So I gave it a little bit broader of a date than that. So the earth hanging on nothing.

Do you realize that, and we learned this in, I forget if it was history class or science class, whatever it was, but that many cultures back then thought the earth was on the back of a turtle.

Four elephants. All kinds of things. And those people believed the earth was fixed.

That was back before the Greeks got to their point, and even Copernicus at that point.

Because some people believed the earth was round, but it was still fixed. Well, back in Job, 2500

B .C., he says the earth hangs on nothing. How would he know that? He's just a man on the earth observing the heavens like everyone else was, but yet he knows that the earth is a sphere, that basically nothing is around it holding it up.

He didn't try to describe the orbital system and the gravity around the sun and that sort of thing, but he understood what

God had revealed to him, that the earth hangs on nothing. Job was just a farmer in the

Bronze Age with simple tools. Hey, Drew, another useful verse that wasn't proven by science until thousands of years later is

Isaiah 40, verse 22, where it says God stretches out the heavens like a curtain.

They didn't realize the universe was expanding. Yeah, that's the expanding universe. Until the 20th century. We quoted that verse earlier, but we talked about the circle of the earth and that particular one, but you're right.

That it was stretching out the heavens, just like the expanding universe, which we definitely believe.

The water cycle. Does the Bible talk about the water cycle? What does? We remember this. Fifth grade, maybe, right?

We're smarter than a fifth grader. We remember about precipitation and condensation and evaporation and transpiration, all these things.

But the water cycle really wasn't defined well until French scientists in the late 1600s,

Pierre Perrault and Edmond Marriott, described it. Now, think about it.

We've all seen lakes, clouds, water, and stuff, but you've never seen water rise up from a lake into a cloud.

I mean, we see mist sometimes. We see, you know, haze or a fog, you know, that kind of thing.

But would you understand, back in Job's time again, the water cycle?

Well, let's look at some of the verses here. I'll read these. Job 26, it says,

He wraps up the water, the water is in his clouds, and the clouds do not burst under them.

In Job 36, For he draws up the drops of water, they distill rain from the mist, which the clouds pour down, they drip upon man abundantly.

So here's a description of drawing up the drops of water, the evaporation that happens where the water goes up to the sky, and collects in the clouds.

It eventually distills as rain and pours down precipitation and condensation.

There's a very similar verse in Amos 9 .6. So where did Job figure all this out from?

You know, these guys didn't exist until 1670. Job, again, wrote in 2500

B .C. Did he just have some extraordinary lucky knowledge?

Did he just guess? Or were these things revealed to him?

And he just penned it down as a writer of the Scripture. Okay, conservation of energy and matter.

This is the first law of thermodynamics. When the Lord says, Thus the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their hosts.

The fact that he said they were completed is actually very important, because the first law of thermodynamics states that neither matter nor energy can either be created nor destroyed at this point.

There is no creation ongoing today. It is finished. There is a conservation of energy. Things can change state.

Things can move around. But if something happens over here, it has to corollarily happen over here.

And there's nothing new that's happening or being created. That there's always a...

Converse forces, I would say. Which, you know, you might say,

Well, you're just reading stuff into the Scriptures at that point. You know, scientists say, Well, yeah, you're just making this sound good for your own benefits.

Well, what I'm telling you is, there's a verse here that explains things, and it's scientifically accurate.

It's not scientifically wrong. So, if you think that's lucky, that's fine.

You can take that assumption. But when I see my Lord describing how

He created the heavens and the earth, and the fact that He's the one that set up the laws that govern the universe, I think that's pretty interesting.

What if this climate change throws it out the window? There's always going to be a give and take.

As a matter of fact, if you're talking about climate change and temperature, the second law of thermodynamics gets into that.

Entropy. Yeah, entropy, which is the state of things becoming more disorderly, or things wearing down.

So the Bible says, Of old you founded the earth, you being the Lord, and the heavens are the work of your hands.

Even they will perish, but you will endure. All of them will wear out like a garment. And there's many verses in the

Bible that talks about the worlds that were created wearing out. And this is governed by the second law of thermodynamics, which is entropy, which is stating that all physical processes in ordered systems, over time, tend to become more disordered.

Everything is running down and wearing out, and becoming less and less useful, especially involved as energy.

Eventually, things will reach a state of equilibrium, where all things will basically stop.

And it's called a heat death at that point. True. Yeah. That law disproves evolution.

For evolution to work, you would have to have a law of innovation and integration. But thermodynamics proves the law of dissolution and disintegration.

It directly disproves evolution. Yeah, we're stepping all over Matt's toes now, but that's okay.

Fine, it'll be weeks before we get back. He's got big feet, though. So that's okay.

Okay, countless stars. When the Old Testament writers looked up at the heavens, and they saw the stars, you can only see so many visible stars.

Now, in parts of the world where it's really dark, it is incredible, if you guys have been to a really dark spot that doesn't have a lot of light pollution.

But for the Old Testament writers to say that the host of heaven cannot be numbered, it's like the sand of the seashore, meaning that there's stars and stars and stars and stars, how would they have known that?

They don't have the type of equipment that we have these days. Back in a book that was written at the time of Ptolemy, it was saying that there was 1 ,100 that were observable.

They were observable by the eye, and maybe by some magnification. But today, we know because we have equipment that there are billions and billions and billions of stars.

And I'm not going to sound like Carl Sagan when I say that. It's like Carl Sagan. Billions and billions.

Apparently, somehow, the Old Testament writers realized that 2 ,500 years ago.

How is that possible? Interesting fact. How about the life is in the blood?

This is about 3 ,500 years ago, where the life of the flesh is in the blood. Well, it's an interesting statement.

If you remember back in the, gosh, was it even back in the 1700s or...

They were still bleeding people out. Trying to get the illness out of their body.

There was medical science in the 1700s and 1600s, like leeches. People used leeches, but they also used bleeding out as part of, like, we're going to heal you by making you bleed.

That was the popular scientific idea at the time.

And they didn't understand that in the blood, it carries oxygen, it carries energy and nourishment, it removes waste from cells.

There's a tremendous process in our body that is part of the circulatory system that we have.

Well, 3 ,500 years ago, the Old Testament writers knew that your life is carried within your blood.

And yet in 1700, 1600, they were still under these ideas that we needed to bleed you out to help your physical frame if you had an illness.

I think it's fantastic. The Bible so often contradicts what man has considered good science at the time.

This is another interesting one. Blood clotting. We know that the

Lord calls upon the children of Israel to circumcise on the eighth day. And probably you've heard that vitamin

K is an agent which needs to be produced by our body so that our blood is able to clot.

It just so happens on the eighth day, we reach the peak of that. It's like, how would someone know that it was the eighth day?

Back in those days. Again, written back in Genesis. We're talking 3 ,000 some years ago.

But they knew that the eighth day was the key day to circumcise a child. And they weren't worried about that child having problems bleeding and such and so forth.

You have to really think about what's going on here. What kind of information did they have at the time?

And what their knowledge, when they wrote these things down, really meant. It meant God was inspiring these words and He understood

His creation when He did so. Here's some extra credit I have down here.

Noah's Ark. We talked about this before. I don't want to go through. We're a little bit late. We're kind of going over this. I have a few things.

I guess it's worth going over. It's kind of fun. Why not, right? I do want to get to something at the end, though.

The seaworthiness of the Ark. We talked about this already, that people have done experiments. But let's read this quote from,

I think these guys were from Cal Berkeley. But it was authorized somehow by the Smithsonian Institute.

This fellow says, You know, you don't think of the Bible necessarily as a scientifically accurate source of information.

So I guess we were quite surprised when we discovered that it would work. Says Thomas Moores, one of the students who worked on the project.

They were trying to figure out, based upon the parameters given in Genesis and the description of the

Ark, would this thing be seaworthy? Would it float? And they found that it was very, very seaworthy.

And they were kind of like, Oh, wow. How about that? Well, then the next question was,

Well, this thing possibly couldn't hold all the animals, could it? So they made the calculations again.

And they talked about the Ark being filled with humans and cargo. And they tried to work backwards as they figured out how much water could be displaced and still be seaworthy without tipping and things like that.

Eventually, they got to the point where they said, well, based upon the configuration of the

Ark, it could hold 2 .15 million sheep.

I don't know why they picked a sheep, but I guess maybe that's because that's an animal for sacrifice or something. So then they said,

Well, how many species exist, and how could it be formed? Well, they go back and forth.

I didn't write all this down, but back and forth between, they would have had to include like 1 .5

million species to have what is represented in the world today. And that's just an estimation as it is.

So 1 .5 million species, 2 .15

million sheep. So give or take, like an elephant's bigger than a sheep, but a squirrel's less than a sheep.

So if you add up all the numbers, they say, well, what's the average weight of an animal, including birds?

So 2 .15, and their conclusion was, it's not likely. And remember, this is

Cal Berkeley. These are not believers. But they said, you know what, it's possible.

And if they're coming up with that based upon crunching numbers that are estimations, why wouldn't we believe that it is possible?

Because they did the numbers, and they didn't have a bias necessarily. They were just trying to get a good grade on their project.

And they were more surprised than anything else that if the numbers came out to be reasonable and an understandable situation where we could believe what the

Bible says. And there's other things. The fumes from the fecal matter from the animals would kill everyone in the dark.

There's some other things. I won't go through these other things. But if you look through some of these websites, it's pretty interesting, some of these things.

I've heard somewhere, and I don't remember where, but I've heard that all seaworthy vessels are based on the proportions of the arc.

Yeah, I think the proportions are tremendously good for seaworthy capability.

Because of the long rectangle thing. And the other thing is, according to what is presented at the, what do you call it, the arc?

Arcing tower? Yes. They were child animals.

So they weren't full size, and they could fit more of them on the arc than a full size.

There's a lot of explanations for a lot of it. One of the complaints that I had there that I didn't go through was the complaints that, well, how could we have such a similar variety of species if there was only two of these and two of these?

How did these two end up creating hundreds and hundreds of them? But the DNA for all of the variations of the species were contained in these two animals.

So, yes, that could explain it. Or they could have brought in various other variants of certain animals, which would also explain it.

But I think of it with dogs, for instance. In the 1800s, the

British, I don't think it's the British Kennel Club. It's the American Kennel Club, and I can't remember who the British side is.

But there were 27 dog breeds mentioned in the 1800s, in the mid -1800s.

By 1900, it was 80 dog breeds. Do you know how many dog breeds there are now? There's 400.

And I think that's low. But just within the last hundred or so years, due to, yes, man has specifically tried to create their own breeds, and that has happened.

But the ability for things to vary over time and create new looking...

Now, why somebody would create a pug, I don't know. Yeah, a chihuahua.

But it's easy to see how that could happen and how those variations could be explained through time, because that's only in the last hundred years.

Right, and they didn't evolve into another species. Right. Dogs stayed dogs. So, one thing

I wanted to mention at the end here, you know, talking about the hermeneutics again, interpreting the

Bible correctly, not going too far with the latest scientific theory, and trying to authoritatively say, this is fact, and the

Bible's an error because it doesn't match our fact. When in reality, it's just a continuation of a progressive scientific line that they have to continue to, you know, worm out year by year, experiment by experiment, and often it changes.

Very much so. But the idea that Christianity has stifled scientific experimentation and discovery is really such a misnomer.

It's ludicrous. This last link I have on here is a list of Christian scientists throughout the last 400 years, and it is a long list.

There's a particular one guy I want to talk about, but it's hard to see that, right? Yes. But all these are names.

They even give Galileo. They're talking about him. So before the 18th century...

Is there Newton? Yeah, Blaise Pascal, we know him. We know Leibniz. We know so many.

Yeah, Kepler's in here. Ampere's in here. A lot of people. Robert Boyle?

Faraday. Yeah, Michael Faraday. James Clerk MacFarlane? There's one person, though, in the 20th century

I want to get to who did a lot of mathematician calculations.

His name's Peter Stoner, who wrote a lot of books on science and the

Bible. And I did not quote from Peter Stoner, but he has a lot of mathematical probability calculations regarding the prophecies.

And now Matt and I and Ivan have not gone over biblical prophecy in detail, but if anyone is ever interested in looking at some of the very interesting prophecies that have been fulfilled, take a look at Peter Stoner's books and how it calculates out what the prophecy would be if this country was prophesied at this time and what the result is and what the mathematical calculation came out to be.

It's astonishing. And again, this man was a scientist, a mathematician, a

Christian, a believer, who wanted to research and examine God's world. Any questions about anything that's going on in science?

Drew Deacon on that list. Drew Deacon? Yeah, I was right here at the end.

Chief Scientist. I was right here at the end. Junior Chief Scientist. Assistant to the

Junior Chief Scientist. Junior Chief Scientist. They didn't have my picture. It is soon to this currently living section here.

I think one of the big takeaways from everything you're talking about,

Drew, is that we, and I can talk about this when I talk about hermeneutics, there's a habit just to pull one verse out and not look at the whole context of what's happening in the

Bible, either from the chapter or even the book itself. And that causes a paradigm of misinterpretation by just pulling that one thing out.

But we do that. And so it's hard for people to look at it.

The Bible originally was not written that way. It was written as a continuous phraseology with the allegorical meaning behind it.

It's just that when the King James Version came, they broke it out like that. No chapter or verse numbers.

Yeah, exactly. And so it made bad habits for us to go ahead and do that. So that's what opens up the whole thing.

A text out of context becomes a pretext. Context is very important.

But from my experience, I have received some of these arguments by unbelievers who

I have tried to talk to about Jesus, in particular the rabbit for one, but also Noah's Ark for another, and how ridiculous

Noah's Ark is. But yet if you look at the evidence, if you look at what the Bible is saying, and you look at the real evidence behind the science of it, we don't have to be fearful.

But we should know some of these background things so that we can help communicate with those who are deceived and believe in some fairy tale like the earth is flat that was just propagated as a lie for many, many, many years.

You know, so we have the opportunity to talk to our friends.

I wish I could say that my friend that was hopping around like a rabbit came to know Jesus. Hopefully one day he will.

But the evidence is there. That rabbit chews that cud, man. If he actually cares to read the

Bible and investigate it, he'll find that out too. But I think the way it works is we present a truth to our friends and we truly believe that God's power is going to work and change their hearts.

The people who really dig in and experiment and try to prove the

Bible wrong, those are often the people who end up becoming the most staunch believers because they see the evidence for what it is.

Your friend who's mocking you probably will never do that. But you pray for that person and you pray that the

Holy Spirit will lift the veil off their eyes. Many people are familiar with the name of Henry Morris who founded the

Institute for Creation Research. He also wrote a book called The Biblical Basis for Modern Science.

And he names a lot of those men up there too. Yeah, he wrote a lot of books. Matt's going to talk about a lot of his books too in the

Creation section of the series because he wrote a lot about creation. Somebody want to close us in prayer tonight?

Dave? Heavenly Father, thank you for this night and we thank you for Pru's teaching and the men that have shown up here tonight to listen to his direction in pointing us to the

Bible. And we thank you for the blood of Jesus that washes clean and all the knowledge that we have that we're getting through this course.