Jason Lisle on Flat Earth, fractals, and the Universe

It's fascinating to me how easily someone in one religion can find the fallacies and biases in another religion.

I think that what's fascinating... You're razor sharp on your criticism of Islam here.

Yeah, but what I find fascinating, Jeff, is that you recognize that with other religions, but you don't do it with your own.

Because I... That may be the case. And there's that confirmation bias coming up again.

One, two, three! Welcome to Apologetics Live. We're here to answer your questions and challenges about God and the

Bible. Meet your hosts from Striving for Eternity Ministries, Andrew Rappaport, Dr. Anthony Silvestro, and Pastor Justin Pierce.

Well, we are live, Apologetics Live, here to answer your theological questions.

Any questions you have about God and the Bible, we argue that we can answer them. If you don't believe that, well, come on in and join us.

Give us those challenges. We have a special show tonight. We got a very excited guest.

Let me bring in my co -host here, Mr. Justin Pierce. How are you, sir?

All right. You're doing good. Stressed and blessed. Stressed and blessed. There you go. Stressed and blessed.

That's what school is. Yes. That's right. That's exactly what it is. Stressed and blessed. We have another co -host with us.

It always gets confusing with you two. There he is, Mr. Justin Pierce. How are you, sir?

Hey, brothers. Doing all right. Doing well. How about y 'all? Doing great. I've been missing you, brother.

I haven't got to see you in a while. It's been like every time you try to get on, I can't get on. When you're on,

I can't get on, or vice versa. I'm glad to see my brother. I really am.

Thanks, Justin. Good to see you too, brother. Sure is. Real quick, before we bring in our guest,

Dr. Jason Lyle, Justin, I know you got an event coming up in Ohio, I believe, next week, correct?

That's right. Justin Peters. Justin Peters. You're going to be down, I believe, at Dr. Silvestro's church, correct?

Correct. That is Olmstead Falls Baptist Church in Olmstead Falls, Ohio.

If any of you are out that way and want to hear Justin Peters, go check that out. That is going to be next weekend, so if you're not sure what that is, that turns out to be the 10th and the 11th.

You're doing a seminar? No, I think you're doing half a seminar, right?

Yeah, kind of half a seminar. Yeah. Elements of my seminar. Okay. Yeah. And then preaching on Sunday?

Yep. Okay. That's the moment. That's the moment. Anything else?

I think that's the only thing you got coming up until G3. Yep. You and I will both be right after G3.

You and I are both headed out to the pastor's conference at the Creation Museum, where you'll be speaking.

So if folks want to come see us there, I encourage you guys to check that out if you're anywhere in that area, pastors especially.

Chance to get to hear Justin and Simone. I'm trying to remember. Now I'm drawing a complete blank on who else is speaking.

Oh, that's so bad of me. Technically, it's at the ARC. It's the ARC Encounter.

Oh, is it at the ARC? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's at the ARC in Conrad and Bayway. That's right.

HB Charles and some others, but those are the only names that I can remember. You're the headliner, right?

No. I'm the B team. Okay. Well, I'm going to bring in Dr.

Jason Lyle. How are you doing, sir? Good. Very good. Good. A lot of people were interested when we said we were having you on.

I will see if people actually come in. I don't know why, but everyone was like, oh, I'll have questions.

Maybe you bring that out in people. Yeah, they will. I think what

I did, I put this as we're going to talk flat earth, and I think someone thinks that you're going to be arguing for flat earth, which tells me they didn't really know who you were.

I was like, okay. Maybe before you accuse someone of making Christianity look ridiculous, you should know who they are and what they're actually going to say.

Just a thought. I always love telling this story,

Jason, because it is my favorite evangelism story. Folks, just picture this scene.

Here we are. We're on the boardwalk in the Jersey Shore. We had, I don't know, maybe 70, 80 people out there evangelizing.

There's this one pastor, and he is talking to this military guy for a while. We had a code.

I told people if I come up and say TW means time waster, it's someone that's wasting your time, move on.

Well, we go and realize that I see this guy. He's talking to him for 40 minutes. I say, TW. He's like, no, no, it's good.

Okay, 40 minutes later, hey, TW. He's like, no, no, no. Another 20 minutes I come by. I'm like, okay, let me get in on this conversation and see what it is you're talking about.

The guy just turns, and he's like, well, there's no intelligent Christian. I'm asking him, how do you define an intelligent

Christian? Each of the things he's trying to define it as I'm able to easily knock down.

Then he goes, well, you show me one intelligent Christian that has a

PhD. That would be an intelligent Christian. I said a PhD. What if he had a dual PhD in astrophysics, astronomy and physics?

With that impression, he's like, no such person exists. Now, what he didn't know is I had a shot. I could see there's

Jason just sitting on a bench. I said, Jason, can you come over here for a second? Jason just walks up, comes over.

I said, meet Dr. Jason Lau, dual PhD astrophysicist. Jason puts his hand out, says hello.

The guy just turns and walked away. That was the end of that. Proving the point that this gentleman really didn't want – he was a time waster.

He didn't want to learn anything. To the pastor, he probably sounded really intelligent, but he didn't even get –

Jason didn't even get to give a single argument. I don't know if we should put

Jason on the spot though, Pastor Justin. You have your logical fallacies that we usually go through on your wall there.

Should we pick an easy one for him to – we usually pick one. Yeah, let's get a really easy one. We usually have to define it and give an example.

But you do have a book out for children to teach them logic. Yeah. Homeschoolers. I'll tell you what.

I've got an easy one, non -sequitur. Go ahead. Oh, that's kind of a generic term for anything that doesn't follow.

It just means it doesn't follow. So whatever your conclusion is, it doesn't follow from your premise. That's kind of a catch -all.

Yeah. Could you give an example of one on the spot? Well, the sky is blue and grass is green.

Therefore, the earth is flat. That would be an example of a non -sequitur. See, not only does he answer that,

Justin, but he makes a perfect segue into the topic tonight. And that's what I was thinking. I was like,

I wonder if he's going to put it into – bring it towards the discussion. No, I have to ask a serious question as we're getting started.

It's one that actually has me confused. Do people actually believe the flat earth thing or are they just making this up?

Because, I mean, I've heard this. I honestly can't imagine that somebody actually believes this. And I'm not trying to be mean, and I know that may sound mean, but I just don't understand why somebody would reason through it.

I haven't done the research to study it. I may actually do that because that is intriguing to me as to why somebody would believe that.

I think you get a mix. I think the folks who are really pushing it,

I think they know better, and especially the ones that have promoted it recently. I think there's evidence that some of them were attempting to make

Christianity look foolish by pointing out verses that they can misinterpret to somehow teach a flatter –

I mean, there's nothing in the Bible that says the earth's flat, but there are certain verses you can pull out of context. And some of them were trying to do that to make

Christianity look silly, and then some Christians, I think, bought into it and thought maybe – because they don't know how to interpret the

Bible either, and so they thought, well, maybe there's something to that. Maybe it really is flat. But I think that some people are genuinely convinced that it's flat.

Well, I know some are because we had one – before I left my last church to move out here, we had several – actually all three of the pastors asked me if I would speak to one individual because the one individual, they said he was starting to get into it.

And I realized very quickly after talking to him, he wasn't starting to get into it. He was full on flat earth.

He even bought a watch that would tell him where the sun was over the flat disk.

He had an app that had all – I mean, he was putting money up for this. And I'll start by saying this.

Because of Jason, we're sitting – Jason, you were speaking up at Jim Osmond's church up there where Justin is at, and we were all at lunch.

And you said something that I ended up using. You said there's an easy way to test if the earth is a sphere.

And all you got to do is go watch a sunrise, stand up, watch the sunrise, and then fall down to the ground as soon as it comes over the water, and you'll watch it again.

And it can only do that if it's a sphere. We were living close to the ocean there, so that's exactly what

I told him to do. And I said an easy way to test. We went through some of the things

I'm sure you'll go over, but that one simple thing has been helpful for people to just be like, you can test this.

And it's like go look on your app that has the sun somehow going like this because it kind of goes in and out around is how his app showed it.

That wouldn't happen. You wouldn't see it twice. And as soon as you said it, it dawned on me because I remember I was in Florida and I was trying to get a picture of the sunset.

And just as I was getting it, clouds moved in and I missed it. And it's like, okay,

I'll just drop down and get it again. The advantage of that curvature.

But for folks who may – this may be the first time hearing it. I know there are people that think it's – like people can't really believe it.

But first, one of the first times I heard someone actually arguing for it, I actually thought it was a joke.

When someone – on this show, first time someone came in on a show Matt and I did, I actually was –

I jokingly said, watch, it's probably some like atheist that just wants to prove Christians are gullible.

And then I found out that the founder of the Flat Earth Society is an agnostic. And they actually –

I don't know if I ever told you. They actually invited me to speak. Yeah, I don't know how I got the invitation.

But I got an email inviting me to speak at a Flat Earth Society convention.

And I said, okay, my topic would be why the Bible has to be a sphere.

And somehow I never heard back from them. They let me do it. I wasn't going to be dishonest going there and then – but I remember

I was on the boardwalk in Jersey. It was the first time I heard about Flat Earth. And I'm sitting there.

I was with – and you know how we do things at our conferences that we used to do at Jersey. I had an older gentleman with me who

I hadn't known before, never met him. But we're evangelizing. I'm supposed to kind of teach him how to evangelize.

I'm talking to this guy, and I'm like, great. Like here I am. I got to talk about – I want to teach this guy how to share the gospel, and we're talking

Flat Earth. And I'm going like, what? Like you really believe the Earth is flat? Like I thought he was just joking because you get strange people that make things up.

I thought he was just making it up. This guy was totally – he's Flat Earth. And we're talking for like 30 minutes, and I go – and I asked him,

I'm like – at one point I'm asking him like, what do you – how do you explain like all the satellites we have in space and all that?

And he's giving all these answers. And after about like 30 minutes, maybe 35 minutes, the older gentleman next to me just looks at this young man and says, well,

I don't believe you. And he's like, oh, really? Why not? He goes, because I've been in space.

It was like the mic drop moment. And it was like, okay.

Like why didn't you jump in about 20 minutes ago? But this is something that, you know, people laugh at.

They criticize Christians of believing in a Flat Earth back many years ago when they thought the

Earth was flat and not a sphere. And they accuse Christians of believing that. And now it seems that Christians are.

What is the whole phenomenon with Flat Earth? And I should actually ask before that, introduce yourself, because I should put up your website so folks can know that you – because you used to be – you used to be with a couple of big name organizations,

Answers in Genesis. If anyone has gone to the Creation Museum and sat in the planetarium, you put that planetarium show together,

Created Cosmos. Yep. You then went over to – wasn't it –

I was at ICR for a little while. Yeah, you went to ICR. Now you're with the Biblical Science Institute. So explain that a little bit and then explain this whole phenomenon with Flat Earth.

OK, well, the Biblical Science Institute, we do a lot of the things that are done by our sister ministry,

Answers in Genesis. Slightly different approach. Just we want to hit all kinds of different people.

I have a real heart for students, especially like college -level students who want maybe a little – go a little deeper into some of this information.

And so I try to get that out there. And what we do at the Biblical Science Institute, we just defend the Christian faith, particularly in matters of origins.

But I want to branch out a little bit too. And so in other areas of science, when people come up and say, no, the

Bible can't be trusted because of this scientific alleged fact, then I'll come in and say, well, let's take a look at this.

And, of course, every time, if you really understand the evidence, it confirms what the Bible teaches. And, of course, it's necessary as one aspect of that to understand what the

Bible is teaching. You have to know a little bit about exegesis, hermeneutics, how to read the Bible so that you don't come away with – or when people make claims that, well, the

Bible teaches a flat earth, you can say, no, it really doesn't. Let's take a look at some of the passages you're looking at and take a look at the assumptions you've imported.

Yeah, lately I've been dealing with the flat earthers. I actually had a series of articles. They're now complete.

I have a series of three articles responding to some specific claims of a particular flat earth advocate.

He was very gracious. I like the guy, but his claims don't stand up to scrutiny.

And so what I did is I did a systematic reputation of those claims and showed that if you're open to it, you can test the shape of the earth with your own senses.

You can do that. And I'd written another article previously showing some experiments you can do to test the shape of the earth, including the sunrise or sunset experiment you just mentioned.

I learned about that when I was an undergraduate physicist. We had to calculate the time difference when you're standing up to when you're lying down.

And I think it's about seven seconds different. And from that, you can actually not only know the earth's spherical, you can calculate its size.

So that's pretty neat. But even when I was back in high school, I remember we took a family vacation to Colorado Springs where I'm now living.

That's one of the reasons I wanted to live here is I fell in love with it at that time. And I remember calculating about the distance where we should be able to see the tops of the

Rocky Mountains based on the curvature of the earth and being very satisfied when indeed they came into view at that distance.

On a flat earth, they would be theoretically visible at all distances because it's flat. There's no curvature. So I've known about the round earth for quite some time.

This movement is the resurgence of flat earthism. It's quite recent.

Actually, even I think even when I was working with answers in Genesis, it was almost unheard of at that time. So there's been a recent surging of that.

I can guarantee you that people who believe that have learned about it on the Internet.

I can guarantee you that because it's not like you can find peer reviewed scientific literature defending a flat earth.

You can't. It's very easy to refute. If you know anything about geometry, trigonometry and observations, you can you can easily demonstrate the world's round.

Anybody can do it. If you live near an ocean or a mountain, it's really easy. And even if you don't, there are other ways to do it using the positions of the stars and so on.

And this is something that educated people have known since ancient times, since at least around 500

B .C. That's when Pythagoras thought that maybe the earth really is round. The Bible was teaching that earlier in Job 26 versus seven and 10.

Bible indicates an earth that hangs in space and has a boundary between the light and darkness of the circle that only works on a sphere.

So but then the Greeks came to accept that. And by 300 B .C., educated, educated people knew the world was round at the time of Christ's earthly ministry.

Educated people knew the world was round. So we've known that for a long time. And there's many different ways you can demonstrate it.

So the the flat earth movement indicates a just an extreme lack of discernment.

And that's something I'm seeing, not just aspects as well. And it's it's sad to me that there are

Christians who are buying into this because that that really is pretty silly. It indicates that they're not reading the scriptures right.

If they think the scriptures support that idea. And it indicates they really don't know anything about science. If they're thinking that there's somehow scientific evidence for flat earth because there just isn't there just isn't.

So it's a lack of discernment. It's conspiratorial thinking. And the fact that there's all kinds of ridiculous nonsense going on today makes it a little harder for me to defend the fact that, you know, you shouldn't jump on every conspiracy theory that it's out there.

The fact that you do have some misinformation out there doesn't mean that all of information is misinformation.

So we really need to be more discerning. But it is a it's a lack of discernment. And I think one thing that fuels it, too, is a lot of people have realized, especially

Christians, we point out that not everything you're taught in school is true. And that's that's right.

You should be skeptical, especially if you're in a public school that's giving you a secular perspective on things.

I think some people think, well, the schools lied to us about evolution. Maybe they lied to us about other stuff.

And I don't that's not a bad attitude to have. But you shouldn't just throw the baby out with the bathwater.

It doesn't mean everything you learned in public school was false because there are certain mathematical truths, for example, the nature of the earth.

That's something that's scientifically testable today. So I would just encourage people to be a bit more discerning in the information they hear.

And in the case of the shape of the earth, that's something you can test. So it's inexcusable to believe in a flat earth these days.

It's something you can test. It's strange that you'd say like math is like an absolute because you obviously haven't watched the recent video.

The high school professor or high school teacher who said, we don't need to know math.

We have to understand about, you know, Antifa and Black Lives Matter, because that's real. That's real truth.

And math, you know, they want to redo math. OK, but, you know, let's look at some of the arguments they make. They will try to make biblical arguments saying, but look, the

Bible refers to four corners of the earth. You know, so isn't that proof that the earth is flat because you can only have four corners on a flat surface?

You know, the interesting thing about that, I haven't heard anyone make that argument in a very long time because it's also inconsistent with their idea for the shape of the earth, because most modern flat earth advocates take the shape of the earth to be like a short, like a cylinder or circle, a flat disk with no corners.

So they can't use that. They can't use that verse. And so I think even most flat earth advocates would say, no, that's that's referring to the four cardinal directions.

Of course, that's referring to the four cardinal directions at the time. Revelation includes that language. But at the time that's written, people already knew again, educated people knew the world was round at that time.

But that was a convenient way to refer to the north, south, east and west. So that's a nonstarter.

It's not compatible with the modern flat, flat disk earth view, which doesn't have corners. Yeah, I know some of the other arguments that they they often give.

I mean, they usually have a lot of different one of the things, though, that they that is very convincing for many.

And you'll see us on YouTube and it looks convincing. If you go early morning out on the on the water, you can actually see further than you're supposed to be able to see if the earth is curved.

How do we explain things like that? Yeah, that's caused by a temperature inversion. In fact, in the I think it's the last article that I wrote on this topic,

I went through the physics of that and showed how light bends. We know that light bends as it goes through a medium where its speed in that medium changes.

And you can see that in water. You maybe you've seen a beam of wood put in water at an angle. And it looks like the wood bends when it goes under the water because the way the light refracts, because the speed of the speed of light in water is only about 75 percent what it is in air.

And so that causes the light to bend. And you can calculate that based on on first physics principles. And so I just did some back of the envelope calculations.

I couldn't initially find anything on how to calculate light, curvature and air.

And so I thought, well, I can I can figure this out. This is kind of basic physics. And I do have a degree in this. I should probably put it to use.

So I ended up doing some back of the envelope calculations and calculated the amount by which light would curve.

And it doesn't take a very strong temperature inversion to do it. Basically, all you need to get light to curve the same way the

Earth does is you need the temperature to increase with altitude instead of decrease.

Normally, the temperature decreases with altitude because eventually in space, the temperature is like close to absolute zero.

So normally the temperature decreases. And I know that when I go to Ike's Peak, I know it's going to be 20 to 30 degrees cooler than it is down here in the town of Colorado Springs.

So that's normally the way it works. But every now and then you get what's called a temperature inversion, where for a for some distance, the temperature will increase.

And if you're in a city, a lot of times you'll see smog on that days because it prevents it prevents convection and such.

So it can it's an inversion layer. And I figured out just from some basic math that if you have so much as a temperature inversion where you get like point one degrees per.

Well, I forget the numbers, but it's on the article. And it doesn't take a very strong temperature inversion for light to curve about five inches every mile.

And now the curvature of the Earth is such that the Earth drops eight inches per mile. So you're almost keeping up with the

Earth there. And so you can actually see a bit further. It caught it. What it causes is a distortion. It looks like the

Earth. It makes the Earth look bigger than it would be otherwise. And you can very nearly double the distance at which you can see things.

And so I actually applied that calculation to the Chicago skyline as seen from dunes that are on the other side of the lake.

And sure enough, you can get the buildings to come up higher, but only on days when there's a temperature inversion. And when the when the air is normal, when the temperature decreases with altitude, as it does very slightly normally, then you don't get that effect.

And so. And by the way, even when that effect kicks in, you still can't see forever. It just makes the Earth look seem a little bigger than it would be, but it's still round.

And so you can't see an infinite distance. So it still confirms around Earth. It's just people don't know much about physics.

They don't realize yet. You can get light to move not quite in a straight line if the air changes temperature.

And that's one of the things if folks, if you ever hear someone bring that argument up, just know that it's only at certain times of the year in certain places that that can happen.

Now, yes, there's an explanation for that. But the thing is, is that so many people will use this.

And that is, I think, in the people I've spoken to, the most convincing argument to many. And yet there's a very good rational explanation for it.

And the thing I've always told people to do is, hey, how about you do that in the middle of the day?

Do the same experiment in the middle of the day and it'll never work. You don't have that, right?

Yeah, double check to make sure the temperature is not inverted. But yeah, because you can get it to persist. But you're right.

It's more likely in the early morning, for example. But yeah, if you don't have the temperature inversion, it will not do that.

It will not do that. And Ron Hughes is saying here that here in Tampa, the inversion over the water is very common.

And that's why they go to certain places for that. Justin. I was going to say,

Jason, have you seen the documentary Behind the Curve? Have any of you seen that? I have not seen it.

If people are interested, it's actually quite fascinating. You can rent it or buy it on YouTube. But it's a documentary entitled

Behind the Curve. And this documentary team goes and they follow around some of the more prominent flat earthers.

And they go into their convention and all that. It's a maddening yet fascinating look inside their mindset.

And so it's very interesting. But what's comical about it, though, is that they actually end up debunking with their own experiments.

They end up debunking their own position. And they don't know what to do with it. But it is a fascinating.

If you want to get into kind of like the psychology of why they think what they think, it's pretty interesting. Behind the

Curve. Do they fly in airplanes all around the world? That's kind of a question.

The military rings Antarctica, which, you know, rings the giant manhole cover that we all live on.

And they won't let you get up to the edge. There's answers they give.

And that's why it's so funny that first time I dealt with it, because the guy was saying that there are no satellites.

It's all conspiracy theory. Genesis does have a lot of good resources as well.

I should have pulled it out, the book. Danny Faulkner wrote a book called Going Flat. And we actually stock it at the

Biblical Science Institute because it's a very well -written book. And if you're a rational person and you want to test the shape of the

Earth, you can do that. But you cannot convince someone who is not willing to be rational.

Someone who is, you know, I'm just I'm going to believe in a flat Earth. And because you can always come up with a rescuing device.

There's always a rescuing device. But the fact is, flat Earthers do not have a consistent model whereby they can explain the positions of satellite.

See, I can predict when the International Space Station is going to go overhead because I know a little bit about physics and I understand its orbit.

So I can do that. Flat Earthers can't do that. Now, they can look it up on a website that was produced by a round Earth believer that has calculated that.

But in terms of calculating it based on their model, can't be done. Can't be done because it's not consistent with observations.

We're calculating sunrise and sunsets and the times of the seasons. Yes, I've seen the little model they have with the sun.

It's sort of like a spotlight over the Earth. That will not work because that would in order to be consistent with seasons, that beam of light would have to cover only one fourth the surface of the

Earth, in which case on a given day, you should have six hours of sunlight throughout the year instead of 12.

You can test that for yourself throughout the course of the year. You have to go complete year. What is the average number of hours of sunlight?

And it turns out to be 12, not six. You can test these things for yourself, but most people would say, well, then there's a rescuing device to explain that away.

But they can't make positive predictions. They can't land people on the moon. They can't put satellites up in space.

They can't do any of those things because they don't have a working model. They have something that looks good to the uninitiated, but it doesn't really work.

Hold on. Use the term that I want you to explain. It's a term that I know you use a lot.

But for folks who may be new, this is an Apologetics Live. We teach how to do Apologetics. You mentioned a rescuing device.

Define what that is, and please give an example. A rescuing device is a hypothesis that is designed to protect your belief from what appears to be evidence to the contrary.

So, for example, my comets can't last millions of years. Everybody knows that.

The rate at which the material is being depleted away from a comet, they evaporate in a time scale of like 100 ,000 years.

So that would seem to be evidence that the solar system is much younger than the 4 .5 billion years.

And so my secular colleagues have come up with a rescuing device they call the Oort Cloud, which is supposedly a comet generator that makes new comets to replenish the old ones.

Now, a good rescuing device, an effective one, is one that can't be disproved. And in case of the

Oort Cloud, we don't have the technology to detect objects at that distance. So there's no way to know that it's there or to disprove it.

That makes it a good rescuing device because you can't prove it or disprove it. But rational people understand we should try to minimize our rescuing devices.

Everybody has them because we all have a worldview that's incomplete. We don't have all the data. We're trying to make sense of that.

But we need to try to minimize rescuing devices because they are ultimately arbitrary and therefore irrational in terms of trying to defend your worldview that way.

You know, it's funny. We have a regular person who comes in here once in a while. I don't know if he's going to come in tonight,

David. It doesn't sound like it. He's on his way to college. But he told us he could prove that the

Oort Clouds exist. He would explain that to you. So we invited him in.

And that's what I was going to ask about is the Oort Clouds on that. Because you're dealing with an unfalsifiable claim, rescuing device.

But the only problem is it's also unprovable and undetectable. And so for when you're making a claim like that, you have no evidence for it.

You have no reasons for it to be in existence other than your own presupposition. Yeah.

And I think for me that's a big problem. Now, I wanted to ask a question.

In the study I have done in the past five minutes, maybe 15 minutes, I've looked at some

Buddhist and some Hindu works and writings talking about the earth being on a disk and having the different animals holding them up.

Is that where this idea of the flat earth comes from? Because I can't think of it any other way.

Yeah. The early Babylonians, even the early Greeks before 500 B .C. taught a flat earth.

Although with the Greeks, they at least the Greeks believed it floated in space. At least one of the Greeks, I forget the name, but he thought it was a flat disk.

But nonetheless, the sun and moon went all the way around it. Not like the modern conception. So that actually works better than the modern version.

But it has its flaws as well. So, yeah, the most ancient pagan cultures believed in a flat earth.

The Bible was unique in terms of Job. It written, we think, around 2000

B .C. And it talks about the circle that God inscribes on the boundary between light and darkness on the face of the waters, which we would call the terminator.

And that only works on a sphere. That's not going to work on any other surface where the terminator is permanently a circle.

And then, of course, in Job 26, verse 7, he stretches out the north of the empty, over the empty place, hangs the earth on nothing.

And so that's a great indication that Job at least apparently had some divine insight into this issue because he knew the correct configuration of the earth.

The Bible is not a science textbook, but when it touches on science, it's right. And it does mention the roundness of the earth.

And in a number of places, too. I would argue the global flood doesn't really make sense without a globe. Water would either run off the sides on a flat earth or if they want to put it in a snow globe, then then the the dome itself constitutes a hill that is not covered by the waters.

You can't really have a global flood without a globe. So since very ancient times, people who were believers in the living

God understood something about the shape of the earth. But up until about 500 B .C., almost all pagan cultures thought the earth was flat.

Some of them thought it floated in water. Some of them thought it was in space. Some of them thought it was held up by something else, a turtle and what have you.

So, yeah, so the Bible is unique in the ancient world. And that's why you have folks who say, well, no, it can't really mean that because, you know, the

Bible is just trying to explain things. They're assuming that it's not inspired and that the

Hebrews were just trying to come up with their own version of this. But I'm sorry that that denies inspiration.

The fact is, God understands the nature of his universe. He made it and he gives little insights on that nature to his people in the book that he inspired.

So the Bible is unique in the ancient world and promoting around earth at the time when nobody else believed it. Well, the

Bible is unique that in many ways. Let me I want to go to some questions that have been asked here are going to go way back up.

And I'll say that I encourage Cody to come in. He has several questions, so maybe he'll actually join in.

And if you want to join us and ask questions of any of us, you just go to a project live dot com.

And there is an icon to participate. Just join us on StreamYard works best in Chrome.

And you just have to make sure to allow for the use of your mic and camera. But here's a question for you,

Jason. Dr. L, I guess your name was too long to type the whole thing out for efficiency.

Do you think the ratios of semi -stable long lived ratio that radio isotopes in Earth rocks and the astronomical bodies, the nebulae are useful in estimating the age of the universe?

Now, this was a question I was gets into a question I wanted to ask you as well, but I was going to ask later. But since this guy came up.

We'll go with this right now. Yeah, I don't think it is, because in order to do any kind of age estimate like that, you'd have to know the initial conditions that were present.

And you'd have to know that the rate at which these things decay has always been what it is today.

Today, it's pretty close to constant. And by constant, I mean, it's actually an exponential decay. But the the exponent is constant with time today.

But that doesn't mean it's always been that way. There's very good evidence that at least some forms of radioactivity were faster in the past.

The rate research project headed up by a number of PhD creation scientists came up with very compelling evidence that I can't think of any other way to explain it other than radioisotope.

Radioisotopes decayed faster in the past. Now, you could if you knew the rate at which it happened exactly when it happened, you could compensate for that.

That's very difficult to do. There's still the problem of the initial conditions. There are ways to try and estimate those initial conditions.

Yes, I am familiar with isochron methods, but they have their assumptions, too. And sometimes they give age estimates that we know are wrong because they've been tested on a rock of known age.

And that's the real that's the real clincher for me. Even if you don't know all the math and know all the physics, the fact is we've tested radiometric dating on rocks of known age.

And it often gives wrong answers, answers that are incredibly inflated. Rocks from Mount St. Helens have been sent in brand new rocks.

And radiometric dating is supposed to tell you when the rock formed, when it hardened, because before that, when it's in a liquid state, the elements can move in and out.

So but then it hardens, it locks it in, that starts the clock. And so the radioactive decay products simply get trapped in there and their source material is depleted.

And so we took rocks from Mount St. Helens, had them dated in a secular lab so we couldn't be accused of bias. And they came back with ages of hundreds of thousands, millions of years on rocks that we know are brand new or less than a few years old at the time they were dated.

You do the same with rocks from Hawaii. You'll get millions of years on rocks that are brand new. You can stick the pole in the magma, pull it out, watch it cool off, send it in the lab.

You'll get millions of years very consistently. So now some answer, but it doesn't consistently give the right answer.

And so that's why it's not terribly useful in terms of age age estimates of anything, really.

I was actually going to ask you that, that very question you just answered, because there is a confusion on this.

Is the magma itself, because it is several thousand years old or millions of years old, quote unquote, is that magma itself going to be datable as it's hot or does it when it cools off?

That's the starting point. Because they're trying to compare what happens in a radioactive decay is you have one element that's radioactive and it will decay into another element.

So over time, the parent decreases and the daughter product increases. And that's

OK. If they're trapped in there, then you can estimate both. But if they're moving, then the parent new parent elements can come in.

New daughter elements can go out. So secularists do not try to date anything liquid or that has been liquid.

They recognize that the date supposed to be when the rock hardened. Some people get misconceptions that they think is when the atoms formed, in which case all everything in the secular view ought to be 13 .8

billion years older. Yeah, there should be a difference in age. Yeah. So I have a feeling,

Jason, I could be wrong, but I think this question may not be for you. And I don't know, maybe you're not an expert on Mormonism, but Ryan Leach asked the question.

Hey, I witness to Mormons frequently when I bring up the problems with Joseph Smith.

The response I get that is general. Sorry. The response is generally that the accounts were recorded by others and not

Joseph Smith. So it may not be accurate. Thoughts. I'm going to assume is since I've written two books on Mormonism that this question is for me.

So the answer to that's really easy, Ryan. It's the fact that Joseph Smith's own accounts have a lot of errors within them.

And that's why even in the Book of Mormon, you see a, you know, basically a summarization of taking.

There's like seven or eight different accounts of how we found the Book of Mormon. Different times where different people were there, different places.

And they try to bring those all together because they couldn't avoid the fact that he had told these stories so many times to different people.

That it they had to somehow bring that together. And so you could just look at what his own accounts are.

It is interesting because when you really press them on that, one of the big things for them is that the

Book of Mormon supposedly was was seen by the witnesses that saw that Joseph Smith do the translation.

But if you actually look at what they actually said in their accounts, they did not see the book being done.

So yeah, there's a lot of errors. One of the funniest things that I think of is the Tanners did a lot of working and a great place to go.

Just do a search on Sandra Tanner. She has a ton of material. Her and her husband who passed away have a lot of material.

Go to MRM. It stands for Mormon Research Ministry dot org. MRM dot org. You can get the book that's right over my shoulder.

They're sharing the good news with Mormons. That will give you information. And then the one above it right there is what do they believe?

Those are available at Striving Fraternity. Those will help you. But one of the funniest stories Sandra Tanner's husband came up realized was

I heard from him was the fact that they had this translation of the

Book of Mormon. And one of the guys translating it just wanted to bring it to his wife to convince her because she was believing that, well,

Joseph Smith was a known con man. He was arrested for it and she thought he still was one and taking her husband's money.

So he wanted to prove it to her. He brought the Book of Mormon home to her and no one knows what happened to it.

Now Joseph Smith's in a dilemma because if he doesn't translate it exactly the same way, well, she can then pull that out and say, see?

And so what he did is he basically said that because of this wicked woman, God wasn't going to give this to anyone anymore.

And therefore, it was just going to be a summarized account of what happened. So. So, yeah, there's a lot of errors within Mormonism.

All right. Next question that we have here. And I know, John, you're backstage and it will bring you in a bit, but I want to get these questions before they roll off.

So Heidi has said a question. Have you gentlemen seen any connection between the increase of flat earth and seven day

Adventism and Hebrew roots movement? I've seen there is different deceptions, kind of weave and interweave.

So just wondering if you've seen that one of the deceptions lead into another. I don't know if.

I haven't really. I think all of them, in some sense, indicate a lack of discernment.

And that's on the rise. But I haven't seen one directly lead into the other. Maybe you guys can comment on that.

Well, I guess. Well, Jason, Justin, go ahead. I don't know that there's a direct, from what

I can see, a direct connection between flat earth and seventh day Adventism and Hebrew roots.

Both of those obviously are problematic in their own right. I don't know that there's a direct connection between them.

Phil Johnson did an excellent series of lectures on seventh day Adventism.

Oh, gosh. Eight or nine months ago, something like that. You can find it on YouTube. But it's really, really good.

A lot of information. He did a really good job refuting it. But I'm not aware of a direct connection. And I guess what

I would say with this is, you know, we have to understand how someone gets into flat earth, flat earthism,

Hebrew roots, any of these sort of things. If you understand the makeup of how someone gets into this,

I think that it will help you to understand the dynamics. Let me give flat earth as the example, since that's what we're talking about tonight.

The way most people that I know that have gotten into flat earth, and Jason, you can correct me if you think there's other ways.

But I think the most popular way, and you kind of said it, it's from the Internet. Watching YouTube. I think what you see with most of these groups, whether it's black

Hebrew Israelites, it's Hebrew roots. Some of them have some different reasons. Black Hebrew Israelites, they want to feel like they want black supremacy.

And so that feeds into that for some of them. That's how they get into that. But what I see a lot of people do is they actually start out like anti -flat earth.

They hear it. They're like, that's so stupid. Let me go research that. Let me see what their arguments are. But then they spend so much time looking at those arguments, so much time listening to this.

They don't listen to any of the arguments against it. They just listen to arguments for it. That then they start sharing it with friends, what they've been hearing and listening to.

And when people start criticizing it, they start themselves giving the defenses that they heard from everything they were watching and reading and listening to.

And as they start explaining it to others, they start believing it themselves. And that's the first stage.

Then they start getting defensive as people start trying to refute them. They dig their heels down, and it becomes a pride issue.

And one of the things you'll see with all these groups is pride. That's why when you see these people, they are willing to fight tooth and nail over these things because it's essentially a pride issue.

And that's why, as if you heard Dr. Lau say, it is very difficult to convince these people.

Scripture is not going to convince them. But it's the Holy Spirit that's ultimately going to convince them.

When they're getting to the point where they are just turning a blind eye to anything and just expecting that they have all the answers, and some of them, they like having the answers you don't have.

That's what makes it so hard to try to correct people like this. And I saw someone in the chat that said

Matt Slick had a flat earther on his program, and he got very angry because Matt tried to correct him.

And that's what you'll see. They do that. One thing that I noticed on your argument,

Jason, as you're talking about Job 2610, he has inscribed a circle on the surface of the waters.

You're talking about the rescuing devices. I actually had a conversation with a flat earther, and I honestly thought it was a joke.

I thought they were kidding. And they used this. And here's how they used it. And I'm sure you've heard this type of thinking before.

Well, a circle is kind of like a hula hoop. Okay? So it's not a sphere.

It's a circle. So it's kind of like a hula hoop. And the water's in it, and it talks about this water in it.

Yeah, there you go. There you go. That's right here, this disc. Because that's what they believe it is. It's a disc that's round.

See, there's the proof. There's your proof. And to use that as that rescuing device to say, hey, look, this can't be talking about a sphere.

It can't be talking in those terms. And I asked them, when did we start using the scientific terms of sphere and things like that?

Did we start using this at the time of Job writing?

Or did we start using this in the 1800s, 1700s, when we started looking at the planets and the way we're doing today?

So maybe you can speak to that. Yeah, I'm not aware of any Hebrew word in the

Bible that's translated as sphere. But I think they're missing the last part of that verse.

The last part of the verse requires it to be a sphere, not a circle. Because it's the boundary between light and darkness that's a circle, not the earth.

The boundary between light and darkness. That's where evening and morning are occurring, where you're seeing a sunset or sunrise.

That's called the terminator. That's the boundary between light and darkness. And the only way that you can have a terminator that is always a circle is a sphere.

No other shape will do it. Any other shape, you rotate it or you move the light around it either way, it's sometimes not going to be a circle.

And it's only a sphere where if you have a light source, the division between the illuminated portion and the non -illuminated portion has to be a circle.

And I realize that some folks who say, well, no, it's like a spotlight effect. Well, first of all, that would have been foreign to the original audience.

They didn't have spotlights back then. Light normally travels in all directions if you're away from its source.

But secondarily, the shape, if you make, if you bend the earth out and look at these projected maps, there are different ways of making maps where you can distort the earth in different ways to get it to be flat, to get it, you know, and that involves distortion.

One of the common ones is where they have an azimuthal equal rejection. And so it puts the

North Pole right at the center. And some flat earthers think that's the actual shape of the earth. And they would say, well, see that it is a circle, the spotlight effect.

It is a circle on the on the boundary between light and darkness. That doesn't work because if you if you look at the positions where the light is, you can call up your friends at those locations and they should be experiencing sunset and sunrise at the times that, you know, that that Terminator passes over.

It doesn't work. It only works on a sphere. So Job 2610 really indicates that they knew that the earth was round at that time.

And it wasn't until a thousand and five hundred years later that that some nonbelievers started to embrace that position.

Yeah. So Humble Clay, who's a regular here, says, how does Jason Lyle have such a big brain in such an average sized skull?

You know, many of us want to know this, too. Cody, Cody ended up saying you can't be a flat earther without also being a moon landing skeptic.

True. And they do go together. He also asked this question. Do you think the flood had to be a miracle?

I don't see any natural way for there to be enough water to cover the earth's mountains and nowhere for it to go.

Thus, the great flood was miraculous. Well, certainly it was miraculous that the we need to define what a miracle is, though.

A miracle isn't is an unusual and extraordinary manifestation of God's power. So something that God doesn't normally do.

It's extraordinary. It's for a specific purpose and that the flood qualifies for that.

The question is, does it violate any natural laws? And the answer is we don't know. And part of the reason is we don't know what all the natural laws are.

So that's that's part of the issue there. But the fact is, God normally works within what we would call laws of nature.

In fact, I would say laws of nature are descriptions of the way God normally accomplishes his will. So their natural law is not any less divine than supernatural manifestation of God's power.

They're equally divine. It's just one is one is what normally happens. And the other is something that does not normally happen.

So I guess maybe a more specific way to put the question is, can we account for the flood via natural phenomena?

It's still God. And the answer is perhaps there are natural mechanisms that would have been in place that would cause a worldwide flood.

Plate tech. We think God used plate tectonics to accomplish the flood. And you don't need any additional waters, plenty of water on the earth.

If you just flatten out its features, the earth would be covered with water to a depth of one point six miles.

There's plenty of water on the earth. The problem is the earth has terrain. It has some sections that are valleys and mountains and the continents kind of stand up a little bit.

But we think during the flood year, the continents got pushed down a little bit into the into the ocean basins.

There are mechanisms to do that. John Baumgartner and Dr. Russ Humphreys, their model of catastrophic plate tectonics is brilliant.

It's the it's apparently the mechanism that God used. Now, whether he needed something supernatural to start it, that he speed up radioactive decay, that creates additional heat to get the plates to start moving, maybe.

So we don't we don't know. We don't know if it violated any laws of physics, but it wouldn't have to. It wouldn't have to.

You can do it with plate tectonics. It's just something that requires God to start it. And then once it once it loses its initial energy, it kind of coasts into their current position.

So it's not going to happen again. And of course, we have a promise from God again as well. There's a question.

Sorry. Go ahead. Go right ahead. You go right. Sorry. Jason, I guess this is kind of tangentially related to what we're talking about.

So we're going back to the moon. Is that correct? From what I understand, in a couple of years, Artemis. The Artemis.

Yeah, the Artemis program. Tell us a little bit about that. Are you excited about that? Why are we going back?

Well, I'm not I'm not part of the program or anything, so I don't know what their motivations are.

I'm just excited to see it because I wasn't alive the last time people were on the moon. And I've always been a little bit envious of the folks who got to see that.

I can I can just imagine, you know, I've seen videos. I've seen the video of Walter Cronkite, you know, just it just flabbergasted.

There are people walking on the moon. I'd love to take it because I love looking at the moon with my telescope. I'd love to look at it and know that there are people on its surface.

That would just be awesome. And of course, the technology has improved so much today. Hopefully we'll get much, much better video quality than we had back in the late 60s and early 70s.

So I'm excited to see that space exploration has always fascinated me. It's in terms of just doing science.

It's more practical to send unmanned space probes out into space. But there is something exciting about the human component and having people, again, walk on the surface of the moon.

I can't wait to see it. I hope it happens. Yeah. Yeah. I can't wait either.

Supposed to be in a couple of years, right? Yeah. I don't know. That was before COVID hit, though.

So that might have set them back. I don't know. Not the disease itself, but the shutdowns. Yeah. Well, you know, then now we've got to figure out it's going to have to be into a wokeness.

So we've got to reschedule. You know, can't be any white people to go there this time. Yeah. Ron says, now

I know that I'm old. He says, I saw them orbit the moon for the first time. Yeah. Actually, the first memory that I have as a child.

So I'm obviously going to date myself. But the first memory that I have as a child is coming down the stairs and my brother was watching them on the moon.

That's the earliest memory that I have, because he made such an excitement about it. I guess I remembered it.

And, you know, so I just sat there and I was like, to me, I was so young. I didn't just look like what

I see on TV. It's just a TV show. I didn't understand the significance of it until much later. Let me say,

I had an opportunity a month or two ago. I was with Jason and such a gracious guy.

He took me out and set up his telescope and we got to do some stargazing. And it's the first time

I have ever seen the moon in a real telescope. And it just was breathtaking.

Just absolutely breathtaking. And we saw Saturn and Jupiter and saw one of the moons of Jupiter going across.

And the shadow, even we could see the shadow from the moon on the surface of Jupiter. I mean, it's just amazing.

And Jason, I want to thank you again. Jason's a really nice guy. Really nice guy. I do have a question.

Speaking of that, did you see the aliens? Did you see the aliens?

Did you see the aliens coming across? Oh, I'm going to ask about it. You're going to have to give me that one.

So, Jason, I have to say, I called you recently, right? And I asked you because we wanted to get

Justin to do a talk. So literally, Justin, you made me so jealous.

I literally called Jason and said, look, I'm calling you. I fully admit it's a purely selfish reason.

We want to do a talk at your church so I can come see through your telescope. It's happening.

It's happening. I'll get the telescope all ready for you. That's the one thing I can't control.

Yeah, well, we just have to make sure we stay long enough that if it's not clear one day, we have a day. But, you know, one of the things

I was, you know, I've always been curious of, Jason, is, you know, reading astronomy and things like this, you end up seeing people talking about where we can see, you know, discussions of an older star versus a younger star based on color, right?

Blue stars versus red stars. It's always fascinating to see this. But, you know, could you explain to layman, this is the hard part.

This, by the way, folks, is what shows you the real intelligence. Okay, is being able to explain this stuff so the rest of us can understand.

But how do we measure the distances between, you know, like we measure distance between us and Betelgeuse?

How do we know how far that actually is? How is that done through the, you know, and then we can determine colors of stars and that determines age.

Can you explain that a bit? Yeah, okay, a couple of questions there. I think the first one, how to get the distance to the stars.

That was problematic for a long time because they are incredibly far away.

And so it's not like you can get out a tape measure or anything like that. I mean, you can't even. But, you know, with things like the moon and planets in our own solar system.

Well, you know, you get your friend on one side of the earth, you get another friend on the other side of the earth. They both look at the moon. They compare it to a background star.

You can use parallax. You can use geometry to figure out the distance to the moon. And there are other ways to do it, too.

Based on the shadow of the earth on the moon during a lunar eclipse, that can get you the size.

In fact, this this was figured out early on. Aristarchus was a Greek scientist, mathematician.

He figured out the distance to the moon. They had telescopes back then. He was able to figure it out based on the shadow of the earth on the moon.

Brilliant. Just using geometry. And he also was able to kind of estimate the size of the sun, which is really tough to do when you don't have telescopes.

And he figured out the sun is much bigger than the earth. He was, as far as we know, the first person to realize that the earth goes around the sun.

He thought once he discovered the sun was much bigger, he thought it would be ridiculous for the big thing to go around the little thing. And he suggested that the earth goes around the sun.

This is 300, 400 BC, something like that. And it's interesting because most people didn't believe him because they thought if the earth went around the sun, then the nearby stars should shift relative to the background stars parallax.

And Aristarchus said, well, maybe the stars are so far away you can't see it. He was exactly right, but they didn't have the technology at the time to test it.

So it wasn't until the 1500s that the heliocentric solar system was revived. And it wasn't until,

I believe, I think it was in the 1800s that people finally detected parallax. Some of the very nearby stars, when the earth's on one side of the sun, they appear to shift a little bit than when they're on the other side of the sun.

And you can simulate this effect if you hold your finger out and blink your eyes back and forth, your finger will seem to shift relative to the background.

That's like your finger's like a nearby star and your left eye and right eye is like the earth being on different sides of the sun.

And we can we can we can image that these days. And so the nearby stars from parallax, you can determine their their distance.

And that's a nice geometric way to figure it out. You need to know geometry and trigonometry, but you can the math straightforward once you know that.

There are other ways to do it. Once you figure out the nearby stars, because parallax from from earth based telescopes doesn't go out very far, because once you get beyond a few hundred light years, the parallax is so small you can't really detect it.

It's blurred out by Earth's atmospheres. We have satellites that can go much further. But there are other methods by which they can get distances.

One of them is they found out that there are certain stars within the parallax distance that have certain properties.

There are things like Cepheid variable stars that pulsate. And if you know the period of their pulsation, you know the brightness of the star.

It's true brightness. And you compare how bright it looks and that gives you the distance. Kind of like, you know, a car light that's nearby looks very bright.

A car light on a distant mountain looks very, very faint. Stars are the same way. If they're if you know their true brightness and you know how bright they look, you can calculate their distance.

That's a standard candle method. So those are some of the ways. There's there's many different ways that they they use to get the distances.

And I've looked at some of these are good methods. There's no doubt that they give good answers to that.

Now, there's this question then about stellar aging. And it's true that when.

Well, OK, let me back up. One of the one of the things they discovered when they started compensating for the distance to the stars or they would find a star cluster.

And there you assume all the stars are about the same distance because it's they're part of the same physical cluster.

It would be unlikely that one of them's way out, you know, real real towards you and then the other one way back here. So when the stars are all the same distance, you can compare their relative brightnesses.

And they found that there's a relationship between the brightness of a star and its color, which indicates temperature.

And they found that the really bright stars tend to be blue. The faint stars tend to be red. Stars like the sun that are yellow are kind of in between are kind of in between that.

And we know color indicates temperature because that's something that we can test in a laboratory. If you heat up a brick, you heat it up enough.

Eventually it'll glow red. You heat it up more. It'll glow yellow. You heat it up more. It'll glow white. You heat it up even more of a glow blue. Maybe you've seen a bulb that pops when it when a light bulb pops briefly.

The temperature gets very, very hot and you might notice it's bluish. That's that's for real. And so there's a relationship between color and temperature.

And so they were able to realize that the hot blue stars were burning very brightly. And then the cooler red stars were were not burning as as brightly.

And they called this the main sequence, this this relationship between luminosity and temperature.

Not all stars are on that main sequence, but a lot of them are. And the initial thinking was stars start out as hot blue and then like a chunk of coal over time, they eventually cool off and they go down to red.

And so the main sequence was initially interpreted as a time sequence that blue stars eventually become red stars.

And I have to tell you, nobody believes that anymore. I haven't met a single astronomer that believes that. And it hasn't been believed for decades because we now know that that main sequence has nothing to do with time.

It's a mass sequence. Stars that are more massive tend to have more pressure in their core, which creates more fusion, creates more energy.

You tend they tend to be blue. They give off a lot of energy. Stars that are not very massive are little red dwarfs.

They don't have as much fusion going on. So their surface temperature is cooler. They don't give us as much energy. So the main sequence has nothing to do with time, nothing whatsoever.

And so a star's color has nothing to do with its age. That being said, because blue stars burn up so quickly, they use up their fuel so quickly because they're very luminous, even though they have a lot of fuel available.

They're big. They use it up very quickly. They can't last very long in time. So if you see a blue star, it has to be young.

It can't be billions of years old. And secularists agree with that. Whereas a red star, you can't you can't tell.

Even in the secular scheme, you can't tell whether it's old or young by its color. Now, I would say as a Christian, all the stars are about the same age because they're all made on day four of the creation week.

I don't think any new ones have formed. There are problems with that. Some of them have died. Some of them have exploded.

But other than that, I would say the stars are all the same age. And there's no evidence that's that's inconsistent with that.

So, Jason, we don't know if we don't we don't have any evidence, if I understood you right, that there have been any new stars to form like we've never seen a part in the sky that was blank.

And now all of a sudden there's a star there. Correct. It's never been observed. Wow. Well, we'll point to what they call star forming regions.

But let me clue you in what they're really seeing there are blue stars. And they know that blue stars can't last billions of years.

So they're they're figural. They must have formed recently. And therefore, they're probably still forming. That region must be a star forming region. But the fact is, no one has ever seen a star form.

The process is supposed to take a long period of time anyway. So it's doubtful that you could. But we don't see things that really resemble stars in the process of formation or anything like that.

And there are all kinds of theoretical difficulties getting a star to form. Once a star is made by God, its own gravity will keep it together because a star is a ball of hydrogen gas in a relatively small area of space.

Cosmically speaking, the sun is about 100 Earths across. That's big, but it's nothing compared to the size of our solar system or a nebula.

And so the secular view is that nebulae, these clouds of gas that are spread out over vast regions of space, their gravity pulls them in and makes a star.

All kinds of problems with that. Because gas pressure when the nebula spread out like that, gas pressure normally overwhelms the meager force of gravity.

Gas pressure wants to make it expand. And I'm not aware of anyone ever having data for a nebula that's actually contracting.

No one's ever seen that. And you'd think, well, yeah, it wouldn't. Because as soon as it compresses in, the gas gets hotter and it wants to repel it again.

Magnetic field lines want to repel. It's like pushing two magnets together north to north. It wants to repel.

And then there's an angular momentum, too. So there are several physical things that would tend to prevent a star from forming.

So I'm pretty well convinced it doesn't happen. I'm not going to be dogmatic about it. But no one's ever seen a star form.

I think it probably can't happen. Can I ask a couple of questions just to... You just did.

I know. And I'm going to ask a couple more. So anyway. So my questions are, we've all heard the problem with the viewing stars exploding and they're billions of light years away.

The argument saying that, well, God's being deceptive. If we can see them and it's not really billions of light years away.

There's a myriad of questions with that. I mean, I've heard the argument so many times that, oh, well, we know we've seen stars formed and things like that.

So, you know, having you on and having that kind of clearing that air is really helpful in the apologetic realm.

So if you could just kind of talk with that, that'd be great. Yeah, it's hard to give a succinct answer to that because it involves knowing a little bit about physics.

Physics of Einstein in particular. I did write a book called The Physics of Einstein that brings people up to speed.

I was just going to say, I think you wrote a book on that. I wrote a book on it. Now make sure that when you say it, tell it to me like I'm five.

Yeah. You know, you've heard that. The book is called The Physics of Einstein. Yeah. And it's available at Biblical Institute, Biblical Science Institute.

That account. Yeah. And there's three chapters answering that. I'm going to answer it, but I wanted to give you that more. If you want the full understanding of it, you're going to have to read the book, really.

And I have a series, too, on our website at Biblical Science Institute dot com. Do you go under topics? Distant starlight is one of those issues.

And I kind of get the rundown at a layman level, just kind of explaining what the perceived problem is.

Attempted solutions. Why the other solutions really don't work. The idea that God created the beams of light already on their way, which makes

God deceptive. That's not going to work. But there is a way to do it, even within known physics.

One of the things that Einstein knew about and wrote about is what we today would call synchronic conventions.

And that has to do with how do you define now far away? And that might seem obvious, but it's not.

Because things on Earth, you know, well, you look at your watch and that's what time it happened.

But then we've come into this pattern of thinking, well, what I see happen in space actually happened a long time ago.

It turns out that's not necessarily the case. The speed of light, the round trip speed of light is well known.

It's well tested. If you take light, bounce it off a mirror, bring it back. If the distance is set, you'll get the same time every time.

But most people assume that light goes the same speed that way as that is coming back. And it doesn't have to be that way.

And Einstein recognized that, that we can't actually know the one way speed of light. And therefore, it can be instantaneous.

Light can take no time at all to get from galaxies, the most distant galaxy in the universe to Earth. And, of course, now to send a return signal would take time to send a round trip signal.

But we don't need the light to make a round trip. It just has to get here. And so if you use what's called an anisotropic synchrony convention, that means anisotropic means different, different directions.

Then you can get light here immediately. And I actually wrote a paper on this 11 years ago.

I think I wrote a paper on it back for the answers research journal. It's never been refuted. The secularists, actually, the secularists who are familiar with physics have said, yeah, he's right about that.

So because there are other there are other papers that have pointed out the same thing. Sarkar and Stachel back in 99 published a paper where they pointed out it's you can you can see the universe in real time using this convention.

So bottom line is there's a known way to get the light here immediately, not taking any time at all.

And yet the light really did come from the star and really reaches Earth. And so if you take that synchrony convention, then we're seeing the universe in real time.

And what bothers people is I'm not saying that that's the only way to do it. I'm just saying that's a perfectly legitimate way to do it.

And it's the way the Bible does it. Yeah. So let's let us bring in John here.

He's been backstage for a bit. He needed to fix his connection, but he's now in. So, John, you had some questions.

Hey, thanks again for being here. Dr. Lyle, I've been a big fan of you for years.

So a couple of things you brought up earlier about the flat

Earth and all that. And then it reminded me of I served four years in the

Navy and my job in Navy was navigation. And so we actually had to learn about the the celestial navigation.

We had a sextant. We had all the books. We had all the calculations that we had to figure out. One of the things whenever we had to navigate by the moon was that we had to calculate the curvature of the

Earth. That was one of the formulas that we had to use. And so therefore, whenever I come across someone who is a flat earther,

I just say, well, figure out then how how to navigate by the moon without using the curvature of the

Earth. And you'll see how how far off you are. So, yeah, that's that.

That was the thought earlier. But my main question was this. There was a post a while ago by Neil deGrasse

Tyson, your nemesis. And he said something like this.

And I don't know if Andrew can bring up this video or not, but if not, I can just go ahead and ask the question.

But he said this. He says, did you know? Yeah. What's up? How long is the video?

Well, the video is like seven minutes long, but I'm not going to do that. So what

I did is you had a four minute mark, right? Yeah. The four minute mark is when he starts actually saying.

So how long do I have to play for? For like a minute. I mean, just. Yeah. All right.

Hold on. Let me cue it up. I have to just change my audio and then share it.

So give me one moment. We'll get this set up. We can do this real time.

All right. In some countries, that's called a meal.

Sorry, I couldn't help it. All right. Here we go. Just tell me when to stop.

All right. You guys are not hearing that through. Oh, I know. Hold on one second.

This is great for for a live show. All right. You throw this at me last minute.

This is what professional looks like, guys. Tonya actually sitting on a rotating earth, passing through a tide that is stationary in space.

Right, because when I sit there, I think, oh, the water's coming in, going out, coming in, going out. You're on earth that is rotating inside and out of high and low tides.

A tidal bulge. A tidal bulge. That's right. So to me, we we had another cosmic queries where we spent a lot of time on that topic.

But I think that's a good one because it looks like water's moving in and out. But you're the one moving through the tide.

You see, I didn't that that's that's counterintuitive. And I wouldn't. What in the world is he talking about,

Dr. While because I never heard of that before, that you're the it's not the tides that are moving back and forth.

It's it's you moving through the tides. I'm like, is this the Matrix?

What is this? Oh, I just wanted to I wanted to know what. Have you heard of this?

Do you know about this? Yeah. OK. And he's he's right. More or less. He's he's simplified a little bit.

But yeah. So the Earth, the Earth's rotating. But if you were if you were on it, if you were on a distant star kind of above the

Earth, looking at it with your telescope, you would see that the moon induces tidal bulges and those tidal bulges would look more or less stationary.

They would kind of stay in the same spot as the Earth rotates underneath them. And so twice a day you get that you get high tide, you get low tide, high tide, low tide.

Right. As you as you rotate around. Now, they do move a little bit because they they track with the moon.

The moon's causing them, but they they're almost stationary. And the Earth's rotating at about a thousand miles per hour at the equator.

And so it rotates through the the tides. So that's the way it would look if you were if you were watching it from a distant star.

We're on a rotating planet. And so from our perspective, it looks like the tides come in twice a day.

I see. Wow. OK. I just thought that that was something that I knew the moon had something to do with the tides and all that.

But I had no idea that that was that was the case. Hey, one more thing.

And this might get complicated. I remember watching like the Learning Channel years ago and it had

Stephen Hawking on there. And he had a theory that black holes were actually like the entry point for wormholes.

And then quasars were the exits for for for for wormhole.

Have you heard of this before or I mean, or is there any kind of truth to this or hasn't been proven?

Yeah, I've heard of it. The the quasar thing is no longer believed.

Theoretically, when you look at the math of general relativity, you look at a black hole. You could you could theoretically connect that black hole to another black hole, either in a different universe or in our own universe.

But with time flowing in the opposite direction. And so theoretically, what is a black hole would be a white hole on the other end of it.

It's it's the math indicates that it can happen, but that doesn't mean it has to happen in reality.

So and we now think quasars are actually black holes. It's just that there's material that's that's funneling into the black hole and heats up.

It's incredibly hot because the energy involved is enormous. And some of that some of that material, instead of falling in, gets channeled away out the north and south pole of the rotating black hole.

And those beams are very, very powerful. We think it's a galactic mass black hole that's beaming radiation.

That's that's, I think, a good explanation. It's the best we can come up with because it's the only thing we can think of that that's that energetic.

So both quasars, quasars probably are fueled by black holes, black holes themselves.

Yes, you can. Theoretically, you can theoretically have a device that's like a black hole called a wormhole that connects two points in space.

But it's now been pretty well proven that you can't have a traversable wormholes.

If you've ever seen the sci fi program Stargate, where they go through a wormhole and they end up, they take a step one step through and then they're on the other side of the galaxy.

And that's a neat idea. But you can make some pretty good arguments that wormholes don't exist. Black holes, yes.

Wormholes, no. And even if wormholes did exist, they wouldn't be traversable. So it wouldn't be like on Stargate where you can actually go through them.

So it all comes down to the math. The math is very complicated. But the bottom line is black holes, yes.

Wormholes, no. Apparently you haven't been watching Marvel and you don't know what you're talking about.

Because if you had been watching Marvel, you'd know that they saved the whole universe by doing that. Don't they go back in time?

I don't remember. It's complicated. Yeah, they went back in time in one of those movies.

Yeah, something like that. I know that because I actually watched one. I watched the, was it

Endgame, which I was told was like 20 movies in. And I didn't understand any of the, there's all these references.

And I was told I had to first watch the first 20 movies to understand it. But now would be a good time,

Pastor Justin, now would be a good time for me. Because I think that, I could be wrong, but I think a lot of people's heads are hurting.

And so now might be a good time to, since they're thinking about their hurting heads, to let them know about getting a

MyPillow. Because after this talk, and folks, this is on podcast.

So you can go and re -listen to it to go, okay, I missed some of this. I got to go check this out. You can get it on podcast, but your head is still going to hurt.

So go get yourself a MyPillow. So when you do lie down at night, you can get yourself a good sleep.

So, and I absolutely love my MyPillows. I have several of them, one that I travel with.

Justin knows that. I travel with my own pillow because I love it that much. I love the topper, but I've recently got their bath towels.

And I've said on this program before, I'm picky about towels. I do not, all my towels would be these heavy towels because I like very absorbent towels.

Problem being is I don't like heavy towels. And as soon as I got the MyPillow towel, I was like, this isn't going to work.

Because it was too light. I immediately thought it wasn't going to be absorbent enough. I was wrong. See, I admit when

I'm wrong, Justin, and you think I don't. But I was wrong. And it was super absorbent.

I absolutely loved it. It was great. Made right here in the United States, by the way. So when you get a

MyPillow, a towel set, the toppers that they have, you're not only supporting American -Made

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That's 1 -800 -873 -0176. And make sure to use the promo code SFE to get all the discounts.

And then at the same time, support Striving for Eternity so that we can continue doing these shows.

And so we appreciate you guys doing that. Now, I saw some questions that we, some, some,

I want to, I'll hit some of these biblical questions that came up earlier. I just got to scroll up to find them. And I, and I have some things that I also wanted to talk about.

A book you recently wrote. Want to talk about that. But there were some biblical questions.

And I just got to go find it. Here we go. So the first one that we had was,

Dr. Lyle, how do you make sense of the waters above the expanse slash firmament or the waters above the heavens?

And what is this referring to? Okay. So this is during the creation week.

God makes, the earth's initially water. It's a water ball. And God on day two separates.

He creates a rakia. That's the Hebrew word for expanse or firmament. And he separates the waters that are under the rakia from the waters that are above or upon.

Actually would be a better translation upon the rakia. And so apparently there's water in the sky and there's water below the sky.

So the rakia seems to be sky. And then at the end, then God calls the rakia

Shemayim, which is heaven. So God calls the sky heaven. And so I would take them to be the same thing because God does.

He equates them. So what are the waters? The waters below, then we find out later on day three,

God separates the waters below and lets land come forth. And the waters are gathered to one place. And those are called seas.

So we know what the waters below are. They're water on earth's surface, oceans, seas. The question is, what are the waters above?

And I got to tell you, I'm in the minority on this. Most creationists disagree with me. But my opinion is that they're clouds because clouds are liquid water droplets in suspension.

The Bible talks about clouds being liquid water droplets in Job. You know,

God binds up waters into clouds and the clouds don't burst under the weight of them. And so I think that's it.

And that fits the context of Genesis, too, because Genesis 1 is telling about things that the

Hebrews would have been familiar with and how those things came to be. And so they were familiar with the land.

And so God describes how the land came about. They were familiar with animals and fish and birds. And so God describes how those were created.

They were familiar, apparently, with waters above because Job was. That's 2000 B .C. as being clouds.

So I think that's the most likely explanation. I took a look at a bunch of different commentaries on it. I think I took a look at 11 different commentaries on that.

And all 11 said that it was clouds. There are some creationists who want to put it out at the edge of the universe.

I think that's pushing it. I don't think that fits the context of Genesis. Well, this is the thing, folks.

If you don't realize that a lot of people know Dr. Lyle for his knowledge of things when it comes to astronomy, physics, things like this.

He has a great handle on Scripture as well. I don't know if you remember this.

Jason stayed at my house, and we actually had a Bible study that night. And I asked him if he wouldn't mind teaching it since we were in Genesis.

And he was like, no, brother, brother, you go ahead. So I had to trick him into teaching. See, every time

I was asked a question, I gave half an answer. And he just couldn't help himself. He had to give the other half. But in the night, he was teaching, and I just sat back and said, good, that's what

I was hoping for. But he understands the Scriptures very well.

And I hope you saw how he gets into the Hebrew to make his name. I'm making this point because a lot of people think of you,

Dr. Lyle, as just like a scientist who happens to be a Christian. And you are a scientist that's a

Christian, but you handle the Scriptures outstandingly. I've seen you do that.

It's kind of the same thing with Justin Peters here because people stereotype him with word of faith. And if you hear him handle the

Scriptures, he's one of the best exegetes that I know. And very few people ask him to speak on that, which is sad.

But Justin Peters, you had some, and then we had some more questions. Yeah, I want to first let everybody know that I did write down 9 -2 -2021 that Andrew admitted that he was wrong.

I did put that down. So we have that on record. Blow you up there. Yeah, let's put it on record.

It's actually there. Andrew admitted he was wrong. It's on record so that everybody, we do have it.

He did it once. Well, what I wanted to ask is, you said you're in the minority view here.

If I'm not mistaken, the majority view is the canopy theory. Maybe you could speak to that because that is an issue.

It is one to talk about and having to do with the scientific realities there.

Dr. MacArthur actually still holds to that view. Others do. Some don't. It's speculative, in my opinion.

You're talking about Genesis creation time, so it's hard to know.

But maybe you can come from a better perspective. But zoom in on this because you said you specifically said creationists. And most creationists don't hold to the canopy anymore.

So then answer the canopy thing and then answer what is the view now.

Okay. Yeah. So the canopy model, it was a neat idea. It was the idea that the original

Earth had a layer of either water vapor, in some cases ice crystals, that's sort of an orbit.

It's on top of the atmosphere. And there was always some question as to whether or not that would be stable. But in any case, and the idea is that it would create a greenhouse effect and give the

Earth kind of a subtropical temperature from pole to pole. And there is evidence that before the flood, the

Earth did have kind of a subtropical temperature almost everywhere. You find fossils of tropical plants in places like Australia or Antarctica, I meant to say,

Antarctica. And so it's interesting that the world was different then. And then some people thought maybe that would suppress violent weather, things like you wouldn't have hurricanes, things like that.

And maybe it would even block a little bit of the ultraviolet light so people wouldn't get cataracts the way they do today.

And maybe that's why people lived longer, because they had extra atmospheric pressure. It explained a lot of things.

It was a neat scientific model. And some people thought that that was what the Bible was referring to, these waters that are above the heavens.

And then the idea is that collapsed at the time of the flood. And that provided the water for the flood in many models.

And one person who is probably the world's expert on this, Larry Vardaman, Dr. Larry Vardaman, he's a

PhD in, I think, in meteorology. He's an expert on atmospheric science. And he studied this, and he really tried to get it to work.

He really wanted the vapor canopy to work. But he found out that no matter what you did, if you put any substantial water vapor, water vapor is a really good greenhouse gas.

People think of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is nothing compared to water vapor. Water vapor traps heat.

And if you put any significant water in, it not only makes the Earth's temperature hot, it makes it too hot, way too hot for life.

And so Dr. Vardaman found you had to reduce the canopy to almost nothing to get it to, to get the

Earth's temperature, surface temperatures to be compatible with what is necessary for life. And so, and of course, you make it that thin, it doesn't really do any of the things that you wanted it to do.

It doesn't increase the atmospheric pressure. It doesn't provide any significant water for the flood. There's always been some question as to biblically, whether or not that's allowable.

Because for one thing, the waters above, biblically, they're not something that disappeared at the time of the flood because the

Psalms refer to the waters above. Praise Him, you waters that are above the heavens.

And that's written well after the flood. So apparently whatever these waters are, they're still there. And that makes me think it's part of the natural weather phenomena, it's clouds.

So I'm not aware of any PhD creation scientists that hold to the vapor canopy anymore.

There might be some, I'm not aware of any. It's fallen out of favor, both for scientific reasons and possibly because it may not be compatible with scripture.

It was a neat idea. One of the most common views today among creation physicists and creation astronomers, with myself as an exception, is that the waters are surrounding the entire universe.

There's sort of a giant sphere that God lifted away from the earth and put at the rim of the universe. And the reason for that is because it does talk about the waters being a pond or above the

Rakhia, which we find later as Shammayim, which is the universe. It's the same place the stars are put.

So I get that. I get the logic of that. But at the same time, Hebrew is pretty flexible in terms of what we talk about takes place in the sky.

Shammayim, Rakhia, I think they just mean sky. So you could talk about the birds flying in the sky. You could talk about the stars being in the sky.

They're not in the same chamber, but they're both in the sky. And so it's perfectly appropriate to talk about the waters above or upon the sky being upon the atmospheric component and not necessarily the celestial component.

And I think that better fits the context of Genesis. Genesis explaining things that the Hebrews were familiar with, which is why it doesn't talk about microbes or things like that that they wouldn't have known about at the time.

It's explaining how the world we see around us came to be. Jason, may

I? That's exactly what I mean. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead, Justin. This is maybe just a bit of a kind of a nerdy question, and I don't even know the proper name for this star, but I was watching one of these videos on YouTube about space and some of the paradoxes, but apparently fairly recently within the last few years,

I think there was a star. There was a star. And all of a sudden it disappeared.

Have you heard about this? It disappeared with no nova, no explosion. It was there and then it was gone.

No, I've not heard of that. I've not heard of that. I know stars explode from time to time, but I've never heard of one just vanishing.

Send me information on that. I'll try to look into it. Okay. I will. I'll see. In fact,

I know where I can find it. Yeah. So I was fascinated by that. I'll send it to you.

Let's shift into other fascinating things because I know somewhere there was someone that was, where was that comment?

Someone was asking for Dr. Lyle to talk on fractals. So I can't find the comment.

Oh, here it is. Fractals, fractals, fractals. They blow my mind in a beautiful way.

Well, I'll say this. And I know that I think you guys said that this appears backwards in my, looks fine on my camera, but it's backwards on you.

So you can hold up yours there. Okay. So this is the new book that you've written. It comes with this

DVD, DVD, CD. I know it's with software. It's the fractal software that used to create the images, which as I told you, you really ruined my sermon prep.

Like Thursday night is not a time to, or whatever night it was to start playing with this disc because I was up to like three in the morning just looking at this stuff and just zooming in, zooming out and playing with it.

Then all of a sudden I'm realizing it's like three something in the morning. I'm like, I got to get to bed. So yeah, I had some extra work to do on the sermon prep that I didn't do that night.

But I love the talk you do on fractals. You now have a book on it.

I know that, you know, you were, you were trying to, it was a while when you used to do this in,

I think PowerPoint or something you just couldn't get the, it to work the way you needed. You've redesigned that talk.

If folks, if you haven't had Dr. Lyle out at your church to speak, well, first off, go book him now.

Okay. Go to the website and book him. Okay. Biblical science institute .com

book him to speak. One of the talks that you could do his starlight talk. Amazing.

But the other one that I love is the fractal talk. I love it because I never got to really see this stuff unless you did the talk, but now

I got the software and I got, and I got the very colorful book. I mean this book folks,

I don't know if this is, we'll even do it justice, but it shows all the fractals as you explain it's really you explain your talk.

Look at those things look just like broccoli. You're folks.

If you don't get that joke, you're going to have to get the book and you know, go watch the talk. But why tell us about this book.

Tell us about why fractals, how this discord, how this shows God's image and why you love broccoli so much.

I don't like Brock. Anyway. So yeah, this is something that I read about.

I was, I was in, it was in the eighties, late eighties, early nineties. I was in high school. And, and these had just been discovered these, these fractals.

And the particular one that we're exploring in this book for most of the book, about first half of the book is called the Mandelbrot set.

And what it is, is mathematicians found that there are certain algorithms where you, you run a, you take a number and you run it through this little formula and you get another number.

You take the output and you put it back in the input. Do it again. You get a new number, do it again, do it again.

You do it again. And they found that depending on the formula and depending on the number you put in, the, the sequence of outputs would either get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, or it would kind of stay small.

Some cases kind of Peter out, kind of go down to zero. And the interesting thing was you couldn't tell just by looking at the number of the formula, what, what it would do.

You couldn't tell how it was going to behave. And this is an example of what mathematicians call chaos. You could take a very small difference in the starting number and enormous change in the outcome.

What, you know, you could take, say the number one, you put it through the formula and it kind of stays small, but you put in the number 1 .0000001,

you run it through the formula and it gets really big. You get totally different output. And they were in particular investigating the formula

Z squared plus C very simple formula, but you, you put the number through it and you don't know what's going to happen.

And so in the in, in the late seventies and early eighties, computers were starting to get fast enough that they could do these calculations repeatedly and very quickly faster than a human could do it.

And so it occurred to somebody, well, let's make a map to see if there's a pattern because we don't want, we want to figure out which numbers stay small or part of the set and which numbers get really big and are off the set.

And when they made a map of it, they used a computer to, to make a map and the shape they got was this.

And nobody was expecting that shape. It's just, it's, it's, it's strange. And, and it's kind of beautiful.

And then the really cool thing is if you zoom in on it, you'll find smaller versions of the original shape.

You zoom in on a little section of the tail and you get that, that shape right there. And, and that's what a fractal is.

A fractal is something that it's got the same, when you zoom in on it, you see the overall shape on a much smaller scale and you can zoom in on that little baby.

And it's got a little, it's got a little baby version right there at the tip. You can zoom in on that and it's the same thing.

And you do that again and again, and again, it goes on forever. And there are certain sections of the shape you zoom on and they're incredibly beautiful.

You get these wonderful spirals and things that look like, like seahorses, kind of these seahorse structures that you see there in the

Valley of the seahorses and elephants and double spirals. It's amazing. Nobody was expecting this because you're just, all you're doing is investigating which numbers belong to the set.

And the map is gorgeous. And it's surprising to everybody. So who knew that numbers had such beauty and complexity built in it?

Because that's all you're doing. You're taking God's numbers. You're running through a little formula and you're seeing which ones, you know, the map that results is stunning.

It's absolutely gorgeous. And as I learned more about this and I started exploring this set,

I, I realized based on the formula, well, I could do that. I could write a program that, that plots that map.

And I did. And I started exploring it. It was gorgeous. And I just wanted to share this with people because what you're seeing here, the images in this book, you need to understand.

Somebody asked me who did the cover. And I had to say, well, no human being designed that shape.

This was the cover was done by God. I picked the colors, but the shape is built into numbers by God, the creator of numbers.

And there's no secular explanation for that. And so there's this, there's this universe, the

Mandelbrot set. It's an infinite universe. You can zoom in on it infinitely and you could literally spend the rest of your life just zooming in on one section of the

Mandelbrot set. It goes forever because it's math. It's not made of atoms. It's made of math. And so that's remarkable.

There's this new universe for us to explore. And I wanted to share that with people that, Hey, there's this new universe that there's this, this secret code that's built into math.

We discovered it in the 1980s. Our ancestors had no idea it was there. And it reflects

God's glory and his beauty and his mind, his infinite mind. And I say, there's no secular explanation for it.

None whatsoever. Has there been an offer? Has there been an attempt at explaining this from a secular point of view?

Not that I've seen. I mean, there are patterns that exist in math, but in terms of the beauty that you see in the

Mandelbrot set, I haven't seen any attempted, attempted explanation. I played devil's advocate in the book and tried to come up with some, but then they're very easy to knock down.

You say, well, you know, there's, there's beauty built into math. How do you explain that? Well, where does math come from?

I say it comes from the mind of God. It's the way God thinks about numbers, but how would a secularist, they can't, they can't appeal to that.

They would say, well, maybe math was something that people made up to help us get along in the universe. That's not going to work because if, if it was something that, if mathematical laws were inventions of people like civil laws, then you'd have different, different countries would have different maths.

That doesn't work. The architects in India use the same math as the architects in the United States, because that's, that's what the physical universe obeys.

It's universal. There's a universality to math, which indicates it's not something people created. We could have created it differently.

In fact, the planets orbited based on mathematical principles before human beings existed for a couple of days or in the secular view for billions of years.

So math existed before people, it can't be a creation of people. And yet math exists in a mind.

It's a conceptual entity. It's how we think about numbers. Almost like logic. That's the problem for the secularists because they don't have minds before people.

People were the first minds to evolve. But in the, in the Christian worldview, we have a mind before people, the mind of God.

And that mind precedes even the physical universe. So we have no problem explaining why the physical universe obeys math, why math is so useful and why it's beautiful.

It's because it reflects the thinking of the triune God of scripture. Yeah. It's kind of like figuring out how many digits are in pi.

Yeah. God knows all of them, but there's an infinite number of them. Yeah. And that's, that can be proven.

It's just, we don't know what they are beyond a certain, it's on a certain. Yeah. The God does. Okay. I'm going to see who that.

That's Justin. Okay. I don't think it's me. No, no.

It was the other Justin. Sorry. Sorry. That was, that was my wife getting some ice out of the,

Oh, okay. I thought she was, I thought she was beating that dog. No, no. I thought, I thought it was, it's not, that's not a dog, but I did see it on camera.

Yeah. It's that's a rat with hair. But no, that's cute dog. Yeah. I've seen rats in New York. They're about the size of Justin's dog.

I'm just saying. So, so one thing I do want to point out is my, my two favorite people are here in this show with me.

I'm Justin and you're not one of them. Justin and Jason. I got to tell you, I just have enormous respect.

I love you guys. I think, you know, your humility, your, your example, your godliness, just, just the way that you guys are, are both willing to sit down and talk.

My, my kids, they love you guys. You know, we went to the arc arc encounter and Jason, I don't know if you remember or not, but we just sat and talked for a good while about starlight and all these other issues.

And my kids were just enamored. They were just, they were just so shocked. Jason, you know, just it's, it's such a, it's such a, a privilege to have people that my family can look up to.

And, and, you know, Justin, you too, brother, you know that, you know how I feel about you. One thing

I want to point out to everybody is. His kids used to look up to me, but obviously they've moved on.

Yeah, they got over it. Yeah, they got over it. No, actually we look up, we love

Andrew too, but one thing I want to point out is that, related to all of these different apologetic issues.

And I brought it up earlier. It's cute and funny. There are people that legitimately push the argument for aliens and this, that, and the other, these two guys below me,

Justin and Jason, you guys talked about this issue on the alien conspiracy, all that stuff. You've got video of it.

I watched it and I loved it. It was, it, it, it ties into this guys.

It ties into this, this conspiracy of, it can't be God. It can't be the way

God says things. It's gotta be something else. We have to tie in evolution. We have to tie in human mind principles.

You know, even with the fractals, you're talking about something that only

God can do. You know, you're talking about all these issues are all apologetic issues and it all begins with God.

And if we go back to the scripture and we go back to God, we can always give an answer, give an account and a reason for the hope that lies within us.

So let me, let me get to some of the other questions that I saw. I'm going to look for them now. You know, when I put this show up,

I'll ask you one real quick question while I look for some of this others. You know, Jason, I told you,

I send you the, the, the advertisement for the show and I was glad that you got it.

So I said, we were going to talk about flat earth. We did. We were going to talk about fractals and we did, and we're going to talk about life, the universe and everything.

And the answer is 42. Thank you. And those who don't know that have not read

Douglas Adams, but I was glad that you picked up on the, on the humor there. Okay. Every astronomer knows that I've even seen it in a technical paper.

One time there was, there was some number that worked out to be 42 and they had a footnote and they, and they cited hitchhiker's guide.

Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. Basically for the short, so people don't have an inside joke, but basically the short of hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy is they, the earth was created as a supercomputer to figure out the answer for life, the universe and everything.

And the answer was 42. But when they had the answer, they forgot what the question was. So they had to create another supercomputer to figure it out.

By the way, the rats were the ones that lab rats were the ones that were actually the brilliant scientists there.

Here's a question for you. Dr. L, two quick questions. What do you think is meant by God stretched out the heavens?

Second one is in regards to ASC, why could light travel faster in one direction, but slower in the opposite?

So could you answer those? With regard to stretching out the heavens? I think it's, it is a literal as that can be understood that the universe has increased in size since God created it.

It, he made it big, it's bigger now. He's stretched it out. Whether that happened during the creation week or whether it's continuing to happen.

I think that might be what we're seeing with these red shifted galaxies, the expansion of the universe. I think that's referred to in Isaiah 40, 22 is one of the verses that indicates that stretching out of the heavens.

So yeah, universe is getting bigger apparently. With regard to the anisotropic synchrony convention, why would light travel faster in one direction, but slower in the opposite?

Because of human stipulations. It turns out that there, there is no objective way to synchronize two clocks separated by a distance where everyone in the universe will agree that they're synchronized at best.

You can come up with a system where you can get a group of people to agree on it, but, but not everyone.

And that's due to a principle called the relativity of simultaneity. And so for example, if, if I say these two clocks are synchronized by whatever means, and my friend who's moving relative to me, he's got a different velocities in a different position.

He will using the same mechanism from his point of view, he will not say those two clocks are synchronized. And one way that people do that is they'll send out a light beam and they'll assume that the light takes the same time to go out as it does come back relative to themselves.

But you see somebody who's moving relative to that person would not see the light going, see faster than the person and see back because that person's in motion relative to the other person.

So there's, there's no way to do it. And because you can't exactly synchronize two clocks objectively, there's no objective thing.

There's no such thing as an objective one way speed. It's relative. It depends on, on your perspective.

And for that reason, there is, there really is no such thing as a one way speed of light in terms of an objective property of the universe.

It's a human stipulation. And that's something that Einstein wrote about. He said, you know, the idea that light went that way is the same speed as that way.

He says, it's not a property of the universe. It's not, he says, it's a stipulation which I can make my own free will in order to arrive at a definition of simultaneity.

I know that's counterintuitive, but the bottom line is the nature of space and time is different from what most people think it is.

I've written a book on the topic. If you want the details of physics of Einstein goes into that, but the bottom line is you can choose the speed of light, the one way speed of light to be the same in all directions, or you can make any other choice.

As long as the round trip speed averages out to C, which is 186 ,282 .397

miles per second. Any other one way speeds, that's up to you. And that pulls you then how to synchronize clocks.

The reason that becomes important is really with starlight, you know, how do we, how can we have all, see all the stars we do that are so far away?

Well, if this, if the light coming toward us is say instantaneous, wouldn't be a problem.

So Chris, Chris calculus man Hudson asks this question. Does the physics of Einstein book contain any calculus at all?

I, um, I, I wanted it to be readable to layman. And so I really avoided calculus as much as I could, but there is, there is one appendix that does have some calculus in it.

Um, there, in order to derive equals MC squared, I couldn't think of how to do it exactly using algebra only.

So I had to use calculus for that one. It's in the appendix. So you can, you can skip that part. Oh no, he's going to, he'll go buy the book just for that.

That's it. Yeah. And he'll take it apart. With the nickname of calculus man, you know, that he obviously is going to want to just, he just wants more of the calculus

I think. And with the question, and there were certain other things too that I could have used calculus, but I really tried to avoid it.

Cause I want, I want everybody to understand the physics of Einstein and not everyone's had calculus. So that is a book that you did self published, right?

For that reason. Yeah. Right. I wasn't sure it would sell. And I didn't want to burden New Leaf with a book that might be a dud.

So I saw probably, but it, it, it's, it's sold pretty well. I enjoyed it. Good. Thanks.

Even I could understand it since, since Justin was picking on me, actually, since, you know, here, did you read this one?

Justin, Melissa says, Andrew, Edward's a good guy too. Also thankful for your ministry, brother.

See, so you pick on me, but there's, there's some of the people that actually appreciate it.

Obviously not Chris Hanholds. He's been, he told you to frame that note you had.

So Justin or Justin, you guys have any, any, we got about 10 minutes left in the show. I don't know if you guys had any questions that you wanted to ask of Dr.

Lyle while he's here. Don't all speak at once. I'm just,

I'm so, I'm just trying to drink it all in and I'm just enjoying every bit of it.

It's been, it's been wonderful. It's been really good. I'll be, I'll be trying to send out,

I'll send all this out to my professors now, because I've been trying to tell them that they need to get both you guys,

Andrew, you included. I'm trying to get all you guys to come to, to the seminary down at the

Shepherds Theological Seminary and, and do some of the discussions there.

I'm really hoping that they'll let it happen and that you guys will do it. That I would be nervous. I'd be nervous.

I know why, because next week we're going to do what? What are we doing next week? Yeah. Cause, cause we have a, so, so he actually goes to school with the one of the professors there used to be my professor,

Dr. David Burgraff, who will be on next week. I'm talking just war theory and can we defend ourselves?

It'll be Dr. David Burgraff, who you may not have heard of. If he's another one, like, like with, as you hear what

Jason with all this astrophysics stuff, he's that way when it comes to history and theology.

Okay. Just knows his stuff crazy. How much information he packs in his head.

He also, I think he was a chemist. That's where his he's got his either master's PhD is in chemistry.

But he he really good. He did his dissertation, just war theory. And so Matt's been working on articles asking the question, can we defend ourselves really an issue for calm in Africa where they're being attacked and things, and they're being asked to answer this.

And so next week we're going to have more of a kind of a panel discussion type set up with, with them.

And so that's going to be very interesting. I would be nervous though, if I came to school to speak because Dr.

Burgraff and I spoke at a conference together and he was taking notes fervently as, as I'm preaching.

And I was like, Oh no. Like the whole time I'm thinking, like the only time I see that is like, you know, in preaching class, right?

You know? And I was like, okay, what, I'm like, okay, what did I do wrong? Because you were taking all kinds of notes.

He's like, no, I was actually taking notes. I wasn't expecting that.

I'm going to be quiet for all of next week. I don't know if I'm going to say a word. I'm just going to tell you it's,

I'm not sure if I'm going to say a word. I'm going to have Justin and Jason have you guys come back in next week and talk about just war so I can be quiet.

Yeah. Well, you know, we'll have to see. We, we already had the one where Justin and Justin against Anthony kind of, it was actually,

I think it was Justin, Justin and I against Anthony. It almost seemed that way. We, but, uh, well,

I can, I can tell you, and that's, that's the whole thing why we wanted to do it as a show is because there are a lot of differing views with just war theory.

And when can we defend ourselves? When is it acceptable? Is it ever acceptable?

Uh, I was trying to get, uh, Phil Johnson to join us, but unfortunately he's got an elders meeting.

I was like, come on, man, get your priorities straight. I mean, elder grace community church, you're going to that, that meeting is going to be more important.

Well, yeah, but he, he has some great things. He wrote on his early, early blogs if you're reading them back then.

And so I'm probably going to pull some of that in to the discussion. Um, but Justin Peters, anything you'd like to say, promote before we give

Jason the last, uh, last, uh, Say or promote. Um, no,

I don't, I don't suppose. Um, Jason, I think I've asked you this before when I interviewed you, but, uh, so our, uh, our son is just an mediocre size star.

Correct. Can you, can you give us an idea? Some of the larger stars, Candace Majoris.

And I think there's, I know Beetlejuice is a big one, but, um, as best we know, as best we know roughly how big can stars get compared to our son?

Uh, they can get quite a bit bigger. Our son is about a hundred Earths in diameter. So think about that line.

If I, I got to see a transit of Venus back in 2012,

I think. Yeah. 2012 where Venus crossed in front of the sun and Venus is the same size of Earth. So it was just, it was interesting to see the little speck.

It's like, that's us. Um, so the sun's a hundred Earths across, uh, there are

Antares, for example, or Beetlejuice. They're both about roughly the same size. They're about 600 suns, suns across.

So they're enormous. And you can, they can, stars can get a little bit bigger than that. They can get, I'd say stars can get up to over a thousand times the diameter of the sun.

Uh, you put a star like that where our son is, we'd be inside it. It would, the orbit would extend out way beyond Mars.

Uh, they get big. It turns out they can't get too much bigger than that because there's a certain, there's a luminosity limit called the

Eddington limit where they would essentially blow themselves apart because of the, the, uh, run, you get runaway fusion in the core.

But so there is a, there is a maximum size of a star, but they get pretty big. So if you have a star that is a thousand times the diameter of our sun, how many suns would fit inside that volume?

So it'd be a thousand cubed, basically, just to give you a feel for it.

So a thousand times a thousand times a thousand. So you realize that means that you don't take you longer than a week to drive around.

Yeah. I can't comprehend. There was a video that had the different sizes and I got lost at, you know, just like with this couple of seconds it goes through and it's like, you can't figure out the relationship.

There's a great video. It's at the, it plays in the planetarium at the creation museum. Yeah. If people haven't gone to the creation museum at the planetarium, the really neat thing that I've told you this before that I love that you did with that is so you take us out into space and you're showing us, you know, all these bigger stars and farther out and here's this one beetle juice and this, and you know, and then you bring us all the way out of what we can, what we can see and guess from the universe.

And then you say, okay, I'm going to every, every box, you put these boxes and it's like, okay, every box is so much, so many light years.

And now we're going to return home and you just, it's just interesting how you're just bringing us all the way from like the outer, outer edges.

And it's like, okay, here's what the stars will look like from all the way out here as we're coming back home. And of course you stop it right at the creation museum.

Yeah, that's pretty cool. No, that is, that's, I, I, I've seen it plenty of times. I love seeing it.

It, it really, the, the thing that that does is two things. One shows you how awesome our

God is because he created this, this universe when people had no way of seeing it, no way of understanding the distances, the complexity and all that.

He just created that because he wanted to, because it shows his glory. And the other thing it does is help me to realize how small we are.

I mean, we as human beings think we are like we're it. And yet the reality is we're very small and God is very big.

And let me end by just encouraging folks with so many people who've been struggling with everything going on in the media.

Uh, it's good to remember that God is, God is big. God is awesome. We're, we're little, the things going on in our world right now, this is small stuff for God.

He can handle these things. He knows what he's doing. And so this is the thing

I always amazed when I, when I look at the universe and study anything with it, it's just, it blows me away. And then

I realized people never knew this for all these centuries, you know, but God knew.

That's the amazing thing. So Jason, any last words that you want as we close out?

Uh, no, thanks for, thanks for having me on. It was fun always to get together with you guys and I appreciate your, your time.

All right. Well, we appreciate you coming on. Always love having you. So folks remember to just strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.