Apologetics Live with Jason Lisle

This is Apologetics Live. To answer your questions, your host of Striving for Eternity, Andrew Rappaport.

All right, we are live, Apologetics Live, here to answer your questions and challenges.

Now, folks, to remind you again that I see in the chat some folks are asking, where's

Matt Slick? As I said on a previous show, he will be out at least for the end, until the end of this year.

He's moving next month. There's going to take time to move. There's going to take time to unpack.

So, but we have a lot of special guest apologists coming in, and we will have some debates as well.

So, tonight we have Dr. Jason Lyle, and we're going to be talking about his background as astrophysicist.

He's an astrophysicist, I should say, and we'll be talking about things like that, creation science. But next week, we will have a debate between a

Lutheran and a Baptist on the topic of baptism. The week after that, we'll be having, we're probably going to review a debate that Eli had done on the

Gospel Truth pod, really, show. And then after that,

I will be at Truth Matters Conference in California. We'll take that week off. But when we return, we're going to do a review, a debate review of my debate last night from the

Gospel Truth. Well, can we actually say it was a debate? For those of you who watched it, you know, you really couldn't say it was a debate because the guy defeated his argument in his three -minute opening.

He had 10 minutes. He did three. He really didn't seem to want to do any cross -examination because he used it just as rebuttal.

I think he was actually, my theory is he said he was a gamer. I think he was playing games during the debate because he seemed like he really didn't want to be there.

He was disinterested. You know, he didn't want to ask questions. He wanted more of a monologue.

I don't know if he really wanted to be there, but this is Apologetics Live. It is a ministry of striving for eternity.

The podcast version is heard on the Christian Podcast Community and you can find all of our podcasts at christianpodcastcommunity .org.

If you're wanting to find out, we have a bunch of podcasts, mine that I have, this is one of them.

The others are Andrew Rapport's Rap Report. That is a weekly episode that we do where it's about an hour long.

But if you like the shorter things, Monday through Friday, Andrew Rapport's Daily Rap Report.

What I've been doing is giving you really short answers, two -minute answers, actually less, about a minute and 45 seconds to challenges that we get.

I'll give you a hint. The one we just did was, Does God Tempt Us to Sin?

That was today's. And tomorrow's will be,

Does God Still Speak to Us Today? So we put those out Monday through Friday, quick, just so you have some of these challenges that people sometimes give.

And so they are available to you. So those are some of the podcasts out there.

And I want to bring in now Dr. Jason Lyle. One of the things,

I always love to tell the story, Jason, of you and I on the boardwalk with some guy who just took about over an hour and a half of this pastor's time, this military guy, and he basically walked over to this conversation and said,

What's your argument? What's your position? And he basically said his conclusion was there are no smart, there's no intelligent

Christians. And I ended up asking him, what would count as intelligence? And he says, You show me someone that has a

Ph .D. and is a Christian. I said, OK, what if he had a Ph .D. in astrophysicists?

Would that count if he had a degree in astronomy and physics?

And he was like, such a thing doesn't exist. And you were like sitting on the bench. I'm like, Jason, can you come here for a second?

I'm like, meet Dr. Jason Lyle, Ph .D. astrophysicist. And the guy just walked away from you and never said a word.

And you were like, what did I say? Your presence was enough to chase him away.

I do have that effect on people. But you used to work for a company, you worked for Answers in Genesis, a very well -known creation science ministry.

Then you moved over to more of a research type of ministry, ICR, Institute of Creation Research, which they're more of doing more research stuff.

I should note for folks that if they've ever been to the Creation Museum and gone in the planetarium, you had a little something to do with that.

You actually put the both, I think, both the presentations together, right? Well, I have several now.

The original three or four presentations, I wrote those. Yeah. So and then you went over to ICR.

And then recently you've you've gone out on your own and you're with a ministry that you've created and you speak for Biblical Science Institute.

So real quick for folks, as we wait for folks to come in, I should announce that if you want to join the discussion, just go to ApologeticsLive .com.

The links to watch and join are right there. Tell us about Biblical Science Institute, why you started this, what you're doing with it and what you hope to see

God do with this ministry. Well, it is a Christian ministry. It's designed to show people that the

Bible is true from the beginning and with a special emphasis on science. I am a scientist.

And by the grace of God, he's selected me to defend the Bible. I enjoy doing that.

I enjoy showing people how science aligns with Scripture. There's a common misconception that to be a

Christian is to be anti -scientific, to be anti -intellectual. And really the purpose of this organization is to show people that, in fact, it really is the opposite.

That's not to say that there aren't any intellectuals who are not Christians. But I do want to show people that it is intellectually inconsistent to not be a

Christian. If you're going to be fully, consistently rational, if you're going to make sense of science and the scientific method, you really have to be a consistent

Christian in order for that to make sense. And I also have a special appreciation for the defense of Genesis in particular, it being foundational to the

Christian faith in terms of major Christian doctrines having their origin, their foundation in Genesis. And so it's an educational science, educational

Christian ministry, basically. Right. And so some of the stuff

I have, some of you, I don't have the DVD I wanted to talk about here. You're the most recent one.

And I forget the name of it. The one on fractals. It's called The Secret Code of Creation. The Secret Code of Creation.

Folks, this is you got to go to BiblicalScienceInstitute .com right now and get that one.

That is so you go. So, folks, no, you just go into they have shop and just got to go into the shop.

I should have done that. I would have found them because there's well, there's several products out here.

But get get the one, the Secret Code of Creation. All right.

It's on page two there. Nice red background. That is like if you want to just be wowed about like how cool, like how awesome

God is. That's what I mean. Like this is the one thing you and I were sitting in Idaho once.

And you were you were you were saying like you were talking about like dentists and different professions where when they get they travel, it's like they have people that come up and ask them things that are kind of practical.

But you have a field that just sits young where you're just constantly going, wow, God is awesome.

So you got some DVDs that that I have here. Understanding Genesis. So talk about that one real quick.

That's alluding back to what I mentioned previously, the fact that Christian doctrines are rooted in Genesis. A lot of Christians think, well, it doesn't really matter what you believe about Genesis, just trust in Jesus.

And of course, Jesus is the the center of our faith.

There's no doubt about that. But Jesus is also the creator and he created the universe into existence.

And so those Christian doctrines go back to Genesis. Yeah, we believe that that human life is valuable.

But why is that? Well, it goes back to the Genesis theme that the human beings are made in the image of God. We're different from animals.

We're classified as a mammal. I understand that. But we're different in terms of we have a spirit. We're made in God's image.

The animals are not. We've been given dominion over the animals. All these Christian concepts go back to the literal history recorded in Genesis.

That's really what that DVD is all about. One that all the kids love, especially?

Dinosaurs. That's just fun. And it's just something that, you know, who doesn't love dinosaurs, especially if you're a young youngster?

I mean, man, I loved dinosaurs when I was young and I never really got over that. I still think they're incredibly cool.

And it is it was for me, it was very exciting once I realized how dinosaurs make sense in light of the biblical, the biblical history.

And that was just cool. It was it was profound to me. And I enjoy sharing that. It would be so that that DVD would be suitable for youngsters, but for adults as well.

I try to reach a wide range of people if I can. All right. And then we have astronomy reveals creation.

That, of course, is my specialty field. I am an astrophysicist. And so it's my joy to share with people how the universe declares

God's glory. How it's how the universe and the science of astronomy is not really consistent with the prevailing secular view of the

Big Bang, the billions of years and so on. So it shows people that the science actually confirms biblical creation in the realm of astronomy.

And actually, I should have brought the books out. You have a couple of books back, Taking Back Astronomy. And the other interesting one to encourage people with it is your

The Stargazer's Guide to the Night Sky. Describe that. Yeah, well,

Taking Back Astronomy, that's the more apologetic of the two that actually goes along with that DVD. And so it's showing people how the universe declares

God's glory, how it's inconsistent with the billions of years, how the science lines up with Genesis. And then

Stargazer's Guide. That's a little different. That one I wrote just to help people enjoy the night sky because the universe does declare

God's glory. And I thought, you know, with this with this second book, I don't need to go out and explicitly point that out.

What I need to do is show people how to enjoy the night sky better. So if you want to know when the next meteor shower is, it's in there.

If you want to know how to find Saturn, it's in there. If you want to know, you say, well, I'm thinking about getting a telescope.

But what are the considerations? It's all in there. So I'm never going to get a telescope. I just want to know what I can see naked eye or with binoculars.

It's in there. So it's just designed to show people how to enjoy the night sky from a Christian perspective.

And it's not hitting you over the head with apologetics like like most of my sources.

But it's just it's just helping you enjoy the night sky. And there is a gospel message in the back. And I do want to talk about, you know, actually, we'll do that before we get to next

DVD. There's been some recent recent things in the news about some some objects heading our way and into our solar system.

Should we be worried? God's designed a very stable universe.

And of course, he's promised us that until until Judgment Day, see, time and harvest will continue.

According to Genesis 822. So the Earth's stable, which, by the way, eliminates any catastrophic global warming or anything like that, or global cooling for that matter.

We have a promise from God that won't happen until Judgment Day. And then nothing can prevent that one.

But no, there are objects that that are in our solar system. There are Earth -crossing asteroids and people get very concerned about those.

But there's we can calculate centuries in advance where those are going to be with with a fair degree of precision.

And none are scheduled to hit the Earth. What was really cool is it was about. Well, first of all, let me back up a little bit there.

About a year was a year or two ago, we had an object enter our solar system that is basically it's an asteroid that does not belong to our solar system.

It's just passing by as it were. And so this object came in from deep space, went around the sun and then it went back out to deep space and over to return.

Really fascinating. You know, also, it's unbelievably long. It was like like the length compared to the width was like I don't like seven to one or something.

It was incredibly it's like a rod, basically. And that was fascinating because we had never seen an interstellar asteroid before.

All the other asteroids orbit the sun and they continue to orbit. This thing came in from deep space, got bent by the sun's gravity and back out.

And then just just like a week or two ago, they discovered the first interstellar comet, a comet that's from deep space.

It doesn't it doesn't circle the sun. It's coming in from deep space. It's going to whiplash.

It's never going to get real close to the sun. It gets about as close as Mars is. It's going to whiplash back out into deep space and we'll never see it again.

Just cool because it's novel. And I like stuff like that in astronomy. It's like, you know, we've got there are thousands of asteroids that orbit the sun.

They're fun to look at. And there are a lot of comets. I've seen a lot of comets. But I like stuff that's unique, stuff that we've never seen before.

And so an interstellar comet. How cool is that? It's not going to get very bright. It's going to get up to about magnitude 15, which is about the brightness of the dwarf planet

Pluto. So unless you have a very powerful telescope, you're probably not going to see it. But it's just it's it's just neat.

It's one of these little surprises that the Lord sends us. Who would have thought of an interstellar comet? Very neat. And comets can last millions and billions of years, right?

Well, they can't. Actually, the ironic thing is only if they were interstellar could they do that. So this is perhaps the one that could last that long because it's been in deep space since creation, presumably.

But the comets that orbit the sun, they can't last millions or billions of years. That's well known.

We know the reason for that is because when comets come close to the sun, that comets are made of ice.

And so that icy material is vaporized away from the surface. And that's actually what forms a comet's tail.

That's material being blasted away from the nucleus of the comet by solar heat, radiation, solar wind carrying it away.

So every time you see a comet, it's getting smaller. It's losing mass. And we can we can do the math. We can measure the rate at which the material is being depleted.

We know the amount of material that's in a comet. They're not very big. They're a few miles across. I guess it's big for an ice ball, but it's not very big compared to a planet.

And so we can do the math. A typical comet can last something like 100 ,000 years. It depends on the orbital characteristics.

It's not millions of years, let alone billions. And so that's somewhat of a problem for the secular view, because the comets are supposed to have formed when the solar system did.

In the secular view, that's 4 .5 billion years ago. But they can't last that long. And that's why my secular colleagues have invented things like the

Oort cloud to supply long period comets. And then they claim the Kuiper belt supports, regenerates short period comets.

But we don't really have any evidence for an Oort cloud. And there's no evidence that the Kuiper belt, that there's a genuine

Kuiper belt with trillions of comet sized objects waiting to fall into the solar system. So those are both examples of rescuing devices that are designed to protect the worldview from what is apparently evidence to the contrary.

Are you saying that the, you know, atheists need to rely on facts like they demand of us?

I thought they just make claims and they don't need to actually support an Oort cloud. Well, in their view, the support is we still have comets, so there must be an

Oort cloud, right? It's a little bit of circular reasoning, but we all have, we all have a worldview.

We all have a way of looking at the world. And when evidence is presented that is contrary to that worldview or seems contrary to that worldview, we have the tendency to fill in, to produce conjectures that will explain, that will account for that evidence within the worldview.

So I don't really blame my secular colleagues for inventing an Oort cloud that's consistent with their belief in billions of years and their observation that we have comets that can't last that long.

They need that. There's no evidence for one. And so I think the evidence is just very consistent with the biblical timescale of thousands of years.

Well, I mean, the nice thing about saying that there could be an Oort cloud is the fact that the fact that we haven't found it doesn't mean it's not out there yet is just the answer, right?

Yeah, the best rescuing devices can't be proved or disproved. That's what makes them good, effective,

I should say. They're not good in a scientific sense. In science, we want things that are falsifiable. Right now, the Oort cloud really isn't.

So it's a conjecture at this point. It's not something that falls into the category of science.

It's an untested conjecture. But I can't disprove it because how do you disprove the existence of something that's undetectable, something that's out beyond the range at which we can detect comet -sized objects?

So it is possible. But I do have to point out there's no evidence for it at present. Yeah, and you actually have something as well when we come to your view on the starlight issue, which is a big issue for a lot of people.

And it's one that comes up often. We get challenged with it. But how could the starlight get here if we have a young age to the universe?

And forgetting the fact that they have a horizon problem and things like that. But the nice thing of your conclusion, and I want you to first explain what are the issues with the starlight problem?

What are the problems that the atheists have? Then explain kind of your view. And the beauty of your view is it's impossible to test so that no one can ever prove you wrong on it.

So that's beautiful. Because science is going to – you put out a hypothesis and they try to prove it wrong.

If you can't prove it wrong, it stands true, right? Well, yeah, there's a lot of misunderstanding on it.

It's a hard issue, and I don't know how much time you want to spend on this because it's difficult. Space and time are not as straightforward as people think.

And that's something that Einstein discovered. And, in fact, I found this issue –

I haven't found a good way to explain this to laymen very succinctly. I haven't found a 30 -second elevator talk that I can give to people that will explain the starlight issue.

And so what I did was I wrote a book about it that shows that if you understand the physics of Einstein, there is no starlight problem.

And basically the perceived problem is that stars are so far away that even though light is very fast, the stars are so far away that the light from the most distant ones would take theoretically billions of years to get from there to here.

And we do see the stars, so obviously the light has gone from there to here, which indicates the universe is at least billions of years old.

That's the thinking. Now, this doesn't apply to any of the stars you would see in the night sky. Those are all relatively nearby.

The light from those would get here within years or 10 years, 100 years, 1 ,000 years.

But what about these distant galaxies that are billions of light years away? And there have been several attempts to figure that out.

But one of the assumptions that people make is that they assume that the description of now that God uses when you talk about day four is kind of the same that we would use today.

It's what we call an Einstein synchrony convention. And in that view, light takes one year to travel a distance of one light year.

A light year is a distance. It sounds like a time, but it's a distance of about six trillion miles. And light takes one year to travel that distance.

That's why they give it the name light year. And the problem is that that definition is recent.

Before Einstein, well before Einstein, especially before 1600, everybody used a very different definition for what now means when you're talking about space.

People use what you might call a visual synchrony convention, whereby something happens when you see it.

And so if a star explodes, if you see a star explode and you ask when did that happen? Before the 1600s, people would say, well, it's happening now because I can see it now.

It wasn't until the time of Einstein that people consistently began using an Einstein synchrony convention, whereby they subtract off what they think is the light travel time from that object to the earth.

And that could be thousands of years to billions of years depending on how far away the object is.

And so what I like to point out to folks is that when you understand something about the physics of Einstein, light can actually travel from those distant galaxies to earth in no time at all because of the way now is defined in space.

And perhaps the best analogy I can think of is if you were to leave, say, New Jersey and travel out here to Colorado, if you were to leave at four o 'clock, you could arrive in Colorado at around four o 'clock depending on the flight.

And I've very nearly done that on some flights. Not only works if you're going east to west, but that's because of the way time zones are structured on the earth.

And that's convenient because we like to have noon where the sun is at the highest point in the sky or around there.

You can do that in space too. And so light can leave a star on day four and arrive on earth on day four in no time at all.

It's not a problem. And actually, that principle, it's called the conventionality thesis, and it's something that is actually really well established in the scientific technical literature.

Over the last hundred years, people have written, scientists, Ph .D., physicists have written about the conventionality thesis.

Now, not everyone has agreed with it, but some people have tried to refute it. And then in the next issue of the journal, somebody will point out that their refutation was wrong.

And so nobody's been able to disprove the conventionality thesis. So there's good evidence for it.

It's not just a blind conjecture. And so my position is that there is no starlight problem because the

Bible is using this anisotropic synchrony convention where light takes no time at all to get from the stars to the earth.

Now, the return trip would take a long time. The light hasn't gone out to the galaxy yet.

That's my position. And my claim that the Bible is using this convention, that is falsifiable.

You could make an argument that it's not. So people sometimes confuse the convention with the model.

A convention is not falsifiable. That's the nature of a convention. Somebody says a table is three feet long.

Somebody else says, no, it's one yard long. Well, who's right? Well, they're both right. Yards versus feet.

It's not a question of right versus wrong. It's a question of which one you want to choose. Those are examples of a convention. They're a convention of measuring length.

The one -way speed of light is like that. You get to take your pick. But then if I make the claim that the

Bible is using a particular convention, that's falsifiable because somebody could make an argument that it's not.

If somebody says Noah's Ark is actually not 300 cubits long, it's actually 300 feet long, well, that's wrong.

And you can demonstrate that, you see. So my model is that God created the entire universe, or God created the luminaries of the universe on day four of the creation week, and that he's using the anisotropic sanctuary convention, which all ancient cultures did until the 1600s and more likely the 20th century.

Yeah. And I hope you see some of the comments that are coming in.

Someone just said, just let this guy keep talking. He's very interesting. So, you know, one of the things when we talk about the, you know, starlight and things like that, you know,

I did actually do what you had said. I flew from the Philippines to the

United States, and when I went to the Philippines, I lost an entire day. I mean,

I took off, I think it was like 11 o 'clock, and I landed at 11 o 'clock, but I lost the entire day.

But coming back, I took off, like, I think it was four, and I landed at four.

It was just like, it was strange to get, you know, to adjust to that. And you do the same thing with light.

Light can leave a star on day four, reach Earth on day four, but if you shine a beam back, it'll take a long time to get there.

It's like going the other way, you see. The round trip speed of light, that's set by God. You can't change that.

Speed of light in a vacuum. The round trip speed of light in a vacuum. But the one -way speed we get to define, and we define it conveniently, just like we define time zones on the

Earth, such that when you fly from east to west, you seem to arrive at the same time you left.

It's the same way with light. It's similar. And here's the book you were referring to on the physics of Einstein.

Yeah. So for folks, that's also available at his store. Am I doing a sales pitch for you?

Thank you. One last one, because this is going to be the proof, the ultimate proof of creation, which you have a book on this.

And I want to spend a little bit of time talking about this. You are, not only do you do a lot with dealing with stars, which are fascinating, and, yes, you talk about dinosaurs, which are cool too, but I think one of the better things that you do is also your area in logic.

And you have a recent, actually, really, I guess, homeschooling books for them.

So let's talk about your books, and then let's get into a discussion of logic and why is it important for a

Christian. Well, logic is basically the principles of correct reasoning. And, well,

I mean, just practicality aside, it's better to reason properly. Obviously, if your thinking is wrong, your actions tend to follow your thoughts.

Your actions are going to tend to turn out not so good. I don't have to give too many examples of that.

I think it's pretty obvious. If your thinking is right, life's going to go better for you. As a Christian, we're commanded to think rightly, and so that's a very good reason to study logic, and logic is really the study of, again, correct thinking.

And then, of course, people are going to ask, but who defines what, who decides what correct thinking is? Well, I would say God defines what correct thinking is.

God's mind controls the universe, and so if you want to succeed in this universe, learn to think the way

God does. Now, obviously, we can't think infinitely like God does, but we can think in a way that's consistent with his nature, and that's something we're commanded to do in Scripture.

In Ephesians 5, we're commanded to emulate God, to emulate his character. In Isaiah 55, it's a great chapter.

It tells us, God tells us that the problem with the wicked is that he's not thinking like God, he's not acting like God. So God says, you need to turn around, you need to change your thoughts, you need to change your ways, because my ways are not your ways, my thoughts are not your thoughts.

That's the problem, and so we're commanded to think, to repent, and start thinking the way

God does, which is to say we're to think logically, and, of course, that's what logic's all about.

And so if you think about it, even the specific laws of logic that we use, they stem from the nature of God.

They stem from the mind of God. We have the law of non -contradiction, which is you can't have A and not A at the same time and in the same sense.

So if I said, my car is in the parking lot, and it's not the case that my car is in the parking lot, you would know that that is false.

A statement can't be true along with its contradiction. And that stems from the nature of God, because God cannot deny himself, the

Bible says. If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself. And so that internal consistency that is part of God's character is manifested in correct thinking.

When you think rightly, don't contradict yourself, because God doesn't, you see. And that's why laws of logic don't change with time, because they're rooted in the nature of God.

God doesn't change with time. Laws of logic apply everywhere in the universe, because God is sovereign over the entire universe.

His thinking is applicable everywhere. Laws of logic are exceptionalist, because God is sovereign over everything.

There's nothing that's outside of his control, and so on. And so we can make sense of laws of logic and their properties in the Christian worldview.

And I wrote, I've written a number of books that deal with that topic, but the one that's most recent,

I actually wrote an introduction to informal logic that's designed to be used as a homeschool curriculum.

I have a real heart for homeschooling. I think that's a great way to go. I think it's biblical. But at the same time, I think people, maybe people here say, well, you know,

I don't have kids. Hey, if you want to get better at logic, pick up our curriculum. That's what it's for. It's to help you to get better at thinking rationally, thinking logically.

And there's a section then on logical fallacies. A great way to learn to think logically is to see how people don't.

And logical fallacies are basically mistakes in reasoning that people commit, and it's helpful to know that.

You know, a doctor knows a lot, a medical doctor knows a lot about how the human body is supposed to work, but he also knows some of the most common ways that it can go wrong.

You wouldn't want to go to a doctor that knew nothing about disease. He said, well, I know how your body is supposed to work, but, you know. So it's good to study logical fallacies, too.

And they tend to come up a lot of times in debates on origins, on creation versus evolution, on religion, and so on.

And so it's very helpful to know something about logic. It's honoring to God when we think rightly. And when we politely correct people who are not thinking rightly, it's helpful to them, too.

Yeah, I mean, one of the things I notice a lot of times is that you have people who they know the logical fallacies by name, right?

I've noticed a lot of times they don't know the meaning of those fallacies. You pick up, they'll be like, you know, you'll say, that's a straw man.

No, actually, I accurately described your position. Or they'll be like, you know, well, that's an ad hominem.

No, I didn't attack your person at all to discredit the argument you're making.

They throw them out there, and they often don't even know the meaning of them, which is why

I thought that your book, The Ultimate Proof of Creation, really was great at helping people get just an introduction to it.

Logic and seeing what makes a valid argument when we make these, because that's the biggest thing.

Even if you don't know all the fallacies, and I don't have them all memorized, but when you understand what makes valid arguments, you can sit there and go, okay,

I may not know what fallacy that is, but there's a problem there. Yeah. And frankly, the most common logical fallacies, there aren't that many, really, in terms of day -to -day fallacies people commit.

And so I actually wrote a follow -up book. So with The Ultimate Proof of Creation, it's not all about logic. It's a defense of the

Christian worldview, but there are two chapters in that book that discuss logic, informal logic and informal logic.

And after that, I thought, you know, it'd be nice to have a book that's just on logic. And so I wrote a book called Discerning Truth. And what it does is it covers the top ten logical fallacies that people tend to commit in debates on origins.

And it explains them and gives examples and shows why they're a fallacy and so on. And so that's – I mean, and you can read that book in an afternoon.

It is not – I mean, it's a short book, and there's only ten fallacies. And so frankly, if you learn, like, those ten fallacies in 90 % of conversations when a fallacy comes up, it'll be one of those ten.

And then there are fallacies that are increasingly obscure. And I've written on some of those, too. But it is helpful to know kind of the top ten, and that's what that book's all about.

And then if you want to do more, get the introduction to informal logic that we have just published.

And that's available on our website as well. And that goes through basically all the informal logical fallacies that I'm aware of.

And, again, it's not that many. I haven't counted, but, you know, like 40 or something. There's not that many, really. And then there's a handful of formal logical fallacies, too.

And those are a little harder to learn because formal logic, it takes a little bit – there's more steps to it. But there's not that many.

In categorical syllogisms, there are only six fallacies, six. And then in propositional logic, there are just – there are a handful, too, three or four, something like that, depending on how you count.

So it's very helpful to learn the fallacies. And I recommend that people even learn the name, at least the

English name. All of them have Latin names, and that can get a little confusing. But it's helpful in a conversation to say, well, actually, you know, you're conversing with somebody, and they make a mistake in reasoning.

You say, well, actually, that's a fallacy of such and such. You've got to do it graciously, of course. But it gives a little more punch.

It shows you know what you're talking about. It shows that you really do understand fallacies and can identify them. Yeah, I mean one of the things

I think more of what your book, The Ultimate Proof of Creation, is it's not just about the logic. It's really written toward proving creation.

But actually, I think it's an excellent book on presuppositional apologetics. The first time

I think that – the first time you and I met, I had gotten your book, The Ultimate Proof of Creation, read it.

And I was working on a book on evangelism. That's probably never going to see the light of day because there's no more need for it.

Basically, you know, what made that book, I thought, different was it was going to teach presuppositional apologetics, logic, and how to ask questions.

Well, all I do now is get your book and get Greg Koukl's book on tactics.

And there's basically, okay, then just apply Ray Comfort's way of the master, and you have my evangelism style.

Why do I need to write anything? But it really is you – and that was the amazing thing that I thought with The Ultimate Proof of Creation.

Because it was written while you were working at Answers in Genesis. It was written to prove creation. And yet, it's one of the best books on logic.

It's one of the best books on presuppositional apologetics. It's all wrapped up in a book that's not that thick.

I've always been amazed how you packed it all in there so well. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. So, we have

Vincent here. We're going to add him in so that he can ask whatever questions he may have.

Hey, how are you all doing today? I'm just jumping in.

What was the name of that book first, again, the first one on the ten logical fallacies? I'm going to look it up.

Well, I've got several on logic. The Ultimate Proof of Creation just has two chapters on it. Okay. Discerning Truth is the book that answers the top ten fallacies.

And then if you want the full curriculum, it's Introduction to Informal Logic, I think is the name of it. So, I don't know.

I'm just curious. I've been listening to this guy that's very interesting. His name is

James Tour. He's a synthetic chemist. And he really pokes a bunch of holes in the evolutionary theory of cells.

I just don't know if you guys have heard about him. But, man, he has some interesting stuff out there that he works in the field.

And he really blows some holes into these anti -creation things. Yeah, I've not heard of that name specifically.

I do try to keep up at least on the basics of biology. He tears a new one in the biological field because he's a synthetic chemist.

And he goes over the absurdity of some of the claims of these biologists who have no idea what they're talking about.

I was wondering if y 'all heard about him. But, man, he's got some really good stuff out there. His name is

James Tour. I think he works in Israel. And they're making some very interesting advances in chemistry that blow my mind.

When people like you who are in the field and him that just stand up so strong for the creation view,

I think that's a very good and encouraging thing for the people out there. So I do appreciate y 'all's work.

And I just want to say thank you. Well, thank you. Appreciate it. Vincent, drop in the chat.

Just drop his name so we can do it or a link so we can find that.

I did. Fifty five minutes and you will it'll blow your mind when you got time.

All right. So I'll grab that and I'll probably put that in the show notes as well. We don't want to play it now, but I'll watch it later.

Anything else you got for us, Vincent? No, no, I just I'm listening. I appreciate what you guys are doing. So I thank you.

Well, it's good. Good seeing you again. Good seeing you. All right. Just put in private chat if you want to come back in.

I'm just going to put you in the backstage. All right. So and one of the things

I think that is important, though, is you you do. I mean, you've gotten your PhD.

It's not like you're the claim that some will make is that Christians don't do real science.

You've you've had articles that have been published. You've done research. Do you find that this is often a thing that ends up being as a

Christian that you have to struggle with? Well, maybe not so much because you're working for yourself now. But when you were going through your schooling,

I mean, how much how much did you feel you had the freedom to explain your

Christian convictions? Well, I going into college,

I had this naive view that, well, college will be, you know, it's it's about free expression of ideas and academic freedom.

And you can you can discuss these issues. And I imagine people, you know, arguing different positions and doing so respectfully.

And I found that that's that's not often the case. And I won't say it's never the case, but it's not often the case.

There is a there's a bias against Christianity. And especially if you're a literal creationist, if you believe in the

Genesis account, there there's going to be a bias against you if you're in a secular school. And frankly, a lot of Christian schools really unfortunate.

But that's the case. And when I was an undergraduate, I had

I felt like I had more freedom to do that because I got really good grades. I mean, I got the highest kinds of grades in the class.

I was a good student. When I went on the graduate level, the grading becomes more subjective, especially if you at the time that when you're defending your dissertation and you really need to have the people that are on your dissertation committee.

Maybe I should back up and explain for people who don't know much about the Ph .D. program. But the first part of the program is mainly classwork.

And then after that, you do research under an academic advisor. And to get your

Ph .D., you have to basically discover something new in science. You have to demonstrate that you've mastered a particular field, discover something new.

And then you have to defend that discovery before at the University of Colorado, six, five or six

Ph .D. astrophysicists. And they try to, you know, critique you.

They try to find problems with it. And if they don't really find anything, then you pass. You get your Ph .D.

And that process can be very subjective. Not that it always is, but it can be. Somebody could have an axe to grind against creationists and they would not allow you to get your

Ph .D. just because you're a creationist. And I'm not saying that anyone on my committee would have done that. But it was a concern of mine because I have known cases where that's happened.

I have known people that have either been let go of professional employment or have not been able to get their

Ph .D., not because of any academic issue, but because they hold to biblical creation. It's very unfortunate.

And so that was over my head when I was there. And so I was kind of cautious about where and when

I said stuff. My fellow students knew that I was a creationist and we had conversations about it. I didn't let on too much to my professors, though.

I didn't lie or anything. I just didn't feel the need to volunteer that information. And that's really kind of advice

I would give to students who are going into a field of hard science, astronomy, biology, especially, geology.

You know, you got to. And of course, it's good to know what the secular view is anyway. So by all means, sit in on the classes, learn what the secular position is, but think through the issues as well.

All right. Well, and I think that's, you know, that's one of the things that is a,

I think, a struggle. We talked last week with Paul Taylor about the and I forget his name.

I think it was Mark. Anyway, the fellow who found the soft tissue in the in the triceratops horn and concluded that, well, the universe can't be that old or dinosaurs can't be that old.

And he lost his tenured job because of the conclusion. And yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, you have that. I think of, you know, someone who you obviously will know.

I don't have permission to give his name, so I won't. But, you know, taught at Brown, if I remember correctly,

Brown for years. And then comes works at ICR and all his fellow professors were like, what happened?

He used to be smart, you know, implying that somehow now he lost all his marbles by, you know, believing in a young earth.

And so I think there is that. I mean, we saw that in in the film. But put together by a

Jewish person, not a Christian, but Ben Ben Stein's film exposed it or expelled.

It shows that, you know, if you don't carry that line, I mean, you're just you're out the door. And then and then they use that to say, well, look, you guys, you

Christians don't have any peer reviewed documents. And of course not, because you reject it just because of the conclusions we have or the belief system that that we would have.

Yeah, there are a lot of it. And I said, of course, we do have peer reviewed. We have creationist peer reviewed journals.

And we need that because sometimes a lot of secular journals will not publish a creationist paper just on principle.

They just won't do it, regardless of the scientific merit of that paper. And so for that reason, we have our own journals and they are peer reviewed.

So so folks who say, well, you don't have you don't do peer reviewed research. Yeah, I did. Well, that's not that's not that's not a real peer reviewed journal.

Well, that's a no true Scotsman fallacy because, in fact, it is peer reviewed. And you said, well, it's not a secular journal.

Yes, that's the point. They don't they tend to block our stuff. And so we need to we need to get the information out.

The point is, the science confirms our position and it's the biases that they get in the way of publication, secular journal, not the science.

OK, and we have a question that came in from Katie. I know she doesn't she doesn't come in here, but her question to you is, did the professors ever give you a lower grade for refusing to state a lie as fact?

That's a good question. I don't think so. I don't think so. As an undergraduate, I got good grades and people knew

I was a creationist. But you know what? I wasn't obnoxious about it. That's another thing. I got to tell you, sometimes creationists are obnoxious about their position and then they get kicked out and they complain.

Well, I thought it would be the right approach. But I believe we need to live as Christians.

And so we need to show gentleness and respect to people, even those who disagree with us. At the graduate level,

I didn't let on too much that I was a creationist. And of course, when I'm taking tests,

I'm being tested on my knowledge of the material that's presented. And so I took it that way. And so I would the answers that I would give would be consistent with the information that I've been taught.

And frankly, in terms of the observational science of astrophysics, there's no conflict with the

Christian worldview at all. It's when they start doing storytelling about the past. And so, I mean,

I remember one of the homework assignments we had to do is we had to calculate the efficiency of nuclear fusion in the

Big Bang. And I can I mean, I can do that. I can say if these conditions existed, then this is what would happen.

I'm not affirming that those conditions ever existed. I'm just saying this is what would happen. Here's what the calculations show would happen.

And so I didn't really I didn't really have a problem with that. And I learned safe ways to if it's a paper,

I learned safe ways to write things. It is generally believed that the universe is 13 .7

billion years old. That's a true statement. Even though I don't hold that belief myself, it's the statement's true.

And so there are ways you can write things that that don't reveal your own position on things.

That's what I recommend to students if they're going into hard science. All right. I am going to bring in Eli.

I know that he he's a regular here. He's with Revealed Apologetics. And I know he he was thrilled that he would have an opportunity to talk with you and ask you questions.

But we may have to limit how many questions he asks you. We're going to be reviewing his debate in probably about two weeks that that he had on the on the gospel truth show.

But go ahead, Eli. Hey, how's it going? How's it going, Dr. Lyle? Good. Good.

I I'm sure people say this all the time, but I'm a really big fan. I think you do.

In my opinion, I think you are the best on what

Dr. Bonson was trying to do. And you do it in a way that's that's easily memorable and very effective.

And so I really appreciate that. I think one of the detriments of presuppositional apologetics is that it can be overly technical.

And so I really appreciate that you have simplified it. Now, like Andrew said.

Oh, well, no, no. Well, I appreciate all your work there. So Andrew's correct. I could stay here all night.

I promise I won't. But I'm very much interested in methodology and the theological foundations of the methodology.

And so I have maybe two or three questions. And if they seem to, you know, take too long to answer, then we can limit it to two or one or whatever.

So I'm just going to shoot. Do you see a necessary connection between the presuppositional methodology and reform theology?

As you know, Vantill tried to put forth a a reformed apologetic methodology.

Or do you see that it's possible to disconnect the two that a non reformed guy could use it just as well?

And there's no necessary connection there. You're going to get me into trouble. I know the answer.

I just need to know. You know, we all have to make decisions about what issues are standoff, you know, die on a hill issues and things like that.

I think that presuppositional apologetics works best if your theology is as biblical as it can possibly be.

And probably none of us have perfect biblical theology.

We all make errors in one way or another. And so I see it as a continuum. I think those people that have the worst theology are going to have a hard time doing presuppositional apologetics, because it's based on what the

Bible says about the nature of God, the nature of man, the nature of truth, the nature of knowledge.

And if you don't have a correct view on this, if you don't have a biblical view on those things, then you're going to be stuck.

Now, I have to be very sympathetic to the reformed position.

I think that that is very biblical. And so I think that the more biblical you are, I think that the better you're going to be able to harness the presuppositional method.

But I wouldn't eliminate people who have a different theology. I would just say you're going to find it difficult to use that method because it is based on what the

Bible has to say about itself, about the nature of knowledge, man, God, and so on. OK.

That was a good answer. You got around to it. The point is made. I'm kind of glad.

This wasn't actually a setup, though. But yeah, because, you know, it's good that you got in trouble once because you got me in trouble once.

We were at lunch with that one fella, if you remember.

I would have taken care of it, but it was just so funny to watch you. We were sitting at lunch and we mentioned

Benny Hinn, and you pulled out that video of Benny Hinn with the lightsaber. That was just classic. We didn't realize there was a guy that actually was totally thinking

Benny Hinn is biblical. And I'm like, OK, well, I'm the guest speaker.

Here's a guy that's got to work with him a bit. I was just like, OK, let me be the bad guy and tell the guy, no,

Benny Hinn's a heretic and you're wrong. I'm glad that Eli did that and put you on the spot, too.

Yeah, I wasn't asking. I don't know, you know, your cocks and how conceited that is.

All right. I'm going to ask another one. Your voices sound a little choppy. I don't know if it's me or you.

It's you. You're getting a little choppy as well. And folks are having a hard time hearing you.

I don't know if there's a way to increase the volume on your mic because I can't do it from my end. What you may want to do is turn your video off.

And that'll probably help. Let me try turning my video off here.

You look a lot better now. Ouch! It sounds pretty bad.

This is the thing with a live stream. We got to get

Eli to get a computer set up where he can actually get good

Internet. Whenever he's in, we have this at least for a little bit. Can you hear us,

Eli? I don't know if we lost them all together.

While we're waiting for Eli, there was a question that came in. Where was it? There we go. Mikkel asks,

Dr. Lyle, are there any new theories dealing with distant starlight problem from a young Earth creation point of view?

Yeah, there are. At the last International Conference on Creationism, which

I attended, there were several talks on distant starlight.

And there's another paper that has come out that was not presented there because the guy didn't come.

But all but one of them basically were premised on my model, and then they took variations of it.

So I was very pleased that the Anisotropic Sanctity Convention has caught on. Two of the presentations at the

ICC were based on my model. They've just taken a slightly different version of it.

And then John Hartnett as well has more or less endorsed my model, but he's taken a slightly different position. He's tried it in a static universe with an alternate explanation for redshift.

But I'm really excited about that. But there are now three creation physicists besides myself that are endorsing a version of the

Anisotropic Sanctity Convention. So that's good. When you get consensus like that, it tells us that we might be on to something.

If it's just me, I think I've got a good argument, but I'm just one guy. Especially if it's your argument.

You can very easily convince yourself of something that's not true if you're not careful. And so the fact that other physicists have come along and said, yeah, this makes sense, or this is the right premise, we're just going to take a little variation of it, that's very encouraging.

Well, Dr. Ort was so convinced there was this cloud out there creating comets that he named one after himself.

So Eli, you're back in on another setup, it looks like. So go for it. All right. Hopefully the sound won't be too choppy.

You guys can hear me okay? A little bit. A little bit. It's a little choppy. I think it's your bandwidth.

Okay, so here's my next question. I would imagine that you argue in favor of God.

And so a lot of the critics will say, how does the transcendental argument demonstrate the triune

God? Why does it have to be a tripersonal God? And I know we get into some philosophical debate, but why three?

Now, I know the answer to this question, but the reason why I ask is that it is often very difficult to explain that aspect of the argument, to get to the specificity of it.

So how would you simply – who's asking – well, how do we know it has to be the

Trinity specifically? The way I argue it is I argue that it has to be the biblical

God, and the biblical God by His own revelation is triune. That's the way I tend to argue it.

Now, I could focus in on it, and I could say there are aspects of God as revealed in the Bible that only make sense if God is triune.

The fact that God is love, and yet there was a time when no other beings than God existed. Now, how can

God be love if there's no one else to love? But, of course, you have the three persons of the

Trinity, so God can be love if He's triune. If there are three gods, then that's a problem because then who's the

Almighty? You can't have three Almighty beings. It's impossible because you can only have one. Only one being can control everything.

If there's a disagreement, then who's in charge? So I would tend to argue it that way. I would tend to argue that the biblical

God is the real God, the only one who can make sense of laws of logic and so on. And then if people want to focus in on the

Trinity, I could say – and there are various aspects, the problem of the one and the many that are solved by the triune

God that don't make sense if you have a unitarian position or if you have a polytheistic system. There are many ones, one and more than ones in nature.

All of mathematics is based on that principle. So I don't know if that's kind of the way you're looking at it, but that's probably the approach

I would take. Okay. I'll probably have to go back and listen since it still sounds very choppy.

We're hearing you good right now. So if you have another question, go for it. Sorry? If you have another question, go for it.

Oh, okay. So just – okay, so I think I caught a little bit of your answer.

Now suppose someone were to say, what about a quadrinity? Hypothetically, if we had four persons within the being of God and people kind of come up with worldviews that are very similar to the

Christian worldview, a hypothetical answer to problems like the one and the many, how would you respond to that?

Yeah, it's funny. I was just discussing that issue, that very issue with my pastor this past week.

We had lunch and discussed that topic. Michael Butler did an article on that topic, pointing out that the quadrinity, you can't have that in the

Christian worldview. There are different ways you could take it. Folks like Michael Butler who are philosophers, they tend to be very philosophical.

I tend to look at it from the perspective that if you're going to copy the Christian worldview, you're going to have a problem because you don't have the

Bible. You say, I'm going to make a God that's just like the biblical God, but your problem is you don't have the Bible.

You don't have objective revelation from that God. He said, well, he revealed himself privately to me. I said, well, how do I know that?

How do I know that? The Bible's objective is written by over 40 different authors and so on, and so there's objectivity, that the fact that they agree demonstrates that there's one mind ultimately behind the

Bible. We have this objective revelation of God, and scripturally, God is a trinity. So again, that's the way I'd argue.

I'd go back to scripture, and then if people want to challenge scripture, I'll just point out that they can't make sense of anything apart from the scriptural worldview.

We also were discussing, you know, could God be a binity? Could he just be two in one? No, because again, the way it's worded, for example, in Hebrew, the first verse of the

Bible, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. It's just those first three words.

In the beginning, God created. So in Hebrew, it would be b 'ra elohim, and it's interesting because b 'ra takes a singular subject.

So one is creating, and yet the name of God, elohim, is plural in Hebrew, and it's interesting.

It can't just be two in one either. So God is one in one sense and more than one in another sense. We know that from the first three words in the

Hebrew Bible. And it can't just be a binity either because elohim, in Hebrew, there's a special class for if you have two of something.

It's called dual. So if you had two gods, it would be elohayim.

And the fact that it's elohim indicates that it's three. Or it could be more, but at least three.

And so you have a hint of the trinity just in the first three words of the Bible. But then I would go through and I would show scripturally that God is three in one, not four in one, not two in one.

He's three in one. And any position that deviates from that will not have the

Bible. It will not enjoy the support of Scripture. And if you don't have Scripture, then you can't make sense of anything.

You don't have objective revelation from God, and therefore you can't know anything. That's the tactic

I would take rather than being philosophical because there's a lot of philosophy there. Yeah.

Yeah. Now, would you say suppose someone were to say is another worldview that might come along, right?

And you've heard Bonson address this. Would you agree that if someone were to say preconditions of intelligibility but maybe a worldview comes along in the future, wouldn't it be the case that in order for that person to use that line of argumentation to hold to that mysterious hypothetical worldview since it's being posited as a future -only preconditions of intelligibility?

In other words, if he doesn't have the preconditions of intelligibility within his own worldview, and he's rejecting the

Christian worldview as having the preconditions of intelligibility, wouldn't he have to hold to that hypothetical if he's going to posit it since he is not standing on any rational ground while he makes that criticism?

Yes. Is that a good observation? Yes. Rationality means that you have a good reason for what you believe.

It doesn't mean that you'll eventually have good reasons for what you believe. Children think they'll eventually have good reasons to believe that there's a monster in the closet, but they don't currently have good reasons for believing there's a monster in the closet, and therefore they are not rational.

And so the person who says, well, okay, granted, my current thinking can't account for the preconditions of intelligibility, but in the future, then maybe

I'll come up with some worldview other than Christianity that can account for the preconditions of intelligibility, then my response would be, well, then in the future you'll be rational.

But right now you're not being rational. Right now you don't have good reasons for what you believe. So, yeah, appealing to the future is really a form of the appeal to ignorance.

Just say that, well, it has been proved that there's not some worldview that can account for these things. So that's one way to answer it.

You could say that right now you are irrational. If you want to be rational right now, there's the

Christian worldview, that's it. That's your only option. And you can have blind faith that in the future somebody will come up with some other worldview that will account for the preconditions of intelligibility, but until then you're not being rational because right now you don't have a good reason to believe what you believe.

And then the other way that you could answer it, and it's inductive, so it's not conclusive, but nonetheless it's powerful, and it's one way that Monson said is appropriate,

I think it is. If a boxer just knocks out everybody, everybody comes into the ring with him.

It's fair for him. Whoever steps up, first punch is a knockout. He does that every time.

It's reasonable for him to say, I'm the best. And some scrawny little guy says, but I think I can beat you. Well, step into the ring, right?

But if he's not willing to do that, then it's reasonable for that guy to say, I'm the best. Now the

Christian worldview is like that. Any worldview that's dared to challenge Christianity has been left in ashes from a rational perspective.

So it's reasonable to say Christianity is it. Now that's inductive, right? It doesn't disprove the possibility of the future worldview.

But you're right. You can't stand on a future presupposition. You have to stand on the presuppositions that you have available to you now, and those have to be well -grounded.

Otherwise your beliefs are irrational. Right. Now my last question, and then

I'll leave you guys alone. If it's okay, I see Andrew looking like he wants to chime in, which is completely fine.

Do I have time for one more? It's okay. Yeah, no. You got time for more. We got two from Cody, and we're actually going to allow traditional

Catholic in here because he says he can ask his question without promoting the

Catholic church or mentioning any Catholics. We're going to see. It'll be a test for us. But go ahead,

Eli. Well, I'm going to come back in, and if I'm able to—

No, go for it. If not, I'm going to try my iPad because it's still a little choppy on my phone.

All right. All right. All right. Thank you, Dr. Pyle. Sure, yeah. All right. So here's

Cody's first question for you. He said he's got a few questions. The first one is, is there any position that you've held on creation science where you've changed on your position?

Yeah. When I was first exposed to creation science, I thought that the vapor canopy hypothesis was a really neat idea, and now the science just isn't there.

Larry Vardman's done some good research on that. I think it's not the right answer. The distant starlight answer, when

I was first involved in creation science, I thought that maybe the speed of light was faster in the past, and there are a couple of people that still hold to that, but I think there are good reasons to think that's not the case.

And then when Russ Humphreys came along, I thought, well, maybe he's got the right answer. So not in terms of anything the

Bible directly says, but in terms of hypotheses that have been proposed to account for what the

Bible says. Yeah, there have been several. Vapor canopy and the solution to the starlight are two that come to mind.

Well, I want to talk about that one because it was one of the questions I was going to ask you anyway. So I asked this of Paul as well because this is something that for many people who understood creation, say, 20 years or plus ago, really knew of this canopy theory.

I don't know if it started with Henry Morris or not, but it really was. Yeah. OK, so let's start by defining the canopy theory.

And then why doesn't it work? What is the replacement theory? So the canopy theory is an older creation model that proposed that the original

Earth, when it was first created, had a layer of water vapor surrounding it, a canopy, a sphere that encircled the entire

Earth. And the theory is that that would create a slight greenhouse effect.

It would make the Earth's temperature very pleasant from pole to pole. It would perhaps suppress violent weather.

And so things like hurricanes maybe wouldn't have happened with that canopy. It was thought that perhaps the waters above that are mentioned in Genesis chapter one were a description of this canopy.

And then the thinking was that that canopy collapsed at the time of the flood and provided the water that was necessary to flood the entire globe.

And, of course, the neat thing about it was it explained a lot.

It explained where the water from the flood came from. It explained what the waters above in Genesis one were.

It maybe explained why people lived so long. Perhaps this added extra protection from cosmic rays and things like that.

So fewer mutations. Maybe that's why people lived so long. Maybe the extra atmospheric pressure made it easier for people to breathe.

We find fossils of insects that are enormous, that get much bigger than insects get today.

I'm kind of happy those are gone, actually. But they thought maybe the extra atmospheric pressure would do that. Lots of good stuff.

And it made sense. The problem is the science just doesn't work. And when Larry Vardman, in particular, did a lot of research on that topic, and he really wanted it to work.

And so he was motivated to find a way to get the canopy to work. But he found that no matter how you do it, water is a really good greenhouse gas, far more so than carbon dioxide.

And if you put a layer of water vapor like that, it makes the Earth's surface temperature intolerably hot, too hot for life.

And other problems came up with it as well. Well, you know, would it be stable?

How would you keep the water vapor there? Again, it would make life impossible. Is the

Hebrew really consistent with that? Hebrew has a different word for vapor. And so if the water is above, what does it call the

Hebrew word water? Mayim, rather than the word for vapor, which I can't remember what it is. So it might not even be that consistent with scripture.

There's a psalm that refers to the waters above as still existing psalms or written after the flood. So why are they written as still existing?

So the problems kept creeping up, and most creationists think that's not the right answer. And we've discovered a lot of things that answer the other challenges, like why do people live so long?

Well, the real question is why don't we? Because people were made originally to live forever. Most of the processes in your body cycle.

Your skin is like a month old. Your red blood cells are three months old. They cycle, right?

The old skin cells fall off, and they would replace them. Your bones are 10 years old. They get replaced every 10 years, something like that.

And so we're designed to live forever. Obviously, when sent into the world, we got an expiration date, so people didn't live so long.

But the current explanation for why we don't live so long is a genetic bottleneck, the fact that all human beings were reduced to eight at the time of the flood.

The only people that survived the flood were Noah and his family, those eight people. Noah lived his full life, even though half of it was almost half of it was after the flood.

So it's probably not an environmental effect. We don't have much information on Mrs. Noah, but if she had a gene for short -livedness, so would everyone after her.

And so that's basically a genetic bottleneck. So we think that's the better explanation for that. In terms of the temperature before the flood and evidence that things were more pleasant, that's probably due to the different position of the continents.

You get different gulf streams and things like that. Continents we think were together before the flood. So most of the things that the canopy attempted to answer, we now have better answers, answers that make more sense, scientifically at least.

So that's kind of a summary in terms of the rise and fall of the vapor canopy. Yeah, I mean, it was,

I think you were the first one I heard say that, yeah, we really don't think that's the best anymore.

And I went, what? Because it answered so much. I thought, you know, this seemed pretty solid, but yeah.

So the other one that we could get into that might be a fun discussion is what are the nephilim?

You may have changed my view, but we're not there yet. So let's go to Cody's second one first.

His second question was, what are the most common arguments you receive against creationism from macro evolutionists and their responses to your answers?

Probably the most common argument is the argument of nested hierarchies.

I think in terms of biology, the fact that when you look at the genetic code of organisms, you can classify them in a hierarchy, and the hierarchy has within it hierarchies, hierarchy within a hierarchy, that's a nested hierarchy, in terms of the similarities and differences in the genetic code.

And my colleague, Dr. Nathaniel Jensen, has studied that. He's an expert on that issue.

In fact, Andrew, if you haven't had him on the show yet, you'll want to snag him, because he's a brilliant biologist. But he's pointed out that that also makes sense in a creation worldview, because the fact is you can classify cars, cars fall in a nested hierarchy, and nobody believes that's because cars are biologically descended from a common ancestor over billions of years.

The reason that you can organize cars is because cars have specific functions, and so you can organize them by the number of tires they have or by the kind of engine they have, and you would find you'll get hierarchies within hierarchies.

The fact that we find that in living beings, although that might be consistent with evolution, it's equally consistent with creation and design, the fact that God is not a haphazard

God. He is a God who is a God of order. The fact is subatomic particles, you can classify them in a nested hierarchy as well.

In fact, I wrote an article, actually a series of articles of that in Acts and Facts years ago, along with Vernon Cupps.

We did a four -part series on subatomic particles and their classification, and you can classify them into a tree, but nobody believes that electrons evolved gradually over millions of years from muons, even though they have some things in common.

Particles are what they are. Now, particles can change, but they change instantly and so on. It's all determined by the laws of physics.

So I would just point out that the evidence is equally consistent with creation, and their response to that is usually they've never thought of that.

They haven't realized that the evidence that they've been taking as evidence for evolution is equally consistent, if not more so, with the creation worldview.

I think part of that would be because they don't actually know the creation worldview that well.

That's true. Because what I find is they don't give it any credibility at all.

So when you mention it, it's just brushed off. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess we can get into this because Charles said, oh, yes, nephilim would be a great topic.

So we got into this because I set you up, right? You were in town.

You were speaking, and we had a Bible study at my house, and I was trying to convince you to teach it since we were in Genesis.

And you were in town, and they could hear me every other week anyway, right? So my thing was

I purposely gave half answers to questions, knowing you'd finish the answers, and before I knew it, you were just, okay, you were teaching.

I was like, okay. So I got that. I got what I wanted. But some of the questions that came up were ones where you and I had disagreed.

One of them was the canopy. It was the first time I had heard a differing view.

The second was your view on the nephilim. So maybe you could get into that.

Okay. The word is not used all that much in Scripture.

Nephilim, that's the Hebrew word. It's possibly related to the

Hebrew word to fall. So it might mean fallen ones. And people think, well, maybe that's fallen angels.

And that's one of the views that exists within the Christian church. I don't think it's the right one.

But basically the whole issue stems around Genesis Chapter 6, the first four verses there.

In fact, maybe I can just turn to it here real quickly just so I don't accidentally misquote anything.

So it says that, Now it came about when men began to walk on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose.

Then the Lord said, My spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh. Nevertheless, his days shall be 120 years.

The Nephilim were on this earth in those days. And also afterward, when the sons of God came into the daughters of men and they bore children to them, those were the mighty men of old, men of renown.

So those are the verses in question. And the first question then is, where are these sons of God?

Because that's going to help you answer the Nephilim. So sons of God, that phrase is used a number of times in the

Bible. And obviously there's the son of God. There's the only begotten son of God, who is

Jesus Christ. And he alone is the only begotten son of God. But throughout the

Scriptures, Christians are referred to as sons of God, particularly in the New Testament. But I think also in the

Old Testament, you'll find some examples of that, where Christians are referred to as sons of God, by the spirit of adoption.

We are Christ's brothers. We're not his brothers by birth. We're his brothers by adoption. That's a theme throughout

Scripture, but especially in the New Testament. Okay, let me interject one thing there.

Because, I mean, that's really the hinge for the position I've looked at, was it's not so much the

Nephilim, because Nephilim is used later. So whether it means fallen or whether it means giant, right?

That doesn't matter. The question really is, who are the sons of God in this? Now, I do know, and I'm going back and dating myself with the research on this, but I do know son of God, there was a use of men that way,

I thought, saying that someone was a son of God, not obviously the son of God.

Yeah. But sons of God, I thought, only referred to angels, at least in the Old Testament.

And there we have Hebrew versus Greek. I think that's not the case.

In fact, I think if you look in the Old Testament, every verse you'll find where sons of God are mentioned, with one exception, you'll find it very easy to look at that as believers, those who have faith in God.

One example of that would be in Job. And I should point out, too, a lot of times the word son is translated as man, or sons are translated as men.

So a lot of times in places where you'll see men of God, it's actually sons of God. And Job is one example of that.

I think it's in the first chapter of Job. Yeah, 1 .6. Yeah. There's 54 times that the phrase shows up in Old and New Testament.

Yeah. Using Logos, I just filtered out the rest of the Bible except for where it says sons of God.

Right. I cheated. Here's the verse I was thinking of, though.

2 .1? It's actually verse 3, where it says that Job was the greatest of all the men of the east.

In Hebrew, it's actually the sons, the sons of the east. Very typically in Hebrew, you would use sons instead of men.

They're almost interchangeable. And, you know, Jesus referring to himself as the son of man and the son of God also, of course.

So that's what I was thinking of. And so, men of the east, sons of the east, men of God, sons of God.

And, of course, that would make perfect sense in Job 1 .6. There was a day when the sons of God, those would be believers, believers in God, came to present themselves before the

Lord. And Satan also came among them. And people think, well, because Satan's there, these have to be spiritual beings.

But, no, I mean, in church on Sunday, Satan can be there. He can be tempting.

He can be tempting Christians. But believers in God have always congregated together.

And that would be consistent with the usage of the term. Now, could sons of God be referring to angels?

I don't think so for a number of reasons. But one that is really compelling to me, it's in the book of Hebrews, Chapter 1.

And Hebrews is a wonderful book. It's one that I've memorized. I've lost some of it with time, but a lot of it is still there.

And the point of Hebrews is that Jesus Christ and the administration that he brings is superior to the administration of the

Old Testament. That's really the point of the book of Hebrews. And in the first chapter, in the first couple of verses, we see in the first few chapters, the author of Hebrews is pointing out that Christ is superior to previous ways in which

God has revealed himself. And in the first few verses, Christ is superior to the prophets, those people that God used to speak his word and to write his word.

So he's superior to the prophets. That's just the first few verses there. Then after that, the argument turns to Christ being superior to the angels.

And that's the rest of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 as well, is that Christ is superior to the angels. And the author of Hebrews makes a number of arguments that Jesus is superior to the angels.

And in verse 5, the author makes the argument that one of the ways in which Christ is superior to the angels is that Christ has a superior name to the angels because he is referred to as the son of God and angels are not, apparently.

So take a look at Hebrews 1, verse 5. For to which of the angels did he ever say, you are my son, today

I have begotten you. And again, I will be a father to him and he shall be a son to me. And so the implication is that God's never said that to his angels.

Angels do not have the father -son relationship. They do have the creator -creation relationship, as do we.

But they don't have that father -son relationship that we have, being adopted brothers of Christ.

So that's one thing that makes me think that sons of God never refers to angels.

I don't believe it ever does. The only place in the Old Testament I can think of, and I'm just being honest with you, that would come close to challenging me, that would be in Job 38.

That's the only place where sons of God probably does not refer to human beings and probably can't.

Because in Job 38, in particular verse 7, God's backing up to what is apparently the creation week and describing the morning stars singing together and the sons of God shouting for joy.

And a lot of people think, well, that must be angels because human beings haven't been created yet. And I think it's probably, well,

I think it's probably a reference to stars. Now stars are sometimes, believe it or not, God's sons because God is the father of lights, according to James 1.

So I think that might be the best. I'm not dogmatic about that. But the fact that Hebrews indicates that Christ is superior to the angels because he has that son -God relationship, the son of God relationship.

He's God's son. God is his father. God the father is his father. And angels don't have that relationship,

I think, makes it really strange to say, well, but they were called sons of God in the Old Testament. And certainly, and here's the other issue, certainly fallen angels would not be called sons of God.

I mean, that's a position of honor that's enjoyed by Christ and it's enjoyed by his brothers. But it wouldn't make sense for fallen angels to be called that.

So, anyway, my interpretation then of Genesis 6, 1 would be, 1 through 4, would be that the sons of God were believers and the daughters of men.

The implication is they're not believers. And God does not approve of a union between a believer and an unbeliever.

That causes problems. And the result of that kind of relationship often is that the children fall away from the faith.

And so what I believe Genesis here is teaching is that the children that were produced in the union between believers and unbelievers, the children tended to be unbelievers.

They were mighty men, but they fell away from the faith. So that would make sense for why the term nephilim, if it means to fall, it would make sense.

The term is also used of the Philistines later on. And, of course, they're human.

But they were big. And so some people think – and by the way, in King James, the noun is translated as giants.

But I don't really think that's the best translation of it. I think the best thing to do is to leave it untranslated.

Yeah, mighty men is how I've seen it referred. Well, the mighty men comes later.

I don't think that's the translation of the philim. It's just that the philim are mighty men. Verse 4, the nephilim were on the earth in those days, blah, blah, blah.

Those were the mighty men who were evolved. And the fact that it refers to them as men indicates to me, yes, these are human beings.

They're not an angel -human hybrid or anything like that. These are men. And, of course, the biblical principle, too, is that angels – first of all, the creatures that God made, the physical creatures reproduce according to their kind.

And so humans always beget humans. Angels and humans are not the same kind and therefore can't interbreed.

People say, oh, but angels can take on human form. I don't think they can by their own ability.

Now, there are times when God will give a body to an angel to perform, you know, so that they can interact with human beings where angels appear.

But you never see demons. You never see that with demons. And so I think that's by God's power. God alone has the power of creation.

We know that. And so God can create a temporary body for an angel. But I don't think they have that power within themselves.

But now we're really getting into deep territory there. Well, that's the extent of the issue in terms of how

I'm going to go about it. Here's a question that came in from someone you know. If the population of the world was wiped out except for Noah and his family, how did the descendants of Cain – how were the descendants of Cain around after the flood?

Oh, they weren't. Genesis 6 is before the flood. And by the way, some people say that the men of God are descendants – or the sons of God are descendants of Seth and the daughters of men are descendants of Cain.

I don't know that that can be supported biblically. I mean it might be the case, but I don't think you can argue that. I'm just arguing that the sons of God are believers regardless of who they're descended from.

Now, there is some evidence that the line of Seth – we know Noah's descended from Seth. And so maybe that's where people think.

Maybe that line was more godly. Maybe. But it's hard to push that. That's the one

I've always had the hard time with is it seems like it's either angels, the sons of God are angels, or the line of Seth.

And I'm going like, but you don't see this Cain and Seth in here at all. One of the things that does get me – so there's a couple reasons

I always held to this position. One is it is the traditional Jewish position.

So it was my starting point. But the thing is that in Genesis 6, whatever happened here was so severe that God had to bring a flood to wipe out all of humanity.

And like the lines of Seth, the lines of Cain, that doesn't seem like enough to say

God has to wipe out all of humanity for this.

So the big thing for me was the term sons of God and then the fact that they were wiped out.

Well, they weren't wiped out for intermarrying, although God does disapprove of believers marrying unbelievers.

That is a biblical principle. You don't marry – now there are provisions if two unbelievers get married, one of them gets saved.

The Bible says you're to remain as long as your spouse will put up with you basically. But there are provisions for that, and maybe they'll get saved as a result.

But you're not to knowingly enter into a romantic relationship with someone that you know is not a believer. That is bad news because it defeats the whole purpose of marriage.

One of the purposes of marriage is to produce godly offspring, and the Bible is very clear about that. It's in – was it

Micah or – it's one of the later prophets, minor prophets. But it's to produce godly offspring.

And so it wasn't – it's the ungodly offspring then that became very wicked.

Verse 5 then is where we see the wickedness of mankind has become great because people have given up on the biblical

God. Verse 5, Genesis 6, verse 5, Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

That's hard to imagine. So many people became so wicked that every thought, everything they thought was just evil.

Well, that's the end of America. And that's what it does. Sadly.

How long we got. But in any case, that was the reason then that God sent the flood. It was because people were wicked.

They were very violent and wicked. All right, here's a quick question coming for you. John Train says,

When does the fractal book come out, Dr. Lyle? I'm looking forward to it. I have to say a hearty amen to this.

So when might we expect to see this? It'll probably be early next year.

The book is written. The text is done. I'm going to go through the next tomorrow and next week.

I'm going to go through and kind of look at it. I put it aside for a little while because I don't know if you're a writer, maybe this applies to you.

I have a very difficult time seeing my own mistakes in writing because I know what I meant to say. And so it's best to put it aside and come back to it later.

And then you find mistakes that you made. And, of course, the folks at New Leaf hopefully will catch other errors, even ones that I missed.

But I want to get it good and edited. And then I'll send it off to New Leaf. They're going to publish it. I've already talked with Tim Dudley about that.

He's graciously offered to publish the book. So it won't be long. It won't be long. The book is done.

The illustrations are in it. It's going to be a copy table style book where it's beautiful, full color pictures from cover to cover.

The way I'm hoping they'll be able to do it at New Leaf is to put even the text on top of fractals. The fractal will be kind of faded so it will be easy to read the text.

But nonetheless, my goal is every page will have something beautiful on it. So I think that will really draw people in.

My goal with this book is people pick it up and say, wow, this is beautiful. Where did these come from? And they realize as they read it, these can only come from the mind of God.

And then they'll repent and get saved. That's the goal. Of course, salvation is up to God. Do you plan to have some pictures of broccoli in there?

There is a picture of broccoli in the book. Yes, there is. Yes, there is. In the last chapter, we do physical fractals.

And so I was sure to include a romanesco broccoli because it's just too good. It's pretty.

There you go. All right. Let me bring James in. James Watkins, you're in here.

So you could go ahead and ask your question. You'd have to first unmute yourself.

Can you hear me? Now we can. Okay. Jason, just out of curiosity, whenever it comes to the issues of creation science versus those who hold to, say, the old earth model, do you think that really the root of the discussion is really centered around the sufficiency of scripture?

Yeah, I think it is. People that hold the old earth view, although they may be very devout

Christians, that position does not come from scripture and is as contrary to a good hermeneutical interpretation of scripture.

In fact, most of them will admit that. There are a lot of folks who are old earth creationists that would say, yes, there's no doubt if you read the

Bible at face value, you get God created 6 ,000 years ago. But let's say with all these considerations from science, and, of course,

I've investigated those scientific considerations and find them wanting. But nonetheless, they'll say because of those considerations, we must take this different interpretation.

One of the few who doesn't argue that way is Hugh Ross. He's one of the very few who argues that the Bible should be interpreted in light of billions of years on its own merit.

And I've refuted his claims in my book, Understanding Genesis. But, yeah, I do think it's an issue of having confidence in God's word.

Now, let me back up to it and give a caveat here. A lot of people just haven't studied the issue.

And a lot of people think, well, you know, I haven't really studied Genesis, but the scientists tell me it's billions of years old. And, you know, there's grace for that, but I would encourage them, okay, study the issue because the

Bible really is pretty clear about the age of the earth. And it's not that it gives us a specific number, but it does tell us that God made six days.

It's clear from context. Those are ordinary days, earth rotations. They divide evening and morning. The Bible's clear about that.

And that humans were made on day six 2 ,000 years ago. So I do think it's an issue of, are we going to let the

Bible be its own final interpreter? All right,

James, you have any other questions? No, that was pretty much it. I'm doing some study right now as far as creation goes.

I've been studying Anthony Silvestro's book as well as your Ultimate Proof of Creation book. I am wanting to do a podcast series myself on creation science.

Just what I've been finding has been the issue has always—I mean,

I think this is with any kind of doctrinal stance that goes against orthodoxy, is it always is rooted in the lack of belief in the sufficiency of Scripture.

So I just want to get your thoughts on that. Yeah, I think that's the case. All right,

I'm going to bring Eli back in to ask his final question that he had. Can you hear me?

Unfortunately, we can. Can you hear me? Yes.

I can't hear anybody. Yeah, we can hear you. Okay, Dr. Lyle. Andrew is completely silent. Someone was saying—

I'm seeing you as upside down. Are you seeing that, Andrew? No. Oh, no? He's upside down on my screen.

I thought maybe you were in Australia. I was complaining before that I can't hear Andrew. I can only hear

Dr. Lyle, and someone messaged me and said, and why are you complaining? It's a good thing that we don't hear

Andrew. I can't hear you. Okay, so I have two questions. One is a practical one, and one is a methodology one, and then

I'll be out of your hair. Okay, so the transcendental argument. What would we say to someone who suggests that in order for us to know the impossibility of the contrary, we need to inductively disprove every other worldview out there?

That's kind of a common—how would you, in a simplified—not simplistic, but a simplified way, answer that point of contention when someone brings it up?

Yeah, there's a few ways to do it. One is kind of the way that I mentioned earlier, to point out that most of our reasoning is inductive.

The fact is you bring an umbrella with you when there's a 90 % chance of rain, and you're not concerned about absolute—the fact that you can't deductively know in advance the weather.

The fact is that the Christian worldview has demolished every challenger, and so it is reasonable to say that it's the only one.

That is inductive. It's true. It doesn't disprove every other. But the other thing I could argue, too, is that by the law of the excluded middle, there are only—in a sense, there are only two worldviews.

There's the Christian worldview, and there's the non -Christian worldview. And with the non -Christian worldview, you can divide it into a number of different sub -families.

There are those that are monistic. There are those that are polytheistic.

There are those—et cetera, et cetera. And you can only divide them so many ways, right? You can say—well, one way to divide it, one way to divide the non -Christian worldview is in terms of number of gods.

There are those that say there's no god. There's those that say there's one god. There's those that say there's many gods.

Now, those are the only logical possibilities. And so if I can refute those three, I've refuted all non -Christian worldviews. And so that's what

I would then proceed to do. I would say, you know, if there's no god, then here's your problem. If there's one god, but it's not the biblical god, here's your problem.

And if there are multiple gods, here's your problem. So you can actually get all other worldviews by virtue of the fact that by the law of the excluded middle, there's only—effectively, there's only two large categories, the

Christian worldview, the non -Christian worldview. Would you say that the Christian worldview provides the preconditions of intelligibility, and because it claims it's the only worldview that does that, and we can demonstrate that it does, then that negates all the other worldviews?

In other words, the fact that it says it's the only one, and it actually is one, we can demonstrate it. You don't have to inductively go through all of them.

Well, that's true. That's absolutely true. You can do it that way. I think it's—in terms of practical effectiveness, it's often good to go through and show people specifically how a worldview that they're entertaining fails.

And so—and the other thing I need to—the other thing I can point out, too, is that apologetically, in terms of apologetics, you don't have to go through every worldview.

You just need to have to—you just go through the worldview of the person you're talking to. That's it, right? So somebody can say, well, hypothetically, there could be some other worldview.

Okay, but do you hold to that one? If not, then you're irrational, right? Because my claim is that the

Christian worldview allows us to be rational by providing the preconditions of intelligibility.

And your worldview, whatever it is, if it's not Christianity, does not. So whatever—so what's your worldview then?

It says, well, let's play these academic games. I'm happy to play academic games after you've repented and trusted in Jesus Christ as your

Savior. Then we can talk about these issues. But right now, you're in trouble because you're on a path that does not end well.

And so let's talk about your worldview, and I'll show you that it doesn't stand up to rational scrutiny. So that might—just as a matter of apologetics,

I'm not in apologetics for academic games. I'm in it because I want to see people saved, and I trust that's true of you as well.

But for that reason, I would often hit it that way. Okay. And my last question is a practical one.

I always ask people this question, and you don't have to go into great detail, but how do you study?

Do you use just physical books, highlighter, notebook, computer?

What is the method to your madness in a tiny kind of summary? Because I know there's a lot that goes into studying.

But if someone were to say, hey, give me some tips to kind of study and retain the material that I'm reading, how do you go about that?

Oh, well, it depends on the topic. In terms of my academic training in astrophysics,

I'm a reader. I like to read. Reading the books is how the information goes in for the most part.

I don't get a lot out of lectures. I attended them because, you know, I'm a goody two -shoes, and it would be rude not to.

But to be honest, I got most of my information out of the books. And working through the problems, too, helps me.

You know, you work through the math, and you say, okay, I see how this is done, and so on. In terms of biblical studies, with me, when

I get the most out of the Bible, I do read the Bible just chapter by chapter. I mean, I do that. But to be honest, when

I get the most out of Scripture, it's when some question has been posed, and it's topical, and I have to cross -reference and things like that.

And the main study tool I use with the Bible is software.

I have a program called – it's called Online Bible. It's written by Larry Pierce. It's a wonderful software.

Not a lot of people know about it. It's ironically not online. But you can download it online, which is how it gets its name.

And he has a free version of it, even. But you can pay $20 and get an amazing piece of software. And you pay an extra $20, and you get the four copyrighted versions of the

Bible. What is it? The NIV, NAS, et cetera, et cetera. What's the website for that? Do you know? I think it's onlinebible .net

or .com or one of those. It actually used to have more than one website where you could get that. And you can buy it there, or you can download the free version there.

And then – Onlinebible .net, I guess. Yeah. Well, thank you very much. Great software.

Yeah, great software. It's got Hebrew and Greek built into it. It's got three different Hebrew lexicons, three different Greek lexicons.

It's got commentaries by John Gill, by John Calvin, all the Johns. And a little bit cheaper than Logosk.

All right. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that. My pleasure. And I'd love to one day interview you on just the topic of presuppositional apologetics.

So if you ever have the time, I'll reach out to you. Okay. If possible, make it work. If not, no worries. And thank you for your time, brother.

God bless. My pleasure. Thank you. All right. So we got about 20 minutes left in the show.

I know there was one question. Let me go back up. Someone did have a question here that I thought was going to be a quick one.

But I got to see if I can find it now. Oh, here we go. Charles asked the question, saying

Eli's question is a great question. What commentaries do you use? I use basically the ones that are built into online

Bible because they're there. Those are some of the best ones. John Gill, because he has a comment on every verse in the

Bible, I love his commentary. That's not to say I agree with everything, but he's a pretty brilliant scholar.

Sometimes Calvin. Sometimes Matthew Henry. Sometimes there's another commentary that's built into online

Bible that is by four authors, and I sometimes find it helpful. I do like Gill, although he's verbose in the way that he writes.

And he'll always start with the negative. I don't know if you've read much of Gill, but the way he'll describe a verse, he'll say, which is not meant, which does not mean such and such and such.

You'll get this almost a paragraph on what it doesn't mean. You're, okay, get to the point. What does it mean? And he gives his reasons for why it doesn't mean that.

And so I like that, that he doesn't just give an opinion. He says here's why it is, and he was familiar with manuscript evidence.

So I like his stuff. And the fact that it's built into online Bible. I don't have the expensive

Logos stuff. Keep in mind, I'm not really a Bible scholar. I'm a scientist.

I dabble with Scripture because I read Scripture because I love my

Lord, and I want to understand it better. And so I probably don't have the library of somebody like James White or anything like that.

But those are the ones that I really use quite a bit. And a lot of it, I just, I'm the kind of person that I don't mind doing stuff that other people might find very tedious.

For example, if I want to know what a Hebrew word really means, I would not be opposed to finding every instance of it in the

Bible and reading it in context. So sometimes I'll do a study that way. And, you know, that might take all day, but I kind of enjoy that because then

I get a real feel for what it means. The NAS cross -references I find very useful and so on.

So those are some of the things I find useful. That's one of the things I love about Logos. I can do one word and get an echo.

I can pull every word out and then, like, I can literally show only texts that have that word in it.

Things like that. It's really nice. One more person before we go to our traditional Catholic friend.

Just some quick things, folks. If you go to Biblical Science Institute, if you're at a computer, open a new tab, do this right now.

Go to BiblicalScienceInstitute .com. There's two things I want you to do there.

One, you have the Home tab. Right next, that's this word Partner. Go over there right now.

Click on that and learn how to become a partner with Biblical Science Institute.

I want you guys to go out there and support Jason with a monthly donation, because he kind of likes to eat monthly, not just, you know, this month.

Maybe next month I won't eat. You know, it's good to eat on a regular basis. So if you guys can help him, not just with a one -time donation, but with a monthly donation, that would be great.

The other thing you could do is on the site, there is a contact form underneath About. If you have events where you would like him to come and speak, then you can fill that out and invite him, and you can get him in your area.

The person who books that wanted me to make sure to mention this. She likes to keep him very, very, very busy.

And we want to see a tired Jason. She booked what, like, you had 16 events in, like, two weeks.

When you came to Jersey, it was like, wow, she didn't waste, like, any second of your time, but you didn't get much rest.

Also, what I want to do is remind you guys, you do not have much time left.

If you want to save $100, join in Striving for Eternity Israel. We'll be going in March 2021.

Jason, if you want to come, you're welcome. But you can go to 2021israeltrip .com.

The speakers are going to be myself, Dr. Anthony Silvestro, Pastor Frank Mullis, Justin Peters.

If Jason comes, I'm sure we'll rope him into speaking. But if you do that this month, the offer of $100 off per person runs out at the end of this month.

So strongly encourage you guys to sign up now. As I've been saying, the bus is filling up.

We get one bus. That's it. 55 people. And then it's cut off. We're almost half full.

So you really got to make sure you do this. I know that it's a long way away. That's plenty of time to save.

But the issue is you cannot wait to sign up. It's $500 down payment now.

But if you can't make it, I think you get all but $125 back per person.

So I strongly encourage you guys to sign up now, 2021israeltrip .com.

So if you can do that, that would be – it's really a neat thing to go. Have you ever been to Israel, Jason?

I have. Okay. So we really got to convince you to do this. But, Ren, remember, anytime you go to Israel, it's a big price tag because their big thing is tourism.

So it's a big price tag, but that includes your hotel stays, your flight out of JFK, your breakfast and dinners, basically everything but your lunches and whatever things you want to buy when you're there.

It's all going to be included. There's even one of the lunches is included. So you get all of that.

Now, if you can't fly out of JFK, you meet us in Israel, and I think you get like $1 ,000 or $1 ,300 off.

So please consider joining us in Israel, 2021israeltrip .com.

Lastly, I'll just mention that if you want to support us that put this on, this show on, just go to strivingforeturning .org/.donate.

And with that, we're going to bring in and see if he can do this our Catholic friend, James. Welcome to the show.

You're muted, though. There you go. Okay. All right. Are you able to hear me? Am I coming in loud and clear?

I can hear you, James. Okay, great. Okay. Okay. Yeah, guys. Dr. Jason, I wanted to know,

I'd seen a video a while back of Richard Dawkins interviewing a scientist, a physicist.

And he, I guess he thought that the scientist was going to, you know, side with him, that there is no

God. But this particular physicist, he didn't fall for it. He, you know, they were speaking about the creation of the universe and physics itself.

And his name is Dr. Steven Weinberg. And he said that he doesn't believe that it all came by accident.

He said that it's too finely tuned, that if you just tweak one little thing, that everything falls apart.

And, you know, I saw that Dawkins was taken aback by this. You could tell he was surprised.

And I noticed that the way that atheists try to get around this now, ever since then, they're trying to put forth this idea that, well, okay.

The reason our universe is the way it is so finely tuned is because it's one of many universes, a multiverse.

And I just wanted to know if you had any, you know, response to that. And also if you could, you had mentioned earlier that the statement that the universe is 13 billion years old is a truth statement, but that you disagree with it.

I'm a little confused by that, if you could elaborate on that. Well, okay. Well, with regard to the fine tuning, yeah, the universe is really well designed.

You change certain parameters. There's some slosh. There's some leeway on some parameters. But if you change the strong force too much, atoms can't exist.

If you change the weak force too much, atoms decay almost immediately. You can't have life. You can't have anything.

So the proposal is, well, we're just the one universe that happened to get it right.

There must be an infinite number of other universes out there. I think that's a form of the gambler's fallacy. It would be kind of comparable to, you know, you flip a coin and it lands heads up ten times in a row.

And you say, well, how do we account for this? How do we make sense of this unlikely occurrence?

Something that we think is chance. Now, I think the more logical position would be to examine the coin and see that maybe it's heads on both sides.

Maybe somebody has engineered the coin such that it will land heads up. I think the illogical response would be to say, well, there must be billions of other people also performing this experiment.

We just happen to be in the room that got the right answer. I don't think that's reasonable.

I think it's a fallacy of irrelevant thesis. We just happen to be in the one where it works. You could apply that reasoning to anything too.

Anything that happens that is unlikely, you know, you say, how did this, can you imagine police investigating a crime scene?

How did this happen? They say, well, it's just chance. We just happen to be in one of the universes where this happened.

And that's the end of it. Let's all go home, you know. That's kind of the end of scientific inquiry right there.

Multiverse by its nature is unscientific. It doesn't make it false, but it makes it unscientific because it cannot be tested in principle.

Any other universe would, by definition, be something that we would not have access to because we only have access to this universe.

If you have access to it, it's part of this universe and not another one. So it's really a very non -scientific answer.

I think a very irrational one. With regard to the age of the universe, of course,

I take scripture at face value. I believe that Genesis is a history book and that God made everything in six days.

Those are ordinary days, earth rotations, each one bound by evening and morning. Human beings are made on the sixth day.

And from those genealogies that you love to read before you go to bed, so -and -so to get so -and -so and then to get so -and -so, you can find that it's a few thousand years between Adam and Christ, something like 4 ,000 years.

And Christ's earthly ministry would have been about 2 ,000 years ago. So you get an age for the earth, the universe, everything of about 6 ,000 years.

Can't put an exact date on it, but it's certainly not going to be millions or billions of years. And so I take issue with my secular colleagues.

One of the reasons they need the billions of years is to get evolution to happen because we all agree that evolution can't happen in thousands of years.

I would argue it can't happen in billions of years either. But you throw in billions of years, and it seems to make almost anything possible.

I think that's the motivation for it. Okay? All right.

I must have misunderstood. I thought you said earlier that it was a truth statement, that it was 13 billion years old.

I must have misheard. I think he's asking what you mean by truth statement.

It's a claim that can be evaluated as true or false, and I happen to believe it's false. Oh, okay.

And I have one more question, since you're an astrophysicist. I personally don't believe –

I believe it's possible maybe there could be life out there in the universe, but not intelligent life that can know good from evil, bad from wrong, like we do because we're made in God's image.

So the idea that all of these – I don't know if you've seen the tic -tac video from the

Navy, the Navy video of them chasing that unidentified flying object.

But they claim, the Navy claims and the military claims that they've been seeing these things for decades.

And I just wanted to know what your opinion is with regards to intelligence, specifically intelligent life in the universe.

Do you believe it could be possible? I don't see how it could be, especially also with regards to God only becoming man, you know, eternity.

So I think there's a lot of problems with that, but I just wanted to get your opinion on that. Yeah, I think you hit the key issue.

I don't think there is intelligent life out in space. Sometimes I doubt there's intelligent life on Earth. But in any case, the problem with having

Vulcans and Klingons out there, as you pointed out, they're not made in the image of God. They can't be saved. They're not related to Jesus.

See, we're related to Jesus. We're all of one blood, and so his blood on the cross counts for us.

He's our kinsman redeemer. He's our relative, and that's why he can save us. But Lieutenant Worf is out of luck because he's a

Klingon, and he can't – he's not related to Jesus, and so he can't be saved. So I think it presents some huge theological problems.

As much as I like sci -fi, and I do like to consider those things, but as sci -fi, as science fiction,

I don't think the real universe is that way. I don't think there's life out there. Non -intelligent life like moss or something like that probably doesn't pose any theological problems.

We found moss on some planet out there. But to be honest, I don't really expect that because it's just based on – not just based on scripture, but based on what we've found in science too.

The animals were made partly for us, and plants are made for animals to eat, and even things like microbes.

It turns out that plants – we've now found that like the roots of plants, without microbes, they won't work properly.

Microbes kind of are the interface between the world of minerals and the world of plants. Microbes help plants to take in certain minerals and so on.

So it seems like everything is part of this balanced system that's designed, and it's all on earth.

It's something that God designed to be inhabited and to be inhabited by us.

Then there's that passage in Isaiah 45, 18. God formed the earth to be inhabited. He didn't make it a waste place.

Although it doesn't specifically come out and say, and not the heavens, that does seem to be kind of the implication. It's that the earth is special in that it's designed for life, and the rest of the universe isn't.

It's designed to declare God's glory and to be beautiful, but not for life. Then in regards to things like UFOs and things like that, have people seen

UFOs? Well, by the literal definition, have you seen something that's unidentified? Okay, yes.

Was it flying? Yes. Was it an object? Well, there you go. I happen to know that a lot of those things, people say, what is that?

That's a UFO. Well, actually, that's a satellite. Well, look at that. What's that bright thing? Well, that's Venus. The most commonly reported

UFO, by the way, is Venus. If you know something about astronomy, it's comical because Venus is incredibly bright, and it's startling when you first see it over the horizon there.

When it's low in the sky, it'll kind of twinkle and dance around because of the way the earth's atmosphere moves and so on.

I've seen lots of interesting things that have taken place in space. I've seen chemical release experiments that they've done, some kind of chemical release experiment where some satellite released material.

I could see it. It was glowing. It was awesome. It's not an alien.

It's a man -made, some kind of man -made experiment. I've seen lots of stuff like that. I've seen satellites because I'm one of the few people that spends a lot of time outside at night, and so I've seen about everything, but I've never seen anything that really would support the idea of aliens visiting the earth.

All right. Well, we have one last thing that I'm getting some echo from you.

Getting a little bit of echo. Jason, are you there? Getting echo from you.

Yeah, thanks. All right. So, Charles put this in. God could create the biblical world with the age of appearance.

Now, I did want to let you, we have about five minutes left to address this because, yes, he did create

Adam and Eve, as someone else said, fully grown, but this does become a problem when it comes to starlight issues especially, but I want to let you just, that comment that God could have created the world with the appearance of age.

Yeah, this is a nuanced issue, and I probably agree with the sentiment of the person posting that, but I wouldn't say it that way because technically the term appearance of age is a reification fallacy because age is not something you can see.

Age is a concept of history. Now, and so when you say, well, this rock looks old or this rock looks, well, what does an old rock look like?

What does a young rock look like? Rocks just look like rocks. Now, we use that term poetically with people.

We'll say people, you know, this person looks, you know, he looks young for his age. People will say that, but we're speaking non -literally because what we really mean, you can't see someone's age.

It's not like they, you know, they have their age posted on their forehead and you can see it. What we can see are certain physical features that we associate with aging, gray hair, lack of hair, wrinkles, liver spots, what have you, and we say, oh, normally people get that characteristic when they're such an age, so we say that person looks such and such an age, but that is a non, that's a non -literal statement, and if you think about it, it wouldn't make sense to apply that kind of language to the earth because when we say a person looks a certain age, we're saying that person has certain features that people typically get when they're that age.

That's what we're really saying. They resemble all the other people that are kind of around that age, but when you talk about the universe, you say, how old does the universe look?

Are you comparing it with all the other universes and how they've aged? Well, no, we've only got the one universe, and it looks the way that it looks, so it doesn't really have an appearance of age at all.

It just appears the way it appears. Adam and Eve, I would prefer to say the universe was made as an adult.

It was made mature. It was made functional. Adam and Eve were made as an adult. You know, if you think about it, even the term fully grown implies that they grew, but they didn't.

They were created as adults, and so I think the universe was made as an adult, too, and so the first trees, they didn't need any time to grow to their size.

They were made big, whether that was instantaneously or whether God rapidly grew them within one day.

I don't know, but in any case, they were made big. They didn't need time to come to that size, and so lots of things like that.

Presumably, Adam had hair when he was first created, yet hair today takes a certain amount of time to grow. Adam didn't need that.

It was there, and I think a lot of the issues that people think are evidence for vast ages can be answered that way, the fact that the universe had to have been created functional if it's going to work, and people can imagine a state that would have led up to that, but that doesn't mean that state ever existed.

I don't think this is the right answer, however, with regards to distant starlight because some people say, well, maybe God made the light all the way on its way.

That's different from mature creation. That is one version of mature creation, and I think it's not a good one because we see things happen in space, and so, in other words, the claim that some people make is that when

God made the stars, the reason we can see them is because God made a beam of light connecting that star to the earth, and so we can see it immediately.

Now, I do think we can see it immediately, but not for that reason. If God made the beam of light, then that means that when we see things happen in space, like stars explode, it would mean that explosion never actually happened.

It was just a picture that God made in a beam of light, a series of pictures, like a motion, you know, of the star exploding that finally reached the earth, whatever, in 1987, for example, when we saw a star blow itself to bits.

And so, if you take the position that God made the beams of light, then that would mean that we're seeing things in space that have never happened, and since God is not the author of confusion,

I don't think that God would do that. It's not that he lacks the power. It's that it's not consistent with his nature to make pictures of things that never actually happened, and movies, in fact, of things that never happened.

But I do think the universe was made mature. It was made functional from the beginning.

All right. Well, Dr. Lyle, I appreciate you coming on, answering some folks' questions.

You're always welcome to come back anytime you want. We'd love to have you, because, you know, basically, when you're in a room, you are the smartest man in the room.

There's not many that are going to disagree with that. Okay, maybe, like, you know, some atheists, but they usually show themselves not to be the smartest person in the room very quickly.

But, no, we appreciate you. And, folks, make sure you go out to biblicalscienceinstitute .com.

Partner with Jason to, you know, help him do what he's doing. He's got some of the best, best books out there.

Very easy to read. Excellent at not only packing a lot into a book, but also taking complex things and making it simple to understand.

Very excellent at that. So don't be like, oh, I won't be able to understand what he's saying. No, you will.

You really will. He breaks it down very simply for you. And so, you know, we appreciate what you're doing, and, folks, go and help him out.

That would be good. So that is it for this week. Again, next week we will have a debate, and that debate will be on the topic of baptism.

We will have a Baptist and a Lutheran. And if I remember correctly, the debate,

I've got to look it up now. I think the debate topic itself is does baptism save or something like that.

So, but let me try to see if I can find it really quick because this is really great for live radio is when you're looking up.

Of course, I don't find it right away. As soon as we're done, it's going to like pop up on my feed.

Oh, here we go. Here it is. So the debate topic is baptism does not save men.

So the Baptist will take the affirmative, as can Cook. And then we'll have

Rob Barnhart, the Lutheran, who will be arguing that position. So that will be right here on this channel next week.

And then after that, Eli and I will be reviewing a debate he recently did on the

Gospel Truth channel. And then we'll take a week off and then review the debate, if we can call it a debate, that I had last night on the

Gospel Truth channel. Is secular humanism, is secular humanism superior to Christianity?

Let's just say the guy lost before he came in. And if I didn't actually need to be there for him to lose because his opening statement, he didn't even realize he undermined the very conclusion he was supposed to be making.

And he never actually answered the question folks were commenting. Four different times

I had to ask him in the cross -examination, will you answer the topic of debate? And he didn't want to do it.

So it will be a fun one to review. So folks, until next time, remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.