Dr. Jason Lisle of the Biblical Science Institute, Then Pope Frankie the Marxist Earth Day Hippy

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00:35

Greetings and welcome to The Divining Line. My name is James White. It is a Friday and we aren't talking about Gnostics today, thankfully.

00:44

In fact, we do not even have a Gnostic on the line. But we are joined today by one of our favorite people to have on.

00:54

In fact, one of my fellow elders at Apologia Church is undoubtedly extremely, extremely happy that we have this gentleman on because he really, really likes him a lot.

01:07

So I didn't do that just to make Pastor Zach feel good. But we are joined today from Colorado Springs, Colorado, by none other.

01:16

I was going to cue up, Jason, I was going to cue up the Star Trek music, but I just totally spaced it.

01:23

I'm sorry. I apologize for that. Because you would have appreciated that.

01:31

Now, which of the series is your favorite? I really like the original and The Next Generation.

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Those would be the top two. Okay, alright. So anybody who is not aware,

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Dr. Jason Lyle, the head of Biblical Science Institute, BSI, if you are not a supporter, if you are not on the mailing list, then you need to immediately repent and get that taken care of so that you can keep up with what is going on.

02:01

And we've had Jason on the program before, and I want to thank you also for joining a couple times now with my daughter,

02:09

Summer and Joy on Sheologians. I think you're their favorite scientist to have on the program as well.

02:20

Good to hear. Yeah, well, good, good. So hey, you're up in Colorado now, so you get to,

02:28

I think, is the star viewing just a little bit better up there than it was being stuck in Dallas?

02:35

Well, yeah, yeah, I think it is. I think it is. For one thing, I can get to darker skies easier.

02:41

Right. Because when I was living in Dallas, I was on the outskirts of Dallas, but the light pollution was just horrible, and I had to drive at least 45 minutes to get to reasonably dark skies where you'd see anything.

02:52

Right. And now my backyard is comparable to that, and I can drive, you know, and if I drive,

02:58

I can drive, I found a spot, it's about an hour out, but it's totally black. It's awesome.

03:04

So it's easier to get to darker skies. Oh, yeah. Well, and I want to thank you. You're the one that sent me the link to the

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Google Maps overlay. Oh, yeah, yeah. Isn't that nice? Have they updated that, by the way?

03:17

Not that I've seen. Yeah, yeah, but it's still very, very useful, and if people are wondering what the world we're talking about, obviously if you don't own your own

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Hubble Space Telescope, which gets rid of all these problems, you have to be very, very concerned about something called light pollution, and man,

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I had no idea. In fact, Jason and I did some stargazing last year in July up in Evergreen, and I sort of assumed we'd be sort of out in the dark, but the reality is there is still a lot of light pollution, thanks to Denver, even out there.

03:57

I was really, really surprised, and so if you can get out where it's dark,

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I learned that from you, and so I've gotten out to Flagstaff. So I've found a spot in Flagstaff that is supposed to be complete darkness and 8 ,000 feet, and man,

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I'll tell you, there are a lot of stars up there, and when you can actually see your shadow from the stars, you know you're in a good spot.

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It's always cold. You must be cold -blooded to be an astronomer, because it's always cold up there at that time of night or something, but man, it's gorgeous, and it's beautiful, and that's when you can start seeing all the deep -sky stuff.

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So as everybody knows, you infected me, not with COVID -19, but with Astronomy 101, and ever since then,

05:01

I mean, I used to travel a lot. We all used to travel a lot. Right now we're just getting used to our cats and dogs and families and stuff like that, but I was out just last week, and I set up the scope that you saw up in Colorado.

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It's a pretty nice mead, and I was noticing that the light pollution really, really, really stinks in Phoenix.

05:29

It's really, really, really bad. No deep -sky stuff, but you can still see stars and planets real nicely, even those of us who live in cities.

05:39

So first and foremost, what would you say to people in our audience?

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Because I get this all the time. People sort of look at me, and they go, Oh, you're getting up at 2 o 'clock in the morning to see

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Jupiter? That seems really silly. They live in cities.

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They've never seen what's up there. I mean, once in a while on a clear night, they see Sirius up there.

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If I'm calling correctly, the brightest star up there, but they just don't see what's up there.

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What do you say to folks like that? Oh, you're depriving yourself of one of the most wonderful natural resources the

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Lord has given us. The Bible singles out the heavens as declaring the glory of God. I mean, everything

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God made declares his glory, but there's something really special about the heavens. You need to do that at least once in your life.

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Once you do it once, you might want to do it again because it's really spectacular. I found a spot, again, an hour, hour and a half drive from here where it's zero light pollution, zero.

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It is absolutely spectacular. Once your eyes get good and dark adapted, it's amazing. I now have night vision, very high -quality night vision goggles with white phosphor.

06:59

That's fun too because you look up and you just see all kinds of things, some stuff that I'd never seen before.

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For one thing, I have an H -alpha filter for these night vision goggles, and that brings out certain nebulae.

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H -alpha is a specific color of red, and a lot of nebulae have that specific color. The eyes don't pick up red well at night, but the night vision goggles excel at it.

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Some things that I had never seen before, I was able to see just last year for the first time. It was a new level of excitement for me.

07:30

You need to do that at least once. You need to get out to dark skies, preferably get access to a telescope and maybe somebody who knows where the good stuff is and check it out.

07:41

Of course, I do have a book that shows where all these cool things are at, The Stargazer's Guide to the Night Sky. If people get interested in that, they can get that on our website.

07:50

You mentioned in a text, you said something about these night vision goggles. Are you talking about just having them on or using them to look through a scope?

08:00

How does that work? Yeah, both. The goggles themselves, I got them at zero magnification.

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All it does, it doesn't make the sky look bigger, it just makes it 3 ,000 times brighter. Boy, does it look spectacular.

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Just panning around is awesome. Then I can slap an H -alpha filter on it, and all of a sudden, you can see nebulae just in the sky.

08:22

I built an adapter for it, though, so I can stick it into my telescope as well. Boy, is that amazing. Well, of course you built an adapter for it.

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You're Jason Lyle. There are other ways to do it, but they require replacing the lens.

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I didn't want to do that, so I built a little adapter. It works really well. You just slap it on there and stick it in.

08:43

Boy, you should see the swan nebulae with the H -alpha filter. It's amazing. When you're here next time, if the situation allows for it, you'll get a kick out of it.

08:53

Oh, well, definitely. Right now, we're supposed to, still scheduled, to do something late

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July, early August. I'm really hoping that all that still happens, or it's going to make 2020 a real bummer of a year if that all gets canceled as well.

09:11

So what you're saying is you can actually see nebulae,

09:17

I guess the plural, without using the scope, just because you can't see them normally because of the faintness or just what?

09:28

And the color. There are a lot of really spectacular nebulae. Some of them are bluish, and those you can see in a telescope, and they look good.

09:35

The Dumbbell Nebula, the Ring Nebula. But then there are some that I've tried to look at in a telescope, like the

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North American Nebula. It's a big nebula, and it's red. And so even with a telescope, because when you're using your night vision, the rods are peaked to the green, and they don't see red very well.

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And so I've never really had a good view of the North American Nebula until I got these night vision goggles put on the

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H -alpha filter. And without a telescope, you can look up, and there it is, and it's just obvious, and it looks like North America. It's really amazing.

10:04

Really? Yeah, it's really spectacular. And some other ones, too. The Lagoon and the Trifid, they just pop out.

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And the Lagoon is incredibly bright in H -alpha. It's astonishing. The Eagle Nebula, which looks pathetic in a telescope even, but you put the

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H -alpha filter on, and it's glorious. It's really amazing. So it's changed. It's pretty neat because there are things that I had not really seen before.

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I knew of them because I've seen these wonderful Hubble pictures, and I've tried to look at them, and maybe you can see them a little bit.

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They just pop out with the H -alpha filter and the night vision goggles. Wow. That's pretty cool.

10:36

Now, that filter, is that similar to ñ because I have some filters that I use to look at nebula, like when

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I look at Orion or something like that, and it does make it glow a whole lot more. Is that a similar type of concept?

10:49

Yeah. Normally the ones that you would use, if you just, for naked eye viewing or for viewing through your telescope without night vision goggles, the ones you'd probably get would be an

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H -beta filter, which peaks in the green, and an oxygen -3 filter.

11:04

Oxygen -3. Yeah, that's what it is. That's what it is, right. And those are great. But you wouldn't normally get an

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H -alpha filter because that filters everything except a deep red that your rods can barely see at all. But for the night vision goggles, they pick out red very well, and infrared even.

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They can see into the infrared a little bit. Wow. So normally you wouldn't get an H -alpha filter just for eye viewing, but with the night vision goggles, it makes an enormous difference.

11:30

Okay. It's really quite spectacular. So now you're talking about infrared stuff. It's been about 20 years ago now that people started using infrared to probe into the center of our galaxy because there's too much dust between us and the center of the galaxy to really be able to see a whole lot in that area.

11:59

But I guess infrared allows you to get through that. So that's how they've done the tracking of stars to be able to verify the existence of Sagittarius A star.

12:14

Tell us a little something about what that's all about. We suspected for a long time that there was a giant black hole in the middle of our own galaxy, but it wasn't until we started looking at the center of our galaxy.

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Sagittarius A is kind of the area that is the center of our galaxy, and A star is the exact location of this black hole.

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We've confirmed it now. The amazing thing is we've actually been able to see stars orbit that black hole.

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We've been able to track their motion for the last decade or so. I even have one of the programs

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I have on my computer. It actually has those stars in their proper orbits, and you can speed it up, time -lapse, and you can watch them orbit this black hole.

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It's astonishing. And within the last few weeks, even, there was a new paper published where one of the innermost stars that's orbiting around there, they've been able to detect precession, which is where the orbits are elliptical, and their farthest point from the star, if Newton's laws were exactly right, that would never change.

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The longest point in the orbit would stay in the same location. But because of the physics that Einstein discovered, orbits precess.

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The ellipse actually itself rotates, so it makes a spirograph pattern if you watch it over time.

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And they've been able to confirm that within the last few weeks that this inner star has precessed in accordance with the equations that Einstein discovered.

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So it's a remarkable confirmation of general relativity, and it's just interesting physics. Black holes are awesome, and I have a whole chapter on them, or maybe two chapters on them, in the book that I wrote on the physics of Einstein because they're just neat.

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And it's neat to see confirmation that we do have one in our own galaxy. We actually think that pretty much all galaxies have a giant black hole in their center.

14:02

Yeah, so don't you think using the men in black universe, don't you think

14:07

Einstein was clearly an alien? I mean, because, I mean, he was so bright, and he didn't have any of the stuff we've got today, and yet we keep proving him right.

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So, I mean, he clearly was from another galaxy, don't you think? I would actually put

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Newton in that bin because Newton, of course, Newton didn't have the benefit, you know, he's centuries earlier, and he didn't have the benefit of the many things that we know today.

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But Newton discovered more things than any one person has any right to. Any one of them would be Nobel Prize worthy today.

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I mean, he discovers the nature, the formula for gravity. He discovers that planets orbit the sun because of gravity.

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The math didn't exist at the time, so he discovers the math calculus that allows him to demonstrate that. He discovers basically everything we know about optics.

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Newton figured that out. Just an incredible mind. Einstein made one very brilliant creative leap, and that is that lengths and the measure of time are not universal.

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That is, depending on how you're moving, you will experience time and lengths differently from someone who's moving differently.

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Once you realize that, and you incorporate the fact that the speed of light, the round -trip speed of light is constant with any observer, the rest of relativity follows naturally from that.

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You can derive it all mathematically, and I demonstrate that in my book, The Physics of Einstein. I show that algebraically you can derive all the rest of relativity just from that one amazing visionary.

15:48

So Einstein, he got one thing incredibly right, and it was ingenious, but it was

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Newton that kind of made all these different discoveries, and you're like, how did he do that? I have no idea.

15:59

Well, sometimes, honestly, I wonder if back then, without the number of distractions, if that isn't a part of it.

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I mean, we just have so many things going on in our mind that they were able to focus so much better than we can today.

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I really wonder about that, because I see the same things in theology. You look at people a couple hundred years ago, and man, they could think deep thoughts and follow long processes of thinking, and it doesn't seem to be as common today, and I just wonder if it's all the stuff we have around us that has something to do with that.

16:41

Now, going back to the center of our galaxy for a moment, I watched a documentary -type thing about the discovery of all this stuff, and one of the things you were just talking about, the orbit of these stars, this massive black hole is able to take huge stars and whip them around at incredible velocities.

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I mean, the power is difficult for our little minds to even begin to imagine.

17:14

Oh, yeah, it's awesome. It's awesome. And the weird physics kicks in when stars get really close to the black hole.

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If you're far away from a black hole, physics works kind of normal. I've asked this question to folks.

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I said, what would happen if I took the sun and compressed it into a black hole? And people think, oh, the

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Earth would just get sucked into it. No, the Earth would continue to orbit just as it does right now. There's nothing weird about that.

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You can orbit around a black hole until you get really close, and then once you get really close to it, the physics gets a little bit wonky.

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The physics differs from the expectations of Newton's physics.

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Newton's physics you can think of as an approximation that works very well if gravitational fields are relatively weak and if the speeds are relatively slow compared to the speed of light.

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But if speeds get close to the speed of light or if the gravity gets very, very intense, as it does near a black hole, you can't rely on the physics of Newton.

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You have to use the better approximation of the physics that Einstein discovered. And you say, well, why even keep the physics of Newton?

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Because it's much easier. Much, much easier. And so if you can get away with using the

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Newton approximation, you should because it's far easier to work the math that way. The physics of Einstein gets into some very difficult mathematics.

18:32

So, okay, I wasn't going to ask this, but what did you think about the movie, oh, good grief, it just flew out of my mind, a couple years ago with the black hole.

18:47

Interstellar? Yes, Interstellar, yes. All right, all right. I enjoyed it.

18:54

The ending I thought was wonky. I didn't like the ending. But the rest of it was intriguing.

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And it was one of the most realistic depictions of a wormhole I've ever seen. And that's because they consulted

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Kip Thorne, who was one of the world's PhD in physics, expert on black holes and wormholes. They consulted him to get that right.

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I mean, it took some license, but you expect that. I mean, if I can enjoy Star Trek, I can appreciate taking license from science.

19:22

That's right. But the planet that they landed on is very close to a black hole and therefore experienced extreme time dilation.

19:29

That was really neat. The amount was off. Gravitational time dilation is normally very, very small.

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And the energy required to leave a gravitational well where the time is that slow, it's not realistic.

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But nonetheless, it was a really cool concept. And it's true in principle that when something orbiting close to a black hole, time slows down.

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And you don't realize it because everything slows down together. Your brain slows down. Your watch slows down. And so it looks normal. But then when you come back out, you realize the rest of the universe has aged 20 years in what has been a month or so for you.

20:02

And that's real physics. And we can demonstrate that that happens. We've been able to measure it using atomic clock.

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We can't get very high speeds or very intense gravitational fields. But even in the weak gravitational field of Earth, we can measure gravitational time dilation using atomic clocks.

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And it's true. And it's exactly what Einstein predicted. So it was a fun movie. And the ending was a little strange.

20:22

But other than that, it was pretty good. Well, you're actually right near one of the main atomic clocks there.

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I used to be much closer because it's actually up in Boulder is where they have the atomic clock, one of the atomic clocks that is used.

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And the transmitters in Fort Collins. And I still have a clock over here that I use that gets the signal from the

20:45

Fort Collins. The radio transmission from Fort Collins resets itself to the atomic clock every night. So I never have to set it.

20:51

It's exactly right. That's kind of neat. It is. It is for astronomy. I remember, hey, you'll be proud of me, but I was, oh, goodness.

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I think I was a teenager, maybe, when my dad told me about that stuff.

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And you could string up an antenna and you could actually listen to that thing.

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I mean, it's as boring as all get out, but you could listen to that tick, tick, tick, and then you'd get your exact time settings from stuff like that.

21:25

So that was long before any of the watches and all the rest of the stuff that you've got today that you can do all that fun stuff. Yeah, even when

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I was in grad school, I don't think they had the clocks. If they were, they were rare. But it was a local phone call, so you could call.

21:38

It was kind of neat. And listen to the signal there and set your watch by it. So it was kind of neat. And I'm sure there were a bunch of you guys there in Boulder who were complete nerds and geeks that were calling that number fairly regularly to make sure that your watches were spot on.

21:54

That's right. We know who you all were. We suffered through your blowing the curve on every test and everything else.

22:02

Yeah, we've been there, done that, got the T -shirt. So anyway, so we've talked a little bit about, you know, there's continuing discoveries.

22:12

Let's talk a little bit about you read, you know, I subscribe to space .com

22:19

and stuff like that, and so you get all these articles and things like that. But obviously so much of this, the vast majority, almost all of it,

22:30

I guess, is pretty much written from a secular perspective now. So give us some insight.

22:38

How do we enjoy all this information? I mean, there's supposed to be the new telescope that's supposed to be sort of taking the place of Hubble.

22:48

I mean, they're not retiring Hubble, but there's supposed to be a new telescope that's going to be launched. The James Webb, yep.

22:54

Yeah, and this actually uses, I mean, because Hubble's like 1980s technology.

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I mean, we've been, you got to give NASA props.

23:05

They'll take really, really, really old tech and make it work forever.

23:12

Yeah, Hubble's powered by a 486 computer processor. There you go. But the neat thing about Hubble is it's got four, it has four instruments in it simultaneously and they can be swapped out.

23:24

So it's not using the same instrumentation that once used the computer, yes, but the instrumentation that it's using, it's upgradable.

23:31

And that was a really clever idea. Now with James Webb, it's not upgradable. So it'll go obsolete sooner. Oh, really?

23:37

Well, why would they do that? Well, because it's not an Earth orbit. They're putting it out in a deeper orbit so it won't be easily accessible.

23:44

But Hubble's an Earth orbit so we can get to it easily. Right, right. When was the last, it was like 2009 was the last time we visited

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Hubble or something like that? Probably was, yeah. Yeah, I think it was. Back when the shuttles were still. Right, yeah, yeah.

23:56

So I guess if you're not going to have shuttles, it doesn't really matter if it's replaceable.

24:02

But at least it will be 2020 tech that we're sending out there rather than anything else.

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And of course, all those things have been great. But the point being, you know, NASA does a great job, but when you subscribe to all these websites and stuff like that, everything you're getting is going to be thrown at you from a secular perspective.

24:22

How can you help us filter some of that stuff out? That really kind of is the main purpose of the

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Biblical Science Institute. So I consider us to be a discernment ministry. We want to show people, we want to educate people, how do you distinguish fact from fiction?

24:41

There's some sort of guidelines that I think are very helpful. First of all, when it comes to how the universe currently operates,

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I think that there's very little difference between creationists and evolutionists, secular astronomers versus Christian astronomers like myself, in terms of how the universe works today.

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Very little difference. I believe that the sun is powered by nuclear fusion in the core. There's good evidence for this. And the reason we would agree on that is because it's testable and repeatable in the present and involves operational science.

25:10

We can check it. If you disagree about how the sun is powered, we can check it. We can detect neutrinos coming from the core of the sun.

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And those are produced by nuclear fusion. So we know fusion is going on in there. The place you need to really watch out is when people talk about what happened in the past.

25:25

That's where we differ. Because we have a different worldview about how the universe came about and how it's maintained today.

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I believe it's maintained by the power of God. God controls what happens in this universe. And I believe the universe was spoken into existence.

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And so somebody who believes that the universe came about by natural causes is going to have very different stories about the past in terms of how things came about.

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So watch out for things like age estimates, where they'll say, well, this is a young star. Well, actually, they're all young.

25:56

Or there's a stellar nursery where there are new stars being formed. They don't see new stars being formed today.

26:02

Nobody's seen that. But it's because of their belief in the billions of years. And they find all these blue stars.

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Blue stars can't last millions of years. That's universally agreed upon because they're incredibly hot. They expend their energy quickly.

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And so my secular colleagues, when they see blue stars, they assume they must have formed recently.

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So that must be a star -forming region. That's where they get that information. It's not that they've actually seen any stars form.

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So you just have to kind of watch and think through what are the assumptions that are involved in this. So basically, if it's a story about the past, you should be very skeptical.

26:33

But if it's about how the universe is operating at the present, we would generally agree with that because it's testable and repeatable.

26:41

But then projections into the future would suffer from the same presuppositional issues as well.

26:48

Yeah, they would. And of course it depends on, for the Christian, in what way is the

26:53

Lord going to make the new heavens and the new earth? Is there continuity?

27:00

I think there's continuity between the current heavens and earth and the new heavens and the earth, just as there's going to be continuity between my current body and my glorified body.

27:10

That's why we bury our dead. We expect them to be resurrected. But they're not exactly the same when they're resurrected. So will we have the same constellations in the new heavens and the new earth?

27:20

Well, maybe. I mean, I don't know. We don't really know at this point. But obviously, yes, we believe that there's going to be in the future a judgment and a restoration, a new heavens and a new earth.

27:32

And our secular colleagues, they don't believe that. So in their view, the universe will continue for billions of years until it runs out of usable energy and dies what they call a heat death.

27:41

Everything's given up its heat, and heat's the only energy that's around. And if heat's not usable, once it gets below a certain level, you can't use it anymore.

27:48

So it's a very dismal view of the future. Yeah. I like that version better.

27:53

So it doesn't contract back and blow up again? No. The older versions of the

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Big Bang allowed for three possible fates, and one of them was a re -collapse. But nobody believes that anymore.

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There's not sufficient gravity to prevent the universe from expanding forever. We've been able to measure that now.

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So unless the Lord were to intervene, the universe would continue to expand forever and run out of usable energy.

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So there's no good ending. If you're a secularist, there's no good ending for this universe.

28:29

That's pretty depressing. Even Star Trek can't solve that, huh? No. In fact,

28:34

I remember one Next Generation episode where the environmentalists got involved, and using warp drive was ruining the fabric of space or something like that.

28:46

Remember that one? Yeah, I do. Yeah. So what did they have to do, put speed limit signs up or something?

28:53

I forget. Actually, that's what they did temporarily. They limited the warp speed to warp 5. They minimized the damage.

28:59

By the time Voyager rolled around, they had solved that problem. They developed a new kind of warp drive that doesn't damage the fabric of space -time.

29:07

Oh, sure they did. And it runs on a different kind of Freon, too,

29:13

I'm sure. No more dilithium crystals on there. Who knows? But anyway, that's the fun of writing fiction and stuff like that.

29:21

So anyway, obviously, that raises the issue of presuppositions.

29:32

And what came first for you? The recognition, because of your studies in science, of the centrality of presuppositions?

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Or was it theologically recognizing that and then applying it outward to the scientific field?

29:50

I mean, for you, what caused you to recognize the importance of looking at things presuppositionally initially?

30:00

I think the science paved the way. But I didn't become a consistent presuppositionalist until recognizing that theologically that made sense.

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And I owe Dr. Greg Bonson and his works for coming to that understanding.

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I mean, I was calling myself presuppositional because I knew that there was no greater standard than God's word, but I didn't really know, well, how then do you go about demonstrating the truth of God's word?

30:29

I think certainly science helped. And also it helps, too, because I double -majored. My undergraduate degree was in physics and astronomy as separate majors.

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And in physics, there's very little disagreement between Christian physicists and secular physicists.

30:48

There's very little difference of opinion because it's all operational science. In astronomy, there's differences because astronomy, a lot of it involves reconstructing past events.

30:57

And so I had two different branches of science, one of which the presuppositions everyone agreed on and the other which there were different presuppositions.

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And I think that helped me to understand the importance of presuppositions in our thinking about the universe.

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But I really became a solid presuppositionalist thanks to Greg Bonson and his works.

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When I listened to the Bonson -Stein debate, that really struck me because whenever I would hear

31:27

Greg Bonson say something, it was exactly right. It was intellectual. It was scholarly.

31:32

It wasn't just me and my Bible. It was scholarly. He put some thought into it, and it was scriptural.

31:38

It was thoroughly biblical, and that impressed me. I remember listening to that debate and thinking, this man argues the way

31:45

Jesus did in his earthly ministry, and I want to learn to do that. And so I listened to that debate to the point where I could probably quote it now.

31:53

It really helped. And then I got all of Bonson's other apologetics material, and each one is a gem.

31:59

I highly recommend Greg Bonson's apologetic material. And what I've tried to do is, now

32:05

Bonson was a biblical creationist like myself. He was a six -day creationist, but he wasn't a scientist.

32:12

And so what I tried to do was take that methodology, the presuppositional methodology, and really push it in creation circles because most creation scientists are not presuppositional.

32:24

And that's a shame because people think that, well, you're giving up use of evidence. No, you're not.

32:29

In fact, you're increasing the value of that evidence because if you really understand presuppositional thinking, all evidence is evidence of the biblical

32:38

God as spelled out in scripture. So it was really Bonson and the theological implications of it, the fact that it's so biblical and the recognition that you can't give secular man and say, yes, you're the judge, and your mind is more than sufficient to judge

32:56

God's word because that's a lie. It's not true. God's word is the ultimate standard by which your mind will be judged.

33:02

And people don't like that, but that's tough. That's the way the universe is. So when did you first hear of the

33:08

Bonson -Stein debate? I had already started at Answers in Genesis, working there. So it had been 2004, 2005, around there.

33:15

Oh, okay. And I very quickly got a hold of the rest of his materials and I wrote

33:21

The Ultimate Proof of Creation, that book which is an introduction to presuppositional apologetics.

33:28

That book was designed to introduce presuppositional apologetics into the world of creation scientists, basically.

33:34

Well, I think it has had that impact. I am encountering more and more people who are focused, especially in the creation area, that are recognizing that, of course,

33:47

I would argue the only way to be consistently presuppositional is to be reformed, but that's a whole other issue as far as there's a lot of folks in that field that wouldn't want to go that far.

34:00

But I think you're sneaking something in there in the process. But be it as it may, so 2004, that was nine years after Greg passed away.

34:12

And so then do you want me to sign an autograph or something for you for the fact that I actually knew him and stuff like that?

34:25

Does that make you... Are you impressed? I'm trying to find anything. I regret that even though our lives overlapped,

34:33

I never had a chance to meet him or even knew about him until after he'd passed away. And I really admire the man.

34:38

He was a gem. And he wasn't just a brilliant scholar, but boy, he sure had a heart. He had a heart for Jesus.

34:44

You could tell he loved people, and he wanted to be winsome in the way that he presented things. And I try to emulate that as much as I can.

34:51

I think Bonson was very Christ -like, and I admire that in any Christian, but especially in a

34:56

Christian scholar. That's just neat. A friend of mine actually gave me a book, one of Bonson's books, where he had signed it.

35:03

So I have his autograph. There you go. That's as close as I can get at this point, but he's going to get a big hug from me in heaven.

35:10

So obviously you've listened to his final sermon. Yes, I have. Yes. Oh, what a gem. Isn't that amazing?

35:15

To live is Christ and to die is gain. What a gem. Yeah, because he knew he had been told this was going to be his third open -heart surgery.

35:24

And he had been told, and diabetes was the underlying issue with all of this stuff, of course.

35:31

That's just a terrible disease. And he had been told, but most people don't survive the third time.

35:38

And so he basically got to preach his own sermon, his own funeral sermon, which was, that's a tremendous privilege, really, when you think about it, to get to preach your own.

35:49

So folks, if you haven't listened to Greg Bonson's final sermon, it's available online. It's easy to find.

35:55

Google. I, of course, listened to it on a cassette tape initially.

36:01

So that would have been like in January, February of 1996. He died in December of 95.

36:07

And within six months of Gordon Stein, which is also very, very, very interesting when you think about it.

36:15

But have you ever heard his debates with the two debates he did with homosexuals?

36:21

Because he wrote on homosexuality, too. Yes. I think I have, but it's been a while.

36:27

I think I've listened to all his debates. Wow. OK. So the reason I mention that is

36:32

I had a teeny, teeny, tiny little part in that happening because he had been scheduled to go to Omaha, Nebraska to debate

36:43

Jerry Matitix. Formerly of Catholic Answers, he was sort of on his own by that particular point in time.

36:49

I think this was 94. And so he was supposed to be debating

36:55

Jerry. And then the opportunity to do the debates on homosexuality came up.

37:01

And so he called me and asked me to take his place and do the debates up in Omaha, which

37:08

I did with Jerry Matitix. I don't think Jerry was happy about that, but I did get a chance to do that.

37:15

And that's what freed him up to do the debates on homosexuality. So there was a little something, a little bit there.

37:22

It wasn't like we called each other up and were buds and stuff like that. But let me put it this way.

37:28

If I'm going to call someone to take my place in a debate, I've got to figure like we're pretty much on the same page if I'm going to trust them to do something like that.

37:38

So yeah, we did have that connection. And his dad was in the

37:44

Phoenix area and I was involved with preaching ordination sermon for a dear friend that his father was involved with.

37:53

So yeah, we had some connections. And a lot of people don't know this. The debate that I did with Patrick Madrid on solo scriptura in San Diego was at Bonson's church.

38:05

Oh, yeah. And that was actually before his death. So I think he was out of town at that point. And they did not have air conditioning, and it was very hot.

38:13

So I just thought I'd mention that while you're passing. But anyways, so yes, the book.

38:22

Make sure people know the book that you're referring to. They can get it from you.

38:27

They can get it from Amazon. What? Yeah, help us out if you get it on our website, biblicalscienceinstitute .com.

38:36

But you can get it from Amazon as well. It's fine. And the book, The Ultimate Proof of Creation, that's the one that I wrote that tries to bring the

38:43

Bonson stuff down even a step further. People say, you know, Bonson brings down Bent Hill.

38:48

And I've tried to bring down Bonson a little bit. Right, right, right. Everybody can understand it. Right, right.

38:54

And obviously, when people see the title of that book, they're not thinking primarily apologetics, though.

38:59

They're thinking they're going to be getting something about the age of the Earth or something like that.

39:05

And it touches on that. But yeah, that's the point, though. I want to draw people in.

39:12

I think the title's true. It delivers on what it promises. But it does it in a way that most people won't expect.

39:18

Right. Because they're expecting some nuanced scientific argument. That's not what you're going to get. You're going to find that unless the biblical worldview is true, science would not even make sense as a procedure.

39:28

It wouldn't make sense to trust in the scientific method if the Bible were not true in what it teaches.

39:34

And that's a different kind of argument. Boy, is it powerful. I've never had anybody be able to come back from it. Right, right.

39:39

So now, I've told the story before. And I've told about it when we've had you on before.

39:45

But we were speaking together with Emilio Ramos in Dallas at a conference there.

39:57

And you said, hey, you know, on Saturday, we get done at like 3 o 'clock in the afternoon.

40:04

How would you like to go stargazing? Now, I had never done that. I had wanted to. I had looked at telescopes.

40:10

I had an interest in these things. I had a science background, science major. But it was biology primarily.

40:16

But I was still interested in those things. And anybody who does a degree in physics is just really weird.

40:21

Let me just mention that in passing. But so we went out.

40:28

You set up your 16 -inch Dobsonian out there.

40:34

Well, actually, it was right next to a road, which was the best we could do, I suppose.

40:40

But there were a few times. In fact, didn't a cop come by once? Am I remembering that correctly?

40:46

Yeah, he said we could set up there. But I couldn't park my car where it was. That's right. That's right. Anyway, so we went out there.

40:56

And, you know, it had been a long day. We were a little tired. And I've noticed that you have a hierarchy of celestial stuff to show people.

41:08

You know what's up there, and you put it in order so you don't start with all the cool stuff up front necessarily, and then people get bored as they go along.

41:17

You wait until, you know, to throw in some good stuff. And you were doing that in Colorado last year because I had focused in on Saturn before you did.

41:27

You were holding that one off until a little bit later on. Oh, you've got to save Saturn. There's nothing better than that.

41:33

Oh, no, there isn't. It's glorious. I think Jupiter and its moons are pretty cool.

41:40

And, of course, when you did show a Saturn, you start whipping off all the names of the moons and all the rest of the stuff.

41:45

I had no idea about a lot of that stuff. I've done a lot of reading on it since then. Some of just the moons of the gas giants are fascinating in and of themselves.

41:56

They really, really are. But one of the last things you did.

42:01

Now, you had mentioned being able to see galaxies. And so I had asked, you know,

42:09

I'd really like to see a galaxy. And so you moved over to the

42:14

Andromeda galaxy. And that was the first time I'd seen anything like that. And so I'm like, okay, now that's pretty cool.

42:22

And the interesting thing is, and I bet you this, can you see that clearly with the night vision goggles?

42:29

Oh, yeah. I bet. No problem. Because I finally saw it without a scope or binoculars, with my not -so -good eyes up there in Flagstaff at 8 ,000 feet in total darkness.

42:42

And then it was like, how can I miss that? I mean, it's right there. It's the farthest thing that is detectable to the unaided human eye.

42:51

Is the Andromeda galaxy? Yeah. So all the other galaxies would not be visible?

42:57

Right. There's two in the southern hemisphere, the Magellanic clouds, that are visible to the unaided eye, but they're closer than Andromeda.

43:03

So it's the most distant object visible to the unaided eye. Okay, all right. So it must be pretty bright to be that far away, and yet we're able to see it with the unaided eye in total darkness.

43:18

So I was pretty amazed by that. And then, of course, you did Saturn, and yeah, that's beautiful, and all the rest of that stuff.

43:25

But that's not what got me. None of that was what got me. Do you remember what got me?

43:33

Albireo. Albireo, which I think was one of the very last things that you showed us, was

43:41

Albireo. And when I walked up to that scope, and if people don't know, a 16 -inch Dobsonian is how long is that thing?

43:48

Is it about what? About six feet. Yeah. And it's actually a 14 -inch.

43:53

Oh, 14. I thought it was 16 -inch. Okay, all right. I was just giving you a little extra there, you know, pumping up the stats or whatever.

44:00

There is a 16 -inch version, but the base plate goes from 60 pounds to 90 pounds.

44:06

It gets really heavy. And I was stunned. Your car is not big.

44:12

I don't know how you got all that in there. It's a Camry. It's got a big trunk. Still, I was just amazed at how you were able to pack that all in there.

44:23

I'm sure you have a computer program that you designed and wrote yourself that told you how to do that.

44:28

But anyway, yeah, I walk up to that thing, and I can still remember,

44:35

I look through the eyepiece, and here is this glorious gold star, and right next to it, this glorious blue star.

44:53

And I don't know that it struck me that night, but it has certainly struck me since then. I've looked at a lot of doubles through my scopes.

45:02

I've never seen a double that can compare to Alberio. I just can't. The color contrast is stunningly striking.

45:10

It really is. And then the thought that crossed my mind always is, who was the first person to realize that that was a double star?

45:22

Because you can't resolve it with the naked eye. Right. So all of the great men of the past had looked up, and if they had seen

45:33

Alberio, which is not the brightest star in the sky, if they had seen it, they thought they were simply looking at a single star, not realizing that they were in fact looking at a beautiful double.

45:46

And in fact, it may be more than that. So my reading has told me it's about 450 million light years away.

45:57

Is that approximately? No, no, no, 415 light years. Okay, 415 light years. That's right, not million, but 415 light years.

46:05

So it's sort of in our neighborhood, I guess you would say. But one of the things that you said that night that I remembered was, we're not sure it's a true binary.

46:18

So tell us a little bit about it. Yeah, so it's a double star.

46:24

Anything is a double star. You see two stars close together, it's a double star. The question is, do those stars orbit around each other?

46:31

Are they a binary? And that's been an ongoing debate for the last 20 years, possibly settled just this past year.

46:41

We think it's probably not a true binary, which is a little disappointing to me. Oh, it is to me too.

46:46

Yeah, but it's now my favorite double star, but it's no longer my favorite binary because it's not a binary.

46:53

That honor now goes to ALMAC, which is the winter version of Albireo. It's not quite as good as Albireo, but it's pretty nice.

46:59

It is. But anyway, yeah, so how do you determine that? Well, one thing is the two stars, if it's a true binary, the two stars will be at about the same distance.

47:10

In a lot of optical doubles, one star is much closer to you than the other. They just happen to be lined up.

47:16

And so if you get two different distance estimates, you know they're just two stars that are, by coincidence, are close together in that part of the sky as viewed from Earth.

47:23

From a different location, they'd look far apart. Now, it turns out these two stars are at about the same distance, so they could be a binary.

47:31

The Hipparchus mission, which measured distances and locations of stars, measured the blue star to be slightly closer to us, but it was within the error bars of the two measurements.

47:41

They could have been binary. More lately, we've had the Gaia mission, which is another mission to measure the positions and distances of stars very precisely.

47:51

And Gaia also puts the blue star a little bit closer than the gold one, but, again, within the error bars.

47:56

But the thing that makes it pretty clear that it's not a true binary is the proper motions of these stars.

48:04

Proper motion refers to the motion of a star along the sky from our perspective on Earth, as opposed to radial motion toward or away from the

48:11

Earth. And the Gaia mission measures that. And if the measurements are right, these two stars are moving in very different directions to the point that it would be far greater than their escape velocity, which means they're not gravitationally bound.

48:23

So if that data is right, Alvera is not a true binary. In terms of the blue and the gold, they're not gravitationally bound to each other.

48:31

However, the gold star is itself a binary, and there's no doubt about that. It's orbited by at least one and possibly two stars that are very close.

48:38

You can't split them in a backyard telescope, but professional observatories have been able to detect a very close companion to Alberio A, so it would be

48:46

Alberio A, A, or A, Alberio AB is what it would be, and Alberio AC.

48:53

So the gold star, it was three stars. And the blue one is just one that, it's photobombing the group.

48:59

It just happens to be in the way. It's photobombing. So how long do we have to look at Alberio before it separates and you can tell it's two different stars?

49:14

You're not going to have to worry about it. Let's put it that way. Oh, wait a minute. Are you saying

49:19

I specifically don't have to worry about it, but my kids might? Anyone listening to this podcast is not going to have to worry about it.

49:26

You're going to have Alberio for your lifetime. Even if they extend our life by a factor of 10 through some kind of achievement, you're still going to have

49:33

Alberio. The motion is very, very small. It's not noticeable within many human lifetimes. Okay, all right.

49:40

You had me worried there for a second because the first thing I did when I got back from Dallas is

49:46

I decided, okay, I'm not going to get some big fancy thing that I don't end up using.

49:53

Telescopes are not all that expensive, amazingly. The ones that can actually work well.

49:59

So I got a little 6 -inch Dobsonian, and I'm like, okay, let's make sure we're going to use this.

50:07

And the first thing I did with it was searching for Alberio, and I remember the first time that thing showed up.

50:13

I'm like, yes, there it is. I wasn't dreaming it out there.

50:19

And so I would highly recommend anyone who is going to be getting into all this, that's something you're going to want to be looking at early on, showing the kids.

50:31

I know I showed my grandkids that up in Vegas, but now they live here in Phoenix, and so I need to drag them out to a nice dark spot and give them another sky tour because that's a whole lot of fun.

50:44

Now, I think I might have something that you don't. I have a solar scope.

50:50

Do you have a solar scope? Not a good one, no. Not a good one? No. I'm not sure how you would define good one.

50:57

Well, I have solar filters that I can put on my binoculars, and they work superbly.

51:04

Yeah, I don't really have a good solar scope. When I was at the University of Colorado in Boulder, we had a wonderful, wonderful solar scope up there that I would use all the time, and it was just a blast.

51:14

I mean, it was really well designed. It had a spectroscope built into it, and you look at the sun in multiple wavelengths.

51:20

It was a gem. And at some point, I want to build my own. Of course. That was me.

51:26

Of course. That's Jason Lyle. He's going to build his own. But, yeah, no, mine's one of the standard ones with it's built specifically just to look at the sun, and you can see the surface and stuff like that.

51:37

Of course, I bought it right as the minimum started. So I really haven't gotten much to see because this has been a really deep minimum.

51:49

It has. It has. It's been amazing. And my understanding is the depth of this minimum has impacted satellites and all sorts of stuff on Earth.

52:01

Now, the sun is your baby because if my memory is serving me correctly, that was what your dissertation was in.

52:09

Am I correct? Right. Yeah. Solar photosphere, motions on the solar photosphere. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about when you and I are talking about a minimum, what are we talking about?

52:22

Yeah, so the sun goes through a 22 -year cycle where the magnetic field flips every 11 years, and then it flips back.

52:30

So the whole cycle is 22 years. And the sunspots correlate with that.

52:35

Sunspots, during a certain point in that cycle, you have a lot of sunspots on the sun. And then at the other point in the cycle, you have very, very few, if any.

52:44

And so every 11 years, you get a boost in sunspots. And that's part of that magnetic reversal.

52:51

Sunspots are controlled by magnetism if you're wondering what the connection is there. The sun's magnetic field is really interesting.

52:58

It's different from Earth's. Earth's, we have the north and south pole. You have a simple, let's call it dipole magnetic field, north pole, south pole.

53:05

The sun has that, and it has what we call a toroidal field where it wraps around east -west.

53:15

And there are two belts, one in the northern hemisphere, one in the southern hemisphere, at least two belts. And the sunspots almost always occur at the latitudes of those two magnetic belts.

53:26

And so you'll notice when you look at images of the sun, the sunspots are not randomly distributed across the surface. They form two rows, one in the northern hemisphere, one in the southern hemisphere.

53:36

And that's where those two magnetic belts are. A little piece of magnetism will pop up from that belt into the surface, and the two sunspots will form usually.

53:47

Sunspots usually form in east -west pairs, and they have opposite magnetic fields because the magnetic field's going up one and down the other.

53:53

So these little pale pairs, really kind of amazing. And those belts move over the course of 11 years.

54:00

They move toward the equator, and then they kind of cancel out when they get around the equator, and then you have very few sunspots. And the field flips then, and then you start a new cycle, and new belt forms at high latitudes.

54:10

And it's every 11 years, like clockwork. But some years are better than others. Some years, you get a solar maximum.

54:16

You have lots of sunspots. Other years, you have a solar maximum. You have relatively few. And there was a period of time,

54:22

I believe in the late 1600s, early 1700s, somewhere around there, where you had the Maunder Minimum, where you had very few sunspots, and it correlated with cooler temperatures, as measured in Europe.

54:34

And so sunspots do have an effect on Earth weather, far more than anything human beings have done, by the way.

54:40

Far more. Yes, I'm well aware of that. We can print all the funny money in the world, and it won't have as much effect as the solar, as that big burning fusion engine in the sky is going to have.

54:57

No two ways about it. Yeah, that is, the sun is fascinating.

55:03

It is neat to live in a day where we get to know things that have just simply never been known before.

55:14

I mean, anything you're talking about right now, regarding the sun's surface and the period of sunspots and the minimums and the whole nine yards, this has only been known for literally a relatively few number of decades.

55:36

And there's still stuff, obviously, that we have not thought through.

55:41

In fact, this is one thing that scares me, and I bet you, you observe this all the time. Scientists, science now is such a diverse field, as far as you can go so in -depth into genetics or into the various biological realms or into earth physics and everything else, that almost anybody has a

56:05

Ph .D. has a Ph .D. in an extremely narrow field.

56:12

And that almost functions to make sure that they can't have a broad education that connects them with everything, with the other fields of human study.

56:23

And the result can be very scary, can be frightening. It really can be. Yeah, it really is.

56:30

And that is a very significant issue today. First of all, I feel blessed to live in the time that I live in where we have all this information.

56:37

It's wonderful. And it's easily accessible now because of the Internet and things like that. It's wonderful. I love it. But one of the problems is, when you specialize, because so much is known, you can only be an expert in a very narrow field of study.

56:51

And that's something, by the way, I recommend to Christians who maybe don't have a lot of education in science.

56:58

And don't be intimidated by somebody who has a Ph .D. in a particular field. I'm sure he knows that very nuanced field very well, but that doesn't make him an expert on everything else in science.

57:07

It really doesn't. And so don't be intimidated. That being said,

57:12

I have a lot of friends in different fields of science from the different places I've worked, from working at Answers in Genesis and so on.

57:19

So I know Ph .D .s in biology and Ph .D .s in geology and so on. And I try to maintain at least a base level of knowledge in these other fields.

57:29

And I think that's important for us to have an accurate view of the universe. It's good to know different experts in different fields.

57:35

And the ones that I give the highest weight to are Christians. And so I know they have a proper worldview.

57:41

But you'd be surprised how many experts in their field, they know nothing about other fields. And they'll talk about evolution.

57:48

Maybe they don't know anything about biology, but they're convinced that Darwinian evolution is true. And, well, how do you know that?

57:54

Well, they don't know it. They're assuming that it's been proved by all the other scientists. It's a real issue these days.

58:03

And I've talked with enough secularists that I know that's true. They're trusting in the consensus, not in data.

58:09

Well, and it's not just in astrophysics or anything else. In the field of theology, you're taught something in seminary.

58:20

And, again, there's a lot of topics that you can get into. And so, for example, the issue of the canon of Scripture.

58:27

The vast majority of New Testament scholars have not spent a great deal of time studying issues such as canonization.

58:34

But people will always say, Well, 95 % of New Testament scholars believe such and so.

58:40

And it's like, if you're in the field, you go, Yeah, but 98 % of them have never read more than two articles on the subject.

58:48

So what does any of that mean? And all this consensus stuff really breaks down as soon as you just start pushing on it at all.

58:56

And I think that's the case in pretty much every field. It's the same type of thing.

59:03

Yeah. So, hey. I remember sitting in an undergraduate class in geology. And they were discussing,

59:10

I can't remember if I've told you this or not, but they were discussing the age of the

59:15

Earth and everything. And, of course, they don't determine the age of the Earth from Earth rocks. They determine it from meteorites. Why is that?

59:21

Well, because of the underlying assumption that the solar system formed at a certain time. And, well, how do we know that's accurate?

59:27

Well, the answer that my geology professor gave was, Well, the astronomers, they demonstrated that the solar system is 4 .5

59:34

billion years old. Fast forward a few years later, I'm in grad school, and we're talking about the radiometric dating and the dating of the sun.

59:40

And how do we know that the sun's really that old? And they say, Well, the geologists have demonstrated the Earth's that old, and so on.

59:46

Each was relying on the other for their evidence. And I thought, That's really telling. Because they're obviously not communicating.

59:52

No. It's an issue. No, it is. It's a major issue. And as you said, you started

59:58

Biblical Science Institute to try to help get all of us up to speed so people can look up Biblical Science Institute online, and they can subscribe.

01:00:11

I believe you have a, is it a monthly newsletter? Yeah, a monthly newsletter. If they go to the bottom of our website, bottom right, there's a sign -up form there.

01:00:19

Easy peasy. It's free. Right, right. And so they can support you and your work there at Biblical Science Institute, and I would encourage people to do that.

01:00:30

I do that because I think it's very, very important, and I can honestly say

01:00:39

I have met few people in my years of ministry that I think exemplify taking a tremendous amount of knowledge and yet not getting stuck on yourself.

01:00:53

So that's a high compliment, Brother Lyle. It truly is.

01:00:58

And a lot of us deeply appreciate all that you've done for the kingdom and for us in discussing these things.

01:01:08

And I, of course, appreciate the fact that we've gone stargazing a few times, and I'm really, really hoping that we get to do it again come

01:01:17

July, August, somewhere in there. Of course, knowing my, I don't believe in luck, but I'll use the colloquial phrase, knowing my luck, that'll be right during the monsoon period, and we'll end up drowned like rats.

01:01:31

Actually, the last time that we did that, when I was driving up to where we were going to meet, it was hailing, but by the time

01:01:38

I got to you, it was totally clear. I know, I know. And I think there was even a sunbeam right on you.

01:01:45

That's just a reflection off my head, actually. It's a bad problem that I have wherever I am.

01:01:51

Yeah, no, we were in evergreen. That was a great time. And so I appreciate your carving out, and I appreciate being the astronomer that you are.

01:02:01

You actually got up at this time of the day. That big, bright thing is still up in the sky.

01:02:07

It's true. We know how you astronomers work. Not exactly the early morning types.

01:02:13

That's true. But thank you for sharing with us and edifying us, and we will continue to pray for you, continue to pray for us.

01:02:20

And I look forward, Lord willing, to seeing you in just a few months up there in Colorado.

01:02:26

Well, thanks. Thanks for having me on the program. I appreciate it. All right. God bless. Thank you, Jason. Bye -bye. Bye -bye. All right.

01:02:33

Always enjoy having Jason on the program. And, of course, we get along real well, as you can tell.

01:02:43

And I didn't bring up the picture, but I've got a picture of he and I next to our telescopes up in Colorado last year.

01:02:51

And we were just getting set up there for some dear, dear, dear friends, Bruce and Marty up there in Colorado.

01:02:58

You know about them because that's where I've been doing programs up there for years during the summers during July from their house up there in the

01:03:09

Evergreen area. So I've got a picture of us doing that. And the funny thing was,

01:03:14

I'll just tell this one last story. When he set up his Dobsonian, his 14 -inch

01:03:19

Dobsonian, something went wrong with the motor. Now, he is a — this guy can design anything.

01:03:26

And so he fixed it himself later on, but you can't sort of do that out in someone's side yard in the dark.

01:03:33

So he didn't have the go -to feature, which I have on, like, on my Meade. If you're not familiar with modern telescopes, what's really neat is once you get them zeroed in on, like,

01:03:43

I'd do a two -star fix, then you can just tell it, I want to see Alberio. And then it tracks.

01:03:51

It'll track it. So if you don't have that, then you have to keep moving the telescope a little bit each time because the

01:03:57

Earth's moving. It's rotating and it's moving. But his — he couldn't use his for that.

01:04:03

Didn't slow him down a bit. The guy knows the night sky so well that even without the ability to use that, he just grabbed the scope and just, let's say it's about right there.

01:04:15

And then he does a little fine -tune. Yep, there it is. It's amazing. And when we were looking at Saturn and Jupiter, he just simply — and then you've got this moon, and this is its features about that.

01:04:26

And he's not looking at anything. It's just off the top of his head. So the guy's brilliant.

01:04:32

He really, really is. So Biblical Science Institute, look him up. Enjoy. I tried reading —

01:04:38

I started reading the Physics of Einstein book. Yeah. No. Because my weakest area —

01:04:46

I mean, I got all A's in it, but my weakest area was mathematics. And — though I could spell it, unlike Harvard.

01:04:54

But, yeah, it was — that was — it was deep. It was very, very deep. Anyways, thanks,

01:05:01

Jason, for joining with us. Now, I do want to discuss a couple other things.

01:05:08

I have to admit, there is some weird stuff, weird, weird stuff going on with Pope Francis.

01:05:21

Pope Francis. For Earth Day — now,

01:05:28

Earth Day is — was, what, was it Wednesday? I think it was Wednesday this week. Tuesday or Wednesday. It was sometime earlier this week.

01:05:35

Earth Day brings out a lot of loonies. Not quite as many this year, because they can't come out anyways, because they're hiding in their homes.

01:05:44

But Pope Francis is — let's just put it this way.

01:05:54

There are a lot of Roman Catholic Marxists in South America, and he's one of them.

01:06:01

He's just — he would not really stand out as being overly odd in South America.

01:06:11

Liberation theology and Marxism have always been bedfellows. And there is currently a

01:06:19

Marxist, full -blown Marxist bishop of Rome.

01:06:24

That's just all there is to it. But he's more than just your standard, everyday commie.

01:06:36

We have failed to care for the Earth. We have sinned against the

01:06:43

Earth, the Pope said during his Wednesday audience. And how does the

01:06:48

Earth react? There is a Spanish saying that is very clear about this.

01:06:54

It goes, God always forgives. We humans sometimes forgive and sometimes not. The Earth never forgives, he warned, departing from his prepared text.

01:07:03

The Earth does not — listen to this. The Earth does not forgive. If we have despoiled the

01:07:11

Earth, its response will be very ugly. The pontiff has declared that the

01:07:18

Wuhan coronavirus is nature's response to humanity's failure to address the catastrophes wrought by human -induced climate change.

01:07:29

Really? You're sure about that? Asked earlier this month whether the

01:07:36

COVID -19 pandemic is an opportunity for an ecological conversion, the pontiff reasserted his conviction that humanity has provoked nature by not responding adequately to the climate crisis.

01:07:48

That's paganism, folks. I mean, okay, buy into all the climate science alarmism you want.

01:08:01

Buy into AOCs. We've got — well, it'll be 11 years now. And then it's all over.

01:08:08

And, of course, you can go back. Every single generation going back to the 70s has had the same thing.

01:08:15

We'll never make it through the 80s. We'll never make it through the 90s. We'll never make it past 2000. Billions dead.

01:08:22

All this type of stuff. All in an effort to push stuff one particular direction.

01:08:28

Okay. But a lot of this stuff becomes pagan.

01:08:35

And what I mean is you've got Mother Earth. You've got Gaia. You have this personification of nature itself to where this planet becomes a female deity.

01:08:53

And the Pope's talking about the Earth not forgiving. And the response will be very ugly.

01:09:02

Now, that's not scientific thinking. Now, a lot of this stuff isn't scientific thinking.

01:09:07

A lot of this stuff is modeling. And, folks, have we not learned over the past couple of months that modeling doesn't work all that well when you don't have good data to put into the model in the first place?

01:09:29

Any model, and I don't care AI the whole nine yards, you've still got to put the data in.

01:09:38

And if you've got bad data, well, there's two ways you can mess it with it.

01:09:44

You can have bad data, and then you can create the model to manipulate the data. And we have now seen exactly how that works with COVID -19.

01:09:56

And we had seen it all right. Why did we trust this stuff? Because we'd already seen these models predicting that we would have oceans.

01:10:07

Well, remember a guy named Al Gore? Remember a guy getting a

01:10:13

Nobel Peace Prize, I think? Did he not get a Nobel? Didn't he get a Nobel Prize for that? He did a movie.

01:10:20

I know Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize for not being George Bush. That was it.

01:10:26

That was the whole reason he got it. Yeah, that was the Do Nothing Award. But didn't

01:10:32

Gore get some? If he didn't get a Nobel Prize, he got some big prize for calling us all out and basically telling us that there would be no ice left on planet

01:10:43

Earth by, I don't know, sometime 10 years ago. What? What, a

01:10:48

Nobel Prize? Yep, climate change.

01:10:54

There you go. Yeah. And you go back and you look at his movie, and all the stuff that he said hasn't happened.

01:11:06

We're well past the days when there was to be no ice left on Earth, and yet there's record ice in the

01:11:12

South Pole. It did make for a really cool movie, yeah. So this model stuff, you can make models do almost anything you want models to do.

01:11:25

That's the problem. And this Pope is totally sold out, completely sold out, to all of the leftist

01:11:38

Marxist stuff. If it's out there, Pope Francis believes it, and he's promoting it.

01:11:45

Within a theological context, the Earth forgiving? We are sinning?

01:11:53

I mean, I know a lot of Roman Catholics that are just cringing every time he starts speaking because he is such a leftist, and he expresses his leftism in theological categories.

01:12:10

You can't get around it. And so there is another...

01:12:18

Oh, that's not what I wanted. Where'd that go? I don't know, I guess I lost it.

01:12:25

Oh, no, no, there it is. There is another article, and it came out yesterday.

01:12:35

This is on cnsnews .com.

01:12:41

Michael W. Chapman. There are numerous

01:12:47

Roman Catholic leaders who are still very concerned about last year's signing with the

01:13:01

Muslims of the document that specifically, and we talked about it at the time, specifically says that diversity of religions is willed by God.

01:13:12

This is... Please, to my

01:13:18

Roman Catholic friends, can we not agree that Innocent III and Pope Francis, he's not

01:13:26

Francis I until he dies, but that Innocent III and Francis are not on the same page on foundational issues of definition?

01:13:42

I mean, and I'm not even talking about the simple statements where he says, you know, homosexuality, who am

01:13:47

I to judge? Atheists going to heaven because they baptized their children?

01:13:56

Because I know what your answer to that is. Your answer is, well, those weren't official pronouncements, but you know in your heart of hearts that that represents what he believes, and that's the filter that he is running in choosing new cardinals and in choosing people that sit on the papal biblical institute and everything else.

01:14:17

You cannot simply... Back when I first started dealing with Roman Catholicism when

01:14:23

John Paul II was the Pope, what you heard over and over again was, we have someone we can turn to to give us infallible interpretation.

01:14:33

Well, you're getting an interpretation from this man, and yet most of you would agree with me that what you're getting is

01:14:41

Marxist foolishness. How do you deal with this?

01:14:48

If you try to pull back from what y 'all were saying before about the Pope to the universal teaching of the

01:14:55

Church, well, conciliarism died a long time ago.

01:15:00

You may want to try to revive it, but you're going to have to admit that while it had its day after the

01:15:11

Council of Pisa and things like that, briefly, it was eventually crushed.

01:15:17

And that Rome, by the time... Vatican I was not a council that was friendly toward conciliarism.

01:15:26

That is the idea of the supremacy of councils. When you're defining the infallibility of the

01:15:32

Pope, the Pope ran that council. So you might say, well, we're going to go back to it.

01:15:41

Well, if you go back to it, isn't that an admission that there was error before, so much for the error of the

01:15:46

Church? Well, I know there's always a way to get around anything. But right now, guys, honestly, your

01:15:56

Church is being led by a Marxist heretic. And that Marxist, and heretical from your own side.

01:16:07

I mean, I think all Popes are heretics, obviously. When you let yourself be called by the names of the

01:16:13

Trinity, I consider you a heretic. But from your own side, from your own definitions, the guy is heretical.

01:16:23

And are you really thinking that it's good enough to say, yeah, he is, but he will never teach it infallibly and do the, he has to say these words and cross himself this direction and face this way and be wearing this type of shoes to actually make that work?

01:16:48

Because you want to see how papal authority works? Look at who the next

01:16:54

Pope's going to be. Who decides the next Pope? The Cardinals. Who's stacking the deck amongst the

01:17:00

Cardinals? This guy. Who is assigning the people to the papal biblical commission or to this commission and that commission?

01:17:09

He is driving the ship hard left. You know that. And it will have an extended impact upon where the

01:17:21

Roman Catholic Church goes. I think, honestly, this may have, this may be why we're hearing more about orthodoxy right now.

01:17:30

Is because if you, it's harder to get a ship with five rudders and five wheels to turn than it is one with a single wheel and a single rudder.

01:17:52

And this has always been the issue between the East and the West between Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy is that Rome is a monarchical system and Eastern Orthodoxy has always had to struggle with having multiple apostolic sees in the

01:18:11

East and so they have collegiality. Now, it doesn't always work and it's not working well right now at all and they have their divisions too but the point is it's really hard to get one person can't just come along and crank the wheel over and get orthodoxy to go one way or the other.

01:18:36

It's not possible. But one pope can and that's one of the major differences between the two and I have to wonder if that isn't partly why you have that type of thing going on.

01:18:52

So there's a bunch of people big names Cardinal Raymond Burke, Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Kazakhstan.

01:19:03

What could possibly bring about people in the

01:19:10

United States talking about a bishop from Kazakhstan and yet he is a hero a hero to conservative, apologetically minded

01:19:23

Roman Catholics in the United States right now because he has stood up and said no way, this is not right.

01:19:33

Athanasius Schneider, you'll hear more about him or you won't hear more about him in the future who knows, that's just papal politics

01:19:43

I don't know how long Francis is going to be in the pontificate he's getting older and he does not have to stay there his predecessors set a new precedent he could retire and then what happens?

01:20:03

I don't know wouldn't that be interesting? Wouldn't it be fascinating if Frankie retires and then you've got three living popes after they choose the next one wow would that be absolutely amazing but the fact is as we saw again you've got a

01:20:32

South American Marxist who thinks the earth is throwing a hissy fit and that's why we have coronavirus it couldn't be that bioweapons lab in Wuhan anybody who suggested that was already handed a tinfoil hat by the media even though a few weeks later everybody had to start going good reason to think that that didn't really promote the narrative but Pope Francis, the earth is angry and there you go that's what's happening my how things have changed my how things have changed

01:21:23

I think back to those first debates with Roman Catholics and now I look at the situation they're facing the changes with Mormonism the changes with the

01:21:34

Watchtower Society a lot of the Watchtower Society changed just because the world has changed so much but the changes in Mormonism who knows where that's going to go change seems to be the universal language now but anyway one last thing my mind is as most of you know is very strange and it reviews things that I have said over the course of hours after I've said them and once you get as old as I am now you start asking yourself did

01:22:22

I make that point? so when I'm thinking about a program what I want to be talking about sometimes

01:22:34

I think of really cool things to say and then I don't say them but since I thought about saying it

01:22:42

I'm not sure whether I did or didn't that's one of the reasons why I may repeat things sometimes did

01:22:48

I already say that? I don't know well I better get it out there just in case most people aren't going to remember what

01:22:55

I said the first time anyways so there you go so one of the things that crossed my mind is yesterday when we talked about the

01:23:05

Qumran material is I wanted to make sure that I communicated that one of the reasons

01:23:14

I shared that information was that it's so painfully obvious that the primary influence upon the

01:23:26

Thanksgiving hymns are the Hebrew scriptures themselves that's why

01:23:33

I went from reading from that one scroll 1

01:23:39

Q H A to 1 Q I S A Isaiah the great

01:23:47

Isaiah scroll was found in the same cave with the Thanksgiving hymns and so the first thought that should cross anyone's mind is that the first foremost influence in anything that's found in that cave when you're asking that question is going to be well what else was it found with?

01:24:09

what else did the people of that community consider important enough to hide in caves as a part of their library?

01:24:18

and the answer to that is they found the scriptures the

01:24:25

Hebrew scriptures to be that important and so I'm not saying that they were as a result completely uninfluenced by anything else in the world but I am saying that if you minimize what must be the most important influence upon them and then point us to something else you might have a reason why you're doing that and it might not be an appropriate reason it might not be using that information as best as it should be and then the other thing and I'm actually going to hold this off I have it up here but I don't want to do that I will maybe leave it for Monday maybe make a note to myself here when

01:25:12

I delete the Francis stuff in my thing I want to make sure that everyone understood that the reason that I read from Isaiah 40 the reason that I made reference to that whole section the trial of the false gods where God says tell me what's going to happen when he's got the false gods in the witness stand, tell me what's going to happen and tell me what happened in the past and why it happened that means that the challenge that God makes to the false gods has to be a challenge that he himself can fulfill and no matter what we do when we start talking about determinism is we have to define whether we're talking about naturalistic determinism we're talking about supernaturalistic determinism we're talking about monotheistic determinism polytheistic determinism are we talking about anything that can constrain

01:26:18

God in what he can do these are all categories as I've pointed out

01:26:25

Ken Wilson is a determinist if he believes that God knows the future and he said

01:26:33

God is autemporal, knows the future if he knows the future then he's a determinist he is a form of determinist, it's not the same kind of determinism as reformed determinism is by any stretch of the imagination there is no divine decree that is exhaustive in provisionist theology but that doesn't change the fact that when you're quoting from scholarly sources if you believe

01:27:00

God knows what the end is going to be and where people are going to be, you are a determinist now how he came to that knowledge how that knowledge itself came into existence different issue has to be discussed that's why there is massive categorical differences between the

01:27:21

Stoics various groups of the Gnostics between regular Gnostics Valentinian Gnostics in different forms of Manicheanism there are differences because that one term determinism is extremely broad and there are numerous factors that have to be brought together to define what is being said and so I hope that you understood the reason why

01:27:52

I was looking at Isaiah 40 is to establish that the

01:27:57

God of the Hebrew Scriptures has a decree by that decree he has complete control over the natural realm that's what the whole point of Isaiah 40 was he brings forth their host not one of them is missing that's what brought me into I was thinking about all the astronomy stuff but the point is that means he has all power and authority in the natural realm and the question then becomes does that authority extend into the spiritual realm and is mankind a special violation of his authority so that mankind has an autonomy that no one else has these are some of the issues that have to be addressed and when you try to flatten everything out and what have

01:28:56

I accused Layton Flowers of doing for years flattening out the biblical perspective on this very issue and when you flatten it out historically so that you can with one breath talk about the alleged one view of the

01:29:17

Stoics, the Gnostics and the Manichaeans you flattened it out to where it's no longer anywhere near truthful that's the key issue alright thanks for listening to the program today thanks again to Jason Lyle, Biblical Science Institute look him up, support him get his books, they're really really good books

01:29:41

I can highly recommend them, I can't understand one of them but the rest of them are really cool and Lord willing