January 4, 2017 Show with Dr. Terry Mortenson on “Searching for Adam: Genesis & the Truth About Man’s Origin”

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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.

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Now here's our host Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming.

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This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this fourth day of January 2016.

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And before I introduce my guest today and my co -host and my topic, I want to remind you that next

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Chef Damien White is providing our gourmet meal that day. And our keynote speaker is

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Dr. Tony Costa of Toronto Baptist Seminary in Canada. He is

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Professor of Apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary. Also, nearly every single

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Christian publisher, every single major Christian publisher in the United States and the

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United Kingdom is donating to us 100 free books of a specific title that I request from each publisher.

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There's no hidden agenda. This was the brainchild of my late wife

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Julie back in the 1990s. And we began doing it then and never stopped.

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And when she went home to be with the Lord, I wanted to continue the tradition of this pastor's luncheon in her honor.

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And so it continues. And I'm looking forward to next Thursday. The following night, Friday, the 13th at 7pm at the

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Carlisle Theatre, another historic building in Carlisle, 900 seat Carlisle Theatre going back to the 1920s,

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I believe, has been restored to its original grandeur and beauty. We are having a debate between the aforementioned

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Dr. Tony Costa of Toronto Baptist Seminary, and Robert St. Genes, a Roman Catholic apologist, founder of Catholic Apologetics International.

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They are debating on the theme, Mary, sinless queen of heaven or sinner saved by grace.

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Well, as I was saying at the outset of the program, I am excited about today's guest that we have on for the very first time on Iron Sharpens Iron.

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We have Dr. Terry Mortenson, and he has quite an amazing resume, if you will.

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Dr. Terry Mortenson, who is on staff with Answers in Genesis.

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He is their historian of geology and researcher for Answers in Genesis.

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He's a lecturer on the creation evolution controversy in 25 countries since the late 1970s, a university campus ministry leader in the

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United States and Eastern Europe with Campus Crusade for Christ. He's the author of many articles and books, including

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The Great Turning Point, and editor and contributor to Coming to Grips with Genesis.

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Today we are discussing his latest book, Searching for Adam, Genesis and the

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Truth about Man's Origin. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you to Iron Sharpens Iron, Dr.

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Terry Mortenson. Good to be with you, Chris. And co -hosting with me once again in studio is

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Charlie Liebert, who is founder of sixdaycreation .com,

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and he is also a former colleague of Ken Ham, and it's great to have you back in the studio with us.

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Thank you, Chris. Great to be here. If anybody would like to join us on the air with a question for Dr. Terry Mortenson, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

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chrisarnson at gmail .com. And as I deal with many of our guests, Dr. Mortenson, I'd like to know, even before we get into the discussion of the biblical and historic

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Adam, I want to find out something about your history. I want to know something about the child of your youth, what religion, if any, you were raised in, and what providential circumstances the

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Lord brought about in your life to draw you to himself and a saving knowledge of him. Well, I grew up in a church -going family, a

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Lutheran family in Minnesota, and our family went to church every

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Sunday, and I was interested in spiritual things, but when I went off to college at the

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University of Minnesota, I became a typical college student in 1971, and still believed in God, but stopped going to church and started going to parties and doing a lot of the things that I'm glad God saved me out of.

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And it was towards the end of my first year at the university that a Campus Crusade for Christ staff member contacted me and shared the gospel with me, and God had been preparing in little ways with interactions with some other people, but that day

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I was ready to put my trust in Christ as my Lord and Savior, and my life was significantly changed, and I was discipled through Campus Crusade in college, and then joined staff when

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I graduated and served there for 26 years. When was it in your life that you developed a fascination and interest in geology and the history of geology?

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Well, right after I became a Christian, I was a math major, so I was very interested in science, and one of my first questions was, what about evolution?

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Because I'd heard, you know, what they taught in the schools and the textbooks and stuff. But I came across a couple of books back in 1972 by Henry Morris and Duane Gish, two of the leaders of the modern creation movement, and they really opened my eyes to the fact that real science does not confirm evolution or millions of years, and so I started reading everything

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I could, and there wasn't a lot available in the early 70s, but when

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I came on staff with Campus Crusade, I began to have a desire to speak on the subject, and so I did a little bit of speaking just on the basis of my own reading and study, and came back to the

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United States in 1979, excuse me, 1989, just before the fall of communism.

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I'd been the director of the Campus Crusade ministry in Czechoslovakia up until that time, and I went to seminary, and I focused as much as I could in my seminary courses on the creation evolution controversy.

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If there's any way I could do a paper or sermon or something related to that, I did. And so during those 14 years on staff,

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I became very conversant with the scientific evidence for the truth of Genesis and the biblical evidence, but I didn't really know historically what was going on, particularly before Darwin, which

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I had come to believe that the problem must have started before Darwin, but I didn't know exactly what.

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And so when I went to do my PhD, that's what I focused on and became really more deeply interested in geology.

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Now, what would be the difference in a course on geology and the history of geology, which is your specialty?

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Well, I am not a geologist, so I don't study rocks and fossils directly, and I've never had a geology course, but I've read a lot of geology texts, especially from the early 19th century when geology was developing.

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And so what I focused on was how that idea of millions of years was developed in the late 18th and early 19th century, who were the key individuals, and in particular in my

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PhD thesis, I focused on a group of authors that collectively became known as the scriptural geologists, and they were what we would call young earth creationists, and they were writing against these old earth ideas and the various Christian compromises with those ideas in the early 19th century.

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Well, I would love to hear about how these theories that not only don't seem to have any biblical merit, but they don't even seem to have any scientific merit, how did these theories develop?

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Well, they were developed in the late 18th and early 19th century by men who were deists or secret atheists or open atheists who rejected the

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Word of God, rejected Genesis as reliable history, and using the assumptions of what philosophers call today naturalism, they sought to explain the geological record of rock layers and fossils by time and chance and the laws of nature.

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And they just assumed that Noah's Flood didn't have anything to do with it, that it couldn't have caused that geological record, and so time was the great hero of the plot.

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Given enough time, we can lay down these layers, we can erode and deposit these layers and fossils, and so with that philosophical worldview presupposition, they reinterpreted the geological evidence in terms of millions of years.

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I would point out to the listeners one particular thing here. This is 18th and 19th century, that before this, through the history of the church, they'd all been what we'd call young earth creationists.

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Yeah, that's exactly right. And there were men in the 17th and 18th century who believed that Noah's Flood was responsible for the geological record, but those were just pioneering ideas that science of geology really didn't develop until the very end of 18th and early 19th century.

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And there were no professional geologists who got paid to study the rocks until about 1840.

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So all of this was developing when there was very, very little understanding of the rocks and the fossils of Europe, to say nothing of the rest of the world.

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Yes. So going back to the 19th century and prior, did you have scientists that were atheists, for instance, who at least agreed with the

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Christians that the earth was a lot younger than is believed by most scientists today?

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And would they concede that the evidence pointed to at least some kind of intelligent design?

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Well, I don't know of any that would have been considered atheists.

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Of course, that wasn't a very popular or widespread view until the 18th century, but I don't know of any that would have agreed that the earth is young.

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They probably never even wrote about it. But as far as intelligent design, even the geologists and other scientists in the late 18th and early 19th century who were embracing the idea of long ages, and they were clearly thinking millions of years, most of them rejected the idea of evolution.

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And contrary to what most people think, Darwin didn't invent the idea of evolution. There were others before him.

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In fact, there were some evolutionists at the University of Edinburgh, where Darwin studied medicine before he quit and ended up at Cambridge.

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And his own grandfather was an evolutionist, and a lot of the ideas in his grandfather's writings are incorporated into Darwin's.

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And in fact, the main ideas of Darwin's theory actually go back to the ancient

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Greeks before the time of Christ. So Darwin just gave what appeared to be a scientific, naturalistic mechanism for evolution.

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But prior to him, most people believed that living things were too exquisitely designed to be as a result of natural processes.

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One of the things that is puzzling to me about our fellow brethren in Christ, many of whom are very intelligent, you might even call some of them brilliant, who are in many respects, if not most respects, just as conservative as we are when it comes to a great majority of scriptural passages, ideas, doctrines, theology, that there is this segment of them that are not only old earth creationists, but that have adopted theistic evolution.

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I don't get all that upset with my brethren who are old earth creationists, although I am not one.

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But when it comes to theistic evolution, this is where I draw the line and become quite concerned, if not disturbed, especially when there is being acceptance of men having evolved from lower life forms and in very clear contradiction to the

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Genesis account of the origins of man. If you could start with the Old Testament evidence for a literal historical

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Adam and Eve and why this is important. Well, I think there are a number of biblical lines of evidence for a historical

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Adam and Eve. First of all, any reader of Scripture who has any significant acquaintance with Scripture will know that there are different genres of literature in the

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Bible. There are parables and prophetic visions and poetry, but much of the

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Bible is historical narrative. And Hebrew historical narrative has very distinctive characteristics that distinguish it from Hebrew poetry.

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So when we examine the first 11 chapters of Genesis, they have all the marks of being historical narrative, just like the rest of Genesis, the book of Exodus, portions of Numbers and Joshua and Kings and on through the

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Old Testament. Also, when we look at all of the references in the New Testament, both in the

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Gospels, Jesus' words, as well as the writings of the New Testament writers, whenever they relate to Genesis 1 to 11 or refer to it, they always treat it as straightforward, literal history.

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There's no hint that they viewed it as symbolic poetry or a vision or any kind of non -literal, non -historical document.

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So I think that's very, very strong evidence that these first 11 chapters are history and they lay the foundation for the whole rest of the

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Bible. And once we start treating it as something other than history, we're undermining the foundations of the rest of the

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Scriptures and the doctrines and particularly the Gospel. Yeah, well, it would seem there is no escaping it that if you believe that men evolved from other life forms, you are also denying that death arrived on the scene after the fall.

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You must be, as a Christian who believes in theistic evolution, you must be clearly stating that there were humanoids and animals dying prior to the fall of Adam.

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Exactly right. And I have found in my reading and my interaction with people, both laypeople and scholars, in the 25 countries that I've spoken in, that most

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Christians who accept the millions of years have never even considered that issue.

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In fact, I have an article on our website where I critique the

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Old Earth views of three of the leading systematic theology texts used in our evangelical seminaries by Millard Erickson, Wayne Grudem, and then

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Gordon Lewis and Bruce Demarest at Denver Seminary. And all of them believe, and as I document in the article, all of them believe that the fall of Adam and Eve had an impact on the whole creation, and that when

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Jesus comes again, he will redeem the whole creation from the curse that was inflicted on the creation in Genesis 3.

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And yet all three of those systematic theology texts promote the acceptance of millions of years, and what

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I show is they didn't connect the dots with their orthodox view of the fall and their unorthodox view of millions of years.

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And it's amazing to me, but I've read lots and lots of literature by Christian scientists and Christian theologians who either haven't even touched this problem of death before the fall or give a very superficial answer that shows that they haven't read the many pieces of young earth creationist literature on this subject.

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This is a huge theological issue, because if you don't have death coming by Adam's sin, then the whole theology of the scripture gets overturned.

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Yeah, that was the primary curse of the fall. Right, the primary curse of the fall is death, and if death was present before the fall, then you've got all kinds of huge theological problems.

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Not so much science, but huge theological problems. Yeah, and you know, we need to realize here that it's not just that we're talking about, well, you know, a dog got to age 13 in the pre -fall world and he died of old age.

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No, what the geological record shows is massive death and destruction.

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We find cancer and arthritis and brain tumors in dinosaur fossils that are supposedly millions of years old.

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We find thorns and thistles in the fossil record in rocks that are supposedly 300 to 400 million years old.

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Evolutionists say the geological record reveals five major mass extinction events when anywhere from 60 to 90 percent of the species living at the time went extinct.

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We're talking about massive death, and for God to look at all of that and say, well, that's very good, is, in my mind, is an assault on the very character of God.

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Yeah, I agree. And the thing that also puzzles me is why these members of the intelligentsia, if you will, these scholars within, even within conservative evangelical

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Christianity, why they would be leaning this way puzzles me because it seems that gradually and slowly, even those scientists in the secular realm, even many that have no religion that they identify with are falling away from Darwinian evolution.

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And so it seems odd to me that you would have secularists and atheists and agnostics involved in scientific study who are beginning to question and even abandon

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Darwinianism, and you have simultaneously Christians adopting it. Well, I think there's three reasons for that.

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One is historical. We have 200 years of compromise in the

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Church over the issue of millions of years, and some of the greatest

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Christian leaders and theologians have been involved in that compromise. Charles Haddon Spurgeon, C .I.

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Schofield, Charles Hodge, B .B. Warfield, and on into the 20th century when the

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Fundamentals were published in 1910 to 1912. R .A.

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Torrey, the second president of Moody Bible Institute, was the editor. Six articles in those 90 essays dealt with science, and none of them defended the young earth view, and three of them explicitly promoted the old earth view.

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And so modern theologians look back at the last 200 years and see all of these great

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Christian leaders who believed in inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture and say, well, look, they didn't think this was important.

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They didn't think the Bible was so clear about the age of the earth. Are you saying they're all wrong?

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And my answer is, yeah, they're wrong on this point. Just like Peter was wrong in Matthew 16 when after he passed his theology exam with an

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A and said, you are the Christ, the Son of the Living God, he then contradicted

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Jesus when Jesus said, I'm going to Jerusalem and I'm going to die at the hands of a sinful man. And Peter said in so many words, no, you're not,

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Lord. And Jesus said to Peter, the text says, get behind me, Satan. So at that moment of his greatest theological statement, just after it, he had become a mouthpiece for Satan.

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And then in Galatians chapter 2, Paul has to confront Peter in Antioch because he was caving in to the peer pressure of the party of the circumcision,

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Jewish Christians who were affecting who he ate meals with. And Paul saw this as a threat to the gospel.

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And he confronted Peter publicly for his hypocrisy, Galatians 2 says. And so we have the second, you know, the second factor is the historical factor.

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But then we have this thing that, you know, we talk to teenagers, especially and say, now don't cave into peer pressure, but let's be honest, peer pressure affects us all.

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And it doesn't matter whether you're 16 or 66. And there is tremendous pressure, academic pressure in the academic world to conform to the majority view.

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And there's penalties if you go against what you already say. And so I think there's a fear of man and a desire for the praise of men, academic praise of men.

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And then the third reason, so you've got a historical, you've got a spiritual reason here.

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But I think a third reason is, and again, this is based on my reading of a lot of old earth literature, they simply are not, they're simply not informed on the scientific evidence.

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They're not reading creationist literature by real top creationist scholars, scientists, and theologians.

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They're ignorant of the evidence. And they're just going with what the media and the science programs on television and the state national parks they go to on vacation are just repeatedly saying, the earth is millions of years old, science has proven this, all the scientists agree.

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They're just not informed. We are going to our first station break right now.

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If you'd like to join us on the air with a question for Dr. Terry Mortenson on searching for Adam, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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Hoping that you can join Chris and me at the G3 Conference in Atlanta, my new hometown.

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.com. We bring biblically faithful pastoral ministry to you, and we invite you to visit the pastor's study by calling in with your questions.

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Eastern Time for a visit to the pastor's study because everyone needs a pastor. Welcome back.

33:06

This is Chris Arnsen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours with about 90 minutes to go is

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Dr. Terry Mortensen, and we are discussing his book Searching for Adam, Genesis and the

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Truth about Man's Origin. Co -hosting with me in studio is Charlie Liebert, founder of sixdaycreation .com.

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If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

33:35

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com, and please give us at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence.

33:46

And give us also some of the

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New Testament areas, texts that show the great importance for believing in a real historic figure named

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Adam. Well, one would be both Matthew 19 and Mark 10, when

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Jesus was confronted by the Pharisees with the question about divorce, and they said, well,

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Moses permitted us to divorce our wives, what do you say? And Jesus said, well, he permitted that because of the hardness of your heart.

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If you want to know God's perspective on marriage, you need to go back to the foundation of marriage, which is Genesis 1 and 2, and he quoted from those two chapters.

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So that was the foundation, and Paul uses the same passages in 1

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Corinthians 11 to argue for male headship in the home, and in 1 Timothy 2, for male headship in the church.

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And he refers to the fall and the deception of Eve in 2

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Corinthians 11, verse 3, where he says, I'm afraid that you'll be deceived by Satan the same way

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Eve was. So this is foundational to our

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Christian life. And then, of course, in Romans 5, he really unpacks the fact that sin came into the world through Adam, and Jesus came into the world as the second

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Adam. He talks about that in 1 Corinthians 15, when he talks about the resurrection of Jesus.

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So you can't mess with the early chapters of Genesis without really undermining

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New Testament teaching on a lot of subjects, including the gospel. And I know that people who listen to my show with any regularity will hear me repeating this, because it's something that I repeat often, but I don't think it can be repeated often enough.

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The whole idea of men evolving from lower life forms is inseparably wedded to racism.

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And the fact that the most notorious and grotesque of racist individuals and organizations that we have on record from the 19th and 20th centuries have believed, in 21st centuries, have believed and still do believe that those of the non -white race, as if there is such a thing as a white race, but those outside of Caucasian individuals, are closer to apes on the evolution chart.

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Is this not a fact that, astonishingly, there seems to be deafening silence very often, even when it comes to the conservatives in the arena of scholarly debate and exchange with evolutionists?

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Well, I agree with you, and you and your listeners would be wise to note the next time you look at these memorable charts showing how an ape -like creature gradually, through, you know, 10 or 15 stages, becomes an upright walking man.

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In a lot of these diagrams, you see they are implicitly racist, because the skin gets lighter as you go from left to right, to the last fully upright man, and very

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Caucasian. So the diagrams are inherently racist, and as Stephen Jay Gould, the great

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Harvard geologist, said once that there were scientific arguments in favor of racism before Charles Darwin, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolution theory.

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And Darwin himself was quite racist. He believed the aborigines were the least evolved, black

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Africans more evolved, mongoloids more evolved, and guess who he thought was the most evolved? White Anglo -Saxons, like himself.

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Yes, and a lot of people are totally shocked to hear that Darwin's complete title, his original complete title of his book, was

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On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favored Races in the

38:27

Struggle for Life. I don't know why that doesn't come off the tongue of every conservative every time he's in an exchange, a public exchange, with an evolutionist who is mocking him, who is mocking the conservative for his, quote -unquote, prehistoric understanding of the origins of life.

38:48

You hear people on TV who are considered to be intellectual all the time laughing at those of us who believe in a real

38:57

Adam and Eve, people like Chris Matthews on CNN, and all these other folks.

39:02

Whenever a politician who's running for office may say that he doesn't believe in evolution, he is the laughingstock of the media.

39:11

And why this truth isn't really, the drumbeat of this truth isn't really going on loudly by those conservatives who know better is a mystery to me.

39:24

Yeah, yeah. And we need to be very clear that the Bible is absolutely crystal clear.

39:31

There's only one race, Adam's race, and there really is no such thing as a black race, and a white race, and a brown race, and a red race, and a yellow race.

39:40

Those are man -made categories that really have flourished in the wake of evolutionary thinking, particularly.

39:49

But there are Christians who have had racist attitudes, and still do today, at least professing

39:57

Christians, and it's because they don't have a biblical understanding of the origin of man.

40:03

And then, of course, you have the racist implications of evolution in terms of Nazi Germany, where Hitler viewed the

40:14

Germans as the highest race. And all the communist regimes have been racist in different ways.

40:20

In fact, one of the chapters in Searching for Adam is all about racism, and the Japanese were very racist in the

40:27

Second World War, viewing themselves as the highest race. And then the eugenics movement, and the focus on supposedly less human humans, and, you know, what was amazing to me is that Planned Parenthood, started by Margaret Sanger, who was very racist, has really focused on abortions in the black community.

40:52

And it's a racist assault on the black community. Yeah, and to show the universal nature of man's sin, regardless of this color of his skin, in the 19th century and earlier, there were many black

41:09

Americans who had a low view of their fellow black men and women with darker skin.

41:19

I mean, even the liberal Maya Angelou had, before her death,

41:25

I've heard her on a number of occasions, refer to instances of bigotry within the black community, where those with lighter skin and straighter hair viewed themselves as superior.

41:41

And I can remember her even recollecting a black church in the south that had a hairbrush tied to a string next to the door, and there was a sign that said, if you cannot run this brush through your hair, do not enter, or something like that.

42:00

Now, whether that was true, I don't know, but that was something from her account, and she was a notorious liberal, as most people know.

42:08

But this is quite a complex issue that really has its fingers in a lot of things that people on its surface may not even realize.

42:23

The depth to which this falsehood of believing in evolution, how it creeps into all manners of society that we don't even comprehend, am

42:35

I right? Oh, that's true, and it is certainly at the foundation of the moral insanity, the moral anarchy that we are dealing with in our culture today in America.

42:49

Because if you teach generations of children, as has been done for the last almost 100 years, that they're just animals descended from some other animal, well, we find evidence of lots of animals that commit what we would call, among humans, rape, and polytheism, and animals that father offspring and then abandon them.

43:20

You can see all kinds of things in animal behavior that, if we're just animals, what's wrong with fornication, adultery, rape?

43:32

And evolutionists say there's animal behavior that looks like homosexual behavior. So, what's wrong with that?

43:39

So, it's really the foundation of the moral anarchy that we're seeing in our country. Charlie Lieber?

43:45

Yeah, I want to make a comment. One of the, I've done some research in this area, and in the

43:51

United States, the abortion statistics are really eye -opening. You have a four out of ten chance of being aborted if you're black, two to three if you're

43:59

Hispanic, and one to two if you're white. That's clear racism. There's no question about that, and I wish the black community would wake up to that fact.

44:08

Where do you find the abortion clinics? In black neighborhoods. Yeah, well,

44:13

I would imagine it's predominantly, but not exclusively. No, predominantly, right? Exactly, I agree.

44:19

And, well, Adam's place in the history of the church's theology, if you could touch on that for a while.

44:28

Well, as Dr. Tom Nettles covered, discussed in his chapter in Searching for Adam, historian of the church.

44:39

Yeah, I know Dr. Tom Nettles very well. He's been on this show quite often. Yeah, he just shows that up until the development of Darwinian evolution, the church was just unanimous about Adam, and Adam being foundational to the

44:57

Gospel, and Genesis being foundational to the rest of the scriptures. So those who are arguing for human evolution and saying that they're, you know, they're faithful evangelical

45:12

Christians, well, they may be in other areas, but in this area, they are heterodoxed.

45:18

They're not orthodox. We have CJ from Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York, who wants to know, is it the opinion of your guest that if a

45:29

Christian believes in theistic evolution, even so much to the point that he believes men evolved from apes, that this person should not be considered a true brother in Christ?

45:44

No, only God can decide that, evaluate that, and the

45:50

Bible is full of lots of examples, and we see lots of examples today of true

45:57

Christians being inconsistent. Earlier, I talked about Peter's mistakes, but you know, if we're all honest, we are all inconsistent in some way.

46:13

None of us is perfectly obedient to the scriptures. None of us has a perfect understanding of scripture.

46:20

So if a person who claims to believe in evolution believes that he is a sinner, she is a sinner, and that Jesus Christ died a substitutionary death to pay the penalty for their sin, to reconcile them to God, then the

46:37

Bible would say they're a true Christian. But if they believe in evolution, they're a true Christian that has some erroneous ideas.

46:46

Yeah, when we are cleansed from our sin by the blood of Christ, he doesn't implant with us within our skulls an infallible brain that is the brain of an infallible genius that knows all truth perfectly.

47:03

There are a lot of Christians who say and do stupid things, even if they are born again, and there have been throughout all of history, and there have even been some of the greatest minds of the church in history that have believed and done stupid things, and sinful things, obviously.

47:22

Yep. Thank you, CJ, for the question, and guess what, CJ? You have won a free copy of Searching for Adam, Genesis and the

47:31

Truth about Man's Origin, compliments of the publisher, and it will be shipped to you, compliments of our friends at CVBBS, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com.

47:44

So look for a package with that label, cvbbs .com, and look for quite a thick package because this is quite a thick book, a very thorough book.

47:55

And who are some of the other contributors to this book, Dr. Mortensen? Dr. Bill Berrick, who is a retired professor at the

48:05

Master's Seminary, did a survey of the Old Testament evidence for historical

48:11

Adam and Eve. We mentioned Dr. Tom Nettles. Dr.

48:16

Eugene Merrill, retired professor from Dallas Theological Seminary has a powerful chapter on the disappearance of Adam and the death of truth.

48:29

Dr. David Cassis, or he will soon have his doctorate, did a chapter on the image of God.

48:36

He teaches at Luther Rice Seminary, so he's looking at what does it mean for man to be made in the image of God, and why is that important.

48:44

And then in dealing with science, we have Dr. David Menton on our staff at Answers in Genesis, who for 34 years was professor of human anatomy at Washington Medical School in St.

48:55

Louis, looking at some of the fossil evidence and showing that it doesn't confirm that we evolved from apes.

49:03

Dr. Stuart Burgess is a design engineer professor at Bristol University in England, and he's done two chapters on the unique anatomy of man that separates us significantly from the apes.

49:20

So those are some of the contributors, and there are others as well.

49:26

There was an excellent section here on the human hand. I thought that was really brilliant, that part of the book.

49:31

Yeah. On the human hand? Why don't you tell me something about that? Well, the human hand and its abilities far exceed anything that the apes can do in terms of fine muscle control and touch, and the ability to write and to do art and craft things.

49:59

So it's very distinct. You know, it's interesting how those who worship the creation rather than the creator, although many of them would not claim to be worshiping animals, but it's interesting, those who put a higher value on the life of animals, especially certain animals like blue whales or polar bears or animals, elephants and gorillas, perhaps.

50:32

But it's interesting how they don't even realize that in their arrogance, when they see something that is wonderful and amazing about the gifts and abilities of an animal, they always want to claim that must mean that there's a human connection there.

50:58

I mean, why can't God give different members of his creation different wonderful attributes that are unique to them, and there is no required connection with the human race at all?

51:12

No, no. There's amazing similarity between a 747 jumbo jet and, you know, a

51:23

Lennox, or a Lexus car, but that's not because they're related.

51:30

It's because they are designed by the same kind of creature, very intelligent engineers.

51:38

And the fact that they both have wheels doesn't mean that one evolved into another. There's similarity of features because of the same designers, human beings.

51:49

And God made lots of creatures that have some similar characteristics, but man really stands apart from any other creature in his existence, his anatomy, his intelligence, his spiritual dimension, his ability to communicate and reason.

52:08

And he stands apart in his origin because Genesis makes it abundantly clear that Adam was made from dust, not from a pre -existing living creature, and Eve was made from the rib of Adam.

52:22

And there's no way you can harmonize those verses with the evolutionary fairy tale.

52:31

We have RJ in White Plains, New York, who brings up something that I have dealt with on this show with other guests in the past.

52:39

But he asks, I have heard that one of my favorite theologians of all time,

52:45

B .B. Warfield, believed in evolution. Is this true? Well, it depends.

52:55

There are a number of readers, myself included, who have read what Warfield said in his many articles.

53:03

And I would say he certainly leaned towards theistic evolution. Some would even call him a theistic evolutionist.

53:13

Others would say, no, he didn't exactly. But if he didn't, he wasn't terribly clear about it,

53:21

I don't think. Yeah, for those of our listeners who don't know who he was, he was one of the great minds of Princeton Seminary before the decline of Princeton, or at least before the full -blown collapse of Princeton into leftist theology.

53:40

Although obviously, even with Warfield there, who is certainly a man who believed in the inerrancy of scripture and a great man that we should revere in many ways, even he obviously was tainted to a degree by the leftist understanding of the origins of man.

53:59

And I have heard by a biographer of Warfield, Fred Zaspel, that he was not like a zealous advocate for theistic evolution.

54:12

He was just posing it as an acceptable possibility or option.

54:19

And I don't want to say too much without Dr. Zaspel here to quote exactly what he said, but it was something in that realm where it was not some kind of person who was vigorously promoting this idea.

54:32

Oh yeah, I would agree. I would agree. It raises an important point, especially in light of this being the 500th year anniversary of the

54:44

Reformation that we need to always remember that it is the

54:50

Word of God that is inerrant, and the only human being who never made any mistakes was the

54:57

Lord Jesus Christ. Everybody else makes mistakes, and so while we can have great respect for Christian leaders, we must never treat them as if they are an infallible pope that we can trust unquestionably in everything that they say or write.

55:16

Yes, men will always let us down eventually. Absolutely. Thank you,

55:22

R .J., and if you give us your full mailing address in White Plains, New York, you are also getting a free copy of this wonderful book that we are addressing today,

55:33

Searching for Adam, Genesis and the Truth about Man's Origin. Compliments of the publisher, and also compliments of Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, our sponsor who is shipping that to you,

55:47

CVBBS .com, CV for Cumberland Valley, BBS for Bible Book Service .com,

55:53

and we thank them for their faithful support of Iron Sharpens Iron. In fact, before I go to Tyler in Mastic Beach, Long Island's question, well, in fact, let me read

56:07

Tyler's question and have you think about it, and then you can respond to it when we return from the break.

56:13

You already touched on this question, but perhaps you can give a broader answer to Tyler's specific question.

56:21

He asks, is it true that evolution has more of an effect on a person's worldview than just biological beliefs?

56:32

And we will be back after these messages for Dr. Mortensen's answer, and for more questions from you, the audience, and answers to them when we return.

56:44

If you'd like to join Tyler and the others with a question of your own on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

56:52

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Dr. Terry Mortensen. Chris Arnson here, and I can't wait to head down to Atlanta, Georgia, and here's my friend,

57:06

Dr. James White, to tell you why. Hi, I'm James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries. I hope you join me at the

57:12

G3 Conference hosted by Pastor Josh Bice and Praise Mill Baptist Church at the

57:17

Georgia International Convention Center in Atlanta, January 19th through the 21st, in celebration of the 500th anniversary of the

57:26

Protestant Reformation. I'll be joined by Paul Washer, Steve Lawson, D .A. Carson, Vody Balcom, Conrad M.

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Bayway, Phil Johnson, Rosaria Butterfield, Todd Friel, and a host of other speakers who are dedicated to the pillars of what

57:40

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57:47

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01:02:12

Welcome back. This is Chris Ornson. If you just tuned us in, our guest for the full two hours, with one hour to go, is

01:02:18

Dr. Terry Mortenson. We are discussing his book, Searching for Adam, Genesis and the

01:02:23

Truth about Man's Origin. If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson .com,

01:02:31

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N, at gmail .com.

01:02:36

And before the break, Tyler in Mastic Beach, Long Island, New York asked, is it true that evolution has more of an effect on a person's worldview than just biological beliefs?

01:02:50

Yes, it certainly does, because when you undermine the truth of Genesis 1 -11, you are undermining the foundations of the rest of the

01:03:03

Bible. All major and minor doctrines in the rest of the Bible are based on those foundational truths.

01:03:10

And so you make Adam and Eve a myth, and you've undermined the

01:03:15

Bible's teaching about marriage, because Jesus and the apostles went back to Genesis to substantiate their teaching about marriage in the

01:03:28

New Testament. You undermine the sanctity of human life if humans are just animals.

01:03:34

We get rid of spare cats, get rid of spare kids. We put our black lab down a few years ago when she developed severe diabetes and blindness.

01:03:45

So if we're just animals, should I put my 92 -year -old mother down who's living with us now, and she has incurable heart disease, and breathing problems, and getting weaker?

01:03:57

No, because my mother is made in the image of God, and my dog was not. We have massive confusion in this country over gender, but the

01:04:06

Bible clearly says God made two genders, only two, male and female, and they are both beautiful.

01:04:15

They are both made in the image of God, and we should be celebrating our unique gender, not trying to be a different gender or deny it.

01:04:25

And so we get into all kinds of confusion. We've talked about racism. Again, if it's the survival of the fittest, then whoever is in political power can exploit and use and even kill or experiment on other people that they deem less evolved.

01:04:48

So it's a huge, huge issue. You know, it's interesting on this moral issue to listen to what the evolutionists say.

01:04:57

Take, for example, the late William Provine at Cornell University, who grew up in the church but was an atheist until his death in 2015.

01:05:09

He said, let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear.

01:05:15

There are no gods, no purposes, no goal -directed forces of any kind. There's no life after death.

01:05:22

When I die, I'm absolutely certain that I'm going to be dead. That's the end for me. There's no ultimate foundation to ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans either.

01:05:32

And if you believe that you're the result of a big bang that happened by chance and caused the sun to form by chance over millions of years and caused the first living cell to form by chance and then by a blind purposeless process of evolution, natural selection, and mutations, you arrive, then you're just the product of a long series of accidents.

01:05:56

And these men are right. There's no basis for morality. So that's a huge, huge implication, and we're seeing that fleshed out in our culture.

01:06:08

The other thing is alluded to even here is that there's really no gospel, because if Adam was a mythological person and never really existed, and the fall never really happened, and my selfishness is just carried over from my animal instincts of my carnivore relatives, well then there's no foundation for the gospel.

01:06:38

Well, thank you, Tyler. And you have also won a free copy of the book that we are discussing,

01:06:44

Searching for Adam, Genesis and the Truth about Man's Origin, a compliment of the publishers, and also compliments of Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com,

01:06:56

who will be shipping that book out to you hopefully in about a week or so.

01:07:02

So keep your eye open for that. We have Jerry in Charlestown, New Hampshire.

01:07:08

Jerry in Charlestown, New Hampshire asks, one of the common arguments against a historical

01:07:15

Adam is defined by scripture are the fossils of the so -called

01:07:21

Neanderthal man, who it is argued has vastly different bone structures than humans, and therefore predates humans by many thousands of years.

01:07:32

How can a Bible -believing geologist respond to those assertions? Obviously that should include a paleontologist.

01:07:42

Well, that is a vastly, vastly inaccurate statement about Neanderthals.

01:07:50

They are very, very similar to modern humans. In fact, there are many evolutionists who would classify

01:07:56

Neanderthals as homo sapiens, and they had incredible abilities.

01:08:04

In many cases, their brain size was larger than modern man. They were very gifted in their use of their hands, and they made boats.

01:08:20

They made sophisticated tools, spears, needles, stone tools.

01:08:26

They made seashell jewelry. They learned how to cook food with fire.

01:08:33

They made homes from animal skins. They made musical instruments from bear femurs.

01:08:39

They cared for their sick, and there's evidence that they did surgery, and Neanderthal bones, where they clearly were amputated and healed, they ceremonially buried their dead.

01:08:54

No animals do that. So the evidence that Neanderthals were 100 % human is just overwhelming, and one of the chapters in Searching for Adam is about Neanderthal man and lays out the evidence for that.

01:09:09

So we've been fed a lot of erroneous ideas in the name of science, but a real, real careful look at the evidence.

01:09:20

They were our ancestors, and where their bones are found in the earth, creationists conclude that they are people who migrated from the

01:09:29

Tower of Babel after the Flood. So this term that the secular evolutionists use,

01:09:38

Neanderthal man, you're not even necessarily objecting to that phrase, but you're just saying that they are not some kind of a humanoid that is closer to apes in any way.

01:09:50

You're just saying that it is an era of time when men lived, I'm assuming, in a certain geography.

01:09:57

I wouldn't even say it was an era of time. They were living with other humans that had other characteristics in terms of their stature.

01:10:08

I mean, even today, we've got people like Shaquille O 'Neal, this huge seven -foot -something basketball player, and we've got the actor

01:10:17

Danny DeVito, who's, I don't know how short he is, but he's pretty short, and we've got pygmy

01:10:24

Africans who are very short. And even among modern people, you can find people that have a very vertical forehead and others who have a receding forehead, and people that have a very jutting jaw and others that are chin and others that don't, and people that have heavy eyebrow ridges and people that don't.

01:10:45

These are all characteristics within the realm of mankind, and they're very superficial differences.

01:10:55

Now, what would be some of the unique distinctives of the Neanderthal man, then? Well, they were pretty robust, larger -boned, generally, and they had very muscular hands, so they were, you know, interesting thing.

01:11:13

I have a lecture on this subject called Ape Man, the Grand Illusion, and I gave that lecture out at a conference in California a few years ago, and a gentleman came up to me afterwards, probably in his 30s, and said, you need to use me in your lecture next time.

01:11:32

I said, why's that? He said, well, my DNA has been mapped, and I have 3 %

01:11:37

Neanderthal DNA. He's originally from Lithuania, and he's not subhuman.

01:11:42

He works in technical support for Google. So, you know, they were human beings, and,

01:11:52

I mean, even today, you know, on average, most Asians are smaller stature than most

01:12:01

Europeans, and it has nothing to do with evolution or inferiority or superiority.

01:12:07

It's just a range in the genetic code that was built into Adam and Eve. There was the genetic information for making tall people and short people and stocky people and petite people and, you know, heavy eyebrow ridges and not very heavy.

01:12:25

Well, I have been called a Neanderthal myself, probably by half of my listeners, at least.

01:12:33

It's really always in the genes. I'll give you an example. The Oriental people that have the olive -shaped eyes and the yellowish skin, that's a genetic variation in humankind that represents the fat layer being higher in the skin than most other human beings.

01:12:51

That's exactly right. The Native American, for example, with the reddish skin color, that's another genetic variation where their capillaries are close to the surface.

01:12:59

So, it's always in the genes, and it's always within the range of the original Adam and Eve. I'm not really sure why

01:13:04

Oriental has fallen out of favor. For some reason, Asian seems to be the proper way to describe them.

01:13:10

Sorry about that. Well, I don't know why. Maybe somebody can point out to me why Oriental is somehow taboo now.

01:13:16

Well, the Orient, I guess, is specifically geographic rather than area people.

01:13:23

One other little fact about Neanderthals. The reason they're called that is because the first skeletons of these humans was found in the

01:13:34

Neander Valley in Germany. So, that's the case with other fossils.

01:13:40

Sometimes they got a name because of where the bones were found, but they were fully human.

01:13:48

I apologize for intruding upon this discussion with this joke that I heard, but I think it's very apropos.

01:13:58

Paul Reiser, many of our listeners may remember who Paul Reiser was or is.

01:14:05

Paul Reiser was a lot more well -known in the 90s and 80s. He was the co -star of the sitcom

01:14:13

Mad About You. He was in the movie Alien. But Paul Reiser is a stand -up comedian, and he told a joke years ago that I saw.

01:14:23

I don't know where he stands on the evolution question, but he was making fun of this fossil evidence that paleontologists are always touting on public television and specials on TV.

01:14:42

He was imagining these two men having a conversation in heaven, and one says to the other, hey,

01:14:50

Murray, can you believe the member of our family, of all people, that these scientists down there on earth found as a representation of our ancestors?

01:15:03

Murray, can you believe Uncle Murray? You mean Murray with the bad posture? Yeah, Murray with the bad posture.

01:15:10

So, now they're saying that we're all coming from apes because of Murray. That's funny. Yeah. Well, some of the

01:15:17

Neanderthal people did have, you know, initially they were kind of stooped in the shoulders, and later more careful research revealed that it was a result of disease.

01:15:29

I think it was rickets or something that caused deformation of the bones.

01:15:35

So, you know, and they were living in caves, and by the way, the Bible talks about cavemen.

01:15:42

In Hebrews chapter 11, it talks about people wandering about in caves and holes in the ground, and Sarah, Jacob, Lazarus, Jesus were buried in a cave, and Elijah and David lived in a cave for a while.

01:15:58

So, there's nothing strange about that. I mean, if you're running for your life as David and Elijah were, a cave is a good place to hide, and Osama bin

01:16:07

Laden discovered that. Yes, that's true. By the way, Jerry in Charlestown, New Hampshire, you have also won a free copy of this marvelous book that we are addressing today on Iron Sharpens Iron, Searching for Adam, Genesis and the

01:16:26

Truth about Man's Origin. We thank you very much for contributing your excellent question to our program today, and keep spreading the word in New Hampshire about Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

01:16:37

I have a comment on the book I want to make. First of all, it's over 500 pages, which is really impressive,

01:16:43

I've got to say that, and the number of different authors you have also is impressive, but the most impressive thing to me was reading into the chapter you wrote in chapter 16, because having worked for Ken Ham and knowing, being a

01:16:54

Young Earth creationist, I love this sentence, and I'm just going to read this sentence here. Genesis chapter 1 clearly teaches, and the rest of Bible confirms, that God supernaturally created

01:17:04

Adam from dust and Eve from his rib on the sixth literal 24 -hour day a little over 6 ,000 years ago.

01:17:12

That's great, okay? Great summarization, Dr. Marks, great summarization. Yeah, thank you.

01:17:18

Now, we have also brought this up before, but this is quite a startling development in a way that would actually lend a lot of weight to the

01:17:33

Young Earth creationists, is the discovery of tissue on dinosaur skeletons, if you could comment on that.

01:17:44

Yes, Mary Schweitzer is a leading expert among the evolutionists on this.

01:17:51

She discovered soft tissue, or discovered first what looked like blood cells and dinosaur bones that were supposedly 68 million years old.

01:18:02

She made that discovery back in about 1983, I think it is, and has gone on.

01:18:08

That was when she was a graduate student at Montana State University, and she's now become quite an expert and has found soft tissue and dinosaur bones, and then creationists have been digging up dinosaur bones and also finding soft tissue and other evidence that these bones are not millions of years old, but they're really only thousands of years old.

01:18:38

Red blood cells in these bones and other characteristics of bone material that shouldn't be there if they're millions of years old.

01:18:49

We have Harrison Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, who wants to know, is there any credible fossil evidence that men and dinosaurs lived at the same time?

01:19:01

For some reason, I don't know why the fossilized footprints of male and,

01:19:08

I'm sorry, human and dinosaur tracks in the same rock seem to be scoffed at continually by the evolutionists.

01:19:19

Well, there's claims of human and dinosaur prints in the Paluxy River area in Texas, but most of the leading creation organizations,

01:19:30

Answers in Genesis, the Institute for Creation Research, and others that have examined this evidence, and obviously they are very, very sympathetic.

01:19:38

We would love to find evidence like that, but they have examined that evidence and are not convinced that it's really human footprints.

01:19:50

Oh, so then even the Young Earth Creationist Society, if you could call it that, or that ilk of scientists would be in agreement with the evolutionists on that one issue that the footprints of humans and together look spurious, the evidence of it.

01:20:11

Yes, and so we don't want to embrace evidence that we think doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

01:20:18

And there's lots of evidence that dinosaurs lived on the earth with man.

01:20:25

There are dragon legends all over the world. There are petroglyphs in the southwest

01:20:31

United States that look like long -necked dinosaurs, like the big sauropods.

01:20:39

There's a temple from the 12th century after Christ in the deep jungles of Cambodia, a very famous temple that has carved in it a number of different animals and one of the arches, doorways, and one of the creatures looks exactly like a stegosaurus with those diamond -shaped plates on its back.

01:20:57

There's a tomb of Bishop Bell in England, an

01:21:03

Anglican bishop who died in 1496. He's buried in the floor of Carlisle Cathedral and carved in the brass band of the lid on his tomb is a number of different animals, including what looks like two long -necked dinosaurs.

01:21:18

So there's lots of evidence that humans and dinosaurs lived together on the earth.

01:21:25

We don't have any clear fossil evidence of them being buried together.

01:21:31

So even as recent as the 15th century, there's a possibility that dinosaurs and men lived together. Yeah. And, you know, people say, well, why did they go extinct?

01:21:40

And we say, well, the same reason probably that lots of other creatures go extinct.

01:21:46

There's a climate change in the area. There's a natural disaster that wipes out a population or their food supply, or most likely, which is the case with most extinctions.

01:21:57

Man overhunts them. Man brings disease into their population.

01:22:03

Man destroys their habitat. How about the evidence of human artifacts in coal?

01:22:09

Is that another evidence for that? Human artifacts in coal? Yes. I'm not aware that there's any such evidence that is stood up to scrutiny by any creation scientists.

01:22:23

I've heard mixed reports on that. That's why I asked the question. Why don't you tell Charlie what is the significance of something like that if they did find something like that?

01:22:31

Why did you even bring that up? Okay. Because coal in the evolutionary time scheme is hundreds of millions of years before anything.

01:22:39

It goes back to what's called the Carboniferous Period. So if there is any human evidence of anything in coal, then certainly that humans existed at that time, that throws a whole evolutionary supposition out.

01:22:50

Hmm. It just boggles my mind why there seems to be an agenda that those in the secular scientific world have that would consider something like men and dinosaurs living at the same time something to be laughed at.

01:23:18

It would seem to me that even if somebody was an advocate of an earth or a universe that is billions of years old or trillions of years old, why the cohabiting of men and dinosaurs would be such a major cog in that wheel,

01:23:39

I don't understand. One thing that I have said to evolutionists that I've met and old earth creationists is that we have living with us right now on this planet tortoises, alligators, and crocodiles.

01:24:02

And I have heard on a number of occasions secular evolutionists claim that those animals lived at the same time with dinosaurs.

01:24:14

Why wouldn't that make them dinosaurs? If dinosaurs come or came in all shapes and sizes, because not all dinosaurs according to even the secular evolutionists were gigantic animals the size of buildings, some of them were as small as rats and house cats according to what

01:24:33

I've always heard, why wouldn't a tortoise, an alligator, and a crocodile be dinosaurs? Well, it's because of the skeletal structure.

01:24:44

Dinosaurs' legs went out down under their bodies the way it does on a horse or a cow, whereas with alligators and crocodiles their arms and legs go out to the side and then down.

01:24:59

So there's an anatomical difference as I understand it. So all dinosaurs were identical in that aspect, what you just described?

01:25:09

Yes, they were either two -legged or four -legged creatures that went down under their bodies the same way they do on mammals and birds.

01:25:23

One of the reasons that evolutionists are going to defend this is because they have a sequence, and that sequence has reptiles first and warm -blooded mammals second.

01:25:33

So you've got to put the reptiles back in the distant past because you've got to get to the first mammals evolving.

01:25:39

So they've got to have them millions of years ago, that's required of their model. Well, the other thing is that we have to understand that this whole issue of origins is ultimately a spiritual conflict.

01:25:54

It's men in rebellion against God, men and women, trying to explain the world without God so they don't have to feel morally accountable to him, and they can dismiss the

01:26:04

Bible and its claims, and they can ignore their sin problem and blame it on something else, their animal ancestry, and they can invent their own moral standards to their liking.

01:26:20

And ultimately it's a spiritual issue, and ultimately evolution is an assault on the truthfulness and the authority of the

01:26:32

Word of God. And that's why it's so important in the Church, because what has happened is, over the last 200 years, much of the

01:26:40

Church, including many of her leaders, have bowed the knee to the authority of what, not the authority of science, but the authority of the majority opinion among scientists.

01:26:54

And so we've had an undermining of the authority of Scripture from the scientific community, and increasingly now we're having another attack, and that is of well -meaning

01:27:08

Bible scholars who have become experts on ancient Near Eastern pagan literature by the

01:27:14

Babylonians, Egyptians, Assyrians, and saying that we can't understand Genesis apart from understanding the ancient

01:27:22

Near Eastern pagan creation and flood myths. And it's another attack on the authority of Scripture.

01:27:32

We have Edwin in Lexington, South Carolina, who asks,

01:27:40

I found it beautiful that Momondo, M -O -M -O -N -D -O, and he has in parentheses, the

01:27:49

DNA journey, had the videos on social media showing how everyone is related, everyone has common ancestry.

01:27:59

Is there something where Christians are harnessing these types of social experiments to open the eyes of the culture?

01:28:09

I'm not really sure what he's referring to with Momondo, I don't know if you've ever heard of that.

01:28:16

No, I haven't, but we have one of the chapters in Searching for Adam is by two geneticists, and I'm not a geneticist, so I've never had a course in genetics, so I worked really hard with these two brilliant geneticists who got their

01:28:35

PhDs from major secular universities, one of them from Harvard. I worked really hard with them to get their chapter down to the level that a non -scientist could understand what they're talking about, and I hope we reach that goal.

01:28:52

But they show not only that the genetic evidence is overwhelmingly confirming that all humans came from two individuals, a man and a woman, but that actually the mutation rates in the human genome confirm what the

01:29:10

Bible says, that Adam and Eve lived about 6 ,000 years ago. So it's a powerful chapter in the book, and very, very thoroughly documented for the readers who really are into genetics to dig deeper.

01:29:27

Well we're going to our final break right now, if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, you have about a little less than a half hour to have your question asked and answered on the air, so I would suggest that you email us as soon as possible at chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

01:29:45

c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com, and please give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

01:29:55

USA. Don't go away, we'll be right back with our final half hour with Dr. Terry Mortensen right after these messages.

01:30:04

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01:36:28

Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours with about 25 minutes to go is

01:36:37

Dr. Terry Mortensen. We have been and will continue discussing his book, Searching for Adam, and if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com,

01:36:50

chrisarnzen at gmail .com, and please give us your name, city, and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the good old

01:37:01

USA, and we will go to a couple more of you that have already written in in a moment, but if you could bring up what's lost in John Walton's The World of Adam and Eve?

01:37:21

Well, he has done what I alluded to in the last comments before our break.

01:37:28

He's a very influential Old Testament scholar at Wheaton College in Illinois, and he has done a series of books,

01:37:40

The Lost World of Genesis 1, The Lost World of Adam and Eve, and I think he's coming out with a new book,

01:37:45

The Lost World of Noah, and he is, on the one hand, he will deny he's not doing this, but if you really read carefully, this is what he's doing.

01:37:56

He's using the ancient Near Eastern pagan creation and flood myth as his hermeneutical interpretive grid for understanding

01:38:06

Genesis, and he's assuming that the ancient Jews had the same worldview as their contemporaries.

01:38:14

They were all culturally related, and it's another way of undermining the authority of the text, and letting the text speak for itself, and I'm very concerned about it, because if you really play it out, what it's really saying is,

01:38:35

Christian in the pew, pastor in the pulpit, don't try, even try to understand

01:38:42

Genesis, because you don't understand the ancient Near Eastern literature.

01:38:47

I will tell you what it means, because I've read that literature in the original languages, and so we've got, in a very real sense, we have a new, like in the

01:38:59

Roman Catholic Church, an evangelical magisterium that is developing that is a great concern to me.

01:39:05

That's a great way of putting that. Go ahead. It's like this intelligentsia where we are supposed to, don't you worry, we've got this all taken care of, all this deep scientific things that is far beyond your capability of understanding.

01:39:25

You just sit there and nod your head and believe what we're saying. We've got this covered, don't worry about it.

01:39:33

Yeah. There's a book by John Oswalt, who's another Old Testament scholar, called

01:39:38

The Bible Among the Myths, and he does a wonderful job of showing the stark contrast between the biblical worldview revealed in Scripture and the ancient

01:39:50

Near Eastern views, not only about God, but sexuality, morality, in every way.

01:39:57

He cites about 10 or 12 major, major differences in those worldviews.

01:40:03

So, of course, as we read the Old Testament, we see that many times the Jews became syncretistic and wedded their

01:40:11

Jewish faith with the pagan religious ideas of their neighbors, but we're not trying to figure out what did the wayward

01:40:20

Jews believe, we're trying to figure out what did God's faithful people believe, and in particular, the writers of Scripture who were prophets of God.

01:40:31

Charlie Liebert, you were just about to say something? Yeah, the important issue here is the level of authority.

01:40:38

When you take historical evidence and put it above Scripture, you've immediately gotten off of the base.

01:40:46

Yep, that's right. And for the last 200 years, well, you know, really, after the

01:40:53

Protestant Reformation, you had the counter -reformation of tradition is more authoritative than Scripture, and another counter -reformation in the intellectual world of the

01:41:06

Enlightenment, which said that reason is the supreme authority for determining truth.

01:41:12

And out of the Enlightenment thinking, the secularists, the deists, and the atheists have hijacked science, which was born in the womb of the biblical worldview, and they've convinced virtually the whole world that science is only possible in an atheistic worldview, and then they're using science, falsely so -called, to hammer away at the trustworthiness and authority of the

01:41:37

Scriptures. Well, see, when they narrow science to materialistic view only, you can't define a whole lot of things.

01:41:44

You can't define the nature of life, because it's materialistic. You can't define it. Why is something alive and something else dead?

01:41:51

Yeah, exactly. And as we've already noted, you can't give any definition to any moral absolute.

01:41:58

It's just personal opinion. Well, that results ultimately in anarchy. I mean, that's where that'll go.

01:42:05

And we're seeing that in our culture. We're seeing that in our culture, and we're seeing that in the Church.

01:42:11

That's right. That's right. Well, tell us more about this chapter,

01:42:18

Genetics Confirms the Recent Supernatural Creation of Adam and Eve. Well, Dr.

01:42:25

Jensen has his PhD from Harvard, and Dr. Tompkins has his PhD in genetics.

01:42:33

I can't remember now. I think it's either Clemson. I think it's Clemson. And they have done a lot of research on genetics.

01:42:42

And so they just unpack the genetic evidence and deal with some of the key arguments that theistic evolutionists have used to try to argue that we are related to the apes.

01:43:01

And so, for example, listeners have probably heard in the past news media reporting that scientists have now shown that chimps and humans have 98 % or 96 % identical

01:43:17

DNA. Well, the fact is that that percentage was arrived at by not comparing the whole genome of chimps and humans, but only selected parts of the genome.

01:43:32

And so Dr. Tompkins and Dr. Jensen show what's wrong with that analysis.

01:43:40

And then there's the chromosome 2, which seems to be a merger in the human genome with two chromosomes in the apes.

01:43:50

And see, that proves that we evolved from apes. And so they tackle that issue.

01:43:57

And again, I think readers will find that this will be the most intellectually challenging chapter.

01:44:04

But I think if they really hang in there, they will be able to get the argument.

01:44:10

I worked really hard with those two authors to get their sentences and vocabulary and to put illustrations in that would help the non -science reader grasp the argument.

01:44:22

I have not been able to read that chapter yet, but I'm looking forward to it because it's an area that I think is greatly used by the evolutionists to try to stump us.

01:44:32

You mean you haven't come around to starting to read it? Not that you couldn't read it while you were trying. No, I haven't.

01:44:39

I haven't had the opportunity or the time at the moment. New semester starts and I've got four classes. So yeah.

01:44:46

Oh, we have a chapter that intrigues me. Ancient man, genius or primitive, if you could explain further.

01:44:54

That will be an enjoyable chapter to lots of people because it's looking at the evidence from ancient man in terms of things that people are well aware of, the pyramids and Machu Picchu in Peru, in the mountains of Peru, where we see incredible engineering feats displayed by the ancients, other kinds of technology that has survived that we've uncovered in archaeological research that shows that ancient man was just as intelligent as we are.

01:45:31

Maybe they didn't have all the technology we have, but they had some understanding of things to produce what they produced thousands of years ago that we still don't understand.

01:45:43

I mean, there's not a consensus on exactly how the Egyptians built the pyramids or how they cut those stones in Machu Picchu that are, they're not all square stones, they're irregular shaped and the contact line between different stones is paper thin.

01:46:04

I mean, it's just amazing. Well, there's only one answer, obviously, aliens! So then we've completely left the world of science into science fiction because there's absolutely 0 .000

01:46:20

evidence of any life anywhere in the universe except on this planet. Well, it is interesting how there are many people out there who would rather jump to that conclusion, more quickly jump to that conclusion, than to delve deeper into the scriptures for the answers to these things.

01:46:41

Yep. On the pyramids in South America, I read a secular article one time and the author said basically that the way those stones are cut, the only way we could do it with our technology today would be with a laser.

01:46:55

So they did something that was beyond anything that we've even figured out yet, because mechanically it wouldn't work.

01:47:02

You couldn't do it mechanically. And this evidence of the genius of man is all over the world.

01:47:11

Of course, the ancient Chinese have it, and Stonehenge in England, it's all over.

01:47:19

And so the whole idea that man was once this club -carrying, grunting, primitive creature that was pulling his wife out of the cave by her hair is a total myth of evolutionists.

01:47:37

What we see in Genesis is Adam could name animals right from the start.

01:47:44

His son Cain built a city. I have a PhD. I wouldn't know how to build a city. Six generations after Adam, they had figured out mining and metallurgy and invented musical instruments.

01:47:58

Genesis 4 reveals that man right from the start was very intelligent and creative and inquisitive.

01:48:07

We have the last winner of your book today, Dr. Mortensen. Aaron from Indianapolis, Indiana, wants to know what percentage of evangelical churches would your guest or Charlie say belong to the

01:48:25

Young Earth camp? That's really hard to say.

01:48:32

Surveys by Gallup and others indicate that 45 % of Americans hold to a

01:48:38

Young Earth view. I've spoken in hundreds of churches in America, and almost all the churches

01:48:47

I get into, the pastor wants me there, the people want me there, but I find enormous ignorance and a considerable amount of compromise even among churches that hold to the literal truth of Genesis.

01:49:05

I'm doubtful that the percentage is really that high. I annually attend the

01:49:12

Evangelical Theological Society. I have for about 20 years, trying to do what I can to influence my colleagues there to think more carefully about these issues.

01:49:23

Young Earth creationists are definitely in a distinct minority among our evangelical scholars.

01:49:31

In my experience with churches, one of the things I've noticed is that a lot of churches have multiple views within the leadership.

01:49:42

Maybe the pastor is Framework, and somebody else is Old Earth, and somebody else is

01:49:47

Young Earth, and they're all three leading the same church. You mean some of them are less evolved? Less evolved, that's a very good way to say it.

01:49:56

I've seen an awful lot of that, and it appears in some cases they'll tolerate

01:50:02

Young Earth, but also in other cases they won't. They simply won't do it. And it leads to confusion among the people of God.

01:50:09

Very confusing, yes. And then we get back to the issue of authority.

01:50:15

So, well, my pastor says, or the pastoral team can't agree on this, so the

01:50:20

Bible must not be clear, and I don't need to study it because the pastors, I mean, they've been to seminary, and they don't know what it means.

01:50:27

I won't even bother reading it. It undermines the faith of God's people in the pew, and so it's a critical issue.

01:50:40

And pastors, you know, they need to, again, it's an issue of authority.

01:50:45

A lot of pastors think this way because they sat under esteemed theologians and Old Testament and New Testament scholars who didn't do their homework on this issue and didn't think it was important, or have accepted the millions of years, or maybe even evolution, and they've made their seminary professors their authority instead of the

01:51:07

Word of God. I went to seminary, and I sat under some excellent teachers, and I respected them and appreciated them, and I learned from them.

01:51:19

My primary PhD supervisor was a theistic evolutionist, and I learned a lot from him, and God used him to sharpen my thinking skills and my writing skills.

01:51:30

But I didn't worship at the feet of my professors, and even if I couldn't say anything out loud in class, at least in my mind,

01:51:42

I would say, you know, God bless you, professor, but that verse doesn't say what you just said it says. And I would disagree in my mind.

01:51:50

I would keep going back to the scriptures, and pastors need to do that, and the people in the pew need to do that.

01:51:57

Yeah, we really need a revival in this area of what is really truth. Well, I want to make sure that you have the last five minutes before we run out of time to really summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today,

01:52:15

Dr. Mortensen. Well, what I really want them to grab is that the

01:52:23

Bible is the inspired and errant word of the Creator. It is true from the very first verse, and more and more research, both by evolutionists unintentionally and by creation scientists, is confirming the truth of that word.

01:52:41

And we don't need to be afraid, we don't need to stick our heads in the sand, but we do need to get armed with resources that will help us to understand the scriptures and the increasingly powerful scientific evidence that confirms

01:52:56

God's word. And that will strengthen our own faith, but it will also embolden us in these days to be more bold in proclaiming the gospel to a lost world that is confused and in its rebellion is going into all kinds of sinful behavior that is self -destructive to individuals and to our society.

01:53:25

And so, I was burdened about this book because I see more and more evangelicals, lay people, and scholars caving in to the evolutionary dogma, and so this one on Adam that combines biblical and scientific and historical studies was to help strengthen the church on this issue.

01:53:50

But as I discuss in the very last chapter, we cannot really argue with any exegetical or hermeneutical consistency for gender being male and female and marriage being a man and a woman on the one hand, and on the other hand, doubt or deny what the scriptures say about the origin of man.

01:54:19

You can't do it because Genesis, the early chapters of Genesis, teach both of those truths, all of those truths.

01:54:26

Likewise, we can't with any kind of exegetical or hermeneutical consistency argue for a literal

01:54:33

Adam and a literal fall and marriage is one man and one woman and yet deny the biblical flood and creation in six days and the fall impacting the whole creation because Genesis teaches all of those things just as clearly as it teaches about marriage or gender.

01:54:53

And so we need to embrace all of the truth of scripture and we need to take the gospel to a lost and dying world that has been massively deceived by evolutionary millions of years thinking masquerading as science.

01:55:12

And so I want to encourage your listeners to get the book and to read it and learn from it and to go back to the scriptures, to let that book drive them back to the scriptures because our book,

01:55:27

Searching for Adam, is not infallible, it's not inspired, it's not inerrant, but I think it's a very good book, a good

01:55:35

Christian book by very serious scholars who are committed to the supreme authority of scripture.

01:55:42

Yes and well let me give you folks the website of the publisher,

01:55:48

New Leaf Publishing Group, it's nlpg for New Leaf Publishing Group, nlpg .com,

01:55:58

nlpg .com and more specifically forward slash searching -for -adam, nlpg .com

01:56:09

forward slash searching -for -adam. You could also go to Cumberland Valley Bible Book Services website where you can order any book by a guest on Iron Sharpens Iron and that's cvbbs .com,

01:56:25

cv for Cumberland Valley, bbs for Bible Book Service dot com.

01:56:31

One last question we'll squeeze in from a listener, B .B. in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania wants to know if you can recommend

01:56:38

The Quest for the Historical Adam, Genesis, Hermeneutics, and Human Origins by William Vandewaard.

01:56:46

Yes we do and we refer to that in our book so that's a good contribution to this vital subject.

01:56:55

I also add that we have over 10 ,000 articles on our Answers in Genesis website and on just about any scientific or biblical question related to origins and biblical authority so it's a tremendous resource.

01:57:12

We've got a lot of videos online that you can watch for free, we've got books online that you can download for free or you can buy them in our bookstore, and if people haven't been to our

01:57:22

Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter in Northern Kentucky they need to plan to visit these world -class exhibits that affirm the truth of scripture and proclaim the gospel.

01:57:36

Yeah I'm hoping to get there myself eventually and for more information on Answers in Genesis where Dr.

01:57:42

Terry Mortensen is a historian of geology and a theologian, speaker, and author, and researcher, answersingenesis .org

01:57:51

is the website, answersingenesis .org, and I just want to thank you so much

01:57:59

Dr. Mortensen for being on the program today. I look forward to you coming back often in the future and do you have any other contact information that you care to share with our listeners?

01:58:10

No, that's it. People can write to me through the website if they want to but I can't answer everybody's individual questions and so I encourage people to check out our website first before they ask a question because it's probably already been answered there.

01:58:29

That's probably true. And I know Charlie Liebert, your website is young...

01:58:36

sixdaycreation .com and yourchristiananswers .com. sixdaycreation .com

01:58:43

and yourchristiananswers .com. That's Y -O -U -R, your Christian Answers. And when are you going to be my guest rather than co -host?

01:58:49

I'm going to be your guest on the 23rd of January. God willing, great. And Dr. Mortensen, regards to Ken and Mark Loy, if you see them in the next day or so.

01:58:59

I will give them your regards. Thank you. And I want to remind everybody, don't forget about the pastor's luncheon and the debate next week,

01:59:08

Thursday and Friday, the 12th and 13th of January. This is the pastor's luncheon featuring Dr.

01:59:14

Tony Costa of Toronto Baptist Seminary on Thursday, January 12th, 11 a .m.

01:59:19

to 2 p .m. at the Carlisle Vault Catering Hall. And also, the debate between Dr.

01:59:24

Tony Costa and Roman Catholic apologist Robert St. Genes of Catholic Apologetics International that's going to be held at the

01:59:31

Carlisle Theatre in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. For more details, email me at chrisarnsen at gmail .com

01:59:37

or chrisarnsen at comcast .net. I hope you all always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater

01:59:45

Savior than you are a sinner. We look forward to hearing from you and your questions for our guests tomorrow on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.