The Bible vs. Evolution Debate — Shane Idleman

To avoid conflicting points of view, intellectually rigorous, yet genuinely respectful debate has become a lost art as our recent election cycle has emphatically demonstrated. We hope that this event serves as a demonstration of goodwill and communal engagement even in the midst of passionate disagreement.

For two millennia, the Bible has served as one of the pillars upon which Western society was built and the primary means through which our value system has been derived. In recent centuries, however, criticism of the Bible has become more widespread in the Western world.

One of the most vigorous contests has been waging in the scientific realm. Does modern science confirm a biblical world view or have the discoveries of the last three to four centuries relegated the scriptures to a place on the historical bookshelf?

Our debaters will be engaged in the discussion, but ultimately it will be each and every one of you here tonight and those watching on the live stream who will have to answer that question for themselves.

All of you are as much a part of tonight's proceedings as any of us will be up on stage. As such, we ask that you keep a few things in mind this evening. Good debates by their nature are frank or blunt in their exchange.

Show of hands, how many of you have attended or are familiar with a formal debate? Okay, some of you. For those of you who've never experienced a formal debate before, it is likely that you will hear ideas expressed rather matter-of-factly that you disagree with very passionately.

To keep an orderly procedure tonight, we ask that you refrain from any verbal or gestural outbursts for the duration of tonight's event. Along a similar vein, this debate is meant to promote further dialogue between people of differing points of view within our community.

Please do not applaud, cheer, or deride either of our speakers before, during, or after their respective presentations. You will be given designated times to applaud the speakers here tonight. That will be after opening statements for each of the speakers, closing statements for each of the speakers, and a time of mutual appreciation at the close of tonight's debate.

Apart from that, we ask that you maintain your silence to keep things orderly and to allow everyone to focus on what is taking place up on stage. If you have the ability to, oh, I'm sorry, we covered that already.

It's my first time here tonight, too, if you all are here for the first time. Some of us are doing it up here for the first time, too, so. Without further ado, let me introduce our debaters. Arguing in the affirmative will be Shane Eidelman.

Mr. Eidelman is the founder and lead pastor of Westside Christian Fellowship in Leona Valley, California. He is the author of multiple books, including Answers for a Confused Church, One Nation Above God, and most recently, Desperate for More of God.

His sermons, books, articles, and radio program have sparked change in the lives of many. He stresses, quote, truth, the foundational beliefs clearly outlined in scripture must remain unmoved and unchanged.

Times change, but truth does not. Entering from stage left, please welcome Pastor Shane Eidelman. Arguing in the negative will be Mr. Jay Nathus. Mr. Nathus is an aerospace engineer and software system safety specialist with the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation, or the shorter version, he's a spaceship inspector.

His international technical papers and presentations have investigated the role communications play in the safety of complex software-driven rocket systems. Those investigations of the failure modes of mines and of social systems have recently set him to writing online, and ideally soon in print, about the importance of knowledge and truth for safety, ethics, and values.

Jay holds a Master's of Science degree in safety science from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering and Psychology from Rutgers University. Entering from stage right, please welcome Mr. Jay Nathus.

The question these gentlemen will be debating tonight is, whether or not a creationist model is consistent with the scientific observations of the natural world. In order to provide for the most meaningful experience possible for all of you, our debaters have agreed to examine this question specifically in light of the field of biology.

With this in mind, both men understand that to wander off-topic into other areas such as ethics and morality, philosophy, ad hominem statements, in other words, person or statements against the person and not against the argument, et cetera, is in violation of the rules that both of them have agreed to prior to tonight's event.

Limited excursions into other scientific fields will be acceptable so long as it reflects on the original question. However, if we hear, for example, a presentation about geology or astrophysics instead of one about biology, they will be an equal violation of the rules of engagement this evening.

Should it be necessary, I will step in to make our debaters aware of any violations along these lines. The flow for tonight's event will proceed as follows. Each speaker will be given 15 minutes to make their opening statements, followed by a 10-minute rebuttal period.

From there, we will move into cross-examinations where our debaters will be given 10 minutes to ask questions of their opponent. A second rebuttal period of five minutes will then take place just before a 10-minute intermission.

Following intermission, we will have audience question and answers for 30 minutes. And finally, 10-minute closing statements will round out this debate tonight. Courtesy notifications will be given to our debaters with two minutes remaining in each period to help them stay within time.

And for the purposes of tonight, that will be either David or myself saying two minutes at their respective time during their presentation. If one of our debaters interrupts the other at any point during the debate, they will be given one warning upon the first violation and a loss of one minute during their following period for every subsequent violation.

I will briefly elaborate on further rules and expectations immediately prior to the relevant portions of tonight's discussion. And with that, I turn the floor over to Mr. Nafis to give us his 15-minute opening statement.

All right.

Thank you, Luke. Thank you, everyone, for coming. And thank you to the West Side Christian Fellowship for sponsoring tonight's debate and to Antelope Valley College for providing us this lovely venue.

Nathus's Opening Statement: Scientific Models and Evolutionary Evidence

Tonight's question is this. Is a creationist model consistent with what we observe in the natural world with respect to biology? Now, there's a lot packed into that question, but the key term to me seems to be model.

What we mean by a model in science is an explanation of the past that allows you to make testable predictions about the future. When you really understand something well, when you're kind of a consummate professional in an arena, you can do like Babe Ruth did in 1932 and call your shot, land it exactly where you meant to, or just be very, very lucky if you're a Cubs fan.

There are two ways to test the model. You can either compare backwards against the evidence of history and look for any place where that model fails to explain some observation within its domain, or you can make some kind of prediction.

You can call your shot and see if your model can hit its target. That may seem kind of ruthless because if your model fails at either of those tests, you have to revise your model. In science, you don't have another option.

Science is very, very ruthless. You might hear tonight that evolution is a theory in crisis or something to that effect, and the scientist's response to that is good. A scientist's job is to keep their theories in crisis by continually testing them, pushing the boundaries, and seeing how much they can explain with each theory.

So you might be wondering now, how would I test a model like creationism or evolution, which seems to operate on a time scale way beyond any human life? And to answer that, I kind of have to go back to my own background in safety science.

Safety, it turns out, is no accident. It's the result, oddly enough, of intelligent design. So we safety scientists end up having to look for ways to discern intelligent design in systems built by some very, very smart people.

There are, it turns out, there are three unmistakable fingerprints in an intelligently designed system. These all have to be there for it to qualify as truly intelligently designed. They are freedom of design, freedom to make a lot of design choices, optimization of design so you can fine-tune your design to its purpose, and preparation by design.

Your designs should be ready for situations that the design couldn't have anticipated were coming. So regarding freedom, the first of these tests, the first fingerprint of intelligent design, freedom is the ability to make large leaps in complexity all at once.

It's the ability to add or remove features. Like if you have, if you only have a phone and you need to get somewhere, you just add a miniature GPS receiver, a little subsystem, just plop it in there. If you have a car and you need more cargo space, add a roof rack or a trailer.

You can make these big leaps if you're a free designer. If you're designing a human, just playing God for a moment, if you're designing your human and you're designing its DNA so that it replicates and functions properly as a species, you would, of course, freely choose how many chromosomes to put in it, right?

Well, interestingly enough, we observed that we have 46 chromosomes in 23 pairs. All the other great apes have 48 in 24 pairs. Now, at first glance, this looks like intelligent design, but things get really, really interesting when you get down to the DNA level.

It turns out if the human chromosomes were designed intelligently, the designer could add or delete a chromosome at will. But the deletion of any chromosome is fatal for a great ape. So evolution's prediction that we share a common ancestor could not be true if that were the case.

Luckily, these days, we can sequence DNA. We can look for that missing chromosome in our own. Turns out it's attached to the end of chromosome number two. At some point during or after we split off from the great apes, our chromosome or great ape chromosome number 13 fused to the end of our chromosome number two.

We can see telomeres, the end bits of any stranded DNA, right in the middle of that stranded DNA, and we can see that it has two centromeres, the bits that hold them together, make that little, like a capital letter H shape when they're laid out.

No intelligent designer would have done that unless they meant to deceive you. And not just you, and not you specifically, only molecular biologists would be deceived by this circumstance. It doesn't seem like an intelligent design of anything but a deceitful designer.

But that's not all. That's not nearly the only evidence against freedom of design in our DNA. It turns out there are these really invasive things called endogenous retroviruses, or ERVs. Now, these are very, very species-specific things that can infect a creature, and they leave behind a piece of the virus's DNA with the rest of the DNA of any of its survivors.

So if anyone survives an ERV and goes on to reproduce, their children will carry those genes and their children's children, and on and on it goes. So biologists have learned to look for these sequences.

They can tell you which order species broke off from each other. Here's the first shot I'm calling tonight. Give us the entire genetic sequence and turn one letter off just to give us scurvy. It just doesn't make sense.

We can also see this in when preparation goes wrong. The movie Shallow Hal, one guy has a tail. That's an example of something called an atavism. That's when an old segment of DNA gets turned back on at a sequence.

Now, if you were designing a dolphin, would you make it grow legs in the womb and then shed them before being born? Well, that's exactly what happens. Two minutes. And in some cases, dolphins keep them because of an atavism.

If we could just get an atavism and let us build our own vitamin C again, that would be great. So we can see evolution happening today in mosquitoes under London subway that are speciating, in the Encephalopoma salamander down by Apple Valley where they've taken two different evolutionary paths around the central California valley.

They can interbreed everywhere along those paths, but when they meet again in Apple Valley, they can't. Where is the species? The species is just an organizational tool. Keep that in mind throughout tonight's debate.

So we've been asked tonight whether a creationist model is consistent with our observations. I've just given you a test that you can actually use when you're buying your next car. As you can see, a hip is intelligently designed too, using the same method.

So these fingerprints of intelligent design are complete, are absent from the natural world in any pattern that would make it usable. And no amount of beauty can bring them back. Importantly, evolution is written into our DNA.

And most importantly, evolution has made predictions and won't miss. So now I would ask Shane to step up to the plate, get one out of the park for us. Predict something and make it come true.

Batter up. I will attempt to answer that hopefully in a few minutes. First, I want to apologize. I was supposed to come out and shake your hand, and I was too worried about my phone being on for Michael's announcement.

So it's off now. It's in airplane mode. And I do want to also thank Antelope Valley College, and Jay and David. It's been actually a pleasure getting to know them. And one of the goals was to have an open dialogue and come together and discuss differences.

Eidelman's Opening Statement: Biblical Creation and Scientific Order

The question is, is the Bible consistent with what we observe in the natural world from a biological standpoint? And I'm answering in the affirmative, and if I could say absolutely yes, exclamation point.

And let me read from the Bible. I think it's okay, right? It's what we're talking about. Psalm 19, the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night reveals knowledge.

There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Basically, creation screams creator. When we look at the natural world, we see the evidence everywhere. But I think it's important to define two terms.

Evolution is something of enormous proportion. The entire universe actually came from nothing. So if you could just, for a minute, close your eyes, think of nothing, and then in an instant, here is everything.

And that is really the definition of evolution. If I'm wrong, Jay will correct me as we go. But also the definition of Christianity is the God of the Bible created the heavens and the earth. The uniformity, the consistency, the stability, and the harmony of the universe declares there is a creator.

Two myths I wanna just throw out there and get these out of the way. Myth number one, science and the Bible offer opposing views. We have this view that science is intellectual, and here's faith, kind of weak-minded people that you poor guys, you got your faith, Christianity's a crutch, and we're the intellectual side.

But we actually see science and the Bible confirm each other, not contradict. They confirm each other in many different areas. And I wanna just throw out there a quote. I don't know if many of you know who Anthony Flew is.

Well, before Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris made atheism popular, Anthony Flew was the world's most famous atheist. But in 2004, he shocked the world. He left atheism. He said, the integrated complexity of life itself, which is far more complex than the physical universe, can only be explained in terms of an intelligent source.

This has been the number one atheist for many years. He went on to say that Christianity is the most persuasive argument. Myth number two, evolution is a fact. And actually, it's not a fact. I think Jay would agree that it's a theory.

And a theory, the definition of a theory is this, a system of ideas given to explain something. So Darwin, Origins of Species, where atheism really got its boost there, he said, this is what I think. It's a theory.

This is what I think happened. Now, this theory is now taught in our secular schools as a fact. And it's really not a fact. There's no factual evidence that supports evolution. It is a theory. And that's why we mention a theory of crisis, because many people are starting to see that this theory doesn't hold a lot of water in light of what we now know.

The science, the science of biogenesis is this, living things come from other living things. That's a science. So we're talking about science. The science of biogenesis says that a living thing must come from another living thing.

So it just contradicted itself if nothing came from something. We both believe in creation. Myself and Jay both believe in creation. Now, you might say, well, hold on. Well, hold on now. Where are you going with this?

Well, let me explain the definition of creation. To bring something into existence. I believe that God created everything versus everything being created by chance. So that's a foundation. That's a framework.

Let's talk about two areas of scripture before my time is up. First, in the beginning, God created, we're talking about biology. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. In the beginning, we have time, space, and matter all at once.

Science teaches that all three of those, science teaches that all three of those must be brought into existence simultaneously. If you have time but no matter, you have nothing. So time, space, and matter.

In the beginning, God created the heavens. There's your space. And the earth, there's your matter. Time, space, and matter right at the beginning. We also observe science. And I should probably mention that.

There's observational science, which we observe. We observe it, we see it. If I jump off that stage, it's gonna hurt. I just observed gravity. But there's historical, or there's different, natural historical science that predicts on what they think happened.

But I'm talking about observational science. It says this, the probabilities that the mathematical equations and the fine-tuning of the universe is absolutely impossible without a creator. If you look at the distance of the sun, some 32 million miles away.

Don't quote me on that quote. I didn't check that. I'm just going off past memory. If it was just a little closer, we would be at a raging inferno. We wouldn't even be here. Just a little further, and it would be an iceberg.

If you take gravity, you take a tape measure, and you stretch it across the entire universe. If you move gravity just one inch, you cannot support life. Oxygen, nitrogen, argon, carbon dioxide bubbles, all to support life.

It's just absolutely amazing. None of this can happen by chance. And let's read Richard Dawkins. Do you know who he is? Many of you don't. Some of you do. He is an evolutionary biologist at Oxford. He said the universe could so easily have remained lifeless and simple, just physics and chemistry, just a scattered dust of the cosmic explosion that gave birth, so something gave birth, to time and space.

The fact that it did not, the fact that life evolved out of literally nothing some 10 billion years ago, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice. Yet that's what atheism does.

It uses words and theories to do it justice. And I've noticed, it's interesting, and please understand my heart, I'm not trying to poke fun, I actually really enjoy David and Jay, it's just a good discussion.

But when we ask the hard questions, where do we come from, what started, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. But if a Christian says, well, I'm not sure, or we actually give an answer, then we're viewed as foolish.

We give an answer that's probable, it fits the evidence, and we're viewed as foolish, but somebody can say, I don't know how that happened. And that's taken as credible. So just consider those things.

I would also encourage you to visit a website entitled Dissent from Darwin. You have 25 pages currently of PhDs from NASA Langley Research Center, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, all the top universities, all these scientists stating this.

We are skeptical of the claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian's theory should be encouraged.

Now, you might say, well, that doesn't represent all the scientists. Of course it doesn't, but it's a growing number, and I know there are many scientists who don't speak out about creation because they're in fear of losing their job.

When you come out and believe in creationism, you will lose your job. You're mocked and you are ridiculed, even though the evidence supports it. So Christianity looks at the evidence, we compare it with science, and we confirm it with God's truth.

It's interesting. We're not saying, you know, Jay, you're right. I mean, the Bible talks about the Earth being flat and being held up by a turtle. We really miss that one. We miss, yeah, we did predict 1 ,000 stars in Isaiah.

We miss that one. The human body's just full of nothing and void and air and space and some water. We miss that one. There's nothing, and one of my challenges, I'll just throw it out there now so he can start thinking about it.

I would like you to name me one scripture, one scripture, where science disproves it, where the Bible is absolutely wrong in this area. Just one scripture, not even science and biology, any area that it is wrong.

So I believe that the Bible confirms the science. Listen to this, the book of Job, written thousands of years ago. The Earth free floats in space. Isaiah, the Earth is a sphere. Hebrews talks about tiny, unseen particles that appear in the creation of life.

Leviticus says, wash with running water to prevent disease. Ironically, I think it was 100, 150 years ago, doctors were going and operating on cadavers for research and then going in to deliver pregnant women, deliver their children, and they had this huge death rate skyrocketing.

What's going on? Somebody actually read Leviticus that you should wash your hands with running water. These things are tested and tried. Job springs at the bottom of the ocean. Leviticus, life is in the blood.

Genesis, our bodies are made from the Earth. There's 28 base and trace elements in the Earth.

Who in the world's gonna write that down that we came from the Earth?

I mean, to make that up and hit it on every point. Psalms talks about the second law of thermodynamics, that the universe will perish, it will wear out like a garment. The first law of thermodynamics deals with the quantity of energy.

The second law deals with the quality, what's happening to the energy. It's dying, the universe is dying. We just look at, I was in a lot better shape 15 years ago. Something's not working here. We are dying, your vehicles are dying.

It supports that. And I love Jeremiah. He said, the stars are innumerable. But scientists, Kepler in 1600 said we have 1 ,005. In the beginning, God created life. I get passionate on this one, if you haven't found this out yet.

If the preacher side of me takes it over, I apologize and come back. I've got a microphone and audience in the bio, so it's kind of hard not to do that. In the beginning, God created life. Then God said, let us make man in our image.

So there's our Christianity supports the Trinity, the triune nature of God, Elohim. It's the plurality of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the Trinity. Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.

See, I have given you every herb that yields seed, which is on the face of the earth. And every tree whose fruit yields seed to you, it shall be food. So here we have created life. The oxy-ribonucleic acid, you know what that is?

DNA, right, some of you do. That's where we get the DNA. DNA consists of 3 .2 billion letters, and the human DNA showing how to build life. If you get a chance, you have to check out this chart. Dr. Rainbow was gracious enough to let us borrow it tonight.

There are 3 .2 billion, this just blew my mind. I took his class on Friday night just to try to get some more information around all of this. This is in every cell of your body, 50, 60 trillion cells, every DNA, telling the amino acids what to do.

Lysine, do here. Glutamine, do here. Lysine, go here. Do this, and it's a building block. Doing this all day long, building, creating life. For all that to just happen is improbable. It just cannot happen.

What about the eye? Look at what the eye does. It works much like a camera. And don't take my word for it. Here is Darwin on the eye. To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.

Now, let me just bring this up. I see a lot of people do this, so I wanted to do this tonight. Sustained life. Okay, I will give you food. So if a creation, amoebo acid is being created, premortal ooze and something happens and we're being created, evolving, how did the earth know to, as we're evolving, maybe next to us is a little strawberry plant or an apple tree, the nutrients, the macronutrients, the micronutrients of carbohydrates, fructose for sugar, for energy, and proteins, and how did the earth, and then here's water, of course, running water, you know you need fresh water.

How did the earth know to generate these things simultaneously so it would match the breakdown, the chemical breakdown of the body? Two minutes. The body actually, the body actually absorbs the life of the food.

Did you know that? So next time those Fritos of Mountain Dew come your way, just turn them away. The life of the body, the life of the food is into the body. That's you eat living food to continue your life.

So I believe that Psalms 129 .13 is true. For you God formed my inner parts, you knit me together in my mother's womb. Think about this. The sperm meets the ovum. Life is a conception. The DNA of the mother, the DNA of the father.

Life begins. That's why we believe in life in conception. It begins. The heart starts to form, the lungs, the kidney, the skeletal system begins to protect the organs such as the heart, the five senses, the taste, the smell.

All these things are activated as life begins to form. It's absolutely amazing. So yes, the creationist model in the book of Genesis is consistent with what we observe in the natural world from a biological standpoint.

In short, the Bible tells us what happened and it backed it up.

That's it. Thank you. Please give our debaters a round of applause. We will now move into our first rebuttal period of 10 minutes each, beginning with Mr. Nafis. This time is a period for our debaters to interact with their opponent's opening statements.

Mr. Nafis.

Nathus's First Rebuttal: Thermodynamics, Abiogenesis, and Cosmology

All right, thank you. And Shane, I can say I share your enthusiasm for natural food. So a few corrections as we begin. The distance from Earth to the sun averages 93 million miles. And interestingly, the habitable zone we've computed now is many millions of miles wide.

So the Earth could have been anywhere in that range and still be just fine. There's no fine-tuning there. And actually, the more powerful the star, the wider the habitable zone. So you put quite a lot on the table there.

It's almost hard to know where to begin. I can also point you to the next chapter in Darwin's book where he says that the evolution of the eye is absurd. The very next chapter explains exactly how the eye was evolved.

So he's using that question as a rhetorical device. Speaking of formation of things in the womb, did you know that humans actually grow an entire coat of hair while in the womb and then shed it? That is another one of these dolphins-with-legs things.

It's an activism. So it's not exactly what you would expect if the human embryo was designed to produce a human. It's what you would expect if the human embryo was designed to produce a fish, then an ape, then a human, to build up in complexity.

Speaking of building up, Jane mentioned the second law of thermodynamics. It's important to remember, as any freshman engineer would know, that the second law of thermodynamics applies to closed systems.

That is that the complexity in a closed system always decreases. Now, the Earth's surface isn't a closed system. It's interesting to notice how neatly the fossil record tracks the input of energy into the Earth's system.

We receive some billions upon billions of watts of energy every day from the sun. That takes a lot of energy to get life going. So what we see in the fossil record, the first fossils are tiny little microbes, the very first traces of life.

And then they build up to very simple multicellular structures, and then very slowly into more complex things with rigid bodies, and then into dinosaurs and all manner of other things, all of which are interestingly absent from the Bible, incidentally.

Another thing that's absent from the Bible is any description of viruses. Now, viruses are an interesting case because they exist somewhere between life and non-life. A virus needs a living thing in order to reproduce, but it itself doesn't have that capability.

So is it alive, is it not? There's an actual vigorous debate among biologists on that question. So that theory is very much in crisis by design. That's why we award the best prizes in science to those who prove theories wrong.

So, complexity builds up by simple physics. If you add energy to a system, it will get more complex. Think of baking a cake. You take eggs and you add some flour and other little bits here and there, some chocolate chip cookies, if you're me, and then you add energy from the oven.

That causes chemical changes in the eggs, causes chemical changes in the flour, causes chemical changes in non-living material that changes its structure. That's all you need. Turns out, scientists working on the problem of abiogenesis have already managed to synthesize, using nothing but heating, cooling, and stirring, two of the four letters of your DNA.

Does anyone wanna bet against them getting together two pretty soon? I suspect not. Now, the fine-tuning argument is an interesting one if you've watched any of Lawrence Krauss' videos lately, because Lawrence Krauss has been working on a problem called weighing the universe.

It seems like a very, very hard thing to do, because he's trying to figure out how the universe will end. As he put it, it seemed like a good idea at the time, because what he's figured out is that we live in, basically, the worst of all possible forms of life.

The worst of all possible universes, a flat one. And actually, oddly enough, when all the calculations are, well, most of the way done, they're still working on some of them, that the total energy of the universe is actually zero.

Who would've expected that going in? Or cosmological theorists, it turns out, because that's what the answer has to be for a universe to be created from nothing. It doesn't require any input from outside the system, because quantum mechanics, it turns out, simply predicts that universes will form spontaneously, generating their own laws, and if you have a whole space, or whole, well, if you have nothingness, nothing weighs something.

Who would've thought it? Turns out most of the mass in all of the 100 billion galaxies, with 100 billion stars each, they're not innumerable, they're just an awful lot of them, most of the mass is in stuff we can't see.

Not that it's just not shining, it's not interacting with light. It's very, very strange stuff, called dark matter and dark energy. These are emerging concepts in physics. They're still being looked for.

There's a big arms race going on right now in the physics community to be the first to actually detect dark matter or dark energy right here on Earth. Through computer modeling, we've figured out that actually, most of the space inside of a proton, these tiny things inside each atom, is empty.

But because of this mass of empty space, that emptiness weighs something, and it turns out to dominate the mass of a proton. So you are mostly made of nothing. And weirdly enough, weirder still, from the computations we've seen so far, and from the observations we've been able to make, way above 99 of everything is not observable by us.

It's either dark matter or dark energy. That extra 1 of the mass of the universe that is what's required to make it flat, and therefore, generatable from nothing, is everything we see is in that less than 1%.

We're a bit of debris floating through a gigantic ocean of dark matter and dark energy. So that can all seem a little bleak, because in the far future, in a flat universe, all of the galaxies are not only getting further away from us, but they're getting further away from us faster and faster every year.

Two minutes. So in the far future, in about 20 or 40 billion years, don't quote me on that, the rate of expansion will be so large that those galaxies will be moving faster than the speed of light. Inflationary physics allows this.

So a future astronomer is way in the future, emerging on galaxies at that point in the history of the universe, will look out into the galaxy and see what scientists saw at the beginning of the 19th century.

They'll look out and see one galaxy. That's it. The evidence for the Big Bang will disappear from the night sky on a long enough time scale. That's not the kind of universe you would expect from a creator who meant that universe for us.

And Shane did issue one direct challenge. What disproves Genesis? Radioisotopic decay. Creation at day one requires, or for the creation to have happened in one week would require one week to cover almost 10 billion years, because we now know the universe is 13 .782 billion years old and that the Earth is about 4 .5 billion years old.

Somewhere between those times, a week passed. And if that's not good enough, then there are entire categories of life missing from the arc story. There are coral reefs on mountains in Texas that could not have formed in a flood.

There's uncountable instances in the geological record and the biological record testifying time that the creation account did not occur as written. That's all.

Like I said, we can be rather frank and blunt on this subject. No personal offense intended. We will now hear from Pastor Eidelman during his first rebuttal period.

Eidelman's First Rebuttal: Radiometric Dating and Design

Well, let me set my timer because I'm a little worried I'm afraid to get shut down like that. 10 minutes, right? Well, a couple things I wanna springboard off of. When we talk about innumerable, innumerable amount of stars, I don't think we know how many stars there are.