Next Week | Genesis 3D Movie | Episode 14

The News of the Week and the Christmas Character Smooge

What's up, guys?

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

Thank you to our live studio audience and everybody watching across dem internets. I'm Jeff Durbin. This is Next Week. Don't forget to like and share the episode. Let's talk about the news.

Ready?

So check it out. Donald Trump is spending the next 10 days out of the country in Asia. I'm actually just letting you know the one and only setup Stephen Colbert used last night. That's what that was about.

President Trump visited South Korea this past week and when prompted about North Korea, he actually said this, as we work together, the U .S. stands prepared to defend itself and its allies using the full range of our unmatched military capabilities and Twitter.

This Friday, France will open its first all-nude restaurant. This would be a great place to go if you'd like to lose your appetite. And it shows the old adage, sinners gonna sin. Definitely. This week's archaeologist discovered an ancient gym near Egypt.

And as it turns out, Pharaoh only granted membership to the Egyptians. That was until Moses said, hey, let my people swole. Dad joke.

Hashtag.

After Sunday's tragic shooting, many celebrities, as usual, and politicians, including Bernie Sanders and Cecil Richards. Wait, is it, is it Cecil or Cecile? Which, which one is it? Because everyone keeps correct.

Well, well, we'll just continue butchering her name like she does everybody else. Cecil Richards tweeted about how they want senseless murders to end. And so apparently now they're all against abortion.

Finally, guys, glad you guys finally caught up. An angry woman caused a flight to perform an emergency landing after discovering her husband was cheating on her. And she actually immediately started hitting him on the flight.

The airline said they could not allow violence on their plane because they are not United Airlines. And guys, check it out. It's November, which means I can finally say Merry Christmas.

That's right.

I am a big fan of Christmas. God becoming a man is a big deal. And I feel like it's been forever since I could say Merry Christmas. But if you ask me, I'd say that right now is just about the right time.

So I feel like I could sing and dance, guys. Here it comes.

So Steve, this right now is of your audience. You can't talk about Christmas now.

I'm completely and utterly, Chris, I am totally confused right now. Who let him in? Can I help you? What do you want?

Yes, you can. By taking down any Christmas decorations you already put up. My name is Nebuchadnezzar Smooch and it's not time for Christmas.

OK, first of all, that can't be your real name.

It is.

Is Nebuchadnezzar even a name?

Absolutely.

It sounds like you took a Bible name and a Christmas name and you smooched it together.

It is my name. My dad wanted to name me after Nebuchadnezzar and my mom wanted a name harder to pronounce.

Well, success. OK, so I'm guessing since your name is Nebuchadnezzar Smooch, you're here because you want to destroy Christmas and all that.

Preposterous. No, I think that's what you are doing with all that singing. I'm here to stop you from celebrating Christmas too early.

Oh, you're one of those people.

The normal kind of people, Jeff. Think of the consequences. Every show only does one Christmas episode a season. You're telling me that you're going to do your one Christmas episode a week after Halloween?

I mean, I just now ate all of my kid's candy.

You ate all your kid's candy in a week?

Oh yeah, I had to get the candy out of the house. I'm about to go on a diet in January like everybody else. Jeff, you can't do your one episode of Christmas this early. You got your Christmas episodes.

Sorry, I need glasses this Christmas. One?

Smooch, we're not doing one Christmas episode. We're doing it the whole time. We're going to decorate a little by little every week.

No!

You can't do that! No show does that! No show does that!

We have a little budget for this show.

Listen to yourself! You sound crazy! No, Bob Crutcher! No, Bob Crutcher!

No! Stop! Go away!

Go away! Little Timmy!

Get out! Get out!

Oh, that's... Smooch, you have to calm down.

You're right. I'm going to ask you one more time. Take down the Christmas decorations. If you don't, I will hate Christmas forever.

Forever ever?

Forever.

Forever.

Forever.

Forever.

That is kind of extreme, don't you think, Smooch?

And I know with you Christmassy people, you need something to celebrate. So if you take down the lights, I'll give you something just as shiny and fun.

Oh, really?

Oh.

Oh, that's amazing.

Isn't it great?

It is great. This is awesome. Yeah, I think we're still going to do Christmas.

Fine.

This is great, though.

I'm keeping my fidget spinner.

Oh.

All right, guys.

That was Smooch.

Merry Christmas. We have a great show for you guys. Awesome show. We have Eric Hoven with Creation today talking about Genesis 3D. We have some important stuff to share with you guys. Like and share the episode.

We will be right back.

Merry Christmas.

Abortion, Civil Debate, and the Need to Be Explicitly Christian

Janice, do you believe we're capable of a civilized debate on this issue? Well, as a person who's spoken of having traveled for an abortion myself, an awful lot of the rhetoric online can be very hurtful.

And we can get an awful lot of abuse. So I would ask anybody engaged on this topic to be civil.

Do you believe abortion is murder?

Yeah, but I'm not going to say yes. I'm not going to blame the women who do it. But we do need to change some of the language. We do need to destigmatize it. It's one of the reasons the abortion rights campaign is called the abortion rights campaign.

For too long, we didn't even use the word abortion in this country. How do you stop babies being murdered?

That's right.

So what you do is, so what you do is, you don't condemn them and tell them they're murderers. From our point of view, we're the campaign to broaden the existing abortion rights in this country. So it's really important that we use the word.

Are told by a medical-certified doctor that this baby is not going to survive outside the room. Why should you be tortured and carry a child that's not going to survive? It's inhuman.

Why is it that the pro-choice movement doesn't like to engage positions intellectually and with reason?

This is what the left does. They intimidate the bully people. And that's the, that's the purpose of the left. Make sure that you don't have, you can't articulate your viewpoint in any way.

Science, Atheism, and the Christian Basis for Knowledge

This is the time you've all been waiting for. It's the time for the blend of the week. So this blend of the week is called evolutionary espresso. It's just your typical coffee bean now, but used to be a fish with legs.

Let's do this, guys. Let's talk about science. Welcome back, everybody. How do you like this lamp? It's wonderful, right? Now, friends, fans, and atheists who believe that humans are nothing more than bipedal protoplasm.

I guess protoplasm sounds more comforting than humans created by an almighty God who loved us before we were even born. Let's face it, guys. Atheism is as stupid as blindfolding a man during a pin the tail on the donkey competition.

And the thing is, men don't even play pin the tail on the donkey. It doesn't make any sense. The notion that human beings are the descendants of highly evolved societies of bacteria in a universe that doesn't care, that isn't guided, that has no purpose, with nothing spiritual or immaterial, that has no goal or end, with no ultimate truth or justice, and where little yellow canaries are descended from dinosaurs is about as solid as Bernie Sanders' promise of free college.

Or Hillary Clinton's promise of pretty much anything ever. You see, we live in interesting times, guys. I mean, we have a watch that tells you how many steps you took that day. If you have to count your steps in order to make sure you're getting enough exercise, you're not getting enough exercise.

You see, technology isn't the only indication that we're living in interesting times. Historically, Christians have been the group known for creating culture, advancing the arts and the sciences, increasing education, developing hospitals, and making the world pretty much a wonderful place.

Just consider these facts. Some of the world's greatest and oldest educational institutions were not just created by Christians, but they were created on the basis of the biblical worldview. Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Harvard, Brown University, and we believe in God Community College.

You see, these institutions were explicitly Christian, and they came into being not as an accident of the Christian faith, but on the basis of Christian principles. Human beings have value and dignity being made in the image of God.

Truth actually matters. It's a real thing. Logic is necessary, universal, immaterial, and unchanging, much like banana-flavored pancakes. Don't ask questions, guys. Just trust me on this one, okay? Now, logic reflects the thinking of God.

There are absolute standards of morality based upon the unchanging character of God. We live in a universe where science is actually possible. Nature is uniform and law-like. God upholds it, and we can depend upon His governance.

And that's why we can do experiments. We can fly planes and make a million movies that, if discovered by humans 100 years from now, will be extraordinarily embarrassing to our society. And mainly, I'm talking about religious.

Can we just please destroy all the copies of that movie so that Bill Maher doesn't represent our society one day? You see, atheism didn't give us the foundations that we have today. Atheists live on borrowed capital.

They have to secretly depend upon the biblical worldview in order to function in God's world. Here's the thing. Show me the educational institution built on the basis of the worldview that believes we are meat-bone descendants of fish.

Show me the hospital built upon atheism. The same atheism, by the way, that believes that human beings are no more special in the cosmos than rocks, weeds, or broccoli.

Can't think of one?

That's because atheism doesn't build those things. Christianity does. And I don't know. Maybe I went too far with saying atheists like Dan Barker from the Freedom From Religion Foundation believes that human beings are just cosmic broccoli.

I mean, it's not like he's actually said anything like that.

If we were like God and if we did know the future, then we would not have free will. We would not be personal beings. And in fact, in reality, we are not. In the end of the cosmos, it's not going to matter.

You and I are like ants or rats or like pieces of broccoli, really, in the big picture.

Eat your kids, broccoli. Eat your broccoli, kids. You are related to them, you know. Now, not only was Christianity foundational to what we know today, but some of the world's greatest scientific advances in minds were Christian in nature.

It's the truth. Just think about the fact that right now, you're all watching this because of a Christian named Samuel Morse. Morse was raised in a Christian home, catechized and saw the world through biblical eyes.

Samuel's wife died while he was away and he received a letter that she fell ill. And the letter said not to bother rushing home because by the time he received the letter, she would have already been buried.

Now, Samuel's parents raised him to glorify God and enjoy him forever and to do whatever he did to the glory of God. So he took that biblical worldview and he developed the technology that allowed people to communicate over long distances in a moment.

Now, we know it today as the telegraph. We also know it as the way great-grandpa communicates to his friends when they're planning a surprise party at the nursing home. At the time, humans could only communicate as fast as a horse.

And after this Christian's invention, we could now communicate at the speed of light. The first testing of this technology came across the ocean with this message, glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace and goodwill towards men.

Stop it. No Christmas references.

I wasn't making any reference to Christmas smooch, but you're right. They did say that in Charlie Brown. Good catch smooch. Put up the picture of the Peanuts gang.

No.

And the very first telegraphic message said this, what hath God wrought? His technology provided the basis for all that we use and take for granted today.

The person I want to focus on today is Samuel Morse, who was 63 when this was painted. In 1844, Morse applied for a patent for his telegraph to show important people in Washington that it worked. He sent a historic message from the old Supreme Court chamber, then in the U .S. Capitol to his assistant in Baltimore.

The message was, what hath God wrought? And a plaque that has that message is still outside the old Supreme Court chamber today. This invention revolutionized communications. We went from a time when it didn't take days, but weeks and months to communicate messages to a time when it was instant.

All previous human history before the advent of the telegraph can be described as the great hush. What hath God wrought indeed? This has been Portrait Innovate.

Awesome, right, guys? Now, so Facebook, Instagram, Verizon, Apple, HBO, CNN and Fox News can all thank God and Samuel Morse for everything that they use today. Now, I mean, without Morse code, we wouldn't even have traditional Christmas specials like this one.

The bumble has one weakness, and I know it. Do-it-yourself lease breaks. No, it's not, Smooge! Now, anyway, like inventions of television, the atheists are dependent upon God for everything they have, from medicine to technology.

Some of the greatest advances in modern science came from Christianity. Yet we live in interesting times. Over the last generation specifically, Christians have largely backed away from culture. That's right.

Christians treated the world like the U .S. did to North Korea. We changed everything, then we ghosted them, knowing all they really need is attention and love. Once the creators and shapers of civilization, because of end times views like that, have left behind, we seem more preoccupied with leaving behind our undies in a secret rapture than leaving behind a lasting and meaningful legacy for Christ.

Into this void enter atheists, humanists, and secularists. Yes, the same ones who believe that we are African apes in a cosmos of time and chance acting on matter, who believe that ultimately nothing really matters.

These are the same people working really hard to do things that actually matter. Atheists like Lawrence Krauss, who believes the universe came from nothing, that the future is miserable, that the physical constants in the universe came about by sheer accident, also teaches as a professor of physics at ASU.

The picture that science presents to us is in some sense uncomfortable. Because what we've learned is that we are more insignificant than we ever could have imagined. You could get rid of us and all the galaxies and everything we see in the universe and it would be largely the same.

So we're insignificant on a scale that Copernicus never would have imagined. And in addition, it turns out the future is miserable. So the two lessons that I like to say I like to give is first we're insignificant and second the future is miserable.

Now you might think that should depress you, but I would argue that in fact it should embolden you and provide you a different kind of consolation. Because if the universe doesn't care about us and if we're an accident in a remote corner of the universe, in some sense it makes us more precious.

Oh, isn't that nice? Now to put this in perspective, here's a man who believes that something came from nothing, even though we all know that something cannot come from nothing. Except for Bitcoin. Except for Bitcoin.

Now you'll have to forgive this African ape for asking what might seem like an obvious question. How do we do physics, which depends on a law-like and uniform universe, if the world is really as Krauss says it is?

Random, unguided, the result of cosmic accidents and not guaranteed to be dependable. I'll tell you how. You have to abandon your atheism and borrow from Christianity. For more on this, I asked a real scientist.

Ladies and gentlemen, the one and only SuperSmart Kyle.

Take a look.

What's up, guys? I'm here with SuperSmart Kyle, who has much better goggles than I have. What's with that, man?

Just to make sure that I'm protected. I have to work with students using acids and it's entertaining.

Yeah, SuperSmart Kyle. All right, so what are we doing today, SuperSmart Kyle?

So we're showing a couple differences between what science would be like if we didn't know what to expect from experiments and when we do know what to expect. The idea being you can have really nasty surprises if you aren't prepared properly, if you weren't able to rely on the future being like the past and knowing what to expect from chemical reactions and here what we expect when we know the conditions of something so that we can control them.

Right.

So you're a total nerd.

A little bit. A geek. I have a job and friends.

Good, okay.

So the idea is that with the Christian worldview, with the biblical worldview, we can actually have a basis for science, right? Nature is uniform. It's law-like. We have past experiences and based upon those past experiences, we can project into the future what will be the case, right?

That's the idea. And so right now we have some bottles of soda and we have some baking soda and we have a spoon and some strips.

And what are these for?

These look like they have carpet on them.

Is that carpet? No, it's not carpet. It's probably a loose pack polymer that contains a couple reagents, pH indicators and chlorine indicators, some other reactants.

Right, carpet.

Okay, so these are pH strips. Okay, so what are we going to do?

So what we're looking at is an example of what happens when you have a kind of a surprise reaction and then what happens when you have sort of a controlled reaction.

Okay.

Here we've already pre-boiled this so that this soda doesn't have any more carbonation in it because that's the first step to actually neutralizing it.

So if you heat up soda, it takes the bubbles out?

It does. No more bubbles.

That's right, they're all gone.

This has caffeine on it.

It does. That's the most important active ingredient of every day.

Okay, oh, very good. Super smart, Kyle. Okay, super smart, Kyle. What's next?

So now we're going to demonstrate what science would be like when we were trying to do reactions if we didn't know what to expect all the time. So I'm going to need you to carefully add a few of these to one of your bottles.

Okay.

And then we'll add a few of these to the others.

Don't be nice, Kyle.

That's right. We have a few more here.

There you go.

All right, so we got the diet soda and we got the Mentos, which is called the what?

This is what's going to be our surface area for removing.

No, the Freshmaker.

Okay, well, I'll take your word for it. This is what's going to give us the surface area to release the carbonation in a slightly rapid fashion.

Oh, okay.

That's the theory.

It's going to basically blow up.

That's the theory.

Yes.

All right, ready?

So Mentos.

See, if science was unpredictable, all of our experiments would look like this and, well, we'd sort of have a mess on our hands.

So the idea is that if nature wasn't uniform, if the universe was unpredictable and chaos, you'd never know what experiment's going to do what.

No, you have to be able to understand what's going to be produced from your experiment so that you know how to control the reactions.

Okay, so let's try one and seal.

This one's going to make a mess.

Should I expect anything?

It might overcome the bottle, but I don't know that I've seen a single one overcome the bottle.

Well, how do you do it? Is it bottom up, right? And you drop it, right?

And launch it?

Okay.

All right, now, when we go to do this in a more controlled fashion so that we know what to expect, we start by characterizing our system. In this case, we boil off a lot of our material so that we have no more carbonate salts.

We check and see, all right, we're still very low on the pH scale below what this will actually read. The idea is, because this is a triprotic acid, we want to be adding in something to neutralize it and evolve some CO2 gas.

Because a lot of that carbonate salt is already gone, there's some gas evolution.

Did you say evolution?

Yes, but not in the speciation sense. This is in the sense of producing a new chemical species from another existing chemical species.

Okay.

Here we should be past the point where we're under acidic conditions. And we should have enough base present to neutralize it.

Enough base present as opposed to trouble?

It would be if you were listening to some sort of a hipster song, but in this case, we're looking for acids and Lewis acids and bases. So there we see a significant color change.

You married, Kyle?

I am. People wonder how, but even scientists can get girls sometimes. So here we are. We're a little bit above neutral pH.

Okay.

Look at there.

All right.

So this is what happens when we understand the conditions going into a system.

Okay.

So the idea is, when you walk into your laboratory as a scientist, because you're super smart, Kyle, and you do these things, you actually didn't have to go out to purchase one of these.

No, I own this.

Yeah.

There are a couple stains here and there that are authentic.

Okay.

Don't worry about it.

It's fine.

So when you walk into your laboratory and you start to do experiments, do you walk into the laboratory going, hey, we don't know, like we don't know what's going to happen.

That's how accidents happen. And that's how we learn how emergency showers work. So that's a bad idea.

Right.

So describe that as a scientist, as a Christian, how does the biblical worldview provide a basis for everything that you do and everything that you teach?

Because we understand the ideas of things like the principle of induction, we can assume that the future will be as the past and that chemical reactions will be governed by specific behaviors, by specific laws.

We are able to move forward and understand new things building on each of the principles that we've learned. And that's very much the way that we actually teach a lot of these labs if they're set up properly, so that students can build on the fundamental concepts in order to build a more rounded understanding of different separations methods, different things that are combined.

And one of the things that I tell them frequently is beginning to sort of look into some of those invisible attributes that hold together the world.

So when you think about, say, an atheistic framework, atheist professors and scientists, colleagues, right? When they walk into a laboratory, they have a particular framework of the world. They believe the world is random.

They do.

Time and chance acting on matter, nothing immaterial. They don't believe in God who personally governs everything. When you think about that worldview, how should that impact how they walk into the laboratory if they really believe that and lived like it?

I think in a lot of regards, they're somewhat foolish for obeying the laws to begin with because they don't believe in an ultimate accountability. So they don't believe in anything that should resemble consistency in the lab.

And I really don't understand how they cross that bridge of not being able to justify the principle of induction and using it every day. So at the end of the day, these guys like to go home and, I don't know, drink whiskey and smoke cigars or something and pretend to not think about the fact that they cannot justify the very science that they're using to be their authority on truth.

Right on. Very good. What's your favorite movie, Kyle?

Spaceballs.

Makes sense. Very good. You see, guys, science isn't actually possible with an atheist postulated and perverse view of the universe. It is possible with the biblical worldview. And that's why some of the greatest scientists and educational institutions were Christian.

Or you can think about men like Richard Dawkins. Dawkins once suggested that Christian education was child abuse. Now I'll tell you what's actually child abuse. Actual child abuse. Now if he would have opened his eyes and ears to the gospel, he would know that biblical Christianity fights against abuse.

But Dawkins is regularly bombastic and he rails against Christianity. As a scientist, he said this about the law-like nature of the universe.

And it's quite true that many scientists, many physicists maintain that the physical constants, the half dozen or so numbers that physicists have to simply assume in order to derive the rest of their understanding just have to be assumed.

You can't provide a rationale for why those numbers are there. And physicists have calculated that if any of these numbers was a little bit different, the universe as we know it wouldn't exist. We wouldn't be here.

The universe would perhaps have fizzled out in the first yocto second and so we wouldn't be here. Or other things would have gone wrong.

Yep.

Now this is also the same man who claims that our 185th millionth grandparent was a fish.

So who really was the first person? And I begin with a slightly paradoxical answer that there never was a first person. Because every animal, every person ever born belonged to the same species as its parents.

You can take that back as far as you like and I take it back to 185 million generations ago. You turn over the page and you reveal that your 185 million greats grandfather was a fish.

Aren't these the guys that constantly condemn mythology? Is it just me? Now also how can these people eat halibut or broccoli without thinking of their ancestors, right? Now Dawkins is another example of a man who doesn't have a workable worldview that can make sense of everything that he's saying and doing.

Now he believes we're descendants of fish and bacteria in a universe that is a cosmic accident. However, he complains about the God of the Bible, condemns the evil in the Bible, thinks religion is a virus and is poisonous and he wishes to eradicate it from the world completely.

I think there's a word for that Dawkins. It's called genocide. But of course he wouldn't want to commit genocide because that wouldn't be ethical. Think about it. And that brings me actually to one thing I wanted to say in today's episode.

Everybody's aware of the tragedy that took place in Texas at a church over the weekend. A dirtbag, as our friends over at Gun Owners of America would say, walked into a Christian church during worship and murdered over 25 people.

Now speaking of ethics, this man it's been reported was a militant atheist. And I want to say this, and this is vital to get right. As a Christian with the biblical worldview, we have an answer as to why these kinds of things happen in the world.

We believe in the fall. And we also have a basis as a Christian standing on God's word to hurt, to shed tears and to complain about it. With the biblical worldview, you have a reason to be morally indignant when a wicked man walks into a church and murders people.

You see the biblical worldview and Jesus gives us a basis to care, to complain and to cry about it. If we abandon Jesus and God's word, and we stand on the worldview postulated by Dawkins and Krauss and company, then what happened in Texas wasn't wrong.

It may have been painful, but it wasn't morally wrong.

It just is.

Which brings us to the fact that this guy, Dawkins, can't even live consistently with what he says. In order to make ethical appeals that have any meaningful, any meaning whatsoever, he has to abandon his atheism and act like people are made in the image of God.

In order to do science, he has to live as though the world is the way God says it is and not the way that he says it is. The Bible says that all of us know God and that we are suppressing the truth about him in unrighteousness and refusing to worship him.

Don't believe it? Take a listen to Dawkins agree.

I think that when you consider the beauty of the world and you wonder how it came to be what it is, you are naturally overwhelmed with a feeling of awe, a feeling of admiration, and you almost feel a desire to worship something.

I feel this. I recognize that other scientists such as Carl Sagan feel this. Einstein felt it. We all of us share a kind of religious reverence.

Hashtag Romans 1 y 'all. Now, that's right. We live in a time following heroes, giants, and warriors in Christianity. These are people who risk their lives and their reputations to bring the gospel to the world, to create beauty, art, and culture, to advance science and reason, to educate the world, and to bring healing to the nations.

We ought to be fighting the good fight against people who want to teach our kids that they are cosmic broccoli. We ought to reject belief systems like atheism that provide no basis for science, no basis for reason, and no basis for ethics.

We ought to love God, the world, and our children enough to win the world to Jesus and leave a lasting legacy. One that actually transforms the world for the glory of God. Because I'll tell you what, believing that my grandpappy was a fish just ain't good enough.

I'm sure you'll agree, guys. We'll be right back, guys, right here next week. Thank you for joining us. Let the world know, share, and like the episode. We'll be right back. Apologia All Access is Apologia Church's opportunity to have a farther reach into the world with our proclamation of the gospel, our defense of the gospel, our engagement of the culture.

And I pray, God, today that you would move in a mighty way, Lord God, to open the eyes and hearts of these people and draw them to your son. So again, it's back to who do we believe, Jesus or Joseph?

What it is is this.

People who are fans of our ministry, who learn from our materials, they partner with us. They join together with Apologia Church. They donate $7 .95 a month. And when they donate, they participate with us in ministry, making all of this possible, the studio, our reach into the world, our evangelism, our special television show, our videos, everything that we do to communicate the gospel around the world.