The Age of the Earth and the Bible (Genesis Apologetics Presentation)

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Do the genealogies in Genesis really add up to a "young earth" created just thousands of years ago? Does radiometric dating trump the Bible's account? Does "old earth" creationism impact the way we see God?

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Well, let's turn to Genesis chapter one today, and I'm gonna give you a quick tour of my talk in the first five minutes, and then we're gonna dive into about 90 -something
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PowerPoint slides that's gonna reiterate the truth we're gonna explore first from God's word. So Genesis chapter one, verses 29 through 31, the last three chapters of Genesis one.
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And God said, behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed, to which it shall be for meat.
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And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to everything that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life,
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I have given every green herb for meat, and it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
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And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. Now we fast forward to Genesis chapter two, verse 18, and God said, it is not good, or let's read chapter two, verse 17.
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And he says, but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.
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We forward to chapter three, verses 18. Thorns and also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shalt eat the herb of the field.
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Think about that for a minute, as I turn to Isaiah 11, verses six and following.
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The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the lion shall lay down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together.
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And a little child shall lead them, and the cow and the bear shall feed. Their young ones shall lie down together, and the lion shall eat straw like an ox.
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And the suckling child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand in the cockatrice den.
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Now let's look to Revelation 21 about the new heavens and the new earth. God says in his word here that I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away and there was no more sea.
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And I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned with her husband.
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And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and he will be their
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God. And God shall wipe away all the tears from their eyes, and there will be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, nor shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away.
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You see, when Christ died, he had a crown of thorns twisted together by the soldiers and placed and drilled onto his head, and he bled through this crown of thorns.
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And Genesis 3 says that thorns and thistles the earth shall produce for you. This is part of the fall, this is part of the curse, and it's no chance that it's just some random thing that Christ had a crown of thorns, representing the curse, put and twisted on his head, because he proved that he conquered sin and death through the crucifixion.
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He conquered it all, because we have been conditioned that if I were to pull out my phone right now and show you guys a video on YouTube that says,
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Komodo dragon eats deer alive, it would be a very disturbing video.
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In fact, I've started the video before for some teenagers when I'm trying to explain this concept. You guys want to see an amazing video, and I show it to them.
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It says Komodo dragon eats deer alive. And this poor deer is sitting there, and a Komodo dragon comes up, and it eats it alive.
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And it's the grossest thing you'd ever want to say. But you know what those teenagers would say back to me? They would say, well, it's just the circle of life.
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It's nature, it's mother nature. It's the circle of life, it's survival of the fittest.
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It's natural selection. Wrong, wrong, wrong. According to scripture, death is an enemy that was conquered by Christ on the cross.
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Death is an enemy, and it's something that I just read to you, two passages, that in Christ's future reign, what is he gonna do with death?
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It's gonna be gone, and the lion is gonna eat straw like an ox.
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Well, something changed, because if that's the world that Christ is gonna restore in the future, and then
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I read for you Genesis 1, where it says everything's supposed to eat the green herb for food, everything.
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Plants is your food, it's gonna be your meat for humans and for all the animals.
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That's what we started that out. Then in the future, the lion's gonna eat straw. So what happened in the middle?
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Is it an engine of millions of years of natural selection and death and survival of the fittest and the circle of life that produced goo to the zoo to me and you through this engine of evolution?
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Because the evolution in a nutshell says that natural selection and mutations plus millions of years leads to vertical evolution.
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Well, you guys, do you see how far apart that is from the biblical account? The Bible says everything started out great,
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God called it very good. Well, is that video of a Komodo dragon eating a deer alive while it's screaming, is that a very good world?
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There are Christians today that believe that in their theology because they don't understand the issue of death before sin.
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It's a huge issue that maligns the character of God and it's really tied to the gospel.
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Simply put, it's this way. What kind of earth is Christ coming to restore in the future?
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Is he coming back to restore an earth that for millions of years existed with Komodo dragons eating deers alive?
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Is that a very good earth? No, so that's why this issue is very, very important. So with that introduction,
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I'm gonna go through a quick overview of our ministry, then we're gonna dive into that topic with more depth.
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Okay, so a little bit about our ministry. If you were here yesterday, this is all repeat to you, but our ministry is
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Genesis Apologetics. We put out a lot of different videos that are on YouTube and we just did one that was in the theaters.
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We have a growing presence on social media. On YouTube, we have about 180 ,000 subscribers, which is a great thing, is when we put out a video on Friday night, it'll spider out around the world and have thousands of views by Monday, which is great.
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You just gotta leverage today's technology. In some months, we have as high as a half a million views.
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Other months, it might be a couple hundred thousand, but we are reaching wide because we wanna reach students where they are, which is on their phone.
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And we strengthen Christian schools. Dave gives about a dozen talks every year at different Christian schools around, actually a dozen times, too, because he's there a couple times at multiple different schools in the
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Sacramento area. And we give an annual conference. You can just go to g1conference .com. We give it at William Jessup University.
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We had about 700 people there in this last one. All of our resources are free to students.
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Our booth is right back there. Please take our stuff away from us. Dave's car is full coming up.
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My car is full coming up. We really wanna get that resources out. It's pretty inexpensive for us to print resources.
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Most books only cost us, through the Kindle store, maybe two or three dollars to print. And so we do really wanna get that information out there.
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We have two different main resources. Actually, one that's not shown here, but Dave heads up our
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Student Zone program, which is for kindergartners through eighth grade. He has about 30 different videos that he puts out that are all short -form videos that are great for kids between kindergarten and eighth grade.
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And then for a little bit older kids, we have debunkevolution .com, which is particularly good if your kids are going to public school between fifth and 10th grade, because we take the top 10 pillars of evolution that are taught as fact in public school and address them through about two hours worth of video content.
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Then for older kids, we have the 7myths .com program. And that's also about two hours, but that's a great program because it takes the top seven false teachings that your students are gonna encounter in college.
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So it grounds them in God's word before they hit college. And our leading book is the answers to the top 50 questions about Genesis creation and Noah's flood.
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We have several copies of that left. That's a great book, like a one -stop place for all the leading questions about creation.
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And our mobile app has over 100 ,000 people that have downloaded our mobile app. It's free on your phone, so you can grab that.
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And our movie that just came out in theaters in March, and we had an encore showing on April 1st. You can just go to noahsflood .com
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because it will be coming out on DVD and streaming platforms. I think we've approved of the 38 different digital streaming platforms.
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It's gonna hit the major 10 immediately by the end of this month, because we wanna go, again, where people are.
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We wanna serve that content onto where they're watching on cable. After that, because the cable requires about a 90 -day exclusive, we're going free on YouTube in multiple languages because we leveraged the movie.
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We wanted to push it through the box office to give it credibility and some awareness, and then it's gonna go through the cable and then through YouTube.
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So let's take a look at the importance of Scripture today, because I see a lot of people today that love
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Jesus, but not a lot of people that have the fear of God or reverence for God's Word.
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In fact, I just watched a short video last night about some leading celebrity kingdom preacher guy, won't give out his name, that really messed up, and a counselor came to see him and says, well, what went wrong?
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When did you stop following Christ? Well, the guy says, I've been loving Jesus my whole life, but what happened with me is
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I gave up the fear of God, and that's what led him to fall. So we have to have the fear or the respect of God, and we wanna love
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Jesus. But look at what Thessalonians says about God's Word. It says here, for this reason, we also thank
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God without ceasing, because when you received the Word of God, which you heard from us, you welcomed it, not as the
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Word of men, but as it is in truth, the Word of God, which you also effectively works in those who believe.
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So if you want God's Word to work effectively in you, you have to treat it with reverence.
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So those of you who know me, my testimony is real simple. So I was saved when I was 11, fell away till I was about 17, and then locked back in with Christ, and God has blessed my life tremendously, but I really didn't understand about the truth of history and the truth of origins until I had one thing change in my life, and that was simply this, a reverence for God's Word over man's
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Word. My ticket to understanding the truth of Genesis was punched by my choice to humble myself under God's Word and listen to it as truth, rather than the world's narrative.
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And when I did that in my heart, when I showed God, okay, I'm ready, I'm gonna trust your Word, then he took me on a journey to discover that God's Word is true.
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Because before that, I thought I was smart through the world and I was gonna bring my understanding, my worldview to the
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Bible, and God just laughed at that. In fact, in my heart, I used to go to conferences and go to Sunday school teaching and everything and listen to the homeschool communities and listen to the fundamentalist
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Christians just talk about the age of the earth and 6 ,000 years and six days, and I would look at them in the most derogatory of senses and go, look at those cute, poor little
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Christians. They're just not very educated and they believe in the 6 ,000 years. Well, I know that dinosaurs went extinct millions of years ago, and God was laughing, just waiting for me because the tables got turned when
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I humbled myself under God's Word. God's like, oh, you're ready for some lessons now? Yeah, sure,
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God, let's do it. And so then He showed me through Scripture first and then through the world and geology and evidence that, oh my gosh,
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Scripture's true. I was the one who was duped. So what an amazing metamorphosis. So it starts with God's Word effectively working in you, but it won't work effectively if you don't welcome it as God's truth.
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If you welcome it as just the Word of men, well, these sheepherders that wrote the Bible, they just did the best they could back in the ancient
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Near East, writing with their best of their understanding. That's not the way to revere God's Word.
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God's Word is inspired, and He chose whomever He wanted to to write it, but it's inspired and true.
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So if you want your students and your own life to have fruit, it is all about your root system.
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If you wanna have good fruit, you gotta have good root. Talk to any farmer, say, what's the most important thing to growing good fruit?
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Well, can you grow good fruit without having good roots? The answer is no. Shallow roots, bad fruits.
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Roots that go down, that gets nourishment and water and all the things that it needs, that's what's gonna produce good fruit.
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But a lot of teenagers that we see today, they're getting choked out because their roots will start to grow down into the
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God's soil, into God's Word, but then they hit, well, Darwin, millions of years, now I gotta stop that root tentacle, it's not gonna grow anymore.
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Oh, what about survival of the fittest? What about the circle of life? What about natural selection? They hit all these rocks or tentacles start to go down, so by the time they get to Genesis, they're just like, well, that's a creation fable, that's a creation myth.
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That's where teenagers are today, most of them in our experience that are going through at least public school and not getting counter teaching through God's Word.
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So we really believe that having a strong root system is what's going to produce good fruit in a
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Christian's life. So it really comes down, if you want God's Word to be effective in your life, it comes down to authority.
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Whose authority are you gonna stand by and frame your worldview on, man's Word or God's Word? Well, did you know that man's
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Word changes all the time? Do research about the age of the Earth, which is our topic today, and find out how many times scientists have changed the age of the
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Earth, or even the age of the universe. It just changed a few years ago, they keep changing it over and over and over again.
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Well, God has never said it or changed it because the Bible says that God's Word is settled throughout all the time, and you can't even change a jot or a tittle.
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Nothing will change about God's Word, and the Bible even says that God reveres His Word over His name.
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So God's Word is settled and it's printed, and God said that's good Bible, and He walked away so we have it in complete form today.
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So the question we have today is, is the age of the Earth connected to the Gospel? How is it connected to the
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Gospel? Because not some, not half, but most Christians today, at least in the state of California, will say, well, it really doesn't matter what you believe in Genesis, it's a secondary issue.
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It's not a primary issue, it's a secondary issue. So I was asked when I did, promoted our movie with a lot of interviews with influencers on YouTube and the radio and things like that, they would say, well,
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Dan, you know, isn't that a secondary issue, the age of the Earth, and what about the Gospel and everything, and how's it tied to the age of the
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Earth? And I said, well, look, it's not a salvation issue. You can be saved and believe whatever you want about Genesis because when
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God's Spirit regenerates you and you get born again, your mind isn't instantly changed in a second, it takes years to undo the world's programming in your mind.
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You're not instantly sanctified and made renewed in your thinking and your mind. Romans 12 says that's a process and it takes time, but it is a growth issue.
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You will have a stunted growth as a Christian if you don't believe those passages I just read you from a literal sense.
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You'll be stunted and your fruit is gonna be limited. I see it happening all the time. So the world's narrative is that slowly through millions of years, you went from rain falling on rocks that formed the first cells and the first cell found someone else to marry and it had goo -like creatures that went to zoo -like creatures that eventually led to man on Earth.
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That's the story. But you know, the Bible's very different. It says that God breathed
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Adam into existence, forming him out of dust and placed him over dominion over all the animal kingdom that he had already made.
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And then Adam exercised that dominion by naming everything. My daughter's on the brink of giving a birth to Casey James, she's pregnant.
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She's due tomorrow, I think, so if I get the call, I have to walk off stage, set the cruise control for 95 and then use it as a fast pass and try to get there.
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But when she names her son Casey James, she's exercising dominion and authority over her because the legal term of art when you read a will is it says your issue are your inheritance.
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Those who will inherit whatever you have, your issue. And Michaela and her husband
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Christian could say we issued Casey James. So they named Casey James. They brought him here physically.
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They brought him here on earth. So there's two way, way, way different stories because the
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Bible says that God created what's on the other side of your screen there, Adam up out of dust.
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And when you look at Luke chapter three, do you know that we have over 70 patriarchs that go from Jesus all the way back through King David and Abraham and Noah all the way back to Adam?
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And here's the scary part for evolutionists and theistic evolutionists. Did you know in Luke chapter three that goes through that whole story, look at the last four words.
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Brian did a great job here talking yesterday about Adam's a real person. Well yeah, I'll show you he's a real person.
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Give you four words. Talked about the last line there. It says Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.
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There's no gap, there's no Neanderthal. You know, there were Neanderthals but there's no Neanderthals that eventually led to humans over millions of years or Cro -Magnon man or Lucy or Homo habilis.
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No, because it closes the gap right there shortly in scriptures. It says Adam was the son of God.
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So it doesn't go Adam through a population of 10 ,000 hominids from which God plucked one out and breathed his spirit into.
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No, it says Adam was the son of God. So these things have significance because if we take a literal interpretation of Genesis, we have creation with six days and God called it very good.
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He's calling it a perfect world. And then after Adam and Eve chose to sin in Genesis, we have sin, death, bloodshed entering into the world.
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We have death in Genesis 2 verse 17. We have thorns and thistles that are gonna come into the world.
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The very thing that Christ put up on his head. Thorns and thistles that shall bear for you.
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So death and suffering were brought into the world by Adam and Eve's sin. That's the biblical story.
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But what a lot of people are doing today is using a non -literal interpretation of Genesis and saying, yeah, at some point in the distant past, there was creation and then there was millions of years of death, sin and suffering.
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Well, wait a minute. Where's Adam in the picture? Well, he's not here yet. That's what they say.
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There's these thorns that they'll date in the fossil record to 200 million years old, but Adam wasn't here to get cursed, to bring in thorns and thistles into the world in the first place.
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So how you can have these fossil records, the fossil record that has these thorns that are 200 million years old before Adam was even here to bring thorns here is a problem with God's word.
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And then they say, yeah, well, there's lots of death because it was the engine of death that led to vertical evolution on earth.
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That's what they're gonna say. And then, of course, we would have Adam and Eve at some point after millions of years of that death machine revved up that led to different varieties of life on earth.
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Then they would say that we had the fall or sin, but that would really have the fall having no effect because death and sin were already here.
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So death and suffering would therefore be God's fault under this model. So God called a world very good were the
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Komodo dragons eating a deer alive. That maligns the character of God.
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Having that type of theological perspective maligns the character of God. So you can't have this situation here where God saw all that he had made and it was very good and have
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Adam and Eve standing on a mountain of death, sin, and bloodshed, and cancer, and tumors, and all this stuff.
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You can't have that. You can't have the fossil record existing with all this death and sin before Adam and Eve were even here to bring death and sin.
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So when it comes to showing that video to your friend, Komodo dragon eats deer alive, just ask him, when did that happen?
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And did that exist from the beginning? Was that God's plan for a very good earth? So, and many will say because they've been conditioned today by lots and lots of evolution, well, it's just a circle of life.
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And let's just stand back and let natural selection and survival of the fittest progress vertical evolution along because they would say what's happening there is just fine because that's how
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God made it to be. No, what's happening there is our fault. We own that because everything under our dominion fell and collapsed when we rebelled against God.
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So they would say that natural selection plus millions of years led to that process and we just gotta let it go.
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You know, those are the same ideas that Hitler brought to World War II and what he was doing.
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The idea of natural selection, well, let's just speed it up a little bit. Let's just help it along. These are very, very wicked ideas that are against the
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Bible because the Bibles we read earlier on says everything's gonna eat green food for herb.
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Let's read it again. So I've given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth and every tree whose fruit yields seeds to you,
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Adam and Eve, it shall be for food. Also to every beast of the earth, to every bird of the air and everything that creeps on the earth in which there is life,
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I've given every green herb for food and it was so. And God saw everything that he had made and indeed it was very good.
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So the evening and the morning were the sixth day. And then we have the curse. Cursed is the ground for your sake after they rebelled and toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.
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Both thorns and thistles that shall bring for you and you shall eat the herb of the field and the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground for out of it you were taken for dust you are and to dust you shall return.
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He's talking about physical death here because he's saying, you know, from dust I drew you and to dust you're going to return.
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So God's not saying I plucked you out of a long chain of human evolution. He says no, your origin, your birth certificate is dirt.
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It went from dirt to Adam, not Adam over millions of years of evolution. So everything under their dominion fell because we were given dominion over everything and everything under that dominion just like an umbrella, it fell.
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So all creation currently groans under the weight of the curse of sin because before the fall we have vegetarianism.
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There was no death, no disease. There was harmony between people and animals. We had harmony between men and women and interestingly, if you look at the text, we were gardeners and we didn't turn until farmers until after the curse.
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So we gardened, we were stewards of God's creation. We didn't have to farm and sweat and produce food by the sweat of our brow.
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There was no pain in childbirth and even the rain and storms were different but now we live in a post -fallen world where things are carnivorous.
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We have death, disease. There's disharmony between people and animal. There's disharmony between male and females.
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Now we're turning to farmers, not gardeners. Now there's pain in childbirth and even storms are different.
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When you go back and look in the fossil record, there's all kinds of evidence that even these dinosaurs had cancerous tumors and cancerous growth.
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You can also find bite marks in their bones and scrapings as they're pulling each other apart.
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Here's a couple of dinosaurs that were caught in the death throes fighting right before they died when
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Noah's Flood slammed up on top of them. So they're in this death pose here. They're scrambling and trying to fight and kill each other right up until the end.
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So it was a wicked world and I tell people about Noah's Flood, if you could go back to before the flood, the day before the flood, and see what was happening on earth because all flesh on earth has corrupted itself and all the thoughts of man were evil continually, you would grab
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God's hand, push it over to the reset button and say, push it, push it, please. Push the reset button.
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So it was a bad place because a lot of our critics are like, oh, you mean the God who drowned the whole world because he was being mean in judgment?
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No, God was being merciful by pushing the reset button and fleshing away the world that then was.
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So here's John Mackay. He's been a creation speaker for years and he's digging up these fossilized thorns and they're in strata that evolutionists would date are millions of years old.
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But we know that these thorns and thistles were part of the curse and are currently a trophy of Christ.
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So they weren't there for millions of years. We brought the thorns and thistles there.
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So what kind of a world will Jesus rule when he returns? Well, we read this, this is Isaiah 11.
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So the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the young goat and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together and a little child shall lead them.
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The cow and the bear will graze, their young ones shall lie down together and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
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The nursing child shall play in the cobra's hole and the weaned child shall put his hand in the viper's den.
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They shall not hurt nor destroy and all my holy mountain for the earth shall be full of knowledge of the
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Lord as the waters cover the sea. So that's talking about the millennial reign of Christ.
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Then we have the new heavens and new earth, same thing. No pain, no suffering, no bloodshed, no death.
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Death is an enemy. So here's, thanks to chat GPT, a couple of neat illustrations that put that point very where.
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Look at that. What would you say is the relationship currently between a wolf and a lamb?
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They have a predator -prey relationship. In fact, I was trolling once for some videos to look at or to put in one of our videos for YouTube about the wolf on lamb encounters and Shutterstock had some pretty scary, graphy, gory stuff between what wolves will do to lambs.
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It's a terrible relationship. It's part of the curse. But that's what it's gonna look like in the new heavens, new earth and the millennial reign.
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It says, look, the lion also shall dwell with the lamb. The leopard shall lie down with the young goat.
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And now we have lions who no longer have a predatory instinct they're going to eat straw like an ox.
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And then kids are gonna be playing around with snakes. The asp, which is a very venomous snake.
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Part of what Christ is gonna come and restore, he's gonna reverse the curse just as what he did here.
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He's gonna reverse the curse and go back to the way it was in the beginning before he messed things up.
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So let's transition now and talk a little bit about science because a lot of people here today and watching online are like, yeah,
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Dan, that's a nice theological story to support your Bible. But we know from science that earth is millions of years old.
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That's what happened to me when I went to seminary. In seminary, they said, look, we are sure from the
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Hebrew writers and the Hebrew texts, the six days are real days. I mean, look, God says, evening, morning, day, number, evening, morning, day, number.
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Whoever wrote Genesis locked those six days up. They're real ordinary earth rotation days. And the
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Genesis genealogies in Genesis chapter five and 10 lead to an earth that's about 6 ,000 years old.
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But then the seminary professor would say, well, but if you guys believe in science, earth has to be millions of years old so you guys go figure it out.
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That put me into a tailspin for decades not knowing about the truth of this. But then
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I learned more about science. I have my PhD in the behavioral sciences and I became pretty well appraised with what real science is compared to historical science because real science has to complete six different steps using the scientific method.
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You've gotta make observation, frame questions, make hypotheses, develop testable predictions, gather data, and then develop general theories.
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So these are the different steps that you have to do with what real science is to put people on the moon, to make new medicines.
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You have to use experimental science. You have to observe, test, repeat, watch things, make conclusions.
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But did you know that evolution theory can't do three of those six steps? You can't observe, you can't test, and you can't repeat.
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So right out of the bat, real science would say, yeah, well, don't use real science to prove evolution because you can't observe, test, and repeat things.
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So evolution's not observable, testable, or replicable. So when
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I worked as an expert witness, they would never put me on the stand when they would try to come against me in my expert opinion that I would give on a certain matter.
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They wouldn't challenge the facts because the facts were already a matter of the evidence record.
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They would challenge my assumptions about the facts and my interpretations about the facts.
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So that's the same thing with respect to evolution. We have the facts. We have fossils in the ground, and we have dinosaur fossils.
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We have what we can see on Earth today. Those are the facts, but it's your worldview, your interpretation of those facts that leads to an interpretation, and your interpretation are based on a foundation of assumptions.
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And with evolution, it's the assumption of millions of years. So observational science is great, credible stuff.
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So when people say, well, don't you believe in science? Yeah, I believe in observational science. I believe in the scientific method because historical science uses abstraction and inference because we can't go back and see what this fossil looked like or how it was living supposedly millions of years ago.
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So we have two opposing views. We have man's theories through which you can view the facts on Earth, or we have the
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Holy Scripture. And I would say this is a much better lens. It's been tied and tested through time and has never failed.
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It always holds up to truth. So we would believe that supernaturalism is a better way to look at Earth.
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So science, real science is observable, testable, repeatable, falsifiable, but millions of years of evolution is none of those things.
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So don't let your friends say, well, you don't believe in science or you're just putting your head in the sand. No, say,
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I believe in real science. What about human writing? Can't that take us back thousands upon thousands of years?
31:39
Well, no, if you open even a sixth grade textbook in the state of California, it will say, well, human writing only goes back, they would say, about 5 ,000 years.
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So here's a question that I asked of a leading history expert. We said this, what is the oldest writing in human history that we have that we can date without having to use carbon -14?
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I'm on an international panel of researchers that look into carbon -14 dating. Some of the people on this panel are the people who pull the handles on accelerator mass spectrometers.
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They understand carbon -14 dating really, really well, and none of us are afraid of the outputs.
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So it works good for a few thousand years, but then there's some really complicated interpretive stuff that would show it gets less and less reliable the further back the dates go.
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So we asked this guy, with the curator of the cuneiform collections in the
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British Museum, and he said, well, for cuneiform, we can securely date it using a solar eclipse, in other words, we can triangulate this writing, because there was a solar eclipse observed about 763
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B .C., and someone wrote about it. Before that, we rely on less secure methods, such as historical records of various sorts.
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That gets us back to about 1400 B .C. Before that, we're less sure still. There are periods of time of known length that float in uncertain relationship to each other.
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So he's saying that if you don't rely on carbon -14 dating, we can only get back about 3 ,000 and some years.
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So when people say, oh, they've got cuneiform writing that goes back 10 ,000 years, ask them how they came up with those dates.
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It only can be dated for sure about 3 ,500 years back. We have writing about the pyramids, we have the
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Chinese, the ancient Chinese are writing on the undersides of turtle shells, we've got cuneiform writing.
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Well, most cultures have ancient writing, but it only goes back for a few thousand years.
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The ancient Greece, their writings run out about 1500 B .C., the Hittites, same thing, they have a medical document that goes back to about 1500
33:42
B .C., and then before that it gets kind of interesting. The Samaritans have got good records that go back about 2500
33:48
B .C. or so, the Hebrew, same thing, Chinese, but it all fizzles, and so you have to fill up this ancient history with faith.
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What are you gonna fill up the backdrop with? God's Word or man's idea about what happened back then.
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So because the further you go back in time, we lose certainty. We know exactly what's going on today.
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We've got video footage and newscasts, we can know to the split second what's going on today, so we have 100 % certainty, and we know what happened with things like World War I, 100 years ago, we've got good records.
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What about the Vikings? Well, we're pretty much sure what happened with those guys about 1 ,000 years ago, but we might have lost some of the nuances and the details.
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Birth of Christ, 2 ,000 years ago, we've got lots of good facts, but we might lose some of the details.
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What about ancient Egypt and ancient China? Well, you know, our certainty's starting to go down now, because the further we go back in time, the more faith we have to have on what we interpret, what we think went back then.
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So we leave the world of observational science, and we have to go into the world of historical science.
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So what are we gonna trust for these things? Because it requires faith. The deeper, further back you go, and you have to have lots of assumptions.
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I'm gonna choose to trust God's Word because it's never been proven wrong. It's upheld scientifically and historically.
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So when it comes to 4 ,000 to 5 ,000 years of Earth history, including things like Noah's Flood, we have a fork in the road.
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Which faith are we gonna have? Faith in God's Word, where He has an eyewitness of who created Him and how long it took and what
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He did? Or are we going to have trust in millions or billions of years through the radiometric dating and the ideas of man?
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Well, scientists would say, well, wait a second. We know for sure how old the Earth is because we can use this radiometric dating tool.
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They would say we know it's about 4 .5 billion years old, and it's all based on this idea of radiometric dating, when they have parent isotopes like uranium, and they see how quickly it decays into a daughter element like uranium decaying into lead or potassium to argon.
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That's the theory, that's the idea. But how reliable is it, and how much can we truly trust in it?
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Well, as a creationist, I would say we believe in relative dating.
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If you see pancake layers of sediment, it's quite obvious that the stuff on the bottom's older than the stuff up on top.
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But the absolute dating is based on faith and inferences, because we know that these rocks were stacked one after the other because they're on top of each other, so that's just fine.
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There's a very high likelihood that that's true. But when they crank these radiometric dates back into millions of years, it requires faith and historical science.
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Here's the formula for radiometric dating. I won't go over all of the details here, but in this formula, it assumes that the starting amounts of the parent and the daughter element are known.
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It assumes that 100 % of the decay is based on radioactive decay, and it assumes a constant decay rate.
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The folks that I know that study this stuff extensively, they have PhDs in chemistry and all these different fields, would say that we know for sure now that there was accelerated nuclear decay during the flood.
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They know it, because during the flood, the earth became a geochemical soup that was being cooked.
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You've got all the fountains of the great deep bursting forth. You've got changes in the climate and the atmosphere. There was all kinds of accelerated nuclear decay that was happening during the flood.
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So if you have assumptions in parts of this formula, you can't trust the output with respect to absolute dating of the earth, and there's all kinds of parts of this formula that are based on assumptions.
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So let's go to Reading, right here, into something called the Ono Formation. I was there with Pastor Franklin several years ago.
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We went and visited this location. Evolutionists would say it's got formations and fossils that are millions of years old.
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It's not too far from where we are right now. Here's what you can find there at the Ono Formation. You can find petrified fossils.
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You can find mud concretions. You can find petrified wood. But you know, when they date these things in the
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Ono Formation, because all kinds of scientists have done the dating there, they would say, well, the mudstone is 110 million years old, and the ammonates that they found date to 36 ,000 years old, to 48 ,000 years old, but the wood dates to 32 ,000 years, to 42 ,000 years old.
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So you can have one concretion that has an ammonite in it and a piece of petrified wood, one product, one concretion with wood and ammonite, three different dates.
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Same thing. One rock, three different dates. So logically speaking, we have two different choices, that two of the three dates are incorrect and one is correct, or all three of the dates are incorrect.
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I think all three of the dates are incorrect. Mount St. Helens gave us a good clue here in the 1980s that things blew up, and so we can have, watch some things get formed that we can radiometrically date later.
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So it blew its top like this, and it allowed Dr. Steve Austin to grab a huge chunk of dacite from the dome after it had burst, took it into a lab to get dating done.
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It erupted in 1986. He collected this 15 -pound rock from the dacite dome, and he took it to a lab, and it came back with five different dates.
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Same rock. We watched it get formed just years before he took it into the lab, and the rock which we knew was only years old was dating 350 ,000 years old, 340 ,000 years old, 900 ,000 years old, all the way up to 2 .8
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million years old. So how in the world can a rock that we watched get formed just years ago provide a radiometric date of 2 .8
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million years old? It happens all the time, not just Mount St. Helens. There's all kinds of examples that we'll go through really quickly here.
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So that rock which was just years old comes back with all kinds of different dates, and we know it was only just years old.
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Here's another one with the basalt in Hawaii. It was igneous rock that people watched get formed in 1959.
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It came back dated 8 .5 million years. It should be dated just 50 years old, not 8 .5
40:08
million years old. Stromboli, Italy, it erupted in 1963. The rocks came back at 2 .4
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million years old. Should be about 50 years old, but they missed it by 2 .399 million years.
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So Mount Etna, Sicily, rocks were formed in 1964. People watched the rocks get formed, dated 700 ,000 years old.
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It was exaggerated, the dates by 14 ,000 times, a huge factor, 14 ,000 times more.
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And you know, this phenomenon goes on and on and on and on. In fact, it was on a debate once online with a guy, and he says,
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Dr. Biddle, you just got these crazy ideas. I've got a library with 5 ,000 books in my geology library, 5 ,000 books, and I know radiometric dating is true.
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And he says, well, look, that's great. You have 5 ,000 books. Go grab me one of your books that shows me where the radiometric age of a rock is the same as the known age of a rock.
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Because in the field of validation, it should be real simple. Watch a volcano get formed in 1960, grab that rock, take it over to a lab, and it should be 50 years old.
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But every time they do that, it's millions and millions of years older than what it really is.
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So when you think about radiometric dating, if we have samples of known age that give dates that don't work, why do we trust it for samples of unknown age?
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Think about that logically for a second. We got a rock that's 50 years old, and we know it doesn't work, so how do we trust radiometric dating for rocks that we haven't seen get formed?
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It's the most amazing logical fallacy, but people want to believe in millions of years old Earth. So what about Answers in Genesis here?
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They've got over 50 different processes, geological clocks that would show that Earth is not billions of years old.
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So there's all kinds of geochronometers that show a young Earth aside from radiometric dating.
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So all kinds of different examples there. We talked a lot about this in my last talk, Dinosaur Soft Tissues, where we have these things that are being stretched that evolutionists say are 68 million years old.
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Here's a triceratops horn being stretched. Well, we know that now they have over 120 peer -reviewed journal articles that have substantiated 16 different types of bioorganic materials.
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The last two that they found are cartilage and nerves, not nerve cells, but actual nerves.
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And one of these 16 different types of bioorganics is collagen, and collagen has a known maximum life of about a million years old.
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By the most liberal estimates, it's probably much shorter than that. So if all the collagen in that bone would decay in one million years, and each one of these is a million, that's how much longer evolutionists say that this collagen can exist.
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But it's all gone in less than a million years, but they say the bone is still 65 million years old.
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Cannot be the case. So what about biblical reasons for young earth? What does the Bible say theologically with respect to this 6 ,000 years?
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Where does it come from? Well, we just opened Genesis chapter five, and it's all laid out there in front of you.
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In fact, my wife's cousin did this manually. Took him about a week, but he came up to about 6 ,000 years, because the
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Bible repeats things like this. Adam lived 130 years, and he begot a son in his own likeness after his own image, and named him
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Seth. And after he had Seth, the days of Adam were 800 years. So you add up 800 to the 130, and you get 930.
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You can repeat that through all the patriarchs listed in the early pages of Scripture, and we have about 1 ,656 years between creation and the flood.
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And then we can plot this out, and we can see, look at this. These guys are living for an average of 912 years before the flood.
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We'll cover the reason why if I can get to it in just a few minutes here, but why they're living so long.
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And did you know that Jesus referred back to the Old Testament, including these chapters, over 40 times, and every single time he did, he regarded it as a literal historical narrative.
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Jesus never said these are fables, myths, and fairy tales. He always regarded it historically.
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Here's some of the citations. Over and over and over again, he's throwing back to Deuteronomy, and Exodus, and Genesis, Isaiah, it goes back all over the place,
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Genesis 127 to 24. All these throwbacks that Jesus is referencing in every single time he's regarding it as a real history book.
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What about historians that have analyzed this all the way through history? You know, we have all kinds of people who have looked at the biblical chronology and have mapped the whole thing out.
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So we've got lots of biblical teaching that spans over thousands and thousands of years, and for the vast, vast, vast majority of all the biblical scholars that have been teaching about the age of the earth, they all held it was basically young, the vast majority of them.
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But then we have in 1804, this thing called the gap theory got invented, and then we have the day age theory started in 1823, got popularized more recently.
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What about the framework idea in 1924? These are all more recent ideas, and progressive creationism in 1945, those are recent ideas because if you go back to the biblical chronologist back in the day, hundreds of years ago, these scholars, well, here's 32 biblical scholars, chronologists, and how they parked the age of the earth.
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They were in vast agreement over and over and over again. Now, there is one exception. When you look at the
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Masoretic texts, that's what you're gonna get, about 6 ,000 years, many creationists will hold to the subdugent set of texts that would put creation about 7 ,800 years.
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But either way, you don't have death before sin, you only got a difference of a couple thousand years. Scholars can debate these nuances.
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We have no problem with just saying the earth is 6 ,000 years old, and so did all kinds of chronologists before our time.
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Well, what about the six days? Do we know that they're really ordinary days, or did God stretch them out?
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Well, the question of that, that question is answered very simply because we have in one section of Scripture where God wrote with His own hand, it says that in Exodus 31,
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God only wrote a little tiny passage of Scripture Himself, and He did it with the 10 commandments.
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And He says in the fourth commandment, for in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that is in them and rested on the seventh day before the
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Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hollowed it. So communication has both a sender and a receiver, and in this case,
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God was the sender of the communication, and He knew in the context with the Israelites that the receivers of the communication, they were going to receive it and interpret it as six ordinary days because God was saying to them, work for six, rest for one.
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He wasn't saying work for 6 ,000 years or 10 ,000 years is a day, whatever. He was saying, no, I'm gonna take your context,
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I'm gonna send you guys a message. So six days as you know them and understand them, that's how long you're supposed to work and you're supposed to have a
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Sabbath. So why would God want us today to interpret it any differently? I would say that He wouldn't.
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He wants us to understand. He told us Himself that it's six days. Now this passage is interesting.
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It's not just some little scrap of Scripture that God wrote that people forget about. Did you know that when the apostles were exclaiming praise after being released from prison, so they heard this, that God had released them from prison, they raised their voice to God with one accord and said,
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Lord, you are God who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them.
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So now we have these New Testament characters in Acts chapter four exclaiming the fourth commandment as a praise to God, so re -endorsing it.
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Then Psalm, again, we have an echo of the fourth commandment where the maker of heaven, earth, the sea and everything that is in them and Nehemiah, same thing.
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You alone are the Lord, you created the heavens, the highest heavens with all their host, the earth and all that is on it and the seas and all that is in them.
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You give life to all things and the host of heaven worships you. So that's permeated through Scripture.
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Here's even three more passages where that fourth commandment is reiterated. So what did
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God want the Israelites to believe when he said it was six days? Did God want them to believe it was something different?
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Certainly not, and God wants us to believe it was the same thing. These are six ordinary days. So let's take a different angle, a different look at it.
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So if you have a friend who doesn't believe that the six days are ordinary days, ask them this. Do you believe that God was capable in creating over six intervals of whatever he chose?
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So could God have created in six seconds or six minutes or six hours or days or weeks or months or years?
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And the honest person's gonna say, well yeah, God was God, he could have created at any interval that he wanted to.
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Well then, was God capable of creating everything within any of these intervals? And of course, but God chose to use a day.
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So he could have done any interval, but he chose to do a day, and he defined what a day is in Genesis chapter one over and over again.
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So it's very clear, he could have created it in an interval, but he chose to do it in a day. And God is the
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Lord who created heavens, who is God, who formed the earth and made it, who has established, he did not create it in vain, who formed it to be inhabited.
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I am the Lord and there is no other. And this shows that he had to create in six days, because if you take all these planets that are spinning together in perfect coordination, it all had to be there in a snapshot of time, because earth is perfectly tuned to that system that you just watched.
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God deliberately intentionally formed it and filled it over six days and put all the orbits and all the planets together with their gravitational fields and the whole bed, because he had to give birth to a system that would sustain life.
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So all of these things had to be there present within just the six days. Let's look at biology, same thing there.
50:15
You can't have birds and, or you can't have the butterflies and the bees separated from vegetation by millions of years.
50:23
The evolutionists actually believe that the wind was responsible for pollination between different trees and plants blowing all the pollen from one place to another.
50:32
But we know that things that require pollination requires pollinators, like the bees and the butterflies.
50:39
So this creation account in the Bible, if you just read it literally, says that you've got day three where God creates all the plants and the food, and on day five he creates the butterflies and the bees.
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These are all part of the synergistic created order of things that have to be present at the same time that all work together in the circles that he made.
51:00
Okay, so let's close with this, the Genesis lifespans. A lot of people mythologize
51:06
God's Word right out of the gate because they start reading about these people who are living 800 years, 900 years, and they're like, well, yeah, that's gotta be a myth and a fable because we know people can't live that long.
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So that used to trouble me as well when I was a teenager, but we have all kinds of things that prove that aging happens.
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We can see people age today, this is our common sense, these are our assumption, we know that people age and we see that decay happens over time.
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So how in the world can we have these people living for hundreds upon hundreds of years? It makes no sense because that's a lot of years.
51:43
Look at that, 100, 200, 300. It's not just living to 200, which would be a feat that maybe someone could believe because some people live today maybe 120 years or so, but this is how long 900 years is.
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So something quite obviously is happening differently back then that's not happening today.
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And the Bible's very clear that they were living 900 years over and over again. We have these years before the flood with these 10 patriarchs are living an average of 912 years.
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And then after the flood, look at the sloping decline. Here on the right side of the screen, we've got after the flood,
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Shem, who was Noah's son, living 600 years, and our fact said 439, and then
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Shelah, 433, all the way down to Peleg, 239, and Reho, 239, and then
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Nahor, Terah, who was Abraham's dad, 205, Abraham, 175, and Moses, 120.
52:40
So interesting, they lived 900 years before the flood and then they didn't just recalibrate down to today's lifespan of 70, 80, 90, 100 years or whatever, they sloped.
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So what's going on with this slope going from 900 and some years all the way down to today's lifespan, what's going on here?
52:59
Well, there's a statistically detectable pattern that's going on here because Noah's flood is the reason you slide in this white bar and you say, yep, it was only after the flood that people started having declining lifespans.
53:12
Why is that happening? What's going on? Here's a quote from Genesis 47.
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Pharaoh said to Jacob, how old are you? Why would they leave this in Scripture? This seems like an everyday conversation, but he's looking at Jacob and he's like, hey, how old are you?
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And Jacob said to Pharaoh, well, the days of the years of my pilgrimage are 130 years.
53:35
Few and evil have been the days of the years of my life and they have not attained to the days of the years of the life of my fathers and the days of their pilgrimage and he died at age 147.
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So, isn't that interesting that they would put in there to reconfirm, yeah, even the people back in those days were believing, yeah,
53:55
I didn't live as old as my grandparents did, but I'm 130 years old. So, but here's the trick.
54:02
It's not the fact that they declined lifespans, it's how they declined the lifespans.
54:07
Let's go a step further. Dr. John Sanford is a geneticist from, a
54:13
PhD from Sanford, I think it was Cornell University, actually, he's featured in our movie, did a great, great job on it.
54:21
He discovered, we believe, why people live declining lifespans and they didn't fall off of a shelf and it all has to do with the original population of people before the earth could have been hundreds of thousands, could have been millions of people.
54:34
Then you have a bottleneck event where you take those millions of people, reduce them down to just eight that board the ark, they're on the ark for a year, they get off, they begin reproducing and breeding just within themselves, so we have a surviving population, then we have a new population.
54:50
When that happened and when they began inbreeding, it exponentially increased the mutational load in our gene pool.
54:59
So exponentially increased mutations led to exponentially declining lifespans.
55:05
If the Bible was a myth and a fairy tale, it just would have gone to 900 years, well, let's correct it down to 80 now, but it didn't happen, it declined over time because the mutational load began sloping up and our lifespans began sloping down.
55:19
So we can actually take this data and use it to make predictions, it's so reliable and so real, we can track this slope, what's called a power law curve slope, and we can make predictions based upon the line of how long people will live.
55:34
The data is that clean, it's that predictable. In fact, statisticians use what's called a multiple
55:40
R squared, which explains the percentage of the data points that are predicted by the line, and it's 95%.
55:47
The likelihood is like one in a quadrillion, it's amazing, it really, really predicts well.
55:53
So why on earth would you have these ancient sheep herders writing down these declining lifespans if they didn't know advanced regression models, if they didn't know advanced polynomial math?
56:06
Because when they were writing down these sloping lifespans, what would be their motivation for writing down, yeah, these guys used to live 900 years old, then they went down to 600, 500, all the way down.
56:16
They would know that their culture wouldn't believe it was true unless it really was true. So we have 2 ,500 years of biblical history that spans all the way from Adam all the way up to Eli with this sloping decline phenomenon that's going on, and we have multiple authors and transcribers writing over this 2 ,500 year lifespan.
56:37
So in order to fabricate this data, you'd have to have one Bible writer take this lifespan, slope it down a little bit, give it to the next writer and say, hey,
56:48
I got us down to about 600 years, now you take it down and slope it more. It would have to be a multi -generational scam for people to hold these lifespans and generally slope them down like this, but that's not what happened because they were even writing against what their culture would understand.
57:04
Their culture would think, yeah, people should only live as long as we are now, but how are they writing these lifespans that go on for hundreds of years and no one calling them out and burning their books?
57:14
We've got 2 ,500 years worth of writing that's going on, so we really have only two options.
57:21
Either the data's real and it represents declining lifespans from the biological decay curve from what happened with eight people who get off the ark and begin inbreeding, or you have a multi -generational scam going on with sheep herders who knew advanced regression math to slope it down like that.
57:41
It's just impossible. It's real data and it confirms the historicity of God's Word, so we have a connection that goes all the way from Jesus through these patriarchs, including the patriarchs who were living hundreds and hundreds of years.
57:55
It's all part of our Savior's history that goes back all the way to the beginning, so what it does is this sloping curve really validates all of Scripture.
58:05
It takes young earth and puts a stamp of approval on it. Okay, guys,
58:11
I think we will end there. I probably have used up my time, and I will take questions later because I want to honor the next speaker and everything, but you guys have been great, and thank you very much.