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If evolution is chance, stay with me now, why does nature look like a designed machine?
The biblical account is that God directly created Adam, and that is a direct creation.
It's like boom, and Eve, another direct creation. Darwin went wrong by cutting out purpose, and he began to see organisms essentially as passive modeling clay.
Organisms get shaped by their environment. And you don't agree with that? Totally wrong.
Totally wrong. Organisms are highly engineered so that they can actually detect changes in their environment.
They're not molded by or shaped by their environment. They shape themselves. Hello, hello.
Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host. In this podcast, we talk about the
Bible in simple terms with experts, PhDs, and scholarly theologians to make understanding
God easier. These conversations have transformed my relationship with Christ and understanding of religion.
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Thank you so much for listening. Now let's get to the show. Hello, hello. Welcome to Biblically Speaking.
I'm your host, Cassian Bellino. We're going to jump right into this topic today, but I want you to buckle up.
I'm going to start with a question. If evolution is chance, stay with me now, why does nature look like a designed machine?
That's what we're going to explore today with someone, I want to say overqualified, to talk about it. My guest,
Dr. G, Dr. Galooza, don't try Googling it, is uniquely qualified to talk about this.
Okay, you are a medical doctor, an engineer, a theologian. You have degrees from University of Minnesota, Harvard University, Moody Bible Institute.
Now, I'm so grateful to have you here. You're the president of the Institute for Creation Research, where you study biological design and how nature is going to reflect its creator.
Welcome to the show. Well, thank you very, very much. I've been looking forward to this for weeks. I've been looking forward to it for weeks.
This is part of the conversation that I've always wanted to talk about science and faith, and especially when it comes to evolution.
As a Sunday school Christian, it's really hard to deny what we're taught in school, but then you don't really see that in Genesis.
It doesn't really make sense that things have evolved over time to where it is today, that we evolved from Capeman. When you look at the
Bible, it's very clear that it's a purposeful, from the start, started with his creation. So I want to just jump right into this, as far as people saying that creationists or people that go to church, they don't believe in evolution.
So what would you say is what creations actually believe about how life changes? Because we've had a lot of guests on here, and everyone has very different takes on it.
Some outrightly deny evolution. Some say, well, micro instances are okay.
What do you say? Right, right. So you really hit on an important point that nobody can really speak for all
Christians and nobody can speak for all creationists. But the thing you let off with is by far the most important.
The biblical account is not at all that humans evolved from some ape -like ancestor.
The biblical account is that God directly created Adam. The account doesn't leave any room.
It says he took the dust of the ground, formed a body, breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and that is a direct creation.
It's like, boom, right from the hand of God, so to speak. And Eve, another direct creation, something from Adam's side.
Boom, Eve. And so the biblical account is direct, direct creation by God.
There's no room for evolution. If you give the words of the Bible their normal meaning.
And so both Adam and Eve are direct creations, and Adam and Eve are the first human couple. So all of us, you, me, and everybody on this planet are descendants from that first human couple, a pair.
And that's the beginning of humankind, as the Bible teaches that. Okay, amazing.
I mean, you've touched on a couple of things as far as, like, the dust on the ground, and we'll get into it a bit of, like, is that symbolic?
Is that literal? But just to kind of clarify and lay some ground rules on evolution, what does you, you know, president of Institute for Creation Research, how do you view the word evolution?
Right. I view the word evolution as most people would understand it, not in the equivocal way of meaning just change over time.
But evolutionists understand that evolution is the process, and this is important theoretically.
It's the process where all life descended from a universal common ancestor.
But the theory is not just to explain the diversity of life on Earth. The main point of the theory is to explain why creatures look so incredibly designed, as your topic of today's podcast is all about.
That is the main feature. That's the main purpose of evolutionary theory, is to explain the design of life, and the diversity of life actually is a follow -on product of that.
But the main point is to explain why creatures and why all of nature looks like a well -oiled machine without appealing to a machine maker, i .e.
a creator. So the theory is to give you an explanation scientifically and plausibly of how you can come up with incredible design and complexity without appealing to a designer.
That is the main function of evolutionary theory. I don't think most evolutionists know that.
I don't think most creationists or intelligent design people know that. That's such a different definition than what
I feel like we're taught, where we start with simplicity and it evolves into complexity. Right, and that's how they would say that.
It evolved into complexity by a hit and miss and trial and error process.
So that is their mechanism and everything about it, in their view, is undirected.
There's no goal in mind at this evolutionary process. There's no purposeful steps in the evolutionary process.
There are no directed steps in the evolutionary process. It is a process that is replete with chance and replete with contingency so that you do not get any hand of a creator in it at all.
Those are core features of evolutionary theory. Okay, so how do you, with that in mind, how do you reconcile that God is both the author of nature but also with scripture as well?
And that scientific discovery seemed to challenge that literal interpretation of Genesis. Why shouldn't honest science influence how we interpret creation?
Well, that's a great question because how should honest science do it?
And that's the qualifying word there is how should honest science. And I don't think that honest science does challenge the scripture.
I don't think honest science does pose any problems at all. It's not the science.
It's not the observations. It is the interpretations of those observations.
And so I don't believe honest science gives us any challenge. For instance, if Adam and Eve were the first real pair of human beings, honest science would say that if mankind was hundreds of thousands of years old, then there should be literally billions upon billions of people on this planet just by population growth.
But honest science says from this date in 2025, if we extrapolate backwards with a reasonable population growth, we get to about 6 ,000 years
BC, 6 ,000 years ago for that. So that the honest science really confirms the scripture.
The honest science is really not contradicting the scripture. Very interesting.
Yeah, you sound very similar to one of my previous guests, Dr. Robert Carter, where he was discussing more so that life began with complexity.
And then after the flood, we've kind of devolved into a more simplistic world, that God created an
Eden of complexity and, you know, intentional design, but more complex than what we see today.
And, you know, we've kind of seen a more decrease in what it is today. Do you agree with that interpretation?
Broadly, but I wouldn't phrase it quite like that. Yes, there was incredible complexity right from the very beginning of creation.
And at every level that you would look from an engineering process, right from the molecular level up to the system levels, to the organ levels, to the organism, and then how organisms relate to each other in this broad environment, all of that was highly, highly engineered.
Engineered is even a better word than complex. Engineered indicates that there's a purpose to it and that there's some testing and that there's optimization, there's efficiencies that we should see, and there are specific engineering things that we should find.
So, really, complexity is not capturing what we really see in biological systems.
Highly, highly engineered right from the very beginning, highly engineered so organisms can do what every organism does, that is reproduce and adapt and metabolize, take things from their environment, build themselves up, turn it into energy and also in order to grow over time.
So all organisms do these things and every one of those biological processes we can see is highly engineered.
And I don't know if I would say it's less engineered today than it was at the beginning of creation, but I do see a lot of breakage in the engineering.
I see a lot of corruption to the engineering, which came about due to the fall. So it's not less engineered, but there are a lot of problems that have been introduced into the engineering.
That's how I would phrase it. What kind of problems? Well, problems like cancer, for one.
Is that based in mutations or where do you think that is caused from over time? Well, mutations in the sense, if we're going to define a mutation as an accidental change and undirected type of change that nobody would really want, that we kind of protect ourselves against when you get x -rays and things like that, yes.
So I use the word mutation to indicate copying errors, mistakes, accidental breakages, those kinds of things.
So, yes, it would be due to those kinds of genetic mutations, which would break down cell regulation for one thing and it would break down the process where cells would automatically self -destruct.
If they can't self -destruct or if they become dysregulated, then you end up with growing tumors and cancers.
So that would be a loss of engineering control. Got it. Okay. I want to do my audience a favor who probably are kind of like me and they were
Sunday school Christians raised in evolution makes sense. Remember the Finches? We all do.
But we want to be obedient and we want to be based in scripture. So how do we grapple with what we were taught, with what we should know?
And so kind of knowing like if I'm a Sunday school Christian, all I know is Darwin theory. From your perspective as an engineer and a physician, where did
Darwin go wrong? Okay. Darwin went wrong really across the board.
And so I would be speaking a little bit different from other creationists. And I can't speak for all creationists.
So I'm speaking for the creationists here at ICR predominantly. Darwin went wrong if you hold out that he cut out the
Bible and he cut out that truth. Boom. We would all agree he went wrong on going off on the wrong track right from the very beginning.
But where he went wrong is he began by cutting out purpose, that things would be a purposeless process.
And that's absolutely essential for his thinking because purpose in engineering and purpose in design are always tied together.
You design for a purpose and the purpose is always what constrains your design. So these two thoughts are tied together.
So evolutionary theory, and according to Darwin, step number one, you have to get purpose out.
It has to be a purposeless, undirected process because purpose is always tied to engineering.
And number two, he went wrong by switching the focus of where the action was actually taking place from inside the organism, as if the organism was a highly engineered entity that was already engineered, let's say, to adapt to things, to outside the organism.
In fact, this was Darwin's major coup and how he broke from previous evolutionists before him.
Darwin began to see it was the, he claimed, and I think he was wrong, that it was the environment which is shaping and molding and crafting creatures over time.
And he began to see the environment as the active operative agent and organisms essentially as passive modeling clay.
Totally wrong. You're breaking my brain. Tell me what it is. I know.
I've got to break your brain because this is what almost all Christians, creationists, and evolutionists think.
No. Environments are basically conditions which just exist outside and organisms are highly engineered so that they can actually detect changes in their environment and they're not molded by or shaped by their environment.
They shape themselves. They shape themselves from innate mechanisms to solve environmental challenges.
And when they solve those challenges, they're fruitful and they multiply and they fill different niches.
So they successfully fill, whereas Darwin says they're selected for or they're picked by.
So Darwin sees the environment as very operative and organisms as passive, but from an engineering perspective, the entity is always active and the environment essentially just exists as variables.
That's like flipping it on its head. Totally flipping it on its head. But after you flip it, it's going to make a lot more sense because everything in the world that you interact with that is highly engineered, a space shuttle, all of the operative capability has been put into that space shuttle, into that entity to do what it's going to need to do as it transverses all of those different environments from launch to outer space to reentry.
All the capability is in there. So if you want to understand how space shuttles operate, you focus on the space shuttle, not the environments around it.
And if you want to understand how organisms really operate, you focus on the organism and how it has any mechanisms to adjust itself to the environment.
Oh, my gosh. There's so many questions I could ask about like nature versus nurture, but I won't. We'll have to save that one. Yeah, that's a good one on that.
But let's just say you were engineered to be nurtured. You were engineered up front to be nurtured.
And if you didn't have the capability to be nurtured, you could never be nurtured.
So, yes, your experiences in life influence you, but they can only influence you because your creator gave you the capacity to be influenced by and to learn from those experiences.
Oh, my gosh. You've said in the past that evolution is a death -driven process, not a creative one.
What do you mean by that? Is that kind of what you're saying now is you either step into it or not?
No, I'm not really saying that. I'm pointing out how really I'll get to your death -driven process in just a second.
Really the capacity for what you and I and any creature on this planet can do, that capacity is an innate capacity.
It's an innate capability that the Lord has built into creatures, and it's that innate capacity which enables them to do whatever they need to do.
And circling back to your question of where Darwin went wrong, he went wrong by really overlooking this innate capacity, and he was focusing more on the nurture part.
He was focusing on the environmental part, and his emphasis of this is where he really went wrong, aside from excluding purpose, is he sees environments as operative, and he doesn't see organisms themselves as being operative, whereas from an engineering perspective, the operative control is always from within and not from without.
So we're flipping everything on its head and saying Darwin went massively wrong, massively wrong, and he gets us off on the wrong track, even in terms of our explanations from his externalistic view, whereas the right track, if you want to explain biology correctly, it's an internalistic view of looking at the organism.
So the answer is where did Darwin go wrong? Point number three, death -driven.
In Darwin's view, death is so vital, and Darwin introduced the whole idea of malthus and competition into his theory, where he would say that at any one generation, more offspring are born than resources available to them, and therefore there's a limited amount of resources, but you have more offspring, and therefore the offspring must compete with each other and compete with each other to the death for those limited resources, and the one that is the best at whatever is being tested will be the one that will survive, and its reproductive, or now we would say, knowing what
Darwin didn't know, its genetic material gets passed on to the next generation, and all of that genetic material, which is not successful, is eliminated from the population, because you can't have it mixing with the good genetic information, so in his view, it has to be out, the good stuff stays, it gets to reproduce for the next generation, and you do this cycle again and again and again, and so in his view, death is the means to good, and he even ends his book by saying, due to extinction, and due to one group of creatures driving others to extinction, we now have the higher evolved forms of life, and so it is this idea of elimination, extinction, one triumphing over the other, that is absolutely essential in Darwin's worldview, and even
Stephen Jobs, when he was dying of pancreatic cancer, he gave his commencement address at Stanford University, he said, death is likely the single best invention of life, it's life's change agent, and so through their view, death is how you eliminate the less fit, death is how the fit go on to reproduce, and so it is this death -driven worldview, it's a worldview that's fueled by death, which of course you and I know is contrary to scripture, because in the
Bible, death was a curse, that was brought on because of Adam's sin, and death is an enemy that the
Lord Jesus came to destroy, and one day in the future, in the new creation, that death will be gone altogether, and so Christians see death as an enemy,
Christians see death as a curse, but in Darwin's worldview, and as Stephen Jobs aptly said, it's the means to good, it is the stepping stone which one group drives the others to extinction, and it advances, so there are some major, major philosophical, and theoretical differences between these two views.
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It's very interesting to be reminded of the curse of death as a Christian and the role that it plays in evolution.
You know, kind of like, oh, the cognitive dissonance it's settling in. But I hear you.
All of that makes sense. I just feel like there is a lot of overwhelming evidence that shows the survival of the fittest, like, you know, fossil record and genetic and radiometric dating.
So all of that kind of points to an ancient Earth and human evolution just over changes.
So how do you, like, you're rejecting that interpretation of it, but how do you justify that?
Is it simply because there's, like, an old Earth versus young Earth perspective here? Or what do you have to say to people that are like, but the data, what do they do with that?
Well, I would say it's not the data. It's their interpretation of the data.
It's everybody sees the same data, and they characterize the same data. And so I would say, just answering your questions, no,
I don't think the fossil record does show an evolution of life. What the fossil record shows very strongly is that organisms appear in the fossil record pretty suddenly without any evolutionary ancestors to them.
That is the over, over, overwhelming fossil evidence. And then organisms stay essentially unchanged throughout their lifetime until they either go extinct or up to the present time.
So if you were to look at a fossil shrimp and you look at one living today, they look essentially the same.
If you look at a fossil horseshoe crab, that's something that supposedly evolved a long time ago, and you look at a horseshoe crab today, they look essentially the same.
Anytime you can find a creature, an ant, whatever, and you look at its fossil ancestor, it doesn't show any evolution.
It shows that it's stayed the same over claimed tens to hundreds of millions of years.
So I'm saying that the fossil record confirms the creation account. It shows sudden appearance.
It shows unchanged forms throughout their lifetime up to the present.
And then it shows extinction. It is not showing a connection to a tree of life from a universal common ancestor.
It shows all different kinds of creatures that have faithfully reproduced after their kind from their own individual ancestors.
That's what the fossil record is really showing. It's completely contrary to a universal common descent view of life.
And not only that, from an engineering perspective, it shows that creatures show up incredibly complicated, highly engineered, right from the very first time you find them in the fossil record.
Highly engineered creatures in every way. So bring on the fossil record,
I would say. It's in my camp, not the evolutionists. As you're saying it,
I can make sense of what you're saying. It's not a simplified version from a couple thousand years ago to what it is today.
It's always been purposeful. It's always been highly engineered. But there are changes that we've seen over time.
There's species that have become smaller. And there's fruit that have become smaller or bigger, aside from GMOs.
But how do creationists explain very clear observable changes? And maybe not just in the engineering level of complexity, but there are micro -evolutions of just things kind of being altered over time through survival of the fittest.
The strongest and the best just keep getting bred, whereas the weakest and the smallest die off and they don't reproduce.
So how do you explain that? I would say most everything you said there would be incorrect. So I would immediately push back on all of those premises and presuppositions.
I would say the observation is we see different varieties of different kinds of creatures.
And whether you want to call those different species or whatever, that terminology is actually very vague on things.
But we'll just say. So if you have shrimp, we have different varieties of shrimp.
And you're correct. There are some bigger shrimp and there are some smaller shrimp. But for all intents and purposes, they are different varieties.
They are the same kind. And the way that they get those different sizes is not due to survival of the fittest at all.
It's not due to the competition between each other to get the scarce resources.
That's a story that has just been made up that's imposed on the observations to get people to think from an evolutionary perspective.
I would answer one. Survival of the fittest, just as the phrase is used, is just a tautology.
It's not explaining anything. The fittest survive. Well, why did they survive? It's because they're the fittest.
And so survival of the fittest is not telling us anything. It just says survivors survive.
And that's all it is. I would say the reason why some creatures would survive, or better yet, since I don't even know whether it's death that's eliminating anything that's less fit, that's another observation that's imposed.
I would say I get different varieties of these shrimp, big shrimp, small shrimp, and changes in these varieties because they have innate mechanisms which enable them to detect their changing environment around them or if they've been moved to a different environment.
They have innate mechanisms which enable them to adjust their size very purposefully, purposefully adjust their size, which enables them to successfully solve the challenges in their environment.
And that's why they live in those environments. And I don't know whether any of the other ones died off or not.
In fact, most studies don't ever document the death of the various creatures. They just see that they've changed and they impose a narrative, oh, this was survival of the fittest.
But I think that gets you off, totally off track right from the very beginning in terms of your explanations because you're not even looking to where the causative ability is which is inside the organism in order to make those traits.
And you're overlooking the whole possibility that those changes could have been purposeful right from the beginning.
You're assuming that they're random. You're assuming that they're happening purposelessly. You're assuming that they give you survival advantages.
You're assuming that then when you survive, you go on to reproduce. All of this is a narrative story which is imposed on it.
I would say a better narrative is you have a population of organisms. They face environmental challenges.
They have innate capacities that are highly engineered within them that enable them to adjust themselves to fit different environments.
There may not be any struggle for life between any of them. The ones that solve these challenges move into those environments.
The ones that don't, they stay in the current environments. And that's how we get bigger and smaller in various varieties amongst the creatures.
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Thank you so much. Now back to the show. Okay, I am following.
With the changes that we choose to have, are you referencing mutations? I feel like mutations are more like micro, within, not yet in that stair step into evolution.
How would you classify mutations? Well, remember I said at the very beginning, I'm going to define mutation in the way that most people are defining mutations, and that it's a copying error, it's a damage to the
DNA, it's a type of genetic mistake. And so no, I am not referring to those kinds of things.
I am referring to just specific genetic changes without characterizing them as mistakes or copying errors.
They're genetic changes that until proven otherwise, there are mechanisms which can direct those genetic changes to the right place and at the right time when needed.
That's not to say that accidents don't happen, but I am saying that the genetic changes that are adaptive, that allow organisms to adapt, and I would cross out that word microevolution, expunge that from my vocabulary, and I would say that organisms have highly regulated genetic changes which enable them to express the proper traits at the proper time in order to solve the problems that they're facing due to highly regulated control systems within their bodies.
Wow. Really redefining everything, Dr. G. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. We're here to redefine it all.
All, in turn, everything that the Sunday Christian, as you said, has been taught throughout their life from the time they're five years old, out the window.
I'm sure that a lot of people, I mean, I'm learning all this for the first time, so be patient with me as I kind of let it slowly seep in.
You're kind of like Dr. Clary. But when it comes to, okay, so intelligence design,
I'm understanding what you're saying. How is, let's speak to the lukewarm Christians, the people that are still kind of ice cold in the data, not yet warmed by, like, the love of Jesus yet, you know?
And how would you speak to their logical thinking of how intelligence design, purposeful design, it's not just a spiritual claim.
It's actually an engineering argument. Like, how do we make it make sense to them? Right. You're pinging right on what the
Bible calls as general revelation. And that is the primary evidence, the first evidence that there is a
God that exists. And even if people never had the Bible, everybody who has ever lived on this planet and every culture that has ever been on this planet knows that things don't make themselves.
They know that everything that is made has a maker. And that is, everybody, this is by experience.
So they all know this. So then they look in the mirror, they look at the water, they see themselves. They see a bird that's flying.
They see a fish that's there. The question is, where did it come from? How did you get these things?
And that is the primary revelation of God to all of nature.
And when you look at these living creatures, they have features that correspond in many, many ways to man -made things.
And so birds have wings. We build planes that have wings and stuff like this. So we have corresponding features that we could go on and on and on between eyes and cameras, muscles, things, pulleys, bars.
I mean, there's these corresponding features between human -engineered things and living creatures.
So the question that is out there, where did they come from?
Darwinian evolution, and this is what everybody gets taught, they say, we have an answer to that.
I can tell you where those things came from. They did not come from a creator. They came through a natural process where there's a variety amongst these creatures.
There's a struggle to survive. The best one comes out on top, which is a little bit more highly engineered and a little bit better suited to its environment than it has offspring that vary in their traits.
They compete with each other. The best one survives in that round, and this round goes on over and over and over for literally millions of years, and out at the end of this process, pop, highly engineered creatures, highly diverse, highly suitable to their environment.
So you have highly engineered creatures and you have a diversity of life. That's how it all happened.
No creator needed. It's a totally natural process of trial and error.
So therefore, you don't need your creator. And besides, what kind of creator would use this death -driven process where one creature drives another to extinction and through suffering and misery and all of these other things?
What kind of creator is that? And number three, everything is random. Everything is purposeless.
Why do you even need a creator? It's a completely undirected process. So as you can see, evolutionary theory baked right into the content of it.
It's atheistic. It's non -theistic. Right there. That is what everybody's taught, and that's why evolutionists don't even have to come out and say, there is no
God. The process itself leads people to think there is no
God, and if there is a God, he's an ogre because he's a bad God, and he allows all of this happening through death and struggle and misery and everything else.
What you think shows the goodness and love of God actually just shows one creature exercising its own selfish outworking to survive at the expense of somebody else.
Who wants a God like that? So you can't reconcile this non -theistic, ogre -ish type of worldview with the view of the
Bible. So I would counter by saying, okay, that's what you think. But an engineered perspective is also a testable way.
So if I believe that creatures look engineered because they are engineered,
I'll make some predictions. If creatures are engineered, I predict that they can be reverse engineered.
I believe that we could study them by reverse engineering them. I believe and I predict that if I do reverse engineer creatures, that how they operate will be best explained by engineering principles.
I predict that if I reverse engineer creatures, that I will find control systems controlling every element inside their body.
I'm not predicting to find random things. In fact, I predict if creatures look engineered because they are engineered, that I expect to find purpose, purposeful operation at every level that I look, from the organism level to the system level, organ level, all the way down to the molecular level.
I predict I'll find these things. And therefore, they're scientifically testable.
In other words, if I don't find engineering principles, then I'm wrong.
If I don't find purposeful systems, then I'm wrong. If I don't find control systems, then
I'm wrong on this. And so I would say put my assumption that creatures look engineered because they are engineered to the test and see what we find.
And the answer is, we find control systems ad nauseum. We find them phenomenally complex.
I don't know of a biological process yet that can't be explained by engineering principles.
I don't know of a single level that I don't find purposeful systems and outcomes. I don't know of anything in biology yet that can't be reverse engineered.
So bingo, we're right on all of these assumptions. Therefore, it's reasonable to conclude that these things are engineered.
And in fact, by your mechanism, when I find real mutations, real accidental changes, the vast over overwhelming amount of times they lead to disease, they lead to cancers.
So your mechanism is flawed. And not only that, your whole magical natural selection process, where you attribute selective ability to nature as if it was alive and as if it had a brain, and you're over overlooking the innate capacity of creatures to solve their own problems.
And then you project that onto nature as if it favored them like a magical God, or it selected for them like a magical God, or it acted on them like a mystical agent.
Your whole mechanism of broken things sorted out by your magical agent is a fairy tale.
That's more of a fairy tale than me looking for highly engineered systems, engineering principles, reverse engineering, and so on.
That's how I'd answer it. Whoa. I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad you're here.
That was amazing. I want to get into kind of the opposite, because I feel like we're exploding with life and engineering and purposeful design, but just getting into the nitty gritty of limits.
And then I want to get into extinction and suffering, but some of the limits that are built into organisms, kind of like what you were just mentioning with reverse engineering.
When we look at organisms, obviously we can't all become anything, anytime, anywhere.
So why do limits exist? And what do they tell us about that, about our designers' intent here?
Well, first, let's take your first thing you said. They show that we can't become anything, anytime, anywhere.
That's a great way of summing it up. And you know what, what you just said is what everybody on the planet has ever observed.
Everybody on the planet has always observed throughout all of human history, and this is real science, that organisms faithfully reproduce after their kind.
Everybody has observed that. Nobody on this planet has ever observed an organism not reproduce after its kind.
So there, bingo, that observation itself, which is probably the most scientific of all observations, is completely contrary to evolutionary theory.
So everything you're filling in in the blanks of evolutionary theory is speculation, it's postulation.
But what real observation shows, without a single exception in all of human history, is that you can't become anything, anytime, anywhere.
Number two, people have realized there's limits to breeding. I mean, people have been breeding racehorses for hundreds of years, but we don't have any 100 -mile -per -hour horses that can go that fast.
So we are even reaching some of the limits of what we can do with even breeding and all of these things.
Now horses get a fraction of a second faster than the other ones. So we're reaching limits to speed.
We start to reach limits to strength. We start to reach limits to abilities.
So yes, that fits perfectly with the idea that if creatures look engineered because they are engineered, all engineers always design within parameters.
So I design a table. My table that my computer's sitting on has parameters.
It'll hold 100 pounds, it'll hold 500 pounds, but it's not going to hold 500 tons.
And so there's a limit to what it can do as an engineer. And I expect those same kind of limits within creatures.
I expect creatures to have incredible capacities, but I don't expect them to be limitless.
In other words, there'll be a limit to human strength. There'll be a limit to human speed at times.
There'll be a limit to what bones are able to withstand.
So yes, I expect to find limits in biology because there's limits in every area of engineering and everything operates within its parameters.
Therefore, I expect to find those also in living things because I'm assuming that they're engineered.
Okay. Just thinking about what was said before of that, you know, our environment,
I'm simply saying this, but our environment doesn't determine who we are, but we fill a role within our environment and we evolve as needed, you know, whether getting bigger or smaller.
Some might say that horses in the right conditions might fill the role of becoming much faster, especially if we gave them more time.
Do you still think that these limits would exist even if we gave them more time and conditions to be faster?
Yes. I think you could give them all the time that anybody would ever hope for and you're going to still hit the limits.
You're going to hit the limits on speed. You're going to hit the limits on size. You're going to hit these limits.
In fact, I think we're already getting to hitting a lot of those limits within professional breeding programs.
And not only that, Darwin in his day, he pretty much knew that there were limits to things.
You can maybe get a fine, limitless gradation. Let's say you're breeding roses.
You can get all kinds of gradation of colors of those roses or maybe even fine gradations of the petals on those.
So in some sense, since the fineness can be small, it could almost be infinite of the gradation.
But you're not going to breed it to be something other than a rose. And Darwin knew that at his time.
So you can get lots of, I wouldn't call it even evolution, I would say lots of adaptations due to their innate adaptability within those parameters, almost an unlimited amount within those parameters, but you can't go outside those parameters.
And breeders know that. Engineers know that. And Darwin knew that. Insane. Insane.
I think we could stay on this topic, but I'm dying to ask this next question. It's about extinction and suffering and understanding that.
And I feel like the hardest thing of everything you've said so far is every kind is engineered at such a high intensity, purposeful level.
So if God designed this creation, why did he design animals that would go extinct? Well, I wouldn't use the word would go extinct.
I would use the word could go extinct. And there's a big difference in terms of what the intent would be.
Since all the organisms are designed within parameters, then any of their exposures outside those parameters could damage them or particularly after the fall could kill them on those areas.
And so after Adam's sin in the fall, the entire creation became corrupted.
The entire creation, particularly the living creatures, became subject to death.
And this is a major departure from what others would claim who would be theistic evolutionists or evolutionists.
They would say that Adam's sin only applied to Adam and death was only applicable to humans.
But prior to Adam's sin, animals had been suffering and animals had been dying and that their death is not tied to Adam's sin.
Only human death is tied to Adam's sin is what they would argue. And I would say that is both scientifically and theologically incorrect.
Adam's sin affected all of creation. And the best place to turn in the scripture to really expound on that would be
Romans chapter 8 verses 18 to 25. In Romans 8, 18 to 25,
Paul is saying that the sufferings that you and I as humans are going through are not to be compared to the glories that are going to be facing us.
And then he elaborates very precisely that it's not only humans that are undergoing this suffering, but the entire creation was made subject to bondage and it's tying it to Adam's sin unwillingly and that the entire creation is awaiting this glorious day when not only humans are released from this bondage of corruption, but the entire creation is released from this bondage of corruption and death and these things.
And Romans 8 is very, very clear that, and it's tying it right back to Adam's sin, right back to Adam's fall, right back to our own suffering and death, that the entire creation was made this way.
So theologically, it's very, very hard to say that there was animal suffering and death prior to Adam's sin.
Romans 8 makes it clear this all came about because of Adam's sin. Therefore, why?
Why suffering? Why disease? Why this death pervading everywhere?
Not due to the will of God the Father, but due to the curse that we've been subjected to in hope due to Adam's sin.
We, as creationists, we have the explanation of why we have this type of suffering and death.
And we, being biblically consistent, are awaiting the day when that curse is removed fully.
The lion will lay down with the lamb and the Lord will wipe away all tears from all eyes and that final enemy of death will be destroyed forever.
Wow. Okay. So how do we cope with disease and suffering and extinction?
We just, it's part of the plan? No, it's not part of the plan. No. It's part of the fall.
It's part of the fall, but how we cope with it, first of all, let's just say this, let's talk about extinction.
There's, we don't really see in the natural realm most creatures driving other creatures to extinction, contrary to what
Darwin imagined in his struggle to survive in survival of the fittest. We just don't see that.
We don't see one predator creature driving the prey all the way to extinction at all out there.
There's really only one creature on this planet which drives other creatures to extinction, and that's us.
And so I would say how to answer your question, how do we deal with it? Humans, step up to the plate.
Do the role that you were created for, which is to be a good steward of this planet, which
God the Father entrusted to us, and be the good steward of this planet.
Don't destroy all the habitats. Don't drive other creatures to extinction. Don't overhunt them, overfish them.
Don't do these things. So bing, let's deal with the one creature who's mostly responsible for extinctions and go back to what you originally created for and take care of it on that.
So there you go. There's a many creationist argument for to be a good ecologist.
I mean, to be, you know, to look at this, to be on the advocate for this planet.
Number two, how do we deal with disease on that? Well, obviously as a Christian, I deal with disease first through prayer, through a creator who can heal diseases, but I'm also a medical doctor.
I went to the University of Minnesota medical school and I look for means to solve disease problems, you know, scientifically.
That's how you do it. You use the technology, you use the resources that the
Lord has enabled us to do to try to emulate Him as best we can in eliminating or alleviating suffering and disease, all the while knowing as a
Christian that I'm just putting off the inevitable, which is death, but I'm helping people on their trek through this journey to have a better life.
Wow. I feel like, and I've heard a lot of conversations of the interpretation of Genesis.
You know, I've had Hugh Ross and Dr. John Walton on, you know, and both have very interesting takes on Genesis.
And I feel like it's a relevant piece in this talk about evolution and intentional design. But why do you have, you know, it sounds like a very literal interpretation of Genesis, and how do you respond to Christians who read
Genesis more symbolically? You know, it's conveying spiritual truth rather than like historical day -by -day sequence.
Right. Perfect question, and probably the main question that divides these different groups of people is your approach to the scripture.
So Hugh Ross and I would both agree that scripture is inspired. He would say, if I were to say,
Dr. Ross, do you believe it's inspired? He'd say, yes. Dr. Walton, yes. Me as well.
We'd all say it's inspired. So for your listeners, particularly those who are really interested in this, the key question is not inspiration.
The key question is not inerrancy. The key question is, the fancy word is perspicuity.
Is the Bible clear? Is the Bible clear? In other words, can ordinary
Christians read it for themselves and understand it for themselves, or do they have to have someone read it and tell them what it says?
I feel like that's literally what we're doing right now. That's right. It's like, you know, you have this here.
So this was a major issue in the Reformation. Prior to the
Reformation, people in the church were told, well, the Bible is a little spiritual, and you can't, you, average person, cannot read it and understand it for yourself.
But holy men, holy men, they can read it. They can get the insights, and they will tell you what it says.
And that put the holy men as the authority in the lives of believers and not the Bible.
The Reformation said wrong, completely wrong, totally wrong. The Bible says that it is inherently clear.
After Moses gave the law, it says you don't have to go and get someone from across the sea to tell you what it says.
And this is in Deuteronomy 32. It's near you. It's in your heart. And the Lord Jesus said, when the
Holy Spirit is come, not a holy man, the Holy Spirit, he will lead you into all truth.
And then in the book of Acts chapter 17, it says when Paul was preaching to the
Bereans, that they were more noble than the Thessalonians, and the Bereans searched the scriptures themselves and understood it for themselves and checked out the apostle
Paul on that. So the Bible teaches that no, the average
Christian with a good translation and the Holy Spirit in their lives, they can read it and they can understand it for themselves.
And the best way to do that is to approach the Bible like you do any other type of literature.
And that is you give words their normal meaning in their normal context. That's how you interpret anything because if words can be made to mean anything you want them to mean, then they really don't mean anything.
And so in every other area of your life, your bank account, your newspaper, you give words their normal meaning in their normal context.
And if you go to court over a contract, the judge is going to give the words their normal meaning in their normal context to interpret that contract.
And that's how we should approach the Bible because that's how the Lord did it. When someone asked the
Lord Jesus, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife? He said, have you not read that from the beginning of creation,
God made them male and female? And he quoted from Genesis chapter one and then he quoted from Genesis chapter two and he said, therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.
The Lord Jesus gave the words their normal meaning and the apostle Paul in first Corinthians 15, when he's speaking of the resurrection from the dead, he said, just as in Adam, going right back to the very beginning, as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.
And so Paul looked at Genesis one, not as an allegory, not as anything other than a real historical record and the
Lord Jesus looked at it as a real historical record. So for all of those reasons, all of those reasons, we would say the
Bible is inherently clear. We give words their normal meaning and their normal context. When the
Bible says there was evening and morning, day one, God couldn't have made it any clearer for anybody who has ever lived on this planet to understand what he's saying because everybody who has ever lived has experienced an evening and a morning and they know exactly what that's talking about.
So we're not disputing over day. I'm saying in context, evening, morning, day one, evening, morning, day two, this is very clear.
Anybody can understand it at any time in any place in human history.
Beautifully said. Beautifully said. Thank you for making that easy to follow. Final question.
This is going to be more like towards you is after all these years of research, all of your conferences, all the times you come to Hawaii, you've been flying over to Guam and engineering, medicine, creation science, what's the one thing that still amazes you about God's design?
The thing that amazes me about the design is how everything fits and works together so well.
It just shows a level of genius in who the creator is, and that's the
Lord Jesus. He is just smart beyond imagination because of that fit.
He understands the processes from beginning to end, so he's a genius. Number two, he's wise.
He makes things that have competing needs. You need to be strong, but you need to be light.
You need to do these things, and so the wise way is to optimize those, so when I look at bones, they're optimized.
When I look at your brain, it's optimized to be efficient, so I see wisdom beyond compare, and then in order to bring this about, to put this about from the microscopic level on,
I see power. I see power that's just unimaginable, so when
I look at all those things, I see the genius, the wisdom, and the power that it's clearly revealed in creation.
That is telling me something about the Lord Jesus who is the creator. He can hear my prayers.
He has the power to answer my prayers. He knows the best way to answer my prayers, so it's very, very applicable in my life.
Amazing. I'm sure everyone's dying to go to one of your classes, read your books, see you speak. What's something coming up for you that people can attend to stay connected?
Well, we have podcasts as well from icr .org.
You can go on there, and there's podcasts. You have some really, really good questions.
We're going to have to copy this way of doing some of these questions. Take them. Take them. You can use all of them. Okay, I'll link your podcast below.
What's the name of it? Well, you would go to icr .org, and then there's a media, slash media, and that'll tell you all the different kinds of podcasts.
We have short ones. We've got long ones, et cetera, and you can come to that, and we have events, and they can find that at icr .org.
They can find events, and if you're just looking for articles to answer a question, icr .org
has thousands of articles. Insane amount of research and data and resources.
I mean, just truly, and they're all, like, so niched down. I mean, I've found some amazing things just about dinosaurs and evolution.
Like, truly, it's so, I want to say, like, family -friendly. Like, if your kid has 1 ,000 questions, icr is so great for just, like, any question your kid might have.
Right, right on that. And clearly, from your podcast today, we approach biology radically differently.
So kind of a concluding thought is I would urge people not to argue amongst evolutionists from within their paradigm.
Their paradigm is fundamentally flawed. You're wasting your time trying to argue from within that paradigm.
ICR's approach, and we're really the leading creationist organization, is to say, leave that paradigm behind.
That's the first 40 minutes of our conversation. Leave it behind. Move to a completely new paradigm, an engineering -based paradigm.
It will radically change the way you think about biology. It's fundamentally different.
That's why you said, my head's exploding. You're changing my thinking. It's radically different.
So let the dead bury their dead. Leave that old paradigm behind. Move to a completely new way of thinking about the creatures.
It'll get you better scientific insights, and it's much more consistent biblically. Thank you for breaking my brain today,
Dr. G. Everybody, Dr. G, you're welcome back anytime. Yes. I think we're going to have to do this for a part two.