Creation vs Evolution Informal Debate

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00:12

This is Apologetics Live, to answer your questions, your host, from Striving for Eternity Ministries, Andrew Rappaport.

00:32

Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to Apologetics Live, another great show. I have got my best good friend and fishing buddy over here,

00:41

Dr. Anthony Silvestro. He is, I'm just going to start calling him the man, the myth, the legend.

00:47

I'm just telling you, we went to a conference, for those of you who don't know, we went to a conference that was put on by Mike Riddle over the weekend, and it is

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Creation Training Initiative. It's a creation basic training conference, and I'm going to put this up here because I want to advertise for this.

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Anthony Silvestro was one of the instructors with this, one of the teachers, and brother,

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I'm going to tell you, my family just absolutely loved it. So, I just want to, you know,

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I don't want to, you know, give a big head or anything else. I just, I cannot say enough about this training and the great work that was done there, just to really shore up believers and help them in that.

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Well, we just want to welcome everybody to another Striving for Eternity, Apologetics Live episode.

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We are going to be talking today, creation versus evolution. It's an informal debate.

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We're going to be talking with David Neff and my dear brother, Anthony. Anthony, go ahead, brother.

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How are you? It was a great training over the weekend. We had a good time, and we'll be at another one coming up in December on teacher training.

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So, I'll be helping, like, grade you guys as you get up and you give your presentations in front of us.

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So, it should be fun. It took us about 45 seconds after this first conference to decide we definitely wanted to do this and go get our airplane tickets and everything.

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It was just incredible. I can't say enough about it. Amen. And so, here's a more important thing, though.

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When are we going to change the music to reflect our names rather than Andrew? All of us.

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Yeah, we're going to put all of us in there. Yeah, with Andrew and Dr. Anthony Silvestro. Actually, it should be with Justin, Dr.

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Anthony Silvestro, and sometimes Andrew Rappaport. There you go. There you go. Well, he is our fearless leader, so we got to always love on him.

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Hey, guys, if anybody wants to come in tonight, apologeticslive .com, go down to the duck. Click on the duck, and you'll come and find us.

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Come in if you have any questions, thoughts, comments, whatnot. We would love to entertain all of those.

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Our guest is here, shall I say, and he is willing to have a discussion with anybody.

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With that, I want to tell you, christianpodcastcommunity .org, they are absolutely blowing up with some great

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Christian content. If you're looking for a podcast to learn multiple podcasts,

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I believe they have over 38 podcasts now, 35 podcasts. Our stuff is on there as well.

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We want to encourage you guys to definitely come into christianpodcastcommunity .org. As always, if you enjoy what we're doing, if you enjoy the efforts, go to Striving for Eternity, and you can support us there, if you will.

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We would greatly appreciate it, especially during these times when so many conferences and so many things have been put to the side.

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If you've done your due diligence at your church, and you feel so inclined, we would love to have your support.

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Buy our books, buy the books from Anthony. I had it around here, and I've lost it.

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Anthony, you might have it up near, I don't know. But we have Anthony's books, we've got

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Andrew's books. He's got something like four or five dozen books that he's written.

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Let's see. This one is on The Origin of Kinds. This is by Dr. Anthony Silvestro.

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That book is fabulous. I've read through it. I love it. What we believe, and let's see, what do they believe, by a pastor and apologist and evangelist,

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Andrew Rappaport. What do they believe? And then the last one, I believe, was, what do we believe?

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And I'm reading through When My Ox Gores My Neighbor.

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I'm reading through that right now, and I really love that. That's on hermeneutics. It's by Pastor Josiah Nichols, who wrote that.

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That did a really good job with that book. Yeah, it was fabulous. So far, what

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I've read is just really digging down into the hermeneutic understanding of how to apply the

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Old and New Testament to today, and that's really important. So with that said,

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I guess we're going to do our informal debate. So let's have David come in, and we'll have

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David, brother, come on in here. And I call everybody brother, whether you are or not. When God saves you, you will be.

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So no slap in the face there, man. It's a Southern hospitality. It's a

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Southern thing. I do want to say this, how David and I met. So it was funny.

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Matt Slick had his 25th anniversary show. It was a Zoom or StreamYard, one of the two.

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And so it was a Monday night, I think, three weeks ago now, three, four weeks ago. And so I went in there and said hi, wished him a happy anniversary.

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And as I wished him a happy anniversary, David was one of the guys that was in the room there.

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And he mentioned something about having an ID, Intelligent Design versus Evolution debate. And here

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I'm thinking, okay, so I'm thinking he's the Intelligent Design guy, right? Because he's on Matt Slick's channel.

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So I asked him about the Intelligent Design and what aspect of it. Because Intelligent Design is a whole array of ideas, most of which

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I would actually disagree with. But so I wanted to see which one he was.

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He goes, oh, no, no, I'm the Evolutionist. I go, oh, cool. And so we got to talking for a moment there.

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And I think you mentioned pretty quickly that you would love to come on the show and chat. So that's why we're here, is to have an informal discussion slash debate.

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So it should be fun tonight. I think Justin's going to ask you to introduce yourself now. Yeah, brother. David, go ahead and introduce yourself to our audience and tell us about yourself, if you would.

07:15

Well, thank you very much. And yeah, I was going to mention that we met on Matt Slick's show.

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So I'm 25 years old. I grew up in the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Church. And I am no longer a

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Christian. Long story about that. I am a music major right now at my local community college.

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And I applied to a couple universities and will hopefully be getting my bachelor's in one of the sciences.

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I'm kind of debating back and forth between biology and geoscience.

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Cool. Okay. Good, good. Yeah, there's a lot of need for that, so for sure.

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Well, so we're going to let things get started. And as we do, one thing that I want to get started with and kind of lay out for Anthony to maybe go through a little bit, just for a second.

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This is Apologetics Live. And as I went through the Creation Initiative training on this weekend at Pastor Andrew Rappaport's church,

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I went there and what I got to say is, oh, hi, brother. Like I said,

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I thoroughly enjoyed this training. I heard my name and now I appear. There you go, brother. Well, we were just saying that the training was phenomenal.

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It was so good. You mean the part where Mike Riddle and Scott taught? Yeah, Scott did great.

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Brother Scott, he did so great. And like I said, if you notice,

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I even took off the little logo for Anthony that I had made up earlier. I've turned into an apologist for my brother up there.

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So, yeah. Anthony did an okay job teaching, too.

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We'll give him some credit. Yeah, well, I'll tell you what, what you presented on Sunday morning, though.

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I don't know if that was recorded or not, but it was recorded. And actually,

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I just got off of a podcast. That's why I was late. I was recording with a matter of theology. And I actually was talking about Anthony's sermon from James chapter three on the tongue.

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We were exegeting through Ephesians chapter four and be angry and do not sin.

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But in the context there, speaking falsehoods, not speaking falsehoods, but speaking truth.

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And so Anthony's sermon came in. But yeah, you get a dentist talking about the tongue. He had to go physical, right?

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He just he had to get into all kinds of description of what the tongue does. Like way more information. I needed to know on a

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Sunday morning. Thank you very much. I want to go clean my teeth afterwards. Yeah.

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Yeah. He was saying the tongue helps to clean teeth, but you still need to floss. You know, I thought he was going to say you still need to see your dentist.

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You know, well, so.

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So what I wanted to point out in the in the training discussion, there are and for every believer non -believer as well.

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It wouldn't to me. It doesn't matter. You have to look at evaluate truth based upon what is the foundational truth of our presupposition?

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And what is our understanding? And why do we understand it? And what I want to bring up is well, there it is.

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There are three critical thinking questions that every person when you're coming to it to a discussion about evolution that you need to to consider.

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And these three critical questions are how do you know that is true?

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In other words, when somebody asks you something, how do you know that is true? When I say something or give you a statement of fact, the universe being 65 billion years old, whatever, and you say, how do you know that is true?

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Has it ever been observed? And are you making any assumptions? And with that, when you look at those three questions, here comes a power question that should come to mind.

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And that is, can you show me any observational evidence for evolution that does not require me to use faith?

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And I would encourage that for anyone. If you are an atheist or whatever else, if you're going to come with the discussion and the arguments of atheism, if you're going to come from that point of view, definitely be able to look at those questions and see if you can answer them for yourself before you make the claims of what you are.

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This comes from Mike Riddle and our beloved brother, Anthony Silvestro.

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He comes from on the Creation Training Initiative. It comes from Mike Riddle, and he is the founder and president and apologist, and he is an incredible teacher.

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And so, everybody write that down, write those questions down, and put them in your mind, and start to ask those questions when you're dealing with these issues.

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So, with that, I want to just quietly sit by and see what happens from here.

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I think we're going to let David speak, right? He wanted to go through some PowerPoints in his position. Yeah, sure, definitely.

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Thank you very much. I am going to make them short.

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Here we go. Well, thank you very much, Anthony, for inviting me on. I really appreciate your time.

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So, the three critical thinking questions, I really love these questions. These are questions that everyone should be asking about all positions that they might come across.

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So, that is what I kind of want to be answering in my opening presentation.

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How do we know that evolution is true and has ever been observed? So, Theodosius Dobzhansky famously said that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

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First, we should know that evolution is an observable fact. Microevolution, no one doubts.

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Speciation, Anthony answers to Genesis, Creation Ministries International all accept speciation and use it as a vital tool for their flood model.

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And finally, macroevolution, speciation is, by definition, macroevolution.

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So, basically, the core tenets of evolution are pretty much uncontroversial across the field.

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So, really, the only major points of disagreement are the following. The time scale of evolution, what role

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God may have played, and the extent of common ancestry. In other words, does all life share a common ancestor, or does only certain organisms share a common ancestor?

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So, of course, speciation, we have different, we understand it so well that we even have names for how different populations speciate.

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And an analogy here is language. Over time, you start with modification.

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We modify language, change the pronunciation and change meaning and add new words. And over time, new languages evolve.

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First point is that evolution helps us understand the development of life. Here is a phylogenetic tree of the cats.

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And this is from a paper. Ability to hybridize is the most important criteria for including species within common phasic type.

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And, basically, they used the genetic evidence to bring this together.

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And this is actually from Creation Ministries International. Now, what

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Creation Ministries International did, which I think is quite deceptive and dishonest, is that they took this image from a peer -reviewed paper, and here it is.

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This is the same exact image. They just drew a little bit of a cat and got rid of the time scale that didn't fit their model.

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And here is the original abstract. Modern field species descended from relatively recent divergence and speciation events that produced successful predatory carnivorous worldwide.

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And this is how we are able to piece together which animals are closely related.

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And using the same exact criteria and the same principles, we are able to show that humans and chimpanzees last shared a common ancestor about 7 million years ago.

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And when we look into fossil record, that's exactly what we see. So we have the molecular clock, the fossil record, and the radiocarbon dates, and other radiometric dating techniques that all independent lines of evidence that tell the same story.

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Finally, let's look at the role evolution plays in health. Evolution plays a back and forth game between the pathogens and us.

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The evolutionary framework helps us to identify the origins of novel viruses. And the evolutionary framework explains why these pathogens counter our attempts to control them.

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So let's take a look at one example, HIV. So this is from a fantastic book called

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Evolving the Human Infected Virus. So the virus HIV has to mutate into a form that could overcome natural immunity to SIV in humans.

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Mammals have a gene that encodes a protein called tetherin. This protein has to evolve to confer resistance to retroviruses by tethering them to the inside of the cell that they affect and preventing the virus from replicating.

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For SIV CpZ to successfully infect a human, it had to overcome the suppressive effects of human tetherin.

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The SIV CpZ evolved by acquiring two anti -tetherin genes called NEF and VPU, one from each of the original multiviruses that fused to form the chimpanzee virus.

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The NEF gene mutated to overcome the chimpanzee tetherin, but the VPU gene remained essentially insert.

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When the virus jumped to humans, human tetherin was so different that the NEF gene could not overcome human tetherin.

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Instead, the VPU gene mutated to overcome human tetherin, allowing HIV -1 group

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M to infect humans. A mutation in the second gene called GHE was also required for the chimpanzee virus to jump to humans.

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So we have what is by all metrics an irreducibly complex virus. We had all these mutations that had to happen in order for the

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SIV virus to successfully infect a human. My last point is that intelligent design creation simply does not have a viable model.

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What does God even mean? Who or what is a designer? What is your nature?

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What is the mechanism by which the intelligent design created? What is the limit to common ancestry?

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And when exactly did this creation happen? When you want to overturn scientific theories, you have to come up with your own model that explains the data better than the currently accepted model.

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Evolution is the only viable model that explains biodiversity. Creationism simply cannot.

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Thank you very much. Anthony?

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Yeah, okay. Wow, you got that done fast, David. I thought you did. Yeah, I thought you did about 10 minutes. You had about seven minutes in that.

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Oh, even better. You're quick. So, okay. So, first of all,

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I do want to say thank you, David, for coming on tonight. For me, I enjoy this type of topic, and we use it to be able to teach the audience for listening.

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Thank you, Justin, for agreeing to... I don't want to say moderate it because this is just an informal discussion.

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Thanks for being here. I'll just be the handsome part of the show. Fair enough.

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I would let you get away with it. I wouldn't let Andrew. I'm here. Someone needs to be the good -looking one, and clearly neither one of you can pull that off.

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Hey, we had some good pictures, though. Yeah. Obviously, you know, David has more hair than both of you,

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I'm just saying. Okay. It's a good thing David's nicer than Andrew.

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See, we are professionals in our field of endeavor because Andrew beats us up all the time.

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Yeah, he does. Okay, so thank you for being here, David. You know, I will say this, too.

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Let me be very blunt with this. While I love the creation versus evolution debates,

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I enjoy college campuses and talking, enjoy doing them online. That is not my primary purpose for talking with you.

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Okay. My primary purpose for talking with you is I want to see you saved. Okay. That's the bottom line.

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You know, I'm sorry about whatever happens in church. I know the IBF has a lot of problems with legalism, and there's a lot of people that leave the church.

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I'm not going to say leave salvation because I don't believe that happens, but leave the church with a very sour taste towards who

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God is because the God that the IBF church often portrays is the wrong

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God. It's not the God of the Bible. And so what do I mean by all that is that,

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David, you and I, Justin, especially Andrew, we're all sinners.

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We've broken God's law continuously, right? Every time we break God's law, we've sinned.

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We're lawbreakers of God, and because of that, we deserve just punishment. What IBF, unfortunately, teaches, and every other false religion on this planet that has ever been here, that is currently here, or ever will be made, believes that somehow, some way, we can do things to earn our salvation, that somehow we can either dress a certain way, like the

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IBF church often teaches, or we have to act a certain way or pretend to be a certain way or whatever it is to try to earn

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God's grace, and yet the Bible teaches none of that. It says that in God's grace, Jesus Christ, God of the flesh, is who took that penalty for us, that God himself came down from heaven, took on flesh.

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Human blood had to drip to pay the human penalty of sin, but he also had to be God to pay the eternal fine that we owe to God, and that through his death, burial, and resurrection, he literally paid the sins, every sin, for those who repent and believe, those who repent of their sin and put their trust in Christ alone for their salvation, not by their works, lest they may boast.

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Yes, thank you for putting that out, IFB, Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Church. Most people on this show probably know what that was, but it's probably good to put it up there.

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So here's the reality, David, is that I believe that evolution is the biggest attack on the church today, and it's why

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I really enjoy defending it. I used to be an evolutionist myself, and it was first saved, and then

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God had opened my eyes to the science that is literally dismissed and not even spoken of in secular science classes.

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And so when I was able to see both of those clearly, God opened my eyes to his creation versus what some secular scientists say.

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And unfortunately, evolution is what is often used for people such as yourself to suppress the truth about God, because I believe you know

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God exists, and that truth gets suppressed about him because of the fact that we all know we're accountable to him, and so we either are going to repent and believe, or we're going to continue to enjoy our sin and pretend he doesn't exist.

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And evolution is a really easy way to do that. And so I'm just being honest with you, but that's where my heart is, and that's what

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I care about in being here. Obviously, I've spent almost all my time just speaking about that.

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The one thing I will address before we kind of get into this informal discussion is you brought up a slide that you just, you had made real quick, and I'm glad you did.

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We're going to bring it up tonight anyway. One of the things that we teach in class is these three critical thinking questions.

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How do you know it's true? Has it ever been observed? And are you making any assumptions? And why are these so vital, so important?

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Because of this, you and I will talk about speciation tonight, which I would equate pretty closely to microevolution.

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I'm not sure exactly how you define it, but I would define it strictly with speciation.

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The part that we would differ on is macroevolution. So for anybody who's watched me on the show before,

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I do not doubt whatsoever that two cats, a pair of cats were on the ark and were in the original creation, and all the different cats we see today have speciated out from them.

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I don't debate that. I don't think you would either for the most part. What the difference is, is

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I don't believe that cat will ever turn into a dog. I don't believe that the T -Rex turned into a modern -day chicken.

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I don't believe any of those macro things happen. And so here's the problem, is that we both agree with speciation for the most part.

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How do we know it's true? We can test in real time speciation. Has it ever been observed?

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Absolutely. To be able to test it, you have to be able to observe it to be able to test it. It's been observed. And are you making assumptions?

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Probably not. We've got that pretty buttoned down in speciation. It might be some minor details that we're still working through.

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As creationists, we have some different ideas on – I wouldn't believe in natural selection.

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I know CMI would. I believe in something called CET that with epigenetics would be what allows microevolution to happen.

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But that's not where the debate's going to be. The debate is going to be on macroevolution.

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How do you know it's true? We don't. There is no witness. We can't test macroevolution.

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Has it ever been observed? No, it's never been observed. And as far as I'm concerned, it never will be because it's not true.

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But are you making assumptions? Absolutely. The entire secular science world, and this is what

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I want everybody to hear tonight, is that if we humans have only been around for about 6 ,000 years, which we would say according to the

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Bible, even from your perspective, David, you would say that we've been around for between 1 and 7 million years depending on which science study that you read.

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The reality is that there is not a single person ever alive who has observed macroevolution.

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And that's the problem. So on that, I'll end. I think that's about my time,

26:13

Justin, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, we're good. All right, great. Thank you.

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There's a couple things that I want to address real quick. Number one, the first thing you said that evolution is the biggest attack on the church today.

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This is what I believe to be a false dilemma. Because I don't believe there's any contradiction between God and evolution.

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I don't see any contradiction between evolution and creation. Because you can have

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God who created life and life with the ability to evolve and radiate out.

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And there are many great Christian scientists like Francis Collins, who are very firm in their evangelical

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Christianity, that take what they see in science and say, okay, there's no contradiction here.

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And the next question I'm going to have for you is what exactly would you accept as macroevolution?

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Because macroevolution, according to Evolution Berkeley, macroevolution generally refers to evolution above the species level, such as hybrid species and speciation.

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So at what level would you draw the line between microevolution and macroevolution?

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And what exactly is a kind?

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So these are, I think, good questions to start with. Yeah, no, that's great. So I'll address both of your things.

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First of all, you talked about Bible and science. Or Bible and evolution.

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Because you don't see an issue between God being able to use evolution as part of his grand scheme.

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So one of the things we just taught in the course on Saturday, that I always teach on, is I do believe they're incompatible.

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And here's why. As a Christian, we believe the Bible to be entirely true from beginning to end.

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There are no contradictions. People who have perceived contradictions, it's because they don't know enough about the study of the

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Bible to work through those contradictions. Guys like Matt Slick has a large course's website dedicated to working through those apparent contradictions.

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And he's done them all on his website. Here's the issue, is that in the

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Bible, God created the earth first, and then he created the sun, moon, and stars.

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According to evolution, you had sun and stars first, and then the earth later on.

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So the order is wrong. And I could go down an entire chart. The earth was made of water, and then the dry land appeared.

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According to evolution, it started as a fiery mass, condensed into a solid object, and eventually water appeared.

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And there's many others I don't need to get into, but the order is completely wrong for the

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Big Bang and evolution for it to be compatible with the Bible because the Bible, again, has it in a different order.

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So they can't be—they can't be—they can't be— God couldn't have used evolution from that perspective.

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Can I respond? Yeah, go ahead. Sure. So again, that really all depends on how literally you want to interpret

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Genesis because I know a lot of people interpreted this as a polemic against the pagan ideas where there's a bunch of different gods creating—

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I don't know if it's supposed to be literal or not, but even if it is literal, then yeah,

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I would agree that there is definitely a huge contradiction. So either—if I were to accept your claim that we must accept

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Genesis as a literal account, then yes, I do agree that there is a significant contradiction between science and religion.

29:55

Okay, and fair enough. So thank you for that. We, of course, will look at this as historical narrative.

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There's a number of reasons for that. I think the Christians that are using the ancient Near East theory framework, different ideas,

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I think that this is—they're in severe, severe error when they do this.

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If you wish for me to cover why they're in error, I can give you those reasons.

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Otherwise, it's not really that important for the listeners at this moment because you've already said, hey, you understand that issue.

30:32

Right. That being said, that's kind of not what we're debating tonight. Right. Really, I don't think religion or Christianity or even atheism or religion should be afraid to look at the evidence from an objective standpoint.

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Because if Christianity was true, then the facts and evidence would speak for themselves and vice versa.

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Oh, and I would completely agree with that. And we'll talk about the evidences in a little bit.

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Now, the Bible would say, it does say that in Romans 1, that God has given plenty of evidence for everybody to know that he exists.

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It says so much so that they're without excuse in Romans 1. So he says that by his creation, the things have been made that everybody knows.

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So I would say that there is plenty of evidence and we should follow the evidence from God's perspective.

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Now, when it comes to the science we're talking about, the problem I have with definitions and defining things is that the word macroevolution has undergone a change in definition.

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So the definition that you read for macroevolution was not the definition that was, even at the time

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I wrote my book, when it was published, it was published four years ago, I think in December. So next month will be four years.

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It was published and was on sale in January of the next month, four years ago. Macroevolution was not defined that way, even four years ago by most secular science that I know of.

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And so macroevolution was always looked at as a way for a kind to turn into another kind.

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And that's a creationist term. It's not a secular science term. So we are using kinds because that is the word that is used over and over again in Genesis.

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And so my starting point is going to be what the Bible says, not what secular science says. So my starting point is going to be when

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God says 10 times the beginning of Genesis, that he made everything after its own kind or to reproduce after its own kind.

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I'm going to say, OK, that's a kind. What exactly is a kind according to the evidence that we see?

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Right? So when he makes each kind, we know in the Bible he does not take one kind and turn it into another kind.

32:47

All right. Sure. So let me, I guess, want to ask what exactly is a kind?

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And can we get an objective criteria of what it is in the taxonomical rank? And are you familiar with phylogenetics at all?

33:01

According to phylogenetics, you're always a part of your ancestral clade. So one kind of animal, no matter where you're at, never really changes into another fundamental kind because they're all a part of their ancestral clade.

33:16

It's all about cladistics. So if I can show you something real quick, can

33:22

I show some images real quick? Yeah, go ahead and bring it up. I mean, the issue with the clades is that starting points are different.

33:30

And so because the starting points are the evolutionist perspective is that we started with a single cell that evolved into different things, right, along the tree.

33:46

And then along that tree have many other branches that come off of it. And so all the animals and humans and everything else can be traced from that single cell, according to secular science and evolutionists.

33:59

We don't believe that in the Bible whatsoever. God created humans distinctly from the rest of creation.

34:06

We're made in his image, in God's image. Animals, plants, nothing else is. He made everything else separate, as separate kinds.

34:14

And we can talk about those kinds in a moment. But I think you want to show us this. Yeah, a couple of examples here.

34:20

Here are alligator -like, and these are from three different taxonomical families.

34:28

And same here, we have different bats, but they are in different families, taxonomical families.

34:34

And same here. So are these all the same kind or are they separate kinds? That's kind of what I want you to nail down.

34:40

What exactly, can you give me a definition of what you think a kind is? Let's start from there. Yeah, so I'm not going to pretend to know those three pictures.

34:51

Okay, I got to put this up. That's hilarious. And that is fair. Those three pictures of Kamala Harris.

34:58

That is great. That's the comment of the night right there. Thank you,

35:04

John, for that one. That's fun. So actually, they're much better than Kamala Harris.

35:09

Okay, and that's fair. But can we actually nail down where a kind lies, either in taxonomically or?

35:18

Yeah, absolutely. So while I don't know every single animal, right, the easiest ones for me to go to would be cats and dogs.

35:26

Because these are the ones that we always use. And so for a dog kind, just understand a dog kind, it would be that whatever is speciated from that original pair, we don't have that original pair anymore, as far as we know.

35:42

So when we look at kinds, I want to give a little background to this. The evolutionist believes that we started with that single cell, and through mutations, new information is added to the genes at that early stage and throughout the stages of evolution.

36:02

And so the reason why new traits develop is because of new mutations that allow new information to be put in.

36:09

That's an evolutionist perspective. From a biblical perspective, we believe that the original pair of dogs that were on the ark, as well as the original pair of dogs that were made at the beginning of creation on day six, they had all the genetic potential possible, so that when they speciated, there was no new information ever added to the new dogs.

36:29

So when you had that original pair of dogs that eventually bred out wolves and dingoes and coyotes and all the house dogs we see today, that all those genes were present in the original kind.

36:45

And that as speciation happens, some genes get expressed, some get suppressed, some get lost.

36:52

Different things like that occur so that we see that the parent kind and eventually species come out of it.

36:59

That parent kind in the future could always theoretically make more of what we see coming from the different species, but the species can never go back upstream, so to speak.

37:10

We can't take a pair of poodles today and try to get back to the original kind that walked off the ark because it has to do with the genes that were already there to begin with.

37:19

So that's the background. To define a kind, what we would say, and you've read this, I'm sure, with CMI and AIG and ICR, is that we would define a kind pretty tightly to this fact.

37:30

If the two animals can relate and have progeny, have a kid, then they would be of the same created kind.

37:41

Now, it doesn't matter if it's a sterile kid or not, but just the fact that they can still reproduce would make them of the same kind.

37:47

One of the greatest evidences we have of this type of thing happening is almost every breed of house dog we see today was bred from just a few pairs of dogs about 600 years ago.

37:59

We've been able to breed out all these different – really, they're called subspecies because dogs are of their own species.

38:06

All house dogs are considered the same species. So now there's a subspecies of the different breeds, and they can all intermix today, and we see some really whacked -out breeds that are really bad.

38:17

We see some others that are pretty ingenious. The Akita is one. We call Akita a purebred, but Akita was actually a mix of a

38:25

Husky, a Great Dane, and – I can't remember the other one off the top of my head right now. Cat food. Yeah, cat food.

38:32

Akitas are beautiful. So can I address that real quick? Yeah, absolutely.

38:37

All right, sure. So both cats and dogs are part of the northern part of Aurora. So I wanted to ask you if it's possible for an animal that kind of floats intermediate between a cat and a dog, but it's not quite either, to kind of speciate and have lineages go one way and others and all of that.

38:56

Is that possible at all? And my second question for you is hyenas and wolves and hyenas and dogs are all part of the dog family, but they are definitely unable to interbreed.

39:09

So are they still of the same created kind? Can I address that real quick? Yeah, wolves and dogs can –

39:16

I'm talking about wolves and – I'm sorry, wolves and hyenas and I think hyenas. Hyenas I don't believe are considered of the same created kind.

39:24

Okay. I think they're still in the same taxonomical family though. Yeah, but see here's the problem is that you're speaking from a secular science perspective, right?

39:35

And from a secular science perspective, not you, but when the classifications, the

39:41

Linnaeus classification system was made initially and has been refined over time, is you look at the common characteristics and traits of animals for the most part and that's how you determine how closely related some are to others.

39:57

But there's a major assumption behind all that is that they all came from that original same cell billions of years ago.

40:03

So everything you're telling me is consistent with what you believe and what secular science says, but it is literally the exact opposite of what is taught biblically and what we believe as creation scientists.

40:15

So you're trying to pin me down into how do I take biblical kinds and stick them into the taxonomical structure.

40:24

It would be like me trying to tell you to take your taxonomical structure and shove it into the

40:29

Bible. If I could look at something real quick. If I could answer something real quick, just to point it out from an apologetic standpoint, you asked the question just a minute ago,

40:41

David, isn't it possible that you could have one animal transition into another kind?

40:49

Possible is the way you stated it. And what I want to want to point out is the possibilities, the probabilities, the supposing and all those things aren't science.

41:02

Those are just suppositions that are made in order to to try to boister the argument.

41:09

You know, you you pointed out Kamala Harris just a minute ago and her three different forms. But, you know, one thing

41:16

I tried to I don't know if it popped up or not. This is what is that? Does anybody know what that picture is?

41:23

That is the that is Kamala Harris. That's the project. This is said to be a 200 million year old what?

41:35

Alligator. I'm not sure right off the top of my head. I'm not a paleo expert. You don't have to be. You just have to look at it and say that's an alligator.

41:41

My point is, is if we're talking about the speciation, if we're talking about the fact that this thing evolved into something else from 200 million years to now, then where are the transitional kinds?

41:54

Where the transitional forms you presupposed that it was possible that the dingo turned into this or whatever, whatever animal it was.

42:03

I don't remember exactly what your wording was. And you're starting from the supposition, the possibilities.

42:09

And that leads me back to the question is, how do you know that is true? And have you ever observed it?

42:15

OK, those are the questions that we need to ask. All right. Sure. David, I do want to throw this quote up here real quick from from Five Souls Ministries, because this is a good answer and I didn't get into this because we got into something else.

42:29

But the reason why evolution is an attack on the church is this point alone. So thank you for this,

42:35

James. It's an attack on the church because it does not deny the sufficiency of scripture. If you deny its sufficiency here, you'll deny it in other places.

42:43

Amen. Bingo. Spot on. That's exactly the issue for for Christians, is that when we allow something like evolution into it, that's clearly not in the

42:53

Bible. We now allow lots of other things like women pastors, like homosexuality, like fill in the blank and it's allowed in there.

43:03

So, OK, David, go on. OK, sure. So I know I brought up in my presentation that we can look at genetics to pinpoint evolutionary history.

43:15

The same genetic information that helps me, I actually got my DNA sequenced from Ancestry .com

43:22

and they were actually able to tell me not only where my family came from, but when they came from and where they actually settled in the

43:30

United States, which I find to be quite fascinating. And we could use the same principle and show from genetics that humans, chimpanzees last shared a common ancestor about seven million years ago.

43:42

And we can do the same thing for cats and dogs and all the other kinds, just kind of pinpoint when and where that diverged.

43:50

And I say pointed out, we have independent lines of evidence. We have the molecular clock, we have the fossil record, and we have the radiometric dating that confirms the age of the fossil record and with the molecular clock.

44:04

So these three independent lines of evidence. OK, so we just started from your ancestry

44:12

DNA and we made it all the way back to those absolute definitives. I'm lost.

44:19

One thing I want to make sure, though, David, in all seriousness, is please, whatever you do, don't go rob a bank and leave your

44:25

DNA everywhere, because now they got you. Let me pull up the paper

44:32

I'm referring to. Oh, look at that. Matt Slick's joined in, too.

44:37

Thank you, Matt. Hey, Matt Slick. How are you? David, Australopithecine or Neanderthal?

44:43

I'm not quite sure what that question is. Yeah. Can you see my friend?

44:49

Maybe he's asking if that's who's in your ancestry. Well, I can answer

44:55

Neanderthals. Neanderthals are a sister clade to Homo sapiens. So they are a closely related species, but we did not descend from them and they did not descend from us.

45:09

That is what the genetics shows. One of the things that if we're going to start talking about genetics, we should really get into the nuts and bolts of genetics.

45:26

I saw a call me email was in here earlier. I don't know if you know, but he and I debated on here several months ago.

45:40

Yes, Matt Slick, I did smile. That was funny. Here's the nuts and bolts.

45:47

I'm going to ask you this question, David, because I love genetics. I love the idea of genetics. Obviously, I look at it from a different perspective than you do.

45:57

I look at genetics as a fine machine. I look at the genetics as an unbelievable creation, an unbelievable storage of information that humans will never be able to accomplish in terms of the efficiency of how much information is stored into such a little tight space.

46:16

It is absolutely amazing. Having said all that, I have to ask this question for you, for us to talk about genetics.

46:25

Do you believe in the evolutionary lineage, so to speak, that I don't care if we talk about pond scum or dirt or goo, whatever,

46:35

I don't know, but somehow we had stuff that randomly through chemical reactions came together into the initial cell?

46:44

Well, avian agenesis is a little bit of a different topic. I will be the first to admit that science does not yet have a solid working theory of avian agenesis.

46:54

I am not an expert on avian agenesis. I'll be the first to admit that we do not know.

47:00

I think that is the most honest position that we can say because it's the first for knowledge.

47:08

I don't know. Therefore, let's find out. There has been some fascinating, really fascinating research going into this, trying to pull up the

47:19

RNA bases. We know that amino acids and all of the other basic ingredients for life does exist in nature, so we just need a catalyst and all of that.

47:30

I honestly do not know much about avian agenesis or the working theories, so I am really not prepared.

47:38

Yeah, I'll help you with that, and then we'll ignore avian agenesis for a little bit. The reason why they have no working theories for it and the reason why—and

47:46

I appreciate your honest position, David. Here's the reality. It's impossible. It can't happen, and that's why evolutionists never want to talk about avian agenesis.

47:56

They always want to start at the single cell, and for right now, we can start at that single cell.

48:01

I'm fine with that. But that's why they start there is because there's literally no answers, and I can demonstrate within 5 to 10 minutes at most why it's impossible for that first cell to have formed, which destroys all of evolution.

48:18

It takes everything right out from under it. It pulls the rug out from under it, so to speak.

48:25

So let me ask you this question. You start with the initial cell, right? Okay. Now, for that to evolve according to secular science and to become all the life that we see today, where did all the information come from that allowed that single, simple cell to proliferate into everything we see today?

48:46

Because you would agree that I have more information in my body than that single cell did.

48:52

I would hope. Well, it all depends on how exactly do you find information or new information?

49:02

That's a loaded question. Well, yeah, and you'll see where I'm going with this. I know there was a mutation somewhere, and I think it was

49:10

E. coli or some other bacteria that enabled it to digest nylon. So the question that I have, is that new information?

49:19

I brought up HIV and how we know the steps that it took to evolve. So is that an example of new information?

49:27

Would that be new information? So one thing we don't want to confuse is a new function with new information.

49:36

And the reason why is this. We can go back to Darwin's finches, and Darwin wrongly assumed that the finches evolved differently, beak sizes and whatnot, because of the foods that were there.

49:51

And so in his model, which is the model of today, natural selection, is that the birds that couldn't chew the harder seeds, they died off because they had no food.

50:06

The ones that just so happened to have stronger beaks through fun mutations, they proliferated because they could eat and they could have more kids.

50:16

And eventually, you have lots of birds now that have thick beaks. I mean, that in a nutshell is what natural selection is.

50:25

And you would agree with that, right? Right. Basically, nature adds as a selective pressure.

50:30

Right. But here's the problem, is that that's not actually what happened, and we know that today.

50:35

Because those same finches that he looked at 150 years ago, we can see that because of epigenetics, the study of epigenetics, and the fact that it wasn't new mutations and new information that gave them that new function.

50:50

What it was instead was they already had the information programs within them. And the sensors are not in the environment that puts environmental pressures on the organism.

51:00

The sensors are actually within the body of the bird, within us humans, within all of God's creation, to be able to detect changes in the environment.

51:10

And with that, you have genes that switch on and off to help accommodate what those differences in environments are.

51:20

So when the bird's beak is not having an easy time eating its food, what ends up happening?

51:27

It triggers sensors, just like sensors like our touch sensors in our fingers and whatnot. It touches off sensors that causes now genetics to be expressed differently and allow their beaks to thicken, sometimes to lengthen.

51:42

And this happens literally with the same bird and the same generation. And those epigenetic changes can be passed on to future progeny.

51:51

So we've discovered these things, which would be an evolutionist's nightmare, but a creationist's haven, because this is exactly what we have talked about for years.

52:03

So going back to your E. coli thing, I have no problems with new functions accidentally being out there, or even maybe not accidental.

52:10

I would say, though, that it's not new information that magically appeared through mutation.

52:16

I would say that information was already there and is now being expressed where previously it wasn't.

52:23

And so basically, I want to make sure I understand your argument that God created them in such a way so that when they were exposed to nylon, this mutation turned on, that caused them to digest nylon.

52:40

Is that a fair representation of what you're arguing? It could be. So that could be an issue.

52:45

Or it could just be that based on all of the... Because E.

52:51

coli, the reason why they use it in research, for people to know, is because you can replicate it really fast. And so you can affect change really fast.

52:58

So it could be that the scientists in the laboratory were noticing certain things the E. coli could do, and they were purposely breeding certain

53:05

E. coli for that purpose. Very similar to dogs. We have dogs that are really good at hunting today.

53:11

Why? Because people 500 years ago looked at some dogs and said, Wow, these dogs seem to hunt better than those dogs.

53:17

I'm going to keep breeding those together and see what happens. And they get really good hunting dogs. And that's why you see some really cool breeds today that do some really cool things.

53:26

And then you've got some really garbage ones like poodles. Or, you know, for cats, like every type of house cat known to man is a garbage.

53:34

Hey, man. Yeah, I mean, they're all a waste as far as I'm concerned. Got to go back to tigers and lions and cool things.

53:43

Yeah, David, thank you. And you did represent it correctly. I just think that there's another option there as well.

53:49

But the bottom line is, is that it's not new information that appears as part of mutations.

53:56

So let me ask you a question. What would you accept as evidence for new information?

54:05

What would you accept as that? Yeah, well, new information means new information.

54:10

So it would be akin to we have a book. Now, I hesitate to use this, but it'll be a simple example without me getting into a lot of details of how to define information.

54:24

Because most people, I don't think, have a good definition of information. So information would be akin to we have a book, we have letters written in the book.

54:37

But it's not just letters, right? Those letters have to represent something. Those letters together have to represent something else, which are words.

54:44

Those words have to represent something else together, which are sentences and thoughts. Those thoughts all have to originate in a mind, immaterial, for those thoughts to be able to be put down into an actual language.

54:56

That would be a very simplistic model of what information would be. There's some more attributes to information that I'm not going to get into right now because we don't need it for our example.

55:08

What new information would be is I have a 10 -chapter book that makes sense.

55:14

We understand it. It's written well. It's not just gibberish. It's actually written in language. It's written by an intelligent being to another intelligent being to read everything.

55:23

If we add two or three more chapters to that book that are also intelligent, mean something, add more to the book and the meaning of the story that the originator is trying to convey through his book, that would be new information being added.

55:40

So that is now akin to that original cell. And I see

55:46

Date call me emo. He couldn't answer this question for two hours. He kept avoiding it. The issue is that for that single cell to turn into everything we see today, we would agree,

55:58

I would believe that human beings are much more complex and have lots more information because we have ears and complex eyes and we have hair and we have all kinds of things that that original cell didn't have.

56:10

And so we would have a lot more information. A dog would have a lot more information, a lot of it being different than what a human has.

56:16

And you could use different trees and plants and fish and every type of life out there has more information.

56:25

That is what I'm saying is where does the new information come from? Because you would have had to have literally, it's not even trillions, you're getting into trillions of trillions of trillions of new bits of information to eventually work its way into what scientists believe to be this taxonomic tree of life for all the life we see today.

56:48

That's the issue. Well, of course, we know we have different types of information because, of course, you said that information is a pretty vague term, correct, if I understood you correctly?

56:58

No, it's a very specific term. I'm doing my best to give a definition of it without bogging everybody down in the details.

57:07

I'm trying to give an analogy that gives a really good idea of what it is and giving some attributes of it.

57:13

All right. So would a duplication mutation be new information or an insertion mutation?

57:19

Yeah, no, because here's the problem. It would be like if I was born with a second nose, right, if I had a mutation,

57:27

I had a second nose. It's all the same information. It was just copied and stuck somewhere else and now it appears on my cheek.

57:33

So that's not new information either. I know secular scientists want to constantly point back to gene duplication as one of those things, but that's not new information.

57:45

They're not being honest when they do that. Okay. So, again, that's pretty much what evolution pretty much in all of biology does.

57:56

It's descent with modification. So they take what's there and they modify it. That's what basically mutations do.

58:01

They take this strand of DNA, this gene, and it duplicates or it inserts itself.

58:09

So, yeah, I'm not quite sure I understand your points. So is DNA just a random sequence of C, T, A, and G?

58:20

So for anyone who knows DNA, it's made of C, T, A, and G, and those are kind of plugged in, right, all along the way, billions of letters long.

58:30

Are they just randomly thrown in there? What do they represent? I don't think

58:37

I understand the question. So the genome is not just random

58:46

C, T, A, and G thrown in there, right, cytosine, tyrosine. I can't remember the other two right now.

58:54

But they're not just randomly thrown in there, are they? Okay, again, let's go back to our analogy of a book.

59:01

I have a bunch of letters. I could take a bunch of letters, and I could just toss them down, take an air dryer, blow them around.

59:11

And does that now make a written language? Well, it depends. I mean, humans are the ones that pretty much invented the letters.

59:23

Well, okay, we invented the letters, but we don't invent the thoughts, right?

59:31

So there's a thought. And that's my point is there's a thought. So there's information. That's a thought that is conveyed based upon the correct arrangement of those letters into groupings of letters, into groupings of groupings of letters, right?

59:47

I mean, that's when we read a book, when we're reading your slides here, there is information conveyed with those letters.

59:54

Those letters by themselves are meaningless. They may not even – like if we would walk into a cave, some ancient caveman before English was even created, you could see people who have written different symbols on the wall of caves.

01:00:11

And maybe they look like some of our modern -day letters. Are those letters representing language or are they just random symbols?

01:00:17

They're representing language. Well, we don't know that. We're assuming that, right? But that's my point is you read a book, and we make the assumption that that's a written language.

01:00:27

That's a good assumption. There's thought conveyed through that. All right, sure. So actually

01:00:32

I found this really good explanation here. So let's say here, a code -straining

01:00:41

DNA, let's say it contains the sequence CTT. You know what that codes for?

01:00:47

Just kind of curious if anyone knows. CTT actually codes for the amino acid leucine.

01:00:55

However, what if we were to modify those so that they were TCT? What happens then?

01:01:01

That DNA would then code for a new amino acid called serine instead of leucine.

01:01:07

So by simply rearranging these letters through insertion or duplication and all of that, you get completely new proteins, which can, of course, produce this new information.

01:01:19

Does that make sense? So I agree with you. So that means that if I take a book that have letters, let's assume that they're not typed into the pages, that they're just loose letters in a book.

01:01:32

So I read the book. It makes a lot of sense. And then if I just take some of the letters and just rearrange some of them, that's new information?

01:01:44

Again, I guess if I were to take a book, that's actually a good analogy.

01:01:50

We have a book. Let's say we have this thing here, and we rearrange it, and it becomes the origins of the species.

01:01:59

We rearrange those letters. Is that new information or no? I mean, again,

01:02:06

I don't think it's a great analogy to use from the logic of science.

01:02:15

The English language has, of course, the 26 letters, the bases. And if we combine these words, the amino acids, we arrange these words into sequences, which are the proteins, and arrange these sequences into paragraphs, which are the tissues, and we can use those paragraphs to make books, essays, et cetera, institute organisms.

01:02:33

Now, according to the creationist reasoning, it should be impossible to make any new information simply by arranging those 26 letters, which is what you're arguing, correct?

01:02:42

Well, yeah, but it's even more than that because, yeah, the issue is twofold.

01:02:47

Number one is it was an intelligent designer, us, who authored the book and rearranged those letters in such a way as to make it make sense.

01:03:01

We're conveying thoughts through there. That's number one. Number two is that to go from the single cell to, say, a human being in all the different stages, you have to not just have the thoughts in there, but you also have to have new letters being tossed in, a genome being increased.

01:03:27

That's where the new information is going to— starting point of new information to come from. Okay. So, again, we have the alphabet, the bases.

01:03:36

We arrange them differently. Is that really new information? I guess I don't quite understand what you're arguing here.

01:03:43

When we rearrange the letters in one way, we can create the Bible, but when we create them another way, it becomes the origins of the species.

01:03:51

Yeah. So is it a random—is this randomly happening, or is there somebody thinking who's actually using them?

01:03:59

This is why it's not the best analogy to use, but it's not the perfect analogy.

01:04:05

But when it comes to DNA, it is random mutations, and you can randomly rearrange one sequence for—that goes for one amino acid, and then a mutation happens that rearranges it and creates a whole new protein, or at least a different protein and a different amino acid, if that makes sense, such as rearranging the

01:04:30

CTC to TCT. You get a whole new amino acid. And so the thing is, when you rearrange those bases one way, you can end up with this organism, but rearrange it a different way, and it could be a different organism.

01:04:47

So here's what's so interesting about this. DNA is like this.

01:04:53

You would have a book. Let's say we have a really long page of a book, and there's all these words written on it, and some of those words mean something that are right next to one another.

01:05:05

But then we crinkle up this page and we turn it and twist it right into the double helix, and now all of a sudden there's not just a primary relationship between words next to one another in some cases, but you also have words next to each other in another dimension, right?

01:05:23

And then you have not only this double helix, but it's folded upon itself in a three -dimensional manner.

01:05:29

So now you have things that were at one end of the paper crumpled over to another end of the paper that actually work together.

01:05:38

There's different coding genes, right? So the information is literally on several different levels with DNA.

01:05:45

So we can't just rearrange letters and all of a sudden have new information because if you rearrange something here, you're going to mess up what's going on for the amino acids next door and the ones when it's folded up that it's communicating with.

01:06:01

So the information – and that's why the argument from a creationist perspective is that the information is already there and things species out of it because you can have those genes being turned off and on that are already present because we already know, and secular scientists would say, those genes can be turned off and on.

01:06:19

They don't know why. We as creationists know why, but they can be turned off and on.

01:06:25

But the secular science point of view is that somehow these mutations are magically able to add information into a genome when that's never been demonstrated.

01:06:41

And that's what my issue is. All secular scientists can say is we have a couple of examples of beneficial mutations where it seems like the function is slightly better or there's a slightly new function, but none of those demonstrate more information.

01:07:00

In fact, as far as we can tell, they all demonstrate still a net loss of information through mutations.

01:07:06

It just so happens to have a benefit in a specific environment and time. Sickle cell anemia is a classic example of this.

01:07:14

Yeah, I actually like that example, sickle cell anemia. By the way, this is a fascinating thing to know, is that the mutation that caused sickle cell anemia was basically a double -edged sword.

01:07:27

It kind of converted resistance to malaria. However, it had a harmful effect if there was like a right combination or whatever.

01:07:37

And so to begin with, the sickle cell, this mutation was initially beneficial because it conferred resistance to malaria, which is quite deadly.

01:07:51

However, eventually, I think malaria actually was able to evolve to overcome that effect there.

01:07:58

No, it hasn't. It's still a benefit. Okay, so let me ask you this.

01:08:06

For people who don't know, the way that oxygen gets carried through our bodies is through hemoglobin.

01:08:14

If you took two dish plates, dishes are kind of like the part that you eat off of is wide, and then the base of it's usually smaller.

01:08:26

So if you can take two plates and put the bases together, where the bigger sides are facing out and the smaller sides are together, that would be what a hemoglobin kind of looks like.

01:08:35

It's a biconcave disk, two disks, biconcave. And so these two disks, and this is what carries lots of oxygen.

01:08:44

I think it's like 16 molecules of oxygen per hemoglobin through the bloodstream. So the blood comes through the lungs, gets oxygenated, dumps off the carbon dioxide, and keeps going through the bloodstream.

01:08:56

What a sickle cell anemia is is when one amino acid on the second beta chain, so one amino acid of all the amino acids that make up the hemoglobin, one amino acid is accidentally switched out in this mutation, and it causes this biconcave disk now to look like a sickle.

01:09:16

One amino acid does this, changes the whole thing. And now it can't carry nearly as much oxygen.

01:09:22

It can carry only a fraction of the oxygen through the bloodstream than what regular hemoglobin can do.

01:09:30

So I ask this question, it's a benefit accidentally because it just so happens that the way malaria attacks us is on the hemoglobin.

01:09:39

It now can't attack us on the hemoglobin, so the person won't die of malaria. But that person has a genetic mutation that causes them permanent damage throughout life.

01:09:52

They are at a genetic disadvantage in a normal state. They're at a genetic disadvantage even in an area of malaria, but it just so happens they won't die of malaria.

01:10:00

So this is a mutation that didn't add information. We would argue that there was a loss of information because now the hemoglobin is half -dead.

01:10:13

Okay, so, and again, I think it's sickle cell anemia,

01:10:19

I think it's when it is a proper carrier. Let me look at sickle cell anemia because this is definitely a—

01:10:31

But we don't need all the details in it. We bring this up because sickle cell anemia is a classic case of a beneficial mutation.

01:10:40

There's a function there. That person with sickle cell anemia can't get—they won't die of malaria.

01:10:48

So that's a benefit, right? They have a benefit. There's a new function, so to speak, for them, but yet it was a loss of information.

01:10:57

It wasn't a gain. In every case we have of these supposed beneficial mutations, and you can look at your science, you can look this up right now, it's estimated that there's only, out of every 10 ,000 mutations, only one to two out of every 10 ,000 are what we call beneficial.

01:11:19

Every other mutation is known to have a neutral or negative effect, and they all are a net loss of information.

01:11:25

But even the beneficial mutations like sickle cell anemia or antibiotic -resistant bacteria, they both result in a loss of information.

01:11:36

All right, sure. Is it about a loop? Okay, so let me give you an interesting example.

01:11:43

A virus here evolved a completely new protein code that was a random sequence that was removed and replaced with a different random sequence, and after a few generations, the non -functional polypeptide sequence gained function as a new protein code that was different from the one that was removed.

01:12:01

Very fascinating research paper. Would this be new information? Well, I would have to see the study, but you said a scientist spliced in something into the genome, right?

01:12:12

Yeah, the virus evolved a new protein. Do you want me to pull up the paper? Yeah, I mean, it's probably not— if you want to pull it up, that's fine.

01:12:20

We can discuss it. The problem is until it gets looked at by creationists,

01:12:28

I'm not aware of this paper, but what I am aware of is that there still has not been one demonstrable mutation that has increased functional genetic information over time.

01:12:42

We don't see this at all. All right, so again, what would you accept as that?

01:12:47

Would the example from HIV, SIV becoming HIV, be sufficient?

01:12:54

Why or why not? Does it have to involve all these different mutations to overcome human tetherin and be able to infect humans?

01:13:04

Well, the problem is that is a— first of all, that is a proposed idea for SIV to HIV.

01:13:13

We don't even know if that's true. I understand, correct. Yeah, no, we don't. And number two is we still don't understand the mechanism of it.

01:13:20

So just because something, quote -unquote, what you would say evolves, doesn't mean that that's actually evolution happening.

01:13:29

It's—what we see in every case is it's epigenetics. It is genes being turned off and on of genes that are already present there.

01:13:38

Okay, so they already had— so this SIV virus already had these genes, so when they jumped over to infect humans in the late 1800s, early 1900s, that it began to switch on and off?

01:13:51

Is that what you're arguing? That it would have the ability to do that. That's correct, if that is indeed what happened.

01:13:58

I know that's the theory, is that a monkey bit a human, eventually— No, I think the hypothesis is that humans in Africa that use monkeys and chimpanzees for meat must have gotten infected from a cat or whatever.

01:14:14

Yeah, I've heard that. I've heard bestiality. There's a number of ideas on that, but it doesn't change the issue, is that we would argue that the genes were already present.

01:14:28

Okay. Yeah. Okay, so what would you accept,

01:14:33

I guess, a gene that's not already present? I don't understand what—

01:14:39

Yeah, I mean, here's the problem, is that has macroevolution from a creationist perspective and from a secular science perspective— we're not talking speciation here.

01:14:51

Nobody—we talked even before the show. We both agree on speciation. The difference we have is that a secular scientist believes that new species evolve out of mutations.

01:15:04

No, that's kind of more of a strawman understanding of it. So what happens— Can you repeat that again, then? Okay, sure.

01:15:09

So here's how speciation, I guess, happens. We have a population, and eventually what happens is they confer their own unique mutations, and they have a genetic barrier.

01:15:25

So this population can no longer interbreed with this population due to some type of barrier, and it's basically the same exact thing as language.

01:15:33

Language evolves the same exact way speciation happens. Yeah, but that's called genetic drift.

01:15:41

I get genetic drift. I wrote about it in my book. The issue with what you're saying is that where did the information come from that caused the speciation?

01:15:51

Because you just threw in the term quickly on mutation, and you talk about two different gene pools. I don't have an issue with the explanation, so to speak, because we see that type of speciation in human beings.

01:16:04

Not that we're different species, but the fact that there's different characteristics among different people groups is a testament to genetic drift.

01:16:15

There's a reason why Mediterranean, like myself, Italian, look different than you, who is probably

01:16:20

Irish, Scottish, I guess Northern European. Yeah, you got it.

01:16:26

Yeah. I didn't even have to look at your government DNA. But so there's a reason why we look slightly different, and a lot of people of your region look the way you do, and a lot of people of my region look the way

01:16:42

I do, is because of this genetic drift and different genes being expressed.

01:16:48

So I don't disagree with you on that. What I'm asking about, though, is where did the information come from that caused the new species to occur?

01:16:57

And so much so that eventually you get something that evolves into a dog, and you get that same thing that can go the other way and evolve into a cat.

01:17:07

I don't know if I understand the question. Starting from the cell, again,

01:17:13

I have not studied abiogenesis, and I'm not quite familiar with the entire theories of all that.

01:17:21

Well, it depends. I mean, if you want to throw away the theory of evolution, well, the hypothesis of evolution really fast and start reading the

01:17:32

Bible again, you'll start studying abiogenesis, because it's impossible. If you start with the cell, it'll be different.

01:17:38

Okay, sure. Let me pull this up, because I think this is called the Phylogenetic Explorer Project.

01:17:45

Let me go back a little bit. David, if I could ask a question.

01:17:53

Sure, go right ahead. How are you, my friend? Standing for Truth is a good friend of mine.

01:17:58

I see him in the comments section. He's a good guy. I've seen him a couple times. Is he a Christian?

01:18:04

Is he an atheist? He's a young earth creationist. He does a lot of debates on his channel. He's a good friend of mine.

01:18:10

Okay. So, David, do you consider yourself to be an atheist and agnostic? I'm an atheist.

01:18:17

So you suppress the truth and unrighteousness, is what the Bible would say. And the reason

01:18:24

I'm saying this is because, and I want to kind of just push you on this a little bit. Everything that I've heard you say so far is, you said this peer -reviewed paper, this paper, only pull that paper up.

01:18:34

For the past half hour, I've quietly sat by, and you keep pulling papers up, trying to have a rescuing device.

01:18:41

So -and -so had this paper, and somebody had this theory, and somebody had this thought. When did you go from being a person who believed in God, who worshiped

01:18:51

God, who believed that He had saved your soul, to going to, oh, I can't believe the

01:18:57

Scripture because it doesn't fit my narrative, so I'm going to believe all these other opinions. I mean,

01:19:03

I'm having a difficult time understanding this. You're not defending your argument. You're defending everyone else's papers.

01:19:11

Well, along, I would say evolution is probably not the definitive thing that caused me to leave

01:19:19

Christianity. I was more or less kind of examining the messianic texts and all, like the, one of the things

01:19:26

I was doing, and I'm actually doing this on my channel, where I go through the messianic prophecies that, because this is probably the argument that sold me the most, was the evidence from the messianic prophecies that Jesus allegedly fulfilled, and the resurrection.

01:19:40

These are the top two arguments when I was a Christian that convinced me of the truth of Christianity. When I went beneath the surface of Christianity, when

01:19:47

I started digging into these messianic texts, I found that they were all misquotes, out of context, mistranslated, and when

01:19:58

I got into the issues of textual criticism, I found that there are so many significant textual variations within the

01:20:08

New Testament that I couldn't really believe that this would be from God.

01:20:16

Does that make any sense? I'm trying to wrap my head around this.

01:20:24

You went to the Old Testament text and you saw some kind of supposed contradiction between the

01:20:33

Old Testament text of the Messiah and what he would be and what he would do. Over 300 -some -odd texts that dealt with the

01:20:41

Messiahship, his authenticity, who he would be, how to identify who he would be, what he would do, how he would come, all the things that he would say, the voluntary and involuntary statements that were made, and you went from being a person who had been broken for truth, who had recognized your vileness and your sin, that you made a profession of faith in Jesus Christ, to being a person that went to find something wrong with the

01:21:17

Scripture. I'm having a hard time understanding that. Of course. I guess let me give you an example of one of these messianic prophecies, and the virgin prophecy,

01:21:31

Matthew quotes it, now all this took place to fulfill what was broken by the Lord through their prophet.

01:21:37

Behold, the virgin shall be with child and shall bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel. However, when I actually went in and dug beneath this text in Isaiah 7 -14,

01:21:45

I realized that the woman, number one, is not a virgin, and that she's already pregnant according to the Hebrew text.

01:21:51

And another example, in Matthew 2 -15, he remained there until the death of her, and to fulfill out of Egypt, I have called my son, that is quoting

01:22:01

Hosea 11 -1. However, when I read Hosea 11 in context, out of it, when

01:22:09

Israel was a youth, the text is talking about Israel. It's not even a messianic prophecy. Okay, slow down.

01:22:18

We need to back up and breathe this a little bit, because you're throwing things like 100 miles an hour trying to get something to stick, and it's not working that way.

01:22:25

Before you ask, Justin, I do want to ask you, David, just for clarification purposes, because you wrote to me, kind of like your background, and I don't know if you wanted to tell the audience where you stand now.

01:22:41

You said you left Christianity. We would say that you were never saved, and that's a present truth about him and your sin, and you've moved on to a

01:22:52

God you've created in your own image. Okay, having said all that, you say you converted to something else.

01:22:58

Yeah, I converted to Judaism, and eventually I was

01:23:06

Orthodox Jewish, and I'm kind of now Reformed Humanist Atheist Jew, so that's where I stand,

01:23:14

I guess. I guess I want to make sure everyone here knows this. You still consider yourself a

01:23:21

Jew, but you're an Atheist Jew. Correct. Correct. Humanist Atheist.

01:23:30

Before we get into that, do you, Justin, want to kind of address some of the issues that I had with the

01:23:36

Messianic texts? Yeah, I want him to do that. I just wanted the audience to kind of know where you're coming from, because that was kind of like out in left field.

01:23:46

That's cool. Yeah, you guys, go ahead. Yeah, sure. So, you're a former

01:23:54

Christian, former Jewish Atheist Humanist?

01:24:02

I'm trying to understand what you're telling us, because it seems to me like you're jumping all over the board to try to fit your own suppositions, and from what

01:24:11

I'm hearing you say is you started out with Matthew, and you were reading the Scripture. Can you tell me how long ago this was that you just started reading the

01:24:19

Scripture and decided it can be true? So, this kind of was a process that started kind of in middle school.

01:24:26

So, this was a pretty long process for me. So, this isn't something that kind of happened overnight, but it was accumulation of learning these texts.

01:24:35

Okay, this is what my pastor was teaching, that Jesus is the Messiah because of these

01:24:41

Messianic prophecies. So, let's find out what these Messianic prophecies are, and let's dig beneath the surface.

01:24:48

Okay, before we get further into this, by definition, a

01:24:55

Jew comes from the, you know, it comes out of the Scripture.

01:25:01

A Jewish person comes from the line of Israel, of Jacob, right?

01:25:08

So, can you explain to me how you can be an atheistic Jew? I mean,

01:25:13

I'm confused on that. I just want to make sure that everybody, because what I'm seeing, there's several people saying that you're kind of all over the place, and I want to kind of batten you down.

01:25:24

Are you willing to abandon being an atheistic Jew, or a Messianic Christian, or an atheist?

01:25:31

I mean, I'm proud of it. I'm willing to go wherever the evidence leads. Well, apparently not, because you've went to three different routes that you're trying to take to find whatever fits your narrative.

01:25:44

And the reason I'm saying that is, you started off in this entire comment, entire show, saying, well, atheism is a fact.

01:25:54

Okay, show us the fact. You actually did, in your actual PowerPoint outline, you said atheism is a fact.

01:26:02

Or, I'm sorry, evolution is a fact. But as I said, evolution does not prove atheism, period.

01:26:09

Okay, well, you said that evolution is a fact.

01:26:15

In order for you to believe in evolution, you have to start with that there was some cosmic starting point, correct?

01:26:23

Correct. If you believe a cosmic starting point, was it self -starting, or was it eternal, or was it created by something, an outside force?

01:26:33

Those are your three possibilities, according to our great teacher, Andrew Rappaport. Sure, so one minute, please.

01:26:44

So, one second. Pulling off this excellent lecture real quick.

01:26:53

While you're pulling that up, for anybody who wants to come in and ask either my summer questions, or ask

01:26:59

David here any questions, feel free to either put them into the chat, or if you want to come on live, because we always love live guests in here, come on in live, and you'll be able to ask those questions live.

01:27:14

Go to apologeticslive .org, scroll to the bottom. When you see the duck symbol, click on it, and you'll be able to evolve right onto this page.

01:27:27

Okay, sure. So, we kind of jumped around a lot of different places. I guess, going back to the issues of the

01:27:34

Messianic prophecies, I felt that the Messianic prophecies that allegedly point to Jesus simply didn't hold any weight.

01:27:43

Okay, before you say they didn't hold weight, what studies did you do that would have led you to believe they didn't hold weight when there have been 2 ,000 years of study?

01:27:53

And I'll say this, there have been 6 ,000 years of study to try to figure out what is the

01:27:59

Proto -Evangelion. You do know what that is, right? Proto -Evangelion, I think that is the word, or whatever.

01:28:05

I know that's Greek, but I cannot remember exactly what the term is. Okay, that's the first gospel.

01:28:11

That's in Genesis 3 .15. Anthony would love to hear that out of Genesis. The reason is because as the man fell from the perfect state of goodness, where God had created everything in six 24 -hour days, and in about a week's time they decided to fall.

01:28:29

I don't know how long it was, but they were teenagers for sure because they didn't want to listen to God and didn't want to believe God. That's every parent's nightmare in life.

01:28:38

So they were teenagers for sure. They didn't want to listen to God. They didn't want to believe in God. And so they looked for anything outside of that, and an atheist come along and says,

01:28:47

God can't be real. He says, you can't believe God. And that atheist was a snake. And he was the first one that denied

01:28:54

God and His truthfulness. And what you've done is you've grabbed a hold of that.

01:29:00

The Proto -Evangelion is that their promise would be that the Redeemer would come. And the very first scripture that tells us that,

01:29:10

I'll pull it up. Genesis 3 .15. And actually

01:29:15

I would argue that the snake wasn't an atheist. I'd argue that he was a theist because Satan knows

01:29:22

God better than any of us do. But before you go there, how many atheists are theists?

01:29:29

Every one of them. So they all know that God exists. So if you go to Genesis 3 .15,

01:29:36

it says, and I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed, and he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.

01:29:45

Now this is the Proto -Evangelion. It's the promise. Listen to this. This is talking to the serpent, to Satan, to the serpent.

01:29:53

God says, I will put enmity between you and the woman. Okay? Now there are some people that teach that this is

01:30:01

Israel, but more specifically, the specific seed is this.

01:30:07

And between your seed and her seed. This is specific. The language here, according to many

01:30:14

Jewish scholars, the language here says the woman indicates that there would be no man, that there would be the woman, which would be the virgin.

01:30:24

And you shall bruise him on his heel, and he shall bruise you on the head.

01:30:29

And this, atomic apologetics says Mary, and that's right. This is an actual discussion from Genesis 3 .15

01:30:38

about the miraculous coming of the Redeemer, the one that would redeem and buy back

01:30:44

God's people. There would be a separation between the people of the world and the people of God, or if you wanted to say the people of Satan and the people of God, through the virgin and her specific seed.

01:30:57

And if you see here, it says he shall bruise your head. The he here is specific.

01:31:03

It is intended to be a specific. It's not a general. It's not they. It is a qualifier that it would be one.

01:31:11

It would be a specific one. And as we go throughout the Scripture, and we look further all the way down through the many passages of the

01:31:20

Messianic passages, this being the very first one, we come to understand what

01:31:26

Matthew is saying. Behold, the virgin shall be called shall be with child.

01:31:31

And that goes specifically back to Genesis 3 .15. But it's quoting

01:31:37

Isaiah 7 .14. Okay. Okay, let's go ahead and go to that. Let's go ahead and go to that one, too, and just give me just a second.

01:31:46

And the reason I want to point this out, let's see. Give me a half second here.

01:31:57

Isaiah 7 .14 says that a specific language being used of the promise that was made in Genesis.

01:32:09

Now, if you'll read along with me, put it in the chat so everybody can see it. If you'll read along with me, it says, therefore, the

01:32:15

Lord himself, it is God himself doing this. Behold, a virgin will be with child.

01:32:23

And that goes specifically back to Genesis 3 .15. It goes specifically back to Genesis 3 .15

01:32:30

that says, here's Isaiah 7 .14.

01:32:37

Go back to Genesis 3 .15. I will put enmity between you and I will put enmity. This is

01:32:42

God himself saying to Satan that I will put an enemy, a hatred between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed.

01:32:54

And the seed is specific. He shall bruise you on the head being a killing blow and you shall bruise him on the hill being a wound that's not unto death.

01:33:05

Now, what you have to understand here is all three of those while I understand that maybe your pastor or somebody else, and I'm not trying to impugn them, that they may not have done a good job trying to explain that to you.

01:33:18

But all the way through the Scripture, what you see is a definitive narrative about who the

01:33:26

Messiah is and what are the circumstances about his coming. Okay? Okay.

01:33:32

So actually Isaiah 7 .14 actually says the young woman is with child. She's already pregnant.

01:33:38

She is not a virgin in Isaiah 7 .14. Okay. Behold, therefore, the

01:33:44

Lord Himself will give you a sign. It's not happening at this very second. The Lord Himself will give you a sign.

01:33:50

This is a sign that is coming. It's not saying that in the time of Isaiah 7 .14

01:33:56

that this is happening. This is saying that when this prophecy is fulfilled, it is fulfilled at a certain point in time and the evidence of this prophecy being fulfilled is that at a specific point in time, a virgin will be with child and bear a son and they will call his name

01:34:16

Immanuel. Now, if you want to go to Luke chapter 2... Okay, sure. If I can address that real quick.

01:34:23

The NASB does not translate that verse correctly. That is an incorrect translation. Okay. And how did you determine that?

01:34:30

By reading the Hebrew. Okay. So the Hebrew is... Let's see.

01:34:38

It says The NASB translates this verse correctly.

01:34:46

The New Revised Standard Version translates this... And you're looking at a difference how?

01:34:59

So let's listen to what the language says. Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign.

01:35:06

It's not saying that the sign is specifically happening right now. It's a promise that when you see this in Matthew, when you see this in Luke, when you see this in the narrative here in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John that tell us about Christ, when you see in Matthew, Mark, and Luke what's going on, and you look in Isaiah chapter 7 verse 14, this is telling us specifically that when you see this specific prophecy taking place, then you will know that that is the prophetic truth.

01:35:43

All right. Sure. So the Lord Himself will give you a sign. Who's the you? The people that are there at the time.

01:35:50

Correct. So Ahaz and the house of David. No. No. No. You're misunderstanding.

01:35:58

It's those people that are there at the time. Now if you want to go... If you want to look at Luke chapter 2, for example, because that is a good fleshing out of that truth.

01:36:10

Luke chapter 2 tells us in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus. We're getting close to Christmas, and we're looking at all this beautiful stuff going on in this.

01:36:21

We see that... Let's see if I can just pull this up. Hold on just a second. Anthony's being all quiet over there.

01:36:32

Can everybody see this? I'm letting you guys do your... Okay. Luke chapter 2.

01:36:37

Can everybody see this screen on my screen share? I just want to make sure.

01:36:45

In those days, the decree went out from Caesar Augustus that should be registered or taxed.

01:36:52

That is that they're going to give an account for who they are, and they're going to be registered. This is the first registration when

01:36:57

Crianius was governor of Syria, and they all went to be registered, each to his own town. Joseph went up from Galilee.

01:37:04

All of this fulfilled Scripture. And the town of Nazareth to Judea, the city of David, which is called

01:37:10

Bethlehem. And this fulfills Scripture as well, that it be specifically from the town of Bethlehem.

01:37:15

Because he was the house and the line of David, lineage of David, to be registered with his wife, his betrothed, who was with child.

01:37:26

And when they were there, the time came for her to give birth. So this is saying that she was with child, and when they got there to Bethlehem, she was ready to give birth.

01:37:40

And she gave birth to her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid in him a manger, because there was no place for them at the inn.

01:37:47

And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night. And what does this say?

01:37:53

And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were filled with great fear.

01:38:01

And the angel said to them, Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.

01:38:10

For unto you this day is born in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord, and you will see a sign for you.

01:38:17

You will find a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes. Now who's it for?

01:38:24

The shepherds. The shepherds and those that were there in the field. If you go back to the language, it says to you that you see the ones that see the sign, and that is the shepherds, and it would be

01:38:38

Mary, and it would be Joseph, and it would be the shepherds and anyone else. Also we notice that it is the wise men, probably wasn't three, but it is the wise men as well.

01:38:49

So, just so that we all understand what's going on there, in the language and in the context, in Isaiah chapter 7 verse 14, the you here are the same you in Luke chapter 2 that are seeing the actual sign take place.

01:39:07

Does that help you with that? Not really, and here's why.

01:39:14

Because this, of course, a sign has to be seen, and nobody saw the virgin birth.

01:39:19

According to the Gospels, everyone assumed that he was Joseph's biological son, and finally nobody knew that Jesus was actually born in Bethlehem.

01:39:29

In fact, in John 7, 42, there is an interesting passage where the people are talking about him, and someone said, has not the scripture said that the

01:39:41

Messiah is descended from David that comes from Bethlehem, the village where David lived? And so there was a division among them.

01:39:49

So not only, the problem is nobody saw the virgin birth. There's no real reason to believe it, as extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

01:39:58

And finally, nobody, at least in the time of Jesus, understood that Jesus was even born in Bethlehem.

01:40:06

In fact, there's another interesting passage in Mark chapter... Actually, hold on, I've got to stop you there. Okay, I've got to stop you there.

01:40:14

Herod comes over to the... Herod comes over to his prophets, and he says, why haven't you found this

01:40:20

Messiah that they thought he was supposed to be a man? When the Magi came, they said, where is the baby so that we may come and worship him?

01:40:29

They were thousands of miles away. They came to come and worship because they saw his sign in the heavens.

01:40:35

They saw that he would come. They came to worship him, and as they got there, they looked at the scripture, and they found that he would be born in Bethlehem, according to the

01:40:48

Old Testament. He would be born of a virgin, according to the Old Testament. They explained it to him, and he said to them, to the

01:40:56

Magi, you go and find him and let me know, because I want to worship also. Of course,

01:41:02

Herod was lying. I'm sorry, excuse me? I said, of course, Herod was lying in the passage. But even if he was lying, he was still admitting that he had an enemy who was a king.

01:41:12

He was a king, and he knew it because he wanted to go and kill all the little children. The end result was he went to go kill all the little children.

01:41:21

They knew that it wasn't lying, and they went after to worship the king of the

01:41:26

Jews, and he did not deny that. Okay, and what evidence is there that this actually took place?

01:41:34

And here's why I say this, is because when you compare the chronology, chronological order of events in Matthew and Luke, you see that they are very different contradictory chronologies, and the

01:41:48

Luke's gospel, they come from Nazareth, go to Jerusalem, go to Bethlehem, give birth in Bethlehem, and go to Jerusalem, fulfill the temple requirements, and after they're done at the temple, they go back to Nazareth.

01:42:01

However, in Matthew, they start in Bethlehem, go down to Egypt for a couple years, and then after that, go all the way back up to Nazareth.

01:42:11

So the chronologies are not... You're skewing all kinds of Bible passages that you just don't know anything about, and I'm not trying to be insulting, but here's the problem

01:42:23

I'm seeing. You are trying to look for any reason in the world that you can find where the

01:42:29

Bible can't be the absolute truth of the Word of God. It can't be the truth, it can't be authoritative to you, because and I mean, look, we all start from a foundation of an axiom, and that axiom is that we know

01:42:42

God exists, and I'll prove that to you. I mean, not just saying, okay, you started out by telling everybody that you used to be a

01:42:50

Christian. So did the God that you believed in, did He save you, or did

01:42:56

He not? Well, I mean, I believed in Jesus, I accepted Him, and I got baptized, so I guess by all metrics,

01:43:04

I was saved. Okay, but actually, you're a false convert, according to the Scripture, because you ran away.

01:43:11

But the point is, you started out knowing God exists. You started with the same axiom that Romans 1 tells us, that we all have, that we all have been given a conscience that bears witness for us against us, that we all have been given an understanding that God exists, and that He has spoken to us through the

01:43:29

Scripture. As Andrew loves to say, God exists, and He has spoken. I've taken that,

01:43:35

I'm going to staple that to my forehead so everybody can see it from now on. You see, the whole point is this, you know that God exists, and that's your axiom.

01:43:43

Your presupposition is, we have to find out a way that God can't be right. So you're trying to appeal to every paper that you can find, and every axiom that you can find, to try to push the narrative because of your guilty conscience.

01:43:59

I mean, why would you come to Christ anyway as a child? Was it because you were such a good person and so great, and you thought, hey, you know what, there's that Jesus too, or because He would save you from sin?

01:44:12

Well, I accepted Jesus because that's what my family was. They were Christians. Okay, but why?

01:44:17

Did it have anything to do with sin at all? I can't remember that far. I was like five years old when

01:44:23

I supposedly accepted Jesus. Okay. So maybe

01:44:28

I didn't really have a full understanding of sin and all that when I was a five -year -old kid. So what do you understand as moral truth?

01:44:35

Well, moral morality is that which reduces harm. So actions that—so kind of going off in moral theory, so that's kind of where I stand.

01:44:51

There is, of course, I believe, objective moral standards. It's always wrong to rape. It's always wrong— By what standard?

01:44:57

By the standard of reducing harm. And what is that—how do you define that? Well, I think it's pretty obvious.

01:45:07

We humans are a social animal, and when the people who cooperate are better able to survive than pass on their genetics, if we had a society where everyone was going around murdering people, raping everyone, and stealing everything, we would have a chaotic system that would completely collapse.

01:45:28

So that is how I understand how morality and ethics evolved, and we see—

01:45:33

Wait, wait, wait. Anyway, that's completely off -topic from the Earth. No, actually, it's not off -topic at all.

01:45:39

Evolution would say that we should kill off all the weaker so that we can preserve the limited natural resources for the stronger.

01:45:47

And who cares if we— I mean, if we rape, then I get to give my seed to more people and be able to have more, right?

01:45:57

I mean, this—rape should be really, really good. Killing should be really good. Hold on, but you're saying no wrong.

01:46:04

This is evolution. You believe in evolution. This is what the whole animal kingdom does, is they have sex with whoever they want.

01:46:12

If all the kids—the pride of the lion, pride, goes and has sex with as many lionesses as he possibly can.

01:46:19

And kills off the babies that are— Kills off the babies that are from other fathers. He kills off other fathers.

01:46:26

He has the hugest territory. I mean, this is evolution in action. Why would—and evolutionists believe that we are just animals.

01:46:33

So why would you have a different moral standard than the entire world has in the animal kingdom?

01:46:39

It doesn't make any sense. See, David, here's what's going on, and the reason we're trying to talk to you about this—

01:46:44

I don't mean to get all excited. I'm just like, this is literally two worldviews in collision.

01:46:49

Colliding. Exactly. Colliding. See, David, here's what you have to think about. You're coming from this point of there is no

01:46:57

God, and this God explains morality, creation, and everything in between.

01:47:03

He explains the reason why. He explains that we have all failed because we're not good to each other.

01:47:10

We're not loving to each other. We do all kinds of bad dirt to each other all the time. And not only that, we fail

01:47:17

His perfect standards. You know, you talk about doing the most good as the standard.

01:47:23

So I asked the last atheist I talked to, and he couldn't give an answer for this. I asked the last one last week.

01:47:29

Did I not? If doing the most good is the standard, and the standard of Christianity is to love your enemies, do good to those that mistreat you, to care for one another, to outdo one another in love and good works, to show the most humility and love and respect to each other, if doing the most good is to care for the lost, care for the homeless, care for those that are hurt and mistreated, if doing the most good is defined by that according to the

01:47:55

Bible, and the most good is to see to it that your eternal life is not spent in hell, but spent with God, then why would you not run to that flee from atheism that says the most good is the one that's the strongest?

01:48:12

Why wouldn't you do that? It is not a strong man. It is not a strong man.

01:48:17

What is survival of the fittest? Survival of the fittest is the ability to reproduce and pass on genetics.

01:48:24

That being said, a society requires cooperation.

01:48:30

Yes, it does. There is no way you can tell me that society requires cooperation when in order for a germ to become a better species of germ, if you want to call it that, a more evolved kind of germ, it has to be able to kill off everything else in order for it to grow into the better species.

01:48:54

You talked about HIV and AIDS, and you started out talking about the DNA sequences.

01:49:00

In order for it to do its job better, and for it to proliferate and grow better, it has to be able to kill more things.

01:49:07

It has to be able to overtake and kill more things, more cells. Okay? Anthony just talked to you about the animals, the lions.

01:49:15

I'm going to tell you, we don't see that as immoral for lions to go out and kill other animals and to kill smaller lions.

01:49:23

That's because they're not moral agents. If we came from the same evolutionary tree as lions, then why would we be moral agents and they're not?

01:49:36

It doesn't make any sense. Your arguments aren't holding weight to morality, and that's why I keep saying that every single issue goes back to morality.

01:49:45

Because the reason you want atheism and evolution and the reason you keep pulling up paper after paper after paper is you want to deny the

01:49:54

God that has given you a conscience. He has given you the reality that you are a sinner in the sight of a holy

01:50:01

God and that you need to know Him and you need to come to repentance. I think we've done an excellent job.

01:50:07

Anthony is a great teacher when it comes to stuff. Andrew is a great teacher when it comes to stuff. I just happen to be in the way, but I'm just going to tell you.

01:50:17

We're at an hour and 50 minutes in, and I just want to tell you this. We care for your soul, and you seem like a nice young man.

01:50:25

But the problem is you started with God as your axiom according to Scripture.

01:50:32

Romans 1 tells us this, that we all start with God. We all are without excuse, and yet you're running from God.

01:50:41

By God's grace, He has shown us the reality of His truth, and we run to Him because He's given us the grace of repentance.

01:50:49

It doesn't sound to me like you've ever dealt with your sin issue, and you're trying to capitulate sin and say that it is just part of the selective, natural selection process.

01:51:02

And here's my problem. You will say there's nothing wrong with a lion that goes out and kills all the other male lions, murders all of the baby lions to force all of the pride of lions to go into heat so that he can have sex with all of them.

01:51:20

You'll say nothing wrong with that. But when anybody else says, you know what, as a human being,

01:51:26

I want to proliferate the greatest good by killing off every man in my community, taking every child and throwing them in the ditch, as Adolf Hitler would have done, and raping all the women, as Genghis Khan did, to proliferate his genetic line, or my genetic line.

01:51:52

You can say straw man all you want to, but I'm giving you the perfect analogy for what you're talking about.

01:52:03

I'm asking you, not as a straw man, how is it wrong for me to do that if it's not wrong for me to do that in any other situation?

01:52:13

Well, I mean, it is wrong because number one, it increases harm and it would cause societal collapse if everyone was doing it.

01:52:20

Not ultimately. No, it does not. But who cares? Who cares? But not ultimately. No, think about this.

01:52:27

If I'm Genghis Khan, killed 220 million people, estimate, and he raped one out of five women, his genetic line is still alive today and they can trace it back to Genghis Khan.

01:52:42

He killed off enemies, bad people, murderers, robbers, rapists, thieves. He killed off anybody that was causing trouble for all his friends and buddies.

01:52:51

And he created a dynasty that was thousands of his own progeny, built up an empire, and then was brought down to nothing.

01:53:05

Let me ask you a question. If he had been able to completely do everything that he had planned on doing, and all of his empire was built around moral good, love, grace, kindness, and everything else, would his actions have been good?

01:53:22

No, because he ends does not justify the means. According to who? According to what

01:53:28

I think is pretty obvious. According to you. You just went to your own subjective mindset.

01:53:36

And so the difference between us and you is you're dealing with subjective reasoning, your own opinion, because you can't stand the facts that God has given to every one of us.

01:53:48

That all liars will have their part in a lake of fire, no thief, no blasphemer in the kingdom of heaven. The problem is you know that you're a sinner in the sight of a holy

01:53:57

God, and you reject that. So you have to say, but my standard's better than everyone else's.

01:54:03

That is not correct. So David, why do you I guess I'm curious about something.

01:54:11

Why a Jew, why didn't you just pick Buddhism or Hinduism or Islam?

01:54:17

Why a Jew? Because I thought it was I mean, I think that could be a whole two -hour discussion in and of itself.

01:54:26

That being said, we only have like six minutes left. Do we want to do like question and answer or like a little bit of a closing statement and then how do we want to do this?

01:54:35

I think another couple streams addressing those issues could be fun. We could just have Jan for another show.

01:54:41

I think it'd be fun to do. I'm just curious as to why Jew. I mean, that just seems odd to me.

01:54:50

I don't know. I mean, granted, I know that there are secular humanist atheistic. I mean, they wouldn't call us atheists.

01:54:55

There are secular humanist Jews out there. The atheist is kind of weird to throw into it, but I guess

01:55:04

I just don't understand. So do you believe in God then? But it's not the

01:55:10

God of the Bible. It's really not even the Jewish God. It's just kind of a

01:55:15

God that you want to believe in, that you've kind of morphed into whatever you've believed with science and your own morality and everything else, right?

01:55:24

I mean, is that what it is? I mean, for me, again,

01:55:33

I don't think the evidence supports the weight of the Bible, and that's why

01:55:38

I reject it. I get why you reject it, but why Jewish? So you believe the

01:55:45

Old Testament? Well, I didn't, but I think that'll take about two hours to kind of get into all in and of itself.

01:55:56

I think Andrew would want to talk to you about that. Yeah, that would be a good two -hour discussion in and of itself, but I was just curious, do we have any questions from the audience?

01:56:06

We've been waiting, but I think what you guys have been doing, everything has been off of this last segment, really.

01:56:15

Why don't we just let you close for a minute or two? I'll close for a minute or two, and we can go from there.

01:56:23

We've got each other's emails. Let's just get you on again here soon. I really enjoyed this. I thought you guys were both very respectful and I thought this was a fun discussion.

01:56:32

Yeah, you were good, so I had a good time. I enjoyed having you. I just want to do a maybe two -minute closing or whatever.

01:56:42

Yeah, go right ahead. Sure. Excellent. Well, thank you very much again. We have three critical questions in front of us.

01:56:49

How do we know that it's true? Has it ever been observed, and how are you making any assumptions? I think

01:56:54

I showed tonight that evolution is true because it has been observed. We have observed microevolution, and we have observed speciation.

01:57:00

Nobody doubts that. If Anthony or anyone else wants to come up with their own theory or replace the theory of evolution, they need to come up with a framework that explains the data better than the current accepted theory.

01:57:13

I don't believe that Anthony, CMI or AIG, has been able to do that tonight.

01:57:20

Of course, he would disagree with that, but in conclusion, we kind of jumped around with a whole bunch of different topics coming from evolution, then going into atheism, and then a little bit of other stuff.

01:57:36

I thought it was a fun discussion, fun debate. As I showed, we can use this genetic data to piece together how life developed, and we can use this information to piece together where viruses came from and how to treat them.

01:57:54

We can use this framework in many other ways, and it explains why viruses counter our attempts to control them.

01:58:08

Again, when I pressed him for what a kind was, he gave me examples, but I don't think he ever gave me an actual definition for what a kind was or how to determine it.

01:58:25

In conclusion, thank you so much for your time, and I am looking forward to our next exchange.

01:58:30

Thank you for being on as well. Here's the reality.

01:58:36

Is it observable? The thing that every evolutionist does is they use evidence for microevolution and speciation, which we would agree with.

01:58:49

They use that evidence and claim that that is evidence now for macroevolution. What they're doing, it's a logical fallacy called equivocation, because there is no evidence for one kind turning to another kind.

01:59:03

The definition I gave earlier, which is the best we have, is if two things can mate, it's of the same created kind.

01:59:12

Most things in this world are obvious as to what's the same created kind. We would never confuse a dog or a cat being of the same created kind.

01:59:20

We wouldn't confuse a chicken and alligator being the same created kind. We have an idea anyway, an implicit idea anyway.

01:59:30

The bottom line is it's an equivocation because it's never been observed.

01:59:35

Evolutionists would acknowledge it's never been observed, because the reality is we have not lived long enough on this planet in only 6 ,000 years to have ever observed any macroevolution supposedly happening.

01:59:48

It's never been observed. Having said all that, the critical problem with evolution is twofold.

01:59:55

The biggest one is there is no way for a cell to magically appear out of thin air or out of Hanscom.

02:00:03

That can't happen. That's why the evolutionist always starts with a single simple cell. Having said that, with a single simple cell, there's been no mutation ever discovered by man that has been shown to increase functional genetic information over time.

02:00:17

Trust me, audience, if there was one, if they've been able to do this, they would have done this over and over and over and over again to create something new.

02:00:27

They would have done this by now to prove all of us creationists wrong. They haven't because they don't exist.

02:00:33

They use these little studies to try to claim that, oh yeah, look, see, here's a new function.

02:00:41

That must be a new information added to the genome. It's not. We've been able to to show it false each and every time.

02:00:50

Having said all that, I'm not here for evolution and creation debate. I enjoy them. David, I'm here because I care about your soul.

02:00:57

The reason why you still want to hang on to the Jew part of your secular humanistic atheistic

02:01:05

Judaism, the reason why you still want to hang on to Jew is because you know

02:01:11

God exists. He's made himself perfectly clear everywhere. You are suppressing the truth about him and your sin the same way

02:01:19

I did back in the day, the same way Justin did back in the day, the same way that our token Jew Andrew did back in the day suppress the truth about God and our sin.

02:01:32

The reality is that you're going to be held accountable to that God. He's given you plenty of evidence. He's going to say you're without excuse on judgment day.

02:01:39

He's going to say you know everything you've ever needed to know that he's existed. You've known you've sinned against him.

02:01:45

The reason why you have morality is because it's written on your heart. You know and have a sense of right from wrong. It doesn't come from humanism.

02:01:51

It doesn't come from your opinion. It comes from God who projects it down to all of us. We can talk about this next time, but there's a reason why it's transcendental.

02:02:01

On that, thank you for being on. I pray that God opens your eyes to your sin and that he grants you repentance and faith in him for the payment of that sin.

02:02:12

I want to see you in heaven one day. Not for you to tell me that I was right about creation, but that you're there in God's presence being forgiven of your sin.

02:02:23

Amen. All right. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for being on.

02:02:30

To the audience, thank you for being here. Just one real quick announcement.

02:02:35

I don't know if Standing for Truth is still here, but we are planning on having a debate next week on Neanderthals, so stay tuned for that.

02:02:42

Yeah, that's cool. Maybe I'll jump onto your list on that. What do we wrap on for next week's show, Justin? Wasn't Pastor Richard going to be on next week,

02:02:52

I believe? Pastor who? Richard. I could be wrong. I'll have to look at the schedule.

02:02:58

I guess we don't know who's on next week. If you don't have anyone scheduled, I'll be glad to come back one next week.

02:03:05

I think we have somebody scheduled, but I can't remember who it is. You're right. If we don't have anybody, I'll contact you, and we'll get you on, and we'll do part two next week.

02:03:12

That'll be fun. Next time, I could maybe discuss a little bit about radiometric gating and how we know that the

02:03:20

Earth is billions of years and not thousands of years. I think that'll be a fun discussion. I would be happy to do that.

02:03:25

The only thing that's going to bump you first is if the alligator herself,

02:03:30

Kamala Harris, decides to come on to the show, we'll have to have her on first, or maybe have you in the background.

02:03:41

I'll be honest. I do not like Kamala Harris at all. Okay. Well, I'm surprised.

02:03:47

I thought you liked alligators. I'm glad you don't. What's scary is that 50 % of our population voted for Biden and her.

02:03:57

No, they didn't. They just had 50 % that showed up on the polls. That's probably true.

02:04:04

The only poll that matters is on Election Day. I'll be honest.

02:04:09

I don't think anyone who voted for Joe Biden or Kamala Harris went in excited about their vote.

02:04:14

Their vote was a vote against Orange Man. You're right. I honestly think both

02:04:21

Biden and Trump are both disgusting people and have no place in politics, but that's a time for...

02:04:27

Yeah, but you're making a moral argument. A morally absolute argument. We'll talk about that more.

02:04:35

I think both of them are disgusting and repulsive. But what if Trump was an orange lion? It'd be okay then.