Creation vs Evolution Informal Debate

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

Opening Banter and Show Introduction

Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to Apologetics Live, another great show. I have got my best good friend and fishing buddy over here, Dr. Anthony Silvestro. He is, I'm just gonna start calling him the man, the myth, the legend.

I'm just telling you. We went to a conference, for those of you who don't know, that we went to a conference that was put on by Mike Riddle over the weekend. And it is Creation Training Initiative. It's a creation basic training conference.

And I'm gonna put this up here because I wanna advertise for this. Anthony Silvestro was one of the instructors with this, one of the teachers. And brother, I'm gonna tell you, my family just absolutely loved it.

So I just want to, I don't wanna 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.

Well, we just wanna welcome everybody to another Striving for Eternity, Apologetics Live episode. We are going to be talking today, creation versus evolution. It's an informal debate. We're gonna be talking with David Neff and my dear brother, Anthony.

Anthony, go ahead, brother.

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

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. It was just incredible. I can't say enough about it, so.

Amen. And so here's a more important thing though. When are we gonna change the music to reflect our names rather than Andrew?

All of us, yeah, we can put all of us in there. Yeah, with Andrew and Dr. Anthony especially.

Actually, it should be with Justin, Dr. Anthony Silvestro and sometimes Andrew Rappaport.

There you go, there you go. Well, he is our fearless leader, so we gotta always love on him. 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.

Come in if you have any questions, thoughts, comments, whatnot. We would love to entertain all of those. Our guests are here, is here, should I say, and he is willing to have a discussion with anybody.

With that, I wanna tell you, christianpodcastcommunity .org. They are absolutely blowing up with some great Christian content. If you're looking for a podcast to learn, multiple podcasts, I believe they have over 38 podcasts now, 35 podcasts, our stuff is on there as well.

We wanna 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.

We would greatly appreciate it, especially during these times when so many conferences and so many things have been put to the side. If you've done your due diligence at your church and you feel so inclined, we would love to have your support.

Buy our books, buy the books from Anthony. I had it around here and I've lost it. Anthony, you might have it up near, I don't know. We have Anthony's books, we've got Andrew's books. He's got something like four or five dozen books that he's written.

Let's see. This one is on the origin of kinds. This is by Dr. Anthony Silvestro. 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, Andrew Rappaport.

What Do They Believe? And then the last one I believe was What Do We Believe? And I'm reading through When My Ox Gores My Neighbor. I'm reading through that right now and I really love that, that's on hermeneutics.

So It said Pastor Josiah Nichols. Josiah Nichols. Who wrote that, did a really good job with that book.

Yeah, it was fabulous. So far what I've read is just really digging down into the hermeneutic understanding of how to apply the Old and New Testament to today and that's really important. So with that said, I guess we're gonna do our informal debate.

So let's have David come in and we'll have David, brother, come on in here. And I call everybody brother, whether you are or not, when God saves you, you will be. So no slap in the face there, man. It's a Southern hospitality.

It's a Southern thing. I do wanna say this, how David and I met. So it was funny, Matt Slick had his 25th anniversary show. It was a Zoom or StreamYard, one of the two. 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. And as I wished him a happy anniversary, David was one of the guys that was in the room there and he mentioned something about having an ID.

Intelligent design versus evolution debate. And here I'm thinking, okay, so I'm thinking he's the intelligent design guy, right? Cause he's on Matt Slick's channel. 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 I would actually disagree with.

But so I wanted to see which one he was. He goes, oh no, no, no, I'm the evolutionist. I go, oh, cool. And so we got to talking for a moment there 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 this, have an informal discussion slash debate. So it should be fun tonight. I think Justin's gonna 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. Well, thank you very much.

And yeah, I was gonna mention that we met on Matt Slick's show. So I'm 25 years old. I grew up in the Independent Fenomenal Baptist Church and I am no longer a Christian, long story about that. I am a music major right now at my local community college and I applied to a couple of universities and will hopefully be getting my bachelor's in one of the sciences.

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

Cool, okay. Good, good. Yeah, there's a lot of need for that, so for sure. Well, so we're gonna let things get started. And as we do, one thing that I wanna get started with and kind of lay out for Anthony to maybe go through a little bit, just for a second.

This is Apologetics Live. And as I went through the creation training initiative, creation initiative training on this weekend at Pastor Andrew Rappaport's church, I went there and what I gotta say is, oh, hi, brother.

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

You mean the part where Mike Riddle and Scott taught?

Yeah, Scott did great, Brother Scott, he did so great. And like I said, if you notice, I even took off the little logo for Anthony that I'd made up earlier. I've turned into an apologist for my brother up there, so.

Yeah, one time I actually Anthony did an okay job teaching too. Let's just, we'll give him some credit. Yeah. Yeah, well, I'll tell you what, what you presented on Sunday morning though, I don't know if that was recorded or not, but it

It was recorded and actually I was, 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.

We were exegeting through Ephesians chapter four and be angry and do not sin, but in the context there speaking false, not speaking falsehoods, but speaking truth. And so Anthony's sermon came in, but yeah, you get a dentist talking about the tongue.

He had to go physical, right? 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 Sunday morning.

Thank you very much. I wanted to go clean my teeth afterwards.

Yeah, 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, you know. I shouldn't have said that to you.

Critical Thinking Questions for Evolution

Well, so what I wanted to point out in the training discussion, there are, and for every believer, non-believer as well, it wouldn't, to me, it doesn't matter. You would have to look at, evaluate truth based upon what is the foundational truth of our presupposition and what is our understanding and why do we understand it?

And what I wanted to bring up is, well, there it is. There are three critical thinking questions that every person, when you're coming to a discussion about evolution that you need to consider. And these three critical questions are how do you know that is true?

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

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

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, you know, atheism, if you're gonna 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.

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

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

I think we're gonna let David speak, right? He wanted to go through some power points. He wanted to go through some power points on this position.

Evolution, Speciation, and Common Ancestry

Yeah, sure, definitely. Thank you very much. I am going to start. Here we go. Well, thank you very much, Anthony, for inviting me on. I really appreciate your time. So the three critical thinking questions, I really love these questions.

These are questions that everyone should be asking about all positions that you might come across. So that is what I'm kind of want to be answering in my opening presentation. How do we know that evolution is true and hasn't ever been observed?

So Theodosius Dobzhansky famously said that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. First, we should know that evolution is an observable fact. Microevolution, no one doubts. Speciation, Anthony, answers to Genesis, creation of many industries, international all accept speciation and use it as a vital tool for their flood model.

And finally, macroevolution, speciation is by definition macroevolution. So basically the core tenets of evolution are pretty much uncontroversial across the field. So really the only major points of disagreement are the following.

The timescale of evolution, what role 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?

So of course, speciation, we have different, we understand it so well that we even have names for how different populations speciates. And an analogy here is language. Over time, you start with modification.

We modify language, change the pronunciation and change meaning and add new words. And over time, new languages evolve. First point is that evolution helps us understand the development of life. Here is a phylogenetic tree of the cats.

And this is from a paper. A village you hybridize is the most important criteria for including species within common basic type. And basically they used the genetic evidence to bring this together. And this is actually from Creation Ministries International.

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

And here is the original abstract. Modern field species descended from relatively recent divergence and speciation events. They produced successful predatory carnivorous worldwide. And this is how we are able to piece together which animals are closely related.

And using the same exact criteria and the same principles, we are able to show that humans and chimpanzees last year, the common ancestor, about 7 million years ago. 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. Finally, let's look at the role evolution plays in health.

Evolution plays a back and forth game between the pathogens and us. 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.

So let's take a look at one example, HIV. So this is from a fantastic book called Evolving the Human Infected Virus. So the virus HIV has to mutate into a form that could overcome natural immunity to SIV in humans.

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.

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

The NEF gene mutated to overcome the chimpanzee tetherin, but the VPU gene remained essentially insert. When the virus jumps to humans, human tetherin was so different that the NEF gene could not overcome human tetherin.

Instead, the VPU gene mutated to overcome human tetherin, allowing HIV -1 group M to infect humans. A mutation in the second gene called GHE was also required for the chimpanzee virus to jump to humans.

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

What does God even mean? Who or what is a designer? What is your nature? What is the mechanism by which the intelligent design created? What is the limit to common ancestry? 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. Evolution is the only viable model that explains biodiversity.

Creationism simply cannot. Thank you very much. Okay. Anthony.

Creation, Sin, and the Gospel

Yeah, okay. Wow, you got that on fast, David. I thought you did. I thought you need about 10 minutes. You have about seven minutes in that. Oh, even better. You're quick. So, okay. So first of all, I do want to say, thank you, David, for coming on tonight.

You know, this is, for me, it's a, I enjoy this type of a topic and we use it to be able to teach the audience for listening. Thank you, Justin, for agreeing to, I can't really, I don't want to say moderate it because this is just an informal discussion.

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

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. Hey, we had some good pictures though. Yeah.

Obviously, you know, David has more hair than both of you. I'm just saying.

It's a good thing David's nicer than Andrew. See, we are professionals in our field of endeavor because Andrew beats us up all the time. Yeah, he does.

So, but okay. So thank you for being here, David. You know, I will say this too. Let me be very blunt with this. I, while I love the creation versus evolution debates, I enjoy college campuses and talking, enjoy doing them online.

That is not my primary purpose for talking with you. Okay. My primary purpose for talking with you is I wanna see you saved. Okay. That's the bottom line. 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. I'm not gonna say leave salvation because I don't believe that happens, but leave the church with a very sour taste towards who God is because the God that the IBF church often portrays is the wrong God.

It's not the God of the Bible. And so what do I mean by all that? Is that David, you and I, Justin, especially Andrew, we're all sinners. We've broken God's law continuously, right? Every time we break God's law, we've sinned.

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 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 God's grace.

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

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

I used to be an evolutionist myself, and it was first saved, and then God had opened my eyes to the science that is literally dismissed and not even spoken of in secular science classes. 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.

And unfortunately, evolution is what is often used for people such as yourself to suppress the truth about God, because I believe you know God exists, and that 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 gonna continue to enjoy our sin and pretend he doesn't exist. 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 I care about in being here.

Obviously, I've spent almost all my time just speaking about that. The one thing I will address before we kind of get into this informal discussion is you brought up a slide that you had made real quick, and I'm glad you did.

We're gonna bring it up tonight anyway. One of the things that we teach in class is these three critical thinking questions. 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? Because of this, you and I will talk about speciation tonight, which I would equate pretty closely to microevolution. I'm not sure exactly how you define it, but I would define it strictly with speciation.

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

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

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

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? Probably not. We've got that pretty buttoned down in speciation.

It might be some minor details that we're still working through. As creationists, we have some different ideas on, I wouldn't believe in natural selection. I know CMI would. I believe in something called CET that with epigenetics would be what allows microevolution to happen.

But that's not where the debate's going to be. The debate is going to be on macroevolution. How do you know it's true? We don't. There was no witness. We can't test macroevolution. 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. But are you making any assumptions? Absolutely. The entire secular science world, and this is what 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 Bible, even from your perspective, David, you would say that we've been around for between one and seven million years, depending on which science study that you read.

The reality is is that there is not a single person ever alive who has observed macroevolution. And that's the problem. So on that, I'll end. I think that's about my time. Justin, if I'm not mistaken, and let's just open the discussion.

God, Evolution, and the Biblical Account of Creation

All right, great. Thank you. There's a couple of 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. This is what I believe to be a false dilemma, because I don't believe there's any contradiction between God and evolution.

I don't see any contradiction between evolution and creation, because you can have God who created life, and life with the ability to evolve and radiate out. And there are many great Christian scientists like Francis Collins, who are very firm in their evangelical Christianity, that take what they see in science, and say, okay, there's no contradiction here.

And the next question I'm going to have for you is what exactly would you accept as macroevolution? Because macroevolution, according to Evolution Berkeley, macroevolution generally refers to evolution up off the species level, such as hybrid species and speciation.

So at what level would you draw the line between microevolution and macroevolution, and what exactly is a kind? So these are, I think, good questions to start with.

Yeah, no, that's great. So I'll address both of your things. First of all, you talked about Bible and science. Or Bible and evolution. Can the Bible, because you don't see an issue between God being able to use evolution as part of his grand scheme.

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

There are no contradictions. People who have perceived contradictions because they don't know enough about the study of the Bible to work through those contradictions. Guys like Matt Slick has large courses website dedicated to working through those apparent contradictions.

And he's done them all on his website. Here's the issue is that in the Bible, God created the earth first, and then he created the sun, moon, and stars. According to evolution, you had sun and stars first, and then the earth later on, right?

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

And there's many others I don't need to get into, but the order is completely wrong for the Big Bang and evolution for it to be compatible with the Bible, because the Bible, again, has it in a different order.

So they can't be, I couldn't have used evolution from that perspective. Now Ben, can I respond?

Yeah, go ahead, yeah. Sure, so again, that really all depends on how literally you want to interpret 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.

I don't know if it's supposed to be literal or not, but even if it is literal, then yeah, I would agree that there is definitely a huge contradiction. So either, if I were to accept your claim that we must accept Genesis as a literal account, then yes, I do agree that there is a significant contradiction between science and religion.

Okay, and fair enough.

So thank you for that. We, of course, will look at this as historical narrative. There's a number of reasons for that. I think the Christians that are using the ancient Near East theory framework, different ideas, I think that this is, they're in severe, severe error when they do this.

If you wish for me to cover why they're in error, I can give you those reasons. Otherwise, it's not really that important for the listeners at this moment, because you've already said, hey, you understand that issue.

Right, that being said, that's kind of not what we're debating tonight, so. Right. Really, I don't think religion or Christianity or even atheism and evolution should be afraid to look at the evidence from an objective standpoint, because if Christianity was true, then the facts and evidence would speak for themselves and vice versa.

Oh, and I would completely agree with that, and we'll talk about the evidences in a little bit. 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, 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. So I would say that there is plenty of evidence and we should follow the evidence from God's perspective. Now, when it comes to the science we're talking about, this is, the problem I have with definitions and defining things is that the word macroevolution has undergone a change in definition.

So the definition that you read for macroevolution was not the definition that was, even at the time I wrote my book, when it was published, it was published four years ago, I think in December. So next month it'll be four years it was published and it 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. And so macroevolution was always looked at as a way for a kind to turn into another kind, right? 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. 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 God says 10 times at the beginning of Genesis that he made everything after its own kind or to reproduce after its own kind, I'm gonna say, okay, that's a kind, what exactly is a kind according to the evidence that we see, right?

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

All right, sure. So let me, I guess I wanna ask what exactly is a kind and can we get an objective criteria of what it is in the taxonomical rank? And are you familiar with phylogenetics at all? 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. It's all about cladistics. So if I can show you something real quick, can I show some images real quick?

Yeah, go ahead and bring it up.

I mean, the issue with the clades is that the starting points are different. And so the starting, 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. 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.

We don't believe that in the Bible whatsoever. God created humans distinctly from the rest of creation. We're made in his image, in God's image. Animals, plants, nothing else is. He made everything else separate, as separate kinds.

And we can talk about those kinds in a moment, but I think you wanna show us this.

Kinds, Clades, and Information in Genetics

Yeah, a couple of examples here. Here are alligator-like, and these are from three different taxonomical families. And same here, we have different bats, but they are in different families, taxonomical families, 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. 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. Okay, I gotta put this up. That's hilarious. And that is fair. Those three pictures of Kamala Harris. You're watching the show.

That is great. That's the comment of the night right there. Thank you, John, for that one. That's fun. So actually, they're much better than Kamala Harris.

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

So while I don't know every single animal, the easiest ones for me to go to would be cats and dogs, because these are the ones that we always use. And so for a dog kind, just to 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.

So when we look at kinds, I wanna 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.

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

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. And that as speciation happens, some genes get expressed, some get suppressed, some get lost, different things like that occur so that we see that, yeah, the parent kind and eventually species come out of it.

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

So that's the background. Now 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 if the two animals can relate and have progeny, have a kid, then they would be of the same created kind.

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. And 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.

We've been able to breed out all these different, really they're called subspecies because dogs are of their own species. 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. We see some others that are pretty ingenious. The Akita is one, right? We call Akita a purebred, but Akita was actually a mix of a 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.

Akitas are beautiful. So can I address that real quick? Yeah, absolutely. All right, sure. So both cats and dogs are part of the Ordovora. So I wanted to ask you, if it's possible for an animal that kind of looks 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, 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. So are they still of the same created kind? Can I address that real quick?

Yeah, wolves and dogs can 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.

Okay, even though there's, I think they're still in the same taxonomical family though.