A Matter of Days - Progressive Creationism

And find your place at verse 1. I feel as if it is necessary this morning to provide at least some preliminary feedback to the message before we read the scripture and move on to our study. I know many of you have not been here for the study.

Some of you are visitors, some of you are relatively new to the church, and we have a tradition in our preaching here, and it has been so since I became the pastor that we would preach through books of the Bible.

And so we have preached through several books and we have found ourselves now at the book of Genesis and we have been looking at the first few verses now for several months. We try to take these things apart and understand them better.

And that's what we are doing. And what I have been examining over the last several weeks is the issue of the creation days. And for someone who hasn't been in church or maybe for someone who hasn't been a part of this conversation or maybe hasn't heard about this particular issue, some other things that I'm going to say may seem so radically opposed to what you are used to that it might even sound as if I have lost my mind.

And so I would encourage you today to please give me just some benefit of the doubt as we go through this text because this is not an easy subject. We started several weeks ago looking at the Genesis days and if you'll turn your bulletin over to the back, you'll see on the back the outline that I wrote to start us off on this subject.

You'll notice that there are four positions which have been given and I have dedicated an entire sermon to each one. So I'm not just giving you a short synopsis, that's what the chart is, but I'm giving you a full explanation at least as best as I can of each of these positions.

We have looked first at the gap theory. The gap theory basically teaches this that before this world was created when God said, or when the Bible says in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, that he had created a world which is a fully functioning world that had animals and beings upon it and that that world fell into ruin, was destroyed, and was remade in Genesis 1 -2 when it says the earth was formless and void and darkness was over the face of the deep and the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters.

What the people who believe in the gap theory believe is that between Genesis 1 1 and 1 -2 there is a large gap of time and as I said if you want to go back and listen to that sermon I would encourage you to.

You'll hear some of the reasons why people believe it and the reasons why I don't teach it and why I don't believe that it's accurate. I don't believe it finds itself in the scripture and I don't believe it finds itself in the historical narrative that we see in the Bible.

However that is one theory and what it's trying to do is it's trying to solve the issue of the apparent age of the earth versus what the Bible gives us which is a relatively short earth history. So they say well there's a gap of time and it's liable to be billions of years in that gap and so that's where the gap, that's where that billions of years go.

I ain't worried about it are y 'all? Okay I'm just going to keep on going. The framework hypothesis, you'll see on your sheet here, that is an entirely different way of understanding Genesis 1 and that basically says that Genesis 1 is a parable.

It is not intended to give a chronological or even a logical understanding of creation but rather to give a literary picture of creation. A parabolic understanding and the point of Genesis 1 is not to tell us how God created but rather it is intended to tell us that God created.

And there are those who believe in the framework hypothesis which I believe is a very difficult thing for people to justify but there are those who believe it and those who teach it and oftentimes it leads to a belief in evolution and particularly in the evolution of man.

And so the framework hypothesis, though it does not demand evolution, does open the door for that. Today we are going to look at progressive creationism. Now again if you haven't been here, I hate feeling like you're diving into the deep end but I want you to understand why we're doing this.

We're taking each view, we're breaking it down into its parts and we're seeking to understand it so that when we get to the view that we teach and we hold in this church we will at least have been fair to those who may hold different views.

It is my job as one of the elders and the pastor of the church to teach you the Word of God and to explain it as best as I can. And sometimes that means stopping and really digging into difficult things.

So if you came today hoping for a sermon on how to make your finances better or how to make your marriage better or something like that, I'm sorry to disappoint you. Today we're going to be talking about creation.

But let me tell you this about that, why that matters. If you do not believe Genesis and you do not believe God as creator, nothing else matters. Because if we don't believe in Genesis then we don't believe much of what Jesus said because much of what Jesus said is based in Genesis.

If we don't believe God created the world then we really don't believe that we are responsible to the God who created us. There is so much that is founded in the beginning of the Bible that is dependent, or rather that the rest of the Bible is dependent upon.

In fact I believe in my heart of hearts that this is one of the reasons why there has been such an onslaught of attack against the creation narrative in the Bible because if we can get people to believe that they are not special creations of God but rather that they are simply grown-up apes, then we have left the understanding of the dignity and true responsibility of man to God.

If you are not a person who's been created in God's image but rather you're just a grown-up ape, then that really changes your entire worldview, doesn't it? It changes how you understand yourself. It changes how you understand the whole world.

It changes how you understand God. So all of these things are important. We're gonna read Genesis 1, 1 -5 and then we're going to look at the subject of progressive creationism. I want to invite you to stand.

I know we've been sitting for a moment but I invite you to stand because this is the Word of God and as is our custom we give honor and reverence to the Word of God. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

The earth was without form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters and God said let there be light and there was light and God saw that the light was good and God separated the light from the darkness God called the light day and the darkness He called night and there was evening and there was morning the first day.

May God add His blessing to the reading and to the hearing of His Word. May He write its eternal truths upon our heart. May He keep me from error as I preach. Amen. You may be seated. What do we do with the days of Genesis 1?

The Age of the Earth and the Scientific Consensus

Honestly this is not a question which has a lot of historic significance because it was only a few hundred years ago that the idea that the earth was billions of years old really became popular the idea that the earth is billions of years old is something that most of us take for granted.

This Tuesday morning my wife is going to take our daughter and go to the Museum of Science and History. I mentioned this a few weeks ago. We go there every few weeks. It's just something that we do. We enjoy going to the zoo.

We enjoy going to MOSH and so we do these things as homeschool parents. We find it enjoyable to take these little field trips and when we go to MOSH as we often do we are immediately confronted with the assumption that the world is billions of years old.

I believe the current position is that the the earth itself is four and a half billion years old and that the universe is somewhere in the neighborhood of 13 .8 and some change. That's the current scientific consensus and it's not really a consensus that is really argued.

If you go into a science classroom and you try to argue for anything other than billions of years you are not really given the time of day. It's not something that people will allow for within the conversation and most people don't understand why that is because most people don't understand science and I stand before you today not as a scientist obviously but as a theologian and an expository teacher.

I teach the Bible but when I was in seminary and I was having to do my seminary work one of the things that I wrote on for my master's thesis was on the conflict or the apparent conflict between science and the Bible because I knew having grown up public school product and having received a degree in social science from university that there was a lot of apparent tension between what the Bible teaches and between what science teaches and so there is a desire to try to find some form of a consensus.

And one of the things that I noticed right away when I was looking at the issue of the age of the earth is a belief in something called uniformitarianism. Now I'm not using that word to confuse you. I want to try to explain it as best I can.

Uniformitarianism is a geological scientific principle. It was popularized by a man named Charles Lyell and it was popularized in the early 1800s and basically what it says is that things like erosion and change on massive scales happen as a result of slow uniform change over long periods of time.

Here is an example that you are all aware of. If you drive west far enough you'll fall into a big hole. It's called the Grand Canyon. I recommend not falling in it. The Grand Canyon is a massive hole in the ground.

If you go to the Grand Canyon and you take a tour they will tell you that this hole in the ground has taken thousands or hundreds of thousands of years to be carved by a very small amount of water which is flowing through the Colorado River.

You guys know that's how they understand how the Grand Canyon was formed. That is an example of uniformitarianism. We know how long it takes for water to wash away a layer of dirt. Therefore we can measure how long it takes a layer to be washed away and we can extrapolate from that data and move backwards and determine how long it took to make this hole.

Based upon the depth of the hole, based upon the movement of the water, based upon the type of rock that's there we can make a scientific estimation as to how old that hole is. That is a very simple understanding of uniformitarianism.

Uniformitarianism is the geological consensus that is taught today. This is how the world operates. So, if uniformitarianism is true, that would mean that the earth has to be billions of years old for us to currently get to experience all of the geologic anomalies that we see all around us such as the Grand Canyon and other major places where we see major change and things had to take a long time to do.

I remember thinking, if we take the Bible and we read it and we see a shorter time span, it doesn't give the time needed for these things. The belief system that grows out of that is the system called progressive creationism.

Progressive creationism teaches that the days in Genesis are not days, but rather they are epics of time. Each one having a beginning and an ending, therefore each one marked with a morning and an evening, but that it's not a 24-hour period, it's not a daylight nighttime period, but that the days themselves represent long epics, sometimes in the vicinity of millions and maybe even billions of years.

Sometimes progressive creationism is called the day-age theory. Have you ever heard this? Have you heard people say this? That the days are not days, but that they're long periods of time? I'm surprised you haven't because this really is, especially since the 1980s, this has become very popular in churches because of a desire to try to marry the seeming geological scientific consensus with the biblical data.

So there's been an attempt to sort of try to bring the two together. The man mostly responsible for trying to bring these together is a man, and I want to say this right now, I respect this guy and I believe he's a believer.

So everything I'm about to say about him, I say having said right away, number one, I don't think he's a false brother. I think he loves the Lord and I do think that he's doing what he thinks is right, even though I may disagree with him.

Okay, so having said that, I want to be clear. His name is Hugh Ross. Dr. Hugh Ross has, and he is an astrophysicist, a brilliant man, and he has proposed the idea that the days in Genesis are not literal days, but that they are long periods of time, and he wrote a book, and I read the book in preparation for my teaching through Genesis.

He wrote a book called The Improbable Planet, and in his book The Improbable Planet, he describes what he believes is the process that God used from taking the earth from the Big Bang, which he believes is the starting point of all things, and moving through the process of change, which he describes as taking billions of years, and then the earth forming four and a half billion years ago, and then the earth going through all of its massive cataclysmic change coming down to the point where he would argue that Adam and Eve were real people.

He doesn't deny Adam and Eve as real people, and he would say Adam and Eve came on the scene about a hundred and fifty thousand years ago, and if you read the Genesis account, you say, well, there's not enough time for that, especially in the genealogies.

He would say, well, the genealogies have gaps, and those gaps make up the time, and so he does have answers to a lot of the objections that people would propose. The wonderful thing about Dr. Ross is he does love the Lord.

Have I already said that? I feel like I'm an apologist for him this morning. I really do want to say, I like this guy in a lot of ways. I've listened to him preach, I've listened to him teach, and I've read his books.

I've read a couple of his books. So I'm saying this, this guy loves the Lord, but I do not agree with a lot of his conclusions. And so this morning, I want to read a few things that progressive creationists teach, and I want to respond to them, but then I want to provide you what I think is the most important response to this teaching.

And again, this may seem like an odd sermon, this may seem like a theology class lecture, but this is important stuff. Again, I want to allow him to state his own case. Dr. Ross says this. He says, these are six points of doctrine, these are all from his website, and this is what he says.

Number one, he says, the Bible, including Genesis 1 to 11, is the error-free Word of God. Amen. That's his first point of doctrine. I agree. We are on the same page. We're starting with the same book.

We're starting with the same principles. He says it's the error-free Word of God. I have no reason to doubt that he believes that's true. Okay? So I give him the benefit of the doubt. Number two, he says the creation account of Genesis 1 follows a basic chronology.

Now, I think that's a good thing to say because that separates him from the framework hypothesis. Remember we learned a few weeks ago the framework hypothesis says it's not chronological, it's not intended to be chronological, it's parabolic, it's a story, it's not the same.

So this is a second, I think, positive that Dr. Ross said. He said it is following a chronology, a basic chronology. Alright, we're good. So we're on the same page. We're on the same page for number one, we're on the same page for number two.

Number three, the record of nature is also a reliable revelation from God. Okay. I agree, but I want to add a caveat. When Dr. Ross says the record of nature provides a reliable revelation from God, that is true.

If you go to Psalm 19, what does it say? The heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaim His handiwork. Day to day it pours out speech. Right? The heavens are the greatest preachers that we've ever seen because every day they come alive and the sun moves through the sky and the sun, the Bible says, is almost like a preacher himself because as he moves across the circuit of the sky, every man has to look at the sun and every man has to understand that was not put there by accident.

That was created by an almighty God. Anybody who looks at creation and the intricate nature of creation and walks away and says, yeah, that's a big old accident. I tell you what, I remember when the day hope was born and I saw my wife give birth and they took the baby away and I'm holding my wife's hand and I'm crying and she's crying and we're looking at each other and she says, go.

Because she knew I want to go see the baby. That moment was like a miracle and when I saw that baby I knew this is no accident. This is life from God and so right there is a reminder to us of God's power.

This is no accident. You are no accident. If you walk across and you look at a building and you see that building and you say, yeah, that happened by accident, you'd be a fool. How can you look at the structure of the human cell and say that happened by accident?

You'd have to be a fool. So, Hugh Ross says, nature is a reliable revelation from God. I agree with him, but here's where I take issue with that simple statement. Nature is reliable. Scripture is reliable, but both of them have to be interpreted and no one interprets neutrally.

There is no such thing as neutrality when it comes to our worldview. The Bible says that when I'm born I'm dead in my trespasses and sins. The very nature of my heart is to rebel against my Creator. In fact, the Bible says until I am born again, I cannot even understand the kingdom of heaven.

I can't even understand the Word of God. So, if I say that the natural man is neutral towards God, I'm lying. The Bible says he is at enmity with God. That he's in rebellion against God. And so the idea that everybody's just looking at the data and everybody's interpreting it neutrally, it's just not the case.

You want to know how true... I encourage you, there's a documentary. It's not a Christian documentary, but it is a documentary. It's called Expelled. It was put out several years ago and it was about scientists who dared to question Darwinian evolution and rather propose the idea of intelligent design.

Now, intelligent design is not necessarily Christian. Intelligent design simply says that the earth and the human body and the cells that make up the body are so intricately designed that they must have a Creator.

There must be an intelligence behind. It doesn't say if it's God or Allah or Buddha or anything else. It just says there has to be an intelligent Creator. And the documentary shows how these people are not only remained outside of the classroom, but some of them even lost their jobs as a result of simply taking a stand that there indicates in the creation a Creator.

So again, are people neutral? No. So I would agree with Dr. Ross. Nature does provide to us a revelation, but we have to interpret that revelation. And everybody who interprets it comes with presuppositions.

And the major presupposition of most people in the world today is what? The earth is four and a half billion years old. The universe is 13 and some change. If that's your overriding presupposition, you can't even have the conversation, can you?

You can't even allow for any dissension. So again, I agree. Nature is a revelation from God. But here's where I disagree. One of the things Dr. Ross has said, he said nature is like the 67th book of the Bible.

You know, we have 66 books and then nature provides a 67th book. I get what he's saying and I don't want to throw stones, but I think you're really treading some fine line there. Because while nature may be a revelation from God, this book of scripture is what we call special revelation.

This is God saw fit to have written down in a way that we could understand it. And that's different from what we call natural revelation, which is the revelation of the world around us. That's natural.

This is special and they are not on the same playing field. Number four, he says this, the message of nature will agree with what the Bible says. I agree. But again, it has to be interpreted. Number five, the Bible contains a selective summary description of God's creation.

And there are no mention of dinosaurs, bipedal primates, quantum mechanics, or the existence of other solar system planets. This is his point to simply say that the Bible doesn't intend to tell us everything.

I don't disagree with that. But to say that the Bible has no mention of these things, I think is making his, is arguing a point that he can't prove. Number six, God gives humans the privilege. Now here, this is the one that really I think I struggle with.

God gives humans the privilege to fill in the details. Carefully though patient, ongoing exploration and increased understanding of the natural realm. So basically what he's saying this, no, excuse me, through patient ongoing exploration of increased understanding the natural realm.

He's basically saying this, the Bible doesn't tell us everything. So we have the liberty now to fill in the details. That, again, I'm not saying it's 100 wrong, but that is a dangerous road to begin going down.

To say we can just fill in the details with what we think and what we discover. So that is his point. Like I said, I don't disagree with everything he said. I don't even really disagree wholeheartedly with everything that he has said.

But what I'm saying is this, his argument that we have to interpret nature like we interpret the Bible. And essentially we interpret the Bible through nature. And this is where I think it gets backwards.

Do we use the Bible to interpret the world or do we use the world to interpret the Bible? That's the, that's really the heart of the issue. Because ultimately we have to start with the Word of God. If the Bible is God's inspired, infallible, inerrant Word, then we have to start there.

Does that mean that science can never tell us anything? No, science tells us many wonderful things. And I think science does back up the Word of God. But there are times when collisions come when we have to take a stand for one side or the other.

And one of the places where we have to consider taking a stand is on the issue of the word day. As we noted when we began this study, the word day can have various meanings, even in English. If I said, in my father's day, I'm not talking about a 24-hour period, I'm talking about a time.

In my father's day, you could get a gallon of gas for 25 cents. That's not talking about a day of 24 hours. And if I said, I only let my kids play during the day, outside. Well, that's not talking about 24 hours, that's talking about light and darkness.

Right? So there are many ways that you can use the word day, and it means something different. So, when Ross and the other progressive creationists come along and say, Moses is not trying to tell us about a 24-hour day.

He's trying to help us understand that these were long periods of times, and he's using the day in the idea of the epic. And here's what he says happens. He says, God created the universe first, and then he, through a process of many billions of years, finally created the earth four and a half billions of years ago.

And this is all in his book, the book I mentioned earlier, Improbable Planet. He describes the creation of the universe. He describes how he believes the Big Bang happened. He describes how it took a long period of time.

And he describes how four and a half billion years ago, the earth came to be. And he says, and now if you read Genesis 1, and it says the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was over the face of the waters, and God said, let there be light.

What it's saying there is that you have to consider that you were on the earth at that time, and this is what you would be seeing. So here's a picture, and I'll give you an idea. He says, ultimately, the universe is created first, four and a half billion years ago, 14 and a half billion years, no, 13 .8 billion, sorry.

The earth was created later, 4 .5 billion years ago. And you are here. So what you see is you see a darkness because he said at that particular period in earth's history, the atmosphere had not yet become transparent.

The atmosphere was at that time opaque, and it would have been impossible to see any light. And the first creative act of God in Genesis 1 -2 is that God made the atmosphere translucent. Not transparent, but translucent.

So that light could penetrate. And that's what is meant by let there be light. There becomes a translucent atmosphere where now light can be seen. But it isn't but for another 100, or 200, or 300 million years before the atmosphere would become transparent.

That is day four, when we see the stars, and the sun, and the moon, which were always there. They were there hundreds of millions of years, and billions of years before the earth. They were always there, but they just couldn't be seen because the atmosphere was not yet transparent and could not be seen.

Sounds great. I mean, it really does. If you're trying to compound the word of God and the science of men, and you're trying to find consensus between two competing arguments, he makes a lot of sense.

And he garners a lot of response. You say, well, pastor, if you're saying so much good about him, why don't you agree with him? I'm going to give you two reasons why I cannot accept progressive creationism.

Personally, and this is the consensus of our elders here, so just so you know, this is not me by myself, but the elders here would teach this. There are two main reasons why I think progressive creationism is a problem.

Death, Disease, and Corruption Before the Fall

Number one, progressive creationism says that prior to the fall of man, there was death, disease, and destruction in the world. Say it again. Prior to the fall of man, which happened when? Genesis 3. Progressive creationism says there has to be death, disease, and destruction prior to the fall.

You say, pastor, what's wrong with that? I don't believe it's biblical. I don't believe it's biblical. The Bible indicates when God created the world at the end of the seven days, no matter how you interpret the days, at the end of the seven days, whether it was seven days, seven thousand years, or seven billion years, everything was good.

There was no death, disease, or destruction at that point. All of those things come as the result of the fall. In fact, I just want to show you a scripture if I could. Turn with me to Romans chapter 8.

And I want you to consider Romans 8. Because this is a big part of the argument I'm going to make. But I want you to consider what it says here regarding what happened at the fall. Go to verse 19. Actually, we'll pick up at verse 18 because that's where the paragraph begins.

Romans 8, verse 18. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth to be compared with the glory that will be revealed to us. So that's the promise we're all looking forward to.

We're all looking forward to the glory that's going to be revealed. Amen? Aren't you tired of this life? You might say, well, I love my life. This life can have many joys. My children are joys. My parents are a joy to me.

My wife is a tremendous joy to me. But every day I see reasons why I look forward to glory. As my body breaks down, as sin in me continues to be a battle, as sin in the world continues to bring destruction, I see why the apostle would write here, our present sufferings are not to be compared with the glory that's coming.

And it's a way of trying to encourage us to be reminded that there's a glory coming, so stay faithful. Now, that's the context of verse 19. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.

For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit grown inwardly, as we wait for the adoption of sons, the redemption of our bodies.

So what's this saying? Creation is waiting for redemption. But why is it waiting? And by the way, creation here is referring to the created order, the earth and all of that created things that are on it.

Why is the earth being anthropomorphized here? Basically what that means is why is the earth being given a personality? Because we know the earth doesn't really have a personality. Trees don't think. Rocks don't think.

Dirt doesn't think. But here, they're given a personality. Why? Because the writer, the Apostle Paul, is saying something very simple. The earth itself is in travail, and it was put there by one person.

Notice, go back. It says, creation was subject to futility, not willingly, meaning the creation didn't do it on its own, but because of him who subjected it. That's talking about Adam. That's saying that the creation all around us is subject to all of the futility, the death, decay, and destruction, all that, was subject because of Adam.

Progressive creationists have to argue that prior to Adam, there was death, disease, and destruction. I don't believe that. I don't believe that before Adam, there was death, disease, and destruction.

Now, you say, why does that matter? Let me put this to you. Let me ask you this question. And I hope this doesn't offend you, and if it does, it's not my intention. Do you believe that this world had cancer prior to the fall?

Because I can take you to several articles where they show dinosaur bones that have cancer in the bones. So either one of two things is true. Either cancer predated the fall, or those dinosaurs lived congruently with man after the fall.

I know it's a radical position, but that's the position I take. That's it. It's the hard, difficult position. It's the position that gets me laughed out of the science class. I remember when I was writing my master's thesis, a science teacher came up and asked me what I was writing about.

I told him. And he said, well, to believe that, you have to reject uniformitarianism. I said, I do. You can't do that. He said, well, yes, I can. Uniformitarianism is a doctrine. It is a teaching. It is a belief that I reject.

I said, what do you replace it with, pastor? Catastrophism. Catastrophism is the different position. Well, what's that mean? I believe that the earth looks the way it does. Because rather than a long period of time, a very small amount of change, I believe over a very short period of time, there were radical catastrophes that caused great amounts of change in a very short amount of time.

And one of those things is the flood. Here's the thing about progressive creationism. If you accept it, and I won't, you know what, if you accept progressive creationism, I'm not going to call you a heretic.

I'm not even going to say that, you know, I'll accept you as a believer. That's not a problem. Here's the issue, though. Not only do you have to believe there was death, destruction, and all that before the flood.

I'm sorry, before the fall. You have to deny the global flood. Dr. Hugh Ross says the flood wasn't global. He says it was a local flood. And it flooded the plains in Mesopotamia, but it was not global.

That, to me, is the second reason I can't be a progressive creationist. One, because I don't believe there was death, decay, and destruction before the fall. But two, because I do believe the flood was a worldwide event.

So if you want to come to me later, if you want to send me an email, or you want to take me out to lunch and tell me why I'm wrong, those are the two places that I'm going to hold. Because I don't believe there was death, disease, and destruction before the fall.

And I don't believe that the flood is a local event. Now, go back for a moment. Catastrophism. You want a good example of catastrophism? The year I was born, 1980. Which makes some of you laugh, because you're a little older than me.

1980, I was born on April the 2nd. Well, just a few months apart from my birth, there was another major event in world history. It's kind of a joke. Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980. The amount of geological change which occurred at the result of the blowing of Mount St. Helens and the resultant destruction was so massive that it's almost unbelievable.

You can go there today and see 30 foot tall layers of rock that most geologists, if they hadn't known it had happened in an afternoon, would tell you it took hundreds of thousands of years. And yet we saw it happen in two to three hours.

I can't give you all of the answers to all of the scientific questions, but I can say this. If I say I believe the Earth is not as old as some would have us believe, I'm not saying so simply because I want to be argumentative or that I want to be on the fringe of science.

I'm saying so because the Bible gives me certain parameters which I must stay within. One, the belief in the flood. And when we get to that point in Genesis, I'll explain more about what I believe happened and how I think it changed the whole face of the world.

I don't think the world looks anything like it did prior to Genesis 6 when the flood happened. I don't think the world looks anything like it did. In fact, the beauty that we have now, and we do have a beautiful world.