Conference with Dr. Jason Lisle Day 1

Kootenai Church

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Let us open in prayer, and then I will introduce to Jason. Let's bow our heads. Father, it is our desire that throughout this evening and the instruction that we get from Dr.

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Lyle that you would be glorified in our hearts, in our minds, in our thoughts, that you would educate and equip and edify us tonight through the truth.

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We pray that our time spent together through this conference may increase our confidence in your word, in your truthfulness, in your wisdom in all things, and equip us to boldly and confidently share the gospel, share our faith, and trust in your word.

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We pray that you would accomplish this work in our hearts for the glory of Christ our King, in whose name we pray. Amen. All right,

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I told you last year at our conference last year with Andrew Rapoport that our conference would only get better each and every year, and we have fulfilled that this year.

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That is almost a promise that keeps itself. Dr. Jason Lyle has a double major in physics and astronomy with a minor in mathematics from Ohio Wesleyan University.

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He has a master's degree and a PhD in astrophysics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Jason has been on staff at Answers in Genesis, where he designed the planetarium presentation titled

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Created Cosmos. He served at the Institute for Creation Research, and now he has founded and runs the

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Biblical Science Institute. Jason puts to lie the notion that no smart people believe in creation, or that no scientists believe in God, or that no truly smart people disagree with evolution.

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He refutes all of that. Jason is a tremendously brilliant man, and we are pleased to have him here, and the

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Church of Christ is blessed to have him serve us in this way. So please welcome Dr. Jason Lyle.

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All right, well, it's very good to be with you this evening, and I'm gonna start by talking about the ultimate proof of creation, making all of the other talks just a waste of time, right?

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Well, not really, because we're gonna cover a lot of science tomorrow, and I find that's very helpful to know something about science so that you can defend biblical creation well, so that you can talk intelligently about the issues, about genetics, fossils, astronomy, and so on.

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It's good to know some things about that. But I gotta tell you, no matter how much you know about science, there's always somebody that knows more than you know about science, especially in a particular field, because there are people who have

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PhDs in genetics, and in certain specialty fields, there's always somebody smarter. And so people have asked me, is there one argument that I could learn just really well that just blows away everything else?

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An ultimate proof of creation, and the answer is yes, there is. And it's good to know this, because those of you that are

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Christians, you wanna share your faith, you wanna share with people that they need to trust in Jesus, they need to repent and believe the gospel, they need to obey

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Christ, and so on. And there are objections to that, and one of the main objections is, well, nobody believes the Bible anymore, because we know millions of years of evolution is the way that life came about, and science has allegedly proved that.

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Of course, it hasn't, but that's what we hear. Evolution is one of the main reasons why people end up rejecting the

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Bible. It's one of the intellectual reasons, or pseudo -intellectual reasons. And so what

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I wanna give you this evening is an ultimate proof that the Christian worldview, beginning in Genesis, really is true, and it's not just a proof of creation, it's a proof of the

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Christian worldview. And so that's something that would be very useful for you Christians to know, and if you're not a

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Christian, you need to become a Christian, and then learn this argument, right? Because we wanna share this with folks.

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It's not a trick, it's not a gimmick, it's a way of revealing truth. Certain things are provable. Now, just because I can demonstrate the truth of biblical creation doesn't mean that everyone will necessarily accept that argument.

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You understand that, right? And there's this temptation for us to say, well, this didn't convince my friend, so therefore, maybe it's not a good argument.

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Well, not necessarily. Sometimes people are not persuaded by very good arguments.

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That doesn't necessarily mean there's anything wrong with the argument. It means there's something wrong with people.

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People are not always rational, and they're not always persuaded by good arguments. In fact, people are often persuaded by bad arguments.

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That's what logical fallacies are. Logical fallacies are bad arguments that tend to be persuasive.

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Well, keep in mind, though, it's not my job, it's not your job as a Christian to ultimately persuade people to change their heart because you can't do that anyway.

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That's up to God. But you can give a defense of the faith that is irrefutable.

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You can give a demonstration of the truth of the Christian worldview. So keep in mind that just because the person doesn't cry uncle, that doesn't mean

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I don't have him in headlock, right? And this is not an intellectual game. This is not a trick or a gimmick.

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This is a matter of eternal life and death. And what I want to show you is that the truth of the

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Christian worldview can be objectively demonstrated in a way that no one can refute. Even though they might not be persuaded, they can't refute it.

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So that's what I want to deal with this evening. I ought to be worth the cost of admission right there, right? Yeah. And of course, it bothers some people because they'll think, well, wait a minute.

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If you can demonstrate the truth of the Christian worldview, then do I need faith? And the answer is yes, because faith is when you have confidence in something you haven't perceived with your senses.

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Now I can't perceive creation with my senses in the sense I can't see God creating and things like that, because he's done.

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That happened before I was born. But nonetheless, I have confidence in it. So it is a type of faith.

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It's just a provable one. That bothers people because they don't know what faith is. Well, before I get to the ultimate proof,

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I want to start with some other lines of scientific evidence that people often use.

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And we'll hit more of these tomorrow. And I want to start with these because these are not the ultimate proof of creation.

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I want to show you how the ultimate proof is different. So by way of contrast, let me start out with some lines of evidence that are good lines of evidence, but they're not quite ultimate.

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For example, we could talk about information. We'll talk about this more tomorrow, information and how information is transmitted and such.

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There's a whole field of science, information theory, that deals with how information is transmitted. And so when you pick up a book and it's got information in it, one of the laws of information theory is that information always originates in a mind.

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And so if you pick up a book and it's got creative information in it, and we'll talk about what that is and how it's defined, and so we'll do that tomorrow.

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But you sort of intuitively know what information is. You read a book, it's got information on it, you can learn something from it.

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You know that ultimately that book came from a mind. Somebody wrote it. It didn't come from like an explosion in a typewriter.

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You would assume that if a book has creative information in it, it comes from a mind. Now, a non -mental process can copy information.

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A Xerox machine can copy information. It can copy a book, but it can't write one because it doesn't have a mind.

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And that's very interesting because you know what we have in DNA? We have information in DNA. The instructions to make you are encoded on that molecule that exists in the cells of your body, and it's got the instructions to make you.

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Where did you get that information? You got it from your parents, they got it from their parents, all the way back to Adam and Eve who got it from God. So the information ultimately that makes up your physical traits, and we'll see how that works genetically tomorrow, but that goes back to a mind.

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It's consistent with the laws of information theory. Mutations don't help.

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They might, under certain circumstances, help an organism survive, that can happen, but it's by reducing information.

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And again, we'll see how that works tomorrow. My point is that genetics really confirms biblical creation. Information theory confirms biblical creation.

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In the beginning, God created, and so all those instructions that are built into us ultimately originated with God.

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Some have been lost over time. We'll see how that works as well. It's not consistent with the idea of evolution, where the information in your

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DNA gradually accumulated over millions of years of chance mutations and then natural selection weeding off the cases that were unsuccessful.

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That's not consistent with information theory. Natural selection and mutations occur, but they can't drive evolution.

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We could talk about the age of the Earth. I'll talk about that more tomorrow in detail, but the Bible indicates a world that's thousands of years old, which is striking to people because we've been brainwashed into believing the

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Earth's 4 .5 billion years old and the universe is supposedly 13 .8 billion years old, although that changed a couple weeks ago.

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It's now 12 to 13 billion years old. Yeah, that changes every now and then. But you know, there's a lot of science that confirms the biblical timescale of thousands of years.

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For example, carbon dating. A lot of people think carbon dating gives the millions of years. It never does. There are other methods that secular scientists use that they believe give millions of years.

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We'll talk about those tomorrow. But carbon dating isn't one of them. Carbon dating is our friend, and it gives age estimates that are consistent with the biblical timescale, give or take.

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I mean, they're not exact, but they're close. For example, diamonds. We found diamonds with C14 in them.

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C14 is an unstable variety of carbon, and it decays with a half -life of 5 ,700 years.

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And so the bottom line is if the entire Earth were made of C14, after a million years, you'd not have one atom of it left.

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It would all have decayed away into nitrogen. And yet we find it in diamonds that are supposedly billions of years old, but they can't be more than a few thousand years old.

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There's lots of stuff like that. And again, we'll hit more of those tomorrow. I just want to point out that the physical evidence confirms the biblical age of the

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Earth of thousands of years. And in particular, the carbon -14, I find that very compelling as a physicist.

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I don't see how you could look at that any other way, really. In my own area of astrophysics, there's all kinds of evidence of a universe that is consistent with the biblical age.

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Comets, for example. Comets are made of ice and dirt, and they orbit around the sun in elliptical pads.

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They go far away from the sun where the ice remains frozen. Then they come close to the sun and get whiplashed back out. Now, you might think, ice close to the sun, that can't be good.

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And you'd be right. The solar heat heats up that ice and vaporizes it. And that's actually what forms a comet's tail.

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That's material being blasted away from the nucleus of the comet. And so every time you see a comet, it's getting smaller, it's losing mass.

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And we know how much mass is there. We can measure that. The nucleus of the comet's a few miles across.

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And we can measure the rate at which it's being depleted. We can see that. And you do the math, you find out a comet can last something like 100 ,000 years maximum.

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A typical comet. Some more, some less. Some much less. I used the SOHO spacecraft in my doctoral research.

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In SOHO, all it does is look at the sun. And it's got one instrument that blocks the sun and looks for comets as they get real close to the sun.

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I've seen comets that have gone behind the sun, and that's it. They were totally destroyed in one pass.

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So Comet ISON, for example. That comet does not exist anymore. It's gone. Because it's been totally destroyed by the solar heat.

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So that would seem to eliminate a multi -billion year old solar system, the fact that we still have comets around.

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And I could go on and on, and we'll see more of these tomorrow. And there's a lot of exciting evidence that confirms biblical creation.

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But my point is that these lines of evidence, as compelling as they seem, they're less than an ultimate proof.

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And the reason they're not quite an ultimate proof is because for every line of evidence that I've presented, a secularist can always invoke what we might call a rescuing device.

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He can come up with a hypothesis that protects his way of thinking, his beliefs from evidence that appears to be to the contrary.

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And so, for example, in the case of comets, my secular colleagues are well aware that comets can't last billions of years.

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They know that. They can do the same math I can do. And so they've said, well, but we know the solar system's billions of years old, because they've accepted that as a fact.

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And so they said, well, there must be a source of new comets, which they call the Oort Cloud. If you've ever heard of the

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Oort Cloud, it's not something that's been seen or discovered. It's something that's been proposed as basically a comet generator.

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And the idea is that out beyond the farthest planets, out beyond Neptune, there's a vast reservoir of potential comets where they remain frozen all the time in circular orbits.

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And then the idea is every now and then, one of them gets dislodged from its orbit, thrown into the inner solar system, becomes a brand new comet.

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So as old comets disintegrate, new ones replace them. So there you go. The solar system can be billions of years old after all.

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We've got a comet generator that keeps it well -stocked with comets. Now, if I were to ask my secular colleague, do you have any observational evidence of an

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Oort Cloud? If he's honest, he'll say, no, we don't. And if he's clever, he'll say, but you can't prove it's not there, right?

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And that's true. I can't disprove the existence of an undetectable Oort Cloud. It's undetectable. How am I supposed to prove or disprove that, right?

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A good rescuing device is neither provable nor disprovable. That's what makes them good. And for every line of evidence

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I've presented, a clever person can come up with a rescuing device. I could point out how information never arises by chance and the fact that we have information in our

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DNA suggests it came from a mind. You could say, well, there could be some undiscovered mechanism that produces that information in our

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DNA. We just haven't discovered it yet. Give us time. Science is a process. Well, yeah, that's true.

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Or carbon, C14 in diamonds. It doesn't last billions of years. It doesn't even last a million years.

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He says, well, there could be some unknown process that's generating new C14 down there. We just haven't discovered it yet.

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Or there could be some kind of contamination on the surface. Give us time, we'll find it. The eschatological cop -out.

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In the future, we'll have an answer for this problem, right? And before I'm too harsh with my critics, I need to point out that Christians have, we have our rescuing devices too.

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If I were to ask you about an alleged contradiction in the Bible, maybe a passage you're not all that familiar with, and I say, how do you reconcile this over here?

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And you, well, I haven't read that in a while, and it does seem to contradict. Your first inclination probably is not to say, well, yeah, you got me there.

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I don't see how this can be reconciled. It's a contradiction. I gotta throw this away. I can't be a Christian anymore. Your first inclination probably is to say, well,

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I don't know right now how to reconcile that, but I know this is the word of God, and it can't have contradictions, so I know there's an answer.

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Give me time, I'll find it. We all have our rescuing devices because we all have a worldview.

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We have a way of thinking about how the world works that affects how we understand the evidence that we see.

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So my secular colleagues and I, we look at the same world. We look at the same Earth.

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We look at the same comets, and my secular colleague looks at those comets. He's got a belief in billions of years.

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Looks at comets and said, there must be an Oort cloud. I believe the Bible. I look at comets, and I say, well, of course the solar system's young.

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You see, we draw different interpretations looking at the same data because we have a different worldview, a different way of thinking about that data.

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If you think about it, creationists and evolutionists have the same facts. A lot of times people think, well, the way that you win the origins debate is you get more facts on your side, right?

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I mean, evolutionists have these facts over here, and creationists, we have these facts over here, and we got more facts. But really, we have the same facts, right?

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I have access to the same fossils and DNA patterns as my secular colleagues.

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I look at the same stars and galaxies that they do. I use the same math they do. We have the same facts.

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We do science pretty much the same way. In terms of real operational science, the kind of stuff that makes computers work and puts people on the moon and so on.

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When I do stoichiometry, I do it the same way as my secular colleagues. When I do math, I do it the same way. We do science pretty much the same way, but we have very different beliefs about the past because we have a different way of looking at the evidence, which you can think of like mental glasses, your worldview, your way of thinking, like mental glasses.

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And I like to think of the Bible like corrective lenses that are designed just for you because the Bible gives us the correct view of history.

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You see? And so when you put those glasses on, the world snaps into focus and you see things as they really are.

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That's what the Bible does for us. I like to think of evolution like red glasses. Now you put on red glasses, you look around, you say, well, the world is red.

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Everything's red. Well, it's not really, is it? But that's what you see because those are the glasses that you're wearing.

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And I realize evolutionists will say, no, we're wearing the right glasses. You're wearing the wrong ones. We'll have to debate that.

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But my point is we all have mental glasses because we all have these presuppositions which are your most basic beliefs about reality.

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A presupposition is not just any old assumption. It's an assumption you hold to very, very tightly.

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Something you would not be willing to give up without a fight. And there are certain presuppositions that are just very basic that you probably haven't even thought about really.

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Like the basic reliability of your senses. Presumably you think that what you see and smell and taste and touch really is pretty close to reality, right?

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That you're not just, I mean, how do you know that though? That's a presupposition, isn't it? How do you know that you're not just a brain in a jar and all your experiences are just electrical input into your brain?

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How do you know that? Well, you presuppose that's not the case. The basic reliability of your memory.

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You probably think that the things you remember actually happened, right? But how do you know that?

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How do you know that your memory's basically reliable? You might say, well, Dr. Lyle, I took a memory test two weeks ago.

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I got an A on it, so I know my memory's reliable. But then I'm gonna ask, how do you know you took a memory test two weeks ago?

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Right, and you're gonna say, well, I remember taking, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd have to assume that my memory is reliable in order to argue that I correctly remember that my memory is reliable.

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That is the nature of the presupposition. You can't escape that. And we use these presuppositions every day.

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Laws of logic. You use laws of logic. Even if you can't recite one, you all know some laws of logic because you couldn't survive without them.

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If I said my car's in the parking lot and it's not in the parking lot, you wouldn't say, wow, I'd like to see a car that's there and not there, right?

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You'd assume that I'm mistaken or lying because you know that you can't have A and not A at the same time and in the same sense.

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That's a law of logic. Can you prove that there are laws of logic? I think you can, but not without using them.

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Because you see, we use laws of logic to prove anything, right? So that's the nature of a presupposition.

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You must use them even in the process of proving them. That bothers folks because most people have the impression that all circular reasoning is wrong.

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We'll come back to that topic a little bit later. But my point is we all have beliefs about how to interpret the evidence, very basic beliefs.

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And some people don't think they do, though. They'll say, well, not me. I don't have beliefs about how evidence should be interpreted.

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I believe that we ought to come to the evidence neutrally, to which I'm gonna say, well, that's a very interesting belief about how evidence should be interpreted, right?

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You see, the philosophy that we should come to the evidence with no philosophy is itself a philosophy.

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It's just a very bad one because it's self -refuting, okay? There is a nature of presuppositions.

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You say, not me. I'm gonna be a rigorous scientist. I'm gonna do some experiments on that rock that I see along the side of the road there.

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I'm gonna be rigorously neutral. I'm not gonna make any assumptions. You've already assumed the rock is there simply because you see it.

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You've already assumed your senses are basically reliable. That's a presupposition. You can't escape that.

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And the kicker is creationists and evolutionists have different presuppositions, different worldviews.

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All of your presuppositions together form your worldview, so I'll use those terms interchangeably. Creationists and evolutionists have different worldviews, different sets of presuppositions, which is why we can look at exactly the same fossil and come to very different conclusions about how that fossil came to be.

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Same evidence, different interpretation because we have a different worldview. Different rules for interpreting the evidence.

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And you're gonna find that presuppositions are hierarchical. Some of them are more basic than others.

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Sometimes you'd be willing to trade in a secondary presupposition to protect your primary one, right, and so presuppositions will come back to an ultimate standard, something that you take as absolutely unquestionable.

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And for the creationists, the Bible should be the ultimate standard. Not that it is that way for all creationists, but it should be, right, because if the

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Bible, I mean, if this really is the inerrant word of God, doesn't it make sense to start our thinking with this, to base our thinking on this?

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Now, I do have secondary presuppositions. I do believe my senses are basically reliable, but then again,

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I believe God created my senses, and so that makes sense. That secondary presupposition is based on my primary presupposition that the

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Bible is true. But you see, my secondary presupposition that my senses are basically reliable,

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I know that my senses can be fooled. That's not my ultimate presupposition, because my senses can be fooled. Have you ever seen an optical illusion?

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Your senses can be fooled under certain circumstances, right? You've ever seen like a beam of wood put in water at an angle, and it looks like the wood bends when it goes under the water, right, because of the way the light refracts.

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Now, presumably, you don't believe that your eyes are being truthful in that circumstance, because your eyes are telling you the wood bends.

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But then again, you could put your hand under there, and you could, what doesn't seem, my sense of touch tells me it doesn't bend.

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My eyes tell me it does bend. Which one do I go with? They can't both be right, right? And so you have a greater presupposition that tells you how to interpret the evidence in that particular instance.

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And so the Bible should be our ultimate standard. Now, for the evolutionists, there's different varieties of evolutionists out there.

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They don't all have the same ultimate standard, but usually, it's either naturalism or strict empiricism.

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One of those two is usually the ultimate standard that an evolutionist has. Naturalism is the belief that nature's all that there is, and so everything that happens happens within the laws of nature, and therefore, there's no

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God, or if there is a God, he's within nature rather than transcendent to it. Or strict empiricism, which is the belief that all truth claims should be answered by observation.

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If you wanna know something, go out and do a science experiment. That's how we know everything. And of course, I believe some truth claims can be answered that way.

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I'm a strong advocate of science and the scientific method, but I don't believe all truth claims can be answered that way, and so we'll circle back to that one a little bit later.

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So, here's the issue. Evidence by itself is never decisive when it comes to a worldview issue.

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And so, it's perfectly fine to show people evidence, scientific evidence, historical evidence, for the racet of the

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Bible, that's fine, but you need to understand that that evidence will not conclusively prove one position or the other because a person's worldview tells them what to make of the evidence.

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When the debate is over worldviews, evidence by itself won't resolve the issue. And I have a silly example

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I like to use to illustrate this. There was a man who thought that he was dead. He thought that he himself was dead.

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And by the way, this is a real psychological condition, believe it or not. It's rare, but it happens. So, this man, he thought that he was dead, and he's very upset about this.

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He doesn't like being dead. Who would, right? And his doctor's trying to convince him, well, of course you're not dead.

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You're walking and talking. And the man says, well, yeah, but a human body can have muscle spasms even after clinical death.

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That could explain my ability to walk and talk. And the doctor says, but look, I have a medical chart showing you you're perfectly healthy.

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And the man looks at that and he says, yeah, but maybe the names got swapped on the chart. That might not even be my chart. And who knows if you're interpreting the data right anyway.

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And the doctor, getting very frustrated, says, well, I'm gonna prove to you that you're not dead. Do dead men bleed? And the guy thinks about it for a second.

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The circulatory system would be stopped. The heart stopped. No, dead men don't bleed. And the doctor very quickly picks the guy in the hand with a little pin.

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Sure enough, a little blood comes to the surface. See, you're bleeding. To which the man responds, well, how about that? I guess dead men do bleed.

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You got me there. Silly example, of course, but it makes the point.

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Did the doctor have evidence for his claim that the man was not dead? Of course he did. There was nothing wrong with those lines of evidence.

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That's good evidence. The fact that the guy could walk and talk, that's good evidence that he's not dead. The medical charts, that's good evidence.

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The guy could bleed, that's good evidence. Did the man find them convincing? And the answer is no, because he had a presupposition that he was dead that told him how to interpret those lines of evidence.

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In each case, he was able to come up with a rescuing device to explain that evidence in light of his worldview.

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You say, but Lyle, are debates over origins like that? They absolutely are.

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They absolutely are. And so that's why you can't just throw evidence at people and expect them to change their worldview.

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Because the worldview tells them what to make of the evidence. Now, it's not wrong to show people evidence and how the

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Bible makes sense of it. It's just not decisive. It's not conclusive. Now, I happen to think fossils are great evidence of the

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Bible, the fact that there was a worldwide flood. I'd expect to find fossils all over the earth and that's what we find. But then again,

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I'm looking at it correctly. I'm looking at the evidence through the lens of scripture, through the history that the Bible gives us, the correct history of the universe.

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My secular colleague's gonna look at that very same fossil and he's gonna say, well, that's not how I see it. Here's how I think the fossils were.

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I think they formed gradually over millions of years. Those don't prove a worldwide flood, they prove millions of years. And you say, well, yeah,

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I guess you could look at it that way, right? See, he's looking at it through a different perspective. And so what we think is, well,

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I guess that evidence is no good. We need more evidence, right? But look, so let me show you how canyons can form quickly.

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Mount St. Helens demonstrated that. Yes, it did. It cut out a canyon 140 at the scale of the Grand Canyon in a matter of hours, showing that canyons don't take millions of years to form.

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But he says, yeah, but just because that canyon formed quickly doesn't mean they all did. The Grand Canyon, that took millions of years.

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Well, well, I guess it could have. Yeah, we weren't around to see it. But look, let me show you, rock layers can be deposited quickly.

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And Mount St. Helens laid down all kinds of new sediment, some of which is hardened into rock. And he says, yeah, but just because those layers did doesn't mean that all that rock layers formed quickly.

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I mean, some of them could have taken millions of years. And you're like, well, yeah, I guess one example of something forming fast doesn't prove they all did.

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But look, let me show you how animals reproduce. They always reproduce according to their kinds. Kangaroos always beget kangaroos.

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He says, well, sure. That's because we haven't been around long enough to see one kind gradually change into another. But they do.

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That's how life evolved. Oh, well, yeah, I guess we haven't been around long enough to see that.

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But look, DNA has information in it. Information never comes about by chance. He says, well, there could be some undiscovered process that generates that information.

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Just give us time. We'll find it. Science is a process. But look, there's evidence in outer space.

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Things like comets that can't last billions of years. He says, no problem. There's an Oort cloud that makes new ones.

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So I present this and people say, are you against showing people evidence? No, I'm not. I do a lot of that.

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I think there's some value in that. But my point is it's not decisive. I do think there's value in showing people evidence and how the

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Bible makes sense of it because most people aren't even aware that there is a Christian way to look at the evidence and there is value in showing them that.

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But my point is just showing people that there is a Christian creation way of looking at the evidence doesn't prove that you must look at it that way.

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Okay? So it's good to show people evidence and how the Bible makes sense of it. This by itself, however, will not resolve a debate over worldviews because a person's worldview tells them what to make of that evidence.

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There's a larger issue at play here. And I think that one of the reasons we have difficulty getting this a lot of times, if you're new to this way of thinking, it's because we tend to spend most of our time with people that have basically the same worldview that we have.

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And when two people have the same worldview, you can convince them of something using evidence. If you and I have a disagreement about whether or not there are crackers in the cupboard, we could settle that debate by going over to the cupboard, opening it up, see whether there are crackers there.

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And we agree on that because we have the same worldview. We agree our senses are reliable and so on. But if I'm having an argument with a

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Hindu over whether or not there are crackers in the cupboard, now Hindus believe that all we see here is illusion.

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It's all maya because they don't believe in distinctions. All is one. And so this world is all illusion. And I show them the crackers.

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Are they gonna accept that as evidence that I'm right? Well, no, they're gonna say, well, that's illusion too. That doesn't prove anything.

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So you see, if you have a different worldview, you can't just throw evidence back and forth. Somehow we need to demonstrate that our way of thinking about the evidence is the right way of thinking about the evidence.

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How are we gonna do that? So I'm standing over here on my biblical presuppositions. Bible's the word of God and so on.

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And my secular colleague is standing on his secular presuppositions, maybe naturalism, maybe strict empiricism.

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How are we gonna get anywhere? We can't just throw evidence back and forth. Well, before I give you the right answer, let me give you the wrong answer because a lot of times, and it's usually the critic that proposes this.

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A lot of times people say, well, here's what we'll do. Here's how we'll resolve the issue. We'll meet on neutral ground. Because certainly there are some presuppositions that we agree on.

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For example, the success of science. The science is a tool for unlocking certain truth claims.

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I agree with that, right? That's a neutral presupposition. And we'll give up the presuppositions we don't agree on.

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And he says, and I certainly don't agree the Bible's the word of God, so you gotta leave that out of the conversation. And a lot of Christians think, well, yeah, that sounds really reasonable.

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We can leave out the Bible and meet on neutral ground. The problem with neutral ground, however, is that there's no such thing as neutral ground.

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And the Bible says as much. When it comes to a faith commitment, Jesus says, he who is not with me is, what, neutral?

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No, he who is not with me is against me. He who does not gather with me scatters. Because the mindset on the flesh is, what, neutral toward God?

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See, unbelievers like to think that. They're like, oh, I'm neutral toward God. I just haven't been convinced that God exists. I haven't seen enough evidence.

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I'd be happy to believe in God. That's not what the Bible says. The Bible says you're hostile toward God if you're not, if you're not, if you don't have your mind set on him, if your mind is set on the flesh, you're hostile toward God.

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You're not even able to subject yourself to love God. You adulteresses do not know that friendship with the world is, what, neutrality toward God?

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It's hostility toward God. Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. You get the picture here?

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You're either God's friend or his enemy. You're with him, you're against him. You're gathering or you're scattering. There's no neutral.

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Because the nature of the claim, Jesus demands obedience to him. He's the ultimate standard.

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He, in the revelation that he's given us in his word, that's the ultimate standard that we're to stand on. And if we reject that, we're not being neutral.

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We're being anti -biblical. My mentor on this topic, Dr. Bonson, liked to call this the pretended neutrality fallacy.

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That's what we're gonna call it. The idea that, oh, I'm neutral. You can pretend to be neutral, but you can't actually be neutral because the

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Bible says there's no such thing. And if you say, well, yes, there is such a thing as neutral and I'm neutral, you've just said the

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Bible's wrong. In which case, you're not being neutral. You've taken a stand that the

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Bible is wrong. You get that? Neutrality is an anti -biblical concept.

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And therefore, to take a stand and to say I'm neutral is to say the Bible's wrong. In which case, you're not being neutral.

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Make sure you get that because you will have to explain that to somebody at some point, by the way. Secularists like to think they're very neutral.

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They're gonna want you to be neutral. But the Bible says there's no such thing. Neutrality is a secular position.

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And so, don't agree to those terms. Somebody says, well, there's neutral ground. And I'm neutral and you should be neutral, too.

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And so, you gotta give up the Bible because that's biased and everything. If you agree to those terms and you say, yeah, we can leave it on neutral ground.

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We can leave the Bible out of the discussion. Neutral ground is a secular concept. The Bible says there's no such thing.

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And if you start the debate by basically conceding that the

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Bible is wrong about neutrality, you've pretty well lost at the outset. Because isn't the debate really about whether or not this is true?

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If this is true, then creation is true. It's that simple because the Bible teaches creation. And so, you're starting the debate by saying, well, this isn't true, at least about neutrality.

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How are you gonna proceed now? You've given up the very thing you're trying to defend. You cannot defend biblical authority by immediately abandoning biblical authority.

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That's not gonna work. Now, people think, oh, but aren't we supposed to be neutral in debating? Not really, not really.

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Secularists like to think that they're neutral and they're gonna want you to be neutral. Two things to remember when people ask you to be neutral.

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One, they're not. Two, you shouldn't be. No one is neutral when it comes to an ultimate standard and you shouldn't attempt to be neutral because, well, first of all, it's logically impossible to be neutral by the nature of the claim.

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Because the Bible says there's no such thing. And so, if you say, yes, there is, you're not neutral. You've taken a stand that the Bible's wrong.

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And secondly, more importantly, God hasn't called us to be neutral. He's called us to be Christians. The man of God is to hold fast the faithful word, which is in accordance with the teaching, so that he will be able both to exhort and sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict.

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Yes, we do stand on God's word, even when refuting those people who contradict God's word. And people will say, well, you can't do that.

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You can't stand on the very thing you're trying to defend. Meanwhile, they're standing on evolution while defending evolution.

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Yeah, they do that. And it seems to me that there's nothing illogical about standing on what you're trying to defend.

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In battle, you can stand on a hill while you're defending the hill, right? That's a good place to be.

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Have you ever had something in your eye? And you can go to a mirror and use your eye to examine your eye and correct your eye.

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There's nothing illogical about that. It's necessary. If you could defend your ultimate standard by standing on something else, then your ultimate standard is an ultimate, is it?

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Obviously, you have to stand on it while defending it. Otherwise, it's not really your ultimate standard. So, all right, so what's the right answer then?

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We can't just throw evidence back and forth because we're each gonna interpret the evidence according to our respective worldview.

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The debate really is about whose worldview is correct. What's the right way to interpret the evidence? We can't meet on neutral ground because there's no such thing as neutral ground.

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So do we just have like a Mexican standoff here where we can just, you know, we can insult each other, but that's about it? No, no, there is a solution because it turns out biblical presuppositions and only biblical presuppositions make knowledge possible.

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And so what we're gonna find is that secular presuppositions are sinking sand. They will not make knowledge possible.

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This is a biblical claim. The Bible tells us the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. You wanna start to know anything?

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It begins with God, the fear of the Lord, a reverential submission to his presuppositions.

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It's biblical presuppositions make knowledge possible. And there's a flip side. Fools despise wisdom instruction.

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You reject the presuppositions of Scripture, the Bible says you're a fool. You've given up knowledge, you've given up wisdom because all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are deposited in Christ.

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It's God's mind that determines truth. And so in order for us to know anything, for us to have truth, it has to be from God, a gift from God.

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And of course, God has given us that gift. Now, there's an objection to this because some people will say, but wait a minute, Dr. Lyle, you're saying we need biblical presuppositions to know anything?

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That's right. But I know some non -Christians and they do know some things, right? Yes, they do.

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But then again, they do know God. They don't have a saving faith in God, but they do know God, because everybody does.

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The Bible makes that clear. And unbelievers do embrace, inconsistently, biblical presuppositions.

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We'll see how that works in a little bit. But I want you to understand that everybody knows God and as a result, everybody can have knowledge.

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My argument is not that you have to profess a belief in God to have knowledge. My argument is that God would have to exist and would have to be the way the

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Bible says he is in order for us to have knowledge. And that is true for believers and unbelievers. This is unbelievers denied.

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For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who, what, who just don't know any better?

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Who suppress the truth and unrighteousness. That's interesting, because to suppress the truth, you have to know the truth.

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That's kind of interesting, isn't it? Self -deception is a real phenomenon. It's something the Bible talks about in James chapter one.

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But it's fascinating, because to be self -deceived, you have to know the truth in order to do the deceiving and you have to somehow accept the deception in order to be deceived.

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It's quite fascinating. And Dr. Bonson actually wrote his dissertation on this topic, and it's a great read, it's a great read.

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Because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. Yes, God has revealed himself inescapably to people.

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So we're hardwired such that we have knowledge of God such that when we look out into creation, we just instantly recognize it as God's handiwork.

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Presents the creation of the world, his invisible attributes are clearly seen. See, Paul's using a play on words there. God's invisible attributes are clearly seen, meaning they're understood.

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Being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they're without excuse. God has hardwired us in such a way that when we look out into creation, we already have built into us some biblical presuppositions, even unbelievers do, that allows us to correctly understand this is the creation of God.

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God's the creator. So that they're without excuse, an apologia, without an apologetic, without a defense.

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That's interesting. A good way to do apologetics, the way to do apologetics is to realize that unbelievers don't have one.

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You can't have knowledge apart from the Christian worldview. So you see my argument, and the thing I want you to take home this evening is only the

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Bible can make sense of those things necessary for knowledge. And I'm gonna flesh this out. If this is kind of new to you, you're thinking,

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I don't know, that's kind of abstract. I don't know if I can follow that. It makes sense. It makes sense. There are certain things, in order for us to know anything about anything, the universe would have to be a certain way.

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You ever thought about that? In order for us to have knowledge of, you know, say Saturn or the

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Andromeda Galaxy, the universe would have to be a certain way. It would have to be sort of orderly, right?

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It would have to be sort of logical. Our minds would have to be a certain way. Our minds would have to be capable of rational thinking, where we could observe the evidence and consider the options that are available to us and choose the best, right?

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Our senses would have to be basically reliable. If my eyes and ears are just totally random in the information they're reporting to me, then

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I couldn't believe anything that I see or hear, right? I couldn't know anything about the universe. If my senses weren't reliable, we might call these prerequisites for knowledge.

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You know what a prerequisite is, right? In college, you have to take Calculus 1 before you take

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Calculus 2. Calculus 1 is a prerequisite for Calculus 2, because Calculus 2 builds on Calculus 1.

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You don't take the prerequisite, then Calculus 2 won't make any sense. And some of you are thinking, it didn't make sense anyway, but you get my point, right?

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In order for the universe to make sense, it would have to be a certain way. There are certain prerequisites. And my point is, the

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Bible tells us the universe is that way. The Bible, you see, the biblical worldview gives us the prerequisites for knowledge.

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It tells us that the universe was made by God and has therefore been organized by God. It tells us that God made our senses and therefore we'd expect them to be reliable, because God made the seeing eye and the hearing ear.

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And it tells us that we're made in the image of God and therefore we have the capacity, albeit on a limited creaturely level, to think in a way that's consistent with the character of God, which is to say logically.

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We can be rational. We don't always exercise that, right? But we have the ability to do that. And so you see my argument that the

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Bible must be true beginning with biblical creation is that if it weren't true, you couldn't prove anything is true. This is fascinating, and it's something most people don't think about.

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People take for granted biblical presuppositions without recognizing they're biblical presuppositions.

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And they try to add to them other presuppositions that are inconsistent and incompatible, like naturalism. Again, we'll see how this works as we go along.

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But you see, my point is, we need to make people aware of their presuppositions and show them that only

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Christian presuppositions make knowledge possible. This is a very powerful argument, and I dare say it's irrefutable.

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I've never had anybody be able to come back with a rational answer to this. You can either be a consistent

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Christian or you can be irrational. Those are your options. Now, unbelievers can have pockets of rationality within their world because they do rely on biblical presuppositions, albeit inconsistently.

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And we wanna point out that inconsistency. Presuppositions, they're like your kidneys, right?

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You can't live without your kidneys. Not for very long, anyway. And they're constantly doing what they're doing, and most people are not aware of their own.

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Presuppositions are like that. What I wanna do, basically, is give the unbeliever the intellectual equivalent of a kidney stone.

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I wanna give him information. I wanna give him information that his presuppositions cannot process.

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And suddenly, he's gonna be very aware of his presuppositions for the first time. If you've ever had a kidney stone, suddenly you're very aware of your kidneys and you know that something is wrong with them.

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That's what I wanna do. I wanna give the unbeliever the intellectual equivalent of a kidney stone for his own good. It's not gonna kill him, it's just gonna hurt.

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It's just gonna hurt. And he'll be better off for it in the long run, hopefully, if he turns to Christ anyway.

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But that's not up to me. I'm just presenting the problem. I'm just making him aware that his presuppositions are faulty.

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They're inconsistent with each other. He has to steal Christian presuppositions to support his own worldview.

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So what are some of these presuppositions I'm talking about that make knowledge possible? Let me just discuss three briefly and we'll focus in on one of them.

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Laws of logic. But you see, laws of logic, that's a Christian presupposition.

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The idea that there are rules of correct reasoning. Why would there be rules of correct reasoning in a chance universe?

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And who decides what they are? Ever thought about that? Laws of logic are abstract and you can't touch a law of logic.

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They're not physical. They're not made of atoms. So that immediately rules out a materialistic worldview.

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Because there are people who say everything that exists is matter in motion. Well, you can't be logical because laws of logic are not matter in motion.

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If everything that exists is just atoms and energy, you can't have laws of logic. You realize that? They cannot exist in a materialistic worldview.

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So that blows away that worldview right there. And yet materialists still wanna think they're logical. But you see, it's inconsistent.

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Laws of logic apply the same everywhere. Now, why would that be? We all assume that. I've never been in this room before today and yet it didn't occur to me to say, boy,

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I hope laws of logic work in this room or I'm in big trouble, right? I assume they worked here, why?

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Because I believe in a God who is sovereign over the entire universe, who's omnipresent and therefore his rules of correct reasoning apply everywhere.

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They work just as well here as they do in the Andromeda galaxy, as they do on the moon, as they do in Europe, okay? Because God is sovereign over the entire universe.

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So laws of logic are the same everywhere. Laws of logic don't change with time, right? You know that.

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You don't say, well, sure, you can't contradict yourself on Fridays, but on Saturdays, go ahead. Contradictions can be true on Saturdays, right?

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No, that wouldn't make sense. We assume that laws of logic will work in the futures they have in the past and that makes sense because God is beyond time.

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And so naturally, his thinking is unchanging. You see, laws of logic really are a reflection of the way

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God thinks and the way he expects us to think, the way we must think if we're to think reasonably, if we're to think rationally, correctly.

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And all the laws of logic and their properties make sense in the Christian worldview. In any other worldview, you'd never be able to account for why laws of logic have the properties that they have or how we could possibly know that.

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Somebody might say, well, I just think laws of logic are the same everywhere. How can you possibly know that apart from divine revelation?

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Have you been everywhere? Oh, you've never even left the Earth. And I gotta tell you, the Earth is a really small part of the universe.

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How can you possibly extrapolate your experiences on this little grain of sand to everywhere?

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That's a hasty generalization fallacy. That's not logical. You can't draw that conclusion, and yet everybody assumes it, why?

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Because we're made in the image of God and God built that into us to know that laws of logic are the same everywhere because He's sovereign over the universe.

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So you see, laws of logic are rooted in the Christian worldview, aren't they? They really are. Or uniformity in nature, which is not to be confused with uniformitarianism.

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We'll talk about uniformitarianism tomorrow. Uniformitarianism is the belief that rates and conditions have been basically constant over Earth's history.

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I don't believe that because there was a worldwide flood that changed rates and conditions quite drastically. But I do believe in uniformity, which is just the idea that there are patterns in nature, that there's orderliness to nature.

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And I would expect that on the basis of God's word because the universe is not an accident.

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It's created by God and it's upheld by God. God upholds all creation by the word of His power, the expression of His power.

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And He does that in a way that's consistent and orderly. In fact, He's promised a certain amount of order in the universe.

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Genesis 8 .22, God promises the basic cycles of nature, the seasons, the day and night cycle, will be in the future as they have been in the past.

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So I know beyond any shadow of a doubt that the sun will rise tomorrow, right? As long as the

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Earth remains, until judgment day. Now on judgment day, all bets are off. But until then, I can rest assured the sun will rise tomorrow.

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But you know what? In a secular worldview, you have no basis for that. And it won't do any good to say, well, it rose yesterday, because that's not the question

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I'm asking. I'm asking how do you know it'll rise tomorrow? And the idea that we can use past experience as a basis for what's likely to happen in the future, that's a

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Christian presupposition because God is sovereign over the past and the future. He upholds things in a consistent way that we can benefit from.

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We need that to live. We need that to survive. Let me give you an example of this.

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Suppose you get up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water, and it's dark, and you're fumbling around, and you stub your toe on something.

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Ah, ever done that? That's unpleasant, isn't it? Now the next night when you get up to get a drink of water, you're very careful not to stub your toe again.

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You say, this time I'm gonna turn the lights on, and this time I'm gonna take it extra slow, whatever. You don't wanna stub your toe again. Why? Because you assume that if you stub your toe again, it will hurt again.

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Now if you're a consistent Christian, that's a very reasonable and rational assumption to make because God upholds the universe in a consistent way.

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Do the same thing, get the same result. What you sow is what you reap, biblical principle. But my point is, in a chance universe, why would you assume that?

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In a chance universe, who knows what's gonna happen? The next time I stub my toe, it might be the most enjoyable experience of my life.

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It's a chance. Why would you expect such a pattern? Uniformity in nature over space and over time, we assume that the laws of nature are the same in the

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Andromeda galaxies, they're on the Earth. All astronomers assume that. But it's only the Christian ones that can explain why that is.

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It's only the Christians who have justification for that belief because God is sovereign over the Andromeda galaxy just as he is

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Earth. Those two are kind of abstract.

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Laws of logic, uniformity of nature. Most of us haven't thought about what makes laws of logic possible or what is it that makes science possible, uniformity in nature and so on.

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But morality, people have given thought to morality, right and wrong, and people have very strong opinions on right and wrong.

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So I wanna kind of focus in on that one because I think of the three, it's the easiest to start with if you're new to this way of thinking.

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Start with morality because people have thought about that. But my point is, morality would make no sense in a chance universe.

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If there's no God, if we're just chemical accidents, well, I'm sorry, but what one chemical accident does to another is morally irrelevant.

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There's no morality. There's no ought in a chance universe. You realize that? Chemistry just behaves the way chemistry behaves.

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There's no right or wrong about it. You certainly can't have absolute morality. Who decides what it is? The idea that we have an obligation to obey

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God's law, that makes sense in a created universe where God has made us and has the right to make the rules and God will hold us accountable for our behavior.

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And so I have a very good reason for obeying God's law. Judgment's coming. And of course, we all fall short.

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We need salvation. I understand that, but my point is, morality makes no sense in a chance universe. So these three things, these are not the only three, but I like to kind of focus in on these three.

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Laws of logic, uniformity in nature, absolute morality. These things only make sense. They're only justified in a

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Christian worldview based on biblical creation with God as the creator. Now, my point is not that evolutionists don't believe in these things.

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My point is they do, and yet on their professed worldview, they would have no basis for them whatsoever.

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And so when my atheist friend says, but Dr. Lyle, I believe in laws of logic, I'm gonna say, yeah, but you shouldn't if you really were an atheist, because why would there be universal laws and who decides what they are and how do you know they don't change with time?

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How do you know they're the same everywhere? Your beliefs are unjustified on your professed worldview. But Dr.

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Lyle, I believe in the methods of science, but you shouldn't if you believe it's a chance universe. Why would you expect to find patterns in a chance universe?

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And why would you expect that there would be any kind of rationality to the universe if there's no mind behind it? Rationality is a characteristic of a mind.

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No mind, no rationality. But Dr. Lyle, I try to behave myself,

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I try to be good. What does that even mean if you're just a chemical accident? That's what I wanna know. So what you wanna do is an internal critique.

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You wanna show that the evolutionist on his own worldview doesn't have a basis for believing in the many things that he has stolen from the

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Christian worldview. So you can think of it like these two cars, and most people think of worldviews this way.

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You just, you pick your worldview, right? Or you get it from your parents or you get it from your professor or whatever.

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And it's just a question of personal preferences. Do you like blue, do you like flame color? Take your pick. But what you're gonna find is that the biblical worldview, when we investigate it, it can lead to knowledge.

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It makes knowledge possible. It can go somewhere. The secular worldview, when we examine it and open it up, it can't possibly work.

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It can't lead to knowledge. It's empty, it's futile. Let me give you an example of an internal critique.

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Somebody's a relativist. You've heard of relativists? They'll say things like, all things are relative. There are no absolutes. And of course, the question you wanna ask is, are you absolutely certain, right?

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Easy. The statement there are no absolutes is an absolute statement. If it's true, it's false. Therefore, it's false.

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You see? Easy. That's an internal critique. You should, that worldview blows itself up on its own terms.

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Another example, strict empiricism. A lot of evolutionists are strict empiricists. They believe that all truth claims are proved by empirical observation.

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Okay, so think of any truth claim you can think of. The way you test it is by observation, by your senses.

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And if you can't taste it or touch it or see it or smell it or hear it, if you can't test it with your senses, then you shouldn't believe it.

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But here's the thing you wanna eventually ask. How do you know the statement itself is true? Was it proved by empirical observation?

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You see, the statement, all truth claims are proved by empirical observation, is itself a truth claim that is not proved by empirical observation, right?

52:27

Because nobody has seen a truth claim. They're abstract. And even if you could, you couldn't see all of them because there's an infinite number of them.

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You see, so the claim that all truth claims are proved by empirical observation is itself a truth claim that cannot be proved by empirical observation.

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And so if it's true, you shouldn't believe it. Isn't that interesting? And people have this way of thinking.

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They don't realize it is illogical. It is self -refuting. Secular worldviews blow themselves up on their own terms every time.

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In fact, any non -Christian worldview, you know, I'm kind of focusing in on evolution and secular thinking, but this will work for other religions too.

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You just need to ask the right questions, push the unbeliever to be consistent with what he says he believes, and the worldview will blow itself up on its own terms.

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You see, all worldviews have to defend themselves in a somewhat circular way. It's just the Christian worldview can do it successfully.

53:19

It can make knowledge possible. The secular worldview or any non -Christian worldview will blow itself up on its own terms. That's how you demonstrate the truth of the

53:26

Christian worldview. So it may seem at first like we can't get anywhere because we're on our two separate islands.

53:32

I'm standing on my biblical presuppositions. Bible is true. There are absolutes from God. There are laws of logic.

53:38

There are laws of morality. There's uniformity and induction that makes science possible because God upholds the universe in a consistent way.

53:44

My secular colleague is standing on some combination of those secular presuppositions, naturalism, empiricism, what have you.

53:50

Bible's irrelevant to any kind of knowledge or science. But what you're gonna find is that secular presuppositions will not support a worldview.

53:58

They're sinking sand. They will not make knowledge possible. They won't. Because you have no basis for laws of logic in a naturalistic universe.

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You have no basis for uniformity in nature if you're an empiricist. You don't have any basis for those things.

54:11

And so when that sand dissolves away, the unbeliever's left in a rather awkward position. He cannot stand on his own worldview.

54:17

And so what's an unbeliever to do? He's gonna do this. Unbelievers must stand on Christian presuppositions because they have to.

54:25

Oh yes, unbelievers do believe in laws of logic. And they do accept that they're universal and unchanging, even though they have no rational basis for that on their own worldview.

54:33

They're standing on the Christian worldview. They're stealing Christian presuppositions to support their own worldview.

54:41

Unbelievers are presuppositional kleptomaniacs. They compulsively steal from the Christian worldview to support their own, and they can't help themselves.

54:48

We're gonna point that out. We're gonna say, well, look, fella, you're standing on Christian ground. He's gonna say, no, it's not.

54:54

No, laws of logic, that's not a Christian presupposition. But the fact is, he can't justify laws of logic on his own worldview.

55:01

And we're gonna point out that inconsistency. Again, it's up to God to change his heart.

55:07

Only God can do that. We're just gonna point out the inconsistency. We're gonna say, look, fella, you're standing on God's ground. You either need to get saved or stop trespassing.

55:14

And we pray you'll get saved, but that's between you and God. We're just pointing out the inconsistency. You can think of a debate over creation and evolution, or a debate over biblical authority, a lot like a debate on the existence of air.

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Can you imagine two people debating whether or not air exists? What would the critic of air say?

55:32

He's up there making all these elaborate arguments. Oh, there's no such thing as air. All the while breathing air, and expecting that we can hear the argument as the sound is transmitted through the air.

55:41

Wouldn't that be rather peculiar? You see, the critic of air must use air in order to make a case against air.

55:48

The fact that he's able to make his argument proves that his argument is wrong. Isn't that interesting? The very fact he can make the argument demonstrates his position is wrong.

55:57

And so it is with the critic of the Bible. The critic of the Bible must use biblical presuppositions in order to argue against the

56:03

Bible. He'll have to use God's laws of logic to say, well, the Bible's not rational.

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It's got contradictions. Wait a minute, who told you that contradictions are always wrong? That's a biblical principle. Oh, yeah.

56:16

Or he'll have to say that the Bible is unscientific, in which case he's relying upon God's upholding the universe in a consistent fashion.

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Or he'll say the Bible is morally disgusting in the things that God does or whatever, in which case he's gonna rely on the absolute morality that can only make sense if God really is the creator.

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Isn't that interesting? The secularist must stand on a Christian ground using

56:39

Christian presuppositions, even in his argument against the Christian position. And that's not gonna work out well for him, is it?

56:46

Because even if he were successful in refuting the Christian position, he would lose the very ground on which he must stand in order to make the argument.

56:55

And I hope you get that picture in your mind, if nothing else. As I, we kept thinking of different ways to illustrate this, and I kept thinking of those old cartoons with the

57:03

Wile E. Coyote, and he would lay a trap down and get caught up in his own trap. It really is that way. It really is that way.

57:09

You see, unbelievers might deny being made in God's image, but they can't escape being made in God's image. They're gonna have to stand on God's ground, even when they make an argument against God.

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The way Van Til put it, he said that it's like a little girl she's slapping her father in the face and spitting on him, insulting him.

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She's only able to do it, as she's sitting in her father's lap. She's only able to do it because her father supports her. You see, and God is that way, too.

57:32

God allows even the atheist to use his laws of logic, to use the fact that God upholds the universe in a consistent fashion, gives him a sense of morality, writes his law on his heart, and so on.

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The atheist can only spit in God's face because God's supporting him. Isn't that fascinating? And again, it's not just these three, but these are the three that I like to focus in on.

57:54

You realize any argument against Christianity will have to use one of these three things. You realize that? It'll either say that Christianity is irrational, in which case they're assuming

58:02

God's laws of logic, or they'll say Christianity is unscientific, in which case they're relying upon uniformity in nature that only makes sense because God upholds creation in a consistent way, or they'll say the

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Bible's morally disgusting, in which case they're relying upon the biblical concept of absolute morality. I want to zoom in on this last one, absolute morality, because I think that was the easiest one to start with if you're new to this way of thinking.

58:23

If God created us, then yeah, he's got the right to set the rules. He's the creator. He can make the universe as he wills.

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It's up to him what he wants to do with it, and he'll hold us accountable for our actions. And so, yeah, we have absolutes from God, and they're the same for everybody, right?

58:37

Because God's sovereign over everybody. God's a linguistic being. He communicated to us. We find that in Genesis.

58:43

So this is a Genesis theme. But if God did not create us, if we're just rearranged pond scum, then why would there be an absolute moral code if we're just chemical accidents?

58:51

There's no moral code for chemistry. Chemistry just does what chemistry does. And some people might say that.

58:57

They might say, that's right. I'm just an evolved ape, and so morality is just, I can invent whatever morality

59:03

I want, but people can't live that way, can they? Because the fact is, if I were to, if I come up against somebody who says, no, morality is relative.

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It's just we're all evolved, and so I can make up my own morality, and so can you. And therefore, you can't go around telling other people what not to do.

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What has he just done? He's told other people what not to do, right? When he says, you can't do that, he's imposed morality on me.

59:30

He's assuming that it's subjective. For that matter, I could just say, okay, then, hypothetically, if I were to pull my glock on you, why can't, you know, why shouldn't

59:38

I pull the trigger? Go ahead, make my day, give me a reason, right? Now, if he says, well, you can't do that, because that would be wrong, well, then he's made my day, right?

59:50

Because he's demonstrated that he understands that morality is objective. It's the same for him and for me.

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And if he says nothing, he says, well, yeah, I guess I can't give a reason, then I just pull the trigger, and I win the debate that way, right? There's no laws of logic in a chance universe, so as far as I can tell, you might as well just win the debate by simply shooting your opponent.

01:00:10

Now, I wouldn't do that, because I'm a Christian, and I understand that we win debates through logical reasoning and not through physical violence, but you see my point, in the secular worldview, why not?

01:00:22

It's just one chemical accident getting rid of another chemical accident. You're gonna ask an unbeliever, how do you decide right from wrong?

01:00:30

What does that even mean? What do right and wrong even mean in your worldview? And how do you decide right from wrong?

01:00:36

Because apart from the biblical God, morality can only be relative, but people cannot live that way, and they won't.

01:00:42

Now, some people might say, well, everybody knows right from wrong. I said, yes, because we're made in God's image. God's written his law in our heart. That's taught in Romans 1,

01:00:49

Romans 2. Yes, but how can you even make sense of right and wrong from your secular perspective?

01:00:54

And there aren't too many responses to this, really. They usually fall into one of these categories.

01:01:00

Some people say, no, you don't need God to know right and wrong, or to know good and bad. Good is what brings the most happiness to the most people.

01:01:09

And aside from the impracticality of that definition, as if I could somehow measure the happiness of a person, you know,

01:01:15

I've got my little tricorder, and I measure your happiness and try to add it up, you know, aside from the impracticality of it, this is arbitrary.

01:01:24

In a chance universe, happiness is just a chemical reaction in your brain, which is just itself a chemical accident, right?

01:01:31

Now, why am I obligated to try and achieve a particular chemical reaction in you? That doesn't make any sense.

01:01:37

Somebody else comes along and says, no, good is what brings the most pain to the most people. Now, that's just a different chemical reaction.

01:01:44

Why should I choose that chemical reaction over that one? There's no objective basis for that. And some of you might be thinking, but wait a minute, we should be concerned about other people, and yes, we should, in the

01:01:54

Christian worldview, because they're made in the image of God, and they're not chemical accidents. But you see, my point is, this argument doesn't make sense.

01:02:01

This position doesn't make sense in the professed worldview of someone who denies the

01:02:07

Bible. And even here, he's borrowing on the Christian worldview, isn't he? He's saying, come on, Lyle, you don't need the

01:02:13

Bible to know right and wrong. Just do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I'm thinking I've heard something like that somewhere.

01:02:21

Oh yeah, that's a Christian position, isn't it? I was debating a PhD neurologist, a brain expert on this issue, and this is what he said.

01:02:29

He said, the moral code is simply electrochemical impulses in the brain. He says, well, it's probably a part of the brain that developed under evolutionary processes, and I said, then why should

01:02:39

I follow it? Why should I follow it? I've got chemistry going on in my stomach.

01:02:46

Should I use my indigestion to tell me right from wrong? There's no moral obligation if it's just chemistry, right?

01:02:53

Some people say, well, laws and morality are conventions adopted for the benefit of society. Come on, Lyle, we need laws or people will go around acting like animals.

01:03:00

You say, but isn't that what we are in your worldview? Are we just animals? And by the way, who decides what benefits society?

01:03:07

That's a problem because not everybody agrees on what benefits society. Hitler had some ideas about that.

01:03:12

I hope you would not agree with him on those issues. See, benefit even assumes an objective standard of goodness, doesn't it?

01:03:19

Who decides what that is? Just to drill it home, consider an evolutionist who is outraged at seeing a violent murder on television.

01:03:27

He says, I can't believe that man shot that little girl, he should go to jail. Now, I'm happy he's angry, but he's an evolutionist.

01:03:33

Why should he be angry on his worldview? It's a behavioral inconsistency. In his worldview, murder is just one chemical accident, getting rid of another chemical accident.

01:03:42

What's the big deal if we're just chemistry? Chemistry just does what chemistry does.

01:03:49

There's no right or wrong about it, right? You mix the vinegar and the baking soda, it will fizz.

01:03:55

That's what chemistry does. You don't get angry at it. You don't get bad baking soda. You shouldn't have fizzed that way. It's just what chemistry does.

01:04:01

Now, if our brain is just like the fizzing of baking soda and vinegar, if it's just chemistry, first of all, we have no choice.

01:04:08

If we're just chemistry, there's no choice, right? And so the whole idea that people could act differently, that goes away.

01:04:13

Moral responsibility goes away. But it wouldn't make sense to punish a chemical accident. If we're just evolved animals, it doesn't make sense to punish an animal.

01:04:22

Lion goes out and kills another lion. They do that sometimes. You don't put the lion in jail and say, you better think about what you did.

01:04:29

That was wrong. It's just what animals do. They don't have that moral code because they're not made in God's image, like we are.

01:04:36

So you see, the fact that the unbeliever, the evolutionist, in the classroom, he might teach, oh, you're just chemical accidents.

01:04:45

Evolved over millions of years. But then he gets upset when he sees a murder on television. You know what it shows? It shows in his heart of hearts, he does really know

01:04:51

God. When I do apologetics, folks, when I'm conversing with someone who professes not to be a

01:05:00

Christian, I don't spend a lot of time presenting new evidence to them because they already have all the evidence they need and they're suppressing that truth and unrighteousness.

01:05:09

What I try to do is expose their suppressed knowledge of God. And I often do that by pointing out that their behavior shows that they don't really believe what they say they believe.

01:05:19

They're in self -denial. And I found that's a very effective way to do apologetics. It really is very effective.

01:05:27

So the unbeliever has to stand on Christian presuppositions even in order to argue against Christian presuppositions.

01:05:35

There is a strategy that you can use to bring this inconsistency to the surface.

01:05:41

It's a very effective strategy. It's not a gimmick or a trick, it's just a way of revealing truth. I call it the don't answer answer strategy.

01:05:47

It's straight from scripture, that's why it works. God does know how to argue. God has yet to lose an argument.

01:05:54

The Bible provides a strategy for effectively defending the Christian faith against all opposition. It's based on Proverbs 26, four and five.

01:05:59

Proverbs 26, four says, do not answer a fool according to his folly, lest you also be like him. So here the

01:06:05

Bible is telling us that when a person who has foolish presuppositions, and the Bible's not just engaging in name calling.

01:06:13

It's not just saying, you're just a moron. It's using that term to describe someone who is dense, who is perhaps intelligent, but who refuses to use his brain in the way that God intended, and is therefore a fool.

01:06:24

That's what the term means. The Bible tells us we're not to answer a fool according to his folly. We're not to accept his presuppositions.

01:06:31

Somebody comes to you and says, you know, we can leave the Bible out of the discussion. We can talk about origins, but leave the

01:06:38

Bible out of the discussion. That is foolish, because the Bible is the only record of origins we have.

01:06:45

That's foolish. Don't do that. Don't embrace his presuppositions. He says, well, I don't believe the Bible. I say, well, that's your problem.

01:06:53

Right, you should. We're gonna represent that with a silly outfit, right? Somebody has a silly worldview.

01:07:01

And so he says, you know, we can talk origins, but you gotta leave the Bible out of the discussion. Now, if you agree to those terms, then you've become like him, haven't you?

01:07:09

And now you can't get anywhere, because you're gonna try and discuss the origin of the universe, leaving out the only historical record you have of the origin of the universe.

01:07:16

Not a good place to start. On the other hand, the next proverb says, answer a fool according to his folly.

01:07:22

You might think, well, that's a contradiction, right? Well, no, because the sense is different. The last part of the verse says, lest he be wise in his own eyes.

01:07:29

So on the one hand, you don't wanna embrace the presuppositions of the other believer, but you do wanna stand on the presuppositions of the unbeliever temporarily to show that they lead to absurdity, so that he can't be wise in his own eyes.

01:07:42

It's kinda like, I'm not gonna live in your house. I'm just gonna step inside for a few minutes to destroy all the furniture and then leave, okay?

01:07:49

And so if somebody comes to you and says, there are no absolutes, that's a silly position, isn't it?

01:07:54

Now, you don't wanna put on the outfit. You don't wanna say, okay, there's no absolutes. You don't wanna agree to that, but you do wanna reflect it back to him and say, actually, the statement you just made, there are no absolutes, is an absolute statement.

01:08:04

You see how silly you're being? Now, you wanna do this politely, of course, but you do wanna point out that his standard destroys itself.

01:08:13

If there were no absolute statements, he couldn't have said there are no absolute, because there are no absolutes, right? So let me give you a silly example, and then

01:08:21

I'll give you some more realistic ones. Somebody comes to you and says, I don't believe in words. Prove to me that creation is true, but you can't use words, because I don't believe in words.

01:08:28

Wouldn't that be ridiculous? Would you embrace that standard? Would you say, well, yeah, I guess, if you don't believe in words,

01:08:35

I can't use words. I'll have to use charades or something. No, don't do that.

01:08:40

Don't answer. You're gonna say something like this. I don't accept your belief that words don't exist, okay?

01:08:46

So you're letting him know that you don't, maybe you don't have to say it. It might be implied. This isn't like a formulaic sort of thing, but that's the attitude you need to have.

01:08:54

You need to say, well, sir, I don't embrace your standard that words don't exist. Okay, that's the don't answer part, and then the answer part is, but hypothetically, if words didn't exist, you couldn't argue anyway.

01:09:05

The fact that you're able to make your case demonstrates that it is wrong. You just used words to tell me that you don't believe in words.

01:09:12

So do words exist or don't they? Now, how's he gonna respond now? If he says nothing,

01:09:18

I win the point. If he says anything, I win the point, right? He's on the horns of a dilemma. This is a good strategy.

01:09:26

That's why God put it in Scripture for us. Never put on the outfit, but do reflect it back.

01:09:33

Reflect back the unbeliever's fallacious thinking so that you can see the absurdity of it. Jesus, in his earthly ministry, was absolutely masterful at using this approach, and you can see it in the way that he responds to his critics.

01:09:45

He never embraces their foolish standard, but then he reflects it back to him. If I'm casting out demons by Satan, then by whom do your sons cast them out?

01:09:57

You can see that it applied masterfully, and of course, Jesus inspired this strategy in the first place, his spirit.

01:10:04

Let's give you some more realistic examples here. Somebody says, I believe in naturalism. Nature's all that there is. Matter in motion.

01:10:10

Show me logically how the Earth could be 6 ,000 years old. Now, I hope you zoomed in on the inconsistency.

01:10:15

Naturalism, logically, because you see, you can't have laws of logic in a naturalistic universe.

01:10:21

If everything that exists is matter in motion, you can't have laws of logic, because they're not made of matter, and they're not in motion.

01:10:27

They're abstract rules of correct reasoning. And so, you wanna use the don't answer answer strategy to expose that absurdity.

01:10:33

First of all, I don't accept your belief in naturalism. Right, I do believe in nature, but I believe that there's more to reality than simply atoms in motion.

01:10:43

But hypothetically, if naturalism were true, it'd be impossible to prove anything, since you can't have laws of logic. And even if you embraced them, you'd have no way of knowing about them, or that they don't change with time, or that they're universal.

01:10:56

Here's another example. Somebody says, you can't take the Bible seriously. It's full of contradictions. You heard people say that before?

01:11:03

And there is some value in going through and saying, show me some, and I'll kinda help you to understand that.

01:11:08

There's some value in that, but ultimately, you wanna answer using the don't answer answer strategy. And you say, well, first of all, I don't accept your claim that the

01:11:13

Bible has contradictions, because you see, the Bible's written by inspiration of God. God cannot deny himself, the Bible says, and therefore, there can't be contradictions in Scripture.

01:11:21

But, and here's a question most people don't think to ask. Hypothetically, in your world view, why would that be wrong?

01:11:30

Well, everybody knows contradictions are wrong. Ah, excuse me, sir, I know contradictions are wrong, because truth is in the mind of God, and God doesn't deny himself, therefore, truth can never contradict truth.

01:11:39

But how can you possibly know that contradictions are always wrong? He says, well, I've never seen two contradictory statements both true.

01:11:47

I'll say, well, I've never seen Antarctica. Does that mean it doesn't exist? That's no proof at all, is it? You couldn't possibly know that contradictions are always false, unless you're

01:11:58

God, or it's been revealed to you by God. Isn't that interesting? It's wrong to teach creation in schools while you're lying to children.

01:12:07

Well, first of all, the don't answer part. I don't accept your claim. I don't accept your presupposition that teaching creation is lying.

01:12:12

Creation is true, I'd be happy to talk with you about that. Happy to talk some of the science, that's great. But hypothetically, if we were lying to children, why in your world view would that be wrong?

01:12:23

Well, everybody knows it's wrong to lie. I, as a Christian, know it's wrong to lie, because that's contrary to God's command, and to his nature, for that matter.

01:12:31

But in your world view, children are just chemical accidents. Now, why should I be concerned about lying to a chemical accident, especially if it benefits my survival?

01:12:42

Christian God's not good. He slaughters innocent children. Look at that Old Testament God, going out and slaughtering all those innocent children, and so on.

01:12:48

A lot of Christians have trouble answering that until you realize the question presupposes the truth of the Christian world view, because you have words like good and innocent.

01:12:58

Those are moral words. They're meaningless in a chance universe. Isn't that interesting?

01:13:04

People are bothered by this problem. It's actually a proof of the Christian world view. First of all,

01:13:09

I don't accept your standard that God is not good. God is good, and is in fact the standard of goodness.

01:13:15

So when you say God is not good, it's like saying Dr. Lyle is not very Dr. Lyle -ish. That's silly.

01:13:23

But hypothetically, apart from God, how can you determine what is good and who are innocent? What do those words even mean in your world view?

01:13:31

They're meaningless. The better you get at this, the more you can see how the non -Christian has to stand on Christian ground to argue against Christianity.

01:13:39

Any argument against Christianity must presuppose Christianity to get off the ground, or at least Christian principles.

01:13:46

And if you recognize this, boy is it powerful. And you can agree with the Apostle Paul and say where's the wise man, where's the scribe, where's the debater of this age?

01:13:52

Is not God made foolish, the wisdom of the world? Sanctified Lord God in your heart, see how everything depends on the truth in Christ.

01:14:00

Then you'll be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks a reason for the hope that's in you with meekness and fear, with gentleness and respect.

01:14:08

And again, people may not convert. That's not your job. As Dr. Bonson liked to put it, it's not our job to open up people's hearts.

01:14:16

That's up to the Holy Spirit. It's our job to close their mouths. And this method will do that. And I've been kind of blunt in the hypothetical answers

01:14:23

I've given. Obviously, we need to be gracious and respectful. I just, I wanted to make the point, but you understand this, of course.

01:14:31

We do need to be respectful. And that's the last part of the verse there. Meekness and fear, gentleness and respect.

01:14:37

As you get good at this, it's very easy to refute people and to just destroy their position intellectually. It really is.

01:14:44

And we need to remember this isn't an academic game. This is not about proving who's right because the fact is if God hadn't changed your heart, you'd be in the same boat as the unbeliever.

01:14:53

And critics are made in the image of God, too, and therefore deserving of respect and dignity, even though they might deny that.

01:14:59

It's true. So the key is to stand on the word of God in our every thought.

01:15:07

And you might think, well, I don't know, it's kind of abstract, it's kind of philosophical. The fact is it's powerful because it's based on the theology that the

01:15:17

Bible itself teaches. It's based on truth, and you can't refute truth. You just can't. It's not a gimmick, it's not something that you can use to prove anything else other than the

01:15:27

Christian worldview, that's all it does is it demonstrates the truth of the Christian worldview. Whether people accept it or not, it's up to God.

01:15:34

I've found that it takes a little bit of time to master this, but not long. I do a class, or I did a class for youngsters, 18 -year -olds, something like that.

01:15:44

It was a one -week class, and I would teach them apologetics, and I would teach them this method. By the end of the week, they had it.

01:15:50

So if teenagers can get this in a week, my point is you can do this. It's not that difficult. It does take a little bit of thought, and you get better at it the more you use it like anything else.

01:15:59

Our website, you can check out more materials on this topic, articles on this topic, biblicalscienceinstitute .com.

01:16:05

And we have, of course, a number of resources on the back table there that you can get, including the book, The Ultimate Proof of Creation, which is what this talk focused on.

01:16:13

We have the DVD as well. And of course, the book's great because I know

01:16:18

I talk too fast, and so I wrote the book really slowly, so you can take your time with it.

01:16:26

And the DVD, you can pause it and say, you know, back it up. We have two sort of sequels,

01:16:31

Nuclear Strength Apologetics, that go into more depth on this very topic. Understanding Genesis, how to apply this to maybe to Christians who are not being so consistent.

01:16:40

Can you use the same way of revealing truth with Christians who are not being consistent as you can? And in particular, in their understanding of the first chapters of Genesis, and the

01:16:50

DVD as well. We'll cover that tomorrow. Discerning Truth, how to spot logical fallacies and arguments that evolutionists tend to make.

01:16:57

We have DVDs, Created Cosmos, takes you on a tour of the universe from a biblical perspective. That's a lot of fun. Stargazer's Guide to the

01:17:03

Night Sky, how to better enjoy the night sky from a Christian perspective. I'll hit more on that tomorrow, as well as Taking Back Astronomy, how to refute the

01:17:10

Big Bang in the billions of years, and so on, and the DVD that goes along with that, Astronomy Reveals Creation. One of my more recent books,

01:17:17

Keeping Faith in an Age of Reason, answers 420 alleged Bible contradictions. Yes, it is helpful to know some of these claims of contradictions, and why they aren't really contradictions at all.

01:17:25

There's an internet list that floats around. It's got over 400 contradictions in the Bible, and I said, okay,

01:17:30

I'll take up the challenge, and I looked up each one of them. Not one of them's a contradiction, and so I wrote a book on it, and you can check that out.

01:17:36

Introduction to Logic, this is my latest book. I'm really excited about this one. It's actually a curriculum designed to teach you logic, and how to think rightly, and it shows you how logic is rooted in the

01:17:45

Christian worldview. You cannot make sense of logic, or laws of logic, apart from the Christian worldview, really, and there's a teacher guide that goes with it, as well.

01:17:52

Physics of Einstein is exactly what you think it is. What about black holes, and time travel, and what about distant starlight, and things like that, and then we have some more, as well.

01:18:02

You can get all the DVDs together for a discount. You can get all the books together for a discount, or you can get everything together, and have an instant creation library for a discount.

01:18:10

That will probably put me out of business, but that's okay. We want to get these resources into your hands, and do sign up.

01:18:15

We have a free monthly newsletter, and it is free. You'll see the sign -up sheets in the back, there, so it's an electronic newsletter, so you'll get in your email.

01:18:25

Make sure you put your email address, or you'll get nothing. Make sure you put your email address legibly, or you'll get nothing, and it is totally free, so not too many things free in this world, right?

01:18:36

Just Salvation and our newsletter, so make sure you check that out, and check us out on the web, as well. The Biblical Science Institute, and we'll be back in about 10 minutes for the

01:18:45

Q &A session. Does that sound good? Okay, very good, thank you very much. All right,

01:18:54

I said earlier that our Q &A was gonna be, is already scripted for tonight, and by scripted, I don't mean that I'm going to be, we're gonna be doing a skit, not that kind of scripted, but I've already composed a few questions that I've sent to Jason ahead of time, and said, on the first night,

01:19:10

I'm gonna be asking you these questions, and then I have a couple of questions that I have not sent to him yet, and you have not seen.

01:19:15

I didn't tell you about that until just now, because the goal of that is I do wanna get his unvarnished, unprepared response to a couple of these questions.

01:19:25

So we're gonna start off with a little bit about getting to know Dr. Lyle. Did you grow up in a Christian home?

01:19:31

I did, my parents are Christian, praise God, I'm very grateful for that, and most of my grandparents, even, so I was very blessed, and I'm just very grateful for that.

01:19:41

You have Christian siblings? I do, I have a brother and a sister, and they are both believers, as far as I know.

01:19:47

My brother actually has Down syndrome, and so it's tough to know kinda what he understands, but he, as far as I can tell, he loves

01:19:54

Jesus, and we talk about that sometimes. And how did God save you? Miraculously, you know, when

01:20:02

I was very, I was probably seven or so, and I, at that point, of course, my theology wasn't that great, but I did know that I was a sinner, and that I couldn't possibly pay for my own sins, except for an eternity in hell, and I knew that I needed the

01:20:18

Savior, I knew that Jesus is God, He's the Son of God, and God Himself, and paid for my sins on the cross, and that by trusting in Him, by repenting of my sins, and trusting in Him, He would be willing to save me, and I believe that is the time that I was saved, when

01:20:33

I was about seven years old. Have you always been one of these wacky, young -earth creationists? You know, it's interesting,

01:20:39

I had never heard about young earth until I was in college, isn't that interesting?

01:20:44

And of course, I grew up in the church, but it just wasn't talked about, and so I probably accept,

01:20:50

I'm sure I accepted the billions of years, just because I hadn't thought about it, even though, in the back of my mind, it was probably niggling at me, that wait a minute, that doesn't quite fit with Genesis, and in college, somebody mentioned to me that the earth is, well, it really is young, and there's science to confirm that, and in a very short period of time,

01:21:07

I realized, well, yeah, of course, that's what the Bible teaches, and then I started studying the science that backs that up, as well.

01:21:14

And where do you live now, and what church do you attend? I now live in Colorado Springs, and I attend Hope Chapel of Colorado Springs.

01:21:21

What kind of church is it? Small, big? It's a small church, it's a Reformed Baptist church, and it's a really good church.

01:21:29

I think it's probably the best one I've ever been a part of, really. I've only been there for a few months, because I just moved to Colorado Springs.

01:21:34

And did they know you when you showed up? They knew me when I showed up, they recognized me, and so I thought, this is probably gonna be a good church.

01:21:42

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When I show up here, people recognize me, too, so.

01:21:49

There you go, there you go. That's how you know it's good. Yeah, with your travel schedule, how often do you get to stay home? About half of the weekends of the year,

01:21:56

I'm home, and the other half, I'm out, something like that. And it comes and goes. I've had a really busy season up until now.

01:22:04

I've got another event after this one. I've got a Florida event next week, so I'll be out next weekend as well.

01:22:11

And then in summer, it kind of tapers off, so I guess people don't like apologetics as much in the summer.

01:22:16

So they're out doing other things. And also in December, because we don't wanna mess up Christmas with apologetics or anything like that, so yeah.

01:22:24

And what sparked your interest in astronomy? Because you typically do not run into people who are experts in the heavens, astronomy, who also believe in a creator and a young Earth creation cosmology.

01:22:37

I've liked astronomy since I was as far back as I can remember. And my dad had an interest in it, and his dad had an interest in it.

01:22:47

They both had small telescopes. And when I was probably in high school, I usurped my dad's telescope and began using it with his blessing out, and just really enjoyed that.

01:22:57

But even when I was little, if we'd make the trip to our little county library,

01:23:03

I'd always get the astronomy books there. And other sciences, too. I like all the sciences, I really do. I like biology and geology.

01:23:09

There's just something special about space. It's beautiful, it's kind of abstract. And so I'm the first person in my family to go into astronomy professionally.

01:23:18

But it's in the genes, apparently. And I just think it's something that God placed in me. The Bible says the heavens declare the glory of God.

01:23:26

And there is something, when you observe the heavens in a telescope, and I love sharing that experience with others.

01:23:32

I have a pretty decent telescope now, and I love showing people the heavens in that, especially Christians who can appreciate what they're looking at as the handiwork of the creator.

01:23:41

And just seeing the light bulb go on, and wow, it really gives you an appreciation for the Lord. Not that we need that to have an appreciation for the

01:23:49

Lord, but it just kind of enhances it. So I've liked it since I was really young. And how did you get involved in physics?

01:23:56

It's the same kind of thing. I've always just thought it was interesting, the way the universe works.

01:24:03

And there's a strong connection, of course, between astronomy and physics. You have to know a bit about one to do the other.

01:24:11

And so, especially things like quantum mechanics, which is kind of weird. And relativity, the

01:24:16

Einstein book, actually. I read a book by Einstein. I was in, I think it was in eighth grade, and it just caught my attention.

01:24:23

This branch of physics where it deals with time, and not being what we think it is.

01:24:29

I like things that are kind of abstract, and a little counterintuitive, and physics is that way.

01:24:35

And it's interesting. I like to know how things work, and make connections. I was reading the

01:24:41

Hardy Boys in eighth grade. Which is kind of abstract and high -minded as well.

01:24:46

It sure is, yeah. So you and I are much alike in that regard. Did your young earth theology cause problems in the secular universities that you attended?

01:24:56

Yes, it did. But you know, you gotta be a little bit careful about this.

01:25:02

This is something I recommend to students when they go off to the university. It's best to be a little bit quiet about being a creationist.

01:25:11

I hate to say that, because you wanna share with folks. But there's a time and a place for everything, right?

01:25:17

There's a time and a place. And your professors don't care what you think anyway. They're there to teach you. And I've been on both sides of that.

01:25:23

I've been a student, I've been a teacher. And so I learned, in graduate school,

01:25:29

I learned to be a little bit quiet about young earth. And that was the real stickler there.

01:25:35

I don't think, people knew I was a Christian. And I don't think that bothered them. I think they thought that, well, that's just some sort of emotional thing that, you know, they go to church every

01:25:42

Sunday and you feel nice for a little while. And if that makes you feel good, more power to you. I don't think they realize that, yes,

01:25:48

I actually believe the Bible. And I believe it's real history. It's not just, church is not just a social gathering for me.

01:25:53

It's important to me to be with my brothers and sisters in Christ. It was an issue a little bit.

01:26:02

Trying to, there was one instance where it really concerned me. See, when I first started graduate school,

01:26:09

I had this belief that, you know, it's a university. And of course it's, you know, that's gonna be, you know, academia and a utopia of freedom of expression to consider various options.

01:26:20

And it's not that way. It is that way if you're not a Christian. But there is this belief that Christianity is sort of backwards and anti -academic.

01:26:31

And so you do have to be a little bit careful about that. And so by my second or third year, I was a little bit more careful.

01:26:36

My first year I was not so careful. And at one point it nearly got me in trouble because I did a talk on campus on creation.

01:26:42

I shouldn't, it wasn't wise, but the Lord protected me anyway. And it got back to one of my professors who said, we need to let this kid go.

01:26:49

You know, we don't want him here. And fortunately God had the right people in the right place at the right time.

01:26:54

My department chair said, no, he's, you know, he was doing that on, as a function of a campus ministry.

01:27:00

So it's a little, I think it's a little weird that he believes that, but praise God, the right guy was in the right place at the right time.

01:27:06

That doesn't always happen. So I've known of cases where people have been vocal about being a creationist and they get booted from the program, it happens.

01:27:15

So that's why I recommend caution. What has earned you the most hostility from your academic peers, being a

01:27:21

Christian or being a young earth creationist Christian specifically? Oh, being a young, yeah, being a young earth creationist.

01:27:27

When they have objected to you being a Christian per se? I don't think so. Some of them maybe, but most of them, most of them knew

01:27:34

I was, that I went to church on Sunday and they understood that. My advisor knew that. I don't think he knew

01:27:40

I was a young earth creationist because I didn't volunteer that information. You know, there's a, the Bible talks about the wisdom and restraining your words at times.

01:27:47

There is wisdom in that. So it was, yeah, it was the young earth. That would have been the real issue.

01:27:53

My denial of evolution, my belief in the biblical timeline. You need to understand most non -Christians think of Christianity as more of an emotional, social kind of thing, rather than a complete worldview that explains the way the universe is.

01:28:07

And I think if they realized what I really believed, they would have been more hostile probably. I know some of them did know what

01:28:13

I believed and were hostile toward it. How did you come to work at Answers in Genesis? Did you know

01:28:19

Ken Ham before that? Did you just walk in and say, hey, I'm smarter than anybody else you have on staff. Could you put me on staff?

01:28:25

No, I met Ken Ham, well, I met him, even when I was an undergraduate, it had to have been,

01:28:31

I think it was one of the first Answers in Genesis seminars. And I actually went up and asked him a question after. Of course, he wouldn't remember me from that one.

01:28:38

But then later on, when I was in grad school and I became increasingly frustrated with the constraints that were placed on me,

01:28:44

I love teaching, I love sharing the intricacies of the universe with folks and seeing them get excited about things.

01:28:52

But I was frustrated because in the secular setting, I had the opportunity to teach at the

01:28:58

University of Colorado in Boulder, and it's a liberal school. I felt that I didn't have the freedom to present anything about God or anything about creation.

01:29:06

And that frustrated me, that I had to teach science from a perspective that I didn't agree with. And so I thought, you know what, about halfway through my graduate school,

01:29:15

I thought, you know what, I'm just gonna go and work at a Christian ministry like Answers in Genesis or ICR or something like that, where I will have the freedom to teach science from a biblical perspective.

01:29:25

Because science, in my mind, should be glorifying to God. If you're not glorifying God in your science, you're not doing it right.

01:29:31

Because science is the study of the systematic way God upholds his creation. And so that's when I kind of made the decision.

01:29:36

And then Ken Ham came and spoke in Colorado a couple times. So I'm at Boulder at this point. And remember they had that shooting at Columbine.

01:29:46

I'm dating myself, this was a while back. But it was tragic, it was all over the news. And Ken Ham was invited to come and speak at Columbine in light of that tragedy on the connection between a belief in evolution and school violence.

01:30:01

And there is a connection between those two. You believe that we're just animals, then why not shoot people that you don't like?

01:30:06

And so I went and reintroduced myself to him and said, I'm getting close to getting my

01:30:12

PhD in astrophysics and I'd like to come work for you. He said, well send me a tape.

01:30:18

He said, do you do presentations? And I said, yeah, I do do presentations. Ken Ham is very good at giving what we call a relevance of Genesis presentation.

01:30:29

And that's the one that I'll be giving first tomorrow, actually. And I kind of use his,

01:30:35

I mean I make it my own. I do it my own way. But nonetheless, I use his logic to help me piece that together to make that presentation.

01:30:42

So when I did it, when I did this presentation, I had it recorded at a church and I sent it to him.

01:30:48

And I think he liked the fact that it kind of copied the way he did it, too. So he was hearing good theology coming out of that.

01:30:56

And he gave me a call and he said, yeah, when you get your PhD, sign on the dotted line. We'd love to have you here.

01:31:02

And he was very good to me and he's been a good friend. And people said, well, you left the answers in Genesis. And I said, yeah, but we left on good terms.

01:31:08

And in fact, I spoke there at their Answering Atheists conference just a few, or just last month.

01:31:14

And it was so fun to see all my friends there. And so that's how I got started with Ken. And then why did you go to ICR, the

01:31:20

Institute for Creation Research? There was an opening there, actually, for Director of Research. And I thought that might be a new challenge.

01:31:27

And I thought it might be interesting, too, to live in Texas. And I didn't like Kentucky very much, to be honest with you.

01:31:33

It's okay, I'm not anti -Kentucky. But I don't like the dreary winters where it's all overcast all the time.

01:31:39

And in Texas, nice and sunny. And it was just a new opportunity for me, too, to direct research there.

01:31:45

And also to bring the presuppositional apologetic, that's what we were talking about this evening, to ICR.

01:31:53

Previous to my coming there, they weren't really focused on that. I tried to kind of push them in that direction gently. Were they more evidentialist and less presuppositionalist?

01:32:01

Yes, yep, yep. What is the Biblical Science Institute? Why did you start that?

01:32:06

And what niche does your ministry fill that Answers in Genesis does not and that ICR does not? What is your unique specialty?

01:32:12

Yeah, each of these ministries, of course, and people say, why can't they all get together? Well, people have different ideas about what

01:32:19

God lays on our hearts, different groups of people that we really wanna reach. And Answers in Genesis does a great job at reaching families.

01:32:29

And that's great, and I'm all for that. And I'm happy to have contributed to them. ICR tries to reach the elite academics, and I felt like there was a niche in between that was not being filled.

01:32:38

I have a heart kind of for students, especially older students that are a little more interested in science.

01:32:44

They wanna go into more depth than you can get in some of these very family -friendly material, and I'm all for that material.

01:32:50

It's just I wanted to go into a little more depth. I try to go just to aim for a little higher level in terms of, but not so academic that only

01:32:59

PhDs can understand it. And I'm sure God wants to save a lot of them, too. It's just I just feel the particular niche that I wanted to hit is students who are interested in science and are intimidated because they think evolution's been proved.

01:33:14

Give me some quick responses to the following statements. No real scientist believes in a young Earth. False. You said quick.

01:33:26

That was quick. Yeah. A little slower. Ray Damadian, the inventor of the MRI, is a young Earth creationist.

01:33:33

Isaac Newton, as far as I can tell, is a young Earth creationist, and he's the father of physics.

01:33:39

Been a lot of brilliant people that I've met in my career. David Menten is a brilliant PhD biologist. He's a young Earth creationist.

01:33:45

Tim Clary, my friend at ICR, is a geologist, PhD geologist, young Earth creationist. Andrew Snelling, PhD geologist at AIG, good friend of mine.

01:33:52

He's my boss at AIG, and just the best boss I've ever had. He's just a great guy. Very devout Christian, and just as smart as they come in terms of understanding geology.

01:34:01

Boy, is he bright. My friend Nathaniel Jeanson, one of the smartest people I've ever met, PhD in biology from Harvard, and he is a young Earth creationist.

01:34:11

But doesn't the fact that they believe in a young Earth disqualify them from being a legitimate scientist? That would be the fallacy of the no true

01:34:17

Scotsman. The no true Scotsman fallacy is where you redefine a word in a way that's not found in a dictionary to protect a claim from counter -argument.

01:34:25

So somebody comes along and says, well, no Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge. Somebody else comes along and says, ah, not true,

01:34:31

Angus is a Scotsman, and he puts sugar in his porridge. He says, well, no true Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge. You see, there's nothing in the definition of a

01:34:38

Scotsman that says you have to put sugar in your porridge or not. And so likewise, there's nothing in the definition of a scientist that says you have to believe in old

01:34:45

Earth or anything like that. In fact, a scientist is someone who does science. And so if you're using the scientific method and you're doing that professionally, you're a scientist.

01:34:52

Why do all the smart people believe in an old Earth? Yeah, well, we just gave some examples of those who don't.

01:34:59

Maybe they would be smarter if they believed in an old Earth. And I could give many more, too, of examples of brilliant, brilliant people.

01:35:08

And I would dare say, you know, if you want to debate some of these folks, I'd be happy to set it up. But again, my friend

01:35:14

Nathaniel Jeanson, he's just a great guy. He's a real solid Christian. And I just have so much respect for him.

01:35:20

PhD from Harvard, that's not an easy thing to do. Especially in biology. And I think they knew he was a creationist.

01:35:28

And so that's even more remarkable to me that he got through that. And he's written a book called Replacing Darwin that is very compelling, very compelling scientifically.

01:35:37

So there are lots of brilliant people that believe in God, believe in biblical creation, believe the Bible, are devout

01:35:43

Christians. Keep in mind, though, that God doesn't use often the mighty, the wise of this world, right?

01:35:50

God often uses the foolish things of the world to confound the wise. And that's glorious.

01:35:55

I think that's wonderful. So why do all these smart people get it so wrong? There's other PhDs on the other side.

01:36:01

Why do they get it so wrong? You know, ultimately, you need to remember it's a spiritual issue, isn't it? It's a spiritual issue.

01:36:07

The natural man cannot understand the things of God. You can't accept them because they're spiritually appraised. So you need to understand that it's the same reason that I could make a wonderful argument for the existence, say, of dark matter, and yet Albert Einstein could not understand that argument.

01:36:23

Why? Because he's dead. And it's the same way with unbelievers. They are spiritually dead, and therefore, they cannot understand the things of God.

01:36:29

It's not because they're stupid. It's because they're dead. And we need to remember that. I gotta tell you, too, just as a particular mechanism, there's academic pride.

01:36:39

There's academic pride. People who are very smart tend to be arrogant. It just happens. And God -

01:36:45

Does the peer pressure keep people from making that? I think that's a big part of it. I think that's a big part of it. But remember,

01:36:50

God resists the proud that gives grace to the humble, the Bible says. And so I think a big part of it is peer pressure.

01:36:57

This is interesting. I've had an opportunity to ask a lot of - I've spent a lot of time with secular scientists, and some of them

01:37:03

I tremendously respect. They're brilliant. They're dead in their trespasses. They're dead in their sins.

01:37:09

But they're brilliant. And I've had the opportunity to ask, okay, why do you believe in evolution? Why do you believe in millions of years, you know?

01:37:17

Why evolution? Well, these fossils. And then you pin them down. Which fossils? Oh, well, Lucy. Okay, the three -foot tree -dwelling primate.

01:37:25

What makes you think evolution? They don't have an answer. And you pin them down, and they say, well, all these other scientists believe in evolution.

01:37:33

Interesting. And you ask them, why do you believe in evolution? Ultimately, it's because everybody else does. And so you have this - Talk about circular reasoning.

01:37:39

Here's begging the question for you right there, in a fallacious way. And so it's interesting.

01:37:44

You think, well, scientists would be above that. They're not. Scientists are people too, and they're affected by peer pressure the same way as everybody else.

01:37:52

Atheists would respect you a lot more if you would just admit that the Earth is old and not young. I found the exact opposite is true.

01:37:58

The exact opposite is true. Atheists do not respect Christians who don't actually believe what the Bible says.

01:38:04

Atheists know very well the Bible says God created in six days. And when Christians try and distort that and say, well, those are symbolic, and they're millions of years, the

01:38:13

Bible's really, God's okay with evolution and or millions of years, the atheists don't respect that, because they know that Christians don't believe their own book.

01:38:21

I find it's a lot more powerful to lay all my cards on the table and say, hey, I believe exactly what the Bible teaches, and I do believe it's got to be properly interpreted, but there's no doubt that Genesis means what it says.

01:38:30

God created in six days. You want to debate the issue? I'd be happy to. I find they respect that a lot more, and they'll say, oh, interesting.

01:38:37

They find it refreshing. Don't you think you would have a lot more success in evangelism if you didn't throw down the unnecessary stumbling block of a young Earth?

01:38:47

I think I'd have a lot more success in evangelism if we removed the unnecessarily stumbling block of the gospel, right?

01:38:53

And we'd throw that away, you know? Sure, you can convince a lot more people. You'll be healthy and wealthy and wise if you just do that.

01:39:00

But here's the problem. That's not the gospel anymore, is it? And it's the same with the age of the Earth, because the fact is, if the

01:39:07

Earth's billions of years old, if fossils are billions of years old, you've got death before sin. If you've got death before sin, then death is not the result of Adam's sin.

01:39:14

Where's your gospel then? If death's not the penalty for sin, why did Jesus die on the cross? You need to present the gospel as it is.

01:39:21

Now, we don't want to add to the offense of the gospel with being obnoxious or anything like that, but nonetheless, the gospel will be offensive because that's the nature of the beast.

01:39:27

People are sinners. They don't like that. They suppress the truth and unrighteousness. And so if you're doing it right, you're gonna offend people.

01:39:33

Jesus offended people. It doesn't mean he was doing it wrong. He's the Son of God. He did everything right, and people took offense to it because they hate

01:39:41

God is what it comes down to. So yeah, you can water down the gospel and you'll get more converts. It's just, you gotta remember what you lead people by is what you lead people to.

01:39:48

If you lead them by a watered -down gospel, you lead them to a watered -down gospel. If you lead them by a position that says, so the

01:39:53

Bible doesn't really, you don't have to take it seriously, you lead them to the position that you don't really have to take the Bible seriously. And so we have a lot of Christians these days that are tossed about by everyone to doctrine because they're not rooted in God's word.

01:40:06

What are your thoughts? We're gonna transition now to some more technical questions. What are your thoughts on the recent photos of the black hole? Awesome, yeah.

01:40:13

You've maybe seen this. They actually were able to link up eight different telescopes around the world.

01:40:19

And what you can do is, radio, because you can record phase information with radio.

01:40:25

Radio's a wave and you can record the wavelengths. There's a mathematical way you can combine the information from these eight telescopes to make it as if it's one big telescope the size of the earth.

01:40:36

That's awesome. And the bigger the telescope, the more, it's kind of counterintuitive, the bigger the telescope, the more detail you can see, the smaller details you can see.

01:40:46

And so in combining these telescopes, they were able to actually image the black hole in the galaxy

01:40:51

M87. And we knew it was there. There was all kinds of evidence that it was there, but we have now an actual picture of it in radio.

01:40:58

And it's wonderful. You can see this, it's this, I mean, you can see the black spot and then there's an accretion disc around it.

01:41:04

People say, well, how do you see a black hole? It's black. There's material orbiting it. And we knew that was there too, even before it was seen.

01:41:11

But if you see the picture of it, you'll see this little orange ring and it's brighter at the bottom due to Lorentz beaming. That was also expected.

01:41:17

That's the material moving toward you. And so its energy gets boosted. It matched Einstein's predictions exactly.

01:41:23

And so it's another confirmation of general relativity. So it's a technological achievement that's just wonderful.

01:41:32

And the science itself is just interesting and very exciting. Recently, there was a article in Science Alert that talked about a dark matter detector detecting the decay of xenon -124.

01:41:45

And they said that the half -life of that element, that atom, is one times 10 to the 22nd years.

01:41:54

What was that discovery about? What is dark matter? What is a dark matter detector? What is xenon?

01:42:00

And what did I just ask you? Quickly, please, we're running out of time.

01:42:06

Right. 42. No. Xenon is an element and it's apparently, that particular version is unstable so it will decay into other elements.

01:42:20

And what they discovered, they actually built a machine to try and detect dark matter. Dark matter is a substance that we believe is very abundant in the universe and yet we have trouble detecting it other than gravity.

01:42:34

The only reason we know it exists is it exerts a gravitational pull on other things. And so the stars that are orbiting in galaxies, they're orbiting faster than they would if there were no dark matter.

01:42:45

So we know there's something there pulling on these stars, making them orbit faster. And there's a lot of it. It's like 90 % of the universe is this dark matter.

01:42:52

And yet we don't know what it is because apparently it doesn't interact with ordinary matter. It's kind of ghostly. It will just go through ordinary matter, whatever it is.

01:42:58

And so they built a detector using many, many atoms of xenon that presumably when this dark matter interacts with them, it'll generate a certain signal.

01:43:09

They haven't found it. They haven't found it. What they instead found is something else that was remarkable.

01:43:14

So they built an instrument to detect one thing. It hasn't found it. And instead, the same instrument detected something else that was kind of interesting.

01:43:21

And that is the decay of this particular isotope of xenon. And it was a double electron capture, which is very rare.

01:43:28

It's where two protons simultaneously suck in two electrons and it has a very, very long half -life.

01:43:33

From that, they're able to extrapolate how long it would take half of it to decay. And it's an enormous, enormous number. So it's interesting scientifically, but it's not terribly relevant to creation.

01:43:42

It's just interesting. All right, have you ever read the biography that is on Rational Wiki of you?

01:43:51

Yes, I have, yeah. I was honored. You were honored? Yeah. So if you go to Rational Wiki, which is,

01:43:58

I think, Wikipedia run by atheist agnostics and virulent God haters and evolutionists, they have a biography of you on there where they spend the first couple of paragraphs talking about how smart you are, how you earned your degree, where you got your degree.

01:44:11

In spite of the fact that you were a young Earth creationist, you managed to slam your way through college and get a degree after all.

01:44:18

And now we're gonna play a little game called Stop. You stop me when you hear a logical fallacy or something you'd like to respond to.

01:44:24

Okay. I'm gonna read parts of this. And I know that there is some profanity in this, but I'm not gonna read that.

01:44:30

I'm not even gonna read those sections. Okay, here we go. Although some creationists claim that a creationist could not earn an advanced degree from a secular university because of institutional prejudice against their beliefs,

01:44:41

Lyle's creationism failed to hinder his academic progress. While members of his master's thesis and PhD dissertation committees might have been aware of his young Earth beliefs, their evaluation of his work was based on his research and not on his personal beliefs.

01:44:54

True or false? That's true. True. But again, I didn't let them know what my personal beliefs were. So they couldn't eject me for that.

01:45:02

Given his qualifications in astrophysics, Lyle has become an authority on the, quote, starlight problem, end quote, in creationist circles.

01:45:10

True? We're gonna talk about that tomorrow in our lunch Q &A. We're gonna talk about Einstein's physics and the speed of light, et cetera.

01:45:16

However, his explanation for how distant starlight is compatible with a six -day creation only a few thousand years ago is very, very weak.

01:45:22

Do you wanna pause here for just a second to tell us what the starlight problem is for those who might not know briefly? Not how you would answer it, but what it is.

01:45:29

So it's the idea of, you know, there are these galaxies that are really, really far away. And even though light is fast, it's very fast, you would think, based on how far away they are, that it would take light billions of years to get from there to here.

01:45:41

But we do see these galaxies, so obviously the light has gone from there to here. And so how do you do that within 6 ,000 years?

01:45:48

That's the distant starlight issue. And I'll explain a possible solution to that tomorrow. Okay, it essentially, this is the definition of your solution, supposed solution, it essentially consists of immediately throwing out the conventional science just because it conflicts with scripture, and then proposing that creation was supernatural, therefore cannot be understood scientifically.

01:46:06

Yeah, that's just false. Because in fact, first of all, it is the answer that I proposed is conventional science.

01:46:13

And it's something that's been written up in the secular technical literature. John Winnie wrote about it.

01:46:19

Carlo Giannani wrote about it in standard physics literature. It's something that's well established called the conventionality thesis.

01:46:26

So we'll talk about that tomorrow, what it is, what it means. But my point is, this is well accepted in the standard scientific literature.

01:46:33

And I did not say that it required a supernatural explanation. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for supernatural explanations.

01:46:39

I just don't think starlight happens to be one of them. That's one of the things that we can explain naturally, actually. So they're just, it's just dishonest.

01:46:46

Most of Lyle's points just begin with the claim that the Bible must be true, cannot change, and so can explain everything.

01:46:52

And he's no stranger to wall -bangingly circular logic, that you're the one guilty of circular logic.

01:46:58

Well, it's funny because of course, whenever you defend an ultimate standard, there's gonna be a degree of circularity.

01:47:03

Just most people are oblivious to that because they don't know anything about logic or they don't know anything about logical fallacies. But I don't reason in a way that begs the question.

01:47:11

I don't reason in a way that commits a fallacy of circular reasoning where I arbitrarily assume that which I'm trying to defend.

01:47:16

It seems like that's what my critics do actually, interestingly. It shouldn't need to be stated that this is the opposite of what a good scientist should do.

01:47:23

So while he may be a published and qualified scientist, the remarks he makes regarding creationism aren't actually very scientific.

01:47:30

Well, I would point out that actually, unless creation's true, science is unjustified. Because the fact that God upholds the universe in consistent fashion and has promised to do so in passages like Genesis 8 .22,

01:47:42

unless that's true, you can't do science. And so non -Christians who do science are the ones who are being inconsistent.

01:47:48

They're borrowing on Christian capital in order to do what they do. Indeed, for answers in Genesis to use him as a leading scientist is practically a sham as it leads their audiences to think that his ideas, which aren't really his ideas, just the same old tired arguments, automatically have credibility due to his real

01:48:05

PhD. So you have a real PhD, congratulations. I have a real PhD, and that's why I'm honored that they would admit that.

01:48:12

But yeah, I mean, the fact is, I'm not aware of any secular physicist who's argued against my model because they know that it works.

01:48:21

My model's based on what's called the conventionality thesis, and it's something that's well -established in the secular literature. It's something that non -physicists don't know much about, and it's counterintuitive.

01:48:29

And so that's what they're attacking. But I don't think they would have any physicists on their side, secular or creationist.

01:48:35

Although he has done research with genuine merit into the sun's heliosphere. I'm honored, thank you. Lyle has yet to perform, let alone publish, credible work into starlight or creationism.

01:48:46

Actually, I did publish back in 2010. So they're either nine years out of date or they're just being dishonest because I published that at past peer review.

01:48:53

So that is in the technical literature. Okay, so this next statement then may be an anachronism, something where they, not an anachronism, a different word, where this was published before you actually published that.

01:49:05

Because they say, in July of 2010, Lyle announced that he was working on a research paper that would be published in the Answers Research Journal, a creation science journal controlled by Answers in Genesis.

01:49:14

He claimed that this paper would fully solve the starlight problem and that publishing it in a peer -reviewed journal would make it legitimate.

01:49:20

However, considering he is publishing in the ARJ and not Science or Nature, where such earth -shattering revelations about physics belong, although Lyle denies that this should be the case, some might suspect his idea isn't up to much.

01:49:35

So in other words, the paper should be rejected because it hasn't been published in an evolutionary journal where they would reject it because it's creation -based.

01:49:43

So, I mean, you talk about circular reasoning, I mean, I think that's a wonderful example of it right there. That is an example of what particular fallacy?

01:49:48

Begging the question. Okay. Lyle is clearly a smart guy.

01:49:54

This is the last paragraph. Lyle is clearly a smart guy who knows a bit more than most creationists, particularly about space.

01:50:02

He is a confident speaker and quite passionate about science education when he isn't trying to replace science textbooks with the

01:50:07

Bible. Is that what you're trying to do, you evil person? I'm all for science.

01:50:13

So again, it's just dishonest. I do believe that science is a valuable tool that God's given us.

01:50:19

I got a PhD in science. I'm not gonna get a PhD in something I hate or trying to replace, but I do recognize that science is predicated on the

01:50:27

Christian worldview. Science works because God upholds the universe in a consistent fashion.

01:50:32

And the interesting thing is, you know, until recent times, everybody knew that. Most scientists of the past were

01:50:38

Christians and creationists even. One of my heroes of the faith, Johannes Kepler, who discovered the three laws of planetary motion was a very devout

01:50:45

Christian and biblical creationist, even calculated the date of creation. He's a young earth creationist. I mean, he's the father of modern astronomy.

01:50:52

I mean, so it's just ridiculous to think that science is somehow antagonistic to the

01:50:57

Bible or that we're trying to replace science with the Bible. I would argue that science is predicated.

01:51:03

It rests upon the truth of scripture. Okay, another technical question. Is Pluto a planet?

01:51:10

Oh, well, that's a taxonomy question. So it's just a question of how you want to classify it.

01:51:16

And most astronomers have said it's not. Do you regard Pluto as a planet? I don't, I don't. I think it was the right decision to pull it.

01:51:23

And let me tell you why. Let me tell you why. Because here's the problem.

01:51:29

We started discovering other objects out there that are about as big as Pluto. And one that we thought was bigger at the time.

01:51:36

We now think it's a little smaller, but Eris, when it was discovered, was bigger than Pluto. So here's the question. Do you add another 20 planets or do you pull one?

01:51:46

Now, folks, think of the children. Think of the children in elementary school. Gotta memorize all these extra planets, come on.

01:51:55

When Pluto, let me give you a little more background on this, it's kind of interesting. When Pluto was first discovered, they thought it was as big as Mars.

01:52:01

Now, Mars is not very big. Mars is about half the size of the Earth, but that's substantial. And you need to understand, because of its distance, it's hard to know the size.

01:52:09

All you see is a point. In the most powerful telescopes we had, especially before Hubble, the most powerful telescopes, all you can see is a point.

01:52:16

How do you know how big it is? You make a guess about how reflective it is and you look at how bright it is based on its distance from the sun and you do some math and you can make an estimate, assuming you know its reflectivity, which we didn't know.

01:52:28

They assumed it was dark and not very reflective and therefore its brightness was due to size. But then as research went on, they found out, oh, it's actually smaller than Mars.

01:52:37

It's actually smaller than the moon. Pluto's only 2 3rds the size of Earth's moon. It's itty bitty.

01:52:43

And there are other objects out there that are about the same size. So you're gonna either have to add them or get rid of Pluto. Now, here's the interesting thing.

01:52:49

This is not the first time this has happened. In the 1800s, 1801, they discovered a new planet in between Mars and Jupiter and they named it

01:52:57

Ceres. Then they discovered another one the same year, Pallas, then Vesta, then Juno. Four new planets, all orbiting in between Mars and Jupiter, all tiny.

01:53:06

And so there was a time, Neptune hadn't been discovered yet. There was a time when our solar system had 11 planets. And then in the 1850s, they started finding dozens and dozens more of these little objects, these little planets in between Mars and Jupiter.

01:53:18

And they thought, you know what? This is a new, these are a new class of objects. And so they demoted them.

01:53:24

They called them minor planets. And eventually they used the term asteroid. So if you've heard what asteroids are, the first four asteroids that were discovered were classified originally as planets.

01:53:33

And then when they discovered that in fact, they're much smaller than the traditional planets and there are a lot of them, they got demoted.

01:53:40

The same thing happened with Pluto. The only difference is that the length of time Pluto was discovered 1930.

01:53:46

And so it was a planet for 75 years before they finally decided, you know what? There's lots of other objects that are nearly that size.

01:53:53

So it really is the largest member of a new class of object, the trans -Neptunian objects. And there are hundreds of them now.

01:53:59

What did you call it? Trans -Neptunian object. In your book, Taking Back Astronomy, you write this. The planet

01:54:05

Mercury is more like the moon than the earth. Mercury is about one third of the size of the earth and has no appreciable atmosphere.

01:54:11

It is essentially a large rock in space, a cratered, barren world, using the term world synonymous with planet.

01:54:18

Mercury stands in stark contrast to the riches and beauty of the earth. At the other end of the line lies distant

01:54:23

Pluto. This tiny world has an average temperature of about 50 Kelvin. Since it is nearly 40 times farther away from the sun than the earth is, the sun would appear over 1000 times fainter as seen from Pluto than it does from the earth.

01:54:36

So if you use the term world and planet synonymously. Which I don't. That was your assumption, not mine.

01:54:41

Oh, you. The moon is a world, but it's not a planet.

01:54:47

I have enjoyed viewing these planets through the telescopes. That's on the very next page. It's true. So were you wrong then or are you wrong now about Pluto not being a planet?

01:54:55

Both, because when I viewed Pluto, it was a planet. Both, that's a logical contradiction, isn't it? No, because the contradiction is A and not

01:55:01

A at the same time and in the same relationship. So since you said two different things at two different times, it's not a contradiction.

01:55:07

When I viewed Pluto for the first time, it was in the 1990s and at that point, it was a planet.

01:55:15

It wasn't until 2005 that it got demoted. And I think that was written in 2004. Although I think

01:55:20

I called it a world because I knew it was coming. Did you really? Yeah, I knew it was gonna get kicked out. See, when

01:55:26

I read that, I had to piece together world equals planet. You talk about the planets, you included that in there, but I searched in vain for where you called

01:55:34

Pluto a planet. You called it a world. I did, yeah. But you called other planets worlds, including our own. And the moon, the moon would be a world.

01:55:41

And Ganymede would be a, moons are worlds too. Anything that's sort of round and, yeah. World is not the same as planet.

01:55:47

I'll give you that one then. Yeah. I thought you would. Give us the - The created cosmos too, the DVD back there that I wrote for the planetarium show.

01:55:54

I don't call Pluto a planet now. And this was before the decision was made. I just figured, I figured it was coming. And so I just called it a world and I thought, you know, then whatever happens,

01:56:02

I'll be safe. You don't have to rewrite the book now. So I don't have to rewrite the book, yes. Is the earth round or flat?

01:56:08

The earth is round. Yeah, the earth is round. What are the arguments for the flat earth? What do flat earthers believe?

01:56:14

And why do they believe that the earth is flat? Oh my. There's a whole psychology of conspiracy theories, right?

01:56:25

And some people are conspiracy theorists and others aren't. And I'm not. Because a conspiracy theory is anti -scientific by its very nature, because evidence against it is evidence for it, right?

01:56:37

If you say, well, there's all this evidence against it. Well, that's because that's what they want you to think, right, you know? And so I think that's,

01:56:43

I think the idea is that it's this vast conspiracy. Do you realize how many people would have to be in on it? Right? Everybody at NASA, there's thousands and thousands of people that would have to be in on this gigantic conspiracy.

01:56:53

And God's in on it too, apparently, because he calls the world round in Job 26 .10. So God knew it was round.

01:57:00

Global flood, you can't have a global flood on a plane because the water runs off the side, right? So the

01:57:06

Bible does teach around earth. So do they believe then that if the earth is like this, it's flat, that the sun rotates around it like this?

01:57:15

So, well, there's different versions of it. One of the most common one I've seen, it has the earth as a flat disc, okay?

01:57:22

Like a CD or whatever. And then the sun goes around, the sun's like a spotlight, and it goes around like that.

01:57:29

And if you think about it, the sun would never set in that view. So if you've seen a sunset, that disproves that model.

01:57:35

Or sunrise, either one. Because it would never set if it's going like that. What are the arguments that they use for it?

01:57:43

Do they use biblical arguments? Yes, they claim that. And they list a bunch of scriptures, and I read the scriptures, and most of them don't mention the earth, and none of them mention flat.

01:57:54

So I'm like, I don't understand how you're getting that from any of these passages. I really don't. I think it's another logical fallacy called elephant hurling, where you just list a bunch of things, and you don't say, how does that actually prove what

01:58:06

I'm trying to say? I haven't heard a logical argument for it. It just, here's the way it is, and if you don't believe it, well, they've gotten to you.

01:58:19

How would you prove to a flat earther that the earth is round? Well, I invite them up to a Pike's Peak and Colorado Springs, where you can see the curvature of the earth.

01:58:27

That'll do it. You could watch a sunrise in Colorado Springs, because the sun, because the earth's round, the sun hits the, sunlight hits the top, illuminated, before I can see the sun, because I'm down on the, you know,

01:58:40

I'm at the base of the mountains, and then the sunlight comes down like a curtain, right? And then as soon as it reaches the bottom of the mountain, then

01:58:47

I can see the sun, because it's actually above the horizon. Another thing you can do too, this is kind of fun, is if you're at either the west coast or the east coast, so you can do either a sunrise or sunset.

01:58:58

So let's say you're watching the sun set over the ocean. What you do is you're, let's say you're lying down, you're lying down and you're watching the sun set, okay?

01:59:06

At the last little moment that the light fades, stand up. You will see another sunset. It'll take another seven seconds.

01:59:13

And from that, you can actually calculate the curvature of the ocean, and actually calculate the size of the earth that way.

01:59:19

So there's lots of different ways you can do that. The earth's, we've known the earth's round since very ancient times. Eratosthenes actually measured the size of the earth using the shadows at two different locations in cities on the summer solstice.

01:59:32

It was quite brilliant. And so people don't realize that we've, there's good evidence that the earth's round. A friend of mine is actually an astronaut,

01:59:38

Jeff Williams. And I got to chat with him once live on the space station over, we were Skyping with him. And that was one of the questions that came up was, so Jeff, could you look out the window and tell us, you know, is it round?

01:59:50

He said, yeah, it's round. It's actually round. All right, another one.

01:59:56

And this might be kind of goofy. Was the moon landing faked? No, the moon landing was not faked. And how do we know that?

02:00:01

I'll actually show you some pictures tomorrow of some of the instruments that we left on the surface of the moon. If you wanted to prove it, you actually can.

02:00:09

It takes a little bit of setup to do this, but we left reflectors on the moon, and at least with Apollo, I think it was

02:00:15

Apollo 11, where they left a reflector on the moon. It's a mirror that's designed to reflect back exactly in the direction that it came from.

02:00:23

It's a clever design. And what you can do is you can bounce a laser off the moon. You can take a laser and shine it at the moon, and it will take three seconds to get the return signal.

02:00:32

And people have done that. So we can actually confirm that we left equipment on the moon up there. It's quite fascinating. Would they have had the technology to fabricate a moon landing?

02:00:40

They would not have had the technology to fake it in the 60s. If you think about it, think about movies where people have landed on the moon.

02:00:48

It always looks off, especially with gravity, because it's very hard to simulate 1 6th Earth gravity.

02:00:54

You can't do it. It's only been very recently that they've gotten close to looking kind of right in some of the

02:01:00

Hollywood movies that they have where people are on the surface of the moon. The way the dust spreads out. You step on the moon, the way the dust spreads out is different than it does on the

02:01:09

Earth. It's ballistic because there's no air on the moon. And so it's hard to get a perfect vacuum on the

02:01:14

Earth. We can get close, but not quite there. So it's funny because people say, well, we couldn't have gone to the moon back in the 60s.

02:01:20

Actually, we didn't have the technology to fake it back in the 60s. We didn't have Photoshop. We didn't have these things.

02:01:26

And so there's no way they could have faked it. It's just not possible. How long would it take to go to Mars?

02:01:33

Between six months and two years, depending on whether we do it. If we used conventional methods, it'd be two years, one way.

02:01:39

You could do it in six months if you had like a nuclear powered rocket. You could get there quicker. Six months.

02:01:45

Why would we want to go to Mars? What's the benefit? There are some people I'd like to send to Mars. I don't know.

02:01:54

There's not a lot of benefit. There's really, the only reason to go is because it'd be cool to have people land on Mars.

02:02:00

And it would be. It'd be cool. I was a little bit late for the moon. I'm a little bit too young for the moon landings.

02:02:07

And my dad told me about them. And I thought, wow, that would be just amazing to look up at the moon and know there are people walking on that.

02:02:15

That's awesome. And it'd be fun to send people to Mars and have them walk on the surface of another planet.

02:02:21

But it's unbelievably difficult to do that. People don't realize the difficulty. Well, we went to the moon. You know, the distance to the moon compared to the distance to Mars, it's enormous.

02:02:31

And there are problems you'd have to overcome. Being in weightlessness for long periods of time is not healthy for you.

02:02:37

Your heart shrinks, your blood supply decreases, your bones decalcify at a rate that's 10 times larger than someone who has osteoporosis.

02:02:47

And so all kinds of nasty things. We're not designed for weightlessness. We're designed for gravity. But a bigger problem would be radiation in space.

02:02:54

We're protected on the Earth because the Earth has a magnetic field and an atmosphere, both of which block cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are not good for you.

02:03:01

They cause mutations. You end up getting cancer, things like that. So, and the astronauts who went to the moon, well, they were outside Earth's magnetic field for just a little while, for a few days.

02:03:09

And so they got an extra dose of radiation. Probably not much more than I get when I go through airport security these days. But, you know, but if you're in space for two years, that's a problem.

02:03:18

And when you're on Mars, Mars doesn't have a global magnetic field, so you're still exposed to it. Mars has a thin atmosphere that'll help you a little bit.

02:03:24

So there are all kinds of difficulties sending humans there. It's not as easy as people think. It's not like going to the moon.

02:03:30

That was child's play compared to going to Mars. Scientifically, it makes more sense to send unmanned spacecraft because then they don't have to worry about radiation and things like that.

02:03:38

But there is the human factor that would be, it would be cool to see people on another planet. Are those difficulties things that can be overcome with technology?

02:03:45

Maybe, maybe, time will tell. Time will tell. Would you want to go? No. You wouldn't go?

02:03:52

I like Colorado. Texas looks a lot like Mars in parts of it.

02:03:58

It kind of does, yeah. Mars is, it's very, it's actually, it's more like Kansas than anything.

02:04:04

Mars is very, very flat. And you'll see on some of these sci -fi movies, they'll have these steep hills and things like, it's not like that. There are tall mountains on Mars, like Olympus Mons, which is three times taller than Mount Everest.

02:04:15

But it's shallow. The base of it would cover Iowa. So it's very shallow sloping. And so there aren't a lot of steep features on Mars.

02:04:22

It's a very Kansas -like planet. And so there would not be a lot of features to see.

02:04:29

I mean, it'd be cool. If I could go instantly, if I could beam in there and take a few pictures and beam out, that'd be cool.

02:04:35

But to spend two years on a spaceship in a tin can, no thank you, pass. What was one of the other things we were talking about today with Justin and Andrew?

02:04:46

There was another subject I was gonna ask you about. Mars. Justin, do you remember it?

02:05:00

I just had a question there I was gonna ask you. I forget what it was now. My memory's going with my age.

02:05:11

Oh, you talked about weightlessness and the effect of the eyes. Yeah, yeah. What is that?

02:05:16

A lot of astronauts, when they're on the International Space Station, of course, they're in a microgravity environment, where they don't feel the force of gravity.

02:05:23

A lot of them come back and they need glasses. It negatively affects their vision.

02:05:28

Is it a permanent vision loss? It's permanent, yeah. And my friend, Jeff Williams, he's very grateful that hasn't happened to him.

02:05:35

It doesn't happen to everybody and they don't know why it happens. Maybe extra pressure on the optic nerve due to the redistribution of fluids in the body, but they're not really sure why that happens.

02:05:44

But it happens quite frequently. Astronauts come back and they need glasses for the first time. Much of the push to go to the moon and to Mars seems to be driven by atheistic assumptions that we're destroying this planet.

02:05:57

We're gonna need to colonize others in order to save the human species. Do you see that? Oh, yeah.

02:06:03

And of course, I don't agree with that presupposition, but that certainly is the motivation for doing a lot of those programs. But I think we can nonetheless use the data that they retrieved to glorify

02:06:11

God, which is why God made these wonderful objects in space, to declare his glory. So I'm all for space exploration.

02:06:18

I just, my motivation's different. The Mars Lander. What happened to that and why?

02:06:24

We're talking about that at lunch today. The Mars Observer? Yeah. Yeah, that. Yeah. That's what

02:06:29

I meant. I think it's the Mars Observer. I wanna make sure I get the right one. But we were talking about unit conversions, metric versus English units.

02:06:38

And that spacecraft crashed because somebody did not do the conversion properly between English and metric.

02:06:43

Or they were assuming something was English when in fact it was metric or vice versa. So you now have a one, so now teachers now have a $1 billion example of student to students as to why you need to be able to convert units properly.

02:06:55

So yeah, it was just a big, catastrophic billion dollar mistake. All right, we're almost done. Anything else you wanna say?

02:07:02

Buy the books. Get the book. I don't know. Are there any other quick questions about some of the things we've talked about here?

02:07:09

Did we cover everything? Anybody have any quick questions? You wanna ask Dr. Lau? Yes. Yeah, xenon.

02:07:26

It's a very, very long time. Yeah. Oh, way more than that.

02:07:35

Way, way, way, way, way more than that. Gotcha.

02:07:49

Okay, so the question is, if xenon has a very large half -life, does that mean it's actually been around that long for us to observe?

02:07:57

And the answer is no. All you have to do is observe it decaying a little bit. See, a half -life is how long it would take for a substance to decay to half of its previous amount.

02:08:09

Okay? Now, you don't have to actually watch it decay to a half amount. You can watch it decay 1%, and then you can extrapolate how long it would take to decay the full amount.

02:08:18

So that's what they've done. They saw one atom decay, and based on the volume, they could say, okay, that means that given this enormous amount of time, which is even longer than the secularists believe for the age of the universe, by an enormous factor, given that amount of time, it would decay to half of its previous value.

02:08:34

But they've only actually observed a little bit of the decay. Yeah. Yep. Peter. Yeah. Oh, no, that wasn't it.

02:08:46

I did think of what I was gonna ask. Steve or Peter? Steve, did you have your hand up? Peter.

02:08:58

Which, well, what singularity in particular? Big Bang or black hole or what? What are we talking about?

02:09:09

Oh. That's a different thing than I was thinking you were thinking. Okay. Yeah. I probably won't touch on that, actually.

02:09:24

I don't know that a lot. I don't know. I haven't thought a lot about that particular point. In physics, when we talk about a singularity, we're talking about a point in space that has no size, and there's a couple different types.

02:09:37

I probably won't even talk about those tomorrow, but yeah, that's kind of what I thought. That's not what you're asking, and I don't know how to answer what you're asking, so yeah.

02:09:45

All right, I remembered one of the things I was gonna ask, and we'll close with this. The Earth's magnetic field, you talked about that.

02:09:51

Is it, two questions, is it decaying? And with that, at what rate and should we be worried?

02:09:58

And number two, evolutionists, atheists will say that that Earth's magnetic field has reversed, the polarity has reversed, and that's their rescue mechanism.

02:10:09

Explain that. Okay, yeah, and I will hit this tomorrow, too, but I'll briefly mention it now.

02:10:14

Yes, the Earth's magnetic field is decaying. We've been able to measure the strength of the magnetic field since the 1830s, actually, so for almost 100, or yeah, it's been quite some time, so we've been able to measure that, in a century and a half, almost two centuries.

02:10:28

So it's decaying. It appears to be an exponential decay, an exponential decay, so it starts out strong, and then the slope changes like that, so it never quite goes to zero.

02:10:37

It just gets weaker and weaker and weaker, and the half -life is estimated to be 1 ,200 years, so every 1 ,200 years, the magnetic field drops to half its previous value.

02:10:47

Interesting, and some estimates put it even shorter than that. They put it like 900 years. We estimate the magnetic field would have been something like 20 times stronger at creation.

02:10:57

The magnetic field is useful. It protects us from cosmic rays, as I mentioned, so what happens as the

02:11:03

Earth's magnetic field weakens? We get less protection from cosmic rays, yeah. Is that a problem? Yeah, but not in your lifetime, because, again, the half -life's 1 ,200 years, so unless you're really taking your vitamins, you're not gonna live to see it half, to even half its current value.

02:11:19

Also, the atmosphere does give us some protection, so even if we had no magnetic field, we'd still have some protection from cosmic rays, but yeah, it'd be better to have a stronger magnetic field.

02:11:28

What is the maximum age of the Earth given the rate of decay? 60 ,000 years. 60 ,000 years would be the maximum age of the

02:11:34

Earth. You go back beyond that, the magnetic field would be stronger than is mathematically sensible. It'd be stronger than the constant.

02:11:39

It was thought that the world, our Earth, is a billion years old in high school. Yeah. So is that a problem? So what they would say is that they would say that the magnetic field has not always been an exponential decay.

02:11:50

It's actually a sine wave, and so it oscillates back and forth, and so they'd say that every now and then it somehow recharges itself, and so we'll talk about that a little bit tomorrow, actually, and how that, it really doesn't work.

02:11:59

It's called a dynamo model, and I'll talk about that tomorrow. It is a rescuing device. It's not something that has good scientific support.

02:12:06

There's no mechanism that would recharge a magnetic field for the Earth. It doesn't happen. We do think the magnetic field probably flipped a few times during the flood year, but then you have a mechanism.

02:12:15

You have rapid plate tectonics, and that disturbs currents in Earth's core, and so a lot of creationists hypothesize that the magnetic field really did flip during the flood year, but there's no mechanism for that today, because today, plate tectonics is very, very slow.

02:12:28

It's not gonna disrupt currents today, so today the magnetic field's just decaying. Before we are dismissed, is there any chance you change your mind about Pluto?

02:12:38

Not unless you destroy those other 200 objects that we found out there. You could destroy those, and then we could rescue, or you could make

02:12:45

Pluto bigger. We could spend trillions of dollars and add mass to it, so it's a nice, big, actual planet.

02:12:51

That would do it. So yeah, sure, I'd be willing. All right, doors will open tomorrow morning at 7 .30.

02:12:57

Please join us for coffee anytime after that, and we'll begin promptly at 8 .30 tomorrow. Hope you guys have enjoyed this, and see you tomorrow, good night.