Conference with Dr. Jason Lisle Day 1

The Ultimate Proof of Creation and Why Worldviews Matter

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

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.

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, I told you last year after, 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. 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. 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 Created Cosmos. He served at the Institute for Creation Research, and now he has founded and runs the 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. He refutes all of that. Jason is a tremendously brilliant man, and we are pleased to have him here, and the Church of Christ is blessed to have him serve us in this way.

So please welcome Dr. Jason Lyle.

Information Theory, Carbon-14, and Comets as Evidence for Young-Earth Creation

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? 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.

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 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? 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 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 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.

Of course, it hasn't, but that's what we hear. Evolution is one of the main reasons why people end up rejecting the Bible. It's one of the intellectual reasons, or pseudo-intellectual reasons. And so what 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 Christian worldview. And so that's something that would be very useful for you Christians to know, and if you're not a Christian, you need to become a Christian and then learn this argument, right?

Because we wanna share this with folks. 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.

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. Not necessarily. Sometimes people are not persuaded by very good arguments.

That doesn't necessarily mean there's anything wrong with the argument. It means there's something wrong with people. People are not always rational, and they're not always persuaded by good arguments.

In fact, people are often persuaded by bad arguments. That's what logical fallacies are. Logical fallacies are bad arguments that tend to be persuasive. 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.

That's up to God. But you can give a defense of the faith that is irrefutable. 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 I don't have him in headlock, right?

And this is not an intellectual game. This is not a trick or a gimmick. This is a matter of eternal life and death. And what I want to show you is that the truth of the 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. 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. 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.

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

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

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

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

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. You know that ultimately that book came from a mind. Somebody wrote it.

It didn't come from like an explosion in a typewriter. 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. A Xerox machine can copy information.

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

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.

It's consistent with the laws of information theory. Mutations don't help. They might, under certain circumstances, help an organism survive. That can happen, but it's by reducing information. And again, we'll see how that works tomorrow.

My point is that genetics really confirms biblical creation. Information theory confirms biblical creation. In the beginning, God created, and so all those instructions that are built into us ultimately originated with God.

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

That's not consistent with information theory. Natural selection and mutations occur, but they can't drive evolution. 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 Earth's 4 .5 billion years old, and the universe is supposedly 13 .8 billion years old, although that changed a couple weeks ago.

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. 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. 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. I mean, they're not exact, but they're close.

For example, diamonds. We've found diamonds with C14 in them. C14 is an unstable variety of carbon, and it decays with a half-life of 5 ,700 years. 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.

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

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. Comets, for example.

Comets are made of ice and dirt, and they orbit around the sun in elliptical paths. 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. 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. 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. And we know how much mass is there. We can measure that. The nucleus of the comet's a few miles across. 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. A typical comet. Some more, some less. Some much less. I used the SOHO spacecraft in my doctoral research.

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. I've seen comets that have gone behind the sun, and that's it.

They were totally destroyed in one pass. So Comet ISON, for example. That comet does not exist anymore. It's gone. Because it's been totally destroyed by the solar heat. So that would seem to eliminate a multi-billion-year-old solar system, the fact that we still have comets around.

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

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

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

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

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. 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.

So as old comets disintegrate, new ones replace them. So there you go. The solar system can be billions of years old after all. We 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 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? 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? A good rescuing device is neither provable nor disprovable. That's what makes them good. And for every line of evidence 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 DNA suggests it came from a mind. He could say, well, there could be some undiscovered mechanism that produces that information in our DNA.

We just haven't discovered it yet. Give us time. Science is a process. Well, yeah, that's true. Or carbon, C14 in diamonds. It doesn't last billions of years. It doesn't even last a million years. He says, well, there could be some unknown process that's generating new C14 down there.

We just haven't discovered it yet. Or there could be some kind of contamination on the surface. Give us time. We'll find it. The eschatological cop-out. 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. If I were to ask you about an alleged contradiction in the Bible, right, maybe a passage you're not all that familiar with, and I say, how do you reconcile this over here?

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

Give me time. I'll find it. We all have our rescuing devices, because we all have a worldview. We have a way of thinking about how the world works that affects how we understand the evidence that we see.

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

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? I mean, evolutionists have these facts over here, and creationists, we have these facts over here, and we got more facts.

Really, we have the same facts, right? I have access to the same fossils and DNA patterns as my secular colleagues. I look at the same stars and galaxies that they do. I use the same math they do. We have the same facts.

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, 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.

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

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

But my point is we all have mental glasses because we all have these presuppositions, which are your most basic beliefs about reality. A presupposition is not just any old assumption, it's an assumption you hold to very, very tightly, 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, 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?

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?

How do you know that? Well, you presuppose that's not the case. The basic reliability of your memory, you probably think that the things you remember actually happened, right? But how do you know that?

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

And you're gonna say, well, I remember taking, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd have to assume that my memory's reliable in order to argue that I correctly remember that my memory is reliable. That is the nature of the presupposition.

You can't escape that. And we use these presuppositions every day. 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.

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? 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.

That's a law of logic. Can you prove that there are laws of logic? I think you can, but not without using them because you see, we use laws of logic to prove anything, right? So that's the nature of a presupposition.

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. 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. 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.

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

It's just a very bad one because it's self-refuting.

Okay, there is some presuppositions.

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. 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. You've already assumed your senses are basically reliable. That's a presupposition. You can't escape that. And the kicker is creationists and evolutionists have different presuppositions, different worldviews.

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.

Same evidence, different interpretation because we have a different worldview. Different rules for interpreting the evidence. And you're gonna find that presuppositions are hierarchical. Some of them are more basic than others.

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

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 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?

Now, I do have secondary presuppositions. I do believe my senses are basically reliable, but then again, I believe God created my senses. And so that makes sense. That secondary presupposition is based on my primary presupposition that the Bible is true.

But you see, my secondary presupposition that my senses are basically reliable, 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?

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.

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

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.

And so the Bible should be our ultimate standard. Now, for the evolutionists, there's different varieties of evolutionists out there. They don't all have the same ultimate standard, but usually it's either naturalism or strict empiricism.

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 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. 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.

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. So here's the issue.

Evidence by itself is never decisive when it comes to a worldview issue. And so it's perfectly fine to show people evidence, scientific evidence, historical evidence for the racet of the 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.

When the debate is over worldviews, evidence by itself won't resolve the issue. And I have a silly example I like to use to illustrate this. There was a man who thought that he was dead. He thought that he himself was dead.

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. He doesn't like being dead.

Who would, right? And his doctor's trying to convince him, well, of course you're not dead. You're walking and talking. And the man says, well, yeah, but a human body can have muscle spasms even after clinical death.

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

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

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. 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. 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.

In each case, he was able to come up with a rescuing device to explain that evidence in light of his worldview. You say, but Lyle, are debates over origins like that? They absolutely are. They absolutely are.

And so that's why you can't just throw evidence at people and expect them to change their worldview. Because the worldview tells them what to make of the evidence. Now, it's not wrong to show people evidence and how the 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 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, 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. My secular colleagues are gonna look at that very same fossil and is gonna say, well, that's not how I see it.

Here's how I think the fossils were. 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, 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, I guess that evidence is no good. We need more evidence, right? But look, so let me show you how canyons can form quickly.

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. 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. 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. And Mount St. Helens laid down all kinds of new sediments, some of which is hardened into rock.

He says, yeah, but just because those layers did doesn't mean that all that rock layers form quickly. 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.

But look, let me show you how animals reproduce. They always reproduce according to their kinds. Kangaroos always beget kangaroos. 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. That's how life evolved. Oh, well, yeah, I guess we haven't been around long enough to see that. 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.

Just give us time. We'll find it. Science is a process. But look, there's evidence in outer space. Things like comets that can't last billions of years. He says, no problem. There's an Oort cloud that makes new ones.

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

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, 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. 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.

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 up, see, well, there are crackers there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 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. You're not even able to subject yourself to the law of God.

You adulterous, do you not know that friendship with the world is, what, neutrality toward God? It's hostility toward God. Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.

Do you get the picture here? 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 because the nature of the claim, Jesus demands obedience to him.

He's the ultimate standard. 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. We're being anti-biblical.