August 9, 2023 Show with Col. Jeffrey N. Williams on “The Apparent Conflict Between Science and Scripture” (Part 2)
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August 9, 2023
Astronaut
Col. JEFFREY N. WILLIAMS,
who orbited the earth more than 8,500 times, walked
in space 5 times, totaling 534 days in space, & captured
more photographs of the Earth than any other
astronaut in history, many of which are found in his book,
The Work of His Hands: A View
of God’s Creation from Space,
who will address:
PART *2* of:
“The APPARENT CONFLICT
BETWEEN SCIENCE & SCRIPTURE:
GLEANING from the MIND,
CAREER & EXPERIENCES of
A CHRISTIAN ASTRONAUT
WHO TRULY BELIEVES
GOD MADE the EARTH by
HIS POWER, ESTABLISHED
the WORLD by HIS WISDOM,
& by HIS UNDERSTANDING
STRETCHED OUT the
HEAVENS (Jeremiah 10:12)”
- 00:03
- Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father
- 00:08
- James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister
- 00:13
- George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron.
- 00:20
- This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.
- 00:31
- Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
- 00:38
- Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have a view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.
- 00:50
- It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.
- 00:57
- And now here's your host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,
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- Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet
- 01:15
- Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.
- 01:20
- This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this ninth day of August, 2023.
- 01:29
- And I'm thrilled to have back on the program a returning guest. He is going to be discussing part two of a topic we began on July 5th of this year.
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- His name is astronaut Colonel Jeffrey N. Williams, who orbited the
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- Earth more than 8 ,500 times, walked in space five times, totaling 534 days in space, and captured more photographs of the
- 01:58
- Earth than any other astronaut in history, many of which are found in his book The Work of His Hands, A View of God's Creation from Space, published by Concordia Publishing House.
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- And today we are addressing part two of the apparent conflict between science and Scripture, gleaning from the mind, career, and experiences of a
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- Christian astronaut who truly believes God made the Earth by his power, established the world by his wisdom, and by his understanding stretched out the heavens from Jeremiah 10, verse 12.
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- It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back for part two of our discussion, Colonel Jeffrey N.
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- Williams. Thank you, Chris. Great to be with you again. I'm going to give our listeners our email address right away in the event that they'd like to join us on the air with a question for an astronaut.
- 02:52
- That's ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.
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- As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the
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- USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal or private matter. And once again,
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- I am dedicating this interview to the memory of my dad, Harry E.
- 03:16
- Arnzen, who was on the team that designed the Lunar Module, also known as the
- 03:23
- LEM, back in the 60s. And I miss my dad very much, and I know that he would have been absolutely thrilled and delighted to hear this interview today.
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- Well, before we go into our discussion, part two of our discussion, on the apparent conflict between science and Scripture, why don't you inform our listeners, if they are hearing you for the first time in this program, or remind our listeners who did hear you the last time, about your book,
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- The Work of His Hands, A View of God's Creation from Space, published by Concordia Publishing House.
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- Yeah, the book was published in 2010. It chronicles a flight that I performed in 2006.
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- It was my first of three six -month stays, expeditions on the International Space Station when we were about halfway through the building of the
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- Space Station. And my goal in the book was just to attempt to vicariously take the reader to the vantage point of low -Earth orbit, and experience some of the main events of the flight, through a written description of the flight, and some photography from launch to landing, to include spacewalks, and visiting space shuttle crews, and other major events.
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- But then also to consider, from the vantage point, the view of the Earth, and to consider the works of God in creation, how
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- He sustains His creation, provisions His creation for our good and for His glory. Praise God.
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- And by the way, this is an absolutely breathtaking book. It's one of those books that you could accurately label as a coffee table book, because it's large, large hardcover book with breathtaking, vividly clear, full -color photographs on excellent stock paper.
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- And what a great way to spark conversations with friends and loved ones, especially if they are not
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- Christian, by having this book on your coffee table as you're sitting around, enjoying a visit from them, and have them look at this and say, hey, what's this about?
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- And I'm sure that many, if not all of them, will be utterly shocked that a conservative evangelical
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- Christian and young Earth creationist is an astronaut and has taken these photos.
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- So it would be a great way to spark conversation, I'm sure. We already have a listener that I want to read his question right off the bat.
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- He is somebody that you know, and he's a dear friend of mine as well. I usually only give first names, cities, and states of listeners who send in questions.
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- But because of the fact that this brother, this very dear brother, is a pastor of a very vital church right in the heart of Manhattan, which is one of the only churches in Manhattan that has the courage and the conviction and unwavering commitment to truth and the necessity of exposing error, who is openly and publicly opposed to all things woke and under that umbrella of the woke and social justice movement.
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- Speaking of my dear friend Pastor Andy Woodard, who is the pastor of Providence Reformed Baptist Church in Manhattan.
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- And if you want any more details on this church, go to pbc, which stands for Providence Baptist Church, dot nyc, pbc .nyc
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- for New York City. But our friend Pastor Andy Woodard says,
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- First of all, send my greetings to Jeff as we were d -men classmates at the
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- Master's Seminary. Secondly, this is a serious question, but I don't mind if you laugh.
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- Jeff, how would or should Christians respond to the idea that the earth is flat and the spherical earth view is a conspiracy theory created to discredit the
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- Bible? He has another question I'll go to later, but if you could answer that question. Well, good to hear from you,
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- Andy. I hope you're doing well. Yeah, we had a great time going through the d -men program.
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- Yeah, that question pops up all the time. And I used to try to engage in it with a logical argument, but it's logic can't engage oftentimes.
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- People are caught up in it. They're confused. I mean,
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- I ask people, just imagine how hard it would be to keep the secret if that was true. It would be impossible, plus all the practical experience that we have in life.
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- So I try to boil my answer down to two words and try to be patient and gentle in those words, but it's just utter foolishness.
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- Yes, he follows up by saying proponents of this view build it on a few ideas.
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- Early NASA rocket scientists being former Nazi engineers and NASA photos being photoshopped and the firmament concept.
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- Any response to any of that? Yeah, again, it's just components of utter foolishness.
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- If you go and look at the argument, none of those arguments stand. And he says, can you respond from both a biblical view and a scientific experiential view of that?
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- We already did. I'm sorry. That was the same question. Further, is this even an important issue as it seems to be increasing in churches, given that many other conspiracies have proven true in the last couple of years?
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- So is this even something important to bring up because of its growing popularity?
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- I'm sure. I mean, I'm not an expert on the the polls of this, but I'm sure it's still a tiny segment of humanity and especially of Christianity that believes this.
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- But yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I would agree. It's a it's a small, very small percentage of folks caught up in this.
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- And conspiracy theories are very attractive to folks. Folks get caught up in it and every one of them has elements of truth,
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- I suppose you could argue. Is it something that is important to address? Yes.
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- Insofar as it's a growing state of confusion among particularly believers that bring great discredit, frankly, upon the faith and make us targets for ridicule.
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- And I think we're going to get in a little bit of history later or go back to some history.
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- And there was some elements of history that were either misguided or thrown out or put out of proportion, blown out of proportion, or just elements that were frankly lies to begin with in an attempt to discredit the church.
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- So when it comes from within, it is an issue that needs to be addressed. And Pastor Andy's last question was, and of course, he doesn't believe this, but he wants you to answer it for the sake of those who do believe it.
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- Was the moon landing faked? Well, obviously you wouldn't you wouldn't even admit to it if it was.
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- But I'm sure that you have some answer to that because it is. Well, that's the irony. If you ask me the question, of course, by those that believe that I'm I'm part of the conspiracy.
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- I'm part of the evil team conspiring in the lie. But of course, we landed on the moon.
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- I tell folks, I just ask him the question. Just imagine how many people, tens of thousands of people were involved in it over many years throughout the 60s.
- 11:35
- And then we finally landed in 1969. We landed six times on the moon.
- 11:42
- A seventh attempt, if you include Apollo 13, involved all those people, to include our enemies, in the
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- Cold War, the Soviet Union, who we were in the race to to achieve that goal.
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- They gave up before we actually achieved it. They gave up the race. They knew they couldn't make it when their N1 rocket blew up.
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- But they were watching and we were spying on each other and all of that. And we did it six times. And then over half a century goes by.
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- Can you imagine how hard it would be to keep the secret with all those people? So many times, it's much easier just to have gone and done it.
- 12:20
- Yeah. And well, thanks, Pastor Andy. And guess what? I've got some great news. You have won a free copy of the book,
- 12:28
- The Work of His Hands. Thanks to our friends at Concordia Publishing House who have provided us with a limited number of copies of this book to give away to listeners who submit questions.
- 12:42
- And I hope to see you at some point in the near future, Pastor Andy. And, in fact,
- 12:47
- I hope that you can make it to my next Free Pastors Luncheon, Iron Trumpet and Zion Radio Free Pastors Luncheon, on Thursday, October the 5th, 11 a .m.
- 12:58
- to 2 p .m. at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville, Pennsylvania. My guest speaker for the conference this year is
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- Jeff Knoblet, the founder of Anchored in Truth Ministries and the pastor of Grace Life Church of the
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- Shoals in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, who is a powerful preacher and firm believer in the doctrines of sovereign grace.
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- So I hope to see you there. I'll read one more question before we go into some of the areas that you didn't have time to cover last time that you wanted to cover today.
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- But we have Ted in Moundville, Alabama. And I did ask this question of you when we were running out of time.
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- And you, I think, gave a two -word answer to it. You were totally dismissing the phenomenon.
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- But I'll give you a chance maybe to be a little longer in your answer this time. Ted from Moundville, Alabama, says,
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- Does your guest have any comment on the recent congressional hearings on UFO phenomenon, and particularly the whistleblowing accusations of David Grush or Grush?
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- I don't know how to pronounce that. Yeah, well, I have to admit, I didn't really watch it in detail.
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- All I did was read the headlines and short reports of what went on there.
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- To me, it's sort of a bizarre distraction. I'm not sure exactly why it's getting all the attention it is.
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- But I don't give it much credibility. I don't want to go too long and waste too much time on this.
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- But I will tell you that the A &E channel network or network years ago held a program, and it was one of their so -called documentaries.
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- And they had me, they had footage of me looking out the window of the space station, which was true footage. It was really me.
- 14:52
- But they framed the story as if I was watching a UFO outside the space station. They told the story.
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- And I had a friend let me know about it. But they made it up, and they call it a documentary.
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- Well, I have a recommendation, Ted, if you are familiar with Apologia Studios and Jeff Durbin, who is a
- 15:14
- Reformed Baptist pastor in Mesa, Arizona. He has been doing some programs on that, where he and some guests have theories about this being a demonic masquerade of some kind.
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- If it's not a full -blown hoax by the whistleblower and others, perhaps to distract the public from Joe Biden and his family's atrocities, that perhaps it's some kind of a demonic thing going on.
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- And so I would urge you to look that up. I'm sure he's going to have more of those interviews to come on Apologia Studios.
- 15:53
- That's Jeff Durbin. You can look it up. Apologia Church in Mesa, Arizona. Okay. Well, we covered a lot of things last time in our interview that are actually pertinent to the theme of the apparent conflict between science and Scripture.
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- What would be one of those things that we failed to cover last time due to time restraints?
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- Well, we kind of rushed through it. I think I'd like to review a little bit of what I introduced the audience to last time.
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- Sure, definitely. Yeah, maybe go into a little bit more detail with the time we have now.
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- First off, I get the question all the time. How can you be in this business as an astronaut or in the world of science and be a believer?
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- Isn't it incompatible? How can you survive? How do you reconcile the supposed incompatibilities?
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- And my answer is short and sweet. There's absolutely no conflict between science and Scripture.
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- They're perfectly compatible. That is true science. And I'll even add practical experimental science, as opposed to some of the theoretical science, which gets more into philosophy than science, some of this modern science that we're exposed to.
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- The conflict is not between science and Scripture. The conflict is in your presuppositions going into your science.
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- So it's a philosophical conflict. And it falls in one of two categories.
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- Either you believe in a God who has revealed himself in varying ways, to include his creative work, and he is the cause of everything.
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- And I'll say that in a general category. And, of course, I would specifically say he has ultimately revealed himself in his word and the person of Jesus Christ, the
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- Son of God. That's the first category. Or the second category, basically, is there is no
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- God. Everything has occurred naturally. And I have to explain why the existence of everything is as it is.
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- Those are the two categories. That's a philosophical conflict. Now, last time
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- I mentioned briefly that what we know is the age of science, or the scientific revolution.
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- And some of the big names, I think I named Johannes Kepler, who is famous for his work in astronomy and planetary motion.
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- And he was so precise in his studies that he missed the timing, as I recall, the orbit of Mars by a few minutes.
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- And that was a problem that he tackled for a long time until he finally figured out the orbit wasn't circular.
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- It was elliptical. And he was able to model, then, mathematically, the orbit of Mars, because he knew there was a precision in the ordering.
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- And he presumed that. So he's known, most famous for that in his work in astronomy.
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- Another person I mentioned was Robert Boyle. And anybody that's been scuba qualified has learned
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- Boyle's law, which is basically addressing the compression of gases. The density of gas increases under pressure.
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- He did broader work in chemistry. Isaac Newton, everybody knows about Newton's laws of motion.
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- The most famous one being force equals mass times acceleration. And everybody that gets, even in high school, certainly college engineering, gets a lot of work in Newton's laws.
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- Michael Faraday did work in electromagnetics. And he's got laws and equations named after him.
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- Louis Pasteur, we all have pasteurized milk. He did work in biology. In fact, he did some experiments on evolution and proved that life could not just come spontaneously.
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- He did some experiments in that area. James Clerk Maxwell is one of my favorites. He did work in electromagnetics and thermodynamics.
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- All of those guys, and many more, were theologians first. They were convicted by the truth of scripture.
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- And their convictions included the account of God's creative work.
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- And they were convicted that his work, in his work, he not only created all things, but he ordered all things.
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- And he gave it a precision in the ordering. And that ordering could be translated into what we know as laws, laws of nature.
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- But the laws of nature were not written on the creative. They weren't labeled on the creation. They weren't obvious.
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- They needed to be discovered. And to be discovered, one would make observations and come up with a theory or a hypothesis, and then do experiments and test the hypothesis, either to be true or false.
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- And if it was false, they would adjust the hypothesis and continue the experimentation, continue the exploration, if you will, into this phenomena, until they came up with a description of what they saw as the order.
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- And that translates into mathematical equations or laws of nature, et cetera.
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- These guys were convicted by the scripture first, and then they felt that they were called in their calling in life to study the works of God and to discover these laws, discover this ordering.
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- And we know that the order then has utility. It's, you know, all things that God created are for our good and for his glory.
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- Certainly the heavens declare the glory of God. But we also know that the provisioning of God's creation are for our good.
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- We grow crops for food, et cetera. There's so many ways that we gain provision from his creative work.
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- The air we breathe, the water cycle, water is essential to life. But that ordering is also a key component of understanding
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- God's provisioning of his creative work. And I like to use or start with the mathematical order.
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- I love math. I've always loved math and science since I was really turned on to it way back in sixth grade with the inspiration of a sixth grade science teacher.
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- And it has fascinated me more and more throughout my life. But it is direct evidence of this order that I'm speaking of that is discoverable, that it's intelligible.
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- Mathematics, which is incredible in and of itself, because it describes so much that we can observe and see and then we can predict, it is not invented by man.
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- It's discovered by us. It has been discovered. That's what drove those guys.
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- And I would say in a large measure, Western civilization has grown the way it has grown, and all the engineering and technology and advancements that we often take for granted came out of that biblical worldview.
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- And we don't have time to go into it today, but the scientific endeavor that came out of that, the post -reformation largely out of England, Oxford, Cambridge, and institutions like that, but also
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- Scotland, came out of the convictions of the biblical worldview in contrast to some of the scientific work that was done even earlier in the
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- Arab community, in the Chinese community, in the Greek community, which made some great discoveries.
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- Those communities made some great discoveries in history, but they didn't have the same worldview that kind of drove them to build on the discoveries.
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- They were more of novelties that kind of came and went with each passing generation.
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- So the worldview was critical. They were theologians first. They were driven by their theology.
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- They were driven in their calling into science. That's very important for us to understand.
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- Science. In fact, could you pick up where you left off there about the theology and worldview of the greatest scientists of history when we return from the break, because we have to go to our first commercial break.
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- Absolutely. All righty, folks. If you have a question for astronaut Colonel Jeffrey N.
- 24:52
- Williams on the apparent conflict between science and Scripture, and we need to emphasize the word apparent, our e -mail address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,
- 25:03
- C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. As always, give us a first name, at least your city and state and country of residence.
- 25:10
- We'll be right back with Colonel Williams after these messages don't go away. The Mid -Atlantic
- 25:16
- Reformation Society presents The Future of Christendom 2023, The Gospel at War, September 15th to the 16th in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, featuring
- 25:27
- Dr. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries. We are excited to be including a formal debate in this year's conference.
- 25:34
- Dr. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries will be debating Dr. Gregory Coles, author of Single Gay Christian, A Personal Journey of Faith and Sexual Identity.
- 25:43
- The debate topic, Is gay Christian a biblically acceptable identity for a member of Christ's Church?
- 25:48
- So come join us for the sixth Future of Christendom conference. The event will take place at Spooky Nook Sports in Mannheim, Pennsylvania, and will run from Friday evening through all day
- 25:57
- Saturday, with an invitation to the Sunday morning worship service of the Independence Reform Bible Church. This will be a weekend packed with practical teaching, with a theme of the
- 26:06
- Gospel at War in many areas of our culture, including government schools, the Supreme Court, missions, feminism, and even the church pulpits.
- 26:13
- Head to futureofchristendom .org. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries here.
- 26:35
- I'm very excited to announce that my longtime friend Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio and I are heading down to Atlanta, Georgia again for the
- 26:43
- G3 National Conference. That's Thursday, September 21st through Saturday the 23rd, on a theme that I have been preaching, teaching, writing about, and defending in live public debates for most of my life, the sovereignty of God.
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- I'll be joined on the speaking roster by Steve Lawson, Voti Baucom, Paul Washer, Virgil Walker, Scott Anuel, and Josh Bice, founder of G3 Ministries.
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- Chris Arnzen and I look forward to seeing you all Thursday, September 21st through Saturday the 23rd at the
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- Jeffrey N. Williams, a gift, and you want to take the NASA logo and turn it into a pendant for a necklace or a ring or something, or anything else that your imagination and creativity can conjure up, they will take what's in your brain and turn it into a physical piece of jewelry that will blow your mind.
- 34:05
- I've seen firsthand the mastery that they have over custom -designing jewelry. The thing is we have no idea when they're going to pull the plug on this offer where we get 100 % of the profits from any sale of jewelry to our listeners.
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- So please go to royaldiadem .com soon and make your purchase or get the ball rolling on your customized piece of jewelry soon because that way you will guarantee that we get 100 % of the profits from that sale.
- 34:39
- And make sure you mention Iron Sherpa's Iron Radio or we will not get that wonderful gift from royaldiadem .com.
- 34:46
- You have to mention Iron Sherpa's Iron Radio. That's royaldiadem .com. We're now back with astronaut
- 34:51
- Colonel Jeffrey N. Williams and we were discussing before the break or you were explaining how the greatest minds of science from years past had their biblical worldview and their theology first and foremost in their mind and they in no way believed that the amazing discoveries they made and the conclusions that they came to were in any way contradicting the
- 35:19
- Word of God and perhaps you could pick up where you left off there. Yeah, you bet.
- 35:26
- Maybe it's good to give a little bit more illustration of what I talk about when
- 35:31
- I'm referring to order, the ordering of God's creative work.
- 35:38
- I mentioned mathematical order. One illustration that's very telling,
- 35:44
- I launched four times on a rocket, once on the space shuttle, three times on a
- 35:49
- Russian Soyuz from different locations on the Earth with the intention to rendezvous and dock with the
- 35:58
- International Space Station. We would launch from each of those times, we would launch at a specific time of day that was driven by the mathematical prediction that we could only launch at that time of that day in order to later rendezvous with the
- 36:15
- Space Station. And we would fire the rocket for less than nine minutes and after nine minutes with the continuous acceleration we would be going to orbital velocity of about 17 ,500 miles an hour in the inertial orbit of the
- 36:29
- Space Station but maybe halfway around the world, on the opposite side or leading it or behind it.
- 36:36
- It varied from launch to launch. But then we would set up a rendezvous profile by making our orbit elliptical at just the right point so that we could predictively rendezvous with the
- 36:49
- Space Station. And in the first couple of instances, it was about 48 hours after launch where we rendezvoused and docked with the
- 36:56
- Space Station, precisely lining up with the docking port and making contact at about 0 .1
- 37:04
- feet per second plus or minus an inch of air from center line. That's only possible because we can predict it mathematically with the laws of physics.
- 37:15
- That's pretty incredible, not to mention the chemistry of the rocket motors and the design of the motors to feed the fuel, the propellant and the oxidizer to the engine at just the right proportions, at just the right speed, to produce just the right amount of thrust to thrust the rocket in a very precise direction for a precise length of time and make all that work.
- 37:41
- That is possible because of the mathematical ordering, and it's a fruit of science, which leads to engineering, which leads to technology development and the capability that we often take for granted.
- 37:54
- Another example of the order I often bring up is an illustration that everybody's been exposed to in school, in high school at least, is the periodic table that we get in chemistry.
- 38:08
- It is amazing to me that all of the elements that have been discovered, the basic elements, have the precise composition that can be measured in effect with whole numbers in the periodic table.
- 38:22
- If you've studied the periodic table, you see many dimensions of order there. Optics is another area.
- 38:28
- We can precisely grind a lens to a very precise shape so that we get something in very precise focus.
- 38:38
- Many of us wear prescription lenses to either read or to see in distance. Most of us have looked through a microscope to make things that are very small look big and bring clarity to the image, or a telescope to bring things far away close and bring clarity to the image.
- 38:59
- All of the optics are an illustration of this ordering of God's creative work.
- 39:09
- Electromagnetic spectrum is another area. We've got different frequency bands for different communication or transmit information.
- 39:18
- All of that is very precisely ordered in the harnessing of that order that's already there.
- 39:24
- For the listeners that don't have an inclination or an interest in math and science, perhaps music is attractive to them.
- 39:35
- Music is another example of the ordering. Music is mathematical. You can take a string, say a guitar string, at a specific length and put it at a tension and pluck it, and it plays a particular note.
- 39:51
- If you were to cut that string in half, exactly in half at the same tension, it would go up one octave.
- 39:58
- And, of course, there's many, many ways that music can be mathematically described. That's an example of order.
- 40:06
- Speaking of music, there's another element, though, that we need to consider when we consider these things, and that is our response to what we observe, our curiosity to search things out.
- 40:19
- I mean, why are we curious? Why do we care? Why are some things that we look at pleasing to the eye and other things are ugly?
- 40:29
- Why is some music pleasing to the ear and other noise, just dissonance or noise?
- 40:38
- That's directly related to bearing the image of God, which is also important for us to consider.
- 40:47
- When you look at other worldviews, like evolution, humanism, whatnot, then we just are here by chance over time.
- 40:53
- How do you explain the mind? You can't explain the mind. It's not just a function of chemical reactions in the brain.
- 41:00
- There's something far greater than that, and the Bible tells us what that is. We are created uniquely bearing the image of God.
- 41:09
- We have a soul with a sense of eternity. We have a mind with the ability to reason and remember the past and contemplate the future.
- 41:17
- We have an intellect with a will and emotions and affections.
- 41:23
- We have the ability to think rationally and to communicate in complex language, to articulate in the abstract.
- 41:33
- That also enters into this answering the call of scientists, which, by the way, the call of a scientist is an example of the dominion mandate right there in Genesis 1 to subdue the earth.
- 41:50
- God created the heavens and the earth, and he gave the earth, basically provisioned to mankind, to male and female, to those created who bear his image.
- 42:08
- And we are to have dominion over it. And the scientific endeavor is just that. It's an aspect of dominion and subduing
- 42:18
- God's created order. By the way, the word universe gives testimony to that.
- 42:25
- There's a unity in the universe. It assumes universal laws, unifying principles, underlying unities underneath what we see and observe.
- 42:38
- And bearing the image of God, we seek it out. We search for it.
- 42:44
- We explore. We contemplate. We experiment. We find usefulness for something.
- 42:51
- We develop. We combine, and we find further usefulness.
- 42:56
- And that gives a worldview understanding, a biblical worldview understanding of, frankly, the history of civilization.
- 43:04
- And science is a way to understand that order. So it's perfectly compatible with a biblical worldview.
- 43:12
- Now, you mentioned music before. I don't know if you have any awareness or expertise in this specific area that I'm about to ask, but it's something that has always fascinated me.
- 43:25
- Because of the fact that you mentioned that music involves math or mathematics, I have always wondered why it is.
- 43:34
- This has to be a God thing, of course. But you could have a church that doesn't have a single soul in that church that is gifted in singing.
- 43:48
- But if you have 100 or more people in that church,
- 43:53
- I'm not saying that this necessarily works when you have a very tiny congregation of 10, 20, 30 people.
- 43:59
- But if you have 100 or more, 200, 300, or 1 ,000 people, and they're singing a cappella, it is absolutely beautiful to the ear, even though you may have very few people, especially in a larger church.
- 44:13
- You can have some people that are gifted singers. But I don't know of more than a handful of gifted singers in the congregation where I'm a member, and yet we have typically over 200 people there gathered on a
- 44:27
- Sunday. And it sounds beautiful when people are singing together. Is there any known math that would explain that?
- 44:36
- Well, there is math in music. I'm not educated in music. I've just read some of it.
- 44:43
- But it is mathematically ordered. It can be described mathematically. Harmony is mathematically described.
- 44:52
- Dissonance is not. It's ugly to the ear. There are certainly degrees of quality.
- 44:58
- I'm not gifted in music and singing myself, but I love to sing. I think there's a couple things there.
- 45:05
- I think that perhaps you have a leadership in worship that's magnified a little bit with the audio system, and that might help drown out those of us that don't have that gift of singing.
- 45:21
- But there's also a unique quality in experiencing believers singing, praising
- 45:33
- God. It's almost like the defects in our abilities are masked by the praise of an assembled group of believers, an ecclesia, a church called out, the local church.
- 45:51
- So there's something beautiful in that. I don't know. That's what I think of off the top of my head as you ask the question.
- 45:58
- Well, we have a listener, Bruce in Oregon, Portland, Oregon, who has a question for you.
- 46:12
- He says, how do you combat those who are either atheists and not
- 46:19
- Christians at all, or they are old earth creationist scientists who claim a very old age for the earth and universe, who say that the light that we are seeing from stars is one of the proofs that the universe is a lot older than young earth creationists claim because of the distance of these stars and our ability to see them?
- 46:48
- Well, I wouldn't describe it as combat, and perhaps the questioner didn't intend it that way, but, you know, we're to engage with those around us.
- 47:02
- And the Bible says with gentleness and respect for one another. So we're just to give testimony to what the
- 47:10
- Bible says, testimony to the revelation of God, and that applies to both nonbelievers as well as other believers that may have theological differences with us, and the questioner referenced old earth and young earth.
- 47:27
- And then the question got narrower in regards to starlight. And the argument says, well, if we can clearly measure the distance to stars and they're billions of light years or millions, hundreds of millions of light years away, then it would have taken that long for the light to travel here, so how can the earth or the universe be young then if it took that long for the light to travel?
- 47:57
- That's the question that your listener got down to. And a lot of people struggle with that.
- 48:04
- A lot of scientists that work in the area that are young earthers or call themselves young earthers struggle with that question, and there's a couple of theories out there.
- 48:15
- To me, and I'm not trained in that area, so I'm not a scientist in that area, but where I've gotten to as I've addressed the question is really very simple.
- 48:27
- The question presumes or assumes an illustration that we might describe as a light bulb, where we have a light bulb and we turn the light switch on, and then the light begins to travel from that light bulb and travels out as far as it can be seen, and it takes time to travel that.
- 48:47
- So we kind of think of a creation of the star in the same way, using that illustration. But I say, why limit ourselves to those kinds of illustrations, those illustrations that we see in life around us?
- 49:02
- Why can't we assume that when God created the stars, and the scripture only says and the stars, it's almost like an afterthought in Genesis 1, why can't we assume the creation of a particular star included the array of light as far as it goes up?
- 49:24
- In other words, created it in its totality, and the totality, it would include how it is perceived from Earth.
- 49:35
- I don't see why that can't be the case. Well, thank you, Bruce. And guess what?
- 49:40
- You have also won a free copy of the book. We are addressing today, or the book that we are giving away today,
- 49:46
- I should say. The Work of His Hands, A View of God's Creation from Space, which is a collection of stunning, breathtaking photographs of Earth from space photographed by our guest,
- 50:01
- Colonel Jeffrey N. Williams. And so please make sure we have your full mailing address, and we will have
- 50:07
- CVBBS, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, ship that out to you at no cost to you or to us.
- 50:15
- Let us know if you're a first -time questioner, so we can also include in that package a brand -new
- 50:21
- New American Standard Bible, which all of our first -time questioners get for sending in questions.
- 50:28
- Let's see, perhaps you could start answering a question. I don't know if we have time to have you give the full answer before our midway break, which is going to be in like three minutes.
- 50:40
- But we have an anonymous listener who says, a couple of my closest friends have professed to be convinced of geocentricism, that the planet
- 50:52
- Earth, if I'm describing this correctly, is actually physically in the center of the universe, and the universe revolves around our planet.
- 51:02
- Is this a ridiculous lie, like the flat Earth theory, or is this something that may have more scientific support to it?
- 51:13
- Well, that question is always sort of confusing to folks anyway. If you study just basic physics or mechanics or, you know, the beginning courses of science, the center of something can be anywhere you define it.
- 51:30
- You know, it's your origin of your reference frame. So mathematically, or when
- 51:37
- I study something, I can put the reference frame, the origin, and the x's, x, y, and z, x, y, and z in this case, in any orientation, any place
- 51:48
- I want to. So in that respect, I can define Earth as the center of things and define that as the origin of my reference frame.
- 51:56
- I can also define the sun as the origin of my reference frame and describe everything there.
- 52:03
- Because of the relative mass difference between the sun and the Earth and the law of gravity that has been discovered, one of the fundamental laws of nature that nobody really understands, but it can be pretty precisely described mathematically, would argue for the better answer in terms of where the questioner is going, is the sun being the center of the solar system and the planets revolving around the sun.
- 52:31
- But even that, mathematically, if you look at physics, there's a slight wobble in the sun because of the gravitational pull of the planets.
- 52:39
- That's getting very precise, it's kind of getting into the noise. So, to me, the whole question is a little bit of a distraction.
- 52:46
- Now, in the medieval times, when they considered the Earth as the center of the world, that was a philosophical center, and that was reputed later on as the sun being the center of the solar system.
- 53:01
- So, you've got to be really careful. Those questions and those arguments can be very distracting from true meaning.
- 53:08
- Now, in the narrow sense, the sun is the center of the solar system, so I'll say that.
- 53:16
- But, yeah, we've got those distractions out there. We've also got lots of other influences that have taken away the truth that science is based on biblical understanding.
- 53:26
- We'll get to that more further after the break. Yes, and we have to go to the break right now. And if you have a question for NASA astronaut
- 53:35
- Colonel Jeffrey N. Williams, please submit it to chrisarnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the
- 53:45
- USA. Please be patient with us, folks, as the middle break is always a bit longer than the other breaks.
- 53:50
- We'll be right back after these messages, so don't go away. The Mid -Atlantic
- 53:55
- Reformation Society presents The Future of Christendom 2023, The Gospel at War, September 15th to the 16th in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, featuring
- 54:06
- Dr. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries. We are excited to be including a formal debate in this year's conference.
- 54:13
- Dr. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries will be debating Dr. Gregory Coles, author of Single Gay Christian, A Personal Journey of Faith and Sexual Identity.
- 54:22
- The debate topic, Is Gay Christian a Biblically Acceptable Identity for a Member of Christ's Church?
- 54:27
- So come join us for the sixth Future of Christendom conference. The event will take place at Spooky Nook Sports in Mannheim, Pennsylvania, and will run from Friday evening through all day
- 54:36
- Saturday with an invitation to the Sunday morning worship service of the Independence Reform Bible Church. This will be a weekend packed with practical teaching with a theme of the
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- Gospel at War in many areas of our culture, including government schools, the Supreme Court, missions, feminism, and even the church pulpits.
- 54:52
- Head to futureofchristendom .org. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries here.
- 55:10
- I'm very excited to announce that my longtime friend Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio and I are heading down to Atlanta, Georgia again for the
- 55:19
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- That's solid -ground -books .com. Before I return to NASA astronaut
- 01:09:08
- Colonel Jeffrey N. Williams and our discussion of the apparent conflict between science and scripture, we just have a couple of very important announcements to make.
- 01:09:17
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- 01:11:50
- and put I Need a Church in the subject line. Also, please do not forget that Dr.
- 01:11:56
- James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, my very dear friend of decades, he is going to be speaking here in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Mannheim, Pennsylvania, to be more specific.
- 01:12:08
- He is one of the speakers at the Mid -Atlantic Reformation Society's Future of Christendom Conference.
- 01:12:17
- This will take place September 15th through September 17th. That's a
- 01:12:22
- Friday through Sunday. And there's also a debate that is a part of that three -day conference on Saturday, September 16th at 3 .30
- 01:12:31
- p .m. Dr. White will be debating Dr. Gregory Coles, who identifies himself as a gay
- 01:12:39
- Christian. And the theme of the debate is, Is Gay Christian a
- 01:12:44
- Biblically Acceptable Identity for a Member of Christ's Church? You don't want to miss that. And so please register as quickly as you can so you get the best price for the registration fee.
- 01:12:55
- The prices will be going up. Go to futureofchristendom .org, futureofchristendom .org.
- 01:13:00
- If you want to send in a question to Astronaut Colonel Jeffrey N. Williams, our e -mail address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,
- 01:13:08
- chrisarnson at gmail .com. And, Colonel Williams, before I go to any other listener questions,
- 01:13:15
- I want to make sure that you finished saying what you were saying, or you wanted to continue on a thread that you had began before the break?
- 01:13:27
- Well, no, we can begin however you would like to. Okay, let's see here.
- 01:13:35
- We have Lawrence in Cape Coral, Florida, who asks,
- 01:13:43
- What is the most difficult thing that you face as an astronaut and a young Earth creationist when you have scientists who are claiming to disagree with you on important issues in that field?
- 01:14:01
- Well, the question, I think, comes from the public perception of the voices that are out there speaking against, say, a biblical faith.
- 01:14:17
- But those voices are transmitted through the media. They're in writing. That's what we hear all the time.
- 01:14:23
- We hear about the conflict. The conflict is there. We keep hearing science is not compatible with Scripture.
- 01:14:31
- But in practice, I just don't get the challenge. I don't have scientists challenging me.
- 01:14:39
- Actually, there's more believers in the scientific community than the public would ever imagine.
- 01:14:45
- Wow. It's just the voices are not heard. The voices are suppressed. And the voice that is transmitted is there's conflict.
- 01:14:54
- There's conflict. You know, I think I mentioned it the last time we were together. The whole
- 01:15:01
- COVID experience and the mantra of early on that the science tells us to do this, the science says this, the consensus of scientists is this.
- 01:15:15
- If you don't comply, you're going against the science. Those were all bumper stickers, kind of intimidating threats that turned out to be largely empty.
- 01:15:28
- There is no consensus in science. Science is inherently questioning and challenging itself.
- 01:15:38
- When science proposes a hypothesis, you experiment to try to disprove the hypothesis.
- 01:15:47
- And that's not what we experienced. So what it did, what the public experience did in the last few years with the whole
- 01:15:53
- COVID thing, is actually put a nick in the armor of the perceived authority of just the word science or the position of being scientist.
- 01:16:04
- And it's an empty shell, largely. Again, there are many believers in the scientific community.
- 01:16:12
- Well, thanks, Lawrence. Give us your full mailing address in Cape Coral, Florida, because you have also won a free copy of the book we have been giving away,
- 01:16:21
- Compliments of Concordia Publishing House, The Work of His Hands, A View of God's Creation from Space, by my guest,
- 01:16:28
- Colonel Jeffrey N. Chris, along those lines, you said last time you welcome book recommendations.
- 01:16:35
- Oh, yes. Oh, of course. Well, let me give your listeners a couple of them. Of course,
- 01:16:40
- I have many, many books. I won't go through all of them. But one that addresses these questions is called
- 01:16:47
- Redeeming Science, A God -Centered Approach, written by Vern Poitras.
- 01:16:53
- And Vern is a theologian, but he also was trained, as I recall, in engineering, if not science.
- 01:17:00
- Yes, I've met him. There's another book. I'd love to get him on the program. I met him face -to -face at an ordination service once.
- 01:17:06
- Yes, yes. I would encourage you to do that. There's another one that I discovered a few years ago by James Nickel called
- 01:17:14
- Mathematics, Is God Silent? And in these books, they not only go into the technical details, but they also go into some aspects of the history that I will be touching on.
- 01:17:28
- Another book I just discovered, I think was published a year ago or so, is
- 01:17:34
- In the Beginning, Listening to Genesis 1 and 2, by Cornelis Van Dam.
- 01:17:41
- V -A -N, separate word, D -A -M, Van Dam. As I recall, he's in Canada.
- 01:17:49
- He's a theologian. But I thought it was a very helpful book in addressing
- 01:17:56
- Genesis 1 and 2 in the context of what we're talking about.
- 01:18:03
- I'll mention one more now, and then we can transition. But that is
- 01:18:08
- The Soul of Science, Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy, by Nancy Piercy and Charles Thaxton.
- 01:18:15
- It's a little bit older, but it's very good. Again, addressing some of these themes as well as the context of history.
- 01:18:26
- For some reason, I can't get my mind past the name Cornelis Van Dam. Cornelis Van Dam sounds like a presuppositionalist who's also a martial artist.
- 01:18:37
- You better not mess with Cornelis Van Dam's Young Earth creationism.
- 01:18:44
- By the way, folks, go to CVBBS .com and find out if they carry those books, and they will likely order them for you, since CVBBS .com
- 01:18:56
- is a sponsor of our program. They're not a publisher. They're a book distributor. So they will likely be able to get whatever you need.
- 01:19:05
- And if you want those names, those books repeated, we'll try to do that before the end of the show, or you can just send me an email.
- 01:19:14
- Well, why don't you continue with some of these other apparent conflicts between science and script?
- 01:19:20
- Yeah, the question's obvious. It's come up. The conflict is assumed.
- 01:19:26
- That's what we learned all our lives. Growing up in school, there was no conflict. These scientists that I mentioned that were theologians first in the age of science, we read about them in textbooks, but nowhere in any textbook does it acknowledge that they were believers.
- 01:19:41
- And we may not agree with all their theology, all the nuances of their theology, but they were believers and they were driven by their faith and their understanding of the
- 01:19:49
- Bible. So the obvious question is, where did the conflict come from? And I think most people assume
- 01:19:55
- Charles Darwin had a big part of it in the growth of the theory of evolution.
- 01:20:01
- When I was a kid, it was called theory. That word theory has been dropped. Now it's just assumed fact supported by science, which is a bad assumption.
- 01:20:10
- There's no science behind it. But it's, of course, much broader than Charles Darwin. In fact, Charles Darwin was actually a little bit publicly shy.
- 01:20:19
- He was, I would say he was even used, his work was used by others to propagate, just as a convenient tool to propagate a propaganda campaign, which
- 01:20:31
- I'll talk a little bit more about. There are just a few names that I'll throw out, and I threw them out last time, but I want to go in a little bit more detail this time, given the more time that we have.
- 01:20:43
- There was a guy by the name of James Hutton, who was a deist, and I'll leave it up to your listeners to go research that word, deist, but basically it's just a theory that, okay,
- 01:20:56
- God existed, he created everything, but then he wound it up like a clock and let it go in its own way, and he doesn't involve himself in his creation.
- 01:21:04
- It was very popular in the 18th century, in particular. And James Hutton considered himself a deist, largely, by the way, immoral.
- 01:21:11
- He was a womanizer. He never married. He was also an alcoholic, or close to an alcoholic, by some accounts.
- 01:21:19
- He thought that religion was just a contrived invention of man, and he first started promoting the idea that the earth was millions of years old, and he suggested kind of a continuous evolution of life.
- 01:21:37
- So that's the late 1700s, so long before Darwin.
- 01:21:44
- But he was a friend, coincidentally, with Charles Darwin's grandfather,
- 01:21:49
- Erasmus Darwin, and Erasmus did a lot of the work in the same area, in the research or formulating a theory of evolution, grandfather of Charles, and he influenced
- 01:22:01
- Charles, of course, greatly later in the following century. The year that Hutton died, in 1797, another guy that was part of this story was born,
- 01:22:13
- Charles Lyell, and he's known as the one that popularized the theory of uniformitarianism, which basically is predicted by the
- 01:22:24
- Apostle Peter in his second letter, where he says that, okay, sure, I'll paraphrase, sure, yeah,
- 01:22:31
- Christ is going to return. You know, we observe things, and they've been going on as they've always gone on.
- 01:22:38
- In other words, it's just we use time to explain everything, as we observe erosion and everything else today, that's the way it's always been going on.
- 01:22:48
- So the scripture, Peter, specifically in 2 Peter chapter 3, actually predicts this in general, this theory of evolution, this uniformitarianism, this old earth kind of thing, it's predicted in scripture.
- 01:23:06
- Lyell was a geologist. He was also antagonistic with religion, and he was greatly influenced by James Hutton from the previous century.
- 01:23:16
- He used the concept of old earth specifically and indirectly to undermine, to undermine indirectly the
- 01:23:26
- Bible, the authority of the Bible. He didn't attack the Bible directly, at least publicly, because you could not survive in those days.
- 01:23:35
- The biblical Christian worldview was predominant, both in private life and public life.
- 01:23:42
- But he sought to undermine the Bible indirectly, specifically the first 11 chapters of the
- 01:23:50
- Bible, with this promoting of uniformitarianism and an old earth.
- 01:23:58
- Charles Lyell was a friend of Charles Darwin, and he actually pushed him pretty hard to publish the origins of the species.
- 01:24:06
- Like I said, Darwin was a little bit publicly shy, so he needed pushing from friends and those around him to actually get out there and make his work public.
- 01:24:17
- There's another guy, he's called Darwin's Bulldog. His name is Thomas Huxley.
- 01:24:24
- He was a very aggressive atheist. He was also known not only as Darwin's Bulldog, but he was known as Evolution's High Priest.
- 01:24:36
- And ironically, he didn't really believe in the science behind Darwin's theories, but he saw them as a convenient tool to propagate the undermining of the authority of the
- 01:24:51
- Bible. And he started portraying theology and the clergy, the leadership of the church specifically, because there were abuses among the clergy, but he began to portray them as enemies of science.
- 01:25:08
- So he started to set the conditions upon which there was this perception, growing perception of conflict between science and the
- 01:25:19
- Bible. But there was a book I mentioned last time. I actually discovered this part of the history before I discovered the book, but the book confirmed a lot of the other research that I had done.
- 01:25:29
- The book, as I mentioned last time, is entitled Of Popes and Unicorns.
- 01:25:35
- The subtitle is Science, Christianity, and How the Conflict Pieces Fooled the
- 01:25:40
- World, written by David Hutchings and James Ungaronew.
- 01:25:49
- They're both in England, as I recall. It was just published last year, but it chronicles the historic context and the history of two other gentlemen by the name of John Draper and Andrew Dixon White.
- 01:26:09
- They were both Americans. One of them immigrated from England and became an American citizen, but the other one was born in America.
- 01:26:16
- They lived in the 1800s and in white up until 1918.
- 01:26:24
- So they were friends. They worked together. They were also friends of Thomas Huxley, who was in England.
- 01:26:34
- And they were instrumental in what has become known as the conflict thesis. And I think
- 01:26:39
- I mentioned last time your listeners can look up conflict thesis, and you'll find write -ups on the
- 01:26:44
- Internet that summarize the work of Draper and White. They were both scientists.
- 01:26:51
- They were both educators as well. And they both wrote works of history, or what were purported to be works of history.
- 01:26:59
- And Draper's book, which was published in 1874, was entitled A History of the
- 01:27:05
- Conflict Between Religion and Science. And it posited the thesis that the progressive power of science was juxtaposed against the regressive and repressive power of religion.
- 01:27:20
- And we still hear those words all the time. Science is progressive. Religion is regressive and repressive.
- 01:27:28
- He invented some of that terminology in that supposed work of history.
- 01:27:34
- White published a little bit later, as I recall, maybe a decade or more, two decades later, a big volume, a big work, entitled
- 01:27:46
- A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology and Christendom. So a little bit narrower.
- 01:27:53
- He upped it to the level of warfare, where Draper called it conflict,
- 01:28:00
- White called it warfare. And specifically, science with Christianity, with the theology that's present in Christendom.
- 01:28:10
- And his thesis was that Christianity has always been at war with science. And he's got lots of details, lots of illustrations, lots of examples in this very large volume.
- 01:28:22
- White, by the way, was also the founding president of Cornell University. He and Mr.
- 01:28:28
- Cornell worked together to found the university, and they declared that it would be an asylum for science.
- 01:28:37
- In other words, we're going to separate science from this regressive power of religion, and Christianity specifically, and so we're going to free science to do its thing.
- 01:28:49
- And they purported that Cornell would be where truth shall be sought for truth's sake, not stretched or cut exactly to fit revealed religion.
- 01:29:03
- So that was their presupposition going in. That was their thesis. They attempted to separate it completely.
- 01:29:10
- Those works of history, those two volumes, first by Draper and then by White, were refuted within a short time, within a decade or two, by the academic world that had a specialty in the history of science and Christianity as fabrications.
- 01:29:29
- In other words, all those details, all those illustrations, all those supposed historical accounts of the conflict or the warfare were fabrications.
- 01:29:39
- They made them up. They were not works of history, and therefore they were widely rejected by historians.
- 01:29:47
- But the war image, the image, the public image has survived in popular thinking even to this day, so much so that I would say that there is a real conflict today, that even the scientific community largely assumes this.
- 01:30:10
- So even believing scientists often have a hard time reconciling their scientific work with a biblical worldview because they have been overcome by this popular image of continuous warfare, when in fact it's a fabricated lie in what
- 01:30:29
- I call a very successful, perhaps the most successful, large -scale propaganda campaign in modern history.
- 01:30:37
- I'll pause there for your question or comment. Well, we do have a listener,
- 01:30:43
- Darcy in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who says, forgive me if you've already brought this up,
- 01:30:51
- I'm just starting to tune in now, but I have heard that there is a confusion over Christianity's being at odds with science because of the fact that the papacy of the
- 01:31:04
- Roman Catholic Church at one time in history was, including things such as a
- 01:31:10
- Roman Catholic defense of geocentricism and the flat earth. Am I on base here that people are confusing those things that had no biblical basis to them that the
- 01:31:22
- Church of Rome defended, and it's being broad -brushed with biblical Christianity as being an enemy of science?
- 01:31:30
- Well, what that question alludes to is one of many illustrations in history where you can find, yes, certainly problems with positions of, say, church leadership or whatnot, in this case the pope or the official
- 01:31:45
- Vatican position. And I'm not sure that the question alludes to this, but typically what is brought up is the conflict that Galileo had, which largely is misrepresented and is used as evidence for the conflict thesis.
- 01:32:03
- But I think if we don't have time to go into it in detail, but if your listeners will research that a little bit more, they'll find out that that story, that historic account has been distorted over and over and over again and does not do credit to the facts of what
- 01:32:23
- Galileo was facing and what his opposition within the Church was motivated by, or whether they were biblical or not.
- 01:32:30
- Certainly there's lots of abuses in history within the Church and within church leadership.
- 01:32:37
- But that doesn't distract in the final analysis of anything that I've been advocating in our conversation today.
- 01:32:47
- Thank you, Darcy. You've also won a free copy of the book written by our guest today,
- 01:32:52
- The Work of His Hands, A View of God's Creation from Space. Make sure we have your full mailing address in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
- 01:32:59
- We have Peabody—I don't know if that's a first or a last name—in Duval, Washington.
- 01:33:05
- Who asks, what can you tell us about black holes?
- 01:33:11
- What do scientists actually know about these things? And how much of it is scientific fact and science fiction?
- 01:33:21
- It's interesting. I get that question often. And first off,
- 01:33:26
- I will say that I'm not trained in that level of physics. Actually, I've never been drawn to study that level of modern physics to much degree.
- 01:33:40
- Anyway, I mean, I'm familiar with it. I read about it in the context of history.
- 01:33:47
- But it's a theory that tries to explain what so far has been not completely explainable.
- 01:33:55
- So it's a theory. It's a theory to try to explain what should be required as what you could largely think of as the energy balance of the universe in the context of what we can observe, in the context of time.
- 01:34:13
- It's related to the more modern discoveries of physics that suggest that the universe had a beginning.
- 01:34:26
- But yet, it can't account for all of the energy observed. So black holes become a theoretical method to try to explain that.
- 01:34:37
- I can't go beyond that. I have tongue -in -cheek answered that question at one point by saying, it's just something made up by the scientific community to try to explain something that's unexplainable.
- 01:34:53
- Again, it's a theory. It's in the news all the time. It's in the media all the time.
- 01:34:59
- So in the popular mind, it's just taken as fact. Well, there are black holes out there, matter, antimatter.
- 01:35:06
- You know, there's the birth of stars. When we look deep into space and we see the imagery that come from the
- 01:35:14
- Hubble Space Telescope or the Webb Space Telescope, it's often described as being very dynamic and exploding this, dying that, or whatnot.
- 01:35:24
- But from what we see, in the short period of time that we've been observing it, it's static.
- 01:35:30
- So even those descriptive words are a little bit misleading for the public consumption.
- 01:35:39
- Thank you, Peabody. Give us your full mailing address in Duval, Washington, because you've also won a free copy of The Work of His Hands.
- 01:35:47
- And that's compliments of Concordia Publishing House and compliments of Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com.
- 01:35:55
- Giovanna in the Bronx, New York, says, this whole concept of liberals and leftists claiming that religion is at odds with true science, isn't it true that a valid claim could be made that these leftists have really invented a religion of their own and don't really follow scientific principles when they state as fact things that have never been proven theories?
- 01:36:28
- Oh, absolutely. It is a religion. In fact, people are inherently religious. Nobody is without religion in that sense.
- 01:36:37
- Everybody seeks to find meaning in their lives. Again, it goes in two categories.
- 01:36:43
- Either you accept God, who has revealed himself, and you search him out according to his revelation, or you want to deny
- 01:36:51
- God. And what's the root cause for somebody wanting to deny God, specifically deny a holy
- 01:36:58
- God, who we know in our conscience we cannot stand before and be justified? So there's efforts to get rid of him.
- 01:37:07
- And that's the history of humanity since the fall, to try to get rid of God. Whatever label you want to put on them, humanist, evolutionist, atheist, or whatnot, it's all different variations of human religion.
- 01:37:27
- Thanks a lot, Giovanna. In fact, let me add this. Let me add this. It's all based on faith.
- 01:37:34
- Even if you read the words of some of the more prominent atheists, Richard Dawkins and others, if you actually read their words, their words are not objective scientific conclusions.
- 01:37:45
- They are words of faith, just like we live by faith.
- 01:37:51
- But I would argue that our faith has objective content, objective revelation, both natural and specifically in the word.
- 01:37:59
- And their faith, largely, if you look at it, if you examine it, is a blind faith.
- 01:38:05
- It's a faith in faith. Yeah. In fact, the late Stephen Hawking, he, as brilliant as he was, would make all kinds of comments about how he believed that the planet
- 01:38:20
- Earth was populated by space aliens and things like that. He would say that he has no, absolute zero, basis on which to develop those thoughts and theories.
- 01:38:31
- That's just insanity, isn't it? Exactly, exactly. And that's an example of the blind faith.
- 01:38:38
- I mean, even the word, I think you've quoted him correctly or paraphrased him correctly when he says, I believe that's a work of faith without objective evidence.
- 01:38:50
- Yeah, that's the way leftists in every sphere of life get away with imposing their agenda on the general public because they will claim, oh, we believe in separation of church and state.
- 01:39:05
- This is not a religious idea that we are mandating. You know, this is basic common sense and this is science and all that.
- 01:39:14
- But it's really coming from an ideology and a worldview. And those things are inherently religious, whether you're an atheist or an agnostic, it's still religion.
- 01:39:27
- Absolutely. Well, we have to go to our final break. And anybody who wants to send in a question, I would strongly advise that you do it immediately because we're rapidly running out of time.
- 01:39:37
- ChrisArnson at Gmail .com, ChrisArnson at Gmail .com. Don't go away. We will be right back with Colonel Jeffrey N.
- 01:39:44
- Williams right after these messages from our sponsors. The Mid -Atlantic
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- James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries here. I'm very excited to announce that my longtime friend, Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and I are heading down to Atlanta, Georgia again, for the
- 01:41:14
- G3 National Conference. That's Thursday, September 21st through Saturday, the 23rd, on a theme that I've been preaching, teaching, writing about and defending in live public debates for most of my life, the sovereignty of God.
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- I'll be joined on the speaking roster by Steve Lawson, Voti Baucom, Paul Washer, Virgil Walker, Scott Anuel, and Josh Bice, founder of G3 Ministries.
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- Chris Arnzen and I look forward to seeing you all Thursday, September 21st through Saturday, the 23rd, at the
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- Chris Armstrong's family of advertisers to keep Iron Sharpens Iron. I'm Dr.
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- Joseph Piper, President Emeritus and Professor of Systematic and Applied Theology at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
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- For details on the eight -volume commentary, go to westminstercommentary .com, westminstercommentary .com.
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- Joseph Piper of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary sent you. When Iron Sharpens Iron Radio first launched in 2005, the publishers of the
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- Do you know what they all have in common? They all require training, assessments and certifications. But do you know what requires no training at all?
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- Please visit us at truthloveparent .com Welcome back. We have
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- Reginald in Troy, New York who asks, what is the farthest planet that you believe human beings will ever physically be capable of traveling to?
- 01:52:34
- I think that given time and the technology development and more critically the political support, which of course brings the funding to develop the technology, we will get to Mars.
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- Beyond Mars I don't think it's possible. But one day we will get to Mars.
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- It's been the target for decades and there's a continual, even today, drive to get there.
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- And theoretically we can get there. Well, I really want you to have an opportunity to make sure that you have time to summarize the most pertinent things, the most important things that you want permanently etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today about this issue before we leave the program.
- 01:53:20
- Yeah, you bet. Before I do that, I'm going to add a couple of books to my list.
- 01:53:25
- Sure. One is I gave a talk in Portland, Oregon last year,
- 01:53:32
- I think it was, and out of the crowd came the author of this book. The book is called
- 01:53:38
- Exposing the Hidden Roots of the Evolutionary Agenda. The subtitle is
- 01:53:43
- The Emperors Who Had No Clothes by Milt Marcy. So I met Milt, had a short visit with him and read the book.
- 01:53:51
- It's well documented and I actually reached out to him afterwards to give some appreciation for that work.
- 01:53:58
- I found it very helpful. And the other one I can't get off the stage without mentioning is, of course, there are many works published by the
- 01:54:07
- Institute of Creation Research, but one I found particularly helpful for this theme, looking at a biblical worldview of science, is called just that,
- 01:54:16
- The Biblical Basis for Modern Science by Henry Morris. I never met
- 01:54:21
- Henry, the founder of ICR, the Institute of Creation Research. I knew his son who passed away last year.
- 01:54:29
- I knew him pretty well. Full disclosure, I serve on the board of directors for ICR.
- 01:54:36
- They're doing some great work, a great group of scientists who have sacrificed their professional careers because they publicly do science in the biblical framework.
- 01:54:51
- So I applaud them for that. So that's another great book reference for science. Yes, I've had a couple of the team members of ICR on the show.
- 01:55:02
- Very good, very good. Yeah, Randy Galluzzi is the current president, and he's doing some great work leading that organization.
- 01:55:12
- I guess what I would say is this conflict is a lie.
- 01:55:18
- I think I've established that. How do we deal with it? We don't enter into battle or conflict in the worldly way.
- 01:55:28
- I'm always reminded of Job 28. Job 28 is a profound chapter, largely overlooked.
- 01:55:35
- The first half of the chapter acknowledges man's amazing ability to extract the provision in God's creation.
- 01:55:44
- And by the way, it also acknowledges the provision that's there. And it does it using the illustration of minds and tearing apart mountains and finding things, and things that are useful, things that are given to us by the
- 01:55:58
- Creator for our good. But then halfway through the chapter, it says, but where can wisdom be found, and where is the place of understanding?
- 01:56:08
- That's that profound word, but, which basically makes the point that we have an amazing
- 01:56:16
- Creator who has provisioned His creation and turned it over to us and given us an amazing ability to even contemplate these things and go search them out, discover them, develop them, technology advancement, all of that, application.
- 01:56:31
- But yet there's something that is not achievable by us, that is unattainable, that is beyond our reach, and it's what
- 01:56:40
- Job 28 refers to as wisdom. And if you follow the theme of wisdom, by the way, the end of the chapter says, the fear of the
- 01:56:48
- Lord is the beginning of wisdom. That's a familiar verse for most of us from Proverbs and elsewhere.
- 01:56:54
- Psalm 111 ends that way as well. If you follow the theme through Scripture, you find out that wisdom is ultimately revealed in the person of Jesus Christ in places like 1
- 01:57:05
- Corinthians chapter 1 and 2 and Colossians chapter 2. And it's a reminder that we just need to sow the seed.
- 01:57:14
- We need to be a faithful witness. We need to live out and give witness to Christ in our life as we deal with these things, with patience and gentleness.
- 01:57:30
- And ultimately, all we can do is sow the seed of truth, and I would include truth to be natural truth that science can discover and we can build upon, but more specifically, the truth of the
- 01:57:44
- Gospel found in the Scriptures. And then it's up to the Lord, by His grace and mercy, to change the hearts of those that we're interacting with.
- 01:57:54
- Amen. By the way, I forgot to do this earlier. I wanted to make sure our listeners knew the full original title of The Origin of the
- 01:58:04
- Species by Charles Darwin. A lot of people don't realize how racist a man he was.
- 01:58:11
- That term racist is thrown around a lot today in a slanderous way against people who are not racist.
- 01:58:18
- But Charles Darwin's book was originally titled On the Origin of the
- 01:58:23
- Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favored Races in the
- 01:58:30
- Struggle for Life. I just thought I'd throw that out there. I forgot to do it earlier. No, it's a great reminder,
- 01:58:36
- Chris. I was going to do that, too, because it is the root of the most evil examples of racism in modern times, like the
- 01:58:45
- Nazi movement, like the founding of Planned Parenthood.
- 01:58:52
- Yep, eugenics. Well, I want to thank you so much, Colonel Williams, for, again, being such a fascinating and superb guest.
- 01:59:00
- I look forward to many future return visits from you. I want to remind our listeners that if you want more information about the book we were giving away today, the work of his hands, go to cph .org.
- 01:59:13
- That's the website for Concordia Publishing House, who were kind enough to give us these giveaway copies, cph .org.
- 01:59:20
- I also want to thank cvbbs .com, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, for shipping out these books to our winners.
- 01:59:27
- I want to thank you so much, Colonel Williams, again, for being on the program. I want to thank everybody who listened.
- 01:59:33
- I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner.