Is The Bible Unscientific?

Bethlehem Bible Church iconBethlehem Bible Church

3 views

0 comments

00:00
If you picked up a bulletin on the way in here, you saw that the title today is, is the
00:05
Bible unscientific? Is the Bible unscientific? Before we get into answering that question,
00:14
I want to start with telling you a story, another story, not about Hawaii, which is quite the opposite of Hawaii.
00:21
The scene is an ice hockey rink. It's an ice hockey rink in upstate New York, and there's a bunch of college kids that are playing a hockey game.
00:31
The home team, despite their home ice advantage, is not expected to do very well. They're playing the number one seed, a team that's been almost undefeated now for several seasons.
00:43
Their diehard fans sell out the stadium, but the local TV, because of the lopsidedness of what everyone's expecting, they don't even bother showing the game live.
00:53
They're going to just show it on tape delay later that night. And the game starts, and sure enough, the home team falls behind early, just as expected.
01:02
And by the end of the second period, they're down three to two. But at the beginning of the third, the visitors commit a crucial penalty, and on the power play, the home team ties it.
01:17
And then with only 10 minutes to go, the home team's captain manages to sneak past the defender, get an open shot, and sneak it past the goalie and score.
01:27
And now they're up four to three. So we've got an upset in the making, right? And the visiting team, the defending champions, they start to panic.
01:37
They're playing sloppy now. They're shooting wildly. They stop working together on the offense. And with the score still four to three, and the final seconds beginning to tick down, the 36 -year -old play -by -play announcer calling this ice hockey game of college kids, some guy named
01:54
Al Michaels, utters the single most famous call in the history of televised sports.
02:03
11 seconds. You've got 10 seconds. The countdown going on right now. Morrow up to Silt, five seconds left in the game.
02:11
Do you believe in miracles? Yes! Yeah. This is the story of the 1980
02:19
Winter Olympics semifinal hockey match between the USA and the
02:24
Soviet Union. And thanks to that call, this game is forever remembered as, anybody know?
02:32
The miracle on ice. The miracle on ice. Absolutely no one going into this game believed the
02:40
US would win. Probably not even the US. The outcome was so infinitely improbable that Al Michaels first, then
02:54
Sports Illustrated, and then essentially the entire world, credits the victory to divine intervention.
03:04
Now, at the same time, though, I suspect that if you asked Mr. Michaels, if you pressed him on it, or the
03:09
USA players, or even the Soviet players, none would probably be able to specify exactly where God's finger rested on that game, right?
03:20
Or if they even really believed that God cared about the outcome of this hockey game. I mean, were the laws of gravity suspended for some brief moment when the captain's
03:33
Mike Urozianni, when his winning shot whistled past the goalie? Did time stop for everyone but goalie
03:40
Jim Craig when he moved to block the Soviets' last few desperate shots? No.
03:46
We don't think so. We don't think that anything like that happened. But we still call it a miracle.
03:52
And truth be told, we kind of throw that term around a lot. And we throw it around pretty freely. How many of you are guilty of this, saying this, or have heard someone say this?
04:03
It's a miracle I made it to work on time today with all that traffic, right?
04:10
I think I say that every day when I go down the turnpike. It was raining when
04:16
I woke up on my wedding day, but miraculously the cloud cover broke just in time for the ceremony to start, right?
04:26
An image of Jesus appeared on my toast. It's a miracle.
04:37
But as far as real miracles are concerned, real miracles, most of the world,
04:43
I think, doesn't really think that they happen. And so when it comes to the Bible, when they come to the
04:49
Bible and they read the Bible, and they read about miracle after miracle after miracle after miracle in the
04:55
Bible, they dismiss the Bible. They lay this charge against it.
05:01
They say the Bible must be made up. It's some kind of fairy tale story.
05:08
The things it describes can't possibly have happened based on the laws of science as we know it.
05:15
And thus, the Bible is unscientific. And so there it is. That's the title of my lesson today.
05:21
And it's actually a question, is the Bible unscientific? And it's the first in a four -part series that I'm going to do this summer, about one lesson a month,
05:31
I'm not doing them all in a row, in which I'm going to be dealing with controversies, challenges, attacks, things questioning the
05:39
Bible, challenges to the Bible. And today's challenge question is, is the
05:44
Bible unscientific? Now, I'm going to try to give, in each one of these lessons,
05:50
I'm going to try to give the challengers their fair shake, all right? So today's challenger,
05:57
I'm going to just hold him up. He's been dead for a while, so he has no say in it, is Scottish philosopher
06:02
David Hume, OK? Now, David Hume lived in the late 1700s. And his most famous essay is called
06:09
Of Miracles, in which he, from a philosophical sort of exercise, attempted to prove that miracles were impossible, that they don't exist.
06:23
And he lays out this whole argument. So let's give him the home playing field here. And we'll use his definition of miracle.
06:30
I don't love it a lot, but let's just use his for now, OK? Here's his definition of miracle.
06:38
A miracle is a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.
06:51
OK, let's try that again. Here we go. A transgression of the law of nature by a particular volition of the deity.
07:00
OK, so transgression of a law of nature. We broke one of the laws of science, right?
07:06
And it's broken by a particular volition, as in an active choice, some kind of action by a deity,
07:14
OK, because he's not positing necessarily the Christian god, but he's just saying some kind of deity. Or by the interposition, as in the intervention, the action, the doing, of some invisible agent,
07:29
OK? So some violation, transgression of a law of nature.
07:36
Now, this definition, I just want to point out, for starters, this definition eliminates from the scope of his argument those things that we would theologically describe as providential, right?
07:52
So providential things are events that we believe God has orchestrated according to his will, but through natural means or human volition,
08:02
OK? Now, how many of you have, I think all of us, right, have experienced, or what we believe to be anyway, experienced
08:12
God's providential working in our lives, right? You've probably heard stories of where people say things like that they were maybe in financial difficulty, and they got in a car accident, and they got the bill, and the bill was just far too much that they could ever pay.
08:36
But that providentially, at the same time that before the accident even happened, a friend or a cousin or somebody else had been praying and just thought that they could use some money, or maybe they owed them some money and remembered, da, da, da.
08:51
And they put a check in the mail, and the check in the mail arrives like on the same day or the day after the car accident, right?
08:58
These things happen. We've heard of these things. This is not just some made up story. I kind of fudged all the details here into hypotheticals, but these are the kinds of stories we hear, especially missionaries.
09:08
George Mueller, like his entire life is filled of these kinds of stories, right?
09:16
Where just random people all of a sudden show up at his door to provide for the needs of his orphanage, his orphanages, just because, you know, all from him praying about it.
09:31
And so we see those things and we call them providential, right? They are really, really improbable, but we still acknowledge that we didn't violate any laws of nature to get it done, right?
09:50
They just seem really improbable. We'll deal with probability in a little bit. But anyway, so Hume, he's excluding that,
09:59
OK, for now. So when we're talking about miracles with Hume, we're only talking about the things where a law of nature, a scientific principle as we know it has been violated, all right, has been changed.
10:14
What are some, if I ask you from the Bible, what are some, what do you think is like the most famous examples of that kind of thing happening?
10:27
Parting the Red Sea, that's a big one, yeah. Parting the Red Sea and or drowning the
10:32
Egyptian army in the Red Sea afterwards. Yes. The resurrection. Thank you.
10:38
He's my plant. The resurrection, in fact, I would say is the greatest and the most important miracle in the
10:46
Bible, all right, the most important, the one on which really all other miracles hinge.
10:54
We'll get to that in a little while. Yeah. The virgin birth. Yeah. Why is the virgin birth a miracle?
11:01
Because we know from science, everything we know about science tells us that there is no way that can happen, and yet it did, right?
11:10
In fact, science sort of proves to us just how miraculous it must possibly have been. Right? Any others?
11:23
Lazarus. A different resurrection, but yeah, right, exactly right.
11:31
It was very widely witnessed, right? Lazarus became infamous, really. Renowned across the nation, the people flocking to come see him, to see this man who once was dead and now was alive.
11:50
Yes. Carrying a leper. Yes. That's a really good one, yeah. The fall of Jericho.
11:58
Yes. Ooh, that's a good one, yep. With the walls coming down, yep. The floating axe head.
12:04
Yes, that's an excellent one. What do we know about axe heads that are made out of iron? Do they float? No. If they're cursed, yeah.
12:18
It's a witch. Yes, Nathan. Water into wine, yes.
12:24
Water into wine is a good one, yeah. Balaam's talking donkey. I have not met too many talking donkeys in my life.
12:31
That is correct, yes. Peter walking on water and Jesus walking on water.
12:37
Yes. Unless there was a sandbar right underneath there. Yes. The sun going backwards.
12:45
Thank you, yes. And also, there's another, right, there's the incident with the army where the sun holds still, right?
12:53
We have both the sun going backwards 10 degrees in one narrative, and then there's another one where God holds the sun still for as long as they hold up his arms and give the
13:02
Israelites the extra time to win the battle. Yeah. Oh, yeah, that's a good one, yes.
13:10
Philip, Philip's sort of transporting. Yeah. Yeah.
13:16
And I'm going to throw in one more here, or two more here. Creation. Creation's a miracle.
13:24
Creation, before creation there was nothing, and now there is something. Right? From nothing, now something.
13:32
And also, the flood. The flood itself is a miracle. All right.
13:41
So we've got lots of miracles. So here is Hume's thesis. All right.
13:47
I'm sorry. I'm going to read it, but I'll explain it afterwards.
13:53
The only way that we can judge between two empirical claims, OK, that is the claim of miracles exist or miracles don't exist, is by weighing the evidence.
14:04
The degree to which we believe one claim over another is proportional to the degree by which the evidence for one outweighs the evidence for the other.
14:13
As the evidence for a miracle is always limited, as miracles are single events occurring at particular times and places, the evidence for the miracle will always be outweighed by the evidence against, the evidence for the law of which the miracle is supposed to be a transgression.
14:31
Thus, since we will never have more evidence for miracles than we have for the principle that natural laws cannot be broken, we must accept that there is no such thing as miracles.
14:45
OK? Yeah. I love your confused faces. Because I read that, and I was like, really? This is the best we got?
14:52
And yet, philosophers afterwards were so excited that he came up with this argument, and secular scientists and everybody afterwards, that they hang their hat on this.
15:04
They love this guy. He's a hero. Hooray.
15:09
We've proved that there's no such thing as miracles. Thus, since we will never have more evidence for miracles than we have for the principle that natural laws cannot be broken, we must accept that there is no such thing as miracles.
15:25
So essentially, what he's saying here is, we have countless witnesses that affirm natural laws cannot be broken.
15:32
Right? We have, let's just stick with the ax head, because that's a nice, simple one. We have billions of people who have thrown heavy things into water, and heavy thing has sunk.
15:46
Right? We've all experienced that. We only have one guy who says he threw something into the water and it floated, right?
15:56
That otherwise should have sunk. And so we've got billions for and one against. And billions is greater than one.
16:03
And so thus, it proves that the one guy must be wrong.
16:13
Now, essentially, the idea of that, there's such an overwhelming number of people that see the law never being transgressed that we can't throw out all of their testimony if just a handful of people come along saying they saw a miracle.
16:30
Now, we can, and he admits this, we could throw it out if we could prove that these handful of people are 100 % reliable.
16:40
But he goes on to lay out these facts, these so -called facts anyway, as to why no miracle witness is ever 100 % reliable, all right?
16:48
So here we go. One, he says that no miracle has ever been sufficiently attested by honest and reliable men.
16:57
People crave miraculous stories and are gullible to a fault. To that,
17:03
I can see his point in that, like, I mean, we do call it the miracle on ice, after all, right? I just said, we toss around that word all the time.
17:09
There's lots of us who like to attribute things to miracles. Miracles only seem to occur among the ignorant and uncivilized peoples.
17:19
And miracles are claimed by all religions. And so the claims cancel each other out. Or to put it another way, why should we believe
17:26
Christian miracle testimonies over, say, Buddhist ones, OK? All right, so let's go through these.
17:32
First off, no miracle has ever been sufficiently attested by honest and reliable men.
17:39
OK, this is an argument for the quantitative, right? He's literally saying billions of people have died and stayed dead.
17:45
Billions is greater than nine named people in the Bible who have risen from the dead. And so that proves that those nine didn't really happen.
17:53
Well, what if 500 people were claimed to rise from the dead and 5 ,000 people saw each one of those 500 people, right?
18:03
I mean, would that bring a different result? And the answer is still no, according to Hume, even though you could say, well, at what point is there enough, right?
18:11
To him, it's only enough if it ever wins the quantitative battle, which is crazy.
18:18
That's the point of miracles, is that they are unusual and rare and special, right?
18:27
Number two about that people are gullible to a fault. I mean, we can't really say this is true for all people.
18:34
Certainly, we all know people who are extremely not gullible, who are skeptical about everything, right?
18:40
Almost to a fault in the other direction that drives us crazy, but they won't believe anything we tell them. My six -year -old, for example.
18:52
What's that? Well, he's 18. And to believe that all these witnesses of miracles are all being gullible almost borders on the absurd.
19:07
We have to turn it. We have to start coming up with these crazy explanations, like that they're having some kind of collective hallucination, even though at no time have we ever observed such a thing as a collective hallucination, right?
19:20
Or we have to say that there was some kind of hypnotism going on or some vast conspiracy happening, right?
19:32
I remember there's a story where Chuck Swindoll said that Watergate proves that conspiracies, that there's no way that the
19:45
Bible could be a conspiracy because if the most powerful men on Earth couldn't keep their story straight and hold together this little lie about a burglary, how do you expect 12 unlearned men from the backwaters of Israel to hold together a story about a resurrection, right?
20:10
Number three, that miracles only occur among ignorant and uncivilized peoples. Well, that's kind of a slap on ancient peoples in general, that we have this sort of bias against them.
20:21
We sort of think that, well, we're way more enlightened and advanced than they were. And that's really not true at all.
20:29
In fact, the Jewish nation, if we're just going to sort of pick on them for a minute, the
20:34
Jewish nation of ancient Israel was probably the most, or I should say the least ignorant and most civilized culture of their time, right?
20:45
Literacy was relatively high for the ancient world in Israel. They had this very complex legal system, probably rivaling even
20:53
Rome. They had a large scholar population. They had highly specialized professions.
21:00
They had sophisticated medical practices, right, and more. Like, this was a really learned country, a really advanced country.
21:09
And yet, when the time came to disprove that Jesus had performed miracles, none of them could do it.
21:17
None of them. Then we get to his trial, and they have to cook up false charges against him because they can't possibly come up with anything true against him, right?
21:29
At number four, Humes claimed about this business of the religions, that all religions claim some kind of miracle story.
21:38
And that is true, that they do. But the miracles themselves, I would say, are not contradictory, okay?
21:45
So I looked it up because I was curious. Buddhists, right? So miracles in Buddhism.
21:52
There's one very famous one where they believe that Buddha, the Buddha, the man who founded
21:59
Buddhism, that he levitated in the air and somehow emanated fire from, fire from one part of his body and water from another part while he was sort of floating in the air, okay?
22:12
It was actually part of a miracle contest that supposedly was going on. Now, whether or not this is true, did he do that?
22:21
I don't know. Whether or not this is true does not preclude whether or not Elijah called down fire on Mount Carmel, okay?
22:30
I would say, for the sake of argument, both could be true. Both could be true.
22:37
What's contradictory is not the miracle or the miracle event. What's contradictory is the claims of the miracle workers, right?
22:45
Buddha had his miracle, supposedly, and he claimed one thing about resurrection, about eternal life, about the path to enlightenment.
22:55
Jesus also performed miracles and he claimed something entirely different about salvation, about eternal life, about the resurrection, right?
23:07
That's what contradicts. And so a more rational approach is not to just dismiss the miracles themselves but rather to examine the strongest claims one at a time on a case -by -case basis.
23:18
You don't just say, like, well, these two things cancel out. You say, well, I mean, imagine if we handled that with a court system, right?
23:29
Like, well, this guy says that he didn't commit the murder. This guy says he did.
23:34
Well, they cancel out. We're done. Go home, everybody. Right? We don't do that. We go, like, all right, well, we have this.
23:42
We have this evidence over here. We have this evidence over here. Let's see if we can collect more evidence. Right?
23:50
And then turns out, oh, actually, this witness over here who says that he did commit the murder, we found some more evidence that proves that his claim is true.
23:57
So we'll believe him, not him. Right?
24:06
Turn to Deuteronomy 13. Let's talk about this.
24:17
Are miracles possible? Anti -miracles.
24:23
Are anti -miracles possible? Miracles happening that are done by folks who are against God, the
24:31
God of the Bible, against Christ. Deuteronomy 13, 1 and 2.
24:38
So there you go. If the prophet or dreamer tells you a sign or wonder, and the sign or wonder he tells you comes to pass, right?
24:51
So here's Moses saying, it's going to be possible for a false prophet to do a miracle.
25:00
That the miracle itself isn't enough. You cannot just say, well, we've got to listen to him because the miracle came to pass.
25:08
So Buddha, for all I know, maybe he did make fire come out of one part of his body and water come out of another.
25:14
It's not exactly the most well -attested story in the Buddhist scriptures, but let's go with it, again, for the sake of argument.
25:21
Moses right here warns us, just because the false prophet actually did a miracle, doesn't mean you just start believing him.
25:31
Because if his message is, follow after other gods, you shall not listen to him.
25:40
Right? Right. Okay, how about Revelation 13? So that was in the ancient times.
25:47
How about the future? Revelation 13.
26:05
Could someone read verse 3, please? Actually, you know what?
26:11
Just go ahead and read 1 through 3. There you go. All right, Charlie, help everybody out for context.
26:18
Who's the beast in this passage? Yes, please.
26:31
Generally speaking, commentators think the beast here is probably, but it's like the kings, right, of the earth that he set up.
26:46
Right? And the dragon is Satan.
26:54
Right? The dragon, we saw it in chapter 12 beforehand. The dragon is Satan. And so here's
26:59
Satan, and he's giving power. He's giving his power, his throne, and great authority to this beast.
27:06
Right? And one of its heads seemed to have a mortal wound, but the mortal wound was healed. A miracle happens.
27:14
He's supposed to be dead, and he's not. It's a pseudo -resurrection, is what's happening here.
27:22
And everyone marvels and follows the beast because of this miracle.
27:29
Right? So there's a future miracle coming. How about Revelation 13, verse 13?
27:38
In verse 11, we have another beast rising out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb, and it spoke like a dragon.
27:45
It exercises all the authority of the first beast in its presence and makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast whose mortal wound was healed.
27:54
It performs great signs, even making fire come down from heaven to earth in front of the people.
28:01
And by the signs that it is allowed to work in the presence of the beast, it deceives those who dwell on the earth, telling them to make an image for the beast that was wounded by the sword and yet lived.
28:14
Right? It's like a prophet, a messenger of the beast. And he too can perform miracles, make fire come down from heaven.
28:22
And again, the miracles are going to convince a whole bunch of people to listen to this guy.
28:28
So I say all that only to point out that miracles are possible, even in the anti, even in the against God.
28:38
Right? So again, just to refute this idea that just because we have conflicting messengers who can perform miracles does not rule out the possibility of miracles happening.
28:56
Now, the thing is that with Hume's argument, right,
29:05
I'm hoping that what you see here is that the whole argument actually is kind of just silly.
29:13
It's a circle. And it falls down upon itself. Because if we agree with Hume that there's this absolutely uniform experience against miracles, right, in other words, that they've never happened.
29:29
Okay? If you take the idea that there's been a uniform experience of miracles never happening, well then, of course, we'd have to say, well, then, there you go.
29:37
Miracles never happened. They never have. Unfortunately, though, we only know that it's a uniform experience.
29:46
We only know if they've never happened if all the reports of them are false. And he says that we only know the reports are false because we know that miracles never occur.
30:01
Right? We're arguing in a circle. His very first supposition after he lays out his principle is basically the idea, well, natural law says that miracles do not occur.
30:12
Thus, all reports of miracles are false. Thus, there's no such thing as miracles.
30:19
But he started out with supposing that the laws cannot be broken, which basically says that miracles cannot occur.
30:28
What's that? Exactly. It's the very definition of it.
30:33
It's like, no, you got it. That's what we were claiming right to begin. Thanks. Yeah. Even though he laid out the definition himself.
30:40
Yeah. So, that's a good point. Yeah. I don't know. I don't really know how much.
30:47
I mean, he clearly was an unbeliever who was trying his hardest to reject them. I don't really know his spiritual condition or his personal story or anything like that.
30:58
I kind of just dealt with just the essay. But that's a really good question. It'd be something to check out. Jonathan, I like what you said because my inspiration for choosing this particular controversy is the first one
31:09
I dealt with. It actually came from a Facebook thread in which I was recently engaged, which
31:15
I know is dangerous. But here we go. The original post had to do with Noah and the great flood.
31:23
And I had posted something about God's covenant with Noah. And then in reply to that,
31:29
I'll just call him an acquaintance. Facebook would call him a friend, right? But I'll be generous and just say it was an acquaintance of the original poster who
31:38
I assume is not a believer of the flood narrative based on his comment, posted, please reference
31:44
God's first law of thermodynamics to understand this whole flooding situation. And I read that and I was like, wait, what?
31:52
I mean, thermodynamics? I don't really want to toot my own horn in here, but I have a graduate degree in mechanical engineering.
32:01
I've taken a lot of thermodynamics classes. And I really wanted to ask this guy, what does the first law, what does conservation of energy have to do with the flood?
32:13
But I think wisely, I didn't ask. I just let it go.
32:19
Because here's the thing. It's a miracle, people, to tell me that it didn't, a miracle didn't happen because a miracle violates a law of nature.
32:30
Yeah, that's the point. Yeah, it's a really long post.
32:38
Facebook does not allow us to digress into such things. Yeah, exactly. And here's the thing, like on a lot of different things in the
32:48
Bible, this is where we get into Providence versus the miraculous.
32:53
Right? In that there are plenty of miracles where, or there are plenty of narratives where the
33:00
Bible isn't explicit about whether or not a miracle is going on here. And so it's possible that it was a miracle, or it's possible that he's using some natural means.
33:08
But either way, who's behind it? Right? Either way, it's still
33:14
God behind it. And every
33:19
Christmas and Easter season, the History Channel and the Discovery Channel, and the like, they trot out a dozen documentaries on the
33:26
Bible. Right? Don't watch them, please. It'll just make you bang your head into the wall. These experts, they get interviewed, they share all these theories about their eclipses and weather patterns and comments over Bethlehem and sandbars in the
33:41
Sea of Galilee, right, and all these sorts of things. And it's all presented as, see, these are real scientific explanations for miracle stories of the
33:51
Bible. Right? Now, they're presenting them not to say how wonderful is it that God could work that out to do it.
34:00
They're presenting it to say that it wasn't, you know, that that just goes to show that it was actually just ignorant people not realizing what was going on, and there wasn't really a miracle, there wasn't really any divine intervention going on here.
34:17
Right? And anything that we can't explain with one of these theories, well, that's just a myth, or it's the collective hallucination.
34:26
We go back to that thing. We're not looking for a natural explanation of how a man can stay alive in an ark with however many different kinds of animals and be provided for for up to, like, 15 months of time.
34:42
Right? We're not looking for a natural explanation of how a man can stay alive inside the belly of a fish for three days.
34:51
We're not looking for a natural explanation for how a man can die on a cross and yet and be buried and be dead for multiple days and then come alive.
35:05
There is no natural explanation. A supernatural explanation is the one that's warranted.
35:11
So the real conflict here is the fundamental debate is between naturalism and theism.
35:20
Naturalism says that the only power are the laws of nature and that everything happens according to their precepts, so there's no supernatural.
35:28
And theism says that there is a God and he is in charge. There is a
35:34
God and he is in charge. Have you ever considered what these... I've been saying the laws of nature and the laws of science all lesson.
35:41
Have you ever considered what those are in our worldview, from a Christian worldview? Turn to Colossians chapter 1.
35:51
What are the laws of science? What are they really? Are they like the Ten Commandments?
36:04
Colossians chapter 1. Someone read verse 16 and 17, please.
36:10
Hold together. Hold together. He upholds the universe, all of creation, and the he here, of course, is
36:19
Christ. There is this sense in this verse that if God ever... If Christ ever stopped exerting force on the universe, it would cease to exist instantly.
36:33
Right? And Hebrews 1 .3 says something similar, that he upholds all things by the word of his power.
36:41
And hold together is in the perfect tense. Okay? The perfect tense, which means it's still happening now.
36:48
Ongoing. The permanence of his holding hand. You know, he's got the whole world in his hands.
36:55
It's kind of a hokey song, but it's true. Listen to this.
37:01
Paul Apple said, Consider what would happen if things changed. If God did not have the world in his hands.
37:08
The sun has a surface temperature of 12 ,000 degrees Fahrenheit. If it were any closer to the earth, we'd burn.
37:15
If it were any further, we'd freeze. Our globe is tilted on an exact angle of 23 degrees, which enables us to have four seasons.
37:24
If it weren't tilted, vapors from the ocean would move north to south and eventually pile up monstrous continents of ice.
37:32
If the moon did not remain a specific distance from the earth in its orbit, the ocean tide would completely cover the land twice a day.
37:43
If the ocean floor merely slipped a few feet deeper, the carbon dioxide and oxygen balance on earth's atmosphere would be completely upset and no animal or vegetable life could exist outside of the oceans.
37:57
If our atmosphere suddenly thinned out, all the meteors that harmlessly burn up when they strike us all the time instead would crash straight into the ground and bombard us.
38:09
These things don't happen in the universe by accident. Jesus Christ sustains the universe.
38:15
He is the principle of cohesion. He is not the deist's watchmaker creator who made the world, set it in motion, wound it up, and hasn't bothered with it since.
38:27
The reason the universe is a cosmos and not a chaos, an ordered and reliable system instead of an erratic and unpredictable muddle, is the upholding power of Jesus Christ.
38:39
Scientists who think they are discovering great truths are in fact doing nothing more than discovering the sustaining laws that Christ uses to control the world.
38:49
No scientist, no mathematician, astronomer, nuclear physicist, they could do anything without the upholding power of Jesus Christ.
38:58
Jesus Christ monitors and sustains the movements and developments of the universe, for the entire universe hangs on the arm of Jesus.
39:07
Or to put it really succinctly, what we call the laws of science and the laws of nature are simply
39:14
God being consistent. God being consistent.
39:22
If we had a God, if there were a God who was of not of our
39:27
God's character in nature, if he was not immutable, if he was not consistent, it would be a world of chaos because there would be no consistency in his creation.
39:42
The consistence we see we see is a reflection of our God's character. And so because we have a miracle worker,
39:53
God, because we have a creator, because he's transcendent of that who created the laws of nature, then he is obviously not subject to them if he's the one who created them.
40:05
They are not moral laws. They are not unbreakable, unshakable things.
40:11
They are simply his design for how things operate. He is the uncaused first cause.
40:20
We're almost out of time, but I just want to say, do you know that the Big Bang Theory, when it first was proposed, scientists almost universally hated it.
40:37
Hated it. Why? Because it suggests a beginning.
40:44
Before that theory, the going theory was that the universe was eternal. The universe itself was
40:52
God. And that everything from there on happened by chance.
40:58
And that really chance is the unbeliever's God. And probability.
41:05
Right? But if there was a Big Bang, I won't get into the arguments of how long ago it was, but if there was a
41:12
Big Bang, if there was a beginning, as soon as there's a beginning, and there is, they have tried and tried and tried again to disprove it, and they can't, and they just keep finding more and more evidence for a beginning.
41:23
If there's a beginning, then that means there is a point at which they cannot observe.
41:30
They can't go back any farther. They don't know where it came from. It's outside of their purview.
41:39
It's as if the scientists struggling and trying to understand our universe, and you can imagine it almost as like trying to climb the highest peak, and they spent years and decades and centuries trying to reach that summit, and they got to the top, and they find the theologians sitting there waiting for them.
41:59
They've been there all along. There is a beginning. There is an uncaused first cause.
42:06
Because as soon as you have a start, as soon as you have nothing first, then there had to be that uncaused first cause that kicked it all off.
42:21
So let me close with this. Since we're completely out of time, I'm going to skip a whole bunch. And let me try to arm you all as apologists.
42:28
How do we answer this challenge that the Bible is unscientific, that miracles are impossible? So first off, let's acknowledge that there are limits to what science can tell us.
42:39
There's only one slice of a knowledge pie. We have other sources like philosophy and history and economics and literature and sociology and religion that all tell us something about knowledge.
42:52
Christians need to reject one of our culture's most unexamined and influential assumptions, actually, which is that you can't know something unless you can prove it scientifically.
43:04
That's sort of this base assumption that a lot of people have. You can't know it until you can prove it.
43:12
But here's the fatal problem for that assumption. That statement itself cannot be proven. It's a presupposition.
43:23
Hume did not actually prove miracles. There's probably at least someone who will tell you they might not be able to quote
43:31
Hume, but they'll say that philosophers have proven that miracles don't happen. In fact, as we've said, his principal point is he's arguing in a circle by assuming what he was trying to prove.
43:43
And moreover, if God exists, then there is very good evidence outside the
43:49
Bible that he does that there is at least an uncaused first cause, that miracles are possible.
43:56
And when we talk about miracles, actually, it is our knowledge of science that allows us to know when they're happening.
44:03
Miracles might not be scientifically explainable, but they are scientifically observable. So don't fall for this idea of God of the gaps.
44:15
God of the gaps is where we can explain most things with science, and then all the things that we can't explain, that's where God is.
44:22
No. God is God of the whole show. Okay?
44:27
The whole kit and caboodle. Also, be on guard for any conversation about naturalism where they try to say that naturalism is quote -unquote good science.
44:39
Because naturalism, this idea that everything is subject to the laws of the universe, laws of nature, like it's not science, it's a presuppositional worldview itself.
44:50
Right? You can't, as I just said, you can't prove naturalism. And lastly, most importantly, if you ever are engaging in any kind of conversation like this, please be aware, be cognizant of the principle of blinded eyes.
45:10
2 Corinthians 4 .4, in their case, the God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God.
45:23
You are not going to argue anyone into heaven. You're not going to prove the point with them.
45:30
They have blinded eyes. Don't get bogged down in details about how
45:35
God created the electromagnetic spectrum or the thermodynamics of the flood or just how deep the
45:42
Red Sea was when Moses parted it or then used it to wipe out an army. You can't change minds until God changes hearts.
45:53
So focus on the heart. Focus on the gospel. God exists. He is the creator.
45:59
We have fallen into sin. We are hopeless and dead, but God has sent his son to be our
46:06
Savior and Redeemer. Thanks.
46:12
Let's pray. Heavenly Father, Lord, we thank you for this time that we've had to try to think critically about challenges to your very existence and for this of men, wiser men than me, who have thought about this and have written this down and given us,
46:39
Lord, knowledge and understanding on a theological basis to show us a way to be good apologists,
46:49
Lord. Father, we pray for those with blinded eyes, Lord, that if we encounter them and engage them or they engage us, may we focus on their heart,
47:01
Lord, and be compassionate towards them and recognize that they argue from ignorance or from just a desperate need to prove their point because to realize that they are sinners is,
47:17
Lord, devastating to many, but they need to know it in order to come to that realization that they need a
47:25
Savior. And we pray that you would bring them to that, that you would give them the grace and the faith to believe in the work of your
47:34
Son on their behalf, that they would rest in Him as their
47:39
Savior and gain eternal life. And, Lord, we thank you for even the tiny way that you have willed that we might be a part of that great plan of salvation.