Apologetics Session 35 - Origins and Evolution - Part 2

Heavenly Father, we just are looking forward to,

Lord, just learning about your creation, learning more about you, God, to just spend time in your presence and fellowship with our brothers.

God, we just thank you for Matt's preparation, we thank you for the time that he's spent, and God, we just pray that you would bless him as he just feeds us from your word and from everything that you've poured into him tonight,

Lord God, we just thank you for this time and we ask you to bless him in Jesus' name, amen. Alright, so we've been a little disjoint with some of the sessions, partly because of my travel schedule, but this is really a continuation of the

Origins and Evolution series of classes. Just as a recap for last time, we walked through sort of the origins of the universe, right?

We talked about the Big Bang, we talked about, you know, the beginning of the universe and the theories around how old the universe is, how old, you know, and how things came about from the matter and energy of the singularity of the

Big Bang. We talked about a number of different cosmological arguments, the

Kalam Cosmological Argument, which is a fairly basic but effective argument for the beginning of the universe, and we talked about some philosophical problems with the idea of infinity.

We talked about what we call God -time, or God not being temporarily fixed in time but being outside of time and the author of time and space, and so we kind of went through sort of the idea of the

Big, right? So if you remember, one of the websites that I went to had this sort of size and scale of the universe thing where you could zoom out to larger and larger distances, but it also had the ability to zoom in to smaller and smaller things, getting down to cellular and molecular level and looking kind of at all of the complexity in the small as well as the large.

We talked about the fine -tuning argument and how our universe is exquisitely fine -tuned.

We talked a little bit about the multiverse and the idea that even if, which is the common argument against the fine -tuning argument, which is that our universe just happens to be the one that's fine -tuned out of the infinite number of universes, but then that just moves the problem away from our universe into the universe -generating machine that has to generate all these universes and how exquisitely fine -tuned it would be.

I threw up a formula that everyone in the room recognized, which was the formula for gravity, and talked about things like the cosmological constant, the gravitational constant, the strong and weak forces, and how each of these things has to be so exquisitely fine -tuned that if any one of them were different, either stronger or weaker, that the universe either would have collapsed in on itself at the

Big Bang or would have expanded so rapidly that it would have resulted in rapid heat death.

We even talked about some of the fine -tuning of our solar system. The fact that we have things like Jupiter, a large gravitational body in our solar system that probably protects us from various asteroid strikes and things exploding, and the fact that our moon is tidally fixed, and just so many different things about our universe that really cries out at the creative power of our

God and the fact that there is specialness to his creation, that it is evident that there's somebody behind, there's someone.

We talked about the attributes that that designer would have to have.

They would have to be timeless, spaceless, unimaginably powerful. It really speaks to there being that God behind.

That was a whirlwind recap of the discussion that we've had around the origins of the universe.

Now we're going to talk about the origins of life. I'm going to start, though, a little bit past the origins of life.

We are going to talk about what they call chemical evolution, which is the origin of first life. But first what we're going to talk about is evolution itself.

Actually, I want to start with a question, which is, who here believes in evolution?

Who here believes in evolution? Anyone raise their hand. You should all be raising your hands. Every single one of you should be raising your hands.

Everyone believes in evolution. The problem is the baggage that comes with that term. The very first thing that I wanted to bring up was the definition of evolution.

This is indicative of the cultural context that we live in, where you actually hear the term evolution, and every single one of you immediately thought of Darwinian evolution by natural selection and random mutation.

Every single one of you, you probably didn't think those words necessarily exactly, but that's what you were thinking of when you heard the term evolution.

I decided to first start with the Webster's, the Merriam -Webster's definition of evolution.

The very first thing that shows up, definition 1a, is descent with modification from preexistent species.

Cumulative inherited change in a population of organisms through time, leading to the appearance of new forms, the process which new species or populations of living things develop from preexisting forms through successive generations.

Then I have a quote from Stephen Jay Gould, which I won't read. It then says, also, the scientific theory explaining the appearance of new species and varieties through the action of various biological mechanisms such as natural selection, genetic mutation, or drift and hybridization.

Another quote, actually two quotes. And then B of that is the historical development of a biological group such as a species or phylo...

I can't pronounce it. Never mind. 2a, the process of change in a certain direction, unfolding.

2b, the action or instance of forming and giving something off, or emission. C, a process of continuous change from a lower, simpler, or worse to higher, more complex, or better state, growth.

2, a process of gradual and relatively peaceful social and political and economic advance.

3, definition 3, the process of working out or developing. So it took us all the way to definition 3 to get at what evolution itself actually is, which is the process of working out or developing.

It's just change over time. That's all evolution is. And it's obvious that change over time happens.

The problem is that, and it's evident by the order in which these definitions occur and by the fact that each and every one of you thought the same thing when

I asked if you believed in evolution, that our culture has ingrained evolution in everyone's mind.

Darwinian evolution by natural selection. So the very first definition on here was the

Darwinian evolution by natural selection definition. And it just brings me back to a lot of the man -on -the -street interviews that I watch for fun, where you could walk down the street, ask any high school kid, any college kid, any random person on the beach in California or Florida or anywhere, what is evolution, and they could tell you.

I mean, they couldn't give you a really scientific definition, but they could tell you basically what evolution was. But you ask them who the next president is or the

Speaker of the House or when our country was, when the

Revolutionary War was, when our country was founded, and they probably couldn't tell you. They couldn't tell you who we fought in World War II or why, but they could tell you what evolution is.

And that's kind of indicative of how ingrained into our culture evolution is.

It is, and I'm going to say this with air quotes, it is a fact, right?

If you ask anyone, you know, a secular person, evolution is a fact.

It is not a theory. When in fact, if you ask them why they believe it, they couldn't tell you.

They would tell you that it's because their teachers told them or that's what science says or scientists say.

But they couldn't really tell you much about evolution or why they believe in evolution.

And this is, again, one of the reasons why we have this apologetics series is because ask most Christians why they believe in Christianity, a lot of them couldn't tell you either.

And that's one of the sad things about the church in the United States today.

So that's, you know, the fact that this is in the dictionary in this order just tells you that the priority to evolution is evolution by natural selection through random mutation.

And let's dissect those words. So Darwinian evolution, it's called Darwinian because of Charles Darwin who was the one who proposed the theory.

And evolution in its original term, which has changed over time, by natural selection and random mutation.

So natural selection just means that evolution is directional in that it utilizes mutations that work.

So the idea of natural selection is that repeated random mutations are attempted and whichever random mutations work or benefit the organism are kept and random mutations that don't work are discarded.

And so that's why you'll hear sometimes the survival of the fittest because any biological organism that adapts in such a way as to benefit would survive and therefore those traits would then also survive.

So Darwinian evolution is an attempt to address certain types of life but not the origins of life itself.

And that was actually a little surprising as even I was studying this. I kind of knew that but I never really thought about that.

Darwinian evolution does not even try to determine how life began, how first life began.

Darwinian evolution is really presupposing that first life had already begun and is really an attempt to describe how new forms of life have emerged.

So Darwinian evolution is trying to explain the emergence of different species and of traits of those species.

Darwinian evolution is founded on what they call the Darwin's tree which is that all life originated from basic single -celled life and over time through natural selection and random mutation emerged into different kinds.

And I'm using the term kinds because that's what's used in the Bible. So when you talk about kinds you're talking about one kind of animal, one species of animal mutating into another species of animal.

Now we all know that we don't see this today. What we see is you breed two dogs, you get a dog.

You breed two horses, you get a horse. You breed two dolphins, you get a dolphin. You can breed different kinds of dogs and you'll get a hybrid version of those kinds of dogs but it's still a dog.

It doesn't suddenly become a cat. And my father -in -law is really happy about that.

But you generally don't see, you never see the emergence of a new kind from a different kind.

So the whole idea of Darwinian evolution is based on common ancestry. So if you look at the tree, the tree has a number of branches but if you walk the tree backwards you get back to these two kinds emerging from this kind and that kind emerging from this kind and so forth.

So we will talk about chemical evolution later. I probably won't get to it today but that's the origin of first life and we are going to talk a bit about kind of the difficulty, the leap, the faith that it takes to believe in some of those things.

And we're going to talk a lot about the genome and some of that as well. So with Darwinian evolution the supposition is that complex forms evolved from simpler forms.

So what is the evidence for this, right? So you would imagine that if more complex forms evolved from simpler forms that in the fossil record you would find simpler forms and then more complex forms over long geological periods of time.

Geologic time is very long. We're talking millions, billions of years, right? Any transitional forms?

And these transitional forms, right? So you would see these simple, sometimes they are called transitional forms which are hybrids, right?

You would see certain animals that had some attributes of a later kind and some attributes of an earlier kind and you would be able to trace the sort of lineage of these.

And so in Darwin's day they understood that the smallest form, the smallest living organism in everyone's bodies are cells, right?

They understood the cell. But in Darwin's day they didn't actually know the inner workings of the cell.

They hadn't discovered the DNA or the genome. They just thought of cells as sort of like gelatinous blocks is kind of what they thought in Darwin's day.

And they also didn't have much in the way of the fossil record with regard to transitional forms or proof within the fossil record of Darwinian evolution.

And Darwin himself actually questioned this, but he just assumed that over time we would find this, that archaeologists and so forth would find evidence in the fossil record of these transitional forms.

And there are quotes of Darwin's, and I'll paraphrase here, that says if we don't find this then my theory should be essentially thrown out.

He fully expected that they would find over time these transitional fossils.

So Darwin stated in 1859 in The Origin of Species that lack of transitional forms in the fossil record, he said, was the greatest objection which can be urged against my theory.

That was his exact words. So if transitional forms aren't found, the theory should be thrown out.

And an evolutionist today would say, but we found transitional forms. Of course we found transitional forms.

These transitional forms are in museums, and they're in textbooks, and they're taught to school children. And so they would say things like, what about Artie and what about Lucy?

And so I actually wanted to look up Artie and Lucy and what they actually found. And so we'll start there.

So we're going to start with Artie. Artie is an example of supposedly a common ancestor of humans.

And this is a rendering that scientists have put together of what Artie probably looked like.

And I say this is what they think that she looked like on purpose.

Scientists postulated that Artie walked upright. And this would have required her to have a curved spine like a human.

And I'll actually have a picture of this later. If you look at chimpanzees, which are supposedly one of our closest ancestors, they have rigid, arced spines.

And this requires them to be hunched over and walk on all fours. So they can't walk upright like we do, whereas we have sort of an

S -curved spine. And again, I'll show you a picture of this. But they postulated that Artie walked upright and would have had to have a curved spine.

Our spine actually intersects with our skull in a different place than it does on apes and chimpanzees, great apes and chimpanzees as well.

It comes in on an angle in a chimpanzee, an angle on the back of the skull. But for a human, it comes in at the base of the skull.

Again, that upright. And this allows us to articulate our heads from an upright position and so forth.

And so these would be things that are required for us to walk upright.

And so you would imagine that in Artie's, you know, the skeletal remains that they found of Artie, that they found evidence that she had a curved spine and that she, you know, the spine intersected the skull at the base the way it does for humans, right?

This is what they actually found of Artie. So this is the skeletal remains of Artie.

So do you notice anything missing there? Her entire spine is missing.

Her whole spine is missing. There are no spine bone fragments that were found.

So the idea of a curved spine is entirely made up in the minds of the scientists and postulated by them that she must have had a curved spine.

Also, do you notice something else missing? The base of her skull. There are so many skull fragments missing that there's no bones that show where the spine intersected the skull.

And the skull fragments were so severely damaged, they don't have any that are where the spine intersects.

The skull fragments also weren't found together. They were found over a 30 -mile radius.

Each of these skull fragments were found in an area covering about 30 miles. None of the skeletons were found complete, but they were pieced together from bone fragments found over this large area.

The rendering was done through multiple digital extrapolations. Very scientific.

So they created her. They obviously have her feet, which they had rendered correctly, as you would imagine, at each foot, which looks more like a hand.

But they essentially created her out of whole cloth.

Artie's brain was about the size of a chimp's. Her height was about the size of a chimp's.

And so I think it's safe to conclude Artie was a chimp.

A bonobo. Exactly. And so I think it's actually a safe conclusion that Artie was just some form of bonobo or chimpanzee and was not really an ancestor of humans.

So the next one that an evolutionist would probably tell you is, okay, fine, fine, never mind

Artie. What about Lucy? You'll hear the fancy name Astrolopithecus afarensis, which is

Lucy and all that. That's just fancy words. I think there's an afarens area of Africa or something that they found

Artie in. But Lucy is hailed as proof of Darwin's theory of evolution.

It is a transitional form discovered. Game over, creationists. Allegedly. It is proof that Darwin's evolution is true.

So I decided, well, let's take a look at Lucy. Let's see what they discovered about Lucy, since she's considered a prime example of ape -to -human transitional form.

And so let's actually, before we get to that,

I wanted to, this is the example of the curved spine versus the arched spine of chimpanzees.

So you can see in a chimpanzee or bonobo, you would have the spine entering on an angle into the skull, and it would be sort of rigid and arched, versus a human spine, which goes in at the base of the skull and is curved around.

So that's what I, when I was talking about curved spines versus arched spines, that's what

I was talking about. But let's take a look at Lucy. This is Lucy. So Lucy, this is what scientists think

Lucy looked like. Now notice they gave her white. Eye whites. White eyes, right?

So we have, you know, our cornea and pupil, and we have the white part, the eye whites, right?

Chimps don't have that. Chimps don't have that. I've got a picture of that here in a second. But they obviously didn't find any biological material to prove that she had eye whites.

So they, again, just made that up to make her look more human. Notice something else in this picture.

Look at her feet. Her feet also don't look like chimpanzee feet. They look like human feet, right?

The chimpanzee feet look like this. Right? So the chimpanzee is on the left and the human foot is on the right.

Again, eye whites for humans, and sort of they have this dark color around there for chimpanzees.

So in the picture of Lucy, I'll go back, you can see she has the eye whites and she has feet that look like human feet.

Right? So they obviously must have found a lot of evidence for this, right, when they found

Lucy's remains, right? What do you think? Any guesses? This is what they found.

This is what they found of Lucy. So what do you notice missing? Everything. Feet. There's no feet.

There are no foot bones in this entire skeleton. Not a one. Not a single foot bone.

They have almost none of the skull. So her eyes obviously couldn't be found because the skeleton is considerably old.

So biological material doesn't last that long. We know that. So the eye whites were something that scientists made up.

They extrapolated. They added to make her look more human -like. There are also no foot bones.

Not a single foot bone. So, again, how did they determine that she had feet that looked like human feet rather than feet that looked like a bonobo or a chimpanzee?

They didn't. They had to make it up. There was a BBC documentary about Lucy where they talked about 400 specimens of Lucy's species being found.

Right? So 400 specimens. That's a lot of specimens. So maybe this is just missing some of the stuff that they found with the other specimens, right?

But do you think they actually found 400 skeletons? Nope. No. They found 400 bone fragments, and 30 % of those were teeth.

That's what they found. They found 400 bone fragments that fill up about the size of a picnic table.

Not specimens, unless you call a bone fragment a specimen. So they didn't find 400 skeletons.

They found 400 bone fragments. 30 % of those were teeth. Lucy's skeleton was found on a hillside, not as a complete skeleton that was intact, but over a 3 -meter area, which is about 9 feet for us

Americans, after sifting about 20 tons, or 50 square meters, of sediment.

And they only found about 20 % of her skeleton, which is what that refers to. Scientists essentially rendered the rest of Lucy to make her appear to be human.

So they essentially said, this is what she must have looked like. They didn't find any evidence that that's what she looked like.

They just sort of made it up as they went. Also, Lucy's face, right?

It looks a little less chimp -like. It looks a little more human -like, right? You know, chimps have a much more sloped forehead.

Now, it is sloped, but it still appears to be a bit more human -like than chimpanzee -like.

So how much of her skull did they find? So let's see.

The brown stuff is what they found. The white stuff is what they extrapolated from the brown stuff, right?

So, you know, they didn't really find a whole lot of her skeleton. They rendered almost everything, but they touted it as if it was science.

As if it was fact. And it's just silly, right?

I mean, how can you come to any conclusions based off of what they found?

You can't. What year were these two things found? Oh, I don't know.

I could look it up, but I don't know. I figure Tony Fauci had to be involved. This was not found during the

Trump era, I will tell you. So, why the attempt to tie humans to chimpanzees, right?

Or to bonobos or to great apes, right? And by the way,

I've littered this talk and the talks we're going to have over the next couple of weeks with videos as well. You're not going to just listen to me drone on.

I do want to inject some videos in here for you guys, because you guys seem to love the videos that I did during the origin of the universe.

So I figured I'd throw some of those in. Some of these are secular videos, meaning not theistic videos.

But the fact that some of these videos on the nose say things that I'm just like, and you still believe this?

I thought was shocking. But why the tie? Does anybody know why people want to tie us to chimpanzees or great apes?

Has anyone heard a reason for that? They don't want to go out of existence. Well, there's certainly the anti -theistic or naturalistic tendencies, but why chimpanzees?

Why not wolves or whales? Is that like a 99 %? 98%.

The 98 % is the section that I call this one. Spot on. So there's a claim that we share 98 % of our

DNA. So they discovered the genome, which we're going to get a lot into that later on.

But they discovered the genome or human DNA or DNA generally.

They discovered that every cell has DNA. And then they came out with a claim that humans and chimpanzees are 98 % the same in our

DNA. There's only a 2 % difference between our DNA and chimp DNA. So decided to look into that.

Let's see if that's true. So just to talk a little bit about DNA, which we're going to get into a lot more

DNA later on, probably in next week's session. We have one next week, right? And the congregation meets the week after.

So next week we're going to get into the genome. And we're going to get into some of the details of the genome and some really cool videos as well about what is termed biological machines.

There's actually nanobiological machines in our bodies, which is pretty cool. But they discovered

DNA. Now, just for perspective, DNA is the double helix that you'll see a lot of times.

And it's comprised of nucleotides and what they call base pairs.

Their bases, which are the central spine of the DNA, is a set of protein base pairs.

Now, a human DNA, so this is in the nucleus of every cell there is

DNA, this molecule. Humans have 3 .097

billion, with a B, base pairs in the double helix

DNA of a human cell. Chimpanzees have 3 .231

billion base pairs in their

DNA. So 3 .097 versus 3 .231 billion base pairs, that's many millions of difference.

So this makes chimp DNA 4 .3 % larger than our DNA. Right there, you're already 4 % off.

There's no way we could be 98 % the same. So how can we get to this 98 % similarity?

So what they did was, and we'll talk more about the structure of DNA and the actual digital code that's in it.

But what they did was they decided to break chimp DNA and human

DNA into chunks. Kind of like, think of it as a book. And we'll show a video where they're actually going to go through this.

But you think of it as a book, where they broke down it into different chunks.

And then after they broke it down into chunks to make a comparison, they excluded 25 % of the human genome.

So they just threw out 25 % of human DNA. And they threw out or excluded 18 % of chimp

DNA. These were things like repetitions in the DNA and stuff that they just decided wasn't important.

And then they took all the parts that didn't match up or make sense and just threw them out.

Called junk DNA. Yeah, they called it junk DNA, which they're actually finding actually has function. As science progresses, it actually hurts their arguments more and more as we discover more about the human genome.

But they excluded all that elements. So what would happen if you included all that?

How similar would our DNA actually be? Well, if you don't exclude the dissimilar chunks from the comparison, it's only between 66 and 86 % similar.

It's a big difference from 98%. And when you think about what

DNA is actually controlling, it's controlling cell function. It's actually code that tells our cells how to function, how to work.

So it's actually a really big difference when you don't essentially cherry pick the parts of DNA that you want to actually compare.

So it's a big difference. And humans supposedly branched off from chimps about 6 million years ago.

And that 6 million years isn't enough time to account for the random mutations necessary for that much difference.

This is why it's so important for them to get to 98%. Because if you've only got 6 million years of random mutation, they've got formulas for how much time it takes to create a new species from a previously simpler form.

And 6 million years, not enough time for only 66 % or 86 % difference.

That's why they have to get to this 99, 98 % number. Matt, you just,

I mean the whole problem. We talked about Howcombe's Razor, right? Yes, Howcombe's Razor, yep. Because you just said, well, there's an assumption about time, which isn't proven.

Right. There's an assumption about this is how long it takes for mutations to create a new species, which is an assumption, another assumption on top of an assumption.

Based on an assumption, yes. Based on an assumption. And then you get to what you're talking about. But that's only part of it because you also said, well, where does life come to begin with?

We're going to get to that. We are going to talk about chemical evolution. So the layers of assumptions and theories are incredible.

Absolutely incredible. That just brings up the whole fallacy of peer review. Yes. Because peer reviews cause this problem.

Yes. Yes, for sure. Because you go in with a presupposition, right, that we evolved from chimps.

We take that as fact and then you have to kind of work the math or the science or whatever it is to try and make that truism true, right?

And so that six million years is a problem. Actually, the Big Bang, just to lean back on the origin of the universe, the

Big Bang was a huge problem for evolutionists, right? Because in Darwin's day, they thought the universe was eternal.

Plenty of time, plenty of time for random mutation by natural selection. But now you've posited, even if you go with the

Big Bang, you know, age of 13 .4 billion years and Earth's age of 4 .6

billion years, right, even if you go with those numbers, well now that gives you a much different time frame to deal with than eternity, right?

Because you're dealing with rolls of the dice, right? These mutations are random. They're not guided by any intelligence.

The only intelligence in Darwinian evolution is the survival of species, right?

Darwinian evolution propagates the random mutations that work. If the organism dies, there's no accumulator that's saying, oh, that was a bad one, let's not do that one again, right?

The roll of the dice is from scratch again. So the organisms have to survive to propagate the good mutations.

So the thought is bad mutations, organisms die off. Good mutations, organisms live, that's the survival of the fittest, right?

Good mutations, organisms live and propagate those mutations to the next generation and then on and on and on it goes, right?

And so if you have a limited amount of time for this roll of dice, right, there's probability on if I'm just rolling the dice randomly and nothing's guiding that process,

I need a large amount of time for the random mutations to, you know, to basically hit the lottery, right, and for this evolution to actually occur.

And so this next video I'm going to show you is actually a video not from a

Christian source that talks about the 98 % and tries to explain why, you know, this stuff was thrown out and it's really okay that it was thrown out and all that stuff.

So I thought it was, I thought it was cool to show it, so let's show it. Let's see, can

I just play it? It's often said that we humans share 50 % of our

DNA with bananas, 80 % with dogs, and 99 % with chimpanzees.

Taken literally, those numbers make it sound like we could pluck one cell from a chimp and one from a human, pull out the tangled bundles of DNA known as chromosomes, unroll each one like a scroll, and read off two nearly identical strings of letters.

But in reality, the human and chimp scrolls don't sync up so easily. In the six to eight million years since we split from our last common ancestor, chance mutations and natural selection have changed each of our genomes in radical and unique ways.

Two human scrolls fused, leaving us with 23 pairs of chromosomes to chimps 24.

Other large mutations revised huge sections of text, duplicating a chunk of human DNA here, erasing a chunk of chimp

DNA there, while throughout the scrolls, tiny mutations swapped one letter for another. When researchers sat down to compare the chimp and human genomes, the single -letter differences were easy to tally, but the big mismatched sections weren't.

For example, if a genetic paragraph thousands of letters long appears twice in a human scroll, but only once in its chimp counterpart, should that second human copy count as thousands of changes, or just one?

And what about identical paragraphs that appear in both genomes, but in different places, or in reverse order?

We're broken up into pieces. Rather than monkey around with these difficult questions, the researchers simply excluded all the large mismatched sections, a whopping 1 .3

billion letters in all, and performed a letter -by -letter comparison on the remaining 2 .4 billion, which turned out to be 98 .77

% identical. So, yes, we share 99 % of our DNA with chimps, if we ignore 18 % of their genome and 25 % of ours.

And there's another problem. Just as a small tweak in a sentence can alter its meaning entirely, or not at all, a few mutations in DNA sometimes produce big changes in a creature's looks or behavior, whereas other times, lots of mutations make very little difference.

So just counting up the number of genetic changes doesn't really tell us that much about how similar or different two creatures are.

But that doesn't mean we can't learn anything by comparing their genomes. DNA contains a record of the evolutionary relationships between all organisms.

It's a garbled record, but by reading closely, we've been able to glean enough information to refine the evolutionary trees we started drawing long before genome sequencing was around.

We may not actually be 99 % chimp, but we are 100 % great ape, and at least a little bananas.

So you can see the presupposition in this video. Even though,

I mean, they were laying it out. They're not hiding the ball here, right? They're not hiding the ball.

They're laying it out that they excluded all this stuff and that they couldn't make sense of this stuff, so they just tossed it.

Nevertheless, we're certainly evolved from chimpanzees or great apes.

This video shocked me, because it wasn't a Christian video. It wasn't like answers in Genesis or somebody trying to argue for theism.

It was essentially someone who accepted the belief in evolution as fact, laid out all the problems with the genome, which, frankly, the discovery of the genome and how cells work is really having a seismic shift in evolutionary circles.

They have something called neo -Darwinian folks that have had a conference. Stephen Meyer talks about this in some of his videos, which we'll look at some of his stuff later, but talks about how they are basically saying we need to come up with a different theory of evolution, because the genome is a real problem for evolutionists.

They're not hiding the ball. They laid it all out, just like I laid it out. They laid it all out and still said, yep, we're descended from them.

This was shocking to me when I saw it. I had to play it for everyone, because, again, coming from their own lips.

Matt, is that video targeted to school -aged children? Probably. Right then and there, they're already starting to indoctrinate what their belief system is going to be.

Most children, this is not a slight to anyone, but most children are not going to grow up to be scientists.

There's a set of people who are intellectually curious and are interested in STEM fields, and there are people who want to write poetry or fix cars.

Most people are not going to invest any time in doing any research on this. They're going to take what the really brainy science people say as fact and move on with their lives.

Frankly, I don't blame them, because who wants to think about this stuff day in and day out but crazy people like us?

Not only that, Matt, but you keep referring to they, and they are not in unanimous agreement about much of anything.

No, and this is something that you'll find shocking. Stephen Meyer tells a story.

Stephen Meyer is a Christian. He's a Christian who is also a physicist and scientist that talks about, you know, he wrote books like Darwin's Doubt and Signature in the

Cell and The Rise of the God Hypothesis. He actually didn't grow up really as a believing

Christian, but really came to believe in God through investigation of some of the science and stuff.

And there's lots of really good videos that I have linked in the appendix of this, in the references section of some of his stuff.

He is really compelling and has really kind of skirted around the issue of God in Darwin's Doubt and Signature in the

Cell. He was really more of a proponent of intelligent design and really wanted to attack things from a purely scientific, and actually used

Darwinian methods for trying to prove that evolution is just really nonsense.

He used some of their scientific methods for it. But then he finally wrote a book called

The Rise of the God Hypothesis where he said, listen, I've been talking about all this intelligent design and avoiding the question of who the designer is.

Now let's talk about who the designer is and why that is the best explanation, rather than things like some of the intelligent design arguments were things around like maybe the

Earth was seeded by aliens. But when you talk about some of the origin of the universe discussions that we had the last time

I was up here, you start to think, okay, well, that's what they call an imminent designer.

But if you think about the design of the universe itself, it has to be a transcendent designer.

So it has to be something outside of the universe because something inside the universe can't create the universe they exist in.

And so that gets to it. So this whole 98 percent, and I guarantee you school kids who couldn't tell you who the vice president was or the last president, well, they probably couldn't tell you the last president because it was

Trump, but they couldn't tell you who the president before that was, they couldn't tell you who the speaker of the house was, couldn't tell you why we celebrate the

Fourth of July. And I'm serious, like there are lots of kids on these man on the street interviews who couldn't, they said we celebrate independence.

Independence from who? Not sure. They couldn't tell you any of that, but they could tell you this 99 percent number. That's how prevalent it is in school systems and in the media and in Discovery Channel or anything.

People know the 98 percent number, right? But when you actually dig into it, it turns out not to be as simple as all of that, right?

When you look at what they do and how they come to that conclusion. This is why I'm always a skeptic when somebody says, well, studies show.

Well, which studies? What were the parameters of the studies? Who was in the study, right? How did they come about their conclusions?

Because you can create a study to tell you anything you wanted to, right? And so it's really important that you actually look at how the science was done to determine whether or not you can really abide by it.

Okay, we have 15 minutes. I'm going to go through the next thing and then we're going to stop before we get to the origin of first life, which is,

I think, the real problem that evolutionists have, right? Because all of what we've talked about presupposes first life existing.

So we'll talk about that in a little bit. But the next thing I want to talk about is something called the Cambrian Explosion.

So you saw in that video that we just showed the trees, right? You saw that sort of branching trees that they had.

They call it the tree of life, right? And it starts at the very base of the trunk of the tree. You start with first life.

The first single -celled organisms in the primordial soup that was, I guess, struck by lightning billions of years ago.

And first life evolved, right? And then you saw that simpler life grew to more complex life and that kind evolved into different kinds and so forth, right?

And so, again, we talked about the fossil record. We talked about some of the skeletons that they found.

That was primarily around human evolution and not all life on the planet evolution.

The Cambrian Explosion is called the

Cambrian Explosion because it appears when you go back in time, the Cambrian era, right?

So it's this period of time about 500 million years ago.

About 500 million years ago, there was this fossil record that occurred in the strata in a relatively short period of time geologically.

It was around 6 million years of time where a bunch of new organisms show up in the fossil record.

Now, these organisms were like crustaceans and different kinds of organisms.

But they had distinct body plans, what they call body plans, which are just their physical characteristics were very different from one another.

Some had exoskeletons, some had internal skeletons, some were, you know, like snails and stuff like that.

So they had very distinct body plans. And they show up in this 6 million year period in the fossil record.

But when you go back through the lower strata, where you would expect to see transitional forms or simpler versions of those different organisms, they can't find them.

It's as if these organisms just showed up all of a sudden, you know, without any simpler forms or any evolution of any kind happening prior to that.

And there's far too many organisms in this Cambrian Explosion. It's not like we see two organisms.

Like, I forget exactly, I think it's 18 or something different organisms. If you watch some of Stephen Meyer's videos, he actually talks in great detail about the

Cambrian Explosion. But these body plans show up in a really small period of time.

This is sometimes referred to as the biological Big Bang, because of how quickly these things just kind of show up out of nothing.

And they still, to this day, haven't been able to find it. And Stephen Meyer, in one of his videos, he tells this funny story.

I'll try and recount it. He tells this funny story about a Chinese evolutionary biologist from China.

Communist China, where you're not allowed to talk against the government. Shows up at a conference of evolutionary biologists in the

United States, and is talking about how the Cambrian Explosion was this huge thing that kind of turned evolutionary biology on its head.

And he said it takes the tree, right, the common trunk, he says it takes Darwin's tree and flips it on its head.

And he tells about this one, and this is Stephen Meyer's story, but he tells about this one evolutionary biologist from the

United States, who stood up and said, aren't you a little concerned about refuting evolutionary biology coming from a communist country?

Where they don't believe in God, right, that was the implication, where they don't believe in God, aren't you afraid you're going to get in trouble? And this

Chinese scientist was ready for an argument, he's like, no, I come from, you know,

China, where you're allowed to question Darwin, but not the government.

He said, you come from the United States, where you're allowed to question your government, but not

Darwin. And so it just shows how indoctrinated academia and the public are with regard to Darwinian evolution, where it's almost a religion in and of itself, right?

You are a fool if you don't believe in Darwinian evolution. And I look at things like the

Cambrian Explosion, you know, and I look at things like the lack of transitional forms, and even the stuff that they've extrapolated and said is how

Lucy and Artie and all the rest of them looked, and I go, you're the fool to believe that this stuff is actually what happened, given the utter lack of evidence of these transitional forms and the fact that you need to extrapolate all of this stuff.

So I, from a Darwinian evolutionary perspective, remain unconvinced by the evidence.

But, so we're going to, we'll probably stop it here, because I want to, there's a lot to go into next, and if I start, we're going to be here pretty late.

Let me ask you a question about the tree. Yes, the tree. Because in order for a new form to happen, to have these random mutations actually, you know, produce some new characteristic that didn't exist before, like lungs, like breathing, and then when you try to get on a tree, so okay, everyone can trace back to their ancestors, but then you have a deal like, okay, well what about the mammals that live in the ocean?

They have all the characteristics of, you know, the swimming and all that, and the fins and all this, but they breathe.

So that's a tremendous break in the tree, and they kind of have to put, like there's no way to get this piece back over to here, or a platypus, and some of those things.

What did the experts say about those kind of anomalies? I mean, you've got to think, these are random mutations, right?

So there's no order, there's no direction, right, other than survival of the animal and adaptation to its environment, right?

So there's not really like a, I would imagine that there would be fewer kinds, because unless it's necessary, unless there's a necessity for the random mutation, then why would we have so many of them?

Oh, I guess you're not quite getting what I'm saying. It's like they have no place to launch back on.

They have no ancestor up their tree, some of these animals that exist. But the thing is, is none of them have an ancestor up the tree.

Well, that's true. They can't find any of the transitional forms, so all of this is assumption, right?

So I think they would answer it the same way they answer everything, right? Which is that they'll eventually find those transitional forms.

Did they get into the 1953 Miller -Urey experiment about the origin of life?

Drew talked about that, and that really has more to do with chemical evolution or the origin of first life, which we're going to cover next time.

Did you see how sophisticated their contraption was at the time? Yeah, and I would point you back to Drew's sermon on that, where he talked in more depth about the fact that they essentially had a closed environment.

They pre -arranged the chemical elements in such a way that they could force a reaction, and the reaction that they forced wasn't actually…

What did it produce? An enzyme, I think it was? Amino acids. Amino acids, right, which are not the same thing as a cell, and we're going to go into the complexity of cells, even single cells, right?

Single -celled organisms are extraordinarily complex things. Extraordinarily complex things.

Yeah, Michael Bee, he wrote about that in Darwin's Black Box. Yes, exactly. And keep in mind, when

Darwinian evolution was proposed, the cell was thought to be a gelatinous blob. They didn't have any idea of mitochondria and DNA and RNA and all of the different biological machines that were in the cell, which we're going to get into a bunch of those.

A bunch of those. And then with chemical evolution, we're also going to talk about the fact that random mutation only works, and natural selection only works, if the organism survives.

What about things like irreducible complexity, right? So we're going to talk a bit about that as well when we go through some of that stuff.

But, yeah, what other questions do you guys have? As far as the

Cambrian explosion, where did they find these organisms? Was it different layers of the earth?

Layers of the earth, exactly. So they call it strata. I use the term strata. I kind of assumed everybody knew what that meant. But strata is just the layers of, you know, things compounding on one another.

And so they can date. They can date the strata. We can argue about the dating methods, but let's just assume that, you know, things lower down are older than things higher up.

That much I think we can tell. And so they date these layers so they know about how much time it took for these layers to build up.

And so that's how they date the duration and where that layer came from in geologic time.

And so what they would expect is that at lower strata, you would find transitional forms for things at higher strata.

So the Cambrian explosion happened in one strata, this Cambrian layer of strata, and they can't find any transitional forms in lower strata to show the evolution to, you know, to these different body plans.

Didn't that compel Stephen Jay Gould to come up with the idea of punctuated equilibrium? Yes. Another ridiculous show.

How would they make out with the Grand Canyon, which is the inverse? Yes. That causes a real problem.

And one thing I'm not going to do is get into Noah's Flood, which is where you're going, because then we're going to be here forever.

But, yeah, so, you know, I look at some of this stuff and just the lack of the evidence of some of this stuff.

Amazing. And really where we're going to get into things that are really going to be, you know, proofs of design, of actual design.

And even if you don't believe in God, like when you look at some of the things as you dive into the human genome and as you dive into the cell, it's shocking what you actually see.

And that, you know, we talk about in science fiction, we talk about nanobots or nanites or, you know, machines.

But they already exist and they already exist in our bodies. I mean, there are things, there are mechanisms that are so small that you can't actually see them, even under a microscope, but we can see the effects of them.

And there are actually little machines that are inside our bodies. So, biological machines that are inside our bodies.

And so we'll talk about the origin of first life or chemical evolution, which, by the way, I said this before,

Darwin's theory doesn't even try to attempt that. And some of the attempts were some of these experiments they did, which didn't even come close.

They didn't even come close. They were only able to build pieces. They weren't able to build the whole. So what else?

Don't most scientists believe in a universal flood? I don't think so.

I think most, and it's really more archaeologists, so we'll talk about the flood,

I guess, a little bit. But the idea of a worldwide flood, most believe that it was a regional flood.

The thing that I find striking is the fact that every ancient culture in every continent of the world has a flood myth.

Every single one of them. They all have their own reasons for it. It's different gods that were angry and brought the flood.

But if the flood of Noah that's in the

Bible covered the whole world, I think that if you look at the different flood myths, they all point to there being a worldwide flood.

And then when you look at some of the fossil record, almost all of it, even in these places that are not necessarily all that close to oceans, almost all of it,

I think 90 -some percent of it, is marine life fossils. Yes. And so when you get into some of that stuff, which, again,

I'm not going to dive hardly at all into Noah's flood. If you guys are interested, we can do a whole thing on Noah's flood.

But I do want to get through the origins of first life, a lot of the biological and, honestly, machine code that's in our bodies.

We're going to go through a few videos. So we'll try and get through all of that next time.

And then the time after that, we'll have a congregational meeting in between. But the time after that, we're going to get into the creation of the world and the

Genesis story. And we're going to go through a few different views. And I'll put a lot of caveats in front of that one, but we'll go through a few different views of that.

We did cover a couple of those when we did our archaeology before that. We did. So maybe you won't have to go crazy in a minute.

No, but we'll go through essentially three to three and a half views on that and go through it and see where we land.

But there was a quote that I wanted to—I thought it was a quote by Robert Jastrow.

And it says, For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream.

He has scaled the mountains of ignorance. He is about to conquer the highest peak. And as he pulls himself up over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

From God in the East for hours. Yeah, I read that. And I find—this is indicative of the fact that a science marches on.

And as we get into things like the human genome, somebody brought out—I forget who it was—talked about junk

DNA, which were these parts of DNA that they thought were useless parts of DNA. And now they're discovering that a lot of these pieces of what they call junk

DNA actually have function for things that they're just now discovering DNA does. And so as science marches on, it actually starts to look more and more like we're not the crazy ones.

The band of theologians at the top of the mountain aren't the crazy ones after all. So Matt, that brings up another thing.

So from an overarching question is, can someone who claims to be a believer in Christ believe in evolution?

Believe in Darwin? Theistic? Can they profess their belief? So let me answer—and

I don't want to jump the gun too much because we are going to talk about theistic evolution, which

I think is different. So if you ask about Darwinian evolution by natural selection through random mutation, which is an unguided, purely natural process,

I think that that belief is based on the belief—more of an atheistic belief.

It is that all of life came from purely naturalistic processes that had no designer and no supernatural—and so I don't think they're compatible.

I think that if you believe in Darwinian evolution, a purely natural process that there's no

God involved in, I don't think that those two views work together because one is postulating a reason for life absent

God, whereas the other is believing in a God that created the world.

Now we're going to go into theistic evolution, which is different. That's a long conversation. It's 8 .04.

We're not doing that today. We're going to go through a few different versions of theistic evolution, actually, in later sessions.

Actually, probably not next time, but the time after that when we go through the creation story, where we're going to talk about what some people, like a biologos and so forth, believe, which is a different version trying to marry theism with evolution.

We'll talk about that later. You know, Darwin got a lot of his ideas from his grandfather,

Erasmus Darwin, who wrote Zoonomia. I didn't know that. Oh, you're the only one.

The rest of us knew that. That's it. Maybe you guys should be up here.

It's always on my mind. Any other questions before we end?

All right, Ivan, why don't you close us out? Father, thank you so much for these wonderful truths that we are discussing and also fallacies that are out there,

Lord, that we have to address. We thank you, Lord, for our brothers here tonight, that we can go ahead and have this type of dialogue, that we have the freedom to share knowledge and to express opinions.

And we thank you, Lord, that we have reason through you, Lord, that we can see your truth through this.

And we ask that you give our brothers a great rest of this week. Be with them, guide them, keep them safe.