History Of Faith And Science (part 3)

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Seasoned Members Class (part 4)

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So we are in Lesson 3, the present debates. If you remember Lesson 1, we talked about the pre -Copernican controversies.
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Those were the ones before Copernicus. For those of you who don't know, Copernicus was a 16th century astronomer.
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Really marks the watershed, the beginning of modern science in the world, in the
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Western world certainly. And we talked about some controversies. First of all, is the universe eternal or is it finite?
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Did it have a beginning? That matters, right? It's theologically really important. So if you don't have a beginning, it's questionable whether you have a beginner, right?
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You have a creator, you have a creation, it's cause and effect. The universe is not self -created or self -existent.
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That's pretty important theologically. Second one we talked about was the shape of the Earth. Okay, have you guys ever seen those
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Ionic, those new... I talked to John about this, Ionic commercials with Jason Bateman. And he goes, on our journey, we've come a long way.
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And he goes through these historical little few -second vignettes of, you know, our first language wasn't really a language.
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These guys, these are cavemen guys and the guy grunts and he goes, well done, thank you. That's how
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I want my meat cooked, right? And he gets to, our first maps really weren't that accurate.
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And he goes, a group of guys and they're dressed in medieval costumes and he goes, guys, you know, the
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Earth is actually... do you have a ball? You know, he's just trying to teach them conceptually how we've moved along.
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So that was the second one we talked about, right? The shape of the Earth. Is the Earth flat or is the Earth spherical?
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And the descriptions from the empirical study of nature and the study of scripture on the face value level seem to conflict.
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So how do we put those together? And third one we talked about was the antipodes. Does anybody remember what the antipodes are?
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Just in brief, general idea. Kind of a word I hadn't heard before, the antipodes. Yeah, it means, in Greek it means opposite feet or anti -feet.
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It means there's people standing on the upside down on part of the Earth, right? And that was kind of a speculative discussion.
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Well, we talked about eventually how that was through exploration. We discovered people did live on the others.
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There were lands, there was dry land, and there were people on the other side. So what we're going to talk about today, and then last week, of course, we talked about the solar system,
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Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and how the church kind of dealt with the rise of modern science with biblical interpretation.
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So the first thing I want to go over is what are the pressing faith and science questions today? Certainly not non -controversial, special creation versus Darwinian evolution.
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Secondly, and your handouts will come into play here shortly, mostly toward the middle and the end.
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So you can just bear with me with this PowerPoint. The first one, special creation versus Darwinian evolution.
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The second debate is the historicity of Genesis 1 to 11 and of Adam and Eve.
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And third is the age of the Earth and cosmos. Features of historical science.
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So let's talk about things that we can't repeat. We can't do experiments to test. These are one -time events, and we're doing kind of a
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CSI, what happened. So the first is historical science examines present effects and draws inferences back to suspected causes in the past.
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That's the number one feature of historical science. Number two, historical science uses a combination of testimony and physical evidence to make a case, okay?
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It's not, well, somebody said something, they gave us their testimony, that settles it. Or because we're dealing with science in the past, it leaves traces, all right?
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You go somewhere, especially nowadays, you're going to leave DNA. You throw your straw in the basket, your DNA is on there.
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Fingerprinting, right? Video cameras, okay? People, there are crimes committed, and there are video cameras everywhere nowadays, right?
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So you leave a trace. If you've done something, you have witnesses also. The whole New Testament Gospels are based in Acts, are based on eyewitness accounts of real events, live and in person.
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That's called direct evidence. That's a very powerful, powerful thing. And our faith is actually based on eyewitness testimony, all right?
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That's part of historical science. Thirdly, historical science employs what's called abductive reasoning.
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Deductive reasoning is mathematically perfect, like 2 plus 2 equals 4, or the classic
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Greek syllogism, Socrates is a man. Sorry, all men are mortal.
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Socrates is a man, therefore, Socrates is mortal. That's called deductive reasoning, okay?
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It's factually true if your premises are true. Inductive reasoning says, okay,
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I'm observing the world, so I think this is how it works. So you're making observations, and you're kind of making a leap of logic, a step saying,
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I'm going to infer, or I'm going to say this is where it leads to next. That's called an inference or inductive reasoning.
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Abductive reasoning is actually, it's inference to the best explanation that accounts for all of the evidence. I'm going to illustrate that here in a second.
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Historical science always answers what likely happened, rather than what happens habitually, or what will happen predictively, okay?
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They study plane crashes to figure out what happened, to say that, well, when these conditions are there, we don't want to fly in those, because what will happen is a plane will crash, right?
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That's an application of inductive reasoning, what usually happens and what will likely happen if we do this, okay?
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You're kind of inferring what will usually happen or might happen. Weather prediction is an example of what will happen based on conditions, computer modeling, and things like that.
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Historical science doesn't work that way. And as a result, the second bullet down there, the conclusions from historical science are necessarily more tentative, or less certain than those from operation or experimental science.
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And that's important when we talk about this debate, models we're going to talk about in the origins debate. We have to kind of hold them a little more tentatively, because we're trying to explain what's the best explanation for all the data, for the text.
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Why is it written that way? Why does it tell us that? Why did that person say that? And why does nature look the way it does?
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That's what we're looking for. Next, the uniformity of the laws of natural processes is assumed.
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Now, you say, I can hear some people say, well, you're making uniformitarian assumptions.
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Every model makes some assumptions of uniformitarity. That's the world we live in. The interesting thing is, if healthy, live people usually stay alive, and suddenly they're dead, you say, that's unusual.
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How did that happen? And we're going to talk about how to think through that from like a
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CSI model. For example, if you have, anybody have like an all -chocolate ice cream?
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You ever have a death -by -chocolate, like chocolate ice cream, chocolate sauce, chocolate whipped cream? Anybody ever eat that?
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It's actually kind of overwhelming, isn't it? By about the third spoon, you're like, man, my taste buds can't handle all this chocolate, right?
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But when you have vanilla with a little bit of hot fudge, man, that hot fudge tastes good, right?
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It stands out. And I view kind of the uniformity of natural phenomena over time to be kind of like that.
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Miracles and intelligent agency stand out. And that's why we're talking about the flow of natural history.
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That's really important, because if there's a creative event, it should be detectable. And so we'll talk about that.
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Examples of historical science applied are medicine. You come in with symptoms. The doctor says, well, what did you do?
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How do you feel? And he uses reasoning to say, well, what caused that present feeling? Did you get something?
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Did you go to a Paul McCartney concert and get exposed to a whole bunch of people? So maybe that's why you're sick, okay?
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Things like that. Law, every day, right? You present a case, the best explanation for what we think is a crime or a civil matter.
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CSI, you get a crime scene we're going to talk about in a second. Paleontology, paleontology is you discover stuff on the ground that looks like certain things.
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How do we explain it? Okay, fossils are one good example of that. And then archaeology, do we have, you know, we're excavating all the time new things.
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And that's actually pretty important biblically, because they are subject to verification archaeologically.
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And I think there's very few examples where, you know, there are questions biblically.
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It tends to back up the biblical text almost all the time. The more we discover, the better it is.
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So I'm going to give you a CSI example, unattended death scenario. This is how historical science works.
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We've got a human body discovered in a room. Recent story, guys, comedian Bob Saget, right? There's an example.
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Nobody was there. There's no eyewitness, no note. We examine the physical evidence to develop a theory about what happened.
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There's four possible causal explanations for that. The first explanation is could be natural.
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Could have died of natural causes. Process is a normal operation.
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It could be accidental, which involves unexpected external events. Flower pot falls off the mantle, or higher probably, unless you're really short.
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And it knocks you out. And there should be evidence of that, because an accident. Suicidal involves causation and intent by self -agency.
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Okay, so we talked earlier about is the universe self -created? Well, that's kind of an example of self -agency.
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I have the power and did something to myself with intent. Homicidal involves causation and intent by an outside agency.
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Somebody else came in and did something to me. There should be evidence of that. And the best theory accounts for all the physical evidence.
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Now, if you walk in a room, there's just a body with no other evidence. You got to examine the body to find out, or things around the body to find out, is there anything?
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And in the case of Bob Saget, they found out there was something. His head was injured. He died likely of a head injury.
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Went to sleep, thought nothing of it. Perhaps he died of a heart attack. His left hand was around here, right?
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Lying flat on his back of the bed. No signs of foul play. No signs of forced entry. All those kind of things.
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So that's kind of how historical science works. We reason from effects or phenomena observable in the present back to past causes.
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And that's what we're really dealing with, with origins. We're really dealing with that kind of process. So the first issue, we're at issue number five out of eight.
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Species fixity. I don't know if you ever heard this term before, but in the rise of modern science, the idea was that God created every species we know on the world as is today.
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It never changed. Well, as we started to explore the earth and see other countries, we realized, oh, there's things that kind of look like what we knew about, but there's things that look a little different.
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And so, secondly, the biblical data really doesn't mention much biological change.
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So it's kind of like the Antipodes, doesn't mention if there are other people. The scriptures don't mention biological change.
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So there's not a whole lot of data from scripture. We look around, and my cat's still my cat.
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Dogs tend to be dogs, right? Species and animals tend to stay, they look the same. Maybe they have spots, maybe they're big, maybe they're small, but they tend to stay within a certain range of variation.
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The fossil record, once we hit 1600 and beyond, there was evidence of extinctions and unknown species we hadn't seen before.
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That kind of led to a theory of biological change. You folks all know the Latin two -word system for everything that exists, every biological plant, animal has two names,
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Latin names. That came from a guy named Carolinus Linnaeus. And Linnaeus came up with that system, and he was a species fixity guy.
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He didn't think that these things change, because he thought, hey, they're in categories, they're going to stay in those categories, let's name them, and let's put them in boxes, and let's classify them.
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And the church didn't have a problem with that, again, because there's no clear biblical text that prohibits it, and our experience matches with it as well.
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So Earth Age, here's a real interesting one. So the scripture text of Genesis 1 gives us a six -day creation historical narrative.
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Okay, that's our basic testimony of creation, divinely inspired, given to us to work with.
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We have a historical interpretive tradition of 17 centuries of church history. The church, until 1700 or so, never varied from their interpretation that that referred to a literal six days.
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Around 1650, Archbishop James Usher, an
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Irish pastor, actually did a chronology, a very detailed chronology, just added up all the genealogies with some outside kind of cross -checking, plus the six days, and he came up with a date of creation of 4004
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BC. Now that was done around 1650, he published his work, and it appeared up until,
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I want to say, the late 1800s in a lot of Bibles. It was like, this is it, King James, it's like, this is it, here we go.
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It wasn't until, again, some subsurface exploration revealed layers of strata with fossils and evidence of extinctions and new body plans.
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So it appeared that some of the species who were created weren't around anymore, and some of the ones we have now may have changed.
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Geology, there was an estimate by Lord Kelvin, where we get the Kelvin temperature scale.
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A British scientist, he estimated, based on if the earth were molten to start, the rate of cooling, he assumed uniformitarian rates of cooling, and he came up with an estimate of 20 million years.
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This was in the late 1800s. Radiochemistry didn't exist until the 20th century, and then he came up with a date of up to 4 .6
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billion years for the age of the earth, and then astronomy, 13 .8 billion years. So from this brief kind of overview, you can see how you've got a very short time on one side, and this couldn't be more different.
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You've got millions and billions of years on the other side. So how do you put those two things together which seem so far apart?
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I'm not going to give the answer necessarily. I'm going to give you on your handouts here in a minute the models that are given to kind of reconcile the two.
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So what are the key questions in creation debates? I'm going to suggest to you there are three key questions. Who or what created?
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Did God create or did natural processes create for any given phenomena that we see in the historical record?
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Secondly, how were things created? Was it through special transcendent divine acts or providential natural processes?
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And thirdly, when things were created is the third question, either recently or anciently.
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By the way, if you look in a geology textbook, you know what the definition of recent is? It's less than 8 ,000 years ago in the
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Holocene period. So, kids, if your mom asks you, what was the last time you cleaned your room?
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Say, Mom, I cleaned it recently. Don't do that, but you can make a joke and you can all laugh about it.
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But that's the definition. My colleague, I work in a science field, and one of my colleagues has a geology textbook, Glossary of Geology, and he's the one who brought that up.
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So, Dino, if you're listening, thank you for that. But, yeah, 8 ,000 years is considered geologically recent.
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So, let's start dealing with the question of biological change a little bit more in historical science.
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This is William Paley. William Paley was, I guess you could say, the popularizer, not necessarily the founder, because this was a doctrine that goes all the way back to Augustine, but really the modern popularizer of what we call natural theology.
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The idea is basically to see it's a practical outworking of the doctrine of general revelation.
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So, if the scriptures say that God can be known through his divine attributes and his existence can be known through a study of nature, the natural world around us, due to the order and the majesty of creation, then we should be able to know at least that there is a
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God and we see evidence of him in creation. That's what natural theology is. And he wrote a book called
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Natural Theology of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature.
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The thing I love about old books is they always had this long run -on titles, and that was the full title. But with Paley, he came up with a famous watchmaker analogy or watchmaker argument.
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It's an argument for divine design in nature, also known as the teleological argument.
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Teleology is goal -directedness or end of Thomas Aquinas and all the way back to Augustine as well.
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It's a theism proof. Now, why was he doing this? Why was he writing this? Paley was addressing the growing heresy of deism.
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And what is deism? What is the heresy? Why is it a heresy? What is that, deism?
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Where does it come from? What is deism in general? If you don't know,
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I can tell you. Yes, exactly. So God set the world in motion, and he kind of leaves it alone.
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And that's where the watchmaker analogy comes in, right? You set a watch, you make a watch, you wind it up, and you let it go.
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Okay, that's what deism said. That's not Christian theology. That's not biblical theism.
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And so what Paley did was he kind of said, no, that doesn't match with the evidence.
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We look at the room. We look at the undetended death scenario. We look at past history, and we say, it doesn't present that way.
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That's not how the universe looks. It looks like it has a purpose. It looks like it was divinely created.
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It can't be explained by what we know of natural processes or pure accident. There's purpose, there's design, and it's all right there.
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Richard Dawkins, you probably heard of him, famous atheist Richard Dawkins, mocked Paley's analogy in his book,
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The Blind Watchmaker, and argued that nature is not good or designed. Paley said it's as if the watchmaker put on a blindfold and made a watch.
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It's terrible. That's an atheistic argument. That's not a theistic argument. Be aware of that.
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So when you hear that, that's what he's referring to. That's what that title refers to. Intelligent design movement of today.
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How many have heard of the intelligent design movement? It's out there. A lot of people, right? It's an attempt to explore the world scientifically, searching for is there purpose and design in nature, in the natural world.
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Do we see evidences of it? And the Discovery Institute is probably the modern gold standard for advancing this natural theology and Paley's original argument, watchmaker analogy for the universe looks design because it is.
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Yes. I think he had borrowed that from somebody, but he was the first one who really popularized it.
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No. He was a Christian theist. In fact, he wrote other books about the historicity of the
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Gospels and other things, really intense theological works. This is more of a popular work to combat the growing trend of deism in England and America at that time.
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No, it was exactly the opposite. Yes. So he would say things like, yeah.
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So Jonathan's comment, in case you couldn't hear it, is Jonathan had always heard that the watchmaker, God wound up a watch and just let it go, was an argument for deism instead of against it.
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That's actually what the deist used. But what Paley argued is, well, the watch is just if you're walking in a park and you find a watch, you would conclude that the watch was made by an intelligent agent.
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So it's a very restrictive kind of argument. It's a restricted argument. But he went on in his book to explain why the eye, the human eye, is intricately designed.
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And those arguments, that it couldn't have been by chance. It couldn't have been by whatever means necessary without an active causal agent, an intelligent designer.
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It couldn't have happened. That was his whole argument. So good question, though. Yeah, but the whole watch thing is an analogy that can be used either way.
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God just wound it up and left it, or the watch itself. So that focused on the running of the watch after it's made.
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Paley said, well, the watch is made by somebody who knows what he's doing and has a purpose to tell time.
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That's why the watch is there. So that's why the teleological, all this has a. . . And time is running, so I apologize.
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Steve, did you have a comment or question? You got it, okay, good. So the next guy, Charles Darwin, Chaz, Chuck.
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The Origin of Species. He wrote that book in 1859, By Means of Natural Selection of the
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Preservations of Featured Races in the Struggle for Life. That's the full title,
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Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin lived from 1809 to 1882, so he was born just after,
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I believe, Paley. Sorry if this messes up the. . . 1805, so he was born four years after Paley died.
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Paley's textbook, using the watchmaker analogy, was required reading in Cambridge when Darwin went there.
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Darwin was very familiar with that argument. Darwin, however, had a daughter that died young, and that radically affected him.
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He originally trained in theology, changed to science from there, and gradually became, depending on who you read, an agnostic or an atheist over time.
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Very sad story, but he was the one who's generally credited or blamed, depending on your position, with these concepts.
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As I said, he was trained in Cambridge in the U .K., and he read Paley's work and was familiar with the watchmaker analogy.
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He looked for a mechanism apart from appeals to theistic causes that could account for the history of biological development called natural selection with survival of the fittest.
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Now, keep in mind that Darwin did not have any idea of genetics. That was still yet to come.
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So he didn't know how it happened. He just theorized that it did happen. They saw evidence of change, but again, he explicitly said, when we saw four possible causal things, accidental, natural, suicidal or self -inflicted, or intelligent agency, outside agency, he said, well,
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I'm going to exclude the last one. It had to happen somehow naturally or something within nature itself that would produce.
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So he went with a purpose, and that purpose was to basically take the opposite position from theism, essentially.
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He published The Origin of Species in 1859, and then he applied those principles to The Origins of Man in a book called
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The Descent of Man in 1871. The latter book, again, applied these evolutionary principles to mankind.
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And again, they're naturalistic or accidental, depending on how you look at it.
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Charles Darwin, this whole theory, the theory comports or agreed with the modernists.
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These are the ones who were more skeptical of biblical religion, more skeptical of theism, and more skeptical of supernatural causation.
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They were known as the modernists. And theological liberals who, again, critiqued the biblical text and looked for reasons why it was not supernatural and was not authoritative and theorized there were lots of errors in it.
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So, again, this kind of fit the times, this fit. It was kind of an idea whose society, as it was going down this deistic road, was waiting for.
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So that's why it took off when it came about, even with a lot of theological liberals, like, yeah, evolution, right?
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Less supernatural, not more. Thomas Jefferson famously cut out all the supernatural stuff out of his
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Bible. That's a Jefferson Bible. That's kind of what we're looking at here. So we have his
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Charles. No, it's not really. There's a cartoon of Charles on the left, kind of evolving as we go.
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And I apologize. I don't know exactly where I got that. I just thought it was funny. The middle one is a tree drawn by Ernst Haeckel.
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Does anybody know what Ernst Haeckel, does that name ring a bell with anybody? H -A -E -K -E -L.
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He was one of Darwin's lieutenants. And he came up with the idea that as we develop biologically, I heard this in the eighth grade for the first time.
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I'm not going to give you the Latin version of it. But the idea is as we develop, we go through our whole evolutionary history.
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So at some point as we develop in the womb, we kind of have gills. We breathe water like fish.
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I kid you not. This is real. And this is what this tree, we look like a chicken sometimes.
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We have like a beak feature or something. We had a tail. It's now gone. It's like the tailbone now.
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So it's an idea that our whole developmental history in the womb reflects this evolutionary history.
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It's since been debunked. It's not believed anymore. But Ernst Haeckel is the guy that came up with this tree of life.
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The very bottom is your single -celled organisms. And from that, everything explodes into existence.
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So I've seen, you've probably seen some diagrams of more of an, it's called instead of the tree of life, sort of the orchard of life.
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Have you guys ever seen this? It's instead of this one tree where everything comes from. This is called universal common descent, by the way, that everything started one organism, developed into another organism, which morphed into another one, to another one, to another one.
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And everything eventually mans up here. We ended up somehow at the end of the chain. So that's the idea of the tree of life.
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The orchard idea is that every kind, if you will, biblical kind, has sort of a point where it's initially created, and then it branches off like this.
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If you want to turn it upside down, instead of one tree that were all descended from an original germ, all men are descended from an original pair.
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All cats are descended from an original cat, right? So you have these discrete creative events, a bunch of trees in an orchard, rather than this concept.
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But this was extremely influential. People saw that tree. We talked about, Mike talked about Arianism, right?
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How did they get people to be Arians back in the day? Arias, with a song, right?
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Like Schoolhouse Rock. How do you get people to remember the Constitution preamble? Schoolhouse Rock, very memorable.
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How do you get people to remember your concept of evolution? Build them a tree. Grow them a tree. There it is.
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Gregor Mendel on the right -hand side was a monk in Germany, and he actually, through breeding peas, kind of founded the science of genetics.
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How do we pass on traits? How do plants pass on traits to their offspring?
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His work was kind of buried for a little while and then rediscovered in the early 20th century. That's going to become important later.
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So we're getting to the handouts here in a second. So biological theories are key developments. Initial theories affirm special creation in the biological realm.
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Common design, rather than universal common descent, was seen as the cause behind the observed phenomenon of biological change.
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Secondly, for many, the creation and the fixity of species was replaced with constant biological development, then a change over time via strictly natural means.
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So the ideas itself evolved until, at the end, product was God's totally out of the picture.
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That's kind of how the thing changed. At first, the church was okay with it because it didn't have those implications, the atheistic or deistic implications.
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But when it morphed, obviously, it's going to depart from Orthodox theism. Darwin's model and ideas were incorporated into the mainstream of biological sciences and eventually into politics, ethics, and economics.
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Somebody called it the universal acid, which erodes everything, right? It erodes theism in every area of life.
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So it's no surprise that society, you know, we have a very non -Christian, non -theistic society.
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Gregor Mendel in the 19th century and science of genetics in the 20th produced what's called, quote, the neo -Darwinian synthesis, which is used for the modern paradigm.
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So a bunch of centuries went by after Darwin, and they said, oh, there it is. There's how it happens, genetics passed on DNA.
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There it is. And they found the structure of DNA in the 50s, Crick and Watson, and they married it with this idea of somehow species change by natural means.
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They put it all together. That's called the neo -Darwinian synthesis. Darwin had three unknowns.
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This is very, very important. Darwin had three unknowns in the late 1800s upon which his theory of biological origins and change depended.
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Number one, at that time, the universe was considered still to be eternal by many, except those in the church.
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So there was an unlimited time frame within which these changes could take place. So if you're doing a calculation on how likely are these changes to help an organism, and you have an unlimited time frame, there are no constraints on your math, right?
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The math lets you go on forever. So you could eventually see how maybe something could happen and organize.
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But now even when the Big Bang cosmology happened, we talked about that, that put a time frame, an end point.
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Now you can do your calculations and figure out just how improbable this theory might be. Secondly, a second assumption he made, there were known gaps in the fossil record, indicating great stops and starts in the process and leaps, actually, of biological change.
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And he assumed they would be filled in the future with more exploration. The missing links would be found confirming gradual transitions.
31:28
So Darwin said, yes, we can't see in the fossil record the links between mammals and whales, for example, land mammals and whales, or dinosaurs and birds.
31:39
We don't see those in the fossil record. They're just not there. But if we wait enough time, they will appear.
31:45
Let's do more exploration. Well, 163 years later, no missing links still. That's a big blow to the theory.
31:56
And thirdly, the stuff of the cell was undifferentiated blob of material that somehow determined how organisms developed.
32:03
They hadn't developed microscopy or other technologies. So what you had is
32:09
Darwin just thought it was this blob of jello, and somehow it could morph and change like clay into other things.
32:16
But we know now that the cell has information in it, and not only information but specific information and very complex coded information that only comes from an intelligent mind.
32:25
That's the only source for that, known source for that kind of thing. Very damaging to the theory. All right, so let's look at the handouts
32:32
I got for you. Oh, sorry, one more slide before we get to the handouts. What were the theological reactions?
32:38
First of all, we have the Princeton Divines, the Seventh -day Adventist Church, and the Genesis Flood Book. Conservative Bible scholars in the late 19th century were the
32:47
Princeton Divines, Hodge, Warfield, et cetera. They were the descendants of Calvin, Luther. They were the most conservative theologians and Bible expositors, and systematic theologians at the time.
33:00
At that time, they developed an Old Earth, what I'll call OE stands for Old Earth, SC is Special Creation view, as did most conservative believers, for about 100 years.
33:12
So when some of the early 19th centuries, the fundamentalist modernist controversy, the book The Fundamentals came out, they held to an
33:20
Old Earth creationist view. They kind of put the two together. The famous Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925,
33:27
Inherit the Wind was a movie made off of that, largely fictional, but that brought to light the theory of evolution and how do we deal with this theory.
33:39
And the public school debate over evolution, that was the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. Clarence Darrow defended a high school biology teacher and William Jennings Bryan prosecuted him for violating the statute against evolution teaching.
33:59
And Bryan actually won the argument. He held to sort of a day -age Old Earth theory. He was put on the spot.
34:05
He said, well, if I had to pick one, that's what I'm going to go with. So that's kind of where the church was at the time, more conservative believers.
34:14
The Seventh -day Adventist Church was the main holdout for what's called a YE, I call it YE, Young Earth, special creationist view.
34:20
We'll look at the handout in a minute. Due to their fidelity to the supposed divine visions or time travel by Ellen G.
34:26
White. And I say either or because it's unclear whether God showed her a vision of the creation days and the flood and other things or whether she claimed a time travel.
34:35
But they believe that she personally witnessed all this stuff. So for them, they didn't have a choice.
34:41
Doctrinally for them, it's a doctrine of the church that they have to believe what Ellen G. White taught.
34:46
That's why they believe you have to worship on Saturday, because Ellen G. White saw the creation on a Saturday when she was back there in time.
34:53
We shouldn't eat animals. Seventh -day Adventists generally favor vegetarianism because they have certain teachings about the flood and causation and animal death and whether that's right or wrong.
35:07
So, again, that kind of grows out of Seventh -day Adventist movement. And thirdly,
35:12
Whitcomb Morris wrote a book called The Genesis Flood in 1961. This renewed interest in the
35:18
Young Earth special creation model among conservatives. So that's kind of your timeline after kind of Darwin, where did the church go with all of this?
35:26
But I will tell you all of these uniformly down this list were all anti -evolution, anti -Darwinian evolution.
35:34
So it was generally your Roman Catholic Church hedged a bit, and also your liberal churches obviously kind of took it in fully.
35:46
And I'll skip this one. Basically, there's a warfare thesis for sake of time. Late 19th century,
35:52
Dixon and White said that faith and science are ultimately at war. One must defeat the other.
35:59
And for us to progress and for science to succeed, religion has to be suppressed and science has to be the victor.
36:05
You'll find this in some debates today. Most popular atheists will pose this kind of line of reasoning and this line of argumentation.
36:15
Largely been debunked today. I think completely debunked today. Science and faith really fit together much better than that thesis would have us believe.
36:23
So if you flip your handouts over, on the backside of these handouts, there's a very busy graph here.
36:33
I just want to define a few things. Like I said, special creationist asserts that God acted supernaturally in the biological realm.
36:40
Design is evident. And it rejects Darwinism. That's called a special creationist. Excuse me.
36:46
An old Earth creationist asserts that the Earth is less than 10 ,000 years old. Old Earth. Young Earth is less than 10.
36:53
Old Earth more than 10 ,000. I have an asterisk there on your handout. You can see the areas where all special creationists agree or where they differ from evolutionary creationists or ECs.
37:06
You'll see them. So let me tell you how this, let me go down to the bottom group there. Evolutionary creationist asserts that God did not act supernaturally in the biological realm.
37:16
Design is not evident and accepts Darwinism. Evolutionary creation, by the way, used to be known as theistic evolutionists.
37:22
They've changed their name to sort of make, kind of jump into the creationist kind of field.
37:28
Because when you call somebody a theistic evolutionist, well, you're an evolutionist. No, I'm a creationist. I'm an evolutionary creationist.
37:34
But they believe that God used evolution to produce all the change still. So it's the same thing, just kind of a name change.
37:41
Deistic or Darwinian evolution, it's kind of what we talked about. It's just God wound it up and let it go. But he's largely uninvolved.
37:47
But if there's any development, it's providential instead of special creation. Does that make sense?
37:53
It's like the rules, the natural laws just ran their course, and that's what it is. And finally, ancient
37:59
Near East refers to cultural influences, beliefs, people, and geography surrounding Israel in the
38:05
Old Testament. And let me just quickly orient you to this chart that I've given you. I've given you this just to kind of give you an idea of where everybody stands or sits in the origins debate.
38:14
On the far left side, I have the columns numbered one through six. In the far left column,
38:20
I have what I call the Biblicists. These are my titles, by the way, not anybody else's. They have a certain set of beliefs.
38:29
There's Robert Sungenis and Gerhardus Bau. They are prominent, and they would say that it's
38:37
Bible only. We can only use the Bible to answer questions in the world, no science at all. It basically excludes all modern science.
38:44
And we'll go down across the column to see where they share beliefs and differ. The second one is what
38:50
I would call the Literalists. Modern apologetics organizations are Answers in Genesis, an institute for creation research, very familiar to many of you.
38:59
Ken Ham and Jason Lyle are two of the main persons involved. They believe in transcendent miracles and creations in Genesis 1, just like all other special creationists.
39:09
They don't believe in Genesis 1 that it reflects providential creation, whereas others do. They would hold that only microevolution or evolution within kinds is attested biblically and scientifically.
39:23
They would say the Genesis 1 timeline is literal. It's a literal six days. Faith and science, they would hold a concordance view, and that is that faith and science are complementary sources of knowledge about the world.
39:35
They're not contradictory. They're not in conflict. That's called a concordance view, and that's very important to keep in mind when we're going through these issues.
39:43
The next one is what about Genesis 1 to 11? It's historical. It's a historical account.
39:48
And you'll see that the other special creationists share that. There's maybe some hedging on the issue of historicity, but not much.
39:56
Adam and Eve, is Adam and Eve, or were they a literal first human pair? They take Adam and Eve as literal.
40:02
The extent and nature of the flood, you'll see column one and two. It's a global flood. Column three would say it's a universal flood.
40:10
It was sufficient. Its purpose was to exterminate humanity, and once that was accomplished, that's the only extent of the flood that's biblically required.
40:21
And then there's some who believe it's universal. Yes, it killed all the people outside of the Ark of Noah, but they would restrict it to more of a local geography.
40:30
I'm not sure how you can tell that. But certainly it was at least enough to kill every person on the face of the earth, if not cover the whole earth.
40:37
So that's kind of the range on that issue. The main approach is to reconcile Genesis 1 and science.
40:42
Column one, a biblicist is a Bible only. In number two, remember we had the billion years on one side and one week on the other side?
40:53
What a young earth creationist, special creationist would say is that, well, God created everything with the appearance of age, or mature creation is the current theory, on how to reconcile science with the
41:06
Bible. And finally, is the Bible the authoritative word of God inspired?
41:11
Yes. Is the Bible inerrant? Yes. And other prominent beliefs, they would kind of make a distinction between historical and operation science, as I've made, but they would say past the 4 ,000 -year mark, everything breaks down.
41:27
I think that's kind of the argument I've heard. If you listen to the Ken Ham -Bill Nye debate, that's kind of the argument he made there.
41:34
So that's where I get that from. And then finally, the other prominent belief is flood geology.
41:40
That's a prominent piece of the model. That does come from George McCready Price. He was a
41:45
Seventh -day Adventist, and he developed the theory of flood geology. And that's a prominent piece of,
41:53
I think, young earth creationists. When they look at the science, they would seek to promote that model.
41:59
If you move over one column, you can see a few differences. Reasons to believe is, I call an essentialist view, old earth creationists it stands for.
42:07
Also, within the realm of special creationists, they're not evolutionists. They're not deistic.
42:14
They are full -blown deistic special creation people. Reasons to believe, that's what
42:20
RTB stands for. That's the main apologetics organization. It's more science -based, although they do reconcile things.
42:31
They're also concordists. So they would say, how can we reconcile literal interpretations with the science and with the world?
42:40
And they would say, yes, transcendent miracles in creation. There's also providential miracles in creation.
42:47
They would agree microevolution is true. They would say the history, it's literal history, but the timeline is analogous to the regular timeline.
42:56
That's how they would kind of get around that problem. And if you go down further, they would say that one of their main approaches to reconcile the two is what's called the day -age view.
43:05
In fact, reasons to believe, that's their view. That was a view developed in the 1800s,
43:11
I believe, along with things like the gap theory. And that's how they would reconcile. They would say, well, in Genesis 1, we can't take the timeline literally, even though it's literal history.
43:21
That's where they would go with it. Does that make sense? That's kind of how they work with that. And then they would advocate the two -books metaphor and progressive creation.
43:29
By the way, everybody who's a special creationist is also a progressive creationist, because whether your progress is six days or three billion years, it's progressive.
43:40
So one of the things I want to, and we've only got a few slides left, one of the things I want to make sure I get clear is, you know, you've got to understand a lot of historical theology, which is what we're doing, in context.
43:52
You know, when you read a John Calvin or Martin Luther, taught a six -day creation, if you read when they were writing that, they weren't trying to calculate the age of the
44:01
Earth. That didn't happen until 100, 150 years later. What they were answering, what Calvin was answering, is the idea that the universe is eternal.
44:11
Oh, sorry, the other way. Calvin was arguing against Augustine, who thought the creation was instantaneous. What Augustine thought is it took
44:17
God one instant to create. You know why he said that? Because Augustine was fighting the people who said, your
44:24
God's not smart enough or powerful enough to create instantly. It took him a whole week.
44:30
Can you imagine that? Your God took too long. It took him six days. Our God in the
44:36
Manichean cult says it was an instant creation. So your God's not as good. That's why
44:42
Augustine took a verse from an extra biblical book and said, God created in an instant and said, there it is.
44:48
But he stretched it out to match the Sabbath command. Does that make sense? It's kind of funny. So Calvin said, no, it wasn't instantaneous.
44:54
The Bible says it was progressive. So that's interesting, right? Historical, you've got to find this context.
44:59
So Luther, what was Luther writing about? Luther was writing against those who thought the universe was eternal. We talked about that the other day.
45:07
So for them, the six days was important because creation is both progressive and it indicates a beginning and end to history.
45:16
So if you look at the evolutionary creations, the right -hand side, you can see where it's radically different.
45:23
BioLogos is the main organization. Francis Collins, who was Anthony Fauci's boss,
45:29
I think, at one time, originally. Until recently, he's the founder of the
45:34
Human Genome Project. He is a professed Christian, apparently, you know, believes all the biblical things, believes the gospel.
45:43
So is John Walton. He was a professor at Wheaton. I don't know if he still is. But if you read any books on origins where it talks about the, what are they called?
45:53
The lost world books, the lost world of Adam and Eve, the lost world of the flood, the lost world of Genesis 1.
45:59
Those are all written by John Walton. And John Walton's coming at it from an
46:06
English literary perspective. But his view is, you saw that ancient Near Eastern thing
46:11
I put up there? He says that they're basically copying, the biblical authors are pretty much copying these cultures around them when they did their stuff.
46:20
So it's culturally based so we can kind of discount not only the timeline but also the history. You see where that goes?
46:26
And it kind of lets the Bible off the hook, but you're giving away an awful lot to do that. So that's
46:31
John Walton and that's Francis Collins, a scientist and a literary scholar. If you go down there, you see some big differences.
46:39
Are there transcendent miracles in Genesis 1? They would say no. Is there providential creation?
46:45
Of course. The revolutionary view, they'd say both micro and macro. So you're going to cross these kinds and we're going to develop naturally.
46:55
The reading of the Genesis 1 timeline, they would say it's more metaphorical. You'll hear the cosmic temple view.
47:02
John Walton's big on the cosmic temple view. This text is only trying to tell us, this is simulating us building a temple for God.
47:12
And God is building the universe as if we were building a temple for him. And it was a seven -day process.
47:18
So they would say it's a metaphor. They would take a non -concordist view.
47:24
So science and faith are separate realms of inquiry. They really don't overlap very much at all.
47:31
They would also say Adam and Eve were not a historical pair. They were more genealogical or representative.
47:38
The theory now is currently, and again, these theories change. These scientific models change. The current theory is that there was a population of hundreds or thousands of humans, humanoids, and God providentially put a soul, a human soul, into one of those humanoids.
47:56
That's the current theory out there in population genetics. That's called the genealogical
48:01
Adam and Eve. But what's interesting is if you look at the science, you look at biological and cellular and genetic science, they're able to trace back.
48:11
You know how boys have an X and a Y chromosome and girls have two X chromosomes, right?
48:18
You know that, right? So XX makes a girl, XY makes a boy. Well, they've traced the Y chromosome all the way back to what scientists call
48:27
Y -chromosomal Adam. Wow. And then on the female side, they trace in all of our cells.
48:36
You go back to biology just for a second. Remember these little power production, these mitochondria in the cell?
48:43
They're your power plants. When you take in sugar or whatever, converts it, make energy, that's done in the mitochondria of the cell.
48:51
They can trace the mitochondrial DNA back to mitochondrial Eve. Okay, maybe it's just a way to organize their thoughts, but it sounds like there's one back there, guy, and one female.
49:05
I don't know. Call me crazy. Sounds like it's pointing in the right direction. So, but anyway, you go down this, and here's, so, by the way,
49:14
I got this chart. I kind of, I didn't steal this chart. I modified this chart. It's my own chart, okay? But this chart
49:19
I kind of got from Dennis Lamoureux, who's a theistic evolutionist out in the west coast,
49:27
Seattle, somewhere. But he had done a similar chart to this. But when he got down to the framework cosmic temple view, when he got, he left out one important thing.
49:41
He got to, is the Bible the word of God and inspired? Yes, of course it is. But he didn't include the next line, is the
49:49
Bible inerrant. It was deliberately left out. Because if you talk to somebody from Biologos, it's very rare to find somebody who will hold to inerrancy.
49:57
In fact, out of all these three, column two, three, and five, which are your three main divisions, only one of these affirms the
50:06
Chicago statement on biblical inerrancy. Do you want to guess which one? Any guesses?
50:14
Two. Any other guesses? I guarantee it's not five.
50:20
I just told you that. There's only one left. So the old earth special creationists are the only ones that unabashedly sign on to the
50:28
Chicago statement. For column number two, at least as far as AIG goes, it's not conservative enough.
50:36
And they add some of the creation science stuff into their statement of faith. So they would affirm, it's kind of,
50:43
I kind of tricked you. But yes, they would affirm it, but it doesn't go far enough. So I think, again, when you're looking at columns two and three, they would hold to full inerrancy.
50:53
Just some would say inerrancy is plus. Let's call it that. Let's be fair. So when you look at here, at the very bottom, remember
51:01
I mentioned intelligent design earlier and William Paley, natural theology? Everybody says, well, where does intelligent design fit in?
51:07
Well, that line at the bottom of your chart, you can't see it on the live stream, I apologize. You have intelligent design.
51:15
You see how that encompasses all the way from column two to column five? So you will find people in the intelligent design movement.
51:23
Two names I have down there are Stephen Meyer and Michael Behe. Stephen Meyer recently wrote a book called
51:29
The Return of the God Hypothesis, highly recommended. He is a strong Christian.
51:36
He is an old earth special creationist. But he goes back to the theistic arguments for the existence of God and how it was largely abandoned.
51:44
He goes back in church history and in the history of science to talk about how the theory of theism in science and intelligent design in the world has never been stronger than it is today.
51:57
So highly recommend The Return of the God Hypothesis, very highly recommended. So Stephen Meyer and the other guy there,
52:03
Michael Behe, he came up with Darwin's black box. He basically launched the intelligent design movement in the mid-'90s.
52:11
His idea, like I told you earlier, was in Darwin's day the cell was this undifferentiated blob.
52:17
It was this black box and somehow magically out of that black box things change. So he got in there and he talked about things and why biological change, the way genetics works and the way
52:30
Darwin envisioned it doesn't work. And he's a Roman Catholic and an evolutionary creationist. So again, you've got the whole gamut.
52:36
It's kind of like a broad tent, that intelligent design tent. And you'll have column two, Young Earth AIG would affirm a lot of what intelligent design does as well.
52:45
So let's move on. We have to conclude. So here you see on the columns there, these are the theological imperatives of theism and special creation that must be affirmed.
52:58
Theistic approaches, we talked last week about kind of Calvin, Melanchthon, Galileo.
53:04
This is where the three main areas and views fall down in the approach to historical science and origins.
53:14
First of all is a separate realms approach. There are separate realms of inquiry with little or no overlap.
53:21
This would be the fitteous, the Bible -only approach, or pretty much the science -only approach of biologos.
53:27
So whether it's in science or whether it's in theology, when it crisscrosses with science, they would say science kind of has to make the final call.
53:38
Then you get your Bible -first approach. Do you remember who was Bible -first last week? Remember Luther? By the way, one of the reasons they hold to a different, closer to the
53:47
Roman Catholic view is Luther took the, this is my body that Christ said for the
53:52
Eucharist we're going to do today. He said that's literal. It is his body. But he didn't quite say it turns into his body, but it's kind of his body.
54:00
And Calvin said, nope, it's symbolic. We would follow Calvin's view. But when it comes to science and faith, the
54:08
Bible -first approach would similar, would follow Luther similarly. And these are scientific models derived from the biblical text.
54:16
This would be your column two, answers in Genesis and ICR. And then you have a science -first approach, scientific models derived from empirical study and then checked by theology.
54:25
This would be reasons to believe in the Discovery Institute, which are your intelligent design guys. So I'm going to skip through these.
54:32
We're out of time. So the creation timeline paradox. Let me leave you with this.
54:38
I think as far as the theory of evolution goes, I think we have a pretty good idea of why that's biblically not acceptable.
54:47
But when it comes to creation timeline, I'd like to boil the problem down to this. If we agree on almost everything else, it's just how do we reconcile the timeline in the science and the world?
55:01
And my contention is that any appeal to a misleading appearance of age either in the text, the day -age view, or the world must be justified by sound reasons as in past debates involving apparent conflicts of faith and science.
55:16
Somewhere there's a time machine. There's a time machine in the text, right? Or there's a time machine built into the world somehow.
55:23
You have two appliances in your house probably, most of you right now, that are veritable time machines. One makes natural processes go faster.
55:31
Anyone want to guess what that is? Cooking. Right? Microwaves. My parents thought it was a miracle.
55:38
They nuked everything. Bacon. It tasted horrible. But look, that's like a time machine.
55:43
Okay? It takes a certain amount of time at a certain temperature to properly cook food. You reduce that by a factor of, you know, 100.
55:52
Crazy. We have a time machine in our kitchen. You also have a time machine probably in your video area.
56:00
Anybody watch a football game in 15 minutes? I have. Skip, skip, skip, skip, skip, skip, skip.
56:06
Right? You have a veritable time machine that if you record something and you play it back and skip through all the commercials, you have just condensed time.
56:17
If you watch the terrible Celtics game from the other end, I'm sorry, and you say, all right,
56:23
I got halftime. I don't want to watch the second half. Just how did it end? Boom, boom, boom, boom. There I am. Okay? You just watch that game in like five seconds.
56:31
So both sides of the time question have to figure out is the time accelerated somehow scientifically in the world or is the time accelerated or abbreviated in the text?
56:43
And that's really the problem to solve. And I'll leave you with this. When we deal with these issues, is our problem with the data?
56:51
Are we saying we're not interpreting scripture right? We're not interpreting the science right? Are we getting it wrong? Is our question with groups who disagree within theology?
57:01
Is the theology messed up? And you've got some of these on your handouts, I think. Yeah, you've got this on your handout. Or are we disputing with somebody's model?
57:11
I would argue that most of the time, at least in special creationism, we're disputing models and we really think we're disputing the text or the science.
57:19
We're really not. Nobody disagrees the earth looks. Al Mohler in his famous YouTube video says why does the earth look so old?
57:25
Maybe because it is. He concedes that it certainly looks really old. But you also have to concede the text makes it look really, really young.
57:34
One week in fact. So how do you put those together? So that model in synthesis is what we're really arguing about in this debate.
57:41
And not so when you when somebody says, well, you're being unfaithful to scripture. That's not really the answer.
57:47
The answer is I don't like your model. Just like I don't like your eschatology or I don't like how you put old
57:52
New Testament together. You dispense a through this, your covenant. I don't know. But I don't like your model. That's what we're arguing about.
57:58
You know, we're both trying to be faithful to scripture. We're both trying to be faithful to all the data. Let's be charitable.
58:03
And that's where we're going to kind of end. Don't have time for that one. Don't have time for that one.
58:11
Let's let's leave you with three questions. When faith and science seem to conflict, how do we resolve the conflicts? First, let's ask ourselves, what does the data from scripture and nature indicate?
58:20
The data, remember, not the theology or science, not the model we develop. But what does the data say? How did the church navigate similar conflicts in the past?
58:27
And that's really what we've tried to do for the past three weeks. How did the church work through this theologically, hermeneutically and and scientifically?
58:35
Thirdly, how do we maintain biblical inerrancy in good science? And can we distinguish the data from the model or the apologetic approach?
58:44
Creation is a doctrinal theological issue. Creationism is an evangelistic approach.
58:52
OK, and it's a model approach to reconcile the two realms. Big difference. So can we distinguish between those?
59:00
And finally, how do we exhibit the love of Christ as we share the gospel? I'll leave you with this quote.
59:07
Werner Heisenberg, the father of quantum physics. The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will make you an atheist.
59:13
But at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting for you. God has two separate realms.
59:21
Of inquiry, and he has given us truth in both realms. Remember, we said truth always meets at the top. And let's try to keep that in mind.
59:28
And let's let's deal with each other with charity. That's where I was going to go earlier with the the issues of theological triage.
59:36
Steve's talked about this in the past. I know we're running over. I'm almost done. First order issues are of first importance.
59:43
We should fight for those second order issues. We can divide over third order issues. We can have healthy debate and still be united.
59:51
So it's fidelity on the essentials charity where we disagree and unity and everything in Christ.
59:57
So let's pray. Let's thank you. Heavenly Father, thank you for this time. Thank you for giving us the ability to understand things.
01:00:05
And Lord, I pray most of all that we would be understanding, wise and charitable. As we apply these lessons we've learned over the last three weeks.
01:00:12
And most of all, Lord, that we would use these things to reach the world with the gospel of Christ.