G1 Conference – Session 3 (Genesis Apologetics)

God of creation, King of all heaven, by your word you spoke it all to be.

And God of the ages, high and exalted one, who am

I that you would think of me? Who am

I that you would think of me?

You are the God who sees, you are the God of all mercy.

You chose to take my place, and I am saved.

Thank you for attending our annual G1 conference. Tonight you will be joining thousands of viewers to take a deep look at the

Bible's case for origins. We welcome many tonight who already believe the foundational teachings of Scripture on the topics we will cover.

We pray your faith is made even stronger as we drill into these matters and discover together that the teachings of God's word are in fact true.

Even starting from the very first pages, many attending tonight are already Christians but haven't explored these topics deeply.

Some are even skeptical. We ask you to engage in all three conference sessions to carefully consider the possibility that Scripture can in fact withstand the toughest pressure testing.

We also welcome those attending tonight who are not yet Christians. Coming to Christ is the first step in a journey to a new life, one marked by both blessing and tribulation.

We pray that all who attend tonight do so with open hearts and minds. These are life -changing truths, truths that can join your heart and mind together in your faith journey.

No matter what your place is tonight, we make this special request that you listen with an open mind and heart.

This is one reason we've turned chat features off to maximize engagement in each speaker's message.

We answer all questions posed by our viewers. Please just email them to staff at genesisapologetics .com.

This broadcast will be permanently hosted on the platform you're watching from tonight. Thank you again for attending.

Welcome to the third and final session of the

G1 Conference. My name is Joe Walters, and I am one of the pastors at Encounter Church in Natomas in Sacramento.

It's my honor to welcome the thousands of you that have gathered to hear about Genesis and its trustworthiness as the

Word of God. Have you ever noticed how many Christians are motivated to believe in evolution?

I'll confess, I used to try to reconcile the Bible with evolution. Maybe I didn't want to sound ignorant, or maybe

I wanted to be able to remove something that could possibly divide me and someone else as I tried to share the gospel with them.

But I soon realized that it was impossible to bend the scriptures around a man -made theory such as evolution.

What I realized is that each of us have a DNA coding that is equal to a million sheets of music, and the author of that music is the

Lord Almighty. Each of you are special and distinct, fearfully and wonderfully made,

Psalm 139 says. Not only does evolution rob God of his glory, but it robs you of your purpose and your distinct value.

Many have observed the moon and the stars, and as technology has advanced, we have seen how vast and immense and infinite space is.

The unbeliever comes to a nihilistic conclusion that we are nothing like specks of dust on a mountain.

Are we mere evolutionary byproducts spiraling in the cosmos? Not according to the word of God.

The heavens are not declaring our insignificance, they are declaring the significant glory of God Almighty.

The skies, the stars, they pour out speech about who our Lord is, who our creator is.

They are declaring the significance of our God. It says that when

God formed my inward parts and knitted me together in my mother's womb, we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

He declared that you are very good as his creation.

So good that he is mindful of you and that he cares for you. So good that he died to make you his.

Seven billion souls on this planet, and he cares for you and for me.

How excellent is the name of our Lord. For this final session, we'll hear about the importance of a truly historical

Adam, how to engage in defending your faith, testing the theory of evolution, and to make sure that you stay to the final session, this speaker is going to touch on the biblical perspective on race.

So let us pray that God will use these amazing people for our edification and for God's glory.

Will you pray with me? Lord Almighty, we thank you. Lord, that you have given us your word, that you have created us, that you have made us,

Lord, for your glory. And Lord, that you have redeemed us, Lord, and given us life, that you gave us a savior that has redeemed us, has forgiven us,

Lord, that we are washed and cleansed of all our sins, that we can be brought into you,

Lord, that we are yours and you, Lord, are ours, that we're citizens of heaven now,

Lord. So may you grow us today in our knowledge so that we may discern your will in our lives.

In Jesus' name we pray, amen. I'd like to welcome

Dr. Robert Carter. He received his Bachelor of Science in Applied Biology from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1992.

He spent four years teaching high school science and went on to obtain his PhD in coral reef ecology from the

University of Miami in 2003. Rob has studied the genetics of fluorescent proteins in corals and sea anemones and holds one patent on a particular fluorescent protein gene.

His current research involves looking for new genetic patterns in the human genome and the development of a biblical model of human genetic history.

Rob works as a speaker and scientist at CMIUS and is passionate about displaying the truthfulness of God's Word using science.

Welcome, Dr. Robert Carter. Hello, everybody.

My name is Dr. Robert Carter. I'm a speaker for Creation Ministries International and I'm going to spend the next 30 minutes talking to you about the historical

Adam theological conundrums and scientific implications. The first question that comes up is why do

I think Adam is important? Well, frankly, it's theological. There are profound theological implications with the reality or not reality of a figure named

Adam early in human history. Before I get to the scientific meat of this discussion, I just want to touch on some of the theological implications of the reality of a historical individual named

Adam who was, at one point in time, the only human being on earth and from whom all human beings today descend.

All we have to do is consider what the New Testament says about Adam. In fact, if you look at Luke chapter 3, the genealogy of Jesus goes all the way back to Adam.

And as far as the Gospels are concerned, Luke is the one who's most concerned about a straightforward, detailed history.

He's the most historical or the most historian -like writer of his age. And clearly, he's linking people, and Jesus specifically, all the way back to Adam, the original, the first.

But there are also theological statements in the writing of Paul. Specifically, if you consider

Romans 5, verses 12 through 21, let me just read you verse 12. Here, Paul is making a profound theological argument that is turning on the historicity, the reality, of the historical man named

Adam. He's referring directly to this Garden of Eden scene where Adam rebelled against God, and therefore

God pronounced death was a result of rebellion against God. I mean, how else would this make any sense if Adam wasn't a real historical figure?

Because Paul here is saying that all death, all suffering, traces back to that event in the

Garden of Eden. Consider also 1 Corinthians 15, 45. Well, that's interesting.

Here, Paul is equating Adam and Jesus in a very significant way. You see, Adam, our progenitor, fell.

Jesus, our representative, rose. Adam succumbed to sin. Jesus overcame sin.

Adam was given death. Jesus resurrected, gave us a solution to death, which traces right back to the

Garden of Eden. Now, I'm not going to spend any more time on the theological implications of this. You can go to creation .com and look up more details if you're interested.

There's some really profound things happening here in the New Testament. We cannot just take Genesis and treat it as mythology or poetry or speculation because of the way the

New Testament authors refer to it. This also raises an issue of biblical perspicuity. That is, how easily can we read it and understand what is said?

There are places in the Bible that are mysterious and will always be mysterious. But there are other places that are crystal clear, specifically when we look at the historical statements in the

Bible. And Genesis is written as if it were history. When it said that Adam was so and so old when his son was born, and Adam lived so many more years, those are historical statements, very clear ones, and the later writers assumed that they were true.

So, if those things aren't really true, if we're supposed to understand them in a different way, then when does the

Bible start being literally able to be understood? That's a valid question.

Now, I know the theologians have developed all sorts of ways around these questions, but I am not intellectually satisfied with any of them.

Because, if you take Genesis as history, that assumption can run through the entire rest of the

Bible without contradiction, without any sort of a conflict. But when you start denigrating

Genesis as something other than history, you come to all sorts of different theological issues later on.

Very important ones, such as the verses I just read. Taking Genesis as history also gives us a historical grounding for understanding and answering some very important questions that are being asked in our culture today.

Like, where do races come from? What is the origin of different people across the world?

And how closely related are we? The Bible gives us very clear answers to those things.

In fact, according to the Bible, we are all kissing cousins from one end of the planet to the other. I mean, given the amount of time the

Bible says the earth has been around, given the average human generation time, there might be only 150, maybe 200 generations in all of human history.

That makes us incredibly closely related, especially if you consider that we all came from Noah's family, who came off of the ark just 4 ,500 years or so ago.

But a lot of people think there's a conundrum here. There's a conflict between what the Bible says and what science says.

I mean, if these are historical events in Genesis, we have the science of genetics, which is able to test theories of history.

Should we see Adam in the data? That's an honest question, and we need to ask it.

And the answer is, yes, if you understand what you're supposed to be looking for. The answer might not be what you expect.

Usually, when it happens to me, it's because I had a misunderstanding of what the Bible was actually saying. I was making assumptions about the

Bible that weren't true. But the evolutionists believe they have discovered a Y -chromosome atom that is the father of all men alive today.

Now, this is not the biblical Adam, because they put him in a different place, in Africa, and hundreds of thousands of years ago, not a few thousand years ago.

The reason for this is something they call the molecular clock. If you add up the number of differences over time, these things add up to long periods of time to explain the number of differences that we see in the

Y -chromosomes in males around the world today. There's a lot of very complex science involved in that.

There's a lot of assumption in that. There's a lot of history in the history of people's assumptions about where humans came from, specifically from monkeys.

And so a lot of that is driving the out -of -Africa theory. Biblically, though, we also have one human ancestor.

His name is Adam, and he lived, oh, 6 ,000 or so years ago. Now, if you want to know when that was, look up my article,

The Biblical Minimum and Maximum Age of the Earth on creation .com. That article will take some important biblical events and give you a possible time frame for when those events might have occurred.

But not only is there a time difference between the evolutionary Adam and the biblical Adam, there is also a location difference.

We don't know where Adam lived. We don't know where Eden was. After Adam got kicked out of Eden, he went eastward.

Well, that's not a very descriptive statement, just eastward of an unknown location called Eden. And the reason I say that's unknown is because, first of all, we don't know where Noah built the ark.

Second of all, Noah floated for five months. There's no geological or geographic connection between the landing place of the ark, which is up in the mountains, and the starting place of the ark.

We have no idea. Now, if you would like, you can check out my two -part article, Where Was Eden?

Part 1 and Part 2, which is on creation .com. And I'll discuss, myself and my co -author, we will discuss a lot of issues involved in trying to figure out where Eden was.

I do not place Eden in modern -day Iraq. In fact, I think that's a biblical minimalist position where people are assuming that there was just a local flood and that Genesis just came out of some of the ancient legends and some of the ancient mythologies of the

Middle East. I don't believe that at all. There's another issue about this idea of why chromosome Adam. In fact,

I've been saying Adam this whole time, but biblically, our Y chromosome answer is not Adam. It's Noah.

That is, all men in the world go back to Noah. Noah goes back to Adam, fine.

But in those ten generations between Adam and Noah, some mutations might have occurred in Noah's Y chromosome, the one he inherited from his father and his father and his father and his father, all the way back to Adam.

And any mutations that occurred would have changed Adam's Y chromosome. And since only

Noah's Y chromosome made it through the flood, we don't actually know what Adam's Y chromosome was. So we should be saying

Y chromosome Noah. That is the father. Noah is the father of all people alive today.

Okay, fine. The Bible says that Noah has three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. If we looked at a family tree of all the

Y chromosomes in the world, do you think you would see Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth? What if I told you that I'm not expecting three branches?

There's a whole lot of reasons for that. Not necessarily three. I mean, it is possible. I don't think so.

But it is possible that Shem, Ham, or Japheth, that their Y chromosome lineage died out. Now, because the population expanded rapidly, and because the

Table of Nations in Genesis 10 tells us all these different nations that came from Shem or Ham or Japheth, okay, I don't think that's true.

But mathematically, it could be true. The probability goes down dramatically in a rapidly expanding population, but it's not impossible.

There's a second reason to question whether or not we should expect three branches, and that is, what if Noah really didn't have any mutations at all?

He's pre -flood. What if the mutation rate pre -flood was very low? Then Shem, Ham, and Japheth may have inherited identical

Y chromosomes. In which case, all the diversity we see today is post -flood, and they all started from Shem, Ham, or Japheth, who might have even had children a couple hundred years after the flood with the same exact Y chromosome.

If that's true, it'll be impossible to actually locate the center point of our family tree.

Ladies, when you were growing in your mother's tummy, your ovaries were finished after only about 22 cell divisions, and the eggs in the ovaries had been held in protective custody until today.

Sometimes ovulation might happen 45 years after a woman is born. Well, that egg is not divided.

Now, there are risks of chromosomal abnormalities as a woman gets older and older.

This is true. Things like Down syndrome are very much tied to the age of the mother. Okay, fine. But most mutations don't come from the mother.

Most mutations come from the father. And the older the father is, the more mutations he passes on to his children.

There's something else that comes into play here, something I call patriarchal drive. I wrote an article about this in the

Journal of Creation. It's now available on creation .com. It's the idea that old men are genetic poison in a population.

Why? Because old men pass on a lot more mutations than young men. You see, a man's reproductive cells, they start dividing at puberty, and they don't stop dividing until the man is dead.

And every time one of those cells divides, it's potentially adding more mutations to any further cell that arises from that cell.

Because the little copying enzymes, they have to copy three to six billion letters, depending on what stage of cell division we're talking about, and they do make occasional mistakes.

And those mistakes can propagate over time. They build up, they build up, they build up. So therefore, older men pass on more mutations.

We've actually measured this in genetics in the real world today. But Noah is the oldest father recorded in the

Bible. I mean, by far, by more than a century, he is the oldest father recorded.

How many mutations did he pass on to his children? So Shem, Ham, and Japheth could have had radically different Y chromosomes than their father.

Or, because of the way the reproductive cells clonally reproduce, it's possible that maybe two of the brothers inherited the same cell line, and the other brother inherited a different cell line, and therefore it's very different.

Or, it's also possible they all inherited the same cell line, and have very similar or even identical

Y chromosomes. All three of those possibilities are within the biblical framework here.

So when you see this tree that I drew of human Y chromosomes, and you don't see three branches, what's your answer?

Is this bad? Does this mean that Adam is not true, that Noah is not true?

Or do we put on our thinking caps and try to think through this? I got this data from the Simon's Genome Diversity Project.

I have done a lot of work on Y chromosome data, using the 1000 Genomes Project, Simon's Genome Diversity Project, the

Human Genome Diversity Program. There's a lot of genetic data out there today, and I've gone through this at length.

This particular tree was drawn after I filtered a lot of data, because you can't just take raw genetic data.

It's full of errors. So there's an art to this science, and we have to be careful when an evolution makes a pronouncement based on art and assumption.

And it's not actually the raw data. But this is the best data that I can present to you right now. This is a tree of all the men in the world.

Every major branch of the Y chromosome family tree is represented here. Let me go through this for you.

A. These are rare lineages only found in Africa. E.

Are lineages found in Africa and not Africa. The lineages I and J are found almost cosmopolitanly in Eurasia, and they represent some of the earliest lineages we find in Eurasia.

R. I am an R. In fact, my subgroup is R1B. I share a

Y chromosome with about 80 % of European males. In fact, my sub -subgroup is targeted in Ireland.

My Irish great -great -great -whatever -grandfather, who fled the Irish potato famine, was a carter, and he was carrying an

R1B. There's Q, which is Native Americans.

Notice that Q splits off from the R lineage before the

R's really form. In fact, you can look at the branches on this tree and estimate how long ago it was when this lineage was founded.

And the R lineage is late in history. It looks like it arose in Central Asia and then spread east, west, and south.

There are a lot of other miscellaneous lineages here. You'll notice they're all labeled with a letter, and the letters aren't in alphabetical order because they're named after the order of their discovery, not necessarily where they fit on the tree.

But look at group O. O is very interesting. These are Chinese, Japanese, Korean.

Most of the people in East Asia belong to group O, and it has this beautiful fan. This is a signature of a population that has remained in one place for a long time and has just grown and grown and grown and grown and grown.

That's what you see when that's true. Going down to the group A lineages, which are rare in Africa, you see it's kind of spindly and spidery.

This is the type of thing that happens when a population is very small for a very long period of time.

Where would I put Noah on this tree? The evolutionary atom is way down off of the

A branch. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to look at this and say, the Bible says that people expanded rapidly.

The signature of a rapidly expanding population is a fan. So I'm going to put Noah somewhere in the center of this starburst.

But I don't know where. And one reason I don't know where is because I don't see three distinct branches. Where's Shem?

Where's Ham? Where's Japheth? Are you going to say, oh, well, Ham went to Africa? No, that's not true.

Oh, not at all. The Table of Nations in Genesis chapter 10 says Ham's descendants lived all over the place, including the island of Crete, which is right next to Greece.

Ham's lineage also goes up into modern day Turkey. Interestingly, a giant wave of Anatolian, Anatolia isn't named for Turkey, Anatolian farmers pushed up into Europe in ancient times.

Were some of the descendants of Ham amongst them? You cannot say that the Japhethites settled

Europe. You don't actually know that. So let me branch off here and talk briefly about the

Table of Nations. One of my favorite things in the Bible is a description of the grandsons of Noah as they spread out on the earth.

However, we have two options here. This is either written as they're spreading out or after they spread out.

So maybe it is an early Genesis record. After the Tower of Babel, someone sat down and said,

OK, these guys went this way, these people went that way, and these people went over there. If that's true, there's another 4 ,000 years of history after that and a lot of opportunity for scrambling, invasions, warfare.

We don't want to talk about what happens to the ladies in a city when the city is conquered by an invading army. What that does is it spreads around Y -chromosomes.

We have trading, we have people wandering, and you can't look at a person and know what his Y -chromosome is.

In fact, if we look at this tree, there's two different parts on this tree that contain men from Papua New Guinea, two radically different parts of the tree, and you can't look at that man and say, oh, you're from this part or that part.

It doesn't work like that. So because you cannot know the history of a man based on his

Y -chromosome lineage, when you look at him, I expect Y -chromosome lineages are going to blend over time.

If that's true, and if the Table of Nations is written early, the signal is going to be completely blurred.

In fact, there might not be any representation of the Table of Nations in genetic data today. The other option is that the

Table of Nations was written several centuries later. Now, not as late as the Babylonian captivity. No, that is not true.

I'm not going to go there. Genesis was not written while the Jews were in Babylon. They didn't just invent a history for themselves.

These are ancient records. But let's say that someone's in the Middle East area, maybe in Israel or maybe somewhere else in the

Middle East, and they're trying to describe an ethnology of all the people that they know about. They know as far west as Crete and northeast

Africa and as far east as Iraq, and they know the people around them, but they don't know anything else about any people group that lives beyond that.

So these people groups are already a product of mixture. So you can say, oh yeah, the descendants of Ham went and settled

Crete. Well, that doesn't mean that every single man on Crete is a descendant of Ham. That a very important center of Mediterranean trade is not going to retain only one

Y -chromosome lineage over time. If this is true, and the Table of Nations is written later in history, again, that means that the signal will be blurred.

So either option, I'm not expecting to see the Table of Nations in modern genetic data because of human behavior and thousands of years of history.

So who settled Europe? Well, the earliest remains in Europe belong to Neanderthals, and they look like they branch off of the

A lineage, which is associated with Africa today. After that, we have these people that move into Europe we call hunter -gatherers.

Now, that's not primitive. That means just people living off the land. Imagine a guy in a cabin in the woods, a log cabin.

He made his log cabin with his axe. He's a hunter -gatherer. He's not farming. He's hunting. He's collecting berries.

He's collecting plants. Hunter -gatherers have to be very in tune to their environment, have to be very smart, or the weather kills them.

And yet these people moved into Europe, genetically distinct from the first people in Europe. And then later on, another wave of people came up, again, from Anatolia, and they brought farming to Europe, and they are very genetically distinct from those other people.

And yet those first people intermingled with Neanderthals, so Neanderthal genes bleed upwards in the archaeological record.

And then a new group of people come in that we can see in the archaeological record. We can see it in the genetics. Those genes from that first people bleed into the second, genes from the second bleed into the third.

We have all this intermixing of peoples, and yet they're bringing in new genes, they're bringing in new technologies, they're bringing in new ideas, new pottery styles.

Now what I'm getting at here is the new field of ancient DNA. We can pull

DNA out of old bones. Yes, it's degraded, it sure is. But if that individual has a whole lot of letters that line it up with one of the existing groups of Y -chromosomes, and doesn't carry the letters from the other

Y -chromosomes, do you know what group he belongs to? And when we do this, we can see genetically distinct populations in Europe.

In fact, the hunter -gatherers and the farmers are more genetically different from each other than Europeans are from East Asians.

So you've probably heard this old, racist, outdated, don't use these terms,

I'm not advocating using these terms, but you've probably heard the phrase, the words, Mongoloid, Caucasoid, and Negroid.

This is outdated, racist terminology that has no place in modern discussions. No one believes this anymore.

And one reason for that is because when you look at Europeans and East Asians, which are two of those classic groups that people try to divide us up into, you just look at Europe and realize we are an amalgamation of people groups that are more distinct than Europeans are from East Asians.

What's a race? I have no definition of it. Modern genetics has destroyed all concept of race.

Let me give you another example. My group, R1B, is a recent group we took over Europe. But if you look in Central Africa, south of Lake Chad, in the country of Cameroon, you will find a group of men, some of whom have the darkest skin of any people on the planet, and they share my

Y chromosome. That means that I am kissing cousins. Me, this Irish Carter, is kissing cousins to men with the darkest skin on the planet, and I'm more closely related to them than I would be to other

Irish men who come from different branches of the family tree. What is a race?

So I'm going to wrap up there. I just talked fast. I threw a lot of words at you, a lot of phrases, a lot of ideas.

I didn't take a lot of time to explain myself. I just want to leave you with the impression, though, that Adam is historically important, theologically important, and genetically sound.

If we understand the possible parameters the

Bible gives us, we have a lot more flexibility than you might expect, and the genetic data does not disprove the biblical

Adam. If you want more information, just go to creation .com. If you want to learn more about the genetics work that I've been doing, there's a little search box on creation .com.

Just go there and type in Carter or type in genetics or anything like that, and it'll bring up a world of information.

Some of that will be a lot easier to understand than what I just presented to you, and some of that is highly technical, because we need a technical analysis.

We need people like you who might want to help write and develop ideas and research and study maybe this or maybe some other topic.

So, my friends, be encouraged. The Bible is true history. The Bible is true theology.

We can use it as a guide to understanding where we came from and where we're going.

Welcome Perseus Poku. He is currently a full -time staff minister and the former chairperson of the apologetic ministry at St.

Paul Baptist Church here in Sacramento, California. He has an AA in education from Consumnus River College, a

BA in history from California State University, and a master's in Christian apologetics from Southern Evangelical Seminary.

He is the president of Sound Reasoning Ministries, from which he provides training on how to articulate and defend the basic tenets of Christianity.

In addition, Mr. Poku has over 24 years training Christians on sound doctrine.

He is also the author of Bible Answers to 110 Doctrinal Questions, and That's Incredible!

Arguments Supporting Miracles, as well as many other publications. Welcome, Perseus Poku.

We want to thank you for joining us for this wonderful conference. My job here is to just spend a few minutes with you talking about relational apologetics.

In the book of Matthew, chapter 8, verses 19 through 20, we find evidence of a commandment that Jesus gave his disciples, which is not only descriptive in nature, but prescriptive.

And by prescriptive, we mean that it's binding not just for one Christian, but it's binding for every

Christian, every born -again believer, things that we are obligated to do. And really, that's what relational apologetics is all about.

It's the ability to take the gospel and let it bleed into the lives of those that surround you, not just hoarding it, not just keeping it to yourself, but to go ye therefore, teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the

Father, of the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever he's commanded us, and lo, he's with us all the way.

So the question is, how do we relate? I'm saved,

I love the Lord, I like Christian apologetics, I like studying about classical apologetics,

I like studying about historical apologetics, maybe evidentiary apologetics, or perhaps you're into presuppositional apologetics.

But I'm here today to talk about relational apologetics, and this is practical theology, the type of apologetics that causes us to share our faith with our neighbor, who perhaps maybe is a

Muslim. The type of apologetics that causes us to share with our mechanic, who may be a

Sikh. The type of apologetics that I'm talking about is the apologetics that inspires us to share with those outside of our orbit.

And all of us have an orbit. You have your family members, you have your church family, you have your racquetball club, you have your soccer club, all of us have an orbit.

And the question is, as a Christian in the 21st century, how are you depositing the word of God?

How are you relating to those that may not believe in what you believe? So in order to affect our personal orbit for Jesus, we must be practical in our theology as well as practice our theology.

So practical theology involves not just orthodoxy, which deals with standard belief, long -held belief that the church has held, major doctrines.

And I encourage every believer to first know why you believe and know what you believe.

All of this study about biblical archaeology, all of this study about evolution, all of this study about philosophy and how

Christians can tear down the strongholds through reasoning, all of this has a purpose, not just for us to be intellectual, not for us to have a title in front of our names.

It's not designed just for us to be mentally superior than other people.

Everything we're learning from the G1 Conference is intended to win other people to Christ, primarily.

Then secondly, within the body of Christ, we all hold firm to the major essentials, but when it comes to the secondary essentials, that's where we have to practice the love of Jesus.

We may disagree on the secondary essentials, but we don't have to fall out, and that's what relational apologetics is all about.

It is how do I relate to those who may not know Jesus? How is my lifestyle going to win others to Jesus?

It's what I call being spiritually attractive, and are you spiritually attractive?

Are you the type of Christian that repel people because of how standoffish you may be, because of how exclusive that you may be, you only hang around church people?

Christ doesn't want that. Christ wants us to share even with people that don't think like us.

We are intentional about our relationships. Why? Because everybody deserves to hear the gospel.

Now, practical theology is the way we conduct ourselves as believers, which is essential to the gospel message.

It's been said many times, people do not care how much you know until they know how much you care.

Let me say it again. People do not care how much you and I know until they know how much you care, and Jesus is a perfect example of relationships and how he dealt differently with every person that he came in contact with.

Being able to know who you are, being able to know that you're a child of God, but not being intimidated.

At the same time, we realize that not everybody in our orbit believes the same things that we believe.

So then we pray, Lord, how can I relate to this Muslim woman? How can

I relate to this Muslim man? Lord, how can I relate to those atheists in my life?

How do I relate to the skeptics? How do I relate to the agnostic? How do I relate to the humanist?

And if we ask God for answers, he promises to give us the answers so we can relate better to those in our orbit.

Now let's look at practical theology. Jesus, as I said, was the perfect example and embodiment of what it means to display

Christian behavior. If you want to know how to witness to people, look at the life of Jesus the

Christ. When we look at Jesus, especially in John, we find him sharing at the wedding of Cana.

He didn't have to accept the invitation, but Jesus was there to relate. He was there to show the people at the wedding, even his mother, that the kingdom of God had arrived.

Jesus believed in relationships, and what we don't want is for all of you to receive this wonderful message of the

Christian response to evolution, the wonderful message of the Christian response to how old the earth is, the

Christian response to dinosaurs, and we're learning these things, and I'm being filled just by hearing the presenters share about the

Christian response to some of these scientific evidence, and we do have a response, but once you're finished gathering all of this information, what are you going to do with it?

Are you just going to be aloof? Are you just going to take it and beat people upside the head with it?

Are you going to sit in your ivory towers where nobody can reach you? I suggest we follow the example of Jesus Christ.

When Jesus needed to relate, which was all times because he's dealing with people, he related to the apostles.

All of them were different, but yet he was able to relate and to connect with each apostle.

Jesus was able to relate in John 4 to the woman at the well, and I love that discourse.

That whole narrative is wonderful, looking at our Savior sitting at the well intentionally.

Why? Because he knew that his disciples would be away taking care of food, and while the disciples were away, my personal opinion in looking at this whole narrative is for him to reach the woman at the well, the disciples had to go.

They had to be outside of the classroom because Jesus set up a classroom right by the well.

He was relating to this woman at the well. Think about it. When she talked about race,

Samaritans and Jews don't have fellowship. Jesus wasn't thrown off. Jesus focused on grace.

When she talked about discrimination, Jesus wasn't thrown off because he knew he was sent there to tell this woman about salvation.

So in our discourse, as we try to relate to those in our orbit, let's not forget the example of Jesus Christ.

If Jesus can deal with people like Zacchaeus, if Jesus could relate to Zacchaeus, who was a tax collector, and many people in that first century

Judeo culture were offended by tax collectors because many of them didn't like tax collectors, just like today.

Not much has changed. A lot of people don't like those that deal with their taxes, like the IRS. But Jesus related to Zacchaeus, and his whole point was, if I could develop a relationship with Zacchaeus and save him, then he could be a blessing for the kingdom.

So number one, we can't count anybody out. Just like Jesus reached low and dealt with us, we are obligated, since we're saved, to reach out to other people.

There's nobody too low that the Holy Spirit can't touch our heart for us to reach down and share the gospel with them.

And then there are some people in our orbit we think they're unsavable. We won't say it, but we act like it.

Oh, that person would never accept Christ. That's not true. We just have to keep sharing, and we have to keep telling them about the gospel.

We have to keep living it. It's not always about talking, but we have to live out the credos of the

Bible. And that's what Jesus did. Jesus came, and he developed relationships with people that were loving and even some people that were considered unlovable.

Jesus reached them. Jesus and the Samaritan woman, Jesus and Zacchaeus, and we talked about Jesus and the disciples.

Wherever Jesus went, he was filled with love, and that love was to bring them to the knowledge of the

Father. Jesus had the kingdom agenda message, and he would not be distracted.

I love you all so much that I have to first build a relationship, and once we build a relationship, then people are more open to hear what you have to say, but we have to first build relationships.

Now, I do realize it's easy to just cast people away. Oh, you're an atheist, and since you're an atheist,

I'm just going to check you out of the box. I'm going to just keep you in your atheist corner. It's easy to just put people in boxes.

Oh, you're agnostic, and since you're agnostic, I'm just going to put you in your agnostic box, and I won't have any dealings with you.

It's easy for us to just put people in boxes, but Jesus says, Whosoever will, let them come, so we can share the truth of God's message with them.

How are you building relationships with Jesus? Are we just continuing this whole concept of being maintainers of the aquarium, and that means that the only people we fellowship with are

Christians. The only people that we hang out with are those that go to our churches, only those that have already accepted

Jesus Christ. Well, we already know Christ for ourselves. What about the other people who don't believe the same things we believe?

Could be a professor in your life. Could be a doctor in your life. Could be a pediatrician in your life.

Whoever it is, they deserve to know the truth of the gospel, and then

I always encourage Christians, you should always have a tool belt, meaning that you should always attend conferences such as these, attend other

Christian conferences. Then you put all this stuff into your tool belt, and once they're in your tool belt, the

Holy Spirit is able to then use what you've already put inside of you so you can bless other people.

Doesn't matter if you're talking to the child or you're talking to the grandparent. Doesn't matter if they come from a scientific background or they've never been to school.

If you avail yourself to studying of God's word and growing in God's word and to learning the signs around us, the

Holy Spirit can use that information, pull it out of you when it's necessary so you can bless other people.

So relational apologetics is important to God. It's not enough just to know Jesus and go to heaven.

He's left us here to be witnesses. He's left us here to build lasting relationships with humanity.

Will they always say yes, Lord? Of course not, but that's not our job. One person plants the seed, the other person waters, and Jesus gives the increase.

This is the why we need to build relationships. Now I want to transition to the what.

The what of relational apologetics, meaning

Christians, all Christians, ought to study.

So I want to propose to you the acronym studies, S -T -U -D -I -E -S, and then

I'm done. The S stands for Christians.

All Christians have to be studious. When we look at 2 Timothy 2 .15,

you'll see that it says, do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly divides the word of truth.

If we're going to correctly divide the word of truth, that infers or there's an insinuation there that you can also wrongly divide the word of truth.

There's nothing more dangerous than a Christian who doesn't know how to handle

God's word the way that it needs to be handled. I've seen Christians take

God's word to win arguments. I've seen Christians take God's words to condemn other people.

I've seen Christians mishandle God's word by what they say and by what they do. But if we're going to handle

God's words correctly, number one, we have to know what it says. Number two, we have to be hermeneutically appropriate.

And once you have that knowledge, the last part is application. And application deals with how we relate to other people.

Even though I know Jesus, even though I have a desire for Christ, can people stand to be around me?

Or are we hindering them from knowing Jesus just by the way we treat other people?

It's not enough to say, I know Jesus on Sunday, but when I get home, my family can't stand me.

We're talking about relational apologetics. How are we relating to other people? You have the knowledge, but are we applying the knowledge?

And being studious is the first part, knowing what God's word says versus what it does not say.

Then the second part is truthful. We have to be truthful when we approach people.

And it reminds me of 1 John 3, verses 18 through 19. And it says, whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already.

One of the questions that I get a lot from various people is, well, a loving God wouldn't send anybody to hell.

And that's true. Loving God is not going to send anybody to hell. But we choose to go to hell when we reject the overture that Jesus gives us.

We willfully say, Lord, I don't want you to be head of my life.

I don't want you to be savior. And once an individual decides to reject the invitation that Jesus has given them, then it's on them.

So we have to be truthful. We share the gospel in love. If I'm dealing with my barber and he doesn't know

Jesus, then I have an obligation to be sensitive to the power of the Holy Spirit.

If he wants me to share my testimony with him, then I need to share with him. Again, we're building relationships.

And oftentimes when I'm in the barbershop, you hear all of this rhetoric.

You hear all of these types of talking. And every now and then somebody approaches me or I may say something, but my relationship with them is intentional because I want them to know

Jesus just like I do. But they're not going to throw me off track because I want to be focused just like Jesus was focused.

Third point, as we're being studious, as we're being truthful, we have to be uncompromising.

Uncompromising. All of this talk about tolerance. All this talk about Christians being intolerant, but we need to tolerate other people.

It's interesting that the culture now, they say one thing in terms of Christians being intolerant, but yet in many cases, this culture is more intolerant than Christians.

They violate their own oath. Let's tolerate everyone except those that agree with us.

That's the world. But we as Christians, we have to be uncompromising in the sense that the methods can change, but the gospel cannot.

So how do we deal with individuals? Those that may not look like us.

Those that may not talk like us. Those that may not have the same economic status as us.

How do we deal with those people? The Holy Spirit, as we acquiesce our will to his, if we lean on him, if we read, if we study, if we desire to apply the word of God, God the

Spirit will guide our tongue. We need to have the desire. We need to pray for the desire because we come in contact with people every day that are not like us.

People that are different than us. And God wants to use us to be liked.

He wants to use us to be exemplars. Not because of us, but because of who we know.

So we can't compromise. We can't compromise what God is saying about humanity.

We can't compromise about what he's saying in terms of gender. We can't compromise what he's saying in terms of historicity.

There are things we can't compromise on. Now the way we approach different people, that is different.

God uses your own uniqueness, your own idiosyncrasies. God knows how to use each one of us to give us a level of influence among those people that we hang around with.

And in using your gifts, in using your position, we're able to be relatable.

And people will come to the Christian who they believe knows something about life.

I've been in many situations. Even in my previous jobs where people that didn't know

Jesus, people that weren't Christians, people that weren't thinking about being

Christians, when situations in their life came about and they were having difficulties, struggling with how to handle these different situations, who do you think they came to?

They came to the man of God who claims he knows the

God of the universe. They wanted to get my perspective on this situation.

And it's not just me. I'm not special. God wants to use all of us to be spiritually attractive so others may want to know what's going on in this life.

So be studious, be truthful, and be uncompromising. Then be deliberate. When I look at the

John 4 narrative of the Samaritan woman, it's the same thing. Jesus was deliberate. It wasn't by chance that he went to Jacob's well and sat there.

That time was designed for that Samaritan woman. Deliberate. So in being relatable, we have to be deliberate.

There are people right now that you can think about in your life. Could be family members.

It could be coworkers. It could be our neighbors. You know them, but you are not certain that they know

Jesus. All of this that we're doing at this conference, it's about us getting closer to the creator through his son,

Jesus Christ. Again, you can get all of the knowledge. You can know all of the statistics.

You can get all the information about the earth and the origin and how we got here, which is important, but it's not more important than us being liked, than us being exemplars, than us being examples of God's trophy cases so other people can see what

God is doing in our life. Can people come to you when there's issues going on with them?

Or are we the cause of them not coming to ask us questions?

Are we the cause of other people being pushed away from knowing Christ because of what we're not doing?

But I want to encourage you. I want to encourage you to live for Jesus. I want to encourage you to reach out to those people around you.

You don't have to know everything. No one man knows everything, but we know this much. We know that Jesus came.

We know that Jesus rose on the third day physically. We know that Jesus is the answer to the problem that ails you.

We don't have to know every answer in this world, but God does. And so when we don't know something, we should go back and investigate and try to get the answer and bring it back to the people that are asking us.

We have to be relatable. And regardless of what this world is saying, it's okay to go back to the people you trust and ask them, do you have an answer to this?

Those Christian pioneers, those Christian mentors that we all have, grandmother and grandfather, even

Sunday school teacher, I'm having a hard time with this question. Can you explain it to me?

Because somebody else wants to know. It's okay. And we have to be deliberate in our approach. Then the next one is intellectual.

When I was in seminary, the question that was asked as part of our test was is there a conflict between Christian apologetics and faith?

And the answer is no. There's no conflict between logic and faith.

There's no conflict between science and faith. There's no conflict between us using our mind for Jesus and faith.

When we use our minds for Jesus, there's nothing more powerful than that, than when a

Christian studies to show themselves approved, a workman who need not be ashamed, but rightly divide in the word of truth, or 1

Peter 3 .15, but sanctify the Lord God in your heart and be you ready to give an answer to each man or woman, a reason for the hope that lies within you, and do it with gentleness and respect.

There's nothing wrong with Christians using their intellect for Jesus Christ. Our history is littered with Christian thinkers.

I enjoy reading the doctrines of Augustine. I enjoy reading the treaties of Irenaeus.

I enjoy reading the stories about Polycarp. I enjoy reading

Tertullian's work. I enjoy reading Thomas Aquinas's work.

I enjoy using my mind for Jesus. There's nothing wrong with it.

It's okay to be emotive. It's okay to get caught up in the music of the church. It's okay.

But after that, how are we using all of this emotion? How are we using all of this logic to bless other people?

Really, that's what it's about. It's about you and I availing ourselves to God for him to use our minds that other people may know him.

Then we have to be ecumenical. There's one body and one spirit, just as you recall to one hope,

Ephesians 4, 1 through 6. We have to be ecumenical. As we go forth, we can't witness in a vacuum.

Let me explain. There are settled church doctrines. And when we are looking at doctrine, we can't just come up with our own doctrine and not look at what the early church fathers and the early

Christians believed. We can't just say, I believe this and not look at what the church has been saying for hundreds of years.

That's called theological malpractice. When you think you're so eloquent and you're so intellectual that you've come up with a new doctrine that nobody has heard before.

If we're going to win other people to Christ, we must learn what the essential settled doctrines are so that we can be part of the

Christian community and we can all stand in unity when we talk about thus said the

Lord, what the scriptures are saying. We do the world harm when

Sister Mary is saying one thing and Brother Joe is saying another thing and Uncle Tom is saying another thing.

No, there are settled doctrines that all of us need to learn so we can all speak with the same language.

We have to be ecumenical. Then lastly, we have to be sound.

Second Timothy 113. What you heard from me, keep as the pattern of sound teaching with faith and love in Christ Jesus.

What you heard from me, keep as the pattern of sound doctrine. That's one of my favorite words, sound, that adjective that goes in front of doctrine.

You see numerous times in the New Testament, sound doctrine, sound doctrine, sound doctrine. And that word sound comes from that root word, who gaze.

And who gaze means healthy. A healthy doctrine.

The type of doctrine that reconciles the prodigal with the parent.

That's a healthy doctrine. A doctrine that has love as its foundation.

That's a healthy doctrine. A doctrine that gives purpose to why we're here because we know the authentic God.

That's a healthy doctrine. It goes against unhealthy doctrine. Unhealthy doctrine causes harm to humanity.

Things such as if you don't have enough money, that's an indication that you're not as righteous.

That's an unhealthy doctrine. Things such as you have to have special spiritual charismatic gifts in order to be saved.

That's an unhealthy doctrine. So we must stick to healthy doctrine. That's why the

New Testament writers always emphasize healthy doctrine. The doctrine that says that Jesus did not raise up physically, that's an unhealthy doctrine, according to Paul.

So we must do like the new agents for the federal government in the counterfeit department.

They study the real currency back and forth.

Daily, they're studying the real currency. The false counterfeit money is never introduced to the new agents.

They're always studying the real currency. They study it to the point where if a counterfeit is introduced, they already know it's a counterfeit because they've been trained and all they've studied is the real thing.

So we as Christians need to study the real thing, which is the word of God. And if you study it long enough, you keep studying, you keep praying, you keep meditating, then eventually when the counterfeit doctrine pops up, you already know it.

So if we're going to be relatable, if we're going to reach the people in our orbit, if we're going to use all of this information that we're getting from the conference accurately, then we must learn how the

Christian studies. We're studious, we're truthful, we're uncompromising, we're deliberate, we're intellectual, ecumenical, then lastly, we're sound.

Thank you for listening to this presentation. May the Lord be with you as you go out in your own orbit to share the gospel.

Amen. Good evening.

Thank you for coming again tonight. My name is Dr. Dan Biddle. We'll be covering one of my favorite topics tonight, looking at the idea of human evolution.

This topic is incredibly important for people who want to study faith and Christianity and understand the contrast between the evolutionary worldview and the biblical worldview because when we surveyed about 600 people on a pollster, these are people checking out of the

Amazon, they got paid a $10 tab to go through and do a survey. We asked them, these 600 people coming through the poll, what's the number one proof for evolution regardless if you're a creationist or you believe in evolution or creation or not, what's the number one evidence that supports evolution?

And 72 % of those responses fell along four categories. It was human evolution,

Darwin's theory proper, fossils and transitions, and science as an authority.

But the number one repeated evidence for evolution was the idea that humans evolved from ape -like creatures.

So it's a really important topic to cover. Tonight, we'll start with what the Bible says.

We have it in Matthew 19. This is Jesus speaking. He says, so the

Pharisees also came to him testing him and saying to him, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason?

And he answered and said to them, have you not read? He who made them at the beginning made them male and female and said, for this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.

So they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let not man separate.

So in the covenant of marriage that Jesus is talking about here, he says at the very beginning, God made them, he made them male and female.

Not millions of years after creation, but at the very beginning of creation. So that's out of the words of Christ.

And he was reflecting back and pulling from Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, verse 24.

And in Luke chapter three, we have a connection between Jesus and that goes all the way back to Adam.

It goes through the line of David and Abraham and all the way back through and Noah. About 70 some plus generations is a connection and narrative in Luke where he weaves together and connects

Christ, the second Adam, all the way back to the first Adam. So we have a historical connection there, if you will, between Jesus and Adam.

So this shows that we have a foundation here and for that foundation to stand, we need a real

Adam, a real garden, a real tree, a real devil, and real sin and death. And that's what the gospel and the

New Testament are standing on. So without those things being real and historical as provided in Genesis 1 to 11, the gospel itself really has no foundation to stand on because they are all based on those things that teach reading

Genesis as history. So and this is even recognized by atheists. Here's a famous quote by a leading atheist.

He said, no Adam and Eve means no need for a savior. It also means that the Bible cannot be trusted as a source of unambiguous literal truth.

It is completely unreliable because it all begins with a myth and builds on that as a basis.

No fall of man means no need for atonement and no need for a redeemer.

So the historicity of Christ and the historicity of Adam being a real person who was made in God's image out of the dust of the earth is essential for the gospel.

It's a foundational matter. So let's review some of the evidence looking about the idea of if humans evolved.

So evidence number one that I'd like to go over that supports the idea of we were spontaneously and instantly created by God is that we have interdependent, obviously engineered, simultaneously assembled body parts that could not come together without intelligence.

So first, if you consider a lock and a key, so a lock goes into the key socket, which has these tumblers and springs and a key by itself has no purpose and a lock socket by itself has no purpose.

The two of these things are connected in an independent or interdependent way. You have to have one.

If you're gonna have one, you have to have the other. And you'll see that in the human body with respect to design.

So consider also a car system, an electrical system in a car. You have a starter and a starting wheel and a flywheel and you've got the electrical system and the battery.

All of these things need to be there at the same time for a car to operate. You have to have the battery to provide voltage and it goes through the wires to the starter and the alternator recharges the battery.

It's this big circle. Those five systems are interdependent and connected. Well, it's really the same thing with our hearing system.

In fact, I'm challenged sometimes when I speak at secular universities. I say, look, give me a chance.

I will do my best to prove the existence of a divine creator in one minute.

And I simply lay out the year. I ask people, how in the world is it that our human hearing system has five separate distinct components that are all connected together in an interdependent way so that when

I'm pushing around sound molecules in the room here, those sound molecules are trapped by the pinna, the outside of our ear that go through a canal that wiggled the little tympanic membrane that goes into the three little tiny ear bones that amplifies those sound waves by a mechanical force of 1 .7

that goes into a hydraulic system as the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup are pushing on the side of the fluid inside of our cochlea.

And that amplifies the signal yet 22 times again that turn it into a chemical and then an electrical charge that goes to a nerve that's wrapped around our brain so that when

I'm moving these sound molecules around, it gets heard as speech and interpreted all at the same time.

These are five interdependent systems that all work together. So if you were to take protein and electricity and whatever else you want in a bucket and stir it for five billion years, you're not gonna get five separate systems that are bolted together that each of which does nothing by itself, is of no significant value.

It takes a designer and a creator to take these five separate components, these five separate machines, if you will, and weave them together so that humans can have hearing.

It requires a divine maker. Evidence number two is

DNA design. I think it's really incredible when you sit back and look at DNA.

We have an uncountable number of these DNA molecules in our bodies. We can stretch them out.

They're a six -foot -long strand that can, you know, stretch. You add them all up. You could stretch between, you know, here and the moon several times over.

And DNA, when you take an honest scientific look at it, is not just scrambled letters.

If you look at the three billion base pairs in our genome that code for genes and proteins that turn into, make who we are today, it's not a just happenstance alphabet soup.

It's information that's coded and engineered in a way that builds useful life.

So it's straight -out information. What about the idea that humans evolved from an ape -like creature?

We overshare, let's say, 98 .6 % of our genomes. Well, we have a longer video on this you can take a look at.

It's one of our most watched videos. The comparison when they came up with, oh, well, humans are 98 to 99 % the same as chimps with respect to our

DNA overlapping, that's not actually true. And a lot of the honest atheists that are looking at this stuff now go back and would admit that, because when they made that comparison saying that 99 % of our

DNA is the same, do you know that they ignored 25 % of the human genome and 18 % of the chimp genome when they made that comparison?

They only took the strands or strings of our DNA letters that overlapped and then they compared those regions.

The parts in the human genome that didn't fit, the parts in the chimp genome that didn't fit, were cut out of the analysis.

They only made the comparison with the leftover parts that were very, very similar. But in order to do that, they had to ignore a quarter of our genome and 18 % of the chimps.

What about mitochondrial DNA mutations? There's been some studies that have come out recently where they used, well, you know, the evolutionary world view is, well, somewhere, many people put about between five and six million years ago, we shared a common ancestor with some ape -like creatures and then the human line kind of spun off and we say, okay, well, how many changes in the genome would have to happen between them between back then and now?

Well, they used to base that on just theory, but now we can go and test using real observational science how frequently we get observed mitochondrial

DNA mutations and the studies that have now done that using some pretty good science show that the

DNA mutation rate of our mitochondrial DNA is 20 times higher than expected by evolutionary theory.

So they expected about one mutation every six to 12 ,000 years.

What they observed was one mutation in every 33 generations.

So just an amazing sped up observation when compared to the evolutionary theory.

It doesn't support it at all and that's why we have even magazine journals and peer -reviewed journals coming out.

This happens to be a science report that says, well, look, evolutionists are most concerned about the effect of a faster mutation rate.

For example, researchers have calculated that mitochondrial Eve, that original Eve, the female that we came from, the woman whose mitochondrial

DNA was ancestral to that in all living people, lived 100 ,000 to 200 ,000 years ago in Africa, but using this new clock based upon the observational mutation rates, she would be a mere 6 ,000 years old.

Where have we heard that before? Well, it's in the Bible. That's what the biblical history would have was that Eve was drawn from Adam's side about 6 ,000 years ago.

A friend of mine is one of the lead chief medical professionals at a huge health system here in the area and he's also a creationist and I pegged him down once at my son's soccer game and I said, what's the leading proof for you as a physician who's been steeped in the medical industry for years, just observationally from an evidence standpoint, what's the top thing that leads you to believe in a divine creator?

He said, that is easy. It's blood coagulation. And I said, well, what do you mean?

He says, well, evolutionists can't explain blood coagulation because there are five separate steps that have to happen when you get a cut that all these signals and all these steps begin to happen to stop the bleeding.

And some people that don't have these steps could bleed out if they don't have the proper medical attention.

But he says, look, Dan, there's no way that that just could have evolved because all of the predecessors in any evolutionary line would have died out if you don't have all five steps in the blood cascade lined up like they do in that process.

So then you also have to think, well, what evolved first, the heart or blood or veins?

You kind of have to have all three at the same time for our circulatory system to work.

The next evidence that we'll look at is just really the weakness of the case for human evolution when you take a look at it objectively and you look at the lineup that they have for ape to human evolution.

It's a really weak, we have changing stories, we have a very scant and scattered and sifted fossil record with huge inferential leaps or big gaps that are requiring a lot of guesswork.

We have consistent exaggeration and contradicting and overlapping icons. So the first one we can take a look at is the changing story.

So if you were to open up a textbook that's about 100 years old, 1915, and look at the idea that they shared back then on the idea of the human evolution tree, we can see it looks like this.

We even have a couple of icons on this tree that were shown to be frauds or have been exaggerated in different ways that have since been removed from the tree.

But in 1915, that's what it looks like. In 1927, we have some changes We still have

Peltdown Man and a couple other figures on there that scientists have later removed.

1931, we have yet more changes that have gone on. 1951, we have a different idea of human evolution.

1965 and then 1985. So there seems to be a new human evolution tree idea for every generation.

About every 20 or 30 years, it changes significantly. And this generation is not exempt from that.

We can look at the most modern human evolution trees. This one just came out by paleo expert

Richard Klein. And the thick vertical bars that you see here show the actual fossil evidence that they found.

And the dashed lines and thin lines indicate the evolutionary relationships that are based on guesses.

So they're trying to fill in the gaps here with guesswork. But if you look at the yellow circles here, all of these are question marks.

They don't know how in history these different evolutionary characters line up.

They have estimations on when they think they lined up based upon dating the strata that these things came from or evolutionary designs that they perceive.

But look at all the question marks. And this is the latest cutting -edge theory here on the human evolution tree.

Here's another one that was published in the Scientific American. Same thing. Look at all of the broken branches.

These all are based on inferences and guesswork from one particular icon to the next to the next.

It's not a complete tree. In fact, most experts today call it a human evolution bush where they have all these kind of connections.

And if you ask one paleo expert and a different paleo expert, they're gonna give you a different conjecture, a different way that the tree's gonna show up for them.

But here we have tons and tons of broken branches. So if you browse through the headlines and follow this topic like I do, you're gonna find time and time again magazine articles, peer -reviewed journal articles, lay articles that are coming out saying things like this.

We have still not found the missing link between us and apes or the human ape is still missing or things like the oldest fossils of our species push back origin of modern humans.

These things go on time and time again. They're consistently redrawing the tree of human evolution.

Our happy 350 ,000th birthday study pushes back homo sapien origins yet again.

The next thing I'd like to look at is this scant, scattered, and sifted fossil record.

So Charles Darwin said that as by evolutionary theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed.

Why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth? And he also said, why is not every geological formation in every stratum full of such intermediate links?

Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain. And this is the most obvious and serious objection that can be urged against his theory, against the theory.

So Charles Darwin, the father of modern evolutionary theory, believed that subsequent decades and centuries of digging would reveal more and new and more convincing transitionary fossils.

But that has not been the case. In fact, we've gone backwards. We're not finding more evolutionary transitions.

We're finding more stasis in the fossil record. So today we have over seven billion humans on the planet.

There are less than 1 .5 million primates, and we have really nothing in between. We've got millions of primates.

We've got over seven billion humans. Where are all the in -betweens? Because you would think if we did evolve from ape -like creatures, there ought to be more of those running around than there are today.

But there's a huge missing middle here. We have apes and humans, but not a lot in between.

So Dr. Ian Tattersall from the American Museum of Natural History has a saying here where he says, look, you could take all of the supposed evidence that humans evolved from ape -like creatures, and if you didn't mind how much you jumbled it up, you could put it all into the back of a pickup truck.

When I was indoctrinated by public school as a high schooler and through college, gosh,

I thought that they had, you know, bulldozer trucks full of transitionary fossils because that's the way they seem to make it appear in the textbooks.

But when you go and you start looking at the actual fossil collections, you can take the whole lot of it and put it into the back of a pickup truck and many estimate even smaller than that, maybe just a wheelbarrow full of fossils that supposedly show this ape -to -human connection.

The next one is having big inferential leaps, consistent exaggerations, contradictions, and overlapping icons.

So let's take a look at this by looking at some of the oldest human evolutionary icons going to the newest.

We can start with Arty. They found Arty in Ethiopia in 1992. She was a sketch of scattered fragmentary bones found in about a 30 -foot excavated area.

Took them about 17 years to reconstruct Arty to the point where they put this digital reconstruction on the front of Science Magazine here.

And none of the bones were found connected or in any way to each other. They were found over about a 30 -foot radius.

And many of the, even the leading finders of this Arty skeleton called it like Irish stew or mush or roadkill.

So they're dealing with very, very scant evidence here. And Arty's claim to fame was that she was supposedly an upright walker or on her way to becoming an upright walker.

And they guessed that in part based upon the bottom of her skull, a part called the foramen magnum.

It's the base of our skull where the spine comes up to the middle there. And they only had about half of her foramen magnum.

And you can guess just by looking there about how the degree of reconstruction that was necessary to take these scattered 100 bones squished about an inch and a half thick and reconstruct it into a skull.

It had to be done digitally. And here's what it looks like when they did that. And you can see here that the base of her skull is largely missing.

They had to take all these 100 fragments, put them together, and reconstruct what they thought her skull might have looked like.

Her spine was another thing that they used to base the idea that she was an upright walker from.

Dr. Lovejoy inferred from the pelvis that her spine was long and curved like a human's rather than short and stiff like a chimp's.

And these changes suggested to him that Artie had been a bipedal or an upright walker for a long time.

In fact, Dr. Lovejoy said that, well, we think Artie had this thing called lumbar lordosis or curvature of the spine.

And we'll take a look at that in a minute here. But Lovejoy did acknowledge, the discoverer of Artie, said that chimps and gorillas do have three to four lumbar vertebrae, but he inferred that Artie must have had six lumbar or lower vertebrae.

And this is important because all of the lower lumbar, all the lower vertebrae from Artie were completely missing.

He was inferring based upon a complete absence of data. So she didn't find, they didn't find any of her lumbar vertebrae.

And here's a simulation showing Artie walking. Well, we can see that this is a quick glimpse of her hip or her pelvis region.

And they're thinking that she's walking like this. And they will draw on her a complete curved spine from start to finish.

But you can see here, they didn't find any of those parts. They had to infer the whole thing.

And it's based upon that inference, based upon a little tiny bump on the pelvis. They think the rest of it should be constructed like this.

So this is really a high degree of inference. They even put a curve on her spine there.

And that's all based really on guesswork. Apes have one long curve, kind of like a shallow

C. Humans have four curves to our spine. We have the cervical, thoracic, lumbar, and sacral.

And that's to facilitate upright walking, whereas chimps are hunched over. So they just have one long curve that they have.

They're kind of forced into a stooped over position there. And they're inferring a human -like lumbar lordosis or a curved spine already based upon nothing but a slight bump in the hip.

We can also take a look at the other parts of her body. And here is an artist's rendition of a baboon that's, or I'm sorry, a bonobo that's right next to her.

She really does look like a bonobo, which is a cousin to a chimp. But based upon this limited data, based upon a bump on her pelvis, completely missing lower lumbar vertebrae, having no spine really to speak of at all, including a missing foramen magnum, only had about half of it, where her spine entered the base of her skull, and a really smashed -up skull.

They're believing that she walked upright. So there's a lot of inference and guesswork going on here.

And then when you look at even her toe and her hallux, apes, many apes have an exaggerated hallux, or they use their hands or their feet like hands, and so they have this hallux that sticks off to the side so that they can grasp things for climbing.

As shown here, they have this huge thumb that sticks out to the side. That bottom clip there is actually that chimp's thumb hanging on to a branch, but it's a thumb attached to her foot and not on her hand.

So Artie was very well equipped for hanging out in trees. Next, let's take a look at Lucy.

Lucy is the leading human evolution icon that's used in sixth -grade textbooks around this state and around most states in the country.

Let's start with a quick clip from Donald Johanson, who's the discoverer of Lucy.

He has this video on BBC where he talks about the number of Lucy's kinds that have been found, or Australopithecine, or Australopithecus afarensis, which means ape from afar.

So let's give this a quick listen. We now have 400 specimens of Lucy's species,

Australopithecus afarensis, named after the Afar region, and we know that there are very large individuals, which were males, and the smaller ones are certainly females.

Okay, so we see here that while this video is playing, Dr. Johanson says we now have 400 specimens of Lucy's kind.

And while he's saying we now have 400 specimens of Lucy's kind, we see this parade of full, complete, upright skeletons marching across the screen while he says we have 400 specimens of Lucy's kind.

But when you look at what he's talking about, he actually, they don't have 400 complete, upright, walking skeletons like they show on the video.

They have this picnic table, and that's what they mean by 400 specimens. In fact, about 380 to be exact, and 35 % of these specimens are just teeth.

So while on the video he says we now have 400 specimens of Lucy's kind, he's talking about bone chips and bone fragments and teeth as specimens, not complete, upright, walking skeleton, as is exaggerated on that video.

They just have these 380 -some bone pieces and fragments that they found in the Hadar region.

So not complete, upright, walking skeletons. But every time we see Lucy in museums and school textbooks, you'll notice that every single time,

I think we found once where there's an exception, they show her with complete eye whites, and only humans have eye whites.

Apes do not have eye whites. There's a couple of species of apes that have a little bit of white rim around their eyes, but for the vast majority of ape species, do not have eye whites, but it's done to exaggerate her human -like appearance.

Here we can see, now they've even taken the fur off of Lucy and given her a family and a husband, so she's walking along there.

No fur with completely white eyes. And here we go again, another one with Lucy with white eyes.

And now we have Lucy in deep thought. Looks like she's philosophizing there. And when you look at the context in which

Lucy was found, they found hundreds of pieces scattered around a three -meter area of a hillside, 50 square meters, or 20 tons was sifted to find what resulted in only being about 20 % of her bones.

So all this work, lots of people, 50 square meters, you know, 20 tons of sediment sifted, and they only found about 20 % of her bones.

And in this collection, just a few years ago, they learned that her thoracic vertebrae actually didn't belong to her.

It belonged to an extinct creature called a theropithecus. So we know that at least one, or probably some of her bones, are from a mixed -up species of different kinds didn't even belong to her ape species.

Okay, the next icon in the lineup is called Homo habilis, or handyman. So if you were to open up a sixth -grade textbook in world history that goes through human evolution, we have

Homo habilis is next. But even the leading evolutionists, this one here, Dr. Richard Leakey, says, look, of the several dozen specimens that we have been said at one time or another to belong to this species, at least half probably don't belong to Homo habilis.

But there is no consensus as to which 50 % should be excluded. No anthropologist's 50 % is quite the same as another's.

Let's just start from the big picture on Homo habilis. They don't have a single one. They have 100 bone pieces and fragments in a collection that they've labeled a taxon

Homo habilis, but they don't have one complete Homo habilis specimen. They just have a bunch of bones, random bones from different places that they're categorizing into the

Homo habilis category. Well, why did they call this creature Homo habilis?

Because it means handyman. And these bones were found, the majority of Homo habilis bones were found in an area where they found thousands of butchered animal remains from bovids or cows, catfish, all kinds of different creatures that had been butchered using choppers, polyhedrons, discoids, and scrapers.

So they also found that these scrapers and these rock tools had to be harvested from a place that was a couple miles away that had this special type of rock called quartzite.

So whoever was taking these stone tools and using them and putting them together and butchering these animals had to learn what kind of rocks to go to and go quarry.

So they had to quarry certain kinds of rocks. They had to flake it with precision, form into several different types of tools that can be used for butchering animals, which was a several stage process.

And thousands of bones from other animals were found pulled apart and not attached. So we have, what we really have here where Homo habilis was found was a human animal killing and butchering site where they were using humans that were smart enough to go a couple miles away, get special kinds of rock, bring them back, forge these rocks into different types of tools for different processes and then use them for butchering and eating animals including ape -like creatures just like Homo habilis.

And here is a quick video that talks about where they found the Homo habilis bones and a living structure that they found not too far away.

The evidence that humans were actually the inhabitants of this site is also confirmed by a 12 -foot circular foundation made of lava stones for a hut shelter they found in the same archaeological bed where Homo habilis bones were found.

Paleo -experts even describe this circular stone foundation as having a striking similarity to the dome -shaped hut shelters still made today by nomadic people in the same area.

But it gets even better. They actually found the stone circle in a layer beneath Homo habilis bones.

Now, that's not faring well for the theory of evolution because whoever was there working with tools and building huts was on the scene before Homo habilis even showed up in the fossil record.

This is exactly the opposite of what we would expect if evolution was true. The 348 animal bones they found scattered around the hut included species from the croc, cow, hippo, elephant, horse, tortoise, giraffe, and pig families.

And do you know how many they found inside the stone hut circle? Only 11 small fragments, which were mostly toes and teeth.

Seems like the leftover pork chops were being thrown outside the living area. The other clue that this site was being inhabited by humans is that 48 of the 50 pieces of debitage, which are the leftover pieces of rock that get removed when stone tools are made, were found outside the stone hut foundation.

Sounds like a human living area to me. Okay, so there we have Homo habilis and it's amazing to me that they found this 12 -foot circular stone hut foundation that obviously had to be built by humans and humans in the same area are building the same type of structures today.

And yet they say that this Homo habilis creature built it. The next in the lineup is

Neanderthals. And from the 1900s to 1960s, so if you go look at my grandpa's version of a

Neanderthal and my dad's version of a Neanderthal and my version of a Neanderthal growing up, if you look at the school textbooks in those eras, you'll find

Neanderthals as a brutish half -man, half -ape creature cruising around with clubs.

That's how it was pitched to us in anthropology classes. But Neanderthals today, after collecting more bones and doing more research and more analyses, they were completely human.

Their genome lines up over 99%, the same as humans are today. They had families with Homo sapiens.

They buried their dead using ceremonies. They made weapons. They made arts. They buried people with flowers.

They had all kinds of things, including musical instruments, that indicate that they were fully human.

Now they've even learned that these Neanderthals were combing beaches and diving down for certain shells at certain depths to make tools for harvesting meat off of animals.

So they were completely human. But that was certainly not the way they were pitched to me when I was a high schooler.

So in summary, we have four to five million years ago we covered arty, then we went on to Lucy's kind, to Homo habilis,

Homo erectus, and Homo sapiens. This is the way it's laid out in a sixth grade textbook. And we have these different fossil icons that we talked about going along each way.

These were just extinct apes. Homo habilis, fewer than a hundred bone pieces represent that taxon.

And did you know that from the time period that evolutionists put between two million and three million years, they only have enough fossil evidence that they claim from ape to human evolution between two million and three million years to put inside of a shoebox and still have room left for putting the shoes back inside.

So they supposedly say we branched off from ape -like creatures starting about five million years ago to present, but they have this huge window between two and three million years ago that they believe, where they have literally almost no evidence, enough to put into a shoebox and still with room left to put in the shoes.

And then the last thing I'll cover here on this is that this is from Dr. Rupp's book called

Contested Bones. They've actually found from evolutionist material that a lot of these evolutionists who are excavating these bones now say there's a huge degree of overlap with these animals or these ape -like creatures coexisting at the same time.

So my question is, how can one supposedly evolve from this creature to the next to the next if evolutionists say, well, they were all living at the same time or in the same era?

And there's plenty of sites and quotations we have from evolutionists about that point.

Okay, so we'll end human evolution here and go on to the next section. Thanks. I'd like to welcome

Dr. Georgia Purdom. She earned her PhD in molecular genetics from the Ohio State University.

After teaching as a college biology professor for six years, she joined Answers in Genesis in 2006, where she serves as the director of educational content in addition to being a speaker and a writer.

She also directs AIG's annual women's conference, Answers for Women, bringing relevant apologetic teaching to women.

Today, Dr. Purdom will be speaking on a biblical view on race. Welcome, Dr. Purdom.

Well, hi, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here with you today and to meet in this virtual online conference.

It's a great new way to share the truth of God's word, and I'm glad to be a part of that.

And we're gonna be talking today about the issue of race. And so I'm gonna share my screen here and be able to show you some slides so that you can follow along here with my presentation on Only One Race, the

Biblical Answer to Racism. And the issue of race is obviously a very relevant topic in our world today, and I'm thankful for the opportunity to be able to address it.

So in this presentation, I'm gonna cover three main areas. So I'm just gonna give you kind of a general outline here.

We're gonna talk about the biblical perspective on race. Then we're gonna talk about how a secular worldview of race leads to racism and the horrific cultural outcomes of that.

And then we're gonna talk about how science supports that biblical perspective. So those are the three main areas.

So I wanna start off by asking some questions. And then as we go through the presentation, keep those in mind because we're gonna answer those questions.

So does the Bible support the idea of multiple races, right? What does that mean for the gospel?

Because Jesus only died for Adam's race, right? Hasn't the Bible been used to support racism? What about things like interracial marriage?

And how should we relate to people who look differently from us? Those are some really critical questions that we need to ask ourselves.

So first and foremost, as Christians, we wanna start with the Bible to answer this question. For this one, we have to start, like many other questions, we have to start at the very beginning of the

Bible with the very, what we call the, we're gonna talk about the seven C's that we talk about here at Answers in Genesis.

But we're gonna start with that first C, which is creation. And we know from Genesis that God created

Adam, okay? So it talks about God breathing into him the breath of life and man became a living being and then

God created Eve. So she made him from a rib from Adam's, made her, sorry, from a rib from Adam's side.

So those were the only two people that God created there in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve. And he told them to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth because they were the only two people, right?

So they have to fill the entire earth. Now, when you ask people, well, who are Adam and Eve's children? They typically will say, well,

Cain, Abel, and Seth. And I always say, well, those are the only three named children in scripture. There are other children because in Genesis 5, 4, it says, after he begot

Seth, the days of Adam were 800 years and he had sons and daughters. Now, we don't know exactly how many children

Adam and Eve had because the Bible doesn't tell us. But according to Jewish tradition and the Jewish historian

Josephus, they held that they had 33 sons and 23 daughters. Now, you might be thinking, whoa, that's 56 kids.

How is that possible? But let's consider two things here. One is that Adam lived to be 930 years old.

Okay, we know that according to scripture. So if Eve lived to be of similar age, it's reasonable to think that their reproductive spans were a lot longer than what we have today.

It might have been a couple hundred years. And they did have the task of filling the earth. So in order to follow

God's commands, they had to have lots of children. And even today, when you think about it, we have women and men living, women that have given birth to 19 living children.

So if they can accomplish that in say 20 or 30 years with 19 kids, imagine how many you could have in a couple hundred years.

Or even a hundred years. That would be quite a few children. So it's very reasonable when you really think about it.

Now, when people understand that Adam and Eve were the only two people that God created to fill the earth, the next question that typically pops into people's mind is, well, all right, who did

Cain marry? Or where did Cain get his wife? Now we could ask that question of any of the children, but people specifically ask about Cain because of this passage in Genesis 4.

Now this is after he killed Abel. And it says, Then Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod on the east of Eden.

Cain knew his wife and she conceived and bore Enoch. Now a lot of times I'll hear people say,

Well, he went to the land of Nod and got a wife. And I say, no, that's not what the passage says. The passage says he went to the land of Nod and knew his wife.

And that's biblical speak for he had sexual relations with his wife and she gave birth to a son.

All right. So if we're going to answer this question, who did Cain marry? We really only have two possibilities.

He either married his sister or he married his niece. Now, when you say that, people might give you kind of a shocked expression, right?

Can you marry your relative? Yes. No, probably only after counseling. Why would you want to?

And so they're kind of shocked by the answer of a sister or a niece because in our modern day, we would say, well, that's wrong.

That's incest, right? You cannot marry a close relative. But we have to remember that, yes, that's true today.

And we're going to talk about why that's true. There's a biblical reason for that. But it wasn't true 6 ,000 years ago.

All right. When Adam and Eve were giving birth to these children and they had nobody else to marry,

God did not actually forbid close relative marriage until the time of Moses. All right.

Abraham married a half -sister, for example. So it was OK up until that time. And the reason that God forbid it and the reason that we forbid it today is due to genetic disorders that can occur when close relatives marry.

So they tend to have, close relatives tend to have the same mutations in their DNA. And so two copies of that mutation tends to lead to genetic diseases or disorders.

So let's go through a little bit of a timeline here to help you understand this a bit more. So Adam and Eve, when they're first created, they're absolutely perfect, right?

No mutations in their DNA, no problems anywhere in that sense. But then they sin, right?

And we have the curse. And so that affects everything. So now mutations are going to start occurring and they're going to increase with time.

But close intermarriage is really normal for about 2 ,500 years until the time of Leviticus.

And specifically in Leviticus 18, God now forbids close intermarriage. Now, the Israelites didn't know anything about DNA, but God did.

And he knew that those mutations were accumulating and close relatives marrying would end up with children that had disorders and disease and obviously he didn't want that.

And so he forbid it and that's the same reason that we forbid it today. But it took a while for that to take place.

So it was okay up until that point. Now, why is it so important to believe that we all descend from Adam and Eve, answering this question of where did

Cain get his wife, right? Well, for that, we have to go to the New Testament. And we read in 1 Corinthians that for as in Adam all die, even so in Christ, all shall be made alive.

Now, I want you to think about this. If there are people on this earth not descended from Adam and Eve and Cain married someone other than a descendant of Adam and Eve, first of all, that would contradict the clear teaching of scripture, right?

Because it's clear that he went to the land of Nod and knew his wife, not got a wife, not that there's other people living there from who knows where, and somehow he married one of them.

But also, this is an issue as it relates to the gospel, right? Because it says here in 1 Corinthians that in Adam all die and last time

I checked, all humans died. Also, we read in 1 Timothy, he desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

So think about this. How can the gospel be for all people if there are races other than Adam's race, right?

So the answer to the question of race is vital to the gospel itself. Why preach the gospel to all nations if some of these people have no opportunities for salvation because they're not descendant from Adam, which is who

Christ died for, right? What does that mean for the Great Commission in Matthew 28? Because Jesus instructs his disciples to make disciples of all nations.

He doesn't say just some nations. He says all nations. So the reason that all humans are sinners, the reason that all humans die is because all humans are descendant from Adam.

And that is the reason that all humans need Christ who died for humans, right? He died for Adam's race.

So the understanding of race is vital to the gospel. And it's reiterated all throughout scripture, right? He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth.

So if we're all one race, then why does everybody look different, right? Where do these different ethnicities or as we like to call them people groups come from?

Not different races because we all come from Adam and Eve. We're the human race. But where do these different ethnicities and people groups come from?

Well, the biblical basis for understanding this comes from the first 11 chapters of Genesis. So let's take a look at some of the major events that happened here so that we can get a better overall picture.

So we've talked about creation, Adam and Eve and the only two people that God created. They had sons and daughters, but before Eve could conceive her first child and that had to happen, right?

Because in Adam, we all die, right? That means everyone, not just some people. Something happened, right?

Before she could conceive that first child. And that is the second C, which is corruption. And we know from scripture that Adam and Eve disobeyed

God, that they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. They sinned. And because we all descend from Adam and Eve, we're all sinned.

We all sin and we all fall short of the glory of God, Romans 3, 23. And in fact, as Adam and Eve's descendants grew and multiplied and filled the earth, things got really bad, which brings us to the next

C, which is catastrophe, right? So the Bible tells us that man's thoughts were only evil continually, according to Genesis 6, 5.

And so God destroyed every human and every air -breathing, land -dwelling animal in a global catastrophic flood, except those that were aboard the ark, which was

Noah and his family and the representatives of the different animal kind. Now, about 100 years after the flood, we arrive at the fourth

C, which is confusion. Now, I often say people are confused about confusion, and that's because it really isn't talked about, sadly, in many churches today.

And yet it's absolutely vital to this issue of race. I've had people come up to me, after I give a presentation similar to this one, and they'll say, how come

I've never heard this before? I mean, I've been in the church for decades, sometimes 60 years I've heard people say, and I've never heard this.

And I say, sadly, it's because many Christian pastors and Christian leaders, I think, fall into one of two categories.

Either they don't believe that Genesis presents true history, so they aren't going to talk about it, at least in a sense of it being actual truth and actual history and things that happened, so they're not going to talk about this event then, or it's a myth, it's not something that really occurred.

Or secondly, they've decided, well, this issue is very divisive, and even though they might believe that Genesis presents true history, some people in their congregation don't, and so they don't want an uproar, and so they don't talk about it.

But yet, Genesis is foundational to this issue of race and racism, so we have to talk about it, we need to talk about it, and we need to understand what happened here.

So after the flood, Noah and his family are actually given a command very similar to the one given to Adam and Eve. They're told to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.

Now they were fruitful and they did multiply. So we have the three sons of Noah and their wives, and then they have children and they have children and they have children.

In 100 years, you can get a lot of people, especially if they're very fertile, they don't have a lot of mutations built up in their

DNA yet, this is very easy to do. But their descendants decided to stay in one place, they decided not to fill the earth, and in fact, we read in Genesis 11 -4, it says, and they said, come let us build ourselves a city and a tower whose top is in the heavens.

Let us make a name for ourselves as we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth. So they rebelled against God.

And this is a diorama that we have at the Ark Encounter that depicts what the people building the tower may have looked like, okay?

So they're building this tower, they're all in one place, they're staying together, so what did God do to punish their rebellion?

It says, therefore its name is called Babel because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth and from there the

Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth. So He confuses their languages, right?

And so it's kind of hard to have major construction projects if you can't understand what the person beside you is saying. So they weren't able to communicate anymore so they stopped building the tower and they scattered.

And this may be where we get our word Babel from, right? When we talk about people that are babbling. Now, nowadays we would say it's not an actual language, right?

They're just saying nonsensical things. But back then they were legitimate languages that different languages that the people were speaking.

So they were all in one place but now they're scattered. And members of the same family probably would have had the same language.

You think mother, father, children but more distant relations would be considered different families so they would have different languages.

And people with different languages end up in different locations. And as the family has left the Tower of Babel not only do they take this language with them but they also take with them a particular genetic makeup with their

DNA, right? For characteristics like skin shade and eye shape and things like that. So what they end up doing is forming tiny little gene pools basically all over the world.

Because back then first of all you don't have Google Translate so you can't understand what other people are saying, right?

And secondly they don't have global travel like we do today. It's not easy to go from point A to point B. So people in Africa probably aren't going to be marrying people in Australia or people in North America aren't going to be marrying people in Europe, right?

Because there's just too much distance between them. But they carry with them certain characteristics.

And as they intermarry within these small groups which isn't a problem at this point because we don't have the mutation filled up yet too much.

And so those characteristics which is encoded by their DNA become dominant through this intermarriage.

So eventually you have things like lighter skin or fairer skin in Europe. You have darker skin in Africa. You have almond -shaped eyes in Asia.

And there's likely some other factors that would have affected this as well. But mainly it comes from the genetic diversity that they take with them, right?

That genetic information that they take with them. But it's just variations on the same traits that Adam and Eve originally had.

So let me use a baking analogy to explain this. Every baker knows that a cake recipe is basically the same no matter what kind of cake you're making.

There are certain elements you're going to have. Like flour, some kind of sweetener, some kind of rising agent, eggs.

That's pretty common for all cakes. But you can make a lot of different cakes from that because you can have different flavoring, different coloring, different pans, different icing, different decoration.

And the same is true for kind of Adam and Eve and the variety from them, right? They're the original recipe, so to speak.

The original DNA recipe. And everybody today is just slight variations on them.

So let me use the example of skin shade to illustrate this because of all the things that tend to separate people of different people groups, it tends to be skin shade.

So let's say we have two genes that code for skin color. Now, reality is that it's a lot more complex than this.

I can speak to that as a geneticist. We know there's at least 16 genes involved in skin shade determination. But the principle is the same.

It doesn't matter whether you're talking about two genes or you're talking about 16 genes. So let's say the uppercase A or B version of the gene results in lots of melanin.

And melanin is the pigment that gives the shade of brown to our skin. And that the lowercase A or B version of the gene results in a small amount of melanin, okay?

So depending on what versions of the genes you inherit from your parents, you could have very dark skin, you could have very light skin, or you could have a lot of skins in between, okay?

So especially if you have two parents that are somewhere in the middle, so to speak, like if they start out with that middle brown where they have a lot of variety in their genetic makeup, if two of those people marry, that's the kind of punnett square that you get there.

You have some people that are very, some children are very dark, some children are very light, but the vast majority are just right in between.

So to get all the skin shades that we see in the world today, then what shade, not color, would that have been in your skin?

Because let's face it, we're all brown, right? So if I held up, people would say I'm white, right? But if I held up a white sheet of paper next to me, and I'm the same color as the paper, somebody needs to call an ambulance, okay?

Because something is wrong, right? I may not be a very dark brown, but I am still a very light brown.

So to get all this variety that we see in the world today, what shade of skin did Adam and Eve have?

Well, probably they had something in the middle. They probably had middle brown because they would have a variety of genes for both light and dark shades of skin.

And that's the variety that we observe today, right? So they would have had now, if they did have 56 kids, it would have been interesting because they would have probably seen some children that were very dark, very few, some children that were very light, very few, but the vast majority, just statistically speaking, would be somewhere in between and would be in the middle.

Yeah, I can't tell you how many times I will open up a children's book that talks about Adam and Eve, and they are shown as blonde -haired and blue -eyed, okay?

Caucasian Adam and Eve. But that's only going to give you more of the same. And the same is true if Adam and Eve were portrayed as very dark.

You would just get more of the same because these individuals lack genetic variety, okay?

You can't get other skin shades if they don't have genetic variety to begin with. But if you do start somewhere in the middle, right, with that middle brown and have that variety in the genes, you can get a lot of those different skin shades.

And we don't even have to go back to the time of Adam and Eve to see this. We can actually see this even in people today. So, for example, this couple that you see on the screen, they are both middle brown.

And so she gave birth to these twin girls. They are fraternal twins. Now, they look very different, but they're fraternal twins.

One child got a lot of genes that code for lots of melanin, and one child got a lot of genes that don't code for a lot of melanin.

And this is how these girls look today. They've grown up. Now, they look very different, but yet they actually are fraternal twins.

Here's another example of that. You have a very light mom in this case, a very dark dad. But they ended up forming two sets of what are called black -white twins.

Now, they're technically not black and white, right? We already discussed that. They're dark brown and light brown. But nonetheless, you can see that you can get a lot of variety from two people when they have variety in their genetic makeup, or you have a mixture coming from one dark parent and one light parent.

Now, probably many of you are familiar with the children's Sunday school song, Jesus Loves the Little Children, right? And it says, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white.

But are we really red, yellow, black, and white? No, we're not, right? So we really need to change that song, okay?

We are shades of brown from dark to light, right? And we want to raise a generation of children on this new version, right?

We want to help them not see people as different races, right?

But instead, as different people with different ethnicities and that we're all brown, right? We're just different shades of brown.

So even that can't separate us. I really like the fact that the Crayola company has actually recently embraced this fact with their new set of crayons called

Colors of the World. And basically what this is, is a box of brown crayons. Now, you might not think that's exciting, but I do, okay?

I think that's amazing because these crayons represent the different shades of brown that people are.

There's no red, yellow, black, and white in this crayon box, right? Because that's not what people are, right? They're just different shades of brown.

So the first four Cs really provide us with an understanding of the fact that we are one race, but multiple people groups.

And people group is a much more accurate and appropriate term than race. And this understanding is absolutely central to the gospel, right?

Because who did Jesus die for? He died for the one man's offense, right? Which is Adam. He died for Adam's race.

And that's why we preach the gospel to all nations because we've all descended from Adam. All of us are sinners and all of us are in need of the salvation through Christ so that we can have access to eternal life.

And so that history that's in Genesis is really foundational to the last three Cs of Christ, cross, and consummation, which involve the gospel message, right?

And the future that's to come that we can share and be with Jesus if we know him as our personal savior.

So how do we practically apply the biblical knowledge that we've learned here? And I hope we can think of multiple ways, especially as it concerns our relationships and treatment of others who might look different from ourselves.

But one that comes immediately to my mind is the idea of interracial marriage. So here's the thing.

If we're all one race, is there any such thing as interracial marriage? The answer is no. There just isn't.

We're all one race, the human race, descended from Adam and Eve. So you know how when you get those things that you have to fill out and they ask you, what race are you?

Okay, I always want to say the human race, right? I'm Adam's race. But what they're really asking is what ethnicity are you, right?

And that can be important because there are certain diseases that tend to run in some ethnicities more than others.

And so people need to, doctors need to know that. I get that. But we are the human race. So there can be no such thing as interracial marriage.

Now, it's not to say that couples shouldn't take into account differences in themselves like culture, likes, dislikes, how many children they want to have, where they want to live, right?

Because you are making a decision to spend a lifetime together. But there's nothing in the Bible that would prevent people from different people groups marrying each other.

There's no prohibitions against that. But there is a type of interracial marriage that the Bible does not condone.

And that's this one in 2 Corinthians. It says, do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers.

What fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness and what communion has light with darkness? And that's the marriage between the two different spiritual races because which impending marriage does

God counsel against? Two non -Christians marrying? Two Christians marrying? Or a non -Christian marrying a

Christian? It's that last one, right? It doesn't matter the skin shade, right? What really is important is whether or not they're a

Christian because while it is a biological fact that all humans belong to one race, it is a spiritual fact that they're divided into two.

And so what is the difference between these two spiritual races? It's the direction in which they are racing, okay?

And God wants both those people in a marriage, what he desires the most is that they be racing towards him.

It's really hard if they're racing in different directions. So if the Bible teaches, and that's just one example, right?

There are obviously many, many more ways that we need to apply what we've learned here to how we treat others, how we look at others, and how we interact with others.

But if the Bible teaches there's only one race, then why do we have so many problems with this race issue in our culture today?

And the bottom line is because we live in a sinful fallen world, right? And people start with their own ideas and their own reasoning apart from God's word.

So the common teaching actually is that there are four main racial groups all evolved from an evolutionary ancestors, okay?

And so we've got things like, and these are the terms they use, Negroid, Mongoloid, Australioid, and Caucasoid.

And that's how they used to label them and said, you know, they came from either one or multiple evolutionary ancestors.

Now, how did this concept become so popular? Well, the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould said this, biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.

So Darwin really provided a quote unquote scientific, and we'll see how it's not very scientific later, basis for this belief and the concept of multiple races expanded and grew from it, right?

So many of Darwin's writings clearly show his beliefs that different races of people descended from ape -like ancestors and that some were more highly involved than others.

The name of his first book on this issue was on the origin of species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life.

Now, the term racist here could be replaced with species because this book focused only on animals and not humans, but the logical progression of his idea of evolution would be man next, right?

And that he basically made clear in his next book on this issue called Dissent of Man in 1871.

And he said this, at some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world.

So for Darwin and many of his contemporaries, the European white were the civilized races and the savages would be

Australian Aborigines and the Negroids. That's what they would think. Now, Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, actually used these evolutionary ideas as a foundation for eugenics.

Eugenics means well -born or good in birth. And he said this, eugenics is a science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race, also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage.

Now, notice he says inborn qualities. So in other words, he's saying keep the race pure, right?

Especially the European white. He said this, speaking of eugenics, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had.

And so again, for Galton and for Darwin, the European whites would be the more suitable race and everyone else was basically less suitable.

Galton said, could not the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied? And undesirables would be people other than European whites.

Now, he is considered the father of eugenics, Galton is, and he promoted the idea that man can evolve into something better and higher if he just could control, took control of marriage and reproduction.

So only the fit marry and reproduce, which in their minds would be the Caucasians and the people that were not defective or had disease and that the unfit would not.

And this was accomplished in the late 1800s and the early 1900s through avenues like involuntary sterilization and marriage restriction laws.

So every state that you see here with lines or in black had sterilization laws in 1935 and these sterilization laws in some states continued until 1970.

And who were they sterilizing? Okay, so they were sterilizing without their permission, sometimes without them even knowing, knowing this and, you know, against their will sometimes.

Those people that they considered unfit, which included those that were diseased, defective and those of what they would call lower races like African -Americans.

They had marriage restriction laws and most of us think about, well, they prohibited interracial marriage.

That was one thing they did, but they also didn't want people that were pure and abnormal, okay, marrying either.

They didn't want defective people marrying. This is a chart from the 1920s showing marriages of fit and unfit with outcomes, again, of pure and abnormal union.

And again, who was abnormal? Well, anyone that was diseased, defective and those of lower races.

And Darwin affirmed his cousin's horrific eugenic ideas further in The Descent of Man when he said this, thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind.

No one who is attendant to the breeding of domestic animals would doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.

It is surprising how soon a want of care or care wrongly directed leads to the degeneration of a domestic race.

But accepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

That is awful, right? When you think about that and the implications about that, but it's truthful. This is what he said.

And, you know, if people are going to tear down statues and cancel people who were racist, then honestly, they should have started with Darwin because it was his so -called scientific principles that provided a foundation for racism.

And the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, very much agreed with these ideas. And in her magazine,

The Woman Rebel, she published an article in 1914 and the author of the article said this, it is generally agreed that lower forms of life must give place to higher types.

And when the pioneer of civilization makes his way into the forest, he must have necessarily destroyed the man -killing animals living therein.

Exterminating warfare is also waged against the savage members of the human race, wherever they oppose the establishment and conditions necessary for the development of the more highly organized types.

So basically what he's saying is just like we do with savage animals, we need to do with man, right? We need to exterminate the savage races, which again would be what they would call the

Negroes or the Australian Aborigines and pretty much anyone who wasn't European white, okay?

That's who they wanted to exterminate to allow the European whites basically to take over and be able to establish themselves in certain areas.

And the author went on to say, of course, where improvement by instruction and subsequent cooperation is possible, this extreme of annihilation need not be practiced.

But unless it can be shown that there is room enough on earth for both savage and civilized, the savage must go.

Okay, so again, well, you know, if we can instruct them and cooperate with them and get along with them, that's okay.

We don't need to annihilate them. But if that can't be done, then we just need to get rid of them. There isn't room on planet earth for both of us.

That's what they're saying. Now, remember, Margaret Sanger published this in her magazine and many, many other articles in her subsequent magazines by leading eugenicists of the time that said we need to get rid of the undesirable and propagate the desirables.

And these ideas continue in the Planned Parenthood organization that she founded even in modern times.

Listen to some of these sobering stats. In America's largest city, that's New York City, a black baby is more likely to be aborted than born alive each year, right?

So between 2012 and 2016, black mothers terminated 136 ,000 plus pregnancies.

At the same time, black mothers gave birth to 118 ,000 babies, right?

And think about where Planned Parenthood offices are typically found. They are in areas with high numbers of African Americans and Hispanics.

It continues today. Nothing has changed, right? Maybe the name and how they do it has changed a little bit, but the ideas are still very much the same as what they started with.

But there's no absolute, there's absolutely no biblical, as we've already seen, basis for the idea of multiple races and racism.

And there's no scientific basis for it either, right? Advances in science, especially

DNA sequencing, has confirmed the biblical truth of one race, okay? So Dr.

Venter, who was involved in sequencing the human genome, when they had done this and other scientists at the

NIH, they put together a draft of the entire sequence of the human genome and they unanimously declared there's only one race, the human race.

Did you know that if you look at any two humans, regardless of their ethnicity, they only differ by 0 .1

% in their DNA, 0 .1. That's pretty amazing. And if you ask what percentage of your genes is reflected in your external appearance, so things that we would say lead to the idea of different ethnicity, the basis by which we talk about race, the answer seems to be in the range of 0 .01%,

okay? So it's a very, very tiny part of the DNA that even leads to those differences. And I think slowly but surely, modern scientists are beginning to change their views on this and realize, especially in the genetic era that we live in, that there is only one race.

In this article, they said the genes that explain the phenotypic differences, and that would be things on the outside, only represent a tiny part of our genome, confirming once again that the concept of race from a genetic standpoint has been abolished.

National Geographic had this as a special issue in 2018. And one of the things that they said in there, again, talking about this idea that there are not separate races, there is only one race, they talked about Craig Venter and the work he had done in sequencing the human genome and said, the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.

And so, we need to remember that and we need to take that term racist and we need to throw it in the trash can because there are not multiple races.

There is only one race, the human race. And we, as Christians especially, need to help people understand this because only when we start with God's word, do we have a basis and understanding for that and we can show people too how science supports and confirms what

God's word says. Now, I want to hope you know about a few of the resources that we have at Answers in Genesis to help you delve a little more deeply into this, okay?

There's no way for me to cover all of this in a half an hour and so, I want to hope you know some of those resources. One Race, One Blood is an excellent book by Ken Ham and his friend,

Dr. Charles Ware. He's an African -American man dealing with this issue from both a biblical standpoint as well as a scientific standpoint and helping us understand this issue more deeply.

We also have a small booklet called The Biblical Answer to Racism. So, a great thing to give people to get them thinking about these issues and talking about these.

The Tower of Babel is another, is a great DVD on this particular issue looking at by Bode Hodge about what happened.

Where did all these people go when they scattered from the Tower of Babel? And he is really an expert in this area and he also has a book by the same name on that topic and that'll really give you a lot of really great detailed information about that.

We also have a book for this issue on this issue for kids, right? One Blood for Kids, What the

Bible Says About Race and we really want to help kids to be able to understand this issue as well. Let's raise a generation of children that are not racist, that don't see these differences, right?

I mean, they see that there are differences but they understand that we are one race and we have a board book too for even younger children to help them understand that called

All God's Children. Also, if you'd like to find out more about eugenics and abortion and Planned Parenthood and how all of that's connected,

I do have a DVD called Eugenics, Abortion, and Genetics in our Sanctity of Life box set.

You can also buy the DVD individually that gives you a lot more information on that. Well, I am out of time today and I want to thank you for having me at this conference and being able to share on this very, very important issue and I hope that you'll find this information useful and again, if you want to find out more information on any of these resources or this particular topic, please check out answersingenesis .org.

Thank you. Well, I hope you've enjoyed these sessions of the G1 Conference and I look forward to next year when we'll be able to gather in person and these conferences are to equip each of us so that when we go out and share the

Word of God that we stand tall and that we're confident that the Word of God is trustworthy. So, I want to thank all of our speakers.

I want to thank the tech team, William Jessup University for letting us use this space. I'd like to just pray over you and pray together.

So, let us pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you, Lord, that you've given us this time together to consider your

Word, to know that it is true, Lord, I pray that every single person has been blessed by you, by these speakers, and that your

Word, Lord, has been written into their hearts. Lord, may you use us in mighty ways for your kingdom.