Genesis Apologetics Refuting Evolution - Understanding the Basics

Just before I get started, I just wanted to try to underscore the purpose of our entire ministry. Our goal is we want people to be so confident in their faith that they will share Jesus Christ. That's really what it's all about.

It's not about being the smartest person in the room or one-upping somebody on social media. It really is about having the confidence in your faith and in the Word of God that you will share. Amen? All right.

So.

Also.

The Deinosuchus Presentation and the Ministry’s Purpose

What does this have to do with my presentation? Absolutely nothing. We had hundreds of kids in here today, and we gave presentations on it. But I will show you what it is so that you're not going, when's he going to talk about Mr. Bones?

Okay. So here he comes. His official name is Deinosuchus, and he is what a scientist called a super croc. Now, why do we care about big alligators? Okay. Well, first of all, was he big? Absolutely. Over 40 feet long.

You can see some of you. That is a regular alligator head. That is his head. He's massive. Now, the reason that we care and got a sample was that we believe, and some other scientists, this is a really good candidate for Leviathan.

That's in the book of? Job. Good. All right. Now, let's get to our topic. So who are we? We are three guys. That's it. Right there. Us. About eight years ago, got together and said, you know, let's start a apologetics ministry because we like to get hate mail and get people to, no, actually, it was all about trying to, we were looking around and we're seeing the students that are struggling in their faith, and we said there's got to be something that we can do to help.

So God took two guys and a PowerPoint, I like to say, and just started blessing our ministry and opening new doors for us. So if you're wondering, we are friends and colleagues with some of the more established ministries, Answers in Genesis, ICR, Creation Ministries International, and this guy is a personal friend, Mike Riddle with Creation Training Initiative.

Okay, and then finally, one more thing about us, mainly what we do, as I run around, I retired from my full-time job in September and I run around to schools and I teach students about creation in the Bible and science.

We also have conferences, we have a social media platform, YouTube, we have different things that we do.

Okay,.

Why Evolution Matters for Faith and the Church

Why does the subject of evolution matter at all? I get that a lot. It's like, isn't it all about Jesus? Yes, it is about Jesus. So there was a study done about ten years ago, and what they did is they interviewed about 1 ,200 people in their 20s that had left the church and said, why did you leave?

And they got all kinds of data and information, but based upon that study, they came up with a terrifying prediction. Based upon that study, they said that two out of three kids that are in church programs are going to walk away from their faith when they hit college.

Two out of three.

I don't know about you, but that wrecks my heart, okay? So when they started looking at the data and trying to figure out what were some of the causes given or reasons, first is this, surprise, surprise, people not walking to talk, hypocrisy.

I do my best to follow Jesus. I'm a broken sinner who found grace, but we try, right? The second is, of course, when they get to college, they get all kinds of temptations that they've never had before and if they're not equipped for it or have a firm foundation and a resolve before they get there, that's another reason.

This is the one that really got me, was the belief that science has disproven the Bible. So let's review. You're kind of hung up with the church because of the personality things and the drama and you got to see the ugly side of church life and then you go to college and you're away from mom and dad for the first time and you get all these crazy party invitations and then you get a professor who says, hey Johnny, hey Susie, all that stuff that your parents taught you about the Bible, well, you can chalk that right up there with with other things that we know now aren't true, like Santa Claus.

Anyway, moving on. See the little kids in the back? Oh, did I say that? All right, so I see some of the high schoolers going, what? All right. So this is what it's going to be like for the remaining part of our session.

So grab, hang on to your seat. Here we go. So is evolution a scientific fact? Well, we have to kind of back up and answer this before we can answer this question. So the first thing to know is there are two different types of science, okay?

The first type is called observational. The second is historical. So observational, how many have done experiments? How many have done the Mentos experiment where you put the Mentos in a Pepsi bottle and watch it go kaboom?

How many did that in their garage? Okay, I didn't know it was gonna go that high. Okay, give me a break. Anyway, after I cleaned up the mess, I vowed never to do that again. So that is operational science to where you do experiments, you come up with an idea, sometimes a very bad idea, and then you test it to see if it's true, and based upon the results, you modify your idea.

Now, this is where we get drones, planes, trains, computers, and, you know, all kinds of fun stuff. That is observational science. It operates in the here and now, and here's the thing. That drone doesn't care if you believe in God.

If you know how to build a drone, good for you. Observational science, your worldview, what you think about God and the universe and the Bible, really doesn't matter that much because you're dealing with the physical properties of the universe.

All right. Historical science is where you dig up fossils, and you come up with all kinds of ideas about where they came from, what creatures made them, where the creatures that made them came from. But since we can't go back in time, we're very limited on what we can test directly.

I mean, you can weigh a fossil, you can measure it, you can do a chemical analysis on it, you can look at the anatomy and come up with some pretty good guesstimations about it, but when it comes to where did life come from, you are dealing with speculation, and guess what?

Your worldview, what you think about the Bible and God, has everything to do with your ideas, which, by the way, aren't testable. So, the bottom, that's why some people can look at the same exact bones.

That's RD, by the way, one of the latest poster children for Apeman, and somebody who doesn't believe in God will look at that and say, hmm, that looks like an ape man to me, or an ape woman, whereas somebody else will say, nope, that's just an extinct ape.

So, the whole point of this, anytime you hear somebody say, science is proven, stop and ask yourself, what kind of science are we talking about? Is it very subjective, historical science, or is it something that we can test now?

Okay, back to the question. That was a long detour, but I thought it was necessary. Is evolution scientific fact? So, what I tell students is when somebody walks up to you and says, do you believe in evolution?

Please don't say no.

Did he say that? Yeah, he said that. The reason is, they're probably thinking about something else. If you say no, they're probably going to think you're not a very smart person and walk away, and that's not what we want.

We want conversations with non-believers. We want to have those conversations. So, instead of saying, when somebody says, do you believe in evolution? What I encourage the students to say is, what do you mean by that?

Are you talking about adaptation, genetic variation? Are you talking about natural selection? Are you talking about Darwinian, goo to the zoo to you?

Evolution.

Because they're very different. But the word is used for all of them, like in the English language, that's true of a lot of things, like bat. What's a bat? What's a one-word definition for bat? A baseball bat, right?

Furry little creature, or you bat your eyes.

Now, if you get those mixed up, you get a bat in the eyes or something furry stuck up your nose. Okay, so it's very important that we, you know, define terms. Okay, so here's what we're going to do. We are going to start with those two.

Adaptation, Genetic Variation, and Selective Breeding

So, virtually all scientists agree that all the different types of dogs came from a wolf-like ancestor, kind of like that guy there. But, last time I checked, there's like three or four hundred different breeds of dogs, depending on who you want to listen to, because people fight about what's a breed.

How did we get so many? Well, dogs are kind of a special example. We got a lot of things at play. Adaptation, genetic variation, and selective breeding. So, now here's what's interesting. After God, do you think that God knew that the fall was going to occur?

Duh!

Okay, so God knew that the animals would need some abilities, the ability to adapt and survive. So, when he said be fruitful and multiply, he gave living creatures the ability to adapt to their surroundings within limits, okay?

So, there's been a lot of really good work done recently by ICR, and they're studying in the lab, how do creatures adapt? And, they've come up with a new term called continuous environmental tracking.

So, how many of you have heard of the self-driving cars? How many of you heard that Tesla's self-driving car ran into an airplane the other day? And, then kept driving. So, we got a hit-and-run automatic car.

So, already we have criminal cars. Where's this world coming to? So, how do these things work? Well, first of all, they have, it's, they use the same process called continuous environmental tracking. So, the first thing they do is they put a bajillion sensors on these things.

They can tell how fast they're going, how close they are to the surroundings, what the pavement conditions are, what the weather conditions are. All these different things they are sensing because it's important to know what to do.

Excuse me. So, anyway. So, let's just kind of go through an example of how this works. So, let's say that this car is driving along, and it's tailgating. So, the sensor says, whoops, I am too close. It feeds that information to a computer that says, yep, yep, yep, you are too close.

So, the next thing that happens is it applies the brake, and the car slows down, and the distance increases, right? So, that particular need is over, so that it goes back into the sensing mode, and that car will continue to do that until it reaches its destination.

That's how they work. They're constantly monitoring and making changes. But, here's the point. The changes that they made are what the programmers put into the computer that runs the car. That's how it knows what to do for different things.

Here's what's interesting. Animals do the same thing. Okay, let's look at a few examples. Here's the arctic fox. This particular one is called Amorph, and he's got some interesting abilities. So, he will actually detect the length of day, and the temperature, and based upon that, when it changes season, he'll process that information, and change his coat from light to dark, or from dark to light.

Obviously, if it's snowing outside, it has a big advantage to have a white coat, and in the summer, that would be a big disadvantage, so. And, it's going to repeat. It does this year, after year, after year, and he's not alone.

There are other creatures that do the same thing. This is one of my favorites. Mexican blind tetra. Who's heard of the blind cave fish? So, what's really interesting? Okay, somebody. So, what's interesting, and they found out by doing this work in a lab, when they are eggs, the eggs measure the conductivity of the water, and depending on if it's low conductivity, they will actually inhibit the amount of protein that's used to make eyes, and instead, channel that energy towards something different.

Now, if you take those eggs, and you were to put them in different water, the fish would have had eyes.

Wow.

So, that is an example of continuous environmental tracking. They're detecting, processing the information, responding, and repeating. Where did.

Those eggs.

Learn to be so smart? Now, we're talking about historical science all of a sudden, right? So, we saw something in a lab. Evolutionists will say, it was billions of years of evolution. As a creationist, I will say, God did that.

God told that little thing what to do, okay? See how that works? So, you can cross over when you're looking at different animals, and different types of science. All right, one of my absolute favorite.

This is the crucian carp, and he has a friend, Knot, called the northern pike, who loves to eat him. Not a good friend. Your mother warned you about your friends, right? Okay, so, now, what's interesting is, after he eats, what goes in must come out, right?

Okay, we're all adults here, and so, what happens is, as it passes through the body, the adult carp that are in that area detect that odor that is in that water now, and they, within 24 hours, start to morph into that.

Now, they don't change in 24 hours, but they start the changes in their bodies to become that. So, Mr. Pike is going to have to either eat them when they're younger, or pick on another fish, okay? Again, detecting the surroundings, processing the information, responding, repeat.

And, of course, deer mice. How many of you like mice?

Poor mice. Nobody likes mice, okay?

Some reason people like rats. Anyway, I digress. So, deer mice have an interesting trait. The ones living in the prairies have shorter tails than the ones that live in the forest. You go, yeah, okay, so?

Well, if you swap them, if you kidnap the little guys, and you put them in the other place, within a generation or two, the tails will change. Because long tails are an advantage in a forest environment for climbing trees and balance.

How did it know to do that, okay? So, again, there's that process. Detect, process, respond, and repeat.

Okay.

One really important thing to remember about adaptation. Those mice are still the carp are still, okay, so it is limited to within what the scientists call a created kind. You don't see fish.

Transforming into bats.

All right.

In fact, there's some scary smart people doing genetic studies and DNA and all that fun stuff that are trying to determine what the biblical kinds would be. It's kind of complicated, but you can get the simple part.

Dog kind, cat kind, so on and so forth.

All right, back to the dogs.

So, now that we know that they have this mechanism for the adaptation, and they go to different environments, certain things get switched on and off, and then they interbreed with other animals that are having the same experience, and pretty soon you have lots of dogs, but they're still just.

Dogs, okay?

Now, selective breeding. Everybody say hi to Rosie. That was my little Rosie. She's in heaven now, but how do you get a Rosie? Well, you go, and you go on the internet, and you find a breeder who finds two little schnauzers, and they get married, and then they have a baby.

This is church, right? Okay, so then they get, they actually, well, so they will produce these little tiny beautiful little toy schnauzers, and they do it.

Again, and again, and again, and again.

Now, during COVID, people started getting bored and creative, right? So, they started, you know, trying some new breeds. So, we're gonna play a little game called, Who's Your Daddy? Okay?

All right.

So, your job, what I'm gonna do here is, you see the numbers, the ones across, the numbered ones, one, two, three, and four, are the parents. The ones on the bottom are the babies, and we're gonna go through one by one, and then I'm gonna highlight it, and then I'll give you the opportunity to show your wisdom about dogs, and yell out the numbers of the dogs.

You ready? All right, who made that cute little girl? Okay, ready? Yeah, one, two, three, yell it out. All right, all right, all right, lots of opinions there. That is a golden doodle. How many got that right?

Okay, a few. Oh, man, lost a lot already. All right, let's, I believe in the God of second chances. We'll give you a second chance. Who made that cute little guy? Who's your daddy? One, two, all right, all right, and it is a labradoodle.

Okay.

Okay, what about this little princess here? Who's your daddy? On the count of three, one, two, three, go. That is a cockapoo. How many got all three right? How many got two out of three right? All right, you get free resources on the table as you leave, okay, anything you want.

Okay, now sometimes, you can take selective reading way too far, okay? Just a note of caution.

I think I like this little guy. I love this one. You know, you could always compromise and breed them together. Dobrowawa, know what I mean? I've never seen a breed like this. Nor have I. I don't know what to make of it, frankly.

It's unsettling. It's disturbing to look at it directly. How did this dog get past regions? That's what I want to know. I'm Sarah McLachlan. Will you help these misunderstood animals? I don't like the fact that it's looking this way.

Save yourselves!

Can you imagine?

Okay, obviously somebody really creative and talented put that together, and they've got a lot of talent, and that was pretend, but that's not. These are the winners of the world's ugliest dog contest.

Hey, think I know where George Lucas got the idea for Yoda. What do you think, huh? Okay, the result of all this is we now have lots and lots and lots and lots of dogs. But they are still just dogs. Good.

I think I'm going to turn myself down a little bit here, so I don't blast your eardrums out. Okay. So we've talked about genetic variation and adaptation. It's time to talk about natural selection, so these little cute little things called not, they were called woolly mammoths.

They lived, a lot of them lived up north during the Ice Age. I heard from Patrick that there was one that was discovered not too far from here. Anyway, so these guys lived by the millions. There were millions of them during the Ice Age, and they're not with us anymore.

Okay, so what happened? Well, at the end of the Ice Age, most of them were wiped out by dust storms, because when the glaciers retreated, they left a lot of silt behind. And then you still, the earth was still settling down after the flood, so you had a lot of hurricanes going on, and they would actually bury these little beasties in dirt, in that silt.

How do I know that? Because on the intact ones, they have found the silt in their lungs and in their bodies, and they're buried standing up in it. So anyway, so now some of them said, I'm out of here, and they started moving down.

Now, I'm from Sacramento, California, and when I was working as a project manager for a utility, we actually found one during an excavation for a power plant. Talk about delaying a project, okay? Anyway, so some of them went south to try to survive.

Now, here's the problem. If you're living in Reading with a fur coat on in the summer, good luck, okay? So it's going to get way too hot. So this animal, these animals have three choices. They can either leave, go somewhere else, okay, that's easiest.

They can quickly adapt if they're able to. In this case, maybe they were able to lose all those layers of fat and fur and everything, or they're going to.

Die, okay?

So in the case of these guys, they died out. However, their cousins are doing just fine in some of the hottest places on the planet, so. So one thing about natural selection, you'll see it in the books, and we'll talk about more of this in a moment.

They tend to pretend it's this superpower, like Mother Nature, who just sits on her throne and decides who lives and who dies. That's not it at all. What it is, it is the ability, it's the elimination of creatures that are unable to relocate or adapt.

They simply can't adapt quickly enough or enough to survive. So here are some quotes from, guess what? Textbooks. Okay, in the science section, here we go. Here are, when you asked about, you know, so looking at bats, bats evolved from small four-legged mammals probably resembling shrews.

Selection, who? Selection simply retooled the four legs into wings, so it's got new legs, it's got different weight, shape, muscles, nervous system, and bones for flying. So basically, we've got a whole new creature.

Now, this guy says, I know that sounds impossible, but we have bats, and there is no God, so therefore it happened, okay? Yeah, timeout, okay? When we, to convert a little shrew into something like a bat would take, it's a brand new creature we're talking about.

We're not talking about a few modifications, okay? So what you will see when you ask certain people about it, you'll say, well, how did that happen? How did, how did natural selection do that? Here's what they say.

These features appeared, emerged, arose, gave rise to, evolved itself. Here's my favorites. Became a miracle of evolution. Now, that's scientific. Or was lucky. If these weren't in textbooks, they would be funny, but this, these are the scientific answers to how it did it.

So some questions to ask in this case. Since bats are very complicated, where would nature get the information to make all those new features like wings and all that? It's like, it can't. How would a creature that is half bat and half shrew make it?

So, let's see. It no longer has four legs. It's got these two sort of wings. So it can't fly. It can't run. You know what this creature is called? Lunch. Okay, it just, it just, just, there's no way that it's going to be able to do that.

How did echolocation evolve? If you've ever studied things like bats or dolphins, you know that they have these really sophisticated systems that we use to create sonar in our submarines and different things.

They're able to echolocate. How does that just create itself? And the answer is, it can't. And finally, if you study the fossil record, you will discover that there are no pre-bats. The bats appear in the fossil record fully formed and fully functional as bats.

So, some more important notes about natural selection. Nature does not have a mind. So, I have colleagues that get kind of grumpy with me when I even teach the words natural selection because it is really a misnomer.

Nature is not deciding. It's the animal's ability to adapt or not adapt that determines whether it survives. Okay, natural selection does not create or form new creatures. And again, it really is all about the creature.

Come up for air. We have talked about adaptation, genetic variation, and natural selection. Adaptation is, please read that. Give my voice a break. Go. What is it? Thank you. And genetic variation? And natural selection?

Oh, done. I like that. Thank you. I catch my breather here. Okay. Here's why earlier I said, when somebody asks you, do you believe in evolution, please ask them what they mean by that. Because these have all been called evolution and they are observable scientific fact.

We can do observational science and see these things occurring. So, if you mean by evolution.

This,.

Then yes, I do believe in evolution. It is God's ability for animals to, that he gave, excuse me, it is the God-given ability for animals to be able to adapt to their surroundings. All right, let's talk about Darwinian evolution.

Darwinian Evolution as a Belief System

What is it? Well, we asked the national biology teachers and here's what they said. Blah-ba-dee-blah-ba-dee-blah-ba-dee-blah-ba-dee-blah-ba-dee-blah. All right, let's make it simple. Time plus chance equals you.

And everything else.

Okay, one day, somehow, living chemicals somehow formed the first living, or excuse me, non-living chemicals formed the first living creature that eventually got bored of being in the water and crawled out of the water and became lots of other creatures.

Some of them, like whales, got bored about being out of water and decided to go back in the water. So, that is Darwinian evolution and it is all historical science. Okay. So, here we go. There it is. We succeeded.

We created the first living creature. Scientists have been trying that for so many years to create life from non-life. And here's the thing that's just kind of comical, actually. If they succeed, they will have proven intelligent design.

Think about that. If we ever succeed in creating life, all that they've ever proven is that really smart people using bazillions of dollars worth of equipment can somehow make life. So far, it hasn't happened.

You don't see mud puddles springing to life new creatures. Okay, it just doesn't happen. Now, when Darwin, who, by the way, didn't invent evolution, he just made it popular. When he looked at a human cell under a microscope, all he could see was a blob of jello.

And he said, well, that looks pretty simple. I could see how that could make itself. Well, now that we have better instruments, we can look inside the cell and see it's crazy complicated. They have been compared to cities, major cities.

They have transportation cities, or excuse me, transportation systems, manufacturing capabilities, all kinds of things going on inside these tiny, tiny little cells. And it all has to work together. Or guess what?

The cell dies. So, it sure looks complicated for it to be able to create itself. But, this is what we see. We see this in textbooks. All life came from one single cell or, you know, creature over millions or billions of years.

So, when you ask people who believe in this theory, how does it work, they'll say random mutations. So, what happens is, when two creatures reproduce, then the offspring will have a random mutation. And then, the ones that have good mutations live, and the ones that have bad mutations don't.

And it just takes lots and lots and lots of time. So, the question is, can random mutations add the kind of information we need to make new features like wings and legs and noses and eyes and toes, okay?

So, you can find quotes like this one. This is Lee Spetner, PhD, physics, MIT, smart guy. You know, people like this have studied it, and they've tried to find it, and they cannot find an example. Here's another one.

Royal Truman, PhD in chemistry. So, they have yet to show to where a mutation produced new information, new features, and yet they'll still hang on to this idea that creatures can make new creatures all by themselves.

See, what evolution needs is information. It needs to go from goo to you. It needs a lot of different information on how to do this. Okay, where are the men in the room? Have you ever built something without reading the instructions?

Okay. Yeah, I always looked at instructions as a troubleshooting guide for when it doesn't work, right? Okay, so, you know what I'm talking about. If you ever build anything, you know that if we don't stop and read the plan and how this thing's supposed to work, then it doesn't go very well, okay?

So, can these cells get information on how to do that? And the answer is no. A lot of scary smart people have studied this, and they're saying there is no known process in nature that would provide the information to go from goo to zoo to you.

By the way, there was a evolutionist, an astronomer, and mathematician named Sir Fred Hoyle, and I guess Fred was kind of bored one day. So, he sat down, and he started doing math.

I only do math when I'm bored.

Anyway, so, what he did is he started doing probability analysis going, okay, so if I have decisions, what are the odds of going from goo to zoo to you? What are the mathematical probabilities? The same as throwing a six on a dice five million times in a row.

The same as having a tornado tear through a junkyard and create an airplane. How many want to ride on that airplane?

No, thank you.

Next. See, these other things, adaptation, genetic variation, natural selection, are reality. They are scientific fact. We can study those. We can know that they're true. But they're not the same as Darwinian evolution, and yet people call them by the same name.

See, those are all testable, repeatable, whereas this is a belief system. Darwinian evolution is really a philosophy that adopted by people that try to explain everything they see without God. And it makes me sad.

They're not enemies in my mind. They are people that are lost, and they're just, they're lost. They are to be looked at as people that we can hopefully reach someday.

All right.

By the way, do all real scientists believe in Darwinian evolution, according to Bill Nye, the science guy? Yeah, yeah, I don't know. Well, on this website, there are over 1 ,000 PhD scientists who, on this website, have signed a petition saying that they don't believe in Darwinian evolution.

Now, here's what's interesting about it. They did that at great peril to their careers. If they are brave enough to sign a petition that's online like this, they feel very strongly about it.

All right.

Evolutionary tree of life?

No.

What we should be teaching people is the creation orchard of life. God created things according to their kinds, and then they had the ability to adapt, and that's what we see today. So it's no wonder that in Romans we read that when you look at what's been created, people are without excuse, but hang on here.

Does that mean we should do this? I've been guilty. So what does God say about it?

Okay.

God says, and this is my life verse, by the way, be in your hearts, but in your hearts, revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have, but do so with.

So I want to unpack this for just a second. We've got a few minutes here left. Always be ready to give an answer. That means that somebody is asking you a question. Ah, so if you are living like Jesus, you are loving like Jesus, you are kind like Jesus, you are honest as you could be, you're hardworking, you are clearly different.

That's when somebody will probably ask you that question. Hey, now my daughter, when she was in high school, this girl came up to her and said,.

What is wrong with you?

She's like, whoa, lady, tic-tac. She said, well, what do you mean? Why are you so stinking nice? Oh, because Jesus said I had to be.

Who?

See how that worked? She was different. So much so that somebody who was not being nice to her asked her a question. Now she's ready to hear about Jesus. And by the way, if you have questions about evolution and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I have done my backing, I have done my training so I can help with those too.

So that is my hope is that we can equip students to help turn the tide of all these kids walking.

Away from their faith.

Here are some suggestions. Number one, please remember, it is all about Jesus. I challenge you sometime to try to explain the gospel to somebody without mentioning anything in Genesis.

Good luck.

After all, what gives God the authority to be in charge? Well, he's the creator.

Where is that?

Genesis.

Okay, where is the fall?

Genesis.

Where is the first promise of Jesus coming?

Genesis.

Where is, you know, the first man and woman?

Genesis.

So you see what I'm saying here? There are so many things that are really important that if they undermine somebody's faith could affect their relationship with Jesus. Number two, well, let's be real best we can.

We don't have to be perfect, but let's always try to follow Christ and own our mistakes. Number three, let's realize that God's word is the truth. Dan and I, and you'll be hearing from him in just a few minutes.

It is so exciting to see students' faces change, especially high schoolers and college students, when they all of a sudden realize they can trust the whole Bible. It changes everything. Now they have confidence to where they will go, and they're more likely to share their faith.

It changes everything in terms of just your overall faith. You don't have to be so scared about certain parts of the Bible that you'll ignore them. All right, last, it is a good time to be a creationist because of that thing called the internet.