Live with Dr. Jason Lisle from Colorado Springs

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00:04

I went and bought one of those electrical fly swatters and they weren't worth it.

00:40

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. We are coming to you live and in not a whole lot of color.

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I mean, our shirts are colorful, but neither Dr. Lyle or I are the most melanated people on the planet.

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And look at my last name. I mean, I am dead any direction you go. But we are coming to you live from Colorado Springs, Colorado in the

01:04

Alpha Omega Ministries Mobile Command Center, whatever that's called. I am just extremely proud of the fact that I have now driven about 800 miles on interstate highways on I -25.

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Do you know there's some horrible construction? There is a place where they make you go over into the other lanes.

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They've divided the folks coming south. So you're taking the fast lane.

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It's one lane, very narrow. And to get there, you have to go down the at an angle like this.

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Now, when you're pulling one of these things with a truck, that ain't no fun.

01:54

OK, because the trailer isn't getting to the down part until after.

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So you get you do this number. Oh, that was fun. Anyways, I'm here. It's working.

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I haven't knocked anything off of it yet. And so we're excited about that.

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And I am joined by Dr. Jason Lyle of the

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Biblical Science Institute, who happens to live in these parts as well. And we have had

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Jason on the program a number of times. You've been on Sheologians. That makes you even more famous than being on The Dividing Line.

02:30

Summer will bake me something for having said that. I imagine some brownies or something eventually, gluten free probably.

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But so we've had you on the program, but we've never been able to do anything in person. Now, we have done things in person.

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In fact, I've told the story that, you know, the primary reason

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I have to have a storage room is so I can have a cool place to store my telescopes.

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And you do realize that's completely your fault. I do. You do. You do realize that we've told the story before we were in Dallas with Amelia Ramos.

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And we were doing a bunch of Christian worldview stuff. I think you were doing, did you do your presuppositional thing at that one?

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I'm not, I don't remember. I can't remember these things either. But we had a

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Q &A. I remember that. We had a Q &A and I was underdressed. You all were making me look bad. And we got done about,

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I don't know, four or something in the afternoon. And all of a sudden you said, hey, want to do some stargazing?

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Now, it's been a long day. We had spoken the night before. And I'm like, oh, OK. I mean, all right.

03:46

So we went over to somebody's house and you drove your car sort of on an embankment behind somebody's fence.

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In fact, didn't the cops come along and make you move your car eventually? They did. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So is that the first time that it ever happened?

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Yes. Oh, OK. So I was with Dr. Islau when he started down the road toward whatever it is he's headed towards.

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But you set up, yours is a 16 inch? 14 inch. 14 inch. 14 inch

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Dobsonian. And now I've got to tell you, folks, I hope

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I'm not revealing secrets here, but I had never seen one of these things before. And I was very impressed with its go to function, where you could tell it to go here and it turns there and things like that.

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But you really, you know, and you really impressed me was about two years ago when you drove up to Evergreen and you brought the same telescope.

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I had my eight inch me. It's a nice scope, but something went wonky with the motor on your telescope.

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Didn't slow him down. It was just about, OK, so it's not going to move there on its own.

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I know where it's supposed to be pointing. So it's just like, OK, I think it's about right there. And I'm just sort of like,

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OK, yeah, all right. So that first night you you showed us you you obviously had a priority list of start with stuff and then move to the cool stuff.

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I figured that out. I figured that out later on. Yeah. And so we're looking at Jupiter, both

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Jupiter and Saturn were visible that night, as I recall. And this guy's sitting here going,

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OK, this is this moon and that's some of the characteristics of that moon and this is that moon. And I'm sitting here going, what?

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And with a 14 inch, you can you can get some resolution regarding the bands on Jupiter and stuff like that quite easily.

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And and even the rings on Saturn. You kept Saturn toward the end. Of course. Yeah, that's the that's the highlight.

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But that wasn't the last thing you showed us. This is maybe you didn't know this, but this is what got me is you showed us

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Alberia. Mm hmm. And I was getting tired. I really was.

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And then you said, I think you all would really like seeing Alberia. OK, fine. Now, actually, I had asked to see

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Andromeda. I really want to see. Go ahead. Yeah. But if you can get him faster,

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I can. That's great. And so you you showed us Andromeda. And that blew me away.

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I'm sitting here going. And you're talking about how fast we're heading toward it and and all the rest is fun stuff.

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And but then afterwards, the last thing we looked at was Alberia. And I've, of course, sent you

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I sent you notice what the background of my Alberia is, is my shot of Alberia.

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I mean, I took that shot. And if you've never seen

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Alberia, if you live like in a massively light polluted city, I feel for you.

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OK, my heart goes out to you. You have missed some of the most beautiful stuff of God's creation.

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And, you know, I can't tell you how many Christians I talk to. And they just sort of look at me like, oh, that's up in the sky.

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You know, and it's just and I don't I don't know how to communicate to somebody.

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Yeah. To say. You kind of have to see it. You have to see it and you have to see it in something other than a picture or something on a computer.

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There's something about seeing it with your own eyes. I know. Even though you're looking through an instrument. Yeah. It's still because through a telescope, you still have to.

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There is that working of your eye you have to do to get that right focus and stuff like that. It's hard to explain how to do it.

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You try to explain to us, it's still something you've just got to do on your own. But still, once you see it,

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I you've done this far more times than I have. But I've given a couple of star shows for some church groups.

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And I love like when you do the the.

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Oh, good grief. Nebula, Ryan's Nebula. Oh, yeah. And especially if you've got a filter in that makes the color pop and someone walks up, it's sort of been a little in the nose for the evening.

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And all of a sudden they look through that and they back up with their eyes.

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What is that? That's been staring at you your whole life.

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I love I love the reaction you get out of it. And kids, kids are either just immediately taken or they want to go play their video games.

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One of the two. There's there's almost no in between. It's amazing. But there we were out along some road and it really wasn't the darkest sky area.

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It wasn't. But you can still see some deep, deep sky objects. And so when

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I got back, I said, all right, I'm going to get a six inch. It's not motorized, but it does have the computer on it so that it knows where you're moving and moving it type thing.

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So it is a go to. It's just not motorized. And they're not all that expensive. And if I use it and I stick with it, then

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I can get a bigger, a bigger scope. And so I did. And so just just last.

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When was that conjunction with Saturn and Jupiter? That was just last December 21st. OK, so so we there was a

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Christmas party at our church at a very a fellow who's pretty well off.

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And so sitting you'll be so proud of sitting in front of his this person's house.

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I had my eight inch me and I had the six inch set up so that everybody could watch the conjunction and see the conjunction.

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And that's a made of a lot of them go on. But I can still tell the difference between the two.

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Yeah, they weren't actually right. I realize that's the first time in human history since we've had telescopes.

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Yes. In that close. Right. Right. Right. Oh, man. It's not going to happen again for 60 years. So, yeah,

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I think you and I are pretty much out of it. I hope to not. Well, if you are, hopefully you still see it, because that'd be a bummer to not be able to see that.

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So anyway. So getting into all that stuff was all this guy's fault. And and he will take the blame for it, whether he wants it or not.

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But it's it's been great. And we're not it's not looking good for us to get to do much.

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It's been looking better. We might. And you never know. You never know. It was there's smoke, the smoke, the haze.

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Wow. I could barely even see the mountains when I was coming in. It's like where the mountains go. This is Colorado and there's no mountains around.

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Anyway, we're going to actually be speaking tomorrow, tomorrow starting four o 'clock,

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I think, when the event begins. OK, and we're both speaking twice. No, you're speaking twice.

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I'm speaking once. You sure about that? I'm sure about that. Oh, OK. All right. I prepared one talk.

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Oh, all right. I was I thought I thought we were both speaking twice. But OK. All right. So they're making me do more of the work.

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That's as it should be. Make the visitor do the work. OK, I get it. Anyways, I don't have this stuff in front of me.

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Do you can you do you have the where people can go or what's in Hope Chapel?

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That's that's my home church. And you can look at Hope Chapel, Colorado Springs on the website. That'll get you all the information.

11:36

Yeah. Yeah. And starting. Well, I'll just ask him to speak up a little bit, but no, because the microphone is the computer.

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So. All right. OK, well, you know me, I yell. So and he's he's much more scholars don't yell, not as much as Richard like them to.

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So anyway, so we'll be speaking tomorrow evening and anybody in the

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Colorado Springs area. You're more than welcome. And then I'm going to be heading up to Denver and I will be preaching at Redemption Hills Church on Sunday morning and Boulder Bible Church Sunday evening.

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For those of you who want to are in that particular area and really if you live sort of between the two, you could go to all of them if you wanted to.

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It's not that far of a drive. So so but we're up here in Colorado for a while.

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I'm on my way next week up to Idaho, where I will speak so many times between Thursday and Monday morning that I can't even remember all of them.

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But that's just how it goes when you're up there. I'll also be speaking. I'll be stopping in Frenchtown, Montana or Wyoming.

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Sorry, Montana. It's on the website. We have a wonderful calendar there with the address and everything else.

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And then I'll be speaking in Las Vegas, Nevada on the way back home, assuming that I have not gone through a excessively low bridge and taken the top of this off or something like that on the way.

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I'm learning. I am really learning a lot. Now, speaking of learning, there is a book to your left there that I had a fly sitting on it just now that I showed everybody on the dividing line.

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And it's got your name on the front. But I'm probably one of the only people who ever suggested to you about writing a book about that subject as someone who

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I mean, I've been doing fractal art since computer programs started coming out that allowed you to do fractal art and the

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Mandelbrot set and the Julia fractals and all this kind of stuff.

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I would post this kind of stuff and people sort of go, that sort of looks like you came from the 1960s and never escaped.

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It's like you're wearing a tie dye shirt type thing, you know, and it's like, no, there's a whole lot more to it than this.

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But I remember the first time I suggested to it, you said, Yeah, well, am I going to do that? So you had when you did your presentation, and you did one presentation, we had some technical issues.

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And then you did one later on that I think you started to sort of replace the first one with that one had when did the book idea?

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Was that first or second? Well, I've always I've always been interested in fractals.

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I learned about them. I was in high school when I learned about him. I read a book by Roger Penrose, the mathematician called

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The Emperor's New Mind, which in itself would be worthy of discussion is fascinating read. He's exploring the nature of consciousness from his apparently non

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Christian perspective. And he's and he comes through, he discusses different things in nature, could this be the source of consciousness?

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And basically, no, nothing in nature can be the source. And one of the things he discusses is chaos can chaos be the source and he talks about fractals and the

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Mandelbrot set in particular. I thought that's that's fascinating. And back then I had just a look, you know, a low end

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PC is like an 80286. Oh, yeah, 286, man. Yeah. And so I wrote a little computer program to plot the

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Mandelbrot set. And I was amazed by it. And, you know, as especially as I zoom in on some of these sections and see the incredible beauty of it.

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And back then it took, of course, I wrote it in basic, I didn't, I wasn't a real good programmer back then. I've gotten a little better over the years.

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But I wrote a program to do it. And some of these plots, it would take over 24 hours for them to render.

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And then I would print them out because then that's it. There was no way to save and keep it. And that was back in the time, you know, there's before the internet.

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So obviously, this was back in a time where you couldn't just download somebody else's program. There were BBS systems.

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And I have access to those. Goodness, you are a BBS guy. Yeah, yeah. See, I was on the

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Mormon Echo Bible Echo. I was doing the theological stuff. You were out geeking out on math stuff.

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Yeah, okay. Yeah. And there were some BBS systems. But but generally, back in those days, if you wanted the program to do something, you had to write it.

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So I wrote my own and it was inefficient, but it got the job done. And lately, I've been able to speed things up,

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I've learned better computer languages, C sharp and things like that, or the new programs in C sharp, it's fast. It's optimized for the

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Mandelbrot set. But I've always thought they were fascinating. Oh, yeah. Oh, it's everyone that I've ever directed to your presentation on it has just been blown away by it.

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They they really found it to be fascinating, even though I think some folks are like, cool, but I'm really not sure what

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I just I just saw, you know, but the mathematically minded are pretty blown away by it.

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Now, for me, look, all the color stuff is just simply assigning values to numbers and stuff like that.

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Um, but I have always been absolutely fascinated with color.

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I mean, if you're familiar with the impressionist painter Claude Monet, Monet is just one of my favorites, because the color that he, he was able to produce.

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And some of his when you zoom in on some of his paintings, it's like, oh, that looks that looks like my fractal art really, really does.

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And so I'm not so much the math part as I am the output, you know, what you end up seeing, but still, that chaos stuff.

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Remember, Jurassic Park, the discussion of chaos at that time, and, and of course, the illustration that and it that it's true, the direction a butterfly taking off from a branch in Colorado can literally impact where a hurricane strikes in Florida.

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And it's true. And the only way to explain it is through fractal mathematics and the, the, the just the hyper complexity that is found there.

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But it's fascinating, because when you think about it, there was, you see it now.

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But no one before the what, 1980s, right, had any possible way of even knowing, right.

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And so I sort of sit back and go, so why would the

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Lord create something like this, you've had the same thought? Why would the

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Lord create something like this that won't be known, until this time in history?

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And as an apologist, part of my thinking is, we also, you know,

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Darwin didn't understand cellular biology, didn't understand DNA, DNA, and everybody now everybody knows what

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RNA is, mRNA is, for reasons that we won't get into right now.

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But those things, again, just the level of complexity of life, unknown until this period in human history, where you have both the greatest opportunities for the demonstration of truth, as well as the greatest opportunities to attack truth.

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And I sort of wonder if, if, and I'm speculating,

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I'm just trying to apply a biblical worldview, but I just sort of wonder if our knowledge of these things, we didn't, we didn't even know, a hundred years ago, they were still arguing about the puffy things in the sky.

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What in the world are these things? And now we know that they are galaxies as large as our own.

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And there are, you know, thanks to Hubble, who was resurrected a couple weeks ago, as you know.

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You heard about that, right? Yes, I did. Yeah. I figured you would. Yeah. Yeah. They were to get it to work again.

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Yes. Yes. It was, it was brought back to life. And we need it because the new, the new one isn't supposed to be launched till later this year.

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I'm not sure. They keep pushing it back. The James Webb telescope. Yeah. Pushing it back. And it's not serviceable.

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So once the, because Hubble's in earth orbit, so you can, you can swap out components. Right. It's like 80 % new telescope.

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Right. Right. Because it was launched early, late eighties. Late eighties, early nineties. Yeah. Yeah.

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Yeah. With the incorrect lens, they had to put co -star. All the new instruments are built toward the new, the new mirror.

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Right. Right. Curvature. But yeah, the James Webb space telescope is not in earth orbit. It will be put out at the earth. I think it's the L2 Lagrangian point out beyond earth.

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It's not serviceable. Once it goes up, that's it. So pray everything works on the James Webb. Yeah. I did not know that.

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Is that so that it's, has a wider field of view or farther away from, why would they put it?

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Why do that? What's the advantage? Well, you don't have the rapid motion around the earth. So there's that. It does get you beyond things like the moon, things like that.

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I'm not sure if I had made the call, it would be in low earth orbit like the Hubble is. In fact, that was, I remember them discussing that one time at the university was up when

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I was up at Boulder and they were saying, yeah, the Hubble, you know, it's neat because it's serviceable. You can go and you can swap out instruments and the

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James Webb, but it can't do that. So let's pray it works. And it's not upgradeable. Yikes. Wow.

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It's a fine instrument. I expect we'll see some of the data from it, but I'm glad the Hubble is still going because the

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Webb isn't quite a replacement of Hubble. It's, I think it's infrared. So we're not going to get quite the same images.

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I like the Hubble that the Hubble can do visual stuff, stuff that would look, you know, if I was there, that's what it would look like.

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So that's kind of a neat thing about the Hubble. One of many things. So the Webb is just. I think it's infrared. X -ray or.

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I think it's infrared. Only only infrared. Wow. Huh. Well, that's fascinating.

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Well, all this stuff, you know, we now have I have apps on my phone where I and I bet you have the exact same apps and probably more where you can pull down all these different current images of the sun.

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My solar telescope is finally having finally has a use because I bought it right as the minimum was starting.

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And so it's like, sure, it's going to look like it did yesterday. There's nothing up there.

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But now there's now there's a whole lot more to be looking at as far as sunspots and stuff goes. But but and of course,

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I mentioned this because, Dr. Lyle, your doctoral work was primarily on solar physics and and regards to that.

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And of course, you've then extended that out to looking at stars in general and especially star controversial stuff regarding star formation.

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There's a lot of assumptions that are functioning in science regarding blue stars or new stars.

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And so this is an area of star formation, and it's all based on a theory of the age of the universe.

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And and so you find yourself obviously not exactly in the in the center of being loved.

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Yeah, sure. You know, when it comes to, you know, how stuff works today, you know, the scientific method,

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I'm all for it. And and a lot of the stuff we've learned about stars, it's great information. When they start speculating about the distant past, you've left the realm of science at that point.

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And and they're they're every day. It seems like we've seen that distinction. No, they don't. They don't.

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Are they just not taught to make that distinction? I think that's a big part of it. I wasn't in my secular education.

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I was not taught to make that distinction. And I think it's an important one, because your assumption, your worldview assumptions are,

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I mean, they're always important, but they're far more important when you're speculating on the past, far more important. Right. And because if you're wrong here, you expect it just gets wrong, wronger and wronger and wronger as you go along, basically.

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Chaos, a little change here. So it's the same thing. And even with the star formation thing, just just a couple of days ago,

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I read a new paper that's published that said this challenges our star formation theories. And it had to do with the fact that a lot of these extrasolar planets that we're finding that orbit around their star, sometimes the star rotates this way and the planet orbits that way.

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And that's something that I would expect as a biblical creationist, because God can make all kinds of it because he's done that in our solar system.

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Some moons like Triton, it goes the other way or they're like that. And so I would expect that.

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But that's totally contrary to the secular model, because we only have naturalistic forces working to form these.

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Yeah. If everything collapsed from a nebula, conservation of angular momentum would keep everything spinning the same way.

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So all the planets and the star would be rotating about the same way. And for our solar system, not too far off, but it's a little bit off even with our sun's tilt at seven degrees relative to the planets.

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How does that happen? There's no there's not really any good explanation for that. And so now that we're finding other planets that, in my view, yeah, that that's the diversity that the

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Lord's built into his universe. That's what I would expect. But it's contrary to secular expectations. We find stuff like that all the time.

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And yet that becomes so central to the theoretical applications and purposes of what you're doing.

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I mean, worldview is just and yet that just isn't that just is not.

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Western education, as it's being done today, especially if you're to do a specialization,

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I mean. You could with the data that's available today, you could so narrowly specialize in something about the sun that could literally leave you ignorant about other aspects of the sun because it's so in -depth in this one area.

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And so because of that, then connecting what's there to the entirety of a worldview issue.

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Our universities are a mess and I'm something of an exception because I like all the different branches of science and I read all about them and even in astronomy.

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And so even though I have my specialty field, I've read about other fields. Most scientists don't do that. Most scientists specialize in one field and they could care less about it, which amazes me.

26:52

Well, they have to get published. That's true. It's that they're running the rat race of academia.

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And there are some real problems with that. There are real problems with that in science.

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There's real problems that theology. Because if you have to get published and you got to come up with something new, well, truth doesn't change all that much.

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And so it can be a real problem in theology as well. But yeah, not having, I have just, when

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I listen to scientists, they have bought into scientism and they don't even realize,

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I think they don't even see. It's sort of like talking to a Jehovah's Witness that's never known anything other than what the Jehovah's Witnesses.

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Jehovah's Witnesses think that nobody out there even knows, for example, what

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Jehovah's name is. And so when they run across someone who knows what the Tetragrammaton is and knows what it is in Hebrew, there's, oh, no.

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It's the same kind of glassy eyed look that I get when I talk with some secularists.

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Because the next generation, we are finally getting into generations of people where they are completely secular.

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Their parents were secular. There's no impact anymore. And so all of a sudden, you start challenging some of their worldview stuff and they're just like, what planet did you come from?

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And why is it spinning backwards? And the best they can do is, it's sort of like Jehovah's Witnesses will respond to a challenge by saying, you're attacking

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Jehovah's organization. And if you challenge the secularist, you're attacking science.

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You're anti -science. And it's like, no, science exists in something a lot bigger than just science.

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And they don't even know what to say. There's an ignorance of the history of science.

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The fact that it stemmed from a Christian worldview. And you mentioned earlier that I feel very blessed to live in the time that I live in, where we have things like these amazing shapes that you can now, on your own computer, you can explore this universe that's been there since creation, but we didn't know about it until 1980s.

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What a blessing. But that comes from Christian thinking. And I would argue that the Renaissance, all these things stem from a

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Christian worldview. Because of the expectation that nature is logical and orderly because it's upheld by the mind of God.

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And even folks like Newton, well, he may have been unorthodox on some issues, but at least he had respect for the

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Bible and he believed in a God who was orderly and upheld creation in a consistent way. And he was able to make more discoveries than any human being has a right to.

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He was truly brilliant. Or Kepler. Kepler was a very consistent biblical

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Christian and a really solid guy. Oh, there are many of them. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It was common. Back then, if you're a scientist, well, of course you're a

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Christian. But most of the textbooks don't even go there now, except out of embarrassment.

29:56

Yeah. Because it just doesn't, they don't see that there's any connection. Right. There's no connection whatsoever.

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And, you know, when people don't have, when people have not been taught to think from a worldview perspective and to see connections, they are easily controlled and they're easily deceived.

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And man, are we seeing that in our world right now? And I, part of me goes, oh, that's terrible.

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That's horrible. And I'm depressed. And then part of me goes, but the only reason you see that is because the

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Spirit of God has worked in your life so as to cause you to want to know truth and to be obedient to truth and to see these connections.

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And the Spirit hasn't gone anywhere. And Nancy Pelosi cannot ban the Spirit of God from the

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United States, even though I'm sure she'd like to. And so why, I think it's my,

31:01

Scotsmen tend to be a little bit on the dreary side at times.

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And so, I mean, Scotty got depressed a few times on the Enterprise. That's what he drank a lot.

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What's that? It's green. All right, no one's going to say what we just said, but I thought about, folks,

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I'm going to tell you something. I have a friend and he's probably watching right now. His name's Ken Gontarz. And Ken is watching the original

31:37

Star Trek series. I don't know what channel it is, but it's on Saturday nights.

31:43

And he would tell me, oh, this one's titled such and so. And I'd say, oh, that's about this, this, that, that.

31:49

And all of a sudden I realized, because I have all of them on this computer right here, all of a sudden I realized they were playing them in the order in which they were produced, just straight down the line, which is the way they are in my program too.

32:04

And so I'd start telling him, like, for example, The Trouble with Tribbles was recently, I said, okay, you've got one of the classics coming up.

32:11

If you enjoy the comedic aspect of Star Trek, once this is done, you've got to go watch the

32:19

DS9. Oh my goodness, that was so good. Oh, they did. I could watch that all day long.

32:26

It was so, so well done. But so I'm telling him all this stuff. Well, the last episode that they played had a scene in it and I've been telling him,

32:38

I'll say, well, watch for this. Okay. This, this is the part you might find interesting or be, be careful.

32:45

Like the Gamesters of Triskelion I said, you might want to not want to have the kids around on that one because they were pushing the limits on that one at that point in the 1960s.

32:55

But so there was this scene and there was a line in it that always just made me laugh.

33:02

And so I was watching it. And so I said to Ken, watch for this line. And so Jason and I were texting about getting together today.

33:10

And I decided to, I decided to test this guy because I've always said he's the smartest guy I've ever met.

33:16

IQ off the charts, all the rest of the stuff. Well, we're talking about astrophysics. Okay. And, and, and fractals and mathematics and Einstein and the speed of light stuff, which

33:26

I still don't even get to understand. We're not talking Star Trek here. Okay. And so I go, all right,

33:33

I'm going to test you. And I give you a line and tell me where it's from Star Trek.

33:39

And it's, what is it? It's green. Now I didn't even go green because I was texting.

33:46

If I had said green, I would have absolutely totally given it away. And it was from Scotty. I won't tell the whole story.

33:55

I mean, I don't know how many years ago this, this thing was produced, but Scotty decided to try to get this one alien incapacity is one alien with alcohol, basically.

34:05

And so at one point he's pouring this guy in the guy goes, what is it? And Scotty goes, it's green.

34:13

And so, so I threw it out. And what did you say? Pasha or something? Police.

34:19

Police. And immediately named the episode. Like, come on, you would even ask me a question.

34:26

I am insulted. And then makes me feel really bad when he goes, and remember, it was in relics in the next generation.

34:36

I'm like, what, what? And he had to tell me and I had to go look. And Scotty had, that was the only time he, yeah, that was the only time he showed up in the next generation.

34:47

Scotty. And that was, you got to admit, somebody had to put some real hard work into figuring out how in the world do you get

34:55

Scott? My, my, my, my daughter just said, this is the nerdiest thing

35:00

I've ever watched on the internet. But how do you get

35:06

Scotty into the next generation? 75 years after he's supposed to be dead and a transporter loop in diagnostic mode.

35:14

Brilliant. I mean, I mean, someone stayed up late at night to come up with that one. So anyways, but it wasn't

35:20

Scotty that did it. It was data, which I found fascinating.

35:26

You know, the data was the one that went, it's green.

35:31

It is green because he wouldn't use the contraction. It's heavy lore. Okay.

35:38

We lost it. No, there is nobody watching anymore there. They were really enjoying the Christian worldview stuff.

35:44

And then we went off after Star Trek. In fairness, by any other rows, by any other name, that is one of my favorite episodes of the original series.

35:52

I liked that one. And it terrified me too. And they could turn the people into these little cubes and then go, and there, and there, and there you are, but they could bring you back as long as you didn't break the cube, then you're, then you're good.

36:06

So, and then of course the, the, the energy barrier. Yeah. At the perimeter of our galaxy, which for which there is no, there is no such thing, but yeah, but it made for a fun, it made for fun with, with Scotty sitting there.

36:20

Can we blow the enterprise up now? Cause that's what they were going to do. But they didn't do it.

36:25

So anyways. You would do that for invaders? No, but we would for friends.

36:34

Okay. All right. Well, I guess, suppose we should point out that we are aware of the fact that Star Trek was not a

36:44

Christian program. It was not. But it is interesting. I'll be honest with you to compare some of the worst of the next generation.

36:54

There was, there was, I recorded all the next generation on videotape.

36:59

Okay. And so it had all the commercials in it. And that, that the whole nine yards, even rich is going,

37:07

Oh, come on guys. But there, there were one or two that I'd simply deleted. There was the one with the androgynous people.

37:15

There was a really anti -theistic ones. Yeah. That was who watches the watchers. That was the one where they're starting to believe in a

37:22

God. Oh, right. Right. Right. Something like that. Yeah. There were, there were a couple I just deleted, but then there were some in the original, like the

37:30

Roman one where Ohura at the end, no, they don't mean the sun is in the sky.

37:36

Son of God. And you're just like, how did, for us today, how did that get in there?

37:44

But it was the late 1960s. It was, it was, things have changed. They've changed a whole lot, sadly.

37:52

So yeah, there was a lot of secularism and it got a whole lot worse in, in the next generation.

37:57

There's no two ways about it, but it does illustrate how scientism can become a consuming worldview.

38:05

And it seems to be not just amongst the people who study science, but in our society, that's the religion that we are being told we must bow the knee to now is man's capacity to examine the universe outside of any worldview issue in pure neutrality, as if there is such a thing.

38:34

And you, you start there and it's frightening what you can end up coming to as far as, as what you can do to your fellow man worth of life.

38:46

You know, I look at the past 18 months and I go, this is, this hasn't been a lot of fun.

38:54

A lot of people's businesses have been crushed there. You know, I think there, I, I don't know if anyone's going to do any studies, but I think the number of churches is going to decline a great deal.

39:08

I think many churches that are still not meeting or meeting online, if they ever get back to,

39:16

I think there's going to be an Epsilon variant and a Zeta variant and all the way there's always going to be a new variant because that's what respiratory viruses are all about.

39:25

It's always been that way. And we've never gotten rid of respiratory virus, the vaccine, it's impossible. It can't be done. So, but everyone's accepted that that's what we need to do.

39:33

And therefore they're willing to do anything to get to an impossible goal. It's amazing. But the point is, if we ever did get back to where I think a lot of those churches, the stories

39:45

I'm hearing right now is when they start coming back about a third of the people return. Yeah. Two thirds have just gotten used to,

39:54

Oh, it's sort of fun just to have it on in the background on a Sunday morning for a while. And then I can get to go do what

39:59

I want. And now theologically I stand back and go, that's not really a bad thing because American evangelicalism has been filled with a whole lot of worldly driftwood to begin with.

40:19

I get that. But we look at all these things and I sit back and I try to take,

40:29

I try to stand back and go, all right, what's, what can the Lord bring out of all of this?

40:36

And no, and frequently we just can't see, but what can the Lord bring out of all of this?

40:43

And being Scottish, I tend to go, well, it could get really bad.

40:52

Okay. I mean, that's, that's sort of my, the Scottish part of me coming through. And literally, as you know, that caused me to think through my eschatology and go, all right, what if, see,

41:11

I'm a church historian. I've taught first, first class I ever taught when I graduated seminary was church history. I've taught it, teaching it right now for a wonderful group of believers in Germany that I had seen every year for years up to 2019.

41:28

And now I don't know if I'll ever get to see them again. So I love teaching church history. That has helped me a great deal because there have been dark, dark times in the history of this world.

41:43

And I've mentioned it many times before, 1347 to 1351, you live in Europe and in some cities, 75 % of the people that were there in 1346 are not there in 1351.

41:56

Can you imagine what it was like to walk by those houses and little houses and big houses?

42:05

It didn't care. It didn't care. And man, do you think you thought about your mortality?

42:12

Yeah. But pretty easy to been reading revelation and seeing every single plague all at once being fulfilled right in front of your eyes.

42:21

And it would have been easy to create an eschatology at that time in my mind and tie things to scripture that just simply weren't true.

42:32

Because think of everything that's happened since the middle of the 14th century.

42:38

Think of the missionaries, think of the churches, think of the impact that Christianity has had on the world as a whole, the improvements, the hospitals, the everything else that's happened.

42:48

You couldn't see that coming. You would have no way of knowing. And so the fact of looking at what scripture taught about the promises of the father to the son and ask of me and I will give you the nations as your inheritance and all of these beautiful, beautiful things.

43:09

I started reasoning from the big issues down to the smaller issues in the application.

43:17

And part of the impetus for that was I've got grandkids. I've got a five -year -old through an 11 -year -old.

43:28

And I look at this world and if I did not have confidence that Christ can keep his people and he's going to accomplish his purposes,

43:39

I don't know how I would be able to get up each morning. I can't protect them.

43:45

I love them so much. I want to protect them, but I can't. And so if your eschatology is just something that's way out there and has no impact on, but I like how

44:00

Doug Wilson puts it, most Christians never, ever, ever think about their great, great grandchildren. And if your eschatology makes you never think about your great, great grandchildren, that's probably a bad sign.

44:15

So I've been thinking about my great, great grandchildren, and I want to somehow communicate the beauty of the

44:24

Mandelbrot fractal set to my great, great grandchildren. So thank you very much for helping us to do that, but also helping us understand it.

44:34

And they're going to need to understand worldview. They're going to need what you have done and what you continue to do in pointing out the presuppositional nature of how you do science.

44:53

And the thing I love about you, Jason, is you do science. You're willing to look at all the data that's coming in.

44:59

You can rejoice in Hubble. You can rejoice in web. You can rejoice in what was the, there is a

45:05

X -ray or infrared satellite that just went offline about six months ago.

45:12

And I just remember I've seen so many incredible images from that thing. And I look at something like that, and I know a bunch of the people that worked on that had no earthly idea of who their creator is or anything else.

45:27

There are examples of common grace, but they couldn't have done what they did without the universe functioning in an orderly fashion.

45:35

They could never have, remember when we, I don't know, about six, seven years ago, we fired basically something about the size of a refrigerator at a passing comet or asteroid.

45:52

I forget which one it was. So we fired that thing off and then the unit stayed behind and then recorded the impact and then used various means of going, okay, this will help us to understand what this thing's made of.

46:07

Okay. You can't hit that sucker. If math doesn't work.

46:14

That's right. Because when you think about it, what was, what was the line?

46:19

Oh, please don't tell me you have this memorized. What was the line that the new Scotty used in the new

46:25

Star Trek movie when they had to beam, they had to beam onto the enterprise at work.

46:34

Remember? It never occurred to me. The space was the thing that was moving. Right. But he said, it's sort of like shooting, trying to shoot an arrow through something while you're riding a horse.

46:45

Yeah. Yeah. Right. Riding a horse. That's Scott. I have to admit, I liked that Scotty. He was good.

46:50

He was really, really good. I haven't seen it yet. I haven't seen Rich pop up and go, okay, stop, stop.

46:57

Quit with the nerdy stuff. But, but, but that kind of precision, that kind of precision requires orderliness and consistency.

47:14

You can do it without a belief in the biblical God, but you can't do it without the fact of the biblical

47:19

God. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And so this question just hit me and I'm going to throw it at you.

47:28

I don't know if you can answer it or not, but flat earthers. Could they come up with a way of explaining how to hit that asteroid?

47:39

Not a chance. I can't, I cannot even be. They don't have a, they don't have a fully self -consistent model.

47:46

They do have a model and I've looked at it. Right. And it, it makes a certain degree of sense as all models do, but there's certain things that it can't explain like sunsets in the model that, that I've seen and have refuted by the way on the website.

48:00

Yes. They have a, there's a particular projection of the earth where you have the North pole at the center and then it goes out like that.

48:07

And so it's a circular map of the earth and Antarctica forms around. That's a particular projection. Whenever you display spherical features on something flat, you have to distort it.

48:17

That's one way of doing it. They take that to be the actual shape of the earth. And then they say the sun moves around like that and the moon, you know, and then the sun has kind of a, kind of a cone shaped beam.

48:28

And for under that beam, it's daylight. Okay. Well, what would be the minimum angle at which the sun could make with the earth?

48:34

How, how low in the sky could the sun possibly appear in that model? I did the math. I went through and calculated and it turns out it's something like eight suns above the horizon.

48:43

If you've ever seen the sun lower than that, the earth ain't flat. Which of course I have. So if you've ever seen a sunset, that model, that model's out.

48:53

You can even, you can even measure the size of the earth. But if you, if you have a nice, like if you're by the ocean, say you're, say you're on the

49:00

West coast and you're watching the sunset, you're lying down, you're watching the sunset. You watch the last little glimmer, bink, stand up, you'll see a second sunset.

49:07

And it'll take an additional seven seconds due to the curvature of the earth. Really? Yeah. And you can actually calculate the size of the earth that way.

49:15

There are going to be people rushing out to the beach in California right now. Or on the other side, you can do the sunrise.

49:21

You've got to stand first. It's a little blink of sunrise and then lie down. You know, seven and it takes seven seconds difference for an, for an average height person.

49:29

And you can measure the, the, the circularity of the earth that way. In fact, right now on the website, I'm, I'm doing a series of articles where I'm refuting a flat earth advocate and the guy's real nice.

49:39

There's no doubt about that. But I think there's some, there's a lack of education in geometry and trigonometry that I think if you, if you, you know, students will say, they ain't the only one.

49:50

I know, I know. But students will say, when am I ever going to use this? This is what you're going to use. And one of the experiments

49:56

I hope to do, I don't think I'm going to get to do it though because of the smoke, because I want to get the article, the next article out on, on Friday.

50:02

Cause he's, cause this flat earther claims that the horizon, no matter how high up you are, the horizon rises to eye level.

50:08

I know that's not true. I've flown on planes and you can see the horizon drops a little bit, but it's not a huge effect. And so I've got a level at some point

50:14

I'm going to go up to the Pikes Peak, put the level there. And, and so, you know, it's, it's flat, you know, and then take a picture of that against the horizon.

50:21

And by my calculation, the horizon should be 1 .7 degrees below level based on the curvature of the earth.

50:28

From Pikes Peak? From Pikes Peak. Yeah. In comparison to? The eastern plains.

50:34

Okay. Yeah. Okay. So if you do West, it'll be a slightly different angle, but yeah, I mean that there are ways you can test that.

50:40

Another way is during a lunar eclipse, the shadow that falls on the moon, always a circle, no matter what the orientation is.

50:47

And that was one of the earliest evidences, by the way, Aristotle argued that that demonstrated that the world was round.

50:53

So people have known the world was round since Aristotle. And this is something that people need to know these things and they're not taught them sadly in most education systems.

51:01

No, not anymore. Not anymore. Well, at least back in my day, you were taught to read.

51:11

And read well enough that as long as you wanted to, you could improve yourself.

51:17

I'm not sure how much of that is the case any longer. But so Biblical Science Institute, you, that's not the only book you've written.

51:25

We've talked about, we had to have you on and talked about your, your books on astronomy. And, and then you have a book that every time you and I are both in a lot of the same groups on Facebook, Presuppositional Apologetics, stuff like that.

51:39

Every time people ask for, Hey, what, what, what introductory texts can

51:44

I buy to use at our church and stuff like that? Your name comes up because Absolute Proof, Ultimate Proof, Ultimate Proof of Creation, which

51:58

I think on a marketing level, I'd go, I'm not sure that was the best title. And the reason

52:05

I say that is that if anybody knows who you are, their assumption is it's about creationism, maybe fossils, something along those lines.

52:18

People have to be told, no, this is actually about application of Christian worldview, Presuppositional Apologetics, the whole nine yards.

52:26

And it's sorta like, Oh, okay. That's actually what I wanted. I want people to pick it up and thinking,

52:33

Oh, I'm going to read about these new evidences, genetics and fossils. And I do mention some of those, but when they pick it up, they're going to get something much better.

52:41

They're going to get an actual proof rather than, so it's, it was, it was quite intentional and it's apparently good marketing because it's my bestselling book.

52:48

All good. All good. All good. Well, the weird, weird, my bestselling book is the

52:54

King James Controversy. So there you go. Different, different realms and different, different contexts there.

53:01

But so you've, you've written many books. Now you, Biblical Science Institute has been what, three years, four years now?

53:08

Four years. We're entering our fifth year now. Really? Yep. Time goes very, very quickly. We're both aging.

53:15

I noticed there's a little more gray in the hair. Every conference I do, I get one more. Yeah. Yeah.

53:21

Yeah. Yeah. Cause I don't remember those earlier. I've had it for a while. Okay. All right.

53:26

All right. So, but so Biblical Science Institute, you were with a number of different ministries in the past, but you wanted, was this sort of a,

53:39

I want to be able to say everything I need to say the way I want to say it?

53:44

That's a big part of it. Yeah. Yeah. Big part of it. Yeah. I hadn't really thought about it that much, but that's why

53:50

I do what I do. You know, things like this too. I mean, it'd be, it'd be hard to sell this on somebody.

53:57

I'm going to write it. It's going to have a lot of pretty pictures in it, but it's going to demonstrate biblical creation. I'm not sure, but this is something

54:04

God laid on my heart to do and I wanted to do it. Right. And by the way, we haven't really talked about the book a whole lot, but that's one of the things that it does is it, it doesn't just, it's not just pick pretty pictures.

54:14

Now kids will pick it up. They'll love the pictures. Of course the colors is beautiful. And I thought about, you know, making calendars with those things, which

54:20

I can do. And if you get the book, you'll get the program. You can do that too. So there you go. But one of the things

54:25

I illustrate in this book is that only the Christian worldview can explain the images that are in this book. One of the questions that came up on Facebook, on my

54:32

Facebook feed, who did the cover? And I'm like, I gotta be honest with you. God did the cover. No human being created that shape.

54:39

Now I picked the colors, but the shape that's God's. You seem to like blue. I do like blue.

54:44

Yes, I could tell. But there's a lot. Yeah, there's a, that's true.

54:51

I know what you're talking about. There's a few, I mean, there's a bunch of different, it's very colorful.

54:56

So I think that, but the main thing here to recognize is although I picked the color scheme, the colors are assigned based on value of an equation.

55:05

And that's built into math by the creator of math. So these literally, this literally is artwork of God.

55:11

There's no explanation. All right. Let's, let's, let's be a secularist here for the past last few minutes.

55:18

A secularist looks at that and just goes, it just is.

55:23

I mean, okay. So there's a, there's a, there's a equation and when you plot it, it does this.

55:31

And as you zoom in on it, it keeps reduplicating itself, but it's just, it just is.

55:37

Sound and fury signifying nothing. Sound and fury signifying nothing. That's all. That's all they can say.

55:42

Yeah. And I discussed that in the book. I say, okay, how would the secularists try and explain this? How would he make sense of it? Because in the secular view, what is math?

55:49

So as a Christian can answer that question, I can say math is the study of the relationship between numbers.

55:54

And somebody says, what are numbers? And I'm going to say numbers are concepts of quantity as determined by God. So in my worldview, math and numbers exist in the mind of God.

56:03

They're his creations in the sense that he's responsible for them. In the secular view, what are numbers?

56:08

Concepts of quantity, which is why India can build spaceships and we can build spaceships and land on the moon.

56:16

It doesn't matter if they have, if it's different over there, there's a consistency that exists everywhere.

56:23

They can have a different culture, different language, but they use the same math because they have to appeal to the same mind, the mind of God, in order to be able to do that.

56:30

And again, they can deny that God, but they can't escape the reality that this is God's universe. That's one of the other things the book goes into detail on is how is it, why is it that math applies to the physical universe?

56:41

Most people have not given that a lot of thought. Most people say, that's silly. We learned about math from the physical universe.

56:47

Not really. Imaginary numbers were not discovered by looking to the physical universe. Now, since we discovered those numbers, we found that there are situations where they do apply to the physical universe, but they were not discovered that way.

56:57

Many mathematical truths were discovered long before they were discovered to have any physical application to the physical universe.

57:05

And some that still don't, we don't have any physical application. You can, you can go, you know, the universe, as far as we know, is four dimensions, three of space, one of time.

57:13

In math, you can do any number of dimensions. You can do what's called Hilbert space, which has an infinite number of dimensions, and you can do math and it's meaningful.

57:20

And so obviously it's not just a reflection of nature. It's, it goes deeper than that. How can the secularists explain that?

57:25

Well, math, you know, something people invented. No, because then we could have invented it differently. And then India would have a different set of math than we would have, just as we have different civil laws than they have.

57:35

That's a human invention. And so these are discussed. And I even brought up the physicist,

57:41

Eugene Wigner, brilliant Nobel prize winning PhD physicist. And he wrote a wonderful article back,

57:47

I think it back in the seventies, called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics and the natural sciences. It's one of my favorite articles.

57:54

And from his brilliant mind, from a secular perspective, he comes to the conclusion. He didn't, he doesn't know basically the, in the end of the end of the article, he says the miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics to the,

58:08

I forget the exact quote, but to the application of the physical universe is a wonderful gift, which we neither understand nor deserve.

58:15

That's his conclusion. Sounds like grace. Yeah. Well, that's fascinating.

58:22

Yeah. That's, that's, that's great stuff. Well, so people can go to biblical science Institute dot com.

58:29

Okay. So you, you even had to think about it for a second. Well, if you go to the others, it'll forward it there. Oh, okay.

58:34

And go to the store and they can get all the books, including fractals. Now, I don't think you charge nearly enough for it because it's full color.

58:42

And you know, that means you have to have heavy paper and everything else. But they can get their copy there.

58:51

Is it eventually going to be available on Amazon places like that? Yeah, I think it will be.

58:57

Yeah. Yeah. New Leaf selling and answers and just selling. I will say though, if you get it through our website, we include the

59:02

CD with it as well. Oh, okay. Right. So, and the CD has all kinds of fractal plotting software on it, including the one

59:09

I wrote that does the fractals in this book. And it's also got, I don't know if you've had a chance to look at it yet, but okay.

59:16

But it also has electronic versions of all the images in the book. Oh, that's neat. And the cool thing is if you use the software that I wrote and you take the image and drop it in the software, you can continue to zoom in on it.

59:26

So yeah. So that's, and any new image you save too, it'll, it stores the coordinates in the image and the equation and everything you need to know.

59:32

So you just drop it back in the program and you can continue to zoom in. The first four I had was called Sterling. And then

59:38

I found something called Ultra Fractal, which has been supported all these years by the same guy, which

59:44

I, I guess I can understand that. And then on my iPhone, I don't know if you've seen someone produce a program called

59:51

Frax. I've got the free version of it. Yeah. It, and you can, when you create something, you can buy credits and upload it to their cloud and get massively high resolution downloads from whatever you've come up with.

01:00:09

And especially if you're just really into the, what it looks like stuff that Frax program is.

01:00:16

It's pretty, really impressive. I mean, you can change light directions and oh, it's

01:00:22

I've, uh, some of the favorite, my favorite ones, Ultra Fractal was more manual. And so you were putting fractals on top of other fractals and then doing interfaces in between them.

01:00:33

And that would create some really fascinating effects and stuff like that. So yeah, you know, the geek factor of this particular program could be a new record.

01:00:43

It could between fractals and Star Trek. Um, I, I think, wow, there's, there's, well, what can

01:00:56

I say for the first, the first program with a guest in the AO mobile command. Uh, we have set a new record for, for geekiness and, uh,

01:01:07

I'm not sure what the difference between geekiness and nerdiness is, but I've never really understood the difference personally.

01:01:13

Uh, but, uh, anyways, so biblical science institute .com fractals, the secret code of creation, make sure to get it and you will get it at Christmas is coming.

01:01:26

And I think it'd be a great gift for, uh, students who going to university for your pastor, whatever else, am

01:01:35

I doing good? Good enough job here. Yeah. But one thing I'd add too, is because of the attractiveness of the book,

01:01:41

I, my hope is that people will buy this, sit on their coffee table, conversation starter, or loan it to your friend because they're the gospels, the gospel message is presented in here and it's presented in a way that I believe is irrefutable.

01:01:53

I can't make anybody only Holy spirit can do that, but I can give them an argument that they can't refute.

01:01:58

Yeah. And it's in there. There you go. There you go. So use it, use it in those that way. So again, if you're in the

01:02:04

Colorado Springs area, uh, tomorrow afternoon, four o 'clock, uh, hope chapel, uh,

01:02:10

Jason and I will be speaking. I am speaking twice. He's only speaking once I misread, but, uh, he's speaking in between the two times that I'm speaking.

01:02:19

I do, I do know that much. And, uh, so we invite you to come along and we'll get a chance to meet you then.

01:02:26

And I really doubt that my talks will be anywhere near as geeky as this one.

01:02:33

I can't see how they could know. So, so if that's an issue for you, but if that's what you're really like, well, sorry, they're not going to be,

01:02:43

I might be able to find some star Trek and analogy to use at some point, but we won't, we won't even bother trying, but Jason, thanks for coming out.

01:02:51

And thank you for being the first, uh, first guest in our mobile studio here. And so if I crash it next week, you may be the only guest in the mobile studio.

01:03:03

We won't even talk about that. So, uh, thanks for being with us. Thanks for watching the program today. Thanks rich for surviving back there.

01:03:11

The looks we've been getting coming back have been fairly interesting. Even summer I'll have to find out what summer and the kids think of all of this, but I don't care.