Conference with Dr. Jason Lisle Day 2

Kootenai Church

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So we're told, and people have confidence in science because it makes computers work and puts people on the moon and all kinds of stuff, all this wonderful technology.

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We should have confidence in science, to some extent we should. We need to recognize though that science is not antagonistic to what the

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Bible says, but is in fact founded upon it. We talked about that last night. So it used to be, because of our

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Christian heritage in this nation, you could say things like abortion is wrong and homosexual behavior is wrong, adultery is wrong.

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People say, well, of course, I understand that. Even non -Christians, a lot of times, would have a degree of respect for the

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Bible, just because of our Christian heritage in this nation. You hear people say, well, you know, the good book says such and such.

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Today, that's not the case. Today, you say abortion's wrong, homosexual behavior's wrong, adultery's wrong. People say, not according to my standard.

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Oh yeah, that is the situation today, isn't it? Because people are not standing on the authority of God's word.

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You stand on the authority of God's word, then of course the things that God says are wrong are wrong. And evolution is one of the main ways that the secularists get people to doubt what the

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Bible says. Because if you can't trust that opening chapter, why would you trust what comes next? And by the way, when

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I talk about evolution, I'm referring to the idea that all organisms are descended from a common ancestor that was something like a bacterium over billions of years.

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And so you're related to broccoli in the evolutionary worldview. That's your distant cousin. I mentioned that one time.

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I was speaking to a group of atheists. By divine providence, I had that opportunity. And I mentioned to them,

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I said, you know, in your worldview, you're related to broccoli. That's your distant cousin. And afterwards, one of them came up to me and said, weren't you kind of poking fun at us for saying we believe we're related to broccoli?

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And I said, isn't that what you believe? He said, well, yeah. I said, well, there you go then, right? I mean, if that sounds silly to you, don't shoot the messenger.

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Maybe you ought to reconsider your belief. I'm just reflecting back to you what you claim to believe. My point is the word evolution can just mean change.

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Well, we all agree things change. The world was once a paradise. Today, it's not. Things have changed. The question is what kinds of change?

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And I don't believe in this kind of change. I do believe organisms can change. And we'll talk about that later today. But they don't change from one basic kind to another.

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Now, if you believe this, it will have consequences for your other beliefs. What you believe about origins has consequences for what you believe about other things.

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If creation's true, then there are certain logical standards that stem from that. If creation's true, you're gonna have laws because we have a lawgiver.

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God made us. He's got the right to make the rules. God's a linguistic being. He's communicated to us. He's made us in his image.

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And so we have the capacity for rationality. We have the capacity, at least Adam had the capacity to obey

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God or disobey God. He had that freedom of choice. And so, and we chose poorly, of course.

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And there are consequences when we break God's law. So the idea of laws, moral laws that are objective and are the same for everyone, that's a

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Genesis concept, isn't it? That goes back to creation because God is the creator. We're all made in God's image.

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God has the same standard for all people. He's no respecter of persons. He doesn't show partiality.

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What about marriage? Where does the idea of marriage come from? The idea of one man and one woman united by God for life?

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That's a Genesis concept, isn't it? God created Adam and Eve. God instituted the family unit.

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God created marriage. And therefore, he gets to define what marriage is. Not the Supreme Court, by the way.

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God defines marriage because he made it. Standards, standards of behavior, standards of clothing.

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I noticed you're all wearing clothes today. I appreciate that. I'm sure you do too. Originally, it wasn't that way. Where did we learn about the origin of clothing?

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It's in Genesis, yeah. That goes back to creation. Meaning of life. Why is it that human life is valuable?

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Intrinsically valuable. And more valuable than, say, animals or plants. Why is that?

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Because human beings are made in the image of God. That's what it comes down to. That's why I can't just go out and shoot somebody that I really don't like.

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Because that person's made in the image of God and deserving of dignity and respect. And has certain rights that have been instilled by God.

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So all of these standards that we teach, we hold these doctrines dear. These are based in Genesis.

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They're based in creation. The fact that God's word is true from the beginning. If, on the other hand, evolution were true, then you would have, logically, if you're gonna be consistent, you would have a different set of standards.

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Why would you have laws in an evolutionary universe? If we're just chemical accidents, there's no laws other than the laws of chemistry.

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There's no moral laws in an evolutionary universe. If you think about it, evolution is all about the strong dominating over the weak.

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That's how evolution is supposed to progress. But laws are designed to protect the weak from the strong.

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If you think about it, they're anti -evolutionary by their very nature. For that matter, why not do what you want with sex?

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If we're just animals, that's pretty much what animals do. They do what's instinctive. Why shouldn't we? Makes sense.

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Abortion, well, why not? If people are just animals, get rid of spare cats, get rid of spare kids.

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Why not? And I'm not suggesting that evolution is the cause of all these problems.

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Sin is the cause of all those problems. I get that. But I am suggesting that evolution gives people a way to try and justify that sin in their minds.

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Because you cannot defend these doctrines on this foundation. It doesn't work.

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Christian doctrines are rooted, directly or indirectly, in Genesis. They really are. Jesus understood this.

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In his earthly ministry, Jesus often quoted or alluded to Genesis in some fashion. Quite frequently, actually.

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If you're reading Matthew 19, when the religious leaders were asking Jesus about divorce to explain marriage,

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Jesus went back and quoted Genesis chapter one and two. And he quoted it like he believed it, like real history.

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How about that? As the basis for marriage. So what's happened in our culture is that foundation of Genesis has been eroded in the minds of people.

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People think, well, you can't trust Genesis anymore. We now know that's just a fairy tale.

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Science tells us evolution's the way life came about. Well, then you can't defend the doctrines that are based on it. Why would you have the laws that God has ordained?

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Why would you have marriage being one man and one woman for life if Adam and Eve's just a fairy tale and not real history?

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And folks, that's not just a hypothetical scenario. That's happening. That's exactly what we're seeing in our culture today.

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People saying, well, there's no Adam and Eve. That's just a fairy tale. Marriage is just a cultural trend. And hey, the culture changes, so why should the definition of marriage change?

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That is exactly the argument that people make when they want to do away with the

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Christian conception of marriage. That's it. See, a lot of people think, but Dr. Lyle, I don't have time to worry about creation and evolution because we've got all these problems in our society.

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Marriage is under attack. We have bad laws on the books and so on. My point is there's a connection. You give up that foundation, you cannot logically, rationally defend the doctrines that are based on it.

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You can't. We need to recognize our foundations are under attack, and if the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?

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A lot of Christians have even been misled in this area, and they think, well, I'm a Christian. I trust in Jesus.

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Praise God, I'm glad you do. But then they say, but I'm not sure about Genesis. The scientists tell me that's not the way that life came about, and so I think

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Genesis is just a myth or it's maybe got some spiritual truth in it, or it's like a parable.

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Genesis is not written that way, though. It's not written like a parable. You know those verses that you love to read before you go to bed, and so -and -so begets so -and -so, and they begets so -and -so.

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Those genealogies like you find in Genesis 5. Well, those verses are there for a reason. They're there to tell us that Genesis is real history, and it tells us the names of these individuals, and in many cases, how long they lived, and the names of at least one of their children, and so on.

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Now, the Bible does use parables at points. Actually, that was the main method of Jesus's earthly teaching ministry was to use parables, but that's where you take something that's physical that we're all familiar with, and you use it to explain something that's spiritual by analogy.

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That's a parable. That's not what's happening here, right? I mean, parables usually don't have specific names anyway.

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In a parable, it's usually there was a certain man or there was a king and what have you, and you certainly wouldn't have a list of genealogies in a parable.

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That would be pointless. That doesn't make sense, and this is not a parable. Now, I recognize there are sections of the

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Bible that are not meant to be taken in a wooden literal sense. I get that. Places like the Psalms and Proverbs that use poetic language, and they use metaphors and things like that.

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When the Bible says there's no rock like our God, it doesn't mean that God is basalt or igneous, right? We understand that.

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It's a metaphor. I get that, but is Genesis written in that poetic fashion?

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No, it's not, not at all. In fact, it's very easy to recognize poetry in Hebrew.

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It's quite different from English poetry. We tend to focus more on rhyme and meter, but in Hebrew poetry, they focused on parallelism, where you would say something and then you would say either the same thing or the flip side using different words.

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So the heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of his hands. Kind of says the same thing using different words, doesn't it?

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It's similar, so that's parallelism, and you'll find that throughout the Psalms and the Proverbs and so on.

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It's beautiful. That's how you recognize poetry in Hebrew. You don't find that in Genesis.

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It's not there. You do not find synonymous or antithetical parallelism in Genesis. There's no evidence of poetry there.

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If you think about it, that would be a terrible poem. Wouldn't it? And so and so begets so and so.

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No, that's not gonna work. And by the way, the style that it is written in is historical narrative.

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That's the way that the Jews recorded their history, and it's even more obvious if you know something about the Hebrew language, the frequent use of the verb consecutive and so on, which

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Genesis makes use of. And so it's very clear that Genesis is intending to record history, literal history.

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And so, and by the way, those genealogies, they lead up to Jesus Christ, and you can read about those in Matthew and in Luke.

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Okay, and so then my question for Christians, and I don't doubt their salvation, who say,

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I trust in Jesus for my salvation, but then they say, but I don't think Adam's real.

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I think Adam's just a metaphor. But Jesus is descended from Adam. You're saying

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Jesus descended from so and so, descended from so and so, descended from a metaphor? Folks, you don't have to be an expert in genetics to know that a real person cannot be descended from a metaphorical person, right?

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What would that transitional form look like? That's not gonna work. It is theologically important that Jesus is descended from a real

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Adam, and so are we all. That makes Jesus our relative. He's our blood relative. We're related to Christ.

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That's awesome. You say, why is that theologically important? Because according to biblical law, only a relative can save you.

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There's an important concept called the kinsman redeemer. It's because Christ's blood is the same as our blood in the sense that we're all descended from Adam, that his blood counts on the cross for us.

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That's why the blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sins. The Bible says in Hebrews 10, four. Now, they were used symbolically in the

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Old Testament to point forward to Christ, but they can't pay for sins because we're not related to animals.

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Unless, of course, evolution's true, in which case, that doctrine's gone, isn't it? No. You see, even the gospel message is founded in the literal history of Genesis.

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Where do we learn that death is the penalty for sin? It's in Genesis. Now, that's reiterated throughout the scriptures, but its origin is in Genesis.

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Where do we learn that man needs a savior? It's in Genesis. Putting it another way, which Adam is non -essential to the gospel?

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Is it the first Adam that made it necessary for us to be saved, or is it Jesus Christ, whom the

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Bible calls the last Adam, who made it possible for us to be saved, who accomplished salvation for all of his people?

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For as an Adam will die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive. Which one is unnecessary?

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Well, and again, I'm not suggesting that people need to understand and believe in a literal

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Genesis in order to be saved. We're saved by God's grace, and that's received through faith, which

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God gives us, and we don't wanna add to that. But I am suggesting that salvation doesn't make sense, logically, apart from a literal

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Genesis. It really doesn't, because what are you being saved from? You learn about sin in Genesis, disobedience to God and its penalty.

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That's all in Genesis. The Bible really is the history book of the universe, because it starts in the beginning

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God created, and it tells us the important events that have happened throughout history in terms of our relationship with God.

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And I find that a lot of people like the morality the Bible teaches, but they wanna reject the history.

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Isn't that true? Even atheists like some of the morality the Bible teaches.

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They read Thou Shalt Not Steal. Oh yeah, that's a good one, yeah. They don't wanna have their wallet stolen.

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Thou Shalt Not Murder. They only like that one. Bible got that one right. They don't wanna be murdered.

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Who would, right? But then they wanna reject the history. But my point is the morality comes out of the history.

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You realize that? Why is it wrong to steal? Because God has apportioned to everyone as he sees fit.

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God is the one who ultimately owns everything. That's the Genesis concept. Why is it wrong to murder? Because man is made in the image of God.

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Where do we learn that? Genesis. You see, the morality comes out of the history. Jesus put it this way.

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When he was speaking to Nicodemus, he said, I've told you earthly things and you do not believe. How will you believe if I tell you heavenly things?

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That's a pretty good question, isn't it? You see, the Bible talks about earthly things like the days of creation, Noah's flood, confusion of tongues at Babel, matters of earth history, earthly things.

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And the Bible talks about heavenly things, spiritual matters, morality, salvation.

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Maybe you say, yes, but I'm not sure that I believe those details in Genesis. I'm not sure that I really believe that God created in six days.

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I'm not sure there really was a worldwide flood. If God didn't get the details right in Genesis, how can you trust that he got the details right on how to inherit eternal life?

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That's what I want to know. Does God know how to communicate or doesn't he? Does God know how to write a book that would communicate clearly to us?

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I think he does. I think any God who can speak the universe into existence can probably write a book. I've written books, it's not that hard.

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Well, it's hard, but my point is it's easier than speaking the universe into existence. Quite a bit.

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But people want to have it both ways. They want to have, on the one hand, you got God's infallible word, you got man's fallible word. Why do people want to change the infallible one when they want these two to agree?

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And people do want them to agree. Maybe to be academically respected. Maybe they think they'll be academically respected.

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Well, I'm a Christian, but I want to believe in evolution so I can be like all the smart people. Of course, not all the smart people believe in evolution,

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I can tell you that. But nonetheless, why is it we want to change the Bible to match evolution rather than the reverse?

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Why not interpret Darwin's book poetically and say, well, he didn't really mean evolution, it's just symbolic for biblical creation?

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Well, people don't do that. And by the way, the one that you modify is the one you don't ultimately have your faith in.

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Think about that. If you have your ultimate faith in the Bible, then you're not gonna touch it. If that's your ultimate standard, you can't modify it because you'd need a greater standard to tell you how to modify it.

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And if you think about it, this is not the way that Jesus responded in his earthly ministry. Oh, the religious leaders of the time,

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Pharisees and Sadducees, were masterful at reinterpreting God's word to match up with their traditions.

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And how did Jesus respond to that? Did he respond with modern political correctness?

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They say, well, that's not my personal opinion, but we don't need to get all upset about this. It's not a salvation after it all, so let's just all hold hands and sing

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Kumbaya, right? Let's just agree to disagree. That's not the way Jesus responded. He would respond with, it is written.

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Have you not read? Isn't that interesting? He took people back to the authority of the written word.

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And you do understand, of course, when Jesus says to the religious leaders, have you not read? You do understand he's using sarcasm.

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We don't tend to think of our Lord doing that, but he did it, and he did it very masterfully, by the way. Have you not read?

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Well, of course they'd read it. They hadn't applied what they had read. They hadn't accepted it. They hadn't internalized it.

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I think it's interesting that our Lord took the Bible to be the ultimate standard.

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It is written, and that settled the matter. Isn't that fascinating? Because Jesus is God, and he could have said, because I'm God and I said so.

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That would have been perfectly fine, but instead he appealed to the written word, which he himself inspired, of course.

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And I think that's a pattern for us, because we can't say, I'm God and I said so, but we can say, God has said in his word.

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We can say, it is written. Have you not read? You can think of the culture war that's going on today a bit like these two cities.

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So you have Christianity, based on creation. God's word is true from the beginning.

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And then the other main faith system in our culture today, secular humanism, based on evolution.

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Man independent from God determines truth. And how are we fighting this war? Maybe not as effectively as we could be.

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We're arguing over issues that maybe aren't so critical. We're zapping these billboards, and it's okay to do that.

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We should do some of that. I'm all for fighting abortion and racism and so on. But if that's all we're doing, we're just trying to alleviate symptoms rather than dealing with the root of the problem.

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Because those issues are gonna keep coming back as long as that edifice is in place. And the worst thing we could be doing is shooting our own foundation, representing

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Christians who say, well, it doesn't matter what you believe about Genesis, zap. You don't need to believe in the literal history.

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That's just a myth or something, zap. Well, all the Christian doctrines are based on the literal history in Genesis.

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And the secular humanists are smart. They're aiming at our foundation. They're saying, well, you can't trust the Bible because you can't trust that first verse.

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Well, you know, that's myth. That's just silly, superstitious nonsense. Well, what's the solution?

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I do think it's fine to zap some billboards and point out that these things are issues and we need to deal with these. That's fine, but we need to do more than that.

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We need to do some damage ourselves and point out that secular humanism, based on evolution, it's not rational.

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It wouldn't make sense of science or logic or morality. It can't explain those things. We need to defend ourselves against these evolutionists that make these really bad arguments.

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I have yet to hear a good argument for evolution. They're always either factually incorrect or they commit one or more logical fallacies.

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And we need to point that out, graciously, but we do need to point it out. We need to point out that evolution is scientifically bankrupt.

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It's not something that has good scientific support. We'll talk about that later today. And I'll show you some evidence that you can use to open the door to get people to think.

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And of course, ultimately, you wanna get to the ultimate proof and show people that science actually wouldn't even be possible in an evolutionary universe where you couldn't have any confidence that your senses are reliable or that there are patterns in nature.

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And then we need to repair the damage that's been done to creation and say, you can trust in Genesis. You can trust in God's word from the beginning.

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And that's, by the way, that's the only way that gospel's gonna make sense is if you start with Genesis. If you don't do that, people are gonna say, well, why would

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I need Jesus? I'm basically a good person. Have you heard people say that before? I'm basically good.

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I think God will let me into heaven. You hear somebody who says that, you've got somebody who doesn't accept Genesis. Because if you accept the

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Genesis history and you ask, wait a minute, sir, ma 'am, how many sins did it take for Adam to ruin the world?

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Oh, one. Yeah, because God's absolutely perfect. His standard's perfect. When you sin against God, you're committing high treason against the king of kings.

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And that deserves capital punishment. Because it's treason. And how many sins have you committed?

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More than one? You got a problem. God can't let you in that new heavens or new earth.

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You'd ruin it just like Adam ruined the original with your sin unpaid for. That's why you need

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Jesus. And I like the way this is illustrated because you notice we're not aiming at the people.

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We want them to be saved. We want them to jump off of that sinking city and swim over and join us on the city of God, Christianity.

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We want them to be saved. And we're not bashful about that. There are some organizations that try to leave the

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Bible out of it and say, well, we'll just show you that there's a God of some sort. Well, the demons believe in God and tremble.

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It doesn't save them. A theist will end up in hell the same as an atheist if he hasn't trusted in Christ for salvation.

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We want people to be saved. And I believe it's best to put all your cards on the table and say, hey, I'm a

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Christian, and I'm not gonna leave the Bible out of the conversation. If you don't believe it, that's your problem. You should believe it.

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It's the basis for rationality. It's the basis for science. It's the basis for morality. And then we want people to be saved.

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So that's why we do what we do. Apologetics is not an academic game. We want people to be saved. And ultimately, we know it's up to God to change their heart, but he calls us to make a defense of the faith, and that's quite an honor and a privilege, and it's something we're obligated to do.

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But what about the timescale of creation? There's some confusion there. There really shouldn't be. Bible tells us that God created in six days.

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It tells us what he did on each of those days of creation. Human beings are made on the sixth day, and so on. And from those genealogies, you love to read before you go to bed, and so they get so -and -so.

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You add up the ages, and you find that God created a few thousand years ago, something like 6 ,000 years ago.

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Can't put an exact date on it, because the ages are rounded to the nearest year, and so on. But anyway, it'd be something like 6 ,000 years.

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It's not gonna be millions of years. And yet, people have the idea that, but wait a minute, hasn't science proved millions of years, right?

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Because you have these rocks, and you can radiometrically date them, right? Of course, we'll talk about that a little bit later on.

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People have misconceptions about that. They think it's almost like magic. You take the rock, you just scan it with your tricorder, and it measures the age of goals, and it tells you the age of it.

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That's not really the way it works, and we'll talk about that later. But my point is, people get intimidated, and they think the world has to be millions of years old.

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They think fossils have been deposited over hundreds of millions of years, because you'll see that in the textbooks, right? Millions of years, gotta be true.

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It's in the textbooks. And I confirmed it on the internet, so it's gotta be true, right? Well, we'll talk about that a little bit later, too.

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My point is, people get intimidated, because there are brilliant people who believe in millions of years, and I don't deny that.

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And so we think, well, we gotta get the millions of years into the biblical timeline somehow, because I'm a Christian, I do believe the Bible, but the scientists, they're really bright, and they say millions of years, gotta fit that in somehow.

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Where are you gonna put it, though? Because the Bible really indicates a few thousand years, something like 4 ,000 years between Adam and Christ's earthly ministry, which was about 2 ,000 years ago.

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Where are you gonna put the millions of years? You can't do it between Adam and Christ, because that would destroy those genealogies, wouldn't it?

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You can't say, and so -and -so begets so -and -so, and then a million years later, they beget so -and -so, that doesn't work. But there's only six days.

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Adam's made on the sixth day, so people try to put the millions of years into the creation week. Where are you gonna do that?

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Where are you gonna fit millions of years into six days? That's gonna be a challenge. Well, there's a few different ways people try to do it.

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Some people would say, well, maybe the millions of years happens before the beginning, and that's pretty easy to refute, because if the millions of years happened before the beginning, then the beginning wouldn't be the beginning, right?

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It would be the much later, and that's not what the Bible says. It's in the beginning that God created the heavens and the earth.

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Or maybe there's an enormous gap between Genesis 1, 1, and 1, 2. Well, the gap theory, we'll come back and talk about that a little bit later.

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There's no evidence for that in the scriptures. But one of the most common is the idea that maybe the days weren't really days at all.

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Maybe they were actually vast ages, hundreds of millions of years each. So God really, he meant to say that he made in six ages, but for some reason, he used the word day and hoped that we'd figure it out.

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It's kind of a strange concept. It's not something the Bible teaches. Not some people would say, oh, but Dr.

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Lyle, there's support for this, right? Because the Bible says in 2 Peter 3 .8 that one day is what the

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Lord is 1 ,000 years. You see, those days might have been long periods of time. And it's interesting what you can get away with when you pull verses out of context, because 2

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Peter 3 .8 is not referring to the days of creation when you read it in context. Not at all.

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And I think it's interesting, too, that people only quote the first part of the verse. What does the rest of the verse say?

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One day is what the Lord is 1 ,000 years, and 1 ,000 years is one day. Cancels that right out, you see. People only take the first part of the verse out of context to make time longer.

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I've never heard anybody take the second part out of context to make time shorter, right? Nobody says, well, the

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Bible indicates 2 ,000 years between Abraham and Christ's earthly ministry, but 1 ,000 years is as a day. It was really only 48 hours.

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People don't do that. That would be silly. And it's not saying a day is 1 ,000 years. It's saying it's as 1 ,000 years, like 1 ,000 years.

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It's a simile. It's comparing two things that are, in fact, very different, and that's what makes it so powerful.

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By the way, how can one day be with the Lord as 1 ,000 years and also 1 ,000 years as one day? How can it work both ways?

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Because God's beyond time, and that really is what the passage is teaching us. God's not a temporal being like we are.

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He doesn't live within time. Now, He can step into time and do things. That's not a problem, but He doesn't require space and time like we do, because He's non -physical.

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He made space and time. God's beyond time. And when you read it in context, that's what it's talking about.

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It's God delaying, from a human perspective, judgment so that many people can be saved. And it's explaining

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God's patience by pointing out that He's beyond time. Of course He's gonna be patient. It's not referring to the days of creation.

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And by the way, even if you said, well, a day equals 1 ,000 years, that would make the

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Earth 12 ,000 years old instead of 6 ,000. It doesn't get you anywhere close to the millions of years that people think they need to add to Genesis.

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But it's not giving you permission to change the word day everywhere you see in Scripture to 1 ,000 years. That's not what it means.

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The Hebrew word for day is yom, and it's used over 2 ,000 times in the Old Testament of the Bible in singular and plural form.

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Plural form is yamim. And I find the only place people question what does day mean is in Genesis.

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Isn't that true? You don't hear people sitting around having Bible studies. Now, how long was Jonah really in the belly of the great fish?

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Were those ordinary days? Oh, I think they were thousands of years. He might have been in there for a very long time, right? Well, no wonder he repented, right?

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Or how long did Joshua really take to march around the walls of Jericho? Were those ordinary days? Oh, I think they were thousands of years. He might have been there a really long time, right?

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And you're laughing because you actually do know how to interpret Scripture because, of course, they're ordinary days.

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We understand that. Now, some people say, oh, but the Hebrew word for day can mean a period of time longer than 24 hours.

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It can mean time in a generic sense, and that's true in certain contexts, primarily in poetic contexts. The main meaning, though, of yom is day, as in an earth rotation or the light portion of an earth rotation.

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The same as our English word for day. In fact, our English word for day can mean a long period of time in poetic contexts.

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You might say, back in my father's day, oh, yeah. That would be a period of time longer than 24 hours. I get that.

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It's being used metaphorically, poetically. I get that. That's legitimate. Back in my father's day, it took three days to drive across Texas during the day.

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So you got the word day used three times in singular and plural, and I'll bet you didn't have any trouble understanding it because you used context.

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You used the surrounding words to constrain the meaning. So back in my father's day, okay, that's a poetic sense.

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It's a non -literal day. That's a period of time. It took three days. Well, those would be ordinary days, wouldn't they?

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Because it's got a number with it. Three days to drive across Texas during the day. That would be the light portion of an ordinary day.

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It wouldn't be the poetic usage, not at all. And it's the same in Hebrew. It's really the same in any language.

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Most words have more than one meaning. You look in a dictionary, you get multiple definitions.

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Why is that? That's the way language is, not just English. Most languages, words can have more than one meaning.

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And you say, well, it's astonishing that we can communicate at all. Not really, because we use context. Only one meaning will fit the context of a well -constructed sentence.

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Now, occasionally, somebody will come up with a bad sentence where a meaning will fit equally well in two different ways.

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And sometimes those are funny if they're done unintentionally. Like I might say, the student center is giving away free guitars, no strings attached.

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What do you mean by that? That's not a well -constructed sentence, is it? Because there's more than one possible meaning.

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But in a good sentence, and God's gonna write good sentences, there's only one meaning that'll fit the context.

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God is not the author of confusion, so he's not gonna write ambiguous sentences in his word. And so, let's take a look at the context surrounding the word day.

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And we'll just take a look outside of Genesis 1, where we all agree on what it means. So, for example, when the word day is used with a number, like the first day, the second day, the third day, the fourth day is in an ordered list.

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And that happens over 400 times outside Genesis 1. We all agree that's an ordinary day. Of course, if I said on the third day he went up to such and such a city, you'd say, well, yeah, that's an ordinary, those are earth rotations,

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I get that. But if I said there was evening and morning, even if the word day is not there, what's an evening plus a morning?

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That's a day, right, that's the limits of a day. And so we get that. That happens 38 times outside of Genesis 1.

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We all agree that's an ordinary day. If I said there was evening that day, or if I said there was morning that day, either one of those would indicate

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I'm talking about an ordinary day, right? Evening with day or morning with day happens 23 times each outside of Genesis 1.

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We all agree those are ordinary days. Or if I said there was day, then there was night. As long as I'm in the historical narrative section of the

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Bible where we're dealing with real history, of course, if I said there was day and then there was night, you know I'm talking about earth rotations, we get that.

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So these are contextual clues that indicate that we're dealing with an ordinary day. Day with a number, day with evening or day with morning, or just evening and morning by themselves, or day with night.

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So let's apply these contextual indicators to Genesis 1 and see if we can figure out what

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God meant when he said that he created in six days. Genesis 1 .5, and God called the light day, so there he's defining it for you.

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Days when it's light out, that would constitute an ordinary day, right? And the darkness he called night, so you have night contrasted with day, that's gotta be an ordinary day.

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And the evening associated with day, that's gotta be an ordinary day. And the morning associated with day, that's gotta be an ordinary day.

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You have evening and morning together, that constitutes an ordinary day, and you get a number with it. God used about every contextual indicator he could possibly have used to indicate that that's an ordinary day, that first day, anyway.

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Well, what about the other days of creation? Well, let's have a look here. Evening, morning, number, day. Evening, morning, number, day.

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Evening, morning, number, day. Evening, morning, number, day. Evening, morning, number, day. That's pretty clear, isn't it?

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It's kinda like God's saying, see the ordinary days, and in case you still don't get it, the ordinary days, and in case you're a little thick, the ordinary days, and in case you're really intellectually challenged, they're ordinary days.

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I don't think he could have been any clearer. People say, well, he could have said 24 -hour days, but then people would say, well, what's an hour, right?

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There's just no satisfying some people. And by the way, hours hadn't been invented yet. They were invented by the Egyptians much later.

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So you can blame them for why we have a 24 -hour in a day instead of something convenient like 10. But anyway, people say, oh, but the sun wasn't created until the fourth day.

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That's true, and it's irrelevant. The sun doesn't have much to do with the length of the day. It's primarily the rotation of the earth that determines the length of the day.

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As long as you have a light source and a rotating planet, you're gonna have day and night. Did we have a light source on the first day?

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Genesis 1, 3, and God said, let there be light, and there was light. Yeah, we had a light source. Did we have a rotating planet?

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And the evening and the morning were the first day. Yeah, we had a rotating planet. So God had a temporary light source for the first three days.

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He replaced it with the sun on day four, perhaps so the Hebrews would be less inclined to worship the sun. Most ancient cultures worshiped the sun as the primary source of life, and so God displaces it a few days.

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God's saying it's not the primary source of life. I'm the primary source of life. God's, the sun is just an object that God created, and it doesn't even give it a name in Genesis.

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It gives something a name, and you're more likely to think of it as a deity. No, it's just an object. It's just the greater light that God made to govern the day and so on.

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You know, all the other units of time other than a week have a basis in astronomy. Did you know that?

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But not a week. Where do we get the idea of a week? Well, all the other units of time have a basis in astronomy.

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A day is a rotation of Earth on its axis. A month is the amount of time it takes the moon to go through its phases.

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That's where we get the word month. It is a moonth. That's where it comes from. The year is the amount of time it takes the

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Earth to go around the sun. But where do we get the idea of seven days in a week? It's not from astronomy.

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It's from history. It's because that's how long God chose to take to create and rest, and the

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Bible specifically tells us that in Exodus chapter 20, you know Exodus chapter 20. That's the

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Ten Commandments. We like to memorize sections of that chapter. Verse eight, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. God goes on and explains in six days you'll do all your labor, but the seventh is the

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Lord's. You don't have to do any work on that day. Verse 11 is the explanation for why. Why do we have a seven day week?

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Because in six days the Lord made the heaven, the earth, the sea, and all that's in them and rested the seventh day. That's a pattern for us.

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And so my point is if God had really created over six ages, hundreds of millions of years each, and then rested for an age of 100 million years, we'd have an awfully long work week, right?

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You'd never make it to the weekend, literally. You would not survive to the weekend. Back in Martin Luther's time there were some people who were trying to squeeze the days of creation into one day, saying

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God actually made everything in one day for various philosophical reasons, not biblical reasons.

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I like how Martin Luther responded to this. He said, how long did the work of creation take when Moses writes that God created heaven and earth and whatever's in them in six days, then let this period continue to have been six days and do not venture to devise any common according to which six days were one day.

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I love this last part. He says, but if you cannot understand how this could have been done in six days, then grant the

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Holy Spirit the honor of being more learned than you are. We need to remember that.

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If you don't understand how God could have done something, that's okay, he's smarter than you are. He's infinitely smarter than you are, in fact.

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But what about the gap theory then? There are folks who say, well, yeah, there's no doubt that God created in six days, but maybe we can shove millions of years in between verse one and verse two.

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In the beginning, God created heaven and earth, and they like to translate verse two, and the earth became without form and void and so on. You really can't translate it that way in that context.

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But there's no evidence of any kind of gap in Genesis, and in fact, it's disallowed on the basis of Hebrew grammar.

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So Genesis one, this is Genesis one written in Hebrew. Hebrew reads right to left, opposite of English. So now verse two uses a construction called a vav disjunctive, and that's where you have and, which is the

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Hebrew word and letter, it's vav, and the earth, vav ha -ha -retz.

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And when you have that, and the earth, and followed by a non -verb, that indicates a vav disjunctive, which is basically indicating that that is a comment on what came previously, a comment or explanation on what came previously.

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See, the normal Hebrew word order would be the verb first, and said God, and created

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God, and so on, and so the verb comes first. But when you have the noun first, then that indicates a vav disjunctive, and the earth was without form and void.

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So now the rest of Genesis is vav consecutive. That's different, that does follow in time.

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And this happened, and that happened, and so on. So verse three and on is vav consecutive. Verse two, no, verse two, vav disjunctive, meaning it's a comment on verse one.

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It's kind of like what we use parentheses for in English. It's providing background information to give further explanation or clarification to the conditions that existed in verse one.

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So you can think of it, in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, parentheses, and the earth was without form and void. It's explaining the conditions that existed when

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God first created the heavens and the earth. So my point is, you cannot put a gap of time between verse one and verse two, because verse two does not follow in time.

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It's not part of the narrative sequence. Rather, it's providing background information, pointing out that the earth was initially without form and void.

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Why? Because God took six days to form it and fill it. It makes sense. So without verse two, you might think that, well,

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God created heaven and the earth just like they are today, full of life and with continents separated from oceans. No, verse two is saying, no, that's not the case.

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Initially, the earth was a ball of water, formless and void, it didn't have life on it. There was not even light yet. And then verse three and following is

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God creating the light and then creating the continents and creating the animals and so on. So you can't put a gap of time between verse one and two grammatically.

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Now, what about the science? Well, we'll talk more about this later, but there's a lot of science that confirms that the world is, that creation was recent and not billions of years ago.

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The fact that we find C14 in just about everything that has carbon in it. C14 is an unstable variety of carbon that has a half -life of 5 ,700 years.

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C14 cannot last even one million years. And yet we find it in diamonds that are supposed to be billions of years old.

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They can't be billions of years old. They can't be more than a few thousand years old or the C14 would have decayed away into nitrogen. Lots of stuff like that.

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We'll cover that a little bit later. So the question I want to ask now is, does it really matter?

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The age of the earth, does it matter? Because historically what happened is the secular scientists came along and said, the

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Bible's not true because we know that the earth is much, much older than the Bible indicates because we think we know how these rock layers were deposited and we think it took millions of years.

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Now, of course, they weren't around to see those rock layers deposited. And so they don't actually know how long it took, but nonetheless, they reasoned that these must have taken millions of years.

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And a lot of the theologians, not all of them, but a lot of them compromised and said, well, maybe we can allow that because after all, it's not a salvation issue.

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We don't want it to be a stumbling block. We just want people to be saved. Who cares about the age of the earth?

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And I think they were well -meaning, but that doesn't make it right. The age of the earth is an important issue, albeit not directly a salvation issue in the sense that nobody's claiming you have to believe in six days to be saved.

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We're saved by God's grace, received through faith in Christ, right? And we don't wanna add to that.

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God, fortunately, does not require us to have perfect theology to be saved. But nonetheless, out of gratitude for our salvation, we ought to get our theology as right as possible.

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So I'm gonna say it's not a salvation issue in that sense, but it is an important issue. It's kind of like gravity. Gravity is not a salvation issue, but would you not agree it's an important issue?

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You can not believe in gravity and still go to heaven. You'd probably get there a lot quicker that way, right? It's an important issue.

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It's important for a couple of reasons. First of all, it's important because it is what the Bible teaches. The Bible does teach that God created in six days.

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Now, I'll grant, most of us can't read the Bible in the original languages, and so we have to rely on a translation, and sometimes the translation doesn't get it quite right.

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So it's always good to go back and double -check. Am I really reading the text properly? And we can challenge each other.

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We can say, brother, I don't think you're reading this text right. I think this is what it means, and we should do that. But then when you go back and you study it, and you say, yeah, there's no doubt.

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I mean, that's what the Bible says, that God created in six days. Once you understand the Bible clearly teaches something, we are obligated to accept that.

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It's just that simple. And, in fact, the section of the Bible that says in six days, God created the heaven, the earth, the sea, and all that's in them, that's part of the

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Ten Commandments that was written in stone by the finger of God. That's awesome. Most of the

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Bible, God used people to write his word in a way that's a little mysterious to us because we can't do that.

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But God used people and used their personalities to write exactly what he wanted them to write. But I think it's interesting, the one place that people most want to compromise is the section where God bypassed human beings and wrote it directly with his own finger in stone.

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That's the place you want to compromise? All scripture's inspired by God. I think in six days is inscribed by God.

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That's interesting. The same Bible that teaches that God created in six days also teaches the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, yes, that Jesus turned the water into wine, walked on water, calmed the storm, raised the dead, raised himself from the dead.

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The same Bible teaches all those things. Is that not correct? If you say yes, but I don't think I believe in the six days because most scientists say that's not possible.

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I got news for you. Most scientists would say virgin birth's not possible, turning water into wine's not possible, resurrection of the dead's not possible.

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You'd have to reject those two to be logically consistent. And you say, but wait a minute,

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Lyle. Those things on the right list, those are miracles. And so, you know, those go beyond science.

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And I'm thinking, wasn't the creation of the universe a miracle? If not, I'd like to see you do it.

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There's another reason why you don't wanna add in the millions of years, and that concerns these fossils that we find all over the world. I would expect to find fossils all over the world because there was a worldwide flood.

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Of course, you're gonna find fossils all over the earth. And we find aquatic organisms and land organisms mixed together.

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That's what you'd expect to find in a worldwide flood. We find aquatic organisms buried on what is now land.

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And so, of course, it was flooded at some point. But you see, my secular colleagues, they don't believe in a worldwide flood. They believe that these fossils were deposited gradually over hundreds of millions of years.

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And if you accept that, if you accept the secular timeline, you've got a huge theological dilemma on your hands because a fossil is a dead thing.

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And if you got fossils 100 million years ago, you've got death before Adam sinned. In fact, you've got death before Adam existed.

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But doesn't the Bible say that sin and death came into the world as a result of Adam? By man came sin, by sin came death, and so on.

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The Bible teaches that in a number of places, not just in Genesis, but reiterated later in Romans and First Corinthians and so on. But if you believe in millions of years, even if you don't embrace evolution in the

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Darwinian sense, but nonetheless you believe in millions of years, then you've got by death came man. In which case, death is not the penalty for Adam's sin.

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It's something that was already in the world. So which is it, is it by death came man or by man came death?

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Those are logically contrary positions. They cannot both be true, they can't. So here you have the

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Garden of Eden, Eve saying God's creation is perfect, Adam saying God said it's very good. He's right, this is very good.

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And by the way, it wasn't just the Garden of Eden, it was God saw everything he had made and behold, it was very good, the

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Bible says. All the Lord's works are perfect, the Bible says in Deuteronomy. So here's the problem though.

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If you think fossils are hundreds of millions of years old, then that means creatures were dying long before Adam and Eve were created, long before God got around to creating them and called the world very good.

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In which case, the Garden of Eden is sitting on top of millions of years of death, suffering, disease, bloodshed, and so on. Do you know we find fossils with evidence of disease in them, arthritis, cancer even?

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There's a whole field called paleopathology that studies disease in fossils. Now, were those diseases already in the world when

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God finally got around to creating Adam and Eve and said, oh, it's very good? If so, then that means disease is very good, suffering is very good, bloodshed is very good.

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In which case, when your friend gets sick, why would you bother praying for him? It's very good that they're sick. It's part of God's perfect plan for a perfect world, right?

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Well, no, that's not right, is it? No, the world was very good when God created it. Today, it's not very good.

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There's a remnant of beauty in the world, don't get me wrong. God still upholds his creation, but there's ugliness, too, because of man's sin.

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So you see, my point is, those fossils can't be before Adam's sin. They have to be sometime after Adam's sin.

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That's when death entered the world. Now, some people might say, but oh, I think, Lyle, I think it's just human death that was introduced when

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Adam sinned. Animals were already living and dying. But I don't think you can defend that scripturally. God cares about animals, too, not to the same extent, those creatures that he made in his own image, but nonetheless, if you think about it, when was animal death instituted?

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Well, it was when Adam sinned, right? Because when Adam sinned, God provided skins of clothing for Adam and Eve, those would be animal skins, which means

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God killed an animal or animals to provide skins of clothing for Adam and Eve. I always thought maybe it was a lamb.

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The Bible doesn't say what animal it was, but that would make sense, maybe pointing forward to the actual lamb who would actually pay for Adam and Eve's sins and not just cover them temporarily.

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So there's no doubt that the living animals also would have been immortal had

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Adam not sinned. Now, some people say, oh, but I got you here, Lyle, because we know plants died before Adam and Eve sinned, right, because they were eating plants or plant parts, at least.

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So you had to have plant death, right? And the interesting thing is plants, biblically, are not considered alive.

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Isn't that interesting? The Bible has a special word, nefesh, nefesh kaya for living creatures, and it applies to human beings and it applies to animals, but it's never applied to plants.

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Plants are never referred to as nefesh kaya anywhere in Scripture. They're not living in that sense.

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Now, modern biologists classify plants as living. I mean, it's okay, it's a different terminology, but the

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Bible doesn't classify them as living. The Bible classifies them as food, albeit self -replicating food, for living creatures.

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And we sort of know that, right? You know there's a difference between a plant and an animal. A plant is not alive in the same way that an animal is, in the same way that we are.

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It's not conscious, it doesn't have blood. The Bible talks about the life being in the blood and so on. And we know that.

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You can talk about a dead plant, but you're being sort of metaphorical, aren't you? You can talk about a dead battery, it doesn't mean it was ever really alive, yeah?

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And we know that. You come across a so -called dead tree. Well, that's nice. I can sit on that for a little while, maybe take a picture of it, put it over the mantel.

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That's nice. If you come across a dead animal, you say, well, that's nice. I think I'm gonna sit on that for a little while, take a picture. That's different, isn't it?

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We recognize animal death as an intrusion into a world that was once perfect, but I can imagine that in the eternal state.

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I think there'll be a plant cycle in the eternal state as well, but not animal death, because that's an intrusion caused by Adam's sin.

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We understand that intuitively, and it's something the Bible teaches. The Bible indicates that God made a very good world, a world that was ruined by man's sin, and people are bothered by that.

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Well, why do animals have to die? Because Adam sinned, because Adam was given dominion over the world. When someone is in authority and they mess up, it affects everyone under their authority.

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We know that. When the government does something stupid, we all suffer as a result of it, because we're under their authority, and so the world fell as a result of Adam's sin, but it'll be made very good again as a result of Christ's obedience, and we can be a part of that very good earth again, that very good new earth, without ruining it, only if our sin's been paid for.

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If you don't understand that principle, you can get mad at God when somebody dies. You can say, some God of love you are. Why did you allow my friend to die?

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If you believe in millions of years, death and suffering are God's fault, not man's fault, because man wasn't around.

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We all agree human beings don't go back hundreds of millions of years. Even the evolutionists concede that, but that's not what the

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Bible teaches. The Bible teaches that it's a result of our sin that the world suffers, and so when somebody dies, we need to remember, that's what

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I deserve too, and it's only by God's grace that I take my next breath, because I don't deserve it.

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We live in a very entitled society today, especially the millennials. They're so entitled.

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I deserve free healthcare. I deserve free education. Actually, what you deserve is death and hell.

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You've earned that. Anything you get that's better than that is by God's grace. If that's an attitude that everybody had, the world would be a lot different, wouldn't it?

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If you realize that it's only by God's grace and mercy that he did not execute you in your sleep for your high treason against him.

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There's another problem, though, that comes up when people try to add the millions of years, and that has to do with the flood, because as I mentioned, secularists do not believe in a worldwide flood, because either the fossils were deposited gradually over hundreds of millions of years, or the bulk of them were deposited by that one worldwide flood.

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That would certainly do it. You can't have both. A worldwide flood would destroy any previous fossil record. You'd lose all your so -called evidence for millions of years, which is, in fact, what the secularists believe.

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No worldwide flood, millions of years instead, and some Christians have even bought into that, and they've said, well, maybe there was a flood, but it wasn't really global.

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I'm thinking of a prominent teacher who goes around teaching that there was a flood, but it was just limited to the Mesopotamia Valley, that Noah's flood was limited to Mesopotamia, and he believes every human was living in Mesopotamia at the time.

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It's kind of interesting. What does the Bible have to say, though? It's always good to go back and double -check, make sure we're reading it right.

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Genesis 6 .17, God says, and behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy, what, a few things here and there?

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No, it's to destroy all flesh. Where is the breath of life from? What, the local Mesopotamia Valley? No, it's from under heaven.

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That would mean everything under the sky, which would be everything, right? Where is the breath of life from under heaven?

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And everything that is in the earth shall die. Sounds like a global flood. Well, let's read on. Genesis 7 .19

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-20, and the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth, and all the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered. 15 cubits upward did the waters prevail.

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The mountains were covered. By local flood, that doesn't make sense. No, it's a global flood.

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All flesh died that moved upon the earth, every creeping thing, every man, all in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land died.

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Every living substance was destroyed. Noah only remained alive, and they never put them on the ark. It's a global flood, isn't it?

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Bible's clear about that. By the way, you can't have a local flood that covers the high hills, right?

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Think about that. What would that look like? It would look like this. Local floods don't cover a high hill.

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This is the nature of water and gravity. It doesn't work. What was the purpose of the rainbow?

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God's promised never to send another global flood, but if it was just a local flood, and God was promising never to send another local flood, then

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God has broken his promise thousands of times, because we do have local floods. We do. Why build an ark the size of an ocean liner?

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Take two of every air -breathing land animal on board for a local flood that you knew was coming? Why not just move, right?

51:21

Well, I wanna skip some of these for time's sake. I do wanna sum it up with this cross series. The church is preaching a message, come to Jesus, come to the cross, and be saved.

51:28

The gospel, we wanna be preaching that. It's important. My point is there's been an attack in the form of millions of years.

51:34

That's one of the attacks on scripture, and that impacts, and the funny thing is, we're inclined to think, because of where that impacts, well, it's a miss.

51:42

Millions of years is not an attack on the gospel, right? That's a side issue. But what we fail to recognize often is that millions of years is an attack on the literal history of Genesis.

51:52

If millions of years is true, then the literal history of Genesis is not, and the gospel is based on the literal history of Genesis.

52:00

Genesis explains why it is that we need a savior. Satan's crafty. If he were aiming at the cross, oh, we'd be concerned about that.

52:07

You can get books to defend the resurrection of Christ. We get that that's important. That's a salvation issue.

52:13

But Satan aims at our foundation, and we think, well, it's just a side issue. That's not important, when really it's a foundational issue.

52:19

It's an attack on the authority of God's word at the very beginning, at the very root. And then these different attacks historically came, naturalism, evolution, eight men, millions of years, no global flood, and they impact.

52:31

And again, we think, well, that's a miss. Didn't hit the cross, when really it was a direct hit. And the result of all these different attacks on Genesis is unbelief.

52:40

Just as Jesus pointed out, if I've told you earthly things and you don't believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things? It's a pretty good question.

52:46

These different symptoms happen. Prayer is outlawed in schools. We say, hey, trust in Jesus. Well, creation's outlawed in schools.

52:54

And well, Jesus is gonna return. Yes, he is, but he's told us to do some things in the meantime, like make disciples of all nations.

53:00

And the Bible's outlawed in schools. We say, let's get the Bible back into schools. And don't get me wrong, I'm all for doing politically what can be done, but my point is, if the culture's gonna be won to Christ, it's not gonna be through politics.

53:11

It's not. It's gonna be through the proclamation of the gospel, and that's only gonna make sense if you can defend the gospel.

53:17

You can defend it beginning in Genesis. And then the Ten Commandments outlawed in schools, and well, let's concentrate on worship.

53:24

And don't get me wrong, the church can be done a lot of great things, but if we're not being obedient in Christ's command to be ready to give an answer, then we've missed the boat, really.

53:34

And again, the gospel in our culture has become obscured by unbelief, because we live in a culture now where people do not respect the

53:40

Bible as they used to. And that begins with those attacks on Genesis. It really does.

53:45

So that's why I founded the Biblical Science Institute. We're a parachurch ministry. Of course, I'm a member of my own local church body, but as a ministry, we come alongside the church, repair the damage that's been done.

53:55

We show you that these are attacks on the Christian faith. We wanna warn you that these are attacks on the Christian faith, and then we show you how to defend the faith against all those different issues, you see, using the various resources that we produce.

54:06

That's why we do what we do. And then ultimately, we'd like to be in the background, because we'd like everyone in the church to recognize that these are attacks on the

54:12

Christian faith, and then we'd like everyone in the church to be able to defend the faith against these issues. And you don't have to go out and get a PhD to do that.

54:19

God calls a few of us to go out and get a PhD and specialize in certain fields and then write about that information and bring the cookies down onto the bottom shelf so that everybody can understand that the gospel is true beginning in Genesis.

54:31

And then the church can say, come to Jesus, come to the cross and be saved. And people say, I get it now. I understand. It's because of what Adam did, that I'm born a sinner.

54:38

I'm born a rebel against God. And I would ruin that new earth the same way Adam ruined the original unless my sin is paid for.

54:44

That's why I need a savior. That's why I need Jesus. So again, check us out on the web, biblicalscienceinstitute .com.

54:50

The book that covers this topic and in greater depth, Understanding Genesis. And I go into more depth too on how do we know that the days are really days and so on.

54:59

And we have this presentation on DVD as well, Understanding Genesis. We talked about ultimate proof of creation last night, how to give a bulletproof argument for biblical creation and the

55:08

Bible in general, and the DVD that goes along with that, along with two follow -ups, Nuclear Strength Apologetics. Discerning Truth, How to Spot Logical Fallacies and Arguments that Evolutionists Tend to Make.

55:18

Stargazer's Guide to the Night Sky, How to Better Enjoy the Night Sky from a Christian Perspective. If you ever wanted to learn the constellations or what can you see in binoculars.

55:26

You know you can see Saturn's rings in binoculars. You just gotta know which one's Saturn. That's where the book will help you. So if you wanted to get a telescope, what kind you might wanna get and how to use it.

55:35

So that's Stargazer's Guide. That's a fun book. Taking Back Astronomy is the topic we'll cover next and how the universe declares

55:41

God's glory. Not a big bang or billions of years. Keeping Faith in an Age of Reason, Answering Over 400 Alleged Bible Contradictions.

55:47

And you find that not one of them is a legitimate contradiction. Physics of Einstein. What about black holes and time warps and wormholes and distant starlight and that kind of thing.

55:56

That's a fun resource. I wrote it on a layman level, but there are in -depth boxes if you wanna go into more information.

56:02

You can read those as well. Introduction to Logic. A Complete Curriculum Explaining Informal Logic from a

56:09

Christian Perspective and pointing out that in fact, logic is based on the Christian worldview. You cannot make sense of laws of logic apart from the

56:15

Christian worldview. There's also a teacher's guide that goes with that if you'd like to use it for homeschooling. I really had homeschoolers in mind when

56:21

I wrote the book, but some people just wanna get better at logic and read it, so there you go. DVDs like The Created Cosmos takes you on a tour of the universe from a biblical perspective.

56:31

Creation Evangelism, How to Take It to the Streets, How to Use Creation to Better Evangelize, to Better Share Your Faith with Your Friends.

56:40

Dinosaurs in the Bible, that's a fun one, especially for the youth. Youth love dinosaurs, and I often think God created dinosaurs just to get kids interested in the

56:47

Bible, because the Bible does have something to say about dinosaurs, and so that's a fun DVD on that topic. Astronomy Reveals Creation, I'll be handling that next.

56:54

Keep in mind, you can get all the, these prices aren't right, but you can get all of the books and DVDs together for discounted prices that you'll see back there.

57:02

We sometimes swap out books, so the prices change a little bit. Don't forget to sign up for a free, free, free monthly newsletter, and make sure you put your email address very legibly, because you will get it once a month in your email, unless you don't put it legibly, in which case you will get nothing.

57:16

And again, check us out on the web, biblicalscienceinstitute .com, and we'll be back in a little bit to talk about astronomy.

57:21

So, thank you very much. Okay, so for our next session here,

57:30

I get to talk about my specialty field of astronomy, which is always fun. And it's, something that pains me is that science has been misused by secularists to try and persuade people that the

57:43

Bible's not true. That's one of the, whoa, okay.

57:50

That's one of the main reasons I founded the Biblical Science Institute, is I want to show people that science confirms the

57:58

Bible. And in fact, the Bible is the foundation for scientific reasoning, and logical reasoning, and morality, and so on.

58:05

But especially in my specialty field of astronomy, there's something wonderful about the universe that really speaks to the majesty of our creator.

58:14

And it's just a shame that people have been, that the science of astronomy and other sciences have been misused to try and persuade people, oh no, the universe just kind of exploded into existence in a big bang billions of years ago.

58:25

That's how everything came about. I cannot believe that that is taken seriously, honestly. That the idea that the universe just kind of exploded into existence, really?

58:34

No, God did make the universe. And what we'll see, what I want to show you today is that when we explore the secrets of the cosmos, they really do confirm

58:42

Biblical creation. They confirm what the Bible teaches. And there are five secrets of the universe that we're gonna cover today.

58:48

We're gonna cover the, the first aspect is that the Bible talks about the glory of the Lord being revealed in the heavens.

58:54

And I think I can show you that. I think you can show you that the heavens really do declare God's glory. Not a big bang, not billions of years.

59:00

We're gonna see how the basics of astronomy that are touched upon in Scripture. Yes, the

59:06

Bible does touch on astronomy. That's not its main point. But when it touches on it, it's accurate. And these would be things that you would learn in any freshman level astronomy class.

59:14

When the Bible speaks to those issues, it's exactly right. And we have confirmation today. We're gonna see that the

59:20

Bible is right when it addresses the issue of the age of the universe. The Bible does teach thousands of years.

59:26

And we're gonna see that the scientific evidence confirms that. It does line up with Scripture. We're gonna see that the uniqueness of the

59:32

Earth that the Bible talks about is confirmed by science as well. So the Bible got that right. And then we're gonna deal with the issue of distant starlight and how

59:39

God might have got the light from those galaxies to the Earth. We're gonna see the Bible is right about that as well. So the take home is the

59:45

Bible is right when it touches on any topic. It would have to be, as the word of God, it would have to be, it would have to be right on any topic on which it touches.

59:55

People have said, but the Bible's not an astronomy textbook. It's not a science textbook. That's true. Because science textbooks change every few years when we learn that we weren't right about some things.

01:00:05

Like Pluto's not a planet anymore, for example. But no, the

01:00:12

Bible never has to be updated because God got it right the first time. And so everything it touches on is right. And when the

01:00:18

Bible touches on science, which it occasionally does, it's right. It's right. And so let's dive right in, see how the glory of the

01:00:30

Lord's revealed in the cosmos. And, wow, you don't have to be an astrophysicist to appreciate the majesty of the

01:00:39

Lord as revealed in the heavens. And it's wonderful these days. We have these wonderful Hubble images.

01:00:44

I'm gonna show you some of these where we can see the incredible beauty of the universe and the incredible size of the universe. The Bible does say that the heavens declare the glory of God.

01:00:52

The skies proclaim the work of his hands. And I'm gonna argue that there are at least a couple of ways in which the universe declares

01:00:58

God's glory. The size and the beauty of the universe. Now, those are not the only two attributes, but if I talked about every attribute of God revealed in the universe, we'd be here for millions of years.

01:01:09

So we don't wanna do that. I'm just gonna focus in on the size and the beauty of the universe. And, again, the beauty of the universe, you don't have to be an astrophysicist to appreciate that.

01:01:19

I think one of the things that attracted me to the field of astronomy was just, it's unbelievably beautiful. The heavens are stunning.

01:01:26

And I'll show you some images of that. But keep in mind the size of these things, too. And that's something that I don't think, even if you do have a

01:01:35

PhD in astrophysics, you can fully grasp. I mean, I can write down numbers using scientific notation that indicates the size of some of these things and the distances involved.

01:01:44

But to really grasp them, it's beyond my comprehension. And that gives us a little window into the mind of God.

01:01:51

I'm sorry we're experiencing technical difficulties. I think he's back there casting out the demons in the system, but apparently this kind comes out only by prayer and fasting.

01:02:00

Anyway. We'll start with the moon. The moon is about the same size as the

01:02:07

United States. So as you appreciate the beauty of these objects, keep in mind the scale of them. This is one of the smaller objects we'll be looking at.

01:02:14

So about the size of the United States. If you put the United States up at the same distance as the moon, it would cover about the same area in the sky.

01:02:20

That gives you kind of a feel for it. And the moon is a lot of fun to look at in a small telescope. This is actually a mosaic image of the moon.

01:02:26

So it's very high -resolution images that have been stitched together. And that's why the color balance is a little different in some places, depending on how the sunlight was hitting it and so on.

01:02:35

So we actually have a spacecraft orbiting the moon, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. It's taking high -resolution images of the surface.

01:02:40

And so we have these wonderful mosaic images of the moon. And I love looking at the moon through a small telescope.

01:02:47

And I really like showing other people the moon through its small telescope. Because they usually look at it and they go, wow. That's cool.

01:02:53

It just looks neat. Especially when it's in the first quarter phase, when it's illuminated right down the middle. Because then you can see the craters very clearly.

01:02:59

When it's full, like it is here, you can't see the craters very well. Because the sun is shining right down in them and you don't see the shadows of those craters.

01:03:08

But nonetheless, it's astonishingly beautiful. And a lot of times people ask, when they're looking through, you know, they're looking at the moon.

01:03:14

And they say, can you see the flag that the astronauts planted? No, you can't see the flag.

01:03:20

When you consider that this is as large as the United States, you're not gonna see something as small as a flag, right?

01:03:28

But the interesting thing is, with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, we do have, it is actually able to see the places where the astronauts landed.

01:03:37

And, any luck? We're gonna swap out mics here? Okay. Sorry about that.

01:03:43

But that happens sometimes. I don't know what it is. But, we're gonna turn this one off.

01:04:58

I think this is amazing. But you can actually see the lower portion of the lunar module. Remember when they landed and they took off, they left the bottom portion of the lander to save fuel.

01:05:08

That spider -like looking structure, right? They left the legs and they just took off the top portion. And so that's still there on the moon, along with some instruments that they left on the surface of the moon.

01:05:18

And if you can see that, see that dark streak that goes over there, like that in the back? That's the footprints of the astronauts.

01:05:23

As they walked over to that crater in back. So, 40 -year -old footprints. And they're not going anywhere anytime soon because there's no weather on the moon.

01:05:34

There's no air. And so there's no wind. And so dust simply accumulates. There's no maid service.

01:05:40

So, those footprints will be there for a very long time. Pretty amazing, isn't it?

01:05:47

So, for those of you that don't believe we landed on the moon, oh, there you go. There it is. We have pictures now.

01:05:58

The scale of the cosmos is as amazing as its beauty. And so, again, keep in mind the moon, about the size of the United States, that's the way the moon looks best is when it's in that first quarter phase, illuminated right down the middle, and you can see the craters.

01:06:09

And it's fun to look at in a telescope because it's interesting because your brain can figure out instantly that it's a sphere, right?

01:06:17

It's not like a flat, when it's full, it looks kind of flat. But when it's in that first quarter phase, due to the illumination of the craters, your brain immediately is able to figure out that it's spherical.

01:06:26

You don't even have to think about it. And so, it's not only the beauty of the moon that the Lord created, but the ingenuity that the

01:06:32

Lord has designed in our brain and in our senses to be able to figure out shapes like that. Quite fascinating.

01:06:38

So, here's the moon compared to the earth. So, it gives you a feel for the size of it. And what a privilege that we live in a time where we have seen our planet from above.

01:06:47

You ever thought about that? Because our ancestors could only have imagined that. And what a wonderful time we live in where we can see this beautiful gem of a planet.

01:06:55

And it is beautiful. The earth is really stunning. And you might think, well, yeah, we're the winner there because we're quite a bit bigger than the moon.

01:07:03

The earth's pretty big. And it is until you compare it to Saturn. And Saturn's about nine earths across.

01:07:10

And that's just the planet, the rings, which are trillions of tiny little moonlets that orbit around Saturn's equator, right?

01:07:16

And so, those form that lovely ring system. It's stunning to see in a telescope. And what a lesson in perspective.

01:07:22

Because when you see Saturn in a small telescope, it just looks like this little gem, this little jewel that you wanna just pluck it out and stick in your pocket and take it home with you.

01:07:30

But you can't because it's nine earths across. And it looks so tiny because it's a billion miles away.

01:07:36

And that just gives you, what a lesson in perspective. I mean, amazing to think about these sorts of things.

01:07:41

And that's something that's always fascinated me about astronomy. And you think, well, okay, but, you know, earth's not that big, but Saturn, at least we got a big planet in our solar system, right?

01:07:49

But Saturn's pretty small compared to the sun, for example. The sun is over 100 earths across. The sun is basically a stable nuclear bomb, hydrogen bomb, fusing hydrogen in the middle in a way that's very stable and secure.

01:08:03

And by the way, hydrogen fusion is a very efficient power source. The sun actually releases more energy into space in one second than a billion major cities on earth could use in an entire year.

01:08:15

And you'd say, well, why would God be wasteful like that? God has unlimited power. And so it's not a problem for him at all.

01:08:21

And you consider that the sun is just one star. Yes, those other objects that you see in the night sky are the same type of object that the sun is.

01:08:29

The sun is a main sequence star, meaning it obeys a, main sequence means it obeys a rule where if you know the mass of the star, that will determine all of its other major characteristics, its size, its brightness, its temperature, its surface color and everything.

01:08:45

So main sequence stars that are the same mass as the sun look about like the sun, they're the same size, same color and so on.

01:08:53

The color is based on surface temperature. Stars like the sun, they're yellow, yellow white, have a surface temperature of about 6 ,000 degrees

01:09:00

Celsius. So pretty toasty. Stars that are less massive than the sun, if they're main sequence stars, they'll be red dwarfs.

01:09:08

So you'd say, yeah, at least we got a, the earth's not that big and apparently Saturn's not that big, but at least we got a pretty big star.

01:09:14

And the sun is larger than the majority of stars in the universe, because the majority of stars in the universe are red dwarfs.

01:09:22

But there are stars that are bigger than the sun, like Mintaka, for example. Now keep in mind, the sun is 100 earths across.

01:09:31

So keep that in mind as we explore stars like Mintaka, which is a blue supergiant. That's one of the stars of Orion's belt that you see in the winter sky.

01:09:38

So it's amazing that that's even bigger than the sun and much brighter. And you think, well, why does it look like a little tiny pinprick of light?

01:09:44

Because it's really far away. The sun is relatively close. It's a mere 93 million miles away.

01:09:50

So it's our next door neighbor. By the way, how long would it take to drive 93 million miles? It takes over 150 years.

01:09:58

That's without stopping for bathroom breaks. So, isn't that amazing? Then you got

01:10:05

Canopus, which you can't really see that from Idaho, but you can get down to Texas, you can see it. It's a white supergiant.

01:10:12

And look how big it is compared. So here's the sun, which is 100 Earths across. Look at Canopus. Astonishing. But there are stars bigger than Canopus.

01:10:19

Antares, for example, which is over 600 suns across. Amazing. And you work that out.

01:10:26

The sun's over 100 Earths across. It's really, really big. Yeah, really big. And it's got these little spots on it.

01:10:33

Those are cooler regions, star spots, where it's not quite as bright as the rest of the star.

01:10:40

So, just amazing. And if you think about, well, why do they look so small? Well, just consider the distances. The distances are outrageous.

01:10:47

Now, some stars are like the sun. They're kind of by themselves. Some stars come in binary pairs, where you have two stars, or three, or four.

01:10:54

And occasionally, you'll get a cluster of stars, where you have a bunch of stars together, like this globular star cluster. I love these things.

01:10:59

These are so beautiful. And even the picture doesn't really capture the beauty of it. When you see these with your own eyes in a telescope, and you're actually seeing the light from these stars, they're stunningly beautiful.

01:11:11

There's perhaps 100 ,000 stars in that cluster. And there's several hundred of these clusters that orbit kind of around the center of our galaxy.

01:11:18

So, M80 is just one of those clusters. I love looking at globular clusters. They're some of my favorite objects to look at in the night sky.

01:11:25

Quite beautiful. And it reminds me of that verse that says that God calls them all by their names. So, God has a name for each and every one of those stars.

01:11:32

We don't, but God does. Some of my favorite objects in the universe are nebulae. A nebula is, nebula means cloud.

01:11:41

It's Latin for cloud. And it looks like a cloud, but it's not a cloud of water vapor like an Earth's sky.

01:11:47

It's a cloud of hydrogen and helium gas. Now, that's the same stuff that stars are made of, but stars are hydrogen gas compacted into a sphere held together by their own gravity.

01:11:56

Yes, gas has gravity, and it's mutual. Attraction holds it together. Whereas a nebula is spread out over a vast region of space, and its gravity would be minimal because it's enormous.

01:12:07

And a nebula like this, our solar system would not even show up on this image, our entire solar system, all the planets and sun and everything, because it's enormous.

01:12:15

And sometimes you'll have a star cluster nearby, so you get two for the price of one there, which is kind of neat. And now, some nebulae are relatively small.

01:12:23

They're only about the size of the solar system. And these are called planetary nebulae. And in planetary nebulae, you have a star in the middle, and it's ejecting gas, usually out the north and south poles of the star.

01:12:33

They call that a bipolar planetary nebulae. And some of them are round. And so here's some pictures of planetary nebulae.

01:12:39

It has nothing to do with planets. It's just a name. And so you have the star in the middle ejecting gas.

01:12:44

Sometimes they're round, and it could be the round ones are also bipolar, with the two lobes, but maybe we're looking right down the barrel, right?

01:12:50

We don't know. We can't get another angle on it, and we're not likely to anytime soon. So there you go. My favorite, the

01:12:56

Ring Nebula, because it was the first that I learned how to find. You can see this in a small backyard telescope, and it's not too far away from the star

01:13:03

Vega. Easy to find in a small telescope. And it's so weird. I mean, it looks like that.

01:13:09

It looks like a gray version of that, because when you're out at night, you're not using your cones, your color vision as much.

01:13:15

You're using mostly your grayscale, your rods. But nonetheless, it looks like a little glowing smoke ring.

01:13:21

And it's so weird. Most places in space, you just see stars and stars and stars. There's this one little sweet spot where you'll see a glowing smoke ring, and it's so strange to see this little cosmic cheerio suspended on nothing, hanging there in space, and you're expecting it to sort of expand.

01:13:34

And it is expanding. It's just you don't notice it very much in a human lifetime. So the star that made it is now collapsed in on itself, that little white dwarf.

01:13:41

So it's no longer producing energy. It's just releasing the energy it already has. So all these objects that we've looked at, stars, planets, moons, and so on, nebulae, clusters, are a part of a much larger structure called a galaxy.

01:13:57

And so we live in one of these galaxies. Ours looks something like that. It's a spiral galaxy with those wonderful arms.

01:14:04

So what you're seeing there is the combined light of about 100 billion stars. 100 billion stars, amazing.

01:14:11

And we've been able to see these since really the 1700s. We had telescopes powerful enough to see these spiral structures.

01:14:18

But early on, they thought these were small and within our galaxy. And then by the early 1900s, they realized that these, in fact, are other galaxies out there with hundreds of billions of stars like ours.

01:14:33

So we're in one of these, and then we can see others by looking through ours because ours is mostly transparent, so we can see out. So pretty stunning.

01:14:39

All kinds of galaxies out in the universe. There are galaxies of tremendous beauty. There are galaxies of tremendous ugliness, yeah.

01:14:49

There are galaxies with large, mysterious arrows next to them. You'll see this in all the textbooks too.

01:14:58

There are galaxies that have rings of stars surrounding them. Isn't that interesting? There are galaxies that look like flying saucers.

01:15:05

Yes, that's a real galaxy. They call that the Sombrero Galaxy. You can see why. And you can see that in a small telescope, including that dark dust lane that blocks the light from the stars behind it.

01:15:13

That's a fun galaxy to look at. It's part of the Virgo Supercluster, easily visible in the springtime, if you know where to look.

01:15:21

There are galaxies in the process of collision where the stars just, if you think about the distances between the stars, the stars would all pass by each other.

01:15:28

The chances of any two stars colliding are remote. So these galaxies will pass harmlessly through each other.

01:15:34

Galaxies upon galaxies. As we go deeper into space, you find galaxies come in clusters. So that's a cluster of, each one of those little fuzzy specks, you see that those are not stars.

01:15:43

Those are galaxies with 100 billion stars each, some more, some less. Got even deeper into space, about as far out as we can look with Hubble.

01:15:53

Galaxies upon galaxies upon galaxies at tremendous distances. Fully formed, fully designed, spiral galaxies in some cases, as well as some ellipticals and peculiars, but a lot of spirals, look at this.

01:16:04

So those are not stars, those are galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars each, all spoken into existence by God.

01:16:11

That's pretty awesome. Think about the power that's involved. Remember I told you our sun releases more energy in a second than a billion major cities could use in a year?

01:16:18

And our sun's just one star. There are stars that are 1 ,000 times brighter than the sun, 10 ,000 times brighter than the sun.

01:16:25

Our galaxy has 100 billion stars, and we think there's at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe. That's a lot of power, isn't it?

01:16:32

That's pretty awesome. A little taste into God's power, of course, he's infinitely powerful, so it's not a problem. He spoke and they leapt into existence, all created in six days.

01:16:43

In fact, what you're seeing here was created in one day, day four, because God spent five of the six creation days working the

01:16:49

Earth, making it right for life. He took one day off, day four, and made everything else, almost as an afterthought.

01:16:55

Like, you know what would go really good with an Earth? How about 100 billion galaxies? Why not, right? And I love the way the

01:17:01

Bible describes the creation of those hundreds of billions of galaxies. It's summed up in this little phrase. He made the stars also. Isn't that awesome?

01:17:09

What a lesson in perspective. Truly, the heavens declare the glory of God. I hope you can see that. I think it's obvious.

01:17:16

I suppose it's easier to believe in a chance big bang universe if you don't know much about it, but if you understand the universe and its beauty and its majesty, you recognize it as the handiwork of the

01:17:25

Lord. What about the basics of astronomy? Things you'd learn in any freshman level astronomy class. The Bible does address those issues, and when it addresses them, it does so properly, even when the science of the time would have been contrary to that.

01:17:39

Yes, there are passages of Scripture that accurately touch on astronomy, where the scientists at the time that the passage was written would have disagreed, and now they have egg on their face, because the

01:17:49

Bible's right, and they were wrong. Let me give you some examples of this. The spherical nature of the

01:17:54

Earth. Yes, the Bible does teach around Earth in multiple ways. Isaiah 40, 22 talks about the circle of the

01:18:01

Earth, and you say, well, that could be a flat disk. It could refer to the Earth's orbit around the sun, so I don't think that's a proof text, but nonetheless, there's a circularity there.

01:18:08

However, the Job 26, 10 passage, I don't think you can get around that any other way than to say the Earth's a sphere, because it says that God inscribes a circle on the face of the waters at the boundary between light and darkness.

01:18:20

Now, that boundary between light and darkness is what we call the terminator. That's where light stops or terminates, sunlight stops or terminates, and the only way you can get a circle for a terminator is to have a spherical planet.

01:18:31

In any other shape, it won't always be a circle, and it's on the face of the waters, because the

01:18:36

Earth's surface is mostly water. So it's a wonderful passage indicating the sphericity of the

01:18:42

Earth, or for that matter, the global flood indicates the Earth is a sphere, right? Because the Bible says all the high hills that were under the whole heavens were covered with water, and you can't do that on a flat disc, because the water would run off the sides, right?

01:18:54

So you can't have that. Well, there's a lip around the edge that holds the water in, but then that itself would constitute a hill that is not covered by the waters.

01:19:03

So the only way you can have a global flood is on a globe. So the Bible does teach in multiple ways a spherical

01:19:08

Earth. And it's interesting to me, too, because if you look in most textbooks, most astronomy textbooks will credit

01:19:14

Pythagoras with being the first to come up with the idea that the Earth might be round. We don't know if he made an argument for it.

01:19:20

Most of his beliefs are not recorded directly. They were recorded by his followers. Aristotle is usually considered the first to prove that the world is round by the fact that the shadow of the

01:19:29

Earth on the moon during a lunar eclipse is always circular. That's a proof of the sphericity of the Earth. The fact that you can see the mast of a ship before the ship as it comes into a shore is an indication of the sphericity of the

01:19:41

Earth. But I think it's interesting because Pythagoras is 500s BC, Aristotle's 300s

01:19:46

BC, Isaiah's 700 BC, Job, we think it's around 2000 BC. So my point is the

01:19:52

Bible is speaking to the issue of the sphericity of the Earth long before the secularists figured it out. Back when the

01:19:58

Greeks thought the world was flat, the Bible's teaching it's round. Isn't that interesting? That's very interesting, I think.

01:20:04

By the way, the idea that Christopher Columbus proved the world is round is a myth. Educated people already knew the world was round at the time of Columbus.

01:20:11

He just thought it'd be faster to go that way, which it turns out it isn't. But I'm glad he made the trip. Earth is suspended in space.

01:20:20

Job 26 .7 says that God hangs the Earth upon nothing, a beautiful poetic description of the nature of gravity.

01:20:25

God literally hangs the Earth on nothing. What a wonderful description of gravity. Might've been hard to believe when it was written back in 2000

01:20:32

BC because even by the 800s to 900s BC, the Greeks and the Babylonians thought that the Earth was a flat disk and floated in water.

01:20:39

And doesn't that make more sense? We've seen things float in water. Our common experience, our intuition says, yes, things can float in water, but you can't hang something on nothing as if God were hanging the

01:20:50

Earth like a Christmas tree ornament but hanging it on nothing. But we have pictures now that confirm the Bible was exactly right.

01:20:56

The Greek experts of the day are what we call wrong. Expansion of the universe.

01:21:03

The Bible teaches that God stretched out or stretches out the heavens as a curtain, spreads them out as a tent to dwell in. It's mentioned a number of places in Scripture, many places, and it wasn't discovered by scientific means until the 1920s, really, when

01:21:16

Edwin Hubble and others, by measuring redshifts of galaxies, found that everything's sort of moving away from everything else, as if the entire universe is just being stretched out, getting bigger.

01:21:25

How about that? And I find this one really remarkable because in order to discover this by scientific means, it really takes modern technology.

01:21:35

You can't see the expansion of the universe just with your naked eye. You go outside tonight and you look up, well, it'd be cloudy tonight, but you go out on a clear night and look up, you go out the next night and look up, the universe looks about the same size.

01:21:46

It doesn't look like it's being stretched out or getting bigger, and yet we know from redshifts of galaxies that it is.

01:21:53

You need modern technology to discover that. You need telescopes and spectroscopes. Telescopes invented in 1608, spectroscopes were invented,

01:22:00

I think, 1700s, but the Bible records this fact in the 700s

01:22:06

BC. I think there's even a passage in Job, which again is 2000 BC, that talks about the stretching out of the heavens. It's almost as if the

01:22:12

Hebrews had some kind of divine insight into this issue. Isn't that fascinating? And of course they did.

01:22:17

By the way, people ask, well, does this mean a big bang, right? Because if the universe is getting bigger, then you run it backwards, doesn't that mean that everything came from a point that itself exploded into existence 13 .8

01:22:30

billion years ago? The answer is no. Just because something is expanding doesn't mean it exploded into existence 13 .8

01:22:37

billion years ago. Some of you are expanding. That doesn't mean you exploded into existence 13 .8

01:22:43

billion years ago. Just means you're a little bigger now than you used to be, and that's a problem all too common to all of us.

01:22:49

But in any case, apparently God made the universe with size and he stretched it out since then. Because the earth was already in the universe when

01:22:54

God first made it. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, so it was already there, and then God stretched it out since then. It was never zero size.

01:23:01

That's an irrational extrapolation to say that because it's bigger now, it must have been zero at some point.

01:23:07

That doesn't follow logically. Now some people have said, but does this at least count as a successful prediction of the

01:23:13

Big Bang? Because didn't the Big Bang predict that the universe would be expanding? And there it is. So isn't that confirmation of the theory?

01:23:19

And the answer is no, because the expansion of the universe was discovered in the 1920s. The Big Bang came along as an explanation for that in 1931.

01:23:27

1931 is when Lemaitre came up with the idea that the universe was once a point that ballooned into its current size much later.

01:23:35

So it's not a prediction. It's a postdiction. The Big Bang is a naturalistic explanation for this expansion that is rightly attributed to God in scripture.

01:23:46

So it's not a Big Bang. It just means the universe is bigger than it used to be. Conservation of energy and mass. This one's a little more abstract, but I believe the

01:23:52

Bible teaches the amount of stuff in the universe, the amount of energy, the amount of mass is constant. Einstein tells us mass and energy really are the same thing, just measured in two different ways.

01:24:01

And the amount of stuff is constant because God is not creating anymore, right?

01:24:08

And God is not destroying that which he created. So the Bible tells us that all things were made by him and that God finished his work of creation by the seventh day.

01:24:19

And so we would expect no new materials gonna come into existence because it would either mean God is still creating, which cannot be because he ended his work by the seventh day or it would mean that something could come into existence apart from God, which cannot be because all things were made by him.

01:24:32

So nothing new is gonna pop into existence and nothing is gonna cease to exist because God upholds what he made and by him all things consist or hold together.

01:24:40

So God is not going to allow material to disappear. Now, he does allow us to change material.

01:24:45

We can transform matter into other forms and so on, but the amount of stuff is constant. And those principles together are the conservation of energy or the conservation of mass.

01:24:54

James Joule is usually credited with the discovery of conservation of energy by doing experiments with collisions of billiard balls and things like that.

01:25:03

He was able to measure the energy going in and the energy coming out, they're the same. And so he's credited with discovering conservation of energy, but he was a

01:25:10

Christian and in his writings, he pointed out that, well, it makes sense that energy would be conserved because God is not creating anymore.

01:25:18

So you see how good science really comes out of a Christian worldview. If you're thinking biblically, you're gonna tend to make correct conclusions from the data.

01:25:28

So his Christianity did not hinder his science, it helped it, it helped him to make discoveries.

01:25:36

The uncountable numbers of stars, the Bible describes Abraham's descendants as being as the stars of heaven or as the sand, which is upon the seashore, which indicates a humanly uncountable number.

01:25:46

And one passage even says that, it says, which cannot be numbered for multitude. So it's a great metaphor, it's a great metaphor.

01:25:56

It might've been hard to believe when it was written because it might've not seemed like a great metaphor when it was written, because the number of stars you can see naked eye is a few thousand, somewhere between 3 ,000 or if you have superb vision, 10 ,000 stars, if you stay up all night and count them all, in terms of those stars that are within the range of human vision.

01:26:16

And so you might say, well, I mean, that's okay as an analogy, but I mean, you could have done better.

01:26:21

Sand on the seashore, yeah, that's uncountable. But the number of stars, I could count to 3 ,000. I mean, it would be tedious, but I could do it.

01:26:28

And then the telescope was invented. And in 1610, Galileo pointed his telescope up at the

01:26:34

Milky Way, that cloudy band, and realized, oh, that's 100 billion or more stars. And you can't count to 100 billion in your lifetime.

01:26:42

And that's just one galaxy. There are other galaxies out there. So it's a great analogy. It's a great analogy, and one that we can appreciate even more now.

01:26:50

I mean, it would have been understandable at the time, don't get me wrong. God wrote the Bible to be understandable. But sometimes, as science comes along and gives us additional insight into the scriptures, that makes us appreciate them even more.

01:27:03

And I think we have an example of that right here. So do you get the point? Have we learned the lesson of history? Have we learned that whenever the

01:27:09

Bible touches on astronomy, it's always right, even if the experts of the day disagree. The Bible turned out to be right in all those cases.

01:27:16

Yes, the Bible was speaking about around Earth when most people did not believe it. The Bible was talking about conservation of energy before anyone believed that.

01:27:23

The Bible was talking about expansion of the universe back in a time when most people thought the universe was static and unchanging.

01:27:29

Bible's talking about uncountable numbers of stars long before we had telescopes to observe that. Isn't that fascinating? And so those people who said, well, the

01:27:37

Bible can't be right about a spherical Earth, because our best experts say it's flat and it's supported by water, it floats in water.

01:27:43

They're wrong, and they've got ink on their face today. The Bible was right, it always is. Have we learned the lesson of history?

01:27:50

I gotta tell you, most people haven't. Because there are people who say, yes, I'll grant you the

01:27:55

Bible got those things right somehow, but nonetheless, we now know that the Bible's wrong about this, that, and the other.

01:28:01

And one of the main things they say is that the Bible is wrong about the age of the universe, because the universe is said to be 13 .8

01:28:09

billion years old. Actually, that was last month. The current estimate is 12 to 13 billion years, because they re -estimated the

01:28:15

Hubble constant. But anyway, it's supposed to be billions of years old. But the fact is, the Bible is right when it speaks to the age of the universe.

01:28:23

God creating in six days, and the indications are that was a few thousand years ago. And what I wanna show you, that there's actually many lines of scientific evidence that confirm the biblical time scale, and so we'll cover just a few of these today.

01:28:34

Yes, God did create in six days. We covered this in the last session. You know, those are ordinary days from context.

01:28:40

Evening, and each one's bounded by an evening and morning, so they're not symbolic or anything like that. They really are literal days, and that was a few thousand years ago.

01:28:47

Something like 6 ,000. People say, well, could it be 7 ,000? Okay, maybe, but it's not gonna be millions or billions.

01:28:53

That's the point. And so we see, for example, evidence that is consistent with that.

01:28:58

For example, the internal heat of the giant planets. Jupiter actually gives off twice as much energy as it gets from the sun.

01:29:04

So think about that. So every second, Jupiter is absorbing one unit of energy from the sun, and it's giving away two.

01:29:11

Take in one, spend away two. Take in one, spend away two. It's kind of like the federal government, right? And like the federal government, it can't do that forever.

01:29:20

Because eventually, you run out of energy, right? So Jupiter is constantly losing energy to space, and it can't do that for billions of years.

01:29:29

It should be an icicle by now if it were really billions of years old. It's kind of like you take a potato out of the microwave. You just heated it up.

01:29:35

You can feel the heat coming off of it, right? You put your hands close to it, you can feel it, because it's radiating that heat into space.

01:29:41

Now, if you come back two hours later, it's cold, isn't it? Because it's lost all that energy to space.

01:29:46

Now, Jupiter is a much bigger potato. It's 10 times the size of the Earth in diameter, so it can radiate for thousands of years, and it's still got energy to spare.

01:29:55

But if it were billions of years old, it really should have run out of energy a long time ago. The problem's even worse for little Neptune. Neptune's only four times the size of the

01:30:01

Earth, and it's actually giving off 2 .6 to 2 .7 times as much energy as it receives from the sun.

01:30:09

Because it's smaller, it can't hold as much energy. So batteries run down with time. So how do they still have heat after all this time?

01:30:17

By the way, a lot of planets do that. Earth does that too. But with Earth, they try and explain it by radioactive decay, which might be sensible.

01:30:25

Radioactive decay gives off heat. But Jupiter and Neptune don't have radioactive elements in any abundance.

01:30:31

They're made of the lighter stuff, hydrogen and helium, mostly. So it's not gonna work for them. Magnetic fields.

01:30:36

The Earth has a magnetic field that's caused by electrical current in Earth's core, and that forms an invisible shield, a visible magnetic shield that protects the

01:30:46

Earth from radiation from the sun, radiation from other stars, cosmic rays. That's very helpful. It's helpful for life.

01:30:52

It's a design feature. But if you think about electrical current running around there, electrical current decays over time.

01:30:59

Batteries run down. And indeed, the Earth's magnetic field has been decaying. We've been able to measure it at least since the 1830s.

01:31:06

We've been able to measure the decay of Earth's magnetic field. It appears to be an exponential decay where it starts out really steep and then it kind of peters out over time rather gradually.

01:31:16

The half -life's something like 1 ,200 years. Now, we think that during the flood year, we think that plate tectonics temporarily disturbed the magnetic field because you have all kinds of motion in the mantle and that's gonna disrupt the currents.

01:31:28

We're not sure that that's the case, but that's reasonable. But in terms of the energy, it's just dropping.

01:31:34

The energy's just dropping because there's nothing to recharge it. And so you run the equation backwards and the

01:31:39

Earth's magnetic field would have been 20 times stronger at creation. So your compass would work really, really well at creation.

01:31:45

But more importantly, you'd have increased protection from cosmic rays. So less disease and things of that nature.

01:31:51

But you run it back further because it's an exponential decay. It gets really strong.

01:31:57

And if you run it back 60 ,000 years, the Earth's magnetic field would be stronger than that of a neutron star, which is enough to rip the atoms of your body apart.

01:32:04

So my point is the Earth can't be nearly even 60 ,000 years old. Now, we're not even talking a million years.

01:32:10

We're talking 60 ,000 years before the magnetic field becomes too strong for matter to exist in its normal form.

01:32:18

And it's not just the Earth. Some of the other planets of the solar system also have magnetic fields. Not all of them, but Jupiter has a whopping big magnetic field.

01:32:25

Very powerful. It's actually too strong for life even today. And so it would be, if you were to come too close to Jupiter, it would induce currents.

01:32:34

It would not be good for you. We actually have a spacecraft orbiting really close to Jupiter and they had to design it special so that it would be protected from Jupiter's powerful magnetic field.

01:32:45

Why does it still have that magnetic field if it's billions of years old? Magnetic fields decay over time. Batteries run down.

01:32:51

And so I would suggest to you that this is an indication that Jupiter's nowhere near billions of years old. It's thousands of years old. The strength of the magnetic field's consistent with that.

01:32:59

The planet Uranus. Uranus, four times the size of the Earth. It's, and it orbits, it's kind of weird because it rotates, it's rotation axis is on its side so it rolls around the sun kind of.

01:33:13

And then the magnetic field is not aligned with the rotation axis. So it would be kind of weird. So the magnetic field would wobble as the planet rotates like that.

01:33:21

So Uranus is just really messed up on a number of levels. And, but it really shouldn't have a magnetic field if it's billions of years old.

01:33:28

A friend of mine, Russ Humphreys, who's a physicist and a biblical creationist like myself, he actually predicted the magnetic field of Uranus based on its biblical age of 6 ,000 years.

01:33:40

He said, okay, based on 6 ,000 years, the magnetic field should have decayed to this amount. He predicted that back in 1984 before it had been measured.

01:33:47

And then Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in 1986 and measured the magnetic field. And Dr. Humphreys was right on.

01:33:54

The secularists were way off because they thought the magnetic field should be basically dead by now because it being billions of years old. And the fact that you can have aurora, aurora borealis, northern lights, that's what that is.

01:34:03

That's aurora borealis. Tells you that there's still a pretty significant magnetic field, especially considering that Uranus is much further away from the sun than we are.

01:34:14

So, and not just Uranus, but Neptune. Russ Humphreys also predicted the magnetic field of Neptune back in 84.

01:34:20

And it was measured in 89. And Humphreys' estimate was right on. The secularists were way off. See how good science starts with scripture?

01:34:28

So it's kind of interesting. Dr. Humphreys' model can explain the magnetic field of all the planets. They're all consistent with 6 ,000 years.

01:34:34

But the interesting thing about Uranus and Neptune is they had not yet been measured in 1984. The other ones had already been measured.

01:34:41

And so he made successful predictions based on biblical creation. Recession of the moon.

01:34:47

The moon is actually spiraling away from the Earth due to tidal forces. This is a little bit counterintuitive to people because you'd think, well, gravity tends to pull things together.

01:34:55

Well, the moon's in orbit around the Earth and that prevents it from ever getting any closer. But the moon pulls on Earth's oceans and that causes tidal bulges.

01:35:05

That's what causes tides. You probably knew that the moon causes tides. But then the Earth's rotating faster than the moon orbits and that causes the tidal bulges to get ahead of the moon.

01:35:14

They're always ahead of it. And because the tidal bulge is ahead of the moon, it pulls forward on the moon. And when you pull forward on something in orbit, it moves out.

01:35:24

It's a little counterintuitive. But when the astronauts wanna go into a higher orbit, they thrust forward and that gives them energy and so they go into a higher orbit.

01:35:31

So the moon is constantly spiraling away from the Earth. Now today, the rate is about an inch and a half a year.

01:35:37

So you think about that. You can add it up and you can figure out how much the moon has moved in your lifetime. It's not a whole lot.

01:35:44

But it's measurable. I guess we can measure it. Because we left reflectors on the moon when the astronauts landed there and we can bounce lasers off of it, measure the time and get the distance to the moon really precisely.

01:35:53

And it is spiraling away from the Earth. We'd expect that. And if you think about it, you run the movie backwards, that means the moon would have been closer to the

01:36:00

Earth in the past, right? And you have to do the math right because the rate is gonna increase.

01:36:05

As the moon gets closer, the tidal bulges would be bigger and they'd pull even harder on it and it'd be even faster and it'd be even bigger.

01:36:12

And it turns out the Earth and moon dive into each other at 1 .4 to 1 .5 billion years in a hypothetical past.

01:36:19

Interesting. And that might sound like a lot. But my point is that's an upper limit on the age of the moon, isn't it?

01:36:25

Because you can't have less distance than zero distance, right? And of course, even before that happened, they'd shred each other due to tidal forces.

01:36:33

But 1 .4 is the upper limit on the age of the moon. And yet, in the secular view, the Earth and moon are supposed to be 4 .5

01:36:40

billion years old. Problem, because 4 .5 is larger than 1 .4, right?

01:36:47

Even the common core folks get that one, so yeah. Okay, that's a problem.

01:36:55

Comets are made up of icy material. They orbit around the sun in elliptical paths. And we mentioned this last night. They come close to the sun.

01:37:01

The icy material's blasted away. And so comets, they just don't last millions of years. They just don't.

01:37:07

And so my secular colleagues have said, well, there's an Oort cloud that makes new ones. Folks, there's no evidence of an Oort cloud. It's just, there's no evidence.

01:37:12

There's no reason to believe in that. Comets are an indication of a young solar system. If we're just gonna go by the evidence, they would seem to be straightforward proof of a young solar system, very clear.

01:37:23

And again, there's always rescuing devices. But nonetheless, they indicate youth. Spiral galaxies also indicate the youth of the universe.

01:37:32

Spiral galaxies, so again, what you're seeing is the combined light of hundreds of billions of stars. And not all galaxies are spiral, but a lot of them are.

01:37:42

And spiral galaxies rotate differentially, meaning the inner portions rotate faster than the outer portions.

01:37:49

That is a star here will make a loop in less time than a star out here. Okay, even if they're at the same speed, this one has farther to go because it's a bigger circumference, right?

01:38:01

And so if you think about it, what that means is spiral galaxies will constantly twist themselves up, wouldn't they?

01:38:07

I mean, if the stars in the core are doing this and the stars out here are doing that, then that spiral structure is getting tighter and tighter and tighter over time, isn't that right?

01:38:17

And so I actually ran a computer simulation based on the measured velocities of these stars to see what it would look like if galaxies were really 10 billion years old.

01:38:28

And the answer is the spiral structure would be gone. They would be twisted up tighter than an old phonograph record.

01:38:34

That's how tight the spiral structure would be. And you don't see that anywhere in the universe. Spiral galaxies look like this. Now, some of them are a little tighter wrapped, but none of them are wrapped even.

01:38:42

I ran the simulation out. I only had to go to a billion years before the galaxy was twisted totally beyond recognition.

01:38:47

Even by 100 million years, you didn't see spiral structure anymore. It was just so twisted up. And so the fact that you have spiral galaxies is an indication of the youth of the universe.

01:38:58

My secular colleagues are well aware of this. They call it the spiral winding problem. It's a problem for their position. It's a feature for my position.

01:39:06

You notice too, the spiral arms have kind of a bluish tinge to them. That's true.

01:39:11

It's because they have a higher proportion of blue stars and blue stars challenge the evolutionary view because blue stars are the brightest stars in the universe.

01:39:19

They expend a lot of energy. Now, as it happens, they're also the most massive stars, which means they have a lot of fuel available, but they use it up at an incredible rate.

01:39:31

Blue stars are kind of like the SUV of the star world. They have a big gas tank, but they get very poor gas mileage.

01:39:39

And so they can't go very far in time before they blow up. And yet we find blue stars everywhere.

01:39:45

Maximum lifetime of the hottest blue stars would be something like a million years. We find them all over the universe. How can the universe be 10 billion years old if all of its constituents, or at least many of them, have to be much less than that?

01:39:56

My secular colleagues say, well, obviously blue stars have formed recently in star -forming regions, but no one's ever seen a star form, folks.

01:40:05

You might have heard it. It's read in the newspaper. This is a star -forming region. What they actually find are blue stars, and they say, well, those are obviously recent, so they must have formed recently.

01:40:14

But you don't see stars forming. Gas does not tend to just sort of collapse in on itself. You know that. You didn't hold your breath when you came to this room just in case all the air went to the corner.

01:40:23

You expect it to spread out. Gas spreads out. That's what it naturally does. And normally the force of gravity in space is very meager.

01:40:30

Now, once you collapse the gas into a star, its own gravity will hold it together. But when it's spread out, the gravity's very meager, and it's not gonna just suddenly magically collect in on itself and form a little sphere.

01:40:43

So star formation is very problematic. I wanna suggest that blue stars are just an indication that God made the universe recently with some of these blue stars already in it, already there.

01:40:53

So really, the evidence is very consistent with the biblical timescale. It's just people don't wanna accept the biblical timescale, but the evidence is there.

01:41:01

Aside from the age issue, there's another issue where people have said, well, the Bible didn't get this right, and that concerns the uniqueness of the

01:41:07

Earth. The Earth really is special. It's not just another planet that's out there. God formed it to be inhabited.

01:41:12

That is, he formed it for the purpose of housing life, and that's something that the Bible tells us in Isaiah 45, 18.

01:41:18

He didn't make the Earth to be a waste place. The Moon kind of is. The Moon's kind of a waste place. It's desolate. But the

01:41:24

Earth God formed to be inhabited, and it has special properties that enable life to exist on its surface.

01:41:31

And so when we look at Earth's neighbors, we find, I mean, I'm glad the Lord made the Moon. The Moon's wonderful. It's a wonderful little world, but it's not designed for life.

01:41:41

It's the temperature difference between day and night's hundreds of degrees. There's no air on the Moon, so breathing would be a problem.

01:41:48

There's no water on the Moon, so if you get thirsty, you're out of luck. There's no food on the Moon, so there's just, I mean, you're gonna go to the

01:41:53

Moon, you're gonna die. Right? When the astronauts went there, they had to bring a little bit of Earth with them, a little bit of Earth's air with them, a little bit of water and food from the

01:42:02

Earth, and then they were only there for a short while, and they had to come back to the Earth. The Moon's not designed for life. One of the astronauts who walked on its surface referred to it as a magnificent desolation.

01:42:10

I think it's a great expression for the Moon. Not designed for life.

01:42:16

Earth's neighbors. You got Venus a little closer to the Sun than the Earth is. Mars a little further away.

01:42:23

I'm glad God made these planets, but they're not designed for life. Now, some secularists thinking, well,

01:42:29

Earth's just an accident, and life is just an accident that happened to evolve on Earth, probably evolved elsewhere in space.

01:42:36

Some thought that Venus might have life on its surface. Venus might be this wonderful tropical world with all kinds of exotic creatures living on it.

01:42:44

You'll see that in some of the older sci -fi shows. I still remember in Old Outer Limits where William Shatner went to Venus, and there was all these strange creatures and everything, and the eerie

01:42:53

Outer Limits music playing. Very, very fun. This, of course, was before they discovered the surface temperature of Venus is 900 degrees

01:43:00

Fahrenheit, so you're not gonna find life on the surface. And by the way, Venus is permanently enshrouded by clouds, and so that's what made it so fun as a target for life because they were free to speculate, unfettered by inconvenient data, as to what might be below those clouds.

01:43:16

We now know those clouds are made of sulfuric acid -type compounds, so there's just lots of wonderful ways to die on Venus. It's not a place you wanna visit on your next vacation, not with a 900 -degree surface temperature, although there's no humidity, so it is a dry heat for whatever that's worth.

01:43:31

But we have Mars a little bit too far away from the sun. Mars is too cold. There's no liquid water on the surface.

01:43:37

There is the water molecule, but it's frozen or vapor. You don't have liquid water on the surface. It doesn't have a protective magnetic field, so you're gonna die on Mars, too, although you'll die slower, so Mars is the better choice.

01:43:50

It'll kill you slower. But it's not designed for life, not like the Earth is. Too cold.

01:43:55

It's kinda like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, right? You got these ones too hot, that one too cold, that one's just right. We'd expect that.

01:44:01

The Earth's designed for life, and that's one reason why I don't expect to find life out in space. God formed the

01:44:07

Earth to be inhabited, and I'll grant the Bible doesn't say there's not ETs out there, but nonetheless, there's some theological issues you'd have to think through if you had intelligent life out in space, right?

01:44:18

If you have Vulcans and Klingons out there, they can't, you realize they can't be saved because we're related to Jesus, that his blood on the cross can pay for our sins, right?

01:44:29

Because he's our kinsman redeemer. But Lieutenant Worf's out of luck, because he's a Klingon, and he's not related to Jesus, so he can't be saved.

01:44:38

Well, maybe Jesus went to the Klingon home world and died for them too. No, because he died once for all. He was raised incorruptible.

01:44:44

He's never gonna die again. So Earth really is special, folks. It really is. It's not just another planet out there.

01:44:51

It's a unique world. You realize God made it on day one. All the other planets are made on day four.

01:44:57

The Hebrew word kokhob for star would include planets as well, so it really is special.

01:45:03

What about the starlight issue? I wanna spend the remaining time on this topic, and this is the issue of how do we get light from those galaxies to Earth within the biblical timescale, right?

01:45:13

Because there are galaxies that are very far away, and although light's very fast, light travels at 186 ,000 miles per second, quick.

01:45:22

And so it's practically, for Earth, it's practically instantaneous. But Earth's pretty small. Once you start considering the distances to these galaxies that are very far away, and they are very far away, then you'd think, well, it ought to take billions of years.

01:45:35

As fast as light is, galaxies are even further away, such that it would take billions of years for the light to get from there to here, and it obviously has gone from there to here because we see the galaxies.

01:45:46

So how do you explain that? And there's a number of different explanations that have been proposed. I do wanna point out, though, that some of the explanations that people propose really can't work logically, and I wanna mention this because if I don't, people will come up and say, but have you thought of this,

01:46:03

Dr. Lyle? And yes, we've thought of that. It doesn't work, there's a reason. But I do have to mention these.

01:46:08

One of them is, well, maybe the distances aren't real. Maybe the galaxies are all really close, and that's just not feasible. The methods by which we estimate distances to these galaxies are good scientific methods.

01:46:19

They're not based on evolutionary assumptions or things like that. It's good to question some of these things and think, now, have you made an assumption in your computation?

01:46:28

But no, some of these are very simple parallax estimates, at least to some of the stars within our own galaxy.

01:46:34

Even our own galaxy won't fit within 6 ,000 light years, which would be the limit you'd have to have for that to solve the starlight problem.

01:46:41

Some people have said, well, maybe the speed of light was faster in the past. And that's a cool idea, and I'm glad people considered that, because a lot of times, secularists will assume that rates are constant and have been constant over time, when really they're not.

01:46:55

And we'll see some examples of that in the next presentation. But in this case, we think there are good reasons why the speed of light has always been what it is today.

01:47:03

The round -trip speed of light's always been what it is today. And it's linked in with properties of matter, for example.

01:47:08

The ratio of electric fields to magnetic fields that makes matter possible is connected with the speed of light. So you change the speed of light very much, then matter atoms can't exist anymore.

01:47:17

So we think there's a good reason that the speed of light's always been what it is today. Some people have said, well, maybe the light was created already on its way.

01:47:24

After all, God made the universe mature. And he did, he did make the universe mature in the sense of fully functioning, at least by the seventh day, it was fully functioning.

01:47:33

God made Adam as an adult. He didn't need time to grow from a baby. He never was a baby. And the universe is like that.

01:47:38

And I agree the universe is like that, but I don't think that God made the beams of light already on their way, because if you believe that God created the light in transit, it means that God created fictional images and movies of things that never happened.

01:47:49

And I wanna give you an example of this to make this clear. So here you have a supernova 1987A.

01:47:54

So before 1987, if you took a picture of the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is a nearby satellite galaxy to the

01:48:01

Milky Way, you would have seen this bright blue star right there. In 1987, in January, that star blew itself to bits.

01:48:08

Just boom, couldn't handle the pressure and decided to sadly take his own life. And this is what's left today.

01:48:16

What you're seeing here is expanding star guts, expanding out into space, okay? So that's what you see today.

01:48:22

Now, the interesting thing is this object is over 100, it's over 160 ,000 light years away.

01:48:27

Now, a light year is a unit of distance. It's one light year is about six trillion miles. So when I say it's 160 ,000 light years away, that means it's really far away.

01:48:35

But it also means that in the standard thinking, it would take light, it takes light one year to travel that distance, to travel a distance of one light year.

01:48:44

And so if this is 160 ,000 light years away, that means the event actually happened 160 ,000 years ago and the light finally reached the earth in 1987.

01:48:53

And that's the way most secularists think about this. You say, well, we know there's not 160 ,000 years ago, because the universe isn't that old.

01:49:01

So the way we're able to see this is God made the beam of light already on its way. Well, that means that that star never existed.

01:49:08

It's just a picture that God made in a beam of light about 6 ,000 light years long that was constantly coming at us.

01:49:14

And then it means this explosion never happened. It's just a sequence of images that God placed in a beam of light.

01:49:20

You see what I'm saying? About 6 ,000 light years out that finally reached the earth in 1987. And I'm not denying that God has the power to do that.

01:49:27

That's not the question. I don't think God would do that, because I don't think it's consistent with his character to make our senses to be basically reliable and then create false light images to deceive them.

01:49:39

So if light in transit is true, then none of those things existed. And now some of you might be thinking,

01:49:44

I don't know, I think God would make fictional images, light with information of things that never existed.

01:49:51

Be careful, because how do you know I'm here right now? You lose contact with reality if you believe that, right?

01:49:57

Because how do you know that God's not just making a picture of me one inch away from your eye? You say, well, we can hear you too.

01:50:04

No problem, God's making the sound one inch away from your ear. You're actually just a head, that's all you are. You're just a head.

01:50:09

You see, you lose contact with reality if you believe that God would do that kind of thing. Some people have proposed that time dilation is the answer.

01:50:16

Time dilation is a real phenomenon. It turns out that time can flow at different rates under different circumstances. That is true.

01:50:23

However, the effect is normally very small, and so it's not going to solve the starlight issue.

01:50:29

Here's what I think the issue is. I think it has to do with what we call the one -way speed of light and what we call synchrony conventions.

01:50:36

Now, this is gonna get a little deep, but then the next session will be easy, I promise. It'll be a lot easier, so stay with me, and I'll try to explain this briefly in my remaining five minutes, cheaper socks.

01:50:46

Okay, so the speed of light, 186 ,282 miles per second, but that is a round -trip time -averaged speed, meaning the way we measure, the way we get that number is by doing a round -trip experiment.

01:50:59

So what I could do, for example, is I could stand over here with my flashlight and a clock, okay, and then we'll build a long hallway.

01:51:09

We'll build it 186 ,282 miles long. We'll pretend we have government funding. We can waste it that way, and we'll put a mirror at the other end of it, okay?

01:51:19

And what I'll do is I'll shine the flashlight. Right at noon, right when my clock strikes noon, I'll turn on the flashlight for just an instant.

01:51:25

The light will zip down that hallway, bounce off the mirror, and return back to me, and then when I see the light, when

01:51:31

I see the reflection, I look at the clock, if I did that, it would take two seconds for me to see the reflection, amazingly.

01:51:38

We tend to think of a reflection in a mirror as instantaneous, and it almost is, but not quite. There's a slight delay, and so if I did that experiment, it would take two seconds for the light to travel that distance twice, so 186 ,282 times two divided by two, and you get the average speed of light is 186 ,282 miles per second, pretty fast, okay?

01:51:58

Now most people assume that it took light one second to go out, and one second to come back, and I couldn't blame you for assuming that, because I depicted it that way in my little illustration, right?

01:52:10

But the fact is, if I'm standing over here watching the reflection, I don't actually know when it hit the mirror. All I know is when

01:52:16

I see the, I know when it started, because I know when I hit the flashlight, I know it started at noon, and I know I see the reflection two seconds later, but I don't actually know that it took one second to hit the mirror, do

01:52:25

I? Hypothetically, it could be the case that it took no time to hit the mirror. Maybe it took zero to hit the mirror, and then it traveled back, and it took all two seconds to come back.

01:52:34

Now you see, because I'm standing here, I would see the same thing, wouldn't I? I send out the light at noon, and I see the light two seconds later.

01:52:42

I don't know that it took one second to go out, and one second to come back. Could have taken zero seconds to go out, two seconds to come back, or it could be the reverse.

01:52:48

It could have taken all two seconds to go out, and no time to come back. That's possible as well, isn't it?

01:52:54

People say, well, why would it be different? I don't know, but the point is, I don't know that it's the same. In science, you're not supposed to assume more than you really have to in order to be able to do science.

01:53:04

And so I can't just assume that it's the same in both directions, because wouldn't that be nice? In fact, if this is the correct scenario, if light, when it's moving toward an observer, maybe just due to the nature of the universe, or due to the nature of light, for whatever reason, if light, when it's moving toward you, takes no time, then you know what that means?

01:53:23

It means there's no starlight problem, because the light from the galaxies would be here instantaneously. The only thing we know is that a round trip speed takes time, but you don't have to get light out to the galaxies, it just has to go one way.

01:53:35

So I'm kind of hoping that this is the answer, but of course, hoping for something doesn't make it so. And so we need to do an experiment to measure what is the one -way speed of light.

01:53:45

To measure the speed of light in one direction, I can't use a mirror anymore, because I'm just on a one -way trip. I'm now gonna need a second clock.

01:53:53

I'm gonna need one clock at my location to record when the light was emitted, and then another clock at the receiving end to record when the light arrived.

01:54:01

Okay, that makes sense, right? I did this experiment in my office. I don't have a long hallway, but I'm pretty good at math,

01:54:09

I can convert, right? So I have the distance between my watch, and there's a clock on my phone, and it's about five feet, and so I can do the math.

01:54:18

And so when my watch struck noon, I turned on the flashlight, and the light went and hit the phone, and what I did is

01:54:24

I read the time as soon as the phone was illuminated, and it said 12 o 'clock. And so I said, ah, light takes five minutes.

01:54:32

Did feel like it, it felt like it was instantaneous, but apparently light takes five minutes to travel from my watch to the phone, is that right?

01:54:38

That's not right, is it? Now that really happened. It is true that when my watch said noon, I turned on the flashlight, and when the phone was illuminated, it said 12 o 'clock.

01:54:48

But it didn't really take five minutes to get there, did it? The fact is, the clock on my phone is five minutes fast, relative to my watch, you see what

01:54:57

I'm saying? And so you can see, obviously, this is only gonna work if these clocks are synchronized, if they read the same time at the same time, right?

01:55:07

You say, well, that's pretty obvious. We just need to make sure the clocks are synchronized. Then we know how to do that, because we've seen all those old spy movies where let's get together and synchronize our watches, right?

01:55:16

We know how to synchronize clocks. It turns out that this is hard to do when those clocks are separated by a distance.

01:55:25

And in fact, it's not good enough for them to be approximately synchronized. They have to be exactly synchronized. Why? Because if this clock is one second fast, or one second slow, it'll make the difference between the speed of light being 186, 282 divided by two, or infinity.

01:55:42

It makes an enormous difference. So you see my point? It's not good enough for them to be approximately synchronized. They have to be exactly synchronized.

01:55:48

So no problem, we'll synchronize clocks. How do you synchronize clocks? Well, one way to do it is by radio transmission.

01:55:54

There is a radio station in Fort Collins, Colorado that's connected to the atomic clock in Boulder, and it's constantly sending out a radio pulse, and a lot of people have clocks.

01:56:04

I actually have one in my home that it receives that radio broadcast, and every night it synchronizes itself at midnight to the atomic clock.

01:56:10

Pretty neat. And so they're synchronized, right? My clock over here is synchronized to the atomic clock.

01:56:18

Well, not exactly, because radio is fast, but it's not quite instant. Radio waves take a little bit of time to get from the station in Fort Collins to my clock in my little apartment, and I don't worry about that, the fact that it's a little bit off.

01:56:35

It's actually a little bit behind, isn't it? But remember, in order to measure the speed of light, which is so fast, those two clocks have to be exactly synchronized.

01:56:43

Close is not good enough. Hmm, so that's a problem, isn't it? Because this clock might be a little bit behind that one.

01:56:52

Now, if I knew how fast radio was, and I knew the distance between, I know the distance between Fort Collins and my apartment, that I know.

01:56:59

If I knew the speed of radio, I could know how long it took to make that trip, and then I could subtract off that little difference, right?

01:57:05

I could compensate for it. So if only I knew the speed of radio. Do you know what the speed of radio is?

01:57:12

Radio travels at the speed of light, which is the very thing I'm trying to measure.

01:57:17

Oh, that's a problem, isn't it? We know that they travel at the same speed. If you shoot light and radio, they'll hit the wall at the same time.

01:57:24

We just don't know what that time is. That's the problem. That's not gonna work. Some people have said, well, here's what you do then.

01:57:33

You have both clocks at the same place, and then you can synchronize them, and that's easy, that works, because you can see they're both reading the same time at the same time.

01:57:41

And then you move one of them or both of them to opposite ends of the hallway. Yes? Under the assumption that they're still synchronized.

01:57:49

There's a problem. According to Einstein, motion affects the passage of time. Now, it's a small amount, but remember, approximately synchronized is not good enough.

01:57:59

They have to be exactly synchronized. So the very fact of moving the clock causes it to tick at a slightly different rate than the other clock.

01:58:06

Now, fortunately, there is an equation that tells us how much time is lost or gained when a clock is moved, right?

01:58:14

That's Einstein discovered that formula. But sadly, in that formula is the one -way speed of light.

01:58:22

The very thing I don't know. I hope you get the picture here. The picture that I'm, here's what I'm trying to show you. Apparently, it's impossible to synchronize two clocks separated by distance without already knowing the one -way speed of light in advance, and you can never measure the one -way speed of light unless you had two clocks that were exactly synchronized separated by distance.

01:58:42

Each one requires you to know the other one first, which means you can never know the one -way speed of light.

01:58:49

And so that's, at first that might seem like, well, that's a little disappointing because I was hoping that we could prove that it's instantaneous when moving towards the

01:58:55

Earth. But it turns out you don't need to because it turns out the one -way speed of light is actually not a property of nature.

01:59:00

It's a convention. It's a convention. A convention is something we get to decide and we all agree to it and it works.

01:59:07

Like driving on the right side of the road, that's a convention. We all agree to it and it works. As long as we all stick to that system, it works.

01:59:13

Of course, you go to Australia, they drive on the left side of the road and they all agree to that system, that works, and so on. So the one -way speed of light's like that.

01:59:22

You can decide that it's the same in all directions and that works. You can use that to synchronize your clocks and then when you measure the speed of light using your synchronized clocks, you'll get that it's the same in all directions.

01:59:33

On the other hand, if somebody from Australia comes out and says, I'm gonna decide that it's instantaneous toward me and I'm gonna use that to synchronize my clocks and then he measures the speed of light, you'll find that it's instantaneous toward me.

01:59:43

That works too. This is called the conventionality thesis. It's something that physicists have been discussing since the time of Einstein.

01:59:50

Einstein himself was aware of this. The fact that there's no objective way to synchronize two clocks and so all you can do is choose the one -way speed of light and then that'll tell you how to synchronize your clocks and then when you measure the one -way speed of light, it'll be whatever you chose.

02:00:04

And so it's a convention and so I'm not gonna go through all the details on this for time's sake but I'm gonna propose that the

02:00:11

Bible uses what's called an anisotropic synchrony convention. Anisotropic means different in different directions. Basically, when light moves toward an observer, it's instant and when it moves away, it's half

02:00:22

C and there's an equation that gives the intermediate angles. I'm not suggesting the other system is wrong where you make the speed of light the same in all directions, it's just a different convention.

02:00:30

The Bible is apparently using this anisotropic synchrony convention because all ancient cultures did, by the way.

02:00:36

In ancient times, when you saw something happen in space, that's when it happened and that really is a very natural way of thinking, isn't it?

02:00:44

When you see a deer on the side of the hill and it's over there eating some grass or something, you don't say to yourself, wow,

02:00:50

I wonder how many millions of years ago that really happened. If you see something happening, that's when it happens, right?

02:00:56

And I think the Bible's using that convention and it just turns out that that is a legitimate convention in physics.

02:01:02

Einstein wrote about that and other physicists have. John Winney demonstrated it in the 1970s.

02:01:08

He wrote two papers on the topic. So I think the Bible's using this anisotropic synchrony convention.

02:01:13

My point is there's no starlight problem because when we see the light, that's when it happened.

02:01:19

So God created the stars on day four and their light reached Earth immediately on day four. It didn't take any time at all because of the way

02:01:26

God is marking time. He's using the ancient convention, not the more modern one. And I think that's suggested by scripture.

02:01:33

It says that God said, let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from night. Let them be for signs, seasons, days, and years.

02:01:39

We find it's the greater light, the lesser light, the stars also. It says, and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the

02:01:46

Earth. And it was so. What was so? He made the lights and they gave light on the

02:01:51

Earth. So apparently the stars didn't take any time at all to give light on the Earth. They immediately fulfilled their

02:01:57

God -ordained rule of giving light on the Earth. And so I hope you've seen the point of this is that the

02:02:04

Bible is right when it touches on any of these topics. And even if my explanation of distant starlight isn't right, we trust that God knows how to communicate that he did what he said he did.

02:02:13

But we do have a working model that makes sense. Nobody's been able to refute it. And so I think we have a good understanding of these things.

02:02:20

Again, some of the resources. This presentation is available. Astronomy Reveals Creation. And I know

02:02:25

I kind of rushed through the starlight issue a little bit because I didn't time it quite right. Sorry about that. And then we do have a book on the topic that covers most of the things

02:02:33

I covered here. Taking Back Astronomy shows how the evidence is consistent with creation, not a big bang or billions of years.

02:02:39

If you want to learn how to find some of these objects we looked at, Stargazer's Guide to the Night Sky, it'll show you a lot of these things you can see in a small telescope.

02:02:45

You just gotta know where to look and the book will tell you that. Even if you don't have a telescope, you just say, what can I see naked eye? A lot.

02:02:52

When's the next meteor shower? The book will tell you. When's the next solar eclipse? It's in there. And so on, and how to look at it and so on.

02:02:58

If you want to deal more with the starlight issue, I wrote this book, The Physics of Einstein, to explain the basics of physics that you need to really understand the starlight issue.

02:03:09

And it's a fun resource. It's written for laymen, but I do have in -depth boxes that have some of the equations if you want to go through the math.

02:03:17

And if you want to skip the math, I won't tell anybody, that's fine. And we have DVDs as well, Created Cosmos, Takes You on a

02:03:23

Tour of the Universe. I won't go through all these because we have before. But do check these out. And don't forget to sign up also for our free monthly newsletter.

02:03:30

And check us on the web, Biblical Science Institute. So we'll be back in 10 minutes, is that right? 10 minutes, okay.

02:03:36

Thank you very much. So what

02:03:45

I want to do with this session is talk about other fields of science and how science confirms biblical creation.

02:03:50

We've already touched on astronomy, my specialty field, but there are other fields of science and they're all interesting. I love them all. And it's useful for us to know a little bit about the basics of various fields of science so that we can talk intelligently with our friends on these topics.

02:04:05

And I want to show you that science does confirm biblical creation. It makes sense. Science makes sense in light of biblical creation.

02:04:13

We all have a way of looking at the world. We look at it through our worldview. We talked about that last night. Creationists and evolutionists look at the same planet and we draw very different interpretations about what the evidence means because the evolutionist, the secularist, is looking at the world in terms of naturalistic thinking.

02:04:28

He's thinking in terms of millions of years of gradual evolutionary processes producing life on earth. And so when he picks up a fossil, he already has that in his mind.

02:04:36

And that affects the conclusions that he draws about the fossil. Biblical creationist is thinking in terms of biblical history, creation, the flood, and so on.

02:04:45

And when we look at the fossils, we think about that in terms of the way we draw conclusions.

02:04:51

And I'm not gonna argue today that the biblical way is the right way of looking at it because we demonstrated that last night.

02:04:57

The biblical worldview is what makes science possible. And so to look at the evidence from an evolutionary perspective, you can do it, but it's irrational because the idea that you're applying science presupposes the biblical creation worldview.

02:05:11

That's not what I'm gonna do today. What I'm gonna do today is talk about some of the evidence and how the evidence makes sense in light of what the

02:05:16

Bible teaches. I'm gonna cover several different fields of science today, three fields briefly. I'm gonna spend the most time on genetics because that really is the most relevant,

02:05:25

I think, to the creation evolution controversy. The genetics, the study of how traits are passed on from one organism to the next.

02:05:31

We'll talk about information theory, about what information is, how it's transmitted, and so on. And we'll find that that strongly confirms biblical creation.

02:05:38

Then we'll talk about geology along with paleontology, the study of rocks and the study of the fossils that are found in those rock layers.

02:05:45

And we're gonna find that the evidence makes sense in light of biblical creation. So let's start with genetics, the study of heredity, the study of how traits are passed on from one organism to the next, the study of how animals change.

02:06:01

Do animals change? Do dogs change? Do dogs change? Dogs do change.

02:06:08

What do they change into? Dogs, yeah. Dogs change into dogs.

02:06:15

And we would expect that because the Bible indicates that God created animals according to their kinds.

02:06:20

God did not make animals to reproduce exact duplicates of themselves, except in the microscopic world.

02:06:27

But in terms of sexually reproducing organisms, God has built in variation. We'll see how that works. And so you can get lots of different breeds of dogs today.

02:06:36

And that's not evolution, that's just dogs. Dogs giving rise to dogs is not evolution, it's just dogs.

02:06:43

We'd expect that. The Bible uses this phrase, after its kind, after their kind, over 10 times in Genesis 1.

02:06:49

That's how many, that's God indicating that the kind is apparently the reproductive limit of an organism.

02:06:56

So different kinds are not related to each other. They're uniquely created by God.

02:07:02

Now I need to point out that kind does not mean species. And this confuses some people. Because a species, that's a man -made classification system, so it doesn't have to line up exactly with biblical terminology.

02:07:16

But you can get different species that are from a common kind.

02:07:21

For example, a group of mosquitoes goes off and lives in a cave for 100 years, and then when it's brought back out due to genetic drift, it can't interbreed with the parent population.

02:07:30

So it's classified as a new species. But they're still mosquitoes. What were they, mosquitoes? What will they be, mosquitoes?

02:07:35

That's not evolution, that's just mosquitoes. But they're classified as a different species because they no longer normally breed with other mosquitoes.

02:07:46

And that's how species is defined. Kind is different. Kind is the original reproductive limit of an organism. So this is important because I find that evolutionists often misrepresent what it is that creationists teach.

02:07:59

Evolutionists, either due to ignorance or deliberately, hopefully it's just ignorance, but they'll often say that creationists believe that God created all the species as we see them today.

02:08:10

Now, I don't believe that. I don't believe that for a moment. Or in some versions, they'll say that creationists believe that God created all the organisms just like they are today, even in their current locations.

02:08:23

Well, that's nonsense. That's not what the Bible teaches. I don't believe that there were poodles in the Garden of Eden, right?

02:08:30

It was a paradise. You're gonna have poodles running around and biting your leg, and no.

02:08:38

That's not gonna happen, no. Animals have changed since creation. Yes, we had dogs at the original creation, just not poodles.

02:08:47

This is not what we believe, the idea that animals have remained exactly the same over time. What we believe is in fact more like this, variation within a kind.

02:08:57

Animals do change. Dogs change quite a bit. They're still dogs, right? And so God did create the dog kind back at creation, and they've branched off into lots of different breeds, and poodles are just one of these horrible examples up here, as a result of the curse, as we'll see in a little bit.

02:09:16

But of course, some kinds have gone extinct. We don't find the kinds of dinosaurs around anymore. There are some kinds where some varieties have gone extinct, but other varieties remain.

02:09:28

Elephants, for example. Mammoths are part of the elephant kind. We believe they're generally related. It's just that particular variety is gone, whereas you have the

02:09:36

Asian elephant, the Indian elephant, they're still around today. So variation within a kind would be the biblical teaching, because organisms reproduce according to their kind.

02:09:46

Whereas in the evolutionary worldview, there is no, there are no kinds, really, because all life is supposed to be descended from a common ancestor over billions of years.

02:09:55

And so, as I mentioned previously, if you believe in evolution, you believe you're related to broccoli. That's your distant cousin.

02:10:01

And so it's cannibalism when you eat broccoli. So there is, the change is unlimited and upward.

02:10:08

Bacteria eventually become something like a horse, and a person, and broccoli, and everything. Now, to see which of these views is confirmed by science, we need to know a little bit about DNA.

02:10:17

DNA is a long molecule that occurs in the cells of your body. It's broken up into a number of pieces that are chromosomes.

02:10:25

But basically, DNA looks something like a twisted ladder, and on the rungs of this ladder are nucleotide base pairs.

02:10:32

And there's four different types that are found in DNA, and they're abbreviated by the four letters that you see there, C, G, A, and T.

02:10:39

And they can, if you look at one strand, the letters can occur in any order.

02:10:45

You don't know in advance what it's gonna be. And that the order of those letters spells out the information to make you.

02:10:54

It spells out the amino acid sequences that are necessary to make the proteins, you're made of proteins, and other stuff, but mostly proteins.

02:11:02

And so, it's much like you could spell help with beads on a rope in Morse code.

02:11:10

Likewise, you could spell out information in DNA, and it's a very efficient way of encoding information, because if you think about it, all the instructions to make you are encoded in your

02:11:20

DNA. Pretty remarkable. And so, the reason that you're a person and not a cabbage is because you have the instructions to make a person in your

02:11:27

DNA, and a cabbage has the instructions to make a cabbage. And aren't you grateful you got the better deal on that one?

02:11:35

And by the way, some of the instructions are the same, because we use some of the same proteins. If that weren't the case, then you could not gain nutrients by eating cabbage.

02:11:42

So, it's important that we have some of this. Some of the DNA is the same. You have some of the same DNA as a banana. And that's good, because you use some of the same proteins.

02:11:50

So, you can eat a banana, and you can gain nutrients from it. That's very important. Because, you know, sometimes the evolutionists will say, you know, well, why is it that we have

02:11:57

DNA in common with a banana and a fruit? And the answer is, because God knew we would need to eat these things.

02:12:04

If God made totally different DNA and totally different proteins, therefore, for everything, then the only thing we'd be able to eat is each other. That would be a bad idea.

02:12:11

So, yeah, we do have some of the same DNA. Now, what's really interesting is you have two sets of DNA, and you get some of your

02:12:21

DNA from dad, you get some of your DNA from mom. Now, they have two sets of DNA, and it's the combination of the two sets that determines your traits.

02:12:29

And so, when mom and dad have kids, then the child gets one of the two bits of information from each set of the

02:12:37

DNA, and it's random, at least we can't predict which one they're gonna get. So, they might get, you know, they're just getting one of two.

02:12:44

So, you're getting half of the information, your DNA from dad, you're getting half the information from your mom, but you have two sets of DNA, and that determines your traits.

02:12:54

And that's why you look a little different from your brothers and sisters, but you also look a little bit similar, because you have some of the same traits, but because you have a unique combination of DNA, you have unique traits, unless you have an identical twin, and then you have the same

02:13:07

DNA. But here's how it works with a blood type, for example. So, you have, again, you have your two sets of DNA, and if you have a gene, a gene is a section of the

02:13:17

DNA that determines a trait. And so, if you have the A allele, allele is a possible gene.

02:13:24

So, if you have A and A, your blood type's A. So, if you get A from dad and A from mom, your blood type's A. If you get A from dad and O from mom, your blood type's still

02:13:31

A, because A is dominant and O is recessive. A dominant gene kind of covers up a recessive gene.

02:13:36

Maybe you remember doing this in school. If you have the two B, your blood type's

02:13:41

B, or B and O, because B's dominant, O is recessive, so your blood type's B. If you have the combination A and B, your blood type's

02:13:47

AB, because they both express. And then, the only way you can have blood type O is if you have both O alleles, because O is a recessive gene.

02:13:57

And so, that's how it works with blood type. So, those are the four blood types that occur in human beings. And there's more, here's our age factors and things like that, but that's the basics of it.

02:14:06

And the thing I find interesting is how it works in terms of passing on traits.

02:14:11

So, let's say mom has blood type A, and let's say it's what they call the heterozygous

02:14:17

A. That's where you have A and O, they're mixed. And let's say dad has heterozygous B. So, mom has blood type

02:14:22

A, dad has blood type B. The children could have any blood type. Interesting. So, one child might get the

02:14:29

A allele from mom and the O from dad, and so her blood type would be A. Her brother might get

02:14:34

B from dad and O from mom. His blood type will be B. The next child might get

02:14:40

A from mom, B from dad, blood type would be AB. And the next child might get O from mom and O from dad, blood type would be

02:14:45

O. Interesting. And so, one person says, well, I've got the same blood type as mom.

02:14:51

The next one says, I've got the same blood type as dad. The next one says, was I adopted? No. No, you still got the information from your parents.

02:15:00

Right, and the next one says, I don't have blood type the same as my parents. What's going on there? No, you still got the information from your parents.

02:15:06

You just have a unique combination. Right, and so you might have the, I have brown eyes like my mom.

02:15:12

My brother has kind of hazel eyes like my dad. My sister has blue eyes. And I used to tell her she was adopted, but she didn't know.

02:15:19

I was just funnin' with her. No, the blue color, it's a recessive gene, so it is possible that it works out that way.

02:15:26

So here it is with skin color. We all have, by the way, we have basically the same skin color. Did you know that? Brown. It's just a question of how much.

02:15:33

How much? And so if you have these types of genes up here, you have lots of melanin in your skin.

02:15:38

That's a pigment. There's a couple different forms of it, but the main form that we're talking about here is kind of a gray scale.

02:15:44

And if you have a lot of it, and it's well distributed in the cells, you're very dark -complected. If you have this combination of genes down here, you're very light -complected.

02:15:54

Now, interestingly, if you're in this box down here, and so you have light skin, and you get married to somebody who's in that box who has light skin, your kids are gonna have light skin, because only the lowercase letters are available.

02:16:06

And so there's no possibility for new combinations. Okay, that's what they call the homozygous combination.

02:16:12

You get locked into that. And likewise, if you're up here, and you get married to somebody up there, your kids will be there. Likewise, if you're here, you have only uppercase

02:16:18

As and only lowercase Bs, and you get married to somebody in that box, your kids will be in that box. But if you're off -axis, if you're over here, and of course, this has the same skin color as that, but the reason's different.

02:16:29

So here you have the heterozygous combination, and you get married to somebody in that box, your kids could have any skin color, ranging from very light to very dark.

02:16:38

And so we think Adam and Eve probably had a combination like this. There's other ways to do it, but they were probably middle -brown, because we're all descended from them, all human beings are.

02:16:47

And so it might have been very interesting when they had children. It might be, I wonder what shade this one's gonna be?

02:16:52

I wonder what shade that one's gonna be? It might have been very exciting for them. But then over the course of time, you get locked into some of these homozygous combinations.

02:17:01

So, and by the way, there are places in the world, even today, where this is still, there are certain places in India where you have this combination, and people will sit down at the same, families will sit down at the same dinner table, very light to very dark shades.

02:17:13

And so that's how it works out. That's just skin color, that's just one example. We're gonna talk a lot about dogs, because there's a lot of variation within the dog kind.

02:17:22

You know, the genes for long fur or short fur and different colors, different color eyes, and so on, big dogs, little dogs, and so on.

02:17:29

Lots of combinations there. But it's all due to the information that God put in the dog kind.

02:17:35

The two dogs that got off Noah's Ark, all the information was in them to make all the different breeds of dogs that we have today.

02:17:41

It's pretty awesome. And we'll see how that works. But here's the thing I wanna emphasize. In the evolutionary worldview, you've got something like bacteria, single -celled organisms, billions of years ago that evolved from, by chance, from chemistry.

02:17:56

And then today, you've got more complex organisms, like a horse. Now, a horse has a lot more information in its

02:18:02

DNA. It's got more instructions. It's not just that it has more DNA, which it does, but it has more instructions in its

02:18:09

DNA. It has information in its DNA that bacteria lack. A horse has information for how to make bones.

02:18:17

Bacteria don't have that, which is why they can't make bones. A horse has information for how to produce legs and feet and eyes and so on.

02:18:26

And bacteria don't have those instructions, which is why they can't produce those traits. That makes sense, right? So it seems to me if bacteria, something like bacteria, evolved into a horse, which is what the evolutionists believe, then at some point, the animal had to gain new information in the

02:18:43

DNA. Does that make sense? Because you have some information here, but you don't have the information for eyes and hooves and things like that.

02:18:50

So in order to produce a horse, it must have gained those instructions at some point. My point is that evolution absolutely requires brand new information to be added to the

02:19:01

DNA, to the genome, in order to work. And that's not the only thing that it requires.

02:19:07

There are all kinds of problems with evolution. But at the very least, if you're not gaining new information, then it's not evolution, is it?

02:19:15

I mean, if these bacteria were to lose some instructions, they're not gonna turn into a horse that way, are they?

02:19:21

Okay. So that's the main point I want you to take away in this first session, is that evolution requires brand new genetic information to be added.

02:19:34

It requires an increase in information. I'm saying that a few different ways to make sure you get it. And that's interesting, because scientifically, you know what we observe scientifically?

02:19:44

Decrease in information. The processes that we observe in nature either decrease the information or are neutral, which means they are in the opposite direction to make evolution happen.

02:19:55

Isn't that interesting? And I wanna give you, first of all, an example of this, of natural selection. A lot of people think natural selection is evolution.

02:20:03

It's not. It's the opposite. Natural selection is a true principle of nature. It's a creationist discovery, by the way.

02:20:08

Edward Blythe discovered natural selection. Darwin did not. Darwin might have named it. But the principle is opposite evolution.

02:20:16

Because remember, evolution's about increasing information. Natural selection decreases information. Let me show you how it works.

02:20:21

Suppose you have two dogs. And suppose that each dog has a gene for short fur and a gene for long fur.

02:20:28

And suppose those genes have a combined effect, which many genes do, such that each dog has medium -length fur.

02:20:35

Okay, make sense? Now, this is simplified, but the basic genetic principles are true. And suppose those two dogs, they fall in love and they get married.

02:20:44

And I do this for kids sometimes, so. Now, some of their, when they have offspring, some of the pups are gonna get the short gene from mom, the short gene from dad, and they're gonna have short fur.

02:20:57

Some of the dogs are gonna get the short gene from mom, the long gene from dad, or vice versa. The long gene from mom, the short gene from dad.

02:21:03

In fact, 50 % of the offspring would have that combination statistically. And they're gonna have medium -length fur just like their parents. Okay?

02:21:10

And then some of the dogs, one -fourth of them will get the long gene from mom, the long gene from dad, and they will have long fur.

02:21:16

Okay? Now, already we have a great example of variation within a kind. We had dogs with medium -length fur, and we ended up with dogs with varieties of length of fur, short, medium, and long.

02:21:28

That's a great example of variation within a kind. But they're still dogs, aren't they? There's no evolution yet.

02:21:34

And in fact, there's been no new information gained because we started with information for short, long, and by combination, medium, and we ended up with dogs that had information for short, long, and by combination, medium.

02:21:46

So there's no evolution yet. There's been no new information. Now, let's suppose the environment gets very, very cold.

02:21:53

What's gonna happen? Well, the dogs that have the shorter and medium -length fur, they don't do so well in that cold environment, right?

02:21:59

The dog that has the longer fur, he's quite comfortable. He's well -insulated against the cold. But the dogs that have the shorter and medium -length fur are not so well -insulated, and so, sadly, they die.

02:22:07

Very sad. But the dogs that have the longer fur are able to survive because they're well -insulated against the cold.

02:22:14

Now, they meet other dogs that have survived because they're also well -insulated against the cold that have the longer fur, and they reproduce. And what kind of dogs are they gonna reproduce?

02:22:20

Dogs with longer fur, right? And if you think about it, that's the only combination that's possible now because these dogs only have information for long.

02:22:30

They both have L genes, and so the offspring's gonna have long fur. There's no other choice at this point.

02:22:37

If the environment got hot, would they go back to having short fur? The answer is no. They'd just die because that information has been lost.

02:22:47

Now, you notice something. This is a great example of adaptation. It's one type of adaptation. The environment got cold, and the dogs that ended up surviving had longer fur.

02:22:57

That's pretty neat. Not that they've adjusted themselves, but rather the dogs that didn't already have long fur died in that environment.

02:23:06

And so, it's a great example of adaptation. But is it evolution? Have we gained any new instructions? We started with information for short, long, and medium, and we ended up with just information for long.

02:23:17

Have we gained new information? No, we've lost information, haven't we? We've lost the instructions for the shorter fur.

02:23:24

Now, if we started the experiment over again, and we had all three varieties, short, medium, long, and this time we put them in a hot environment, now what's gonna happen?

02:23:32

Well, now the dogs with the longer fur don't do so well in that environment, and so sadly they die. But the dogs with the shorter length fur, they do well in that warm environment.

02:23:40

They're able to dissipate their heat better, and so they meet other dogs that have survived in that warmer environment, and they reproduce, and all the dogs are gonna have short fur at that point.

02:23:49

And so, I mean, this makes sense, but my point is natural selection is the exact opposite of evolution, because evolution requires new instructions to be added to the genome.

02:23:59

Natural selection results in the loss of information, because the animals that have information for traits that are not conducive to survival in that environment die, and the information is lost with them.

02:24:13

So again, we started with information for long, short, and medium, and we ended up with just information for short. We've lost information.

02:24:20

Natural selection only reduces information. Think about it. All it's doing is referring to the death of organisms that have information -producing traits that's not conducive to survival.

02:24:30

And so we find, lo and behold, dogs that end up in the colder environment have the longer fur. If they didn't, they'd die. Dogs that end up in the very hot environments have the shorter, thinner fur.

02:24:38

If they didn't, they'd die, and so on and so forth. And so you see, you don't need to take two of each breed of dog on Noah's Ark, right?

02:24:48

You just need two dogs. You don't need to take two Dalmatians and two Dingos and two Collies, and you certainly don't need two poodles on board

02:24:55

Noah's Ark, right? You just need two dogs. And they get off Noah's Ark, and they spread out, and they carry certain genes with them, and if those genes, as they spread out, if those genes are conducive to survival in that environment, then they're preserved.

02:25:09

If not, they die out. Of course, some genes are kind of neutral with respect to survival, like eye color doesn't really matter too much in terms of survival.

02:25:17

It's just which population ended up with that characteristic. That's just genetic drift. And so, lo and behold, dogs that are in colder climates, they do have thicker, longer fur.

02:25:27

Dogs that are in hot environments do have thinner fur. This is a great example of adaptation. The dogs have adapted to their environment by virtue of the fact that the dogs that weren't already adjusted have died.

02:25:37

It's a great example of natural selection or survival of the fittest, but it's not an example of evolution, because we started with dogs, ended up with dogs.

02:25:44

That's not evolution, that's just dogs. And we don't have any new instructions. In fact, we've lost information.

02:25:50

We've lost information for those traits that would not be conducive to survival in that environment.

02:25:55

So this is how we account for the different kinds of wild dogs that we find in the world. It's the built -in genetic information, along with whether or not that information produces traits that are helpful for survival in that environment.

02:26:08

If they're not, then the dogs die out in that environment. So you can account for wild dogs that way. Well, what about mutations then?

02:26:14

Because evolutionists will say, but Dr. Lyle, it's not just natural selection. It's natural selection and mutations that drive evolution.

02:26:21

So let's talk about mutations. A mutation is a mistake in your DNA. Think of it as a typo in your

02:26:26

DNA. And believe it or not, you actually have, in your DNA, mechanisms that will correct most mutations.

02:26:33

999 out of 1 ,000 mutations your cells will fix. Did you know that? You have a built -in typo editor that will go in and fix most of your mutations.

02:26:41

But every now and then, one gets through. And when that happens, you end up with problems because you're now missing some instructions.

02:26:48

For example, all dogs should have information for four normal legs.

02:26:54

That's not a variable trait. All dogs should have that. But there's a mutation that occurs when the DNA's copied a lot of times.

02:27:00

It won't be copied exactly right. And some instructions are lost. And so you end up with a dog with four stubby little legs because he's missing some instructions and so his legs don't form properly.

02:27:12

Now if you think about it, a dog like that is not gonna do so well in the wild, is he? He's got those short, stubby little legs.

02:27:18

He can't run very fast. He can't catch anything. He's more likely to be caught by something else. Dogs like that's not gonna do so well in the wild.

02:27:26

But some people like dogs with short, stubby little legs because they can't jump up on you, at least not as much.

02:27:33

And so people will take these little dogs with short, stubby little legs and take care of them and feed them and spend millions of dollars trying to keep them alive.

02:27:41

So these dogs don't have to survive in the wild because they have a human caretaker who will take care of all of their needs and so on.

02:27:48

That's why domestic breeds of dogs tend to be full of mutations because we humans are preventing natural selection from weeding them out.

02:27:59

There's all kinds of mutations in various dogs. There's a mutation that causes a dog's snout not to form properly.

02:28:06

A dog's supposed to have a long snout and that helps with its ability to smell and so on. But there's a mutation that causes the snout to be short.

02:28:14

And it has a horrible underbite because the chin was designed to fit the longer snout and the skin was designed to fit the longer snout.

02:28:21

So it hangs off to the side if you don't clean it and get infected. And some people think that's cute. But you think the dog says, gee, I love having my nose stuffed into my face.

02:28:28

That's great. Maybe not so much. Poodles have some problems.

02:28:42

I'm not anti -poodle, but they really do have problems. And some of these are secondary results.

02:28:49

Some of them are directly from a mutation. Some are secondary. There's a mutation, for example, in a poodle that causes its hair to grow forever.

02:28:55

A dog's hair is supposed to grow so long and then it stops and it falls out. And that regulates the hair growth. With a poodle, that gene has been damaged and so they can't shut off their hair growth.

02:29:03

Their hair grows indefinitely. A poodle could not survive in the wild. Can you imagine that? Trying to drag all that hair behind it?

02:29:10

I mean, there's no way it could survive. Poodles require human beings to give them a haircut every now and then. They need that.

02:29:16

If you aren't careful, the hair will get in their eyes and their eyes can get infected and they can go blind or can get in their ears and their ears can get infected and can kill them under certain circumstances.

02:29:24

They do have problems. They do have problems because they don't need to survive in the wild. They have a human caretaker who is protecting them from extinction.

02:29:33

Otherwise, they would be gone a long time ago. Natural selection would have weeded them out. So you see, this is how we can account for the different breeds of domestic dogs.

02:29:41

It's just the information that God built in their kind and mutations, mistakes that have crept in and caused little problems within the dog kind.

02:29:49

But this is not evolution because it's in the wrong direction, isn't it? It's not evolution because you start with, by the way, we think the dogs that were on Noah's Ark would have been more like the wolf kind because wolves still have a lot of what we call the heterozygous code, big

02:30:02

A, little A, big B, little B. So there's lots of potential for variation. The domestic breeds of dogs, you lock in the traits.

02:30:08

It's big A, big A, little B, little B, and so on, which is why domestic breeds, when they reproduce, it's almost an exact duplicate.

02:30:16

A lot of the variation's been lost for good or for bad. I love golden retrievers. I think they're a wonderful breed.

02:30:22

You breed two golden retrievers, you get a golden retriever and they're always sweet and pretty just like their parents. But there's not much variation available anymore and they have problems.

02:30:32

Goldens tend to suffer from hip dysplasia. They have other issues as well because of the mutations that have accumulated in their genome.

02:30:39

That's just the way it is. And if you think about it, poodles are kind of, they're kind of at the bottom of the line there because,

02:30:46

I mean, you know, that's kind of the end of the line. This is not, this is not evolution though, is it?

02:30:55

Because we're not gaining new information. We've lost information and as a result, you're losing the ability to produce variation within a kind and so on.

02:31:03

A friend of mine who actually has a poodle or a similar breed, he says that poodles are kind of like, if you think of it like in the world of cars, the wolf would be sort of like the

02:31:15

Rolls Royce. A lot of extra features on it. Windshield wipers on the headlights, that's cute.

02:31:21

I mean, you don't really need that, but it's nice. It's a nice extra little feature. Whereas a poodle is kind of like a

02:31:26

Kia. It's kind of, that's just kind of it. You remove one part from a

02:31:33

Kia, it doesn't work anymore. I mean, it has nothing extra on it. So it's kind of, poodles are kind of the bottom line there.

02:31:41

But this is an evolution. When I teach this to youngsters, I say, you can think of the information in your

02:31:46

DNA like jelly beans. And so the coyotes, the wild kinds of dogs have lots of information, lots of different possibilities for variation, but as you collectively, as you inbreed animals, it concentrates those mutations until you're reduced down to the point where you're down to the poodle and then you just don't have a lot of information left at that point.

02:32:04

You have kind of the bare minimum information necessary to keep the poor thing alive. Now, can you turn a dog into a cat by removing jelly beans?

02:32:16

The answer is no, because a cat has different information, doesn't it? Theoretically, you could start with two wolves again and by selectively breeding and capturing the right mutations and capturing the right, theoretically, you could get all the way down to a poodle again.

02:32:29

I don't know whether you'd want to, but you could do that, okay? But if you take two poodles and breed them, can you get back to a wolf?

02:32:34

And the answer is no, because they don't have the instructions anymore. Those instructions are gone. So this is all, now this is all good science, isn't it?

02:32:41

Because this is stuff we can observe in the present. We can examine dogs, we can see how dogs reproduce, and we find, you know what, dogs reproduce dogs.

02:32:49

Now, you can get lots of variation within the dog kind, but they're still dogs. This is good observational science.

02:32:55

It's testable, it's repeatable in the present. It's something we've observed today, and it's consistent with biblical creation, and it's not consistent with evolution.

02:33:03

Evolution would require brand new information to be added to organisms so that they could constantly improve and become more complex.

02:33:10

That's not what we see. You inbreed dogs, and they get more and more degenerate. That's just what happens.

02:33:17

I do have to point out that mutations can be beneficial in the sense of helping organisms survive, but only by losing information.

02:33:23

So they're still in the wrong direction to make evolution happen. I'll give you just one example of this for time's sake. There's a bacterium called

02:33:29

H. pylori, which causes stomach ulcers, and that's unpleasant. And so you go to the doctor, and the doctor gives you an antibiotic.

02:33:38

Nice. The antibiotic, which is harmless to you, is absorbed into the bacterium, and he's got an enzyme in him that's part of his system.

02:33:47

Enzyme's just a protein that acts as a catalyst. And when that enzyme that's part of his system that he produces, when it interacts with the antibiotic, it converts the antibiotic into a poison, and the poison kills the bacterium, and you feel better until you get your medical bill.

02:34:02

There's a mutated form of H. pylori. He's missing the instructions that produces that enzyme, or at least he can't produce very much of it.

02:34:10

And so the antibiotic goes in there, and it just sits there because he lacks the ability to turn it into the poison. And so he survives.

02:34:18

But he survives because he's missing some instructions. It's just in that situation, it happens to benefit him.

02:34:24

And so what happens then is you take your antibiotic, and you feel better because you've killed all the normal bacteria. You say,

02:34:29

I think I'm done. I think I can stop taking my antibiotic early. Don't do that. Because if you do, then the mutant form, which is resistant to the antibiotics, will reproduce, and now you've got a resistant strain, and they're harder to kill.

02:34:43

Now eventually the antibiotic will kill them too because they do have a little bit of that enzyme. They just don't have very much of it. They can't produce it.

02:34:49

And in the wild, they don't compete well with the normal healthy bacteria because that enzyme does something. It's part of his internal chemistry.

02:34:56

But my point is, mistakes, reduction in information can help an organism survive, but it's still the opposite of evolution.

02:35:05

So evolutionists like to talk about beneficial mutations, and I'd say, that's true, but it's irrelevant. It's irrelevant because you need new information in the genome to make evolution work, and losing information is not new information.

02:35:18

It just happens to help an organism to survive in some instances. Dr. Lee Spetner, PhD in biophysics from Johns Hopkins University says, all point mutations that have been studied on the molecular level turn out to reduce the genetic information, not to increase it.

02:35:31

He says, not even one mutation has been observed that adds little information to the genome. Now, there are different types of mutations.

02:35:37

There's a mutation that can cause a section of the DNA to get duplicated. People say, well, there you go, new information.

02:35:43

Come on, folks, think about this. If you're reading a newspaper and a paragraph accidentally got duplicated, do you have any new information?

02:35:50

Could you learn anything from the duplicate paragraph you couldn't learn from the original? Of course not, there's no new information there. Just makes the

02:35:56

DNA longer, but it doesn't add new instructions. So you see, genetics really does confirm biblical creation, doesn't it?

02:36:03

Not that we can go back in time and test creation by the scientific method, although the scientific method presupposes biblical creation as we saw last night.

02:36:11

But nonetheless, what we see in the present world is consistent with what we would expect given what the Bible teaches in Genesis.

02:36:17

Well, we've talked a lot about information. There's a whole branch of science dealing with information and its origin and how it's transmitted and so on.

02:36:24

We all sort of intuitively know what information is. You pick up a book, it's got information. How would we define it?

02:36:30

Well, we could define it this way. The information always entails these three characteristics. First of all, it entails a symbolic code system.

02:36:38

And so when you pick up a book, and it wouldn't have to be the Bible, but the Bible works. The Bible has information in it, doesn't it?

02:36:44

And so I see here a word, king, the word king.

02:36:51

And I don't see a king, do I? I see a word that represents an idea. It represents the idea of a king.

02:36:57

And so that's a symbolic code system. These letters represent something else.

02:37:03

And so you can pick up a cookbook and it'll mention an ingredient, it'll mention sugar. Now, you don't find sugar in the cookbook.

02:37:09

You find a word that represents an idea, it codes for it. So that's an important aspect of information.

02:37:16

There's always a language convention. There's grammar, there's syntax. This Bible's English. The Bible's originally written in Hebrew and Greek, some

02:37:23

Aramaic, but there's a language convention. There's syntax, there's grammar, there's rules of grammar, and so on.

02:37:29

And there is meaning. There's an expected action and intended purpose. I can learn something when

02:37:34

I read a book. The author intended me to do something. Maybe it's just to have a better knowledge of the subject, but often it's to do something physical with a specific purpose in mind.

02:37:45

So if you have a cookbook, the expected action is that you will combine the ingredients in the way the book specifies. And the purpose is so you won't go hungry.

02:37:52

That makes sense. So a cookbook counts as information. The Bible counts as information. Any book you read really counts as information, doesn't it?

02:37:59

Because it fulfills these criteria. There's a symbolic code system, there's a language, and there's meaning.

02:38:05

There's an expected action, an intended purpose on the part of the recipient. It doesn't matter if the person actually follows through on the action.

02:38:12

It doesn't matter. All there has to be is an intended action, an intended purpose.

02:38:19

So let's try our information detection skills using these three criteria, symbolic code system, language, meaning, and see if this is information.

02:38:29

Could this be information? Looks like it could be. Looks like there might be a code system there.

02:38:36

That's possible. Is there language? Oh, maybe. I mean, it looks like it's organized into possibly sentences, so it looks like there could be a language there.

02:38:44

It's reasonable. But is there meaning in it? The only way to know that is to decode it. In fact, when hieroglyphics were first discovered, they didn't know how to interpret them until the

02:38:55

Rosetta Stone was discovered, and then they were able to translate it, and they said, oh, yeah, this is a legitimate language. This is legitimate information.

02:39:01

What turns out, this is legitimate. This is information, because I know the code, you see.

02:39:07

I know what it means. And it turns out this is, in fact, Genesis 1, 1 through 5 in the form of icons, you see.

02:39:14

In the beginning, like the clipboard for a movie, in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters, and God said, let there be light, and there was light, and God saw the light, that it was good, right?

02:39:28

Isn't that neat? So this counts as information. Now, it turns out, whenever you have information, certain laws apply.

02:39:38

Just like when you have energy, the law of conservation of energy applies, which says you can't create or destroy energy. We covered that in the previous session.

02:39:45

Likewise, there are laws regarding information, and one of those laws is that information never originates by itself spontaneously in matter.

02:39:55

Information doesn't just generate itself. Interesting. Dr. Werner Goet, one of the world's experts on information theory, says there is no known law of nature, no known process, and no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter.

02:40:09

So information doesn't just spontaneously generate. Now, that is very intuitive, right? Because, again, if you pick up a book, and it's got information in it, you probably would not think, well, that probably just happened when a typewriter exploded.

02:40:21

You would think, no, somebody wrote that. And that comes to another law of information theory, which deals with the origin of information.

02:40:30

It turns out, as you would probably expect, information always originates in a mind. Dr. Goet says, when its progress along the chain of transmission events is traced backwards, every piece of information leads to a mental source, the mind of the sender.

02:40:45

So if you pick up a book, and it's got information in it, ultimately, that information came from a mind. You know that.

02:40:51

Now, that doesn't mean that particular copy was handwritten by the person, right? Because this,

02:40:56

I mean, this Bible was made by a machine that makes lots of them simultaneously, but where did it get its information? From another computer, which got it from another computer, and so on.

02:41:05

Non -mental machines can copy information, but they can't create information. Only a mind can create information.

02:41:13

Okay, and so when you pick up a book, you know that originally it has an author. Now, that's very interesting, the fact that information always originates in a mind, because what do we have in DNA?

02:41:22

Information. The instructions to make the proteins that make you are encoded in your

02:41:27

DNA. There are instructions for each amino acid, there's a stop codon and a start codon that tells you when to start the sequence and when to stop it, and so on.

02:41:36

DNA has instructions, it has information in it, which means that the information in your DNA ultimately came from the mind.

02:41:43

And you see, that eliminates evolution, doesn't it? The idea that the information in your DNA gradually accumulated accidentally over millions of years?

02:41:49

That's not possible according to the laws of information theory. I mean, you got the information in your

02:41:56

DNA from your parents, they got it from their parents, it's been copied many times, and some has been lost because of mutations that have reduced the information in your

02:42:03

DNA, and so we all have some problems. We all have some little health problems. I get lower back pain,

02:42:08

I inherited that mutation from my dad, thanks dad. And he got it from his dad, and so on.

02:42:14

And so we all have our little problems that we have inherited, so we're all a little bit like a poodle,

02:42:22

I'm afraid, yeah. And it's only gonna get worse until the Lord returns.

02:42:27

But in any case, the fact is that DNA, having information in it, only makes sense in light of creation.

02:42:36

It's not consistent with evolution. Science is consistent with creation, it really is. And by the way,

02:42:41

I know that even the most ardent evolutionist, in his heart of hearts, really knows that information does not come about by chance.

02:42:50

He knows that information originates from a mind. I know this, I did a social experiment a while back. I posted an article on my blog.

02:42:57

I reposted it on the Biblical Science Institute website. The article's called On the Origin of Articles by Means of Natural Selection, et cetera, et cetera.

02:43:05

The article tries to convince you that articles do not have authors, but they, in fact, are generated as typos accumulate, you see, over millions of years.

02:43:18

And granted, most typos make an article worse, but we throw those ones out, because they're no fun to read. And so the articles that get preserved are the ones that have useful information in them.

02:43:27

And so articles probably started out as a single letter, and then over millions of years, that letter accumulated other letters, and most of them made it worse, but we threw those ones out.

02:43:36

But gradually, articles have accumulated over millions and millions of years, and that's how articles come about.

02:43:42

And there's all kinds of evidence for this, that all articles have a common ancestor. For example, the fact that many of them use the same words, right?

02:43:50

I mean, you'd be surprised how often the word the occurs in articles. And that's obviously proof that they're descended from a common ancestor, isn't it?

02:43:59

Anyway, I posted this article, and it had all the arguments that evolutionists make for evolution and genetics, just applied it to articles.

02:44:07

And it works just as well, interestingly. And the funny thing was not so much the article, the funny thing was the comments that I got on it.

02:44:15

Because at the time, I allowed people to post on my blog, and a lot of evolutionists got on there and said, we know you wrote this,

02:44:22

Dr. Lyle. I said, how do you know that? Did you see me write it? Oh no, oh, you're just taking it on faith?

02:44:29

Oh, that's interesting, interesting. But well, we could check your IP address and everything and prove that you posted it.

02:44:35

I said, hey, I admit to posting it. When this thing evolved on my computer, it was just too good not to share it. Well, it says it was written by you.

02:44:42

No, it says it was posted by me. And by the way, do you believe everything you read? Bible says it's written by God. Do you believe that?

02:44:47

Oh, interesting. Inconsistent. It was funny, because I started playing the part of an evolutionist then, using all the arguments that they use and so on.

02:44:56

And I said, you must be one of those authorists that believe that articles have authors.

02:45:02

And I mean, how unscientific is that? I mean, if there's an author in this article, let him show himself to me right now.

02:45:08

And it was funny. It was kind of calling myself out, kind of interesting. And I said, you know, if you want to believe in authors, that's fine, but keep it in church, man.

02:45:21

And have a look at it in your spare time. It was fun. It was a fun conversation. And you know what? Not one of them, not one of them could prove that I was the author, that the article had an author.

02:45:30

And it would have been very easy for them to do so. All they would have had to have done was said, we know that you or somebody wrote this article because it has information in it.

02:45:39

And not one of them made that argument. You know why? Because then they'd lose evolution.

02:45:44

They'd disprove evolution, because DNA has information in it. Isn't that interesting? Let's talk about geology now in the remaining time.

02:45:54

Study of rocks, how rocks form and so on. The first little myth

02:46:01

I have to blow up is the idea that these rocks have been age -dated, that we can know how old a rock is by measuring radioactive elements and so on.

02:46:10

So they call it radiometric dating. I wanna show you how it works and the problems with it. It does have problems.

02:46:17

So we're all made of atoms, these little particles that exist. And everything's made up of atoms.

02:46:24

And so some atoms are radioactive. Radioactive means that they're, or another word would be unstable.

02:46:31

It means that they basically will spontaneously change into a different kind of atom. For example, uranium -238 does this.

02:46:37

That's a uranium -238 atom. Not that it looks exactly like that, but you get the idea. So it's got protons and neutrons in the nucleus.

02:46:45

And every now and then it'll emit a combination of protons and neutrons, and that'll change the element number, or it'll emit a electron or positron, and that'll change the type of atom.

02:46:56

So for example, uranium -238 will spontaneously change into thorium. You don't have to do anything. It just does it all on its own. It'll just sit there for a while, and then poof, it'll spit out a helium nucleus and turn into thorium.

02:47:06

And then thorium will sit there for a little while, and poof, it'll spit out a beta decay, and it'll change into the next element, which changes into the next one, so on all the way down to lead -206.

02:47:15

Now, lead -206 is stable. So once you're lead -206, it'll stay lead -206. And the physics of this, it's not entirely understood why certain elements do this.

02:47:23

And most elements don't. Most of the stuff you're made of is stable, so you're not gonna change into anything else in the next 24 hours anyway.

02:47:30

But there are a small fraction of elements that are radioactive, and so they'll spontaneously change into other elements. Now, for any given atom, the time at which it's gonna take to change is unpredictable and random.

02:47:41

But if you have a large sample of them, you know that after a certain amount of time, half of them will have decayed away.

02:47:47

That's what we call the half -life. And it's kind of like popcorn. You don't know which kernel's gonna pop next, do you?

02:47:55

But you do know that after two minutes, you're pretty well done, right? Two minutes in the microwave, or two and a half minutes. If they're gonna pop, they popped, right?

02:48:01

It's the same way with uranium -238. We can measure the rate at which they decay, and it's very slow for uranium -238.

02:48:07

It would take, hypothetically, it would take four or five billion years for half of the uranium -238 to change all the way down to lead -206.

02:48:17

And some decays are fast and some are slow, but that's the way it works with uranium. So the bottom line is if I had a chunk of solid uranium, and I waited for several billion years, it would be half -uranium, half -lead, well, along with the intermediate elements, which

02:48:30

I've not shown for simplicity, and then eventually it'll just be lead. Don't have to do anything, it does it all by itself.

02:48:36

And lead was stable, so it'll stay lead. And so the idea is if you had a rock that has some uranium and some lead, and that rock that you pick up from the earth, you could figure out when it was all uranium.

02:48:47

Knowing the rate at which it changes, you could extrapolate backwards and figure out when it was all uranium. Pretty clever, right?

02:48:54

But how do you know it was all uranium to begin with? How do you know the rock wasn't made yesterday, already half -uranium, half -lead?

02:49:03

And by the way, secularists do not assume that the rock was all uranium to begin with. They believe it had some lead in it to begin with.

02:49:10

Well, how much lead should we start with? Well, you tell me how old you want the rock to be, and I'll tell you how much lead it started with.

02:49:17

So you see, there's a problem right there. You see, there are certain assumptions that go into radiometric dating, and one of them is that you know the initial ratio of what we call parent -to -daughter elements.

02:49:27

And so you can think of it like the sand going from the top chamber to the bottom chamber in an hourglass, right? So there you have uranium changing into lead.

02:49:35

And you can use an hourglass to tell time if you make certain assumptions. If when you came into this room this morning, and I had an hourglass here, and it looked just like that, and I said, how long ago did

02:49:45

I turn this over? You said, well, that's easy, Lyle. It was a half hour ago, right? Because it's hourglass, it's halfway through, a half an hour ago.

02:49:53

I said, gotcha, because in fact, I turned it over just before you came in, but already a lot of the sand was in the bottom chamber.

02:49:59

So you assumed all the sand was in the top chamber, and that's not right. It's like assuming the rock was all uranium to begin with. It wasn't. So there's assumption of initial conditions.

02:50:07

There's the assumption of how do you know somebody didn't add sand when you weren't looking? Now, uranium is leachable in saltwater.

02:50:13

It can move in and out of rocks. Well, that's a problem, isn't it? Because the world was flooded at one point, so the uranium can move in and out.

02:50:20

Or how do you know the throat of the bottle has always been the same size? Now, that's probably a pretty safe assumption with an hourglass, given the properties of matter, but we don't know why it is that decay rates happen at the rate they do, and they could have been different in the past.

02:50:33

In fact, there's very compelling evidence that they were different in the past. So these are some of the assumptions that go into radiometric dating, and there was a research project a number of years ago conducted by a group of very brilliant creation scientists, and they found that number two, compelling evidence that number two is wrong.

02:50:51

The decay rate was much faster in the past. We think during the flood year, maybe during creation week, the decay rate was much faster.

02:50:59

And if you don't compensate for that, you're gonna get ages that are way too old, age estimates that are far older than the true age.

02:51:05

But in any case, regardless of whether you know the details of these assumptions, here's the bottom line.

02:51:11

We know that radiometric dating doesn't work because we've tested it on rocks whose age we know.

02:51:18

You see, radiometric dating is supposed to tell you when the rock hardened. That sets the zero point of the clock because then the gases can't move, or at least gas can't move in and out.

02:51:27

So we took, for example, rocks from Mount St. Helens. Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, right?

02:51:32

There've been some subsequent eruptions. And we took brand new rocks, less than 10 years old, and we sent them in and had them radiometrically dated.

02:51:39

Now, why would you do that? It's expensive to radiometrically date a rock. Why would you date a rock you already know the age?

02:51:44

Normally, they don't do that. Well, we wanted to test the method. We wanted to see if the answer was right because we already know the answer.

02:51:50

It's just a few years old. And those rocks came back with estimated ages of hundreds of thousands to millions of years on rocks that we know are just a few years old.

02:51:59

And you say, well, that's an isolated incident. It's not. If you take a rock from Hawaii and you send it in, a brand new rock, you can take a pole, stick it in the lava, pull it out, send it in, have it dated, you'll get millions of years for a rock that you saw form.

02:52:15

In fact, some of these methods can even give a negative age, which I think is funny. You can actually hold in your hand a rock that according to radiometric dating has not formed yet.

02:52:26

So the bottom line is radiometric dating has been shown to not work on rocks of known age. Secularists assume it works on rocks of unknown age.

02:52:35

Is that scientific? I don't think that is. What about carbon dating? Carbon dating is similar, but carbon dating is better because at least when we test carbon dating on things of known age, it tends to give the right answer.

02:52:46

And so I have more confidence in carbon. Now, it's not infallible either. And sometimes it'll give a little bit of inflated ages, but it never gives millions or billions of years.

02:52:54

With carbon dating, the way it works, most carbon is C12. So you get six protons and six neutrons in the nucleus.

02:53:01

There's a variety of carbon called C14. There's two extra neutrons, and that makes it unstable. C14 will spontaneously decay into nitrogen.

02:53:08

And that C14 is produced in the upper atmosphere as cosmic rays bombard nitrogen atoms, converting a small fraction of nitrogen into C14.

02:53:17

And then what happens is plants will take in the carbon from the atmosphere, and they use that to build themselves.

02:53:24

And so a small fraction of plants are C14, as well as a lot of C12, regular carbon.

02:53:31

And then the animals eat the plants, and then we eat the animals, or we eat the plants either way. And so we have a little bit of C14 in us.

02:53:38

So you're all slightly unstable. How about that? A little bit of C14 in you. And that's constantly decaying into nitrogen, but you're constantly replacing it because you're eating more food, right?

02:53:49

You're eating more food, and you take in new carbon. And so as the C14 decays away, you replace it. And so when you're alive, the

02:53:55

C14 to C12 ratio in you is about the same as it is in the environment until you die. When you die, you don't eat anymore.

02:54:02

You don't breathe anymore. And so the C14 just decays away. You're not replacing it anymore. And so the idea is when you're alive, the

02:54:09

C14 to C12 remains about constant, remains the same, until you die, and then it just decays away.

02:54:14

And so with carbon dating, you can tell how long ago something died if it was a living creature.

02:54:20

And the interesting thing is whenever we carbon date stuff, we get ages that are within the biblical timescale, within the ballpark anyway.

02:54:28

Very interesting. You know, we've carbon dated dinosaur remains, dinosaur fossils. If there's enough carbon left in the fossil, you can date it.

02:54:35

And every one we've tried gives thousands of years, every single one. Not one of them gives millions of years.

02:54:41

If the fossils really were millions of years old, you wouldn't have any C14 in them, but there always is. You can take a chunk of coal.

02:54:48

Coal beds are supposed to be hundreds of millions of years old, but they have C14 in them. Every sample we've tested.

02:54:54

They used to use coal to calibrate the detection machines under the assumption that coal being hundreds of millions of years old should have zero

02:55:02

C14 in it. But that's wrong. We now know that all coal has C14 in it. We found diamonds that has

02:55:08

C14 in them that limits the age to a few thousand years. There's lots of processes like that, folks. Carbon dating is not the only one.

02:55:15

There are all kinds of physical processes that limit the age of the earth to thousands of years, not millions or billions, or at least much less than the 4 .5

02:55:24

billion. The rate at which salt accumulates in the ocean. Freshwater, even freshwater has just a little bit of salt in it, which it picks up from the continents.

02:55:31

Water dumps it into the ocean. The water evaporates and it's recycled, but the salt remains.

02:55:37

Salt doesn't evaporate. And so the oceans are constantly getting saltier. And you do the math, 62 million years ago, the oceans would have had zero salt in them.

02:55:47

So that's an upper limit, because you can't have less salt than no salt, right? So, and you think, well, that's a long time.

02:55:53

But the problem is the secular age of the ocean is supposed to be 3 billion years. And that's a lot older than 62 million years.

02:56:00

But we think the ocean probably had salt in it to begin with. And so obviously it's gonna be a few thousand years old.

02:56:05

The rate at which mud accumulates on the ocean floor. We can calculate that. There are 20 billion tons per year. Now you can get rid of a little bit of it with plate tectonics, subduction, but only a billion tons per year maximum that way.

02:56:17

It takes only 12 million years to accumulate the current amount of mud on the ocean floor. And that's assuming constant rates. That's assuming there was no worldwide flood, which would dump a lot of mud very quickly.

02:56:26

So it's consistent with the biblical age, but it's not consistent with the billions of years. Human population.

02:56:31

How long does it take to get Earth's current population of human beings? It doesn't take millions of years. And we know that.

02:56:38

We've been able to estimate, or at least measure, and in some cases estimate world population growth.

02:56:44

But the bottom line is these are all scientific estimates. You can't scientifically prove the age of something because you can't go back in time and observe it.

02:56:51

And science is all about observation. All age -dating methods that are scientific -based are based on assumptions.

02:56:57

It's just that they tend to give the right answer anyway. They tend to give ages that are consistent with the biblical timescale.

02:57:02

There are very few that give billions of years, and those are the ones the secularists like to use because it gives them the answer they like. But the fact is the ages really are very, the evidence is very consistent with the biblical timescale.

02:57:13

And the bottom line is we have the birth certificate of the universe. When you ask about the age of something, you realize you're not asking a science question.

02:57:21

You're asking a history question. And the best way to answer a history question is with a history book. And we have that in the word of God.

02:57:28

So the secular scientists say the Earth's billions of years old. Take my word for it. God says I created in six days. Take my word for it.

02:57:33

That's really what it comes down to. Now, the science lines up with what God says, but we know definitively because its creation is part of recorded history.

02:57:45

What about the fossils we find in these rock layers? There's evidence that they formed very quickly. Here's a fossil ichthyosaur. This is a marine reptile that once was in the

02:57:53

Earth's oceans, thought to be extinct today. And it was buried, it was killed, buried, and fossilized in the process of giving birth.

02:58:00

You see the baby ichthyosaur being born there? They're born tail first, because they're air breathers. And so as soon as they're born, they have to swim to the surface and get their first breath of air.

02:58:08

It's kind of neat. There's a fish fossilized in the process of eating another fish. You find all kinds of examples of this, of things that are just killed, and boom, they're just buried quickly.

02:58:17

You see, most things, when they die, they don't fossilize. Let's do a little thought experiment here.

02:58:22

We have our dead cat, Earl, okay? Been picking on dogs. We'll pick on cats now.

02:58:28

And we're gonna watch him slowly fossilize over millions of years, right? Well, what happens is, day one, you have a dead cat on the grass.

02:58:36

What happens on day three? You have a smelly dead cat on the grass, yeah. What happens on day nine? You have a very smelly dead cat on the grass.

02:58:42

What happens on day 20? Parts of Earl are missing. Yeah, they've been picked off by scavengers. They started to decay.

02:58:48

Day 38, more of Earl missing. Day 65, Earl's missing. Where's Earl? He's been recycled into the environment.

02:58:55

Most things that die are picked off by scavengers. They decay. They're recycled back into the environment, and I'm very grateful for that.

02:59:02

If you want to form a fossil, you have to bury something. And even then, I had the wrong idea, because we find fossil fish all over the

02:59:07

Earth. And I was told the fish dies. It sinks down to the bottom. It's slowly covered with sediment over millions of years, because these sediments are deposited millions of years after the other one, right?

02:59:17

No, because if this layer was deposited a million years after that layer, the top of the fish would have decayed.

02:59:25

In order to form a fossil, you have to bury it quickly. And most fish float anyway, so if you think about it.

02:59:33

Or they're picked off by scavengers. They don't just sit there and wait to fossilize. You've seen those Discovery Channel or National Geographic where you see the ocean floor.

02:59:40

You don't just see billions of dead fish waiting to fossilize. It's active, right? Now, if you want to form a fossil fish, here's how you do it.

02:59:48

You go home to your aquarium, and you dump some concrete in there, okay?

02:59:56

And that's gonna kill that poor fish. It's gonna bury him quickly. And then usually there's enough bacteria left that they can eat away at the soft parts of the fish, but not the bone.

03:00:06

And then what happens is the minerals will move in and fill in all the holes in the bone, and you get a fossil. And that's how you do it. It doesn't take millions of years.

03:00:12

We can do it quickly in a laboratory. And what about the types of fossils we find?

03:00:18

You'll see all kinds of evidence for evolution, right? And I'm thinking, no, that's variation within a kind. You get different varieties of horse.

03:00:25

But these ones are really small, and those ones are big. So what? We have horses of different sizes today. These are both adult horses.

03:00:31

They're just different breeds. Oh, but their feet were a little different. So what? It's variation within a kind. They're still horses.

03:00:38

And by the way, they don't even teach this anymore, at least knowledgeable evolutionists don't, because the number of ribs is different.

03:00:44

If you organize them in terms of the way their feet supposedly evolved, if you organize them in terms of the number of ribs, it would be a different order.

03:00:53

So it's kind of interesting. It's a nice, neat progression. And of course, even the patterns on there, like we don't have any knowledge of what the patterns looked like on their skin.

03:01:03

But it's kind of interesting. Lots of different varieties of horses. Some have gone extinct. The rocks in which fossils are found, they don't take millions of years to form.

03:01:09

Here's a set of car keys embedded inside solid rock. I don't think that happened millions of years ago. It's a solid rock.

03:01:16

Here's a man -made clock embedded inside solid rock. That's the one rock we know exactly when it happened, right?

03:01:23

Look at all these sedimentary layers. Some of them are still loose, but some of them are hardened into rock.

03:01:31

And there's a person down there for scale. Those did not exist before 1980. Those were formed in the

03:01:36

Mount St. Helens eruption. Yeah, it doesn't take millions of years. That canyon did not exist before 1980.

03:01:42

Oh, but canyons take millions of years to form. That one didn't. That formed in a matter of hours when the

03:01:48

Mount St. Helens eruption happened. So lots more, but I'm running out of time. If I did all of these, we'd be here for millions of years.

03:01:57

The bottom line I wanna point out is that geology really does confirm biblical creation.

03:02:03

It really does. Recent creation in a worldwide flood. And so when you see these rock layers, you need to be reminded, these are not evidence of evolution or millions of years.

03:02:11

They're evidence of the worldwide flood. Most of these rock layers that have fossils in it, most of those were deposited during that worldwide flood.

03:02:18

And you know what that reminds us of? It reminds us God is righteous and he judges sin. So the real message of the rocks is repent.

03:02:26

God judges sin because he's righteous. Only a wicked judge would let sin go unpunished, right?

03:02:32

A wicked judge would say, oh, you're guilty, eh, just go free, who cares? God's righteous and so he will judge sin, but he provides a way of escape as well.

03:02:40

And of course that way of escape ultimately is Jesus Christ. Noah was able to escape the flood physically because God told him how to build the ark and Noah's a preacher of righteousness.

03:02:50

He lets us come on board the ark and be saved. I'm sure he was out there preaching that message and yet of all the billions of people, and yes, there were probably billions of people in the world at the time of the flood, if you do the math.

03:02:58

Of all those billions of people, eight were saved, eight. You say, oh, but the majority of people today, they don't believe in a worldwide flood.

03:03:06

Well, the majority of people did not survive the worldwide flood. That's something to think about. And then of course,

03:03:13

God was the one that closed the door on that ark, which I think is interesting because God is the one who decides time of mercy is over, time of judgment begins.

03:03:22

And so that's something for us all to remember. I'm not gonna do the resource thing because we're running a little bit over, but do check us out on the web,

03:03:28

Biblical Science Institute. And I wanna thank you very much. Hope you enjoyed that. All right, everyone.

03:03:36

We are gonna get started with our lunchtime question and answer. So I had some things that I wanted to discuss with Dr.

03:03:41

Lyle and if we have some time at the end of this before the next session starts around one o 'clock, we'll get into a couple of the questions that you have submitted.

03:03:50

And then we will have a Q &A as part of our last session instead of that seminar, that session titled His Star. Can you briefly describe what

03:03:56

His Star is about? It's the exploration of what is the star that led the Magi to Christ at the time of Christ's birth.

03:04:04

Okay. What I wanted to talk about was Einstein's theory of relativity because it ties in with the speed of light, synchronicity, conventionality that you were talking about earlier.

03:04:17

Briefly describe what relativity is, what the theory of relativity is. Relativity is the branch of physics that was discovered by Albert Einstein.

03:04:29

There are two sort of subdivisions in relativity called special relativity and general relativity.

03:04:36

And special was discovered in 1905 and then in 1915 he discovered general relativity.

03:04:42

Basically, they're the branch of physics that deals with the unusual effects that happen when an object travels at very, very high speeds or in a very intense gravitational field.

03:04:55

The special theory of relativity ignores gravity. The general theory includes gravity. And so what

03:05:00

Einstein discovered was that space and time are a little different than what most people think they are.

03:05:08

They're not sort of absolute and the same everywhere. Clocks don't, our natural expectation is to think that clocks all tick at the same rate if they're a well -constructed clock, okay?

03:05:18

You got a good one, you got a Rolex and it's gonna take a lickin' and keep on tickin', right? The assumption is that no matter how you move, it doesn't affect the rate at which time flows.

03:05:30

And the effect indeed is so small that we don't notice it in our everyday lives. But Einstein was able to figure out rationally from really just two observations that time is affected by motion.

03:05:42

The flow of time, the rate at which clocks tick is affected by motion. And also lengths are affected by motion.

03:05:51

And so how thick you are depends on how fast you're moving. That's kind of interesting. And again, it's not something we would notice in our everyday experiences because the effect is very small.

03:06:00

It's not until you get up to a substantial fraction of the speed of light that the effects become significant. But that's really what it is.

03:06:07

It's the physics dealing with very, very high speeds or very intense gravitational fields. So the theory of relativity is that time and space or matter are relative to what?

03:06:20

They're relative to the speed of light, interestingly, and the round trip speed of light. One of the peculiarities that was discovered in the late 1800s is that the speed of light, no matter how you measure it, the round trip speed of light is always 186 ,282 miles per second.

03:06:41

And that's very peculiar. I wanna give you an example of this. Suppose that you're in a car and you're driving 50 miles an hour and somebody in the back seat takes a baseball and throws it, and they're capable of throwing a baseball at 50 miles an hour, and so they throw it out the window.

03:06:57

Now someone on the sidewalk would see that ball traveling at 100 miles an hour, wouldn't they?

03:07:03

Because it would be the speed of the car plus the speed of the baseball, it'd be 100 miles an hour. That's called the Galilean Velocity Addition Theorem.

03:07:10

Okay, you just add the velocities. But what's peculiar is light doesn't work that way. If I'm traveling down the road at half the speed of light and I turn my headlights on and they're moving the speed of light faster than me, which is

03:07:24

C, I'm traveling at half C, you'd think somebody on the sidewalk would see the light traveling at 1 .5C,

03:07:31

50 % faster, but he doesn't. Somehow he sees the speed of light as C faster than him, whereas I see the speed of light as C faster than me, even though I'm moving relative to him.

03:07:42

Very peculiar. And Einstein realized that the resolution to that paradox is entailed by the fact that my clock doesn't tick at the same rate as someone on the sidewalk, and so the way

03:07:53

I measure time's different, and lengths change, and so the way my rulers are not the same as a person's who's stationary on the sidewalk.

03:08:02

So if you're traveling at 3 .25 the speed of light, your ruler is different than the man standing on the sidewalk right next to you as you pass by.

03:08:10

Right, that's right. If you could take a snapshot from a neutral perspective, your ruler and his ruler would be different lengths, even though they might be one -foot rulers.

03:08:18

That's right. Because you're traveling at the speed of light, therefore the length of everything relative to you has shrunk.

03:08:25

Yes, and the thing that's surprising to people is when you're moving, you do not notice any of these effects, because everything shrinks together.

03:08:36

Okay, and so you might say, well, this ruler seems just as long as it used to be. It's still the length of my arm, but that's because your arm has also shrunk in that direction, and so on.

03:08:44

So everything moves together. Your time might be slowed down, and so you're moving very slowly, and your clock is ticking very slowly, but you don't notice it, because your brain is slowed at the same rate your watch is, and so everything slows together.

03:08:56

And so you don't notice the effects in your own car, or in your own spaceship, or whatever you're in that's moving at some substantial fraction of the speed of light, but somebody watching you with a telescope would notice that inside your chamber there, you're moving very slowly, and the faster you get to the speed of light, the slower and slower time flows.

03:09:14

So give us a thought experiment with the traveling to a distant star, say Alpha Centauri, traveling at the speed of light.

03:09:22

What would the effects of that time dilation and that space dilation be? So as you move closer and closer to the speed of light, since time slows down, you age very slowly, but from your perspective, it doesn't seem that way.

03:09:34

It seems like time's flowing normally, but from your perspective, as you're moving very fast, you're always allowed to consider yourself stationary.

03:09:43

You see, I mean, we don't feel like we're moving, do we? We're in this room, we're on the Earth, that the Earth's rotating, and we're moving at 700 miles per hour relative to the center of the

03:09:50

Earth in an easterly direction, and then we're orbiting around the sun at 67 ,000 miles per hour. You don't feel that, right, because it's a smooth motion.

03:09:59

So the person who's in the spaceship, from his perspective, it's the universe that's moving backwards at a substantial fraction of the speed of light, and so from his perspective, since things shrink in the direction of motion, that star that was very distant is now not so distant because the universe is compressed in the direction of motion, interestingly.

03:10:16

And so what happens, let's say it's a star that's, say, four light years away, Alpha Centauri, the nearest star, it's 4 .3

03:10:22

light years away. So he'd say, well, it's gonna take at least 4 .3 years to get there because we can't move faster than the speed of light, we can only move slower than the speed of light.

03:10:31

So I move up to a very high speed, as close to light as I can get. The person on the ship would be able to make the trip in, say, a couple of months, because from his point of view, the universe shrank in the direction that he's traveling, and so it didn't take very long to get there.

03:10:45

Now, a person on Earth would say, no, the reason you were able to make that trip in what seems like two months is because your clock was running very slowly.

03:10:52

And so they both agree, everybody agrees that they're able to make the trip in, the astronaut is able to make the trip aging only a couple of months.

03:11:01

They disagree on the explanation for why, because the explanation is relative to the person's point of view, so that's where it gets its name.

03:11:08

So twin astronauts, one stays on Earth, one gets in the ship and heads off to Alpha Centauri, makes the trip there, and comes back, what happens?

03:11:15

So he comes back and meets his twin. And his twin would have aged 8 .6 years, whereas the astronaut would have aged barely, you know, four months, say, depending on the speed.

03:11:26

So the twins are now different ages. So very interesting. Is traveling at the speed of light possible?

03:11:33

And if not, why not? So it turns out traveling at the speed of light is not possible unless you're light, okay?

03:11:38

Light travels at the speed of light. Anything that has no mass has to travel, no rest mass, has to travel at the speed of light.

03:11:44

Anything that has mass, though, can't ever reach it, because there's a third effect that kicks in. We talked about how lengths compress as you go faster and faster.

03:11:52

Your time slows down as you go faster and faster. The third effect that kicks in is mass increases, mass goes up, things get heavier.

03:12:01

And when something's heavier, it takes more force to accelerate it. And so it turns out that in the limit as you approach the speed of light, your mass would go up to infinity, and it would take an infinite amount of force to get you any faster.

03:12:11

So you can't ever push something up to the speed of light. You can get arbitrarily close, but you can never reach it.

03:12:19

And if you reach the speed of light, or you got close to the speed of light, is time travel possible? Well, in a way, yes, because in a sense, we're already traveling through time, because, right,

03:12:30

I'm going from 12, 45, 47 seconds to 48, 49, we're moving forward in time now. Now, the interesting thing is you can increase the rate at which you move through time by simply moving through space.

03:12:40

And so if you wanted to, you could travel at a very close to the speed of light out to a distant star and come back, and you could see the future of the

03:12:47

Earth. You could come back, you'd be 100 years later here, but from your point of view, the trip only takes a couple months.

03:12:53

So that's a type of time travel. But if you wanted to come back. So hold on a second, say that again. Because, yeah, let's just say that again.

03:13:02

I'm not gonna admit how stupid I feel after that. So you could travel two months at near the speed of light, or at the speed of light to someplace and come back.

03:13:11

When you got back, you would be two months older. But everybody here would have been, you would see your grandchildren and maybe your great -grandchildren.

03:13:19

So you would be traveling into the future of our planet, but not the future of you. Yeah. Okay.

03:13:27

Yeah. You got the right idea. That's it. So yeah. Can we travel to the past? Effectively, you're aging, and there's the problem.

03:13:35

If you say, well, okay, I wanna come back and tell my wife about this, that I met my distant kid, but I'm sorry, she's dead and you can't, there's nothing you can do about it.

03:13:41

You can't go back. Because in order to go back in time, you'd have to go faster than light. If you can go faster than light, you can go back in time.

03:13:47

So you can't go faster than light. Therefore, you can't go back in time. Are you telling me that end game and back to the future are not possible?

03:13:53

Sorry, it's not gonna happen. What is the logical problem with traveling back into the past?

03:13:59

And why does that logical problem mean that we can never go back in the past?

03:14:06

Well, one of the issues is sometimes called the grandfather paradox. In principle, it would be, if you could go back in time, in principle, you could, although it would be ill -advised, you could go back and assassinate your grandfather before he ever even met your grandmother, in which case your father's never born, in which case you're never born.

03:14:23

But if you're never born, then how can you possibly go back and assassinate your grandfather, you see? And so you end up with a paradox.

03:14:28

On the one hand, you must exist in order to cause his death. On the other hand, you can't exist because he died. And so it leads to a logical contradiction.

03:14:36

And that which leads to a contradiction is false. Therefore, time travel into the past is false.

03:14:43

Did you catch the logical math behind that, everyone? Okay. Back to the future, basically.

03:14:51

It's false. Yeah, it's not gonna work. But it's a good movie, it's fun. Now, your paradigm that you have proposed for rescuing the starlight time issue problem, that rescue device, would you call it a rescue device?

03:15:07

No, because it's testable. Rescuing devices are not testable by their nature. Okay. It's a hypothesis.

03:15:13

It's a hypothesis. And it is a way of explaining how distant starlight can get to the Earth. And here, I'll try and state it in how

03:15:20

I would state it, and you see if this is accurate. You're saying that we can only know the round -trip speed of light. We cannot know the one -directional speed of light.

03:15:27

So it is possible that the speed of light going away from us could be instant. Coming back to us, it would be half of what we observe.

03:15:34

Or it's possible that the speed of light coming toward us is instant. And away from us would be half of what we observe.

03:15:42

Correct. Round -trip -wise. Yep, that's right. Anybody who tries to measure the speed of light has to make certain assumptions regarding what they're measuring and how they're measuring it.

03:15:52

All those assumptions are built into it. Yeah. So you have essentially proposed a hypothesis that is impossible to disprove.

03:16:02

Is that correct? Well, there's a nuance to this, because the hypothesis that it is impossible to measure the one -way speed of light could be falsified if somebody would simply measure the one -way speed of light without assuming it.

03:16:16

So the hypothesis that the one -way speed of light is untestable is itself a testable hypothesis.

03:16:22

Does that make sense? Did you follow that? Okay. On the other hand, the one -way speed of light itself is not testable.

03:16:28

No, I followed that, but say it again for the people who might not have. Sure. Sure. So what's called the conventionality thesis is the proof, the supposition, the hypothesis that you can't measure the one -way speed of light without circular assumptions, without first assuming it.

03:16:48

Now, you could, in principle, falsify that by measuring the one -way speed of light without circular assumptions, but nobody has figured out how to do that.

03:16:56

And I think that hypothesis is actually, I think it's more than a hypothesis. I think it's been proven. John Winnie in 19, not everybody agrees with this proof, but John Winnie in 1970 showed that relativity works equally well no matter what the one -way speed of light is.

03:17:08

You can make it anything you want. So the one -way speed of light is a convention. Now, my saying that, that this one -way speed of light is a convention is itself a testable statement because if you could somehow objectively measure the one -way speed of light without first assuming it, then you would falsify my statement.

03:17:28

You would falsify my hypothesis, but nobody's been able to do that. Your hypothesis that the, and I'm gonna suggest that what you're suggesting is not that the light travels instantly from us, but that the light traveling to us relative to our point of observation is instant.

03:17:45

Therefore, we are seeing in real time what is happening in the Andromeda galaxy. Sort of.

03:17:50

One little nuance, though. I'm not proposing that as a hypothesis. I'm proposing that as a convention, which is what

03:17:57

Einstein said it was. He said the one -way speed of light, he said it's neither a hypothesis about, it's neither a hypothesis nor a supposition about the physical nature of light, but a stipulation which

03:18:09

I can make of my own free will in order to arrive at a definition of simultaneity. In other words, what he's saying is we get to choose the one -way speed of light to be whatever we like, and then that will define what constitutes synchronized clocks.

03:18:22

That's the only way to do it because there's no objective way to synchronize two clocks separated by a distance unless you suppose the one -way speed of light.

03:18:31

And so that's the part that I've had difficulty communicating that to laymen because it is a hard concept.

03:18:37

It's difficult because we tend to think of space and time as absolute. They're not. And so as a result of that, there's no objective way to synchronize two clocks that everyone in the universe would agree on.

03:18:48

That's called the relativity of simultaneity. And as a result of that, it's impossible to measure exactly any one -way speed.

03:18:55

We can do it approximately, but you can't actually measure the one -way speed of light, and therefore, it's something that we get to choose.

03:19:02

And I'm suggesting not that the speed of light is instantaneous toward us in the sense that that's right, and the other definition of it being the same in all directions is wrong.

03:19:11

I'm just suggesting there are two different conventions, like the metric system or the English system. You want to measure a table in feet? You can do that.

03:19:17

You want to measure it in meters? You can do that too. You'll get a different number that's reflecting the same reality. The length of the table doesn't change.

03:19:23

So the convention of different ways of measuring the speed of light is something that's consistent with Einstein's theory, and what you have postulated or suggested is consistent with Einstein's theory.

03:19:32

It works for a young earth creationist perspective. And then the kicker is that if you take

03:19:38

God's word as serious as what he is describing in Scripture as inspired, then we have people in Scripture and God describing events that happened billions of light years away as happening in real time from our vantage point.

03:19:52

So that seems to suggest as if God is using the same convention of measuring the speed of light that it is instant toward us.

03:19:58

We're seeing events in real time. Yes. I believe the Bible's using that anisotropic synchrony convention. And by the way, all ancient cultures did until around the time, well, at least until the 1600s.

03:20:08

Everybody used that convention. Do you know, now you've suggested this as a way of resolving that issue.

03:20:14

Do you know of any astrophysicists or any of your peers who are secular that reject the timeline of Scripture, old earth, do you know of any of them that know of your hypothesis, have read it and interacted with it, and have admitted that they are unable to disprove that?

03:20:29

Yeah, yeah. Have any of them disproved it? No, they haven't disproved it. In fact, secular physicists, if they know

03:20:37

Einstein's physics, they know that what I'm saying works. They understand the conventionality thesis.

03:20:43

And it's kind of interesting. I had one guy, there was one guy, he was a grad student in physics, but he knew his stuff, he knew relativity. And he interacted with me a little bit and asked me some questions.

03:20:51

And he understood, he's not a younger creationist by any means. And then he got onto a secular blog where folks were making fun of my model.

03:21:00

And he says, you guys don't know what you're talking about. You can't criticize him for that. You know, he said, he's playing you like a fish.

03:21:06

And of course, I wasn't, I wasn't trying to fool anybody. It's just, they didn't know their physics and they thought what I was proposing was new.

03:21:12

It's not, what I'm proposing is well established in the literature. And again, John Winney's article, there was actually two articles called the

03:21:20

Special Relativity Without One -Way Velocity Assumptions, part one and part two. And he showed that all relativity works without one -way assumptions.

03:21:29

There's another article by Wesley Salmon called the Philosophical Significance of the One -Way Speed of Light. What I presented to you today is not new.

03:21:37

It's just nobody ever, as far as I know, I'm the first person to realize that that solves the distant starlight problem. That's my minor contribution is to point out that it solves the starlight problem.

03:21:46

But the fact that the one -way speed of light is conventional is well known in the physics literature. It really is.

03:21:52

So the physics of your theory, the postulates of your theory have been around for years. Yeah. You just simply applied it to this and said, then that is the solution and it's already in the physics of Einstein.

03:22:01

Yeah, that's right. So what is covered in that book, The Physics of Einstein for, I've read it.

03:22:06

So if anybody, has anybody else here read that, The Physics of Einstein? No, okay. I read it in preparation for what we're going through here.

03:22:13

I never understood the theory of relativity. I thought it was Einstein's way of trying to figure out the complex family tree in Clarkport.

03:22:19

I had no idea that had anything to do with anything else. I'd never even studied or thought through it. I read Jason's book and what he does is he begins back in history, 1500s, 1400s, whenever some of these theories with Galileo and who else was it?

03:22:34

Well, yeah, Galileo was the main guy who came up. He was the Galilean velocity addition theorem. So that's what I started with. Yeah, he starts with that and then he kind of builds on until he gets to Einstein.

03:22:42

And then rather than just dumping Einstein's theory on you and all of its glory, Jason does the hard work of laying it out layer by layer, postulate by postulate, until you get it.

03:22:51

And there's great thought experiments, illustrations like the space travel to a distant universe and what would happen to twins.

03:22:57

He does all of that to show you how, and he just builds one thing after another, first time dilation and space dilation and then matter and mass and energy and how all of it's tied together until you arrive at Einstein's theory.

03:23:07

And then he applies it to some of the stuff that we're talking about here. Black holes, which is fascinating. Time travel, which is another one.

03:23:14

And the distant starlight problem. So it is a very, I was able to understand it and I know nothing about that field before stepping into it.

03:23:22

Let me give you a couple of questions here from relating to Einstein's theory.

03:23:30

What do you think about the emerging theory that black holes can create a big bang after a big crunch, that something came from nothing naturally?

03:23:40

Okay, well, black holes aren't strongly connected to the big crunch theory.

03:23:46

They used to think, this was decades ago, that folks who believed in the big bang thought that the universe might expand to a certain point and then fall back in on itself and you'd end up with an inverted big bang, which they called the big crunch.

03:24:04

And then in some versions of that, it would rebound. Boom, and you get another big bang, another big crunch, boom.

03:24:10

And that cycle might be eternal. And so that's what the big crunch is. As far as I know, nobody believes that anymore.

03:24:18

And one of the reasons is the outward energy of expansion exceeds the inward pull of gravity.

03:24:24

And so the universe, it's gonna continue to expand forever. All our observations indicate, based on the physics that we understand, the universe will expand forever.

03:24:32

And so there can't be a big crunch. So that's been pretty well eliminated. Even the secularists don't buy into that anymore.

03:24:38

All right, if your theory about the one -way speed of light is correct, we wouldn't be able to see any planets farther than 6 ,000 light years away as their light would be reflected.

03:24:47

Is this consistent with what can be observed through a telescope? First explain the question. That's a great question, that's a great question.

03:24:54

So because planets shine by reflected light, the light needs to go from the sun and hit the planet and then come back, you see.

03:25:03

And the speed of light can only be instant in one direction, just once. And so that can explain why we see distant stars, because the light only has to go from there to here.

03:25:12

But for planets, the light has to go out from the sun, hit the planet, and then come back. And so yes, it is true that planets in our solar system that shine by reflected sunlight, you would not be able to see them if they were more than, that's actually 3 ,000, if they're more than 3 ,000 light years out, because remember, light travels out at half

03:25:28

C. And so even though the return trip would be instant. But of course, our solar system isn't that big.

03:25:35

The Neptune, let's see, Neptune's what, about four hours away, four light hours away. So for light to get from the sun, regardless of what you believe about one -way speed of light, for light to get out to Neptune and then come back and hit the

03:25:47

Earth takes eight hours. So all the planets in our solar system would have been visible by the end of day four.

03:25:55

All of them would have been visible. It is true, though, that if you had planets out at tremendous distances, you wouldn't be able to see them by sunlight. Now, there are planets in other solar systems that we can see that are far out, but they're shining by the reflected light of their star, and that doesn't take very long to get there.

03:26:08

It takes a few hours. So that's a very ingenious question. All right, since motion affects the passage of time, is that why car clocks never keep time?

03:26:18

Yeah, it's not. The effects of relativity on the slowing of time are minuscule, and they're not something you're ever gonna see.

03:26:28

Because in order to see a 1 % time dilation, in order for a clock to be ticking 1 % slower than a stationary clock, you would have to move at 14 % the speed of light.

03:26:42

And none of you have cars that can get up to 14 % the speed of light. By the way, that would be about the equivalent of if you were to travel around the

03:26:51

Earth in one second. Can you imagine that? Traveling around the Earth in one second, you'd be traveling at about 14 % the speed of light.

03:26:58

So if we put a clock on Superman, and we have him fly around the Earth in one second, and he comes back, there would be a 1 % difference between his clock and my clock.

03:27:09

He would have experienced time dilation. So at ordinary speeds, at 50 miles an hour, the effects are negligible.

03:27:15

You can't measure them. And you might say, well, how do we measure them at all? And the answer is using atomic clocks. That's how it's been measured. One of the first experiments to measure time dilation had airplanes fly around the world in opposite directions.

03:27:27

And because the Earth's rotating, the plane that's flying westward is effectively stationary. The Earth's just rotating underneath it, whereas the other one is moving substantially.

03:27:36

And even though it's not even close to 14 % speed of light, nonetheless, the atomic clocks could measure even the very small difference.

03:27:43

But unless your car has an atomic clock, you're never gonna notice any difference. Car clocks aren't very accurate because they're not very well built.

03:27:51

That's all it comes down to, yeah. So while you are moving, while you are in motion, while all of us are in motion, you are technically, time is traveling slower for you.

03:28:01

Yeah, that's right. You are thinner and shorter. That's right. And distance has shrunk. Yeah. But so negligible that we never notice it, never can notice it.

03:28:08

That's right, that's right. But it's a real phenomenon nonetheless. It is, it is. And gravity is another factor too.

03:28:15

Gravity also slows the passage of time. And so the fact that we're sitting here in a gravitational field as opposed to in deep space causes our clocks to tick just slightly slower.

03:28:24

And therefore, you're aging very slightly slower than if you had a twin who lived out in space in zero G, you would age slightly slower.

03:28:30

And I figured out the difference one time. I thought, what is the difference of the effect? And the answer is, if you lived to be 70 years old, you would gain an extra two seconds for living on the

03:28:42

Earth in a gravitational field. That's the difference. It's tiny, it's tiny. All right, let's close with one quick personal question that somebody asked.

03:28:51

And then we will have a five -minute break for you to clear off your tables. Grab something more to eat or drink if you would like.

03:28:57

Let's make it 10 minutes. We'll do a 10 -minute break. Grab something to eat or drink if you like, and then we'll come back. Here's the personal question.

03:29:04

Are you married and do you have children? I'm not married and I don't have children, yeah. Somebody Googled your name on Google and it said you were 69 years old.

03:29:14

Is that true? How do you look so young? And is this the effects of time travel? It's the effect of time dilation, yeah. I've been out. Somebody mentioned that to me.

03:29:24

Are you really 69? I said, do you believe everything you read on the internet? Somebody mentioned

03:29:30

I should fix it, get on Google and tell them my true age. I thought, you know what, I don't think I will. I think I'll just leave that as a little lesson to folks that you should not believe everything you read on the internet.

03:29:39

All right, let's take a 10 -minute break and then we'll come back with a final session. All right, so in this last presentation,

03:29:47

I wanna talk about secret code of creation. Wouldn't that be neat if there was a secret code built into some aspect of creation?

03:29:54

There was the movie a few years ago, what was it, National Treasure, right, where Nicolas Cage found a secret code on the back of the

03:30:02

Declaration of Independence and that indicated that there was some really intelligent people that built that code in there.

03:30:09

Codes always indicate intelligence. And so what would happen if we found a code built into numbers?

03:30:16

That would be awesome, wouldn't it? Because it would imply that there's an intelligence behind numbers. We don't think of God creating numbers, we think of God creating physical things, planets and stars and animals and so on.

03:30:28

But God is also sovereign over the abstract world of mathematics. And so God's mind is responsible for numbers just as much as it's responsible for the physical creation.

03:30:39

What would happen then if we found a secret code built into numbers? Numbers, one, two, three, four. What if there was a pattern built in there?

03:30:48

Well, there is, there is. And this was discovered in the 1980s and it is mind -blowing.

03:30:56

And I just wanna share it with you because it's cool and it has no secular explanation for it. You cannot make sense of this from any perspective other than the

03:31:03

Christian worldview. And so it is just very powerful confirmation of the

03:31:08

Christian worldview, very awesome. And I have to start by saying that when

03:31:14

I was young and my mother would prepare these wonderful meals, she was a very good cook and I would enjoy that.

03:31:20

But every now and then she would make something I didn't like, like broccoli. But the rule was you had to eat everything on your plate before you could be excused and do what you wanted to do.

03:31:31

And so in rare moments of maturity, I would occasionally eat the broccoli first, kind of get that out of the way and then

03:31:38

I could enjoy the rest of my meal. Does that make sense? Well, in the same spirit, we're gonna have to do a little broccoli first, but stay with me because it's gonna get really cool and you're not gonna enjoy the rest of the meal if you don't go through the broccoli, that's just the way it works.

03:31:53

So we're gonna have to do a little bit of definitional stuff with mathematics here and this is all high school stuff, it's not that difficult.

03:32:01

But stay with me because it's gonna get really good really fast. We're gonna talk about sets. A set in mathematics is just exactly what you think it is.

03:32:08

It's a collection of numbers that have a common property and that property could be anything.

03:32:15

You can define your own sets and in most sets, some numbers are included in the set and then other numbers are excluded from the set.

03:32:22

That's pretty easy. So for example, we could consider the set of even numbers, the set of even numbers.

03:32:28

Well, the numbers that would belong to that set would be all those ones, those numbers that are, when you divide them by two, you get an integer.

03:32:34

We understand that, so that's the set of even numbers and so those numbers would be included, those numbers at the bottom would be excluded.

03:32:41

So that's pretty easy. We could consider the set of negative numbers. Now this is a different set and so different numbers will belong to it.

03:32:48

The set of negative numbers would include numbers like negative three, negative a half and so on and then it would exclude all those other numbers.

03:32:56

So that's pretty easy. Now those two sets are very simple, they're very easy. You can tell just by looking at the number whether or not it belongs to the set.

03:33:05

You look at the set of negative numbers, does it have a little minus sign in front of it? Then it belongs, easy.

03:33:11

Some sets are defined in a way that's a little more complicated where you can't tell just by looking at the number whether or not it belongs.

03:33:18

You're gonna have to do a little bit of work to figure it out and so what we're gonna talk about is what's called the

03:33:24

Mandelbrot set and the Mandelbrot set is defined according to this simple little formula and it is very simple and I'll walk you through it but it's defined, the

03:33:33

Mandelbrot set is defined as all the numbers C, C is a candidate for the

03:33:39

Mandelbrot set. We wanna see if the number C does or does not belong to the Mandelbrot set. It's the set of all numbers for which the sequence

03:33:46

Z, which is another number, remains small according to this little formula and I know that sounds complicated but I'll step you through it and you can see how it's actually very easy.

03:33:55

So basically Z and the fact that Z has a little N under it means that there's lots of Zs. There's Z1, there's

03:34:01

Z2, Z3 and so on. There's a sequence of Z and if that sequence of Z stays small like zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, that would stay small, wouldn't it?

03:34:11

Then the number C does belong to the Mandelbrot set. If on the other hand that sequence of Z gets very big, if it goes one, two, a thousand, a million, infinity, then in fact

03:34:23

C is not part of the Mandelbrot set. You got that? Let's run through a couple of examples just so you can see it.

03:34:29

So we're gonna ask is the number one part of the Mandelbrot set? So our candidate that's potentially part of the

03:34:35

Mandelbrot set is the number one. So C equals one. We plug that into our little formula. So we have Z squared plus one, that's the number we're evaluating, is

03:34:43

ZN plus one. ZN plus one means that's the next value of Z. And so what we're, now the first value of Z always starts as zero.

03:34:51

That's just part of the definition there. And so we're gonna start with zero squared plus one.

03:34:57

That's pretty easy. Zero squared plus one is one. Yeah, that's right.

03:35:03

Zero squared is zero plus one is one, right? You're all common core educated, aren't you? Okay. So that's the new value of Z.

03:35:13

Okay, so we're gonna record that on our list. So Z started as zero, now it's one. And what we're gonna do is put that back in.

03:35:18

That's the next value of Z. So we're gonna put that back in. So now we got one squared, which is one, plus one is two.

03:35:24

All right, very good. Gonna put that back in. So now we have two squared, which is four plus one is five.

03:35:31

Put that back in. Five squared, five times itself is 25, plus one is 26.

03:35:38

Put that back in. 26 squared plus one is a big number. Okay, and so on and so forth.

03:35:44

Now is the sequence of Z staying small? No, it's getting big, isn't it?

03:35:50

So is the number one part of the Mandelbrot set? The answer is no, because the

03:35:55

Mandelbrot set requires the sequence of Z to stay small. That sequence did not stay small. It got really big.

03:36:00

And you can see it's just gonna get bigger and bigger, isn't it? It's just gonna get bigger and bigger. So the number one is not part of the

03:36:06

Mandelbrot set. Had to do a little bit of work, but we got there, right? Let's try another one. Is the number negative one part of the

03:36:14

Mandelbrot set? So now we're gonna put C equals negative one. We're gonna put that into our formula. So now we're gonna have Z squared minus one is the new value of Z.

03:36:22

Z always starts as zero. So we have zero squared minus one is negative one, right?

03:36:29

We're gonna put that back in. Now negative one squared, negative one times itself is positive one minus one is zero.

03:36:38

Well, that's interesting. Put that back in. This looks familiar, doesn't it? Zero squared, what's negative one again, isn't it?

03:36:44

Put that back in, negative one. Oh, that's interesting. It just kind of oscillates, doesn't it? Zero, negative one, zero, negative one, zero, negative one.

03:36:50

Is the sequence of Z staying small? Yes, it is. You can see it's never gonna deviate from zero or negative one.

03:36:57

It's staying small. So is the number negative one part of the Mandelbrot set? Yes, it is. Okay, you got that?

03:37:03

So it's, I mean, it's a little tedious, but it's not intellectually difficult. You just have to run it through the formula a few times.

03:37:10

And I won't do any more of that because you get the idea and it is tedious. So there's one more complication and then we'll get to the really cool stuff.

03:37:18

Okay, the other complication is that the Mandelbrot set also includes the so -called complex and imaginary numbers.

03:37:25

And boy, I hate that name because imaginary makes you think like it doesn't exist. But an imaginary number, they do exist, but they are the square root of a negative.

03:37:36

So when you multiply an imaginary number times itself, you get a negative number. And the primary imaginary number is abbreviated by a lowercase i.

03:37:44

So i squared equals negative one. And that's challenging to us, isn't it? Because how can you multiply something by itself and get a negative?

03:37:54

I mean, imaginary numbers are not positive because a positive number times a positive number is a positive number.

03:38:00

And yet imaginary numbers are not negative because a negative number times a negative number is a positive number, right?

03:38:07

And yet they're not zero because zero squared is zero. So it bothers people. How can you have a number that's not positive, it's not negative, and it's not zero, and yet they do exist?

03:38:19

Yes, they do. I hate the name. It's imaginary. It makes it sound like they don't exist.

03:38:25

And to add insult to injury, numbers that are not imaginary are called real. It's just a name, though.

03:38:30

It's just a name. But how do we make sense of a number that when you multiply it by itself, you get a negative, a number that's not positive, not negative, not zero?

03:38:40

Well, I have to point out that this may be counterintuitive because our intuition is based on experience.

03:38:47

And most people don't have a lot of experience with the so -called imaginary numbers. It's kind of like when you were a little kid and you were first introduced to negative numbers.

03:38:56

That might have bothered you, right? I mean, you understand one apple, two apple, three apple.

03:39:01

How can you have less than zero apples? That doesn't make sense. How can you have less than nothing? It doesn't make sense when you're a little kid because you don't have any experience in that.

03:39:10

You get a little bit older, you get a bank account, suddenly negative numbers make a lot of sense. Yes, I can have less than nothing.

03:39:17

So, well, imaginary numbers are the same way. You can have numbers that are not positive, not negative, not zero.

03:39:24

It's just most adults don't have a lot of experience with that, so it's kind of bothersome to us. How could we think about these? Well, here's one way you could think about it.

03:39:30

Consider a number line. So, the numbers that are to the right of zero, those we would call positive.

03:39:36

The numbers that are to the left of zero, we would call negative. Where are you gonna put an imaginary number? It can't be to the right of zero because that's positive.

03:39:43

It can't be to the left of zero because that's negative. It can't be at zero because that's zero. You can think of an imaginary number as being off axis like that.

03:39:50

Yeah, that makes sense because it's not to the right of zero. It's not positive. It's not to the left of zero. It's not negative, and yet it's not at zero.

03:39:56

It's along a different axis, and so you can think of the imaginary numbers as being sort of perpendicular to the real numbers, and by multiplying

03:40:03

I by any of the real numbers, you can end up with other imaginary numbers, and they obey all the ordinary rules of algebra.

03:40:09

You just need to remember that whenever you have I squared, that's equal to negative one. You can also have numbers that are off axis.

03:40:17

You can have a number that has a real component and an imaginary component, and those are called complex numbers because they have two parts, a real part and an imaginary part, and usually we represent the real part as being along the x -axis, and the imaginary part as being along the y -axis, and this is really neat.

03:40:34

This is called an argand plane, and it's neat because I can represent any point on a plane with one number.

03:40:41

It's got two parts, which is why I can represent it on a plane with the real part indicating the x -axis, the imaginary part indicating the y -axis.

03:40:49

Now, what I pointed out is that the Mandelbrot set also includes these imaginary and complex numbers, not just the real numbers, and we checked two of them.

03:40:57

We checked one and we checked negative one. We found that one does not belong to the Mandelbrot set, but negative one does.

03:41:03

What if we checked the imaginary numbers and the complex numbers? Well, you'd find some of them belong, some of them don't, but that's tedious to go through and check each one, so we'll let the computer do it.

03:41:12

Computers don't mind doing tedious things, and what we'll do is we'll make a map of the Mandelbrot set because I want to see if there's a pattern here.

03:41:19

Is there any pattern to those numbers that do or do not belong to the Mandelbrot set? And so what we'll do is we'll take the points that do belong and we'll color those black, and we checked negative one.

03:41:30

We found that it did belong. I've checked zero. It plugs zero and it just stays zero, zero, zero.

03:41:35

The sequence of z stays zero, so it belongs as well, and so we'll color those black, and had we checked these other points, we would find that these points all belong to the

03:41:45

Mandelbrot set, so we'll color them black. I'm just picking points at random and find that those points do belong, and then points that don't belong to the

03:41:51

Mandelbrot set, we'll give them a color like red, for example. It wouldn't have to be red. I can pick any color. We found that one, the number one, does not belong to the

03:41:58

Mandelbrot set, so it gets colored red, okay, and had we checked these other points, we would find that these do not belong to the

03:42:04

Mandelbrot set, and so they get colored red, and so you see what happens is we're making a map of which points belong to this little formula, z squared plus c.

03:42:14

When you run it through that, when you run z through there and z stays small, you color it black. z gets big, you color it red, easy, and what happens as you check more and more points is that a shape starts to emerge, and the shape that emerges is fascinating, and it's not something that anyone expected, so let me just cut to the chase and show you what happens when you map out the

03:42:35

Mandelbrot set. This is the shape that you get, and it's really a strange kind of shape, and again,

03:42:42

I'll explain. Those points that are black are points that do belong to the Mandelbrot set. Those points that are colored do not, and I even shaded it, so points where the sequence of z gets really big really fast,

03:42:54

I made those kind of a dark red color, and points where z got big but it did so slowly, I colored those a lighter color, like light yellow, and so you can think of the bright points as being very close to the

03:43:06

Mandelbrot set, but they're not quite on it, okay, and then points that are black do belong to the Mandelbrot set.

03:43:11

The sequence of z stays bound. It never exceeds, I think it never exceeds a value of two. Okay, so now we just look at the map, and we can tell which points belong to the

03:43:21

Mandelbrot set. You can see that zero does. You can see that negative 1 .5, there's negative 1 .5,

03:43:27

that belongs. 1 .5i does belong. I does belong, technically. There's a little black spot there, and so on and so forth, so we've had the computer run it through, and we don't have to go through that little formula ourselves anymore, because that's tedious.

03:43:41

The computer's done the work for us, and it's interesting, the shape that emerges here, so you have the large structure here.

03:43:50

You have a perfect circle that's centered exactly on negative one, and has a radius of exactly 1 .4.

03:43:56

The last point is negative two. There's a spike that comes out here that's covered up by the graph that I'll show you in a minute.

03:44:02

There's a cusp here, a really interesting shape. Now, I'm gonna go ahead and remove the axis lines, because what's interesting is not so much the fact that these points belong to the

03:44:13

Mandelbrot set, as the shape itself. Nobody was expecting that when you made a map of points of the

03:44:18

Mandelbrot in the Argon plane, that you would end up with such an interesting shape, and it has all kinds of interesting properties that we'll explore here.

03:44:25

So, notice the basic structure of it. You have this sort of heart -like structure here. This is called a cardioid. Now, a cardioid is what happens when you take a circle, and you roll it around another circle of equal size, keeping your pencil affixed to one spot on the circle.

03:44:40

Let me show you this. So, here's a cardioid, you see? I'm keeping my pencil on one spot on the circle. That's the shape that it makes, and that is the exact shape of the primary lobe of the

03:44:51

Mandelbrot set there. Isn't that interesting? And then, all the other geometric shapes we see are either perfect circles, and they are perfect circles, they're exact, and they have circles growing off of them, and circles growing off of them, and then we have these little tendrils that grow off to the side, like little,

03:45:05

I don't know, little branches that branch off, including a straight one here, a spike on the end, and a little bump on that, and so on.

03:45:13

And what we find, all we're gonna do now is just explore this shape that nobody was expecting, because it turns out to be really interesting, and it's got some interesting properties to it as well.

03:45:22

We can zoom in on various portions of the shape, because the computer's already done the work for us. It's already made this map, and we can zoom in on it a little bit.

03:45:29

We find, for example, that when we explore the upper portion of the cardioid, you can see these circles that you have there, and on top of them are growing off these little trees with branches, and you notice the first one here branches.

03:45:42

It's got three total. It's got two, and then a stem, so it branches off into three, right? Now, the next one down, on the next biggest bump, it's one, if you count them, one, two, three, four, it's got five, and the next one down is seven, and the next one down is nine, 11, 13, 15, 17, and so on, so each one gains two extra tendrils, so the

03:46:05

Mandelbrot somehow understands odd numbers, even though there was nothing in the equation that had to do with odd numbers, right?

03:46:11

Somehow it knows how to count by the odd numbers all the way down to infinity, odd infinity, whatever that means, so interesting, isn't it?

03:46:18

And on the other side, you have the odds and the evens, three, that branches into four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, so on, so the

03:46:23

Mandelbrot somehow knows how to count, which is kind of interesting. I guess it's not surprising that, I mean, it has mathematical properties, it is, after all, a mathematical graph, but it's surprising that it has the particular properties that it has.

03:46:34

Why would these tendrils branch off and have the properties that they have? It's quite fascinating, and what even really blew my mind was when

03:46:42

I started counting the tendrils in between these two lumps, so this one, so this guy right here, which is in between this one and that one, right, so the next biggest one in between the two, because this one has three tendrils, and that one has five, and you add three and five, and you get eight, and lo and behold, that's exactly how many this one has.

03:46:59

That's kind of interesting, is that true of all of them? Yes, it is. Each one that's in between the two adds the number of tendrils between those two, every one of them, every one of them, and it even works with the ones in between those two, so if you took eight and five, lo and behold, that one will have 13, undoubtedly, so not only does the

03:47:19

Mandelbrot set know how to count, it somehow knows how to add. It's kind of wild. Nobody was expecting this.

03:47:25

Where is this coming from, you know? How can we make sense of this shape? Well, we'll talk more about that later on. I just wanted to point out, it's got these weird properties to it that nobody was expecting, because all we're doing is making the map of what points belong to z squared plus c.

03:47:39

That's it, and the map turns out to be wild. One of the most interesting aspects, though, of this map, well, the first instance of it occurs with this little spike out here.

03:47:51

You might notice the spike coming out there, and it's black, so that tells you those points do belong to the

03:47:56

Mandelbrot set, but then it's got a little bump on the end of it here, and I thought, well, what is that bump doing there? Let's zoom in on it and see what it looks like.

03:48:04

We zoom in on that, we find that it's, oh, that's interesting. It's another

03:48:10

Mandelbrot set, isn't it? And it's almost identical to the original. You have the cardioid shape here, you have the circles growing on top of circles, and so on.

03:48:19

The only difference is it's got extra spikes growing off of it. You see these extra little spikes here? Those weren't on the original.

03:48:25

It's kind of interesting, because we zoomed in on a spike, and the baby version has extra spikes.

03:48:31

Kind of interesting, like it inherits the property of the parent that it grows off of. And so, and I looked at that, and I thought, well, that's interesting.

03:48:38

That's got a little spike there, too, and it's got a little bump on it. Now, what could that possibly be? And we zoom in on that, and oh, it's another one.

03:48:44

That's interesting. And they look at that, and of course, it's got extra spikes, even, because we zoomed in on a spike of a spike, and it's got extra spikes.

03:48:51

We zoom, and of course, it's got a little bump on it. What could that possibly be? And of course, you can do this literally forever.

03:48:57

There are an infinite number of baby versions built into the original. Isn't that fascinating? And if we think about this, and I'm kind of being a little bit anticlimactic here, but how do we make sense of this?

03:49:10

Well, in the Christian worldview, mathematics is the way God thinks about numbers, and so when we look at shapes like this, it's giving us a window into the way

03:49:18

God thinks, not that we can fully understand how God thinks he's infinite, but nonetheless, we see aspects of infinity built into math, because we're exploring something about the way

03:49:27

God thinks. Pretty neat, and you could literally do that forever, but just look how small that baby is compared to the original.

03:49:36

Pretty amazing. And any shape that's like that, that when you zoom in on it, has a smaller version of itself built into it is called a fractal.

03:49:46

So the Mandelbrot set is one example of a fractal. There are other ones that we'll explore later on. It's not just the overall shape that repeats either.

03:49:54

You can zoom in on a section of the Mandelbrot, and you'll find that no matter how much you zoom in on it, it looks kind of similar.

03:49:59

And so, for example, if we zoom in on one of these tendrils that grows off here, you can see how they kind of spiral around.

03:50:05

It's stunningly beautiful, at least I think it is. But as we zoom in on that, you think, well, it's gonna end, right? Eventually it'll get down, and it'll be nice and smooth, but it just doesn't.

03:50:13

The more you zoom in, it just continues to branch off, and branch off, and branch into branches, and branch into branches of branches, and so on.

03:50:19

And again, you can zoom on it literally forever, and it just keeps going, and going, and going, giving you a little window into the mind of God, not only his infinitude, but his beauty, and how that's been built into creation.

03:50:33

One of the interesting areas that I wanted to explore in this shape, and it's kind of fun to explore an aspect of God's creation that's non -physical, right?

03:50:42

Because you understand, this shape doesn't exist, it's not made of, this shape isn't made of atoms. This is built into math, which is conceptual.

03:50:50

It's not like you can point a telescope anywhere and see this shape. You say, well, I see it on the computer screen. Well, that's just a representation of it.

03:50:56

The computer has graphed a finite range of this infinite shape. But the shape itself is interesting, and you could spend a lifetime exploring it, because it is infinite.

03:51:05

So let's just pick a few areas here. One area that's of particular interest is the area between the cardioid, and what's called the main disc here.

03:51:14

So the cardioid on the main disc, this valley right here, which is called the Valley of the Seahorses, or Seahorse Valley. We zoom in on that, and you can see this.

03:51:22

What happens is, on the right, it starts to look like seahorses. They're upside down, but you see that? What's happened is, remember those tendrils, how they go three, five, seven, nine?

03:51:30

They keep increasing. After a while, there's so many of them, they start to spiral around each other, and you form these incredibly intricate sort of cobweb shapes.

03:51:38

Now, again, I'll remind you that points that are black are points that do belong to the Malabarot set. The points that are colored do not, and the points that are brightly colored are very close to being on the

03:51:48

Malabarot set. Now, the colors are arbitrary. I can make them whatever I want. And so every now and then, we'll change them, just to keep things a little bit interesting.

03:51:56

But anyway, let's zoom in on some of these seahorses and see what they look like. And you can see, it's amazingly beautiful.

03:52:03

And who would have imagined that when you run numbers through that little formula, z squared plus c, this is the shape that you get?

03:52:09

Nobody was expecting that. It's wild. And mathematicians were puzzled initially. They thought maybe this was an artifact of the way the computer's plotting it, but it's not.

03:52:19

I mean, you could plot these points by hand, it would take forever, but you could do it. This is what you get. It's not the computer that's making this.

03:52:25

The computer's just revealing it quickly. Now, because these points are bright, that tells you they're very close to being on the

03:52:31

Malabarot set. And it doesn't look like it, right? Because it looks like, well, the nearest black spots are over here. It doesn't look like there's anything there.

03:52:38

But the fact that they're bright tells you they are very close to it. It's just what's happened is there's a very thin black thread of points that do belong on the

03:52:46

Malabarot set that winds around very, very rapidly around itself. And it's just so small that it's smaller than a pixel and the computer doesn't actually graph it.

03:52:55

So you can imagine a very thin black thread weaving around and wiggling around like that and making this incredibly complex shape that you see here.

03:53:05

And stunningly beautiful, I think. So let's zoom in on this seahorse. We'll zoom in on the central hub there.

03:53:14

Isn't that neat? And I found from experience that you can zoom in on the center of that hub until your heart's content and nothing changes.

03:53:21

It just goes on forever. And again, a little window into the mind of God. So I thought, okay, we'll go off axis then because I don't want to just sit forever and zoom in on that.

03:53:30

I might hypnotize myself or something, I don't know. But we'll go off axis and find out what these strands, because it looks kind of like a spiderweb, doesn't it?

03:53:37

In the sense that you have a central hub and then you have these strands that spin away from it. So what happens if we look at one of the strands of the spiderweb?

03:53:45

What are they made of? And so we'll zoom in on one of those and we'll find that they're made of more spiderwebs.

03:53:51

Smaller spiderwebs, interesting. And a few spirals, like the spiral of the tail of the seahorse, you get a few of those.

03:53:58

So isn't that lovely? And we'll zoom in on one of these shapes here. Let's zoom in on these.

03:54:04

So here you find sort of two hubs of a spiderweb, one here and one there. And they kind of branch out.

03:54:11

And in the middle you have four, one, two, three, four. And as we zoom in, it'll go to eight, 16, 32, 64.

03:54:18

It multiplies by two. So the Mandelbrot set knows how to add. It knows how to multiply as well. It knows the powers of two.

03:54:24

And as we zoom in on that central hub there, again, it goes from two to four to eight.

03:54:31

So in the middle is another little baby Mandelbrot set. How about that? So there you see the eight and there's the 16 and there's the 32 and 64 and so on.

03:54:40

And then there's a little baby right in the middle. Almost identical to the parent, except it's got extra stuff growing off to the side.

03:54:46

We zoomed in on a spiderweb and so it's got all these spiderwebs growing off of it. And stunningly beautiful. And you'll notice it has a little bump over there too.

03:54:52

Yes, it's got a baby version as well, just like the original did. So isn't that amazing? And look how small this shape is compared to the original when we zoom back out.

03:55:02

It's just a tiny little section of a spiderweb that's growing in the valley of the

03:55:07

Mandelbrot set there. Well, let's go back to the Valley of the Seahorses. The Valley of the

03:55:13

Seahorses is on the right side. Now on the left, we have what's called the Valley of the Double Spirals. And mathematicians like to give fun names to these things.

03:55:21

So the Double Spiral Valley over here, we'll zoom in on one of these and you can see why. We have a spiral, I really love this area of the

03:55:27

Mandelbrot set. This is really pretty because it reminds me of spiral galaxies, which God also made. God is sovereign over math, is also sovereign over astronomy.

03:55:35

And so we'd expect to find some of the same shapes there. This is a double spiral. What do I mean by double spiral?

03:55:41

I mean, there are two independent strands that wrap around each other. This strand right here, if you follow it around, wraps in like that, right?

03:55:49

It's different from this strand. This strand is different, isn't it? Because it wraps around here, you can see that that one's in between.

03:55:55

So this and this are the same, that and that are the same. So two independent strands that wrap around each other.

03:56:01

Some of the spirals in the Mandelbrot are double, some are single. This is a double. It's incredibly beautiful. And so I thought, well, again, let's zoom in on it and find out what it's made of.

03:56:09

And you find that it's got, it's more double spirals of unbelievable beauty. And again, keep in mind what's happening here.

03:56:17

The black points that do belong to the Mandelbrot set are so small at this point, there's such a thin thread, you can't see very many of them.

03:56:24

There's a few, a little black plate. You can see a little black spot there, and one there, and a few. But mostly it's such a thin thread that's just weaving around and making this beautiful, intricate shape.

03:56:37

And one of the structures here too that I think is really pretty, I call them bow ties. It looks like that little structure right there.

03:56:42

It's like a little bow tie. It's got the two double spirals that intersect in the middle. And we find when we zoom in on one of these bow ties, it goes again, it goes from two, and you have four there, and eight, and 16, and 32, all the powers of two, all the way into the middle.

03:56:58

You're not surprised this time, it's another little baby Mandelbrot set there in the middle. And isn't that lovely? And it's rotated around too, you notice.

03:57:05

Because on the main set, the cardioid's on the right, so it's been flipped around. Because we zoomed in on a spiral, and so it got rotated around.

03:57:11

And growing off to the side are all kinds of these beautiful double spirals. Isn't that pretty? Who's responsible for that shape?

03:57:20

Well, no human being made that, right? This is just what happens when you plug numbers into that little formula.

03:57:29

And so you'd have to, well, who's responsible for numbers? So the answer is, God's responsible for numbers. And so this is literally artwork of God, it really is.

03:57:37

No human being sat down and decided to create this shape, and that it should have these beautiful structures off the, I haven't seen human artwork that compares, really.

03:57:47

And certainly it's not, human artwork is not infinite either. This you could continue to zoom in. You could spend your entire life studying this shape, and you've not even scratched the surface, because it is infinite.

03:57:57

And you might even notice that little baby right there. Yep, you could zoom in on that too. It's got its own Valley of the Seahorses, and Valley of the

03:58:04

Double Spirals, and you could zoom in on those. And they get more intricate and complex. The more you zoom in, the more intricate and beautiful it gets.

03:58:11

Very unlike man -made machines. Man -made machines, the more you zoom in, the simpler they get, right?

03:58:17

Because eventually they get down to the point where we can't even construct it anymore. But this gets more complex as you zoom in.

03:58:23

Interesting. Another valley that's interesting to explore is the one over here on the right of the cardioid.

03:58:31

And they call this one the Valley of the Elephants. You'll see why when we zoom in. It's the only symmetric valley on the

03:58:39

Mandelbrot, where you have the same above and below. It's like a mirror image of itself. And you can see, it looks like a bunch of elephants, one after the other.

03:58:48

Isn't that interesting? Where they got the trunk that kind of curls up. Isn't that fascinating? And then on the top, they're hanging from the ceiling. So there you go.

03:58:55

So a bunch of elephants. We'll zoom in on the lower stack here, just so you can see a couple of these in detail. And you can see there's, each one has its own little circle that it's growing off of.

03:59:04

So it reminded me of like a circus elephant, where they're balancing on a ball or something like that. And there's an infinite number of them.

03:59:09

They get smaller and their trunk gets curlier the more you zoom in. But there's an infinite number of these elephants going into Elephant Valley.

03:59:16

They just get smaller and smaller and smaller. So what happens if you zoom in on the trunk of one of these elephants? You have a single spiral.

03:59:22

So this is a single strand, right? Because this strand, as it wraps around, it's the same as, those are the same.

03:59:29

Those are all the same strand. It's one strand wrapped around itself. And then if you zoom in on the sides of one of these strands to see what they're made of, you again find, you find some of those bow tie structures again.

03:59:40

There's several of them. There's one there. And then spiderweb structures and the spirals, single spirals now. Zooming in on one of the bow ties.

03:59:49

It's the same as before, except now it's a single spiral. The bow ties before were double spirals. So again, it inherits the properties of the parent that it grows off of.

03:59:58

And quite lovely. Who could have imagined that such beauty would be built into numbers? Beauty that occasionally

04:00:04

PowerPoint can't handle. And this is an alienware too. So it just goes to show you.

04:00:11

So there's one of these bow ties in all of its glory. And again, it goes from two central hubs.

04:00:17

And you can see there's four in the middle and then eight and 16 and 32. Each one doubles the previous one. So we go into the center there.

04:00:24

And isn't that lovely? And just, I mean, it'd be one thing if I just said, you know, here's some pretty stuff that a computer generated.

04:00:32

But this isn't something that a computer generated. It's something that a computer revealed. Because computers are not responsible for numbers.

04:00:39

They merely use numbers. God's responsible for numbers. And in principle, again, you could plot the shape by hand.

04:00:46

You could manually run the numbers through that. I've shown you how to do it. We did the first two manually. You could run the numbers through that and plot the shape.

04:00:53

And this is what you'd get. The computer just does it very quickly. But my point is that the computer didn't make it.

04:00:59

People didn't make it. This shape exists in the mind of God. And there's no naturalistic explanation for this.

04:01:06

There really isn't. So all that, the points that belong to that formula for which

04:01:14

Z is bound under Z squared plus C. Isn't that amazing? Isn't that amazing? So then it made me think, well, that's just one formula.

04:01:22

Right, I mean, you could spend your life studying that shape. It's infinite. Goes on forever. But I wanna explore other shapes.

04:01:29

What happens if you change the formula? What happens if you try Z cubed plus C?

04:01:34

Well, it turns out you get a different shape. And now I have another infinite shape that I could spend my entire lifetime exploring.

04:01:42

And it's similar, but it's a little bit different. Everything kind of gets doubled.

04:01:47

The basic shape that you have here is called a nephroid. And you notice everything's gone up by one.

04:01:54

The circles have become cardioids, right? So circles have no cusps. Cardioids have one cusp, there.

04:02:02

The main shape itself, which used to be a cardioid, is now a nephroid. A cardioid has one cusp. A nephroid has two, there and there.

04:02:08

So it's got another one now. And a nephroid is what happens when you take a circle that's half the size of the original and you roll it around, keeping your pencil affixed to a point on the smaller circle.

04:02:17

That's the shape that you get, and you can see that. That's exactly what it is. It's a perfect nephroid. Why? I have no idea.

04:02:23

That's what it is. That's what it is. And in fact, what we can do is we can incrementally,

04:02:30

I even tried intermediate powers. Like what happens if you do Z to the 2 .1, 2 .2, 2 .3? And you can see how one shape kind of morphs into the other.

04:02:38

Let's see. So that was kind of a fun little experiment. So you can see how the Mandelbrot becomes what we call a multibrot, because it's a multiple of the

04:02:46

Mandelbrot. So there's the Mandelbrot, and then there's the first multibrot, Z cubed plus C. And you can see how everything kind of gets doubled.

04:02:53

Some things get quadrupled. Like the baby Mandelbrot there, it gets split into two, and then eventually it gets split into four.

04:03:00

So there's one, two, three, four. So there's now four baby versions of the original. So some things get quadrupled, but most things are doubled.

04:03:07

And so I wondered, okay, well, what happens when we zoom in on this? Is it also a fractal? Does it have a valley of elephants?

04:03:14

That's the one section that doesn't change very much, right? Because the Mandelbrot set had this valley of elephants.

04:03:19

Does the nephroid have a valley of elephants? Well, let's check it out. Let's zoom in. Thanks to the power of computers, we can do that.

04:03:27

So we zoom in there, and we find, lo and behold, you see elephants. How about that? Elephant after elephant, kind of interesting.

04:03:35

But remember, before, we had one elephant growing on each circle. But the circles have split into cardioids, and now we have two elephants on each cardioid.

04:03:47

See, one, two, one, two. So before, we had an infinite number of elephants, and now we have twice that many.

04:03:54

That's pretty neat. Simmer on that for a little while. Infinity is such a weird concept, but it's real.

04:04:04

Yeah, so we'll zoom in on that. Zoom in on one of these curly trunks, and again, it's a single spiral like before.

04:04:09

I think we'll find bow ties again. We found those last time. Well, we zoom in, and we find that this time, instead of having bow ties, we have tri -ties.

04:04:21

See, instead of two loops, it's three. Isn't that interesting? So it went up by, well, it kind of makes sense.

04:04:26

We went from z squared to z cubed, and so they go from two to three. And when we zoom in here on the middle, it goes from three to one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, to 27.

04:04:36

It's all the powers of three. And so you get a different shape. When you zoom in on the baby version, lo and behold, you have another baby multibrot.

04:04:44

So it is also a fractal. It repeats itself infinitely, and it gets more and more beautiful the more you zoom in. That's interesting.

04:04:51

That, I think, is an aspect of God that he's built into his creation, at least in the world of mathematics.

04:04:57

The more you zoom in on it, the prettier it gets. So that's what happens when you have z cubed. And I'm just having fun playing with these different sets, wondering, what do you get?

04:05:07

What do you get when you try z cubed? What do you get when you try z to the fourth? Well, you get that. Okay. And it goes on forever, too.

04:05:13

You can zoom in on it. It's got baby versions of it. And now I'm starting to see a pattern, right? Because the first multibrot, the z cubed plus z, has a two -fold structure, right?

04:05:23

This is a mirror image of that, right? Two kind of main lobes. Z to the fourth has three main lobes, and so naturally, z to the fifth has four.

04:05:32

It's always one less than the power. And z to the sixth has five. And so it occurred to me, if I did z to the seventh, I could get snowflakes.

04:05:39

And you sure do. You get snowflakes. And if you zoom in on them, do you get baby snowflakes? You sure do. Of incredible beauty.

04:05:45

Isn't that awesome? Isn't that awesome? And then I started playing with negative powers. What happens if you get z to the negative two?

04:05:51

You get that. That's interesting. And remember, black is points that do belong to the set.

04:05:57

And so now, most of the universe belongs, right? Because we have a negative power. So it kind of flips it inside out. So most of the universe now belongs to the set.

04:06:05

And these are points that don't, these points in here. And you get these little pebble -like structures.

04:06:11

And I zoomed in on those. You think it's gonna be fractal? Is it gonna repeat infinitely? Let's have a look here.

04:06:16

So you have these wonderful little pebble structures. And we'll zoom in on that and see if it kind of continues infinitely.

04:06:24

It's stunningly beautiful, at least I think it is. Zoom in on that. And you think it's gonna stop.

04:06:31

We're gonna get down to nothing. It just doesn't. It just keeps going. So it's also a fractal that continues infinitely to repeat the same basic pattern.

04:06:40

Isn't that astonishing? Little window into the mind of God. Little window into the mind of God. So that's z to the negative two.

04:06:47

I tried z to the negative three. You get that. Z to the negative four. Z to the negative five. There's another way to make snowflakes. Z to the negative five. You have an inside -out snowflake.

04:06:55

So it's just fun to explore these shapes. But let's get down to business now. What does all this mean?

04:07:01

Are we just looking at pretty shapes? What causes the beauty in fractals? What causes the complexity in fractals?

04:07:09

The fact that you can zoom in forever. They're infinite. They repeat infinitely. Let's start with the first.

04:07:14

What causes the beauty in fractals? What are some possibilities? Well, some people have said, well, Lyle, you picked pretty colors.

04:07:20

It's the man -made color scheme. And I told you, the colors are arbitrary. I could pick whatever colors I want.

04:07:25

I picked ones that I think look nice. There's some programs that people have written that don't pick very nice colors, and shame on them, right?

04:07:33

But I don't think it's the colors that create the beauty. I think they enhance it. But the fact is, the shape itself is beautiful, even in grayscale, with no color at all.

04:07:42

The shape is beautiful. There's something about the shape that strikes us, and we say, yes, that appeals to my sense of beauty.

04:07:50

So I think the color enhances it, the way salt will bring out the flavor of a food, but it doesn't create, it doesn't create the beauty.

04:07:57

The beauty's already there. The man -made color scheme just kind of brings it out a little bit. Did the computer create the beauty?

04:08:02

Now, you might think that. You might say, well, I saw your computer plot that there, Lyle. But the fact is, that shape has been built into numbers since creation.

04:08:12

The computer just revealed it quickly. And again, you could plot this by hand. You could plot it by hand.

04:08:18

You could sit down and run the numbers through that formula. I showed you how to do it. It's tedious, but you could do it. And you could plot each of those points by hand, and you'd find the same shapes there.

04:08:26

The computer did not create it. The computer merely revealed it quickly. Did people make this?

04:08:32

Well, in the sense that we decided what formula to check, but once we picked the formula, the shape's determined.

04:08:38

You have to run the numbers through that, and we didn't create numbers. It's not like any human being sat down and said,

04:08:44

I'm gonna make this incredibly awesome shape with a cardioid here and some circles, got an infinite number of circles growing off of it, and an infinite number.

04:08:51

We can't create infinite things. No human being made this, not at all.

04:08:57

Human beings were surprised when the shape was discovered in the 1980s, when computers were finally fast enough to be able to plot these things in a relatively reasonable amount of time.

04:09:07

You wouldn't be surprised by something you yourself made, right? You wouldn't make something, you'd say, well, how about that?

04:09:13

I had no idea it would be like that. That would be rather silly. No, people didn't make it. Somehow it's built into math.

04:09:18

The beauty is somehow built into numbers revealed when we run through that little formula. So what causes the complexity in fractals?

04:09:26

The fact that they repeat infinitely and have all these interesting shapes? Again, I'm gonna ask, did the computer create it?

04:09:32

No, the computer didn't create it. The computer revealed it, and it revealed it quickly. The computer didn't create the shape any more than microscopes create bacteria.

04:09:41

Microscopes allow us to see bacteria. The computer allowed us to see a shape that had been hidden in numbers since creation.

04:09:48

Did human beings create it? Well, again, we were astonished. We were surprised by what we found. We didn't create this. We did pick the formula, but that's it.

04:09:55

The shape, then, is determined by the laws of mathematics. It's not something that we created.

04:10:00

Did the formula create it? Well, again, the formula revealed it, but we found that when you change the formula, you still get incredible beauty.

04:10:05

Somehow the complexity is built into math itself. It's not something that human beings made.

04:10:13

So what is math? Well, math is the study of the relationship between numbers. That's just the dictionary definition of mathematics.

04:10:21

And, of course, being an amateur philosopher, I'm gonna ask, then, what are numbers, right?

04:10:27

Come on, Lyle, we know what numbers are. Have you ever tried to define what numbers are? Some of these things that we take for granted, like consciousness, are very hard to define without referencing something that basically means the same thing.

04:10:40

Consciousness, self -awareness. Well, yeah, but does it tell me, right? What are numbers?

04:10:45

I consulted a number of dictionaries. The best definition I could find, and I think it's a good one, is that numbers are a concept of quantity.

04:10:51

Numbers are a concept of quantity. Yeah, that works. So conceptual, something that exists in the mind.

04:10:56

So you can have three apples. Now, the apples are not the number. It's the three that's the number, right? And that number is conceptual.

04:11:04

You could remove the apples, and you could still have the conception of threeness. So what do three apples have in common with three oranges?

04:11:10

I mean, their atoms are totally different. Their properties are different. What they have in common is threeness. Threeness.

04:11:16

It's a concept, isn't it? So numbers are concepts. They are abstract in nature, not physical.

04:11:22

They exist in the mind. You cannot stub your toe on a number. You could stub your toe on a number of things.

04:11:28

You could stub your toe on three rocks, but you can't stub your toe on three, because it's not physical.

04:11:35

It exists, but it's not physical. You say, well, I don't know. I think that's the number three right there. It's physical.

04:11:40

It's on the screen. But is that really the number three? Because if it is, then I just destroyed the number three, and poor children will now have to count one, two, four, and so on.

04:11:48

Well, you say, well, that's not really the number three, is it? That's a representation of the number three, and I can remove the representation. The threeness still exists.

04:11:56

Numerals are not numbers. They're representations of numbers, and we can represent it differently. We could represent it with three capital

04:12:02

I's. That's how the Romans would represent the number three. It's still the same number, isn't it? It just has a different representation.

04:12:08

So human beings created the notation that we use for numbers, but we didn't create numbers. No, we didn't create numbers.

04:12:15

They already existed. Laws of math, which govern the relationship between numbers, are conceptual.

04:12:21

They exist in the mind. So here's the question that I'm gonna ask. Where do laws of math come from?

04:12:28

The fact that two plus two equals four. You say, well, that's obvious. Everybody knows that.

04:12:33

Yeah, everybody knows that, but where does it come from? Did laws of math evolve? Now, see, in the physical universe, when we have things like biological organisms, and they have all this design in them, they're well -constructed, they work well, and the way evolutionists like to explain that, the way sectarists like to explain that is evolution.

04:12:55

They say, well, they weren't originally that way. Originally, they were very simple, but then they became more and more complex over time.

04:13:01

Is that gonna work? Of course, that doesn't actually work, but is that gonna work with math? Is it like two plus two used to equal seven, but now it evolved, and now it equals four?

04:13:11

No, laws of math don't evolve, right? Because numbers don't evolve. It's not like seven used to be three, but then it evolved, or that three and seven have a common ancestor.

04:13:19

It doesn't even make any sense. Numbers are what they are. They do not change. The relationships between numbers do not change.

04:13:25

Two plus two has always equaled four, hasn't it? Were they created by people? Some people say that.

04:13:31

You think human beings came around and decided, you know what, I think two plus two should equal, I think it should equal four, and we all kind of agreed on that, and that shook hands, and it just became that way?

04:13:41

Ridiculous. Laws of math were not created by people. They were discovered by people.

04:13:47

If they were created by people, we could have created them differently. We could have said two plus two equals three, and we all agreed to that, and that would work.

04:13:53

But can you imagine trying that? Go to a bank and say, I've decided that here's what my account should be.

04:13:59

That's not gonna work out well for you, is it? Or an architect who decides that laws of math are arbitrary, they can be whatever he wants.

04:14:05

I would not walk into that building. They're not created by people, because in fact they existed before people.

04:14:13

The relationship between a planet's period and its orbit around the sun, which Johannes Kepler discovered, that's a mathematical relationship, p squared equals a cubed.

04:14:22

People discovered that, they didn't create it. Planets orbited perfectly well before people were around, right?

04:14:27

And they obeyed that law for two days. Because humans are made on day six, yes.

04:14:34

Do laws of math come from the universe? Some people say that. It's just laws of math describe the way the universe is.

04:14:42

Well, it is interesting that we can use laws of math, laws of mathematics to describe various aspects of the universe, but they don't come from the universe.

04:14:50

Because the universe is changing. It's expanding, stars explode. If laws of math merely reflected the way the universe is, then they would be changing, wouldn't they?

04:14:59

Because the universe is changing. You don't wanna make laws of math contingent upon the universe, because then you would make them contingent upon something that's changing.

04:15:05

And frankly, you'd expect them to be different in different places, because the universe is hot in some places, and it's cold in other places.

04:15:11

And so you'd expect laws of mathematics would be different if they were just merely reflections of the way the universe is, because the universe is different in different places.

04:15:18

So they didn't come from the universe. I wanna suggest to you that laws of mathematics stem from the mind of God. God is the person who determines mathematical truths.

04:15:28

God's mind is not like our mind. There is a similarity, because we're made in God's image. We can think, we can be rational.

04:15:35

But our minds discover truth, whereas God's mind determines truth. You ever thought about that?

04:15:41

God, what God thinks is what is true. Something is true if it corresponds to the mind of God. And so God has determined what the relationship between numbers is, and that's the relationship between numbers, and we as creatures discover that relationship systematically over time.

04:15:57

We pass it on to our children and so on, and knowledge builds. But it makes sense that laws of mathematics stem from the mind of God when we consider their properties.

04:16:05

Laws of mathematics are conceptual, meaning they exist in a mind. Well, that makes sense, because God thinks.

04:16:12

Laws of mathematics are universal, meaning they're the same everywhere. They're invariant, meaning they don't change with time.

04:16:18

And they're exceptionless. It's not like two plus two equals four most of the time, but every now and then it's 17. And these things make sense in light of the fact that laws of mathematics stem from the mind of God.

04:16:30

Of course laws of mathematics would be conceptual, because all thoughts are conceptual. And so when God thinks something, it's gonna be conceptual.

04:16:37

Of course laws of mathematics will be universal. They'll be the same everywhere. Why? Because God is omnipresent. God's thinking determines truth everywhere in the universe, not just on the earth.

04:16:47

And so we expect laws of mathematics will work everywhere the same way they do on earth. Laws of mathematics are invariant.

04:16:53

They don't change with time, because God doesn't change with time, and therefore his thinking does not change with time. Isn't that right?

04:16:59

I the Lord do not change, therefore you sons of Jacob are not consumed. God's beyond time, he made time. And so naturally his thinking isn't gonna change, therefore you can trust that two plus two will equal four tomorrow.

04:17:10

It will. Count on it, because God does not change, because God is faithful. And they're exceptionless.

04:17:16

There are no exceptions to laws of mathematics, because God is sovereign over all truth. All truth claims are determined by him.

04:17:23

But the naturalist has a dilemma. The person who says, oh, there's no God, if there is, he's within nature.

04:17:29

He's certainly not the biblical guy. He's got a dilemma. Because on the one hand, laws of mathematics are conceptual, they exist in the mind.

04:17:36

But the naturalist doesn't have a mind before people. Problem, right? Laws of math require a mind, because they're conceptual and concepts require a mind.

04:17:46

And yet laws of math existed before people, so they're not the result of human minds. But if nature's all that there is, according to the secularists, there was a point where the universe had no minds, but it still had laws of mathematics.

04:18:00

But you can't have laws of mathematics without a mind, because they're conceptual. Problem. It's an inconsistency in secular thinking.

04:18:08

But it makes sense in the Christian worldview, where God determines truth. There are other types of fractals.

04:18:15

There are physical fractals, or at least things that are approximate fractals that exist in nature. The fractals we've looked at so far, the

04:18:22

Mandelbrot set and the variations of it, the Maldebrats, you can't touch those. They're not made of atoms, they're made of math.

04:18:29

They're made of numbers. They're maps of numbers. But there are things in the physical universe that when you zoom in on them, they repeat, either exactly or approximately, up to a certain point.

04:18:40

They don't go on forever, because eventually you get down to atoms and they're not fractal anymore. But there are things that are approximate fractals.

04:18:45

Let me give you an example of fractals in the physical world. I'll give you several examples. First of all, snowflakes. Snowflakes are fractal.

04:18:52

They have that six -fold symmetry, you zoom in on them, you still have six -fold symmetry, you zoom in on them, six -fold symmetry and so on. So these little gems from heaven that the

04:18:58

Lord sends us and we go and scrape them off our car and ugh. But they're actually lovely, they're beautiful.

04:19:04

Little fractals, isn't that interesting? That stuff that grows on your windows is fractal.

04:19:09

Can you see the way it branches and then it branches into branches and branches into branches and branches and so on. It continues down, up to a certain point and then it stops.

04:19:16

So it's an approximate fractal. Ferns, certain ferns are fractal because you have the main leaf and then it branches off into leaflets who branch off into smaller leaflets and so on, up to a certain point.

04:19:27

So each section resembles the original in a sense. I even found fractal broccoli.

04:19:33

So I guess broccoli is good for something after all. There you go. See that? It's a cone made up of cones which are made up of cones which are made up of cones.

04:19:44

Isn't that fascinating? And so it's just a shame it's so disgustingly, it's taste but anyway.

04:19:52

Coastlines, coastlines are fractal because the way they branch and then they branch into branches and so on. Mountain chains are fractal when you look at them from above because of the way the mountains branch and branch into branches and so on.

04:20:01

Clouds are fractal. Am I looking at the entire sky or am I zoomed in on a very small section of a cloud? It's hard to know because you zoom in on a cloud, it looks kind of like a cloud, doesn't it?

04:20:10

It just, it kind of repeats that pattern. The way lightning branches is fractal because you have the main bolt and it branches into branches and they branch into smaller branches and so on.

04:20:18

So the way lightning branches is fractal and quite beautiful actually. And it's interesting too to watch it in slow motion where you can actually see the branching happening as the lightning, as the lightning strikes until the leader connects and then most of the current goes down the leader.

04:20:33

But isn't that fascinating? So lots of things, there are lots of things in the physical world that are approximate fractals.

04:20:39

So then I'm gonna ask this question. Why do fractals occur both in math, which is not made of atoms, and the physical world, which is made of atoms?

04:20:49

Why do they occur in math, which is conceptual, and the physical world, which is not conceptual, right?

04:20:56

I mean, after all this shape, that's a mathematical plot. It's one of the multibrots. We saw that earlier. That's what happens when you plot all those points that are bound under Z to the fifth or Z to the seventh plus C.

04:21:07

That doesn't exist physically, but that does. Yeah, you can see that in the winter.

04:21:14

That shape is part, that's part of the Mandelbrot set. That's one of those branches in the Mandelbrot set. You can't touch that, but that you could, although you shouldn't.

04:21:25

That's physical. Yeah. That, it might, you say, well, that's a plant. No, it's not. That's a mathematical graph called a

04:21:32

Barnsley fern. It's a mathematical graph where each leaflet is the entire shape. Let me show you.

04:21:38

Watch the entire shape. It becomes its own leaflet. See that? That's just cool, isn't it?

04:21:43

Let's do that again. Yeah. So the entire shape is each leaflet.

04:21:49

That's a mathematical graph. On the other hand, that is physical. That only exists in a mind.

04:21:56

That exists physically. You can touch it. That shape is a mathematical graph, but that grows on your windows.

04:22:04

One is abstract, the other is physical. The shape is a mathematical graph, cones on cones.

04:22:11

It does not exist physically, whereas this, unfortunately, does. This shape is a mathematical graph, part of the

04:22:21

Mandelbrot set. You can't see it in a telescope, because it's not physical. You have to plot it using a computer, because it exists only in the mind of God.

04:22:30

And yet, that shape, you can see in a telescope, and I have many times. The Whirlpool Galaxy, just off the tail of the

04:22:36

Big Dipper. So, why is it that fractals occur both in math, which is conceptual, and the physical world, which is not conceptual, is, in fact, made of atoms?

04:22:47

Now, one answer, and I think it's a reasonable one, but it falls short of the complete answer, is that, well, the physical universe obeys mathematical laws, and that is true.

04:22:56

We can write down equations to explain how the universe behaves. So, it stands to reason, if fractals can occur in math, they can also occur in the physical world, which obeys math.

04:23:05

Okay, but then, of course, I'm gonna have to ask, why does the physical world obey math? That's what I wanna know. And we take that for granted, that you can write down math formulae that describe the physical universe, like E equals

04:23:19

MC squared. You heard of that one before? Yeah, that's one of the ones that Einstein discovered. And it's true, and it applies to the physical universe, or F equals

04:23:29

MA, or whatever, these various formulae. But how is that? How is it that these formulae that are conceptual, that exist in the mind, somehow apply to the physical universe, which does not exist in the mind?

04:23:39

What's the connection between these two? Well, in the Christian worldview, I can make sense of that, because mathematics is a reflection of God's thoughts, and God's thoughts are what controls the physical universe, in fact, created the universe and upholds it.

04:23:53

So, it stands to reason that since God thinks mathematically, and since the universe is upheld by the mind of God, that the universe will obey math.

04:23:59

It makes sense, doesn't it? In the Christian worldview, it makes sense. The universe obeys math, because the universe obeys

04:24:07

God, and God thinks mathematically. So, I, as a Christian, can explain, at least in general principles, why the physical universe obeys mathematical laws, and therefore, why physical fractals can exist, and why they reflect mathematical fractals.

04:24:22

But I wanna suggest that the secular worldview cannot cogently answer that. They can't explain the properties of laws of mathematics, how we could possibly know that mathematics has these properties, the fact that laws of math are universal, they're the same everywhere, or the fact that they don't change with time.

04:24:40

How do you know that? How do you know that math is the same in the Andromeda Galaxy? It's not like you've been there. And yet, everybody assumes that, because everybody knows in their heart, it's

04:24:49

God, you see. Why it is that the physical universe is compelled to obey math. You might, we take it for granted.

04:24:56

We take it for granted. Of course, the universe obeys mathematical laws. We've been discovering them for thousands of years, right?

04:25:02

But you know, secularists cannot explain it. They can't, unless you think I'm making that up.

04:25:08

I wanna show you a paper written by Dr. Eugene Wigner, who is a brilliant physicist.

04:25:16

He is a Nobel Prize winner. This is no slouch, he's brilliant. And he wrote an article years back called

04:25:23

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. You see, he's not a

04:25:28

Christian, as far as I can tell, he's not a Christian, and he's trying to explain from a naturalistic perspective, why is it that the universe obeys, the physical universe obeys mathematical laws, which are conceptual?

04:25:40

And the paper's a wonderful read, because he doesn't really have an answer to it. He comes across and says, it is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, or the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind's capacity to divine them.

04:25:53

He says, it's amazing enough that there are laws of nature, because without a lawgiver, why would you have laws, right? That's amazing enough that there are these formulae, mathematical formulae that the universe obeys, and it's even more amazing that human beings can figure it out.

04:26:07

How is that? He can't make sense of it in his worldview, you see. What is the conclusion of this?

04:26:14

And I'm not making fun of him, I respect this guy. I respect his honesty, I respect his brilliance, but what is his conclusion?

04:26:20

From a secular perspective, how does he explain the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences?

04:26:27

Here's the answer, this is the conclusion of his article. The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of laws of physics is a wonderful gift, which we neither understand or deserve.

04:26:38

Isn't that interesting? He is utterly perplexed from a non -Christian perspective as to why the physical universe obeys math.

04:26:46

And I dare say there is no solution in the secular worldview. It's only the Christian worldview where we have a

04:26:52

God who is transcendent, who is responsible for numbers, and is also responsible for upholding the physical universe.

04:26:57

You see, that's the connection between math and the physical universe. Both of them are aspects of the way

04:27:03

God thinks. Mathematics is the way God thinks about numbers. The physical universe is something that God's spoken to existence and upholds by the word of his power.

04:27:09

That's why they go together. Why can we discover laws of mathematics and laws of nature? Because we're made in the image of God and God has given us that gift of rationality.

04:27:17

And we're able to discover these things in reliable senses whereby we can probe the universe. You see, so I can make sense of the effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.

04:27:27

And in fact, in the last chapter of my book on the physics of Einstein, I wrote a little section called the reasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.

04:27:37

Because you see, I can make sense of why science works and why it obeys math. I can make sense of that as a Christian.

04:27:44

So we've seen that there's beauty of infinite complexity. Yes, fractals are infinite, the mathematical ones anyway.

04:27:50

The Mandelbrot set, it'll go on forever. It's infinite. It's built into numbers, revealed by that little formula.

04:27:57

Numbers are abstract conceptions of quantity, which means they require a mind because concepts require a mind.

04:28:04

You can't have numbers without a mind. But we have a mind that's beyond human minds, the mind of God. That's why you can have, mathematics can go into things like infinity, and that's because God's mind is infinite.

04:28:17

We have trouble with that, but God doesn't. Numbers are a reflection of the way God thinks. They're the way God thinks about, mathematics is the way

04:28:25

God thinks about numbers. The relationship between numbers is determined by the mind of God and discovered in some cases by the mind of man.

04:28:32

The secular worldview cannot account for the existence of numbers, why it is that you can have these abstract conceptions before human beings existed, or their properties, why it is that two plus two equals four.

04:28:45

You can't even explain that in a secular worldview. We know it's true, but you can't explain it. You can't account for it. Their properties, the fact that mathematical laws don't change over time or space, they're the same yesterday, today, and forever, because Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and his mind is responsible for mathematical truths.

04:29:03

Also, they can't explain how we could possibly know any of these things. Granted, maybe laws of math are universal, but how do you know that?

04:29:10

I know that as a Christian because it's by revelation. God has told me that he's infinite, so he knows everything, so if he tells me that he holds all creation, then

04:29:19

I can trust that he does. Numbers existed before people, yet their conceptions, meaning they require a mind, the naturalist has a problem, because he doesn't have minds before people, but he's got numbers before people, but numbers require a mind.

04:29:31

It's a problem. Laws of mathematics are universal, invariant, abstract. Entities which make sense, given the fact that God is omnipresent, doesn't change with time, and his thinking is abstract, as all thinking is.

04:29:42

The physical world also contains fractals, at least approximate fractals, and yet the secular worldview cannot account for why the physical universe obeys mathematics.

04:29:50

We've seen even the most brilliant physicists have not been able to figure that out, and there's been no improvement since Wigner. The universe is controlled by the mind of God.

04:29:58

I can make sense of this from a Christian perspective. So in terms of resources, again,

04:30:04

I wanna push the ultimate proof of creation, as well as the DVD, and nuclear strength apologetics will be a follow -up to these kinds of presentations as well.

04:30:12

If you wanna book on this topic, I'm working on it. I'm working on it, and it's gonna be awesome. It's gonna be beautiful, and the

04:30:17

DVD on it will be finished even before that. We might have the DVD out next month, even, on the fractal presentation, so, because it's just, it's worth sharing.

04:30:27

It's just neat. And again, understanding Genesis, how to defend the six days of creation, and why it really does matter, as long as the

04:30:33

DVD on that topic. And again, don't forget, we have lots of astronomy materials as well. That's my specialty topic, as well as keeping faith in the age of reason, answering 400 alleged

04:30:42

Bible contradictions to the physics of Einstein. It's exactly what you think it is. Equals MC squared, that kind of stuff.

04:30:48

Black holes, I love black holes. They're just fascinating, and there's a whole section in that book on that topic.

04:30:54

And then, I think we're out of dinosaurs, but you can backorder stuff if we run out, and don't forget to sign up for our free monthly newsletter.

04:31:03

And I don't make a big deal out of funding, because I wanna be as generous as possible, but if you can partner with us, we'd appreciate that.

04:31:10

We do have a, on the website, you can contribute some monthly amount. It's up to you what you wanna contribute.

04:31:16

We have several different levels, but we are funded by donations, so we'd appreciate that if you can do that, and if not, then enjoy it for free.

04:31:22

I really had students in mind when I created this ministry, and students don't have any money, so I made it free for that reason.

04:31:30

So I wanna thank you very much, and we'll be back in 10 minutes for a Q &A. Thank you very much. All right,

04:31:38

I wanna begin with a couple questions about the fractal presentation real quick, but ones that I just got it down, and then I promise we will try and get to as many of these other ones as we possibly can.

04:31:47

The layer upon layer, does that mean that the formula changed? So if you were to take one of those numbers as you zoom in, zoom in, zoom in, grab that number, has the formula changed, or does the formula just create, so if you were to represent that number in the formula, would the formula be exactly what it was at the beginning when you started that, or would it be a multiplication of those numbers?

04:32:08

So it would be, what was the formula? Give me the first part of the formula, Zn? Z squared plus C. Z squared plus C, so would it be like Z squared plus C to the ninth power if you zoom right in?

04:32:19

Is that formula multiplying as well? No, the formula stays the same. What you're doing when you zoom in is you're looking at a narrower range of numbers that you're running through that formula.

04:32:29

Okay, so in the original, do you have to graph the X -axis and the Y -axis? In math we're taught there's a

04:32:35

Z -axis, right? Three dimensions? You're not zooming down the Z -axis, you're actually just zooming in on an

04:32:40

X -Y -axis. Yeah, there's no Z -axis. The mathematical fractals, there's no

04:32:45

Z -axis, they're two -dimensional. So then you're dealing with a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a number when you are zooming way in.

04:32:54

Yes, that's right, yep. Okay, is it possible, because you showed how you have a mathematical formula that creates a lightning look in a spiral galaxy, broccoli, ferns.

04:33:06

Is it possible that every created item that God himself has created is represented in a mathematical fractal with some conceptual parallel?

04:33:18

It could be. Nobody knows because they're infinite and we'll never explore them infinitely because they're infinite.

04:33:24

Because we got bow ties. Yeah, we got bow ties, we got seahorses, we got elephants, yeah. Ferns, broccoli.

04:33:29

We got ferns. If you allow different sets, that's probably the case but nobody really knows.

04:33:36

I mean, this is the beginning of the adventure and human beings have not explored fractals for real.

04:33:41

We've only known about these since 1980. So, I mean, we're just at the beginning of the game on these things.

04:33:47

So, yeah, but they are infinite so there could be anything in there. When you're looking at the original one with the cardio.

04:33:54

Cardioid. Cardioid. When you zoomed in on that, where the valley of the elephants was at the tip of that, it looked as if that valley never meets.

04:34:04

It goes on and on and on. Is that true or does it reach a point at some point where it stops?

04:34:09

Well, they connect at one fourth but in terms of the elephants, the elephants get smaller and smaller and so there are, in fact, an infinite number of elephants in Elephant Valley.

04:34:18

You could continue to zoom in on that cusp forever, infinitely. There's an infinite number of elephants. Wow. Until you go to the

04:34:26

Z cubed and there's twice that many, right? What are your current thoughts on the god force or the god particle that keeps atoms together?

04:34:37

Yeah, so it's poorly named and I don't think that they meant any disrespect in calling it the god particle.

04:34:42

They're referring to the Higgs boson. It's something that was predicted to exist on the basis of our standard model of particle physics and the idea is that the

04:34:52

Higgs field, for every particle, there's a field that's associated with it. The Higgs field, a field is something that penetrates all through space, like a magnetic field.

04:35:01

You might have seen a magnet with iron filings around it and how they show you the magnetic field.

04:35:06

Even though the field itself isn't visible, you can make it visible with iron filings. The idea is that there's a Higgs field that permeates the entire universe that gives particles their mass based on how much they interact with the

04:35:16

Higgs field and so particles like light, which don't have any mass, they don't interact with the Higgs field. They just go straight through it whereas particles that are heavier, like protons and neutrons, electrons, they interact with that Higgs field and that gives them mass and then the

04:35:31

Higgs boson is sort of the smallest particle that's associated with that field and it's complicated but I think the physics there is good.

04:35:40

I think that the Higgs field is right. It's good physics. It is the way that God has chosen to impart mass to the particles that he created.

04:35:48

So it's not a replacement for God. It's the mechanism that God uses. Does that make sense? Okay. Would you explain how we perceive being outside the

04:35:56

Milky Way galaxy, looking at it with the naked eye from our backyard when the spot from which we are standing, observing it, is in the

04:36:02

Milky Way galaxy? Yeah, so if you think about it, the Milky Way, it's disk shape. It's a spiral but it's got some thickness to it.

04:36:10

It's not like paper. It's got some thickness to it. So what happens when you take a look at a disk that has some thickness edge on, like a plate edge on, what does it look like?

04:36:18

It looks like a straight line, doesn't it? And that's why when you go out on a summer night when it's nice and clear, you'll see this straight line.

04:36:25

It's a cloudy band. That's the Milky Way. It's spiral. It's a disk.

04:36:30

We're in the disk and so it looks like a straight line that covers the sky that way. But you see pictures of the

04:36:36

Milky Way galaxy. Are those artists' conceptions? Because we can't actually go out and take a picture of our galaxy. Right, we can't get outside our galaxy.

04:36:42

So if you've seen an image of the Milky Way from above, it's an artist's conception. It's not real.

04:36:47

Or they'll show another galaxy that's spiral and they'll say, our galaxy looks like this one, which we think it does.

04:36:54

Is the sun diminishing and if the Earth is a million years old, would the sun be touching the Earth going back a million years?

04:36:59

The answer is no. The sun's not, it's not shrinking. There was an old argument that some creationists had jumped on that said the sun is shrinking.

04:37:08

But no, I used the SOHO spacecraft in my doctoral dissertation and it's able to measure the sun very, very precisely.

04:37:14

The sun is not, it's not shrinking in size, not substantially. How is it burning up without shrinking or consuming fuel?

04:37:20

Well, it does consume fuel, but the nuclear fusion that's going on in the core, it's converting hydrogen into helium.

04:37:27

So the number of atoms, well, the number of protons and neutrons remains the same.

04:37:33

It's just the protons get converted to neutrons and that releases energy. So it's not really losing mass, not substantially.

04:37:40

So it won't lose mass, will it burn out? Eventually, it will. Once you run out of hydrogen, once all the hydrogen is converted to helium, then there's no more power available.

04:37:51

But the interesting thing is there's enough mass there that it could continue to, it's a very efficient power source.

04:37:58

It could continue to fuse hydrogen into helium for potentially five to 10 billion years in a hypothetical future.

04:38:04

So it's not something you're gonna have to worry about in your lifetime. And even if it were, I'm sure the

04:38:09

Lord has other plans. Unless I can travel at the speed of light for a long time. Well, that's true, that's true. And come back.

04:38:15

But then I think you'd meet the return of the Lord a lot quicker that way. I think that's what would happen. Who came up with the idea of an

04:38:22

Oort cloud originally and how long has it been an idea or a proposition? The Oort cloud, it was invented, it's named after its inventor,

04:38:29

Jan Oort. And I forget when he came up with the idea, but it's been around for a while. It's been around for probably almost a century, maybe not quite a century.

04:38:38

And yeah, so he came up with that idea that you have a comet generator, that this big sphere of potential comets as a solution to the fact that comets appear to support a young solar system and we can't have that.

04:38:49

What is the evolutionist rationale for a planetary magnetic fields? Okay, so we talked about how magnetic fields decay with time.

04:38:57

We can measure that. The secularists, their rescuing device for that is to say that there must be some kind of recharging mechanism that rebuilds the magnetic fields after they decay.

04:39:07

And they call it a magnetic dynamo. And it's supposed to work a bit like the alternator in your car.

04:39:13

The alternator in your car takes the mechanical energy from the wheels and uses that to recharge the battery. So the idea is that you can take mechanical energy from a planet's rotation and somehow put that into the magnetic field.

04:39:24

And there are many problems with that, not the least of which is the alternator in your car is a pretty complicated, it's a complex instrument.

04:39:30

It takes some design to be able to take mechanical energy and transform it into electrical energy.

04:39:36

Whereas you don't have that complex mechanism in something like the Earth. Also, the dynamo requires differential rotation.

04:39:43

It would require the Earth's equator to be spinning faster than the poles, which doesn't work so well for a solid planet like the

04:39:49

Earth, right? It rotates as a solid body. And there are other problems with the dynamo model too. For one thing, it requires the rotation axis to be aligned with the magnetic axis, which for the

04:39:59

Earth, they're not too far off. They're like 11 degrees apart. But for Uranus, they're way off. It's like 96 degrees tilted or something.

04:40:05

And likewise for Neptune, they're way off. So it has made predictions that have been falsified, whereas Dr.

04:40:13

Humphrey's model has made predictions that have been verified. What is the biggest star we know of and how much bigger is it than our sun?

04:40:20

I'm not sure what the latest number is. I showed Antares in the presentation. Antares is about 600 times the size of the sun, so is

04:40:29

Betelgeuse. They're enormous stars. The biggest one would be maybe twice as big as Betelgeuse.

04:40:36

And we think that stars probably can't get too much bigger than that anyway. There's a certain limit on the mass and size of stars for physical reasons.

04:40:44

What limits them? There's what's called the Eddington limit for one, which it turns out that if you make a star bigger than a certain amount, it increases the pressure in the core to the point that the star would explode before you could actually get it together even.

04:40:59

So that's called the Eddington limit. And that's a mass limit, though. That limits the mass to something like 200 suns,

04:41:05

I think. So that would be one limitation. Is it true that all the stars start as giant ones but over time become red dwarfs and eventually explode?

04:41:13

No, it's not true. Even in the secular view, they don't believe that. They used to teach that stars started as blue stars and then faded to red.

04:41:21

Nobody believes that anymore either, by the way. The latest view is that stars start as main sequence stars.

04:41:27

When we talk about main sequence stars, they obey the rule. If you know the mass, you know everything else about it. And then they evolve into giant stars.

04:41:36

And depending on the mass, some of them evolve into super giants. Stars like the sun that are relatively low mass are supposedly, eventually when they run out of fuel and they collapse in on themselves and become a white dwarf, stars that are much more massive than the sun are thought to explode when they run out of fuel.

04:41:54

It's kind of counterintuitive. You run out of fuel, so you explode. Oh, okay. We do know stars explode, but I'm not sure that's the right explanation for why.

04:42:02

And in terms of stellar evolution, I'm not convinced that much of that, I'm not convinced there's much merit to it. It's not something you can observe, right?

04:42:10

We don't observe stars changing over time, except a little bit. Sometimes their color will change a little bit, or their brightness will change a little bit from century to century.

04:42:18

But in terms of seeing a star swell up into a giant, we've never seen that. It's never happened. I think giant stars are probably created giant stars.

04:42:26

When secular scientists talk about the Kuiper Belt, what are they referring to? Do creationists have another meaning for it?

04:42:31

Okay, oh yeah. So there's actually, I simplified it a little bit for the presentation, but there's two types of comets.

04:42:40

There are short period comets, which have a period of less than 200 years. And there are long period comets, which have a period longer than 200 years, or equal to 200 years.

04:42:50

And it turns out, short period comets tend to orbit in the plane of the solar system. They tend to orbit in the same disk as the planets, roughly.

04:42:57

They can be off a little bit. And they tend to orbit in the same direction as the planets, with some exceptions. Halley's Comet's an exception.

04:43:03

It orbits backwards relative to the planets. But long period comets are like cats. They just do what they want.

04:43:10

They have tails, and they do what they want. And so a long period comet, if the planets are in this plane, a long period comet might be like this.

04:43:18

It might come in like that, and then zip out. Okay? And a different one will come in like that, and a different one will come in like that.

04:43:24

So what they've done is they've prepared, and both of these, both short period comets and long period comets, are a problem for billions of years.

04:43:32

But since they're two different, they're two different categories of comets, they've had to propose two different sources for them.

04:43:42

And so the Oort Cloud is supposed to resupply the long period comets, and then the Kuiper Belt is supposed to resupply the short period comets.

04:43:49

It gets a little more complex, though, because what happened was they were expecting to find trillions of comet -sized objects out beyond Neptune in a disk.

04:43:57

Okay? And they ought to look like comets. Instead, what they found were several hundred objects that are much larger than comets.

04:44:04

Comets usually four or five miles across, okay, in terms of the nucleus. They started finding objects that are 50 to 100, 500 to 1 ,000 miles across, something like that, much, much bigger than comets, orbiting out at that distance, and not quite, kind of in the disk, but with quite a bit more range than they were expecting.

04:44:22

And they found that these objects typically were not the same color as comets. They tended to be redder than comets, which suggests their composition is different.

04:44:30

And what they did with this, they started, they said, well, see, we found the Kuiper Belt. That wasn't remotely what you were expecting.

04:44:36

You were expecting to find trillions of tiny comets, and instead you found hundreds of much larger objects that aren't even the same color as comets.

04:44:44

And so they now call that the Kuiper Belt. Okay, you can name it whatever you want, but it's not the kind of Kuiper Belt they were expecting, and it's not the kind of Kuiper Belt that will resupply short -period comets.

04:44:56

So there's still a problem. Is there evidence for one original continent moving into the ones that we have now?

04:45:02

Yeah, there is. I do accept the idea of Pangaea, the idea that the continents were originally connected. By the way, that's a creationist concept.

04:45:09

Yeah, it was a creationist that came up with the idea that the continents were separated during the World Wide Flood. And it was the secularists that hated that, because they, well, you can't move something as big as a continent.

04:45:18

And then after a while, they finally warmed up to the idea, and they said, well, maybe we can accept that as long as we slow it down and let it take millions and millions of years.

04:45:25

But we do think that the continents were connected before Noah's Flood. The fact that they fit together is pretty good evidence.

04:45:31

And the fact that fossils, you can line up the fossils in certain regions. You'll find that fossils of creatures that lived before the

04:45:38

Flood that are on, say, the east coast of the United States match up with those in,

04:45:43

I guess, what would be Europe. But in any case, you can match up the way the fossils are. Certain mountain chains that are pre -Flood mountain chains, and that would be like, maybe the

04:45:51

Appalachians would be late Flood or possibly pre -Flood. Some of those line up as well. So there's good evidence that the continents were connected before the

04:45:59

Flood. And that would make sense, too. Some people have said the scriptures may suggest that.

04:46:05

The Bible says that originally God caused the waters to gather together into one place, which might suggest that land was in the other place.

04:46:12

I don't know that that's conclusive, but it would make it easier for the animals to get to the Ark, too, because they wouldn't have to cross an ocean.

04:46:19

And getting back's a little trickier, but not too much, because the ocean levels would have been lower after the Flood. There'd be land bridges and ice bridges and such.

04:46:26

Why are secular scientists using a multiverse to support their origin of the universe? Yeah, the multiverse,

04:46:32

I think it's a version of the gambler's fallacy, which is the idea that if you flipped a coin 10 times in a row, what are the odds that they'd all come up heads up?

04:46:44

I mean, it'd be astronomical, right? And so somebody says, well, boy, we've got this universe that's extremely fine -tuned.

04:46:51

It's kind of like we landed heads up 10 times in a row. Therefore, it must just be that there's actually an incredible number of universes, and we just happened to get the one that got lucky.

04:47:02

And so that's a form of the gambler's fallacy. It'd be like saying, you know, I had this incredibly improbable event happen.

04:47:07

Therefore, there must be lots of other rooms with other people gambling where they lost. It doesn't make sense to me.

04:47:13

But it has to do with the fact that the universe appears to be well -designed for life. Everybody knows that. Secularists know that.

04:47:18

The universe is fine -tuned. It's designed for life. And that just doesn't make sense if the universe is chance.

04:47:24

And so the idea is, well, there must be an infinite number of universes, and we just happened to land in the one that got lucky. That's really what it comes down to.

04:47:31

How do they recalculate the age of the universe? Is there any concern from scientists or secularists that their numbers continue to change so many times with such a vast difference?

04:47:40

Yeah, that's a concern. The way that they calculate the age of the universe, they don't calculate it. They estimate it.

04:47:46

They make a guess at the age of the universe by assuming, by measuring the rate of expansion, which we call the

04:47:51

Hubble constant, the rate at which the universe is expanding, assuming that the conditions were basically like that in the past and then rolling it back to a point where everything would be in a point.

04:48:01

And so I think that's an unreasonable extrapolation because it assumes that the universe was not created with size.

04:48:06

I know it was created with size. Genesis tells us that. So that's what they're assuming. They're taking the Hubble constant and running it backwards, including for effects of gravity and things like that.

04:48:15

It's a little bit complicated, but that's the basic idea. They run that back in time. And what happens is, every now and then, they re -estimate the

04:48:22

Hubble constant because it's very hard to measure the expansion rate of the universe because you need to measure the red ships of galaxies.

04:48:28

That's easy. And then you need to find the distance to those galaxies. That's hard. It's hard to get the distance to galaxies precisely.

04:48:35

There's a few different methods that they use. And recently, they just redid that. They re -estimated the Hubble constant, and it made the universe younger by a billion years or so than the previous estimate.

04:48:46

And that is an issue. That is an issue because, you know, last year, you're just a moron if you didn't believe the universe is 13 .8

04:48:54

billion years old. Now you're a moron if you do believe that because now we know it's only 12 to 13 billion years old and so on.

04:48:59

And so it does change from time to time. And then occasionally, they'll run into inconsistency. There's actually an inconsistency now because one estimate that they used to give the 13 .8

04:49:07

billion years, that's still a good estimate in their view, and yet they've got another one that contradicts it. So it's really perplexing.

04:49:13

I think it's a problem. Are atheist presuppositions accepted as brute facts, and is there a rational argument for brute facts?

04:49:20

Yeah, I think most atheists are totally oblivious to their own presuppositions. And if you do pin them down and finally get them to think through them, they will accept them as brute facts.

04:49:30

But then, of course, I'm going to point out that no, you can't have brute facts. Facts are interpreted. They are interpreted.

04:49:37

Anything that you believe, if you're gonna be a rational person, you need to be able to give a reason for it, right?

04:49:43

That's what rationality is. It's having good reasons for what you believe and abandoning beliefs for which you do not have good reasons.

04:49:49

That's the whole point of education, by the way, is to come up with good biblical reasons for what you believe.

04:49:55

Children are not rational. Children don't have good reasons for what they believe. They believe there's a monster in the closet.

04:50:01

They have no logical reason to believe there's a monster in the closet. But they nonetheless act on that belief. They pull the sheets over their head, and they think that protects them from the monster in the closet.

04:50:09

And they wake up the next morning and conclude that must have saved them. Now, that is not logical. And we expect that from children.

04:50:15

But when adults behave that way, it's a problem. And so I would say to my atheistic friend, he says, well,

04:50:22

I know the scientific method. I don't need to give a reason for it. I'm gonna say, actually, if you're gonna be rational, you do. Otherwise, you're acting like a child.

04:50:27

You believe in the monster in the closet, and you have no basis for it. And so I would argue that secularists do not have a basis for logic, science, mathematics, any of that stuff.

04:50:35

They cannot account for it in their own worldview, and therefore, they're being like little children believing in something for which they have no basis on their own worldview.

04:50:42

Is there more helium in space than on Earth? Well, yes, because there's more space.

04:50:51

So if you're talking about density, I don't know. The Earth tends to have a lot more of the heavier stuff, the heavier elements, oxygen and carbon, silicon, things like that.

04:50:59

So is the Earth losing helium because it continues to rise in space? Yes, yeah, the helium, it's a little counterintuitive.

04:51:05

Helium, I mean, helium has gravity. We tend to think of helium as floating and has levity, but that's because it displaces air, and air is heavier than helium, oxygen, nitrogen, heavier than helium.

04:51:15

But helium, once it gets out to the outer atmosphere, especially when you have a solar flare, and that'll heat up the

04:51:21

Earth's atmosphere, and that'll kick out helium atoms. And so the Earth is slowly leaking helium, that's true. And where do nebulae get their helium?

04:51:30

And how do nebulae form? I don't think nebulae do form. I think they were created by God. I don't think there's any other explanation for that.

04:51:37

And the original elements, hydrogen and helium, I think those are all created by God. Some people say, well, you've heard the old expression, we're all made of star stuff.

04:51:44

Carl Sagan used to say that. We're all made of, you know, stardust. Because in the secular view, the

04:51:49

Big Bang can't produce heavier elements like oxygen and nitrogen, all the stuff that the Earth's made of. You can't make that in the

04:51:54

Big Bang. The Big Bang's supposed to produce hydrogen and helium, but the Big Bang has its own set of problems. But the bottom line is we know that the

04:52:03

Earth was created before the stars, so the Earth's not made of star stuff. I think, so the nebulae, I think, are created by God.

04:52:09

Yeah. What do you believe is the reason God created man? Why did God create man? We know, I can give an ultimate answer to that, is for his own glory.

04:52:17

Because everything that God does is for his own glory. In terms of the specifics, I can't give a specific answer to that.

04:52:23

God doesn't require us, I can tell you that. We are not needed. But nonetheless, God is a

04:52:29

God of love. And so, I think he made human beings to love. Now, there's three members of the

04:52:34

Trinity, so God doesn't need people to love, because God, the three members of the Trinity love, each member of the

04:52:39

Trinity loves the other two members of the Trinity, so you have love without people. But nonetheless, it's out of his graciousness, out of his love,

04:52:46

God created human beings. And of course, freely offers salvation to us, even though we've rebelled against him.

04:52:53

It's awesome, awesome thought. I would just add to that, one of the things that God does in creating man and allowing history to unfold as he has is to display his attributes, not only to himself, but also to his creation.

04:53:08

So even without the creation of everything, God would not be able to display his attributes of long -suffering and grace and mercy and justice, because there would be no opportunity amongst the members of the

04:53:17

Trinity for God to show his justice, his mercy, his grace, or his long -suffering. But with a sinful humanity, he can do that, and he can display those attributes to his creation for his glory and for the good of that creation, so that that creation, he can lavish it with its goodness while displaying those attributes, glorify himself, and be good to you and I.

04:53:38

That's true. What was God doing before creation? The interesting thing about that question is there is no before the creation, you understand, because in the beginning, it's in the beginning that God created, so there's no time before creation.

04:53:51

Now, God exists beyond creation. That might be a better way to put it.

04:53:57

God created time. There is no before the beginning. It's like going further north than the North Pole. You get to the North Pole, that's it, you're done.

04:54:04

But God is not limited to creation, and God is not temporal either. He doesn't exist within time.

04:54:10

That's hard for us. That's hard for us to understand because all our thinking is within time. We're temporal creatures. We live within, we need space and time to exist.

04:54:18

God doesn't need space or time to exist. He made space and time, so there actually is no before the beginning.

04:54:24

We might talk about it metaphorically. Before the beginning, God was, there really isn't a before the beginning, even though God is beyond space and time.

04:54:34

Is the Aristotelian proof of the existence of God consistent with the biblical worldview if it attempts to prove God without the

04:54:40

Bible? Is that an example of general revelation? In a sense, yes.

04:54:47

Aristotle argued that God is the prime mover. It's interesting.

04:54:54

His argument's interesting. I don't think it's the best argument because the best argument is that we know God exists is we have revelation from God.

04:55:01

Of course, we have ultimately his word, but even Aristotle's arguments, Aristotle's assuming things like laws of logic.

04:55:07

Aristotle is considered the pioneer of laws of logic, really, but he discovered them and was able to do so because of the mind of God, you see, so even his argument tacitly presupposes the

04:55:19

Christian worldview, even though he didn't identify as a Christian. What are your thoughts on planet nine, and I'm assuming they're not asking about Pluto.

04:55:27

Yeah, yeah. There's currently no evidence of any planets beyond Neptune.

04:55:34

That doesn't mean it's impossible that there could be. If they exist, they're really far out there and very dark because the technology now exists that if there were a planet, say, two or three times the distance of Neptune that's as big as the

04:55:49

Earth, we would've found it. We would've already seen it, so that means they're either not there or they're really far away or they're nearly pitch black where they don't give off, they don't reflect much sunlight back, so it is possible that there's another planet out there.

04:56:01

Does there come a point at which the distance that a planet would be away from our sun would be too far for it to actually be within our sun's gravitational pull of any size?

04:56:11

Yeah, once you get out to a substantial fraction of the distance to the next star, then it's not that the, gravity never goes to zero.

04:56:18

It just diminishes, but it diminishes to the point where the next star out would have a significant effect on that planet and would tend to eject, it would tend to eject it from our solar system, so once you get out to maybe beyond 10 ,000 astronomical units, one astronomical unit is the distance from the

04:56:33

Earth to the sun, so you get 10 ,000 times that distance, then the effects of the gravity of the other stars starts to kick in and you can't really have stable orbits too much beyond that.

04:56:43

Do you agree with Kepler's idea that science is thinking God's thoughts after him? Absolutely, absolutely.

04:56:49

I think that's the whole point of science is to think God's thoughts after him and to glorify him for what he's made in the consistent way that he upholds creation.

04:56:58

And what advice do you have for homeschool parents raising their children, or choosing their kid's science curriculum? Well, I got some great resources back there.

04:57:08

You might check out my friends over at Answers in Genesis as well, they have some wonderful curricula there. Just make sure you get them solid in the word of God and education, you know, it's interesting because I went through the public school system,

04:57:21

I'm not proud of that, but it's just true. And some people say, well, you know, you went to public school and you turned out okay.

04:57:28

First of all, I'm not okay, okay, I'm not. You don't believe that Pluto was a planet, so there you go.

04:57:36

So there you go, yeah. And secondly, God can redeem us. He can use the miseducation that I had.

04:57:45

And don't get me wrong, I appreciate, maybe some of you are teachers in the public education.

04:57:50

I appreciate that there are Christians in public education that are displacing someone who would undoubtedly teach a very secular worldview, so I'm not knocking that.

04:57:58

But nonetheless, I'm a strong advocate of homeschooling. I think it's wonderful because it really is, it's really biblical.

04:58:04

And you can delegate, I believe, but nonetheless, God never gave the government the right over children's education, never.

04:58:11

And it's kind of interesting, you know, Jesus, when they show him, they ask him about taxes, and he says, show me a coin.

04:58:18

Whose face is on this coin? Whose image is on this coin? Caesar, give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's. Whose image are children made in?

04:58:25

God's image. Don't give unto Caesar that which belongs to God, you know? That being the case,

04:58:33

I'm a strong advocate of homeschooling. If you can do it, it's really a wonderful thing to do. And there's some wonderful resources now available, the resources back there.

04:58:41

And I now believe that the point of education is to learn to think in a way that's consistent with the mind of God. That's the point of education, to take captive every thought and do obedience to Christ.

04:58:50

That's a biblical theme. And so if I'm gonna teach children, I'm gonna teach them history from the perspective, not just here's a bunch of dead guys and what happened to them.

04:58:59

No, here is the sovereign unfolding of God's plan throughout time. That's a different perspective, isn't it?

04:59:05

Mathematics, I'm not just gonna teach them, here's what you need to know so you can build bridges. I'm gonna say, no, here's a window into the mind of God.

04:59:12

That's kind of what I showed in the previous session. And I find a lot of people, if they're taught it that way, wow, math isn't so boring after all.

04:59:19

I'm thinking God's thoughts after, and that's kind of different, isn't it? What advice then do you have for parents whose kids are in public school or private school that is not a young earth creationist environment?

04:59:29

Pull them out. You know, I do think it's okay to delegate a little bit, but you have to be very careful about that.

04:59:38

You're responsible for the education of your children. Yes, you can delegate. You can say, you know, Uncle Fred is really good at math.

04:59:44

I'd like him to teach you math. Okay, that's fine. But you're still responsible, ultimately, for them. And so homeschooling's great.

04:59:51

If you can send them to a private school, especially a Christian school, it's gonna teach biblical creation. They're rare, but there are a few of them.

04:59:58

That's a great option as well. In scripture, God has prescribed the eating of animal flesh, and our bodies seem to be biologically adapted to the proteins and fats as healthful, are biologically adapted to eating proteins and fats and being able to process them,

05:00:17

I guess. Yes, Adam and Eve were vegetarians prior to the fall when there was no death. Therefore, is it true that consuming meat is short of God's original design?

05:00:25

Well, it is in the sense that, yeah, I mean, originally, human beings were designed to eat plants and animals. All animals were originally vegetarian according to Genesis 1, 29 and 30.

05:00:34

So, and a lot of people think, well, that's silly. That's, you're telling me lions used to eat plants? Yes, lions used to eat plants.

05:00:40

And by the way, sometimes, even today, they'll go back to their pre -fall diet. There was a case of a little tyke.

05:00:46

She was a 350 -pound female lion raised in captivity who refused to eat meat her entire life. I've got pictures of her.

05:00:53

They tried to give her meat. She turned away from it. She didn't even like the smell of meat. She liked milk, but not meat. And she did like eggs, but not meat.

05:01:01

And so, animals don't really need meat. They don't. Even animals that we think of as carnivores, human beings, we don't really need meat.

05:01:09

Now, it is true that today, in our fallen world, it's a post -flood world. It was after the time of the flood,

05:01:14

God gave Noah permission to eat meat. And there's any number of reasons why that could be. It could be that, I mean, there are some plants that are now extinct.

05:01:22

And it could be that some of those plants had some of the proteins that we're missing now. I mean, I don't know.

05:01:27

But the fact is, God did give us permission to eat meat. So, in Genesis, I think it's Genesis 9, 3.

05:01:33

So, everything that, every living thing that moves, you know, I'm giving you to eat.

05:01:38

So, that's why you can eat a hot dog, because that's pretty much every living thing that moves. So, you're okay with that.

05:01:45

But, yeah, I mean, it is short of the original plan. But it might be, it's probably a good idea to eat meat unless you're really conscious about getting the, make sure you get the right nutrients from plants.

05:01:59

Is there going to be a follow -up to the basics of presuppositional apologetics in future presentations of your book form, or any presuppositional works that are coming down the line?

05:02:07

Yes, and in fact, they're already done. A couple of them are already done. The two DVDs called Nuclear Strength Apologetics, there's two of them.

05:02:15

Those are follow -ups to the ultimate proof of creation that I did last night. And they go into other areas, and just kind of explore that concept a little bit more.

05:02:24

And practical application, too. In at least one of those DVDs, I go through and I show conversations that I've had with people.

05:02:31

Some of them via email, where I've dialogued with folks. Also on our website, the Biblical Science Institute, a lot of, one of the more popular sections on that website is called

05:02:41

Refuting the Critics. And I'll go through and I'll show you how to do presuppositional apologetics. Every response

05:02:48

I give is a presuppositional response. Now, sometimes I'll bring in evidence, but I do it in a presuppositional way, a way that assumes biblical authority, presupposes biblical authority, and does an internal critique of the secular worldview.

05:02:58

So the website, those DVDs, and I'm sure we'll have more in the future, yeah. Is the difference between a wild animal and a domestic a loss of information?

05:03:07

Wolves are wild, have more information. Black Labradors are domestic and have less information. That is generally true, that is generally true.

05:03:13

Domesticated animals tend to have less of the heterozygous state, where you have big A, little

05:03:19

A, big B, little B. Domestic animals tend to have more of the homozygous, big

05:03:24

A, big A, little B, little B, and so on. And that does cause problems, because it turns out that a lot of diseases, if they're caused by a mutation, a lot of times, if you'll have a mutated gene and a healthy gene, you won't suffer a disease.

05:03:42

You'll be healthy, the good gene will sort of cover up the bad gene. Mutations, in other words, mutations tend to be recessive.

05:03:49

But on the other hand, if you have domestic animals where you've inbred them, that concentrates those mutations, you see, and so you're more likely to get a mutated gene on the same locus, the same site, lower locus.

05:04:03

Anyway, and then you're more likely to suffer from a disease, so that's why domestic animals tend to be not as healthy as wild ones.

05:04:10

If evolution is just a rescue device or cover for immorality, isn't attacking evolution missing the foundation?

05:04:17

Isn't the foundational problem really just a rebellion and evolution is an excuse? So should we as believers then focus on rebellion primarily and evolution secondarily?

05:04:27

Yeah, I think there's something to that. It's certainly the case that people use evolution as an intellectual cover for their sin, for the fact that they have a rebellious heart.

05:04:37

But here's the problem, you can't change a person's heart. You can't, that's up to God. Only God can change a person's heart.

05:04:43

And so my goal as an apologist is to deal, is to do what God tells me to do, to give a defense of the faith.

05:04:50

And so I'm gonna deal primarily with the intellectual blocks that they raise, knowing that it is, in fact, a heart issue.

05:04:55

There's no doubt about that. And I would not be hesitant to point it out to them.

05:05:01

Say, you know, the reason you believe in evolution ultimately is because you're a wicked sinner. Really. And I said, and you know, lest you think

05:05:09

I'm talking down to you, that's exactly what I would be, except the Lord changed my heart. So I'm not superior to you in any way.

05:05:14

I was a wicked sinner before God turned my heart around. I'd be in the same boat you're in. So, and because I care about you,

05:05:20

I wanna share with you, you know, some of these things. So it is a heart issue and you do need to keep that in mind, but you also need to keep in mind, you can't change a person's heart.

05:05:26

All we can do is help them over the intellectual stomach blocks. We wanna urge them, obviously, to repent, knowing that ultimately repentance is a gift from God.

05:05:36

Are we now discovering, or are we not discovering, that even the physical may be infinite? Quarks and the smaller particles with silly names.

05:05:43

Sorry, I cannot remember the names of them, but I believe there are four. Okay. I don't think so.

05:05:50

We think that quarks are fundamental, meaning they're not made up of anything smaller. We think electrons are fundamental. They're not made up of anything smaller.

05:05:57

Could they be? Yes, but there are some reasons to think they probably aren't, because once you get down to the quantum level, nature gets really weird, really fat.

05:06:07

You think relativity is weird. Talk about quantum mechanics. Oh, it's bizarre. Things that don't act like discrete particles anymore, they start acting like waves, and a wave doesn't have one position in a space, right?

05:06:17

A wave's kind of everywhere, isn't it? And particles start behaving like that, where they start acting like they're kind of here and there, and it's not a violation of laws of logic, because a wave can be here and there, because a wave is extended in space, and so particles start behaving like that, and so if they were made up of smaller particles, then they wouldn't have that wave nature.

05:06:36

This will be a quick one. How do you challenge or refute the worldview of secular evolution growing within the church today, the idea that God used evolution, and mankind,

05:06:45

Adam and Eve, were just the first to be made in God's image? Yeah, the first presentation I gave today really hit that topic pretty hard.

05:06:52

The fact is that all Christian theology is based on creation, directly or indirectly.

05:06:58

The fact that God made Adam and Eve, were made in the image of God, and therefore responsible to God for actions. Adam sinned, that's why we're born into the world sinners.

05:07:06

Sinners beget sinners, so we have that sin nature. The fact that death is the penalty for sin, that's a Genesis theme.

05:07:12

If Adam and Eve's just a fairy tale, you have no rational basis for believing that death is the penalty for sin, and if that's not the case, why did

05:07:18

Jesus die on the cross? And so it's very clear that, and also too,

05:07:23

I think it impugns the nature of God to say that God is a cruel ogre who created over billions of years of death and suffering, that he intended it to be that way, and said it's very good.

05:07:33

No, it's not very good, and things die, and things suffer, not because of God's fault, but because it's the right punishment for sin.

05:07:39

It's our fault, not God's fault. And really, the person who blames God for death and suffering is doing just exactly what

05:07:45

Adam did. When Adam sinned, he blamed God, indirectly. He blamed the woman, but he said, the woman who you gave to me.

05:07:52

Why did he say that? Was it to distinguish Eve from all the other women that were on the planet? No, he's impugning

05:07:58

God. He's saying, you know, you gave her to me. And that is inappropriate. Adam had nobody to blame but Adam.

05:08:07

And likewise, when we say, you know, God's responsible for death and suffering, and that's what you believe, if you believe in evolution. If you believe

05:08:12

God guided it, then you believe God is responsible for death and suffering, but no, we are responsible for death and suffering.

05:08:18

And what is the most difficult single evidence for old Earth that you still struggle with? Oh, I don't think there are any.

05:08:24

I mean, I would be honest with you if I thought there were some. I think starlight was the last issue for me, but now that I've studied that more,

05:08:31

I think, well, that's a non -starter right there, the idea that starlight proves an old universe. It doesn't, if you know anything about relativity, the

05:08:38

Einstein physics and synchrony conventions. I know that's complicated if you haven't heard that stuff before, but I've studied it for a long time.

05:08:45

And so for me, it's very, very clear. Radiometric dating before the rate project, that was kind of a holdout, but now we've got really good answers to that to the point that it kind of flips it around.

05:08:55

It's like, how do you explain radiometric dating if you believe in millions of years? Because the fact is, I didn't cover this in the presentation, but radioactive decay produces helium as a byproduct, and we find helium in these rocks that we find.

05:09:08

And yet, if it had happened over millions of years, as the evolutionists believed, the helium should have leaked out, because rocks are porous.

05:09:13

They have little holes in them, and they can leak gas. And we've measured the rate at which they leak gas, and it's rapid.

05:09:19

And so the fact is, if this radioactivity really had happened over billions of years, why do these rocks have so much helium in them?

05:09:27

And the rate research team studied that issue and found that the data are consistent with about 6 ,000 years, very consistent.

05:09:35

And so you turn that around on them, you say, what used to be your main argument really belongs to us now.

05:09:41

The fact is, you can't account for these things. I have yet to hear a good argument for an old Earth. All of them assume arbitrarily either naturalism, the idea that there's no

05:09:51

God God didn't create, or uniformitarianism, which is the idea that rates and conditions have been basically constant, and therefore denies a worldwide flood.

05:09:59

And those are anti -biblical assumptions, aren't they? And so anyone who makes an argument for an old

05:10:04

Earth has already rejected the biblical timeline in order to make the argument, in which case they are begging the question.

05:10:11

Yes, very good. So if you assume what you're trying to prove, which evolutionists have to do in order to argue for an old

05:10:17

Earth, they have to make certain assumptions, they're begging the question. Every argument that I've heard for an old Earth begs the question, every single one.

05:10:23

I have yet to find an exception. And by the way, less people think, well, you're doing that too. No, I'm not. Because you'll notice the arguments that I made were an internal critique, where I assumed the starting point of my opponent to show that it leads to a contradiction.

05:10:35

I assumed for the sake of argument that uniformitarianism is true and that the moon really has been moving at this general rate.

05:10:44

The tidal breaking constant's always been the same. That's a uniformitarian assumption, you see. And it leads to an inconsistency. Anyway, you still get a young universe, you see.

05:10:51

And so the arguments that we make do not beg the question. Rather, they're an example of the don't answer answer strategy. What's the difference between world and planet?

05:11:00

World's more generic. You can even use world to talk about the world of men. World's just a region.

05:11:06

The moon is a world. I like to use it as just kind of a generic term for anything, really, world.

05:11:12

Planet has a specific definition. Especially now that the International Astronomical Union, back in 2005, they came up with the definition.

05:11:19

It's not a perfect definition, but it's sufficient. A planet has to be round in shape, basically round.

05:11:26

And it has to have cleared out all the other objects that are orbiting at that distance.

05:11:31

So if you have other similar -sized objects at that distance, then it's not considered a planet. Okay, so we have two different last and final categories of questions.

05:11:40

One is not something you've touched on here, but I'll throw it out there and let you take a swing at it. How do you defend the infallibility of the

05:11:46

Bible as it has been translated and interpreted differently over time, in and out of context, especially with reference to Genesis?

05:11:53

Well, you know, it's interesting. People who ask that question obviously often haven't really studied that issue because when you take a look at, you know, people say, well, the

05:12:03

Bible's a translation of a translation of a translation. I'm sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about. The Bible's been translated once.

05:12:08

I mean, in terms of most of the major translations today have been translated directly from Hebrew into English and directly from, in the

05:12:14

New Testament, directly from Greek into English, been translated once. Now, the copying issue's different because the Bible has been copied many times, but we find ancient copies of the

05:12:23

Bible. And so we can see often where little changes have come in. And yes, little changes have come in over time.

05:12:30

That's kind of, I think, disappointing to some Christians when they first learn that because they have this impression that, you know, the

05:12:35

Bible came down in its current form in the NIV on Mount Sinai. And, you know, and it's exactly the way that it used to be.

05:12:43

It's not, it's changed a little bit. But the fact that we can see these older copies, we can see where it's changed, and we can often reconstruct the original.

05:12:50

And so we know what the original text was. And when you do compare these ancient manuscripts, you find that the

05:12:55

Bible really is the most authentic book of the ancient world. There are a couple of ways you could measure the authenticity of a book in terms of its faithfulness to the original copy.

05:13:05

One of them would be the number of ancient manuscripts that you find. More is better, obviously, because then you can compare and you can see where there are little differences.

05:13:11

If they're all, you know, if this verse is the same in all of them, you can say, well, that's pretty much it, isn't it?

05:13:17

If there are little changes, you can say, oh, yeah, but this change doesn't, this word doesn't make sense in this. What that one does, that's obviously the original.

05:13:23

You can often figure it out. So the number of ancient manuscripts and then the shortness of the time between when the document was originally written and the oldest one that we find, shorter being better, right?

05:13:34

Because at shorter time, there's been less time for there to be any changes made. And when you use those two criteria, you find that the most authentic book of the ancient world is the

05:13:43

Bible, by far. The New Testament followed by the Old Testament and then like in a distant third is like the

05:13:48

Iliad or something like that by Homer. And so when you do your homework, the

05:13:54

Bible has been very faithfully transmitted. I won't say that it's perfect, but it's been faithfully transmitted to the point that if you look at the changes on these different things, it amounts to like one word per page on a typical

05:14:04

Bible. That's how much it's changed, not much. And most of those are very minor, the instead of a or something like that. There's been no changes in any of the major doctrines.

05:14:14

So the Bible really has, if you do your homework, the Bible really has been very faithfully preserved for us by the

05:14:20

Lord. When you talk about changes in the transmission of the text, you're really not talking about changes so much as you're talking about copyist errors.

05:14:25

Yes, copyist errors. And that's different. It's not like somebody read a verse and then said, well, I'm gonna change this. I'm gonna throw a reincarnation out of the text and change it to be something else.

05:14:33

Or I'm gonna insert resurrection into the text and change it from something else. We're talking about sometimes word order, sometimes the absence or presence of an indefinite or definite article.

05:14:41

Sometimes talking about misspellings of words or the elimination of a word or sometimes a contraction of words like can't from cannot, things like that that are copyist errors that do not affect the meaning of the text.

05:14:51

They affect the appearance of the text. That's the type of changes that we're making, but they're copyist errors, which we can identify when you compare copies to copies.

05:14:58

So I'll give you, since we have a few minutes, I'll give you a quick illustration of this. Imagine that I were to put four or five sentences up on that screen, and then

05:15:06

I were to give you a few minutes to copy word for word those everybody in this room, four or five, those four or five paragraphs up on the screen, and everybody made a copy, and then

05:15:13

I eliminated that, took it off of the screen. If we went out here and compared copy with copy with copy, you would find some spelling errors.

05:15:19

You would find some punctuation errors. You'd find the absence of a certain article, a or an or the. But if we took all the copies that were represented in this room, we compared them with one another, do you think we could accurately recreate the original that was on the screen?

05:15:32

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, we could, because we can identify what the copyist errors are in Scripture, so that's what we're talking about.

05:15:40

Fair enough? Okay, so the last question that we have was probably asked by half a dozen different people, and it had to do with climate change, global warming.

05:15:50

So let me give you kind of the range of the kinds of questions that were asked, and then you can answer this, or we can kick this around as our final topic, because I don't believe that you addressed this at all in any of the presentations.

05:16:03

Okay, here's a sampling of the questions. Would the movement of the moon away from the

05:16:09

Earth and the decay of the magnetic force explain what used to be called global warming? Hold on, let me give you some more.

05:16:17

Is the climate of today unprecedented, or has it happened before?

05:16:22

What is the evidence of man's causation of climate change, and is the data consistent and definite, or variable and subject to interpretation depending on one's agenda?

05:16:32

Let's grab some of those, and then we'll move on to other related questions. Okay, I don't think the moon or the magnetic field affect the weather too much.

05:16:39

The moon shouldn't affect it hardly at all, because it's only, since creation, the moon's only moved 730 feet away from the

05:16:47

Earth, so it's not a huge difference. The magnetic field might have a very small effect, in that the magnetic field prevents cosmic rays from intersecting the

05:16:58

Earth's atmosphere, and some people have theorized that cosmic rays can form seeds for clouds, so there could be a very slight effect on weather, but I wouldn't think it would be very substantial, so I don't think that would affect it very much.

05:17:10

Is our current period of climate change unprecedented? No, the climate changes from time to time, it happens.

05:17:17

There was a period around 1000 AD, where we had what we call the medieval warming period, where there's evidence that the

05:17:25

Earth's temperature was just a little higher during that time, higher than it is today, actually. There was a period during the,

05:17:31

I think it's the 1700s, where we had what they call the Little Ice Age in Europe, where the

05:17:37

Earth's temperatures went down for a little while, for a few decades, then came back up, climate change is natural.

05:17:43

It tends to be cyclic, because it, not necessarily a simple cycle, but we don't know exactly why these things happen, why it goes down and up.

05:17:52

A lot of it could be connected to the sun, the sun has natural cycles, some of which we understand, some of which we don't understand, but the sun is, the sun does not always produce exactly the same luminosity, it's a little bit hotter at times, and a little bit cooler at times.

05:18:06

When the sun has more sunspots, when it's active, you might think it'd be cooler, because the sunspots are darker, but the rest of the sun overcompensates, and so the sun is slightly warmer when sunspots are high, and Earth's temperatures tend to be a little warmer when there's more sunspots on the sun, and that's a 22 -year cycle, but then there are other longer cycles that could affect it as well.

05:18:26

What was the other one, that last one? I forget. The moon?

05:18:34

Oh, the agenda. Say that again. Is the data consistent and definitive, or a variable and subject to interpretation to fit a preconceived agenda?

05:18:43

Yeah, I mean, there's some data that's clear. I think there's good evidence that the

05:18:49

Earth's temperature is a little bit warmer now than it was 100 years ago. It's gone up by like a degree and a half.

05:18:55

There's some evidence for that. So that's good data. The rest really is speculation, though, in terms of, well, it's gonna run away and become, you're gonna have runaway global warming, and they used to say that, but there's been no evidence of global warming for the last 20 years, so now they call it climate change.

05:19:11

That way, no matter what happens, they can say we were right. But yeah, there's been no evidence of that at all for the last 20 years.

05:19:18

So it's just a natural cycle. There's no evidence that it'll run away catastrophically.

05:19:23

By the way, we have a promise from God that catastrophic global warming will not happen at least until Judgment Day, and there's no preventing that one.

05:19:30

But Genesis 8 .22, God promises that the basic cycles of nature, the seasons, seed time and harvest, will continue in the futures.

05:19:38

They have in the past. Day and night cycle will continue in the futures in the past as long as the Earth remains. And so we have a promise from God that catastrophic global warming that would end life, that would end the seasons, can't happen.

05:19:49

It's not possible. Not possible. Do you remember back in the 1980s, we were all warned about global cooling in the coming ice age?

05:19:55

You guys all remember that? I do. Yeah. Are there assumptions built into the global warming models, global warming hysteria?

05:20:04

Are there certain things that they have to assume in order to make that hysteria seem reasonable? Yes, one of which is the

05:20:09

Milankovitch theory, which is, it's just a, I don't wanna go into too much detail. It's a ridiculous model that's based on, it's based on evolution, it's based on millions of years.

05:20:19

The idea that the Earth's, it has to do with the orbital resonance that the Earth has with the sun and so on and so forth. I'm not gonna go into details of it, but you don't have to know that to know.

05:20:26

Yes, it's very model dependent. That the Milankovitch theory is internally inconsistent because it requires two different data points that are contradictory to both be right in order for it to work.

05:20:36

A colleague of mine, Jake Hebert, pointed that out, wrote some papers on it. It's a devastating reputation of the

05:20:41

Milankovitch, and most of the global warming hype is based on the Milankovitch, as well as a lot of the different dating techniques.

05:20:48

You've heard about ice cores and things like that allegedly proving the millions of years. They all calibrate those to the

05:20:53

Milankovitch, though, which has now been refuted. So yeah, there's a lot of hype there, but we have a promise from God there's not gonna have catastrophic global warming.

05:21:02

There is no scientific evidence for catastrophic global warming or global cooling. There is evidence that you have these mild and natural variations in climate.

05:21:11

That's what we'd expect as part of the cycle that God built into nature, but God has built a very robust earth, and you can't break it as easily as people think they can.

05:21:22

We got through all the questions in a timely manner. Give Jason a round of applause and your thanks for doing this.

05:21:33

Next May, this is what I was gonna mention. We have Scott Klusendorf coming in October. Next May, a year from now, not on Lost in the 50s weekend.

05:21:40

That was a mistake because I don't care about cars, so it wasn't even on my radar to schedule around that, and I apologize for that, so it won't be

05:21:47

Lost in the 50s weekend. But next May, the end of May, we have Paul Taylor coming from the Mount St.

05:21:52

Helens Creation Center. Jason knows Paul, has worked with Paul, met Paul. And next year in May is the 40th anniversary of the eruption of Mount St.

05:22:01

Helens, and he is going to be coming and doing creation apologetics from the perspective of one who knows the

05:22:08

Mount St. Helens event, and it will be basically a little more than a week after the 40th anniversary of the eruption of Mount St.

05:22:14

Helens. So that's what we have on the docket for the next year. Thank you again to Jason.

05:22:19

Give a round of applause, everyone. Thank you very much. Much appreciated. Thank you. All right,

05:22:28

I'll close in prayer, and then I'll have one final announcement before we are dismissed. Let's bow in prayer.

05:22:34

Father, we are so grateful for this day, these two days that we've been able to share together, the fellowship that we have enjoyed, the instruction, the equipping, and the edifying and encouragement, and even getting a glimpse into your mind as infinite and immense and glorious as it is.

05:22:50

We thank you for encouraging us in your word and in the truth, and we pray that your blessing might rest upon us as we leave this place.

05:22:56

Keep us safe in our travels, and we pray that we might be able to use the things that we have learned here in a way to defend and articulate the faith that has been once for all delivered to the saints, the faith that we are to defend and give an answer for and to present to a lost and dying world.

05:23:12

Make us ready and able servants to do that work that you may be glorified in and through us. We thank you again for your goodness and for those who have helped make this possible.