Jason Lisle on Apologetics and Science, Honesty in Textual Criticism, More Reformation History

And greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. Yes, we were on at this time yesterday. No, it's not going to be a daily thing, but some people think we should do that. But really wouldn't work all that well.

We've got a lot to get to today. I can't see anything on the screen. So I'm not sure where I'm supposed to be looking or anything like that. So I'm going to assume we're over here for now. Hey, there we go.

It's the chewing gum and bailing wire thing. But since we do have so much to get to, I want to start off by immediately bringing on our guest today. Well, I guess it's been a week and a half now already.

I was in Dallas, Texas, and I spoke at a conference with a number of folks. Phil Johnson was there, for example, and I think Todd Friel was there. I'm not always 100 certain that I'm in the same room with Todd Friel.

He moves so quickly. It's sort of that quantum thing. Maybe our guests could explain some of that to me a little bit later on. But also one of those speaking was Dr. Jason Lyle. And Dr. Lyle is, well, let's go ahead and bring Dr. Lyle on, let him explain that himself.

Let's.

Make sure that Skype is working. And Dr. Lyle, are you with us? And so let's talk a little bit.

About the Biblical Science Institute, brand new. And people might say, well, isn't it a little bit strange? Aren't you guys competitors? And no, I don't consider ourselves competitors. I think God's people will support what God puts upon their hearts.

So I don't have any problems with that. How long has Biblical Science Institute been around? We started mid-July, so it's very new ministry. Very new, yes. And I'm just going to tell everybody, I think I was one of the first five people to sign up to support Dr. Lyle, I believe in what he's doing.

Now, obviously, you've written before, so you're going to be making that material available through the Biblical Science Institute, but you also are doing more writing. And you have a book, I've pre-ordered it, called Keeping Faith in an Age of Reason.

Now, I do have to ask the question, what's with the headless guy at the bow tie? This concerned me a little bit because I'm fairly known for wearing bow ties, but there's someone else that wears bow ties too.

So is there a double entendre here? I'm a little concerned,.

Exactly what... Well, our publisher, New Leaf Publishing Group, they graciously agreed to publish the book, and they picked the cover, but I liked it. And it did remind me of a certain engineer who goes around speaking.

Well, he's not a scientist, but he plays one on TV, and he claims that the Bible can't be trusted because millions of years of evolution. It looked a little bit like that guy, and I thought that might make a good cover.

Except you can see the stars directly through where the cranium is supposed to be.

Yeah, he's literally lost his head in this book.

Yes, I see that. Well, that's not what the book's about though. Now, how long is the book?

Oh, I forget the number of pages. It's not super long though. Well, let's see. In Word, it's 135 pages, but I don't know how that translates.

That's what I wondered, because when I looked on... I think I looked... I looked someplace, it says something like 400 pages or something. I'm like, oh my goodness, that thing is a tome. But then when I looked at it, it's like, no, not quite that big.

So, yeah, all right. So, tell us a little bit about it. I mean, what prompted you to write it? Why would people.

Want to be looking and getting it? Yes. Years ago, there was a popular meme that had been circulating on the internet, and it was 439 contradictions in the Bible. And atheists would just, you know, they slap this on their page and they're, see, therefore, you know, I'm done.

You're refuted, sir. And I thought, you know, I'm going to go through those and see, are there really any contradictions in the Bible? Now, I know as a presuppositionalist, they're not going to be, but nonetheless, some of those deserve to be answered.

And so what I thought I'd do is go through each one of those. Now, it turned out a lot of them were duplicates. Some of them were just dumb duplicates where they'd repeated the very question. Some of them were like 17 of the same category of question.

So it turned out to be about 420 claims that the Bible has contradictions. And I thought, I'm just going to go through and see, are any of these, if you were, I mean, even if you weren't coming at it from a distinctly Christian perspective, would a person who's trying to be reasonable and giving the text the benefit of the doubt, would he or she conclude that any of these are legitimate contradiction?

I don't think he would. I mean, when you study these in their proper context and you read them carefully, you're going to find that the Bible really is fully self-consistent. And so that list has now been.

Refuted, I would say. Well, good. Obviously, you're familiar with, in fact, I've got a large tome back here in the background, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties by Archer. There have been books, but almost all of those were written before the internet and before Facebook memes and all the rest of that stuff.

And unfortunately, every generation has to keep dealing with these things. I remember the first people, well, probably, maybe when I was nine and I was arguing the existence of God with some guys at my mom's work.

She worked at a print shop. I remember that very clearly, but maybe they had brought up something like that, but I don't remember that far back. But the first people I can remember as an adult that were throwing contradictions out at me were Mormon missionaries.

And so I included a number of examples such as the Acts 9, Acts 22 alleged contradiction, did Paul hear the voice, did Paul not hear the voice, etc., etc., etc. And so that's obviously been something we've had to deal with for a long, long time.

And it's interesting to me, many of the leading apologists today won't even touch that subject with a 10-foot pole. I mean, William Lane Craig will not even wander into the field of dealing with the alleged consistency of Scripture.

He actually basically says, you know, there's things that, there are contradictions. There are apologists who will actually say that. So you're a little bit out of sort of the mainstream in seeking to address these things, because it sounds like you have a presupposition, I'm not using that term in any sneaky sense, that harmonizing the Word of God, not in an artificial sense, not in a simplistic sense, not in what you see sometimes in some books, but in a meaningful sense, allowing it to speak for itself, is how we should start.

And being, as I teach in a lot of seminaries, I hope you realize that you and I are a little bit on the weird side, if we start from that perspective.

Yeah, and that's one of the things that characterizes this new ministry that I've started, the Biblical Science Institute. It's distinctly presuppositional in its approach, which means I take the Bible to be the ultimate standard for all truth claims.

I mean, it is the ultimate standard. And so, and I don't deny that. People say, well, you're biased. Well, everybody's got a bias. The question is, which bias is the best bias with which to be biased?

That's the issue. And I have a bias that allows me to interpret data, it makes science possible, it makes the law of non-contradiction meaningful, which is the very thing that people try to use against God, and yet that law is based on his character, the fact that God doesn't deny himself, the fact that God is sovereign over all truth, and so on.

And so when I went into this list, analyzing it, granted, I have a bias, but nonetheless, I also have a confidence that God's Word is true. And so I expect that when there's an apparent contradiction, I expect it's resolvable.

Maybe not by me, even. Maybe not, you know, without a lot of difficulty, although I got to tell you, very few of these were difficult. Very few of them did I have to go back to the original text and do a little bit of homework.

Most of the critics just hadn't read the text carefully. But I go in with the expectation that these are going to be resolvable at some point, because I am a presuppositionalist, because I have confidence in the Word of God, and that's something that I think when folks are not presuppositional in their approach, when they're evidential, there is a sort of fear that, well, maybe there really is one, maybe I better just.

Not touch the issue. Right. Yeah, definitely. Well, it's something I've been dealing with for many, many years, back long before the internet. Do you know what a BBS was? Oh yeah, bulletin board system.

You're geeky enough to have been doing that one, back with the TRS -80 and stuff like that, I would imagine. Yeah, okay. I know you're kind. Well, I was on BBSes back then, too, and this was back in the day when we ran into a group called Dennis McKinsey and an atheist that had a publication.

It wasn't even photocopied. It was, what was it? Mimeographed. Mimeographed. Remember those mimeographed machines? They'd smell really funny. He would send out a three-page printed on both sides thing on the errors in the Bible each month, and you could subscribe to it, called Biblical Errancy.

And I started subscribing to his stuff, and I started just taking apart his arguments and his alleged contradictions. And this was, you know, he's gone to the net, obviously, since then, but this was way back, probably mid -80s, somewhere around in that time frame.

And so yeah, this has been something that we've been involved with for a long time, and yet every generation needs to be doing it. So when's the book supposed to be out? It should be out, like, this week.

This week? Good, good. I am very much looking forward to that. Now, I have in my hand, I know you can't see me, but I can see you, I have in my hand another book that obviously goes along the same line that I want you to know, given the disorganization of my personal library, which is a fairly substantial library, took me about 40 minutes to locate where in the world I put it, called The Ultimate Proof of Creation, Resolving the Origins Debate.

And you look a little younger in this picture on the back here, Jason. I was. Have you noticed that? I hate to tell you, but there seems to be a little bit of change in the color of your hair up front there.

Have you.

Noticed that? Yeah, I'm slowly fossilizing over millions of years here as I decay.

Well, it's a dark background, so you sort of, you look, I don't know, it works real well. Anyways, so here you have a little bit longer work, 250 pages. But this is more, if someone looked at this as primarily a creation evolution type thing, that's not really the main focus, is it?

Right. And, you know, it's not that I was being deceptive, but at the same time, my goal in that book was to expose the presuppositional method to those who are creation scientists, because it is very powerful.

It is the way in which we should frame our arguments. I don't want to take away from any of the fine work that my creation scientists colleagues have done. There's, they've done some amazing stuff. I just wanted to give them sort of a package in which to, in which to present their evidence so that they're doing it in the right way.

And, you know, that basically was my goal, was to get the Bonson type thinking into the minds of creationists, because once you get that way of thinking down, it is very powerful, and you're going to have a confidence in God's word that you don't have if you're just relying on your understanding of evidence, because you never know all the evidence, and you don't ever know if your understanding of it's 100 and so on.

You become presuppositional, you have a humble boldness, humility because of who we are, but boldness because you know it's the word of God, and it's going to stand the test of time. And so that was really my goal.

And it is, I mean, the title is accurate. It is an ultimate proof of creation. It's just not the kind of proof that people are used to when they're dealing with creation versus evolution. It's a much more, it's a much more powerful argument than what people are used to.

And again, I'm not, I'm not against arguments from irreducible complexity or things like that. There's some good things there. But since those are based on science, which is inductive, and therefore rarely conclusive, I wanted to give a very powerful argument that shows you that you can know, for absolute certainty, you can know that there is an ultimate proof of creation.

Creation really is true and is.

What makes science possible. Yeah, very appreciative of that. And it seems like you've been fairly successful. I've happened to notice a real increase in interest in that form of argumentation in the creation science community as a whole.

I'm not going to, I don't want to force you to take all the credit for that. But it does seem that some, I've been very interested to see that some names that in the past I wouldn't have associated with that kind of perspective have gone, hey, this actually makes sense.

Of course, the thing is, that kind of argumentation, as I say all the time, our theology determines our apologetics, and not the other way around. And so, to use that form of argumentation requires an extremely high view of scripture, an extremely high view of God as creator, as sovereign over his universe, and everything that goes along with it, which may be why it wasn't as popular in times past.

And certainly, I'm afraid there are certain people whose view of scripture would really preclude their ability to consistently utilize that kind of argumentation, because they've accepted a almost secular view of where scripture came from, rather than scripture's own testimony to itself.

Maybe you're by the back door trying to challenge them to rethink where they may have gone wrong.

There? Yeah, and maybe not even so back door. I mean, I'm pretty upfront about it. I have, the one thing I didn't, the only thing I didn't mention in the book, you won't see presuppositional apologetics and the ultimate proof of creation.

I didn't use that particular phrase. I was worried there might be a knee-jerk reaction to that. People misunderstand it. And even just like yesterday, somebody posted on my Facebook page, and they said that presuppositional apologetics is you just state your belief, and that is so far from what the method is.

It's ridiculous. But I have seen a resurgence in the method. I'm very encouraged by that. I can tell the folks who have been thinking presuppositionally, when I look on Facebook and I see some of the interactions there with Christians dialoguing with atheists and creationists versus evolutionists, I can tell the ones who have been thinking and reading presupp, because they're winning the arguments.

They're, I mean, they destroy their opponent. There was somebody who posted on my Facebook page, I think this was a couple months ago, and it was a, there was a geology professor, PhD in geology, and he was challenging this this young lady.

She was 14, and she took him to task. She destroyed his argument, and she did it presuppositionally. And I mean, that really shows you the power of the method when you can take somebody who maybe doesn't have as much knowledge as the geology professor, but she knows her Bible.

She's standing on it. She's standing on the Word of God, and it was very enjoyable for me to see that. Not just, I mean, you know, not for the sake of winning arguments, but it's delightful to see people who are thinking scripturally, and they're able to reason.

They're able to win arguments the way that Jesus did in his earthly ministry. Jesus was not the sort of person you wanted to argue against, because he was very good at thinking through these issues and using the Bible as his ultimate standard, which I think is interesting, because he's God.

He can say, I'm God, and I said so, but he stands on the written word as his ultimate standard, and how can we as Christ followers do any less? Yeah, we definitely.

Need to follow our own Lord, who is the very definition of truth. So you've got the ultimate proof of creation. You've got Keeping Faith in an Age of Reason coming out hopefully this week. I now have in my hand a book called Taking Back Astronomy, The Heavens Declare Creation and Science Confirms It, and this is one of, I noticed that in the Stargazer's Guide, both are heavy books in the sense that they're full color on every page, and therefore you have to use glossy paper, and therefore if you toss this at somebody, you could be arrested for assault with a deadly weapon.

They are substantial works. Of course, this is a smaller work, and how would you describe this? Is this more of a, I don't know, how would you describe this? Obviously, you've got lots of space in between.

It's not meant to be some deep tome. Who's your audience with Taking Back Astronomy? Anyone who's interested in astronomy.

And wondering how do the discoveries that we find in space, how do those correlate with the Christian worldview? That's really the purpose of it. It is an apologetic book. It's meant to, it argues for the Christian worldview.

I think it does it in a presuppositional way, but nonetheless uses a lot of evidence and shows how the evidence lines up with God's Word, and it's divided into a number of subsections where you can see how in the past God's Word, when it spoke on astronomy, it was right, and today we'd have to agree that the world's spherical, something the Bible implies in a number of places, or various things, various things in Scripture.

And then today, well, there's some places where secular astronomers would disagree with the Bible, and yet we'd see when you really understand the evidence, it lines up with the Bible anyway. So there's just, there's no reason to doubt God's Word.

And it's just giving people a little bit of the evidence that they can use to have an intelligent conversation. I'm all for precept, but sometimes it is good to know a little bit of the actual science that you can go into, so people can say, well, you know, precept may work on paper, it's very philosophical, but when it comes down to the hard data, do you have answers there?

Well, yeah, we do. We have answers there, and it makes sense. It lines up with what the Bible teaches. It's a fun book, it's the kind of book, taking back astronomy, it's the kind of book you read it, and then you give it to your secular friend, and they read it,.

And you never know. It plants some seeds. Yeah, definitely, and it's a very attractive book, so it's something you can give to somebody as a gift, and I think it would get read. And it does mention the fact, and I did want to mention this, people may be asking, well, should we listen to this guy?

Well, there's this thing called a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Colorado, which I believe, if I recall correctly, is in that bastion of conservatism known as Boulder, yes? The People's Republic of Boulder, yes.

I mean, every time I either drive a car or ride a bike through Boulder, it automatically starts turning left. I have to fight it. It's almost like a spin. I'm not even sure how they've managed to do that, but I happen to go up to Boulder.

I've got a church there that I've been going to, I don't know, for almost 10 years now or so, there in Boulder. I've climbed up out of Left Hand Canyon up to Ward. Ward, did you ever go to Ward while you were there?

I've been there, yeah. Isn't that one of the weirdest little places time forgot? It is. I mean, if you go straight up Left Hand Canyon, there's this one place where there's a VW bug, and it's like only the top of it is buried next to the road.

How does that happen? The people there are really curmudgeonly, and they were doing pot long before it was legal in Colorado. They're really mad that everyone else is getting to do this now, and they don't want anybody to come in there, especially if you're wearing cotton spandex and you're on a bike.

They do not like you. Let me tell you something. It's almost like they growl. It's really weird. But yeah, Boulder, beautiful, beautiful place. What I started doing, I'll just tell you this real quickly.

What I started doing almost every Sunday after the Mount Evans Hill climb, I do the Mount Evans Hill climb. You've obviously been up to the top of Mount Evans, right? I have, yep. Highest paved road. Well, using the term paved of some places for that road is a little bit of a stretch, to be perfectly honest with you.

Every year, there is a race from Idaho Springs to the top of Mount Evans on bike. I've done that the last three years. If you can imagine what it's like to just go all out for just under three hours to 14 ,130 feet above sea level, then you know I'm even weirder than you thought that I was.

But going up there to the top of that particular mountain, some of the people in the church will go with us up there and we'll ride up to the top and take pictures. You're so high there, you can actually start seeing the curvature of the earth, which I'm not sure what the flat earthers do with that.

Why is it doing that? I don't know. Well, strange. Isn't it weird? Now, have you ever taken your telescope up there?

I have not on Mount Evans, but I have taken it up to Estes Park, and boy, wow. I would imagine. The higher you get up, and I didn't have my big one back then, but it was like an eight-inch telescope.

When you take it up on top of a mountain, you're almost in space at that point, and the sky is as dark as you can imagine. Unbelievable up there, a little past Estes up in the Rocky Mountain National Park.

That was a lot of fun. Sometimes, if I didn't want to drive quite as far, I'd just take it up to past Nederland. There's some places not too far away from Boulder where you want to get behind the first range of mountains so you can block the light pollution from Denver, because it does put out quite a bit.

We watched one of the delineated meteor storms back in 2000, and I forget what the year was. There's some great viewing around there. You've got great viewing at day, you've got great hiking. It was a fun place to live, and yeah, very liberal, but if you can put up with that, the beauty was outstanding.

I'm blaming you, but I'm trying to put together my Orion 6i reflector. It's all your fault. If I can actually make that work, then we'll think about the big one. Anyways, what I do on the Sunday after climbing Mount Evans is I teach at that church in Boulder, and then we climb up Flagstaff.

You know the amphitheater up there in Flagstaff? Yes, we've been there many times. Then we go past it all the way up, and the section past that hits 16 grade, which on a bike is first gear standing with your eyes bulging, and it's just ugly.

I don't know why I do it, but I've done it for three years in a row now, and it's just killer, but I love the area. The big question is how do you survive doing a PhD in astrophysics in a context like that?

Yeah, it may work to my advantage. I'm not a terribly social person, so I didn't interact a lot with a lot of the strange folks there in Boulder. It's sort of divided. Boulder has two groups of people, and they're very different.

You get the new age folks, and then you get the academic elites, and neither of them particularly like Christians, I've noticed. Nonetheless, I was able to find a good church in the area. I found a few Christians there.

You get 25 ,000 students when I was there. You're going to find a few that are solid. The thing I've discovered too in places like that that are very liberal, when you do find some solid Christians there, they are really solid because they have to be.

It's a real bonding experience. It's not like here in Texas. Everybody and their neighbors are Christian, and they haven't even heard that there's not Christians. I'm exaggerating, but you take my point.

In a place like that, when you find a little bit of light in the darkness, it really shines. There were some really good folks there. That's the key, I think. You've got to stay in God's word. You've got to meet up with other Christians who are serious about studying God's word.

They're serious about Christianity. It's not just a label they stick on. It's a hobby they do on Sunday. It's their life, as it is for me. You find a few like that, and you make them your best friends.

That's the way to do it, in my view. That's what I'd recommend to students who are going to be part of a very secular education. Yeah, I'm not sure which church you went to. I.

Know that the church that I've been going to and speaking at regularly, South Boulder Bible Church, Eric Ellis is the pastor there. Good folks. God's got his people everywhere. We don't want to hammer on Boulder too much.

I was only slightly exaggerating when I said my bike turns to the.

Left when I'm riding through Boulder. It's like 90%. I was there when they had the election for.

Gore, and it was like 90 for Gore. It's very, very... Oh yeah, it is. One other book real quick. While looking for ultimate proof, I discovered that my purchase of this one in Dallas was a double purchase.

Lord's blessing to you there. I now have two signed copies of The Stargazer's Guide to the Night Sky. This is a much heavier... This is a big book. This must have taken you some serious time. Obviously, one of the things I need to be studying through greatly myself, because I want to be able to find some of the things that we found.

We went out. I mentioned it earlier. We went out and did some stargazing. Even though we weren't all that far out of Dallas, there are some places here in Arizona I could go that we could definitely get some really dark skies and clear viewing.

In fact, I rode my bike up to the top of Mount Lemon this past Saturday morning and touched the gate at the University of Arizona Sky Center up there. They have a number of scopes up on the top of Mount Lemon, though with all the light from Tucson, I'm not really sure how that works.

Maybe they're doing some other kind of study. I don't know. This book, Free Planisphere Inside. I noticed with my telescope, I got... What is it? What was the free program that came with that? Dark Sky?

Something Sky? I put it on my other Mac or something like that. There's a lot of stuff out there now. Someone reads your book and then you've recommended to me stuff from my iPhone, iPad. You were using something on your iPhone where you just held it up to the sky and it can match up with what's up there and stuff like that.

We live in a day where you can do more.

Than you've ever done before, right? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's amazing what we can do now. Especially with digital cameras. Back when I was young, you had to use film. Let me tell you, and I tried it. It was a horrible disaster trying to take a picture of something with film.

You really got to know what you're doing. Oh, yeah. With digital cameras, it's easy as pie. In fact, you can hold your iPhone up. They make little iPhone adapters. As long as it's fairly bright, you can take pictures with your iPhone and stuff.

You get these wonderful images. There are people that use a webcam. They'll record a time sequence, a movie animation of Saturn. What you can do is you can freeze out the scene. You can get really sharp images that way.

Deep sky cameras, I've got a deep sky camera. It's like $300 bucks. It'll take these wonderful images, color images of nebulae that just 20 years ago, that was hard to do. Now it's easy. Now the newer telescopes, they've got the computer controls, computer tracking, which makes it a lot easier to compensate for Earth's rotation.

Back in the old days, you had to line up your telescope. You had to do it every night. You had to line it up on Polaris and get it aligned in order to even use the clock drive. We've come a long way. What an exciting time that we live in where you can hold up your phone and it'll identify what you're looking at.

I think that's pretty neat.

That was pretty amazing. I'll just tell a personal story real quick here. We had seen Saturn. We got a really good shot of Saturn. In fact, you sort of indicated you went a little bit early on that. You normally hold that off a little bit later in the evening.

That was before the cop chased us around. Still don't know why he didn't like you parking on the grass. Anyway, we saw Saturn. You could tell I wanted to see if we could track down a galaxy, which we did.

We saw Andromeda. You seemed to indicate that given the focal length of your telescope, we were actually only seeing a part of Andromeda. It's actually bigger than the image we were seeing. We were sort of seeing the core at that particular point in time.

We had seen some other things. Then the last thing that we looked at, you said you wanted to show us a binary star. I'm like, that sort of reminds me of a couple Star Trek episodes at some point. I wonder which one.

How would the Enterprise circle just one of the two? Things like that going through my mind. It had been a long day. You lined up Albireo. Beta Cygni is another name that I've seen used, I think, for the blue star.

At least that's what I've seen in some of the stuff I've been looking up. I look inside this thing, and I am just stunned at what I see. From our perspective, mankind had always identified that as a single star until we had telescopes.

You're able to distinguish there's actually two stars there. The color contrast between the two was just stunning. It was just incredible. In fact, I think I showed on the dividing line when I got back, I showed maybe a Hubble image of it or somebody's image of it.

The contrast between the blue and it's just gold. I mean, it just looks absolutely gold. Maybe it's because of the blue being there gives it that hue. I don't know. It was absolutely beautiful through that telescope.

I've looked up some information since then. I've actually seen some argumentation. Maybe you comment. Some people are arguing that it's an optical double and not a physical double. Isn't that something we would be able to determine over time?

Yes, but it would take a long time to do it because those stars are far enough apart that if they're gravitationally bound, and I think more astronomers think they are bound than not, but if they're gravitationally bound and therefore genuine binary, the orbital period would be something like 100 ,000 years.

They haven't orbited even once since creation. It's hard to tell if they're genuinely orbiting together or if they're passing by each other. Their proximity to each other makes me think it's probably a genuine binary, and I think that's the majority position, but it's hard to know for certain with stars like.

That. I think it's 430 light years, I think, was what I was seeing. Have you ever looked into how.

The name developed? I have. Yeah, that's quite a story. It was a really weird story. I mean,.

Misunderstandings in Arabic and all the rest of this stuff. You go, well, as you had said out there, these stars, many of them, their names are so ancient and old that no one really has any serious idea of where in the world they came from.

They've been around forever. And so somebody in Channel just said that I'm such a nerd, and I'm like, you have no idea who I'm interviewing if you think I'm a nerd. Not even close. Come on, man. I'm a wannabe nerd in comparison to Jason Lyle.

But anyway, seriously, when we came there, you just sort of out of the blue the first night said, hey, how about after the conference, I grab my telescope and we go out and do some stargazing. I'm like, oh, it never even crossed my mind.

It's like, cool. All right, let's see what we can do. And especially seeing El Barrio, I don't know why it was so incredibly captivating. I mean, I only saw it for a matter of seconds, literally, because I wanted everybody else to get to see it too.

But it was just, I don't know, maybe it's just one of those things where mankind obviously has been staring up at the skies since creation itself. And for most of creation had better views than those of us that live in light polluted cities like I do, unfortunately, in Phoenix, which is, it's even worse than Denver or Boulder, anything like that, because it's so dusty.

So it's just, I don't even know how to measure it. But we had some wind over the weekend. And man, Phoenix was horrible. My car was covered in dust the next morning. So I can't imagine how you could have seen almost anything the night before with all that stuff hanging in the air.

But mankind has been looking up there and looking at these things. And it was not until, I don't know when, that someone, because of the invention of a telescope, was able to go, hey, wait a minute, we've always thought...

Now, El Barrio is part of which constellation? Cygnus. Okay, Cygnus. So they had identified it as a star, just seen it as a star all along. And then all of a sudden, oh, it's actually two stars and very different stars as far as their beauty and everything else goes.

And I don't know what it was, but it just really, really struck me that we live in a day where not only as we're looking outward, you know, I love that video that you have. And by the way, folks, if you haven't seen this, have you redone or are.

You going to be redoing the fractal video? I'm going to be redoing it. I've done, I have generated some new animations with a better color scheme. It'll look sweet. It'll look really nice.

Okay. All right. So, because I've sent a lot of people to your fractal video, but you and Bill Gates were in Mortal Kombat during that particular, you know what I mean? You even said, you even said that Bill Gates loads anti-creationist viruses on, you even said that during the, because you were fighting with that thing to get it to work.

So, despite that, it was wonderfully fascinating. And if you, if people don't know what we're talking about, go look up Jason Lyle fractals on YouTube. Most, some people, not a lot of people know, but, but some people know that I've been doing fractal art since the nineties, since there was a, have you ever seen a DOS?

I think it was a DOS based program called Sterling. And it really produced some gorgeous images. It really, really did. And so I, the fractal bug bit me a long, long time ago. And so when, when I saw your, your video, it's like, oh yeah, I've wanted to write on this forever because this is, this is something that is in the very nature of mathematics itself.