Engineering Aspects of Apologetics

Creation Fellowship

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Okay, I'm Terry Kammerzell here on behalf of Creation Fellowship Santee. We love to learn about our creator

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God and we believe the Bible, when read properly, rules out the possibility of millions or billions of years.

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We used to meet for 10 years at the Creation and Earth History Museum in Santee, California. Tonight we welcome our 90th new speaker since meeting online.

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Our mission statement is 1 Peter 3 .15. Always be ready to give an answer for the hope that lies within you.

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You can see a list of our upcoming speakers by visiting tinyurl .com

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forward slash CF Santee. That's C like Creation, F like Fellowship and Santee is spelled

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S -A -N -T -E -E. Steve Hendrickson is a somewhat new friend of our ministry and tonight we're happy to have him speak for us.

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Steve's teaching has spanned from 1977, teaching electronic systems repair in the

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U .S. Air Force to 2011, teaching thermodynamics at the University of Virginia.

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His apologetics teaching began in 1993 and continues to the present. You can even find some of his articles in the

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Creation Club magazine. And with that, Steve, I'm happy to turn it over to you. Okay, well, thank you and welcome to everyone.

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I'm going to go ahead and share the screen and put my slides up. Okay, and I'm going to go and I'm going to turn off my speaker,

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I think. Your camera, you mean? Yes. And we can see your presentation, but it's not as the slideshow right now.

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Okay, so it will be when I hit this, I think. There we go.

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Okay, and hopefully you can get rid of the other stuff. But anyway, I went ahead and used Terry's graphic.

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I really liked it. I think she did a good job on that and I appreciate it. So the first thing

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I'm going to talk about is engineering. Is there evidence for God? And we can look at that in terms of the simple facts of design and things we find in nature.

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And there happens to be a very good verse for that. My background is, since I retired from the

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Air Force, has been electrical systems design. And that theater you see in the left -hand side is one of my designs.

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It was in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and we did a performing arts theater there, which is a pretty complicated electrical system design.

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And so I need to get rid of this. So is there a way to slide it off the edge?

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I guess there is. Okay, good. So anyway, I've done, since retiring from the

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Air Force, I've done designs a lot of the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, seminaries in the areas, commercial properties, large churches, large high schools, and mostly three -phase power, 480 volts, three -phase systems typically, and lighting systems, and of course, fire alarm systems for life safety.

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The U .S. Air Force career spanned from 77 to 97.

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When I joined the Air Force, I enlisted, and I earned three Associates of Applied Science degrees from the

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Community College of the Air Force. And an Associate of Applied Science is probably better than an

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Associate's degree, simply because you need to know how to do the technician requirements for those.

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So I've always considered to be kind of the premier Associate's degree. And then

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I got, the Air Force sent me to Ohio State University, and I got a BSEE in 86.

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And then they sent me to the University of Washington in 1990, and I'd have an

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MSEE degree from there as well. My academic rank is currently Assistant Professor.

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I'm pretty much retired from that. And design electrical engineering, I've retired from that back in 20, excuse me, yeah, 2015 was when

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I retired from that. So anyway, I've been doing apologetics ever since. The Imperial Center was one of my first big jobs that I did, and the theater is actually in the center background there where we did the

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Performing Arts Theater, but that was one of the first ones I started on. So what is engineering about?

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It's about design, and of course, God did it first. Design, just remember this, it's plan and purpose.

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You have to have some purpose that you need, and then you have to have a plan to do it. And that's really what it is.

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And God gets the glory when you actually look at real designs, and real designs,

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I would call when you look at life systems and things like that. So what is the design verse?

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Well, this is very well known by most people on this website, at least, since the creation of the world,

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God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

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So you can look at what God has done in nature, whether it be a blade of grass, or a beetle, or maybe a lizard crawling across the ceiling in your house, or something like that.

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You can see those things that are there, and those are real designs. If you understand a cell, a cell is a factory, and it has a lot of stuff going on there.

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And that is all part of God's system. And so when people tell me, hey, do you have any evidence for God?

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I'll just say, well, if you said that to God, and he said you have no excuse, how would you answer that?

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I like to sort of challenge them a little bit. Well, if he did show me this and that.

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No, no, no. The simple fact is, is that God has given us a ton of evidence, and I'm going to explain that in here.

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So this is what I call the design verse, but I also call it the biomimetric, biomimetics verse, which simply means mimicking nature and mimicking what we see that is out there.

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Biology, molecular biology is mimicked in many respects.

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And so it's also, I call it the engineering verse and the biomimetics verse.

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So what are some, these are the five points I'm going to make. And you would think with five points, it ought to be pretty easy to do a slide quickly, a slideshow quickly,

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I should say. But there's a lot to it. We're going to look at atheist blind spots and what real science is.

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We're going to look at important terms like specified complexity, irreducible complexity, information, and reductionism, and make sure you understand those terms.

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The design argument is called the teleological argument. Matter, energy, and information is next.

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We're going to make sure we have an understanding of those and how they relate. Also, what is a reasonable faith?

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So I will ask that, you know, my faith is based on the Bible, based on Christianity and the fact that Jesus Christ imputed his righteousness to me.

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And that's the only way I can go to heaven. Unfortunately, he took the punishment for my sins. So that's where I stand.

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All right. So the atheist blind spot, in many cases, the atheist is like a person wearing blinders, but that's usually for a horse, but you can have this blind spot that's out there.

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And let me show you a few. And first of all, think about it. If the Bible is true and science is the search for truth, which it is, then we would expect the

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Bible and science to be in harmony. So the Bible is called the anvil of God. It's sustained many hammer attacks over the years.

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And the nice thing about engineering is engineering is nothing more than applied science.

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And science needs to be based on empirical data. So we'll talk about that. Well, here's

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Richard Dawkins standing on a bus. There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

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Well, that was in 2009 when he made that statement and that article came out.

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And the simple fact is, is that he's an opponent, certainly of the

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Bible and of people who believe in the Bible, especially in the science community. And he says, the virgin birth, the resurrection, the raising of Lazarus, even the

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Old Testament miracles, all are freely used for religious propaganda. And they are very effective with an audience of unsophisticates and children.

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Okay, I would say, I would challenge him a little bit. I've seen him in person. He's been to the

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University of Virginia. And I happen to know a lot of professional engineers. And I've seen and read that many

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Nobel Prize winners are Christians. So that doesn't seem to reflect well with what he's saying here.

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So, you know, Plato said, no one is more hated than he who speaks the truth. Well, the truth will always sound like hate to those who hate the truth.

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And thy word is true from the beginning. And every one of thy righteous judgments endureth forever.

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Psalm 119, 160. It's a good verse to remember. I'll come back to that slide later. Also, are we supposed to trust science?

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Science News is a weekly magazine that used to come out, and I used to subscribe to it. Do I trust one but not the other?

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Well, actually, the Bible has many more reasons, good reasons. And you guys have people every week or so, or, you know, you do take some breaks in between.

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But these people come along, Jason Lyle, Dr. Anthony Silvestro, and Mike Riddle, and others.

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They come along and they tell us very good evidences for biblical truth, and they strengthen our faith.

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Iron does sharpen iron in this respect, that we get strengthened when we hear that.

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And when somebody opposes something, that can also sharpen the iron when we get together.

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So, good biblical truth there. All right, now, can we reconcile science and the

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Bible? Well, Stephen Jay Gould said it was non -overlapping magisteria. But what we should do is we should use good logical arguments.

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It's not a blind faith. We do have the same evidence everyone else sees that's out there.

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So, let me present this to you. I'm going to take the left in the top middle second, because it's more difficult.

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The first two are pretty easy. And I'm going to actually bring my magnifier up here, and I'm going to come over here and fit

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Carl Sagan's quote in here. And we'll come back to this quote. But Carl Sagan said, the cosmos is all that is, or was, or ever was, or ever will be.

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He did say that. It's in a book I have in my library. And if people know my library, they will say

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I have a pretty big library. All right. So, if every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again.

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There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense.

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If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true. And someone would find a way to figure it all out again.

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These are two examples right here of what I call hand -waving.

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They have a hidden assumption. Their hidden assumption is there is no God. And so, therefore, they're just hand -waving.

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They're not accepting a maxim I say that things happened either naturally or not.

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And believe it or not, you can get people to agree with you on that. Now, if you're going to say it didn't, it happened naturally, then the evolutionary paradigm, the teaching there does make sense.

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But if God exists, it changes everything. And it certainly can make Penn Jillette incorrect on his science quote here.

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But now let's go to a more difficult case. Oh, by the way, I would just say,

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Jesus replied, your mistake is that you don't know the scriptures and you don't know the power of God.

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That's the problem with Sagan and Jillette. All right, so this one's better.

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I contend we are both atheists. I just believe in one less God than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all other possible gods, you will understand why

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I dismiss yours. I knew that when I was working with the idea clubs and other things at the

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University of Virginia, I was going to have some smart students who wanted to use this type of an argument with me.

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And I said, I had to think about it. How do I answer this argument? And I came up with what

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I think is the best solution. I've seen other solutions, but I like mine the best. And so anyway, here's how

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I handle that argument. This is a category error on the part of Stephen Roberts and those who would use his argument.

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It's a category error. Here's the problem. If you have, this is not a category of true or false gods by number.

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The category is truth about no God versus a true God and what those attributes would be.

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For example, if I have a counterfeit $20 bill, how many counterfeits do I have? I may have a thousand counterfeit $20 bills, but if I understand and recognize all of the important characteristics of the proper $20 bill, then

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I know what the truth is in this. And so really it's the category of a true $20 bill versus a non -true $20 bill.

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And so that's the category. It's not this true or false gods number. It's really the truth being the category.

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I prefer to use that argument and I have used that argument and been able to with good.

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I mean, it's never failed as far as I can tell with those people who bring it up. As a matter of fact, I've had compliments of people saying, yeah, that's not a bad argument.

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Great. Good to know. Another thing I want to point out is that we have a distorted understanding of science.

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For example, Freeman Dyson said, the public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths.

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In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.

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That's true. Charles Bennett, who was professor of astronomy, physics and astronomy at John Hopkins University and a principal investigator for NASA, wrote the following letter to the editors of Science.

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This is in 2011. Science is an important magazine. He said, the title of the six main news of the week story, at long last,

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Gravity Probe B satellite proves Einstein right. Page 649 made me cringe.

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I find myself frequently repeating to students and the public that science doesn't prove theories.

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Scientific measurements can only disprove theories or be consistent with them. Any theory that is consistent with measurements could be disproved by a future measurement.

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I wouldn't have expected Science magazine of all places to say a theory was proved.

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The editors responded, Bennett is completely correct. It's an important conceptual point and we blew it.

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I love that. You know what? The closest thing to we have to a truth or a proof or a fact in science is a law of science.

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For example, in electrical engineering, there's Ohm's law. There's Kirchhoff's laws for current and voltage.

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And in thermodynamics, which is more like a mechanical engineering science, although electrical engineers get into it when it comes to dissipating heat in electronic circuits and stuff like that.

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The second law of thermodynamics is an excellent one, as well as the first law. And those are things that we have observed that have never been abrogated or found wrong.

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So that's an important slide. Here is one argument I love to use. And by the way, you don't have to have a sheet of paper, but you can have, say, a envelope or a napkin, even if you're talking to someone at a restaurant, having coffee with them.

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But anyway, I'd like to point out and lay out the piece of paper there. You could do this at the University of Virginia easily enough.

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I say, OK, all of the collective knowledge in the universe is represented by this piece of paper.

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So ask, how much do I know? How much do you know? And hand them a pencil and point out with good reason that we can only know a minuscule amount of it.

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OK, by that, I mean, you could ask some questions like, well, you know, on Uranus, there's moons around Uranus.

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What do we know about those moons? Do we know what the weather was there yesterday or right now? There's just all sorts of ways you can explain it.

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And you can go right into the deep blue sea. And you can go into the cell. And you can go into a whole bunch of other parts.

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And pretty soon they'll understand. They're just going to put a little dot on that piece of paper.

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So we really don't know. And here's the thing. There's an awful lot you don't know. So much of what you don't know may provide all the proofs and things that you really need to believe and that sort of thing.

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So get them to open their minds. And that's what I try to do with that. All right, I'm going to give you a practical example.

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And this is one I've been using since the mid -90s. I became a Christian in 93. But one thing

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I had trouble with is my first major back in 1974 was astrophysics.

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It was before I became an electrical engineer and before I was in the Air Force. And when

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I became a Christian in 93, it was kind of like, wow, don't we know the Andromeda galaxy and stuff like that are millions of light years away?

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In other words, we're seeing the light from them from a long time ago. But I'm reading these things in the Bible about God stretches out the heavens.

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For example, Job 9 .8 stretched out the heavens. Psalm 104 .2.

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Go on down to, you know, number 8. The Lord your maker who stretched out the heavens. Isaiah 51 or 11.

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Thus declares the Lord who stretched out the heavens. We have that all over the place. That's very interesting.

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And I said, well, when did we measure the speed of light? And so I went back and I studied some of the old measurements. And I found this guy named

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Leon Foucault, who was known for the Foucault pendulum. And one of the things he did was an experiment that has been repeated many, many times over the years.

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But it was a good way of measuring the speed of light. I found that was in 1862. And here's what he got.

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He ended up right here. And I'm going to bring that up a little bit right here.

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He goes, okay, what was his measurement? He would determine it to be 298 ,000 kilometers per second.

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The accepted speed of light is 299 ,792 ,458 meters per second.

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So he was very close. And that has been repeated. That experiment's been repeated. So it's worthwhile.

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Therefore, since we have those things, I went ahead and did what an engineer does. An engineer puts a graph on a whiteboard.

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He goes, okay, I have the speed of light on the y -axis, on the x -axis. I have years. I start from today. I go back to 1862.

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And the year is now 2024. So there I have actual data back to Leon Foucault on a measurement.

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And it seems to be a constant speed of light. I would agree. However, how old is the universe?

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At the time I was doing this calculation, the universe was around 13 .8 billion years old. And I said, okay,

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I'm an engineer. It's easy to make a calculation. How big is that orange line there, that backward extrapolation?

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Well, it turns out to be 138 million feet beyond the whiteboard.

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In other words, if I had 100 years equaling one foot on my whiteboard, it would be 26 ,136 miles of a backwards extrapolation.

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And I'm going to tell you, an engineer doesn't like it much when you go about more than 10 % beyond the data, the known data.

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So when I saw that, I said, you know what? We are making a huge, massive assumption here.

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And the massive assumption is very simple. We are saying the speed of light has been a constant.

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And yet we're dealing with an almighty, all -powerful, omniscient God. There is no reason in the world he couldn't have stretched out the heavens and used whatever speed of light he needed.

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It could have been infinite. We just don't know what it could have been. And it could have changed, really, our understanding of cosmology.

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And the James Webb Telescope nowadays is changing our understanding of cosmology as we look at it.

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However, the speed of light being a constant, we can't guarantee that. We only have data that goes back to 1862 as an accurate measurement.

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So get this. If, oops, sorry, if you can change the speed of light in a laboratory, and you can, if you can change radioactive decay rates in a laboratory, and I've talked to nuclear engineers, and they say, yeah, we can do that, then why can't

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God do that too? And I would say, I'm no longer worried about the speed of light. I'm really no longer worried about radiometric dating.

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I just know that there are massive assumptions involved. And I mean, massive assumptions involved.

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All right. Also, when we study light, that is the electromagnetic spectrum. I went to Ohio State University, and they used to brag.

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And they used to say, you know what? Our university teaches master's level electromagnetics to all of our undergraduate students in electrical engineering.

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Aren't we good? And I said, well, would that mean, if I went to one of the professors, does that mean we understand everything we need to know about electromagnetics?

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And they go, oh, no, no. There's all sorts of things we don't understand. And they would also say, but, and I might say, well, how about the speed of light?

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Do we understand that as a constant? Oh, yeah, we accept that. Well, they don't really have any reason for accepting that, other than that's their particular choice to do that.

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The simple fact is, is we don't know that much about light. And I recently posted on Facebook an example of ball lightning, which is something we don't understand.

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But we also don't understand the power of lightning. And as a design electrical engineer,

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I used to have design lightning protection systems for buildings. But we know that lightning has tremendous power.

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And it can kill a bunch of cattle. Farmers need to know about thunderstorms in the area. And they need to keep their cows away from trees.

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Because the tree stands out there like a lightning rod. And then it sets up voltage gradients on the ground, which stops the heart of the cows.

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And the cows all die in lots. I used to have pictures and slides of this when

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I would teach lightning protection in the Air Force Institute of Technology classes. So anyway, that was good.

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Also, I met this guy named Jason Lyle. He's one of my favorite people. Certainly a great astronomer, apologist for the faith.

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He came and stayed at my house one night when I got him to speak in a nearby church. And I had first met him in 2004 at Liberty University.

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And he and Danny Faulkner were together sort of backstage.

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And I got a chance to go in and talk to him for about 45 minutes or so. You know, I don't know that Danny would recognize me.

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You know, Danny and I ought to be good friends. Because he and I are the same age. And it'd be fun to get to know him better.

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But I've only spoken to Danny in person that one time. And I've spoken a few times on the phone to him.

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But I don't know. But during that time, I was able to tell them my story about... Steve? Yes. Danny's going to speak for us very soon.

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So... Yes, next week, right? Yeah. Is it next week? Yeah. Okay. Well, I'll be here. Okay. Okay.

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All right. So anyway, I was getting ready to take him to the airport. I have this picture taken.

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Thank you. All right. Now, we're going to leave from here.

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I took him to the airport. He got there fine. He's still... You guys know he's out there doing a good job. All right.

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Now, important terms. Specified complexity, irreducible complexity, information, and reductionism.

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We need to understand those terms. And I have a really good way of explaining them, I think.

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As far as everybody will understand. So I'm going to talk about specified complexity here.

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Common pebbles in a stream bed. Well, how about if you find those in a stream bed? No? What's the difference?

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Well, here's the difference. I love to use this slide. I like to do like a little engineering analysis of an arrowhead.

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The arrowhead compared to pebbles in a stream bed. Note that both are complex. But the arrowhead has specified complexity.

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Let me just bring that up a little. And there we go.

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Is that going to work? Okay. Both have specified complexity.

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Both are complex. Arrowhead has specified complexity. It displays what we call design, plan, and purpose.

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One, it's tapered to a point to quickly pierce animal skin with high point pressure. Two, it's beveled on the sides to deeply cut into the animal.

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Three, the flat shape is there to enhance penetration into the animal. Four, the base is shaped to enable attachment to an arrow shaft and to resist dislodging from the animal after penetration.

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That would be an engineering analysis of it. The arrowhead is designed, hence the plan and purpose, that is clearly seen when compared to a complex pebble or rock.

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So that was a slide I made up. Huh, must have been 1995 or so when I first made this slide up.

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And here we go. We have common clouds, although the one on the upper right might be a little worrisome if you see it.

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But those are common clouds formations. Nothing unusual there. But if I see that, I have specified complexity in that.

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As a matter of fact, I have more than that. I have information coming from that as well. Okay. How about this?

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We have a common rock formation, well known in areas of the western states. But is it hiding something?

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Well, it is once you have work and energy put into it. You have the face of this guy.

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Well, Crazy Horse Monument is where you see that in South Dakota, I think it is.

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Devil's Tower. That was used in movies and things like that. It's a very popular natural thing, we understand.

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But if you have a creationist engineer versus, or geological engineer versus other geological engineer, you might have some severe disagreements in how it was formed.

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Here we have a non -natural formation. This is not from wind and weather erosion, of course.

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Mount Rushmore faces no way. All right. In Virginia, that's where I was, central

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Virginia, a natural bridge. Virginia is very common. This is a common thing to go see.

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And you can see how small the people are there. But it's kind of a fun one to go see. I've been there.

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Pretty neat. But Monticello, our electrical firm did a lot of work at Monticello and stuff like that.

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And that's Thomas Jefferson's home. And it was a very nice structure and stuff.

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And you could understand his European influence and that sort of thing when you saw it. That is not natural.

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That is something that's man -made. And by the way, we're doing a lot of work there because it's falling apart and breaking down.

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And that's why we have to do that. Here we have a great monument to Noah's Flood.

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It's a global event. That's what the Bible tells us. And we have a great monument to a recent volcano eruption, a local event from Mount St.

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Helens. And there's a whole different talk you can do on this. So those are great reasons to understand what we see in terms of figuring out where specified complexity and that sort of thing takes place.

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OK, next. Michael Behe uses this as an example. That is a mousetrap.

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OK, kind of a little joke. But anyway, the mousetrap system has several irreducibly complex requirements.

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It has a platform, a catch, a holding bar. If you take any one of these pieces away from it, it will not work.

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And so therefore, you don't have what you need. That is called irreducible complexity.

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And that's from Professor Michael Behe. OK, so he did

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Darwin's Black Box. He talked about all sorts of interesting things, including self -repairing mechanisms, such as blood clotting and stuff like that.

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But he also talked about this little thing called a bacterial flagellum motor. It's very important.

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It was a little outboard motor with all the mechanical components and control system needed to move in position as required and an energy system and means of reproduction so more can be made.

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That was all part of the design in our DNA. Perhaps one of the most interesting ones to me, by the way, that motor and this motor from an electrical engineering standpoint, we're looking at microbiology or molecular biology,

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I should say. And we're seeing literally design, a very nice design. The ATP synthase, it's an astounding nanomotor.

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About 40 quadrillion of these are in us. And the reason we say 40 quadrillion is because the estimate of cells in a human being is somewhere between 30 and 100 trillion cells in a human being.

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And there's thousands of these motors in each cell. So therefore, it goes up by another magnitude into the quadrillions.

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And so, on average, an adult human body can produce and consume its own body weight in ATP each day.

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That's amazing. ATP synthase produces adenosine triphosphate,

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ATP, which is the primary energy currency of the cell. Without them, we die.

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Every cell, everything action that takes place in the cell requires energy. And this is what produces the energy packets we need.

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And if you weigh 150 pounds, it could be 150 pounds your body produces in a day. So it's an amazing machine, and it better work or you're going to die.

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So it's a great one to use. I've seen this used in arguments, I would say debates more or less between atheists and maybe

31:34

Dr. James Wyatt or somebody like that. He's used the ATP synthase as that. It's a great piece, a great unit to argue with.

31:44

Okay. Reductionist thinking. This is an important point. Many quotes today show reductionism.

31:51

And physicist Steven Weinberg and astronomer

31:56

Margaret Gellar, I believe they both have died by now. But anyway, the question was, why should it...

32:05

This is what Margaret Gellar said. Why should it, the universe, be meaningful? What kind of meaning?

32:11

It is simply a physical system. Where is its significance?

32:17

That was stated by Margaret Gellar. She's missing the point. And this is how Dr. Werner Gitt talks about it.

32:24

Weinberg and Gellar are like physicists who evaluate a Bach cantata or violin recital only according to acoustical principles.

32:35

Hmm, they're missing the point. There's a very good thing that I had read about that I went ahead and put into a slide.

32:44

It was the scientist and the scout. And so the scientist is the guy who is very precise in his measurements.

32:50

And the scout, he's out there learning about new things to use. So here's the message.

32:57

One warm summer evening, two people walk along the beach, listening to the whisperings of the lapping ripples.

33:04

And watching the star -filled sky. Neither is aware of the other. Suddenly a light flashes out at sea.

33:10

How do they respond? The first one, a retired professor of physics, runs to his car where he keeps many physical instruments.

33:18

He measures the duration of the pulses with a stopwatch, determines the intensity of the light with a photometer, and analyzes its spectrum.

33:25

He also locates the position of the light against the starry background. On the way back home, he stops a couple of times to repeat the position settings.

33:35

Arriving home, his wife asks, you seem to be excited, dear. Did you see something unusual?

33:41

Yes, he replies. I observed something which I could identify as a heated tungsten wire enclosed inside a silicate container.

33:49

It radiated a regular set of flashes of visible light, having an intensity of 2500 lumens at a distance of about 850 meters from the coast.

34:01

The other person on the beach that evening is a young scout on his way home. When he arrives home, his mother asks the same question.

34:09

You seem to be excited, dear. Did you see something unusual? Yes, he replies.

34:14

I saw a boat signaling SOS messages. So I called the Coast Guard and they immediately dispatched a rescue boat.

34:21

Everybody on board was saved. Both saw the event, but only one saw the message.

34:29

And that's a good way to, you know, reckon. We have a tendency to reduce things in the wrong direction.

34:38

They're usually much more detailed than we take advantage of. And this is a very useful metaphor that has been used for years.

34:46

So it's commonly called the six blind men and the elephant. Okay. And you have to go back.

34:53

It's kind of like the blank sheet of paper argument I previously used. But here we have the six blind scientists and the elephant.

35:00

And so one's feeling the ear and it's a fan. The other's feeling the tusks, it's a spear.

35:06

And the trunk, it's a snake. And the leg, it's a tree. And the guys on the side, he said, it's a wall.

35:13

And the other guy says, it's a rope. There's a matter of perspective there, but they're all reducing it to only what they're seeing.

35:19

And that's the issue. So an American cartoonist named Sam Gross published a book featuring the blind men and the elephant.

35:27

And I always have to laugh at this on the cover. However, one blind man was feeling a pile of elephant dung.

35:34

The book was titled, An Elephant is Soft and Mushy. I always thought that was kind of funny.

35:41

Okay. The point is, we need to dig and work to get to the truth. We need to be aware of reductionism.

35:47

And that reductionism that can miss the meaning or the big picture of the scientific work.

35:53

And that's, I think, why many people miss God. So information, we're going to go to that now.

35:59

It is an entity. The three fundamental entities, matter, material, energy, which is material, information, which is immaterial.

36:10

Dr. Gidd also adds a fourth. He calls it will, but we'll be fine just with the three. You need to have an account of origins for all of the entities.

36:21

That's the real reason you need to have them. So we'll talk a little bit more about this as we go, because we're going to have some other slides of Dr.

36:30

Werner Gidd. All right. So I'm sorry, design argument or the teleological argument as it's called.

36:37

So we have the professional society or the National Society of Professional Engineers, NSPE, and they have a code of ethics.

36:46

And because I taught Introduction to Engineering as one of my college courses, I had this book that talked about the engineer's creed.

36:55

And is there a statement in there about divine guidance? Well, that's amazing.

37:01

And by the way, we also have Sagan who wrote the movie Contact. That was an interesting movie.

37:06

And I've used that many times to point out to people that this is one area where you have to come in and understand that there is a search for truth that needs to be done.

37:18

And it's a difficult search. So that's what we're looking for. But here we have this engineer's creed, and it had this statement about divine guidance.

37:26

Well, here it is. This was the engineer's creed that I taught on the right side here. And it said, as a professional engineer,

37:34

I dedicate my professional knowledge and skill to the advancement and betterment of human welfare.

37:39

I pledge to give the utmost of performance, to participate in none but honest enterprise, to live and work according to the laws of man and the highest standards of professional conduct, to place service before profit, the honor and standing of the profession before personal advantage, and the public welfare above all other considerations.

38:04

In humility and with need for divine guidance, I make this pledge.

38:09

And that was in June of 1954. And it is now 2024.

38:16

So 70 years ago was when that came out. And 1954 was the year I was born.

38:22

So they changed this in 2021. It now reads in a similar manner.

38:30

But when you get down to the bottom, it says, in humility, I make this pledge. So they took it out, which is sad in my mind.

38:39

But when I taught it, it was still in there. And it was in there until 2021. So the question

38:46

I would have is, why would the best and most experienced engineers adopt a statement like this?

38:52

Maybe these professional engineers see plan and purpose and design, specified irreducible complexity and information.

39:00

They see the design inference observed clearly in nature. All right.

39:06

So this is an interesting little graphic. And I can maybe bring that up.

39:14

I'm not going to bother. Anyway, if you look at the graphic on the left, you will see that the

39:19

Christian and Jewish people, 65 and 21, so that's about 86 % of them, believe a little over 85%, were

39:30

Nobel Prize laureates. They won the Nobel Prize. The atheist or agnostic was about 7%.

39:36

And then they had others that were in there. So here's the meme. Roughly 70 % of the

39:42

Nobel Prize winning scientists are Christians. But don't worry, atheists. They're all idiots. I kind of like the way that meme goes.

39:52

So let's go back to some information. Human genome has about 3 .3 billion base pairs.

39:59

I'm going to talk more about what happens to the brain's neurons in a few minutes. But the bottom line is, is we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

40:09

All right. Here's a historic picture, probably around 1953, 54, 55, of James Watson on the left and Francis Crick on the right.

40:20

We'll come back to that picture in a bit. Also, where do codes come from? Codes always come from intelligence, as far as we know.

40:28

The messages and codes come from intelligence not produced in any other way.

40:35

So that's where we come back into the movie Contact. Is DNA a code? Well, yes, you're going to find a lot of people who will claim that it's a code, including computer designers and Bill Gates and people like that.

40:48

But we need a design argument. So what is the teleological argument?

40:54

I do recommend gotquestions .org. It's a good place to go for some of these questions, and they have a lot of good articles.

41:01

Can intuition be trusted? What do we mean by design? There's a cosmological argument about the beginning of the universe, which is useful.

41:09

But the teleological argument is also called the anthropic principle, the design and purpose that is seen in the universe itself.

41:17

Here's an example of a real engineering project. I have replaced so many ceiling fans and lights and everything else.

41:28

I took that picture, but there's a way everything works together, and you have to connect everything to make it all work.

41:35

Well, when we were doing for our church, and if you ever come to our church, you'll see this little thing they call the bistro in our church.

41:44

That bistro had to be designed, and that was the last actual AutoCAD drawing that I worked on, and that was in 2017.

41:53

And basically, I set up a panel B1. I don't know if you can see my cursor, but the panel

41:59

B1 was right here, and I put that in there. It's a 100 amp panel, which ran all of the circuits necessary for that to operate.

42:08

And then we had design specifications. For example, we told them what kind of cables and conductors to bring, the wires, building wire descriptions, single conductor, insulated wire, copper, 600 volt insulation.

42:21

Gave the type that are there. Stranded conductors shall be used for number eight gauge and larger. Metal clad cable is permitted.

42:27

These are the design specifications and the design drawings as part of the plan necessary to have the purpose of having a bistro in that location, which was nothing really more than a storage room before.

42:41

So that's where design, plan, and purpose come into play. So what do you get?

42:48

You get these books that tell you how poorly the human body is designed and stuff like that.

42:54

And here's my face when an atheist who is berating the intelligent design of the human body then tells me what they have designed, because I often ask them that, which is not even close to a single cell.

43:05

So they're sitting here complaining about some design in the human body and stuff like that, or cancer, or all sorts of stuff.

43:13

The village atheist poo -pooing the design of the eye or something else. These are things that you just, you can't understand how incredibly complex the eye or other things really are.

43:27

We come back to theology. Systematic theology is the greatest of the sciences,

43:33

Dr. Louis Sperry -Chaffer said. And I have this book in my library where I can, where I took this quote from.

43:39

It's fallen upon evil days between the rejection and ridicule of it by the so -called progressives and the neglect and abridgment of it by the

43:47

Orthodox, it as a potent force or influence is approaching the point of extinction.

43:53

That's page V of this book. The beginning of the preface of the systematic theology by Dr.

44:00

Chaffer was, who founded Dallas Theological Seminary in 1924. So theology has long been called the queen of the sciences.

44:10

You can Google it. All right. Versus what is much more recent.

44:16

And the much more recent event than the Bible, of course, is the evolutionist

44:22

Bible, the Richard Dawkins Bible, stuff like that. What if Chaffer is right and Richard Dawkins Darwinism is wrong?

44:31

Well, so the Bible would be true. That would be what

44:36

Chaffer says. God is real. His authorship. Eternal life is real. Heaven is real. Hell is real.

44:42

Thus, the eternal consequences certainly do exist. The written words of truth.

44:48

We have the Old Testament, which Jesus spoke about all the time. He said the scriptures cannot be broken.

44:54

John 10, 35b. And we have inerrancy and a good way to make a case for the

45:00

Bible being true in its entirety for the Christian faith. We have some pictures of the younger

45:08

Darwin. So he was probably around 22 or so years old when that picture was done, or that painting was done.

45:17

And the 1870s. He was a tired man at that point. Darwin's natural selection talked about a selective advantage, slight and gradual variations, functional advantage, needs a working model that can be preserved and reproduced.

45:32

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed that could not possibly have performed by numerous successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.

45:41

That was what Michael Behe and others have looked at to state that these are problems.

45:47

We do have irreducible complexity and other things that break this down. The origin of the species.

45:53

Here's the whole title on the origin of the species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life.

46:02

It was really quite racist in many respects. He did some decent observation.

46:09

The Darwin's fissions were a good observation, but he made conclusions about them, which turned out to be not true because they can be cyclic and stuff like that.

46:19

Okay. Also, when you see something that comes from these types of things, which is good science, and you see something like this, which is nothing more than hand -waving.

46:29

Anytime you see these types of things set up, it's simply hand -waving. They're saying we came from apes.

46:35

Here's the progression and that sort of thing. Forget that. That's just hand -waving. That's not factual.

46:43

Reality is we have real science. It studies the universe and seeks the truth. It should admit its own limitations.

46:50

It should be transparent about assumptions. The speed of light is hardly transparent about the assumptions that's made about it.

46:56

Should have laws when evidence justifies. And we do have laws. Like I mentioned

47:01

Ohm's law, second law of thermon, that sort of thing. Problem of pride.

47:07

That is a universal problem. We have scientism, philosophical position that nothing is outside of that box.

47:14

What you see is what you get. Skewing the results negates real science. Christian reason.

47:20

We are to reason together. We are to test everything. We're to always be ready to give a reason for the hope that's in us.

47:27

We're to earnestly contend for the faith. And we're to demolish arguments against the knowledge of God.

47:33

Those are things that we should do as apologists for the faith. And we should articulate them as well as possible.

47:40

And we should be very logical in our manner. Maybe there's a message in the details.

47:45

Okay. Well, I made this slide right around 19, probably 93 or 4, because I remembered that when

47:54

I was studying electronics, we were looking at Russian aircraft and stuff like that, that we had captured back in the late 70s.

48:02

And we looked at their chips because we didn't think they had good chips and stuff. And we found out they copied our chips.

48:08

They not only copied them, they copied them with little pieces of artwork that were done by the engineers who designed them.

48:17

And those pieces of artwork, believe it or not, were unnecessary. They were just having fun.

48:25

But the Russians didn't know that. They thought maybe they were part of the heat sinking, stuff like that. So when they copied it, they copied the whole thing.

48:31

That was interesting. And there were these little pictures in the details, which were really literally unimportant other than, you know, the designer one.

48:39

This bird's for you. And the cheetah that they put in there. So it's kind of fun to realize that here they are copying things, worried about maybe thermodynamics and heat transfer.

48:49

And yet that's not why they were used at all.

48:54

They were just the artists having some fun in their design. Is intuition telling me something here?

49:02

Well, here's what we have. We have what the atheists claim is the god of the gaps.

49:08

And yet on the other side, we have the science of the gaps. So design, we have plan and purpose.

49:14

We have intelligence. We have order. We have complexity. Those complexity would be small probability, specified complexity, and irreducible complexity.

49:23

So what about information? Well, we're going to talk about that in a minute. But design.

49:30

This is one of the alternate textbooks that I used in my Intro to Engineering class.

49:36

And it had a section, of course, on design because it's so important to engineers. And design is to create, fashion, execute, or construct according to a plan.

49:45

Design can be defined as any activity whose objective is to meet a need.

49:50

So that's our understanding of what engineers do for design. Here's a

49:56

Webster's Dictionary view. To create, fashion, execute, or construct according to plan.

50:03

Devise, contrive, design a system for tracking inventory, or something like that. Here's what

50:09

William Dempsey had to say. He said, if intelligent design is a thoroughly apt phrase, the same cannot be said for the phrase natural selection.

50:19

The second word in this phrase, selection, is, of course, an acronym for choice.

50:25

Indeed, the L -E -C is selection. In selection is a variant of the

50:32

L -E -G that in the Latin, lego, means to choose or select. And that also appears as L -I -G in intelligence.

50:42

Natural selection is therefore an oxymoron. It attributes the power to choose, which properly belongs only to intelligent agents.

50:51

To natural causes, which inherently lack the power to choose. I thought that was a good argument by him.

50:58

There's also this Dictionary of Christianity and Science. Unfortunately, it's edited by Old Earther Viewpoints.

51:07

But it's got a lot of useful articles in it, including articles on information, irreducible complexity, reductionism, specified complexity, teleology, which is the design argument, and obviously a lot more.

51:21

So it's useful. Two of my heroes that are engineers, introducing

51:28

Andy McIntosh, who is a dear friend and I have visited with and been with many times.

51:34

And Dr. Stuart Burgess, who knows Andy very well. I do not know

51:40

Stuart, but I would love to meet him and talk to him. But anyway, one thing about Andy McIntosh is he is a professor, which is the highest teaching rank in the

51:50

United Kingdom University hierarchy. He's now retired from Leeds University. There's a few pictures of him when he was younger.

51:58

Okay, the last time I had him here, he stayed at my place and he said, Hey, Steve, I can be there for a week.

52:03

Can you get me filled up? And I said, I sure can. And I went ahead and scheduled him for all sorts of stuff.

52:09

One of the things I want to point out in this introduction here is he won the 2010

52:15

Times Higher Education Award for Outstanding Contribution to Innovation and Technology.

52:22

That was a big award because it was a European award and it brought a lot of good attention to Leeds University. He has four

52:28

U .S. patents and one European patent. He says, as a scientist, I look at the world around me and observe engineering mechanisms of such remarkable complexity that I am drawn to the conclusion of intelligent design being behind such complex order.

52:49

There is a fundamental law, second law of thermodynamics is what he's talking about, in the universe to which there is no known exception.

52:56

That is that when there is any work done due to energy conversion, there is always some dissipation of useful energy.

53:05

In purely thermodynamic terms, this means for a closed system, the measure of energy no longer available for useful work is increasing.

53:16

This is called entropy. Thus, in a closed system, the overall entropy is increasing and the universe is considered a closed system.

53:25

Then he says, however, the law applies not only to the area of mechanics and engines, it applies to any system since entropy is effectively a measure of disorder in that system.

53:38

In overall terms, disorder increases. Cars rust and machines wear out.

53:44

No spontaneous reversal of this process has ever been observed for a closed system.

53:50

For living systems, the law is still applies. That which is dead, such as a stick or leaf from a tree, has no information or teleomany within it to convert the sun's energy to useful work.

54:03

Indeed, it will simply heat up and entropy will increase. Okay, so in our own personal conversations, we have talked about open systems where the energy comes in and really destroys and knocks and makes things much, much worse very rapidly.

54:18

Storms and things like that will do that. So this is actually on the Answers in Genesis website.

54:24

And so it's useful. So this slide, if you review this in the future and you want to find the source, this slide will provide it.

54:32

Okay. He also said, it is not scientific to argue on the one hand for the obvious design of a

54:38

Boeing 747 and then rule design out of court when considering the far more versatile flight of an

54:48

Eagle, Falcon, or remarkable Hummingbird. Modern minds within the secular media are presenting an unscientific duality of thought when praising engineering complexity in man -made machines, glorifying in great creative advances of mankind, but presenting the complexity in the world around us of often far greater intricacy than man -made machines as due to a gigantic unplanned cosmic experiment with no creator.

55:17

Well, he's right there. As Professor Gitt has stated, no information can exist without an initial mental source.

55:25

No information can exist in purely statistical processes. Good point. So he's written a lot and done his research on the

55:34

Bombardier Beetle. That is where he's coming from. He talks about what an amazing thing it is and how it's put together.

55:41

And many of you, I'm sure, have heard about what goes on with the Bombardier Beetle. Here was his experimental setup.

55:48

And this thing was 20 times larger. Let's see.

55:53

First platform experimental rig built and tested to mimic the physics of the Bombardier Beetle chamber, approximately 20 times the one millimeter combustion chamber of the

56:03

Beetle. So that's how they mimicked it. All right. Now, going back to our other engineer here, we have the

56:14

Olympic cycling that he's been working on. And so Stuart has also worked on much more complex things, such as some satellites that were there.

56:25

And his knowledge of human anatomy really helps him because he was able to unfold the energy system, the solar panels and stuff needed to power the satellite.

56:37

And so this satellite has a little video that's there, the EVASAT satellite that was there.

56:43

And that was a big deal, a very expensive project that he was a design engineer on.

56:49

And so this thing actually talks about what EVASAT was. And we have that and you have this available to you later to look back on.

56:58

I'm hurrying up a little to get through more of these slides. Okay. He said, he's talking about Falkner's, Danny Falkner's work,

57:08

The Created Cosmos. And he said, the supernatural speeding up of light by the stretching of space was proposed by this author in 2002.

57:17

However, it has been explained more recently and in more detail by Danny Falkner, who calls it the

57:23

Daisha solution. Daisha comes from the Hebrew for bringing forth. So this is really somewhat in agreement to what

57:30

I had originally come up with back in the early 90s as well. We look at what

57:36

God's word says, and then we think in terms of maybe this speed of light was faster than the speed of light we have today as a constant.

57:44

All right. Now, this is a great one. I want to make sure I read this. So here's what

57:49

Richard Dawkins, who is definitely loved by the world. I've seen him come and strut around at the

57:55

University of Virginia and people would just fawn over him. But he's very articulate and he calls out engineers

58:04

Macintosh and Burgess. And here's what he says. He says, I like mavericks. I like free spirits who buck the trend and strike out on their own.

58:13

They're not usually right, but on rare occasions when they are, they are right. They are very right indeed.

58:18

Importantly so. And all power to them. Maybe Burgess and Macintosh are right and all the rest of us biologists, geologists, archaeologists, historians, chemists, physicists, cosmologists, and yes, thermodynamicists and respectable theologians, the vast majority of Nobel Prize winners, fellows of the

58:39

Royal Society and of the National Academies of the world are wrong. Not just slightly wrong, but catastrophically, appallingly, devastatingly wrong.

58:49

It is possible and I am going to follow that possibility through to its logical conclusion. I shall not here defend the views held by the scientific establishment.

58:59

I am among those who have done that elsewhere in many books. My purpose in this article is only to convey the full magnitude of the air into which if Burgess and Macintosh are right, the scientific establishment has fallen.

59:18

Wow. Okay. By the way, when he says respectable theologians, he means those who accept his billions of years timeline paradigm.

59:26

Okay. And is of necessity for any way that neo -Darwinian evolution can actually proceed.

59:32

So that's a great slide. Again, thy word is true. From the beginning and every one of thy judgments, righteous judgments endure forever.

59:43

So I'm going to stick with the Bible. I think it has a lot better evidence for truth than science, which has a way of changing over time.

59:53

All right. And by the way, Richard Dawkins was challenged by another good friend of mine and a chess player. I'm also a chess player and I reached correspondence master level.

01:00:04

So anyway, Jonathan Sarfatti wrote a great response to it where Richard Dawkins said the greatest show on earth, whereas Jonathan said the greatest hoax on earth.

01:00:17

All right. By the way, you can go to YouTube. You can find out about pistol shrimps, sonic weaponry, the bombardier beetle, the

01:00:24

King Fisher bird, which I love those King Fisher birds, hummingbirds. Oh, I'm sorry. Hummingbirds and the monarch butterfly.

01:00:30

Those are all over the internet with short little video clips. You have a gecko.

01:00:36

The gecko scampers along ceiling. Biologists and engineers studied the microscopic hairs on the toes of geckos and discovered the ends of the hairs directly attached to molecules in the surface by what is called van der

01:00:48

Waals force, a type of attraction between atoms. So this heavy little lizard can scamper right along your ceiling.

01:00:56

It's very well engineered. But here's one I wanted to read you because I'm an electrical engineer.

01:01:01

And this one really caught my eye. This was on the cover of the design of life. And here's what it said.

01:01:08

During the first 18 months from conception, the brain's neurons are formed, deployed, and connected in a tsunami of activity at the rate of 250 ,000 per minute until a hundred billion neurons are arrayed in a powerful organized matrix.

01:01:25

Each neuron may have tens of thousands of finger -like appendages or dendrites, which connect with other neurons and dendrites in a bafflingly complex circuitry.

01:01:38

No two neutrons are exactly the same. I'm sorry. No two neurons are exactly the same.

01:01:46

With the result that circuitry of each brain is unique. That circuitry is more complex than all the telephone circuitry on the face of the earth.

01:01:55

Three decades ago, science writer Isaac Asimov was so impressed with the densely organized complexity of the human brain that he wrote, in man is a three pound brain, which as far as we know, is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter in the universe.

01:02:13

Well, from an electrical engineering standpoint, that's a, we should believe in God kind of view. We should believe in an omniscient designer.

01:02:22

Okay. We're going to explain a few more terms. Mass, energy, and information. All right.

01:02:28

Relationship of energy to mass. The famous equation E equals mc squared. We have energy and mass related by the speed of light, but there's much more to it.

01:02:37

And Dr. Werner Gitt talked about it. 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.

01:02:50

Okay. So he talks about this and you'll have this for posterity if you want to read this, because this is being recorded.

01:02:59

All right. And he talks about the fact that Jesus is the source of all energy.

01:03:04

Jesus is the source of all matter. And he's the source of all biological information. That's from page 162 of his book.

01:03:11

In the beginning was information. Okay. And I provided those verses in which he uses

01:03:16

Romans 1 .20, which is our design verse that we're talking about. So there is

01:03:22

Dr. Werner Gitt. He was born in 1937. And the source of this is actually German.

01:03:28

And so it's difficult for me to watch other than to say that it's a good picture of him recently in 2019.

01:03:35

But he is getting older. And one of the things he also uses in that book is this organ playing robot, which is exhibited at the

01:03:44

Expo in 85 in Japan. It can play any sheet of music that's put in front of it. And does pretty well.

01:03:50

Yet it can't do anything without intelligence behind it for hardware, software, programming, and camera.

01:03:56

You have to have the intelligence to put everything together to build the hardware and design the software and do everything else.

01:04:03

That's an important source for the designers to have. What do we have in DNA?

01:04:09

We have a masterpiece of information design. The genetic code. Conclusion is the coding system used for a living being is optimal from an engineering standpoint.

01:04:20

This fact strengthens the argument that it was a case of purposeful design rather than fortuitous chance.

01:04:26

That was from his book as well. Okay, he has his critics. Of course, he will have critics.

01:04:32

But that's not a shocker to us. Using their arguments for smart people. You know, they're saying all these guys, you know, disagree with him.

01:04:40

But wait a second. How many guys here on the right, bottom right, using their arguments for smart people?

01:04:48

What was the percentage of smart people who got on Noah's Ark? So that's how you can always respond to something like that.

01:04:55

All right. Here's the Atheist Nobel Prize winner, James D. Watson. He's still alive, about 96 years old now.

01:05:02

But they're still finding he reduced his understanding of what was in this DNA. And his reductionism is catching up to him because there's so much more that's there.

01:05:14

James Watson and Francis Crick. That's the old picture that I showed of them. Here's a newer picture that they took in 1990.

01:05:22

And since then, Francis Crick has died. And we don't talk about junk

01:05:28

DNA so much anymore. You know what? Creationists predicted that this junk idea wouldn't last.

01:05:33

And it really hasn't. They were proven right. So they made a good prediction. So in engineering, the big question is, how can

01:05:42

I get rich in engineering? Well, mimic nature. Biomimetics. Mind the secrets.

01:05:48

We have plentiful water. Why don't we make an engine that runs on water? How about nanomolecular machines like ATP synthase and the bacterial flagellum?

01:05:58

Those show an amazing amount of stuff that can be done on a small scale. And they're planned in purpose.

01:06:04

So that's one thing we can think about. How about this? This bisous idea, where these things will seal right to underwater ships and stuff like that.

01:06:16

You can find those things. They have real muscle power. This guy is amazing.

01:06:22

These little birds, these kingfisher birds. You know, they have stories of people helping these birds that were injured or stuck someplace.

01:06:31

And the bird remembers it and comes back to visit the human and stuff. It's an amazing bird.

01:06:37

I love this. I have a picture of it on my wall in my office, just five feet to the left of me right now.

01:06:44

So I love this bird. It's a tremendous design. All right. So I'm getting finished here.

01:06:51

I know Robin's saying, hey, Steve, you're already over time. So let's look at reasonable faith real quick. Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.

01:06:59

OK, we have to watch out about confirmation bias. So we need to be aware of the oppositions of science, falsely so -called.

01:07:06

Important verse. So C .S. Lewis has a wonderful statement that he makes on it.

01:07:13

I don't really have time to read it, but he's making the idea that if evolution was true, we had better question our own mental processes.

01:07:23

OK, Dr. Ben Carson. Here's a guy who was very popular in the media until he became a conservative

01:07:32

Republican. He's no longer very popular, but he's a pretty smart guy. And I believe he's

01:07:38

Seventh -day Adventist Christian. So does it take a rocket scientist?

01:07:43

So that was a brain surgeon. How about a rocket scientist? Does it take a rocket scientist to believe this stuff?

01:07:49

Well, Werner Von Braun is a very good example. I really like. He's very articulate. He said the two most powerful forces shaping our civilization today are science and religion.

01:08:00

Through science, man strives to learn more of the mysteries of creation. Through religion, he seeks to know the

01:08:05

Creator. Neither operates independently. It is as difficult for me to understand a scientist who does not acknowledge the presence of a superior rationality behind the existence of the universe as it is to comprehend a theologian who would deny the advances of science.

01:08:22

Far from bringing independent or opposing forces, science and religion are sisters. Both seek a better world.

01:08:28

While science seeks control over the forces of nature around us, religion controls the forces of nature within us.

01:08:36

Great point. While the admission of a design of the universe ultimately raises the question of a designer, a subject outside of science, the scientific method, does not allow us to exclude data which would lead to a conclusion that the universe, life, and man are based on design.

01:08:53

And I'm going to speed up a little bit as we go through these. So there was one article he wrote on immortality.

01:08:59

I'll just show the slides real quick so you have it in the video. I went ahead and took the book which is in my library and wrote it up as well and even highlighted it.

01:09:09

Okay, one of his bronze statements was, but must we really light a candle to see the sun?

01:09:16

He felt God was so obvious. And he also talks about it. There's the fuller context of that particular statement.

01:09:23

He was important because he developed big things. He developed the Saturn V rocket, as well as the

01:09:28

Mercury and Gemini rockets, which got us in the 60s to the moon. So that was an important thing.

01:09:34

And then this is another one which shows the locations of the six places where we landed on the moon.

01:09:40

The last three, we actually had the lunar rover vehicle, the car that drove around the moon.

01:09:46

Apollo 13 is not there because it had its failure that occurred. Last thing, although I know of no reference to Christ ever commenting on scientific work,

01:09:57

I do know that he said, ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. Thus I am certain that were he among us today,

01:10:04

Christ would encourage scientific research as modern man's most noble striving to comprehend and admire his father's handiwork.

01:10:11

The universe as revealed through scientific inquiry is the living witness that God has indeed been at work.

01:10:18

All right, finally, Atheist Views. Small to the large.

01:10:23

DNA molecule is the small. That was Crick's specialty. Next slide is with Carl Sagan.

01:10:30

But here's what Crick said. Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.

01:10:39

Then Sagan comes along and he does the Cosmos Theory and he writes in the book, the cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.

01:10:47

Our feeblest contemplations of the cosmos stir us. There is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory of falling from a height.

01:10:58

We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries. That's right from his book, page four.

01:11:04

But the heavens declare the glory of God. And that comes from Psalm 19. So the first sentence is nothing but hand waving.

01:11:13

And he can't know what he's saying there. Okay. Here's Richard Dawkins' famous quote. The feature of living matter that most demands explanation is that it is almost unimaginably complicated in directions that convey a powerful illusion of deliberate design.

01:11:28

I went ahead and fixed that for him. Instead of illusion, I said evidence of deliberate design.

01:11:33

And that's God from Romans 120. The problem is atheists can't see design. They just, they have to explain it away.

01:11:40

Okay. And so Nancy Percy says Darwinism has become our culture's official creation myth protected by a priesthood of as dogmatic as any religious curia.

01:11:51

Nancy Percy made that statement. So from God's perspective, we know that the fool is set in his heart.

01:11:56

There is no God. They are wrong. So we're going to go through a summary slide.

01:12:02

Engineering aspects. Engineering is equal to applied science. And we can be apologists as well.

01:12:08

The atheist's blind spot is the fact that they have empirical data.

01:12:14

They have real science. They use massive assumptions and they use reductionism and they cannot see design.

01:12:20

That's their problem. That's their blind spot. Important terms. Specified complexity. Irreducible complexity.

01:12:26

Information. Reductionism. We have the arrowhead. We can show it by. We have sculptures we could show it by.

01:12:31

We like the rock sculptures. We have the mousetrap. Design teleological argument seems best.

01:12:37

It's plan and purpose. Romans 120. There is no excuse and you can tell people. You may be told by God you have no excuse if you don't think there's evidence for God.

01:12:47

Also, we have matter, energy, and information as three entities we can certainly use in our apologetics. What is a reasonable faith?

01:12:53

Well, Christianity. Very reasonable faith. So most reasonable faith. Man's designs versus God's designs compared.

01:13:01

We recognize design, plan, and purpose. What we don't know. We need to remember that.

01:13:07

Avoid logical fallacies and massive assumptions. Known scientific laws are out there. Biomimetics has good ideas we can use for design.

01:13:15

DNA. It's a code. It's very complex. Nanomachines and cells such as ATP synthase.

01:13:21

Bacterial flagellum. Brain circuitry for 18 months as I've reported. The bombardier beetle. The cosmos declares

01:13:28

God itself. And photosynthesis. Wait a minute. Photosynthesis. Did I cover that? Well, let's cover it.

01:13:34

In the most intelligent human design... If the most intelligent human designers can't duplicate photosynthesis, then it's perfectly scientific to believe that photosynthesis had a far more intelligent designer.

01:13:49

That's very logical and it seems like we can't duplicate photosynthesis. Okay. Ask the beasts and let them teach you.

01:13:57

And the birds of the heavens and let them tell you. Or speak to the earth and let it teach you.

01:14:03

And let the fish of the sea declare to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the

01:14:09

Lord has done this? There's our verse. It's the engineering verse.

01:14:15

It's the design verse. It's the biomimetics verse. But it's the useful verse. That's the end.

01:14:21

Thank you. All right. Stop chair.

01:14:27

All right. Thank you. Did you stop? There we go. Yeah. Sorry. I had to let you know it was time.

01:14:35

I know. We have time constraints because it's almost 11 o 'clock here.

01:14:42

We're going to shut down recording and live stream. Let me go ahead and close things out here.

01:14:48

So that was a great presentation. Thank you so much, Steve, for that. And I think we don't really have any questions.

01:14:55

So we're going to go ahead and skip the Q &A tonight. Although if you hang back in the room for a few minutes, a couple people might have direct questions for you.

01:15:04

But with that, if you guys want to read more of the work and study that Steve has done, you can find his articles published on the

01:15:15

Creation Club magazine, which is an online resource. I believe it also is mailed.

01:15:21

But you can find it all online as well. And we, again, are Creation Fellowship Santee.

01:15:26

You can find a list of our upcoming speakers. And we have some pretty great ones coming up for the summer by typing in tinyurl .com

01:15:36

forward slash cfsantee. And you can also email us at creationfellowshipsantee at gmail .com

01:15:43

so that you get put on our email list. We promise not to spam, but we'll send you links for all of our upcoming speakers.

01:15:50

And with that, we're going to go ahead and sign off for tonight. Oh, I wanted to mention for the recording, if you have any questions, if you've made it to the end of the video and you have questions for Steve, email us at creationfellowshipsantee at gmail .com.

01:16:06

I will make sure that he gets the questions and I will email you back.

01:16:12

Can you still hear me? Yes, yes, we can. Okay, I'm not seeing my face anymore, so I must have taken it somewhere off.