December 2, 2016 Show with Danny R. Faulkner on “The New Astronomy Book”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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Now here's our host Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming.

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This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron wishing you all a happy Friday on this second day of December 2016.

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I'm delighted to have as a returning guest today Dr. Danny R. Faulkner.

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He is former faculty member at the University of South Carolina Lancaster for over 26 years, a member of the

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Creation Research Society, editor of the Christian Research Society Quarterly and author of more than 100 papers in various astronomy and astrophysics journals.

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He's the author of Universe by Design, The Created Cosmos and the book we are discussing today,

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The New Astronomy Book. It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron, Dr.

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Danny R. Faulkner. Thanks a lot, good to be here. And co -hosting with me in the studio today happens to be a friend of Dr.

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Faulkner and a new resident of the Carlisle, Pennsylvania area, Charlie Liebert.

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He is founder of Six Day Creation and it's my honor and privilege to have you co -hosting with me for the very first time,

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Charlie Liebert. Thank you very much, Chris. It's good to be here. Great. Well, first before I go into Dr.

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Faulkner's background and his book, Charlie, why don't you tell our listeners something about sixdaycreation .com.

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Okay. I became a Christian at midlife and as a result before that I was a hardcore atheist, so I understand that viewpoint.

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So you had a good midlife crisis. Yes, a very positive midlife crisis and it was very dramatic conversion.

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And after that, for several years, we went to South Carolina and came back to North Carolina. And during that time, as I grew up in Christ, I realized that there were a lot of questions that were being asked among people that Christians weren't easily answered.

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Now today with the internet, that may be different, but 25 years ago, that wasn't the case. So I started a website called sixdaycreation .com

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and on that site are answers to questions, both written answers and also video answers of questions from seminars and workshops

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I've done over the years. So that's the six -day creation. Now, in addition, I published two books recently, which we're just starting on.

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And we'll talk about those more when I come back on January 23rd. Yes, Charlie Liebert will be my guest on January 23rd.

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And you had some kind of working relationship with Ken Ham and some other folks related in young earth creationism, haven't you?

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Yes. Right after I retired, I worked for Ken's ministry for about two and a half years. I did some workshops and seminars with smaller cities around the

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US, including a trip to Panama to do a group in Panama. And your background as far as your career was in chemistry.

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Yes, I have a bachelor's in chemistry and a master's in marketing. And I spent the first third of my career in the laboratory doing chemistry and then graduated to marketing and various financial analysis type things and took a retirement in my mid -50s.

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Great. And Dr. Faulkner, for those of our listeners who did not hear your other interview or may be unfamiliar with you, tell us about the

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Creation Research Society and the Creation Research Society quarterly. Well, the

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Creation Research Society is one of the oldest creation organizations around. It was founded in 1963.

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It was a group of pioneering creation scientists. There were 10 of them. One of them was Henry Morris, which has fingerprint over everything back then, it seems like, dealing with creation.

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And they founded what they wanted to be a research society or a creation society. There are different societies and different professions.

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For instance, in astronomy, there's the American Astronomical Society. There's the American Geological Society for the geologists.

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There's the American Medical Association for physicians. There's the Bar Association for attorneys. Every profession has its professional societies.

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The CRS, as we call it for short, is the professional society for creationists. Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to be a scientist to be a member.

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You need to have a master's degree in some science or science -related field to be a voting member, but you can be a sustaining member or a student member by just agreeing with what we're trying to do and beliefless statements of faith as well.

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And they began publishing the quarterly almost immediately, so we're in our 52nd year of publication. We're doing the quarterly four times a year, of course, by the name.

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And I've been the editor now for a couple of years. And we have various sorts of articles. We started something a couple of years ago having special themed issues.

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And we had one on dinosaur soft preservation of tissue, part of a research project we funded.

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And then we had one on the terminology of biology this year. And the next spring, our issue is going to be dedicated to astronomy.

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So the purpose of the Society is to promote creation research, and that's what we're all about.

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We don't do a lot of the other things that major creation organizations do. Well, yeah, you brought up something that actually

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Charlie Liebert, my co -host, had brought up during a Bible study that I happened to walk in on.

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And it was already taking place at a local restaurant. And providentially, Charlie was in there. But you brought up that soft tissue discovery.

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If you could explain a little bit further about that, because it's pretty remarkable and mind -blowing stuff.

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It might have just quickly went over the heads of people listening without even realizing the magnitude of that.

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Yeah, according to the standard understanding, dinosaurs died out 60, 65 million years ago.

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And of course, they've been fossilized. And of course, after 60 million years plus, you wouldn't expect to find any soft tissues left.

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This is in rock. You've had a lot of mineralization take place. And it's a long time for decay to take place.

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And it's quite a shock, about a decade ago, when Mary Schweitzer, a North Carolina state scientist, actually documented for the first time, really, in the literature that the

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Hell Creek Formation in Montana, there seemed to be soft tissue preserved in it.

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There are some blood vessels, what appear to be blood vessels, what appear to be blood cells, other connecting tissue present.

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And this caused quite a stir. Because if it's millions of years old, you couldn't expect to find anything preserved after all that time.

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If it's even just thousands of years old, as we believe, that's going to be quite a stretch. But at least that's possible,

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I suppose, but not with millions of years. And that's been discussed in the literature. And certainly, they're coming around to understanding, yeah, this is not contamination.

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It's real stuff. And so we started a project called iDyno. It was an attempt to do this research with creationists in charge.

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So part of the first phase of that was to collect the dinosaur sample.

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And we had a couple of researchers who did. They went out to Hell Creek. They have private land. They dug up a triceratops horn.

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That's a three -horned dinosaur. And then they began to analyze the tissue they found. And sure enough, they found all sorts of spongy tissue that appears to be related to the horn itself.

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It's not some contamination by fairly recent organisms invading it.

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It really is in the tissue itself. And we've published several papers on that. We're now starting on iDyno2, which is to go beyond and do other things beyond just identifying the thing, but also looking at some of the more molecular stuff that's going on.

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So this is very exciting, because it seemed to rule out that these things are millions of years old, as generally thought.

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And that is really an important thing for people to realize, that there are good reasons for believing that dinosaurs and all sorts of other things were buried very recently and very catastrophically.

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Now, why is it that not only the secular scientists, who have been pushing an ancient

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Earth and have been pushing the idea that dinosaurs died out millions of years before the arrival of mankind, they push that as a fact.

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Why are they, and also our Christian brothers who are old Earth creationists, why are they not all waving the white flag, then?

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What's going on with that? Well, that's a real paradigm shift. I mean, if the universe, if the world,

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I should say, is not millions of years old, just thousands of years old, then number one, evolution is completely out the window.

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It cannot have happened. So if you're committed to evolution, if you believe in naturalism and nothing else, there is no creator, then you've got a problem.

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Now, many of our Christian brothers, who unfortunately buy into this, some are theistic evolutionists, others are not, but they still believe in millions of years, they've got a problem, too, because they want to be, quote -unquote, scientifically respectable, because science has supposedly overwhelmingly shown that the world is millions of years old.

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But if you've got evidence out there staring in the face that suggests something very different from that, it's been suppressed for the most part.

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So this should be a wake -up call for atheistic evolutionists, for theistic evolutionists, for Christians who don't believe in evolution, but still believe in millions of years.

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This is really big news, and if it caused such a huge paradigm shift, you'd have to re -evaluate almost everything you believe to get there.

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One of the things that's important to realize about this is that they're stuck with their presuppositions, and because of that, they cannot concede that it could be less than billions and billions of years.

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Oh, yes, and that's very clear. The main presupposition people have is that evolution is taking place, and that's the correct explanation for how we in the world came to be, and if you look around, you don't see evolution taking place before your eyes, so therefore, if it took place, it must have happened very slowly, very gradually, and that's where the whole idea of millions of years comes in.

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That was an idea that slipped in really 200 years ago, and most people today think it was just a matter of science.

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Scientists just went out and didn't have any preconceptions and asked, well, how old is the Earth? And out came the answer from the research, and that's not the way it was at all.

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In reality, it's a long chain of assumption of evolution that's built in from the very beginning. Yeah, this is pretty remarkable stuff, and I'm just amazed that it hasn't been the subject of major news reports and all that kind of thing, but I definitely would like to follow up with interviews, including yourself, if you'd like, that are specifically addressing that issue, because it is pretty mind -blowing to me, especially not only the discovery, but the cover -up is equally amazing.

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Yeah, if people want to learn more about the Creation Research Society and some of our work on this, they can go to our website at creationresearch .org,

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and they have the option to join there if they'd like, but some of our articles are actually online for free, others you have to be a member to get access to, it's embargoed for some time, but we have information there about the iDino project and the status of it, what we've accomplished in the past, and what our plans are for the next step in all of this.

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So creationresearch .org will give you a lot of information. Yeah, it seems to me, and I've said this before, and I've heard other people say it too, it seems to me that those, especially the secular evolutionists, those who are not in any sense creationists, they have created either unconsciously or consciously a religion out of their beliefs, and they mock

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Christians and others who believe in the biblical account of creation, they mock us and say that our intrusion into the topic using our faith and the beliefs that are harmonious with our faith in the scriptures, they say that we have no place in that conversation, that science and religion are two opposite things, and yet they really seem to have a religious approach to this where they're ignoring scientific evidence, just like the

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Roman Catholic Church did at one time, at the time condemning Copernicus and Galileo and so on, they seem to be blind to scientific thought because it contradicts their quote -unquote religious ideas.

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Of course, they would never admit that we're religious, but it seems they hold to these ideas like religious tenets.

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Oh yeah, it is very much a metaphysical belief, in which case it is a kind of religious tenet and religious system at that point, and we just know people by saying that, well, no, it's just science, and science and religion are opposite ideas.

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Well, in reality, a lot of the people pursuing science have some religious -like tenets driving them in what they believe and what they're proposing on the world.

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Now, before I move on to the main topic at hand, the new astronomy book, wasn't the woman who made this soft tissue discovery not even a

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Christian of any kind? I don't know if she's a Christian, she's definitely not a creationist, and that's very interesting.

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And you know, she went out there, Hell Creek, it's been probably 15 years ago, she was with some really veteran researchers out there, she was kind of new, and how they stumbled upon this is they dug up, they excavated a

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T -Rex femur, it's a big, large, one of the largest bones in anybody, and they wanted to take it out, and they had to,

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I think they were airlifting it with a helicopter, something that was too big, they needed to break it in order to bring it out, and so they did break the thing inside, and when they did, this smell came up, it was like rotting flesh, and she was like, whoa, what's that?

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And the guy in charge said, oh, all Hell Creek fossils smell like that for a day or so.

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You know, he'd smelled it so many times, but it never occurred to him, well, if you got rotting flesh smell, maybe there's some rotting flesh involved.

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And so they preserved the stuff on site, and they, of course, were going to put the bone back together when they got back, but she took some tissue samples, and then she took, when she got back to the lab after she preserved them, she began checking into it, and somehow she found the soft tissues in it, so it's almost an accidental thing that she stumbled across it, and people had been observing things in the field that had they really opened their eyes up and thought about it, it was worth pursuing all along.

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It wasn't like this was a hidden secret, it's just it was in plain sight, but nobody really noticed or recognized what it meant.

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What was her name again? Mary Schweitzer. Mary Schweitzer. Now, has she since become a creationist?

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No, not to my knowledge. She's actually, some people have kind of, I think she's got kind of an arm's length attitude towards us, because she feels that some people have misused her work, and have misrepresented her work, and I think we need to be very sensitive in how we treat her work, and we should show a lot of respect, because she's taken a lot of arrows here, and we should actually praise her work, and do what we can with it, but make sure we accurately represent it as well, and so I think she's been a little hurt from the enthusiasm some creations have had, but to my knowledge, she's not made a change in her life, as the sort of salvation sort of thing we're talking about, but she certainly has been very curious, and I think she's a wonderful scientist, because she's followed the data where it should take you, and that's the sort of thing you're supposed to do in science.

16:29

Yes. Well, you've written this book, the new astronomy book. Tell us why you wrote this book, and some of the details about it, and who it's intended for.

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Okay, well, it's a series done by Masterbooks. They have a whole series of these books done on weather, and geology, and the flood, and fossils, and so forth, so they asked me about three years ago to write this book, and it came out two years ago, and it's intended for youngsters.

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It's not a little tiny kid's book. I'd say more like upper grade school and middle school. I love the way they arranged this.

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I wrote the text, and they kind of rearranged it and edited it. They didn't change my words much at all, and I was really happy about that, but the book really works on three levels.

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It's got color coding in it with three different colors, kind of white, and kind of a pale blue, and then a purple,

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I should say, and then a very deep sort of purple, and so it's a basic, more advanced level three than above that, and so a young person particularly, if they're very young, can read through just the level one stuff and get a lot of information out of it, and then you can come back later, maybe the following year in school, and do the level two, and then maybe the following year do the level three.

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A lot of homeschoolers really like the book because they can use it for three different levels. You combine it with the unit of astronomy that they're doing, say fourth grade, sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade, something like that.

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It's very beautifully illustrated. It's got some great figures and pictures inside of it, all in color, and it's not just a kid's book though because I've had a number of adults that I know who've read it, and they said they got a lot out of it as well, so the book works on so many levels.

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It's again a kid's resource, but it really is good all the way up to adults, and homeschoolers will love it because it's so versatile, and you can use it three times for one kid actually if you pace it right.

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One of the real advantages in homeschool is a lot of homeschools have two and three children that are going through various levels at the same time, and this book would allow them to take astronomy as a theme and take two or three different grade levels and have the students working through it at the same book, but having different levels.

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I think that's a great, a brilliant step, Daniel. That really impressed me when I saw that. Well, I don't take credit for it, but the people at Master's Books who put that together, but once I saw how they arranged my material,

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I thought, well, that's wonderful. I think that's fantastic too, but I don't take the credit they do. Okay, that's fine.

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And Master's Books is a subsidiary of New Leaf Publishing Group, and we have interviewed quite a number of the authors who are under the umbrella of that publishing ministry, and we thank them for providing us with some such great content for Iron Trump and Zion Radio interviews.

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If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

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chrisarnsen at gmail .com, c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com.

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Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

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USA, and please only remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter.

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Perhaps somebody is going to a church where they teach old earth creationism and you've got a problem with it, and I'd rather you not badmouth your pastor or church on the air so you can remain anonymous if you'd like.

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But anyone else, we would love to hear from you at chrisarnsen at gmail .com, chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

20:08

If you could, just because there are a lot of, for lack of a better term, laymen out there that sometimes confuse the terms astronomy and astrology, if you could differentiate between those two things.

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Oh yeah, I get that question all the time, and I've been called an astrologer too many times, I can't hear it again. What confuses us is that a lot of sciences have the word logos in it, biology, geology, those kind of things, anthropology, and that usually is understood to mean the study of, but then you come to astronomy and suddenly it's astrology, which is really a belief system.

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It's an ancient pagan religion. It's the belief that the planets and the sun and the moon and the stars and their positions in the sky will have effects upon our lives, upon our destinies.

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You can get a horoscope every day of what to do today because of what the stars tell you.

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It's based upon the idea that the planets and the sun and the moon were gods. They were. I mean, Jupiter, that's the name of the king of the gods of the

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Greeks, and Venus was the queen that was a goddess of beauty and love, and Mars was a god of war, so each one of these are deities to them.

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And modern astrology, as we know it, really came together during the Roman Empire 2 ,000 years ago. Now, astronomy, on the other hand, is the study of astronomical bodies, the science, we'd say.

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And since the word astrology was already taken, then that was a bit of a problem. Much of its history, astronomy and astrology, were mingled.

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400 years ago, around 1600, the two were still very mingled, but by 1700, they had gone their separate ways.

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And so during the 1700s, the 1600s, 17th century, they coined a new term, astronomy, and that just simply means star arranger, you know, so you're arranging information about the stars.

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So that's the history of how this came about. Again, they were mingled for so long, but most people should know the difference, but people do get confused, and I don't take offense.

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I don't know too many astronomers who do. We just kind of chuckle when people call us an astrologer instead of an astronomer.

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And what sign are you? No, I'm only kidding. Well, it depends on how you mean that.

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Most of the horoscopes will tell me I'm a Libra, but I know I'm a Virgo. And the basis for that is that your sign is actually your sun sign.

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It's supposed to be the constellation of a zodiac where the sun was the day you were born.

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We have 12 constellations that are along the path the sun appears to take to the sky each year.

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That's simply the plane of our orbit around the sun. So as we orbit the sun, the sun seems to orbit us through the stars once a year, and it spends about a month in each one of those 12 constellations.

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And so if you're a Libra, that's because the sun was in your, your, it was in the constellation Libra when you were born.

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Here's the problem, though. Modern astrology, you know, that's an oxymoron, isn't it? It was set up during the

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Roman period 2000 years ago, but due to a very subtle effect called precession, the signs have shifted by about one slot.

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And I can look up up on star charts and stuff, and I can see that very clearly when I was born, the sun was in Virgo, not in Libra.

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And modern astrologers just assume that they pretend as if the signs have not shifted in 2000 years.

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And that's pretty, that's pretty funny. I tell people, I don't read horoscopes very often.

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I haven't read them in years. But, you know, I'd look at the funny papers when I get enough funnies in the crossword puzzle and the jumble, word jumble, and I had nothing else to do than I might look at it.

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And I would read Libra, but then I'd also read Virgo, and I'd just take my pick. And they're all pretty, pretty, pretty blasé, you know, the kind of pithy little things like, you know, be careful when money matters today.

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Friends might be helpful today. Well, I'm glad to hear that because usually I can,

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I can spend my money like a drunken congressman. Or my friends are such jerks, they're never very helpful.

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It's kind of about time they, they kind of... So, you know what I'd love to see on a horoscope is something like this.

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Do not repeat, do not go on the bypass today. There is a Mack truck with your name on it.

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Dan, Danny, I want to pursue this a little bit. You said basically the signs have shifted. So if they're staying with the dates they have, then they're actually lying in their interpretations then, right?

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Because they're giving the wrong sign for what's real today. Well, they would say that the constellations changed, but the signs behind them didn't change.

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I mean, just screw it, it doesn't make any sense. Now, to be fair, there is a small minority of astrologers who actually do make that correction.

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They do, okay. But I've never seen one of those. I've read about them, but I've never seen their work.

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Everything on astrology I've ever seen uses the traditional approach, which is out of date by 2 ,000 years or off by one sign.

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But I've heard some flim flam saying, well, the constellations changed, but the signs didn't, and they were just kind of silly.

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So it's phony on two levels, and it's phony on the astrology level. It's also phony on the actual sign level.

25:12

Sure, that's right. Well, let's take some of our listener questions.

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We have Jim right here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Who says, it seems like the observed speed of light that we've seen from far away stars is more consistent with an old earth creationism, according to some

25:33

Christian brothers and friends I've spoken with. I hold to a literal six -day creation, but some of us, but some use the translation of age for the word yom in Genesis rather than day.

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Coupled with what we observe in creation itself, this would seem to make a strong case.

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What are your thoughts on this? Wow, your listener Jim there didn't waste any time, did he?

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He opened up an industrial drinks drum of worms here. There's a lot of that question.

26:10

Thank you, Jim. That's an excellent question with questions put together. Okay, this is what we call the light travel time problem.

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And we don't measure the speed of light generally coming from things to us. We can measure that in the lab and we assume that the speed of light is the same and I have no quarrel with that.

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And I'm just pointing out a fine point there. But what we usually say is this, let's say for the sake of argument, the creation's a little over 6 ,000 years ago.

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And if light's been traveling at the same speed, it would seem we can't see anything beyond 6 ,000 light years.

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And we see things that are millions or even billions of light years away. For instance, if it were clear tonight where I live, it won't be.

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But if it were, I could go out and I could probably spot the Andromeda galaxy. And it's about 2 million light years away, give or take a little bit.

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It's certainly not within 6 ,000. So how can I see it? Well, that's a real problem and we need to deal with that.

27:00

Again, we call it the light travel time problem. But you know, right off the bat, this question, this problem is not usually formulated properly because we concentrate as the world exists now, 6 ,000 years, let's say, after creation.

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But you know, there's an even bigger problem right on the front of creation. You know, the stars were made on day four and Adam was made two days later on day six.

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And so when God ended the creation week, night fell that first night, now day seven, because their day began at sundown.

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It got dark. Adam looked up in the sky. What did he see? Well, I believe he saw stars because if he didn't, then the stars could not fulfill their functions.

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There were several functions given to them in the day four account. So they had to be visible in order to fulfill those purposes that they had.

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But the problem is, the nearest star outside the sun is more than four light years away. That's the nearest star.

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So we kind of concentrate on the most distant things in the universe today. But you know, look at poor Adam. He couldn't have seen anything.

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Well, I believe he did. And so if we can solve Adam's light travel time problem, we can probably solve ours as well.

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Now, let me say this is a good problem we have to come up with, a tough problem. And it is,

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I think, kind of a good argument. If I were trying to make a case for billions of years, I would probably go that route myself.

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But I don't think appealing to day age really works. There are several problems there.

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The Hebrew word yom can indeed mean, has four distinct meanings. It can mean the daylight part of a day.

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It can mean the 24 -hour cycle. It can refer to a period of time. And it can also refer to some time appointed for some purpose, like Day of Reckoning, for instance.

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Now, those four meanings in Hebrew, and there are examples of how each one's used, also appear in English as well.

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It's uncanny, but the English word day has the same four meanings. In Romance languages, the same word for day has the same four meanings.

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In Russian, the word for day has the same four meanings. In Japanese, I've checked, it has the same four connotations.

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I think that's interesting that I'm taking a smattering of different languages, and we find the same four meanings possible in each one.

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So I think that's something somewhat universal. So we don't have to look necessarily just at the Hebrew and say there's something special here.

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It's kind of common across all languages. And we're never confused, usually never confused on the usage, because it's the context that tells us.

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If you use the word day in a sentence, you can probably figure out pretty quickly which definition is intended.

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And I think the clues given to us in the Genesis 1 account of creation do the same thing. My favorite argument is in verse 5.

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It says God, creating the light, separating the light from dark, and He called the light day, and the dark

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He called night. And it's immediately followed by the evening and the morning were the first day.

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And so if there's any question, God has just defined what He meant by a day. And then He uses that word immediately.

30:08

It would be very poor, poor writing style to define a word and then immediately use some different meaning for it.

30:14

And there are other arguments you can make about it. So I think it's a pretty good case that they are six normal days.

30:20

Furthermore, the stars were not made until day four, but yet the earth was made on day one before the stars were made.

30:29

And the day H3 doesn't work at that point because, well, it doesn't get you back.

30:35

You have the light supposedly leaving those stars much later than generally is believed by astronomers.

30:43

It just doesn't work when you look at the details. So I don't think going that route works. There have been at least five different solutions that recent creationists have argued.

30:52

One is the idea that the universe is created mature with light already streaming toward us.

30:58

And another one is that the speed of light was much greater in the past, but was decreased to what it is today.

31:04

And that would allow for great distance to be spanned. Other people have suggested relativistic solutions dealing with general relativity.

31:14

John Hartnett and Russ Humphreys have both pursued versions of that. Jason Lyles has offered a similar version called the

31:21

Asynchrony, oh boy, I never can remember, sign convention, and ASC for short.

31:27

And then I've actually proposed my own about three years ago. And I can walk through this very quickly.

31:35

It takes longer than I think that care to take here, but I will talk through it I note that there's a lot of process going on during the creation week.

31:45

You know, God didn't just create everything instantly on each of the six days of creation. It's a common belief people have, but the language of the creation account doesn't really support that.

31:56

For instance, on day six, God made man of the dust of the ground. He didn't make proof instantly out of nothing, ex nihilo, but he took dust and formed it.

32:06

And it says, he used the word form, and it suggests to me that there was a process of forming there. It was probably very rapid, but it still was a process.

32:14

We also find in verse 19 of chapter two that God made the flying animals and the land animals in much the same manner.

32:24

He formed them out of the dust of the ground as well. I missed that for many years, as it turns out. We also find that on day three, the plants kind of came up out of the ground and the

32:36

King James in verse 11, I think it says, God said, let the earth bring forth, and it describes these various plants.

32:43

In verse 12, it says, the earth brought forth these various types of plants. And I read that many times.

32:48

I assume that bring forth and brought forth were just two same verbs, different tenses, but I looked it up several years ago, and much to my surprise, there are two different, very different Hebrew words used there.

33:00

And those meanings are very dynamic. Sprout is not bad. Produce, thrust, shoot, grow.

33:08

So what I envisioned happening just on the words used there is that the plant came going up out of the ground very quickly.

33:16

I guess sort of like a time -lapse movie. Again, you see process taking place. And why did

33:21

God run through that process? Well, the purpose of those plants, at least one of the purposes, is to produce food.

33:27

We know from Genesis 1, 30, 29, 30, I believe, everything, every animal is vegetarian there at the beginning of the creation, including man, and animals were as well.

33:39

There was no carnivorous activity, as we can tell. And so those plants had to provide food for man and beast a few days later.

33:46

But, you know, it takes weeks or months for the fastest -growing food plants to produce fruit, and it can take years in the case of trees, for instance.

33:56

So I think God ran them through a very rapid development, if you will, maturity process to bring them to maturity so that they could be available two or three days later for living creatures to eat of those.

34:10

Well, I see this process of creation working throughout the creation week, so I think we can kind of infer a pattern there.

34:17

And perhaps on day four, when God made the stars, and by the way, the stars are almost mentioned as an afterthought at the end of that whole structure there, perhaps

34:28

God rapidly formed them and then rapidly brought the life here, as much as he brought those plants out of the ground and animals out of the ground, maybe he brought the light very rapidly here.

34:37

And so I'm appealing here to a miracle. I think many of the other explanations are attempting to use physics, to use some sort of physical explanation about all this.

34:46

But I think sometimes we creation scientists forget just how miraculous the creation week was.

34:53

Some people have challenged me, well, what's your physical mechanism? And I respond, well, what's your physical mechanism for the virgin birth and resurrection?

35:00

We recognize those as miracles. Even in the creation week, the creation of matter out of nothing at some point in the creation week, that too was a miracle.

35:08

Why did God have to use physics in order to bring the life here? Anyway, that's briefly my explanation.

35:14

I've written it on our, if you go to the Answers in Genesis website, you can read more about what I've suggested. And we also have a chapter in the book,

35:21

New Answers book, dealing with that and other solutions. And we're out of time for today. I'm just kidding.

35:29

But anyway, that was a great question. I love that question. And it was a very complex one, but it takes time to really answer it. And I didn't really,

35:35

I gave you the brief version of that answer. And well, Jim, guess what?

35:41

Jim in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, you have won a free copy of the new astronomy book, compliments of the publishers, master books, and also compliments of Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CVBBS .com,

35:58

who will be mailing that out to you. And we thank our friends at CVBBS .com for sponsoring

36:05

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We have to go to a break right now. There are quite a number of listeners who are waiting patiently to have their questions asked.

36:13

So we thank you for your patience. And if you would like to join them with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

36:23

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Dr. Danny Falk. I'm Chris Arnson, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

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And here's one of my favorite guests, Todd Friel, to tell you about a conference he and I are going to.

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Hello, this is Todd Friel, host of Wretched Radio and Wretched TV and occasional guest on Chris's show,

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Iron Criticizing Iron. I think that's what it's called. Hoping that you can join

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Chris and me at the G3 conference in Atlanta. My new hometown. It is going to be a bang up conference called the

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Carson, Votie Baucom, Conrad and Bayway, Phil Johnson, James White and a bunch of other people. We hope to see you there.

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Learn more at g3conference .com g3conference .com. Thanks, Todd.

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Hi, I'm Pastor Bill Shishko inviting you to tune in to a visit to the pastor's study every

40:15

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40:25

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40:33

Our time will be lively, useful, sometimes controversial, but never dull. Join us this

40:39

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40:45

And that's every Saturday at 12 noon eastern time on wlie540am .com

40:53

where you can hear that program anywhere in the world via live streaming and also anywhere in the

40:59

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41:05

AM dial at 540 am on the radio. And we thank

41:10

Pastor Bill Shishko and his much needed contribution to the radio airwaves because he is truly a gifted brother in Christ with a brilliant mind and I'm so glad that he has launched this program.

41:27

If you just tuned in, our guest right now on Iron Sharpens Iron is

41:33

Dr. Danny R. Faulkner, former faculty member at the University of South Carolina, Lancaster for over 26 years, member of the

41:43

Creation Research Society, editor of the Creation Research Society Quarterly, author of more than 100 papers in various astronomy and astrophysics journals, author of Universe by Design, The Created Cosmos, which was our topic the last time he was on, and another book that we are discussing today,

42:02

The New Astronomy Book. My co -host in studio is Charlie Liebert, founder of 6daycreation .com.

42:10

If you'd like to join us, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com chrisarnson at gmail .com

42:18

We do have a listener who happens to be one of my former pastors,

42:26

Pastor Mark Grimaldi of Grace Reformed Baptist Church in Merrick, Long Island, New York.

42:33

And since I can without hesitation vouch or highly recommend that anyone listening attend or even become a member of this church, if possible, their website is gracereformedbaptistchurch .com

42:52

gracereformedbaptistchurch .com But Pastor Grimaldi asks, what would be the effect on our country economically if all of the economists came to embrace evolution?

43:08

Considering how much our economy is invested in evolution, educationally, scientifically, grants, government sponsorship, etc.,

43:16

even if they knew the truth, would they ever acknowledge it? Well, that's a hypothetical question, always difficult to answer.

43:27

I would say that when people are offered evidence to the contrary, we tend to ignore or minimize that evidence or we try to spin it a certain way and interpret it away.

43:38

The whole thing with the soft tissue in dinosaur, preserved in dinosaur fossils, is,

43:45

I think, the kind of example we're talking about. This is huge, absolutely huge. But what the response is, is that they've tried to find different ways to explain it away.

43:55

They say, well, one suggestion has been that iron has been absorbed in and it acts to preserve that soft tissue.

44:05

It acts as a preservative to keep it. Another proposal has just been, well, who would have thought under the right conditions this stuff can be preserved much longer than we had thought, those kind of things.

44:15

So people will go to, of course, none of those answers really make a lot of sense, but people are going to do that anyway.

44:21

So there's a huge stubbornness to resist that. And I just don't see people then changing their paradigm and then suddenly causing, and I'm not going to make up people on the fact that all of a sudden this evolutionary funding is going to dry up or somehow not be spent or something.

44:38

The real problem is that it's not really a head problem. It's a heart problem.

44:45

You know, people may see data that just totally blows their belief system apart. But if it's the alternative to their belief system requires you to acknowledge that there's a sovereign creator that has created us and hence has a claim upon our lives and can expect certain behavior on our part, certain attitudes on our part, that's life changing.

45:08

I mean, you're going to have to change your life in accordance with that realization. But the heart of man is dark and it's wicked.

45:15

It's going to resist that at all costs. So I just, I can't imagine that you would have this huge paradigm shift that would cause the funding to totally change in all of this.

45:26

It would, if that were the case, I think there would be a tremendous change in the world itself.

45:32

It would be a tremendous tremendous revival in this country that would accompany that.

45:39

And that would be a good thing if we could get that. I do want to make a comment on that because I've done some research for a book

45:44

I'm working on right now. And one of the things that you come to is there are literally millions and millions of dollars spent by the federal government in grants that go to things like putting the worm in the proper place in the evolutionary cycle or putting the fern in that place.

45:58

Those dollars, if they were spent for health research would probably bring us closer to solutions if we did it there rather than spending it on putting the evolutionary tree together.

46:09

We have, oh, by the way, Pastor Mark, you have won a free copy of the new astronomy book by our guest,

46:18

Dr. Danny Faulkner. So please give us your full mailing address so we can have that shipped out to you by Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CVBBS .com.

46:28

And we thank you for contributing to today's show. We have Pastor Sterling Vanderwerker at Shepard's Fellowship of Greensboro, North Carolina, who says,

46:37

Hi, Brother Charlie. I'm so glad that you got to meet up with Brother Chris. This is going to be a great show.

46:43

I do have a question for you guys. Have the contacts for the following issue.

46:50

Please explain in normal human terms of the ideas that time and space function like fabric with three -dimensional -like characteristics.

47:04

We go from the difficult to the near impossible. That's a real toughie.

47:11

Well, it gets kind of philosophical and I'll try to take a stab at you. Actually, I've written a book on cosmology.

47:16

It's been a dozen years ago called Universe by Design, also written, published by Master Books. It was my first book. And I've discussed it and other related issues dealing with cosmology.

47:25

That is not a kid's book, by the way. But, you know, in Newtonian philosophy, in Newtonian physics, really going back to Galileo and even back to the ancient times, they viewed space and time as separate entities.

47:42

And they were kind of like I like to liken it to a stage, the background upon which the play is played out through the real character's energy and matter.

47:55

So you've got this pretty inert, pretty uninvolved backdrop of space and time and matter and energy are working their magic or whatever they do, their physics that they go through.

48:06

But that idea began to come under scrutiny more than a century ago.

48:12

And it was Albert Einstein that kind of put it together a hundred years ago in his theory of general relativity.

48:19

And this idea of general relativity is that, first of all, space and time are not unrelated or independent.

48:27

Things are actually intimately related. And I give you an illustration that we do that all the time. I could ask you, Charlie, how far from where you live now to back to Greensboro?

48:36

How far away? About 300 miles. But you started to say how much, six hours, you said? Yeah, right, right, six hours.

48:43

And my point is, many, many times people will say, well, how far away is something? And you'll give it hours, driving time.

48:50

Right. I like that all the time. And so we understand that, you know, certain highway speed, average speed of what you do, 50, 60, whatever it is, you can drive that distance and it's probably more helpful than knowing just what the miles are.

49:01

Where I used to live in South Carolina, we were about two and a half, three hours from the beach. And I didn't care how far it was.

49:07

And driving distance, I just wanted to know how long it was going to take to get there and get back home when I went home. And so we do that all the time.

49:15

We convert the two. Well, we can do the same thing with time. If we multiply the time by the speed of light, then you get something that's in units of distance.

49:24

And that's what Einstein proposed. And then he said, it's just a fourth dimension here. That you tie with the other three.

49:31

And then you can write mathematical equations that describe those now four dimensions of what we call space -time.

49:39

Or if you want to shorten that up just to space understanding, it has four dimensions. Then you can write equations that are matrices equations that do this.

49:47

And it describes like an X, Y, Z, and T coordinate system. Imagine if you go back to high school geometry, you had a

49:54

Cartesian coordinate with an X and a Y. You could throw an X and Y systems like a checkerboard. You've got coordinates.

50:01

If you have a map grid, some places, say in the Midwest, where the streets run north, south, and east, west, you can start numbering from the zero block to the one block and work your way out and find addresses pretty accurately anywhere.

50:13

Well, imagine doing that in a third and then fourth dimension. I can imagine the third, the fourth. I have a hard time really kind of drawing that in my mind.

50:22

But I can still mathematically describe it. And those lines that you can draw and represent the

50:28

X, Y, Z, and now the time or CT, if you will, dimension are like threads in a fabric.

50:36

And what Einstein proposed was this fabric could be affected by the presence of matter and or energy.

50:44

If you have a large amount of matter or energy present embedded in space, then it could actually bend that space and time very subtly and cause it to curve.

50:56

And that's where we get the idea of a fabric. It kind of can bend like a two -dimensional fabric can bend. Well, now you got four dimensions, but you can write mathematically how that could happen in four dimensions simultaneously.

51:06

And so now you see there's an interaction between matter and energy and space and time very different from the

51:12

Newtonian concept where the two are unrelated and time and space are absolutes or they're rigid as it were.

51:19

You can now bend those. And under Einstein's idea of general relativity, this bending of space -time then kind of gives a mechanism by how gravity is supposed to be transmitted.

51:30

One of the big questions people had from Newtonian physics, Newton had proposed his famous law of gravity, but how does that information about, say, the sun's location and its mass in space, how does it get transmitted to other objects, as you say, for the earth?

51:47

How does it know where the sun is so it can respond accordingly? Well, Einstein tried to handle that by general relativity.

51:54

What happens is the sun's mass bends that space fabric of space -time, and the earth is moving forward, if nothing else, in the time dimension.

52:03

Can't help but do that because that's how time works. And as it does, it's moving on what we call a geodesic, a straight -line path through that curved space -time.

52:11

But to our perception, that path looks like it's a trajectory of acceleration as the thing orbits around the sun every year.

52:21

And so what Einstein was trying to do at a more fundamental level... I was still there?

52:29

Yeah, I don't know why you went silent there for a second. I just heard some glitches. Okay. At any rate, his idea was...

52:36

I'm still here. I keep hearing these beeps. Yeah, maybe the government is trying to intrude upon our conversation. I don't hear anything on my end, by the way.

52:44

Okay. I may be changing phone here in just a minute, but at any rate, handsets, I should say. But the whole idea is this thing is a mechanism by which the location of the sun is transmitted to the

52:58

Earth and other objects so they know where they are. And that's the whole idea of Einsteinian gravity.

53:05

Now, the thing is, this theory that he put forth makes a number of predictions. And those predictions were tested almost immediately.

53:12

There was an eclipse in 1919 where they did the first test and it came through with blind colors.

53:20

And this general relativity has been tested countless times since then, very sophisticated experiments.

53:27

And every time it's actually the predictions have been matched by the observations we have from the experimental results we get.

53:36

I'm convinced it's one of the best theories we've ever come up with. We're down to the point now where there are variations on general relativity that we're now testing different versions of that that some of the experiments are doing.

53:49

So in a nutshell, that's what's going on with space and time. As weird as that concept seems, it does do a very good job of explaining how gravity works and how matter and energy works and how matter and energy with respect to space and time and how they work.

54:08

It's a wonderful theory that works very well. Does it mean it's the ultimate reality? Well, I would be hesitant to go there because we've had ideas in the past in physics thinking that we'd reached ultimate reality only to get mugged by the next set of experiments which open up a whole new world of physics.

54:26

So all I can say is that it is the best understanding we have of how space and time work.

54:32

And Pastor Sterling Vanderwerker adds, we are in our second generation of homeschool grandchildren listening to Starlight and Time book from Creation Ministries in Atlanta.

54:44

Well, Pastor Sterling Vanderwerker, thank you for your question. And you are also getting a free copy of the new astronomy book.

54:51

So I hope that you start reading that to your grandchildren. And we look forward to hearing from you in the future with more questions on Iron Sharpens Iron.

55:01

And we're going to a break right now. This would be a good time for our guests to change phones because I have a feeling his battery was dying.

55:08

I think that's maybe what the problem was. And so perhaps Dr. Faulkner, you could change phones while we're on a station break and I'll hang up and you could call back.

55:18

But we will be back after these messages from our sponsors. So please do not go away.

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Hi, I'm Pastor Bill Shishko, inviting you to tune in to a visit to The Pastor's Study every

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Saturday from 12 noon to 1 pm on WLIE Radio, www .wlie540am

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.com. We bring biblically faithful pastoral ministry to you and we invite you to visit

01:00:00

The Pastor's Study by calling in with your questions. Our time will be lively, useful, sometimes controversial, but never dull.

01:00:08

Join us this Saturday at 12 noon for a visit to The Pastor's Study because everyone needs a pastor.

01:00:15

That's 12 noon to 1 pm eastern time on wlie540am .com.

01:00:21

And welcome back. If you just joined us, our guest today is Dr. Danny Faulkner.

01:00:26

We're discussing his new book, The New Astronomy Book. And my co -host in studio is Charlie Liebert, founder of 6daycreation .com.

01:00:35

And before I go to our listener in Slovenia who has a question, Charlie wanted to follow up on something that you were saying before the break,

01:00:43

Dr. Faulkner. Yes, Danny, in the comment you made about the fabric of the universe, I thought of Isaiah 40 .22

01:00:50

and I want to read that verse and just establishes the veracity of scripture. It is he that sits upon the circle of the earth and the inhabitants thereof are his grasshoppers.

01:00:58

They stretch out the heavens like a curtain and spread them out as a tent to dwell in.

01:01:03

There's your fabric of time -space, right in scripture. That's one of the verses that Russ Humphreys, who's one of the first people to really talk about the philosophy in this context, that made that exact parallel to that and other passages that talk about the fabric of spaces that were in the

01:01:18

Bible. Yes, and to me that's just incredible that it just establishes scripture knows what it's talking about.

01:01:25

Yep. We have Joe in Slovenia who says, please ask

01:01:30

Dr. Faulkner if he is familiar with the work of the French astronomer Chantal Jacques, I cannot pronounce this,

01:01:40

Volkowicz, W -O -L -K -I -E -W -I -E -Z.

01:01:45

I would never in a million years be able to pronounce that. She has done extensive research on hundreds of cave paintings in Europe, developing the theory that men from the earliest, from the very earliest days of archaeological history were accomplished astronomers and mathematicians.

01:02:02

She says that each painting in the Hall of Bowls in the

01:02:07

Lascaux Cave is aligned with a corresponding zodiac constellation.

01:02:14

The positions and relationships of the animals indicate astronomical knowledge of the solstice positions, the constellations and the fixed stars.

01:02:25

Is her work scientific support of the scriptural declaration that man from the very beginning understood what

01:02:31

God intended by let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years from Genesis chapter 1, verse 13?

01:02:48

Well, I'm not familiar with all the specifics of that particular person, but I'm familiar with at least the

01:02:53

Lascaux Cave. It's got those exquisite cave drawings that were, paintings that were discovered, early in the

01:03:04

Second World War, I believe. And it's a big tourist site there in the south of France. A beautiful, exquisite thing, a lot of different animals.

01:03:11

And for years, I had noticed that there is what appears to be a bull. It's one of the most common reproduced ones from the

01:03:18

Lascaux. And above it, to the upper right, there are five or six stars and a clump.

01:03:26

And years ago, I noticed that on these photographs. I thought, well, that looks like the Pleiades star cluster. And the bull would correspond to what we call

01:03:33

Taurus. That's the constellation of the bull. And about two years ago, I started looking into this a little bit more.

01:03:39

And sure enough, there are people who have already suggested this in the literature ahead of me. So I wasn't the first to notice it, but I was kind of independently discovered it on my own.

01:03:48

Particularly, they're making connection with that one. I'm not aware of attempts to really fit together other ones.

01:03:55

But I think a number of people now are convinced at least that one is a depiction of Taurus and the

01:04:03

Pleiades. I think it's a very good fit. Somebody wrote me a while back with some attempt to tie together some other constellations.

01:04:10

And I didn't think the fits were nearly as good. I would have to look into that more about what this person from Slovenia is suggesting.

01:04:17

However, we know the constellations are very ancient. We have 48 constellations handed down to us from the ancient world.

01:04:24

A man named Claudius Ptolemy wrote these up in a book originally called the Syntaxes. We now call it the

01:04:30

Almagest. Written in the early 2nd century AD. And many of the things we know about ancient astronomy were given to us through Ptolemy.

01:04:39

We know about the works of other people, for instance, before him, the Greeks, ancient Greeks, what they did, what they accomplished.

01:04:46

Now, this is where it gets interesting. People have done this. I know people in the mid to late part of the 19th century already did this, way ahead of me, of course.

01:04:55

So I'm just borrowing their work. If you take the 48 constellations that Ptolemy recorded and you plot them up in his descriptions, you can kind of find the center of all of that.

01:05:07

And the center of that ought to be the North Ecliptic Pole. Just as the

01:05:15

Earth has a North Pole, there's a North Pole in the sky, but also the orbit of the Earth has an ecliptic pole. And actually, we're going to be looking at the

01:05:22

North Celestial Pole and its relationship with that. Now, earlier on, we talked about astrology today on the program.

01:05:29

I talked about this thing called precession, which has shifted the zodiacal constellations, and hence the horoscopes are messed up by one sign.

01:05:36

It also causes a subtle shift in those stars. For instance, some of the stars that Ptolemy could see at his lifetime are down below the horizon today, and others are above, and there's kind of a gap there in the lower part of the sky.

01:05:53

By looking at all that, we can then, knowing the precession cycle, can figure out when those constellations were codified.

01:06:00

And they were codified really about the mid part of the third millennium BC. We're talking, you know, over 4 ,000 years ago, 4 ,500 years ago.

01:06:10

And so that tells us that when Ptolemy codified them almost 2 ,000 years ago, he was putting together, codifying some constellations that had been around for at least 2 ,000 years before him.

01:06:22

What sources he had were not entirely certain, but he had worked from ancient sources, apparently. Now, what's interesting is that date agrees very well with the biblical date of the flood and or the

01:06:36

Tower of Babel shortly after the flood. And that would seem to indicate that the constellations as we know them go back to the time of the flood and maybe the dispersal at Babel, and which would explain why people would have taken those constellations with them around the world.

01:06:51

We find similarities in different constellations Ours in the West comes out of the Middle East and from the

01:06:57

Greeks after the Middle East. But there are systems, say, in North America among the natives there, among the

01:07:03

Far East and other places. There are differences, but yet there's some similarities. For instance, many of them see a couple of bears up in the sky.

01:07:11

And that's a problem for the conventional dating because they would be a problem for conventional dating because they would argue that the

01:07:21

Native Americans, for instance, came here 10 ,000, 12 ,000 years ago.

01:07:28

And in reality, this would seem to indicate that they arrived much later than that.

01:07:36

And I think the constellations we find like that really give credence to the fact that we have the biblical time frame that can tell us what the proper time frame for things would be in the universe and the

01:07:50

Earth. As far as dating Lascaux, I think they've been radiocarbon dated going back probably 20 ,000 years or so.

01:07:58

We would disagree with those dates. But that's the whole part of the whole issue dealing with radiocarbon dating, which is something

01:08:06

I don't know if we really want to talk about today. But I'm very excited about the facts here that they seem to indicate the recent origin of mankind, the fact that the ancient constellations are truly ancient.

01:08:20

They go back at least 4 ,500 years ago, which doesn't take us necessarily all the way back to the patriarchs before the flood, but it at least gives us a hint that we have very truly ancient constellations.

01:08:33

Well, thank you, Joe, in Slovenia. And you have won our final copy of the

01:08:38

New Astronomy book, compliments of Master Books, and also compliments of our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com.

01:08:50

And thank you, Joe, for providing an American address to ship you this book, because obviously it's very expensive to ship overseas.

01:09:00

So we are very happy and thankful that you have an American contact that will be able to get those books to you at some point.

01:09:08

And we have a person who uses an alias, and one of these days

01:09:15

I got to find out why she uses this alias. I have no idea why. I'd love to find out the real name of this listener who blesses us with a question from time to time.

01:09:26

But Lam Lam in Valley Stream, New York, says, Dear Faithful Brother Chris, thank you for bringing the gentle brother,

01:09:35

Dr. Danny Faulkner, again. My question is, what does the word new in Dr.

01:09:42

Faulkner's book titled The New Astronomy Book mean? What's new in terms of perspective, discovery, or what?

01:09:48

Are there any fun family activities in the book? Also, as understood, it was said to be suitable to use as curriculum.

01:09:57

So what additional tools, say telescope, are needed in order to fulfill the laboratory portion of the education requirement?

01:10:08

Or that could be used as curriculum with some invalid information?

01:10:13

Or could be, I'm not sure what that last sentence means. But if you could respond to the best of your ability to Lam Lam's question.

01:10:22

Okay, the series that's part of was actually launched more than 15 years ago,

01:10:28

I think the late 90s. And one of those included a book called The Astronomy Book. And we went with a whole new edition, a whole new author, a different author than the first one.

01:10:39

And so kind of relaunching these, they wanted to change it before it just went methodically from chapter to chapter before with some questions at the end of the ones.

01:10:46

But they wanted to change the appearance and the feel of these. They wanted to go with the color coding and the three different levels.

01:10:53

And again, the content was completely reworked. So we couldn't call it The Astronomy Book because that title's already out there.

01:10:59

So we decided to call it The Astronomy Book. And I believe there's maybe another one out there in the same series.

01:11:06

I don't know which one it is, like the New Geology Book or the New Weather Book. But there's at least one other title that has new in it as well, part of that series.

01:11:15

And it's just representing just a revamping of how they did it. And I must say, I think the new series is much prettier than the old series.

01:11:24

They have more photographs, less artwork than before. And I think photographs always work better than doing paintings or whatever kind of artwork you do.

01:11:32

As far as ancillary materials, we don't have that. I guess somebody could write a study guide for it,

01:11:38

I suppose. But we do have the, again, the three -level color -coded thing. There are some questions in there.

01:11:45

I think there are some resources in the back that are mentioned that you can use. So you don't need a telescope for this.

01:11:50

This is generally for a grade school and middle school curriculum.

01:11:57

You wouldn't be doing telescopes per se. That would be a nice touch. But that requires some outlay of expenses and also some knowledge of how to use the telescope.

01:12:07

So it's kind of difficult to just say, well, go buy this and go look at this in the sky. That would be kind of hard to do.

01:12:14

Yes, speak. Go ahead. I'm sorry. Yeah, we kind of mean it as a supplement to be used as part of a curriculum.

01:12:21

You might be doing it in, say, homeschooling. Or you can do it in school as well. Yes, and so sorry,

01:12:28

Lam Lam, that we don't have a free book for you. We're all out of the books. But if you'd like to order that on your own, you can go to cvbbs .com,

01:12:37

Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, because they have in stock a quite a number of titles by Master Books and New Leaf Publishing Group.

01:12:48

So go to cvbbs .com. And if they don't have it in stock, they will certainly order it for you.

01:12:54

And please tell them at cvbbs .com that you heard about the book through Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

01:13:04

And we always appreciate you joining us on the air with your questions.

01:13:10

And speaking of books that have beautiful photographs in them,

01:13:19

Colonel Jeffrey Williams, who is a Christian astronaut, he has a really beautiful book.

01:13:26

Have you seen his book, Dr. Faulkner? Yes, I have a copy. It is gorgeous. Yeah, and he has taken more photographs from space than any other astronaut in history.

01:13:38

And why is the title of his book escaping me? It's a beautiful coffee table book, very large, filled with vibrant photographs, and I can't remember the title of it.

01:13:50

But I don't know if you can, but if you go to cvbbs .com, you can ask them to look up Colonel Jeffrey Williams.

01:14:00

And that, I believe, is the only book that he specifically wrote and contributed photographs to.

01:14:08

And we'll get back to you at some point with the actual title of that book, because it just flew out of my head.

01:14:14

I can't remember it. The foreword of that book is by Dr. John MacArthur of Grace Community Church and Grace Team Ministries, who has been a guest on Iron, Sharp, and Zarn, and we hope to get him back in the near future as well.

01:14:28

What is the approximate age of the Earth that is believed to be the accurate age by young Earth creationists, at least the greatest number of men that could agree on a number like that?

01:14:48

Well, before we answer that question, I just looked up the name of the book. It's called The Work of His Hand.

01:14:53

That's right. So I just wanted to get that out there from Jeffrey Williams. Yeah, how old do you think, do we recreationists think?

01:15:00

The young Earth creationists, yeah. We think a little over 6 ,000 years. It's pretty straightforward.

01:15:07

You look at the genealogies of chapter 5 in Genesis, and that takes you from creation to the flood, and that's like 16 and a half centuries.

01:15:19

And then genealogies of chapter 11 take you from Noah to Abraham. And when you add that up, you're talking something on the order of 2 ,000 years to Abraham from the creation, maybe a little more than that, actually.

01:15:33

And then we got the tricky matter of trying to date when did Abraham live, and you can do that with a combination of secular chronologies, and then also the other

01:15:42

Bible chronologies found throughout the historical books, the books of Kings, for instance, the Old Testament. And there's some variations between that.

01:15:49

There's a question about how long the Israelites were in Egypt. Was it, you know, 230 years? Was it 400 years?

01:15:55

Those kind of questions. But you end up with something close to 6 ,000 years. I tend to think a bit more than that, maybe even as much as 6 ,200 years.

01:16:03

I have a hard time getting to 7 ,000, but if you take the chronologies given in the

01:16:09

Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament done around 2nd or 3rd century BC, you get something close to 7 ,000 years.

01:16:19

And it's inescapable. You're going to get something on that range, 6 ,000 to 7 ,000 years. And many, many people have tried it.

01:16:25

The most famous being, of course, Archbishop James Usher, who around 1650 did his

01:16:32

Annals of the World. But he was not alone. There were many people who worked on it. Sir Isaac Newton had his own chronology.

01:16:38

The other great astronomer who did was Johannes Kepler. And there were many, many other people who attended

01:16:43

Lightfoot, tried it. And they all kind of converged on a little over 6 ,000 years ago. So when so many bright minds look at Scripture and apply the same sort of assumptions with variations, then you get something a little over 6 ,000 years.

01:16:58

I think you're going to have to conclude, if you believe in integrative Scripture at all, that the creation is a little over 6 ,000 years old.

01:17:06

Yeah, so that, I probably misspoke in the way I asked the question. It's not just the Earth. It's all of creation, the entire universe.

01:17:13

Yeah, there are some people out there who believe that the Earth itself is pretty young, but the universe is old.

01:17:20

We call them old universe, young Earth creationists. Seventh -day Adventists often fall in that category.

01:17:27

But there are other non -FDAs that also believe that as well. And that introduces problems

01:17:33

I alluded to before. You have stars then obviously existing before the Earth existed.

01:17:39

And that's a problem with reconciling with the Genesis 1 creation account. I'd like to ask both you and my co -host,

01:17:48

Charlie Liebert, a question. And perhaps I'll start with you, Dr. Faulkner. But as you know, as both of you know, there are

01:17:57

Christians who believe that a six, a literal six -day understanding of the creation is absolutely essential.

01:18:09

They would say that those who stray from that strict six -day literal interpretation are even heretical or even dangerously heretical.

01:18:20

You have those who think that old Earth or even old universe, old creation understanding is very critical because they will say, and of course,

01:18:33

I don't mean to broad brush, but many of them will say that the young Earth creationists are an embarrassment to Christianity because they think that the enlightened scientific world has the truth on this issue.

01:18:53

And therefore, the young Earth creationists are coming across to the world as being laughably

01:19:01

Neanderthal, pardon the pun there, that they are really out of step with the modern science and they are really holding on to fairy tales and legends just because it seems to be in harmony with their understanding of scripture.

01:19:22

And then you have those that really don't think it matters at all what you think about the age of the creation.

01:19:29

So, obviously, you're a young Earth creationist, but how serious is this according to your understanding?

01:19:38

Well, I would not place the age of creation among the cardinal doctrines of Christianity.

01:19:46

You've got just a few of those things, such as the inspiration of scripture, the deity of Jesus Christ, Trinity, the birth and resurrection, the sacrificial atonement of Jesus Christ on the cross for arrition of sin.

01:19:57

Those are the cardinal doctrines of Christianity. They're outlined in the great creeds going back at least to the

01:20:02

Nicene Creed of 370, 700 years ago. There is an affirmation there of creation, but not necessarily recent creation.

01:20:11

I'm putting a time span on that. Having said that, almost everybody in the

01:20:16

Christian West believed in thousands of years, six day, normal day creation. Until fairly modern times, it really wasn't until the 18th century, late 18th century at that, that you got ideas about geology and then in the 19th century about biology suggesting evolution where this pressure for long time periods came about.

01:20:37

So I would not brand anybody who disagrees about the age of creation with me as a heretic.

01:20:43

I'm very reluctant to use the H word on people. I think we should reserve it for people who truly are heretics.

01:20:49

However, ideas do have consequences. If you get something wrong in scripture, then it's gonna have propagation from there.

01:20:58

You know, important questions come up. Was there a real Adam and Eve? Was there a Garden of Eden?

01:21:04

Was there a literal fruit there that Adam and Eve partook of to cause them to come into the world? Many people who believe in millions of years believe there was a real

01:21:12

Adam and Eve, but some don't. And if they don't believe in a real Adam and Eve, they don't believe in a fall in the garden, then you've got a real problem because writing to the

01:21:21

Corinthians, Apostle Paul connected the disobedience of the first Adam, bringing death by sin into the world, and then by the obedience of the last

01:21:32

Adam, Jesus Christ, all can be made alive. So there's a contrast there. If the first Adam didn't exist, then what did it say about the second

01:21:38

Adam? Because you see the important doctrines of salvation are established in the first few chapters of Genesis, the first messianic prophecies in 315 of Genesis.

01:21:49

So it has some consequences. While they may not be heretics, it starts raising problems and issues for people.

01:21:58

And I do understand the temptation that many people have. They look at the science and it seems insurmountable to them that, well, the evidence seems to indicate billions of years.

01:22:06

And so yeah, you recent creationists would be an embarrassment. But first of all, I'm not impressed with the supposed data that suggests that it's billions of years old.

01:22:15

I look at the history of how that came about, particularly in the 19th century, and it all comes down to the assumption of evolution.

01:22:23

You take evolution away, then suddenly the great need for time is gone, and you start interpreting the world very differently than you would otherwise.

01:22:31

And I think that's the real issue. But ultimately, yeah, this might be an embarrassment, but the atheists and the skeptics are not satisfied with that.

01:22:41

Because, you know, let's say we all agreed, okay, it really is billions of years old, it doesn't really matter, and we'll accept that.

01:22:47

Well, they're not going to stop at that point. I think the final point, or the next point they would go to, would be things such as the virgin birth and the resurrection.

01:22:57

The science that establishes that the virgin birth and resurrection, and I'm talking about somebody who's been dead, profoundly dead, just not merely dead, but profoundly really dead for three days, is very powerful.

01:23:08

There's a good scientific argument to make that the resurrection cannot happen. Good argument to make from biology that the virgin birth cannot happen.

01:23:17

I would even go so far to say that I think science can more conclusively rule out those two things than it can rule out a recent creation.

01:23:26

I think the evidence is that strong. Of course, the people who caution us and say we're being a big embarrassment don't want to go there, but those are the real stakes.

01:23:35

And if they think they can mollify, satisfy the atheist skeptics just by giving up recent creation, creation ideas at all, they're sadly mistaken, because that,

01:23:46

I think, is the real crux of the matter. And they won't quit until they've gotten rid of the virgin birth and resurrection.

01:23:53

And Charlie, Liebert? Yes, I want to try a little different approach on this. I deal with people on this issue all the time.

01:24:00

And one of the things I do is I use a technique in my book to do that, and that is asking questions. Why do you want the earth to be old?

01:24:07

What's the motivation? What's the reason behind it? And if you get down to presuppositions, what you eventually find is that they want to be inconsistent with science.

01:24:17

Now that's a problem, because science is interpretive, and science changes. Scripture is not interpretive, and it's interpretive, but it doesn't change.

01:24:27

So if you've got the literal instructions in Genesis chapter one, where it's very clear that it'd be in six literal days, you can't get past that.

01:24:35

Even Hebrew scholars can't get past that. You wind up with a reason, a motivation that is non -biblical.

01:24:42

And when you point that out to old earthers, they usually get angry, because they don't want to be told that they don't believe the

01:24:48

Bible, which you're not telling them directly, but you really are, because you don't believe scripture. Now, what do you mean by science changes?

01:24:55

Obviously, scientific fact doesn't change unless there's something about the fact that is changeable.

01:25:02

No, the interpretation of what we know from science is what changes. Interpretation. Okay, let me give you an example.

01:25:08

When I was in school, and they taught me about cells, they talked about the cell being filled with protoplasm, and that protoplasm is how the body worked.

01:25:16

We had no clue about DNA and the incredible complexity in the cell. So that was the excuse.

01:25:21

Now, science changed. When the electron microscope came along, we saw things we never even could have imagined at the beginning.

01:25:27

So science is always gaining and interpreting and changing. Another example for you, they told most of my wife, they claimed the

01:25:37

Big Bang happened 16 to 18 billion years ago. That's a range of 2 billion years, but now they're saying it's 13 .8

01:25:44

billion years ago, plus or minus 1%. Well, both those figures can't be correct, because they don't overlap at all.

01:25:52

And that's indicative again, well, what's going to be next week or next month? Science changes continually on those kinds of questions.

01:25:59

Now, I spoke with an old earth, and I guess

01:26:04

I should start using the word old creation Christian, who is a scientist and he believes firmly in an old earth because he believes that that is the consensus of the vast majority of Christians who are geologists.

01:26:25

Christians who are not liberal, they are evangelical, perhaps some of them are

01:26:33

Roman Catholic, but they have a conservative interpretation of the scriptures and narratives and so on.

01:26:42

And this person had basically shared with me that he thinks it's mind boggling that any

01:26:50

Christian who is a knowledgeable geologist would reject the knowledge and findings and unanimous belief of most of the

01:27:04

Christian geological world. Now, how do you guys respond to that?

01:27:11

He's making a basic assumption, and that is the principles of geology, of uniformitarianism is the principle that works.

01:27:20

And I would say that's been falsified at Mount St. Helens and a number of other places where uniformitarianism doesn't work.

01:27:28

It doesn't work, for example, to the Grand Canyon because if the Grand Canyon were eroded by slow processes, there should be a massive delta at the end of the

01:27:34

Colorado River. There's virtually none. That material went somewhere else. Yeah, and obviously, as you know, at some point,

01:27:43

I am intending to do a two -day interview where I have both views back to back being represented and somebody who is a geologist who contributed to the

01:27:55

Grand Canyon monument to an ancient Earth. And do you know of this book,

01:28:02

Dr. Faulkner? Who's the author of that again? Is that Steve Austin or is that? No, it's

01:28:07

Old Earth. Oh, okay, I know the book. It came out just in the last six to eight months. Carol Hill, Greg Davidson, Tim Helbel and Wayne Ranney are the editors.

01:28:18

Right, it really took on Steve Austin's work on Grand Canyon as well as Andrew Snelling, my boss here at Ancestors and Genesis, his studies of Grand Canyon.

01:28:30

So yeah, I think both Steve and Andrew are working on responses to that book because they believe it's misrepresented a lot of our case tremendously.

01:28:40

You know what? I mean, this person, you're saying this person says, well, all these geologists appear to be Christians, love the

01:28:46

Lord. Most of them believe in billions of years, but the question is, when was truth ever determined by majority votes?

01:28:54

Many times we know that the majority can be wrong about things. And throughout much of church history, most of the vast majority of opinion based on scripture was that the world was only thousands of years old.

01:29:05

This idea that it was billions of years old is fairly recent and it's not been driven by scriptural teaching and understanding.

01:29:14

It's been driven by the quote -unquote science. And you've had Christian leaders running for cover, trying to find various ways, desperately to make that fit with gap theory, day age, framework hypothesis, allegory, all sorts of different approaches.

01:29:36

But if you, as Terry already mentioned, you know, if you tell the days of creation, it's pretty clear that the most eminent

01:29:42

Hebrew scholars and biblical scholars and Old Testament scholars have to agree that, yeah, this is talking about six day normal creation.

01:29:49

It's not talking about anything else. So I think people are being blinded by the science.

01:29:55

They take that as being primacy and being authoritative, and they then really lean on the understanding of scripture to come to some other conclusion.

01:30:05

We have to go to our final break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

01:30:12

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the good old

01:30:21

USA. And please only remain anonymous if it's about a private matter. Perhaps you are in disagreement with your own pastor or something like that.

01:30:31

We understand your desire to be anonymous with a case like that, but please at least give us your first name, city, and state if it's not a private issue.

01:30:41

We're going to be right back with our guest Dr. Danny Faulkner and our co -host

01:30:47

Charlie Liebert right after these messages. So don't go away.

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01:32:05

Paul wrote to the church at Galatia for am I now seeking the approval of man or of God? Or am

01:32:10

I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. Hi, I'm Mark Lukens, pastor of Providence Baptist Church.

01:32:19

We are a Reformed Baptist Church and we hold to the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689.

01:32:25

We are in Norfolk, Massachusetts. We strive to reflect Paul's mindset to be much more concerned with how

01:32:30

God views what we say and what we do than how men view these things. That's not the best recipe for popularity, but since that wasn't the

01:32:38

Apostle's priority, it must not be ours either. We believe by God's grace that we are called to demonstrate love and compassion to our fellow man and to be vessels of Christ's mercy to a lost and hurting community around us and to build up the body of Christ in truth and love.

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01:34:17

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01:34:25

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01:36:07

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01:36:16

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01:36:44

And we do, well, welcome back. First of all, this is Chris Arnson of Iron Trap and Zion.

01:36:50

If you just tuned us in, our guest for the full two hours with about 25 minutes to go today is

01:36:56

Dr. Danny R. Faulkner, and we have been discussing, among many other things, his book,

01:37:03

The New Astronomy Book, where we've been talking about all kinds of things involving a young Earth versus an old

01:37:10

Earth, or should I say a young creation versus an old creation, and many things involved in that.

01:37:16

If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com

01:37:23

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Harrison in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania wants to know, well, do you take a strict view that it's impossible for life to be existing on other planets?

01:37:36

I understand how a Christian who is a scientist might think that it's improbable, but I do not understand why anyone would say dogmatically that it is absolutely impossible because the

01:37:48

Bible seems to be very silent on the issue. Yeah, I take a pretty strong view, but I would stop short of saying absolutely not.

01:37:57

I've written a pocket guide to extraterrestrials and ETs here at Answers in Genesis, and I'm also off and on working on a book on the question as well, a little more in depth on it.

01:38:09

But you know, the question is, where does life come from? If you believe in the

01:38:15

Bible, you believe in creation, you believe that God created life on Earth. And if you don't believe that, then you have to believe that life arose spontaneously, and that runs into scientific problems immediately.

01:38:27

One of the first things I learned in biology class in high school 45 years ago was this rule or law of biogenesis that only life produces life.

01:38:37

There's absolutely no scientific evidence that life arises spontaneously. But then again,

01:38:42

I want to address this then biblically. I think the science says that life does not arise spontaneously on its own, and also the

01:38:49

Bible happens to agree with that. I love it when the science agrees with the Bible on these kind of questions. But anyway, if God has created life on Earth, then the question really comes down, did

01:38:59

God create life elsewhere in the universe? Now, I'm going to restrict my discussion to life like us.

01:39:06

I think that's a real question people have. Are there beings like us out there in the universe? And if there are, then are they really like us?

01:39:13

Do they have souls as we have? Do they have eternal destinies? Will they be spending eternity? Those kind of questions. And if so, then are they fallen creatures?

01:39:21

Are they in need of salvation? If indeed they're fallen creatures, then in need of salvation, then the question arises, well, why?

01:39:28

Why are they so fallen creatures? There's a couple of possibilities. One could be that they are sinners because of Adam's sin, and so consequently the atoning work of Jesus Christ on the cross on Earth would suffice to cover those sins.

01:39:43

But think about it. To the aliens were the aliens, and Adam is an alien, and the work that Jesus Christ did on the cross happened on an alien world.

01:39:54

So if you're going to try to preach the gospel on one of these alien worlds, your gospel message may begin something like this.

01:40:00

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. I think your response just kind of answers the question that that isn't going to work, is it?

01:40:12

So the other possibility is, well, maybe these creatures had an Adam that died that went into sin and through a garden choice in the

01:40:21

Garden of Eden on their planet. And so each of these worlds they fell into sin individually. But then that's good, but then that would require the redemptive work of Jesus Christ to be accomplished on that planet as well.

01:40:32

So you basically have a situation where Jesus came to this planet, was born of a virgin, lived a perfect life, laid down his life in atonement for sin, and then rose again on the third day to then ascend above the

01:40:45

Earth and go to another planet and do it again and do it again and do it again and so forth. The problem with that is we know that Jesus, when he left this world, did not go down to the planet and do it again because we know he went to sit at the right hand of the

01:40:57

Father. That's done, I think, quite literally from Scripture. Jesus really, truly did die once for all.

01:41:06

Now, the other possibility is that there are beings like us out there, but they never fell into sin and hence they're living in a sinless, perfect world and they themselves are not fallen creatures.

01:41:14

My problem with that is that Romans chapter 8 seems to indicate that the entire creation has been affected by the taint of man's sin.

01:41:23

I think that's also why 2 Peter 3 and the book of Revelation of Levi -Isaiah as well speak of there being a new heaven and a new

01:41:29

Earth. 2 Peter 3 is most specific about this heaven and Earth passing away. And that's talking about the entirety of creation going on there, being destroyed by fire and then being reconstituted or recreated.

01:41:43

And I think it's because the very creation itself, all of it, is tainted by man's sin and must be redeemed even as we are.

01:41:50

And so these creatures are living in a tainted by sin world, but they themselves are not. And that's inconsistent to me.

01:41:57

And that would seem to rule out the possibility then, I think theologically and biblically, of there being intelligent life like us on other planets.

01:42:05

Now that doesn't really address the question of, you know, could there be plants or bacteria or something on other planets?

01:42:12

And then... Or something like mammals or something like reptiles? But I think the problem is, with that I would say, is that we find that man has a specific function of having dominion on the earth.

01:42:28

That's taught in Genesis. It's also taught in Psalm 8 as well, where we're in charge of the world and we would have a world then that has nobody in charge.

01:42:37

Now, I'm not arguing from silence. I'm not saying, well, because the Bible doesn't tell us they're aliens that there must not be any.

01:42:44

That's not the point. I'm arguing, you know, biblically and theologically, consider the possibilities and none of them seem to work.

01:42:51

So that's the reason why I believe that when the question comes up, are we alone in the universe?

01:42:57

I think the very definite answer from Scripture, the implication is, yes, we are alone.

01:43:03

Now, again, I can't point to a specific verse that says you are alone in the universe. God didn't make any other things.

01:43:10

But there are a lot of questions like this that are not answered in Scripture. So we must use biblical principles like so many other things that are not answered directly.

01:43:18

So again, I would conclude pretty strongly, I think that no, that God didn't make anything else that they're like this.

01:43:24

I don't think scientifically and biblically, they arose on their own. And I could be wrong about how I've interpreted

01:43:29

Scripture, but I think it's pretty clear to me. I need to add something here. One of the interesting things about the origin of life question comes to who are the spokesmen?

01:43:40

The best spokesman for evolution today in the world is Dr. Richard Dawkins. And Dawkins' explanation for the origin of life is not evolution on Earth.

01:43:48

It's panspermia. It's life coming from another planet from aliens. That to me...

01:43:53

And you have a problem with that? Yes, I do have a huge problem with that.

01:44:00

Charlie, does Dawkins actually believe that or just know that as a possibility? He actually said that on a videotape

01:44:06

I've seen that that's his best guess. That panspermia is the best guess. I know that Hoyle and Witt Gremsing were on that.

01:44:13

I wasn't aware that Dawkins had endorsed it so strongly. Yes, Dawkins endorsed it fairly recently. He was in an interview with the...

01:44:20

I can't think of the guy's name, the guy that did the video, that movie. I'm not sure which movie you mean.

01:44:27

It was about censoring evolution in the classroom. Oh, Ben...

01:44:34

Ben Stein. Ben Stein, yes. In that film, Dawkins is shown saying that. Okay. His best guess is panspermia.

01:44:43

That's a pretty grasping at straws, desperate idea. Yes, it's extremely desperate. And it doesn't really answer the question.

01:44:50

It just simply puts the question off someplace else. In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that would be an

01:44:55

SEP that stands for someone else's problem. That's correct. That's correct.

01:45:01

It's interesting that these enlightened intellectuals who are the elite of the society allegedly laugh at our

01:45:15

Bible stories, and yet they come up with things that are infinitely more bizarre and that, as has been said by other

01:45:24

Christians, require more faith to believe than even our Bible stories. The origin of life is a showstopper for evolution because everything we know scientifically is life comes from life of the same kind.

01:45:39

And that's a scientific law. Just out of curiosity, Dr. Faulkner, have you ever had any exchanges with scientists who are

01:45:49

Mormon? Because Mormons do believe there is life on other planets because they believe if you're a faithful Mormon, you will be the god of your own planet.

01:45:59

And there's apparently an infinite number of planets out there that are inhabited by beings who are under the godship of a

01:46:11

Mormon. I've never had that discussion, per se.

01:46:16

I've known some Mormon scientists, but we've never discussed that particular one. But you bring this up because it is related to the question of life on other planets.

01:46:25

The question of parallel worlds, the idea that there are other worlds like our own, was a very common belief in the early 19th century.

01:46:34

In fact, it came up even earlier than that, the 18th century. And the world in which Joseph Smith grew up in, this was discussed quite a bit.

01:46:42

And at the time, many people, scientists and laymen alike, were well aware that we had planets in the solar system.

01:46:48

Likely other stars had planets. We didn't know that until about 25 years ago, for sure. But they speculated that those things existed.

01:46:56

And people were opining that almost all the planets were inhabited. The moon was inhabited. Some thought the sun was inhabited.

01:47:02

So people were thinking that life was all over the place. And so that's where Joseph Smith got his own peculiar theology and cosmology.

01:47:10

He was heavily influenced by his culture. One of the questions I get asked quite frequently from people in the area of astronomy is, if there are, and they're making a supposition here, if there are so many worlds that are like Earth out there with the billions and billions of stars, how could we deny the fact that there's life like us out there?

01:47:29

And my response is, I don't know that there's that many planets. And can you just address that, Danny? Yeah, we've speculated about planets orbiting other stars for close to four centuries.

01:47:39

But the actual good first conclusive data, there were attempts in the 19th and 20th century as well.

01:47:47

All of them turned out to be species. But in the last 20, 25 years, we began getting with modern technology and modern techniques of observing with large telescopes.

01:47:56

We've detected other planets orbiting other stars. And we now know of nearly 4 ,000 extrasolar planets, planets orbiting other stars.

01:48:05

Now out of that 4 ,000, how many do you think are Earth -like? Well, my expectation is probably zero, but I don't know if that's true.

01:48:13

Ding, ding, ding. You get exactly right. That's the correct answer. There have been a few that have been suggested, but when you start looking at them, none of the few supposed

01:48:22

Earth -like planets work. I look at it, and you've got to be kidding me. These are supposedly Earth -like. Now, 30 years ago, you would have said to people, how many planets would we need to discover before we'd find some

01:48:32

Earth -like ones? If you said it would require 4 ,000, I think people would have said, oh, certainly by the time we got to 4 ,000, we'd find a number of Earth -like planets.

01:48:39

Well, we found none. I think the Earth really is a rare commodity. But you know what?

01:48:45

You can take that data. 4 ,000 known planets, and the number keeps increasing. There probably are millions and billions of planets out there.

01:48:56

However, you've got to look for Earth -like planets. None seems to exist. The science seems to suggest that to us.

01:49:02

We've got a 4 ,000 sample size. That's getting pretty big. We ought to be able to reach a scientific conclusion, and the conclusion is there are no

01:49:08

Earth -like planets out there. But I digress. One of the questions on that that comes to my mind is the presence of water is extremely important for life.

01:49:17

Do we find that spectroscopically out there anywhere? Oh, water is found everywhere. In fact, water is the most abundant molecule in the universe.

01:49:26

We see it in the atmospheres of cool stars. We see it in the interstellar medium, the stuff between the stars. We see it on some of the planets.

01:49:31

But guess what? Everywhere we find it, it's either gas or solid. Okay, not liquid.

01:49:37

The only place we know for certain in the universe that liquid water exists is on the Earth. Now, there have been suggestions on a couple of satellites of the outer planets that they might have liquid water deep down into the surfaces, but the evidence for that is, at best, indirect.

01:49:51

We don't know for certain water exists anywhere, and that's an important factor. But even if you did find

01:49:57

Earth -like planets, and even if you did find liquid water on them, where does life come from?

01:50:03

If you go back to the law of biogenesis, that life only begets life, nonliving things do not produce living things, then you realize the probability of life arising naturalistically is zero.

01:50:18

And this attempt to look at more and more and more planets and saying, well, there must be billions and billions of planets, certainly this must happen.

01:50:24

Well, you're asking to get the impossible to happen simply by doing it, having more chances at doing it.

01:50:31

You know, like, I would love to ride a four -minute mile. At my age of 62, that's not very likely, but why not enter every mile race that's out there, and eventually

01:50:41

I'll do it. In that kind of argument, you're taking the impossible and then trying to make it probable by simply multiplying by a large number.

01:50:49

And that logically and mathematically and scientifically doesn't work. Yes, that's correct. Very quickly, Lam Lam and Valley Stream, since you could not find the information about the

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01:51:08

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You can also go to something that's a lot easier to remember. They should have given me this in the first place when

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worldmag as a abbreviation of magazine .com forward slash iron sharpens.

01:51:44

Last but not least, Lam Lam, you could go to the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio website, and if you scroll down, it's right at the top of the section that has all of our sponsors' banner ads, and you could click on that for World Magazine.

01:51:57

That's ironsharpensironradio .com. ironsharpensironradio .com. Arnie in Perry County said that he has heard

01:52:04

Mormons believe that God did not actually create the universe.

01:52:11

He reorganized it because matter is eternal. Is this true? Meaning, is this true that the

01:52:17

Mormons believe that? I'm not sure of the specifics on that, but their God is not capable of creation.

01:52:24

I mean, they believe that they teach that Elohim, the God of the Bible, was born a man on or near someplace called

01:52:31

Kolob, either a planet or a planet -orbiting star named Kolob. It's not clear. And that Elohim then, through following proper teachings,

01:52:42

Mormon teaching, I guess, on that planet, became a god himself, was exalted, and he and his wife came to the earth.

01:52:49

They were given this earth as a planet, and Elohim then populated the earth and became the god over the earth.

01:52:57

The problem with that is that he didn't create anything other than living things.

01:53:03

He certainly didn't create the earth. He didn't create the universe, as the Bible clearly teaches God did.

01:53:08

So yeah, I think they would believe in an eternal universe, and it's kind of an eternal scheme, a pyramid scheme.

01:53:14

You get in early, and you become some sort of elevated being, a god at that point. I would like, first,

01:53:20

I'd like Charlie Liebert, before we go off the air for like two minutes, conclude with your final thoughts in summary, and then

01:53:30

I'd like you, Dr. Faulkner, after Charlie's finished, to conclude with a few minutes of your own to give our listeners what you most want etched in their hearts and minds.

01:53:40

Charlie, if you could. Yes, sure. When I think about science in the Bible, I begin to think about the fact that in the scientific world, the evidence is interpreted.

01:53:51

We look at things and we see differences. For example, if you stand on the rim of Grand Canyon and you look at that, one person will say, wow, look at that, millions and millions of years of erosion.

01:54:01

The next person looks at the same canyon says, wow, look at the result of Noah's flood. So the presuppositions in the person's mind are more important than the actual interpretation, because the canyon is there.

01:54:15

It's a big hole in the ground, but it doesn't tell you how it was formed. So all science is interpretive.

01:54:20

Scripture's not in that same form. Scripture comes authoritatively to us and tells us what it is about the universe.

01:54:27

We used that example in Isaiah before. There are many other places in scripture where the Bible is right. I mean, you go back to the book of Job and it says the earth hangs on nothing.

01:54:34

That's a good expression of what the gravitational force looks like when you look at the planet Earth. So the scripture's veracity is far better than science.

01:54:44

So we weigh the two, and this is why I'm a six -day, one of the reasons I'm a six -day creationist. We weigh the two and we say scripture is correct.

01:54:51

If science conflicts, there's got to be a issue with science, not an issue with scripture. So if we do that, then we're going to be six -day creationists.

01:54:59

We have no other choice because the language is clear. And Charlie Liebert's website is sixdaycreation .com,

01:55:07

sixdaycreation .com. Dr. Danny Faulkner, if you could now have the floor for a few minutes to give our listeners what you most want etched in their hearts and minds.

01:55:17

Well, as Charlie was saying, we scientists, creationists and evolutionists look at the same world.

01:55:22

We look at the same data, but we interpret it very differently because our assumptions are different. To the

01:55:27

Christian, we should realize the authority of scripture, God's way of revealing

01:55:33

His truth to mankind, and we should study it and use it as the authority. I get very concerned when people want to take the teachings of man coming from supposedly billions of years and then impose that back on scripture.

01:55:49

It's a very dangerous thing to do because the same science, supposedly, that tells you that the world is very old, billions of years, is also the same science that would even more strongly tell you the virgin birth and resurrection could not take place.

01:56:03

You know, if you don't have a miracle of creation, how can you believe these other miracles that are central to what we believe?

01:56:10

You know, Jesus, the New Testament tells us that absent the resurrection, we're miserable.

01:56:15

We're most miserable among all men. That is the key thing. And scientists, unbelieving scientists, the atheists and the skeptics of all types, would ultimately attack that.

01:56:26

And I do believe the attack on the doctrine of creation is a not -so -subtle attack because it ultimately leads right back to those cardinal doctrines of Christianity.

01:56:36

And while we might think what we believe about creation is not really that important, it fundamentally is because it starts giving up the battle and establishes the ground rules upon which we will debate all these other topics.

01:56:48

The Christian who gives up creation so quickly will soon find they're totally disarmed when it comes down to what they think are their, quote -unquote, really important issues of Christianity.

01:56:57

And one last question from a listener. We have Bibi in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, who wants to know, she has heard rumors that Carl Sagan came to a saving knowledge of Christ before he passed away.

01:57:10

Do you know anything about this rumor? No evidence about that at all. In fact, Larry Vardeman, who is associated with the

01:57:16

Institute for Creation Research, met Carl Sagan perhaps a year or more before Carl Sagan's death.

01:57:22

They were at a conference and Larry went up to talk to him and Carl Sagan noticed his affiliation on his badge and engaged

01:57:31

Larry in a conversation and they had to finally get pulled off the stage because the next speaker was coming up.

01:57:37

And Carl Sagan and Larry actually traded letters over the next year or so, and in those letters, Larry presented the gospel to Carl Sagan.

01:57:44

So Carl Sagan definitely heard the gospel, but there's no evidence through Larry or anybody else that he ever repented and responded to that gospel.

01:57:51

It's possible, but there's no evidence he ever did. Well, I just want to remind our listeners if you want to get the new astronomy book, go to Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com,

01:58:03

cv for Cumberland Valley, bbs for biblebookservice .com. And if it is not on the internet catalog already, they will order it for you.

01:58:14

They do have a number of books from Master Books in Stock and New Leaf Publishing Group, which is an affiliation.

01:58:25

They are affiliated with Master Books. So go to cvbbs .com, cvbbs .com.

01:58:32

And do you have any contact information yourself, Dr. Faulkner, that you would like to provide?

01:58:38

Well, you can go to the website for Answers in Genesis. It's all one word, answersingenesis .org.

01:58:44

I also mentioned before the creationresearch .org. That's the Creation Research Society website as well.

01:58:49

And we have scads of articles there and lots of things I've written there. And you can actually probably get ahold of me by requesting through our correspondence there to get ahold of me if you need to.

01:59:00

So that's answersingenesis .org. And the other was again? creationresearch .org.

01:59:06

answersingenesis .org and creationresearch .org. Thank you so much,

01:59:12

Dr. Faulkner. If you could wait on the phone just for a few seconds here when we go off the air, because I'd like to say a final goodbye to you off the air.

01:59:21

Okay. And I want to thank everybody who took the time to write in questions today.

01:59:26

And I want to thank everybody else who listened to the program today. I hope you have a safe, joyful, and God -honoring weekend and Lord's Day.

01:59:34

And I hope you all always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater

01:59:41

Savior than you are a sinner. We look forward to hearing from you and your questions for our guests next week on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.