Genesis #04 Ch. 1:19-2:3 Life After It's Own Kind — Chuck Missler

This is the fourth study in the book of Genesis conducted by Chuck Missler. The subject of this tape is Genesis chapter 1, verse 19, through chapter 2, verse 3.

Creationism, Scientific Evidence, and the Limits of Evolution

I brought in a few articles. First of all, there have been a couple of articles, and I had two, and I'm frustrated because I couldn't find the one that I wanted, but I did find one from the Wall Street Journal.

This happens to be from June 15th of 79, so it's like a year ago. But it has an article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. It says, Modern Creationists Seeking Equal Time. And it's just a summary of the fact that the pro-creationist movement has gained a lot of momentum and respectability.

There's another article. I remember two articles, and I went through my own archives. I happen to have an archive of these things, and I found this one. I just didn't find the other one because I seemed to have misplaced it.

But it just points out that there is a organized, effective movement by several, but the one that it particularly gives credit to is the Creation Research Institute right down here in San Diego. They're doing a very, very effective job at enlisting the involvement of first-class scientists, not Christian guys like maybe myself who mean well, but guys who really know what they're doing, and publishing sophisticated articles in sophisticated journals, and gaining a momentum for the validity of the creationist point of view.

In fact, the article I couldn't find, but I remember it very well. It was fun because it happened to be in the journal, and that's why I remembered it. It was over on the left side. I couldn't lay my hands on it.

The gist of the article was that the debates that are organized are generally won by the creationists, and the reason they are is really funny. In fact, the journal had a lot of fun. They really poked fun at the evolutionists in the article.

I wish I could get my hands on it to share with you because the creationists in the debating teams that they field are better informed with facts, and they keep the discussion on a scientific basis. And the trap that the evolutionists fall into is the religious argument, and they lose the debates because they get devastated because the creationists insist upon keeping it on a scientific basis, on a non-religious basis, and win the debates.

And it's really funny is that the evolutionists retreat to emotion, and religion, and other things, and it's very funny. But it just mentions that in here, dogs are always a dog, and a frog didn't turn into a prince, and so forth, the flavor of this thing.

And it points out the creationists tend to win, and some fairly substantially competent textbooks are finally available to the educators that are willing to do this. And it's interesting, some of the concessions, the fact that there was a sudden burial of the fossils is now acknowledged by the evolutionists, and so forth.

The scientific evidence for creation is overwhelming, says David Minton, and so forth, and more and more reasonable scientists are speaking out against the silly theory of evolution, and so forth. And it's interesting, the fossil records, and so you can use the very retreat of the evolutionists is used by the creationists effectively.

So I really meant to get this other article, I couldn't find it to share with you, which is humorous, because the Wall Street Journal editors really tore up the conduct of the evolutionists in the debate.

Just while we're sort of in the pre-prayer mode, I see this isn't really sanctified, this is just nonsense, we'll pray in a minute, and have the Holy Spirit guide the rest of the study. But those of you that have a flippant nature, and thus have a certain rapport with my flippant nature, I thought I would share with you some other things.

But I saw an article, Alex, you'll love this if you haven't seen it, in the November 79 Scientific American, now less than 1 of you will know what I'm talking about as I go through this, and the reason I won't share the whole article with you is I don't understand it either.

But the article in November 79 Scientific American has an article which has to do with quantum theory and reality. Quantum theory is a very advanced form of mathematics and modern physics that deals with the physical behavior of subatomic particles, and it underlies a lot of what we do in modern physics.

But the doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness, now let me go over that again, the doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment.

Now that's wild! The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment.

And what's embodied in this is a relatively famous equation known as the Bell inequality, named after not the Bell system, but a mathematician. And it turns out, and it's a very, very heavy article, and I frankly, I wasn't just being cute or self-effacing, I have, I don't really fully understand the article.

But the impact of the article is that experiments are contradictory in terms of their support or rejection of the Bell inequality. And that turns out to be, to attack some basic, three basic suppositions that underlie our concept of reality.

And it apparently, there's empirical verification, I should put it this way, there's empirical devastation of the fundamental principles upon which the rest of it's based. But the whole idea that there's existence, independent of consciousness of that existence, turns out to be empirically disprovable.

And so if you're really trying to, you know, I think it's exciting how science and mathematics is helping us understand the scripture. I don't think, I think you all in this audience are sophisticated enough to understand that science does not disprove the Bible, quite the contrary.

Where science is true science, it is supported. And we're going to touch on some of that stuff in our obviously Genesis study. But on the other hand, what science does do for you, we tend as Christians, biblically based Christians, to make light of man's knowledge, the foolishness of men and all that.

And in a certain sense, that's important to get man's knowledge in perspective. On the other hand, we also have a tendency to react too far to that. And we tend to disparage the quest for knowledge in the secular sense.

And I think it's unfortunate. I think we need to have our quest for knowledge in a more reverent manner perhaps. And we need to understand that when we get a discovery that's consistent with the scripture, that doesn't support the scripture.

It simply says our discovery is valid. But what science is doing for us through modern physics, mathematics, the information sciences particularly, is broadening our understanding and our horizons to maybe more fully understand the message God has for us.

And when we got into the Superman and all that last time, that's a, I'm sorry I didn't have the presence of mind to grab this last time because it affects more the material last time than tonight. But yes, I have a question.

But the article in Reader's Digest about can have the astronomers found God as the reference. And apparently several people have suggested I read it. I have not had occasion to. And it does sound good.

And I'm always intrigued with these guys that almost, almost make it to heaven. I think of, I'm thinking of, was it, who was the governor that Paul went up before? Where he said, you almost convinced me?

Felix, yeah, thank you. Felix, right? In the Book of Acts. You almost convinced me. And I really wonder if he's going to regret that he didn't go all the way. You know, I mean, I don't know. I don't know.

I obviously have no way of knowing his spiritual state. Maybe later he was converted. I sure hope so. But that almost is a heavy almost. And I always see, I always tend to see Pilot the same way. I have great sympathy with Pilot.

Because I think as an executive, I can relate to where he's at. And he did his best to somehow unravel this mess that he inherited. Came very short of, came just short of seeming to get his real grasp of what was going on.

Prayer and the Authority of Acts 7

But OK, let's go before the Lord in a word of prayer. Oh, Father, we just do praise you this evening for the joy of gathering in the name of Jesus Christ. And we thank you, Father, that not only have you created us, but that you have redeemed us from ourselves.

And Father, we thank you for these books of Moses, the book of Genesis. We thank you, Father, that you have given us this record. And Father, as we approach it, we just, we know it. We need your enlightenment, your Holy Spirit to open it to our understanding.

We just beseech thee to pour that out upon all of us tonight, that we might behold your truth. And in that truth, behold Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen. One of the things that I meant to point out some time ago and took for granted, but I probably shouldn't.

I'd like you to, let's start tonight, we'll just take a quick peek at Acts 7. Acts 7 is one of my favorite commentaries. People ask, you know, what commentaries do you use on the Old Testament? You know, and I mentioned Matthew, Luke, Paul, but that really isn't what they mean.

One of my favorite commentators on the Old Testament is Stephen. I'm sorry. Yeah, it's in the New. But it's commentary on the Old Testament. Commentary on the Old Testament. If you really want a good commentary on the Old Testament, Stephen is pretty neat.

Does a good job. But one of the, and we could spend a lot of time here. You find, you know, in the book of Acts chapter 7, just to digress slightly, there's all kinds of discoveries. Some time, we may take six months and go through the seventh chapter of Acts.

For example, verse 18, it says, till another king arose who knew not Joseph. Referring, of course, to Moses, I mean to the Israelites in Egypt. And the word another there in the Greek is different as opposed to the same as, meaning a totally different kind of king.

And we find out from Isaiah that the king was Assyrian, not Egyptian. Did you know that? A little side thing. If you're interested in that, get the tape on Isaiah and it goes into that. But you get the clue from the Greek here.

And that absolutely devastates most people's understanding of the Egyptian history. But it also explains why the pharaoh in Egypt was perhaps a little nervous about the growing Hebrew populations, because while he was in charge, he ethnically may have had some different, just as Herod was not Jewish.

He was a Jumean, and so on. But that's another story. Again, what I'm really after is verse 22. And Moses was learned in, or schooled, or educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and in deeds.

Now, as diligent students of the scripture, you all know how carefully, was it Nina Foch, who took Charlton Heston out of the bulrushes and brought him up under Sir Cedric Hardwick as Moses. In other words, adopted and raised in court and educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.

Now, that's a very interesting thing. I want you to recognize for something that the author of the Torah, first five books of the Old Testament, was educated from a baby through his manhood. Where? In Egypt, at the best schools they had.

So he learned all the, quote, wisdom, close quote, of the Egyptians. Now, you can go through, any of you who have an encyclopedia or some cultural resources at your fingertips, go through and understand how the Egyptians viewed the world, the cosmos.

You know, they had some wild ideas. You know, you go back and you read some of the ancient, not just Egyptian, but Babylon, you name it. They had some crazy ideas, concepts of the world. You know, there was flat and all those kinds of things.

But also, this whole idea of, you know, we revere Aristotle culturally, right? Well, he divided the universe into four elements, right? Fire, water, earth, and air. Well, we may revere Aristotle for lots of things, but his physics wasn't one of them, right?

And you can go through and poke fun at the conceptual understanding, scientifically, of the ancient cultures, all of them. And Egypt is no different. They had some strange ideas. Now, what's fascinating is not just what the five books of Moses say.

One of the things I would like to get in our consciousness is the things it doesn't say. It doesn't have the earth on the shoulders of Atlas standing on a turtle or whatever, okay? Now, in contrast to some of the things that we could poke fun at, what is interesting, that in the books, in the Torah, you find suggested or underlying the rules and ordinances, the whole concept of bacteriology, which was 3 ,500 years later introduced by Louis Pasteur, and we are products of that culture.

And so what we read there, we're quite comfortable with. We fail to appreciate that that was radical prior to the discoveries of Louis Pasteur. We talk about blood. We are very conscious of blood circulation as anticipated by Moses and Leviticus and elsewhere because we're the beneficiaries of William Harvey, is that right, Dr. Miller, in the 1600s.

So not only is that discovery, many of the discoveries we take for granted roughly in the 1600s, 17th century, and thus part of our cultural background, we take that for granted. What's amazing is that Moses also took it for granted, and his taking it for granted, as his evidence writing, is remarkable, recognizing Acts 7 .22, that he was schooled from ground up in all the learning and the wisdom of the Egyptians.

Sterilization, quarantine, these are ideas that we attribute to Joseph Lister, also in the 17th century, as radical innovations, not endemic to Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, you name it. In fact, you can go in Iraq and Syria today and wonder if they have read anything about Joseph.

I shouldn't say that. Some of these cultures, though, frankly, are pretty primitive. And one of the problems in what we sometimes consider an underdeveloped country situation is an awareness of basic hygiene.

The Torah has in it, endemic in it, is basic hygiene. Evaporation, condensation, I'd like to get in that more specifically. We talked about the flat world, Isaiah chapter 40, saying, is it on the sphere of the earth?

And he hangs it, Job tells us he hangs it, Job 26 says he hangs it in nothing, which is a very, very radically modern cosmology, as we know, as products of our culture. I can't resist digressing a little bit because it isn't really a digression from what we're going to get into tonight.

The Biblical Water Cycle and the Design of Creation

But one of the things that I think is kind of fun in contrasting the ancient cultures is the thing that we call the water cycle. Now, we take for granted the water cycle because every night at 10 o 'clock, we watch the news.

At the end, we see the satellite view of the earth and we have the temperatures and all this stuff. So we're very sophisticated meteorologically. Very interesting. The largest computers that have ever been built are still most challenged by trying to build models of the water, you know, the meteorological system.

So it's not trivial. Solomon poses a question in Ecclesiastes chapter 1. We might turn to that if for no other reason than to get you into Ecclesiastes. Some of your Bibles may creak a little there. I'm sure Daniel's Revelation will be well-worn.

But Ecclesiastes may still... Be careful you don't rip it. You know, it may still have the gold. I shouldn't be... Okay. In Ecclesiastes, Solomon poses a question. And it's a very interesting question.

In verse 7, he says, All the rivers run into the sea, and yet the sea is not full. Have you ever wondered about that? Can you imagine a small boy sitting at the Mississippi Delta or whatever, watching this river, you know, go downstream, continually, day and night, keeps rolling into the ocean.

But the ocean doesn't get any higher. It tries every six hours to get a little higher, but you discover those are tides. That doesn't rattle you too much. But you watch all over the world, rivers run into the sea, yet the sea doesn't fill up.

That puzzles Solomon. Verse 6 and 7, verse 6 and 7, The wind goeth toward the south and turneth about again to the north. It whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to its circuits.

That's a remarkable insight. We call that the cyclonic system. And you can spend a lot, you know, you can blow a lot of your college time messing around in that area, if you're not careful. Verse, all the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full.

Unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. Well, that's a pretty interesting thing. You mean the cycle is closed. Terrific. How can it be closed? Understand the fact that the air is in circuits is interesting.

The fact there are paths that the air follows around the earth itself is an interesting insight for Solomon who did not have the beneficiary, was not the beneficiary of aerial photographs, let alone satellite pictures like you and I are.

Water weighs about 800 times what air does. Furthermore, salt water, which is what we're dealing with, has contaminants that will kill plant life. You don't believe that. We live on the water over Newport Beach, and let me tell you, a man would kill me if I took a bucket of salt water off the dock and watered her geraniums with it.

You know, it'd be a bad scene. So, it could spoil my whole day. So, how does it happen? Well, Job tells us. Let's turn to Job 36. Job 36, and we'll look for about verse 27. In fact, we should start at verse 26.

It's a neat verse. We'll pick it up on our way. Behold, God is great, and we know him not. Neither can the number of his years be searched out. To me, that sounds like he's not in our time domain, just as an aside.

He maketh small the drops of water. They pour down rain according to their vapor, which clouds do drop and distill upon man abundantly. Now, the way you get the salt out of the water is you distill it.

If you've taken a first-year chemistry course or whatever, you know what distillation is. It's not a trivial process, but that's how the salt gets out of the water. And when you take, you can go to Psalm 135, verses 6 and 7.

Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did he in heaven and in earth, and in the seas and all deep places. He causeth the vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth. He maketh the lightnings for the rain.

He bringeth out the wind, the wind out of his treasuries, and so forth. And so you can put these three passages together, Ecclesiastes chapter 1, Job 36, and Psalm 135, and get a description that's a pretty passable description for a high school physics book about the water cycle, in terms of the fact that closure takes place by evaporation from the seas.

Now, what you probably won't know from, well, there's a few other things. Let's just amplify this a little bit. What's really interesting about, we could spend the evening on water. You take hydrogen, which is a dangerous gas.

So, that's the Hindenburg disaster, right? Hydrogen is an explosive, a very dangerous gas. You take oxygen. Oxygen also is a dangerous gas. If I was conducting an experiment up here with oxygen, I'd make sure there's no one smoking nearby.

Oxygen is dangerous, ask the Apollo astronauts. Okay? Now, God takes one of the most, two of the most explosive gases, hydrogen and oxygen, mixes them together, and creates water, which is what you use to put out fires with.

Isn't that interesting? Water is interesting for lots of other reasons. Of course, it's the most plentiful thing on the planet Earth, I guess. But also, it violates some of the laws of nature. You all know that when things get hot, they expand, and things get cold, they contract.

The reason highways have bumps in them, you've got what they call expansion joints. In Dallas, they weren't quite good enough, and they exploded, as you may know, because the expansion joints, you know, it was exceeded what they needed.

So you have things, things in general expand when they're hot, contract when they're cold, and as a mechanic, you know this, if you've got a force fit that's tough, you can heat it, and sometimes something that's intractable will yield if it's made larger, and so forth.

There's a measurable coefficient of expansion per degree centigrade, and you deal with this as an engineer or a mechanic, what have you. There are a few things that do the opposite. There are a few metals that actually contract when heated and expand when cold, and they're used to make pendulum unclocks and things that should, so their temperature, the pendulum stays the same length in different temperatures.

There are some materials that violate this, but uniformly. Water doesn't either. When water, and I'll speak in Fahrenheit because we're used to that, when it gets to 38 degrees, it stops contracting. It tends to somewhat contract as it gets colder.

Down to 38 degrees. From 38 degrees to freezing, it starts to expand, and it expands 30 when freezing. And it has a very non-linear, very peculiar curve. If you, in a laboratory, try to plot, it's volume per temperature.

It's a very erratic curve. But the curve has been designed so that, first of all, in a local region, everything will be the same temperature locally before it freezes, and when it freezes, so it can expand.

Now, what's interesting about this, I imagine, how many of you knew that before tonight? You knew that by reading Job 26? Yes, it's in Job 26. He ponders the fact that, you know, that water's like a stone that doesn't, that floats, won't sink.

If water didn't do that, we'd probably have very great difficulty supporting life on the planet Earth, because rivers would freeze from the bottom up, and many of them would never defrost. And if you make an ecological study of the planet Earth, you'd discover you probably have to alter the basic properties of water in order to have life on the planet Earth, and guess what?

Those properties are altered to the non-linearity we experience in the laboratory. Very interesting. Something else that's kind of interesting, the ratio of Earth to land on the planet Earth observes this square law.

If you took half of, if you had half the seas, you'd have one-fourth the rainfall. It turns out if you play around with the ratio of Earth to water on the Earth, on the planet Earth, it turns out to be a very sensitive adjustment.

You want just the right amount of land versus water to create the properties we enjoy. And we could go through a whole list tonight. Now, relax, I'm not going to go through all of them. This whole idea of how close should the Earth be to the sun.

If it's a hair closer, it gets too hot. The heat avoids, does not allow you to have an atmosphere, among a lot of other problems it creates. Gets a little further from the sun, it gets too cold. Mercury, by the way, has seven times the heat that the Earth has.

Very uncomfortable. You might get a kick out of it, it has an 87-day year. So, you know, time flies. Uranus, in contrast to that, has one-hundredth of the heat that the Earth has. It's high. The weatherman on Uranus says, the high today is minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit.

Birthdays would be rather rare, because it has an 84-year year. So, I mean, it would take 84 times as long to have a year as we do. So Uranus isn't really too... Real estate there is cheap, probably.

Very delicate situation. Before I leave this whole idea of water, though, I discovered something relatively late in my... Now, I'm a Naval Academy graduate, and as a Naval Academy graduate, I spent four years marching down Stripling Rock to the academic group of buildings, one of which was called Maury Hall.

And I knew, as most people in the world, not just Americans know, Matthew Fontaine Maury, M-A-U-R-Y, happened to be an American naval officer, but he's known as the father of oceanography in all countries.

He was one of these guys, way, way back, that got interested in oceanography, and he did the beginning of that whole science by gathering data and publishing some things. And he, not just in America, but all over the world, is acknowledged as the father of oceanography.

What I didn't know was how he got interested in oceanography. He heard, in church one day, a sermon preached on Psalm 8. And in Psalm 8, there's a phrase. It speaks of paths in the sea. And he was freaked out by that.

He says, there are paths in the sea. And he decided to try and find out where they were. And he started, he organized ways of taking data among all the ships that sailed certain courses, and he gathered that data and laid out maps and discovered what we know today as the basic currents in the world, worldwide, around the world.

We speak of the Gulf Stream and all these things. And he mapped most of them by very rudimentary data, back in the 1800s, I guess. But what fascinated me, he got onto that by Psalm 8. Psalm 8, if I recall correctly.

Now, so one of the things I challenge you to do is as you read Job or Psalms or whatever, you can probably make a career for yourself. Job mentions something that, to the best of my knowledge, no one's quite sure what he's hinting at.

He's talking about warfare, and he speaks of the treasuries of the snow. And to the best of my horizon, in the things I've read, I don't think anyone has, while we obviously know a lot about snow, most of it's just interesting.

Not necessarily useful from a point of warfare. And that's apparently the context of the remark that's made in Job. And I'm sure there's dozens of those. So somebody here tonight will read sometime this summer while you're sitting on the beach getting sunburned, you'll come across in your devotions or digging, something that may just grab you, and maybe the Lord will put you on a whole new career path.

And so I just throw that out. I'm also intrigued with the idea of salt. We mentioned salt earlier, about salt killing plant life. All this nonsense cannot be devoid of any spiritual, there has to be some spiritual content from time to time to keep you coming Monday night, so I have to turn from all this interesting but useless, trivial technology to make an interesting remark.

We're all challenged to be the salt of the earth by Jesus Christ. And I've heard all kinds of sermons as to what that means. You know, salt preserves, salt does this and salt does that. And one of the things that I think of whenever I think of salt is, in fact, what do you think?

If I gave you some salt, what would that do to you tonight? Make you thirsty. If you're the salt of the earth, have you made anyone thirsty? I suddenly decided that's really what I'm trying to do. Remember we had that little thing last time.

I'm not trying to teach. I'm trying to make you thirsty to dig into His Word. And so that's my excuse for this flippant, trivial style. But it's also an interesting thing in terms of the challenge, where Jesus Christ says, you are the salt of the earth.

What is He referring to? Probably, you probably could 7 or 8 point our lecture on what salt means. But to me, what it means is to make other people thirsty. So, one other thing I'd like to mention is, I talked briefly, the whole theme that we've been into is all the evidence for design by our Lord in the universe and in the earth and in the creation.

You know, there's been a tendency for many of us that are victims of what I'll call an elementary school concept of science. To speak of, you know, we're prey in our thinking to the evolutionist argument.

Those of you that are gamblers know that if you have a poor bet that's biased in favor of the house, it doesn't matter how many times you play it, you're still going to lose. And the mentality of evolutionists is that any odds are okay if you play them long enough.

The odds are several billion to one against you, but that's okay. We're going to play it again and again for billions of years. And somehow that mentality justifies these ridiculous scientific conclusions, hypotheses that they attempt to validate.

And most of us that know anything about probabilities know that if you've got a bias against you, gee, the more you play it, the more that's going to accumulate against you. And that's exactly the predicament that the evolutionists have.

But the other side of this is the presumption that somehow, you know, the whole survival of the fittest idea, that nature somehow will tend to correct itself. That's sort of the presumption that underlies evolution.

It happens that that presumption undermines their argument because nature will tend to go to the status quo, not towards an increase in sophistication through mutations. But we've covered that. But the other thought that needs to be mentioned is this whole idea of ecology.

That's not a new word. It's been of interest in the scientific community for centuries. But it's gotten a lot of popular interest in the popular press in, say, the last 10 years or so. And the one thing we've learned, that we've become aware of, is that we live not in a self-correcting ecology, but quite the contrary, one that's in a very delicate balance and where imbalances tend to disrupt.

Okay? If you think that through, with an understanding, a modern understanding of ecology, the fact that it's delicate and it's not self-correcting, if you think that through, that utterly devastates the evolutionary argument for our present situation.

If you want a specific, interesting example of that, sometime do a study of the Aswan Dam. The Aswan Dam was to solve all the flooding of the Nile problems and so forth. And the Soviet Union spent a lot of money helping the Egyptians construct this thing.

Big modern marvel, the Aswan Dam. And there have been many articles published that suggest that the best thing that could ever happen for Egypt was to blow it out of the thing. And because, it turns out, all kinds of unforeseen ramifications of that occur.

Because the flooding of the Nile doesn't flood anymore, the infusion of the salt water has killed certain kind of life upon which their industries depended. All the flax is gone, because it depended upon certain things at the salt water because there isn't the flooding anymore.

And also the fishing industry is devastated. And we could go through a whole summary, not only of the economic devastation of the Aswan Dam in Egypt, but what's most interesting, you can read all this prophesied by Isaiah in chapter 19.

Isaiah in chapter 19 describes all of this. And if you want an interesting study, dig out some summary of the Aswan Dam and its ecological disaster and compare it with Isaiah 19. We won't take the time tonight, because I've already digressed for quite, probably substantially more than I really should with you.

And if you're interested in the detail, there is a tape. The firefighters have a tape on Isaiah 19 that you can take out. In terms of evidence of design, it's tempting just to list all kinds of things, so I'd like to just leave you with a few.

We can look at the human eye. I used my little watch analogy the other evening in terms of the absurdity that complexity can occur without a designer is, of course, so absurd to be humorous. And we've talked about the hand and other things.

The human eye is an interesting study in its own right in terms of being just an incredible self-focusing camera. But what most of you probably would not have occasion to realize is that the eye is sensitive to a very, very narrow spectrum in the different frequencies that it could have been a receptor of.

We speak of its particular band as the visible light range. Well, that's because that's the eye sensitive to it. But it's bounded, just to give you a feeling for this, on the one side by the infrared and on the other side by the ultraviolet.

There are all kinds of frequencies, emissions, and so forth the eye cannot see. There's nothing wrong with infrared. We design missiles to track infrared. If you go to a doctor, he can give you a thermograph to see if there's an occlusion in your arteries, veins, what have you.

It's a useful medical instrument to look at the thermograph or the infrared. Ultraviolet is a very, very valuable form of emission. What's interesting, though, is that if you were a very, very experienced engineer and knew all there is to know about communications theory and you wanted to design a sensor with an optimum signal-to-noise ratio, maximum of information and a minimum of noise or error, you would optimize the eye the way we have one.

You would not have it receptive to those frequencies which would cause confusion or cause noise as opposed to signal. That's exactly what we have in our eye. Studies of the eye lead to the remarkable discovery that it's optimized as a general-purpose sensor, which I think is remarkable for that to happen by chance without the evidence of a designer.

Genesis 1 and the “After Its Kind” Pattern

Let's, at this point, to make sure we don't get totally off, let's go through Genesis 1 and then comment on a few other things. Since we have made so little progress in the last few evenings, we'll start from Genesis 1, verse 1, and read to the end of the chapter.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved, brooded upon the face of the waters.

And God said, first direct quote, Let there be light, and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light day, and the darkness he called night.