Apologetics Session 36 - Origins and Evolution - Part 3

So this is, I guess, part three. We went through the origin of the universe the first time around.

I did a recap last time on that. Last time, we went through evolution, primarily focused on the fossil record, primarily focused on the science of evolutionists and the,

I guess I'll call it pseudoscience, in some cases, because of the extrapolation that's done, the tremendous amount of extrapolation.

We went through, specifically, things like the human and chimp DNA comparisons that were done that claimed to be 98%.

But in fact, when you actually look at how the studies were done, it was excluding a tremendous amount of biological material,

DNA material, when it did those comparisons. And so we went through all of that,

UCRD, all of that stuff. So now that we've gone through and demonstrated, really, the lack of transitional form evidence in the fossil record, we now need to get to the origin of first life.

So as I said last time, when we look at evolution, and we sort of use that term in the sort of popular sense, which is really to say

Darwinian evolution by natural selection through random mutation. But that's too big of a mouthful to say, so we'll just paraphrase and say evolution.

But when we talked about evolution, we all know that evolution actually happens, right?

Or what a lot of people term as microevolution does happen. There's adaptation. There are somewhat adaptations within kinds.

So in other words, you can have lots of different breeds of dogs, and you can crossbreed dogs, and you'll get an adapted version.

Or you could have certain animals that will adapt to their surrounding environment.

So an example that I heard in another video was if you put long -haired dogs and short -haired dogs in a very cold environment, and the long -haired dogs, through natural selection, would probably win out.

And over time, you would end up with long -haired dogs, primarily because the short -haired dogs would die off. And short -haired dogs may breed with long -haired dogs.

You may end up with some sort of adapted form. But these types of microchanges, and one of the famous examples is what they call

Darwin's finches, which are these finches, which are birds that live on the

Galapagos Islands. And some of them have longer beaks. Some of them have shorter beaks.

Their beaks have essentially evolved over time, adapted to the food sources that they're currently consuming.

But those are adaptations within a species. Those are not what

Darwin's theory is meant to posit, which is that a new species can come out of an earlier, more simplistic species.

So this evolution of kinds is something that has never been observed and has never been scientifically proven.

So it is still a theory, and no transitional forms, as we discussed last time, have been found to demonstrate in the fossil record this concept of Darwin's tree, where you've got simpler forms evolving into more complex and different forms through these mutations.

And we talked about the fact that evolution requires survival of the organism to propagate the adaptations and mutations downstream in later generations.

So mutations that will result in the death of an organism would essentially make it so that that mutation didn't propagate.

And only mutations that allow for the survival of the organism would then survive on into future generations.

And this is very important, especially when we want to talk about the origin of first life. Because Darwin's theory of evolution does not actually even attempt to determine where the first life came from.

It presupposes life existed already, and that these biological organisms were essentially mutating over time to create other forms or other organisms.

We talked a bit about the Cambrian explosion. We talked about the fact that a whole series of organisms show up in the fossil record with very distinct body plans.

And there's no evidence of any prior forms in the lower strata where those fossils were found.

So the origin of first life, this is what some people term as chemical evolution. And Darwin's theory doesn't really try to go after this.

Darwin kind of assumed that later scientists would figure some of this stuff out. So chemical evolution, which is essentially living organisms evolving from inorganic chemicals or non -living chemicals.

So this is life springing from non -life. So evolution relies on this trial and error mutation process.

So a mutation happens, and that mutation either results in survival or death of the organism, and the surviving mutations propagate downstream.

Again, if the organism dies, there's no way for it to propagate, because there's no super brain that is over -evolution that is keeping track of which things worked and which things didn't.

And Drew actually talked about some experiments. And there was actually a video later on that we're going to watch, which actually talks about some of those experiments in detail around essentially biologists trying to orchestrate this life coming from inorganic chemicals.

This session is going to be a bit video heavy, mainly because a number of the concepts that we're going to talk about are very difficult to conceptualize just through words.

And it's much easier to watch these videos that are sort of showing renderings of things like double helix and unwinding

DNA and cell division and so forth. So we're going to go through a bunch of that stuff.

So in Darwin's day, they understood that the cell was a building block of the living organisms. But what they didn't understand is sort of the internals of the actual cell.

They knew that biological life was made up of cells, but they kind of thought in Darwin's day, which, you know, late 1800s, that a cell was just sort of like this gelatinous blob.

They didn't really understand the sort of biological machines that are inside of a cell and the function.

They certainly didn't understand DNA and the human genome or genomics in general.

So they didn't really have kind of a concept of the sort of mini machines that were there.

They also didn't understand that those mini machines had specific functions and very complex functions.

There's the mitochondrion, which is the sort of energy plant of the cell. There's the ribosome, which makes proteins and links amino acids together.

There's the nucleus, which is sort of, it houses the gene, right? It houses the

DNA. And there's an immense amount of information that's inside a

DNA. I think we talked about, when we were talking about the human chimp, there's three billion base pairs in the human, it's three point something, but three billion base pairs in the human

DNA. So that's just,

I mean, when you think about the size of the information that's in there, and each of those pieces of information actually dictate function within the cell itself.

So just like humans can't survive without organs, the cell can't survive without these organelles.

That's what they call them, they call them organelles, which are like the organs of the cell itself. And so evolution teaches that each organism evolves from a less complex to more complex organism, so you would imagine that the cell itself would also evolve from less complex cells to more complex cells.

And it's easy to think about when you already have life kind of going, but when you're thinking about just chemicals in some primordial soup, it's kind of difficult to understand how these inorganic chemicals would sort of arrange themselves into a living organism, because the cell itself is actually incredibly complicated and complex.

So they have been able to recreate, as Drew shared in one of his sermons, they were able to recreate the formation of some simple proteins, but it was in a closed system, and they had, they were using sort of, they had sort of prearranged certain circumstances within that closed system that they don't believe, modern scientists don't believe that the

Earth wasn't that way, theoretically, back when this supposedly happened. And so it, they really are a long ways off from recreating this, because I just don't think it's possible to recreate.

So the other thing is, is whenever you're dealing with some of these experiments, you're dealing with an intelligence, a mind, which is the biologists themselves, that are always monkeying with things to try and orchestrate them, so they're prearranging things in a certain order, which kind of refutes the whole sort of random chance argument in and of itself, right?

Because they're sort of prearranging things to try and get the result that they want. So, and again,

Darwinian evolution, we're gonna talk a little bit about theistic evolution next time, but Darwinian evolution is a purely material process, meaning that there's no external, there's no external actor that is trying to orchestrate this, it is entirely material, natural processes.

And so for life to begin in an undirected material process, you would have to imagine that there would be a tremendous amount of luck, right?

And it's sort of, the numbers are incomprehensible. Because if it didn't work, again, if the random chemicals didn't arrange themselves in such a way to create the first simplistic single -celled organism, there's nothing outside of this undirected material process that's keeping track of what it had attempted and how it failed, because it's, again, an undirected material process.

So every time the dice is rolled, you're rolling from scratch, right? There's no way to essentially, to essentially keep track of your failures the way scientists normally do in experiments.

So, and even if you could find, even if they could prove that proteins themselves were formed, you still don't, you're still a long ways off from the complexity of a single cell, right, all of the organelles.

Because the cell, if you take any one of those organelles out of the cell, the cell dies, it doesn't function.

And so it is a concept that is known as irreducible complexity, which means that if you have something that is irreducibly complex, it means if you take anything away from it, then the thing stops functioning.

And so one example that's used a lot is a mousetrap, right?

So a mousetrap has got the wooden plank or whatever that it's on, you've got the spring, you've got the bar that comes over, you've got the trigger, what do they call it, the little, where you put the bait.

You take any one of those things away and the mousetrap doesn't work. Now, the mousetrap not working is, you know, just a mousetrap not working, but a cell not working means the cell itself dies.

And so it is an irreducibly complex thing. So, put simply, irreducible complexity states that certain biological systems with multiple interacting parts would not function if one part was removed.

And so, you know, in the mousetrap example, if you take a block of wood away, none of the metal parts have anything to snap to.

And so every piece of the machine is required.

So the machine itself is irreducibly complex. And since evolution has to prove that these things came together by chance, this is a real problem for them, right?

Because you've got a cell that won't function even to the point of, you know, you get down even to the pieces of the cell.

So things like DNA, right, these things have to come together in the right order to actually produce function.

So, irreducible complexity is a, there's a video, it's a short video, it's about two and a half minutes, that goes through the concept of irreducible complexity in an evolutionary sense.

I think this is an Answers in the Genesis. And said that we humans share 50 % of our

DNA with the map. That is the old video. Can we see the one with the panda?

The panda. Let's get rid of the other, I was shown this before class, so I'm gonna get rid of that.

And then let me go back to here, go to this slide.

Oh, yeah. The bacterial flagellum was one of the central examples of irreducible complexity, as he highlighted in his book.

If you take away the propeller, if you take away the motor, if you take away the clamps that hold it onto the cell's membrane, take away any of a number of different parts, it's not that the flagellum's gonna spin half as fast as it used to, it's broken, and it doesn't work at all.

It's like taking the propeller off of an outboard motor on your boat, and wondering how far now you can go in the water.

You can't go anywhere. So that's a problem for Darwin's theory, because Darwin's theory says that things evolve by working a little bit, maybe not very well, but a little bit, and then a mutation, a change comes along that helps it work a little bit better, and that helps the organism survive, and have more offspring, and so then another change comes along, and another, another, and it gradually builds up to the final structure.

Well, that might work for some things, but it doesn't work for systems that are irreducibly complex, things like the bacterial flagellum, because, well, if you wanted to build an outboard motor for a boat, what would you start with?

Would you start with, say, just an iron rod that, you know, in the future would attach a motor to the propeller?

Well, what's that gonna do? It's not gonna do anything. Would you start with just a propeller? Well, that's not gonna do anything.

It's not attached to anything. Would you start with just a motor? Well, that's not gonna propel you anywhere.

So with irreducibly complex systems like the flagellum, Darwin's idea is dead in the water, like a boat with an outboard motor that doesn't work.

Natural selection selects or favors variations that confer a functional advantage on a system.

Many of the simpler versions that you could imagine of the bacterial flagellar motor perform no function at all.

So if you imagine trying to build a flagellar motor, adding parts one by one until you finally get to the complete system, you're gonna encounter configurations of parts that confer no function, in which the motor simply will not work, at which point the evolutionary process will terminate.

It will cease to continue because the system conferring no function will not be preserved and passed on to the next generation.

Right, so this was just a quick example of irreducible complexity.

So it essentially, you know, in this example, you've got this motor, right, which is for bacteria that has a bunch of interacting parts that actually, you know, propel the bacteria, allow it to move around.

So without that, then the bacteria can't move around, the bacteria dies, right? So again, this irreducible complex system needs every piece for it to work, just like the outboard motor example.

So, you know, this is an example of a number of things having to come together all at the same time for, you know, things to work in Darwin's theory, right?

And so you can't go from a simpler form to a more complex form for things like this that are irreducibly complex.

I understand that, you know, in Darwin's day, it was probably easier to think about things, you know, and it's kind of an easy thing to think, oh, well, it's gonna work a little bit, and then it's gonna work a little bit more, and then it's eventually gonna perfect itself.

But you've got things here that if they don't work perfectly well, then the organism itself dies.

They didn't have an electron telescope back then. No, they didn't. And, you know, things like this that science has discovered, and I think

I said this last time, as science marches on, it actually makes the theory of evolution harder and harder to accept, to the point that neo -Darwinists, and you're gonna hear a little bit more about that later, neo -Darwinists are actually kind of like worried that they need to come up with a new theory of evolution.

But the funny thing is, as I said last time as well, you know, you're almost considered, you know, a moron for questioning it, right?

There's this, there's almost a religious adherence to this theory, you know, of evolution to the point that you can't, you know, you can't question it.

Yeah, who's behind that? Yeah. So that's one example of irreducible complexity.

Now we start talking about some of the inner workings of the cell, and this is stuff that Darwin couldn't have known because I think it was 1953 when the structure of the

DNA molecule was really kind of sort of elucidated.

And so now we know that there's a tremendous amount of code.

They call it, you know, genetic code, but it's digital code that is embedded in every one of our cells.

It's a tremendous amount of information, 3 .4 billion letters long of information that's in a strand of DNA.

So it's a massive amount of code. And it's not just, one way that I've heard

Dr. Meyer, and you're gonna see another video by Dr. Meyer later, but one of the ways I heard Dr.

Meyer say it is, it's not just that you have the letters, you have to have the sentences. That genetic code is organized in such a way that it produces a specific function.

If you reorganize the letters, if you jumble them up, then the cell itself doesn't function because it doesn't have the code.

So you can think of it kind of as computer code, right? Being a software engineer, it's something

I understand fairly well that if you were to take someone's actual computer code and you were to jumble up a function, right?

Because we actually have things structured in functions. If you were to jumble up the inner workings of that function, it wouldn't produce the same result that you want it to produce, right?

And so it's the same thing in our bodies, right? It's the same thing in DNA. There's a tremendous amount of code that is actually written into our cells that actually calls our cells to function in the way that those cells are meant to.

So there's also the matter of cell division. This is how single -celled organisms become more complex.

You've got cell division. Well, in cell division, the DNA, right? If a cell wants to divide into two identical cells, then the

DNA in the origin cell has to actually be replicated so that it can create a second cell with a copy of that DNA.

And so there's actually, and again, this is a video -heavy day. There's machines inside our cells that deal with the copying, transcribing, translating, and error correction in the actual cell themselves.

And these things are too small to actually see, but there's basically a rendering of kind of how this works.

They know some of the pieces of the cell that actually are doing these functions and how they work.

But the DNA itself is actually the code that runs our bodies, that runs our cells.

So there's a quick video on DNA itself just so that you guys can conceptualize what

DNA is, because these things are really complicated to think about. Nobody in this room, I don't think anybody in this room, is a biologist, so some of these things are hard to sort of conceptualize.

I thought that, is somebody in this room a biologist? Okay, okay, great, you're a biologist. Drew's a biologist?

I'm amazed at that. But this is a video that kind of demonstrates what

DNA is and how it's structured. So that you can kind of see what we're talking about.

And just keep in mind, all of this is supposed to have happened entirely by chance.

All of this stuff kind of is supposed to have come out by chance. This is what mainstream science teaches, that this happened by chance.

So let's see, is this gonna play for me or not? There's a chance.

Ruh -roh. Ruh -roh. What is

DNA? Every living thing has DNA, from plants to animals to bacteria, even to viruses, which were once considered non -living.

And most importantly, we humans have it. DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid.

And although every living thing has DNA, its varied compositions differentiate you from others.

The interesting fact is that humans' DNA is 99 % the same.

Therefore, it is only 1 % of DNA that makes you unique. Does this mean twins don't have exactly the same

DNA? No, they don't, unless they're monozygotic or identical twins.

So now the questions arise. Why every living thing has DNA? What is so important in it?

And what does it do? DNA is a recipe for synthesizing proteins. DNA synthesizes

RNA, or ribonucleic acid, by a process called transcription. This is further translated into proteins by a process termed as translation.

The explanation of DNA conversion into RNA and finally RNA into proteins is called central dogma.

DNA contains hereditary information that is passed on to you from your parents. If you and your father have the same color of eyes or your hair are as silky as your mother, it is because of DNA that you inherited from your parents.

Even many diseases are passed on from generation to generation because of DNA. Where does

DNA reside in your body? Your body is made up of billions and trillions of cells and almost all cells have

DNA in their nucleus. Can you tell us which cell may not contain DNA? Now let's talk about the structure of DNA.

Think of DNA structure as a ladder whose rungs are made up of different bases and sides as sugar phosphate.

Each composition of this nitrogenous base, pentose sugar and phosphate group is called nucleotide.

The nitrogenous bases are of four different types, adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine.

Adenine will always bind with thymine and cytosine with guanine. This type of bonding is hydrogen bonding.

Phosphate and sugar are linked together to make backbone and complimentary bases are attached on it.

Due to the bond angle of the sugar phosphate molecules, the linkages will eventually form a double helix structure.

There's a lot more to know about DNA, but that's all for now. Your headers.

We gotta get the headers. So the reason I bring that up is, or the reason why

I wanted to show that video is because as you can see, there are four letters, right? So you can essentially break down DNA into a bit of code, right?

Just like we have 26 letters in the alphabet, there's four letters and they're representative of nucleotide bases.

So ATGC, right? Now, it talked about how they bind together, but then you also have the arrangement of them within the double helix

DNA structure. And they're arranged in a particular order so that it produces a specified function for that cell, right?

I'm not a biologist, so I'm sure it's way more detailed than that, but just think about arranging letters in a sentence, right?

The way you would in a book, right? If you arrange letters in a random order, you get gibberish, but if you arrange letters in a particular order to convey meaning, then you have a word or a sentence.

Similarly in DNA, these bases are arranged in a particular order to produce a function, right?

So to actually convey meaning or produce a function to that cell. And so during cell division, this

DNA has to get replicated so that you can create another cell. And it talked about the

RNA and the process of transcribing, translating.

And we're also gonna talk a little bit about how that goes. And there's another cooler video,

I think, that actually shows this cell division process and the kind of biological machines that are in our bodies that are actually, like it just kind of talked about the process there, but when you see this next video, it's amazing.

It's amazing, the machines that are in our body that are actually performing this cell division function.

So here's the next video, which is describing that process. Keep in mind, all this happened by chance.

No. These are tiny molecular machines and they are doing this inside your body right now.

To understand why, we have to zoom out. Every day in an adult human body, 50 to 70 billion of your cells die.

Either they're stressed or damaged or just old, but this is normal. In fact, it's called programmed cell death.

But to make up for all these lost cells, right now, billions of your cells are dividing, essentially creating new cells.

And that process of cell division, also called mitosis, well, it requires an army of tiny molecular machines.

So let's take a closer look. DNA is a good place to start, the double helix molecule we always talk about.

This is a scientifically accurate depiction of DNA created by Drew Barry at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research.

If you unwind the two strands, you can see that each has a sugar phosphate backbone connected to the sequence of nucleic acid base pairs known by the letters

A, T, G, and C. Now the strands run in opposite directions, which is important when you go to copy

DNA. Copying DNA is one of the first steps in cell division. Here, the two strands of DNA are being unwound and separated by the tiny blue molecular machine called helicase.

Helicase literally spins as fast as a jet engine. The strand of DNA on the right has its complementary strand assembled continuously, but the other strand is more complicated because it runs in the opposite direction.

So it must be looped out with its complementary strand assembled in reverse, section by section.

At the end of this process, you have two identical DNA molecules, each one a few centimeters long, but just a couple nanometers wide.

So to prevent the DNA from becoming a tangled mess, it is wrapped around proteins called histones, forming a nucleosome.

These nucleosomes are bundled together into a fiber known as chromatin, which is further looped and coiled to form a chromosome, one of the largest molecular structures in your body.

You can actually see chromosomes under a microscope in dividing cells. Only then do they take on their characteristic shape.

Otherwise, the DNA is more strewn inside the nucleus. The process of dividing a cell takes around an hour in mammals.

So this footage is from a time -lapse. You can see how the chromosomes line up on the equator of the cell.

Now, when everything is right, they are pulled apart into the two new daughter cells, each one containing an identical copy of DNA.

Now, simple as this looks, the process is incredibly complicated and requires even more fascinating molecular machines to accomplish it.

So let's look at a single chromosome. One chromosome consists of two sausage -shaped chromatids containing the identical copies of DNA made earlier.

Each chromatid is attached to microtubule fibers, which guide and help align them in the correct position.

The microtubules are connected to the chromatid at the kinetochore, here colored red. The kinetochore consists of hundreds of different proteins working together to achieve multiple objectives.

In fact, it's one of the most sophisticated molecular mechanisms inside your body. The kinetochore is central to the successful separation of the chromatids.

It creates a dynamic connection between the chromosome and the microtubules. For a reason no one's yet been able to figure out, the microtubules are constantly being built at one end and deconstructed at the other.

While the chromosome is still getting ready, the kinetochore sends out a chemical stop signal to the rest of the cell, shown here by the red molecules, basically saying this chromosome is not yet ready to divide.

The kinetochore also mechanically senses tension. When the tension is just right and the position and attachment are correct, all the proteins get ready, shown here by turning green.

At this point, the stop signal broadcasting system is not switched off. Instead, it is literally carried away from the kinetochore down the microtubules by a dynein motor.

That's the walking guy. This is really what it looks like. It has long legs so it can avoid obstacles and step over the kinesins, molecular motors that walk in the opposite direction.

Personally, I'm astounded by these tiny molecular machines, how they're able to routinely and faithfully execute their functions billions of times over inside your body at this exact instant.

I'm also amazed by the scientists who were able to work out how this happens in such detail that we could create realistic depictions of them like you saw in the animations in this video.

But perhaps the most amazing thing is just how much is left to be discovered, like figuring out how exactly the chromatids are pulled to opposite ends of the cell.

There is still so much that we don't quite know. You know, what I find exciting is that in science fiction, for decades, we've been writing about tiny nanobots that will be injected into our bloodstreams that can heal us.

But what this suggests, the existence of these tiny molecular machines inside us, it suggests that there isn't a physical limit that would prevent that.

So I think it's pretty likely that in future, we will be able to develop our own tiny molecular machines that will be able to repair our bodies better than they can repair themselves.

No idea if that second part is gonna happen, but it's neat to think about, because I am a sci -fi nerd.

But nevertheless, when you look at a video like that, what's the first thing that comes to mind?

If they had an electron microscope back in Darwin's time, the theory would never have been devised.

But when you look at something like that, does that give you the idea of random chance, or does that look more like an engineer built a machine?

Intelligent design. Yeah, an engineer built a machine that had a specific function, and these machines are constantly running in your body day after day, year after year.

And it's an engineer on the order of magnitudes more than the human brain. Because they still, and they admit, that they still don't understand how everything actually works, right?

They're able to render the things that they observe today, but they're things that they observe that they still don't have an explanation for.

So it just shows you that the level of engineering required is at a scale, to your point, that is far beyond what we can do today, given all of our technology, all of our know -how, all of our wisdom, all of our science, right?

So, I mean, that to me, when you see things like that, it just puts the theory of evolution in a totally different camp, in my mind, right?

Where I feel more like people lecturing us, people who believe in God, and believe that God created the world, and created us, and everything, people lecturing us, telling us that we're unscientific.

Most people that believe it, by the way, don't go into anywhere near the detail that even we are in this class, and we're not going into near the detail that you could possibly go into, but people who wanna lecture us, clearly don't understand what's going on inside the body.

Because, I mean, when you look at that kind of stuff, what is more plausible, that that was engineered, or that that happened on its own, through random chance?

And when you talk about irreducible complexity, going back to that concept again, any one of those things doesn't work.

The machine that carries it across the strand, the transcribing, the unwinding of the

DNA, and assembling it back in reverse order, any one of those things is not working. That cell doesn't divide.

It just doesn't divide. And the organism dies, right? Eventually cells do die, all cells eventually die, and if the cells can't divide, that organism dies.

And so, how would anything like that evolve over time, right?

It's a difficult thing. I'm sure there are very smart evolutionary biologists that would sit here and laugh at me about this, but,

I mean, just look at what they've discovered. And if they're honest, they're doing the same thing

Darwin is doing. We'll eventually figure it out. We'll eventually figure it out. You just talked about one small piece of a cell.

Yes. This is just one little. This is just cell division, yes. This is not even the cell carrying out its function.

This is just cell division. Yeah, you're 100 % right. And when we talked about the immense amount of code, right, in the

DNA itself, right, and all of the machines that are in there that are basically replicating that code, it's just staggering.

It's staggering to me, the amount of complexity that's in just a single cell.

A single cell. It's amazing to me. So, we're going to kind of cap off,

I think, here. Let me just think. So, yeah, so going back to the video that I just showed, you know, there's, you know, science, there's the scientific method, which is the method of experimentation, right?

Experimenting and observing the results of your experiments, right? Learning from those. And then there's sort of the idea behind science that not everything is repeatable, right?

And so there's sort of going to the best explanation, right?

So when you look at something like that, right, you think of an engineer, you think of an intelligence, a mind behind the creation of that.

Just like if you were to look at a watch, I brought this up last time, you look at a watch, you don't assume that that watch, you know, came about by chance.

Or you look at a house or a building, you don't assume that those things sort of just happened on their own. You assume there's an intelligence behind the creation of that thing.

We think of a car or, you know, any mechanical device. Assume that there's an engineer, there's an intelligence, a mind behind the creation of that thing.

And that's because that's what we observe in the material universe, right?

Is that whenever you see something that is complex like that, you assume that there's a mind behind it.

Dr. Meyer, Stephen Meyer is, there's a lot of his videos linked in this.

He's an intelligent design proponent. He is a

Christian and a theist, and he wrote three good books that, one is called

Darwin's Tao, one is called Signature in the Cell, which talks a lot about that, and then there's The Rise of the God Hypothesis, which in the first two books, he basically argues for intelligent design, but leaves out who the designer is.

On purpose, right? He's doing that to basically say, you know, just based off scientific methods, this, you know, the idea of an intelligent designer makes the most sense.

And there's some folks that think space aliens are the designer, right? That they came through and, you know, seeded the planet or something.

But then when you add on what we talked about in the very first session, right, which is around sort of the low entropy conditions at the beginning of the universe, all of the, you know, constants that are in physics, and how finely tuned our universe is, you then have to go to a transcendent designer, right?

You have to go to a mind, a designer that is outside of the physical universe because, you know, a space alien lives inside this universe, couldn't have created this universe.

So you have to move to a transcendent designer, which, if you look at like some of William Lane Craig's stuff they talk about, you know, spaceless, timeless, and unbelievably powerful.

So this is, you know, essentially a description of God, right, being the actual intelligence behind the creation of all of this.

So the amount of information that's encoded in DNA, the nanomachines, right, it just defies the possibility that this could strictly have been created from an undirected material process.

And so Stephen Myers is a good person who's been pushing on this.

There's one last video that we're gonna go, it's an hour long video, but we're only gonna go through two sections of the video.

It's what they call the Sunday special with Ben Shapiro, if you guys are Ben Shapiro fans, where he talks about two things.

One is the idea of, you know, intelligent design and the problems with Darwinian evolution, and the other is one of the examples of them trying to refute that through something that they call the

RNA world, which he's gonna talk more about it, more intelligently about it than I could. And we'll cap off with that, and then, you know, any questions that you guys have, we can talk through.

This will last, I don't know, maybe 10 minutes. I may just have to go out to the,

Mrs. Darwin's.

So we'll just fire it up on natural light. If you're investigating an origin question, or...

All right, so let's talk about the origin of life problem. The question being, how did organic life arise from non -organic material?

There's some experiments that were done in the early 20th century in which under certain conditions, it looked as though maybe organic material could be created from non -organic material, but there really, as you point out, has not been a great explanation of how non -organic material could create an information system like DNA.

I was wondering if you could elucidate that. So, yeah, the famous experiment in biology textbooks is the

Miller -Urey experiment of 1952 and 1953. They sparked a chamber that had gases known as reducing gases that then spontaneously produced a few of the 20 protein -forming amino acids, two or three.

Problem is that amino acids do not a protein make, and proteins by themselves do not make life.

So they were really quite a long ways away from demonstrating anything like a spontaneous chemical origin of life.

It's ironic that that experiment was performed in the same year as Watson and Crick's discovery of the structure of the

DNA molecule and the subsequent elucidation of the information bearing properties of the molecule, because in what's called chemical evolutionary theory, by the 1960s and certainly by the early 1980s, the field reached a state of impasse precisely because the biologists and the biochemists realized that to build an actual living cell, you've got to have information -rich molecules.

You can't just have the components. You can't just have the letters. You've got to have sentences. And so there were a number of problems with the

Miller -Urey experiment. One was they presupposed conditions on the early Earth and in the early Earth's atmosphere that didn't actually match the conditions on the early

Earth. We didn't have a reducing atmosphere. We had a slightly oxidizing or neutral atmosphere.

You rerun those experiments. You don't get amino acids forming spontaneously. But the bigger problem was how do you arrange the amino acids in the very specific ways that are required to form a three -dimensional structure called a protein fold?

And that problem hasn't been solved apart from watching DNA do it inside living cells.

So to build proteins, what we know is you need information stored in the DNA molecule. And so as the molecular biological revolution unfolded in the 50s, 60s, 70s, the scientists working on the origin of life realized the problem was much harder than they realized.

But they didn't just need to account for certain kinds of building blocks of life. They needed to account for the information that would organize the building blocks into DNA molecules, into protein molecules, and into the complex information processing systems that characterize even the simplest living cells.

So one of the theories that has been posited to sort of solve this problem is the so -called RNA world thesis. Can you talk about what exactly that is?

So one of the reasons the origin of life problem is so hard for evolutionary biologists is you can't invoke natural selection reasonably.

Because natural selection only depends on self -replication, differential survival of lots of offspring.

But that only happens, differential organisms only divide and reproduce on the basis of things that are happening at a molecular level that involve information -rich

DNA and proteins. So if you're trying to explain the origin of information rich DNA and proteins, you can't invoke prebiotic natural selection.

It's a contradiction in terms, as one of the great evolutionary biologists of Jansky said. So that made the origin of life problem even harder than the problems we've been talking about previously as far as explaining the origin of the information for new forms of life.

But one theory that attempted to get around that is called the RNA world. And it was based on the observation that some

RNA molecules can perform two functions at once.

They can perform the function of information storage, like DNA. But they can also catalyze certain reactions, like proteins.

Proteins catalyze at much faster rates than would otherwise occur, really crucial biochemical reactions that are crucial to the metabolism.

So if RNA could do both, the thought was that maybe life started with an RNA molecule that could copy itself, that could get natural selection going at a molecular level before you had life.

Problem has turned out, again, to be an information problem. So we've done experiments on RNAs. They call them ribozyme engineering experiments.

And the name is apt, because it is a lot of intelligent designs, a lot of engineering. But people have tried to engineer

RNA molecules by arranging the sequence of bases. RNA, like DNA, has these bases that carry information.

And they've arranged the bases very specifically to try to build RNA molecules that would copy themselves to get a self -replicating system going, which would get natural selection going.

Problem is, number one, we have been able to design some RNA molecules that will copy about 10 % of themselves, but only if the bases are very specifically arranged, which means that to get a self -replicating system going, you've got to have information.

And where is the information coming from? It's coming from the intelligent biochemist who's doing the ribozyme engineering.

So what's actually being simulated in these simulations is the need, we argue, for intelligent design.

The RNA world doesn't eliminate or refute the intelligent design argument based on information.

It actually demonstrates or illustrates the need for intelligent design. And so I don't think it really solves the problem, unless RNA world people are saying, well, that's where the intelligent designer input the information in the first place.

So it seems like the biggest blowback that you've gotten, obviously, in terms of intelligent design is the term intelligent design.

Because it seems like most of the critiques that you've made of neo -Darwinism are fairly well accepted. Is that accurate?

Increasingly so. In 2016, a number of us attended a conference at the World Society of London in, obviously,

London. And it was a group of leading evolutionary biologists, called the meeting, to address new trends in evolutionary biology, they called it.

It was innocuous way of saying neo -Darwinism is dead, and we need a new theory. First talk of the conference was by a leading

Austrian evolutionary biologist named Gerd Muller, who enumerated five, what he called, explanatory deficits of neo -Darwinism.

Elsewhere, he's written that neo -Darwinism has no theory of the generative, by which he means, it explains the small scale variations very well, like the

Galapagos finches, but it doesn't explain the origin of major innovations in the history of life. And so many evolutionary biologists are now, there's an aphorism.

It's mutation and selection explain the survival, but not the arrival of the fittest.

The problem is, the main mechanism of evolutionary change doesn't seem to have significant creative power.

And that's the problem, I think, increasingly being recognized, and as a result of that, many people within evolutionary biology are looking for new mechanisms, calling for the formulation of a new theory.

And that's kind of striking, it's an astounding admission. When you think about how the theory is presented through the textbooks, with science popularizers, the new atheists, the public spokesmen for science, the

National Center for Science Education, or the National Academy of Sciences, when they talk about evolution, it's a fact.

Richard Dawkins has said that if you find someone who questions it, they're either stupid, wicked, or insane.

But the reality on the ground, or rather in the peer -reviewed literature within evolutionary biology is very different.

There's a recognition that the fundamental problems haven't been solved, and one of which is, Mueller acknowledged the problem of the origin of biological form.

When I saw that, it's in a table in a book that he's written with another evolutionary biologist, it says, a list of unsolved problems, one of which they list, the origin of biological form,

I was stunned. It was 2003, MIT Press, that was the very problem that Darwin was supposed to have solved in 1859, and it's now an open question.

But with that said, it seems like, for a, so that's the section that I wanted, which really talks about the origin of first life.

This, if you wanna watch the whole video, it's linked in the references. They talk about the deficits within Darwinism for the evolution of kinds, or evolving from bears to whales, or whatever, but this is really talking about the evolution of first life, and the fact that evolution, even today, doesn't have an explanation for it.

And I thought it was, I thought it was interesting that, that evolutionary biologists today are actually, really, the more science is progressing, the more problems that they're finding with the theory of evolution.

And it is a theory. I thought it was interesting that he points out that what evolutionary biologists say behind closed doors in their own circles differs dramatically from what is taught in the public schools, to our children, to the general public, which is that evolution is not a theory, it's a fact.

It's been proven, and they have a massive amount of scientific evidence. I think last time, and this time, we've shown they don't have hardly any evidence at all, right, for evolution.

What they have is an incomplete fossil record, right, with major extrapolations of skeletal structure, and transitional forms that just are essentially created from very small amounts of skeletal material that are found over great distances from each other.

They have no theory for the existence of first life.

They have a whole bunch of experiments that they've tried to run, and haven't been able to successfully produce the rise of life from non -life.

They don't have an explanation for even how some of these fundamental processes within these cells work, to the point that, and those videos that I showed before were not answers in Genesis videos.

They were not Christian videos. These were videos from people, just like the 98 % DNA video that I showed, these are people who accept evolution as fact, and they put these videos together, and they freely admit that they don't have an explanation for how these biological machines necessarily work.

They have some, but not all. They don't know how the cells, you know, are pulled apart. And so, they're still in the same boat that Darwin was in, back in 1859, saying, eventually, we're gonna figure it out.

Eventually, we're gonna figure out how this stuff all happened. We have no idea how it happened now, but eventually, we're gonna figure it out, which is why they're saying, we're not giving up the theory of evolution, right?

He said those neo -Darwinists came together, and they said, we need to find another theory. We need to enhance the theory or find another theory.

They're not willing to let go of the theory and say, you know what? The inference to the best explanation is that this was a created, this was created by a master engineer that has a level of intelligence and a level of capability far beyond anything we could possibly imagine.

In other words, God created all things, given his infinite intelligence and ability to create.

So, I just, the more you do the research, the more you come out stunned that the facts just don't lead where they say they lead.

But I still find it amazing that they teach this to our children. And as Stephen Meyer said,

Dawkins says that anyone who doesn't believe in the theory of evolution, anyone who doesn't believe that evolution is the origin of life is either stupid, wicked, what did he say, stupid, wicked, or insane.

Yes, thank you. Stupid, wicked, or insane, right? And they're happy to castigate all of us who are just looking at the evidence and saying there's engineering behind this.

They're happy to call us stupid, you know, Bible -thumping morons. Bible -thumping wingnuts.

Yep. And so, with that, 7 .59 on the dot. What time?

7 .59? 7 .59, yeah. Awesome. Wondering if anybody has any comments or questions?

Well, I can give an anecdotal response to all that because I'm a living proof of it, what happened.

Because, you know, many of you know that I went through my whole cancer treatment and the way they resolved the problem was they put me on gene therapy.

And the only way they can make it work was to do punch biopsies throughout my body and they said it just like that.

We're taking the script from your DNA and we're gonna have a counter -script that's gonna stop the production of what's gonna happen there.

And it says, and I went, how are you gonna do that? So we know the how, we don't know the why. And they were very -

Yeah, and Stephen Meyer even said that, he said, they don't know how this works other than to watch it work in the cells.

Other than to observe it actually functioning. Exactly. And so, yeah, and so they, I had to go, they had to kind of teach me really quick about what the process was gonna be.

But it was basically done, you know, the formula that was particular to my

DNA makeup was being made and what the counter piece was gonna be to fight the cancer cell directly.

And so these things that came into my body were seekers to stop the production because basically cancer is an overproduction of a cell.

It goes too fast. So how do you slow it down in doing all that? And I don't wanna give the impression that science is evil, right?

I actually don't think that science and religion are necessarily incompatible. I don't think that,

I think some science, right, or again, I use the term pseudoscience, right, that I don't wanna give, like, we're not crazy people that think, you know, you can't take medicine or something, right?

Like, let's not talk about COVID or anything around that right now. But like, the problem is is that science in America and some more than other, evolution certainly, has become a religion of its own, right?

Where they're taking it on faith that this is actually how life began and how, you know, creatures evolved on this planet.

And the whole reason for it is to elevate man to godhood and cut

God out of the equation. This is a, it's no coincidence that the neo -Darwinists are the ones that are, the new atheists, rather, are the ones being quoted as saying that if you don't take evolution on face value, then you're wicked, stupid, or insane, right?

It's because to say that there's an intelligence, that there's a mind, that there's a

God behind the creation of life and the creation of the universe rocks them to their core.

And so they have to hold on, white -knuckled to this theory, right, and that we will eventually, you know, develop the intelligence and science to figure this out.

Well, I think if you Google Richard Dawkins, fine, you'll see

Wikipedia pop up first or whatever. It'll say he's an evolutionary biologist. Yeah. How can you be someone who's seeking the truth, not knowing what the truth is, but doing it through the scientific method, as you said, but pre -assuming that evolution is the way

I want it to go? Well, and physicists and astronomers, the same thing, right? Evolutionary biologists, you know, on the topic that we're talking about in our first session, scientists presuppose that everything is done through naturalistic process, right?

That it's undirected, it's all naturalistic processes. So when you talk about the finite universe and the creation of, you know, of stars and galaxies and all of the, you know, constants and math that is behind all of that, you know, we talked about the formula for gravity, the gravitational constant, the cosmological constant, and the weak force and the strong force.

All of these things, they have to presuppose that supernatural beings are out of bounds, that everything has to be explained within the natural universe.

So a transcendent creator, they already presuppose that that is impossible, right?

Rather than allowing the data and the science to allow them to infer to the best explanation, right?

Even if they say, they're not even willing to say, we're not sure, you know, it's possible, but we're just not sure if we're gonna find something that explains this, they're not even willing to be that intellectually honest.

They have to presuppose that supernatural beings are impossible, and therefore they have to continue to search for a naturalistic explanation.

And that's relevant to biology as well, right? To, you know, the origin of first life and to,

I mean, we today, right, have thousands and thousands of years of history, and we know that if you breed two dogs, you get a dog, and if you try and crossbreed a dog with a bird, you don't get anything, right?

I mean, even if you could figure it out. There are. I don't think a dog would make it from a bird. Right, but you'll never be able to breed a dog with wings.

You'll never be able to breed a dog with wings, right? And so we know that this, you know, evolution of kinds has never been observed, and there's no evidence for it, right?

And then when you actually get down at the molecular level, it just gets even more apparent that there is, in fact, a creator, so.

Yes, Rob. It's amazing, that all being said, if you go back to the very beginning, okay, and if you do this, you become like God.

And that's the foundation of everything right now. That's a great point. Man wants to be God. We'll be our own

God. We don't need you. And it goes back to the foundation of Genesis right back there, and what

Satan's trying to do. And I think that's a really important thing. We're not wrestling against flesh and blood, and that's the important thing for us to remember as believers, to follow and know who the real

God is here, and it's not Rod Chandler. I can't accomplish anything. Is it? I thought for sure you would have it.

Oh, well, there's people too. But really, seriously, when you think about that from a theological basis, that's our fight.

It isn't against this. It's against the fact that we're fighting against Satan, who's gonna convince his people.

Yes. Your father's a liar, the father of lies, and if you wanna believe that, you can have all the intelligence you want, but God is still

God. And what was it that one time, all the scientists got together, the greatest scientists that ever lived all got together, and said, we can make a man.

We'll prove it, and they started getting the dirt and putting it together, and God said, oh, no, no, get your own dirt. Get your own dirt. Get your own dirt.

Get your own dirt. Get your own dirt. Get your own dirt. But, you know. That's a good one. Hey, Rod, or Matt, a book by Henry Morris that people have to read is

The Biblical Basis for Modern Science. The Biblical Basis for Modern, he shows how those that build the foundation of modern science were all

Bible -believing Christians. Yeah. Like Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, so many others. Yeah, and so science didn't always, science wasn't always separate from religion, so it didn't used to be the case that you had to accept purely naturalistic processes.

Newton wrote more on theology than he did on science. Yes, and Bible prophecy, too. Yeah, and if you watch some of the videos linked in this, which

I'll send it out after next time, but if you watch some of the videos, there's, you know,

Stephen Meyer actually testified before Congress where he talked about Isaac Newton in detail and some of his presuppositions around gravity and the need for God for any of this stuff to, and, you know, modern science is built on the backs of these giant intellects who all believed

God existed and God created the universe. So, next time, there's gonna be no videos.

Next time, there's gonna be a whole bunch of slides, and we're gonna talk about, we're gonna dig more into the creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2, so we're actually gonna read

Genesis 1 and 2, and we're gonna go through the six days of creation and talk about three different interpretations, or four -ish, like three and a half, different interpretations of Genesis 1 and 2.

I am going to give a huge disclaimer at the beginning of that session.

We're gonna have a discussion around, you know, what doctrinal issues, depending on the different view that you take, what the doctrinal issues are with those views.

Some believe in historical Adam, some don't believe in historical Adam, and what does that mean, and things like that.

So, we're actually gonna go through that next time. The three and a half views are going to be young Earth creationism, which is probably the most popular view, old

Earth creationism, and then we're gonna go through two variants of theistic evolution.

One is a purely naturalistic version of theistic evolution, and one is sort of a hybrid version of theistic evolution that actually posits a historical

Adam amongst theistic evolutionary processes. So, we'll talk about that next time, and that'll wrap up the whole origins and evolution.

Yeah, next time. Next time is in two weeks, right? Next time is in two weeks, yes, that's a good point. We do have a congregational meeting next

Monday, or this coming Monday, and we will meet here for this final origins and evolution talk, and we'll take it from there.

All right, which one of you closes out in prayer? Heavenly Father, we thank you so much,

Lord God, for Matt and for teaching us tonight, Lord God, and we know that you are the creator of the universe,

Lord God, we honor you, we worship you, and we love you, Lord Jesus, and we cannot wait until you come back to rule and reign and remove all this nonsense, this evil that so many people have swallowed.

Lord God, for those under a sentence of judicial blindness, we pray for their sake that you open their eyes,

Lord God, and bring many to salvation in Jesus Christ. And Lord, as we leave here tonight, I pray that you give each one of us journey mercies home, keep us safe on the road,

Lord God, and take us safely back to our homes. We give you all the praise and glory and thanks in Jesus' precious name, amen.