Apologetics Session 37- Origins and Evolution - Part 4

Thank you for this day. Thank you for all the blessings that you've given us, Lord. I just ask that you would bless this time tonight, that you would, you know, as we look over your word and what you did at the beginning of time in your creation,

Lord, I just pray that everyone would be edified by the teaching, that you would allow us to see things through your word,

God. And we thank you so much for the sacrifice of your son on the cross for our salvation. We pray all these things in Christ's name, amen.

Amen. Alrighty, so by way of recap, we've actually gone through a number of topics.

This is, I guess, the fourth session. So we've gone through the creation of the universe, the

Big Bang, a lot of the fine -tuning and cosmological arguments. We've gone through a lot of the evolutionary data, so going through transitional forms and really the lack of evidence for those transitional forms or sort of the extrapolation of that.

And then we went really deep into the human genome, the biological nanomachines that are in our bodies, a lot of videos that we walked through to kind of help elucidate the topic because it's hard to describe these things and grasp them.

And then into DNA and just a massive amount of digital code that's essentially in our bodies that dictate how our cells function and do things like repair and cell division and we focused in on cell division and the copying and transcribing of DNA.

A lot of really interesting kind of stuff there. We're going to kind of pull back from a lot of that because I think we've done,

I mean there's certainly we could go a lot deeper, but we've done a lot to sort of talk about why it is reasonable.

And not only reasonable, but probably the best explanation for both the creation of the universe and the creation of life in our universe to posit that there's a designer, an engineer, a transcendent and all -powerful being that actually created both the universe and life on our planet.

Now we're going to kind of go into a bit of a, I'll call it inside baseball topic, where we're going to talk about some of the different views of creation.

And I want to kind of start off with a disclaimer.

This is very similar to the eschatological disclaimer that I gave around eschatology where some of these views

I'll say are better than others, but I don't want to think that these are issues that we should necessarily divide over.

I think some of them have stronger indications towards doctrine than others do, but this is something that I believe, my personal opinion, is that there are

Christians that probably hold to almost all of these views, if not all of these views, and that we really need to separate our soteriology from our belief around creation.

I think that there's a right view, obviously I think there's a right view about this, and I think that some views have much larger hurdles to overcome, and it's really kind of on the folks that want to hold to those views to attempt to overcome those hurdles.

We'll talk a little bit about the specifics of that. I just kind of wanted to start out with sort of a disclaimer, and we'll talk about the specifics.

That doesn't mean that this isn't an important issue or an important topic. It certainly is one.

It certainly has implications on things like soteriology and some of the other doctrines that we've discussed, and we'll talk more about that as well.

The reason I say this is because God, Jesus said, what must I do to be saved, and when people asked him what must

I do to be saved, he said, you must believe in me, go to seminary, become a theological expert, and then you'll be saved.

And that's kind of what I'm trying to get at, which is that there are people that are saved that just don't have a deep understanding of doctrinal issues, so we need to be careful about condemning someone who may just be uninformed or maybe hasn't thought about it very deeply.

And I do think that we should hold teachers to a higher standard who may be teaching some of these views, because they have done the due diligence, they have done the research, they have done the studying, they have gone to seminary, they've been educated on this stuff.

Jesus said, shall incur stricter judgment. Right, absolutely. So, with that large and long disclaimer, we're going to talk about essentially three major views, one being the old earth, one being the young earth, and one being theistic evolution, and with theistic evolution we're going to go kind of into two variants.

So, the way, and there are videos that are linked in the, and I'll send it out after tonight's session,

I'll send out the actual Word document that has all of this stuff, including the references to all of the videos that we've gone through and some videos that we have not.

There are videos by respected theologians who talk about some of these other views and hold different views to probably most

Christians, but, you know, and so you guys can watch those at your leisure, but, and I'll talk a little bit about some of the things that they said in those videos.

Matt? Yeah. Just a comment. Having three major views of creation and so forth, it is,

I think it's important for us to realize we can't be too dogmatic about any one, have to be open, but cautiously so.

And I'm going to be open about my particular feeling on these views, and kind of where I stand on them as well, you know, and just so that you guys are all, you know, we'll be up front about it.

But I think that the important thing, though, about any of these views is that we essentially lean on God's Word and what it says.

Now, God's Word can be interpreted multiple ways, but I find that some people try to take a particular, you really have to look at the motivations of people.

Some people want to let the Word of God speak to them, and others want to read into God's Word something that they already believe, or something that they want to believe.

And so in some of these views, and I'm kind of dancing around a little bit here, but in some of these views

I think it is people trying to read in science in particular into God's Word.

And God's Word is not a scientific document, right? It is an inspired scripture.

And so I think that some of these views are harder to justify, and people kind of read in what they want to do.

But I do understand that it is also something that people get very passionate about. Some people get very passionate about their particular viewpoint, and they want to push it over others.

And I think that we need to be gracious to folks. All right, so what

I wanted to do is really just start with God's Word, right?

Start with the actual Genesis account. So I only have one slide for today. No videos today. I know you guys love the videos.

But I wanted to go through, really start with God's Word and go through the actual

Genesis account, Genesis 1 and 2, and kind of start there.

And just lay out the six days of creation. So at the very beginning of the

Bible, we have Genesis 1 -1, where it says, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.

And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. So that's the introduction statement, and actually leads in, and we'll talk more about that statement in a bit, leads into something called gap theory, which we'll get into in a bit, talking about the age of the earth and the universe.

That's the introduction. And then when we get to the first day, which is Genesis 1 -3 -5, it says,

And God said, Let there be light. And there was light. And God saw the light, saw that the light was good.

And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. And there was evening, and there was morning the first day.

So that's day one, right, of creation. Then we move on to day two, where God separates the waters from the sea.

It says in Genesis 1 -6 -8, God said, Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.

And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse.

And it was so. And God called the expanse heaven. And there was evening, and there was morning the second day.

So that's day two. Day three is where God separates the earth from the sea and creates vegetation.

So this is Genesis 1 -9 -13. And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.

And it was so. God called the dry land earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called seas.

And God saw that it was good. And God said, Let the earth bring vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit, in which is their seed, each according to its kind on the earth.

And it was so. And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit, in which is their seed, each according to its kind.

And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning the third day. So that's day three.

Day four, God creates the sun, moon, and stars. So this is 14 -19. And God said,

Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years.

And let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.

And it was so. And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night and the stars.

And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness.

And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning the fourth day. So then we get on to the fifth day, which is

God creating the sea creatures and the birds. And it says in, this is 20 -23.

And God said, Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let the birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.

So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind.

And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.

And there was evening, and there was morning the fifth day. Now we finally get to day six.

Day six is where God creates land creatures, humanity, and gives vegetation for food, 24 -31.

And God said, Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds, livestock and creeping things, and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.

And it was so. And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds, and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind.

And God saw that it was good. Then God said, Let us make man in our image after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

And God said, Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit.

You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the heavens, and to everything that creeps on the earth, and everything that has breath of life,

I have given every green plant for food. And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made. And behold, it was very good.

And there was evening, and there was morning, the sixth day. And then lastly, we get to Genesis 2, 1 through 3, which is the seventh day.

God rests from his work of creation. And so 2, 1 says, Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done.

So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.

So that is the seven -day creation story, right? And we have a few different views that people who read this passage take.

Obviously, non -Christians don't believe any of it, right? Non -Christians who don't believe in God's word and don't believe that it has any inspiration or any authority on earth believe that this is just a storybook, right?

We're going to ignore those. We're going to talk about what Christians believe about this. I think that we've done a pretty good job over the last few sessions of looking at what non -Christians and naturalists believe and kind of deconstructing some of that.

And I think that the fact that many atheists and naturalists presuppose that a supernatural being and that supernatural circumstances to the creation of the world and of life, they sort of presuppose that that is impossible, is a major reason why they're essentially reading in their own beliefs into the creation of the world.

And so we'll look at some of the things that Christians hold. So there's probably the most popular view that Christians hold, which is a young earth creationism view.

And it's an easy explanation as to why they believe this, right?

It's probably the most commonly held belief. One strong proponent of this view is

Ken Ham. I'm sure you guys have all heard of Ken Ham, Creation Museum, Bible Museum, ARC.

Answers in Genesis. Yeah, Answers in Genesis, yes. And he's a huge proponent and a major debater of young earth creationism, as well as other things about the

ARC and dinosaurs living with humans and so forth.

And this view holds that the earth is roughly 6 ,000 years old. It can go as much as 10 ,000, but it's generally between the 6 ,000 and 10 ,000 year mark, right?

You can vary a little bit there, but generally speaking, 6 ,000 years old. A lot of this is based off of the lineages in the

Bible going back to Adam. And it holds that the seven days of creation were literal 24 -hour days and not longer periods of time.

So the arguments for this view are really straightforward. It says, we just read the entire creation account.

And since the Bible is the word of God and it says days, the view here is that you should take that to mean days, right?

It's the word yom in Hebrew. I'm sure I'm mispronouncing it.

And so people that hold to this view would, if you remember the, and actually the

Sunday, believe it or not. It's funny how things, how God works to have things come up.

But if you remember when I taught on a lot of the historicity of the

Bible, we talked about something called textual criticism. Which is a science about reading texts and determining their meaning.

And Pastor, this past week, also talked about textual criticism when he talked about the passage in John that had, that there was discrepancies about whether or not it was written by John or added later on.

Not whether or not it was an accurate account of particular events that happened, but whether or not it was actually written by John.

That was really the argument. But, you know, one who holds to the young earth creationism view would utilize a lot of the same tactics as a textual critic would.

By looking at the word day or yom and interpreting it to mean a day.

And how we interpret a day to be today, which is that it's a 24 hour period of time.

Part of it being, if you go to the equator, you've got 12 hours a day, 12 hours a night.

So, you know, half hour, half a day period of time. So arguments against this view would lean on,

I'm going to say the word facts of science. We'll just leave it there, but I'm going to say facts of science.

Mainly geology, which dates the earth to a much older, much older date.

It would also look at things like the speed of light, which is something that we know.

And the distance of stars to the earth, right?

And how many, how long it would take for light from those stars to travel to be visible by our eyes.

So in my life, growing up, I've always held to the young earth creationism view.

It just seemed to make the most sense to me that you read the Bible the way you read the Bible.

And that it means what it means. And I will say though that I'm not entirely dogmatic about it.

And to your point, we probably ought not to be too dogmatic about views unless they are, you know, really heretical views.

Amen. Yeah. The one thing you're doing is you're taking it literally. Correct.

Word for word here. Correct. And it's interesting, when we went through biblical archaeology before, and there were actually stories of creation, very similar to the stories of the flood you talked about before.

There were also creation stories from the Babylonians and the Sumerians and some other cultures.

And those cultures, when they described creation, it was very poetic language.

It was very full of hyperbole. It was very mystical. Yes. But it's very interesting in God's word in the creation account.

It's very short and very straightforward. And some people would claim that it's poetic and it's all symbology, but it's not written that way.

Right. When we talk about some of the other views, we're going to talk about some of the genres of literature that they want to assign to parts of Genesis.

Not all of Genesis, but parts of Genesis. So yes, you're 100 % right. Young Earth creationism, which is a view

I've held growing up and probably am still in favor of, is the view that you take

Genesis 1 and 2 literally. It does.

The arguments against things like the speed of light, which is something that we can measure, and the fact that the distance of stars and the amount of time it would take the light from those stars to travel to our eyes is something that would count against this view.

Similarly, the age of the Earth, the geological age of the Earth, looking at certain minerals and things and being able to gauge their age, puts the

Earth at 4 .6 billion years old. And then looking at things like the speed of light, it's putting, if you rewind time, that's how they get to the 13.

Remember when we talked in the first session about the 13 .4 billion year age of the universe?

That was basically rewinding the clock, based on how far away things are now, rewinding the clock of the observable universe back to a zero point.

Taking into account things like the speed of light. And so all of these things would be points against it.

Now, I personally had always thought, and an example that I've always used is, did

God create Adam and Eve as babies? He didn't, right?

So if you, let's say that you materialized into the universe, in the

Garden of Eden, and you saw Adam and Eve, with all of the scientific knowledge that we have today, what would your assumption about Adam and Eve be?

Adults. But they were full grown adults, but your assumption would be, knowing how full grown adults become full grown adults, that they were born at some point.

That they were infants, that they grew up, that they became teenagers, and then ultimately became adults, right?

But you would be wrong, right? Because that's not what the Bible says. The Bible says that God created

Adam from the dust of the earth, and he created Eve from Adam's rib, right? And so, essentially, they were created with what

I've termed implied age, right? There was an implied maturity, right?

An implied growth that was there, but they had never been babies. They were not born.

They were created as full grown adults. No belly buttons. No belly buttons, yes.

Good point. But, if God can do that with a human being, probably one of, if not the most complex creation, right?

Couldn't he do that with a tree? Couldn't he do that with the rocks? Couldn't he do that with a mountain? One of the other things is, if God created a full grown tree and you cut the tree down, would there be growth rings inside it?

And so, an all -powerful God, this is not actually a hard problem to solve, right?

He can create a universe as big as he wants. He can pre -stream the light across the universe.

He can create it with this sort of implication of age. Go ahead. Well, like when

Jesus fed the 5 ,000, he fed the people from fish that had never swam in the ocean and bread that had never grown from wheat.

Right. So, I find the whole, the sort of naturalistic arguments against the seven day creation, essentially they fall over because if you believe in creation at all, then you believe in an all -powerful

God, and therefore an all -powerful God, this is not actually a problem. It's the same type of argument that I've heard people say, you know, if God created the universe and we're the only life in it, this is a sci -fi argument, then why did

God go through all the trouble of creating those stars and planets? The answer is, what trouble? Right. What trouble?

Because at the end of the day, this was not a difficult problem for God to solve, right?

So, I don't find those arguments particularly persuasive.

Go ahead, Rob. No, I was just wondering, do you also, I'm assuming, considering that the earth was perfect at the time and a curse came upon the lower earth, like that?

Right. Go ahead, Bob. I'm looking at slides one and four.

Yeah. And I don't quite understand slide one.

I know. I've looked at Genesis many times, and I just, my finite mind just doesn't comprehend it.

Yes. Because then, in slide four, he creates the sun and the moon. Correct. So, I can't see what...

This is an argument for a different view that we're going to get to, which is an old earth creationism view.

Well, if I can continue, then I see slides one, two, and three.

I could say, in my mind, they could be old creation view. And when

God created the sun and the moon to be for calendars and days and times like that, that's when the young earth comes into play.

I mean, I just don't get it. And that's okay, because it's God. It's okay.

This is not a problem. So, one of the arguments is that the light that was created in slide one, or in the first day, was not the light of our sun, our star.

It was a different light that God created. Well, does it say that he actually created it, or that he just separated it?

He said, let there be light. Okay. He separated the light from the darkness. Okay. Yes. But he didn't create our sun.

No, I know that. Our moon until the fourth day of creation. Right. And then said that we should use those to mark days and seasons.

And this is actually an argument for what they call the day -age view, which is the old earth view that I'm highlighting.

Okay. Which is that these were not 24 -hour days, but were actually periods of time, which we'll get to in a second.

But just to finish off here, I'm not persuaded by the arguments of age of earth, or speed of light, or any of the physical issues that people have, or scientific issues that people have with the 24 -hour day, or young earth creation view.

Did you want to say something, Drew? Oh, okay. I thought maybe you were saying that. I'm worried about your hour time frame.

So then we're going to move on to old earth creationism. And this gets into a bit of what you were talking about.

And this is actually held by folks like Stephen Meyer, who we saw talking about DNA last time.

It's also held by Dr. John Lennox, who's another debater and scientist and theologian.

Hugh Ross. Hugh Ross. Hugh Ross. And an example of this is something called the day age view, which is to say that the age of the earth, the age of the universe, could still be 13 .4

billion and 4 .6 billion years old, respectively, and the creation story could still hold.

It really triggers off the word day or yom. There's some actual arguments I don't quite get about the grammar in Hebrew around the difference between how day is represented for the first four days and how it's represented for the fifth and sixth day.

There's some grammar around that, which there's a video link that has Dr. Lennox explaining this, which he does a better job than I could.

I didn't quite understand it, but nevertheless, it is represented grammatically differently, although the word day itself is used.

And what this holds, the day age view, it's a bit of gap theory plus day age. So what that means is that that first, if you remember, before day one, there was sort of an introduction.

It says, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

And then he goes into, and God said, let there be light, and went through the first day. Now, some people include that first introduction in day one, and some people don't.

Some people say that's a gap. There's a gap of time. That could be when God created the actual universe.

So he creates the universe, you know, what is it, nine billion years goes by, or eight billion years goes by, and then he starts creating the earth, right?

And that all of these other things are things that happened in that gap. And then combine that with the day age view, which is that those days were not actual 24 -hour periods, but rather just periods of time.

And one of the main arguments for this is the fact that God didn't create the sun, moon, and stars until the fourth day.

So how would you measure a 24 -hour day on days one, two, and three, if the mechanism through which we measure a 24 -hour day is, you know, the earth rotating on its axis, and, you know, years being the earth rotating around the sun, and so forth.

Now, I don't necessarily have a problem with that view. I also don't necessarily find it difficult that God could do days one, two, and three in a 24 -hour period without there being a sun, an earth to rotate around its axis, or a sun to rotate around.

Because God, again, being all -powerful, could have done that in a 24 -hour period without having those mechanisms through which we measure time, or at least measure days.

Matt, it says, of course, in verse one that he created the heavens and the earth at that time.

Right. But that doesn't mean he developed it. Correct. Correct. So, again, there's this idea of, you know, and again, a lot of people with the old earth creationism view want to hold to things like the

Big Bang, right? The Big Bang being something that God started. Basically, God created, out of nothing, the entire universe in one word, or bang, right, that went out.

And long periods of time, which are not long periods of time for God, long periods of time elapsed where this universe started to develop, again, through God's fine -tuning of the universal constants, right?

And then God created, you know, the earth, created the sun, moon, and stars, created all of these things, and then started creating vegetation, and sea creatures, and creatures of the air, and eventually man, and so forth.

So God still spoke into existence all of these things. It just didn't happen in six 24 -hour days, right?

That would be kind of the argument for the day -age view, and would allow you to say, sure, the earth is 4 .5

billion years old. Sure, the universe is 13 .5 billion years old. You still don't hold to things like evolution.

You still hold to a creationist worldview, but you just don't necessarily hold to the six 24 -hour days.

Now, it does require you to read the word day differently than you can in a literal sense.

Go ahead. What would the day -age theorist argument, especially when you're saying that the language is a little different, when it comes to the yam plus a number, any kind of number with it, throughout the

Pentateuch is a 24 -hour time frame. So they're saying that there's a language change.

I haven't heard that one before. So it has to do, and John Lennox does a better job than me of this, but it has to do with saying day for versus the fourth day.

So it wasn't terribly persuasive to me.

It was just an interesting thing that you're like, oh, yeah, it is different. I really didn't understand why it made any real difference, because yam, the word day, is the thing that we're talking about.

And read in context day in a number, you're talking about a 24 -hour day versus, say, the day of the

Lord, which is clearly talking about a period.

Or you're talking about—one of the other arguments was that how long is day seven?

Theoretically, we're still in day seven, right? So can it refer to a 24 -hour day or not? Because day seven, when

God ceased his creative work, it didn't start again.

It wasn't like day eight he started creating again. It was day seven, and so one of the arguments is that, well, we're still in day seven, so how can it be a 24 -hour day if it's thousands of years?

I mean, even if you hold a younger creationist view, it's thousands of years. And so the day -age view

I'm open to, but I still don't necessarily hold to it. I still hold to a younger creationist view, because I have a hard time pulling myself away from reading

Genesis literally. And, again, I've already talked about the fact that an all -powerful

God doesn't have a problem with these quote -unquote problems that science today actually creates.

We see through a glass darkly. Yes, yes. And I'm sure there's going to be lots of stuff we get to have and we're going to ask

God, we're going to be like, man, I really had that wrong, didn't I? So I have no issue with that.

So, again, science dates the Earth to be much older than 6 ,000 years. So one also argument is that God gave us rational minds.

He gave us minds that could do things like, eventually do things like, determine the speed of light and stuff.

So, you know, given God's sort of natural revelation or general revelation, why would he sort of do these things in a way to confuse us?

But then the alternate to that is, why would he inspire the words in Genesis to say day if they weren't?

So you've got confusion on both ends, on both of those arguments. There are certainly parts of the

Bible that we don't want to take literally. John Lennox actually brings up an interesting argument about a passage of Scripture that talks about, you know, the pillars that hold up the

Earth, and the Earth is obviously not on pillars. And so proponents of this view basically say that Genesis doesn't really tell us how

God created the universe, it just tells us how God created the Earth and all of the creatures, including man, that are on it.

And so there's four ages that you have to take into consideration. The age of the universe, the age of the

Earth, the age of life, and the age of humanity. Because if you think about it in that sort of context, you've got when was the universe created?

That's that introduction plus maybe day one. You've got the age of the Earth, which is

God creating the actual Earth, separating the waters, creating the land, separating, you know, heavens from Earth.

You've got the age of life, which is when God's creating all of the life that's teeming in the waters and so forth.

And then you have the age of humanity, which is day six when God created Adam and Eve. And so these days in this particular view, there could be ages or, you know, periods of time between each of these ages.

The only reason that I'm even open to this view at all is the fact that it still holds the most important thing, which is that God and God said, and then things happened, right?

Things were created. And so it still holds to an all -powerful God actually creating all the things we know in the observable universe.

And the fall is still preserved with all of this, which I'm going to get into when we get into theistic evolution and some of the problems with that.

So, like, you know, the rest of the account of the Garden of Eden, you know, isn't affected by this.

This is just literally a difference of understanding the period, the actual time period in which all of these things happened, which is why it's not very objectionable to me.

I don't necessarily, I'm not super dogmatic about either of the views, but I still prefer to read the

Bible literally than to not. There are, in fact, though, things that, you know, there's different genres of literature in the

Bible. We talked about this a bit when we talked about, you know, sort of hyperbole.

And the idea, like, when David is saying, I wept tears, you know, that filled my, obviously he didn't weep tears that filled his entire bed, right?

So there are things that when God, when Jesus said, I am the door, he didn't mean he was a door, an actual wooden door.

What he was meaning is he was an entryway to something. He was the thing you had to pass through.

He was talking more functionally than that he was a physical door, right? So there are definitely things in the Bible that you have to read differently because they're metaphors or hyperbole.

But people that want to classify this particular section of the Bible as being sort of, you know, a story or myth or what we'll talk about, something called mytho -history, which is a genre of literature that a lot of people want to cast the first 11 chapters of Genesis in.

I just don't, I just kind of have a hard problem with that. So one of the objections to this view, though, to the day age view, is that death would have had to have entered the world prior to the fall.

If these days were not 24 hour days and they were in fact long, long periods of time, then you would have had death of animals at least entering the world.

And so the, for example, one of the examples that I've talked to Drew about is the fact that whales, right, whales eat plankton, right?

Plankton are alive. Whales have no way of eating vegetation. They have a screen that they suck plankton through and eat those plankton.

So at a minimum, if we have millions of years, there's a bunch of plankton that are dying in the ocean, right, by being eaten by whales.

I don't think, I don't think an old earth person would say that either, because until the fall, animals didn't eat animals.

And that goes across the board. There was a, there was a corruption of the creation when fall occurred.

And that's when we have creatures dying across the board. That's the standard view.

But when, when you look at how God created certain animals, right, there's, there's no mechanisms in, say, a whale's mouth for them to eat plants.

So you would have to, you would have to hold a view, I suppose, where somehow at the fall, that's when whales did it and that there was some other way for them to eat.

Maybe they sucked in bacteria or they, they ate something else in, in that way.

But if you look at how animals feed today, I agree with you that, that some of like, like lions attacking deers or, or, or whatever, right, that, that is a, you know, sort of carnivorous thing.

But you still have certain animals that, you know, didn't have a mechanism to do anything but what they, what they do, right.

They didn't have a physical mechanism. Right. That's what I'm saying. You'd have to hold that that mechanism was different before the fall than it was after.

So, yeah, that's entirely, that's entirely plausible as well. Go ahead,

Bob. So I guess as we're talking about it, and I'm still trying to play this out in my mind,

I think in, in the sea world, there are lower lifes that probably feed off of the vegetation that grows in the sea.

And then it just goes up the chain that the higher lifes will eat the lower lifes until you get to the point where the whales are able to eat plankton.

And it's, as it is today, an ongoing process. Um, and I, I could, and I know

God can, full grown, but I can see an old earth where God initially, initially seeded it with young plants.

Sure. And over a period of time they grew, ergo you have life rings and trees and stuff like that.

Yes. And then the, the fruit bearing trees would have time to mature to the point where they can bear fruit if it happened over a period of time.

And maybe man and female, male and female were young adults, teenagers, 12, 13 our age maybe.

And, um, by that time they had the fruit and the field to, to eat from.

So an old earth, new earth would kind of satisfy that. Yeah. So I don't think what you're saying has anything to do with age.

The reason I brought up the whale is because the physical mechanism. I get you.

Right. Is, is only there for one type of thing. And so, um, you would have to posit as, as Drew was alluding to that there was a different mechanism or maybe there was a different kind of plant.

But again, what we're doing here is we're sort of extrapolating, we're sort of guessing, we're imagining what could have happened.

And certainly an all powerful guy can do anything. Right. Um, but we just, we don't know. So you have to kind of come up with explanations.

Again, the young earth creationist doesn't have this problem. Right. There's, there's not this like massive amount of time.

Um, but with an old earth view you're, you're going to have to, you're going to have to imagine certain other scenarios.

Which again, all of them are totally plausible. I'm not, I'm not saying they aren't. I'm just saying that you sort of have to come up with how was this different before and after the fall.

Um, but people, um, and let's just jump right into theistic evolution because we are running out of time. Um, and get into some of the other problems about death entering the world that certainly are in play for theistic evolution.

Um, so theistic evolution, while I haven't done a survey, is probably the minority view among Christians.

Um, uh, and, and, uh, certain folks like Dr. William Lane Craig, who we watched a bunch of William Lane Craig's videos for the creation of the universe.

Uh, or at least his, um, his foundation, right? Uh, reasonable faith. Um, has brought in, and there's another organization called

BioLogos who are hard, um, evolutionary biologists, um, theistic evolutionary biologists.

And, and this is a fairly simple, um, a fairly simple view, which is that all of the stuff that science teaches today, all of the evolutionary theory,

Darwinian evolution, um, is true. Um, it's just that God was behind it all, right?

Um, and what, I guess, atheistic evolutionary biologists would hold is that you're just trying to come up with the answers that we haven't found yet by, by positing a

God monkeying around the system in the background. So we talked about the fact that chemical evolution, or the origins of first life, they really just don't have a good explanation for.

And Darwinian evolution doesn't even try to, um, to explain it. Um, and what, what theistic evolution, uh, has going forward is that you don't really have to explain it.

You can just say God made it happen, right? And that God got things started and then allowed evolution to be, um, the thing, the thing that actually, um, you know, brought about life on this planet and mankind and so forth.

Um, and it does go a long way to explaining why all of the things that we can't explain are explainable by an all -powerful

God. Um, but you've essentially got, um, this sort of God guided process versus an unguided process.

So the unguided process is the purely naturalistic view. The God guided process is the theistic evolutionary view.

Um, and so that God basically stood there and allowed, um, and, and, you know, used evolution as the vehicle to bring about life on this planet.

Now, could God have done that? He's an all -powerful God, of course he could have done that. But does, uh, that make a whole lot of sense in light of Genesis and also given the sheer lack of evidence for the evolutionary theory in the first place, right?

All, the theistic evolutionist has all of the same baggage and problems that the naturalistic evolutionist has around the lack of transitional forms, right?

The only thing they get by is the how does the origin of first life come about, right?

Um, and, and explaining the, um, the, you know, the, the, the unlikelihood of that.

Um, which it can be super unlikely because God kicked it off. But they just ran into a bigger wall.

Oh yeah. Because they're going to have to deal with hundreds of Bible verses. Yes. Hundreds.

So you've got, um, you've got the, the problem of Genesis 1 -1, but you have way more problems than just Genesis 1 -1 if you, if you, uh, go with the theistic evolution.

Now, I'm going to go out on a limb here, and I may be the only one out on this limb. So, um, you guys may saw it off behind me, but, uh, but I'm going to,

I'm going to go out on a limb and say there probably are believing Christians who hold to this view. And they probably hold to this view because they want to believe all the things that science teaches, and they don't want to be considered, uh, a fool.

Um, now if their soteriology is right and all of that, then, uh, I'm going to say they're believing

Christians. I can't read into their hearts, but they've got a really uphill battle to, to, um, to fight for this view.

Um, the only thing going for you is that you can walk around amongst all the unsaved and they all think that you're only a little bit of a fool because you believe in God.

Um, but some of the major, uh, issues with this, besides the scientific issues with this that all evolution has, are some of the doctrinal issues that you're going to run into.

For one, you have to believe, um, well, there's two variants to this view.

One view that posits a historical Adam, and one view that doesn't posit a historical Adam. Uh, so the biologos folks don't posit a historical

Adam, but William Lane Craig does posit a historical Adam. The reason William Lane Craig does posit a historical

Adam is because he's writing a systematic theology, philosophical theology. Um, and he needed to dive into Genesis and believed in evolution, and so, uh, he realizes all of the doctrinal issues of not having a historical

Adam bring into play. And so he has posited a historical Adam, and I'll talk about his particular view, uh, in a second.

But the doctrinal issues that you run into, um, and I'm going to go a little bit fast.

There's a lot more, uh, that I've written in the, in the actual, um, document here. But one of the, the main issues is

Jesus believed in a historical Adam. We know this because he talked about the creation when he was discussing marriage and Matthew.

He talked about God creating Adam and Eve, male and female he created them, right? He actually referenced it.

So Jesus, if you believe, again, that Jesus is God, would have known better if that wasn't the case, right?

And so I have a real problem with theistic evolution that posits the lack of a historical Adam, primarily because Jesus believed in, in Adam.

And if Adam didn't actually exist, then how can you posit that Jesus was in fact divine? So did

Paul. So did Paul. Um, but Paul wasn't God. Jesus was. So Jesus was there at the beginning.

He knows what happened. He was a witness to it all, right? He was the author of it all. And so, and so he would have known better if that wasn't the case.

Um, and, and so that's one problem that I have, uh, with it. Um, there's a, there's an innumerable number of problems with this view, um, if you don't believe in a historical

Adam. Um, there's an equally number of problems, even if you do believe in a historical Adam.

So let me talk about William Lane Craig's view of it. So he believes that there was a real

Adam and Eve, and that they were part of a population of hominids called Homo heidelbergensis, which, uh, otherwise called heidelberg man, which was a, which was a pre, uh, a, this is all evolutionary theory, was a predecessor to both

Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, um, and lived about 700 ,000 years ago.

And he believes that there was a community of these hominids, uh, and that God chose two individuals from, uh, an actual

Adam, a male and female, to impart his likeness to, right? So we're made in the image of God.

Um, he, he, uh, essentially imparted his likeness on, onto these two human individuals.

They were the first two truly human beings. Um, and that, um, that we essentially descend, all of us descend from that pair.

Um, that, that all of the, the rest of them, um, um, were not humans, that these two were, and that we descend from that human pair.

There's a lot more to go into with his view. Um, I recommend if you want to get into it, you can read or, or watch, uh, some of the stuff that's been talked about.

What's that? Is there any evidence for this? Oh, no, of course not. Um, no more than the evolutionists have.

Then why bother with this? But, but what he, but what he posits is this, this, uh, Adam, this Adam and Eve, um, people, um, that lived 700 ,000 years ago and that that was who we all descend from.

And this allows you to believe in theistic evolution because, um, you know, you have all of the evolutionary theory just lines up with, with, with your beliefs.

You believe in what, what we will call modern day science. And the Easter Bunny. And the

Easter Bunny. Now, why does, why is he harping so much on there being a historical

Adam and Eve? Besides the, the point that I made about Jesus believing in them. Because if there is no

Adam, there is no fall. So if there is no fall, there is no need for a saver.

There is no original sin. Now, he has a different view of original sin. He thinks that all humankind was, was, uh, you know, was essentially created with original sin.

Um, and that, um, you know, and, and so he has a totally different view about that. But if you read the rest of the

Genesis account, you have a particular fall where mankind, using their free will, disobeyed

God, brought sin and death into the world. Um, and, and as a result, uh, created the need for a savior.

Right? Which ultimately was, was fulfilled in, in the, the person of Jesus Christ who died on the cross in place, uh, of us, took the punishment for our sins and made a way for us to be reconciled to God.

Um, and so, um, Dr. William Lane Craig knows the importance of that.

Um, now he has a, he has a different view of original sin. Uh, he also, um, uh, you know, is really,

I think, trying to read science in, into the Bible. But what he casts all of Genesis 1 through 11, which is going up to the flood, um, he casts that all into a genre called mytho -history.

Which is to say that it is part myth, part history. Um, so, uh, while there was an

Adam and Eve that were created, they weren't created, uh, you know, on the sixth day, and those weren't actual 24 hour days.

Um, that God essentially plucked and imbued humanness, or his image, on, on two of these individuals.

Now, one of the other problems, as we've been talking about, is the idea that death was, was present in the world prior to the fall.

Now, we all know the wages of sin is death. We all know that, that sin was the, the, uh, the, the vehicle through which death entered the world.

So, how do people who believe in this get around that? Well, they posit a couple of things.

Either that, if you're an old, uh, if, if you're an old earth creationist who believes that death was in the world, the death of animals, then you posit that, that sin brought in the death of humans.

And for the theistic evolutionist, um, you would posit that death of both hominids, humans, uh, that Adam and Eve were mortal from the beginning, uh, and that death was really a spiritual death that entered the world and not a physical death that entered the world.

So, those are some of the arguments that, that folks, uh, on that side would make. Now, theistic evolutionists who don't believe in a physical

Adam, or, uh, uh, an actual Adam, they throw all of this out and just say that this is, this is essentially a, a archetypal story.

It was, it was meant to sort of describe to us, um, our fallen nature and so forth.

And they are, like, completely on a, on a different, uh, different plane than the rest of us for that. Alright, questions?

Yes. Yes. Isaiah says that God did not create the earth without form and void. So, that's a direct contradiction to Genesis.

So, but if you look at the Hebrew interlinear, it says, it doesn't say, and the earth was without form and void, it says became without form and void.

So, that means it was something before it was out, without form and void. And that's where you get your gap theory.

You can have dinosaurs, you can have billions of years. For example, the earth, I've read a book where the earth wasn't even in the

Milky Way galaxy at first. It was, no, I mean, this is serious. Yeah, no. Yeah, it was gathering.

I'm just laughing at there's so many different views. Well, heavy metals and light metals and everything else from other, so we could live here.

So, then it was moved in here. But anyway, that's off the subject. But you could have all that. You don't have to deny science.

You don't have to make stuff up. There's still a 24 -hour period. So, when you start, because you had the fall of Satan, the transgression of Satan.

It threw everything into chaos. Because God does, you can't create something without form and void.

It's physically impossible. It's not logical. How do you make something without form? You can't.

You can't make a pot without form. It's not a pot. So, the rest of Genesis after that is

God putting things back in order. And the only place, you have to look where it either says made or let there be.

So, those were things that already existed. And he's putting it back in order. The only places where there's something brand new is the word create.

Because you have God made something from absolute nothing. So, if you look at it very clearly, it matches with science in every single way.

It matches with the Bible. It's a 24 -hour period. What do you mean it matches with science in every single way? No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Science. No, science. Real science. Cosmology. Real science. Not garbage science.

Not false science. You can have a 13 -billion -year -old universe, 8 -billion -year -old earth, and it all works out.

Okay. It doesn't have to be. You don't have to jump through hoops and say 24 hours.

No, a real day was a billion years. You can have 24 -hour days. You can have everything working together.

It just fits like a hand in a glove. And look at any Hebrew interlinear. It says it became without form and void.

It's not junk theology either. It just fits. So, anyway,

I've been itching and I'm sitting on pins and needles trying to get all that out. But, otherwise, the

Bible contradicts itself. Because Isaiah clearly says he did not create it without form and void.

And... Do you remember? No, you can look it up. Okay. We'll have to look that up.

You guys said the Bible's not junk. We'll have to look that up. Yeah. Because I don't recall that part of Isaiah, but I'll definitely look it up afterwards.

Okay. But, I mean, I've got the interlinear right here as well. Yep, yep. I've got an interlinear as well.

Jim, what about the fall, though? Is the fall still happening? Sure, of course. Yes, of course.

All that, you know, that's all pre... This is right after that word became.

God puts everything back in order. So, when the word said, is very good. Yes. It was very good. Of course.

Because that's one of the huge problems that some of these views are running into. Oh, no, no,

I mean, there's no... Just after that one small... Genesis 1, 1, and 2. It's just...

It fits everything else. Because how else do you attribute the fall of Lucifer? It took a third of the angels with him, and he rebelled against God.

And that's what threw the universe in chaos. Because Lucifer was the angel of light, right? And light's the most powerful energy in the universe.

He had control of that. He knew how it worked. He was an archangel. And he wouldn't have rebelled if he didn't think he had a shot at winning.

Yeah, I always struggle because, you know, if you could be in the presence of God and actually understand how powerful he is, how could you, no matter how powerful he is...

Pride, it says in the Bible, right? How could you think... But you just said he thought he had a shot at winning.

Yes, but it was a false delusion. Through his pride, it says corruption came into him.

But I've always found that it was easier for humans who aren't able to be in the presence of God and actually see with their own eyes to do things like posit the fact that he doesn't exist versus actually being in his presence for how long was he in his presence?

It's tangential because we know he did rebel. So we don't know why, how, it's just what we're told.

We are running out of time, and so I'm going to jump to another section here.

But I just wanted to kind of lay out that there are, I'm sure, a plethora of other views that I haven't actually covered here of people that believe different things about the creation of the universe and the creation of the earth and the creation of life and the creation of man on this planet.

But I will point out that there are certain doctrinal issues that you have trouble with regarding death, regarding the fact that Jesus believed in a historical

Adam. And so if people propose that those things didn't exist, the

Jesus one is the one that I really have a real problem with, the fact that if there wasn't a historical

Adam, why did Jesus say that there was? And so, again, going back to that.

What I want to kind of end with, though, is kind of jumping back a little bit to evolution and one last argument against evolution, which is the moral problem with evolution.

And there's a famous quote by one of the new atheists, Richard Dawkins. It says, this is

Richard Dawkins, The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

I'm sure anyone who's studied any of the debates between atheists and theists has probably heard this quote.

And this is what I call an atheist who is consistent.

Because if you're an atheist, this is what you must believe. That there is, in fact, no good, no evil.

It is essentially entirely subjective. So this is why

I always laugh when you have atheists that tell you you're wrong for believing something or you're wrong for telling them how they should live their lives or you're wrong, you're wrong.

Because if this world doesn't have an absolute authority, then who are they to tell me I'm wrong?

And so if there's no absolute morality, then no one can say that anything is necessarily wrong.

So who's to say that murder is wrong? Who's to say that cannibalism is wrong? Who's to say that genocide is wrong?

If there is no absolute authority and everything is simply left to cultural perspectives, then in a culture where cannibalism is considered right and the way you ought to live your life, for that culture, that is right.

There's nothing actually wrong with it. And while this is probably going to get us banned off YouTube, who's to say that Hitler or Stalin were wrong for killing six million

Jews or exterminating the hundreds of millions of people who were exterminated by communist atheists?

There was cultural acceptance in their day for things that they were doing. Now there were other cultures outside that didn't accept it, but their culture did accept it.

So those dictators were no more right or wrong than anyone else. And so this comes to a problem of standards.

A lot of the new atheists, what they'll say is that morality is simply standards that societies put together to maximize human flourishing.

Well, maximizing my flourishing is taking everything you guys own for myself. That's maximizing my flourishing.

And if there is no ultimate moral authority, then who is anyone to tell me that I'm wrong for doing that?

So I wrote a lot more on this, but this was just kind of a brief aside to one last sort of problem that theists don't have, because we believe in an ultimate authority.

We believe in a God who actually not only created the universe and all of mankind, but created the rules by which we should live our lives.

And so what this sort of atheistic, sort of relativistic view brings us to is essentially mob rule.

Whoever the most people are, what they believe is how the society should function.

And I've heard, and I forget who actually said this, but I've heard someone say that mob rule is just two wolves and a sheep deciding what they're going to have for dinner.

Majority rule. So an atheist that believes in the emergence of consciousness through an undirected material process is left with a purposeless universe where no animal can criticize another animal for their behavior.

And in animal, I'm actually including humans, because that's what evolutionists believe we are. We're just evolved animals.

And so in the end, we're just advanced bacteria making our way through a purposeless universe.

Matt, talk to me about animals. That's encouraging. Yes, exactly. Talk to me about animals. Genesis 2 .19

says Adam gave names to the animals. Does evolution have a theory as to how animals were named?

He was a genius, apparently. Apparently, but I assume,

I'm not an evolutionist, so this is an assumption that I'm going to make. I assume they just thought that, you know, over time, humans, you know, cultures named animals, you know, and then those things.

Like that looks like an aardvark. Yeah, like I don't, you know, I don't really know where evolutionists get that.

But again, you know, I'm not an evolutionist. It would have changed the

Tower of Babel anyway. Yes, yes. That's true. That's true.

All right, so I just wanted to finish with that. I don't know, does anybody have any questions or comments?

That's a lot, I know. So this whole, this is four sessions, and as you can see, just skimming the surface, we have ate up most of the time in each of these four sessions and then some.

We've gone over most, I think except for the last time, we've gone over almost every time because this is a very deep topic.

I have just a massive number of videos, and I've written a whole lot more, you know, on this subject in the document that I'll send you all.

All of the videos that were in the PowerPoint are also linked in the back of this document so that you guys can watch them at your leisure, including a bunch of videos that you guys, that I didn't play in here because they were far, far too long to play and we would have been here for months.

So, with that, does anybody else have any comments? Thank you, very good.

Well, thank you all. This has been a lot of fun to do research into. It's funny how every time

I research a topic that I think I know, I learn a whole bunch that I had no idea about.

So it's as much fun to actually dig into it as it is to get up here and kind of share what

I've found with all of you, which is largely what I'm doing is collecting and filtering information that I can present to all of you folks.

Most of it is not original thought. When Moses recorded this, did he have any idea?

That we'd be arguing about it thousands of years later? I have to imagine he didn't think much about us thousands of years later.

Many thousands of years later. All right. Well, with that,

I'm going to pick on... to pray for us to leave.

Dear Heavenly Father, Lord, we just give you praise and we give you glory that it was by your hand, by your power, and for your will, and for your glory that you've created all these things,

Lord. And Lord, even I am reminded that the reason that you created was to present your son,

Jesus, with a bride without spot, without wrinkle. And all of humanity was created so that you could draw out a redeemed humanity to present to your son as his bride,

Lord God. And all this will pass away.

Everything will be uncreated. And Lord, the only thing that will remain is your glory and your church, and your body, and your holy angels, and Christ, and the

Holy Spirit, Lord. And God will be all in all, it says in Corinthians, Lord God. So we just praise you for you are worthy of our praise,

Lord God. And we thank you for saving us. We thank you for drawing us out from being lost.

Lord God, you've redeemed us. You bought us with a price, a great price, with the blood of your Son, Lord. And we just give you great praise tonight.

We thank you. And we thank you for everything that Matt has presented with us tonight. In Jesus' name, amen.