CARM Interview with Dr. Jason Lisle

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Hi, Ken Cook sitting down here with Dr. Jason Lyle. This is hopefully the first of many

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CARM discussions that we'll be having. So Dr. Lyle, thank you for sitting down and joining me today. My pleasure.

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Give us a little bit of history about your background. Okay, I am an astrophysicist currently working with answers in Genesis, and I grew up in a

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Christian home, and when I was pretty young I received Christ as my savior, and I became,

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I was always interested in science when I was very young, and so I ended up, when I got to college I ended up majoring in physics and astronomy, minoring in math, and then

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I went off to the University of Colorado where I got my Ph .D. in astrophysics, and all that time I was excited not only about science but about God and how science is even made possible by the

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Christian world view, so that's what I try to communicate to people today. Excellent. What do you think is the biggest issue facing the

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Christian church today? You know, one of the biggest issues is we haven't been faithful to the word of God in terms of defending the

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Christian faith, and particularly in the book of Genesis. A lot of people don't realize it, but because they think, well, you know, we've got all these other issues to deal with, you know, marriage is under attack in our culture, and we have strange laws on the books and things like that that are un -Christian, and they don't realize that we've lost that Christian foundation in Genesis because those

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Christian doctrines go back to Genesis. Marriage goes back to Genesis. It was because God made the man and the woman in the

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Garden of Eden that we have this principle of marriage, and so in our culture people have increasingly rejected

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Genesis, and as a result of that we're seeing more and more people reject the doctrines that come out of Genesis, namely

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Christian doctrines, and ultimately this salvation doesn't really make sense apart from a liberal reading of Genesis.

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If death was not introduced as the right result for Adam's sin, why do we need a Savior? Why did

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Jesus die on the cross? And so as we see our culture reject biblical authority, starting with Genesis, we're going to have all these different issues that we're seeing.

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So for you, science and theology are really intertwined.

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Yeah, I would say that actually Christian theology is the foundation for science. It's because Christianity is true that science is possible.

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As an example of that, there are certain things that have to be true for science to be workable. The universe would have to be organized in a particular way.

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It would have to be sort of logical, and it would have to be orderly. Now that makes sense in a Christian worldview, because God upholds the universe by the

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Word of His power. The Bible tells us that. He tells us there are certain cycles of nature that will be in the future as they have been in the past.

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Genesis, St. 22, the basic cycles of nature repeat. And that's really what science is based on. It's finding patterns in nature, cycles that repeat themselves.

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That's why the scientific method works. You repeat it, you test it, you get the same answer. That's because God upholds the universe in a consistent way.

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So science comes out of Christian worldview. Now that's not to say that you have to be a professing Christian to do science.

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I would just point out you're not being consistent if you're not a professing Christian and you're doing science, because you're relying on something that only makes sense if Christianity is true, while simultaneously denying

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Christianity. And so my secular colleagues are able to do science because the Bible is true. Okay.

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That's, I think, a really interesting and valid and important distinction.

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It's almost like your approach to apologetic, how does that work into this kind of theology first sort of a mindset?

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Well, a lot of folks, when they do debates and they do apologetics, they tend to think of creation and evolution, for example, as two competing models.

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And then they try to take a look at what the science better fits and so on. But I think a better way to look at it is to recognize that neither creation nor evolution could make sense unless creation is true.

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And so it's kind of like you have these two people debating on this topic, both of them assuming that creation is true.

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Now, it makes sense for the creationist to assume that creation is true, but it doesn't make sense for the evolutionist to assume that creation is true.

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In order for science and scientific models to be sensible, biblical creation has to be true. If the universe really is chance, as my evolutionary colleagues believe, it wouldn't make sense to do science.

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Why would the mind even be able to understand the universe if it's just, you know, rearranged ponds gum that had some sort of survival value in the past?

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There's no reason to think that science would be possible in an evolutionary worldview. And so the debate really is more of a philosophical debate.

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It is on the level of theology rather than on the level of specific scientific evidences. Okay. So I kind of want to take people through a little bit of maybe the standard questions that you get.

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You know, to be honest, a lot of the questions that we've received that people want us to ask you are the standard questions.

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They're answered over and over and over. That's right. But people for some reason don't hear them. So if we could briefly maybe rapid fire go through these.

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Sure. Why isn't the word dinosaur in the Bible? The word dinosaur was invented in 1841. The Bible was translated into English.

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The King James was 1611. The word dinosaur didn't exist at the time. But you will find the word dragon in the

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Bible. I think a lot of those references are dinosaurs or similar animals like plesiosaurs. God did know about dinosaurs.

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He did make them. Excellent. Noah's Ark isn't big enough to fit all of the animals.

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I mean, there's a lot of animals. You know, I often ask the critic then, you know, how big the Ark was? And they usually say no.

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And I said, you know how many animals had to go on it? And they would usually say no. But I still don't think you can get all those animals on the Ark. Now that is not a logical objection when you can't possibly fit an unknown number of animals on a boat of unknown size.

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Yeah. I mean, it turns out when you do the math, you'll find that there's plenty of room on board the Ark. We've had people that have done that. John Whitmore did the calculations.

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He figures there's about 16 ,000 animals, 8 ,000 kinds, two of each kind, seven of some, but relatively few of the clean kinds.

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And if you do the math, you find out that animals fill up about 48 % of the Ark conservatively. And so there's plenty of room for the animals.

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Is that 48 % of the surface area of the walking space or is that 48 % of the overall volume?

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It's actually by area. So three decks in terms of the area that they would fill up, it would have been less than half.

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So you have a half a deck for Noah and the wife to play shuffleboard and you have a complete deck for Noah's sons to play football.

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Excellent. You know, other standard objections is, you know, science proves that the universe is 13 billion years old.

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You know, I believe all old earth or old universe arguments are ultimately self -refuting. They're circular and self -refuting.

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They tend to assume that things have always been going at the same rate that they occur today. And they tend to assume naturalism.

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They assume that God didn't create the universe supernaturally, that it came about by natural means. But of course that's contrary to scripture, you see.

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And so I would say that they're subtly assuming their conclusion. They're assuming God didn't create.

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They're assuming no worldwide flood, things of that nature. And then they come to the conclusion, hey, God didn't create, there was no worldwide flood.

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That's the very assumption that they've started with. All age -dating methods are based on certain assumptions about rates and conditions.

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And what I can do as a biblical creationist is I can say, okay, temporarily let me assume that rates are constant as you believe and that naturalism is true as you believe.

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Not that I really believe that, but for the sake of argument. And I find there are lots of things that are inconsistent with that, even on those assumptions, like the rate at which the earth's magnetic field is decaying, or the fact that we find

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C14 in things that evolutionists believe to be millions of years old. Those things decay too quickly, even assuming today's rates are consistent.

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And so I think that there's a tremendous amount of evidence that's consistent with the age that the Bible indicates for the earth and for the universe.

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And there really is no cogent argument I've heard for millions or billions of years. So would you be comfortable with a 6 ,000 -year earth, a 10 ,000 -year earth, a 20 ,000 -year earth?

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Where do you sit on that kind of young earth continuum? I'd like to say it's about 6 ,000, because the

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Bible gives us sufficient information to compute that approximate date. Now the ages are rounded off to the nearest year, so what that tells me is

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I can't get an exact date for creation, but it's going to be about 6 ,000. Some people push it back to 10, and I think their motivation for that is they're just worried that we can't quite fit everything into 6 ,000 years.

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And I like to tell them, well, you know what, you're kind of wimping out there a little bit, because I think really the scriptures are pretty solid.

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It's about 6 ,000. And I don't think there is any evidence for gaps in the genealogies. People argue for that.

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But we've looked into that. We've had a Hebrew scholar look into that. And the way the words are used, it really doesn't indicate that there are gaps in the genealogies.

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And even if there were, that would just push it back just a little bit. But I'm thinking roughly 6 ,000 years. If somebody wanted to argue 6 ,500,

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I wouldn't debate against them on that topic. But I don't think it's as old even as 10 ,000, and certainly not 20 ,000 or 30 ,000.

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How long do you think Adam and Eve were in the garden before sin came in? That's a real popular question.

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We don't know exactly. The Bible doesn't tell us that. I think it was a relatively short period of time. And there are a couple of arguments for that.

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First of all, Eve, God told them to go and multiply. And it seems that in their perfect condition, they would have been able to do that relatively quickly.

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And so some people have argued that the sin must have happened before Eve's first menstrual cycle.

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And so perhaps within a month, perhaps, was when they sinned. Maybe even a few days.

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But in any case, I don't think it was a very long period of time. We know that it had to have been less than 130. That's when

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Seth was born. And Cain and Abel were before Seth. And we know that children were born after sin.

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And so that puts an upper limit. But I actually get the feeling that it was a relatively short period of time. But again, we can't be dogmatic as the

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Bible doesn't specifically say. Just to dig into that a little bit, Genesis 3, when we're talking about the curse on Eve, it mentions that there will be an increase in pain for her child buried.

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Isn't that a meaningless statement to a woman who has never had pain in child burying? I don't think so. Because you can increase from zero to something.

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And so her pain would have increased from nothing to something. And God told them too that they would die.

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There was no death before that. But you don't have to necessarily see something or experience something to know about it.

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I mean, suicide would be a great example of that. You don't have to experience suicide to know, to have a concept of what it is.

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And likewise, Eve didn't have to experience pain to have at least an intellectual concept of what it is. That's right. So kind of moving forward,

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I guess, on the timeline, where did Cain and Abel get their wives? Yeah, that's another common one that we get. Genesis 5, beginning in the first verse there, it gives us the generations of Adam.

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And if you read on, I think it's to verse 4, it says that Adam had sons and daughters. So there were women that were around.

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Now some people think, well, wait a minute. Could they have married their sisters? Can you marry a relative? And that's one of the questions

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I ask people. Can you marry a relative? Well, of course you can marry a relative, because we're all related. We're all descended from Adam and Eve. If you marry a human being, you marry a relative.

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And if you don't marry a human being, you're in big trouble. So yeah. And so they must have married. Now today, we don't marry close relatives.

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But that's because, well, there's a number of reasons. But one of them is that the genetic code has been polluted with time.

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We now have mutations and things. And it would be unhealthy, actually, to marry someone real close to you, because the children could have extra mutations.

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They have mutations in the same spots. Whereas if you marry someone that's further away, it's not quite as closely related.

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A good gene from one parent can sort of cover up the bad gene from another parent. So they tend to be healthier that way.

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But if you think about it originally, that wouldn't have been a problem. There wouldn't have been any mutations, any mistakes in the DNA of Adam and Eve.

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And so their children would have had relatively few mutations. And so it wouldn't have been a problem genetically.

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So for the first few generations, of course, they would have married very close relatives, including sisters. It wasn't until about the time of Moses, Leviticus, where God says, okay, from now on, you can't marry a close relative.

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But even Abraham married his half -sister, Sarah. A lot of people don't realize that. So even up to that time, it was still okay to marry relatively close relatives, because the genetic condition wasn't as bad back then.

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The worldwide flood, we want to kind of zoom in on that as we go down this timeline. You assert, obviously, that it's worldwide.

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There's the counter -argument that says, well, worldwide for somebody who lives in the middle of Mesopotamia would be all of Mesopotamia.

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How do you address that issue? Well, we go back to the scriptures, and we see what God has to say about it. And we look at Genesis 6, we find that God says,

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I, even I, do bring a flood of waters to destroy all flesh and learn as the breath of life from under heaven, and everything that is in the earth shall die.

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And so it's very clear when he talks about under heaven, that means everything under the sky, which would be everything, everything on earth would die.

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And in fact, even the way it's worded, there's a double all in the Hebrew, everything that's in the whole earth and so on. And when you have that in Hebrew, it means it's a total, it's a completely worldwide flood.

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In fact, the Bible says all the high hills that run over the whole heaven were covered. Now, you can't have a local flood that covers the high hills, because water seeks its own level.

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And so if you're going to have a flood that covers the mountains, as the Bible says, that's going to have to be a worldwide flood.

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Are we talking about all the mountains? I mean, is Mount Everest kind of sticking up a little bit? And if so, if not,

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I mean, if so, where did we get all that water? Yeah, it says, well, the Bible says all the high hills under the whole heaven.

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So that would be all of them. So that means every mountain. Now, the Bible doesn't say that the mountains that are here today were there before the flood.

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And so a lot of people assume, well, Mount Everest was there before the flood and the water had to come up. But wait a minute, the Bible doesn't say that. Could be that those mountains are post -flood.

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I happen to think Everest is a post -flood mountain that was created towards the end of the flood. In terms of where the water came from, well, most of it's still there.

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The earth's almost three fourths covered with water even today. So there's plenty of water. In fact, if you were to push the continents into the ocean basins, kind of smooth out earth's terrain, it would be covered with water to a depth of 1 .6

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miles. So there's plenty of water to do it. It's just today, there's places where it sticks up, there's places where it's lower down.

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So during the flood, that would have evened out. And there's an interesting model that was created by Dr. John Baumgartner.

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He's a PhD geophysicist. And he has a really neat model for how the flood might have occurred. Now, it's a scientific model and we're speculating about the past, so we can't be dogmatic about it.

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We do know from scripture that it was global. But this particular model could be wrong, but it's a really good one. And it shows that during the flood, the continents would have been pushed down a little bit due to plate tectonics.

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Actually, the plates get pushed apart at the time of the worldwide flood and the waters come up on the continents.

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And of course, there's the fountains of the great deep bursting forth, the Bible says. We think that's maybe subterranean volcanism that would spew water into the upper atmosphere, fall back into the continents as rain.

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And then toward the end of the flood, as the water goes off the land, the continents bob back up again.

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Continents actually float on Earth's mantle is the way to think about it. And so we have a mechanism that basically pulls the continents down and then releases them back up towards the end of the flood.

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And it seems to work very well. If everything died, though, I mean, how do the animals get all over the

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Earth again? Okay, well, we know that two of every kind of air -breathing land animal was on board Noah's Ark.

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People try to make fun of that. They say, well, you can put whales on the Ark. You don't need an aquarium on the

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Ark. The Ark's in an aquarium. But in terms of getting all the animals on there, not a problem.

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We think the continents might have been connected before the flood, so there's no problem getting the animals to the Ark. The real question comes up with people who say, well, how do you think the kangaroos got to Australia?

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That's a better question. And the answer is they hopped. You see, after the flood, we think that the oceans would have been, we think there was an ice age after the flood.

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That's another issue that we could get into, maybe. But during that time, the ocean levels would have been lower.

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There would have been ice bridges and land bridges, and so they could have hopped to Australia, not a problem. And then when the water levels come back up a little bit towards the end of the ice age, that cuts off Australia from the mainland, which is why we find marsupials there and not as many placentals, because marsupials don't compete so well with placentals.

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So they would always be on the perimeter as the animals expanded from the mountains of Ararat where the Ark landed.

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So, let's bring up this issue of the ice age. There's a lot of talk today about global warming, global cooling, climate change.

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Has that always been happening? Is it man doing that? And if there was an ice age, why didn't everything die off?

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Well, yeah, a lot of people have misconceptions of the ice age. I do believe in the ice age, and it turns out, interestingly, it's the secularists that have big problems with the ice age, because they think that, a lot of people think that, well, the earth was just colder, but that's not, that doesn't give you an ice age.

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If you make the earth colder, you just get a cold earth. You don't get ice. To have ice, you need to have increased snowfall to get, to build up these layers of ice, and it turns out about the only way to do that is a worldwide flood.

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The natural aftermath of a worldwide flood is an ice age, because the worldwide flood, you've got the continents breaking apart, fountains of the great deep bursting forth, lots of heat released in the ocean, and we think there have been aerosols in the atmosphere.

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Imagine all the volcanoes on earth went off. That's going to block a fraction of sunlight. Even today, when a major volcano erupts, it cools the earth just a little bit.

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So during the flood, or very shortly after the flood, you've got warm water. Water tends to have a high specific heat.

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It holds its heat real well. That's why coastal regions tend to have pleasant climates. And you've got cold continents. So what happens?

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The water evaporates from the ocean because it's nice and warm. It goes over the continents, which is cold, and then the cold air can't hold as much.

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You get precipitation. It falls as snow. And so the natural aftermath of a worldwide flood is an ice age.

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And we figure that lasted a few hundred years. See, evolutionists believe the ice age lasted much longer than that, but we believe it lasted a few hundred years after the flood, and then about maybe 700 years of it.

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It tapered off, and the earth reached roughly the temperatures that we have today. And even during the ice age, people think, well, you get this big snow of all earth.

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No, no. There were places that were tropical on the earth, even during the ice age. In fact, it was very pleasant in certain parts of the world.

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It's just that you had more of the earth glaciated than we have today. Today, about 10 % of the earth is glaciated.

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During the ice age, it would have been about 30%. So you get three times more ice on the earth is what it comes down to. So is that why we maybe don't see ice being talked about in the

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Bible too much? Not a whole lot, but we do find it in Job, interestingly. And Job was written during when we think the ice age was.

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And so I think it's interesting that the treasures of ice and snow are mentioned in the very book that would have taken place during that time.

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Sure. Let's talk about Job briefly. We see, you know, some weird things in Job.

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Dinosaurs, not dinosaurs, but a leviathan, a behemoth, unicorn.

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What are these animals? I mean, doesn't that just show that it's kind of a silly myth that these things weren't really there?

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Well, I mean, the Bible's not written in that sort of language. It's written as historic narrative. Now, Job is a poetic book. And so it does use some figures of speech and so on.

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But the sections that you're talking about where God questions Job, he's comparing his power to certain creatures. And it wouldn't make sense for him to use fictional creatures, would it?

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If he was comparing his power to a fictional creature, you'd think, well, God's power is fictional. So it doesn't make sense. And if you look in the list, too, there are other animals that we all know are real animals, the horse and the eagle and what have you.

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Now, what about the unicorn then? Referring apparently to an animal that has one horn. Now, we tend to think of the mythological version of that.

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It's sort of like a horse with a single horn going out. But the Bible doesn't say that. It just indicates a one -horned creature.

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And there are animals that have one horns. There's a certain type of rhinoceros that has exactly one horn.

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There's certain dinosaurs that had one horn, like a monoclonius that had a single horn going out of it. And I do believe those animals existed.

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And so I think it's a little disingenuous when evolutionists say, well, you know, you can't have the one -horned animal. Well, you don't believe in one -horned animals.

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They do exist. It's just it's not referring to the horse mythical version of a unicorn, but the real animal existed.

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And with regard to behemoth and leviathan, those animals existed, too. Those are real animals. Now, the fact that we don't see animals matching those descriptions today suggests to me that they're not around anymore.

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But a real good candidate for a behemoth would be a dinosaur. And if you read the description of behemoth there in Job chapter 40, verse 15, it sounds an awful lot like a sauropod dinosaur.

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Now, people have preconceptions about dinosaurs living millions of years ago and so on. But the Bible tells us that the world's not that old anyway.

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Dinosaurs did live at the same time as people. And Job apparently saw a creature like that. And just from the description of it with the muscles along its stomach and so on, it certainly sounds like a sauropod dinosaur.

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And having a tail like a cedar tree, that's the verse that really sticks out to me. I notice some

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Bibles in the footnotes will say, well, that's possibly an elephant or hippopotamus, but they don't have a tail like a cedar tree.

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And so it makes more sense to me that the behemoth, which basically means beast of beasts, that it would be a sauropod dinosaur.

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It's definitely not an elephant or hippo. And likewise, leviathan sounds like one of the aquatic kinds. Not a true dinosaur, because true dinosaurs were land dwelling.

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But perhaps something like a plesiosaur that lived in water but was air breathing and could maybe come up on land and so on.

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These were real creatures that lived. And Job apparently saw them. And we even have cave paintings and such of dinosaurs.

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We know they did live with people. There's no doubt about that. So you would actually, as a

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Ph .D. scientist, say that dinosaurs and people were on the earth at the same time.

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That can't be well received in the scientific community. Well, you know, a lot of people reject that.

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But it's not for logical reasons. It's not for scientific reasons. It's because they have a preconception that the world's billions of years old.

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And they have a preconception that there was no worldwide flood. And they have a preconception that slow gradual processes deposited the fossils.

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And so the fact that you find the dinosaur fossils, they tend to be lower down. They say, well, that must mean they were millions of years ago. And therefore, they didn't live with human beings, because you find those fossils higher up.

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But you see, it's driven by philosophy. It's not driven by evidence. If we take a look at the evidence, it's consistent with scripture. You're probably familiar that there are lots of legends of people encountering dragons.

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And if you think about what a dragon is, it's basically a dinosaur, isn't it? Or something like maybe the distorted memory of a dinosaur that's passed down by word of mouth over generations.

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And the fact that you find dragon legends all over the world is, I think, very good evidence that people did see dinosaurs.

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And like I said, we even have cave paintings of people that draw. You know, people sometimes live in caves. And they drew on the caves.

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And you see things like buffalo and people and sauropod dinosaurs. There's a tomb in Carlisle Cathedral that's

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Bishop Bell's tomb. And it's got engraved animals along the side on these brass strips. And they're all animals you'd recognize, including dinosaurs, sauropod dinosaurs.

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Now, this is 15th century, before dinosaur fossils were found. And so that tells me that these people were seeing the real animals.

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Some of these were apparently still alive, or at least they'd been passed down by word of mouth until the 1500s. Are there any dinosaurs living today?

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Not that we know of. But there are things that are just as mind -blowing from an evolutionary point of view. For example, there's a pine tree called a

22:07

Wollemi Pine that's found in the same rock layers as dinosaur fossils. And evolutionists said, well, that's been extinct for millions of years.

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Well, you know, they found some live Wollemi Pines in sections of Australia. And I think that's very interesting because, you know, it makes you wonder.

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Because a plant can't run away and hide. And yet it evaded our detection until very recently. It was only in the 90s that they found these.

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And so it makes you wonder if maybe there are some critters out there that we haven't discovered yet. And, of course, scientists find new types of life forms every day that we didn't realize existed.

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So it's possible that there are some kinds of dinosaurs alive today. There are certainly legends of people encountering dinosaurs in relatively recent times.

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The Australian Aborigines have their legends of Bunyip, some kind of monster that they're afraid of.

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In the African Congo, there's a legend of a creature called Nokhali and Denbi, as what the natives call it. They say it kills elephants.

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Whatever it is, it seems enormous. And their descriptions of it sound like a sauropod dinosaur. So it makes you wonder if some of these might still be alive.

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But in any case, we know they did live with human beings because ultimately the Bible tells us that. Land animals remained on day six.

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Human beings remained on day six. Therefore, all land animals lived at the same time as human beings. And they would have no doubt seen them and interacted with them.

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And whether they lived to recent times, we don't know. But there are some interesting legends that I think are supportive of that.

23:21

Excellent. One more quick question on animals, and then I kind of want to shift more into your scientific training or field of expertise if we can.

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There are a lot of animals with all kinds of crazy adaptations and defense mechanisms.

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A skunk sprays. A porcupine has needles. If God is creating a perfect world, why would he have such creatures that seem to be ready to defend themselves if animals don't eat each other?

23:54

Well, originally, we know from Scripture they wouldn't have eaten other animals. We know the world was very good when it was first created.

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There had been no death in it, so you wouldn't have animals eating other animals. The Bible explicitly tells us that in Genesis 1, 29 and 30.

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God gave the plants for Adam and Eve to eat and for everything that creeps upon the earth.

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He says he gave every green herb for food. So originally they would have eaten only plants. Now after sin all bets are off, because after sin we know that nature became corrupt.

24:20

There are basically several different explanations depending on what type of defense attack structure it is.

24:27

You keep in mind claws that can be used for killing can also be used for digging. So it could be that the particular defense structure in question had a different purpose in the past.

24:36

That's one possibility, and that might be the case for some creatures. Another possibility is that there are mutations that can change a structure just a little bit.

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So bacteria that would have been perfectly benign before the fall, you mutate one thing, now suddenly they can eat human flesh.

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So you end up with flesh eating bacteria based on one or more mutations. So that's another way that things can become dangerous as a result of the fall.

24:59

Another possibility we need to consider is that God actually designed certain structures to cause pain.

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We know that because Genesis tells us when Adam sinned, God told Adam that thorns and thistles shall the field bring forth unto thee now.

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So as a result of Adam's sin, God actually caused certain structures to cause pain. Whether that was built into their genetic code and God just activated the gene, or whether he did a little alteration on his original creation at that time,

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I don't know. But we do know that thorns would not have existed before the fall. And so things like bee stingers,

25:28

I wonder if maybe that was something that was activated at the time of the fall that just didn't exist before. And so basically using those three things, we can explain in a world that we live in today that is cursed and fallen as a result of sin, we can explain defense attack structures.

25:41

Excellent. Moving on to something, as I said, a little bit more along your lines of expertise, it seems that as I kind of look at what you've written, you seem to be really focused on this issue of distant starlight.

25:56

Why is that such a passion of yours? Well, it's a passion of mine, well, for two reasons. First of all, I'm an astrophysicist and so that's right along the lines of my field of study.

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And second, it's the last holdout. Because you think about it, there were arguments that people who believed in evolution and millions of years, even older creationists would like to use to try and argue that the

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Earth's very old. Basically, all those have been answered at this point. There really aren't any good ones left. And distant starlight,

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I think, was the last one to be answered. And I think I've got a good answer for it. And in any case, regardless of whether I do or not, that's why it's interesting.

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It's kind of the last big question that we've had as creationists as to how do we account for this in thousands of years.

26:35

Because if you take the standard assumptions, it seems like it would take a long time for the light to get from there to here.

26:41

But I now know, having studied physics a little bit more, there are several different ways you can get light to travel a very large distance in a short period of time.

26:47

So, talk a little bit about traditional answers to that kind of problem and maybe critique them slightly.

26:54

Okay. You know, I know that, personally, I look at it and say,

26:59

God simply created it here. He created an adult Adam. He didn't have to let

27:05

Adam grow up from an infant. He began talking with him immediately. He began searching for a mate for him immediately.

27:12

You know, we see trees that are already bearing fruit. That's not the case with an infant tree.

27:18

Why would the earth or even the universe be any different? That's a really good point. And I like that answer for almost everything except distant starlight.

27:26

I think there's a slight difference here that I'll point out. But yeah, I do think that God made trees already, perhaps with rings in them already, that today we would think, well, those are annual.

27:35

But the first ones weren't. The first ones were just part of the structure of the tree. And they were a necessary part of the structure of the tree to give it stability.

27:41

And likewise, with Adam being made as an adult, it wouldn't make sense to make him as a baby. He needs someone to care for him. And so, it makes sense that God would start in that situation.

27:49

I do think starlight's in a different category, though. And it's not that God lacks the power to make light in transit. He certainly could do that.

27:55

There's no issue there. But did he do that? I don't think he did. And one reason for that is we see things happen in space.

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We see stars blowing up, for example. And if that's the case, look, for example, Supernova 1987A is a star that we saw.

28:08

We saw the light from it in 1987. And it's in one of the Magellanic Clouds, which is just shy of 200 ,000 light years away.

28:16

And so, if that star really did explode and its light took 180 ,000 or whatever, 200 ,000 years to get here, well, that's a problem, isn't it?

28:24

So you say, well, no, God just made the beam en route. But if that's so, I've got a picture on my computer of a star that never existed.

28:31

It was just a picture that God created in a beam. And it means the explosion never happened either. So I've got a picture of an exploding star that never existed.

28:38

Today, you can point a telescope there and you'll see the remnants of the star. And I've got a problem with that being all fiction that God created.

28:44

It's one thing for God to create a structure within a tree that we could falsely interpret as age. But it's another thing for God to create images of things that don't exist when he made our eyes to basically believe what we see.

28:56

I think you could extend the argument. You could say, well, maybe, you know, how do I know that you're sitting here right in front of me? I mean, it could be that God's creating the light right in front of my eyes with images of you right there.

29:04

Let's not go down the point of Hume, shall we? My point is, it's an epistemological question.

29:11

Can we trust what we see? I believe that we can. And I think there's another answer anyway for distant starlight. I won't press you on that too much because you're releasing a paper on this shortly, from what

29:21

I read. Well, I have written a paper on that. It's called the Anisotropic Synchrony Convention. And it critiques a little bit of some of the older answers that have been given.

29:30

And it offers what I believe is a reasonable solution to distant starlight. But I guess the long story short, though, is regardless of what you think the answer is, and people can feel free to reject my answer if they find a logical reason to.

29:42

But that's fine. But we need to remember that God doesn't lie. And so when he tells us he made it in six days, we can trust that.

29:47

There are going to be some aspects of creation, or for that matter, other acts of God that he's done that we're not going to understand.

29:53

I'm never going to know the scientific details of how God raised Christ from the dead. But I trust that he did.

29:58

It's part of history. There's certainly good evidence for that. And it's ultimately because it's what God said in his word. As a physicist, or an astrophysicist,

30:06

I would imagine that the sun standing still, that passage is something that rings in your head sometimes.

30:13

And you see that, and you try to think of the mechanics. Explain your picture of that to us a little bit.

30:19

Well, we know today that we live on a rotating planet, and that's how it causes sunrise and sunset. So apparently God just stopped the

30:24

Earth for a period of time, and so they wouldn't have seen it. Maybe the sun and the moon, too. Maybe the actual motion of the moon around the

30:31

Earth. He just froze that. It's not a problem for God. In fact, I had an interviewer one time. He was a secular guy.

30:36

He was interviewing me. He said, how can you have God do that? At the time, I had the workstation for the planetarium at the

30:42

Creation Museum in my office. I was programming it there. He said, how did God? You can't just stop the Earth. And I said, sure you can.

30:47

And I clicked the button on the computer screen, and I said, there you go. I think God did it just like that. It stopped, and it just stops.

30:54

And people think, well, wouldn't the people go flying off as if God would somehow forget to stop the people? He's smart enough to stop every atom on Earth, but he would somehow forget the atoms that are just on its surface.

31:06

It's not a problem for God to temporarily suspend laws of nature. I don't know that that's how he did it, but it's certainly not beyond him to do something like that.

31:14

There are his laws of nature, and he's free to suspend them if he wishes. And so I think with Joshua's long day, or for that matter, the sun going backward in the sky as we read in another account of Scripture, God just stopped the rotation of the

31:24

Earth, and the other one, he just reversed the rotation of the Earth for a little bit. Not a problem for God to do things like that. Do you think that there's a good naturalistic explanation for those sorts of things?

31:34

I mean, how do naturalists... outside of just saying, well, the biblical account is absolutely wrong, is there a naturalistic explanation that you've interacted with?

31:43

Not that I'm aware of. Not for those two. Not to stop the sun for an entire day. I mean, that's amazing.

31:49

Now, if somebody offered me a good one, okay. I mean, God normally accomplishes his will through what we call natural phenomena.

31:56

In fact, I would call the laws of nature the normal way that God accomplishes his will. That's a description of how God normally acts.

32:02

But is God free to act in other ways? Yeah, he is. Does the Bible tell us specifically how he acted there?

32:08

No. But my impression based on what I do know about the laws of physics suggests that he did temporarily suspend them in an activity.

32:14

But it could be that we don't understand physics well enough. Maybe there will be an explanation at some point. It's just my point is

32:20

God is not required to act within the laws of nature. He can act in other ways if he chooses. Excellent. So, kind of coming back,

32:26

I guess, full circle to the foundational issues, what are your thoughts, feelings on traditional creation or theistic proofs for God's existence?

32:36

Maybe we start with the cosmological argument. Is that a good argument to use?

32:44

Is that something you think a Christian can consistently interact with? I find that with the traditional arguments for God, if you're dealing with someone who is a really committed atheist, they really have a contrary view, those arguments are not only not persuasive to them, but they don't have a legitimate rebuttal to them.

33:02

They'll have some little loophole that you'll think, yeah, you know, I guess my argument's not conclusive. I would say the traditional arguments are not conclusive, in my opinion.

33:11

There's something to them. I do believe that the universe requires a cause. I do believe that cause is

33:16

God. And there is something to arguing that way. But I would argue that the only, let me put it this way, the only argument

33:23

I'm aware of that is conclusive proof of God and or the Christian worldview is what we would call the transcendental argument for God, arguing as we did earlier that God is necessary as a precondition for science and reasoning and everything else that we take for granted.

33:38

I find that argument to be absolutely irrefutable. I'm not saying you shouldn't use these other arguments, but I think you should use them primarily as either confirmation of the

33:44

Christian worldview, or maybe to open a door as a way of getting people to think about some of these issues and maybe then leading them into a transcendental argument.

33:51

Okay. I guess, how would you describe the ultimate proof of creation, then?

33:57

The ultimate proof of creation, it's succinctly stated, is that unless the Bible is true, you can't prove that anything is true.

34:03

And so the Bible is a necessary precondition for proving anything else. So if you're going to take the position that we can't prove things, which everybody would take, everybody would say, yeah, we can know some things.

34:11

We have some knowledge. Unless you take the issue. Well, yeah. But see, even he looks both ways before he crosses the street.

34:17

Everybody believes in their heart of hearts that there is, there are some things that we can know. We act on that.

34:23

And so people who say otherwise are being inconsistent. But in any case, I would say that the Bible is the necessary precondition for those things to make sense.

34:30

And so it's only in the Christian worldview that I can have knowledge. And since I can have knowledge, that proves that the

34:36

Christian worldview is true. Now, people might argue that and they'll say, oh, but I don't believe the Bible. And I say, but you should, is my point.

34:43

In order for knowledge to be meaningful, the Bible would have to be true. The way my mentor,

34:49

Dr. Bonson, put it, he said, in a way, debating over the existence of God is like debating on the existence of air. You can imagine somebody arguing that air doesn't exist, making all these arguments against air.

34:58

But he'd have to use air to make the arguments. And he's all, he's breathing at the time that he's making the argument. He has to use air, the critic of air has to use air to make a case against air.

35:07

Likewise, the critic of the biblical God has to use things that are contingent upon the biblical

35:12

God in order to make an argument against the biblical God. The fact that he can make his argument proves that he's wrong.

35:18

Excellent. Would you hold that statement to be true when interacting with a

35:23

Muslim or a Hindu? Absolutely. The transcendental argument will work against any non -Christian worldview.

35:29

In fact, it will even work against inconsistent Christian worldviews, people that don't hold the Bible as a single unit or worldview, where they've distorted sections of it.

35:38

Basically the method, it's more than just the transcendental argument, but that's a big part of it. I also look for inconsistency and I look for arbitrariness.

35:45

So inconsistency where they say one thing here and then the opposite here. You can't have that. You can't have contradictions. Or arbitrariness, where they just don't have a reason for what they believe.

35:53

They say, well, I just think it's this way. Well, then I think it's just the other way. So you can't get anywhere, right?

35:58

If you're going to be arbitrary, I'll be arbitrary too. And so you look for those things. You look for arbitrariness, inconsistency, and then you look for those preconditions of intelligibility, the things that are necessary for knowledge.

36:08

And you'll find that every worldview except Christianity cannot fulfill all of them. And that includes false religions, it includes secularism, anything you can think of except biblical

36:18

Christianity. And I've even used these type of arguments against Christians who are sincere, but who argue for millions of years because that's not a consistent

36:25

Christian position. Excellent. Just, you know, the last thing I want to touch on real quick is there's a lot of information out there about Answers of Genesis, you know, saying that if you don't agree with six literal days, you're not a

36:41

Christian, you can't be a Christian. What's your response to that?

36:46

Those are just straw man attacks. There's a misrepresentation of our position. We've never said that. We've always maintained that salvation is by God's grace, received through faith in Christ alone.

36:56

And that's in nothing else. We've never said, and you have to believe in six days. The Bible doesn't say that, neither would we.

37:02

But my point is this, that if you are a Christian, you are a consistent Christian, and you don't believe in six days, you're being inconsistent.

37:09

And praise God, he lets inconsistent people into heaven because it's by his grace that we're saved.

37:14

And I'm sure I have inconsistencies in my own life. I don't always behave in a way that's consistent with my worldview there.

37:20

But that is sin. That is wrong when I do that. And praise God, he overlooks that. He's covered my sins.

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And so I would say that Christians, if you really want to show your gratitude to God for being saved, you need to start being obedient to his word, taking his word at face value, really reading it consistently, and that includes believing in six days and really standing up for that issue.

37:40

Excellent. Well, hey, thank you for taking the time to sit down with me. My pleasure. If you guys are interested in getting additional resources,

37:47

Dr. Lyle both has DVDs and books on the ultimate proof of creation, available at answersingenesis .org.

37:55

Feel free to check those out. Also, as you guys probably already know, karm .org

38:00

has an extensive tag argument or transcendental argument for the existence of God.

38:06

Please take the time, check that out. There's entire sections of the website devoted to that. Thank you for your time.