6000 Years and Counting

0:00 Yeah. Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Cory J. Mahler and I'm still woe. 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 God said, Let there be light, and there was light, and

1:00 God 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. And 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. 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

1:45 gathered together he called seas, and God saw that it was good. Today's episode of Stone Choir as you might have guessed is going to be about the six days of creation, as it intersects with theology today and as it intersects with modern scientific understanding. This is a subject that we broached in episode six on the perspicuity of scripture, where we discussed in in some different detail than we're going to go in today the fact that there are modern debates among Christians about to what degree do we believe the Bible. Do we believe that it is allegorical in some areas? Are this is this some sort of fictional genre of literature that isn't to be believed literally? What do you do when God is saying things that don't line

2:36 up with our understanding of physics? Yeah, for example, when you read through Genesis one and two, light appears before stars appear. Obviously as as intelligent men, we know that's stupid because we know that light comes from stars. God says the opposite. And so as Christians, we have one approach to these things and then the world has another approach to these things. One of the reasons we want to tackle this subject today is that the question of how does scientific knowledge match up with or conflict with what's in scripture is a stumbling block for some people who are coming to the faith. I know that lately we've picked up quite a few new listeners, uh, particularly from the myth of twentieth century appearance.

3:17 Uh thank you again to Adam for that. That was a a treat to be on there. And I one of the things that I mentioned, and it surprised him a little bit, was that I am a young earth creationist. The reason that I am, and the reason we're discussing this today, is that it is the only possible Christian position. So today's episode is going to be in two parts. The first part's going to be the short part talking about the theology, and then we're going to spend the rest of the time talking about some of the science. Because I know that a lot of you, if you're looking at Christianity, that you maybe you want to believe it, you're trying to figure out what this stuff is about, the things that you know,

3:49 the things that are scientific knowledge that you think you can have confidence in, if they're at odds with this Jesus stuff, you got to keep your bearings. And then and as Christians for the majority of the audience, those who are fully engaged in the faith, what do we do with a world that's saying, no, that's nonsense. Here's what we actually believe. And today there are a lot of people in the church who want to kind of split the difference and say, well, you know, it's just kind of it was it was flowery language. Who knows what God really meant? One of the tricks that's played within the church is that you'll find guys today saying, Well, if you look at the early church fathers, they debated whether the six days of creation was literal or

4:31 not. It is true to an extent. There were some church fathers who disputed whether it was six natural twenty four hour days. However, they were not doing that in defense of a universe that was millions or billions of years old. Their argument was whether it was 168 hours or whether it was less than that. Because the other side of that argument was specifically saying creation was instantaneous, effectively the big bang. And then after that, God, you know, put everything together. And so they were debating within a very small amount of time, was it you know a femtosecond or was it 168 hours? That's not remotely the debate today. So if you hear someone claiming to be a Christian who says, oh, that's an open question because the early church fathers debated, know

5:18 that they're lying to you, flat out lying. None of the church fathers say what they were saying when they want to say who could not possibly know. Maybe it might have been a thousand years, ten thousand years, a million years. They weren't saying that. And if they had, they would have been wrong, because they were flawed, sinful men, just like you and me and everyone who's ever looked at these things. We have scripture. We have scripture to be confident in. And that was episode six on the clarity of scripture, discussing the fact that as Christians, that is our frame of reference. When God spoke the universe into existence, as Corey just read, that's it. It appeared because he said it. He declared it and it became.

6:00 That's That is power. That is the infinite power of the creator. Creation began at that point. And so the six days of creation are when God was putting the universe together, when he was establishing the order that we see observable today. Yeah, we see rules, we see constants, we see patterns emerge over and over, and they tend to be very consistent. We don't see a lot of variation over time. Or if we do see variation, it's predictable based on rules inherent to the system. And that is something that people want to sort of soft pedal and say, well, I'm not going to talk about the Bible, but there's got to be an intelligent designer, don't you think? Well, yeah, that's true, but why why be godless?

6:45 It's God. And so the second half of this episode, you know, the majority of the episode we're talking about the science stuff, we're going to be making the case that if you If you reject scripture, or if you don't believe scripture yet, you say, well, that's faith-based. I'm fact-based. We will demonstrate. Mostly Corney's going to be demonstrating by because he's he's actually well versed in science. I'm going to be your voice in this episode, just kind of being the the dummy listening and asking questions because I'll tell you, my science education was utter garbage. I the Lutheran high school I went to in Indianapolis had the same science teacher in tenth and eleventh grade. I very distinctly remember the first day of eleventh grade.

7:24 She said, Hey guys, remember last year when I told you what exothermic and endothermic reactions were about? I got those backwards. So So I knew she was wrong at the time, but like Lutheran schools are variable in quality. So I love science. I'm I'm that guy, except I'm also Christian. But whenever I look at these things, it's always in view of here's what I already believe based on scripture, what is it that we're discovering in creation? If you've gone back through the catalog of Stone Choir episodes, you will find that Corey and I will very often point back to Job chapters 38 and following, where God finally appears to Job to answer him, to answer his complaints and his demands for explanation.

8:11 And And what you find, please go read it. It's beautiful. It's the as I've said is one of my favorite passages. When God appears to Job and talks to him, he doesn't coddle him. He doesn't say, oh, sorry, you're going through this, or he doesn't, he doesn't try to make things better right away. His immediate response when Job is demanding explanations from the Creator is who are you? Where were you when I formed the world. And he goes into great length for multiple chapters describing his creation as testifying to his glory. So when I say I love science, it's not the the reddit atheist soyjack face. I love the fact that when I look at creation, every time there's something that we finally figure out a little bit more, it's

8:57 a greater revelation of God's natural revelation. I see God in those things because I believe God when He said He made them. And so as we get into some of the details, what we will establish is that it is also faith-based to believe the science, so-called, against Scripture. And it's in fact a much more absurd belief system. It might be helpful to point out before we get into more of the scripture, the word that is underlying day there in Genesis, and the word is Hemera. That word just means day in Greek. From B Dag. The first definition is the period between sunrise and sunset. Exactly what we would call a day in English. The second definition is the civil or legal day, which includes the night. Again, one of the main definitions we would use in English.

9:56 This is a term that means day. It means 24-hour day. It means exactly what it says. This is not a figurative day. This is not a metaphorical day. This is not an age, this is not an era. That is an argument that has been raised many times, because just like English, most other languages have a figurative use of the term day. You know, every dog has his day. That doesn't necessarily mean a literal day. Could mean a period of time. The same thing can be true in Greek or indeed in Hebrew. But the core sense of the term, and if you read in the context, it is very clear the core sense is meant. The core sense of the term is the 24-hour literal day. So creation 24-hour twenty four our literal day six days, and then resting on

10:52 the seventh day. That is why when you look at the Church Fathers, many of them will have written something titled the Hexameron, which is just on the six days because creation was a literal week. The modern attempt to hand wave away on the basis of, well, there could be this figurative use of this particular term is simply embarrassment at what scripture says in light of what science supposedly claims. And it is generally embarrassment by men who do not understand either scripture or the science. And we will get into those in that order in this episode. And God actually goes out of his way rhetorically in the first five days of creation to say each time, and there was evening and there was morning the first day, and the second, and the

11:47 third, and the fourth, and the fifth. God over and over again says this is a 24 hour day. So I thank you pr for bringing that up. That is a it's a crucial point because as a Christian, if you actually believe scripture, it's necessary to believe that. And And it's a small detail, but it's consistent with the rest. And as I said at the beginning, one of the one of the things to understand when we're looking at the six days of creation before God finished, as he declared it to be finished and said is very good, is that everything was up for grabs. As I said, you have light before you have stars, like the order of operations doesn't make sense based on the way things exist today. And so if you're looking at a system evolving and building

12:35 on itself internally, yeah, it doesn't make sense. But we don't need a system to make sense internally because God wasn't done making it. It was on the last day when he said it was very good and then he rested that it was complete. At that point it was locked in. Before that, he was messing with things. He was changing things, he was moving parts around. So it's okay for the beginning not to add up. That's not illogical because God is doing stuff. He's working. You know, imagine you you come to someone who's building a watch or a garden, you know, whatever he's doing, some creative, you know, as we call creative process, and he's in the middle of it, and you come in and say, Well, you're missing this and this

13:18 and this, and it doesn't make any sense. It's not gonna work. And you say, Well I'm not done yet. Come back on the seventh day and I'll be done with the thing. The creative process involves a period of time where it's unfinished and then at the end it's finished. Personally, as a perfectionist, it's something that keeps me from doing a lot of things because I start and I am simultaneously my own critic and like that's crap, that's not good enough and so I never get very far into anything because I destroy it before there can be enough there for me to build on it. God doesn't have that problem. When He built the thing, it was all internally consistent. So that's a small point, but it's it's a crucial point for

13:56 Christians. It's not necessarily going to convince you if you think that it's permissible to believe in old earth or something else. The things that we say next in these parts about theology are going to go directly at you. We're going to be dire very direct that if you believe in old earth, you are sinning, you're believing something contrary to scripture. the six-day thing, like it's it's true and it's correct, but you're not going to believe it until you believe this next part. So the crucial argument, the old The only argument, the only argument that's necessary for any Christian to understand is that every theory, every system of the universe, every system of life that is older than six thousand years, that's you know millions of years or billions

14:45 of years, any of those necessarily have death before death came into the world. So we're gonna go first over the passages that make very clear that there was no death before Adam sinned, and therefore nothing could die before Adam sinned. Nothing. Not only people, but nothing in the universe could have died. That was also a change. That was a change to the universe. It wasn't only a change to a man or to humanity. All of creation fell with Adam. Because Adam was the head of the world. God had put him in place. God created the animals and then brought them to Adam, and he named each of them, including Eve. That was an exercise of authority over all of creation. God put Adam in charge. So when Adam, the head, fell, all the stuff fell.

15:37 Everything fell. The animals fell. There would not be death without Adam's sin. You and I die today. Our animals die, our pets die. Death that's today such a natural part of our lives and of the world was introduced by Adamson. So to begin, just gonna read a a couple passages that use the word in Greek cosmos. Same word, it's where we get the word. And it means everything. It means it's more than simply limited to humankind or mankind. The first passage is from Romans five. Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned. This is very clear. Romans 5 is saying, death came into the world, into the cosmos by Adam's sin.

16:33 That's reiterated in John 1. The next day, John the Baptist saw Jesus coming toward him and said, Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Same word here. Sin of the world is the sin of the cosmos, Meaning all the sin everywhere. Now, this these this in particular is a passage that some of the reformed must necessarily dispute if they believe in limited atonement, because if you you you must necessarily limit world down to not only humanity but to the elect, otherwise you have to reject that verse. So these are some places where one of the reasons it's important to tackle this question is that when the six days of creation are undermined. When you start messing with the question of how God created things, it goes directly to the

17:24 question of original sin. And that is fundamentally what is attacked by a denial of the sixth natural twenty-four-hour day creation. It is fundamentally an attack on these passages, on the fact that the whole universe fell when Adam sinned. And the last passage that make this abundantly clear using the word cosmos is Colossians one. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for by him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions, or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him, and he is before all things, and in him all things hold together, and he is the head of the body, the church, he is the beginning,

18:08 the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile himself to all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. So when Colossians one says that Jesus reconciles himself to all things, that's also talking about the cosmos, in earth or in heaven, the earth in heaven. it's talking about all the stuff, all the universe, all of creation. Jesus reconciliation on the cross is not limited to man. Forget the elect, it's not simply limited to man, it's limited to nothing. God reconciles and makes peace by his blood on the cross all things. So this is the reason that this is such a crucial question for

19:02 the Christian faith. Because see, it's it's small fiddly point. If you want to just argue about six natural 20, four hour days, okay, well, whatever. When you get to the fact that all the stuff we're going to talk about in the latter part of the episode dealing with the so called scientific evidence, all of it necessarily involves death existing before Adam sinned, which has to deny all this. It has to say that Adam's sin did not cause the universe to fall. There was no sin anywhere in the universe. And incidentally, these passages also preclude the existence of life anywhere else. There can only be salvation where this promise has been given. This is the only place where there's life because it's the only

19:41 place where God delivered his salvation. The existence of Adam as the head of this world necessitates that although the rest of the universe fell, there can't be life elsewhere that would not have access to this information. So this is a it's a it's the root of the Christian faith. If you get rid of of original sin, if you get rid of the fact that by whom all things were made through Christ is the same Christ through whom all things are reconciled, that's the whole shooting match. And see, it's this is one of those end runs that Satan loves to do. Satan doesn't go directly at stuff and say, Well, Jesus didn't die for the whole world. He'll say, Oh, well, there's there was death before Adam.

20:28 And then it unwinds everything. Because if you believe there was death before Adam, well then what what did Jesus die for? Suddenly Jesus propitiating death on blood on the cross get gets very limited. It gets narrowed down to to a sliver of the very creation that God Himself said he was redeeming, because it was only through the death of the one through whom it was created that that redemption would have been possible. The other passage in Romans 8 that is perhaps the most clear on this point is one that doesn't use the word cosmos. It uses a different Greek word that also means creation. Effectively it's it's related to the next ex nihilo creation creation of everything. So again, that is vastly superseding the elect or even mankind

21:14 or even life. It's all the stuff. Everything that was created in the six days is what is being referred to here in this passage in Romans eight. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us, for the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God, for the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now, and not only the creation, but

21:58 we ourselves, who have who have the first fruits of the Spirits, groan inwardly as we wait we eagerly for the adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we are saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. So here in this passage in Romans eight, Paul, in God's words, is explicitly contrasting the whole world with we the believers. So again, there's just to hammer this point home, there is no possibility that all of creation did not fall with Adam's personal sin. The very same sin that you inherit, the very very same sin that causes you to yourself sin and to die. Adam's sin did that to everything.

22:51 And so as we get into the things that will address the claims that, well, maybe the earth is millions of years old, and you know, it's it's okay to believe that because you know we're we're not really sure because the you know the genre of Genesis 1 and 2. It could be anything. You don't have to read that literally. If you do that, you necessarily deny the death entered the world with Adam. And if you do that, you deny the faith. Because if you deny original sin and you deny how God redeems the universe, that's a denial of God. So just by itself, the fact that original sin applies to the whole world as scripture attests, necessarily negates the possibility of any sort of theistic evolution, any sort of theistic evolution.

23:38 There's no possibility for any of the evolutionary macro scale processes that we're all familiar with from school. They cannot exist without death. So it's literally one or the other. Either death came into the world through Adam, as God says, or death has always just been a natural thing and you know, eventually, you know, God made people or you know, somehow people came to be. And then we're off the races. Then we have the period of of human existence. To believe the latter is to deny God and to not be Christian. That there's a very clear dividing line there. And that's why that the lie that I mentioned earlier where guys will say, oh well, the early church fathers debated over the six days, the hexameron.

24:26 they'll say, well that you know, they weren't sure, you know, sometimes said some said it was six twenty four hour days, somet said it was a different period of time. Yep. The ones who said it was a different period of time said it was instant. They were they were debating inside of 168 hours how much shorter might it have been. Now, I believe they were wrong, but even if they got that right, it it doesn't matter because the very fact that there was a dispute in the historic church never, ever, ever opened the door for someone to believe that the earth or the universe is older than several thousand years old. Now one thing that we mentioned in the episode six on the perspecuity of scripture is that yeah, the most obvious thing is when

25:10 we take measurements of things, obviously, you know, if if a if you believe what Christians have believed throughout history, the earth is about six thousand years, you know, maybe seven, it's somewhere in there. It's thousands of years old, certainly less than ten. Corey and I believe six, but if you want to be off by a thousand years, that's fine. That's fundamentally a question of some of the variations in the genealogies of scripture, which is how we calculate those dates. The difference is that if you go back further than that, you can't believe anything that's in the Bible. And yet, if say say that say everything's inside 10,000 years, well, that would mean that if there's any light coming to Earth from

25:53 any system more than ten thousand light years away, it can't exist. It would mean that the furthest away that we could see anything would be six thousand light years or seven thousand. Nothing could be, you know, billions of light years away. It that's impossible. That's absolutely true. If when God created the universe in the six days, he booted it up from scratch. And so the argument that we make in in episode six is that that's not at all the case. Just as Adam was created as a full grown sexually mature man with an age, Cory and I believe that he was seventy. Because if Adam was created as a seventy year old, that would make him an elder. It would mean that when he died at 930 years, he was

26:37 effectively a one thousand-year-old man. It would make him the oldest man ever. It would make him living a thousand years, which is a perfectly round scriptural number, it would have made him an elder over creation, which would have incidentally been necessary for him to have the very headship over creation that God had ordained. So if we're wrong about that, no big deal. But Adam was created with an age. He was an he was an adult. He wasn't a child. He wasn't a baby. He wasn't an infant or a zygote. He had an age. The universe also has an age. And it didn't match because it didn't need to match, because God had not yet established the order of everything. You know, the things that we observe today as constants, as scientific

27:19 universal constants, those are God's variables. They're whatever He set them to be. The comparison that came to mind when I was thinking about preparing for the show was when I was in school, there a game came out from, you know, everybody knows Sene Halo from Bungie before Microsoft acquired them. Bungie's first game was Marathon. And one of the amazing things about Marathon, it was around the same time as Doom. It was a little bit newer than Doom. It was much more advanced in a lot of ways. One of the amazing things about playing Marathon, a first-person shooter, was that they m Bungie shipped the same map editors that they themselves used to make the game, which meant that anyone could make their

28:01 own maps. And so people had a lot of fun playing with them. And one of the things that really kind of expanded my mind just from messing with that was in the level editor, you could mess with constants. So every level had a constant for gravity. And one of the most entertaining levels was when was when guys would change gravity. They would, you know, they would reduce it by 90%. So you could suddenly jump huge distances. Because gravity, the gravitational constant, there's just a variable in the table for the level editor. God did the same thing with the universe. He set these numbers seemingly in stone, but he ordained them. He set them. And so we're stuck with them. Like we we don't have the level at her.

28:41 We can't mess with creation. But the point is that when God ordained those things that to us seem like constants, they're only constants because he liked them. We don't know why. He just he picked them and they work. And everything in the universe works because of them, because of how precisely tuned they are to the world that God created. If the numbers were different, we can tell in simulations that everything would go flying apart. So it's all a perfectly balanced system from our perspective. The important thing is that God set what he wanted. And so is the earth six thousand years old? Yes. Is the earth four and a half billion years old? Yes. God created a four and a half billion year old Earth

29:23 six thousand years ago. He created a thirteen point eight billion year old universe six thousand years ago, give or take. Again, not sticking to the six thousand number, but the creation of an old universe and an old earth is entirely consistent with the belief of a God who can create everything from nothing simply by speaking. So that is an article of faith, but it's no stretch. If you if if you can't believe that, then you certainly can't believe any of the miracles in the Bible. And so the the crucial point that I want the the Christians in the audience to take home from this is that when we look at the evidence, when we talk about the scientific stuff for the rest of this, it's not to bolster our faith.

30:05 It's not to justify what we already believe. It is that we have confidence in our faith that when God, who created the universe, says these things, we just believe them. And then, as we understand creation better, as Christians have always done for thousands of years, discovery of God's creation, as God testifies in Job, testifies to God. God uses creation to testify to us about his own glory. So when we look at these things and we see how magnificently, incomprehensibly huge the world is, that testifies that God's glory. That doesn't make us small and insignificant. It makes God huge. The fact that the scale makes us seem small doesn't diminish the importance of humanity. It shows that of all the things in creation that testify to

30:52 God's glory, he came as a man. We were made in his image, and then he came as one of us to redeem us and all things because of Adam's sin. So there's no it's either you believe the Bible or you believe Bill Mai. And unfortunately, we have a lot of people in the church today who want to believe Bill Nye and stay in the church. And it's like what do you say? Like there's there are two different approaches to this. And for peop people who are in the middle, I hope you take that contrast seriously. the I love science atheists, the Reddit atheists, they will believe any sort of absurdity. The same people who are adamant that we are stupid, that we're rubs for thinking that the Earth is six thousand years old.

31:35 Also today think we're rubes for thinking that a man is a man and a woman is a woman. Like this the the idol of science, the false god of science, that is in fact no science at all, because scantia means truth, knowledge. The absence of truth and knowledge it means that there's nothing related to to science That's just it's a false religion. And so just as the church has been used as a cloak for a false religion that's Jesus flavored, the pursuit of knowledge of creation is a cloak that's being used by these atheists to to be a a a cloaking device for them to twist the creation that was intended by God to testify to his glory. They try to use it to testify to uh I don't know what, to to the absence of God.

32:24 Which if facially is absurd. And so that's gonna be the rest of this episode. You mentioned Bill Nye and I always find him particularly amusing because inevitably the I love science crowd are credentialist in their leanings, and Bill Nye is a mechanical engineer, and they take his word as a sort of gospel on things about which he has no formal training whatsoever, so it's just a little bit of hypocrisy from that crowd, not surprising. But before we dive into the science property I'll take the opportunity to critique the simulation theory because you mentioned that if we change the constants in a simulation of whatever body it happens to be, things don't work so well. The fundamental problem with simulation theory, and I've mentioned this elsewhere, is

33:19 that any evidence for us existing in a simulation is simultaneously evidence for a creator. And Ockham's razor or however you prefer to phrase it, it is more reasonable to conclude there is a creator than that there is a simulation. So it is actually impossible to prove simulation theory because any evidence for it is simply proving a creator even more strongly. But at the outset of this segment, the balance of this podcast episode, there are five questions I want to highlight that are relevant here. These are questions that science simply cannot answer, and we're using science, of course, here in the lowercase sense, as it were, the minor sense, the modern sense, not the proper Latin sense of the

34:14 term, which as mentioned is just knowledge. And it is fair also to say that is truth, because what is knowledge? It is true warranted belief, to use the philosophical definition. So the five questions First, why is there anything instead of nothing? Science has no answer for this. Science has no way of answering this. Second, why do immaterial things exist and not just material? Or phrased another way, why is there immaterial, not just material? We'll get into that the distinction there, why that matters. Third, why is there life instead of just matter? Science has no answer to bridge the gap from non living matter to living matter to life. This is a biogenesis, life arising from non-life. This is one of the things for which the I Love Science

35:17 Crowd and others will often ridicule our medieval ancestors, because they believed in abiogenesis of a certain kind. They thought, for instance, if you left meat out, it spawned maggots. Which is more or less true from their perspective. They observed it, that's what happened. They did not have a vacuum chamber, they couldn't isolate the meat to prove that no you actually need a fly to come and lay eggs on the thing, and then it produces maggots. They didn't know that. They had no way to test that. But modern theories of evolution rely on abiogenesis. very thing they mock. And you can get them with this, incidentally. You can start to describe a biogenesis and they'll laugh along with you, they'll think it's ridiculous, but then you point out that no,

36:00 I'm talking about the very basis of the Neo Darwinian evolution you believe. They turn bright red, it's good fun to watch. Fourth, why is there intelligent life? Because there is a fundamental distinction between something that is merely alive and something that is intelligent, something that has that inner life to a certain degree. And I say a certain degree because I distinguish between them in the next question, but there is a difference between broccoli and a cat. A cat is intelligent life, broccoli is not. How do you explain that within the framework of science? And then fifth, why is there sapient, which is to say human, self aware, life? This is really two questions in one. There's the easy problem of consciousness and the hard problem of consciousness.

36:54 The easy problem is the mechanics of cognition. Objective experience. How do you explain the mechanic of human cognition, of self-awareness. How do you explain these systems? And then there's the hard problem of consciousness, which is the metaphysics of cognition. How do you explain subjective experience? Qualia, which is the personal subjective experience of something. A quale is the singular is a quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person. And so these are the questions that it's important to contemplate when dealing with science's supposed explanations for everything. We won't go into each one of these in detail in this episode, but we will investigate at least two of them in a

37:48 fair degree of detail. And so to start off, I want to start with a major problem for Neo-Darwinian evolution, I'm going to use NDE or Neo-Darwinian evolution, because that's really a description of the modern version of evolution that is believed in the academy and the sciences. You could also call it the modern synthesis, there's technically a small distinction there, but I'll probably use them interchangeably because they effectively are. But the issue is irreducible complexity. And irreducible complexity is how we describe a system that is complex in a way where if you remove any particular part of the system, it no longer functions, or at least no longer functions at a level that makes the system useful.

38:44 And there are many systems like this. There are many of them in your body, there are many of them out in nature. In these systems, any particular part of the system can be removed to make the system no longer function. And the problem with that is that if you believe the evolutionary explanation for these things, then all of these components have to evolve simultaneously and synchronously. Because if one appears before another, they don't interoperate, they don't work together. Yes, in some cases, there are subparts of a system that may be useful in and of themselves, separate from the system itself. And for those, you don't need to deal with this irreducible complexity for that part of the system.

39:35 For the rest of the system, you still do, but there are also systems where the subparts are not useful at least not in isolation, and so they are only useful in the system itself, and there are many of these in the body. In those systems there is no evolutionary way to explain the evolution of any particular subpart without having to explain the entirety of the system evolving at once. Now I've said that there's such thing as an irreducibly complex system. You'll see this all over a certain kind of literature, and you will see this also incidentally from evolutionists. They admit that this is a problem, to some degree. They try to dismiss it, but if you read their actual journals, the academic ones, they will admit there are problems here.

40:31 But a fundamental point I want to make is that there is no such thing as a simple system. No system is simple. All systems are irreducibly complex. This is tautological. A system is an irreducibly complex set of things that interact in a particular way. Now a given system may have ancillary or additional parts of the system that you can remove and the system will still function, but it is that core that is irreducibly complex. That is the core of the system. The other parts may be helpful, but if you can remove them, they are not part of the irreducible complexity For example, some of the systems in your body that are irreducibly complex. We'll go over two of them t just sort of in a cursory fashion.

41:27 We're not going to go into all of the chemistry for this. There's no reason to do that here. If you are interested, it's very easy to find papers or a YouTube video or what have you on these subjects. But But vision, your visual system, is irreducibly complex. There are parts of your visual system that if you take them in isolation, they have no value. If you remove really any particular part of the complex system that results in you being able to see, you are no longer able to see. Yes, there are certain parts that you can impair and still see. Of course, some of you listening may be wearing glasses. You can still see, with or without the glasses. Without the glasses your vision is impaired in some way, otherwise you

42:17 wouldn't need the glasses. But that isn't a removal of part of this complex system, it is an impairment, and as you can see, it causes problems. But the visual system for human beings, for mammals more generally, but phototransduction, which is just a fancy way of saying taking the light that is outside, external to you, strikes your eye, and translating it into a signal in the brain so that you can see. Translating into a picture. Phototransduction has about twelve steps. These are complicated chemical processes. This is biochemistry. I said I won't go over the specifics, there's no need here. But that's just to transmit the fact that a single photon hit one of the receptive cells in your eye into your brain via the optical nerve to paint

43:12 that tiny part of a picture of the outside world, and this happens on the order of single or double digit depending on the cells involved, millisecond resolution. And this happens millions of times every single day. This happens across the many receptive cells in your eye constantly. This system is incomprehensibly complex and delicate, and it has to have all evolved simultaneously and synchronously in order for it to make any sense. Now, some, particularly Richard Dawkins comes to mind, have attempted to raise the argument that there are precursor systems to the mammalian eye, and therefore we can explain that we went from this to this to this and eventually got to the human eye. The problem is, if you look at the biochemistry, and this is

44:09 a little game they play, I'll go over this in more detail in a minute. But if you look at the biochemistry These simpler systems, supposedly simpler systems, they are in a sense simpler, but in a sense not, because the idea that single cells are simple is archaic and wrong. Single cells are not simple, they are highly complex. But this idea that these supposed precursors are simple breaks down biochemically, and it breaks down biochemically because they are not a biochemical precursor. And this is the issue. There are three systems for any given function that have to develop simultaneously and synchronously. Because it's not just one overarching system. So for instance, let's stay with the eye.

45:00 There's the mechanical, which is of course the muscles that move the eye, the cells that comprise the eye, the lens that shields the eye, etcetera, there are many systems here. So that's the mechanical part of the overall system. There is the chemical. All of these various chemicals that are transmitting information from one step to the next, translating it from a photon eventually into voltage gated by calcium that that transmits along the optic nerve into the brain. And then there are neurotransmitters involved. Th that's the chemical system. And then there is the neural system. The brain has to be able to interpret these signals. And the same thing is true of any other part of your body, your hand.

45:51 You have fingers and a thumb, you have the nerves and the tendons, you have the chemicals that actuate the muscles, and you have the part of your brain that controls these things that receives the signals and sends them back. These three systems have to develop together because no single system is of any use in isolation. If you have this sea of chemicals, but no surface with which they can interact, no mechanics, no machinery they can operate, they're useless. If you have the machinery and the chemicals, but no receptors in the brain to actually deal with them. The systems are utterly useless, in fact they are detrimental, because they incur an immense energy cost. These must develop simultaneously.

46:38 It is incomprehensibly unlikely to the point of being mathematically impossible that this could happen. We'll get into the numbers a little later. But this is just for the vision system or for the hand as I mentioned, and this is true of so many different systems in your body. Blood clotting is another one. Blood clotting is an excellent example because blood clotting again seems like something that could be simple, but then you start to read about it. It is extremely complex. Blood clotting is a cascade of chemical reactions that have to fire perfectly. And the reason they have to fire perfectly, now bear in mind when I say perfectly, I'm not saying absolutely perfectly. There's a different thing here.

47:31 I'm saying they cannot misfire. Because if blood clotting misfires, there are a handful of options. If you cut yourself and your coagulation system doesn't fire properly, maybe it doesn't clot and you bleed out, and you die. Or it triggers randomly, somewhere in your body, forms a clot, causes you a stroke, heart attack, what have you, you die. And so this system not only has to be able to trigger at the right time, in the right place, for the right period of time, and then shut down, it has to not accidentally trigger anywhere else in the body at the wrong time. Now, instead of going through the cascade of how blood clotting actually occurs, and there are actually two paths that trigger in a different way.

48:26 There's some important reasons for that. There's still some research as to why exactly that is the case. But I want to read through just some of the factors, some of the chemical substances that are involved in blood clotting. Just to give you a sort of idea of how complex the system is. There's factor one, fibrinogen, factor two, prothrombin, factor three, tissue factor, factor four, the calcium ion, factor five, proacelarin, factor six, factor seven, Proconvertin Factor eight Antihemophilic Factor A Factor nine Antihemophilic Factor B, Factor ten, Stuart Prower factor, eleven, plasma thromboplastin antecedent, factor twelve, the Hagaman factor, factor thirteen, fibrin stabilizing factor, then there's the

49:20 von Willibrand factor, precalocrine, calicrine, high molecular weight kinogen, fibronectin, anti thrombin three, Heparin COFACTOI, Protein C, Protein S, Protein Z, Protein Z related Protease Inhibitor, Plasminogen, Alpha II antiplasmin, Alpha II macroglobulin, tissue plasminogen activator, urokinase, plasminogen activator inhibitor one, plasminogen activator inhibitor two. And these all interact in a delicate dance that if it goes wrong, you die. And somehow we are supposed to believe that this evolved by chance. And I think this is a good point to highlight exactly what the evolutionists claim. Because they will up one side and down the other, in many cases, say they do not believe in random chance, but they do

50:18 and here's why. They will highlight the natural selection part of their doctrine, of their theory. What they will try to downplay for the common man when they are speaking to the laity as it were, is the random chance part because the issue is against what is natural selection acting? It's acting against mutations that arise randomly. And so all of this relies on random chance, and that's important when we get to the math in a little bit. I know we started with science and we'll get to math. It couldn't be more terrible, but it's important to have sort of a general understanding of some of this and why neo-Darwinian evolution is so utterly ridiculous. If you are relying entirely on random chance to produce the material

51:16 against which natural selection can act, then the math becomes very important. Another example, not a human example, although I guess it is to some degree because you have them living in you, creatures that have them, the cilia that bacteria, or flagella in that case, use to propel themselves around. We'll link to something on that, I won't go over it. It's another case of an extremely complex system that interacts to the point where you cannot have any particular part of it arise by itself because it would actually be harmful. If parts of that particular system arose independently of the system they would actually tear the cell apart. Which could hardly be said to be reproductively beneficial.

52:08 I think as folks are processing this episode, the the science stuff, keep in mind the recent episodes we did on the big lie and on conspiracy theories, because the principles that we demonstrated in the first one and then outlined in the second one are a play here. In the conspiracy theory episode we talked a lot about the moon landing. And so some of the examples that Corey's given and some more he's gonna give are similar in the sense that they're pot shots at the facts that are claimed by the other side, just as the ones that Owen Owen Benjamin uses for, well, how did they make a phone call from the moon? And what about the Van Allen belts? The distinction that we made there that I want you to keep

52:52 You to keep in mind as you're listening to these things is that one, there was a very easy answer to both of those. It was a solvable problem. It was not a tricky problem. it's always easy to ask a question, but Those are questions that in the case of the moon landing, the NASA guys figured it out. They solve that problem as part of the system. So when Benjamin takes his pot shots at the moon landing, it's fundamentally disingenuous. These are also pot shots in the sense that they're easy. The difference is that just as in the episode on The Big Lie of the 20th century, if these If these things are not true, then the whole thing falls apart. So they're not pot shots in the sense that they're cheap shots,

53:39 that they're they're fake. It's that they're easy because they're there's gimme. If the complexity of these systems is to be believed, they never could have evolved in place as we're told they evolved. So it's it's an internally inconsistent claim that falls apart when you actually examine it, you don't need to they're the ones who are effectively resorting to to faith. They're saying, well, then a miracle occurred. And they won't call it a miracle, obviously, because their whole reason for going down this path of not glorifying God by what they look at, their purpose in their scientific inquiry is denying God. We'll say given that there is no God, how then do we explain this system? As Corey's laying out, you can't you can't explain an eyeball or

54:32 cilia if you cannot account for God creating it, in place as a whole functional thing. Just like Adam. Adam was an entire man. Had all his parts in all the right places, had forty six chromosomes, all the stuff was there It wasn't finished until God said it was very good. But as God made the things, they were done. And they were conceived in God's mind. I guess that's how scripture says it. So we can say that. God doesn't have a mind. I mean, it's it's another one of those irreducibility problems, except it's the infinite one. You really don't want people messing with that because when you try to introspect how God works as though he's an amoeba, you're gonna become a very splendid heretic.

55:17 But even just looking at the smallest things, the arguments fall apart. So part of the reason we did this episode after the big lie and conspiracy theories is that here's an example of when you apply Proper scrutiny to the fundamentals of the claims, the claims fall apart. And that's the distinction between somebody like Benjamin saying, well, that can't have happened because of X, Y, and Z, and us saying, well, that can't have happened because of X, Y, and Z. The X, Y, and Z, if you're not thinking about it, will seem like it's, you know, just it's pot shots. It's just, well, you said this and they said that, and so what can be true? If you can clearly demonstrate that the claim itself is falsifiable, then

55:59 you're left with the rest of it. And in a case of these things like these evolutionary processes so called, literally nothing is possible. If you believe what they are saying about how these things came about and you look at what we have, they couldn't have come about. So these questions are the important questions for I hate to use the word debunking, but that's really what it is. For debunking the claims of evolutionists and the claims of those who say that, well, you know, and particularly theistic evolutions, who say maybe that maybe they'll they'll put Adam on the sixth day where it ceases to be metaphorical, but then you have this long period of p time before that where other stuff was happening and then God

56:43 kind of congealed mankind at the last minute and then landed it and then it became real. But before that we had amoeba and we had evolution and all this stuff. Even if you ignore the death part from the scripture intro, the math still doesn't work. The f the physics and the chemistry still doesn't work. The biology itself is literally impossible in their own system. So I just wanted to point out that those episodes previously dealing with weighing evidence are they're a crucial part of just being good at thinking. Like one of the overarching themes of Stone Choir, apart from the theology stuff, is we hope that anyone who's listening will get better at thinking. Because you don't have to be smart to be careful.

57:26 You don't have to be smart to do a good job and not being hoodwinked. You know, Cory, like I said, Cory knows a whole lot more about the science than I do. He could probably trick me, but I at least know enough that he would have to be doing a really good job. And so whether it's him or it's someone else, you know, there was there was a post that came up a couple months ago on Reddit where someone was making an anonymous claim about biological aliens. And I read it and it checked out. It's consistent with my beliefs about so-called aliens, that they're demonic, that they're real physical manifestations using created material for for evil for demonic purposes. And so I I sent that to someone who has a

58:11 PhD in this stuff and said, I my smell test passes with this. I can't see anything obviously wrong with it, but I know that I could be tricked because I'm I'm not that knowledgeable about it. And so I asked someone who knew whole knew a whole lot more about the specific claims in the article. And he said, yeah, it basically makes sense. So it's good to have someone you can refer to to help you with smell tests, but even if at a basic level, just being careful about thinking and analyzing things can give you the foundation that it's going to be a lot harder for you to fall for stuff that's plainly dumb. And so the things we're going to go over, although the the scientific inquiries are complex, we'll we'll link to some of the papers

58:50 and some videos that go into a ton of detail on this stuff. And if you're excited about that, cool. Like it I don't find that interesting because I don't worry about it. But if it's something that worries you, I would say go look at the data. But I would also say if you're worried that the evidence is going to invalidate scripture, then it doesn't matter what evidence you find because you have a spiritual problem first. You have a spiritual problem of not believing believing scripture, even when it's in a ration irrational, because sometimes it is. I mean, miracles are irrational to say that God did something that's outside the bounds of material creation is irrational. It's reason cannot explain the things why we call it a miracle.

59:31 Something also is in episode six. So it's okay for there to be miracles, and that's another reason why this episode is important, because there are miracles. God does creative impossible things that are not impossible for him because he's God. They're impossible for us to explain in some cases, particularly when we try to make up fairy tales like some of this stuff. And so these attacks on the six days of creation, not only is it an attack on original sin and an attack on Christ's redeeming work in the world. But it's also just an attack on the supernatural, on whether or not God can do these things. Forget for a moment, did He the fundamental denial of someone who's concerned that unless I see the fact I can believe the Bible,

1:00:23 that's not a question of did he. That's a question of can he? And if you believe that God can't do something, then we're not talking about the same God because the God that we as Christians hold to is infinite. He's omnipotent. he knows everything. He can do anything. Nothing is beyond his ability. that's literally the definition of God. Like it's it's another one of those systems where when you start looking at the definitions, they describe the thing inextricably. There's no way to remove or subtract or or it's all ha it all has to fit together, just like these tiny examples. And I think frankly, that's to me, I see that also as evidence of the existence of God. That from the smallest to the largest, you know, whether you're looking

1:01:06 at the structure of an atom or the structure of a galaxy, they're shaped the same way. You got something really heavy and big in the middle, and you have a cloud of stuff circling around it. God loves these patterns and they play out over and over in creation. Why? 'Cause it's what he wanted to do. We just we're along for the ride and it's how everything works and we should enjoy it. And if you're trying to figure stuff out, that's good. It's important to try to figure stuff out. Just be clear that if you're looking at evidence and weighing it to judge scripture, you've got it backwards. When we do these subjects about science and things like that, we never want to give the impression that we are subjecting scripture to

1:01:48 our own reason or our own senses. That's never the point we want to make. We want to make that having believed in what scripture says as best we possibly can, with absolute faith to the best of the ability God's given us, then what? Then we look at these things and it turns out that as I said earlier, believing that God did this stuff is actually the easiest sell of all. It's far easier than believing the theories that are presented to explain the world without God. You mentioned tricking people, and that's actually exactly the point that I have here as my next item on this list as it were. Evolutionists play fast and loose when it comes to three distinct concepts. These are all evolutionary concepts in the broader sense of the

1:02:40 term evolution, not just in the biological sense, because you have evolution of, say, the pencil over time as it is refined in terms of its design. But the three distinct concepts are morphological evolution, conceptual evolution, and biochemical evolution, the last one being the most properly biological of all of them, although morphological is also biological in this sense. But the issue here is that scientists, evolutionists, particularly science apologists, so called, will either deliberately or carelessly conflate these, and they are not identical, they are quite distinct. To give some examples to make this easier to understand, a bicycle is morphologically the predecessor of the motorcycle.

1:03:39 It is also conceptually the predecessor. It is not biochemically the predecessor. We're dealing with mechanical systems here, non-biological mechanical systems, because of course there are biological mechanical systems. You are, to some degree, a series of biological machines. But morphologically is just simply speaking in terms of form, using the Greek there. And so you have something that is, with regard to its form, the antecedent of something else. And so that would be the case with various kinds of transport. You can go from the bicycle to the motorcycle or from the bicycle to the car, these are similar in form to some degree. They are also similar to some degree in concept. They are forms of transportation using wheels to get you from point

1:04:36 A to point B. Now, conceptually, if we expand the concept, a bicycle can be the conceptual antecedent of an airplane. It is It is not the morphological antecedent of an airplane, most certainly, and biochemical we've left aside because it's not even involved in this realm at this point. But when it comes to biology, this becomes a major problem for the evolutionist, because you can say that the eye spot on some simple relatively speaking creature is perhaps the conceptual antecedent of the mammalian eye, but it is most certainly not the biochemical antecedent, and so it is not an argument for evolution. The evolutionist is looking at it as an intelligent being from the outside and saying this is conceptually related to this, well that's actually

1:05:31 proof of a creator of an intelligence relating concepts. They'll never admit that. But giving that there is not that biochemical relationship, you cannot say that the one is evolutionarily the antecedent of the other. And so it's important to be careful when someone brings up these arguments to identify which one of these kinds of evolution is in play. Because evolutionists have to prove morphological and biochemical. They don't have to prove conceptual, although conceptual is a problem for them because if you prove conceptual, you're really proving there's intelligence involved in some way. But they'll play fast and loose because they expect you not to pay close enough attention and just say okay, well, an eye spot

1:06:18 detects photons and so it must be the antecedent of the eye. No, it's not. They are biochemically distinct and you cannot get from one to the other using the systems of the one, in this case, the eye spot getting to the eye. And so it is not proof for evolution. But before we get into really the last part of this episode, which would be the philosophical issues, and I don't know if we'll go over all of them. The episode might run a little long if we do that. There are a few major problems I want to highlight before we move on. I've touched on a couple of them to some degree. I touched on the issue of abiogenesis, how do you explain that we have life? How did it arise from non life? That's the issue of abiogenesis.

1:07:07 There's no answer. in the scientific literature. You may have heard of an experiment back in the nineteen fifties, in which some scientists set up a supposedly primordial soup that that was theoretically the conditions of some primordial earth, and then passed a very high voltage through it, and wound up with some precursors to certain chemicals that are necessary for life. And that's possible they did that. There has been absolutely no progress in seventy years on that front. They have not been able to make any progress toward creating more complex materials, molecules, etc needed for life. And that's with the application of intelligence, which is of course a fundamental problem with all of these experiments.

1:08:02 They all run afoul, necessarily, of the very sort of strictures that should be in place for any experiment designed to prove evolution. Because all of them have intelligent input. If you're saying that an intelligence can create conditions and then apply energy or what have you, some outside factor to a system and create life, you haven't proved evolution. You've proved intelligent design. The only way you could prove evolution is if you were to find some sort of primordial planet out there that approximates Earth, and then watch it for millions of years. If life arises, okay fine. Evolution is true. You have to make sure that you didn't have life arise on the planet because you contaminated the planet.

1:08:54 But that's the only way to do it. If you are setting up an experiment as an intelligent actor, you have already violated what is necessary as preconditions to prove your conclusion. You've defeated yourself before you started. The other issue, one of the other issues of the four, is chirality. This sort of adds a level of complexity to the biochemistry. And two things, or a thing in two forms, is chiral if it is asymmetric in such a way that the structure and its mirror image are not superimposable. That sounds complicated, but stick your hands in front of your face and look at them. Your hands are chiral. And you know this because you've probably accidentally tried to put on the wrong glove at some point.

1:09:46 You cannot, no matter how you orient it, put on the left glove on the right hand, or vice versa. Because your hands are chiral. They're not superimposable. You can't just reorient the one to be the other. And that's why your gloves are handed. They do not fit on the wrong hand. Many molecules, many of the building blocks of life, including amino acids, are chiral. Now there are about five hundred some amino acids, but really the relevant ones are the alpha amino acids, of which there are twenty two, twenty naturally occurring. These are the ones that form proteins. These are obviously very important for life. Nineteen out of twenty of them are L chiral, which is to say left handed. You cannot use the other.

1:10:36 You cannot make use of the right-handed version. In fact, it's going to cause problems in many cases. This is also relevant in the pharmaceutical industry, because, believe it or not, drugs, many of them, are handed. The molecules in them are handed. They are either left handed or right handed, and if you use the wrong version, it may very well kill you instead of help you. That is how important chirality can be. The same is true of the naturally occurring compounds, the wrong one may very well destroy the cell. And so this is just an additional layer of complexity, and leading into my next point, an additional problem with probability, because it significantly decreases the probability of creating the molecule you want by chance anyway.

1:11:25 If you have an intelligently designed system, it does it by design. If you have a randomly designed, as it were, system, well it has to do it according to probability, and the probabilities here simply don't work. I'll get into more of the specifics in the philosophical section section of the episode. But even given the immense amount of time that fine, I am willing to grant to the evolutionist that the universe is billions of years old. I also believe it's six thousand years old. I have an article on that, I will put it in the show notes. But even if you take the billions of years old and give them that time in order for life to evolve, well you can't actually give them the eleven or twelve or thirteen or however many

1:12:09 billions of years they want. Give them fifty, I don't care. You can't give them that because you have the age of the Earth, which is four and a half billion supposedly, even if you don't subtract the time from them for the Earth cooling from the molten phase according to their cosmology. Even if you give them four and a half billion, it doesn't work. The probability does not play out, there's not enough time. There are a lot of reasons for that, some of them are very complicated. I'll give a couple examples that are very easy to understand in the philosophical section. But the final of the four major problems that I want to highlight before moving on is the information problem. This is the easy information problem.

1:12:49 There's also a hard one, which is in the next section. The easy information problem, very simple to understand, but truly insurmountable, to date, for the evolutionist. Within a biological system, no evidence has ever been presented of the creation of novel to that system information Now you may think, how can that possibly be true? We have Darwin's finches. We won't get into some of the funnier bits of Darwin's finches, he mislabeled things and lost specimens, but other than that. That does not prove the creation of novel information, because that did not happen according to the creation of novel information. You're probably more familiar with dog breeds than you are with the various subspecies of finch or what have you.

1:13:42 Dog breeds are created through selective breeding that results in the loss of information. A Pomeranian has less genetic information than whatever the original ancestor, dog, or wolf was. From the original ancestor, the one that came off Noah's Ark, you could arrive at all of the current species through the selective loss of information over successive generations. You cannot get back to that original dog, that original canid, from what we have today, because the information has been lost. That is what we have been able to demonstrate, through experiments and just through breeding animals. If you lose information selectively, you can create subspecies. That's what happened with human beings.

1:14:38 Through the selective loss of information, we went from what was present in depending how far back you want to go, Adam or the sons of Noah, to the various nations we see today. You cannot get back to them from us. The information has been lost. This is a fundamental problem for the evolutionist because evolution necessitates it relies upon the ability to create novel information that has not been demonstrated, and if you cannot demonstrate that, then evolution is necessarily false. This leads into the philosophical section and the hard information problem. The hard information problem is simply this. Information can neither be created nor destroyed. Now I said information can be lost, that's a different thing.

1:15:33 You can lose information from a system. The information's still exists in sort of a grand sense. The information itself is not destroyed. This gets into the difference between instance and form and the mind of God. We won't get into that. It's constant, that's maybe for another episode. But the fundamental point is simply that information can neither be created nor destroyed. This is a hard information problem philosophically for the evolutionist. Because again, evolution relies on the creation of novel information at least within a given biological system, and that has not been demonstrated to happen as I mentioned before. Now, surely someone listening, at some point, or someone who has sent

1:16:16 a clip of this episode, what have you, is going to say aha black holes. They destroy information, and so information can be destroyed. Two problems with that. One, we don't know that black holes destroy information, there's the issue of Hawking radiation and various other things. But two, and more saliently, the person raising this objection is undoubtedly going to be the I love science type. Beyond the event horizon, nothing is knowable, according to the best of our current science and certainly the best of our current technology. And so anything beyond the event horizon is purely conjecture. Therefore, it is not falsifiable, therefore, it is not per the terms set by the scientific community itself science.

1:17:08 It is conjecture. It is no more compelling, in a hard sense, than fiction. And so again, I would highlight that adaptation is driven by loss, and this is another facet of this information problem, because the information drops out of the system, it's not destroyed, it is simply no longer available to that biological system. The next philosophical issue that I would raise is this a relatively simple one, very easy to understand this one, get a firm grasp of it, but it is absolutely fatal to the evolutionist. And that is the difference between analog and digital information. Analog information is what it is because it is what it is. Digital information is what it is because some intelligence defined it to

1:18:04 be that. This is a fundamental distinction. So if we use the most basic example, pick up any physical object, it is what it is because it is what it is. There's information there, in the broad sense of information. That's analog information. Digital is something entirely different. So the pen I'm holding is a pen, analog information, it's a pen because it's a pen. The word pen is digital. The word pen means this thing that I am holding. It references really the form, the concept of a pen, but it also references the specific instance that I do have in my hand right now. That is digital information. The letters PEN reference pen because we as human beings have defined it to do so. An intelligence is required for digital information to have meaning.

1:19:02 Digital information does not mean what it means because it inherently means that. DNA is digital, because DNA is a language. It is a language based on AGTC. Or if you're talking about RNA instead, AGUC, Uracil instead of thymine. It is based on these base pairs, which are used to construct the human and animal genomes, pretty much life on Earth. If DNA is digital, which it in fact is, then you need an intelligence to have defined what these mean, why they mean that. PEN means pen, because humans define that. DNA means human being in the case of our genome because God defined that. This is a fundamental problem for the evolutionist.

1:20:03 You do not have analog information contained in the genome. You have digital information stored there. And that is why there is so much information stored in the human and other genomes. Because it's digital. And this leads into my next point. Many will say that there's a system or something in the world that has the appearance of design is a misnomer. Now we do use it in a way that is fair, I will say. If you were to throw a bunch of marbles on the floor, and they formed what appeared to be a pattern, that is, to some degree, the appearance of design. But there is also design in play. And there is design in play, because all of those systems that contributed to that appearance of design, that appearance of a pattern, were

1:21:03 in fact themselves designed. Gravity is a constant set by God. The density of the marbles is a thing set by God, the way these interact, the way that kinetic forces interplay, all of these various things are design, and so the result is the result of design. And so we do a disservice to ourselves when we say that something has the appearance of design and don't really think about what it is we're saying. It on a superficial level has the appearance of design, but on a fundamental level, it is still the result of design. This is a game that evolutionists play. They'll try to say that something has the appearance of design, and they'll use this to gloss over all sorts of things that very clearly do not have the appearance of design, but have the reality

1:21:51 of design. So we could go back to the vision system or blood clotting or neurochemistry or any of a thousand different things. These are designed, very obviously designed, and they want you to disbelieve your lying eyes, as it were. They want to tell you that well, obviously it looks like it was designed, but you can't possibly believe that because it can't be designed I'll get into that point in a little bit here. But just be careful when someone is using this appearance of design argument. Most likely the person, if it's related to biochemistry, related to biology evolution, is attempting to mislead you, is attempting to hand wave away something that very clearly has design, not just the appearance of

1:22:41 design. And this leads into another argument that is often raised. This one is particularly popular amongst the Reddit set, and that is the argument that begins with given enough time and then add whatever you want after that. Fundamentally this works because most people are enumerate, and because most people are not going to analyze the problems that arise, regardless of how much time there is. And so for instance, if you have A complex system composed of say five parts. Picked an arbitrary number, it doesn't matter for the example. Composed of a number of parts. If all of these parts must arise together, and any one part arising by itself not only causes the likelihood of the other parts arising to decrease,

1:23:44 but makes it impossible in some cases, no matter how much time you have, you are never going to get to the complex system arising in toto. And this happens in biology. This is not just an example that I'm picking out of nowhere. If you use the primordial soup that biologists like to pretend existed, let's say it did. Let's say you have the primordial soup. Let's say you get a reaction that produces one of the precursors needed for a certain biological system. That reaction in a biological system is probably mediated by enzymes, it almost certainly is. It will have various processes that spin it up, processes that spin it down. Just like blood clotting. If you didn't have something that stopped the clotting, you would just

1:24:36 become one giant clot and die. Which if you want to experience that, you can go get a booster shot. But the problem with the primordial soup is that there's nothing to mediate this reaction. So even if you have the enzyme needed to start the reaction, or let's say it's a reaction that doesn't need an enzyme, it just happens very slowly, all of your precursors are going to turn into your product. The problem is that many of those precursors are shared by other parts of the complex system. If this particular part of the complex system arises first, it will use up all the precursors. There will be no precursors for the other parts of the complex system to arise. Your system has just defeated itself, and it doesn't matter how much

1:25:22 time you have, because you have now made it impossible to get to the complex system. And this props up everywhere. I've given just one simple example of this. This happens time and time again, regardless of how much time there is. And as we'll see, there's not enough time, even according to their arguments for billions of years. I guess briefly here I should respond to an objection that will come up inevitably regarding supposedly transitional species. There are certain scientists, archaeologists, paleontologists who will argue that we have discovered non-humid hominid species. There are a number of responses to this. One response is that if you showed them the skull of the elephant man, they would probably identify it as some non human creature,

1:26:20 despite the fact that he was just a malformed man. And this is the case with many sorts of deformities we have. You could show them the skeleton of a dwarf, and they might tell you that it's no it's an ancient hominid that was of short stature. No, they're just deformities that happen to human beings. If you find a deformed skeleton you haven't found another species, you've found a deformed skeleton, we have those to day. But as we mentioned in a previous episode, Europeans have Neanderthal DNA. Asians have Denisovin, and Africans have the so called ghost DNA. Are these extinct nonhuman species. No. They are no longer extant subspecies of the human species. The evidence of non-humid hominids is not only incredibly thin,

1:27:18 it doesn't actually prove any of the supposed things they claim it proves. And the more you look into it, the less convincing it becomes. On a related note to that, there is the issue of radiometric dating. Radiometric dating, very simply, I'm sure many listening already know this. But it is simply based on the fact that certain forms of atoms naturally decay over time. It may be a very long time, it may not be relatively speaking that long of a time. There are different pairs that are used for different lengths of time. And so carbon fourteen is probably the one you've heard the most. It's not the most important one for science, but it's probably the one you've heard the most. There are other compounds that decay at various rates.

1:28:15 There is a fundamental problem with radiometric dating. And that is that the starting conditions are unknown, necessarily unknown. The starting conditions are conjecture. Which is not science. That's conjecture. It's a different thing. Science in the sense that those who advocate for evolution would use it. In order to say that we now have this proportion of this isotope. Therefore this item is X years old. You must know the starting proportion of the isotope. We will go ahead and say that yes, probabilistically you can say that if you know the starting proportion and you know the ending proportion, you can calculate the time. That's fine. That's simple statistics that that follows. The problem is you can't know the starting proportion.

1:29:12 And you can't know the starting proportion because in many cases the claim is that it was millions or billions of years ago. No one was there to measure. And so it is based on conjecture. Being based on conjecture, it really isn't even persuasive. And not only that, there have been many cases where objects of known age have been taken and radio dated, and they have wound up with wildly different results that were wildly wrong. One particular example of this is they have taken fresh rock produced by volcanoes to various labs to date it, and they've returned completely inconsistent results. A million years, eight million years, four million years. Turns out it's twelve years old. So So radiometric dating is not very convincing.

1:30:07 Really it's not convincing at all. It's the same sort of problem that we have with a lot of the climate data today, where they will say it's some amazing new record and it's it's many percent off norms when the satellite data goes back 10, 15, 20 years. The instrument and data in some cases may go back a hundred years or so. And if you happen to be on the oceans, then you'll have some records from the eighteen hundreds where ship captains were recording as best they could with you know, obviously non-calibrated instruments. And so you can have some vague sense, but for us to claim today that what we are observing is normal and then to extrapolate back in time. As Corey just said, that that's not science.

1:30:57 Like it's it's scientific inquiry. Like it's fine to try to model stuff. That's intelligent. But you don't make absolute claims when you have cr when you put garbage in, you don't then swear by it. And you certainly don't browbeat people who think something different when your evidence is functionally no better than their evidence. Yeah, it's again that's why we began we began with scripture because as Christians, the Word of God is our evidence. It is the standard by which we evaluate reality. And so if Scripture says that the sun rises in the west and we see the sun rising in the east, I'm gonna believe the Bible as a matter of faith. The thing is, we don't have to believe things that are counterfactual

1:31:46 because what we're told in scripture never ends up being in opposition to what we find in creation. There are things where we can't maybe come up with a scientific explanation. You know, obviously if if the rocks on the earth appear to be millions of years old, that's a it's an inconsistency, but it's not an inconsistency that undermines scripture. It's something that should be addressed. And that's part of the reason that we're doing this episode is that Christians should have sound answers to this. I don't want Christians to be shrieking about Darwin and just just being completely incoherent. You know, that's what happens to Corey and I when we try to talk about race. Race is genetic. It's genetic in a way that's explainable in scripture, going back six

1:32:38 thousand years and going back to the flood, everything, all the variation that we see today is explainable both in scientific terms and in scriptural terms. The two are not at odds. You know, the mention of dog breeds, most of the the variations of dog breeds today are less than two hundred years old. Some of the primary forms go back three and four thousand years, but when you look at the incredible variety today, there I saw one list that showed like four hundred and fifty distinct dog breeds. Most of those are new. And they're new in very substantially obvious ways, as Cory is saying, if you were an alien who landed on Earth and you dug up a Parsons Russell Terrier and you dug up a Great Dane,

1:33:24 you might you know, if you're pretty good at it, you might be able to determine them morphologically they were similar at some point, you would never necessarily conclude that they were the same species from those two examples. Because he said, like, either one is a very tiny amateur version of the other, or one is a mutant version or deformed or something. You would never think they were both dogs. You know, we because we know the time periods are like, well, yeah, that's they're both clearly dogs. We can we can analyze their genes and we know the history of the breeds. So when we look at data and then we look at scripture, as Christians, we have to believe scripture, and then you know, I hope

1:34:01 that the data accords. Like it's it's easier for me as a Christian, as a young earth creationist, when I point to these things And it's consistent with what I already believe. Now it doesn't undermine my faith that it doesn't, but it's easier in this world, especially in this day, to be credible to someone who's also intelligent and they believe you know they're well informed based on the cutting edge version of the knowledge that they're given. If you have an explanation that doesn't make you look like you just say you have to believe my crazy skydaddy religion and you have to take all these articles of faith. As I said at the beginning, it turns out that when you go down this path of theistic evolution and

1:34:42 long periods of time, it turns out that you have to have a de greater degree of faith in the theories presented by modern scientists than you would if you simply believed in the six days of creation. Yeah, in the case of some of the time periods necessary to achieve some of the results, even conceivably, even for some of the results that you know, where it's completely a random process and they say, well, given a long, you know, it's the the million monkeys that a typewriter a typewriter's m may eventually produce the works of Shakespeare, that level of absurd speculation requires a duration of the existence of the universe that's orders of magnitudes beyond orders of magnitude beyond what we know to be true based on all available data.

1:35:28 You know, I saw some of the latest speculation was maybe the Earth's or the universe is twenty six point seven billion years old or something. I don't care. Like it doesn't it doesn't concern me if the thirteen point eight billion, which is a number I've used in the in episode six. If that turns out to be wrong, who cares? Like it's I'm always glad when we're learning more about how God put creation together because it's cool. It's interesting. I every week I tune in to look at the latest James Webb telescope pictures and data because they're looking back to the very beginnings of the creation of the universe. And what's funny is they're finding more and more impossible things. the further back they look, they're finding, for example, much more mature

1:36:09 galaxies that according to their current models couldn't possibly exist. You couldn't have a a galaxy as fully flushed out as some of the galaxies they're finding, you know, just a couple hundred million years after the big bang. That's not possible based on any of their theories. It's possible based on my theory because I just believe that God put the stuff together and he set it in motion in six days. And so as we're looking, you know you know, through thirteen point six, you know, five or four billion light years of distance for that light to travel to us. Yeah, it's one of the questions that I think we we skipped over earlier. If the universe is only six thousand years old, how do we see in the light?

1:36:49 Well, as we said at the beginning, God created light before he created stars. How does that work? I don't know. But the system was complete when he said it was very good. And so if there's light appearing, I think that's cool. I think like that's it. You know, it's a st it's a stupid response, but I think that's cool. God put a star 14 billion years away, and then he put all of the photons from that star all the way along so that any human being at any point of observ observation would be able to see the light. Why? So we know the star is there. And because it was a complete system. Like God didn't put the photons in transit just for our sake or for our sake at all. He did it because he wanted a complete system.

1:37:36 And And when it's set in motion and everything just works, the scientists who deny God have to try to find some explanation for patterns. And the explanation is in the system in the sense that all of it just works. And I think it's the the normalcy bias that has really completely overwhelmed modern scientific thought to think, well, you know, this exists so obviously this must exist exist. You know, and sometimes they'll talk about the the unlikeliness of the creation of life or whatever and in particular the fact that there's no evidence for life anywhere else in the universe. I I don't think that's a strong evidence against the scientific arguments against scripture for the simple reason that in my lifetime we didn't

1:38:20 have any proof that other planets existed. It's only, you know, in in I think maybe Zoomer lifetimes, certainly millennial lifetimes, that we've actually found physical evidence for exoplanets. Before that was just theoretical. So we're always finding new things. But I can say as a Christian we're not going to find life because this is where God put life. Everything else is dead. Will that be the case in the new Earth? I don't know. Personally I think it probably won't be. I think there will probably be life elsewhere and I think we'll probably take it with us. I think that God put all that stuff out there, including the planets, for us to actually explore. I don't think it's gonna happen in this earth, but I think

1:38:59 in the new earth, we're still gonna have the urge to explore. God made us to you know to fill the earth and subdue it. All this space, I don't think we're just stuck in the some corner of the Milky Way galaxy. I think that we will be able to travel. You know, it's not a matter of faith. It's just my personal opinion. Because when I see the stuff, it's it's cool. And I think that people want to go see interesting stuff. You know, it's back to the the prior episode just dealing with conspiracy theories, one of the worst things that's come out of the skepticism about the moon landing is people saying space is fake and gay. It's not even real. You know, the flat earth stuff ends up reducing the immense beauty

1:39:41 and splendor of creation, of God's creation, that testifies to his glory. I just don't want to rob God of the glory that he ascribes to himself. As he said in in the ending chapters of Job that the heavens testify to his glory, all of it. Everything we see in in this world, everything that we see in the heavens, it's all God revealing himself as himself. Not only to us, but just for its own sake. He put all this stuff together. There's stuff we'll never ever be able to understand. No matter how long we look or how hard we think about it, there's stuff that's too far away to see. Well it's not there for us. It's there because God wanted to do it. And as a Christian, I take comfort in that. It never, when there's new discoveries, it never yeah, every time as

1:40:28 I said in the the episode on scripture, it never undermines my faith because it's always more of what I always knew. Yeah, the Genesis passage we opened with, it's the very first thing that I personally read as a child when my parents were teaching me to read the first novel thing that they sent in front of me and said, Go read this. It was Genesis one and following. I knew the things the scientists are only now discovering because I believed those simple words. They weren't scientific explanations. They were explanations that a four-year-old could understand, or that Moses could understand, in an age where you know, they had astronomy, but they didn't know the details we know. It didn't matter.

1:41:07 God gave us what we need in Scripture to believe in Him, but it's not at odds with the revelation of God in all of creation. So I think these subjects are important for us to be conversant in because we're a part of the world. We're a part of being able to speak to others. And in particular today, when we have a lot of people who are looking at the church for the moral questions. If we attack those people on the basis of our being bad at scientific explanations, that's going to undermine their ability to come to the faith. It truly will. As I said before, if you sound retarded as a Christian when you talk about things that someone knows something about, they're not going to take you seriously.

1:41:51 It's not that everyone has to be conversant and everything. As I said, like I'm Corey's going to do an infinitely better job at explaining some of the science than I could. I would give a much simpler version. That's fine. If you want to go in depth, the depth is there, but the anchor should not be perfect knowledge of scientific facts about creation, the anchor should be scripture and what God has revealed in the Word. Because when the revelation of the Word is consistent with the revelation of creation, which is always the case, that's something for us to give thanks for as Christians and for us to be excited about sharing with unbelievers. And for those who are curious, we should be able to say

1:42:31 this book that's thousands of years old is consistent, it's consonant with the things that you know in the things where there's an apparent disagreement. Let's talk through it because it turns out that your faith-based belief system in what you've been taught is actually a much bigger stretch than our faith-based belief system that a God spoke the universe into existence six thousand years ago and everything just worked. I take comfort in that and I hope to share that comfort with others as well. That's an important point, and you raised it previously as well, but it's one of the remaining five points I'd like to make in this section. It takes more faith to believe in science, so called, than it

1:43:15 does to believe in God. But fundamentally, it is important first to realize that both are based on faith You have to have faith in the science or you have to have faith in God. Now you can have faith in both to some degree, but you cannot believe the science where it contradicts what God says, if you have faith in God. Alternatively, you can have faith in the science and say that God is wrong. I wouldn't recommend that. But those are the two options. Science likes to claim, and this is one of the other remaining points, but science likes to claim that it is entirely objective, that it is truly empirical, it relies only on the senses and what can be measured and tested and falsified can be reduced to data

1:44:14 somewhere and then analyzed. But that's simply not true. For one, science largely focuses on induction, which is the inference of a rule from specific data points. So again it's just empiricism. As opposed to deduction which is the use of the rule to determine what will happen in individual cases. Now science does both. It tries to go up to the rule and then down from the rule. But science is largely an empirical enterprise. But fundamental to this empirical enterprise is really something taken perhaps somewhat ironically, from philosophy, from David Hume. And that is the exclusion of miracles of God, of anything that is not to the mind of the scientist, empirical. Now if you're ever at a trial, whether you're attorney, a party,

1:45:16 or member of the jury, the beginning of the trial phase starts with what is called void dire, which is just old French for speak truthfully. That is the interrogation, I guess you could say uncharitably, but is the interviewing of of the potential members of the jury panel, the members of the jury pool, to determine if they are suitable for the jury. During that phase, as the attorney, you have two kinds of ways to strike jurors from the pool and therefore not impanel them. They will not be part of the eventual jury that hears the case. The first is a challenge for cause. You have an infinite number of these. And the reason you have an infinite number of these is because a challenge for cause is a challenge where you have a cause.

1:46:11 So for instance, if you have someone in the jury pool who hates your client or thinks that all people who have your client's hair color are guilty of crimes, or whatever it happens to be, some cause that is a legitimate reason to dismiss this person from the jury pool. You can dismiss for cause, as long as you can state that cause and the judge accepts it. Which is to say that it's in the law. The other kind of judge that you have is what is called a peremptory challenge. A peremptory challenge is for use where you do not have a cause that you can state. Now you can read into that whatever you please, but where you cannot state a challenge for cause, you can use one of your peremptory challenges.

1:47:01 Now I say one of because you have a limited number. Depends on the venue and the kind of case as to how many you have, but you have to use them strategically and carefully. That's fine in a court of law, it has a place in certain venues. That should not be something that we use in scientific investigation. If you peremptorily exclude certain causes, certain explanations for phenomena, you have artificially limited yourself and crippled yourself, quite frankly, because you will not be able to arrive at a correct conclusion if the correct conclusion is contained with what you peremptorily excluded. If you peremptorily exclude something and it turns out that that thing is the cause of what you are investigating, there is no way

1:47:55 for you to arrive at the correct conclusion. And that is exactly what modern science does. Because modern science, as a peremptory exclusion, says that miracles do not take place, says that God does not exist, says that design is not the explanation for life. And if you do that, you necessarily have limited your field of investigation. And so modern science isn't really science because it's not attempting to find true knowledge, it is attempting to find an explanation for everything that exists in the absence of God. That is what modern science actually is. Modern science is simply a long, convoluted, complicated attempt to explain away God. Because they don't want to believe in God. It's not because there isn't evidence for God.

1:48:48 It's not because God doesn't have explanatory power, it's not because we can't look at creation and see that there was in fact a designer, that there is a designer. It's because they do not want God to be real, because they do not want to have to obey God. That is why science engages in the way that it does, and that is not properly science, that is an artificial construct that sh has no right to be called science. But that is what we have today. And one of the ways that science hand waves away very clear instances of something that is inexplicable according to their materialism or clearly shows design is they will call it an emergent property or an emergent phenomenon. Anytime you hear either of those phrases, you should be on maximum

1:49:48 guard. This person is probably or almost certainly trying to mislead you. One thing that some scientists have now started calling an emergent phenomenon is consciousness. They just hand wave away the problem of consciousness, which is one of the problems listed earlier, a serious problem that science, using its methods cannot explain, they hand wave it away by saying If you create the brain, that material that just as an effect of existing produces the mind. What's the problem with that? Well they don't give you any mechanism by which that happens. They don't give you a means, and not only that, it can't be falsified, it can't be tested, and so it isn't science by their own definition. But they constantly do this.

1:50:41 They encounter a hard problem they say all an emergent property, emergent phenomenon This is one of the ways they deliberately mislead you to make you believe that they have an answer for everything when they very clearly do not have an answer. And so the penultimate issue that I would like to address is I've said we would get into a little bit of math, and this is the little bit of math. We already mentioned DNA and RNA and the base pairs and those things. In a really very real, perhaps amusing sense human beings are fertilizer held together by sugar. If you don't get the joke, then you should look up the constituent parts of DNA. But the mathematics for this are very important. And here is why.

1:51:35 In the human genome, there are three billion base pairs. If you give the diploid number, so not giving a gamete, giving a somatic cell instead, six billion base pairs total. Including because you have two copies of each chromosome. Except for the sex chromosome, if you are male, then you have one X and one Y, as opposed to females who still have two copies. Assuming nothing has gone wrong. But you have six billion base pairs in your diploid cells. The number is a little higher for females versus males because the X chromosome is larger than the Y, but it's close enough. It's a little higher than six billion. So let's say we have these six billion base pairs. The claim is that Earth is four point five billion years old,

1:52:27 and again we'll give them even the amount of time necessary for it to cool from a molten state will give them those hundreds of millions of years whatever it happens to be. Some of you will undoubtedly already see a problem here. You need to have a correct, which is to say a human word, mutation, more than every single year, for the entire existence of the planet, in order to get from nothing to a human being. This becomes a very serious problem when you start taking into account, well, higher life forms have gestational periods. And not every mutation is in the right direction. Some mutations, in fact, most mutations, are deleterious. Some mutations result in death. There's war and famine and accident, misadventure.

1:53:21 The mathematics simply does not work. But let's look at some concrete numbers here so we can get a better idea of what is going on here in probability. When you speak of probability for things like this, and I will link an article that deals with this. It actually deals with copying and pasting passwords of all things, but it gives the math for this. It's an article I wrote some years ago. But the relevant numbers are the number of characters in your pool, which is to say the distinct characters, and then the number of characters for we'll call it a word. For the word you need to create. You need to arise, in this case by random chance. And so for the alphabet, you have twenty-six characters.

1:54:23 For a one character word, that means if you do random chance, roll a twenty six sided die, say you have a one in twenty six chance. If you do this every hour, you'll probably wind up getting the letter you want in just over a day. Doesn't take very much time. The same thing is true if you deal with the alphabet and basic punctuation, in this case, I'm just going to say space and period because that's what you need for just a basic sentence. But of course that's not complete yet, is it? Because I've only included lowercase. We have to include uppercase, so fifty-four characters. Now it takes about two days of rolling that die. Now a you know fifty four sided die, but rolling that die every hour to get that one character word that you need.

1:55:21 Well, let's bump that up a little bit to five. A five character word. We'll stick with our upper and lowercase and basic punctuation character set. Well now the odds instead of being one in fifty four are one in four hundred and fifty nine million one hundred and sixty five thousand and twenty four. It's now going to take you fifty two thousand four hundred and sixteen years to get that string. Let's again bump things up just a little bit. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. That's fifty six characters in our character set. How long would it take us rolling that die once every hour to arrive at that string? And the answer is one point one seven nine times ten to the ninety third years.

1:56:23 That's an incomprehensible number. But in order to put it a little bit more in context, not entirely, because once you start getting into exponents that large, it's very difficult to grasp them. The number of atoms in the universe is estimated to be ten to the eighty second. It would take you more years to create that simple string by chance than there are atoms in the universe. Which is really just a long and complicated way of saying it is mathematically impossible. You will never get a human being by random chance, no matter how much time you give the evolutionist, and the problem for the evolutionist is that he only has about four billion years. Which sounds like a very long time. Until you actually run the numbers, and then suddenly it doesn't work

1:57:19 whatsoever. And so I come to the last point that I want to make in this section. And this is a point that is a little different from the others. And the reason I want to make this point is that it is important for you to understand this specific point that I'm going to make, because in the years to come, it is going to become highly relevant to the Christian. Now, as mentioned earlier, there are irreducibly complex systems. There is no explanation for how you could go from something that does not have blood that clots, to a creature that has the sort of clotting capabilities that a mammal does, that a human being has. There is no way to explain that. We cannot get from the non existence of the system or some

1:58:15 supposed simple version biochemically up to the complicated system that we have today, the one that we see, the one that exists that must be explained by evolution if evolution is true. And here's the problem. In probably not too many years, we will see scientists devising so-called AI experiments to get from point A to point B, which is to say, to get from nothing to get to the complex system. And they will say, Well, look, the system found a path. The problem with this is that it will be impossible to replicate that properly, to analyze it whatsoever, and it will prove nothing, and the reason that it will prove nothing is that the scientist will have set the conditions for the experiment, and then the AI will

1:59:09 have modified them undoubtedly, but the result will not be falsifiable. The result will not be science. The result will be pure speculation. But they will try to use this to say, look, we have proved that evolution is true, and they will have proved no such thing. It is vitally important to understand the game that they are going to play, because this is going to happen, and it will not be that long before they start doing it. Some of them are probably already trying. But there will be papers published that will say we have explained how blood clotting occurs. This supposedly irreducibly complex system that we couldn't explain in the context of Neo Darwinian evolution, we have shown conclusively with AI that it's

1:59:54 possible. But again they will have shown no such thing. Because all they will have done is shown that if a scientist tells an AI to get from A to B, the AI will spit out something that supposedly gets from A to B. There will be no way to prove that that is true, there will be no way to falsify it, there will be no way to analyze it, subject to the very terms that science sets for itself, or any other terms, quite frankly. But this is something that is coming down the pipeline, and it will be used against Christians. It is a weapon from Satan, like much of the rest of AI, even if AI has certain promise in some areas, I think personally, it is dangerous to the point that we should ban it. This is something that Satan will use against the Christian faith, and

2:00:42 Christians have to be on guard against this. We live in an era where there are going to be novel challenges to the Christian faith, but at the same time they aren't novel. Because it's just Satan sewing doubt. It's what he's been doing all along. He just happens to have a new and shiny tool. There's no reason to believe the evolutionists when they hand wave away problems by ignoring them. There's no reason to believe the evolutionists when they conflate the morphological, the conceptual and the biochemical. There's no reason to believe the evolutionists when they hand wave away irreducible complexity. There's no reason to believe the evolutionist when they say that chirality, oh that doesn't matter, life could have arisen in some other way.

2:01:30 And there is no reason to believe them when in the not too distant future they come out and say, Well AI has proved. No it hasn't. They're just lying. As they've been doing all along. So we started this episode with five questions, and we didn't go into all of them in depth because some of them are really beyond the scope of this episode. Yes, we delved into the philosophy, but really only insofar as it directly touches on the question of evolution, which is the topic proper of this episode. We'll get into the others in some future episode. But the takeaway for the Christian, really. It isn't all the scientific information presented. It isn't the scientific information that will be in the show notes,

2:02:23 where you can get further detail on many of these subjects in really as much depth as you'd like. You could very well get a PhD in many of these, if you were so inclined. I personally am not. That's not the point. The takeaway of this episode Episode is really that you can choose between what God says and what godless scientists tell you to believe. And many come to this from the exact wrong side. They come at the question as if we should look at it from the way that really the evolutionists tell us we should. Look at all of these little shiny things we've collected and built up this system by expanding God. Because again, that's what they do.

2:03:23 They exclude God just as one of their preconditions, their presuppositions, they say there is no God. That is the exact wrong way to look at this. The way a Christian should look at these matters is if there is a God. That's the first question. Is there a God? If there is a God, then you look to the nature of that god. You look to what that god has said. Has he spoken to you? What has he told you? And so as a Christian, first and foremost you trust God. And so when you look to God's Word, you aren't looking to God's Word to find ways that it disagrees with science or ways science disagrees with God's Word. Because God is the fundamental foundation of truth. And God is the fundamental foundation of truth will never lie.

2:04:20 God is always true. Everything he says is true. Everything he says is reliable. And so we know as a matter of fact, as an absolute fact, that God's word is true. And so you look to God's word, and it is not God's word that we subject to science, it is science that we subject to God's word. If the scientists come to a conclusion that is contrary to Scripture, there are two possibilities. One, we have misinterpreted it, that is entirely possible. Not with regard to things that are clear. So the six days of creation literal days, very clear. Science, in so far as science supposedly disagrees, is wrong. But the other alternative is just that, that the scientists are in fact wrong. And so if the scientists say that scripture says X and the

2:05:14 scientists claim not X, we as Christians are bound to believe X, and the scientists are wrong. Now we can investigate with the tools that science uses to prove the scientists are wrong. There are many great Christian scientists who have done this, particularly when it comes to genetics, or when it comes to high level, say synthetic chemistry. Those sorts of fields tend to find men who don't believe in the dogma of Neo Darwinian evolution. Because it does not square with what they know about the world. Now you'll find some biologists who believe it, because they hand wave away the chemistry problems, the math problems, these problems, about which the biologist doesn't know that much. But Christians can very well investigate these problems, can delve into them,

2:06:05 can find ways in which they clearly agree with Scripture. We've gone over those in this episode on a number of topics. There are many more we could have addressed. We did not address everything because we didn't want the episode to run for sixty hours. But that fundamental takeaway is what it is vitally important, what we want you to hear in this episode, what we want you to remember from this episode, you can remember or forget the science as is useful to you in your life. It's useful to have a basic understanding of some of this stuff. You probably don't need to remember all of the various compounds that are involved in the cascade that is blood clotting. I don't remember them all. I have them written down, that's why I could read them.

2:06:56 But fundamentally, take away and remember that God is true and what he says is reliable, and so we come at it from almost the exact opposite direction of the scientists. The scientists assume there is no God, and then try to explain his creation, which of course is an insane proposition. It is impossible. We as Christians come at it from the exact opposite direction. We know there is a God, and so we look at creation through that lens, and we see his action in creation, we see his design in creation. We see creation as something that was built by an intelligent God Not as a clock from which he walked away after he spun it up, not what the deist claim, but as a god who is actively involved in creation, who is responsible for every cell division,

2:07:51 every coming together or separation of atoms or molecules or what have you, every last thing that happens in creation happens because God created it that way and permits it to happen or causes it to happen. Our God is an awesome God, who is in charge of all things, who is king over creation, who is in charge of all things, who mediates all things, as Scripture says, in whom we live and move and have our being. And so contrary to what the scientists, the evolutionists would claim, belief in God doesn't cripple the mind. Belief in God doesn't preclude you from answering these questions. Rather, belief in God is the only thing that enables giving an accurate answer, that enables you to give a true answer.

2:08:50 Because if you're the evolutionist, we went through a list of things you simply cannot answer. All of the questions with which we started this episode have answers for the Christian. Not one of them is answerable for the evolutionist This is one of their key arguments, one of their key dogmas, particularly when you get into the philosophy of science. The explanatory power of a theory, of a belief, what have you, matters matters. If something has no explanatory power, then it's false. What use is it? If you came up with a theory that explained absolutely nothing. At the absolute best that theory is irrelevant. If on the other hand, you have a theory that explains everything, that theory is extremely powerful, that theory is very relevant, that theory

2:09:46 is true. God explains, God gives an answer to each one of these questions. Evolution answers not one of them. Evolution has no explanatory power. God has infinite explanatory power. And no it's not the god of the gaps that certain neo atheists, certain new atheists attempt to argue. Because each one of those questions is a key question, is a vitally important question, is a question that has relevant to your life and the life of everyone else who ever has or ever will live. Because of course it's important to know why is there anything instead of nothing? How is there immaterial and not just material? How is there life and not just matter? Why is there intelligent life? Why is there sapient life?

2:10:36 Why do humans exist? Why are we self aware? How are we self aware? What does it mean to have qualia? All of these things are answerable for the Christian, and these are key matters of life. Why believe in a theory that cannot answer any of these? These aren't little gaps in knowledge. These are fundamental gaping chasms in human knowledge that science can never fill And yet, for the Christian, we know the answer to each and every one. The answer ultimately is God. But there are, of course, answers leading up to that. I can give a concrete, firm answer to each one of those, and undoubtedly we will do that. But the takeaway for the Christian, again, is that we come to these problems knowing that God exists, and therefore, there is an answer,

2:11:31 there is a true answer, there is a right answer, and that answer is grounded in God as Creator. As we confess in the first article of the Creed. I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. God is the creator of all things, He is the foundation of all things. He is the explanation. And as Christians, that means we have the only true answer. The scientists ultimately have nothing.