Where we ended last week, we kind of started, I think, to see that we have a circular argument going on. What's bad about a circular argument? Anybody? It never ends. It never ends? Be more physical than that. You're assuming things for each step. Oh, okay. Yeah, you're assuming things for each step. Okay, yeah, yeah. And those assumptions sort of, yeah, that each step assumes that the other one was true and it sort of wraps around again. Yeah, let's hear what's a good example of a circular argument. You know, I know that this is white because all dry erase boards are white. And let's see here. And I know that all dry erase boards are white because this is a dry erase board and it's white. You know, I mean, these things, and that's not a good example, but basically, yeah, you just end up running in a circle because the authority for one statement depends on the other one being true. And then you go to that other one and you find out that it depends on the first one again. Usually these circles are a bit bigger, three, four, five steps. And it's hard because you have to follow these arguments all the way to the end to realize that you wrapped around again and you're not making any sense. Now, if you're having an argument or a debate with somebody, you can nail them on a circular argument. You can say, that's a circular argument, and write that in there. If you can prove it, you win. You're done. It's over, and all that's left is the mini cupcakes. Which, by the way, those are for everybody. We'll care about them. And I don't even mind if you use the middle class and grab one because, you know, it's that important. They're good guys. They're so good. It's lemon-filled. Lemon-filled, right? With raspberries on top. They're made by a professional. Alright, so we've got So it sounds like a circular argument is bad, and if you're trying to back up some statement of yours with a circular argument, Generally speaking, it is bad. It means that you've not really established anything. You've just established a bunch of things that depend on each other. But how do you get into that circle? Now, unfortunately, when we're talking about some things, we don't have any place else to go. If you're talking about what is the ultimate authority for truth, I might say that it's the Bible. It's the Word of God. And you tell me, well, prove it. If the word of God appeals to some other authority to tell you that it's the ultimate authority, guess who's the ultimate authority now? The thing I depended upon. Well, I know that it's the ultimate authority because this thing says it is. Oh, then that thing's really the ultimate, isn't it? And I just failed because ultimate means it's the last one to change. You know, it's the most important thing. It's top of the heap all authority Should come down from the Word of God into everything that we believe and everything we practice But it doesn't you know, I mean, you know, it doesn't typically Anyway, the there's a problem though because a lot of people a lot of people who will argue with you about this sort of thing they They think oh well You know, I think I've got you, because you're telling me that, you know, who is God? Well, you know, we tell them what the Bible says God is. You know, He's the Spirit, three-person, the Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit, the Creator of all things, the Lord of all things, all that stuff. We tell them all that, and they say, well, how do you know? And we say, because the Bible told us so, just like the old children's song. And they say, oh, the Bible, okay, well, how do you know that you can trust the Bible? And the only real answer to that that's correct is because God gave it to us. But wait a minute, I just went in a circle, because I just told you, you know, we know who God is because of the Bible, and we know the Bible is true because God gave it to us? What, you know, that's circular, right? I don't know what word I was trying to say, but circular. This doesn't make any sense. But with ultimate authority, you don't have a choice. Because I can't appeal outside of the circle. If I do, there's something greater than God or something greater than the Word to start the whole thing off. A lot of logic problems are actually like that. Logic assumes that logic exists and that it works. If A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C. Everybody knows that from algebra. That's also a truth in the laws of logic. And we just assume that because it's self-evident. It makes sense to us. You can try to prove it, but you're just going to find yourself turning in a circle. Bertrand Russell, famous idiot atheist, not idiot, he's a very intelligent man, but atheists in general Honestly, you always find holes in their arguments, and you always find reasons why they totally reject God. Agnostics are a little bit different. They're willing to talk to you about it sometimes, but a pure atheist usually is a pure atheist because he's got another ax to grind, just so you know. Just about every atheist in the world who's made a name for himself as an atheist, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, all of these people, You go back in your life, in their life, and you find the place where they just absolutely had to say there is no God. It's because of sex. They wanted to do something sexually that a personal God wouldn't allow them to do, like cheat on their wives, or something like that. And at that point, they're faced with this dilemma in their own mind. Okay, if I believe there's a God, I can't do this. don't believe there's a God, then it's okay. And I don't have to feel bad about myself. I'm just playing out the evolutionary chain. You know, men want to be everywhere, be with all women, then spread their seeds, all that crap you've ever heard in science. You know, and everybody believes that. Yeah, anyway, so Bertrand Russell's one of those guys. He wanted to cheat on his wife, and suddenly he's an atheist. It's like, oh, yeah. Anyway, but he'll tell you he's got lots of reasons. He wrote a book called Why I'm Not a Christian, and all this kind of stuff. It's nothing, honestly. You read through it, and you're like, you know, it's mostly word. It's just drivel. In the end, it doesn't make logical sense deep down. And that's understandable because of something in Romans 1, actually. Let's see here. For some reason, I don't ever remember the exact verse, but I will find it. Let's see here. And I'll say it out loud so it's on the tape, too. Romans 1. It's later on in there. Yeah, OK. It's a long passage, and I'm not going to get into the whole thing, but Romans 1 has within it a short passage which is an explanation for all of the sexual degradation of the world and for the fact that there is a fundamental, honestly, there's an intelligence problem that unsaved people can't see that they have. It's not that we're smarter than them, but in this one area, we have been given to see something that they just can't understand. They can't see it. Even though it's logical. Even though it makes sense. And starting in verse 28, I'm skipping all the parts about lust and all that stuff. Romans 1-28, And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents. I love that you threw that in there. Parents always like that. It's like, see? OK. Foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, They not only do them, but give approval to those who practice them. And it's saying that they have, you know, a fundamental thought problem and a fundamental moral problem. They don't know right from wrong, and they've been, it says, given over to a debased mind. Their mind has been corrupted by this thing. The mind doesn't work anymore. you know, all of their thoughts. And they can be geniuses in some areas. I mean, Stephen Hawking, great scientist. I mean, he came up with some amazing things. There's no question about it. You read his work. It's seminal for his, you know, for a lot of the things he covered. But Stephen Hawking, you know, again, you know, he had to have a reason why he ended up, you know, sleeping with a grad student or whatever it was he was, and leaving his wife and having affairs. And if that guy can have an affair, good heavens, anybody can have an affair. I'm sorry. That was mean. That was just mean. I'm so sorry. That was a terrible thing to say. You can't say everyone was involved. Well, that was beneath me, and I shouldn't have done it. But he's brilliant. You read his scientific work that doesn't have to do anything with God or the beginning of all things. And you recognize that, wow, he saw things nobody else did. I mean, he really had a glimpse of the stuff. But in this one area, he just falls into the same trap every atheist does. The simple logic of it evades him. When faced with the impossibility of something coming into being from nothing, unless there's something external to all of reality, it creates it. For example, an entity may be saying, let there be light. Yeah, but we can't have that, yes. So on a logical level, that's just not enough to believe, hey, logically, there is a creator. You have to have your faith in God, correct? Yeah, you kind of do. I mean, you can believe that there is a God. You can get deeply into monotheism in some way, usually. I think a lot of people do, just from their own discoveries in science and whatnot. Islam's famous for this. They've got a million people, it seems like, in their history who are just, again, brilliant scientists, brilliant mathematicians, you know, and they know there's only one God. They just didn't know which one it was. But yeah, yeah, exactly. So you've got, anyway, I'm not, what I'm saying is I'm not denying that these people are brilliant. are intelligent. I'm denying that their intelligence carries over into all categories. You know, that's really true of everybody. Everybody who says they're really smart, there's something they're stupid about. Believe me, there are so many things that I'm stupid about. I happen to know a little bit about church history, and that's about it. Everything else is some sort of just walking in the dark, like everybody else is in some ways, except that the Lord has illuminated some parts of my path. You know, people don't recognize that. People think, oh, intelligence, this is a sword that I can wield against any problem. It's like, yeah, but you won't, because you don't dare. thing that you have to phase up to. And usually, it's your moral responsibility to a God who made you to do something, and you're clearly not doing it. Anyway. So that was Rowenza. Let's see here. Where am I? All right. But they're the ones who really like to point out that all our arguments are circular. But theirs aren't, too. And that sounds funny, but, you know, I can say this. Okay, so we live inside a box, essentially. Right? We do. Honestly. Reality. The laws of logic, the laws of physics, everything about the universe that we are in is finite. It's sort of encapsulated. You know, nobody believes the universe is infinite, really. You know, it doesn't even make sense from modern science's perspective. They all say there's an edge to it, there's a limit past which you can't go at this point. Maybe it's expanding, maybe it's contracting, maybe it's doing something else. But the fact is, the laws of reality only work in here with us. And we're kind of stuck in here, and we don't know what it looks like outside the box. We can't imagine, because we are ourselves real and, I would say, created beings, we can't imagine what the uncreated is like. what the unreal is really like. All of our unreality that we imagine in our mind, it's just a shadow with a new paint job of something that's real that we saw someplace else, you know? That's why, I mean, fiction, some fiction is really great, but a lot of fiction, you know, you get tired of it after a while, because you're just rehashing the same things. Well, yeah, there's only so many stories you can tell. Reality is limited. If you live in the box, you're stuck in the box. Your vision stops at the end of the box. You can't see outside it. You can't get out of it. You're stuck in space and time. Unless I sound like a Doctor Who episode. I don't want to do that necessarily. Not today. I like Doctor Who, but I'll talk about that some other time. Or I won't, probably. We can't comprehend anything. We can't comprehend, for example, a universe in which 2 plus 2 isn't 4, in which true and false could be the same thing. Those things, we say, oh yeah, I can imagine that. I can imagine that right now. 2 plus 2 is 5. There, I imagined it. It's like, yeah, but you didn't imagine all the implications of that. You didn't imagine how much that changes Everything in the universe, I mean, you know, the very foundation of math is different because 2 plus 2 equals 4. That's why I was talking about Bertrand Russell. Ha, I remembered. Bertrand Russell famously wrote a book of several hundred pages trying to prove that 2 plus 2 is 4. You know, because he, I think he grasped some of the problem, but he thought he couldn't solve it without God. And so, You know, he said, well, if we just had proof that we could really sink our teeth into it, the most basic axioms of reality, we'd have a foundation. We could build this whole tower of Babel of our own understanding. That would be awesome. But, you know, in the end, he writes his hundreds of pages. Nobody reads it, practically. A few people read it and say, that doesn't even make any sense. A few other people say, no, actually, it makes perfect sense. You know, I mean, you know, there's back and forth on it, but has he accomplished anything? Has anybody said, oh wow, no, we absolutely know without a doubt that, you know, our reality is only possible because 2 and 2 is 4, because we proved that 2 and 2 is 4. No. You haven't added up every 2 and 2 in the universe, so you can't prove it. It sounds stupid. How can you have science? How can you learn anything if you can't apply general rules to specific problems? It doesn't make any sense. Yeah, all of that is evidence that we have intelligences that accomplish things that, you know, where did they come from? How in the world did species that are simpler than us, How in the world do they go through the whole chain of accidents? And that's what evolution is. It's a whole chain of accidents. It's mutations. And mutations are 99.99% bad, OK? Usually, mutants die. They don't get animated claws like Wolverine. And mutants die in the real world. Seriously. They almost never survive. And the argument of neo-Darwinism is that, but occasionally, some survive because it actually makes them better able to survive, and they in turn take over all of the resources, and their children, and the gene has to breed true, so they have to mate with somebody who maybe didn't have that mutation, but their mutation has to be the one to come through. And eventually all of their offspring have that mutation and that makes them so much better than the original that they take over all the resources in the area and starve them out or destroy them. And then the species evolve from one thing to the next. every single thing that you think of as an advantage to living in this world, either as an animal or as a human being. You know, it's very hard to get from point A to point B thinking about eyes. A lot of people have said, well, you know, there's some very simple fly words that have I didn't write a talk about this at some point, did I? OK, yeah, I've seen a lot of it. I'm also seeing a lot of it. I wouldn't know if you did, because what? OK, no. Sorry. No, I'm not. Flatworms, some flatworms, just have light-sensitive cells. And that's all. They can see some light or no light. That's all they can sense. That's all they know, as far as we know. for light sensors, you know, much like the little electronic light sensors we have that tell us when the light's on or whatever. That's what they have. And people say, well, you see, so there's a very simple thing happening there. And gradually, they mutated, you know, they, accidental changes. And that's the only way it can happen, because if you introduce somebody to come along and guide it. Well, you just invented God, an intelligent designer, and just jammed evolution on top of him. And if he's that powerful, why couldn't he just do it in six days like this book said he did? You know, I mean, nobody who's arguing for this really likes the idea that once you get that far into it, you've got a God who could basically just, and it exists, you know? And everything exists. He says, let there be light. And light springs into existence because he can't be a liar. That's what happened with light. Something that didn't exist at all became real just because he always tells the truth. That is the power of God just saying something. Two words in Latin, although I don't think he was speaking Latin. else just sort of follows from there. And it's day six that he's saying, you know, let's let all the landmasses that I've made, you know, let's have animals springing forth from them. And at the very end of it, as a special deal, he gets some ducks together and he makes a man. And that's, honestly, that is the Bible's view of creation. And, you know, people say that's ridiculous. That's crazy. It's a myth. It's an ancient fairy tale passed on. Everybody borrowed it from everybody else. All the myths look the same, which they don't actually. That's always said by people who never actually read them, never actually got into them. I say all this because once, we had to. My wife and I did to find a way to get out of the weird situation we were in spiritually. But anyway, I won't get into that now. Maybe someday. Yeah, so here's your problem though. You can't have an intelligence guiding this evolution, because then you've given up the whole ballgame. If that intelligence can guide evolution, anything can. He can do anything you want. Right then and there, you just created an omnipotent god, and oh well, you're done! Game over, man! We don't say that. We say little tiny accidental changes, most of which kill the being that they're coming forth with, if it manages to survive and manages to breed true. Most of the time, it's not an advantage. Hey, you know, this ape here has three legs. Well, that sounds like an advantage. Three legs are better than two, right? I mean, he'd have to go find a blind ape to probably procreate with, because all the ones he saw would be like, no way, man, you've got three legs. You're right. I mean, honestly, how is that a survival characteristic? How does three legs do any better for you in the world, if that happens with a mutation? I'm assuming a big one. Usually, mutations are so tiny anyway. Usually they're fatal. I mean, usually the body self-aborts within, you know, a day or two of conception. Sometimes it's that early because it's just not viable. The mutation fails. All right, so I say all of that because, again, this is the only alternative they've given us, but it's the one they have to hang on to, because somebody gave it to them. It's the only one they've got. There's only, well, I guess there's two. If you want to go with the alien theory, panspermia, you know, aliens, you know, some great alien race came along and, you know, seeded life here, there, and everywhere on the planet, and it's kind of Star Trek-y, you know, that kind of thing. Well, that sounds fine, but it sounds like you just invented another set of gods to me. If they're that powerful, if they did all of that, you just, you keep trading one god for another. Be honest! Just be honest and say, yeah, okay, we've got gods. be responsible. And that can happen. So the only way is just self-production. Yes. So you personally, because I've seen Darwinism as a way to discredit the Bible, I personally believe there is evolution, but you're saying that God which I personally agree with as well. That's the intelligent design argument. If that's the best you can do, you can do that. I don't actually believe that. I am full on, 100%, you know, I mean. You know, a guy can snap his fingers and you think, you know. And I've got some reasons probably that aren't to do specifically with the Bible. But mostly it's because the Bible treats it as being absolutely true. Here's a question for you actually. Do you think that man evolved from lower life forms? I don't believe so because we were made from the Bible and it tells us that we were made from the Bible. Well, yeah, but everything else apparently evolved, so why not man? Why do we look so similar? We definitely share some cells with other animals. Don't we share cells with the banana? Well, I mean, all the carbon-based life on this planet shares a heck of a lot of DNA, but... Let me answer the question. I mean, we were definitely made by God. The Bible tells us. But looking back, you can see we have proof that animals did evolve. Proof is funny. Whatever science says. I know. Yeah, yeah. And it's tough because when, you know. It's hard to prove it. It is. And again, history kind of makes a mess out of this for people who really love history more than science, which is me. Yeah, at every point in history, most of the scientists have believed things. And at most points in history, they've been wrong. It's like, well, how do you know you're right this time? Oh, because we're smarter than the old people. No, you're not. You're not smarter than ancient people. Your brains haven't developed more. There hasn't been that much evolution in 3,000 years, believe you me. Whatever you think about that. So it can't be intelligence. And then, well, maybe it's knowledge. OK, well, maybe. You could argue that we've gotten more of the fruits of observation, and we can consider those more. And maybe, but again, there's just a burden of proof behind that. I don't know. And almost everything has a pretty good explanation that doesn't require all that time. I don't know. And I'm reminded of, see, in the late 19th century, this is how far back most of this stuff goes. Because Darwin is mid to late 19th century, of course. He was an atheist, correct? He may have been an agnostic. I mean, he grew up in a church. Everybody knew that. But I don't think he was flat out an atheist. I could be wrong. I haven't really, I don't really remember on his point. I haven't looked at his life. But it's that time period at which, see, because he didn't know about genetics. Really, I mean, he knew about breeding. So he had that sort of inherent genetic understanding that comes with breeding. You know that things breed true under certain circumstances and don't in others. He probably knew that blue eyes are recessive, even though he wouldn't have called them recessive. He just said, rare. It only happened when there's a lot of blue eyes in the family already. Um, that kind of thing. Uh, but you know, Mendel is sort of at the same time period as Mendel the monk. Yes. I just wanted to like add a little bit of observation. Okay. About like, uh, it's like, did man ever move from... You're asking me if he did? No, I just wanted to say something. Oh, okay. Okay. If God created man, because I believe God created him. Yeah, a good engineer is going to keep reusing his blueprints when he works, right? Yeah, not the blueprints, but the footprints. Because I see God as he knows the future from the past. Maybe I mean Yeah, maybe, you know, you could sort of picture under your scenario God thinking that it'll be obvious that there was one creator for all of this because they all share blueprints. And it's funny that the opposite happened, you know, that everybody's like, no, that's the reason why we don't believe it. I've got to come up with something. That's where it usually falls down to. But oh, that's what that sounded like. It was me. I keep forgetting. I set an alarm for 10 o'clock, so I know. So I let you people out on time, which is not something I usually do with my Sunday school classes. Let's see here. Come on, wake up. All right, there it is. All right. Oh, shoot. Popped my stack. I don't know where I was. No, that's all right, that's all right. No, I mean, it's a good point, though, that you can read evidence often two different ways. It depends on your presuppositions. Are you going to go in there thinking this is true, or are you going to go in there thinking maybe that's true? And you have to start with some presuppositions. That's really the whole point of a circular argument issue with authority. You know, if you go into, you know, the only way to really test whether or not it makes sense, for example, that the Bible is the authority that determines everything else we believe, the only way to test that is to try it, really. Not in your own life, necessarily, although I would argue that's a good idea. But, you know, start building the logical cathedrals that you have to build to make the world work. let's take the ones that the world has given us where the Bible can't possibly be true and it's just a myth, it's made up by a bunch of people who are self-serving, they have their own agenda. Yeah, you got two options here and one of them probably works better than the other. One of them is self-consistent and that's always the real question about logical issues. Is it consistent? It's got to be consistent all the way through. It's got to be, you know, it's got to be, all these things have to kind of be equally true and true of each other and true under all the circumstances. Because if you ever end up contradicting yourself, well, then you failed. Maybe you're not wrong, but maybe your argument just was really screwed up. It happens. It happens to me. Anyway, so actually, this is good. So it sort of brought me back around to the point. Oh, okay. I will finish what I was going to say briefly, though. End of the 19th century, you've got, you know, Darwin and Mendel, and the ideas come together because of other people. Obviously, people like that are like, oh, hey, wait a minute. We've got... This is the mechanism by which Darwin's theory is proven. See, Darwin has the changes, and the changes They evolve into better creatures because of random genetic changes, which we know exist. Because they're starting to get to the point where they can understand that stuff. And Mendel did all this largely without microscopes, if I remember correctly. I mean, he did it just planting peas, I think. Yeah. Yeah. So a monk in a garden planting peas figured out genetics. People are smart. People are smarter than you give them credit for sometimes. But yeah, but once we got down into molecular biology, and Watson and Crick get the whole double helix out and show us DNA, we're just like, that's the program that creates people and sustains them generation after generation? And by the way, the program that makes sure that their offspring will survive in the world because it's always mixing them up. It never ever produces, well, not it never, but certainly in higher forms, it never produces a clone hardly. It's usually producing a combination of the male and the female that come together and make something new. And it could be male or female because it's all XX or XY. And the Lord made it so that, basically, you can't have life without the X chromosome. The X chromosome has to be there. Why? You could double up on the Xs, or in some cases, you have an extra one or another, and then you end up with things like Down syndrome. And that's probably the best possible too many chromosomes problem. All the others are far worse, usually, and a lot harder for people to deal with. But anyway, yeah, so at the end of the 19th century, they put all this together like, oh, it makes perfect sense. And then the mathematicians come along and say, yeah, but you just told us. I mean, we never see mutations, hardly. And we never see good ones. We've never seen a positive mutation. You can pull out all of the moths that turn white in England, you can find. And there's arguments for people saying, no, it's just that one, you know, You know, one version of them basically took over because the environment changed, but both versions were coexisting. You know, I don't know. But yeah, so the mathematicians say it's just impossible. I mean, you've got so, especially when DNA was found, that even got worse, because they're sitting there going, there's 23 chromosomes. There's all these different protein combinations. There could be hundreds of thousands or millions of different combinations that make a real higher life form. You know, whether it be a bumblebee or it be, you know, Charlie's Eagle that propels Illinois. I mean, you know, whatever. I'm not sure I'm that much higher than a bumblebee some days, but you know. Yeah, the DNA produces, can produce any of those things at all It's all compatible in the sense that it all has the same idea behind the blueprint. The blueprints all work the same way, but the things that are actually recorded on the blueprints are so radically different that you can't easily, you know, we're only just now starting to play around with this whole gene splicing and all this kind of stuff. That took us a long time to get there. Now imagine it happening randomly, by accident. And they say, well, we don't know how you would ever prove that it would work. Because mathematically, it's impossible. And it is, honestly. You can put millions of years in there. You're just not going to get from a single-celled organism to Pamela Harris. You're just not going to get that far. It's impossible. She's too complicated. And it's too simple. And there's a lot of things that she can do that a protozoa can't. Like, have more than one cell, right? Yeah, that alone, right? Oh, man, we're almost done. Okay. Yeah, so, I mean, under those circumstances, what were they gonna do? Well, the geologists sort of came along and said, you know, we can dig a lot deeper. We understand strata. And we actually were covering this a lot earlier than you all, you biologists. You know, geologists and biologists, they never get along. Anyway, so the geologists are all like, you know, we've got all these strata in the Earth, and we wondered, you know, we've been trying to figure out how long it took them to get there. But if you're telling us it took a really long time, that kind of makes sense. And then carbon-14 dating came along. And then it was just like, oh, well, there you go. This is easy now, because we can date not the rocks themselves all the time, but certainly things we find in these strata and determine how old they are, maybe. And so they put out their guesses based on the dating and partially based on what the biology people were saying, well, it had to have giving a sort of timeline. That timeline has changed a lot since 1900. I mean, you know, there, up and down, back and forth. And, you know, and we learn more things. You know, some giant thing fell into the Gulf of Mexico and changed everything for a long time. You know, I mean, you know, that meteor strike. I'm not going to try to pronounce that word. I don't know what it is. I'd jigsaw up or something, but I don't know. I did try to pronounce that word. I don't know why. And it's, I don't know, what you kind of see when you're reading the papers and you're looking back and forth at the history, the biologists and the geologists, they kind of, they feed off each other. Oh, you're saying it could be that long. Well, that's perfect because I can make this fit. You know, but they're guessing, and what we really rely on is the strata we find them in. That's what tells us how old it is. And originally, the geologists were saying, well, we know how old the strata is because we know how old the organism was. Oh, no! Circular argument. And it's not one with basic assumptions. See, the problem is all the basic assumptions, I think, were wrong going into it. You can't really build a house of facts on that. So I really don't think that I don't think fossils on the strata prove anything, honestly. I mean, other than something big happened between the beginning of life and now. A lot of big things, perhaps. And things that used to exist don't anymore. And some things didn't show up in the lower levels and showed up in the higher ones. And I don't know if they didn't exist. They just didn't get caught in it somehow, or what? I don't know. Because again, we have no observers. The best we can do is try to make the facts fit. And I think they're really trying, but they're always going in there with the assumption. But it has to be this way. I mean, you have to end up with evolution being true. Yeah, I know. You call it a theory of evolution. But the fact is, we're functioning like it's exactly right. It's like the theory of a quantum theory. We know that's true. I mean, at least, you know, the early parts of it, I have no idea about strings, but that kind of got beyond me at that point. Anyway, it's just, you know, they have these self-fulfilling, you know, self, not aggrandizing, they feed off each other to end up producing a timeline that everybody's kind of comfortable with. And because carbon-14 dating is working that way, they can be like, well, yeah, it has to be this old because it has this much carbon in it. And nobody considers the fact that God kind of specializes in making things look old when they weren't, like Adam. He's not fooling people. He's not playing tricks on us. But Adam was not a baby. Adam was not an embryo at any time. Adam was a full-grown man who, if you examined him, you would say, oh, he went through, what, 20, 21 years of growth, ordinary, normal growth, puberty. All that stuff must have happened to him, because he looks just like a normal human being does in the following generations, who grew from an embryo to that. Adam looks older than he is. I think everything in the universe looks a little bit older than it is. God, you know, I mean, why put the stars in the sky if nobody's going to see them for billions and billions of years? So he puts them up close. It stretches it out. And the Bible actually says that. He unrolled the heavens like a scroll. And as you stretch it out, you get redshift. You get light existing on all the points between the two things. You get stars that must have been producing light billions of years ago if you traveled that far. I can still do it in an instant. It's weird. I mean, there's all kinds of great stuff out there. I have a million books I can recommend. And there's probably a million more that somebody who is really up on this could recommend. I'm more up on the logic side of it. Anyway. But there's so many people not here that I'm kind of glad. Because the things I want to get into next time is, okay, what else could be the authority alongside Scripture or against Scripture? What else could it be? And then we'll finally get into things that are maybe perhaps Because it's one thing if you believe life evolved or if you believe that life happened in six days just a thousand years ago. It doesn't really change your spiritual life at this moment probably, you know, generally speaking. I will say though that yeah, you're right about Adam. Adam has to depend upon all of the Adam and Eve stuff really happening. If they're just myths, or if they're just symbols of something, then salvation can't happen, and authority makes no sense. So that's important. Yes, that was the authority issue I was just talking about. Yeah, yeah. I mean, because it comes from that. You know, when You know, when somebody asks Paul, you know, why don't you let women preach? He doesn't have this answer about, well, you know, in the culture today, they're not really ready to preach, and we've kind of subjugated them. But eventually, you know, as they are educated and grow up, they could preach too, probably. He doesn't say any of that stuff. And he doesn't say, you know, their chattel, their possessions, we own them. He doesn't say that either. What Paul says is, because she was deceived first, and she deceived Adam. That's his reason. You know, you can like it or not like it, but that is exactly the reason Paul gives. And those of us who believe in the Bible have to deal with, what does that mean? What does that mean to us? How does that change our view of men and women? And it doesn't mean that all women are liars, so don't take that away, that's wrong, okay? Although, honestly, all women are liars because all men are liars except for Jesus Christ. So, you know, I can't, you know, can't really say much about that. We're out of time completely. We've got to get going. So, I'm sorry. Let's pray real fast here. Lord, thank you for your word. Thank you for the authority in your word. Lord, help us to understand it. Help us to dig down deeply into these things, even though we don't have much time to ever be deep, Lord. But I pray that you'll just, I don't know, give people hearts to understand things like this Romans 1 passage. In Jesus' name, amen. Thank you all.