With every breath I take, I will praise your name Take my life for it's all I have to give Now you've found me, I know where I belong Sing Alleluia Sing Alleluia Love's so amazing, I can hardly believe that it's real So with all that I am, I will praise your holy name So what you have done for me is much more than I can comprehend You're strong enough To carry me through all of my guilt and my shame With every breath I take I will praise your name Take my life for it's all I have to give Now you've found me I know where I belong Sing hallelujah Sing Alleluia Sing Alleluia Sing Alleluia Cause you're strong enough to carry me through all of my guilt and my shame So I will say, I will go, save me or show me your way With every breath I take, I will praise your name. Saved my life for it's all I have to give. Now you found me, I know where I belong. Sing a lullaby. Alleluia Your steadfast love endures Though all the earth may fade You alone, you are good In everything you do, you are mighty to save Your word is the lamp to light my way The covenant you make, you'll never break In all the ways you love me You are forever holy And could be uncompared You're steadfast love endures You're steadfast love endures Through all the wickedness I hold In the trials and the tears, where the sorrow melts my soul, strengthened by Your Word. Give me understanding, God, and grace for while I keep Your law. Turn my eyes to You, Lord, guide me with Your Spirit, restore my broken Step past love and doors Step past love and doors You are my hiding place, my shield There is nothing I can say. Thank you much. Thank you much. All right. And make sure my timers are running. I'm going to reset this one, too. All right. Well, my intention today is to discuss what I believe is one of the, other than sin, is one of the biggest impediments that can keep a person from coming to the faith, or for many of our young people today, can lead to a loss of faith, and that is evolution or the teachings of natural science. Jesus himself spoke to this. He says, I have spoken of earthly things that you do not believe. How then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things? The Bible is under attack today, and in particular, it's the historical components of the Bible that are being attacked by a scientific community that holds to an atheistic worldview, who is trying to explain how our world came to be through purely natural processes. The passage here that I would allude to argues that if we cannot trust what the Bible says on historical matters, historical matters like the global flood or Garden of Eden, these components of the Bible, how can we trust what it says about spiritual matters like salvation. The Old Testament and New Testament are inseparable. And if a person finds themselves doubting content in the Old Testament, how are they going to be able to trust content in the New Testament? And I believe that natural science today is, again, one of our biggest impediments that is keeping people from coming to the faith. And for young people that grow up in the church can lead to a loss of faith. And I can tell you many, many times I've been contacted by students who get up into college and find themselves in a faith crisis based on because of what they've been taught. We have to remember that the science that's being taught today is a science that's based on atheism. And I'm not claiming that all scientists are atheists, because this is clearly not the case. But the science that's being taught is a science that's exclusively based on atheism. They've rejected the Bible as an accurate historical document that describes the early periods of the Earth. They've rejected the existence of God and his creation. And they're doing their best to explain how our world came to be through purely natural processes. They're dedicated to naturalism. This is the reigning philosophy of science today. That's why we call our science museums natural history museums. It describes the history of the world through within the bounds of naturalism. Or why a naturalist has been a synonym for a scientist going back a couple hundred years. Why we call the world outside nature. I don't even like using the word nature anymore, because that's the creation. But when this view of this, when this naturalism philosophy is applied to the living world, to the world that's outside, to the biological world, that's where the evolution comes from. We need to keep in mind that evolution is a theory that has been put forth to explain how life came to be on this planet through purely natural processes. And unfortunately, a lot of Christians just don't understand this, don't understand the significance that evolution can have on a person of faith or keeping someone from coming to the faith. Many Christians accept evolution, the people that we would call theistic evolutionists. But in my opinion, there's two ways of reconciling the conflicts that exist between science and the Bible. There's two ways of reconciling the conflicts that exist. One is that you accept what scientists are teaching, and then look to the Bible to see how you can reinterpret it to be in agreement, or we assume what the Bible teaches is correct, and we look to see how the scientific findings can be interpreted to be in agreement with the Bible. And in my opinion, we should be doing the latter. And one of the most important scientific findings out there that needs to be interpreted within the Bible is the fossil record. Because the fossil record stands as one of the main proofs of evolution today. And informed as we are by the global flood, we should assume that the geology of that event has been misinterpreted, which it most certainly has. OK? So I want to focus on, one of my purposes is to help you understand what evolution is. I've studied evolution at the gradual level. And so I can describe for you well what evolution is. And I want to help you understand what we can accept and what I believe we can't accept. And then look to see what we've learned since Darwin formed his seminal theory to what we've learned since that pokes a hole, pokes many holes in all of this business. So Darwin published his seminal book on the origin of species in 1859, which included two main principles. The principle of descent with modification that newer organisms versions of their ancestors, as well as a mechanism to explain how these new organisms come to be. A mechanism he termed natural selection. Natural selection ultimately occurs because within populations there is diversity. And the existence of diversity is one of the main proofs, if you will, of evolution, that organisms are evolving through time. Darwin himself was an accomplished breeder of pigeons. And much of his views about natural selection came from his own experience in pigeon breeding. He was an accomplished breeder of pigeons. Many people were during this time. Pigeon breeding was a very popular hobby. From the very rich all the way down to the terribly poor, you could be a breeder of pigeons. Pigeons were wild. You could grab them off the streets anywhere and set up a little ranch, shackle, coop somewhere and start your own little pigeon population. And through selective breeding, you could come up with some really wild breeds if you controlled their mating. And from the rock pigeon, from the basic wild pigeon that was present in England, lots of diverse, weird-looking breeds were developed. through what we call artificial selection. And again, Darwin was well familiar with these domestic breeding histories. He actually published a book in 1868 titled The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, where he charted the breeding history, or what we call the genealogy, of domestic pigeon breeds. So he knew how this worked, that by controlling who would mate within a population, you could get that population to change through time. And he envisioned nature to be doing the same thing. The nature, he argued, also selects who could mate based on traits that they have that would make them more beneficial than others. Traits, for example, like size or the kind of hair that is possessed by an animal could dramatically affect their survival ability in a particular habitat or predator-prey competitions, and therefore dramatically determine who will be more successful, who would live longer. And if you live longer and get more food, you're going to have more offspring. And the population can rapidly shift in one direction because of this process we call natural selection. And there's not a problem with this, not a problem at all with the natural selection as being a valid mechanism that God put in place to help organisms adapt to diverse types of habitats that we find on the earth today. Well, some of Darwin's main examples came from observations he made on a famous voyage he took out to the Galapagos Islands. And one of his primary examples were the finches that he saw in the Galapagos Islands, one of his main examples to support this theory he called natural selection. What he found on the Galapagos Islands were finches of a variety of types. On one island, he found there was a finch with a smaller beak. Or another, there was a larger beak. And another, there would be a hooked beak. Because on the different islands, they were eating different types of foods. And he argued that natural selection had been involved. That a wild type population from South America, at some point, found their way to the Galapagos Islands. perhaps when it was still part of the mainland. It's an island chain. Island chains were once land bridges until isolated. So he argued that a population of finches made their way out to the Galapagos and then, because of natural selection, had changed into these different types of finches. But he uses this example to support that all organisms on Earth have descended from one common ancestor through this mechanism. The problem with this is that the finches are still finches. There's really no upward progression, upward level of change that's demonstrated here. All examples of evolution just show minor levels of variation. I mean, the change in a finch's beak from big to small is hardly enough evidence to support that all life on Earth has descended from a common ancestor. More than this, what they found was that the population would often revert back to a mean. The beaks would change during certain seasonal changes to different types of beaks. And when the weather returned back to what was more normal in that island, the beak would return back to a normal size. So they would oscillate back and forth. There was no upward progression that we saw here. Now, I want to talk to you about speciation. Although Darwin's book was called On the Origin of Species, he never actually discussed how species originate, but rather how a species will change through time through this mechanism called natural selection. Now, a species is defined as a naturally occurring breeding group that is reproductively isolated from other such groups. It is a breeding population. that is related to but is separated from another breeding population. And we can accept, I believe, that new species form through time. What typically happens to form a new species is that a parent population will become splintered. Or during the process of, for example, migration, a population will become isolated from another part of its population. This often happens because they're separated by geographic barriers. Two populations will start migrating and will be separated by a body of water or by a large land mass, like a mountain, and they will live for a period of time in isolation. One over here where it's wet, like on this side of the Cascades. Another over on the other side where it's dry. And those populations will start to adapt and change through time as they start to specialize to those different habitats. Well, one of the things that we've discovered, one of the things that's been observed, is when these populations, for example, after a period of isolation, if they ever have a chance to reunite, what will happen is that the populations will remain separate. Even though living in the same areas, if those populations that lived for a part for a period of time are ever reunited and living back in the same area, the separate populations will remain separate instinctively. They instinctively remain separate from one another. And this indicates that this process is part of design. Because it's an innate process. It's an instinctive or innate process. They instinctively remain separate. And the reason for this seems obvious, to preserve the specializations that have been developed over a period of time. Now think about if the polar bear, for example, if a brown bear made it up in the polar bear region and bred with the polar bears that are up there, all the specializations that allow polar bears to be so successful where they live could be lost. in one generation by hybridizing with the brown bear. Those specializations can easily be lost. So by remaining instinctively separate, they are preserved. And what can happen through time, these specializations can lead to enough genetic change where the chromosomes become unable to pair and cross over during the first division after fertilization. They can become genetically incompatible. But the fact that they remain separate in the wild instinctively indicates that the entire process is by design. And that's one of the mechanisms that God built into the various kinds he made. So we can accept this. We can accept that speciation happens, that natural selection is a significant part of helping organisms adapt to environments. I don't have a problem with these phylogenetic trees. The evolutionists use little diagrams like this to kind of illustrate how organisms have changed through time. From what was one parent population, you get different species. And then they'll start to change and you get more species. By the way, evolutionists are fond of calling these diagrams a tree of life. Right? What we have a problem with is the assertion that all life on Earth has descended from a common ancestor through this mechanism. This is one of the things we have a problem with. It's not that organisms change through time. It's not that they evolve. But that this process that has been observed, this adaptational process and speciation are responsible for all life on Earth. This is what we have a problem with. The small scale change that we see happening in populations that we would call microevolution is being used to support a grand theory that all life on Earth is related to one common ancestral cell. One ancestral cell is believed to have developed all on its own through purely natural processes and has given rise to all life on Earth. This is where we have a problem with that and the fact that they claim mutations as a source of genetic information. Ludicrous. I'll discuss that maybe a little bit later. The existence of information coming about through random changes is just one of the tremendous unreasonable parts of the whole theory of evolution. But let me introduce you to someone. This is Ernst Haeckel. Ernst Haeckel was an evangelical promoter of Darwinism in Europe. In fact, Charles Darwin believed that Ernst Haeckel's enthusiastic propagation was the chief factor in his theory's success in Germany, and by extension, Europe. Ian Taylor, in his book In the Minds of Men, said that Haeckel became Darwin's chief European apostle, proclaiming the gospel of evolution with evangelical fervor, not only to the university intelligentsia, but to the common man by popular books and to the working classes by lectures and rented halls. Ernest Haeckel was the first person to create a tree of life that included mankind. But to fill in the gaps between humans and apes, he just went ahead and invented an ape man. He believed that the only major difference between man and apes was that men could speak and apes could not. He therefore postulated a missing link that he named Pythacanthropus allelis, which means speechless ape man, and even had an artist, Gabriel Max, draw the imagined creature you see here although there was not a scrap of physical evidence to support its existence. A contemporary of Ernst Haeckel's by the name of Rudolf Verschau, who was famous as the founder of cellular pathology and for many years was the president of the Berlin Anthropological Society, was scathing in his criticisms of Ernst Haeckel. For him to have given a zoological or scientific name to a creature that had not been proven to exist was, to him, a great mockery of science. And Hegel would eventually become notorious as the scientist who perpetuated fraud after fraud to promote the theory of evolution. Charles Darwin sketched out a tree of life. And one of the big mysteries for Charles Darwin was the fact that he could not connect together life on Earth through a gradual blending or gradual series of transitional forms. When he looked around at living populations, he saw distinct groups. distinct groups that were separated from one another by massive gaps. In his little sketchbook, he refers to why these groups exist and he attributes it to extinction. I could read this text for you. He says, I think, case must be that one generation then would have as many living as now. To do this, to have as many species in the same genus requires extinction. Thus, between A and B, there's an immense gap of relation. Between C and B, there's a finer gradation. Between B and E, there's rather greater distinction. Thus, genera would be formed bearing relation to ancient types with several extinct forms. He attributed these gaps between these various branches on the tree of life to extinction. Now his theory told him if the kinds of selection was involved that breeders have been doing, that crate pigeons and horses and cows and dogs and cats, this would be a slow and gradual process over many successive generations. And what you should see is an imperceptible blend of organisms from one type to another. But what we see are distinct groups, distinct groups. And to Charles Darwin, this is very, very puzzling. And he assumed that through time, that fossils would eventually be found to prove this theory true. In living populations, there are distinct groups. He assumed that these distinct groups are due to extinctions. But he assumed that the fossils, that all those animals lived at one point in time and became extinct, and we should find their ancestors in the fossil record. And he predicted that that would happen. He actually gives a carefully worded apology in his book, On the Origin of Species, that he couldn't point to fossils at that point in time. But, here we are 150 years later, the question is, have those transitions be found? What Darwin didn't know is that the missing links were really missing. Now, what the fossil record looks like, you see here a diagram of the fossil record, and they use illustrations like this. What we found is that in the layers of rocks that blanket the earth, fossils are found, and that fossils are typically found below or above other fossils. Now, we attribute the fossil record to the global flood. And we believe that what you're looking at there is just the destruction of successive habitats. As the flood water rose, it destroyed habitats sequentially. Because different plants and animals live in different areas. These different kinds of habitats we call biomes. And these biomes differ from one another based on the amount of rainfall and temperature in those areas. And the amount of rainfall and temperature is directly related to elevation. So as the floodwaters rose, it systematically destroyed successive habitats. That's why they're sorted the way they are. But to an evolutionist, this sorting of fossils represents the history of life on Earth over hundreds of millions of years. But all they can really point to is that there's different fossils in this layer than the one above. For evolution to be illustrated by the fossil record, they need to be able to show that an organism changed through time through a series of fossil forms. The question is, can they? This is what Darwin predicted. He predicted that the fossils would be found in the fossil record, that we only have this one now and this one now, but all the other ones in between went extinct, and that they would be found in fossil forms. But he was very puzzled that he couldn't point to them that day, predicted that they would be found. Listen to some words from Darwin. The distinctness of specific forms, and them all being blended together by innumerable transitional links, is a very obvious difficulty. I believed in the matter of species belonging to several of the main divisions of the animal kingdom, some of which are among those known as the First Walks. When Darwin was writing The Origin of Species, it was well known at the time that the first fossils of animals appeared suddenly without pre-existing in the geological record. So there was a deep conflict between what was to be told at the expected time, meaning the abundance of transitional forms going back to that common ancestor, the humans, versus what was to be impossible. Documenting that each and each day was true, the Ornrocks found a replicating planet in the air. She revealed that a fraction of fossils connected in some of her earlier forms to complex animals like tricots were a trail of incremental steps and a fable of biological experience. Such areas would document the trial and error process of natural selection. But Darwin says, in the origin, where are these transitioning forms? They're not part of the puzzle. What we see instead are fully formed, discrete groups. Now, that's a world-class puzzle for someone like Darwin. Now, I should point out that Darwin himself didn't invent evolution by any means. There were a lot of people during Darwin's day that believed in evolution. His theory differed in a couple of main areas. One was that the mechanism he proposed to explain these different forms was a very slow and gradual process. This process called natural selection would be very slow and gradual. Most of the evolution of Darwin's day held to a mechanism they called saltation. Saltation. They believed evolution occurred in rapid jumps because of these groups, which are groups of organisms that are vastly separated from one another. You know, you've got a whole bunch of turtles, and you've got a whole bunch of lizards, and you've got a whole bunch of snakes, and any kind of animal that you want to talk about, you have distinct groups. And you look at the invertebrates, The invertebrate phyla are about as distinct from one another as animals can possibly be. You've got the cnidarians, or your echinoderms, like your starfish, your mollusks, like your clams, and your arthropods. You've got just as distinct as you can possibly be. To evolutionists of Darwin's day, they believed that evolution occurred in rapid jumps because of these tremendous gaps. Darwin said, no, this is not true. Evolution must occur in slow and gradual processes. And that was one of the main things he took exception to with evolutionists of Darwin's day. The main difference between his theory and theirs was it must be slow and gradual. He predicted the fossils would eventually be found. But the gaps are real. The absence of these transitional forms are significant. There is nothing connecting these various invertebrate phyla together. They're as separate from one another as an animal can possibly be. There's not an imperceptible blend in living populations or in fossil forms. And there's nothing in the fossil record that shows where these animals came from. The first time a jellyfish appears in the fossil record, they're perfectly formed jellyfish. The first time a starfish appears in the fossil record, they're perfectly formed starfish. The first time a bat appears, perfectly formed bat, or a pterosaur, like a pterodactyl, perfectly formed. Nothing indicating, nothing in the fossil record that shows where they came from. And some paleontologists will admit this. Often people don't. This is Stephen Jay Gould. who arguably one of the most famous paleontologists of our day. I say this because he was featured on an episode of The Simpsons. You know, I think that's a claim to fame of scientists today. If you get featured on The Simpsons, you've made it, you know? Anyway, Stephen J. Gould admits to the rarity and transitional forms. He says, the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches. The rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. Stephen Jay Gould and others argued, because of the absence of transitionals, have argued for a new method of evolution or a different method of evolution they call punctuated equilibrium. They argue that organisms can stay the same for a long period of time and then rapidly jump in a punctuated manner and then have a long period of equilibrium. But that's just saltation by another name. Saltation is what was held to in Darwin's day. He proposed a slow and gradual mechanism that he called natural selection. It predicted the fossils would eventually be found. Paleontologists today readily admit on some level that these gaps are real. And now they're starting to argue again for a rapid evolutionary mechanism, one that would not leave fossil forms. But to us, this makes perfect sense. These gaps make perfect sense because the Bible clearly describes God having created many kinds of animals. Many kinds of plants and animals were created in the beginning. Many kinds of animals were then put on board the ark. during the flood of Noah and reintroduced afterwards. The Cretan biologists believe that this kind designation is synonymous with the family level of classification, at least in mammals. We have this taxonomic hierarchy, kingdom, item, class, order, family, genus, species. And at the family level, for example, the level canidae, which includes all the canines, would be a biblical kind. So we don't know how many canines God created in the beginning, but we know that there was one pair of canines on board the ark. Two canines on board the ark, if we're correct, because they're an unclean animal. There were seven pairs of clean animals, one pair of unclean animal. So from the canines, we get all of these various types of dogs that we have today, providing us with a pretty good Some illustration or the domestic breeding histories from the wolf have shown us all of these various forms were available to the wolf and has been selected out through selective breeding, giving us a pretty good measure of the amount of variability that was present at the creation or is present to these various kinds of plants and animals. It all makes good sense if we look at it. Darwin also didn't know about heredity. about heredity or how traits are inherited from ancestors, from our parents. The principles of heredity were established by this guy right here, Gregor Mendel, who was an Augustinian monk and is today considered the father of genetics. He conducted plant breeding experiments while living in an Austrian monastery. In 1866, his work was published, but went largely unrecognized until the turn of the century, until after the 1900s. Gregor Mendel, just to give you a short summary of what he did, he did breeding experiments with pea plants that had opposing traits. He bought a bunch of different purebred pea plants, pea plants that were big and pea plants that were small, and then he bred those together. a pea plant that had purple flowers and a pea plant that had white flowers, like in this illustration. And then he bred them together. And then he measured or tracked the passing on of those traits to the offspring in successive generations. So purple plant, purple flower and white flower, bred those together and checked to see what the offspring looked like in the first generation, then hybridized those and checked to see what it looked like in the next generation. And he established some of the principles of genetics. For example, that some traits are dominant over others. When two traits are blended like this or made it together, only one of them showed up in the first generation. When he self-pollinated that generation, what he found was a specific numerical ratio of the traits in the next. There was always a three-to-one ratio of the dominant trait to the recessive trait. In every trait he checked, he saw a three-to-one ratio. He even did these experiments with multiple traits. So two traits at the same time, a tall plant with purple flowers and a short plant with white flowers. Read those together and check to see how those traits would be found in the population. But again, found specific numerical ratios, a 9-3-3-1 ratio was always found when he was checking two traits like this, which showed that Evolution is limited. That although there's a lot of variability found in a population, the variability is limited to the genes that are present at the time. The genes can combine forming lots of variety, lots of get shuffled around forming lots of different kinds of varieties, but it's limited. It's very limited. Fixed ratios are always seen. But I want to insert here another point, and that is that Gregor Mendel, like the great majority of our founding fathers, believed in God. That God created the cosmos and such scientists were very committed to the existence of God and for most part Christianity. The majority, the founding fathers of our various science disciplines believed in God. Nicolai Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle, Sir Isaac Newton, you can go on and on and on. The vast majority of the founding fathers of our various science disciplines believed in God. The scientific revolution was due to the fact that so many great men of science were active at that period of time who believed in God. Because they had a right worldview, because they had a right correct view of the world, their theories, their hypotheses and theories were more likely to be correct. Because they believed there was a law of giver, they looked for fixed order and purpose in what had been made and they found it. They believed, people like Sir Isaac Newton, arguably one of the most intelligent men who's ever lived, he believed there was going to be a fixed order in the universe because it had been created rather than being a random chaos, which you would expect from a great cosmic explosion. He looked for it. He found it. He assumed you could describe the physical processes of the universe mathematically. He sought to do so and was able to. When your worldview is correct, your theories will be correct. If you have an incorrect worldview, you will find science operating at a snail's pace, which is what's happening today, especially in the area of cell biology and genetics. Darwin also didn't know about genetic information. Now, genetic information exists in the cells of all organisms in this complex molecule called DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, shown here. The actual structure, called a helical structure, double helix, was discovered by James Watson and Francis Crick, who won the Nobel Prize for this in 1962. Now, DNA contains coded, complex instructions that tell cells how to make proteins. It is information. No one denies that it's information. Even Bill Gates says it's by far the most sophisticated program around. It's information. And as such, it stands as the single most powerful argument for intelligent design that exists. Because in all human experience, information comes from only one source, and that's an intelligent mind. When we discovered that information existed within cells, within every organism on Earth, it should have led to the conclusion that that information was also likely the result of an intelligent mind. Because that's how science is supposed to work. You're supposed to use your past experience, your knowledge that you have to inform your conclusions. Your hypotheses are supposed to be based on prior knowledge. Based on all human experience, information comes from only one source, an intelligent mind. It should have led inexorably with certainty to the hypothesis that the information found in cells that governs the biological world was a result of intelligent mind as well. Because again, that's how science is supposed to work. But with regard to the theory of evolution, they've taken the scientific method and flipped it on its head. You're supposed to start with a hypothesis and then do some experiments, and you could elevate that to a theory if your experiments show it to be true. And then you try to falsify your theory. You do experiments trying to falsify your theory. And if you can't falsify it under any conceivable circumstance, you may be able to consider it a fact. But they've taken a scientific method, flipped it on its head. They are assuming evolutions of fact. And now they're trying to work out the theories to support it. Whether it's through our Darwinian mechanisms or some other, they're still debating these points, but it's a fact that it's occurred. They teach it as a fact, and they teach it evangelically. Now, the amount of DNA information packed into a cell is just mind-boggling. To illustrate this, let me explain to you what you're looking at. On the DNA molecule, it looks like a ladder that's been twisted. And every step of the ladder is made up of a different molecule. We represent those molecules by the letters A, T, C, and G. Adenosine triphosphate, thymidine triphosphate, cytosine triphosphate, guanidine triphosphate, abbreviated with the letters A, T, C, and G. This is a sequencing gel. One of the ways that they determine the sequence of molecules along the length of this ladder is by running them out on a gel, and that's what that is. I did many, many sequencing gels while a technician at Texas Tech. And then you generate your data that looks like this. It's a sequence of A, T, Cs, and Gs. It's a code, though, that the cell translates, and it's an instruction that tells them how to make proteins. And proteins are the machinery and material that make life possible. It tells them not only how to make the proteins, but what to do with them afterwards. where to take them, what else to assemble them to. It's a very complex genetic code. But to illustrate how much information is there, if every letter here, which again represents a different rung of this ladder, if every letter there is equal to a letter in our alphabet, then in one human cell there's about as much information as there are in 1,000 books. or a little two-millimeter, pinhead-sized pile of DNA contains as many letters as there would be in 1,000 of 500 stacks of books reaching the moon or a single stack of books reaching the sun. It's an incredible amount of information. An incredible compression system for information is being used there. But again, where do Darwinists say all this information came from? Random mutations. that the first organism had a little bit of DNA, managed to somehow pop a little bit of DNA into existence at the beginning. And from that little bit of information, more information has developed through time by randomly changing that information. That as the DNA strand was copied, a few mistakes were made every time it was copied, or exposures to foreign mutagens like UV bombardments eventually increased the amount of information. It's an affront to reason. It's an affront to logic, and it's an affront to common sense to suggest such a thing, because you just cannot create more information by randomly changing information. You cannot go into a book and randomly change letters and produce your second volume of your book, no matter how hard you might try. But this is the theory they rely on, and it's more collectively referred to as neo-Darwinism or New Darwinism. One of the things we know, although there are times when a mutation can produce a beneficial outcome, that's always due to the destruction of information. If a cell loses a protein that it was making, that can be beneficial under some isolated circumstances. Antibiotic resistances are frequently due to something like that. An antibiotic is working against a bacteria by attacking some particular protein that it has, and if it dumps that protein, then the antibiotic is no longer effective. You know, so it can produce a benefit. But the vast majority of mutations we are aware of produce disorders and diseases. A great number, a great list of genetic diseases is at this point on file. But to be perfectly honest, on rare circumstances, and I've had a chance to look over the results of mutagenesis studies as a technician, under rare circumstances a mutation can do something remarkable. I mean, it can give you the ability to produce laser beams out your eyes, or so it can survive, you know, damage so well that they can coat your skeleton with atom and two. If you don't know what this picture is, then, yeah, terrible. This is the X-Men. So, X-Men, due to mutations, or superheroes due to mutation. But no, you know, mutations don't do these kind of things. That's why we call it science fiction. It's science fiction. Darwin also didn't know about molecular machines, that within cells are microscopic nanoscale machines. Darwin said, if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed that could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down, but I can find out no such case. Well, Charles, numerous molecular machines have now been discovered, which are, in fact, irreducibly complex. They simply cannot be developed through numerous successive slight modifications. This is called a kinesin. It's a little walking robot that transports packages from one side of the cell to another. Lots and lots of molecular machines have been found at this point in time. that can't be developed through numerous successive slight modifications. By adding one piece, and then after a few generations, adding one more piece, and after a few generations, adding one more piece, the machine doesn't work unless all the pieces are there at the exact same time. One of these remarkable machines is possessed by a bacteria. These are bacteria that are swimming around using a little outboard motor that they have called a, this one's stuck on the slide. You want to kind of help him. Give him a little budge, trying to get him loose out this side. But these are swimming through a motor that they have that's called a flagellum. shown here. The flagellum is a nanomachine that is built using information in approximately 50 different genes, 50 different genetic segments we call genes. And it contains about 25 to 40 different proteins depending on the species Each of these proteins exist in multiple copies. This shows how the flagellum is actually built within the bacterial cell, the sequence of steps that goes through to actually build this machine. It's a complex molecular nanoscale type machine that exists within bacteria. It has proteins that make up the filament that you see here through a long, narrow central channel to the end where they self-assemble. The bacteria constructs this complex nanoscale structure through more efficient than any human design process could. It is, in short, the world's smallest rotary propulsion system. It has all the parts that we would place in our own motors. It is constructed of proteins, as I mentioned, each with a different function. Some serve as a rotary motor. Others serve as bushings. There's a drive shaft. There's a rotation switch regulator. There's a universal joint. And then the long helical propeller that is used to drive the bacteria forward. Francis Crick, do you remember who I said Francis Crick was? He was one of the co-discoverers of the DNA helix. He won the Nobel Prize in 1962. He admits to seeing evidence of design, but states that biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved. There's tremendous evidence of design out there. Romans 1.20 says, for since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature are clearly seen in what has been made, so that men are without excuse. They have to keep reminding themselves that there is not design, and after all, it looks designed, but it is rather evolved. Darwin didn't know about the problems of life's origin. In a letter written in 1871 to a botanist friend of his, Charles Darwin suggested a natural origin of life in a warm little pond. He said, it is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are present, which could ever have been present. But if, and oh, what a big if, we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, et cetera, present that a protein compound would chemically form, ready to undergo still more complex changes. At the present day, much such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed. However, to understand the origin of life challenges facing evolution, it's important to point out a number of things. And that is that multiple macromolecules are necessary to have a living cell. I'll show you some probability numbers here in just a second. But we should understand this, that people of old assumed that life could arise spontaneously, could just arise spontaneously. And that's because if the food eventually just seems to grow organisms. Well, even in refrigeration, eventually you're going to see some mold or some fungus just suddenly pop into existence. And in fact, in 1668, Francisco Redi did an experiment to show that flies would not just spontaneously form on meat if he covered that meat with the gauze. But even after Francisco Reddy's experiment, scientists, even Francisco Reddy, continue to believe in spontaneous generation under some conditions. The advent of the microscope even further enhanced the belief, because under microscopic analysis of water samples, for example, a clean water sample would suddenly birth a number of swimming organisms. You can take a handful of grass, stick it in water, leave it in a warm place for a little bit, and come back, and it's teeming with all kinds of little swimming creatures. Well, spontaneous generation, or so they thought. But this was finally laid to rest by Louis Pasteur. He was a devout Catholic and a creationist who was known as the father of microbiology. His discovery that most infectious organisms are caused by germs, known as the germ theory of disease, is one of the most important in medical history. He also discovered several species of bacteria. He discovered staphylococcus, streptococcus, and pneumonia, with the responsible for staph infections, strep throat, and pneumonia. In 1859, the same year that Darwin published The Origin of Species, the French Academy of Sciences sponsored a contest for the best experiment that could prove or disprove the origin of life. In Pasteur's winning experiment, what he did was he constructed a gooseneck flask. This is Pasteur's gooseneck flask that was used to win this contest. He boiled some meat broth inside until it was sterile. And then after that, no organisms grew. even though it was exposed to the atmosphere. But what he did then was he tipped the gooseneck flask so that the meat broth could get into the neck and then come back into the flask. And after doing that, it became contaminated with bacteria and fungi. And so he argued that living organisms are everywhere, even in the air. What this did was to show that these acts of spontaneous generation are because of particles of organisms that are in the air. And if they fall into the meat broth, they will grow. And if they can't, they won't. Simply put, but although spontaneous generation had been conclusively refuted almost 20 years prior by Louis Pasteur, Haig would continue to advocate for its belief on purely religious grounds. In 1876, he said, if we do not accept the hypothesis of spontaneous generation, then at this one point in the history of evolution, we must have recourse to the miracle of supernatural creation. Hegel chose spontaneous generation even though there was no empirical evidence to support it because he did not like the alternative, that is, a belief in God. 24 years after Pasteur's award-winning experiment, Ernst Haeckel committed another act of fraud to prove that life arose spontaneously on Earth. He claimed the existence of first cells that he named monerins and described them as being very primitive protocells that are not composed of any organs at all, but consist entirely of shapeless, simple, homogeneous matter. They're nothing more than a shapeless mole bottle of a lump of mucus or slime, consisting of albuminous combinations of carbon. But where did Hegel see this cell he described as a simple lump of mucous or slime? They were only found in his imagination. They are, in fact, a theoretical necessity for the theory of evolution that life originated all on its own. However, the lack of their existence did not stop him from making more than 30 drawings of these imaginary monerans, which along with 73 pages of speculations were published in a prestigious scientific journal in 1868. He also gave them scientific names, such as proto-amoeba primitiva, because a primitive proto-amoeba must have existed before the first amoeba. But the extent of his drawings of monerans shown here is really one of the measures of his fraud. The height of his deception is better illustrated by the fact that he made similarly detailed but accurate drawings of diatoms shown here. Diatoms are single cell algae that enclose himself in a wall made of silica, which have these beautiful symmetric forms. and Ernst Haeckel published on diatoms. These are two plates from his book titled Art Forms in Nature. Ernst Haeckel had access to the most advanced optical technology available to his time as a professor at Janey University. published pictures here on diatoms. Having some of the best optical technology available just shows that he knew better. It wasn't that he, I mean, he knew better. He was able to see diatoms. But his book titled Art, Form, and Nature is interesting too. Isn't it interesting that he could see art in nature, but not an artisan behind that nature? The monerans that Haeckel imagined did not then, nor do they now exist. The actual organisms, bacteria that were later given this name, monerans, are now known to be in possession of one of those most complex molecular machines we're aware of, the bacterial flagellum. Let me just show you. I've got to move towards a close pretty quick. To add further weight to the problem of the origin of life, let me show you the probability of just a single small protein forming through purely natural processes. This is the calculated probability for a single chain of amino acids forming that's only 150 in length. OK? 150 amino acids. This is the probability. 1 out of 10 to the 164th power. This is a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion times smaller than the odds of finding a single specific particle amongst all the particles in the known universe. And this is a tiny little protein, 150 in length. The RNA polymerase, which is responsible for copying DNA so that code can later become a protein, has 3,000 amino acids. But that was the probability of just getting one little protein to form. However, to get a cell requires multiple macromolecules. You have to have DNA. You have to have proteins. You have to have carbohydrates. You have to have lipids. Multiple macro, big macromolecules are required to have that first cell. And although Darwin and his contemporaries could envision of a cell that was a little lump of mucus or slime, we now know that the cell is an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. The more we learn about the cell, the more we're just blown away with how complex it really is. And we still, at this point, only really know the big picture. Because they're so microscopic, we can't really see them in action. We can show animations of what's going on like this. But it's really like we're looking at them from a distant hilltop with a telescope, trying to figure out what's going on. That's kind of what we're doing. But again, there's little you can draw as far as analogy is concerned to compare with the cell. It's unparalleled in its complexity. A marvel of modern technology like a Bowen 747 doesn't compare. They have orders of magnitude more moving parts. A factory that builds 747s doesn't compare. The cell is literally like a city. in complexity. It has not only machines, it has factories, it has highway systems, it has trucks and trains hauling things from one side to another. Grace like a river Flows through me now Love like an ocean Carries me out He gives and he takes Blessed be his name I wait below Searching so aimlessly For something good, for something great For something that can separate My listless thoughts and words From all that I call yours Because I'm falling now Further into pointless musings, grey confusions Everything you've removed I've brought back from the grave And all the words I seem to say Are all the ways I've gone astray Please take my hand and lead me back To when I adored you A powerful, a childlike faith You threw it all, I want to say You made the earth, I cannot state How glorious you are heart. No longer lost. You chip away the hardened stone. I find my peace in you alone. The righteousness I hold no longer mine to own. I am completely yours I am completely yours All the words I seem to say Are all the ways I've gone astray Please take my hand and lead me back To what I adored you A power full of childlike faith And through it all I want to say You made the earth I cannot state But how glorious Glorious you are Glorious you are Beautiful you are Your steadfast love endures Though all the earth may fade You alone, you are good In everything you do, you are mighty to save Your word is a lamp to light my way Stub fest love indoors You are my hiding place, my shield There is nothing I can say There is nothing I can make Deserving of your love Hold me up and keep me safe Regard me in your warm embrace I'll be great and holy, but beautiful and mighty. My loving Savior. You step past love and death. Just a fast-loving noise. Oh God, my God, will you reach out to me this time? Cause I'm so lost and confused I can't find my way home without you You're strong enough to carry me through all of my guilt and my shame With every breath I take, I will praise your name Take my life for it's all I have to give Now you've found me, I know where I belong Sing Alleluia Sing Alleluia Love's so amazing, I can hardly believe that it's real So with all that I am, I will praise your holy name So what you have done for me is much more than I can comprehend You're strong enough To carry me through all of my guilt and my shame With every breath I take I will praise your name Take my life for it's all I have to give Now you've found me I know where I belong Sing hallelujah Sing hallelujah Sing hallelujah Sing hallelujah Cause you're strong enough to carry me through all of my guilt and my shame So when you will say that I will go save you, show me your face With every breath I take, I will praise your name. Saved my life, for it's all I have to give. Now you found me, I know where I belong. Segale. Alleluia Grace like a river Flows through me now Love like an ocean Carries me out He gives and He takes Blessed be Him Dan, it's great to have you here at the conference. It's great to be here again. Hold that hand out like that. You think I want to get slapped by that? OK, but you got your mic there, so you're good to go. I got a mic to the gills here. OK, put your shoes on there. You have podium. I don't think that figures that out. Thanks. I'll put that on my third foot when I'm done. When you're this big, you need three feet. Oh, it's always an adventure when you're around Dr. Fernandez. I don't know what it is about him, but he's so charming. I keep coming back for more. So today, we're going to look at the problems with distant starlight. And by way of introduction, I want to tell you a little bit about myself and how I came to be up here in front of you talking about a very, very serious technical problem. So my background is I have a Bachelor of Science from Northwestern University. That's the one in Chicago, not the one in Kirkland. I played professional basketball for about three years and was a software engineer for about 24 years. And then since 2003, as Dr. Fernandez mentioned, I've been a Sunday school teacher teaching kids ranging from sixth grade to their sixth decade of life. So you notice that there's nothing about cosmology, astrophysics, or anything in my background. So you might think that I'm somewhat unqualified to be up here. And I would not necessarily disagree with you. But I think I'm in good company, because there are quite a few people in history who are unqualified to do what they did. And I want to introduce you to a few of them. The first of them is Michael Faraday. Michael Faraday is the one who discovered electromagnetism. Without him, I never would have been able to get a degree in electrical engineering. He invented the Bunsen burner and he discovered the benzene molecule of all things. And he also made the first electric motor and generator. This despite the fact that he only had a rudimentary education and he worked as a lab assistant. So you might say that he was unqualified. William Herschel. William Herschel is credited with discovering the planet Uranus and infrared radiation. This despite the fact that he was a music teacher and a composer. I would say he was unqualified. And lastly, my musical heroes from the 1980s, Phil Collins. who can't read music, believe it or not. Phil Collins cannot read music. And by his own admission, in a song that he wrote and sang with Genesis in the early 90s, he can't dance, he can't sing, and he can't talk. The only thing about him is the way that he walks. So you might say that he was unqualified, but yet he was one of the biggest pop stars of the 80s and early 90s. So seriously though, how did I get started on this journey? I was roped into the whole distant starlight problem. It started in a galaxy long time ago. It started a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Well, not really. It actually started about two years ago in an email. I had just finished writing my book, and I was getting ready to go to press, and I was soliciting endorsements. And I handed my manuscript off. A very prominent Christian apologist agreed to read my manuscript. And remarkably, two weeks later, he got back to me with the answer. I couldn't believe he actually wrote back. So here's what he said. He says, hey, Dan, I think your book is fresh, creative, and practical. I know it's going to help many, many Sunday school leaders and students. Oh, yeah. So I'm starting to go like, oh, I'm going to get an endorsement. I'm going to put it on the cover and everything. And I had to keep reading. When I kept reading, this is what I saw. To be honest, I just have one hesitancy, the fact that the book takes a hard line on the age of the earth. Personally, I feel very strongly, based on scripture and science, that kids need to be taught different views on this issue. I meet too many young people who feel that young earth creationism is the only option for their faith, and so they jettison Christianity entirely when they learn of the scientific evidence for an older earth. Yeah, the feeling I got was kind of like the feeling I get when this happens at the gas pump. If you don't know why this is painful, ask somebody who is obsessive compulsive or a perfectionist. This is a no-win situation right here. But then I got to thinking about something that I had heard. So in that same conference, I thought back to what William Lane Craig had said. A friend of mine asked William Lane Craig a question about his view on the age of the Earth. And William Lane Craig had this to say. When you think that we can see the stars, billions of light years away, shows how ancient the universe is. That the world was created a few thousand years ago is so ad hoc and artificial, it strikes me as far more plausible to think that these distant objects have emitted this light, and therefore, the universe is very ancient. And then as I continued to ruminate on this problem, I remembered, wait a minute. Seven years prior, back at the 2010 Worldview Apologetics Conference, I had the opportunity to stand in front of none other than Norman Geisler himself. I was the very first person to take the microphone at the Worldview Apologetics Conference and ask Dr. Geisler a question. And I asked him about his view on the age of the Earth. Here's what he had to say. His answer is legendary. This is absolutely hilarious. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I'm a young earth creationist. On the other four days, I'm an old earth creationist. But I'm cheering for, and I'm praying for, and I'm hoping for the young earthers to be right, but I'm not betting on them. So when I pressed him on this very gently, because I didn't want to get into a debate with probably the premier apologist of our time, this is what he had to say. I think the speed of light is the crucial thing. If you could prove that the speed of light changes, you'd probably convert me to a young Earth creationist. Hmm. It seems to me that young Earthers, like myself, have a distant starlight problem. The problem, succinctly stated, looks like this. If the universe were 6,000 years old, we would not be able to see anything in the nighttime sky more than 6,000 light years away. We can see stars that are billions of light years away, Therefore, the universe must be billions of years old. It's an open and shut case. Seems like the nail in the coffin of the young-Earth argument, doesn't it? But what a lot of people don't know is that old-Earthers also have a distant starlight problem. Their problem is a little bit different, and it's stated like this. The Big Bang model predicts hotspots in outer space. And I'll get into this, what you mean by this. But there are no hotspots. The cosmic microwave background radiation is remarkably uniform. Therefore, the universe can't be 14 billion years old. So what are we talking about cosmic microwave background radiation? This next image. is from a project called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP. What this is is a false color image of basically what amounts to the temperature of outer Spain, otherwise known as okra. So even you, vegetarians, have experienced conduction. It's a great way to get heat from one place to another, but it requires physical contact. Two services must be in physical contact. The next way to move heat is via heat from one place to another in outer space. Matter of fact, this is the only way you can get heat from one place to another in outer space. And one more thing about thermal radiation. Thermal radiation, infrared radiation, the stuff that we perceive as heat, is really electromagnetic radiation. And because it's electromagnetic radiation, it's just electromagnetic radiation that you cannot see, it travels at the speed of light. So keep that in mind. So what does this have to do with the Big Bang's distant starlight problem? Well, let's say we have a little blue-green marble out in outer space. There we go. And then, as the Big Bang model tells us, the Earth was created, excuse me, all of the cosmos came into existence 13.8 billion years ago when a singularity exploded and basically nothing exploded into everything. At the bare minimum, we should be able to see about 13 billion light years in any given direction as we look in the nighttime sky. So let's say we go about 13 billion light years away, and on one side of the planet, we put something hot, like a cup of coffee. And on the other side, we put something significantly cooler, like ice cube. For those of you who are not sure who this guy is, Ice Cube. The other Ice Cube. So, if you've ever left a cup of coffee out in the middle of a room and come back 30 minutes later, you'll notice what about it? It's no longer hot. Well, what happens to all my heat energy? Well, it escapes into the air. And what happens is if you could find a thermometer sensitive enough, you would notice that eventually the temperature of the cup of coffee would come down to room temperature, and the temperature of the room would be elevated ever so slightly until they reach equilibrium. So in order for us to reach equilibrium, for this side of the universe to get all the heat over here over to this side, well, we have to do that via radiation. We have no physical contact, because things are too far apart in outer space. And we have no medium, perfect vacuum, no gravity. So we're relying on radiation. So the problem is, it only travels at the speed of light, and we're 13 billion light years away. So the heat energy from both sides can only get, at this point, to the Earth. You picking up what I'm putting down? Smelling what I'm cooking? OK, good. So because the heat energy over here hasn't had a chance, it can only have gotten as far as Earth, it hasn't had a chance, not enough time, to get over here to the other side to warm up the ice cube. Right? Does that make sense? See, some of you are kind of squinting at me. I'm not sure if it's because you forgot your glasses or you're just not understanding me. So there hasn't been enough time to get the heat energy over here all the way over here. And by the way, this has to happen many times back and forth. It's not just a one-time exchange, shake hands, and you're done. It's a constant process. So the Old Earth model has a serious problem in that there's not enough time, not even after 13 billion years, to get all the heat from one end of the universe to the other end. People are smart, they work on problems, and they solve them. So in the 80s, a guy by the name of Donald Guth comes up with this theory called cosmic inflation. And he was followed very shortly thereafter by a guy by the name of Paul J. Steinhardt and Andre Lind. And these three wunderkinds worked together, and they put together this theory of cosmic inflation. And they say, aha, now we have a solution to our distant starlight problem. And here's what NASA says their solution is. Inflation supposes a burst of exponential expansion in the early universe, so it follows that distant regions were actually much closer together prior to inflation than they would have been with only standard Big Bang expansion. Thus, such regions could have been in causal contact prior to inflation and could have attained a uniform temperature. Should I bring Beaker back? Yeah, there's a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo. I'm a very visual person. Let's put a picture on this and see if we can't make sense of this. So this is supposed to be how the Big Bang happened. So way over here on the left, we have the Big Bang happening. It's when the singularity exploded. And then you see this area right here. This is marked inflation. It's probably really difficult to see where you are. But there's a section here. We see where the curve is. It's very, very steep. So the idea is that during this period of rapid expansion, that the space actually expanded at many times the speed of light. Space itself expanded at many times the speed of light, thus giving just enough time for all the heat to be exchanged between particle and particle. And then so expansion happens. And then for no reason, expansion starts. And then for no reason, the inflation event stops, and then we continue on with the slow, gradual expansion that we see today. Remember that W map, the really pretty one with the red and blue and green spots? That's that disk right there. That's supposed to be the cosmic microwave background radiation. So here we are in the present, and as we look into outer space, we're said to be able to look back into time. But we can't see past this point, because as the story goes, the universe was opaque back here. We won't be able to see that. So inflation, the singularity explodes, and then suddenly we have this massive expansion and then continues out. No explanation for the start of inflation, no explanation for the stop of inflation. Now, I think a lot of times when people hear this, they think, oh, cosmic inflation, the scientists have figured it out. The natural reaction, I think, is kind of like this. Uh-oh, we need sound. We need sound. He's saying, nothing to see here, please disperse. Convection. Convection requires a medium. There's nothing to see here, although there's a fireworks factory exploding in the background. Well, you see that the thing is that inflation has problems. Matter of fact, it's got some pretty big problems. Maybe not quite on the order of magnitude as a fireworks factory on fire, but it has problems nonetheless. Take this quote for example. This guy says, does the theory really work as advertised? Are the predictions made in the early 1980s still the predictions of the inflationary model as we understand it today? There is an argument to be made that the answer to both questions is no. Guess who said this? I'll give you a hint, it wasn't Ken Ham. Paul J. Steinhardt, the director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. He's one of the three guys who originally worked on and developed the cosmic inflation model. This isn't the only time he said this, though. In another article in Scientific American, Steinhardt, along with two others, had this to say. Yet even now, the cosmology community in a cold, honest look at the Big Bang inflationary theory or paid significant attention to critics who questioned whether inflation happened. Rather, cosmologists appear to accept at face value the proponent's assertion that we must believe the inflationary theory because it offers the only simple explanation of the observed features of the universe. The article continues. Inflationary cosmology as we currently understand it cannot be evaluated using the scientific method. It's philosophy. not science. As we have discussed, the expected outcome of inflation can easily change if we vary the initial conditions, change the shape of the inflationary energy density curve, or simply note that it leads to eternal inflation and a multi-mess. That's what he calls the multiverse. Finally, he wraps up with, individually and collectively, these features make inflation so flexible that no experiment can ever disprove it. And the little QR code there is the reference to the article. If your phone can't pick it up from that distance, see me afterwards, and I'll let you scan it for a small fee. That's a joke. You can laugh at that. So what are we to take away from this? Well, the point I want you to come away from this with is that inflation is not settled science. There's no such thing as settled science, so don't ever let anybody use that argument on you. Science, by nature, by very nature, is inductive. All we can do is formulate theories and hypotheses, and we test them, but we're only ever one discovery away from having our favorite theory invalidated. which should send us back to the drawing board. But cosmic inflation is so flexible that they don't have to do that. They just kind of turn the knobs and flip a couple switches, and boom, it works for that too. See? It's a solution that cures all problems. So there's no such thing as settled science. One of my favorite movies is the movie Men in Black. It's from the early 90s. And there's this scene where Will Smith finally has his first encounter with an actual alien, like an extraterrestrial alien living in New York City. And he and Tommy Lee Jones are sitting in a park bench after this encounter. Do we have sound yet? Are we going to have sound for this one? Thank you. So they have this encounter, and they're sitting on the park bench, and Will Smith is just trying to figure out what in the world is going on. And Will Smith asks Tommy Lee Jones, he says, well, why don't we just tell people? People are smart. And he says, no, a person is smart. People are dumb, panicky animals, and you know it. And then I'll let him fill in the rest of the quote. Imagine what we'll know tomorrow, right? But yet we get so caught up in our scientific theory saying, no, this is the way it is, and if you don't agree with me, you're a science denier. Wow, think of how many science deniers we've had throughout history. In the first century AD, geocentrism was all the rage. Claudius Ptolemy actually came up with equations to map the positions of the heavenly bodies in the sky, but it was based on a geocentric model. He's like, oh yeah, we got cycles and epicycles, and his equations worked remarkably well. It was pretty impressive. The problem is, it was wrong, because you had an incorrect model of the solar system. But this view persisted for a good 1,500 years. Everybody knew that cycles and epicycles were the cat's meow. In the 17th century, life from non-life was all the rage. Oh, spontaneous generation. You can get maggots from rotting meat. And then Francesco Redi's like, yeah, I'm not so sure about that. Let's do a little experiment. So he sets up his little, his famous three jar experiment. You got a jar with some meat here, it's completely open. You got a jar with a cork on the top and a jar with some gauze on it. And he noticed that after some time, oh yeah, yep, yep, spontaneous generation, right? Well, no, because the jar that was sealed, no maggots to be found anywhere. And then he saw over here that the flies had actually laid eggs and the maggots had hatched on top of the gauze because they were attracted to the smell of the rotting meat. But everybody knew that life came from non-life. It wasn't until about 191 years later when Louis Pasteur came along in 1859 and he finally put the whole life from non-life thing to rest. Well, that is until Alexander Oparin came along in 1924 and came up with this idea of abiogenesis, life from non-life, those who do not learn from the past. And then finally, back in the 1800s, in the 19th century, everybody knew that the body had four humors in it, blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. And then if you got sick, the way to restore your health was to simply let a little blood out, and we can restore the balance of the four humors, and you'd be all right, as the kids like to say these days. Well, unfortunately, for Mr. Washington's, his sake, his doctors knew this to be the case, but they bled him out. Apparently, they hadn't read Leviticus 17.11, which says the life is in the blood. Maybe if they had spent a little more time studying scripture, they would have known that if the life is in the blood, you don't let out the thing that has the life in it, because when that happens, you die. But everybody knew That was the settled science of the day. All right. So I've harped on a lot about the old Earth position and about science in general. Science is not bad, don't get me wrong. You just have to realize it has limitations. It is a tool for understanding. It is not the end-all be-all. So what is the young Earth's solution to the distant starlight problem? Well, there are four broad categories that I want to address. They are CDK, and I'll explain these in turn, like created on its way, or the appearance of age argument, there are relativistic effects that involve using Einstein's theory of general relativity, and also alternate timing conventions. Let's look at the first one, CDK. In CDK, the theory is that in the distant past, light was orders of magnitude faster than it is today. This was made popular by a paper done by Barry Sutterfield and Trevor Norman back in 1987. And they were, as far as I can understand, they were pretty much roundly mocked by the scientific community. There was much scoffing and gnashing of teeth going on about this. The problem seems to be with c-decay that there's no solid evidence that the speed of light has changed in any meaningful way over time. So the theory has been mostly abandoned, although I have noted that in 2002 Paul Davies has indicated that light has been slowing down since the beginning of the universe. And there are a couple other guys, Yao Magizio and Ash Forty in 2016 have also proposed much the same thing. But I guess because they're not young Earthers, they get a pass. So there's no bias there at all. The second approach, the second proposed solution is light created on its way. Now, this theory says that, well, if things are moving away and light travels at the speed of light, then all God had to do was just make the light beam in transit. So he kinda like stretched out the light beam and said, poof, there it is. And then you got instant streaming light. Well, there's a problem with this. There are several problems, matter of fact. First of all, there's no clear biblical support or reason for God to do this. It is untestable because it makes no scientific predictions. Come on. It invokes the god of the gaps, which is basically like saying, excuse me. That's the problem with speaking right after lunch. Invokes the God of the Gap. The God of the Gap's argument is basically saying, when you say, oh, I don't know how it happened, so therefore God must have done it. It's kind of intellectually lazy. We don't wanna have to go there. And most observable events, I think this is probably the strongest argument against it, most observable events would never actually have happened. So it's one thing to say, we got light, and you can see it, God stretched it out, but what people don't seem to often realize is that light carries information. And that information, it changes. So take, for example, in 1987, if you were privileged to live in the Southern Hemisphere, you would have noticed this in the nighttime sky. This is supernova 1987A. It is a supermassive star that exploded, visible in the Southern Hemisphere. So as the name implies, 1987A, it happened on February 23, 1987. And A means it was the first supernova detected that year. So let's take a look at the problem that supernova 1987A poses for the appearance of age argument. So let's say that we have Earth here, in the black void of space, and we're on day four of creation, in 1 a.m., that's Annamundi in the year of the world. So it's not anti-meridian, it's not 1 a.m., one in the morning. So on day four of creation, God said, let there be, and you'll have to take my word for it, but there are stars up there. But there's only one star in particular we care about. It's this one right here. We're going to drop a star right there, and we're going to put it 168,000 light years away from Earth, which is where this supermassive star is located. So the problem is that it's 168,000 light years away. Light travels at the speed of light. So how long should it take for the light to get to us? 168,000 years, right? Well, that will never do. So as the story goes, what God did is he created the light in transit so that if you were to inspect the light beam at any point on the path between the star and the earth, you would see the exact same picture. Light created in transit. Looks good so far. Seems intuitive. Okay, it works. But now, wink, come on. Come on. There we go. But the problem is, God wants to put on a light show in 1987. That's 5,987 years after the creation event, assuming creation at 4,000 BC. We're just gonna pick that number and go for it. God wants this star to explode 168,000 light years away from Earth, and he wants it to appear there. But the problem is, it's going to take 168,000 years for that image to get to Earth. In 5,987 years, the light would have only gotten this far. Well, that will never do. Talk about being late to the party, because that would mean you have 162,013 years of the wrong image. Hmm, what do we do? Well, God created light in transit, so he can just do that again. So what we need to do is take that 5,987 year period, slide it down, and then fill in the tail with the false images of the star exploding. Are you picking up what I'm putting down? OK? So this way, remember, this is the image as it's speeding towards Earth at the speed of light, right? This is not multiple stars. So now, the false image of this exploding star is now 5,987 light years away. Now, as the clock progresses and 5,987 years pass, we come to February 23, 1987. People in the Southern Hemisphere are like, whoa! Star exploded, man! Name it 1987A! But there's a problem, right? It didn't actually happen. This is not the image of the real thing. It didn't actually happen. The light from the exploding star is still way back here. So now you've got 162,013 years of fake news. So I wouldn't call it the appearance of age argument or the light in transit argument. I would call it the fake news argument, because that's really what it is. So I don't think this works at all. Now, the next category is relativistic effects. We won't get too deep into this, because the theory of general relativity is deep and a mind-bending experience. But Russell Humphreys in his book, Starlight and Time, and Dr. John Gideon Hartnett in Starlight, Time, and the New Physics, both proposed two different approaches using general relativity. Just in a nutshell, general relativity basically states that the passage of time is affected by both gravity and motion. So the closer you get to a gravitational source, the more time slows down. Right? And the faster you go, the more time slows down. And some other non-intuitive things happen under special relativity, where as you approach the speed of light, length contracts. So if you want to get thin, run at the speed of light, and you'll compress in this direction. It won't do anything for you in this direction, but it'll slim you up this way. So the passage of time in the early universe was drastically affected by gravity and or movement. The problem with this is that observations generally don't match the predictions. Both Hartnett and Humphreys themselves have both admitted to various failings in their respective cosmologies. I mean, this is how it is, right? You put a theory out there, somebody pokes holes in it, and you go back to the drawing board. That's just kind of how science works. It's no big deal. Nothing personal. Even John Hartnett has since, and we'll get into this in a minute, the cosmology that he wrote about in Starlight Time and the new physics, he has since walked away from that because he's found a better approach. And that is to use a different timing convention, which is our next category of distant starlight solutions. This is the book, The Physics of Einstein, by Dr. Jason Lyle. I highly recommend this book. It's very accessible. He's got all the really hard math in boxes so that you can skip it if you want to, which is generally what I do, because it's been years since I've done hard math. But it's a really, really great book. Helps you understand special relativity, general relativity, and everything, all the weirdness that goes along with it. So one of the interesting things about relativity is when Einstein was working on this, his equations deal with the speed of light. Now, the one-way speed of light, is impossible to measure for reasons that I won't get into. It's a little long and technical. But it's impossible to determine the one-way speed of light. Every single measurement that we have of the speed of light assumes a round trip. They always bounce the light off of some other place and measure the time it takes to make that circuit. So when Einstein was working with equations, he says, well, I'm going to assume, and this is an assumption, and he states as much, He says, I'm going to assume that the speed of light is the same in all directions. This is called isotropy, depending upon what school you went to, I guess. So he says he assumed an isotropic speed of light. Speed of light is the same in every direction. But his equations don't mandate that. Isotropy, or the uniform speed of light in every direction, is a convention, not a mandate. Jason Lyle says, wait a minute, what if light is not isotropic? What if it's anisotropic, not isotropic? What if incoming light arrives instantaneously But outgoing light travels at what we would call one half the speed of light. So a light from a star beam, that supernova 1987A explodes, boom, we see it the instant it happens. But if that light were to reflect off the surface of the Earth and then go back to somebody who's standing on, well, I guess near, because the stars exploded, you wouldn't want to be too close, it would take, the light would be traveling towards him at half that speed. So he says, what if that were the case? That would get rid of the distant starlight problem. But the problem with this is, well, it's weird. It's counterintuitive. Why should light be different in any direction? It doesn't make any sense. But then again, the more you read about relativity, the more you realize that none of it makes any sense, because it's so beyond our experience. Things happen differently when you're traveling this slow, as opposed to when you start approaching the speed of light. Weird stuff happens. And even smart people don't get it. I have looked and looked and looked and looked and searched and googled my fingers off trying to find a really airtight argument against Lyle's Anisotropic Synchrony Convention, or ASC. I can't find one. The arguments that I usually find look a little bit like this. This is from a prominent ministry's website. I'm not going to mention the name. My intention here is not to embarrass anybody or poke fun at anybody. I'm just trying to give you an example of one of the arguments that I've seen posed against it. He says, our ministry tends not to agree with Dr. Lyle's ASC idea regarding it as somewhat ad hoc. ASC is really a kinematic model, considering only motion without discussing causes, rather akin to Ptolemy's epicycles in a geocentric cosmology. We prefer the time dilation explanations by physicists Dr. Russell Humphreys and Dr. John Hartnett. I went looking for a rebuttal from Dr. Hartnett and Dr. Lyle on this theory. Like, what do you have to say in response to this? I couldn't find one online, so I emailed Dr. Hartnett, who was, by the way, he was kind enough to review chapter 15 of my first book, The Problems with Distant Starlight, upon which this presentation is based. So he was kind enough to review my manuscript for me. And this is what Dr. Hartnett had to say. Kinematics or dynamics has nothing to do with the topic. The author, this guy, did not understand that whatever convention is chosen, one must use the appropriate physics under that assumption. This, I think, is the reason he gets it so wrong. So there's just a lot of misunderstanding about what exactly ASC is, and what it means, and does it work with existing physics. It's not a replacement. It works completely in mesh, in sync with general and special relativity. Matter of fact, Dr. Hartnett himself, on his website, says, on this website you'll find articles on my use of Carmelli's cosmology. That's the cosmology upon which his cosmology was based. They will all remain, but note that I no longer have much faith in such an approach. So that brings me up to the present. I now believe that Lyle's ASC model is the best solution by a long shot. And incidentally, I asked Dr. Hartnett, I was like, well, have you talked to this other ministry? He says, yeah, they don't want to listen to me. But they prefer the cosmology that Dr. Hartnett now rejects. So scientists are all completely unbiased, right? All right, so let's hear it from the horse's mouth. Dr. Jason Lyle says in his book, The Physics of Einstein, when we really understand that ASC and ESC, ESC is the Einstein synchrony convention, right, speed of light same in all directions, are merely two different coordinate systems, we can see why it is meaningless to talk about which is true. Each is a legitimate system by which to catalog events. Under ASC, we see that the universe in real time. And since this seems to be the convention used in the Bible, there can be no distant starlight problem for a young universe. There never has been. Interesting take on the problem. Problem? What problem? There is no problem. You're just using the wrong timing convention. Is that the solution? I'm not sure. Einstein himself said, if at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it. So maybe there's hope for the ASC, right? So in a nutshell, my analysis of the situation is that young Earthers have a light travel time problem. With several proposed solutions, each solution has issues, and not all young Earth cosmologists agree which is the right solution. Welcome to science. Old Earthers, on the other hand, also have a light travel time problem with a generally accepted solution. But that solution has issues. And not all old Earth cosmologists agree on their solution. So what are we to do about this? What's the answer? Well, I think we need to become a little more comfortable with those three ugly words that most of us, especially the men, hate to utter. I don't know. Aren't you glad you came to listen to me talk today about the distant starlight problem? Yeah! 45 minutes of me saying, I don't know. But we get a cute dog at the end. So I got that going for me. So what are we to do? Seriously, practically speaking, how are we to resolve these apparent Bible science conflicts? Well, here's what I propose. You need to ask questions. First of all, you need to ask yourself the question, do I understand the Bible and the theory correctly? Have I properly interpreted Scripture with Scripture? Am I exegeting or am I eisegeting? Am I taking out of or am I putting into the text? Once you understand the Bible and how it affects the theory at hand, do you understand the theory correctly? If the answer to either of these is no, lather, rinse, and repeat. You need to come to a good understanding of both what the Bible says and what the theory says. Secondly, does this theory contradict what the Bible says? If the theory flatly contradicts what the Bible says, like for example, let's take the theory that day seven of creation never ended. Excuse me, each one of the days of creation is a long epoch. It's not a literal 24 hour day. Well then what do you do with Exodus 20, 11, which says, you know, honor the Sabbath, consider it holy, for in six days the Lord your God created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them. Six days. So if your theory contradicts what the Bible says, theory gotta go. And finally, does adopting the theory cause the Bible to contradict itself? If, taking again, the idea that the days of creation are infinitely long epochs or undeterminately long epochs, and looking at day seven, oh, day seven never ended, well, what do you do when you get to Genesis 5.5? What's Genesis 5.5 say? Genesis 5.5 says Adam lived 930 years and he died. So wait a minute, Adam was created on day six, which means he lived through at least part of day six. part of millions of years? And then if day seven never ended, then what do we do with the 930 years? Was God lying? Did he make a mistake? Or does he not do math? I mean, I know math is hard, but he's the one who invented it, so you'd think God would have a grasp on this, right? So if your theory causes the Bible to contradict itself, theory gotta go. So, I wanna go back to the email that I received from that apologist. because something really hit me. He says, I meet too many young people who feel that young earth creationism is the only option for their faith, and so they jettison Christianity entirely when they learn the scientific evidence for an older earth. You see that word, scientific? In the Latin, the word knowledge is scientia, and that's where we get our word science. It means knowledge. Well, that causes me to think about 1 Timothy 6. Guard what has been entrusted to you, avoiding worldly and empty chatter and the opposing arguments of what is falsely called knowledge, scientia, science. If you read the King James, it actually uses the word science here. Which some have professed and thus gone astray from the faith. You know, it's almost like God saw us coming. Yeah, there we go. Now you see the parallels here? They jettison Christianity entirely when they learn of the scientific evidence for an older Earth. And Timothy, Paul says to Timothy, they adopt what is falsely called knowledge, which some have professed and gone astray from the faith. You think maybe God saw this coming and was trying to warn us about it? So, my exhortation to you, my brothers and sisters in the Lord, is to see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of this world, rather than according to Christ. Thank you very much for your time, I appreciate it. My Lord, my Savior, forever your faithful. My Lord, my Savior, forever your good to me. Your love's enough to ransom us Your voice will calm the seas Your arms stretched out to grant us life It brings me to my knees My God. Be my remedy A song of creation My perfect melody To you we sing A hope of the nations It's you that we seek And I'm so overwhelmed, I can't hide My life is paid for and finally free When grace so amazing meets the spiritual rain The love of our Savior that He freely gave And I just can't imagine what He wants from me He's the one of my eyes My Lord, my Savior, forever you're faithful My Lord, my Savior, forever you're good My Lord, my Savior, forever you're faithful My Lord, my Savior, forever you're good My Lord, my Savior, forever you're faithful My Lord, my Savior, forever You're good. My Lord, my Savior, forever You're faithful. My Lord, my Savior, forever You're good to me. When grace so amazing meets the spiritual rain, the love of our Savior that He freely gave, I just can't imagine what He My eyes My Lord, my Savior forever.