Well, thank you all for coming out on a Saturday. Since this is kind of casual today, I want to clarify a point that I made last night that we talked a little bit about, which is the truth claims of this whole idea of evolutionary truth. And again, I would refer you to Nancy Piercy's book, Total Truth. Great book. Somebody said, well, what about fire? What about gravity? If I stuck my hand in the fire, wouldn't they say that was true, that it would burn me? Or if I jumped off a building, that I would die because the acceleration of gravity when I hit the ground, it would kill me. And yes, the evolutionists would concede that that was true. That would fall in that category that we talked about last night of the second three of the four assumptions The first one was the rational mind. I beg your pardon, the third. The second one was sense perceptions. The third one was uniformity, the so-called natural laws, and the fourth one was eyewitness testimony. Now, they will agree that most of the time sense perceptions are true and that uniformity is their big one that they like. That's what they call natural laws. So that would fall under the category of natural laws. The sort of things that they talk about as being evolutionary in nature, in other words, we believe these things because as a survival strategy it benefited our ancestors, therefore they made more copies of their DNA than the individuals who did not believe in these things. So things like beauty, goodness, morality, and truth as a concept, these are the things they say are evolutionary in nature. Belief in God. And so when they say there is no truth, that's generally what they're talking about. And they say that a lot. The other things, just briefly review what we talked about last night, is we talked about Christianity and science, and how science, modern science, was really, came out of Christianity, out of the Christian worldview. Christianity was the mother and father of what we call modern science, and how science is incomplete without Christianity. Science cannot even give a scientific reason why we do science in the first place. And science, for the sake of science, takes us places like what we had inside the Third Reich in Nazi Germany, where you're doing experiments on human beings that we look at as horrific. And so science, without any guiding principle, without any meaning or purpose, which come from Christianity, an empty vessel. And we talked, finally, about Christianity being unique among world religions and how the scientific method comes right out of the Bible, how it comes from Christianity. And the scientific method is this whole idea of what we do now in modern science. And what we do is we have an idea of what is true, of what best describes the world we live in, of what best describes reality. We talked last night a little bit about how truth is really the most accurate description of reality. That's kind of its definition. And so what we do in science, this modern scientific method that comes out of the Bible, is we have a hypothesis. We say this is the way things are. And then we say if this is true, then this other, if X is true, then Y will follow. That's a prediction. And the scriptures are all about predictions. That's what prophecy is. This is what is going to happen. We talked about how all the great prophets, leaders, proponents of Christianity, men such as Moses. I didn't mention Elijah last night, but he would certainly be one. I mean, he certainly said, OK, if your prediction is true, then make some fire. And certainly Peter and Paul and Jesus himself said, this is reality, this is what was predicted, and then what followed tested it, so therefore it is true. That's what modern science is about. Hypothesis, making predictions, observation and data collection, and the testing of your prediction. That's the modern scientific method. You can Google it in several places on the internet, modern scientific method, and that's what you'll find. It may be a little bit longer than that, it may be a little bit shorter than that, but that's what it is. and how the truth claims of Christianity are unique in that it's the only one that opens itself up to this scientific method, which makes sense since it gave us the scientific method. That's where it came from. So tonight, or tonight, this morning, we're going to talk about Darwinism, Darwinistic evolution, and we're going to talk about it in particular regard to this scientific method. and does it hold up? Now, originally, and that's where the title comes from, It's Not Rocket Science. Originally, the title for this talk was The Elephant in the Room. And so you'll see a lot of elephants in illustrations in the course of this talk because the first time I gave it, the person who had asked me to give it didn't like it, but she thought I wasn't being serious enough, that I had to give it a different title. So when you see the elephants, you'll know why. I thought we'd start out with a little fun with kind of my favourite foil, not Stephen Colbert, but his guest, Richard Dawkins, who has written so many books in in defence of evolution, saying that evolution is true. And his most recent book, which was a bestseller, was called The God Delusion. And as he went around the country a few years back promoting his book, he was on a lot of talk shows and one of them was the Colbert Show. And as I said last night, this whole idea of the God Delusion is ironic to the point of absurdity, because if our belief in God is an evolutionary, if it came from evolution, then first of all, there is no truth according to these proponents of evolution, so how could we be deluded from anything? We just believe in God because evolutionarily it was favourable to us, and secondarily, it would be truth from an evolutionary point of view, because the vast majority of the population of the world believe in God, so it must you know, give us fitness for survival. And so I pointed out how even if Dawkins were right, which he isn't, he'd be wrong. So let's take a look at this little clip. My guest tonight is a scientist who argues that there is no God. Well, you know what? He'll have an eternity in hell to prove it. Please welcome Richard Dawkins. Thank you for coming on. I'm so excited to have you. I have to admit, I thought I was getting Gerald Hawkins. Chocolate Thunder. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that. OK. Usually they say they were expecting a man in a wheelchair who can't talk. Oh, they confused me with Stephen Hawking. Oh, Stephen Hawking. OK. Is he going to hell, too? I reckon so. Yeah, you maybe so, maybe so. Yeah, God doesn't like black holes. Alright. Your book started off great, okay? It's got a shiny silver cover and I can see my face in it. But after that I got pretty upset, okay? You say that God is... it's called the God delusion, alright? And you say that there is no God, that God is a myth, and that religion is corrosive. Well, I say that God is very, very improbable. You can't actually disprove God. Right, because he exists. Let's hear it. There is no God. Our belief in him is a delusion. The world and the whole universe was created by a series of random actions. We're all just monkeys and we should fornicate with our feces. Those are your greatest hits, right? I've encapsulated the book, basically. Now, you're not a big fan of intelligent design, either, I'm imagining. I'm a very big fan of intelligent design for man-made things, but I'm not a big fan... of intelligent design for natural things. What do you mean? What's the difference between those things? I mean, aren't we natural? We're part of the natural order of things. There's no intelligent design in the natural order of things. There's plenty of intelligent design in computers and cars and telephones. They're all intelligently designed. And we are so stupid that we think that just because telephones and computers and cars are intelligently designed, that means we are too. Well, we're not. But I'm more complex than my computer. You certainly are. Right, so how could I be here? I mean, how could... it's either... it's either... I'm... I lost. I'll tell you. I'm lost. But I'm lost. If this is... Intelligently designed, like say your book is intelligently designed. It is, by the way. But the universe... But the universe is not intelligently designed. Then you're saying that the universe just... just naturally came into existence Continues existence through the natural laws of nature through physics the thermodynamics the laws of gravity and energy Produced you eventually and then through you produce this book that proves that it has no natural intelligence Let's take that step by step. Oh, I don't think we have time. You were right. You were right as far as the We've got to go. I'm sorry. Richard Dawkins, thank you so much for being my guest. The book is The God Delusion. We'll be right back. OK, I love that interview. So actually, Colbert makes some good point, even though he kind of lost the point he was trying to make there, which was that how can order come out of disorder? And he kind of never got there, but he did in the end, but I just thought, like my music last night, I'd wake you up a little bit this morning. There are other people, kind of the Billy Grahams of evolution, if you will. the Josh McDowell's of Evolution, and one of them is this organization called the National Center for Science Education, and their number one spokesperson is Eugenie Scott, who is an apostle, an acolyte of materialism, and who goes around the country. Anytime someone is threatening to teach intelligent design or to open up Darwinistic evolution for serious scientific criticism, and tries to stop that from happening. And this picture is from a puff piece they did in Scientific American a few years back on Teach the Science. Now, what she meant by that is, don't you dare criticize evolution. And when I bring up Eugenie Scott, because I don't know if she's still doing this, But what she used to do all the time, frequently, when she began a lecture is that she'd take some prop, not her pointer, that might break, but she used to take a floppy disk back when we still used those and would let it fall to the ground and say, you see that? That's gravity. That's a fact. And that's the way evolution is. It's a fact, just like gravity. And we see this a lot. Here's an article. As you may know, Darwin's birthday is the exact same day as Abraham Lincoln. So this past year in February was his 200th birthday. And so there was a lot going on in the news about evolution this past February. So here's a letter to the editor from the Sentinel. And you see this individual, it really doesn't matter what it all says, but it says, evolution is as well established as the theory of atoms or gravity, or that the sun is the center of the solar system. And so you hear this a lot, that evolution is just like gravity. And gravity, of course, that whole Newtonian physics is what got us to the moon, to Mars, and to other places. So, let's talk a little bit about that. Certainly, Charles Darwin, when he published Origin of the Species in 1859, it was a world-shattering event. The first edition sold out almost immediately. A scientific revolution did follow. That's undeniable, and it's also undeniable that it's forever changed how we look at the world. Now I want to briefly talk about some other scientific evolutions. Incidentally, these guys were all Christians. I mean, Copernicus was a priest, for crying out loud. And Galileo and Newton, both confessing Christians. But I want you to take particular notice that their work was based on observations. And from these observations, they made predictions that were testable. And that's what modern science is all about. Now, Charles Darwin made a lot of observations, to be sure. You all know about his voyage of the Beagle. He went to the Galapagos Islands. He wrote down a lot, studied a lot, and he made a lot of observations. He was a naturalistic extraordinaire, and he did have and encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world. But is his theory really like gravity? Well, we're not going to have a physics class here today, but I do want to point out the differences. Here's the classical, if any of you took physics in high school or college, you might remember this. This is kind of Newton's theory of gravity, or the equation that describes it. the gravitational force. This would be the force, say, between the Earth and the Moon or any two large bodies. And this G is the gravitational constant that he derived. And the mass 1, M1 is the mass of one body, M2 is the mass of another body. So this could be the Moon here and the Earth here. And then the radius is the distance between the two bodies. So this is it. It's a very elegant, relatively simple equation. that describes the way things are. And you can make measurements any time and prove this. Test it. See if his prediction is true. Another one that might be well-known is force equals mass times acceleration. Did Darwin do this? Well, he tried. And if you read Origin of the Species, you'll see that he really tried to do this. He started out, we're going to take three of those ideas, this is right out of the Origin of the Species. The Origin of the Species, if you're ever curious, the first and the sixth, which was the final, editions are online at literature.org. You can read chapter three where most of this stuff is. You can look at the titles of the chapters. And it is kind of interesting to read if you can get through the Victorian English, the 19th century language. It's not that bad. You can read parts of it, and I encourage you to do so. So the first idea was that population is going to increase as the food supply increases, that it's that what we're always trying to do is increase our numbers. The second idea is that then there would become – when – as you exhaust the idea – as you exhaust the food supply, there would then emerge a struggle for existence, and then that is when natural selection would become operative. So we're going to take just a quick look at those three ideas to see if evolution is like gravity. Now, he got this idea about exhausting the food supply. Incidentally, it seems to be one that never goes away, that from Thomas Malthus, I don't know if you remember, some of you, I'm sure in this room, a lot of you remember this idea of the population bomb. You remember that book from the 70s, I believe, where we were all, we were going to exhaust the food supply on the planet and we were all going to die. And this is basically what Thomas Malthus was worried about in the 19th century, that we would – the population was going to increase, and we were going to exhaust the food supply. And they just noticed this geometric increase of populations. And so Darwin took this idea from Malthus, and he said that, The population – and incidentally, this is right out of Origin of the Species. The population must increase, and it must increase geometrically. Every single organic being around us may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers. I think you can all see, just for starters, that's not true. I mean, people decide not to have kids for all kinds of reasons. And certainly, as you look at the human condition throughout time, throughout history, and even in present time, you see that, well, for one thing, there have always been people who've decided to be celibate. For another thing, there's always been people, people who aren't even Christian, who've decided to be celibate. People who have fallen, people who've decided to be homosexual. And people who get married who are able to have children, I mean, who just decide for one reason or another that they don't want children or that they just want one child. And from a Darwinian point of view, some of the people who have decided not to reproduce have been some of the richest, some of the most powerful, and so forth and so on. I could show you, you know, people have put together lists of these type of things. For example, we talked about Newton. You'd certainly think you'd want Isaac Newton to be making lots of kids. And he decided never to get married, never had any kids. And there are many kings who didn't have as many kids as they could have. So right away you see that this first premise is not true. the struggle for existence. Again, the quotation marks are because it's right out of the origin of the species. Of the many individuals of any species which are periodically born, but a small number can survive. What is this saying? First of all, if Darwin is right, then this has to be true. If this is the way evolution works, And again, these ideas are never taught. I rarely hear these talked about. That, okay, what you want to do is you want to glean out whoever is most effective at reproducing. So if these bad qualities exist, they have to die before they reach reproductive age. Because if they reach reproductive age, they're going to pollute the gene pool. They're going to dilute the gene pool with their, quote, bad DNA. Now, from a Darwinian point of view, of course, there is no good or bad. There's only survival. And whoever makes the most copies of his or her DNA wins the battle for survival. So this whole idea of goodness, from our perspective, goes out the window. The only goodness is making more copies of your DNA. But you can see how this has to be true. So there has to really be infant mortality. Let's take humans. That's what we all care about. And so humans have to die before they reach reproductive age. So most of the bad ones have to die in childhood. And as we look back, in observable history, we never ever see a period that has this majority dying out. Now, you say, what does he mean by but a small number? Well, I think a small number would be probably that only 5% can survive. I mean, 10% a fairly big number, certainly, but let's give them 20%, okay? We'll be conservative. So we know of no period in observable history where we had 80% infant mortality. So then we get back into this being unobservable science, which isn't science at all. And the other thing he says is that The struggle almost invariably will be most severe between individuals of the same species. So this is a cutthroat idea about what humans are, that as we're struggling for existence, we're going to struggle among each other. Proponents of this idea would point to wars and so forth, but wars are always the exception in human history. I mean, certainly wars are there, but most of the time we see people coming together in community, engaging in commerce, engaging in agriculture and so forth. We see people cooperating. So this idea of struggling among each other just really doesn't happen. Most of these – his observations were done throughout his life. He read other people's works. He – and his – of course, his big thing was the long voyage on the ship, the Beagle, that went to the Galapagos Islands. But these ideas were really deductions. That is, he thought about them. And so from that point of view – and this Right. Read other people's work and said, this is the way it must be. And we're going to get into that, about how he arrived at these conclusions and why. The point I'm trying to make here is that if you put it under the magnifying glass of the scientific method, as you would gravity, as you would physics, as you would chemistry, it doesn't hold up. And lastly, so once you have the population, growing and growing and growing. Then you get the struggle for existence. Then this whole idea of natural selection emerges and survival of the fittest. And I want to take a moment to quickly read this paragraph. If variations which are useful to their possessors in the struggle for life do occur, can we doubt, remembering that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive, that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others would have the best chance of surviving and procreating their kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. Now I just want to zoom in on that last phrase. On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. Now let's test that idea. Let's look at some of the things that exist in humankind and have always existed, some of the practices that we have always done. As far as we know, homosexuals have always been around. Either abandoning, as the Spartans and Romans did sometimes, children on the hillside, or performing abortions have always been around. Alcoholism has always been around. And you can make a long list of these traits that are certainly the least degree injurious that just don't seem to go away over observable history. These things that we do that would definitely be detrimental to our survival as a species, and they're not being weeded out. They're not being gotten rid of by the Darwinian method. They continue to exist. So as you test this, it just doesn't work under any observable type of science. So, as we put these to the test, we find that the population does not increase relative to the food supply. I mean, you need to look no further than Europe, where they have plenty of food, they have plenty of resources, yet they're their population is going down. The only way their population is growing is by immigration. They're not making more copies of their own DNA. So, certainly, from a scientific method, if Darwinistic evolution is true, the prediction you would make is these people who, from a Darwinian point of view, would be highly evolved, would be highly successful, would continue to make more copies of their DNA. and they're not doing it. So it fails that test. Secondly, the struggle for existence between ourselves. Are we doing that? No. We're trying to eradicate war. We're trying to eradicate disease. We're taking the people who have the least hope of reproducing sometimes and we're helping them to survive. And we think this is good. Now, from a Christian point of view, we have reason to think that is good. But from an evolutionary point of view, you would never predict that that would be true. And so, there is no survival of the fittest. And again, I already talked about the fact that those traits which are the least degree injurious would be eliminated. So if you test it like you would any other science, it's not like gravity. It's not a bit like gravity. First of all, it doesn't have an elegant equation like physics or chemistry. Second of all, if you try to give it one, which Darwin did try to do, and then you test it according to those premises, You make observations, it fails. So it's not a bit like gravity. It's not a fact like gravity. It's nothing like those types of science. Now, I don't want to say that it's not science at all, because certainly science has a big umbrella under which you can find a lot of things. And many things that are science, people try to say, well, we're going to put that under the umbrella of Darwinism, under the rubric of Darwinism. And that's really not so, it's just some sort of biological science that may or may not have to do with Darwinism. And lastly, I want to point out to you that what it is, it's a historical science. That's what it is. It's more like history. Now, where did he get his observations? What led him? to make these conclusions? Well, it's evident from Darwin's personal writings that he had a distinctively anti-theistic mindset. You have to remember that in this historical period of the 19th century, this is where a type of theology called deism emerged. There was a God, maybe an author of the universe but then he left, you know, he went to Disneyland or somewhere. And then, so he sort of set everything up like a clock and then it was running on its own after that. And there was this distinctively anti-miracle mindset that we, instead of man being the measure, I'm sorry, instead of God being the measure of all things, that man became the measure of all things. so that we could explain everything, that there were these natural laws that were in existence, and that we could assign them to all that. And you'll hear that Darwin at one point wanted to become a minister, that he wanted to study for the clergy. I think that's true, but if he had become a minister, he was from a Unitarian family. And the Unitarians were, now they're humanists, I know that very well because I was raised in a Unitarian family. But at the time they were deist. They did believe in a supernatural God at some point in the history of the universe, but he was no longer there and he certainly didn't intervene in the day-to-day workings of the universe. He refers in one letter to Christianity as a damnable doctrine. He was upset because the ramifications of the Christian doctrine were that a lot of his friends and relatives were not going to go to paradise. And regarding the Old Testament, that it was manifestly a false history of the world. Now I'm going to use this paragraph a couple of times in a letter to his friend Asa Gray. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created, actually the name of it is Ichnemonidae, which is why I just have parasitic wasp up there, with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that cats should play with mice. In other words, he's appealing to this idea of evil, of badness, that this is bad. Why would a good God allow evil? It revolts our understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not unbounded. For what advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of lower animals throughout almost endless time? This is from his autobiography. Now, this isn't science. This is theology. The premise in the argument here is that God wouldn't do things this way. And if you read the origin of the species, you'll find this come up several places. He literally says, this is the way I think that things must have happened. There are those of you out there that would say, the creator, or this happened during creation. He never uses the word God that I can remember but the implication is clear that this is the way God did it, but I say no, he wouldn't have done it this way. And that pretty much is his argument. And this argument is still used a lot for promoting evolution. And it's what we call homology. Now what does that mean? Well, in my arm there's one bone here, there's two bones here, And then there's about 10 bones in this wrist area. And then you have this plan in my hand where there are five radiating bones that become my fingers. You see the same thing in my leg. One bone here, two bones here, 10 bones roughly, 8 to 10 bones in the ankle area, and then five radiating bones in the feet. And you see this plan in vertebrates, those animals with backbones, repeated, particularly among mammals. And so the evolutionist says that means we must have a common ancestor. And those of us who believe we're products of a creator say, why? God just, why wouldn't he do it that way? It makes perfect sense to me. So I find this argument very weak, but basically Darwin's argument is that God wouldn't have done it that way. And I'm not going to read this whole paragraph, but he makes this point at length in this paragraph, and at the end he talks about this upland goose who has webbed feet. and he really never goes near the water or swims in the water, so why would he have webbed feet? So, I don't know if you're familiar with the word theodicy, it was coined by a guy named Leibniz, a wonderful Christian philosopher, at least I think so, and it comes from the word for God, Theo, and the word for justice, and it was his explanation of evil. But it's a word that's used when we try to explain evil and its existence in the universe, in the world. And so, what Darwin was presenting here is he couldn't believe God would have had a world where wasps would lay their eggs inside of other insects, and as they hatch, they would eat their way out, that this is just really bad, this is horrible, and that cats would play with mice, to what seems to us just for fun. And why should similar bones have been, this is a quote, been created to form the wing and leg of a bat, used as they are for such totally different purposes, namely flying and walking. And then, again, getting back to this post-Renaissance idea, post-Enlightenment idea, the more we know of the fixed laws of nature, the more incredible do miracles become. Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws. This is this appeal that I talked about last night that we see so often today, this appeal to uniformity as being the most important of the assumptions that we make. So this isn't surprising. You had plenty of skeptics at this time. Kind of the two words that you hear a lot about emerging during the Enlightenment are human reason and nature. In other words, natural laws and the way things are. And Kant, Hume, important philosophers of their time were promoting this idea of skepticism. They were arguing against the classic design arguments. arguing against the classic arguments that had always been around as how you could pretty much prove God. And you had the Industrial Revolution where human beings were accomplishing great things on their own. People were losing touch with nature, losing touch with God's creation. When you lived on a farm and you witnessed the miracle of seeds growing and animals giving birth all the time, and instead you came in and did piece work at a factory with machines, you got out of touch with the creation. And Newton, although he was a Christian and presented his entire work as an apologetic to God's glory, nonetheless an unintended consequence of his ideas was that there was this clockwork universe. So, it's not surprising. I want to digress just for a moment to talk about how people have become so immersed in this idea of evolution as negative theology that they forget it's not science. The preeminent journal, pretty much without argument, in the scientific establishment is Nature. a scan of an old copy of that journal. And that comes out of Britain. The equivalent here in the United States is called science. Now, of course, as you go down into the various disciplines of physics or chemistry or anesthesiology, you find other scientific journals. But as you ascend that pyramid and just get to pure science, you find nature. And after Philip Johnson, I'm sure most of you are familiar with him, wrote his book that shook up the scientific world, the evolutionary establishment called Darwin on Trial. They were angry. And they were very angry, and this editorial written by David Hull, who's still alive, he's a philosopher of science, he's actually an American, but he was on the editorial board, and he wrote an editorial in response, largely, to Philip Johnson's book called God of the Galapagos. And I'd like to take a moment just to read to you a couple of paragraphs out of that editorial. He says, this is in a science journal, what kind of God can one infer from the sort of phenomena epitomized by the species on Darwin's Galapagos Islands? The evolutionary process is rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain, and horror. Millions of sperm and ova are produced that never unite to form a zygote. Of the millions of zygotes that are produced, only a few ever reach maturity. On current estimates, 95% of the DNA that an organism contains has no function. Let me just stop here for a minute. Now, that's no longer true. Certain organic systems are marvels engineering. Others are little more than contraptions. When the eggs that cuckoos lay in the nests of other birds hatch, the cuckoo chick proceeds to push the eggs of its foster parents out of the nest. The queens of a particular species of parasitic ant have only one remarkable adaptation, a serrated appendage which they used to saw off the head of the host queen. To quote Darwin, I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent god would have designably created the Ichthymonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars. He's saying that all these things are bad, they're not good. Whatever the God implied by evolutionary theory and the data of natural history may be like, he is not the Protestant God of waste not, want not. He is also not a loving God who cares about his productions. He is not even the awful God portrayed in the book of Job. Actually, I think he needs to re-read that. The God of the Galapagos is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical. He is certainly not the God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray. Whatever you think about that, that's not science. That's theology. And here it is in the most respected science journal in the world. It's theology and philosophy, it's not science. And so, when you're presented with these sorts of arguments, I think you need to ask the question about, gee, is that science, really? What is science? And to me, the weaknesses of this argument, again, and we talked about this last night, and I can't overstress its importance, is that Darwinism has been described as a universal acid. And if that is true, then you lose the ability to call anything good or bad. See, we can recognize the fallenness of our world from a Christian point of view. We can say that is bad, that we wish that weren't so, that it's a result of Adam's sin. But from an evolutionary point of view, you lose the ability to appeal to goodness or badness, to be outraged by these behaviors. there is no good or bad, there's just survival. Where you come up with this idea that wasps who do this, or that cuckoos who lay their eggs in other birds' nests, or ants that saw the heads off other ants, that that's evil. And there are other explanations for that from a biblical perspective as well. But the whole idea that there's such a thing as good is a premise that relies on the knowledge of God's character. The only way I know that we can gain knowledge of God's character is to read the Bible. Where is the empirical evidence that the design is bad? You'll hear this argument a lot. You'll hear it about a panda's thumb. You'll hear it about the construction of the retina in animals. you'll hear it maybe about the appendix. You'll hear this whole idea, the design of the human knee and so forth, being bad. And that to me is a faulty argument, and I'll tell you why. In order to say that design is bad scientifically, you have to compare it to another design. The F-22 has been in the news a lot lately. So take an airplane. And let's say that – I believe the F-22 is made by Lockheed Martin. Let's say that Northrop Grumman comes along and says, you know what? The design of that plane is really bad. And the Defense Department is going to say what? They're going to say, okay, well, then you show us a design that's better. And so they produce a lot of drawings and say, well, this design would be better. And they say, you know, those drawings look great, but I really want to see that thing in production. I want to see some hours logged in on its flying. In fact, I want to see a lot of hours logged in on its flying and see what problems develop over its life. Only then are you able to say this design is bad. So if you're saying that the design of the human eye or the design of a panda's thumb is bad, well then it behooves you to show a different design that's better. And talk's cheap. I mean, I want to see the thing up in operation. So build me a panda with a better thumb. Build me a human with a better eye, and then we'll talk. But otherwise, like I say, talk is cheap. And if we're talking about science here, then you can have all the hypotheses that you want that the design is bad, but until you have an operational unit It's just an opinion. And science definitely should be data-driven, not theology-driven and not just opinion-driven. Now, I really ought to get rid of this slide because even the scientists say this isn't true anymore. And it really shows you how fast things have changed and this whole idea of common descent that Darwin put forth in his book, Origin of the Species, has been blown out of the water this year. And now, if you – the way I got this illustration years back was I Googled phylogenetic tree. You can't even find it if you Google it anymore. If you go to some of the common sites for illustrations, like Wikipedia, you can find it, but it's a lot harder. It's all jumbled up, because now that they've done DNA studies, they don't know what to say, because there is no common descent like this anymore. But I still want to talk about it, because it is one of the strengths of evolutionary theory. It's why when you present this to school children, that they glom onto it. Because you look at this idea, down here we have LUCA, and that's how it's usually abbreviated, and that stands for Last Universal Common Ancestor. So you'll see this term LUCA. And then as you look at protozoa, if they're still called that, or peripheral sponges – now, these used to be called solenorates. Now they're called middaria. This would include jellies and a lot of – we used to call them jellyfish, but now they're jellies. And then you go up to flatworms, roundworms, mollusks, and so forth. And so you see this – this idea emerges that, eventually, it leads to us. Oh, yeah, I can see that. And, you know – But there is some strength as you follow this step-by-step nature of God's creation. You can see why people might buy into that, as ridiculous as it may seem to us. So, when you explore this idea, and this is what I'm talking about, the elephants in the room, that's an expression about obvious problems that people start to ignore after a while that are right there, yet they don't talk about them. And the first one is the fossil record. And Darwin knew about these shortcomings. In fact, you have to go no further than the titles in some of his chapters will talk about. But at the time, there were very prominent scientists Louis Agassiz, Adam Sedgwick, Richard Owen, and others who pointed out these shortcomings to him. And he just tried to argue them away. He really never successfully answered them. If you look at the chapter titles, difficulties of the theory, miscellaneous objections to the theory of natural selection, on the imperfection of the geological record, Now, again, I encourage you to go, if you're interested, to literature.org and you can read about this. And they're still there. And, for example, the missing transitions, which continues to get swept under the rug. They still, you know, the latest thing are the feathered dinosaurs. You know, these walking fish are another one. Of course, ape demand, we're going to spend a whole lecture on that. But even if you acknowledge those for a second, those are all within a single group. These big groups of classification, which incidentally are arbitrary and they were developed by a Christian man named Carl Linnaeus, who believed in creation, but the big groups are called phylums, and the phylum that we're in is called vertebrates. And even if you got into this, it still doesn't answer the question about the transitions between the big groups or phylums. So all these transitions that the evolutionists do appeal to are within a single phylum. But Darwin says, he who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record will rightly reject my whole theory, for he may ask in vain where are the numberless transitional lengths. You've probably seen that quote before. Stephen Jay Gould, who passed away several years ago, was a Darwinian fundamentalist. He tried to explain this idea away with a concept called punctuated equilibrium. The whole idea of punctuated equilibrium. The punctuations are the fact that there are these big gaps. The equilibrium says that for long periods of time in the geological record, nothing changes. So that what we see are long periods of stasis and then sudden emergence of new animals as though they were created. So this is a picture of Stephen Jay Gould when he was on the Simpsons. And just about, I mean, that show was around for so, is it still around? I don't even, yeah. Yeah, so it has to be the world's longest show. The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontologists. He will, he forever rued the day he ever put that in print because people like me and pastors all over the United States and probably the world are, flashing it up on screens ever since he said it. Let me go back to that and talk just briefly about punctuated equilibrium, which will come up again on because that's what they talk about with humankind. So this idea of why you can't see the transitions, the idea is that there was a population of a certain species that became isolated from the rest, geographically isolated, and that to this small population that there was intense evolutionary pressure. Now he doesn't define what that is, but you can imagine, you know, Maybe they were bombarded with radiation, or there was some predator that was preying upon them, so that they either had to evolve or die, and so that this evolution took place very rapidly. Well, the problem with that, again, is that when we get to science, real science, where we make observations, and we put intense evolutionary pressure on any isolated a group of species, what happens? They go extinct. I mean, we see this time and again. When we over-hunted the whales, the whales didn't, like, get faster or grow legs and run away from us on land. They went extinct. And with – and you'll hear these numbers about – Animals going extinct all over the world. I forget how many animals go extinct every day or every few minutes another species goes extinct. But they're not evolving. Butterflies aren't growing arms so they can fight back. It just doesn't happen. When you apply intense evolutionary pressure on a group of animals or plants, they die. They go extinct. And so that's kind of the idea that, and if you apply a lot of radiation, they don't mutate, they die. And so this idea of rapid evolution, and then, so you don't see the evolution taking place. This is an explanation of why you can't make the observations that would prove what they say is true. So this is an excuse. Punctuated equilibrium is an excuse. for why you can't test their theory. Now, the sudden appearance, the abrupt manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations has been urged by several paleontologists, for instance, by Agassiz, Pictet, and Professor Sedgwick, as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of species. If numerous species belonging to the same genera or families have really started into life all at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of descent with slow modification through natural selection. Well, it should have been fatal. But apparently it wasn't because that's what we see in the fossil record time and again. We see the sudden appearance of animals and plants as though they were created. Now, I want to take a look at a couple of graphs. Now, this is the way things ought to be if the predictions were true. This is time on the y-axis, and this is morphological distance. In other words, if we all started out from this Luca, this last universal common ancestor, and then he mutated and became two different species, those two became four, those four became eight, Those eight became 16 and so forth. Then over time, then they would grow apart in their morphology. They would have different body plans. So this is what we would expect to see in the fossil record. We would expect, as we went back in time, to see everything pretty much the same. And then as time goes on, we would see more and more different types of body plans. So let's test that. What do we really see? in the fossil record. What we really see is, all at once, in this so-called Cambrian explosion, we see all the different body plans. And even this one up here, which – this one here that doesn't appear for a while is still in the Cambrian period, and those are vertebrates. But all the rest of them all appear at once, and then some of them go extinct. That's what these gaps are. But they all appear at once. And there are some back here that also roughly fall into the same time period. But it's as though they were created. Gee, one could, like, imagine that. Now, here's just another way of graphing the same thing. This is the number of phyla. Remember, those are those big groups of different kinds of animals. And over here is time. So, again, back here, there's only one phylum, right? And that's the last universal common ancestor. and then they would slowly increase in number, rapidly, rapidly, rapidly, and then as all the evolutionary niches were filled, then it would slowly level out. But what do we really see? What we really see is, bam, everything appears all at once again, as though somebody created them, and then we see them going extinct and slowly dropping off until we get to present. his predictions do not come true. Again, Chris said I could take a little extra time with this talk, so I want to talk about this idea of organs of extreme perfection. There are lots of these. Lots and lots and lots of them. But the one that is classically discussed is the eye. And Darwin says, if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. Now, I have a problem with this statement because what he's saying is You have to prove my theory wrong. He's not saying, I'm going to prove my theory right. Here's how you prove it's right. He's saying, if you can prove that what I hypothesize isn't true, then my theory is wrong. That's not the way we do science. The way we do science is we say, here's my idea, here's how you can test it. And so people have presented this argument time and again and they never get called on it. Well, in logic we have a name for this idea. It's called argument from ignorance. And what he's saying is something should be believed until it is shown to be false. Accept this because you can't prove it isn't true. Now, this is evolution of the gaps. We always get accused of being God of the gaps. We don't know how this happened, so we're going to say God did it. And what he's doing here is he's saying we don't know how this happened, so we're going to say evolution did it. So, it's evolution of the gaps. Now, it kind of reminds me of the story of the guy who goes in the doctor's office flapping his arms. And the doctor says, why are you flapping your arms like that? And he says, to keep the alligators away. Well, you know, this is in Northern California, and the doctor says, there aren't any alligators within thousands of miles of here. And he says, see, it works. And, I mean, it's crazy. And so what Darwin is, I like to call this idea, you know, monkeys could fly out of my pocket theory. It might happen. We've never seen it happen, but it might happen. So the burden of proof of this idea of organs of extreme perfection, and this would be the eye and the blood clotting system and lots and lots of other things in the human body, for example, the burden of proof should be on Darwin. Where's the empirical evidence for his hypothesis? Well, these were all questions raised by scientists of the time. And the usual scenario – now, these are all from one phylum called Molesca. And in the Molesca, this is where the squids and the octopus are. So you see this eye that's very – is very similar. to the vertebrate eye, which is very complex. And then there are some other creatures within this phylum that have all different kinds of eyes. Now, you don't see this step-by-step evolution of the eyes in other animals below there. This is isolated to the mollusk. And there is no evolutionary relationship claimed between these different animals within this phylum. But they point to this, and they say, see, it could have happened. And you even see it. in textbooks, and about this is how it could have happened, this is how it must have happened. But the problem with this, and this is something brought up by Michael Behe in his excellent book Darwin's Black Box, is when you get down to a cellular level, the most primitive photoreceptor is incredibly complex. Now I'm not going to go through all this, but you see like this is the chemical that has to change when light hits it. And you can see that there are all these other chemicals that have to react with it, and then it's got to go back to its original configuration, and that this causes a voltage change, which sends an impulse, and so forth. So even the most simple photoreceptor in the most primitive animal is incredibly complex, and there is no step-by-step evolutionary scenario that can be demonstrated empirically. So, as we talk about the elephants in the room, the first one is that Darwin's whole book is a theological argument. It's an argument, an anti-theological argument, that there are the missing transitions, there are the sudden appearances, and there are these morphological novelties that are not well explained. So the strength we've already talked about, pattern recognition, that small-scale changes can be well accounted for. And these are the things that we always hear about, the bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics, insects becoming resistant to certain insecticides. We see these small-scale changes. that can happen, but really, as has often been pointed out by intelligent design proponents, by Christians, is these small-scale changes, the fact that we are programmed to be able to survive in all of animals and plants, and that we can have changes in our DNA that allow us to survive, that allow animals, bacteria, to survive in plants as well. because of these evolutionary pressures, allows them to stay the same, not to change. In other words, when you expose bacteria to antibiotics and they mutate so that they can live in the presence of that antibiotic, they don't become an amoeba, they don't become a protozoa, they stay in E. coli or whatever bacteria that they are. So it allows them to survive as the kind of animal that they are. God created animals and plants according to their kinds and this pre-programmed nature of their DNA that allows these small-scale changes allows them to survive as the kind that God made them. But nonetheless, these small-scale changes can be accounted for by natural selection. Thus, certain biological changes are well accounted for. And in an era that humans seem to want everything explained, including first causes, by a scientific, naturalistic, materialistic explanation, Darwinism had no competitors. So it is compelling as an explanation of evil and suffering. We were in this post-enlightenment world, where we were appealing to reason and nature. It was an era right after the Industrial Revolution. To me, this is right out of Deuteronomy 8, where Moses, as he's preaching, is saying, You're going to build fine houses and settle down, and you're going to forget the Lord your God, who gave you all this stuff and gave you the ability to produce it. And that is exactly what happened. Moses' predictions came true, that people would forget the Lord their God. And there was no competition. So, that's it for this lecture, folks. Thank you very much. It came from monkeys. How come there are monkeys if we evolved from the last universal common ancestor? How come that would seem to still be present as perhaps bacteria and amoeba? And I think the evolution – the way that question is traditionally answered is that this animal found its evolutionary niche. You know, it found a place that fit it. And then others of that population got out of that niche somehow, and they were subject to these evolutionary pressures, and then they moved on. The question, of course, is, where are the transitional links? And – but, yeah, that's a good question. And why are there some of these evolutionary relics, if you will, like the shark or the horseshoe crab, and yet others are highly evolved? And, again, the way that question is answered by the evolutionists is that, well, they found an evolutionary niche that fitted them, that fit them, and they were successful and there was no need for them to evolve. But again, this is sleight of hand, this is the shell game, and it's an explanation rather than science. And the thrust of this lecture is that Darwinistic evolution is not rocket science. It is not empirical science. And that needs to be pointed out any time this discussion starts. My question is, well, what do you mean by science? Because this is historical science. It's not the type of science where we have a hypothesis, we make observations, we can test our results, so we can't take pick an animal, expose that animal to radiation or to predators, and watch that animal mutate. In fact, to my knowledge, no one's ever observed a slam-dunk beneficial mutation, one that helps us out. I mean, there are small ones, but nothing that changes a major structure. And there have been books written about the fact, and we're gonna talk about this in the next lecture, these limits. Michael Behe just wrote a second book a couple of years back, or a year and a half ago, called The Edge of Evolution, meaning that, sure, you can have these small-scale changes, but then you reach this edge beyond which you cannot go. Evolution cannot take us. He presents a tougher reading than his first book. You can't go beyond this, and he gives mathematical reasons why you just never going to go beyond that. The question is, at length, I've kind of driven home the point that from an evolutionary point of view, you are no longer permitted to claim good or bad. What they do is they invade our theistic framework to make these moral claims of goodness and evil. In other words, they borrow the cloak of a Christian to say, God is good, this is good, wasps laying their eggs inside caterpillars is bad. Because from an evolutionary point of view, there is no good or bad, there's only survival. So if the wasp survives by doing this and you believe in evolution, you're not allowed to say that's bad. However, God has placed eternity in our hearts, God has placed in our hearts this inherent, what philosophers call natural law. And so when people are presented with this, they don't stop and think that any judgement of goodness or evil requires a belief in a god. So when Darwin presents them with this idea that this explains good and evil, they glom onto it right away. because we want a quick answer as humans so we can move on. So it really does work. It really does work for the masses. We've always lived in a soundbite world. and even though in Darwin's time there was no television or radio and so forth, we've always wanted the quick answer, and the quick answer is that, OK, this explains it, there is no God, and Darwinism then leads to, hey, I can do whatever I want, because there will be no judgement, and so forth. So, I think that's the answer. This is, the question is, can there be spontaneous evolution? And what you're really talking about, and I'll bring this up again in the next lecture, is this idea, well actually the last lecture, of jumps. Did anybody see what was the Michael Crichton book that was made into a movie? Jurassic Park. Remember at the end, a dinosaur egg hatches and a bird comes out. That would be what you're talking about. And evolutionists would call this a saltation. And what that word comes from is the Latin word for jump. And Darwin had a famous statement, which was, natura non facet saltum, nature doesn't make jumps. All those guys were still using Latin back then. And it was just at the end of the period where scientific works were no longer being presented in Latin, actually. And so Darwin said, no, if you have a jump like that, then you're really appealing to a miracle. And if I were to allow for jumps, then there would be no difference in my theory and the creationist theory. And this is why Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins used to get into it. Because Richard Dawkins would point out to Stephen Jay Gould with his punctuated equilibrium that you're just trying to find a way to sneak a jump in there. and there are no jumps. Darwinism, if it's true, must proceed in this step-by-step, slow progress. That's the only way it can work. Otherwise, you're appealing because the mathematical improbability of all these changes happening in concert to give us a feather, to give us the ability to fly, to give us the hollow bones that birds possess so they can be light enough to fly, to give us the air sacs that they possess in their lungs that allow them to fly for miles and miles and miles without having to stop and catch their breath so that they can eliminate the carbon dioxide and not get an oxygen debt like you and I get, that would be a miracle. There would be no difference between that sort of evolution and a miracle. And so that's why Darwin was so emphatic in saying, Natura non facet saltam, nature doesn't make jumps, because then the whole thing falls apart. then you're just appealing to some other sort of miracle, because it would be a miracle, mathematically, it would be so improbable as to be a miracle. So no, there's in true Darwinistic theory, but people make, the point is, and kind of the point, one of the points of the talk, is that it's truly, I don't want to say that there aren't good scientists out there who believe in evolution, because of course there are, and they're doing good work, but they have not examined these implications. And most of us kind of lead benighted sort of lives, you know, that we wander around, we do the work that's in front of us and we never think to what the implications of our worldview are and really what are the implications of what I believe and what does that really mean to buy into this whole idea of Darwinism. We're told in people wearing white lab coats and grey hair who work at universities that Darwinism is true. And so we believe it. And what I try to do at the end is tell you why so many people do believe in it, the whole pattern recognition thing. And it is, at first glance, a somewhat compelling explanation of the existence of evil. And it is an attempt to kind of make a science out of the natural world in the same way that Newton described physics, and Boyle described chemistry, and so forth. Good Christian men. Yes, sir?