All right, guys, thank you for being here. Today, we are going to be looking at creation once again. And everybody should have two things. If you didn't get it, Winston should have it. You should have a handout and a booklet that he's handing out as well for you to share and read. Hopefully it will help you in your evangelism and defending the faith. So, like I said, today we're gonna specifically look at creation from the point of view of science, because science is a really big topic right now. It's been, it's in the news practically every day. It doesn't take a lot of searching to see that the Bible is constantly under attack from everybody, usually for theological views, but also now we're dealing with scientific views. People believe that the Bible doesn't have authority when it comes to things like gender identity, when it comes to things like creation, when it comes to things like abortion, what constitutes life, what makes a living human being. And this is nothing new. We've seen it throughout history. The Bible is constantly being attacked. It was the very first thing that Satan did was he asked Eve, did God indeed say? Does God have authority to tell you what you can and can't eat? And it was that very decision when she decided that, hey, maybe God isn't right. Maybe God can be wrong. Maybe his word isn't as authoritative as we are led to believe. That's when she ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, passed it to Adam as well, who ate as well, and led all of us to most of the problems that we have today. So, as I said, this is going to be a lot. Some of it's going to be a lot of rehash. I know Tom covered a lot of these things, but we're going to try to go a little bit more in-depth with our lesson today. Actually, I should set my timer so I don't go over. Right. So, we're going to begin by defining what we're actually looking at today. By defining, first of all, what is science? You know, the word comes from old English and from Latin. It means knowledge. The current definition of science from the Oxford Dictionary says, it's the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. So science self-defines itself as being intellectual and practical. This is something that you know through intelligence. Only intelligent beings can perform and understand science. It's practical. It should have practical application for our lives. It's a systematic study. It's not information that's simply given to you, but it's information that you attain. It's knowledge that you attain by studying structure and behavior through observation and experimentation. And they use primarily the scientific method. Does anybody know what the scientific method is? Yes, Claudia. Amen. And so there are a multitude of steps that they use, right? As she said, you know, the first step is technically observation. You observe the things around you, you observe what's happening, and then you start to ask questions. You say, what is happening here? There's something that the process I'm seeing or whatever I'm witnessing here, there seems to be something, information I'm lacking that I want to know. I want to know why this is happening or how this is happening. So through observation, it leads to questions, and then through questions, it leads you to hypothesize, well, I think this might be what's happening. You form a hypothesis, and then you determine how best you can prove whether or not that hypothesis, that theory that you've created is true. So you develop, create, and enact an experiment. You know, say I think the sun comes up every single day. So you say, I'll create an experiment. I will observe the horizon where I've seen the sun before, and I will look at the horizon every single day. And I will say, OK, the sun comes up today, the sun came up tomorrow, the sun comes up the next day. The evidence is showing me that the sun comes up every single day. That's what you do. You analyze the data that you collect, and then you come to a conclusion. And that's what we're going to do today. We're going to sort of analyze the nature of science and the Bible, which is why the guide is sort of organized in that way. We're going to make some observations. We're going to look at some hypotheses. We're going to look at some experimentation. Then we're going to analyze and come to our own conclusions about the subject. Next, let's define scripture. Who wants, this should be an easy one, who wants to define what scripture is? Yes, Emery. Amen. Right, so this is God's word, this is a word that's been handed down to us, that God has preserved for us, that he's delivered to us, that he's given to us so that we would have a source of information. Psalm 119. Verse 89 to 91 says, forever, O Lord, your word is settled in heaven. Your faithfulness continues throughout all generations. You establish the earth and it stands. They stand this day according to your ordinances. For all things are your servants. So not only is God's word handed down, but he is faithful to continue to allow his word to uphold his creative work. It was his word that has Created the world. It's the word that has established the earth through creation. And now it's the word that continues to Uphold and sustain the world throughout life and existence That's exactly what scripture is that's what we're dealing with those are the two sources of information now what is creation Let's define that really quickly When we think of creation, what's the first thing you think of? I? the universe, which is... Okay, but it's substance, right? We're thinking of matter, we're thinking of space, something that occupies a space and does so over time, right? So it's matter, it's space, it's time, but it's also everything. If before creation there was absolutely nothing, then now we can say that God not only created things of substance, but things that are abstract. Things like laws of physics, laws of logic, paradigms, natural constants, like the speed of light, right? That's a fairly constant number. Gravity is a fairly consistent number here. It's what, 9.8 meters per second? That's the gravity constant here on Earth. These are things that God has created. He didn't just create a substance to just exist without order, right? He's created it to exist in a certain way and by certain means. So those are the things that we're looking at. We're gonna look at science, we're gonna look at scripture, and we're gonna look at creation. Now, let's do some observations. What do we observe from a scientific worldview? Anyone? If your goal is to examine, to observe, hypothesize, experiment, analyze, and conclude, then what does that lead to, ultimately? Any idea? Any thoughts on what it would give you, on what you might suspect to happen? Yes, Emery. Exactly. To one degree, that's exactly what you're going to do. If you're going to examine something and you're going to attain knowledge, is that going to be the end of the road for you? Right? Because you haven't been given all of the information, answering your questions is probably only going to lead to more questions. Especially if you weren't there to see things be born, be created, originate in the first place. You're going to be stuck in this loop of question, answer, question. It's just this pitfall where you keep going down this well. And science would self-identify that, but we'll get to that in a minute. So where does science get its authority? Yes, David. Right? So, in a way, it's self-attesting. Right? They develop a hypothesis. If they're able to prove that something happens in the future, they use that knowledge to say that this is applicable in other spaces. So, it's the knowledge that they gain from science that allows them to make conclusions and perform other scientific experiments. Now, what do we observe from a biblical worldview? We look at the Bible, what does the Bible tell us about the universe? What does the Bible give us? Think about what, I'm talking about the most important things, right? Think about purpose. Yes, Claudio. Amen. Okay, well that's the ultimate goal of where I was going, but like I said, we see, When we look at creation from a scientific worldview, all we get is more questions. It's this pitfall of science that just opens itself up to more science, and there's never any true, ultimate answer to anything. But when you look at the Bible, and you ask, why are we here? What's the purpose of our being here? Why were we created? We see a purpose for it. We see order, and how God created it. We see direction in how things were created, as if we're being created for a purpose, we're being led somewhere to an ultimate destination, that there's meaning in creation. Not that purpose and meaning are different things. Purpose means there was an intent to creating it. Meaning means that there's substance, that there's significance to God's creation. We see a destination, right? The new heavens and the new earth and being remade just as He made the earth in the first place, but better, glorious, unchanging, perfect. And what Claudia said, all of that is supposed to lead us to God. We see God in creation, right? Just as it says in Romans 1, all these things are meant to point us to God. His power, his divine, invisible attributes have all been clearly seen since the creation of the world. That's their purpose. Now, where does Scripture get its authority? Any ideas? Well, it's also self-attesting. The Bible claims to be the Word of God. We have the apostles claiming that the words that were being written by Paul were Scripture. We have Christ quoting Scripture from Isaiah in the Psalms saying this is the Word of God. It is written, it has been said. God spoke to you saying these things. So both science and Scripture are both self-attesting. Don't let anybody tell you, well, you make circular arguments by claiming that the Bible is true and science is not. They both self-test one another. They're both circular arguments. Difference is, how do you know you can trust the Bible or scripture? Well, you examine what the source is, right? You examine the source of science, you just get a question somebody asked and did an experimentation and came up to a conclusion. When you look at the Bible, you're seeing The question of how we are here, why we are here, and God giving his word saying, you're here because I created you. This world exists because I designed it. You're here because you are here to glorify me in creation, and you are here to glorify me through belief in my son, Jesus Christ. We see a lot more purpose, meaning, when we examine things from a biblical perspective, from a biblical worldview. Now let's look at hypotheses. So what are the scientific hypotheses that we see that exist for creation? Just name one, probably the biggest one. What does science tell us the world came from? Amen. Yep, the Big Bang. That's what they think. They think the world, that the universe didn't exist, It was nothing, there was no form, there was no substance, there was no in or out, left or right, there was just absence of all things. And that randomly, billions upon trillions of years ago, for no reason, all of a sudden the universe spontaneously exploded into existence. Yep, I completely agree with that. But, well, technically though, I mean, yes, from a scientific point of view it makes no sense. It's arbitrary. They just have to say, they have to come up with something. Right. Yeah. Yep. And they stick to it. I mean, I saw an interview with Richard Dawkins, and he was having some kind of debate slash interview with a member of the Catholic Church, and he was discussing the Big Bang, the source of it, the initiating, inciting event of it. And they said, well, if there was nothing, then where did it come from? And he starts to explain. He's like, well, whatever it was, it was something very simple and very small. And people just started laughing. He's like, I don't understand why you're laughing. He couldn't grasp it. They're like, well, you're trying to explain nothing. You're trying to define what nothing was that exploded and created itself. Yeah, it's all molecules, atoms, subatomic particles. Yes, Michel. Yeah, I mean, I've seen him say that, but like when, I mean, maybe you saw something different than that, but the one, the interview I said, it sounded like he was talking like he might believe in a creator, but then if you press him on it, he was saying that we were seeded by a higher life form, but one that originated within the universe. Like he believes that aliens came and planted life on the planet. You know, I completely would agree with that. Yeah, it doesn't, it holds no weight. There's no, there's nothing that would explain why nothing could explode into something. There's no evidence of it. There's no past recording of it. It doesn't make logical sense. So when you examine it, it holds no water. It doesn't, it doesn't hold, it doesn't, it doesn't bear fruit, right? And therefore we, as people that are logical beings created in the image of God, we discount it. And also, she mentioned Answers in Genesis. I put a list of resources. Answers in Genesis is one of them in the back part of your handout. So did anybody not get a handout? Everybody got one, right? Yeah. So it's on the back there. Just a couple resources you can look at to delve more into this if you have conversations where you need answers to questions. But they stick to their Big Bang theory. There are some people, I have seen people that suggested models of an eternal universe. There are certain people that believe that the universe exists and always has existed, and matter has always been here. There was no beginning, there was no end. If there was a Big Bang, it wasn't a result of nothing exploding, it was a result of just matter collecting and exploding and compressing. What's the problem we see with that? Matter existing forever? Yes, Claudia. Right. And the, you know, especially in light of the natural world, which is what science says it's doing, it's observing a natural world, every single thing within the natural world tells you that things start, have a lifespan, and are then destroyed, right? Even our sun, right? Our sun is not eternal. You know, the life that they put on it, I mean, we would believe that the sun was created about 14,000 years ago, but even the sun, from a scientific perspective, is about five or 50 billion years old, and it's about halfway through its life cycle from a scientific point of view. So, the universe is created. It has a starting point. Sun has a starting point. Every star has a starting point. A black hole isn't a special scientific thing. It's just a dead star that was so massive it collapsed in on itself. Right? All single-celled organisms, multi-celled organisms, animals, people, trees, plants, everything begins, it lives, and it dies. So what would make you think that the universe itself simply always existed, has no beginning, no end? It would also be illogical. And we can discount it. Yeah. No, I mean, we believe God is eternal. God has always existed. And we have, however, a reason. We have purpose. We've been told that. He's claimed to exist forever before the foundations of the world. We have him attesting to that. We see everything within the natural world have a beginning, middle, and end. But because God created the bounds of matter, space, and time, and God exists outside of that, uniquely apart from those things, we can say that God exists without time, that He doesn't have a beginning, middle, or an end, that He simply exists, and He always has existed, and He always will exist. And when He promises that we will be with Him forever, that's not a long span of time. It means we will be taken out of time, and we will be with Him truly forever. All right? Was there any other questions about that? So, another theory, and this is an extension kind of Big Bang, because this isn't technically a creation theory, but we have the creation of life on the planet, how we got here specifically, we have the theory of Darwinian evolution, right? And this is significant because we're not saying this is just all evolution doesn't go under this bracket. This is specific evolution, right? We see evolution, right? Parents give birth to children that are slightly different than them. They take parts of both parents and that child is unique. And the same two parents can give birth to 100 children. Isn't that what the Duggars were up to, like 100 children? And those children are unique. They look different. They have unique personalities, different hair, different skin. There's, you know, the biological process of procreation God made, designed it to be, to allow a multitude of things to change in human beings as they procreate and make other little baby human beings. But we'll get more into that in a second. I also wanted to do this one because This might seem silly at first, but it's important because part of the reason why we're doing this is to help you examine things from a biblical perspective, a biblical worldview, right? And this is very popular in the culture now, but you might not know that this is actually a genuine scientific theory that's out there, which is multiverse theory, right? that tells us that this universe that exists right now was created as a branch off of another universe. If anybody's seen any of the Marvel movies lately, there's that movie Everything Everywhere All at Once. I love stuff like this. I watch this stuff all the time. I eat it up because it's fascinating and interesting. But there are people that genuinely believe that this is where the universe came from. right, that there's a universe in which you came here today, maybe you took the freeway when you drove here. But maybe you decided in another universe to take the back roads, and how that one decision creates a whole new universe that spans all these different timelines of, of, of possibilities and differences within them. So what's the problem that we have with that theory? Yes, Dave. Absolutely, that's a scientific reason to discount it alone. What about a biblical reason? What's the problem you have if you have multiple paths of time and existence? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep, that's all true. I was thinking more along the lines of, if you have a person, right, and they're in one universe, and like I said, we're driving a car and we have a path, two paths we can take, and your choice determines that a whole nother universe will branch off so that you make both choices, right? What happens when you make moral choices? when you're living in a universe where you've decided not to commit murder, and you live in a universe where you've decided to commit murder, right? Does God judge all versions of all people in that case? Does that mean that everything is essentially eventual? If there's an infinite number of universes that take place, then how could anybody hold me responsible for committing a crime when this is simply the universe in which I had to because in the other universe I didn't? Accountability becomes a problem. Moral absolutes become a problem. God's justice becomes a problem. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely true here. But people are trying to come up with these theories that absolve them of responsibility. And that's what you see with this particular theory itself. Now I'll ask this to you guys. What biblical hypotheses exist, right? We've looked at scientific hypotheses for creation. What biblical hypotheses exist for creation? Anyone? Yeah. Hypotheses. Well, that's ultimately, I mean, it is a trick question, right? There are none. The Bible doesn't theorize about its own creation, the nature of its creation or its creator. The Bible simply claims, it says, I am, well, the Bible says God says through his word, I am the creator. It says that in Genesis. It talks about it in the Psalms. We read about it today in Naveen's passage in Psalm 104. It talks about God being the creator of the universe. There's also a passage in Job that I'll read for you now. Job chapter 38, right? This is near the culmination of the end of the book after God, you know, Job's had everything stripped from him. His friends are trying to help him, they're trying to support him, but they're also kind of accusing him of being sinful, and that's why God is punishing him. And then Elihu comes along and kind of sets everybody straight, and then God comes and he talks to Job directly. And when God comes, what does he say to Job? How does he appeal to Job when Job is suffering from all of his ills and all of his woes and having everything, including his children, taken from him? Does God say, I'm sorry? Does God say, I'll fix it? No, God comes to him claiming that he is the creator. So in Job 38 verse 3, it says, Now gird up your loins like a man, and I will ask you, and you instruct me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding. Who set its measurements, since you know? Or who stretched the line on it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Or who enclosed the sea with doors? When bursting forth, it went out from the womb. When I made a cloud its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and I placed boundaries on it, and set a bolt and doors, and I said, Thus far you shall come, but no further, and here shall your proud waves stop." God absolutely claims to be the creator of the entire universe. He doesn't give us room to speculate. This is something that he is very insistent on. We have any questions before I move on? No? I'll take that as a no. So let's move on. Section five, experimentation, right? We've developed our we've looked at our hypotheses and possibilities. Now let's look at experimentation. So what scientific evidence has been produced to prove the Big Bang theory? Sorry? No? Anything? No? Yes, Dave? Right? Is there a biblical argument for that? Well, I can tell you, Zechariah 12.1 says, the burden of the word of the Lord concerning Israel thus declares the Lord who stretches out the heavens, lays the foundation of the earth, and forms the spirit of the man within. Says that stretching out of the earth, the universe, is something that God has done, God continues to do. He stretches out the world. So the expansion of planets and universes and stars doesn't make it an unbiblical thing. It doesn't prove creation through a scientific worldview. The Bible tells us these things, and it's not like the Bible is filled to the brim with scientific points of interest. But when God makes a scientific point, a lot of times you can trust that it's true. Sometimes he talks about it from a perspective. It says about the moon and the sun rising and setting. Obviously, the moon and sun aren't physically, well, they are technically, but they're not moving around the earth. Earth is moving around, well, moon revolves around the earth, earth around the sun, but from our perspective, we see these things rise and fall in the horizon. But that's just poetic language. It's just a way to see it from our perspective and give us information. All right, that's one of the things we want to note about the scientific method. The scientific method is really great for predicting events, right? You said as you observe something, and you come to observations, and you experiment, and you declare that something you concluded that this is something that's going to happen each time because this is how science is working, this is how the world is working as it was created. It tells you a lot about whether or not you can trust that things are most likely going to happen like that tomorrow, right? You go to like Yellowstone, you know, those hot springs that shoot up every, you know, what, 40 minutes or an hour, however, I've never been there. But they observe that every day and they can run their clocks by it and they say, oh, this is how it works. But if you're observing something like that, does that tell you where it started? Does that tell you how it began, when it began, why it began? Scientific method is pretty good at predicting how something will take place in the future, but it's not that great at examining why something happened in the first place. It's not great with origins. It's not great with creation. How about scientific evidence that's been produced to prove the theory of Darwinian evolution? Anything there? A lot of people will hold up a fossil record for you, and they'll show you, well, if you look at this animal, looks like this animal, looks like this animal, like this. Clearly, there's a progression. Right? Well, if you look at the, you know, every Thanksgiving, the dog show, right? And you see all the dogs lined up and you see the little, little, little, little toy dogs, right, Rick, and you got those, the sport dogs and the terriers, and you get up to the Mastiffs and all the way up. Did the little one lead to the big one? No, there's just There's an abundance of genetic material that creates a bunch of different dogs. It doesn't mean that the little one had to lead to the big one. It doesn't mean that they had to progress one from the other. It just means that they are all alike. They're all of the same kind of animal, right? Yeah, I don't know specifically which one you're talking about, but I know that there are... I've seen videos and where they're interviewing about different skulls they found. And there are certain ones that are like closer to like the most neanderthal, like the biggest and like neanderthal ones that are that they're saying this is a type of person. And there are ones that look closer to ape and that people want to put on that line, you know, that big, that famous picture of evolution. But they're like, No, this is clearly closer to an ape. This is just a version of an ape that doesn't exist anymore. Right? They're all of the same kind. People have to understand that, that the Bible is actually scientifically accurate about that. Evolution, Darwinian evolution, tells you that an ape over time can develop into a human being. It'll tell you that a Tyrannosaurus Rex can develop over time into a chicken. And it can tell you that some kind of weird, you know, velociraptor or something can develop into something like an alligator, right? But what does that mean? That means that at some point a Tyrannosaurus rex had to give birth to something that wasn't a Tyrannosaurus rex. An ape had to give birth to something that wasn't an ape. A velociraptor had to give birth to something that wasn't a velociraptor. God said that when he created everything, and according to its kind, that it would give birth to offspring according to its kind. So that means a person will always give birth to a person. Dog will always give birth to a dog. Ape will always give birth to an ape. And you know what? That's observable and that's repeatable. We see it millions of times every single day. That's scientifically accurate. People would say that the flood proves that Darwinian evolution happened because after the flood, there's no way that there could be that many different kinds of animals on a boat. Well, we have to worry about that word kind because it says two of every kind went on to the ark. When we classify animals, we classify them, you have the animal kingdom. There's five different kingdoms, right? There's animal, plant, fungi, and like two versions of single-celled organisms. But every single animal, fish, dog, cat, even dinosaurs, people, all fall under the animal kingdom. And then they classify it further. It's kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, and subspecies. People in science will say, well, there's millions of species. Of course, you can never fit two of each of those on the ark. Well, God classifies kind differently. Right? When you have dogs, all dogs can, you know, we were just talking about dogs. There's a lot of different types of dogs. It doesn't require every single breed of dog in order to create, you know, a Labradoodle. You just need a Labrador and a poodle. Right? And, yep. And the who knows what the first types of dog creatures were that were on the arc, but they didn't need to be every type of dog, we just needed two dogs, a male and a female. And they didn't need to be full size, they could have been little puppies, which are a lot smaller. Right? And also, they would say, there's actually scientific evidence to prove that the fossil records we see actually would do more to prove that the flood took place very rapidly. People want to say that the fossil records prove that animals were around millions of years ago. But if you look at anything that dies, usually its body is devoured pretty quickly. Bacteria, other animals, weather, all types of things kill off animals on a pretty quick basis. If you leave a roadkill out by the side of the road, in two months, it's not there anymore. you know, just disappears because it's degraded down to nothing and the animals have eaten away at it. Now why are we finding thousands upon thousands of dinosaur bones all in one place, perfectly preserved, some of them giving birth, some of them eating other animals in the process? Suggests that something happened catastrophically all at once that killed them rapidly, and then some other event that covered them up rapidly to allow the process of fossilization to occur. doesn't have to take place over millions upon millions of years. And that was something that I watched in, what was it? Is Genesis History the Last Resource? It's a movie. We actually watched it here at church a couple years back. If you get the opportunity to see it, it's a really great movie. And it'll discuss all of that. Now we look at what evidence has been produced to prove the biblical account of creation. Well, we do have a bit of an issue there because as I said, the Bible isn't really meant to be this purely scientific book. It's not designed to be observable and repeatable. So the Bible doesn't really produce a ton of scientific evidence. What does it produce? What kind of evidence does the Bible produce? Historic evidence. Prophecy does concern prophecy. But yeah, we're talking about this is a historic book, right? When you're, you know, if you're in a court of law, you know, they'll produce scientific evidence to prove something happened. But what else do they produce? What's primarily happening in a court of law? Yes, Claudia. Well, there's circumstantial evidence, but I was thinking more along the lines of testimony, right? Even scientific evidence is presented under the testimony of a witness, usually a doctor or somebody that's an expert in a field. They come and they display why this evidence occurs. We need that testimony. We don't just produce evidence and say, here you go, take it or leave it. They say, no, I need to understand why this is significant. We take testimony. Like I said, going back to how we observe and try to determine that something happens. If you move into a house, right? And you see Larry, the next door neighbor, every Saturday morning during the summer with his shirt off mowing his lawn. And you see him out there every single weekend while you're drinking your coffee and you observe that every day, are you going to conclude that Larry's been out there every single weekend since time began? Nope. You're going to determine probably that that had a starting point. that he hasn't done it forever, and how would you know, how would you find that out? You'd ask Larry, if he was a nice enough guy, maybe ask him to put a shirt on, say, Larry, how long have you been doing this? I see you do it out here every weekend. How long have you been doing this? And maybe he'll give you an answer. Maybe you're friendly with the neighbors, and you ask them, you look for eyewitness accounts, right? Maybe Larry dies, and he leaves a diary, and you read it, and you read how every day he's been doing it since he moved in the building, yeah. Amen. Yep. And he does it through the work of of apostles, right? So we have written documents, we have historical documents. They're not just documents, it's not like John Smith finding a plate that only he could read. These were written by eyewitnesses, right? And they were tested by other eyewitnesses. In 1 John he says, that which we have seen, which we have held in our own hands, and he's speaking to these people as if they have beheld it too. These were witnesses with him. They've all seen the same events. So we take historical evidence when we're looking at a historic event, which you would have as written evidence, oral evidence, visual evidence, physical evidence, which most of, I mean, aside from visual evidence is all found in scripture aside from physical, but we have that through. archaeological digs that they've been doing for years. The Bible's a very popular book. There's always people that are trying to prove whether or not the Bible is true or not. They're always trying to discover where the Tower of Babel was or where the Ark was. They're in the mountains looking for a boat stuck on the rocks. They're always trying to figure out whether or not the Bible is true using physical evidence. But like I said, the Bible does give us scientific truth, especially with creation. We were talking about last week about the word yom, how it said that God created the world in seven days. In six days he created it, seventh day of rest. So we're trying to determine whether or not that word yom means just a day, or is it a long span of time for each day? Does it mean ages at the same time? And there are Christians that fall on both lines of that. But I would just tell you when you read Exodus 20 where it says, for in six days, the Lord made the heavens and the earth and sea and all that is in them and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Talking about, you know, obeying the Sabbath. So God is telling us that his model for creation in seven days is made to represent how we're living our lives in a seven day span. not just as the God took the seventh day off and blessed it and hollowed it because it was an age of time and you should do the same thing, take weeks off and take a long span of time off. He's like, no, seven days. Six days you work, take the seventh day off because that's what I did in creation. It talks about the earth. We're talking about whether or not the earth was flat or round. There's still flat earthers. I don't know how that became big again, but it's out there. Isaiah 40 says, it is he, God, who sits above the circle of the earth and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers who stretch out the heavens like a curtain and spread them out like a tent to dwell in. Job 26 says he stretches out the north over empty space and hangs the earth on nothing. There's some people that want to believe that we're sitting on a giant tortoise with four elephants around as well, but no. Job has a scientific accuracy. He stretches out the north over empty space and hangs the earth on nothing. The earth exists in outer space. There's nothing upholding it, nothing lifting it, there's nothing moving it. Atlas isn't under there. And that famous pose that I would embarrass myself doing, right? It's God allowing the earth to exist within the physical laws of nature that he created. He has set it on its on its spinning path. Any questions before I move on to the next section? No? Okay. So now let us go to analysis. Right? We've kind of dealt with these, but we'll go through them quickly. What ultimate purpose is found when we examine the scientific worldview? Do we see any purpose in it? No. It's arbitrary. For no reason at all, nothing exploded into everything, right? And through that process of nothing exploding into everything, it kept exploding and creating stuff that organized itself for no reason. Somehow, primordial soups created life out of non-life, which is an impossibility, and no scientific experiment has ever created or duplicated that. and that it was so miraculous when it happened, that that organized material became more and more organized, more and more complex, gained information as it goes, which is actually not what happens in reproduction, it actually you lose information. Right? And that we are advancing from ape from from fungi to fish to ape to man. Right? And that means that we truly have no purpose, because we would still be evolving. Right? If you look at the scientific model, right, an ape growing into man, right, they get taller, and they lose a lot of their hair. So obviously, I'm next on the evolutionary chain. Right? This is it. This is what you have to look forward to. But that's ridiculous. Right? We have a purpose here and today. God has created us in his image. We're not progressing into another form. We didn't come from a lesser form. We were created in the very image of God. Right? And as I said before, the process of science, this is directly from the University of Berkeley where they talk about the process of science. They say it is iterative. They say science circles back on itself so that useful ideas are built upon and used to learn even more about the natural world. This often means that successive investigations of a topic lead back to the same question but at deeper and deeper levels. So the purpose of science is to develop more science. How were we created? Well, Big Bang Theory. We're going to investigate that until we come up with another theory that's even more unsolvable or more mysterious. And we're going to come up with scientific experiments that prove how mysterious it is, and we'll have more science. As I said, there's no evidence to prove the Darwinian evolution or the theory of the Big Bang. That's why they're still considered theories. The scientific process doesn't come with us any further when it comes to creation. It doesn't get to this analysis state. They've hypothesized that the world would explode out of nothing, and they've produced no evidence, so they have no analysis, they have no conclusion. They've theorized that monkeys turn to man over thousands of years, and they've produced no evidence. That's not observable, it's not repeatable, nor is creation. Right? They have no evidence to move on to analysis. They have no conclusion. We have the Bible. Right? What ultimate purpose has God revealed in his word? Claudia said it earlier. What was it again? The glory of glory of God. Right? God says, I have, you know, that's why, you know, I talked about this a long time ago when I went through a study of God's image in man, right? Talking about the nature of man being created in God's image. When God created man on the sixth day, what did he say about his creation? Not just good. Very good, right? After he created each independent thing, he said it was good. Then when he created man, he said it was very good, right? That is not because mankind is special. That is not because God was just proud about everything that he did. It was very good because his creation now contained his image. His image present on the world, that's what made it very good. Yes? Yep, absolutely. Amen, I agree. Psalm 19 says the heavens are telling of the glory of God and their expanse is declaring the work of his hands. not just us. You know, Anthony said it last week, you know, he said the stars are there to proclaim the glory of God, you know, and they do so fully. You know, when people wonder, well, why aren't we just the sun, moon, and the planet? Well, it's because we would have a very, all the scientific, like Galileo, when he was under house arrest by the Pope for declaring that the Earth revolved around the Sun, they didn't believe him, they said that's against, that's heresy, the Earth is the center of the universe, right? They were technically both wrong, right? Universe or the Sun, neither one of them are the center of the universe. But the Pope had this very, man-centered version of the universe, that it all meant to revolve around us. It makes us very big. If you just have a universe that's sun, moon, and planet, it's very easy to build ourselves up and to think that we are so important. I think that billions of stars, billions of planets, and a span of space that we can't even measure or see exists so that we simply understand that when God said he created the universe, we understand, okay, this is a little bit above my pay grade. This is far beyond me. Just a little, right? So I asked you which of the two worldviews science or scripture involving creation have a more consistent logical preponderance of the evidence. You think science is convinced you it's true? Or do you think the Bible is more accurate? The Bible, right? The Bible has, like I said, we have a reliable source, we have trustworthy evidence, a Bible that is self-attesting, it's non-contradictory, and it is conclusive. So, as we get to that, now let's move on to our final conclusions as we wrap up. And they're on the back page of your handout. Conclusion one, God is the one and only creator. Multiple times God claims to be the creator. 39 times in the Bible it says, I am the Lord, your God. Personal God where he claims to be our God, the one who has created us, the one who's taken personal responsibility for being our Lord and our God. Joel 2.27 says, thus you will know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I am the Lord your God, and there is no other. And my people will never be put to shame. Saying not only is he creator, but he's the one and only, there is no other God. Isaiah 40, 28 says, do you not know, have you not heard that everything, sorry, the everlasting God, the Lord, the creator of the ends of the earth does not become weary or tired. His understanding is inscrutable. He absolutely claims that we can trust this from the Bible. Second conclusion, the Bible is our sole authority and is sufficient to answer all relevant questions pertaining to creation, existence, life, salvation, God's revealed nature, and the future. Anne Marie mentioned earlier 2 Timothy 3, where it says, all scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work. It's God's word, it is him breathed, it is him revealing himself to us. And I note there that I specifically ask that it's sufficient to answer all relevant questions pertaining to creation. There are certainly avenues that we could go down that God has not provided information for. Something came out of Augustine. Somebody mentioned a conversation that Augustine had recorded. It was a very simple conversation between two men, and the first said, Oh, one man said, what was God doing before he created the world? And the other man curtly responds, he was preparing hell for those who pry too deep. You know, now Augustine actually warned against using that in a facetious manner, not just to make, you know, not not laughably. But when you understand the weight of what it means, it's actually quite accurate. You know, trying to understand things that God has not revealed to us and God has not informed us of is probably going to get us into a lot of trouble. You're going to make a lot of assumptions that are unbiblical and could very well be heretical. So if God hasn't revealed it to us, stay out of it. Leave it where it lies. God doesn't need you to know it. Next, science is a wonderful tool we can use to examine the awesome wonder of God's glory and his creative power as he's displayed it within his creation. In Wayne Grudem's doctrine, Bible doctrine, he writes, the doctrine of creation will enable us to recognize more clearly that scientific and technological study in itself glorifies God, for it enables us to discover how incredibly wise, powerful, and skillful God was in his work of creation. John Calvin wrote something similar. He wrote, it was of importance to furnish us with a more intimate knowledge in order that we might not wander to and fro in uncertainty. Hence God was pleased that a history of the creation should exist, a history on which the faith of the church might lean without seeking any other God than him, whom Moses sets forth as the creator and architect of the world. This knowledge is of the highest use, not only as an antidote to the monstrous fables which anciently prevailed both in Egypt and other regions of the world, but also as means of giving a clear manifestation of the eternity of God as contrasted with the birth of creation, and thereby inspiring us with higher admiration. And finally, science, being a created framework of knowledge, is always to be viewed and examined in light of biblical teaching, not the other way around. Also in Grudem, he mentions that there was a book written by a man named Schaeffer who was titled No Final Conflict, and it was all particularly about dealing with science and the Bible, where he made the principle that when all the facts are rightly understood, there will be no final conflict between scripture and natural science, right? I'll end right here, because the final thing I have noted is that you might have heard lately about there's something called a Frankfurt Declaration, right? Recently, with all the problems with the, especially here in the States, but this is actually a German declaration, but it's been signed by a lot of notable pastors, Jeff Durbin, James White, John MacArthur, Justin Peters, Votie Baucom. The Declaration deals with governmental authority over its people regarding things that God has declared. And it says in Article 2, talk specifically as God as the source of truth and the role of science. And it says here that we affirm that God, the creator, is the truth, and that therefore, objective truth exists and can be derived from his revelation in scripture and nature, and from any facts which can be credibly verified. We endure science which seeks to discover, through the scientific method and debate, the truths that God has built into the natural world. We also affirm the limitations of science, including its inability to speak authoritatively on areas outside its purview and its propensity to err when data is lacking. Since man has fallen into sin, we further affirm that all his thoughts, deductions, and institutions contain degrees of corruption which tend to distort, manipulate, or suppress the truth. So pretty much what that's saying is that we can use science. We can study science. We can know science. But we always have to understand that God created science. If science is knowledge, God created knowledge. Yes? Mm-hmm. then. Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, when we look at the Bible, there are plenty of people out there that have done that. There are scientists like Galileo, Michael Faraday, that were examining things through reading that passage. Michael Faraday said, well, there are invisible things in the world that God has set in motion. I want to discover what they were. And he discovered electromagnetism. Right? And, you know, people will call you a kook for it and stuff like that, but it doesn't matter. They don't have a leg to stand on. If you adopt the scientific worldview, where science is understandable and knowable at all times, and that leads you to describe a universe that creates itself out of nothing randomly without purpose. Right? Essentially, all things fall apart. all logic falls apart at that point. Because the very creation of the universe that you say has order started from a miraculous, unknowable event. And you have to adopt a Christian worldview at that point. and say, well, how do these other things happen? Well, I can trust they happen because they happened yesterday. There's order, there's substance to them. And yet, in this world that I've created that has order and substance, miraculously, another universe could just spring into existence for no reason at all at any given point in time, right? It leads you down a road that you can't trust anything truly because there's always that factor of impossible, spontaneous creation or destruction. But we have the Word of God. We stand on that, and we can trust that. Amen? All right, let us pray. Heavenly Father, Our Lord, our God, our creator. We thank you so much, Father, for this time we've had today. We thank you for being our creator, Father, for not leaving us in the wind, not leaving us to gather evidence to try to understand the world as it is without any direction, without any hope, without any purpose, without any meaning, Father, but that you've given us your word to tell us who you are. that you've revealed yourself to us through your word, that you've revealed yourself to us through your creation, and that you've revealed yourself first and foremost on a more personal level through your son Jesus Christ. We thank you for it, Father. We ask that we would go out this world and that we would have debates with people that would open them up to the fact that science holds no true weight if it's not seen in light of a biblical worldview. And we ask that you would give us boldness to proclaim the truth of your word to even those that are the most hostile against you. knowing that the gospel is powerful, the gospel is true, and that the gospel can transform even the most wretched sinner into a believer. Father, please be with us and be glorified in our study and in our fellowship and in our lives. Most importantly, be glorified in yourself through your son. We ask in his name, amen. Amen. Guys, you should have gotten a couple of these too. Please feel free to hand them out. My last batch that I got for free, and I was supposed to hand them out in a certain period of time, so talk about God, his existence, talk about worldviews. It's great to read, and hand them out to somebody you know. Have a conversation. It's a great start there. All right, have a blessed week, guys. Thank you.