Okay, so let's jump into this matter of five cues or five questions for evolutionists. Somebody has said, an accusation hardens the will, but a question pricks the conscience. So this is the way I oftentimes like to witness, I like to approach people that maybe are atheistic or agnostic is with some questions. Go back and look at it sometime, how often Jesus asks questions, leading questions to get people thinking. Now I'm looking at some young people out here. Part of my burden with this presentation is to inoculate young people, and Pastor Brad's giving me the chance to be able to speak at the school tomorrow, but to inoculate young people against the lies that are gonna come at them in higher academia. Listen, if you're a Christian, if you're a creationist especially, you've got a target on you. You've got a target on you. There's going to be professors that are going to mock your faith. Young lady, young man, how can you believe in creation? That's merely faith. I hold to science. You want to believe in creationism? OK. Go one building over. That's the religious studies department. Don't bring it in the science room. We deal with hard facts like Big Bang and evolution and this kind of thing, not creation. That's religious faith. Well, we're going to talk about that a little bit. You might say, well, that's a little bit harsh. Do professors really like to make fun of young people that believe in Christ? Yes. Let me give you a story. I'm going to tell you a story about a guy named Jesse Kilgore. Here's a picture of Jesse up there. Jesse lived in upstate New York, closer to where I live, and he served in the military. He did a brief stint in the military. His dad had been in the military. He went in the military. He's a Christian. He believed in God, and he believed in creation. When he got back, he was able to go to community college, you know, as part of the government program, and he studied biology. Went in the biology class and tried to take a stand against evolution. Now, he didn't have any Real background, didn't have a lot of knowledge on this thing. But he said, no, I believe in creation. Well, his professor began to make fun of him. And his peers began to make fun of him. And finally, his professor said this, Jesse, you know what you need to do? You need to go and get a copy of Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion. Get a copy of the book, God Delusion. That'll set you straight. Unfortunately, this book by atheist Richard Dawkins is a bestseller on college campuses. Very sad. But probably the most formidable atheist in the world, Richard Dawkins. And I've read his book. And it isn't even particularly good. Like, he's a pretty good biologist. His evolutionary arguments are much better than his philosophical ones. But Jesse read the book, and it really, it just knocked the faith out of him. So bad that Jesse Kilgore would take a gun and go in the woods out behind his house and shoot himself and kill himself. Now you might say, that's pretty extreme. And it is. It's a sad story on a bunch of levels. It's a sad story that a professor would so ostracize a Christian and take him to that. It's sad that Jesse wouldn't maybe approach his pastor or his parents. He didn't approach anybody with his doubts and his struggles. And his parents were grief-stricken, and they tried to find out what had happened. And his friend said, well, he had pretty much become an atheist with no belief in the existence of God in any form, or an afterlife, or even in the concept of right and wrong. It absolutely blew him out of the water. And his parents said, well, what was it? What did this? And his friend said, it was that book. It was that atheist book. And his parents began to search his room and under his mattress, they found his copy of the God Delusion with his bookmark on the last page. My friends, we're engaged in a battle for the souls of men. And too much of us are off picking daisies and aren't engaged in the battle. Now you have a place in the battle. Are you taking a stand? Are you making a difference? So my objective this morning is just to come alongside your pastors and arm you a little bit, maybe motivate you a little bit in this matter of taking a stand and being salt in a world that's literally going to hell around us. We read this morning in 1 Peter 3, verse 15 says this, but sanctify the Lord, guard in your hearts, and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asks you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear. Now, there's a primary command there, which is to be ready to give an answer, okay? We're gonna try to help with that a little this morning. But there's a secondary command. Does anybody see it in there? I'm looking for some feedback here this morning. What's the secondary command? Obviously want to give an answer, but then also what? I hear some murmuring. The crowd murmured amongst themselves. Somebody raise your hand. Yeah, Bob. Okay, yeah, that's true. It does say sanctify the Lord in your hearts, but I'm looking for something a little different toward the end of the verse there. Huh? Yeah, do it with me, so it's not enough to give an answer, but God's telling us how we do it. Stupid evolutionists. Man, I can't believe you believe. You really believe that? Oh, come on. Wait a minute, you're disobeying that second command because, see, we're to do it with meekness and fear. We're to attract people with love and kindness. And I hope you won't sense in me that spirit of arrogance or condescension. And so that's why I suggest asking questions. So we're going to have five cues, five questions. Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to give the question and we're all going to repeat it just so it kind of sticks in our brain. So question number one, wait for it, is where did it all come from? Let us say it together. Where did it all come from? You see, this is maybe one of the most fundamental questions of science. We have this law called the law of cause and effect. Perhaps you remember it taught this way. Every action demands an equal and opposite reaction, right? So we see something happen and we say, okay, what caused that? We inherently know built, baked into the fabric of our universe is this law of cause and effect. We try something, and we look to see what the effect's going to be. Ah, we don't know exactly what your sickness is, but we think, here, try this, and then call me. Let me know how it went. Cause and effect. OK? So we see an explosion. Let's say you and I are walking down the street. We see an explosion. And I say to you, let's say my buddy Bob and I are walking down the street, and I say, Bob, it was a bad day for that building. Don't worry about that. It happens sometimes. No big deal. What? We don't want buildings exploding. We wanna know what caused that, right? Cause and effect. What caused that explosion? Okay, well, what about this one? What chicken laid that egg? Where'd that come from? Now, if you ask an evolutionist that, what are they gonna say, hmm? Somebody tell me. Yeah, well it came from nowhere, but they will start with something before we get there, because we are going there. But what caused the universe? I hear some of you guys saying the Big Bang, right? On Dino Day, there was this Big Bang. There was this ginormous explosion that made the whole universe. But just like we talked about a second ago, you can't stop there. Explosions don't just happen. We have to keep asking the question, where did that come from? And when you say this to atheists and evolutionists, sometimes they'll get a weird look on their face, like you're not supposed to ask that question. Sometimes you'll get some guy who's maybe studied particle physics or something like this, astrophysics, and he'll say, well, it came from the condensation of the vapor cloud. There was this vapor cloud that condensed, and all of a sudden we got the Big Bang. Now if they say that, what should we say? Very good. You guys got it. Word to Vapor Clock, we can play this game all day long. And at the end of the day, you're only going to get three possibilities. Now, my friends, I've done this presentation all over the world. I've done it in Africa. I've done it in Europe. I actually did it in Cambodia. I've done it all up to South America. And I've never had anybody suggest to me there are anything but these three possibilities. Possibility number one is spontaneous generation. That is, it literally came out of nothing. Now, you might be sitting there saying, no, people don't really believe that, do they? Oh, yes, they do. Here is a textbook, 2015. According to the Big Bang theory, the universe blinked, blinked, mind you, violently into existence 13.77 billion years ago. You may wonder how a universe can be created out of nothing, or how we know the Big Bang happened at all. Creating a universe out of nothing is mostly beyond the scope of this chapter. Yeah, wouldn't you say? Here's a best-selling book by Lawrence Krauss. Modern science has now made it plausible that space, time, matter, energy, even the universe can emerge from nothing. Here's best-selling author Stephen Hawking. Space and energy spontaneously invented an event we now call the Big Bang. Nothing caused the Big Bang. Nothing. Here's physicist Paul Davies from England. He says, the Big Bang represents the instantaneous suspension of physical laws, the sudden, abrupt flash of lawlessness that allows something to come out of nothing. It represents a true miracle transcending physical principles. Well, now, hang on just a minute. I thought The reason that we're not allowed to talk about the Bible and bring that into the science classroom is because of these miracles that are supernatural that we can't allow to even be discussed in science. Oh, but it's okay to have a miracle when we need it for the Big Bang. You see a little bit of inconsistency here. How is that any more scientific than just in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth? How is that not also a position of faith? You see, my friends, we don't see explosions bringing nothingness into galaxies. It just doesn't get observed. It's a position of faith. Well, there's a second option if you don't like spontaneous generation, and that is eternality of matter. You know, matter's always been there in some form or the other, whether it's a Big Bang or whether it's a vapor cloud or whatever. It's always been there. It didn't come from nothing. It's always been there. It's eternal. In fact, that was the position of the Renaissance from the early scientists. They followed Aristotle's thinking. The cosmos is in a steady state. It's eternal, unique, and inclusive. The universe is indestructible. And in fact, that's the position of the humanists, the early humanists, going all the way back to 1933 in their Humanist Manifesto. They said the religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing. There was never a point of creation, whether it was Big Bang or God. Now the problem with this, not only does it violate the law of cause and effect, but also it violates the laws of thermodynamics. That is, we observe this trend towards disorder. The universe is literally running down. And some of you say, yeah, I get that. My bedroom's running down. OK. It happens. You got to put energy into systems. You got to create order in the systems. If you leave it alone, they turn to dust, they decay. It's the second law of thermodynamics, or the law of degeneration, or the law of entropy. So you can believe in the eternality of matter if you want, but it actually goes against some of our best established science. Spontaneous generation goes against the basic law of cause and effect. Eternality of matter goes against the laws of thermodynamics. You can believe it if you want, but you're actually not scientific. You're going against science. Now, there's another option that does not go against science, and that is intelligent design. Just look at the universe and look at the scientific laws. It's not going to tell you who the designer is, but it should bring you to that point of saying, no, we don't get designs without a designer. This is the most reasonable of the three possibilities. You might not like it if you're an atheist, but it is the most reasonable. It does not contradict any laws of science. Now, I do this presentation at secular colleges. I did that in Wyoming not too long ago. And invariably, someone is going to ask this question, OK, Dino Dave, then you tell me, where did God come from? In fact, Richard Dawkins, in his nasty little book, God Delusion, has a whole chapter on this, where he basically says, if you think the universe coming out of nothing is a little bit of a stretch, you tell me how God came out of nothing. That's even harder. And he thinks just by asking that question, he's pretty much disproved there's even a God. So if someone asked you this, how would you respond? If somebody said, where did God come from? How would you answer that question? Somebody help me out this morning. He's always existed. I hear a voice from the back. This is very true. But are we in the same boat as number two here, the eternality of matter, folks? Are we basically in the same boat where we're just saying God is eternal? And we really don't, I mean, it still violates the law of cause and effect. Or do we have something a little better? Oh, if we knew we would be God, okay, there's a good angle on it. I want you to think about it for just a sec in a little different way. Why do we ask the question, where'd that come from, where'd that come from, where'd that come from? The reason we ask that is because we live in a cause and effect world. As I said, it's baked into the laws of our cosmos. Question, is God bound by the laws He created? Huh? No! By anybody's definition, God is supernatural. He does not obey natural laws. And so if you say there is no supernatural, then yes, you have to explain everything by natural laws. But if I say, no, God is outside the box, he's outside the laws of cause and effect and thermodynamics and all this stuff, he doesn't obey the laws, we don't have to answer where he came from. Does that make sense? They're trying to apply God's physical universe onto God. It's a complete error of category. So Psalm 19 verse 1 says, the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handy work. Okay, question number one was? Hey, we're getting pretty good. Where did it all come from? Question number two, how could a big bang create an ordered universe? Let's all say it. How could a big bang create an ordered universe? Okay, you guys are about up to a B minus. We're gonna get better as we go, I'm sure. So this question isn't so much the origin of the universe. This is more the character of the universe. That is, we see the universe is very purposeful. It's ordered. It's not in a random state like you might expect to come from an explosion. So how could an explosion have brought that about? For example, could Webster's unabridged dictionary come from an explosion in a print shop? So I got a dictionary. I'm holding it up, and I'm telling my friend Bob Brenneman over here, I'm saying, now, Bob, you're not going to believe this. This just happened last week, man. I was looking out my window, and there's a print shop down the street down there. And all of a sudden, the whole thing went up. And I went down to see if everybody was OK. And everybody was fine. There wasn't anybody in there. But out of that explosion, I got a dictionary. And I took it home as a souvenir. As some of you are kind of looking at me like I'm crazy, what's the matter with my story, huh? Somebody? What's the matter with it? It's impossible? Why? You got ink, you got print, you got glue, you got paper, you got everything you need for a dictionary right in that print shop. You got explosion to create lots of energy. Why wouldn't it make my dictionary? Ooh, explosions destroyed. Don't you know, Dino Dave, we drop bombs on our enemies to randomize, not make the tank better, but to randomize the tank, and maybe even randomize the nasty dude in the tank. And it doesn't create order. It destroys order every single time. And you got an explosion in a print shop, it's not going to create a dictionary. It's going to create a mess every single time. So why is the universe rational, operating under laws that permit scientific inquiry? Got some young people here this morning. I want a young person to answer this question. So the Earth is going around the Sun, okay? We're a certain distance out from the Sun. We're going around the Sun. If the Earth was a little bit further out in our orbit around the Sun, what would happen to us? Some young person help me out here. Okay, I hear some voices. Somebody raise your hand. Yes. We'd freeze, we'd be popsicles! What if, in our orbit, we were a little bit closer to the sun? What would happen? I hear a voice in the back, yeah? We'd be toast, we'd be crispy critters, right? You know, it's a very precarious thing. You think that happened by accident? By a mindless chance? The universe is fine-tuned for life. Gravity's too strong, we won't move. Gravity's too weak, we float off to space. The strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, the gravitational acceleration, all these things. In fact, a guy named Donald Page of Princeton's Institute of Advanced Science calculated the odds against our universe taking a form suitable for life as 1 in 10 to the billion to the 124th hour. A number that exceeds all imagination. And you can believe that if you want. I don't have enough faith to believe that. I think it was rigged for life by an intelligent designer. Here's Paul Davies. Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth. It's inconvenient for Paul Davies and some of his buddies. The universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient coincidences and special features and the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life and hence conscious beings to exist. It doesn't seem reasonable. So the evolutionists can say, well, OK, it's a very, very, very fortunate accident. I don't have enough faith to believe that. No, no. I must say, uh-uh. There's just no way. It's an incredible design. There must be a great designer. Romans 1.20 says it this way, for the invisible things of him, that's God, from the creation of the world are clearly seen. How are they seen? Being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so they're without excuse. No person's ever gonna stand before God and say, but God, you never showed me. Maybe there's an atheist or an agnostic in the room this morning. Maybe there's someone who just never confessed faith in Jesus Christ and made him Lord of your life. You will stand before God someday and you will not be able to give an excuse because God has revealed himself to you. How? in the orderly creation round about you. You just have to open your eyes and use the brain he's given you and it should tell you that there is a creator. Well, question number one was? Where did it all come from? Question number two was? Okay, we're struggling a little bit here. How could a big bang create an ordered universe? Question number three is, how could life come from rocks? Let's all say it. How could life come from rocks? This is actually one of my favorites. I just love this one. You see, there was a guy, you may remember him from science class, named Louis Pasteur, in the 1800s, and he conducted a famous experiment where he sterilized some nutrients in the jar, and then he put another jar next to it that he didn't sterilize, and he sealed this one, and lo and behold, bacterial life grew in the one that wasn't sealed and sterilized, and it didn't grow in the other one, and he showed that life cannot come from non-life. Before that, people would think, well, just this dead soup all by itself can generate life. And he showed, no, once I sterilize these, once I sterilize both these, there's nothing alive in there. And only if it's open and some of the spores can fall into it are we going to get mold. If you close it off, you're not going to get it. And we still talk about pasteurized milk named after the Christian Louis Pasteur who established what we call the law of biogenesis. It's a law because there's no known scientific exceptions. And so only life begets life, the law of biogenesis. Now this basically kills off the whole story of goo to you via the zoo. Because how do you get the goo? Right? That's a problem. If life requires a creator to get it started, well then we might as well just have the creator make the various forms of life that are around about us. We don't even need evolution. Did you know there is no such thing as simple life? Evolutionists like to talk about simple life. Well, some simple life in the oceans maybe kind of came into existence. No, there's no such thing as simple life. Even a single celled creature is ridiculously complex. Now, they didn't know that in Darwin's day. It was kind of a little mystery. They knew about the cell nucleus and the cell wall. Well, they didn't know about the complexity of all these systems, transportation systems, and waste disposal, energy systems, and information libraries, and oh, my goodness, the veritable city with streets and communication happening back and forth, and all this stuff. I mean, even just think about the DNA, the DNA that is in you, the recipe to make a you is so complicated that if we took all your chromosomes and stretched them out, they'd go back and forth to the moon 100,000 times. That's a lot of information. And yet, it's so compact, it can fit into a teaspoon. Crazy, crazy nanotechnology. You think this came about from water and rocks? Will a little lightning strike it? What's the probability that a long DNA molecule and the critical control kits and the proper DNA markers and the interacting RNA that copies it and moves it around, the ribosomal machinery, precise enzymes that tie in each part of this, all came together? Because you need all those pieces for it to even work. Look at this, my friends, 2018. Molecular biology, the transformation into a primitive living cell Capable of further evolution require appears to require overcoming an information hurdle of super astronomical proportions an event that could not have happened within the time frame of the earth except we believe as a Miracle as far as I know these folks are atheists Wow Okay, so it's allowed to have a miracle in the science classroom. We need to get rocks and water to turn into life my friends Random changes don't make orderly systems. If I lined up a bunch of apes and had them typing on typewriters, would they put together all the works of Shakespeare if we gave them enough time? No, they'd make a colossal mess. And yet we read things like this in Science Magazine. You owe your life to rock. Really? Hey, question. Have they been able to make life in the laboratory? Have they? Has anybody? What's the answer? No. Even with all our intelligence and millions of dollars, we cannot make it. Oh, they've been able to put some methane and ammonia, and they spark it, and they boil some water. And down in the bottom here, they collect some red goo, which has some amino acids. Now understand, amino acid is just a molecule. It's a dead molecule. You take these amino acids, and you need to fold them just right, just right, to make a thing called a protein. Now, a protein now has the ability to maybe be a screw or a joint or a hook or a bearing or something in one of these zillions of machines that we have in the cell. Our cells are mostly water and protein, lots of protein machines. And this is just one, if it gets folded just right, but we never even see one folded right to become the first screw or ball bearing or whatever to be used in a molecular machine in a cell. That's how far away we are. It's not going to happen by itself in nature. It's ridiculous. In fact, if it did happen, let's say you got something alive and you exposed it to methane and ammonia and sparked it and boiled it, guess what would happen to it? You would kill it. That's not an environment that can even sustain life. In fact, if you just needed to have the ingredients and somehow they just would come together all by themselves, you could take a frog, you could put the frog in a blender, stir it up real good and just leave it there, then come back together. Where do you get all the parts for the frog? Right there. It's just going to be a sad day in Frogville. Yet you read things in master's level textbooks in the university like this. This was Darwin's warm little pond, the famous prebiotic soup. The prebiotic soup would contain organic building blocks dissolved in water. You read this soup, soup, soup, like the soup has some miracle. Here, it's 2020. Zoology. The early organic molecules accumulated in primitive oceans to form a hot, dilute soup. In this primordial broth, you've got all these goodies. I'm not going to read them all. Okay, here's another one. This is ecology textbook. Recently, it's been suggested the hydrothermal vents are the potential site for the origin of life on earth. Vent water may be the ultimate soup in the sorcerer's kettle. Well, I mean, soup, soup, soup. I'm waiting for Campbell's to come out with this, okay? And it's gonna be primordial soup, and right there, it's gonna be your grandpapa on the can. No, no, the Bible says he. God giveth to all life and breath and all things. Okay, question number one was? Where did it all come from? Question number two? Pretty good. How could a big bang create another universe? Question number three? You guys liked that one. That one you got. How could life come from rocks? Question number four, how could biological systems assemble by accident? Let's all say it. How could biological systems assemble by accident? So you get life. OK. It's maybe a single-celled creature. How are you going to get eyeballs? How are you going to get a human immune system? How are you going to get blood that can clot itself. How are you going to get sexual reproduction? How are you going to get sonar in birds? How are you going to get sonar in bats? How are you going to get feathers in birds? You know, long before you have a bird that could fly, you'd have a dinosaur that had half a wing that wasn't any use, and so he'd get selected against. How do you get these complex systems? that are of no use till all the pieces are in place. Darwin struggled with this himself. He talked in his book, The Origin of Species, about the difficulty of the human eye. He said, quote, to suppose the eye could have formed by natural selection seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. Yet he believed it, and he tried to put together a case for it. Did you know in the retina of your eye, less than two square inches, you have 100 million Light-sensitive cells. We talked about the complexity of one cell. A hundred million and less than two square inches. The blood. Blood's this amazing tissue. The Bible says the life of the flesh is in the blood. The blood is one of the most amazing things. It brings oxygen and food, carries away waste, fights intruders. It can clot itself. It can heal itself. Truly, the blood is this river of life. Our heart. I mean, we could go on and on about all these systems, this circulatory system, right? pumping machine, organ for enriching the blood, complex network of closed tubes. Our hearts are machines the size of a human fist that can pump 2,000 gallons a day, 60,000 miles of blood vessels and go on for a whole lifetime. Don't have any pumps like that. You see, life's systems, life's complex systems are like a mousetrap. You say, well, Dino Dave, how are they like a mousetrap? Look at this mouse trap. Now, you've got these six different pieces, the hammer, the catch, the bait, the base, the holding bar, and the spring. Now, what if I were to just arbitrarily take away one of those pieces from the system? How many mice would I catch? How come I wouldn't catch five-sixths as many mice? I've got five of the six pieces still. Huh? Why not? They have to work together. And if all the pieces are not there at the exact same time in the right place, you're catching precisely zero mice. There's no selection benefit unless it all works. And that's how life systems are. You can't assemble them by one little accidental mutation at a time over millions of years because along the way you have no benefit. Let me take this down to a really, really simple level. You may have heard this analogy before. This tail on the back of a bacterium, a single-celled creature, has a little tail. The tail kind of swivels around. It works like an outboard engine, and it moves the bacterium through water. It allows the bacterium to move from one place to another. Without it, it would be dead in the water. Yet this is a crazy, complicated rotary outboard engine. Can you imagine the first guy who looked in the microscope? Hey, Charlie, come here. I got an outboard engine in my microscope. What? But we know it's an outboard engine because we recognize all these pieces. We recognize the rotor, the stator, the hook joints, the bearings. We build outboard engines. I'm going to show you a little animation of this thing in just a second, but I want to show you how complicated this thing is. This outboard engine is running at 100,000 RPM. Some of you guys understand cars. What would happen if I were to take my car? I drive a Kia. What if I were to take the engine up to 100,000 RPM? What would happen? The Big Bang would happen. Very good, Bob. Yes, it'd be a meltdown, right? Jet engines run at 100,000 RPM. But try doing this with a jet engine. This thing can stop and reverse directions in a quarter of a turn. We don't have engines this good. It's unbelievable, really. And the thing is so small, you could fit 8 million of them in a human hair. Crazy. Look at this little animation of this thing. So scientists, look at this. And it's made of 40 different proteins. And yet, if one of the proteins is absent, guess what happens? It's dead in the water. And so we read things in a science journal, 2017, the bacteria flagellum exemplifies a system that even small deviations from the highly regulated flagellar assembly process can abolish motility and cause negative physiological outcomes. Can somebody translate that in English? What are they saying? It won't work! Why didn't they just say that? Well, then maybe people would understand the problem, I don't know. But that's not how they said it in a science journal. in 2017. You see, mutations that are random create weird errors. At best, they're harmless. At worst, they're congenital birth defects, things like two-headed turtles and other issues. They don't create information systems. Werner Gitt, director of the German Federal Institute of Physics, says, information only arises through an intentional volitional act. There is no known natural law through which matter can give rise to information, neither is there any physical process or material phenomenon known. that can do this. Here's evolutionist Shapiro in his book, A View from the 21st Century. As many biologists have argued since the 19th century, random changes would overwhelmingly tend to degrade intricately organized systems rather than adapt them to new functions. While the psalmist knew that long ago, he said, I will praise thee for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Question number one was? Where did it all come from? Question number two was? How could a big bang create another universe? Question number three was? How could life come from rocks? Question number four was? Wow! Some of you guys are reading notes. You gotta be. That's impressive, okay. Question number five, why do we have a soul? Let's all say it. Why do we have a soul? You see, this ends up being a bigger problem than you might think for most atheists and evolutionists, this question, why do we have a soul? See, here's a tree, and a tree has a physical presence. It's just a body, right? It's got the physical structure. But question, if I get my chainsaw, and I sort of cut the tree down, does the tree say, ouch? No. If I start cutting on this guy, is he going to say, ouch? Well, he's going to say something, right? There's something different going on. We have these pain recesses. We've got a thing called a brain. It's a physical thing that sets up there in the cranium. And so they have something going on the tree doesn't have. But can I tell you something? No ape has ever built an altar. No dolphin has ever said, why am I here? Where am I going? Your dog, as smart as your dog might be, has never sat there and contemplated morality and eternity. There's something fundamentally different in man, and it's called a soul. So at what point in the evolutionary process did a soul slip in? And what benefit for survival is it? That's the problem. Here's Michael Egner, he's a neurosurgeon, he says this, we are more different from apes, remember this is supposed to be our cousins, we're more different from apes than apes are from viruses. Our difference is a metaphysical chasm, systems of taxonomy that emphasize physical and genetic similarities and ignore the fact that human beings are capable of abstract thought and contemplation of moral law and eternity are pitifully inadequate to describe man. He says, yeah, you're trying to group things just based on physical similarity. Oh, we're pretty close to the ape. They got two eyes, we got two eyes, they got two ears, we got two ears. You're totally leaving out this massive difference called a soul. Now I want you to watch this. This is one of my favorite quotes. This is by an atheist named Jesse Bering. Watch this quote. I love this quote. Jesse says this, and he's angry. As a way of thinking, God is an inherent part of our natural cognitive systems, and ridding ourselves of him, really, thoroughly, permanently removing him from our heads would require a neurosurgeon, not a science teacher. He's mad. I can't get rid of God. He's stuck in my brain. He's part of me. I cannot get rid of him. Because Jesse has a soul. Evolutionists have tried to push the idea that humans are nothing but a moist robot, but such materialism doesn't square with our human experience. If we're nothing but a cosmic accident, why could we even trust our brain? I mean, what's to say our brain is rational? What's to say our thinking is even rational? Why should we believe what seems to be logical to us if we're just a cosmic accident? Here's Bertrand Russell, one of the most famous atheists of the last century. Man's origin, his growth, his hopes, his fears, his loves, his beliefs are but the outcome of an accidental co-location of atoms. There's no purpose. There's nothing. Michael Behe, creationist, responds this way. He says, those who declare they have no mind, are not intelligent, conscious, or free, are hardly in a position to reason about any topic, let alone the state of mind that they're not having. Good point. Even Darwin struggled with this. Darwin wrote a letter to his friend, William Gramey, said, then with me the horrid doubt always rises whether the convictions of a man's mind, which have been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the convictions of a monkey's mind if there are any convictions in such a mind? There's a textbook, talks about the brain, the soul, says, during the last four decades, an exciting exploration of our inner space, of what we commonly call the mind, has been going on. But research in the field of cognition are still struggling to understand how the mind's qualities spring from living tissue and electrical impulses. Souls and synapses are hard to reconcile. Folks, it's a secular textbook. Souls and synapses are hard to reconcile. Even Richard Dawkins, in his nasty little book, God Delusion, says this, after he talks about the unlikelihood of life from non-life, he says, The origin of consciousness may be another gap whose bridging was of the same order of improbability. He's saying it's not real likely that we should have this conscious soul. It's a problem for him. It keeps him up at night. Why is this a problem for the atheist? Why does it give Richard Dawkins heartburn? Let me see if I can illustrate. Let's say everybody on this side of the room are carnivores. You guys are carnivores. You like pepperoni or sausage or something like that on your pizza. Don't tell me otherwise. You're nasty critters that eat animals. Over here, we're all nice, fuzzy, cuddly guys. I'm going to put myself in this camp over here, because we eat things like mushrooms in our pizza, maybe a little bit of peppers or onions or something like that. Bob, oh, OK. No, just for today, Bob's an herbivore, too, over here. Now, let's say, but by the way, if you believe evolution, even the herbivores, they get to where they get by kind of stepping on each other, right? Like so somebody has a mutation that gives them a little bit of an advantage and he steps on everybody else, he gets more grass and trees, he gets to have more spouses, he gets to leave more offspring, and that's how the whole population of herbivores advances, supposedly, according to evolutionary theory. But now let's just say, let's just say that Pastor Bob is the first herbivore in the whole population to get a mutation to have a conscience. While everybody else is just stepping on each other, trying to get the most vegetables and leave the most offspring, he's sitting there saying, what's right and wrong? Where did we come from? What's the purpose of all this? And while we're all watching Bob contemplate this weird abstract thoughts of his, all of a sudden, out of the forest come the carnivores, and we go, Why? Because they're fierce. They got teeth and claws and they want to eat us. And so we all start running away and all the herbivores, and I'm running too because they're nasty, and all of a sudden I hit a stone, I twist my ankle, I go down hard, and I can't walk. And all you other nice herbivores look back and say, oh poor Dino Dave, bad day for him, and they all run off. Except for Bob, who has a mutation for a conscience. And he comes back and says, oh, Dino Dave, come on, let me help you. Come on, pick you up. We got this. Well, guess what's going to happen to him? He going to be lunch for these guys. Follow me. There is no benefit to having a soul. None. and it causes the evolutionists' fits, and it causes Richard Dawkins to stay up at night, there is no benefit in an evolutionary scheme, period. Romans 119 says it this way, because that which may be known of God is manifest where? In them. Why do you have a soul? God has showed it to him. Moral fingerprint of God on every heart. Okay, that's our five Qs. Without looking at your notes, every once in a while I get somebody who can do this. Is there anybody that can give me all five? You want to take a stab at it? No, okay, that's cool. Come on up afterwards, grab some of the pamphlets. Here they are. Where did it all come from? How could a big bang create an ordered universe? How could life come from rocks? How could biological systems assemble by accident and why? Do we have a soul? Perhaps, young person, you can be armed someday that if somebody is giving you the questions about your faith, you can come back and say, sir, politely, sir, can I ask you five quick questions about origins? You see, I believe creation is the better model. Colossians 4 says it this way, let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how you ought to answer every man. You see, We're supposed to be the salt of the earth. I like that illustration that Jesus uses in Matthew 5, 13. And he says, you know, if you don't have that saltiness, you're good for nothing but to be stepped on. Question, are you being salt? I like to think about this in a scientific way. See, salt preserves. You can take some fish that would rot in literally days, but you put it and pack it in salt, and you can take it out to sea in barrels, and you can eat it for months. Salt preserves. Salt also has a medicinal value. You don't have antiseptic. You can pack some wound with salt. Doesn't feel good. It stings, but it'll get some of the germs out of there. Salt also adds flavor. Hey, question. Are you inhibiting the decay of the world around about you? Are you coming in alongside to help heal those that have been injured by sin? Are you making a world that's degenerating and going to hell more palatable for a God who has a taste for holiness? Are you being salt? Are you just floating along? Well, I'm here in church, Dino Dave. If God didn't have a purpose for you here in the greater Matthews area, he would take you home. Do you understand you have a role? Wow, I'm a little bit of an older believer. God's giving you time to pray and cry to him for souls, to cry out for revival in this community, for his church to be built up. Are you just kind of hanging around, trying to make this bunch of skin, this thing that we're stuck in, comfortable for the last few years and accomplishing zero for God? Oh, you've got wisdom for your children, grandchildren, for your community around about you. Some of you folks are in the workplace, you're gonna meet people, you're gonna have a chance to interact with people that Pastor Brad and Pastor Bob and Pastor Ron will never see. You may be their only chance to hear the truth of the gospel. Do you have a burden for them? Do you care about your neighbors that are lost? Are you doing anything for God? Are you being insulted? Does it bother you that your neighbors are lost and going to hell? Does it keep you up at night?