You could have skipped the introduction and just said, and now Summer's dad. And that would have actually worked better for most folks anyways. And that would be fine with me. You know you've lived life when you're known for just being your kid's dad. That's a good goal to have. It truly, truly is. In Matthew chapter 19, Jesus was being drawn into a current debate of his day. In fact, if you're familiar with the background, you know that what the Jews were asking Jesus in Matthew chapter 19 was to take a side in a current debate between the two major pharisaical schools, Hillel and Shammai. The Shammites believed that a man could divorce his wife for any reason at all. I've often heard people say if she just burned the toast. I'm not sure if they had toast in first century Israel, but did something that was displeasing in his sight and this would be sufficient for him to give her a bill of divorce. The Hillelians were a little bit more biblical and a little bit more on the conservative side and said, no, there had to be a fundamental violation of biblical law, some type of pornaya, some type of adultery, some type of sin along these lines. And so they wanted him to take sides. Now, his answer is, of course, perfect. It always is in regards to that particular issue. But I want you to look at a particular aspect of it, because I want to make application to where we are today as an introduction to the topic. We only have a brief period of time. He answered and said to them, have you not read that, and I'm going to read it literally, the creator from beginning made them male and female. The creator from the beginning made them male and female. Now, Jesus' response is going to be, here is God's intention for marriage. Here is the foundation of marriage. He goes back and interprets the book of Genesis for us and indicates that father and mother, son, daughter, marriage, union, these are all things that are a part of God's intention and God's establishment. And therefore, no one in the current debate had the answer right as to the nature of marriage. But our society today struggles to even get to the basic beginning point of Jesus' response. Because He uses this phrase, the Creator. The One who made them. Now that wasn't controversial to them. It has not been controversial for mankind down through the ages until recently, until only the past number of hundreds of years, really not even 200 years. And what changed all of this? Because when we hear what's going on in our society, when we listen to people literally standing in front of us and saying that it is a good moral thing to redefine marriage, to redefine what it means to be a husband, to redefine what it means to be a wife, a male, a female, a son, a daughter. When our medical authorities only two weeks ago suggested that it's time to remove gender from birth certificates, we have to ask a question. Why didn't every pagan society in history implode like ours is? What has changed? What has opened this door? Now, I'm not suggesting that there's a simple answer, but I am saying that there is one aspect that was absolutely necessary that did not exist in antiquity. It did not exist through the Dark Ages, the Medieval period, through the Reformation, even through the Enlightenment. But they came into existence in the middle of the 19th century. And so when Jesus responds, We cannot even begin to enter into His response with the people that are a part of our communities any longer, our neighbors, who have been brought up and raised up in a thoroughly secular mindset that has been completely dominated by the acceptance as an absolute dogma of Darwinism. It was Charles Darwin that made it possible for people to not be able to hear Jesus answering this question. Think about how many times in Scripture the foundational response given by the Word of God assumes the reality of the Creator. Think about the prophet Isaiah. as he is prophesying 700 years before Christ, and as the people of Israel are going into captivity, and the peoples of the nations around them are inviting them to come worship false gods. Jeremiah had the same situation. So, when you look at the trial of the false gods in Isaiah 40-48, what is the foundational assumption all the way through? There is a Creator who made all things and defines all things by His act of creation. You can't make heads or tails out of Isaiah, and if you can't make heads or tails out of Isaiah, you're not going to be able to make heads or tails out of the New Testament. That draws so heavily from Isaiah. And then in Jeremiah, the people have actually gone into captivity, and it's fascinating to me, in Jeremiah chapter 10, I didn't realize this until I was well out of seminary, but there's a little section there where God actually gives the words to his people to say to the Babylonians, they're inviting them to come worship false gods, and it switches from Hebrew to Aramaic. And in Jeremiah chapter 10, what you're supposed to tell the others, any God that did not create the heavens and the earth will perish from under the heavens and the earth. And you're given the exact words to say in the language they would understand. But what's the foundational assumption? That there's a creator. The argument of scripture is that there is a maker of all things. And those gods that did not make all things, that came out of creation, aren't even worthy to be called gods. Look at the book of Romans. How many times does the simple reality of God as creator come up? Romans chapter 1, which lays out for us in such a vitally important fashion, the grounds of the gospel. Paul got through the bad news before he got to the good news. That's one of the biggest problems we have in our day. We skip over the bad news and just try to jump into the good news, and no one knows what we're talking about. And to get to that in Romans chapter 1, you cannot make any sense of Paul's argumentation there. If you do not begin with the fact that there is a creator and it's not us, we are the creation. And so we are suppressing the knowledge of our creator. Absolutely central. So I submit to you that a Christian faith, a Christian religion, to use that term, that has no creator will be absolutely incoherent, will make no sense. So you look at liberalism today, and liberalism, the left, has abandoned the idea of a creator. That's why they do not any longer have an inspired Bible. It's not a supernatural revelation, it's just simply what you make of it. And that's why, eventually, you see things like, well, Union Theological Seminary, I call it the Walker Seminary, I'm drawing that from the TV series, The Walking Dead. It went apostate in the late 19th century, but it's still walking around. Its flesh is falling off and it's really disgusting, but it's still there. It's more Buddhist now than it is Christian, but it's still there. It pretends to be Christian. So some of you probably saw the video last year or maybe the year before. Of these people walking in dressed as trees and plants and stuff, you know into their into their Chapel service and that was also the same place where you had a bunch of plants set up in the middle I don't think you all are really interested in doing this but plants set up in the middle and people were gathered around and they were confessing their sins to the plants and Okay, this is what you come up with, and we read our Bibles and go, where did these people come from? They are the natural result of losing the central affirmations of the Christian faith, and that includes the reality that there is a creator. I can guarantee you there is no one, no one at Union Theological Seminary that believes in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. They don't believe that. They have fully embraced a worldview that gets rid of the Creator. Now, there's all sorts of books out there on the person Charles Darwin and his mentality, his upbringing, his background, and there's differing interpretations as to why he had the motivations to do the things that he did and say the things that he did and the racism that's inherent in his system and all those other things are associated with it. We're not going to get into it. Don't have time to get into that today. We're talking about the ugly isms. And the ugly ism that I am speaking about is Darwinism and it is a central dogma of the secular, naturalistic worldview all around us. Everybody in this room knows that if you want to in any way advance in the field of science, you cannot even let it be known in any way, even a hint of an idea, that you might question the central tenets of Darwinism. You will be laughed out of the room. You will not be given positions. You will not be allowed to publish. And it has been this way for a very, very long period of time. Now, I think it is important. Let me mention something. Why did I choose this? Well, I think it's central to understand how we've gotten to where we are. You cannot have a creator who can speak directly to our condition. You cannot have a creator who has the answers to our confusions. If you can't have that, we have no means, really, of explaining anything because we start with God as the creator. And Darwinism allows you to have a completely naturalistic world, whereas men in the past went, we are so complicated. Life is so complicated. There has to be one who brought these things into existence. No, Darwin said. There is actually a process that exists that would allow that level of complexity to develop through random, completely random, non-directed forces. Now, I think it's very important, I think all of us as Christians today should understand certain biological facts, and we should understand what the current theoretical system really does say. I'll be very brief here. And you might say, why should we listen to you? Interestingly enough, I did finish all the work for my Bachelor of Science degree. I was Department Fellow of Anatomy and Physiology. But the main reason is I spent a tremendous amount of my time debating not only with my high school teachers, because I was in a public high school, but then I went to a Southern Baptist Christian school and was the only creationist in the biology department. And that was in the 1980s. So I had to continue that battle and in fact when I graduated the first book I read after I graduated was Dawkins the blind watchmaker because I wanted to read the absolute best the other side had to offer and As a result of reading that book having just finished all this work in biology and genetics mice my senior year Did any of you here ever raise? Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies any anybody here know what a There you go. Okay. All right. Found one person. Yay. I raised 35,000 Drosophila melanogaster my final semester in college, studying the white eye locusts in the genetics of that particular little bug. They're very interesting little things, but you've got to make sure to let them out because they're not really good for, well, fruit. That's why they're called fruit flies. So, I recognize from what Dawkins was saying what the error in his system was. But I didn't have the terminology to express it yet because this was just the time when people were coming up with expressions such as intelligent design, irreducible complexity and things like that. Now we have a wealth of books that address this issue. But we need to be careful when we represent what Darwin's theory is saying. Darwin's theory is not saying that a bird lays an egg and a human pops out or anything like that. But it's fundamental form. Now remember, Darwin didn't understand the things we know today. Darwin didn't know about genetics. He didn't know about DNA. He didn't know about the function of mutation. He didn't know any of these things. And I'm not sure he ever would have come up with this theory had he had even the slightest idea of the complexity of the most basic of human cells. He didn't know any of that stuff. But what his basic idea was is that it's a slow process that involves the survival of the fittest. If your particular body form and your particular abilities allow you to have more kids than somebody else's, then that particular species is going to move your direction. Now, in the modern context, in the modern neo-Darwinian micromutational theory, The idea is that natural selection, which is the idea, again, that there are pressures upon populations. And if you have the genetics that allows you to be a little bit less noticeable to your predators, to the things that eat you, or give you a little advantage seeing your prey, Little things like that, you're going to end up having a few more offspring in the next generation, and a few more in the next, and a few more in the next. And it is this natural selection, working on genotypes, that improves things, and then you have mutation. And mutations allow new data to enter into our genetic spectrum. Now this is where it becomes very, very controversial. Because natural selection does take place. We've observed it over and over and over again. There's no question. Because that's built into our genetics. That's how God made us and that's how populations can survive changing environmental situations and everything else. That's predictable from a non-Darwinian perspective. Darwinism is dependent upon good mutation. Now, anyone who knows genetics knows that 99.95% of all mutations are deleterious, they will destroy things. And the more we've come to understand, we've mapped the human genome now and everything else, the more we've come to understand this, the more unlikely this whole system is, but the idea still, and it's a religious idea anymore, cannot be questioned. is that these random mutations, they must be random. There can be no direction. I know there are some theistic evolutionists out there that want God to come along and nudge things and provide a mutation here and provide a mutation there. I realize that. But they are not accepted within the academy. They are not accepted as being true Darwinists. It has to be random. It has to come from... There can't be a direction involved. We look at it because we look at ourselves as the top of the rung. But a real Darwinian just simply says, well, we just happen to be what currently exists at this time. There is no upward direction. There is no downward direction. And by the way, put a footnote in at this point, that's where the new movement, which you're going to be hearing a lot more about if you haven't already heard about it now, transhumanism, pops in and says, this is where we need to break the Darwinian cycle. and start using our technology and our ability to alter the human genome because we've gotten as far as natural selection and Darwin can take us and now it's time to start using genetics and our technology to get to the next level, which should cause all of us to shudder. It should cause all of us to shudder because that kind of technology is out there People are working on it right now, but unfortunately they are doing so primarily outside of a Christian worldview. So super soldiers, we all like, we all love watching the movies about that, but we wouldn't like to actually have them running around the planet. And you can, I can guarantee you that's being worked on right now, especially in places like China. So the point is that it is an undirected has no goal, no observable direction. It has to be undirected to be true Darwinism. So why is that one of the ugly isms? Well, it's real simple. When we look back at the pagan religions of man, we look back at the various kinds of beliefs that were banished and destroyed by the Christian faith, the paganism of Rome, the various philosophical systems of Greece. You go outside of the Western tradition, the rest of the world, there is always this constant reality that you have to explain the complexity of life. And the fact that in our entire experience, We recognize our dependence upon other forms of life. And the more we've actually learned about biology and about zoology and the oceans, and I had to take a class in college called Limnology. How many in here know what Limnology is? One, two, okay. All right, thank you. So now you know who all the geeks are. You can sit farther away from them next time if you want to. Limnology, the study of inland lakes and streams. Ooh, that was an exciting class. Actually, it was. When you have a professor that that's his field, and he's not really good in any other field, but he's really good in that field, yeah, that actually was a very exciting class. All these fields, we've learned how interdependent life is. how the life cycle is so delicately balanced, and how mankind does mess that up very often with the things that he does, and yet how resilient it actually is in responding to these things. But the point is, we have a whole lot more information today than they had back then, and yet they did not fall into the insanity that we are experiencing today. Why? Why is it that we see in secular humanism a total rejection, total rejection of everything that is good in the claims of Christ? I mean, if you haven't been listening, listen to philosophers who are trying to speak from this world today, from this type of perspective today. We are simply fizzing chemicals. We are moist robots. That one's sort of disgusting. I don't like that one. Moist robots. I'm from the Star Trek generation. Any Trekkies out there? Some of you actually put your hand up. That's amazing. A real Trekkie just sits there and goes, sort of like a Vulcan thing. You don't want anybody to know, but yes, I'm there. In one of the episodes, The Next Generation, there is a description of mankind that I think is just perfectly suited to being a Darwinist. This life form describes us as ugly bags of mostly water. Ugly bags of mostly water. Okay. But you see, all of these descriptions are meant to communicate the fact that all the things we said in the past about the sanctity of life, the transcendent meaning of life, was all made up. It was fiction. It was based upon the fantasies that we had. That's what you're taught When you go to almost any university, and sadly it underlies a lot of what's taught in many Christian universities today, when you get into the biology department, that we are nothing but the random result of a process that had no direction whatsoever, and it had no direction because there is no creator. There is no maker. So you go ahead, take the time to listen to someone like Richard Dawkins. And hear what he says. Many times he contradicts himself. He has to. Because he's actually made in the image of God. And that drives him insane. And so he does contradict himself. But there are times when the honesty flows out of the man. And he will simply tell you, this universe is pitiless, it is merciless, it cares nothing for you, it cares nothing for life on this planet. There is no transcendent meaning and any attempt to create it is purely artificial and it's fiction. It is something you're doing to make yourself feel better, to fizz a little more happily. That's all you can do. And so when we engage in conversation with people in our society, there's two things we have to recognize. Let's start with us Christians. We have been deeply influenced by Darwinism. Now I'm not talking about, I was raised in a very, very strict fundamentalist context. All right, so I was taught from knee-high to a grasshopper that all this stuff was a bunch of lies. Now, I very quickly discovered I needed to know why that was, that that wasn't enough. I needed to, if I was going to be amongst these people and try to speak with these people, that I needed to learn what it is they were actually saying. But you and I are still influenced by the culture in which we live. And we know the look to expect from anyone when we question the reality of Darwinism, because it's a dogma. It's a dogma of our society. It is now at the very basis, everything we are seeing about all this equity. Now, I'm not saying that they're consistent, OK? Let me correct something right now, because I've often pointed out that all of this stuff about the LGBTQ movement. Stand back for a second and analyze that from a Darwinian natural perspective, from natural selection. If the greatest good is you getting the most number of your offspring into the next generation, that whole movement is suicide. Because you don't get any of your offspring into the next generation. So it's scientifically suicidal from that viewpoint. I know they have explanations. There's always an explanation. Well, we've seen that natural selection actually allows for, you know, some particular individuals in a particular population to assist others and they always come up with stuff. But the reality is in this pitiless, merciless universe, It doesn't make any sense for those things to exist. But all this stuff about equity that is now being forced upon us, from a Darwinian perspective, that doesn't make a lick of sense. There are people who are genetically superior to other people in particular areas. They are. I mean, the Olympics just got over. I didn't really watch much of it personally, which is sort of sad. But I can guarantee you, if almost anybody in this room got on the track with even the slowest of those runners, the camera wouldn't even catch us coming across the finish line, OK? There are people who are simply genetically able to run like the wind. So that is recognized. That is seen as an appropriate thing within that perspective. So why would naturalists be embracing contradictory things? It's real simple. Darwin allows you to not have a creator that explains the differences between men and women, between different men, different women. There's no creator any longer. And if there's no creator, then we get to define what's right and wrong. We get to define where mankind should be going. We get to define everything, but only for a brief period of time. Because we're not going to live forever, which is why, of course, there is this mad push toward what? Finding a way to banish human death. It's part of the transhumanism idea. Even Star Trek has played with it. The Borg. If you've ever seen The Borg, you're going, that's not where I want to go. And I certainly would agree with that. But that whole mindset comes from the idea that if we don't have a creator, there is no transcendent meaning. There is no life after death. There is no judgment. There is nothing right, wrong, or indifferent about The various forms of bodies that we have and genders and everything else. So we get to define everything ourselves. But we don't live forever. And so since we don't live forever, we can't pass any of this. What in the world of the current? Think about it. Think about our current side or think about what's going on right now. Now almost anything is being put out right now as being truthful. May not be next year. We all know that. So what is there to pass on to the next generation? What is there to give form? What is there to give purpose? A sense of belonging and understanding? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I feel for the young people of this generation. I truly, truly do feel for them. Because as they look toward their futures, All they've ever experienced is change. What was good 10 years ago isn't good any longer. They know what they have to do to even have acceptance amongst their peers. And I feel sorry for them because that reality of transcendent meaning has been stolen from them. It's been stolen from them. Now, we don't live in in a cave someplace. And so we engage in seeing what the culture is producing. And we certainly try to teach ourselves and our children to engage in worldview analysis and to filter things through. But the fact remains that we know and we are influenced by what is considered to be absolute truth by our society. And that means that we have to take a stand and it's going to take energy, it's going to take commitment to take a stand, and sometimes we fear doing it because we don't necessarily know that we can answer all of the objections. That's why presupposition apologetics is so important, I think, in providing that kind of response. But we have been influenced by it. And then when we try, all of us have neighbors. I had a situation. Remember when Jupiter and Saturn conjuncted back in December of last year. Some people were really disappointed that they didn't actually sit on top of each other and then glow real bright so we could have a Bethlehem star or something like that. But they got closer to each other from our perspective than they had been for, what was it, since the 1400s or 1600s? I forget. It had been a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long time. And so I had set up one of my telescopes out on, I was going to say the front lawn because I wanted to show how sensitive I am to where I am. You have something called grass here. Uh, I'm from Phoenix and so it was in my rocks. And, um, why would you have a lawn in Phoenix? That does not make any sense. God did not intend grass to grow there. and actually I consider it torture to try to make grass to grow in Phoenix and it costs way too much anyways. So I had one of my smaller telescopes set up and there were these guys that were renting the house across the way. They were going to Grand Canyon, interestingly enough, which was, it's still a Ostensibly Christian University, but anyway So they saw it and I invited him over and and we're talking about all these types of things and even though they said they were Spiritual not sure what that means even though said they were spiritual. I could sense the chasm in the everyday thinking of these individuals they have such a hard time with the idea of that God is such a reality that I am who I am because He's made me this way. The world is as He intends it to be. He has the right to determine the parameters of my behavior, and there's going to be a day of judgment. It's just hard. Now, we know they're made in the image of God. That's the contact point. That's the contact point with the lost. They're made in the image of God. That's not going to change. They have to be suppressing that knowledge. I get it. But the more consistently people think as a secularist of this world, the more that way of thought numbs the mind to fundamental and foundational truths that we are seeking to communicate to them that define the gospel. Do you see how effective that is? You've encountered it. I know you've encountered it. You felt that frustration because the language that you were using just didn't seem to bridge across. And that's the land we're living in now. It's been happening for a long time, but we've been living on the momentum of what has taken place in the past. Now we're getting to the point where we have a generation coming up that is thoroughly secular. They have no knowledge. You ask them. When I was a kid, even the unbelievers knew Bible stories. They had that cultural connection. For many people today, no knowledge at all. And for many of us, we are really good at speaking Christianese, but we need to realize Christianese doesn't translate real well. Doesn't translate real well. And so Darwin has opened the door, has given the ability to mankind to create what I see as the fullest rejection of the claims of Christ. Think about any aspect of the claims of Christ. Does a Creator-less universe have any way to understand Jesus' message and preaching? What an effective means. I mean, we've seen how the cults can insulate people from the Gospel by changing the meaning of words and coming up with other revelations and all the rest of this kind of stuff. But what an incredible, effective way to numb the mind To help, because the Bible says we suppress the knowledge of God. Well, that takes energy. But if everybody around you is doing it the same way, then you're encouraged to do it. That's why I feel that when Christ, Christ is, what's he doing? He is destroying his enemies. He's putting them under his feet. This is the greatest enemy I can think of. It's an ultimate denial. Christ Lordship, and it's going to be put under his feet, but how is that going to happen? Well, one possibility is it's given free reign and then it destroys itself spectacularly. Because you cannot have a society that will last built upon this foundation. It will destroy itself. We already saw how badly it can do that, because you know who embraced Darwin with open arms? The ugly guy on the graphic that we have for the Grace Agenda Conference. He's not back. There he is. Oh, you bet. The Marxists love Darwin. They love that message, because that allows them to put the state in the place of God. And what was the result of that in the 20th century? 120 million dead. 120 million dead. I'm not a prophet nor a son of a prophet, so I will not prophesy as to what's going to take place in regards to this. But one thing I can tell you, when you try to build a society that does not acknowledge that there is a creator and a day of judgment, you will become a tyrant, a totalitarian, and your system will crumble. So why is Darwinism important? Isn't that just a bunch of science stuff? No, it has become absolutely central in the minds and thinking of those people who are seeking to build a society while rejecting All of the things that God says are absolutely necessary. And why does he get to say that? He's the creator. He made us. He wrote the manual. And so our message to the world is Christ or chaos. Christ or chaos. As this chaos flows across our land, we have to be able to identify where it came from. And one of the key issues in that identification is the In the thinking of the people around us, there's no creator. This is all random. We know that's not true. But that's what's taught. It cannot be questioned. You'll lose your job in science if you dare do so. And it all goes back to Darwinism. May God, in his mercy, shed the light of his truth and allow people to see the beauty of his creation, to see that he is the creator, and that He has entered into His own creation, the person of Jesus Christ, and that by submission to Him, we can have peace with Him and true life in this world. Let's pray together. Our gracious Heavenly Father, we do live in a day of great darkness in our society, and yet Your Word contains great light. At the very foundation of that message, is the fact that you are our maker. You defined us. You defined the purpose of our life, the reason of our life, the end of our life, and that we will only find peace when we recognize who we are in light of you as our creator. Thank you for opening our hearts and minds. Use us to open the hearts and minds of others. May we teach Each other may we teach our children to honor you as the one who from the beginning made them male and female and as a result gets to define for us the purpose of our life, true worship, and what will await us at the end of our lives. Thank you for this time for us to consider these things, give us opportunity for us to share them with others, and for all these things in Christ's name. Amen.