We're reading this morning from the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 17. The Apostle Paul here is preaching the Gospel in the city of Athens, and I'm very interested as to how he begins when he's preaching to these people. They were idolaters. That's obvious from what was going on there. Paul's spirit was stirred when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry, it literally means the city was full of idols. They were worshipping all kinds of different deities and they were so concerned when anyone would visit their city that they would feel at home there religiously. If there wasn't a church or a temple or some sort of a place of worship that those people were used to, they wanted them to be able to worship there and so they put up an altar with an inscription on it to the unknown God. That's what that was all about. So this was true ecumenism at work. I mean, you talk about syncretism, this is it, right here in Acts 17. The Bible says there's nothing new under the sun. And we have people today who want everybody in the world to feel comfortable. It doesn't matter what you are, who you are, what you do, you can all be God's children and be pleasing to God. whoever your God may be. You can call Him whatever you want. You can even manufacture a God of your own imagination and we'll accept that. That's the modern idea. But it's not a modern idea. It's an old idea. It's as old as hell itself from whence it comes. But notice how Paul deals with that. Where does he start when he's preaching? Acts 17 verse 22. Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars Hill and said, ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by and beheld your devotions," and he really is referring to those deities that they were worshipping, "...I found an altar with this inscription, To the unknown God, whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you." And notice where he begins, verse 24, God that made the world and all things therein, saying that He is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands, neither is worship with men's hands, as though He needed anything, saying He giveth to all life and breath and all things, and hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed and the bounds of their habitation and so on. Paul begins with creation. God that made the world and all things therein. And you'll notice in verse 26, He hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth. So there you have two references to creation in just a couple of verses. He starts out, God that made the world and all things therein. That's just like quoting Genesis chapter 1 verse 1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And then he talks about the creation of man himself. He hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth. God who made the world. That's what we believe. That's what we preach. There is no room for any other theory, any other hypothesis as to how all things came about. Here it is. God made all things. There's no room for evolution. And we've been speaking about that, and without becoming pedantic or repeating myself, let me just say once more, maybe not for the final time, there is no room for evolutionary thinking if you believe the Bible. Period. It's one or the other. You can be an evolutionist if you want, but don't tell me you're an evolutionist and you also believe the Bible. This is impossible, though many will say that it's not. Now, anybody with a basic education, or anybody who gets access to the media, newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, whatever, We'll know that science is something that's based on observation and experimentation. Scientists are very fond of experiments. Now I'm not a scientist per se, I did pass an examination in high school, it's called an O-level, which some people will say is no level. I did pass the exam in general science, which was a mixture of physics, biology and chemistry. But I'm not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination. But scientists, I do know, in every single discipline follow rules of a famous scientific method when they're investigating things and when they're seeking to acquire new knowledge. Now you know what a hypothesis is. A hypothesis is really an educated guess. It's when somebody puts forward a thesis or puts forward an idea and a hypothesis is formed based on observation or a prediction and then that hypothesis is actually put to the test and the results of that are analysed. Now, if the test results verify repeatedly what was anticipated by the hypothesis then the scientific method that's used is said to have proven the theory. I know that because it was written by Henry Morris III. This is what happens in the scientific world. Now, in the pure sciences, as they're called, and I've just mentioned them, the evidence has to be observable, it has to be measurable, and the experiment itself has to be repeatable. Right? Now, in the applied sciences, as they're called, and you can include their engineering and medicine and pharmacology and so on. The testing is far more rigorous, because unknown information might well result in the kind of failure that will do enormous damage, including killing people. And you don't want that, at least most people don't want that. Biblical thinking people don't want that. Now, many scientists would insist that to be satisfactorily proven, the hypothesis has to be falsifiable as well. You say, well, what does that mean? Well, that standard, which is actually demanded in courts of law when scientific evidence is used in a case simply means that one has to understand the processes and the procedures used in the testing of the theory so well that the wrong answer must also be known. See what I'm saying? It has to be not only satisfactorily proven, if you like, positively, but the hypothesis has to be falsifiable. You have to have the wrong answer as well. The scientist has to understand the information so very well that he would know what would disprove his theory. That's what we're saying here. Now that level of rigour is applied by most experimental scientists we are told today. Now although many experiments have been used to try to duplicate some form of evolutionary change, that is to say from a lower form of life to a higher form of life, or from a mixture of chemicals to some kind of reproducing life form, Nobody to this point has even come close to evolving anything in a laboratory. It just hasn't happened. They've not been able to do it. Now there are certain kinds of chains that can be repeated over and over or replicated such as mutations that have often produced really grotesque results in various creatures. But the best scientists, using the most expensive equipment, are not able to transform a lower form of life into a higher form of life. In other words, science doesn't see evolution happening today. It doesn't happen. That's it. Period. It does not happen. And yet, if you talk to evolutionary scientists, They will tell you that they believe it to be possible. They believe it to be possible. They must be believing that by faith, because they've never seen it. They've never actually been able to do it. Now, they insist that since we can see adaptive change among living things, such as big dogs, large dogs and small dogs, there must be, they tell us, evolutionary change that is not just horizontal but vertical change among living things over long periods of time such as one common ancestor that develops into both dogs and cats. But the fact of the matter is there is nothing like that that is observable in this present world. It doesn't exist. There's no doubt that scientists have been able to, through selective breeding of animals, make some pretty big changes to the shapes and sizes of animals. My son-in-law is a veterinarian, and I'm sure he knows this already, but I'm told, because I'm not a vet, I have to read this in magazines and periodicals and so on from people who know, there are over 450 breeds of dogs. Did you know that? Over 450 different breeds. From a little tiny Chihuahua to the Irish Wolfhound or the Great Dane or the Afghan Wolfhound. But all of those and every one in between, they're still dogs, aren't they? I mean, I don't think any one of those has ever changed into a horse or a cow or a pig. That doesn't happen. The same, of course, could be said for cats. The Cat Fanciers Association, I read, recognises only 39 breeds of cats, but they're all various shapes and sizes and colours, but they're all still cats at the end of the day. Now change among kinds of creatures can happen or can be made to happen, but those changes are always observed to remain within very specific and defined limits. Right from the beginning, when anyone has ever studied these particular creatures and these particular issues, there has never been a change observable from one kind of animal to another. Now we shouldn't be surprised by that, Because the Bible talks about that. The Bible talks about that actually in 1 Corinthians chapter 15. Here is what it says. 1 Corinthians 15 verse 39. All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds. In other words, they are different. Now evolutionary theory tells us, and they are very insistent about it, that way back somewhere in the unobservable past, a common ancestor to both dogs and cats began to evolve over a long period of time into the different kinds of animals that we now recognise as dogs and cats. The problem is, there is no evidence for such change. And that includes the fossil record. There are no dogs or cats. I was going to say, but there are. There are no cogs or dats. That's what I meant to say. Have you ever seen a cog? I have, but it's not a living thing. I've never seen a dat. Except when it's short for data. And somebody put a period after it. Henry Morris III said, and I quote, finches, birds, may display variations in beak sizes in isolated population groups such as in Darwin's Galapagos Islands. However, finches do not become woodpeckers, nor do fish become amphibians. There are no fincheckers, and there are no fishivians. He's being facetious here, but it's very true. It's a serious point. Modern science doesn't observe any upward evolution taking place today. Natural selection is often talked about among evolutionists. It's the process whereby natural environments tend to call the least fit from some populations. Natural selection actually conserves. It preserves and protects a species. It doesn't innovate. It doesn't create something new as it were. Natural selection only selects from among what already exists. By itself it doesn't add any genetic information. I know that this sounds very technical but it's very important. It's very important. There's no one who has observed the evolutionary process of upward change taking place in our day. Why? Because it doesn't happen. That's why. There's false reasoning used by evolutionary scientists and what they'll tell us is, since there's evidence of small changes among creatures, then there must be big changes over time. That's the hypothesis. That's their thesis, if you like. Now, you could call that logic. You could say that it's logic. You could say that that is a supposition that's based on logical thinking, but it isn't observation. And it certainly is not fact. Now, I'm sure you've heard of the geologic time scale. When I was in school, I remember we studied geology and we came across this stuff. a geologic time scale. Now that scale has been produced by men and it attempts to show the development of a graded series of organisms from the primitive to the advanced. Maybe some of you can remember when you were in school there were charts and textbooks that they gave to you in which all the geologic periods and eras were outlined in a host of names that you couldn't pronounce. And those charts always make the bottom layer of fossils, I'll try to pronounce it correctly, the Proterozoic era, which is the earliest stratum in which the very first minute forms of life could be found. And then above that you have the Cambrian period, the Ordovician, the Silurian, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, and you've heard of that I'm sure. and all the rest. And it sounds so very impressive, doesn't it? So impressive. Now, the creators of these charts always top them off with what is known as the Quaternary Period in which mankind is found. That's us. Now, the only problem is they never mention that there's no place on the face of the earth where all of these geologic periods are found in order. There's nowhere on this Earth where you find that order. And evolutionists never tell us either that there are actually some important parts of the Earth where these periods are out of order. In other words, where there are so-called old fossils on top of the so-called young ones. Now in Glacier National Park, you may have visited there before. It extends up into southern Alberta in Canada. There's an area of over 500 miles in length where these old fossils are on top of the young ones. Now evolutionists will try to explain that by saying that this is caused by an overthrust. That is, the earth buckled at that point and those old fossils slid over the top of the young ones. Now if that's true then let's think about this, if there's an area 500 miles long and 50 miles wide with tons and tons of rock that's slid over the other rock, there ought to be a good deal of crushed rock between those layers, wouldn't you think? There ought to be what you would call striations and abrasions here and there. But those two layers actually join one another with a line that is as smooth as a knife blade. Now how do you explain that? How do evolutionists explain it? I'm told, though I've never been there, there's another area in northern China, in which once again old fossils are on top of young ones. There's another area in Scandinavia, over a thousand miles long, where once again old fossils are found on top of young ones in vast areas. And the line between them is just as smooth as it can be. Now, if tons of rock in one stratum passed over another stratum, wouldn't you think there would be some sort of marks, like abrasive marks that you could observe? But those marks are not there. Why not? I know that in recent years there has been a lot of evolutionary thinking that has been helped along by fantasy. such as Steven Spielberg movies, like Jurassic Park. And we often hear about the fossils of dinosaurs. I know some of you have been to museums, and when you've gone into some of those larger museums, you may have seen skeletal, if I could say it, remains of dinosaurs. And so you'll know what a T-Rex is, presumably. Tyrannosaurus Rex and Brontosaurus and others. Now the word dinosaur just simply means a terrible lizard and of course they're not lizards. But that's what dinosaur means. Now creationists are often accused of not believing in dinosaurs. This is not true. But what they do deny is that dinosaurs evolved. See that's the that's the falsehood that they evolved. Evolutionists present And then they expect people to believe on top of the facts their hypotheses as well. That's the problem. They'll have these things that are factual. Yes, there were dinosaurs. Here's the skeletal remains. But here's the explanation that we're going to give for these dinosaurs. And that we don't accept. But the evolutionists want you to take it as a package. They want the facts and the fiction to be mixed together. So it's just like the movies. Now we're very glad to accept facts, but not theories. Evolutionists present dinosaurs as examples of their theory that when life evolved above the reptilian stage, the dinosaurs died out because they faced the competition of superior creatures, or because the environment that they were in changed too quickly for them to adapt to it. But that raises a number of questions. Why did not the smaller members of reptilian life die out as well? I mean, why are there lizards today that are able to face the competition of superior animals? Would it not be adequate to say that dinosaurs are examples of animals that degenerated instead of evolved? That would be more accurate. The fossil record, as far as proving evolution, it doesn't do that at all. It doesn't prove anything. It doesn't prove, nor does it disprove, frankly, evolution. But these fossils are facts whose origin can be explained in one of two ways, either by evolution or by creation. And we believe that it's by God's creation. You can choose what explanation to believe. But if an evolutionist is to make his theory believable and acceptable, he would need to have a graded series of fossils which show how an animal developed into a different kind of animal. And men and women, that does not exist. There is no such graded series. There are great problems that evolutionists face. and we probably haven't time to deal with many of them in this particular series, it might turn into a never-ending study. But one of the problems is the absence of intermediate species, the so-called missing links. If evolution has really occurred, there ought to be millions of fossils which show a graded series of steps from one kind of animal to another kind, all the way from the lowest forms of life to the most highly developed. Now, in reality, there are no unquestioned intermediate fossils. Evolutionists will always counter this by saying, well, the fossil record is incomplete. That might be true, but if there's a transition from one species to another that occurred so many millions of times, The total absence of unquestionable proof of even one such transition seems to be a bit fishy, if I could put it that way. I mean, wouldn't you think it would be one or two that they could point to? Now, if the fossil record is that incomplete, then the entire system of gating rock strata by the existence of so-called indexed fossils has to be brought into question. And evolutionists have been guilty of what you would call reasoning in a circle on this particular matter. They often classify certain rock strata on the basis of the presence of specific fossils, i.e. dinosaurs are put into one period, trilobites are put into another period. And then the evolutionists will date the age of those fossils on the basis of the rock strata in which they are found. And of course, this is a logical fallacy. When we're talking about this subject, a lot of it comes back to the question of the origin of life. There's a lot of people, including the National Geographic and others, and they're always trying to figure this out, the origin of life. Where did we come from? How did we get here? And in order to avoid that problem there are those people that we have already dealt with called theistic evolutionists. They say they believe that after all things evolved up to the point of life then God created life itself and then things evolved on after that. The very fact that there are theistic evolutionists shows how serious they consider the problem to be about the origin of life. Some explanations for the origin of life are not explanations at all. Someone, for instance, said somewhere that life came from another planet and not the Earth. And so it would be very suitable for people to be able to find evidence of life on other planets. And hence we have these idiots sending these probes to different planets out there and trying to prove that life could have existed there. And if they can prove that life could have existed there, then they'll say that life did exist there. That's how these people reason. That's how they talk. That's how they follow so-called logic. Well, if life could be sustained there, that means that there was life there at one time, even though we don't see it now. Really? But that's how they reason. That's how they reason. But of course, even if that were true, that life came from another planet, it just puts the problem into a different realm. It doesn't tell us how that life originated It just tells us that it didn't originate here, but it originated somewhere. By the way, I don't believe that there's life on other planets. I don't believe in UFOs, and I don't believe in aliens and all that stuff. But one theory of the origin of life says that a rare combination of oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen produced life by a fortuitous concurrence of atoms. And they'll illustrate that, some of them, by telling us, like somebody at a gaming table in Las Vegas, if he keeps throwing the dice long enough, is bound to win. All that that proves is that they don't know much about Las Vegas. That's a rare occurrence. Of course, that's the reason evolutionists have to postulate billions of years for life to originate. That kind of helps with the problem, they think, but it doesn't. But you see, there are things that will never occur, no matter how long a time is involved. One throw of the dice for example can never have two different totals at the same time. There are other theories and we could take a long time to go into those theories perhaps we will on another occasion but it's amazing to me the things that people will come up with to try to avoid the very simple statement of scripture which is that in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. We're going to continue to look at this subject or other aspects of it that I think are very important for us to note and I trust the Lord will help us as we do so.