What I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and pray. And then we're just going to do a brief review of what we learned last month. And then we'll make our way forward with our next segment of this apologetics course. So let's bow our heads and pray together. Mighty God, I just thank you so much that we have a brotherhood here of people who care to know what your word teaches, who care to know where these different doctrines are taught and care to know how to defend the faith and set it before an unbelieving world to really confront them in their unbelief and lay before them your truth as a mighty contrast. And indeed, Lord, to expound the truth, that you are the lone rock upon whom we can build our worldview, our belief system, our understanding, and not have the ground underneath us ripped out. Lord, I pray that it would be more clear to everyone in this room how to faithfully defend your word and the teachings of your word and to confront an unbelieving world with the foolishness of unbelief. In Jesus' mighty name we pray, by your Holy Spirit, amen. All right. So what we learned last week had to do primarily with creation. We're going to move on to a different doctrine and consider its implications this week. But we learned Westminster Shorter Catechism question. Anybody know? All right. And what does that question say? What is the work of creation? The work of creation is God's making all things of nothing. by the word of his power in a space of six days and all very good. All right, some of you guys are really using those songs. A lot easier to memorize the Westminster Shorter Catechism with the help of Holly Dutton's CDs. Really incredible. I remember my kids being super young and getting through like 20 songs in a week just by playing them. In the car and things like that. We had been on a family vacation. So... Alright. Proof text. Anybody remember? Hebrews 11 3. Anyone think they can do it by themselves? Any bossermans think they can do it by themselves? Hebrews 11 3. By... By faith. We understand. Joanna's got it. You got it back there Charlie? All right, let's say it together. I will speak it first and you can repeat after me. By faith we understand. By faith we understand. That the worlds were prepared by the word of God. That the worlds were prepared by the word of God. So that what is seen. So that what is seen. Was not made out of things which are visible. And here we see the presuppositional nature of the Christian faith. We begin with faith and belief in what our God has told us and we proceed from that foundation. And what I want to do before we jump into this week's topic of providence and design, is I just want to talk about the doctrines we've looked at already. We saw from the doctrine of eternal punishment that there are going to be people who know in the clearest sense that God is who he claims to be, but will still war against that belief for eternity. This tells us something about our interaction with an unbeliever that reason and evidence alone cannot be what ultimately changes a person from being in a position of unbelief to belief. Otherwise our doctrine of eternal punishment would make no sense because they will have all the evidence. They have every reason to believe, but a hardened heart is not changed by more evidence. This is very important. And that concept is antithesis. The unbeliever looks at the world in an entirely different way, interprets every single fact in a different way than we do as believers. They might say two plus two equals four, but we mean God created two plus God created two equals God created four. They don't believe that. They think there is just a universe of numbers that somehow is there. All right, so that's the first concept. Then we talked about God being absolute. And by that, what we mean is that God is not relative to anything else. He's not contained by anything else. He's not dependent on anything else. These amount to biblical doctrines of divine simplicity, which is that God doesn't even have any parts. He's not divisible. He's not put together. And that makes him the ultimate reference point for everything that exists and for all our thoughts. He is the most certain being in all reality. His existence, in fact, and despite our recalcitrance to this fact, his existence is as certain to you at every moment as your own existence. Because to know ourselves, we know ourselves with reference to and in light of this absolute God. That we call our presupposition. Our belief in God shapes and colors every other belief that we have. And if God is not your presupposition, the absolute God, then what is? Anybody remember? Yourself. If God is not your ultimate authority and the lens through which you evaluate and understand everything, you have to fundamentally treat yourself as your ultimate authority. That is the unbelieving presupposition. So then we talk about the Trinity and we talk about how the doctrine of the Trinity really does lie at the base of all that we believe and understand. Because in order to make sense of the world, we have to take categories and apply them to a multiplicity of things. We're always balancing what philosophers call the problem of the one and the many. Our God is the only God who by his very nature is inherently qualified. to be the reference point of all of our thinking. Because in him, the problem of the one and the many is entirely resolved. The three persons perfectly represent the one divine being. The one divine being is perfectly expressed in the three persons. And what we're doing when we're thinking and making sense of the world is a reflection of God himself. All right, creation. This is what we did last week. All things have a definite beginning in time. Things came into being out of nothing. God didn't use preexisting material as if he was dependent on the nature of things that precede our existence or our form. He spoke everything into being and his sole inspiration for everything created was nothing other than himself. What this means is that everything must reveal the mind and qualities and attributes of God. He is the sole source of inspiration for what exists. There is nothing else. Therefore, we are confronted with divine revelation everywhere. So we're going to finally continue on to this topic and it's the topic of providence. This is another doctrine and then we're going to go into classic arguments for the existence of God based on design and see how there's how they're often misguided and how to put them in their proper light. Now providence carries on from the notion of creation. It's not just that God made everything orderly, then left, and so there are faint hints of how God originally made things, but as for all of the facts and everything that happens in between, that's just up to chance. Providence says not only did God create everything originally to reveal Him, But actually, everything in the course of time is expressive of His eternal decrees and plans for this creation. God is continuing to reveal Himself in the events of human history and in everything in the world. He didn't just leave it alone and then it sunk into some state where it's obscure now. Now, that means our goal when we interpret anything is to think God's thoughts after Him. Explain what that means. Every fact in this room right here, right now, God thought before it was. Everything. Bible talks about the hairs on your head being numbered. It says in Psalm 139 that all of the story of my life was essentially written beforehand. That's how we sing it in church. All of my days were written in your book. And therefore, when we're interpreting anything, we're looking at that thing we're interpreting, whatever fact it may be, no matter how simple, and we're peering into the plan in the mind of God. None of it falls out of his providential plan. And from that, we can begin our lecture then. What is providence? Well, let's define it. This will be our question for this week. What are God's works of providence? God's works of providence are His most holy, wise, and powerful, preserving and governing all His creatures and all their actions. Okay? And I'm going to go through the doctrinal part of this a little bit more quickly, but I'm just going to emphasize a few things about it. It's alike with creation because both providence, all of his providential acts and his creative act, they're the divine decrees. God planned them from eternity past. He's not kind of, you know, working in the moment thinking about the next thing to do. On the other hand they're distinguished in this. What God creates is the fact that things exist and what they are. He creates animals according to their kind and so you have classes and kinds and things. But His providence has to do with how things continue to be. God didn't leave the world alone. And so we should expect to see God's design, not just in the way things originally were, but in the creation up to this point and at all times. So, I'm going to just run through, you know, a few of these, you know, aspects of divine providence kind of bound up with creation. We sing this one all of the time. The heavens are telling of the glory of God, and their expanse is declaring the work of his hand. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language, nor are there words. Their voice is not heard. Their line has gone out through all the earth and their utterance to the end of the world." By this translation, what it's saying is it doesn't use audible words, but it's speaking all the time. I'm going to emphasize a few things about this. When you read this psalm, you would not gather that man has to engage in a hard labor while looking at the heavens, much less creation, to make his way to the conclusion that God exists, right? This passage is telling you at all times, it is fundamentally clear, it is unambiguous that God exists. This is very important when we start thinking about theistic arguments and how the scriptures state it. You look at the heavenly bodies, they're one of the major things that the Bible will turn to again and again is revealing God. And part of that is because of just how essential they are to your existence. First of all, they're the natural light sources. You take away the sun, take away the stars and the moon, we're all in a lot of trouble. We're not gonna be able to see at all. And yet we conveniently have them crafted for our senses to respond to. not too bright so we can't see anything, and not so dim that we go about in the world stumbling. We walk into a place that's ready-made. But it's more than that. It's pretty obvious to all of humanity that heat is going to come from the sun. It's pretty obvious that your ability to tell time is going to be based on when the moon is in the sky, where it's at in the sky, where the sun's in the sky. Your ability to have any sort of plans to meet somewhere at some point in the day is due to these heavenly bodies. Even your location on the earth as people would navigate the seas was guided by the stars. All of these things, life itself, it was clear to even most primitive people that without sunlight, nothing would grow. We walk into this place where it is clear that God is providing for us because of these bodies above our heads, placed perfectly. The way the Bible would describe it sometimes is that they reveal God's skill. You know, the word wisdom in the Bible, chokmah, frequently means really skill to make things that last and work and have a useful function. When the Bible is celebrating God's wisdom is manifesting creation, it's usually that. It's funny, you think about even just planning a lunch with an atheist who's just convinced that God does not exist. And that atheist is just assuming and relying on so many things that are just stable. that we can tell time, that there is going to be light to get there. Just the myriad of things that he's taking for granted to even meet with you, to talk to you, to tell you that there is no God. It is an incredible thing, and this is why the Bible says things like that the fool says in his heart, there is no God. It says these things are plain. And I'll just go through a few more. Ecosystems are celebrated in the Bible. Extraordinary animals are celebrated in the Bible as immediate evidence of the creator. Even more we could note that the Bible even tells us we can gain instruction from the animal creation and we see this in Genesis too. God sends Adam to go name animals and he noticed from his observation of animals that there's this male-female thing and he concludes, I'm male and I don't have a partner like the animals. Think about the deep analogical reasoning going on. Humans are like animals enough to where I'd expect to see male-female pairs, and yet I am sufficiently different from all of these animals that, well, none of those females are going to work for me. What's that? Yes, indeed, indeed. There's been great regress in all of these areas, unfortunately. God frequently tells people to look at creation in the Bible and learn from it, the way ants work, the way that various animals provide for the winter and store up. Even the way that cultivated animals like cows listen to those who are taking care of them and are obedient is celebrated in Isaiah 1. All of these characteristics, the fact that the creation can tell us about ourselves, the Bible puts it forth as clear, indisputable evidence of God's existence and provision and providence. Of course, the human body, I took the Da Vinci picture and very carefully edited that, but the human body. We are called image bearers of God and now that's not to say that our bodies look like God. He's invisible, he's infinite, he's simple, all of these things. However, our bodies are clearly in a position to take mastery over the creation. Our appendable thumb is an incredible thing that enables us to have dominion and power over the world round about us. Our ability to see with our eyes, to hear with our ear, Bible says that that is a revelation in and of itself of God. It says that your five senses, for example, in Psalm 94, says, did the God who make the ear, is he unable to hear? No, your sense of hearing gives you insight into a God who is a God of communication, who has an eternal word right next to him. But when we really press forward with this, especially the intellect of human creatures is a profound and indisputable reflection of the God in whose image we're made. The majestic opening of the Gospel of John is what we have in mind here. It's just said a few verses earlier, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God, kind of doubles as reason and language, but that word, word. It says, in him was life, and the life was the light of men, and the light shines in the darkness. That's talking about you and me in our sinful condition. And the darkness did not overpower it. It goes on to say there was the true light, which, coming into the world, enlightens every man. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world did not know him. It says it enlightens every one of us. Christ's activity in the world enlightens all of us. We are constantly basking in his light. but by a willful maneuver of our sinful rebellion, we don't know him in the relational capacity we should. Speaking to the fact that we know God innately. You take a look at the human person, our consciousness is this profound thing that we can not only think thoughts, but think about our thoughts. Our self-consciousness is actually marked out in Genesis by a different word. It says a man, when the spirit breathed into him life, that he receives a neshama. And that is a specific word never used in animal spirits. It speaks to the concept, or rather souls, but speaks to the concept that we have a intellectual spirit that is capable of self-reflection. You look about every single human culture, every single culture worships. It's that pervasive, it's a universal. because we have a basic awareness of ourselves as spiritual beings, and we have a basic sense of need to worship a spiritual being. Our language, our capacity to recognize wisdom, our morality, our government, all of these things, the Bible celebrates as immediately revealing the fact that we are created in God's image. But here's the additional thing we have to take into account when we talk about providence. Not only all these grand features of how we were created, We also have a story that we believe in that encompasses much more than God made all things and he said they were very good. We have a doctrine of divine providence and human history. And we have to take these into account as well. We believe that man has radically changed in human history. In a way, I might even say that, you know, these advocates of evolution in a way, I would just note that we've kind of, We've definitely beat them to that punch. I want you to think about what the Bible says about man. Man's lifespan has changed radically. Man was originally created in such a way he could not die. Can you imagine a human body that is subject to zero decay? That's something radically different than what we are now. Not only that, but before the flood, how old did human lifespans approach, anybody? They all approach 1,000 years. And it's kind of a tragedy when they don't make it to 950 and 930. After the flood, human lifespans tend to approach 150 years. After the Mosaic Law, the human lifespan approaches, well, according to Psalm 90, and this is true even today, the average lifespan is 70 to 80 years. That's what Moses reflected in Psalm 90. We're changing. But we're not changing by becoming more and more capable of all sorts of different feats. We're actually declining in our capacities and our abilities to live for lengthy periods. In fact, I'll just note Steven Grocott, he's a PhD in organic chemistry, he observes that from what we understand about DNA, it makes perfect sense that as time goes on, that the various sorts of negative mutations in the genetic code would actually multiply and decrease the human lifespan. This fits with our worldview, friends. Just the same, we also know that Adam and Eve, their children, granted, probably separated by 50 to 100 years, intermarried. I stress that because it's nothing like this sort of situation where you'd have a family where you have people engaging in, why can't I think of the word, marrying your brother, incest, incestual relationships, because in fact, they would seem like citizens of a society, many of whom you wouldn't even know. Adam and Eve having had, you know, a daughter who's a hundred years less than none of you have even lived a hundred years. And you'll notice that almost all of the births that take place in Genesis 4 and 5 happen after people are 100 to 120 years old, implying a vast separation. But it's noteworthy that it's not until the Mosaic law that it's prohibited to marry a sister. But if we're dealing with a genetic code that's breaking down, it's not only because we have shorter lifespans and you could never be separated from your sister as if by another citizen, but it's also inherently harmful for the offspring. These sorts of things work with our worldview. The changes in what we'd expect from human procreation We obviously have a darkened mind and understanding. We've fallen into sin. But the other thing I want to note is this. We believe in cataclysmic change in human history. This world has changed in radical, radical ways. And it's changed very quickly. Whatever conception you have of a flood, even if it's localized enough to put a boat on Mount Arad, or you have a worldwide flood view, which is what I tend toward, radical change has happened on this globe. Right here, this is actually a picture of a fox frozen in ice. This is from Germany three years ago. A fox apparently jumped into some kind of freezing river and froze really quickly. How many of you know that we have an... Scientists will talk about an ice age where you find various animal species frozen in motion. This works excellently for people who believe in a worldwide flood as we do, a cataclysmic change. And it's important that we understand what these are and that we're taking them seriously. Natural defenses entered into creatures they formerly didn't have. One of the curses of the fall is it says that plants will bear thorns. What does this imply? At least the ones that men were cultivating didn't. and a radical change took place in a species. This isn't the sort of gradual change that would be posited by evolution. This is something radical that God has made to occur. Natural disasters apparently would not have occurred in the fashion that they now do, but by God's providence, they do. And this is why for Christians, the concept of microevolution, can anyone, would anyone be able to define that? What's the difference between micro and macroevolution? Go right ahead. Changes that do not extend beyond the species Right. It's changes that involve isolating traits that are already in the genome. So that, of course, in certain circumstances, if the classic example in England, that during the Industrial Age, moths that were dark black could blend in with the industrial smoke. And the ones that were white seemed briefly to be wiped out. It's often set forth as a proof of evolution. But in fact, no new information got added into the genome for that to happen. And in fact, as soon as they had cleaner methods of industry, white ones came back. Those things work fine for us. Yes, sir. That's right. In fact, that's the case with viruses when they mutate as well. They actually tend to become less severe first off. So they're more bland and that's actually why they can survive more because the hosts who carry them don't die immediately and then they can give it to someone else. And so that's noteworthy and I'll note this as well. We believe distinctly as Christians and this is actually, not a controversial idea anymore as it once was that every human race came from the same source. There we have isolation of different traits and obviously magnification in different cultures and different places on the globe. But that was not always believed. In fact, earliest theories of evolution posited, and this is one of just the horrors of it, that the African-American race or African race came from an entirely different source. That's kind of how they justified them being, what was it, three-fifths of human? What was it? Three-fifths. They literally posited a different origin. Some of the dark history of different pieces of evolutionary theory. I put Samuel Stanhope Smith. He was one of the presidents of Princeton. He was a Presbyterian minister and he wrote an epic paper to the effect of essentially the common descent of all human beings. And it's interesting to note his contribution there. So with all of this information before us, here's what we gotta take in. Our doctrine of providence says this, that the divine mind is revealed everywhere. It takes no technical expertise in any science to know that. If we engage in investigation on deeper levels, we expect to find more awe-inspiring wisdom of God. And even chaos in creation fits into our picture. We are under God's judgment. And this is important because the world is gonna say chaos seems to fight against this concept of intelligent design. Well, when the intelligent designer has a just cause to judge us, even judgment has an intelligent place in creation and apparent chaos. And of course, our responsibility therefore to think God's thoughts after him in how we study things. So I'm gonna jump into the classic teleological argument and I wanna talk about our concerns with it. The classic teleological argument articulated by William Paley, Thomas Aquinas, others, it says something like this, premise one, somebody read those premises for me and then read the conclusion. All right, okay, so this is a valid argument. The question is, is it sound? And in here, what do you think, what do you think would be an important critique for us as Christians? We're gonna critique this from a Christian perspective and a non-Christian perspective. What might we have as a problem with this? Well, it doesn't start with God. It starts with the concept that we, well, let's go with this, Christian critique. First of all, to go to an unbeliever and tell them this, like, hey, simple reasoning, you're smart, you have reason, let me just approach you as a pure non-believer and see if you can follow this argument. It would imply that the unbeliever is not completely, sorry, wait just a moment. Someone was watching another sermon right now actually, it was better than mine. All right, first problem. It doesn't confront the fact that the unbeliever already knows that God exists and is suppressing the knowledge of God in unrighteousness. It actually treats the unbeliever as if, okay, maybe you haven't noticed, so let me help you get to the point where you do notice that God exists. Can you see why that's a bit problematic? You are putting the unbeliever in the position to be the judge and jury for whether or not the revelation of God is sufficient, and you're treating them like they're not hostile to the conclusion. Do you see what I'm saying? Second concern I put out here is this. It treats divine revelation as ambiguous. As if it wasn't already on the loudspeaker that God exists from within you and outside of you. So now let me point you to some evidence for that conclusion as if it were not entirely clear. And often what it does is it involves turning to some technical expertise. as if I need to find some novel example of design in reality so that then you can believe in a designer. As if I jump into the complexity of the genome or a human cell, that's going to help you as if it's not evident right here right now for us to even be talking. These are some of the concerns. Now, what do you think unbelievers might say? These are my concerns as a believer, but how do you think an unbeliever might critique that classical teleological argument? Go ahead. Okay, they might say it's circular, like what is design? Such that you can then infer a designer. Wouldn't you have to first know that the universe doesn't just automatically design itself? self and design is just a figment of our imagination. Yeah, people say that. We're calling design is just human made up word. Yeah, sure, they'd say you're an idiot. And the Bible says a lot of stupid things. That's ad hominem, not super compelling. Sure, there might be some kind of a designer, but there's no evidence of who he is or what Yeah, there was a designer. It's not the God you're talking about. And not only that, you're trying to point to design and science to point to your God, but honestly, your Bible contradicts science all the time. So even if there is a designer, it's not that one. Here's a common one. It would come up in the 20th century quite a bit. Okay, so maybe it is true within this universe that if you see design, there must be a designer. But here's the thing. Have you ever seen the entire universe? How many of you have seen the entire thing? So how can you say the entire universe is designed? Maybe alien life forms designed our species and implanted them here. That actually is one of the things that Richard Dawkins, you know, this is crazy. These are the people who despise Christian theism, but they will themselves contemplate supernatural extraterrestrial explanations of how we got here. Anything but your God. They might furthermore say, why is there only one designer? Maybe there are many. In fact, maybe, because I don't know if you've noticed, there's also chaos in reality, or at least there appears to be. So maybe there's a designer, and then there's like a malignant troll deity who's constantly besting him, and they're locked in an eternal struggle. And we're in an era where the design deity maybe had the upper hand. These are among the many things that you're going to hear from an unbeliever when you present them with this sort of argument. And in a sense, you have to step back and say, and by the way, I put him in the position to be the judge and jury of the evidence, and well, he found it lacking. He brought up all these other things. So, I'll just mention another one. You know, when you point out gaps in the evolutionary history where, you know, there's just all these missing links. One of the things that have even been contemplated, this is actually contemplated by very serious neo-Darwinians. that maybe the way evolution happened was through what they called punctuated equilibrium. It's the concept that maybe one species could birth a ready-made, totally radically different species. Now, of course, I mean, when we're hearing this as Christians, we're sitting there going, man, this sounds so supernatural, what you're describing to me. You know, some extraterrestrial thing put us here, then somehow we make radical leaps in entirely different species along the way. This is sounding, this sounds like a religion. Go ahead, Scott. Yeah, on that argument. Right, yes, that's a great point. You know, there generally is hostility toward an unfamiliar species. Yes, DJ. Mm-hmm, yeah. Right. Right? Right. How are we getting the male and female here? I mean, these are the sorts of wild questions that really do present themselves when you're dealing with this problem. But notably, the unbeliever will contemplate it. Because here's the thing, friends. If you are hostile in the depths of your soul to the concept that the God we're talking about exists, who is the source of your guilt, who is going to judge you, maybe eternally, any other option will do. And you're right back in a worldview of idolatry like we talked about this morning. You will prefer an idol. So I'm gonna say how a presuppositionalist would articulate this, little Cornelius Van Tilwright here, one of the fathers of presuppositional apologetics. Here's how he would articulate this argument and change it. He says this, affirmation and denial of design by the Trinity implies one's design by the Trinity. You come to the unbeliever, the unbeliever denies design by the Trinity, therefore the unbeliever affirms his own design by the Trinity. How can he make this argument? Well, here's how he makes this argument. You need the absolute God of Christianity and that God alone as your presupposition. You can't even escape him as such despite your deepest rebellion to even know that your words accurately describe the reality outside of you. The only way you could know that, and you all proceed as if you do know that, is if there is a being who matched you for an external universe, all of that external universe, there's no part of it, which is a country that is run by chaos or another god, but the entire universe is made by him and every intellect is made by him to match one another. His concept, therefore, is that you need this sort of absolute God, this absolute being, who is constantly speaking to you from without and from within, that the two are made for one another, to even know that evidence can support conclusions. That is to say that logic and reason actually defines the way things really are. You need this God to know that your numbers even accurately describe the world outside of you. So he says this, Mr. Unbeliever, you don't get it. To even be talking to me right now with any degree of confidence that this conversation can take us somewhere useful, that we can even have a meeting of the minds, All of it presupposes that we are swimming in. God is our atmosphere. And not just any God, not just a local creator, not just any God, a mere name for a deity of thunder like Zeus or something like that, but the absolute creator God. And Van Til's challenge goes like this. Justify that you can be confident of any of those things on an unbelieving presupposition. And it's not hard to show that a finite man has no ground of certainty of any of those things when he starts with himself as his ultimate authority. Now you're confronting the unbeliever with his constant denial and at the same time confronting him with the fact that every second of his existence betrays an awareness of a God who made him for the world and the world for him. That is the nature of a presuppositional argument. One must be so designed to meaningfully affirm or deny design, to meaningfully communicate, to meaningfully use reason. Now, the unbeliever will critique this in a couple of ways, and I just want to explain what they're going to say. One critique is this. Most unbelievers, and I've had this conversation many times, so I'll tell you what to say. They'll admit that they cannot have absolute certainty, that their words accurately describe reality. They cannot have absolute certainty that tomorrow the sun will rise or that we will have what you call uniformity in nature. But you know what they'll say? It's still highly probable. It's likely that I have some grasp of reality. You know what they'll say? They'll say it's because I've gotten around pretty good. I mean, look at me. I'm walking around, I'm making sense of the world around me, and I'm talking to you, and I don't willingly believe what you're telling me is the necessary grounding for all that I do. Now, there are all sorts of ways to respond to this sort of critique. One is more technical, it's Hume's critique, but here's a more practical explanation. That's like saying, I've got 50 bucks in my wallet. I don't know where it's from, and any store that I go to, it purchases exactly what I'm looking for, and I just bought lunch 10 minutes ago. But what we're telling you is it makes a radical difference where that $50 came from. It makes a radical difference if that's 50 stolen dollars. It makes a radical difference if that's 50 monopoly dollars. It makes a radical difference if it's $50 that you earned. And what I'm saying about your mind and your reason is that it makes a radical difference as to who made it. If it came into being by chance, who's to say it's not going to betray you overnight by chance? How can you trust it? unless you know it to be the creation of a God who is absolute, who's all-controlling, and has crafted it for the world outside of you. That's how we're going to articulate this. And notably, one of the great, great philosophers of the Enlightenment, David Hume, he actually explains this so very well in his essay on human understanding in Bread and Age of Skeptics, and rightly so if you start as an unbeliever who starts with yourself as your ultimate authority. Hume pointed out there is no way to prove that even numbers apply to reality. There's no way to know it for sure. If you're self-deceived and you're in an illusion, there's no way out of that picture. Moreover, to calculate probability, you need numbers to apply to reality, but even more, the only way you can ever calculate probability, surely and absolutely, is if you know that you have a sufficient sampling. How do you ever know that you have a sufficient sampling? How long have you lived? Getting around pretty well, what, 25 years, 30 years, 40 years? That is nothing. against the apparent history of reality as we know it. Moreover, this is what's even more problematic. When you say, I know the sun is going to rise tomorrow because for the last 365 days it's done just that. Therefore, it's likely it will happen tomorrow. You have to already know that there's uniformity in nature. You can't learn that there's uniformity in nature to arrive at the conclusion that there will be tomorrow. You have to presuppose it to even begin calculating probability. So what Hume says is that in fact this entire way of thinking is circular and we agree with him in our critique of the unbeliever. Next thing the unbeliever might say is this, okay, you got me. I don't know if my mind or words truly describe reality, but it's worked so far, so I'm just gonna keep using them. This is different than saying it's probable that it does, saying I'm just gonna pragmatically assume that they do. And again, there are ready responses to this. If you really don't know for sure that reason applies to reality because you're made in the image of God and creation's made by his hand, then why isn't it just as reasonable for you to conclude the opposite? I don't know if my mind truly describes reality, therefore I'm going to act chaotically and not listen to reason. To even think the way that you are right now, you're betraying the fact that you do have a rational mind made in the image of God and you are wired to listen to it and deny the God who made you in the same breath. I would notably, again, point out the concept that your time frame is always insufficient. It's worked for me so far. Guess what? People believed in idols for most of human history, and they would say it worked for them. This sort of pragmatic reasoning is no grounding for truth. So what we would say as a presuppositionalist, they might attack our second premise as well. We say whether you deny or affirm, you are always affirming. that you are made in the image of God who crafted you for reality. They might say, I'm gonna deny the second premise. I'm actually neither affirming or denying a designer's existence. But in that case, again, we will respond pretty readily. In fact, you are denying the existence of the sort of God we're talking about. Sort of God we're talking about is a God who is speaking to everywhere unambiguously, totally clearly, And you're denying that his voice has been so clear. In fact, even trying to escape between the horns of the dilemma that I'm describing for you is you using reason to the best of your ability to escape this conclusion. And this is the clearest indication, once again, that you are not your ultimate starting point, but you live and move and breathe every day like you live in a world that has been crafted for you and you crafted for it. every moment of your existence. And the scary thing for you, unbeliever, is you never give thanks to God for it. That's what Romans 1 says. God's attributes are clearly seen, but man did not give thanks. And see, at the end of this argument, friends, we don't just have the unbeliever embrace another belief, God exists, a designer exists. At the end of this argument, we're ready to set forth Christ as the only solution because the problem isn't you didn't know something before. The problem is you've known it all along and you've denied it like a rebel. And God help you if you don't have a savior. The end of this argument is the gospel. So when we think about all that, friends, you know, I'm imagining there are other practical objections to what I'm saying right now, and some of you have probably been thinking these right now. How many of you have been hearing what I'm saying, and you're like, yeah, that's accurate, that's what the Bible says. Everybody knows God exists. But you're saying, to be totally honest with you, Brant, I don't live every day with a constant sense of God. It isn't obvious to me every second if I consult my own feelings or my own heart. Sometimes what's more obvious to me is that the Seahawks lost, that I hate my job, that I'm mad at my sister, and I find myself able to live as if God doesn't exist all the time. How many of you are actually kind of thinking that right now? Just a little bit. Yeah, it's fair. But our response to ourselves and our own heart and to the unbeliever is perfectly clear on a biblical worldview why that's the case. We're all really, really practiced at denying God. Have you ever had anything else in your life that deep down in your soul you knew but you really practiced at denying it? Anybody? We're saying that's the natural condition of man. And you do need to accept the fact that it's hard to say that to your own heart, much less to an unbelieving world's heart. But it sounds a lot more like the biblical prophets, doesn't it? Not only that, our laxity proves our sin. This is exactly what the Bible says about us, that we're not responsive. Another thing that's frustrating is that people say, I have to believe foolish things to believe in the, to accept God. And in one sense, that's true. There are things the Bible says that, that contradict conventional wisdom, but ultimately it's not true because the dumbest thing you could ever do is deny the existence of the God who makes reason itself reasonable. That's why the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge and understanding. With that in mind, then I want to ask, This question, do we have no use for classical arguments for the existence of God, profound descriptions and expressions of how God's design is evident in creation? And my answer is no, we're just gonna use them differently. First of all, I would say the number one reason you need to know all the information I'm about to tell you is because you love God's creation and you love your creator, and that itself is an apologetic to the world, that you love to see his working in the creation in his fingerprint everywhere. You actually come off as incredulous if you say, I live life to think God's thoughts after him, and I have little interest in investigating the depths of it. Proverbs 25 too says, sorry, that is the glory of God to conceal a matter, the glory of man to search it out. Moreover, these bits of information I'm gonna give you, you should think of them like this. If you were having an intervention with a drug addict family member, you know in their heart of hearts the whole time they know they're a drug addict, they've known it for the last five years. But if there was an exceptional moment where their drug addiction really harmed someone else, That might be something you brought up in that intervention, a stark moment of where they have harmed others on account of their addiction. These sorts of pieces of information I'm giving you are the sorts of things to begin this confrontation and discussion that you know God exists, and I'm gonna lay something before you that is a really profound example of that and make you grapple with that. as I tell you the whole time that you know God exists and you need to quit suppressing him. It's a wake-up call. It's also us being willing to speak people's language and say we are not abandoning the sphere of science. So with that in mind, we're going to look at some things. I would highly recommend this book. It's called Creation in Six Days, Why 50 Scientists Believe in I forget the subtitle, but 50 scientists believe this. Here's one of them, John P. Marcus, and I love the book because it's honest, presuppositional sort of stuff. Almost every chapter begins this way. Somebody read what John P. Marcus, PhD in biochemistry says. Anybody? I believe that the literal six-day creation of the universe is based primarily on the teaching of the Bible, and my understanding is that that this is God's word and is true. This faith, however, does not close my eyes to scientific evidence. Rather, it opens my eyes so that I can make sense out of all the data. Two things that confirm my belief in creation are the clear evidence of design in nature and the vanishingly small probabilities of life coming All right, we're going to look at some of these. This is a perspective of a believing science saying, I'm going to believe that I may understand. 50 of these scientists have this perspective. And I'll show you the sorts of things they unearth from that perspective. I will note, I'm not going to make an effort to defend six-day creation specifically today. I'm not denying there has been a range in Christian history for different views on that. I'm really focusing on the design aspect of this. If you want to know my personal view, I'm happy to tell you. I take the six-day view, but I'm not going to go into defending that scripturally or anything today. Here's one of the number one arguments against evolutionary theory and for the need for a designer. Who thinks they can define the second law of thermodynamics? The first law is the conservation of matter. Things don't disappear. It just doesn't happen. You can break it apart. You can change it. You can alter it. The matter doesn't disappear. Who knows the second law? Who thinks they can define it? Yes, DJ. Yes, everything moves from order to disorder, and energy tends to dissipate and create a state of equilibrium. This concept is not hard, and I will just lay it forth for you. It's very simple. You've got a house. You've got your fireplace. It might be around 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit. It's heating the room to 70 degrees, a comfortable 70, and outside it's 32. What is going to happen in the course of time with that heat? Is that home just going to stay 70 degrees for eternity? What's going to happen? It's going to dissipate and get colder and eventually it's going to be like this. You're going to have an empty fireplace, and it's going to be 32 degrees everywhere because that heat dissipates, and one common temperature, equilibrium, is the result. This isn't just true about energy, that it tends to dissipate. And frankly, every scientist who's an engineer trying to create new products is trying to answer the question, how can I keep energy more focused instead of dissipating and going to a state of equilibrium? Well, the same is true of information and order. If you looked at, say, a French patisserie, I don't know, in Rest Park, England, you would see a scene like this. Now, it tends to feature smaller flowers, and these gardens are meant to be viewed from above so that you can see a wonderful, beautiful design. What's going to happen if the gardener quits his job? What's going to happen? Disorder. What's going to happen is that the geraniums right here in this nice little patch are going to do one of two things. They're going to start growing outside of that patch over here, and they're going to start growing over here, and they're going to all get interspersed, and eventually this garden is either going to have all of these plants everywhere, or more likely what's going to happen, weeds are going to take over and you're just going to have a jungle here. Those lines that you see between the grass and the gravel, this order that we have with real wonderfully straight lines and mathematical curves, it's gonna dissipate. The order is going to leave. This is a basic feature of reality as we know it. You would never guess that if you threw a few potted plants in a field, and you threw some gravel in the field, that natural movements alone are gonna create these paths, are going to create these perfect hedges, you would never think that way. This is just a fundamental disposition that we have toward reality. Very problematically, an evolutionary worldview asserts the opposite. And to really get into that, I just want to do a little test for you guys. So which of these two, this is our entropy exam, it's the end of your science class, which of these two cups is in a more disorderly state? Okay, the ice cup. That's what almost all of us will say. In fact, It's going to be the glass of water. Here's why. In the ice cup, you actually have distinctions. In this airy part between each ice chip, you have a very different temperature than you have in the ice. You have things separated. But when entropy occurs, what it's going to do is it's going to turn everything into a bland sameness, just like your garden is going to become one jungle with all sorts of different plants everywhere. So it is that these distinctions are going to dissipate. And in fact, it is of course just a cup of water that is one temperature with no edges, with no defined differences between one state of matter and another. That's where it's going to end up. Well, I want to talk to you about evolution. It defies entropy, very simply. You know, the law of biogenesis says that living things come from other living things. Fundamentally, evolution has to say that from non-living inorganic matter comes living things. And this is something that is not substantiated by any experiment. However, a common experiment that people point to is contradicting this, is the Miller experiment of 1953. And there's Miller right there, there's his contraption. And he said, if you give me heat, You give me electricity, you give me ammonia and methane, H2O, I can make amino acids, which amino acids are the fundamental pieces of living things as we know them. Here is his experiment. It looks like this right here if you want to see the actual thing. It looks like this over here. We've got H2O turned into vapor. They have a gas inlet to let in those other gases. And what they do is they send electric shocks through it when it makes it over to the left. And then they cool it, and then they've got amino acids. So look, we've done it. We've produced the building blocks of life in an experiment. And the thought is that they're reproducing the conditions that would have been prevalent on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago. OK, here's the first thing that's noteworthy. Evidently, hundreds of millions of years ago, there were no test tube systems quite like Mr. Miller's here. This is actually a system designed to make amino acids. Noteworthy observation, right? This is not pure chaos. This is a design contraption to produce a result. OK? That's the first thing. Second thing, his experiment. What's that? Result's not typical. That's right, that's right. Okay, notably as well, as soon as these amino acids get created, they have to be removed immediately from the state where they were made, and that's where you had that little cooling thing right there, and they have to be removed from it, and even then, they're not preserved. So they don't carry on for any length of time, even with these special conditions. Then, moreover, oxygen has to be excluded from the entire experiment. So these vacuums here to produce this. And that, of course, is not a condition that prevails. And in fact, oxygen subsequently becomes something that's going to be necessary for living things. And then finally, of course, nothing like proteins or cells are actually living things in that degree are produced by this. And so, you know, this is why, you know, these are the critiques raised by chemical physicist A.J. Monty-White to the effect that this is not by any means a helpful step toward the conclusion that order can arise from pure disorder. Everything about this conveys the idea that these amino acids were designed, and furthermore, even with the design imposed by the experiment, would not exist for very long. Even the Big Bang defies entropy. I would point to you, and that's the concept that reality bursts forth from utterly condensed energy and matter and produce the reality as we know it. John R. Rankine, mathematical physics was his expertise. He spent five years of his life attempting the difficult work of trying to explain how tiny little modifications, undesigned, can produce the profoundly well-ordered galaxies that we know and frankly exist in ourselves. This is what he said. Do we hear of any of these supporters of evolution being willing themselves to spend years of their lives pursuing the complex mathematics involved in their patched up but unproven theories? Alternatively, are they willing to pay others to do this work and approach the problem objectively, that is, willing to accept that physical theory could result in a negative answer? His point is this, the world is not looking for studies like his. The minute it yields results like his that it's mathematically impossible for a world that begins essentially as plasma to make its way into states like galaxies, they're not interested in the study. There's not a think tank trying to demonstrate that conclusion. He spent years of his life on that. Today I alluded to what the James Webb Space Telescope observed. This was reported by PBS, by the way. The model of the universe as we have it is that it's 13.77 billion years old. That's what the prevailing theory is. At the beginning, you have the Big Bang. You have, essentially, high energy and incredibly unfamiliar states of existence here. And then, essentially, as things cool down through the course of 13.77 billion years, then that's when you can get rock-like planets, gas ball planets that are not themselves like suns and radiated from within. and end up with things like the Milky Way out here, which is where we're supposed to be. What happened when they made the best effort to understand what the universe looks like here is the thing I read about in church today, where man talks about the impossible being discovered. What they discovered is that when you look deep into the universe as we know it, when you're looking here, you see mature galaxies that look as mature as the one that we're in. And I'll just be really frank about what this is going to do. You might think, man, this is going to send ripples in the world of various cosmological theory. In a sense, it will. But this is typically what they do. They'll typically say, well, if you asked them a year ago, we know for certain you can't have mature galaxies over there. Now they'll say, well, I guess you can. And in a way, friends, this is where I want you to be at least understanding. This is a religion. You are naive if you don't understand that it is. It's a religion that will accept miracles. They won't call them by that name. But I'll cite several examples of this as we go on. But that is the situation. And when we look at this, we naturally take our next step from the problem of entropy, things breaking down, not getting better, to really dealing with the questions of the probability and possibility of evolution. Stephen Jay Gould, a very famous advocate of evolution, but he did say this, if you repeated the Earth's history a million times, I doubt that evolution would ever produce the human species. His point was this, it is so unlikely on evolutionary theory that you and I should even be here right now. It's almost unthinkable. And we can only wish that Gould would have taken this more seriously. To demonstrate this, you have to understand probability. I want to talk to you guys. How many combinations of a deck of 52 cards do you think can be made, like successive cards? I'm gonna lay this out for you because you have to understand how hard it is to get an ordered series. Okay, so this is fairly obvious. Here's your cards, 52 cards in the deck. You got spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs, all of it. Okay, you gotta understand this first. To get an ace of spades as your first card, let's say that we're going for this order. You've shuffled your deck 800 times, and you're hoping to get, in straight order, these 52 cards. Ace of spades, two of spades, three of spades. All right? OK. So the likelihood that your first card is going to be an ace of spades would be what? 1 in 52. That's not so bad. What is the likely code that your second card, if you're going to do two just random deck, you're going to get ace, two of spades? It's going to be 1 over 52 times 1 over 51. Those odds go up big time. It's 1 in 2,652 shuffled decks where you get ace of spades, two of spades. OK, when you take it up to four, you're already in the realm of like, you'd have to literally have 6,497,400 shuffled decks, that's how likely it is that you're gonna get ace of spades, two of spades, three of spades. Okay, as you go on and you start talking about order and probability, to the 13th card, that's all of the spades in a row, so you're going ace of spades, two, three, four, five, six, all the way up to the king. You're at a number that is going to have 21 zeros after it. To get an entire deck, this is what you're going to be at, a number with 67 zeros after it. To get that many pieces to come together, this is what it means. One shuffle in, and I put the number up there for you. Anyone knows that number and can read it, more power to you. One shuffle in that number. And one with that on the top of your fraction and that big number on the bottom, that's how many shuffles it would take to get that full deck. Now, to put in perspective how absurd this number is, and kids, this is why you don't gamble, okay? You're feeling lucky. Go ahead, Cameron. Yeah, saying there's a chance. Saying there's a chance. Guys, to put this in perspective, I want you guys to see this. How much is 8 times 10 to the 67? Fairly easy calculation would say the number of atoms, smallest particles, on planet Earth is 1 times 10 to the 50. I just want you to take that in for a moment. I get astounded every time I say this. The chance is that when you shuffle a deck of cards, that the shuffle you have has ever been shuffled before. It is so astronomically small as to be impossible. Is that absurd? That's the likelihood of getting 52 pieces of something in a proper order at random. I bring this up because here's how it works. Our human skeleton has 206 parts. The smallest cells that we have have upwards of that number, more than 206 parts. This is the sort of calculation that people engage in to demonstrate the, not just in probability, but in possibility. I'm going to read what Jerry R. Bergman, PhD in biology, says about this. Achievement of only the correct general position required. Ignoring for now where the bones came from, their upside down or right side up placement, their alignment, the origin of tendons, ligaments, and other supporting structures. For all 206 parts, will occur only once out of 10 to the 388 random assortments. To put this in perspective, this is what it's like. If one new trial could be completed each second for every single available second in all the estimated evolutionary view of astronomic time, about 10 to the 20 billion years, it gives us 10 to the 18th power. The chances that the correct general position will be obtained by random is less than once in 10 billion years. This will produce the probability only, if you give me those 10 billion years with every second, of 10 to the 388 minus 18. So you're still at 10 to the 370. And atoms on Earth amount to a 10 to the 50. This is what you're talking about when you're talking about things randomly coming together to even be in the right position to be a living thing. And you're not only with that in evolution, you're talking about mutations happening at random again and again and again in advantageous ways through the millions of years, hundreds of millions of years, thousands of millions of years of alleged human history. This is so improbable as to approach what we would think of as impossible. But this again is where the advocate of the evolutionary religion will say, but here we are. And I'm not even considering the possibility that what you're saying is true. And this is why we have to turn around to the evolutionists and say, you're a religious devotee to a worldview. But here's the problem. The worldview you're even a devotee to, if it were true, you'd have every reason to doubt your own mind. The thoughts of your mind in an evolutionary worldview are just things that are advantageous. And advantage has nothing to do with truth. It was advantageous for seasons of human history for everybody to be an idolater. In fact, it even is evident that it's advantageous to this day for people to believe in God to live a little bit longer. So why don't you? It's pragmatic. And this is people using God's reason against him, trying to find any bush to hide behind. So I'll go on to another concept of irreducible complexity. Michael Behe obviously is, if you're privy to these sorts of things, at the forefront of this concept in his book Darwin's Black Box, published many times since 1996. His basic concept is this. Gradual evolutionary steps cannot be responsible for the complex species that we have now. Because certain systems are irreducibly complex. Which is to say, if you take any piece out of that system, it doesn't work at all. Which means you can't, by gradual progress, get those different pieces, because for that whole gradual period until they all exist, it's completely useless. That's the concept, and he takes this down to a chemical level. Go right ahead, sir. Yeah, right. Right, that's right. That's right. That's right. There has to be a modicum of function. But to convey this point, what I want to do is this. I want to give you this quote from Charles Darwin. This is from The Origin of the Species, and this is what Behe is seizing upon vehemently. Somebody read this quote. That's right and with the science that he had available to him perhaps he couldn't But there are, frankly, an infinitude of cases. And I want to display the point. Guys, to have a mousetrap work, this is a classic example, you need to have all these pieces here. If you lack one of these pieces, will the mousetrap work at all? Will it do anything? No, you have duct tape. Yeah, and then that could be the savior. You know, and you can build on the complexity of this. You've got a spring, you've got a catch, you've got a hammer. These are the pieces of a mousetrap. You should know it as well. You have the clamps holding these things down. It's not going to work without those, right? Presumably as well, you've got to have bait. It's also probably not going to be very successful without some attractive element to it, although it could get lucky. We've talked about randomness. Additionally, what else do you need for this trap to do anything? So yes, you need that. So you need a mechanism to get it going. Additionally, you actually need a specific type of predator that you're looking for. There are no mice in the world. This mousetrap is not going to help you in a world populated solely by dinosaurs, right? Right? So you're going to need a mouse. Additionally, you're going to need that hand that Turnley talked about to go ahead and set this thing. And of course, there we have a system with all of these different pieces. If any one of them is lacking internally or externally, it can't work at all. So you get that. Yes. Well, I'll just take an example by Andrew McIntosh, a chemical engineer. That's where he has his PhD. He published a paper on birds, feathers, and flight. And I just want to talk to you about irreducible complexity with it. If you looked at a bird, I want to know how many distinct parts you think are necessary for this eagle to fly. Let's state the obvious ones. OK, good. Wings. OK, yes. Wings. Feathers. OK, we're going to talk about that. Good call. Good call. Well, we'll go with this first, these fairly obvious ones. I bet you've never thought of this. Birds actually have the capacity to breathe without exhaling. Did you guys know that? Birds couldn't fly as fast as they do if they had to exhale while breathing. It actually would be impossible for them to have their capacities. Now that's a complex lung system, right? To be able to intake without exhaling and through the same organ in which you're intaking. But of course, obviously feathers, and did you know that forward facing elbows, if they did not have forward facing elbows, they would lack the capacity fundamentally to be aerodynamic in the way they need to be to fly. So these are not optional elements. It's not going to work if you first have a species who has to exhale like most of its supposed precursors. It's just not going to work. But as we move on, we obviously have the point that was made earlier, which I appreciate from Xerophos, to the effect that they not only have to have hollow bones, that's one of the ways they can fly, but they actually have to have cross members in those bones. They're not hollow. They're not light enough to fly without the cross members. They're going to be brittle. So you have to have both of these things. My wife is into birding, and so I particularly enjoy going through this. Feathers are some of the most incredible things in how they actually function. And I'm going to go through these feathers. Feathers, of course, are going to have this basic quill that is going to run through the entire thing, or you can call this a shaft. But what's really incredible about feathers is when you zoom in on them. What you actually have is this complex pattern where the left and the right side are going to have two different sorts of finest feather hairs going forth. And this is what they're going to look like. You have to have what you might call on the south side of this feather ridged barbules. That allows the hooked barbules to move and to slide. If they didn't move and slide, when a bird would actually have no ability to move its wings and to spread out its wings, it would just all be held together too tight. It has to slide. On the other hand, it can't slide entirely in every direction. And if it didn't have this exact system, what would happen is they would just get frizzled and frayed the minute wind passed through them. This is incredibly precise. Utterly fascinating to know what's going on in bird feathers. And without these specific types of structures, they wouldn't be able to fly at all. And this is pretty complex, down to every single feather and down to every single barbule and hook. Not only that, but as you go on, these feathers actually would become useless very quickly if it were not for the fact that they have an oil-secreting ergopeel gland. And when you see birds kind of like picking it themselves, what they're actually doing is they're taking this oil that is secreted from the back of the bird and they're spreading it onto their feathers. And without this gland, their feathers would become useless in a very short period of time. You're talking about needing specific lungs, a specific gland with oils, with very specific types of feathers. You take away any of this. Specific bone structure, you take away any piece of this, the bird can't fly. Additionally, his neck has got to have a 180 degree plus capacity to bend and to move or it wouldn't be able to get to the gland wherein this oil is secreted and its wings can be preened. And it has to have a specific sort of beak to engage in that preening process. When you get down to it, this irreducible complexity for this flying creature is so grand, the thought of gradual steps in all of these systems coming about all simultaneously defies reason. And this is exactly what is argued in McIntosh's paper. And I would just emphasize again, the book I mentioned at the beginning about why 50 scientists believe in six-day creation, his article is in there where he summarizes what his more scholarly pieces come to conclude on this topic. But see guys, this irreducible complexity is everywhere. That is one example of it. The fact is in Michael Behe's book, Darwin's Doubt, he goes into the chemical complexity of vision. What he really emphasizes is the incredible number of chemical reactions that have to happen for you to experience sight as you do. And what he loves to emphasize is this has nothing to do. with looking at fossil record or missing links or gaps, or even just development of different organs. These are fundamental chemical truths that don't change over time. They're stakes in the ground. If you don't have these chemical things all in their proper order, you don't have vision as we know it at all. But there are other wonderful things. The bee's waggle dance is a dance whereby a bee by a very specific wing structure goes into figure eight with a zigzag in the middle. So you're going like this, but it's more like in the middle like this and this is how bees communicate to other bees that they have found a rich pollen source and it literally sends out vibrations through the air which are then gathered by other bees nearby and they know to come and to participate in the work of gleaning. Go ahead. So we've created a false waggle dance or something like that. Exactly. You see, this is, I mean, it's incredible. And it's noteworthy that for a bee to do this in midair, to fly this way, is still a mystery for the most advanced efforts on human parts of aviation. I don't know if Dan has any insight into this, but I had one teacher tell me about a lecture he viewed at Boeing. arguing that it was impossible for bees to fly based on everything we know about how to make airplanes fly. The complexity to make figure-eight motions like that with the body and the way that bees' wings fly, again, is irreducible. You take out any of these pieces, and it can't do it at all. Dolphin sonar. is another example of that. They are literally sending out noises, bouncing off things, coming back to them, and enabling them to gather in space where things are by these sounds they make. Take a very complex, not only ear structure, or essentially receiving structure, but also of sending. And these things must exist together. This is the concept of irreducible complexity. And again, the unbeliever will go to the miraculous in his worldview to avoid these conclusions. And that's why we have to be prepared to pursue them with this truth that the existence of God is at least as, it is more obvious than any of these incredible examples of improbability or irreducible complexity. And what you're doing right now in racing from its implications is all due to a more fundamental disposition. You've been suppressing the truth and unrighteousness from the beginning. That's how we're gonna use these truths. Go ahead, my friend. That's right. That's a great point. It's a great point. I will just continue with this concept of irreducible complexity. Note that it goes down to the cellular level. The smallest single-celled organisms that we have, that we can view, they tend to function with a thing called a flagellum. These smallest single-celled organisms, you can fit 10 to the 17. That's 10 with 17 zeros. 10e to the 17, sorry. With 17 zeros behind it, you can fit 10 of these on, excuse me, that number of these on a pinhead. That's how small these are. but they have a complex motor that moves those little strings behind them in a circular motion, motor that moves them around that looks like this. The number of parts necessary to make that work is incredibly complex and on the smallest level imaginable. So when you have this conception that you can just start with more simple, smaller creatures and kind of build your way up, they're already too complex. and irreducibly so. I remember when we had a guy from the Creation Research Institute come out, or the Discovery Institute in Seattle, early in Trinitas, there was a fellow who was an expert on flagellum. I don't know if it's flagella or something else, but written several papers on the topic. And he was actually very secretive about his identity because scientists who even observe these things and put it in print might be signing their death warrant to ever have a job at any major university. But I would note as well irreducible complexity is present on an ecological level. That is to say, there are ecosystems that won't work at all without certain basic things. Even the interaction between trees and fungi underneath the ground is so vast and complex that if you got rid of fungi, you would not have trees. the way that we understand them. And so Henry Zewail, a PhD in biology and zoology, he makes exactly this argument. It's really important to have diversity of species, and it's really important for a diversity of species to have overlap in doing some of the same things, and that's really how you create an ecosystem that can work. And again, without these basic structures, we find ourselves in a place where life is not possible at all. And guys, this is actually not hard to confirm. When we look across the universe as we know it, there is nowhere, nowhere that's a viable candidate so far as we are aware for life as we know it. It's incredible. If that were the only thing that the cosmos did was tell us constantly and repeatedly how incredible it is, what's going on in this planet, it would have served grand purposes for the kingdom of God. But we'll move on to one other concept, and that is the problem of gaps in the fossil record when we talk about evolution and how this points again to a designer. And not just a designer, friends, we need to be very clear. We begin with the truth that the triune God is speaking to us everywhere, has spoken to us clearly in scripture. And we don't believe this evidence points to just some bland designer. We are starting with God, looking down at the creation, learning more about God, and returning right back to him with praise and saying, more please. We call that spiral reasoning, as opposed to linear reasoning, starting with myself and building a bridge to the Creator. We're starting on the firm foundation of the Creator's revelation, and we're just going out and coming back again and again. When we look at this, Dr. Stephen Meyer, you guys, how many people have heard of Stephen Meyer? Discovery Institute director. His book, Darwin's Doubt, I'll be really honest, I'm at about page 200 in that book and my bookmark stays there. It's stayed there for many, many months, I think up to like maybe 15. It's a tough book to read if you're not an expert, but its point is straightforward. When you look at the eras of geological history that's posited or, you know, the different eras of, you know, Earth's history as regards organic life, there are different ages. In the Cambrian age, right there where I've got the big red line, we see this explosion in life forms. Now I'm not calling into question this scheme right here. The way they come up with these ages have to do with geological layers and where they expect to find in different sorts of types of rock and the earth and layers, different species and things like that. They're going to date the species according to that layer where they find it, okay? And the fact is, when we look at what is thought to be the Cambrian layer, we find the sudden explosion of species all over the globe. Trilobites, different sorts of marine life, especially. And do you know where we find them? Do you know where we find these primarily? Up on mountain ridges. This is a crazy thing. This fossil, the Burgess Shale Field Fossil Deposit in Yoho National Park, it's actually in Alberta, but you have to go a little bit southwest of that and you're in BC, has one of the most vast fossil deposits that we know of. And this is what it looks like. That's your shale. So it's that kind of broken up flat rock. And there are multitudinous fossils found in it. of creatures that are very clearly would inhabit the sea. Now for us as Christian friends, it's really hard to not look at that and go, yeah, we've been talking about, you know, a worldwide flood, you know, well, since Genesis chapter six through nine. And why are we finding these species up here? And so, so for us, we're already like, yeah, this is right in my wheelhouse, but here's the thing. Basically, 17,000 species explode on the scene of human history with no precursors. You don't see anything before it that are viable candidates in any measure for being intermediary species or a step along the way. Why is it that when we're digging, that's what we find and we don't find anything before it anticipating it? This is a question that is not only deeply mysterious, it is deeply problematic for classic Darwinianism, which is a steady, progressive improvement of species by natural selection. This is why things are being posited like everything from alien implantation to a punctuated equilibrium, things just kind of bursting, radically different species from a prior species. Even that is too difficult. You don't even have species to our knowledge that could plausibly birth these new sorts of life forms. And so Stephen Meyer's book argues this in great depths with much greater clarity than myself. And I would point you to that as another resource from this lecture. But I'll just carry on. Paleontologist, J.Y. Chen, Chinese paleontologist, extremely well respected in the field. This is what he said after he came to similar conclusions about, he's not an evolutionist. This is so curious. And at a lecture at University of Washington, he said this. Someone read this quote. It's fascinating. That's what he said. You know, to look at this, this is not a Christian person who shares our presuppositions, but he does look at this and say, the explosion of life forms without these intermediary species upon the thousands. This compels me to not believe the theory of evolution. You know, again, we can look at this and say how unfortunate it is that the A, that's all he's concluded, and how problematic it is that that's all that he's concluded, because what this person needs is to acknowledge the God who gave him the intellect to draw these sorts of reasonable conclusions and expect that they actually represent reality. And no science can prove that. That actually is the precondition of doing science. And that's the problem of the state of fallen man. They use the tools of reason that God gave them and only make sense to be trusted if he gave them, but then they turn around with them and deny the creator who made them and the world to have such fruitful interaction together. That is what we're confronting an unbelieving world with. Now, I just want to talk about the fossil record with respect to the age of the Earth, and this is the one thing I am going to say. We have reason to doubt what you'd call scientific orthodoxy about the age of the Earth, and I'm going to just pass on a few of the sorts of things that would yield a different conclusion. You know, when we went to Lewis and Clark Caverns in Montana with a family vacation a few years ago, they would point to the stalactites and stalagmites. Those are those kind of things that stick down from the ceiling and confidently declared how many millions of years old they were. But consider the perspective of Keith H. Wanzer. He's a physicist. And this is what he has observed in his studies. He says this. He talks about his experience as a young man. A sign above the entrance of Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico until 1988 said the caverns were at least 260 million years old. In recent years, and this is I believe in the late 90s for him, the age on the sign was reduced to 7 to 10 million years old. That's a pretty big difference. Okay, I'm just gonna throw that out there. It's a big difference. Then, then reduced to 2 million. And now the sign is gone. Perhaps as a result of observations that stalactite growth rates of several inches a month are common. You know, I had this experience as well, and I don't know if you've had this experience. This is what we mean when we talked earlier about science is great as a tool, it's not great as your God. The exact same thing has happened in other directions when it came to Glacier National Park. It used to be these signs that said, in 50 years, glaciers will be gone. Then it was reduced in so many years. Those signs are gone now. Because actually, I believe it was in 2017, there was a radical increase of the glacier size that was unexpected entirely. Now does it shake people's belief in climate change and things like that? And of course we actually, we have a great place in our heart for climate change as Christians. Evidently the world changed radically. from the antediluvian pre-flood state to what it is now. But my point is, friends, we need to be aware that scientific conclusions, especially about ages and ages of ago, are all provisional. and presuppositional. Another instance of this is the lava field thought to exist underneath Yellowstone National Park. I read an article about four years ago about how, in fact, that lava field is something between 10 to 40 times as large as we thought it was before. Now, here's the problem. I'm thinking about this going, that lava field is a present existing reality that we can actually try to scientifically investigate. I hope you can understand, Mr. Scientist, when you tell me that our world is 500 million years old and you can't even look at past time, why I'd go, if you were wrong about a present reality you can investigate by such vast proportions, you could conceivably be wrong as well about the age of the earth. I'll give you another example of what we're talking about. It was believed up until the 2000s that it would be impossible to ever have soft dinosaur tissue ever discovered. Why? Well, when you have this scheme that we looked at a moment ago, this timeline, dinosaurs were on this earth hundreds of millions of years ago. You would expect that the fossilization of these sorts of creatures would be the sort of thing where you'd never find soft dinosaur tissue. In fact, in 2005, Dr. Mary Schweitzer found the first soft dinosaur tissue in marrow, essentially, inside of a fossilized bone. Then in 2012, a triceratops found in Hill Creek, Montana, from a brow horn. Again, we found soft dinosaur tissue. I would agree with the prior consensus. It strikes me as insane to believe that after hundreds of millions of years, such could be preserved in soft form. What do you think the evolutionist community says when they hear this? They say, well, I guess soft dinosaur tissue can be preserved for hundreds of millions of years. Who knew? Who knew? And again, it's understandable. It's a religion. And any modification to keep the basic presuppositions of that religion is acceptable. But for us, we're going to go, yeah, we think it's reasonable that dinosaur life coexisted with human life for different seasons. There are arguments to the effect that Behemoth and Leviathan and Job reflect some awareness of aquatic and land dinosaurs in the latter chapters of Job. Go ahead, Scott. or this discovery by a geologist or whoever found it. I've heard of similar things, and you know, I can only imagine the range of explanations for what really took place, or how, you know, there was an old footprint, but it somehow got softened, and you know, then a human footprint. And these things, and again friends, what I want to emphasize is, it's not hard to see how the evolutionists ends up where they do with their conclusions when they have ironclad presuppositions that only a naturalistic explanation will work. If you start there, it's not hard to understand why you're advancing in that direction. And that's why we have to attack the presuppositions. I'll just point out another one, continental erosion. It is not hard to calculate the fact that continental edges erode. They're eroding all the time. A classic example, of course, are the white cliffs of Dover, as we have here in Dover, England. It's actually to have like signs to not walk down there because, well, those tall cliffs constantly are having, you know, these bluffs are, you know, caving in at certain points. And when we look at, for example, erosion via rain, via river, via flooding, all of these things, you can calculate the Earth's erosion. And here's the thing. Earth could not be hundreds of millions of years old and have continents erode at the rate that they are. Now, of course, what's their answer? that the Earth is also pushing the continents up from beneath with new rock and elements of various sorts. But here's the problem. We have on Earth places like the Grand Canyon, based on the basic geological schemes, different layers of rock well preserved for hundreds of millions of years. And they show no evidence of erosion. This Grand Canyon, these walls here, are not newly produced earth pushed up from below. But if you actually give us 500 million years, even the basic level of decay that we would expect from rainwater and other elements should have eroded this canyon and eroded various whole edges of submerged whole continents within the range of something like 10 million years. Just saying friends, this is the sort of thing that different scientists like Ariel A. Roth observe. He says this, the present rate of erosion of our continents by rain and consequent rivers into the ocean is so rapid that we would expect the continents to be eroded down to sea level about 10 million years ago. Renewal of our continents from below is sometimes proposed to resolve the dilemma. This does not seem to be a solution since the geologic column which contains ancient layers is still well represented on the continent. I will point you again to that book for much more technical dating methods, where you can point, what is the number one dating method to say the earth is super old? Anybody? Carbon. Yes, of course. Yeah. However, helium-zikron dating would yield a radically different conclusion with regard to when you take granite, there's zikron. sorry, zikron is a sort of crystal in these rocks and what you can observe from that is that helium that is contained in the rocks along with it should have dissipated, because helium of course is on the periodic table one of the smallest and easiest elements to dissipate, should have dissipated within thousands of years in rock that is dated to 340 million years or 505 million years. And we have a conflict with scientific data, not surprisingly. And we would simply know that there is data to support even the youngest views of the earth. It just happens not to be the data that scientific orthodoxy counts as the most authoritative. It's counted as problematic. And that's the problem. Presuppositions are driving this, and we have to attack them. I'm going to end there today, guys. 7.56. So here is going to be your homework assignment. We're going to go back. What's that? Sure. I will send out links to these different books for those of you who are interested. But we're going to go back to Westminster's Shorter Catechism. We're going to say this together. And that will be the end of our class. And I'll do the proof text as well, which is going to be Romans 120. All right. Let's all read it together. What are God's works of providence? God's works of providence are His most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all His creatures and all their actions. And we'll do Romans 1 20 antiphonally. Let's do that a second. And this comes especially to His wise governing, because it says this, and you guys repeat after me. For since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes, His eternal power, and divine nature had been clearly seen. being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. All right, let's sing the doxology. Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise Him, all creatures, here below. Praise him above ye heavenly hosts. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. All