Good morning. Welcome to Forest Gate. It's time to take a roll, so everyone sit down please. And since the principal is in a classroom, if there are any disciplinary issues, it will be very easy for me to address that. Let's begin with a word of prayer. Father, we're grateful that we have the time that you've set aside for us on this, your Sabbath day, to be together as your covenant people, to enjoy the fellowship of believers, and to be engaged in the instruction of the Word, in the preaching, and time of worship, prayer, and so on. We thank you for these things. We ask that you would be with us in spirit today continue to look at this subject of naturalism and that you would equip us to be good witnesses and defenders of the faith in Christ's name. Amen. So today is naturalism part two. We will continue the discussion we began last week. And part of my motivation for spending a full two weeks on this subject is that in the next couple of weeks I want to move into talking specifically about evolution and specifically about climate change. Because those are two things, especially evolution. Evolution particularly because it really represents an assault on the veracity and the authority of Scripture. And climate change, because it's become such a universal thing, I mean literally you cannot look at the news on a daily basis without seeing something that's being attributed to climate change. We're so surrounded by that notion that we want to be able to defend that. So we will look at those two topics and the stuff that we're doing last week and today will set the stage for that discussion as we get into more specific areas of the scientific enterprise. So today I'm going to start with a little quiz. I've included a couple of quotes in here and let's see if we can figure out who said these things. First quote there is, the cosmos is all that is, or was, or ever will be. Carl Sagan was famous for that statement. Yes, he has a different grasp of reality now than what he did at that time. And again, notice, here's someone who is a renowned scientist, but look at the statement. What is scientific about that statement? Nothing. It's a statement of faith, isn't it? Okay, let's look at this next one. And here are two separate quotes. I want to differentiate between the two, but the two go together nicely in this context. The first part of the quote says, There is no heaven or afterlife. That is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark. And the other quote says, spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. Stephen Hawking, yeah. Again, where is the science in that? All the more astounding because he has such a brain. Yeah, and part of what I'm trying to show you here is that the problem is not an intellectual problem, is it? These are two of the smartest men, two of the smartest scientific minds of our time, and yet they're making statements that are patently absurd. This is part of the explanation. If you adhere to naturalism as a worldview, and just to review, naturalism, how do we define naturalism? Tell me from last week. Somebody brought their notes. Naturalism is that belief that everything has to have a natural explanation. That no supernatural explanations are admissible. That whatever happens, it can all be explained in terms of some natural laws. Now what happens is that some of the stuff we see we can't explain yet, but the rescuing device is that we haven't figured out what the law is yet. But we're assuming ahead of time that there is nothing supernatural going on in the universe, that everything has to be explained by some quote natural causes. So look at what Stephen Hawking says about where the universe came from. If it didn't come from a creator, then it must have come from what? Spontaneous creation. What does that mean? It sounds natural, right? It sounds very scientific. You want to talk about a miracle? That's a miracle, right? Spontaneous creation is the idea that something can come from absolutely nothing. Stop and think about that for a while. One of the evidences for the existence of God, and we mentioned this last week, is that there has to be a first cause. There has to be something that exists eternally in order for there to be anything at all now. Something has to have the power of existence, the power of being in itself, in order for us to explain the existence of the universe as we see it. So if you dismiss that idea, God couldn't have had anything to do with it, then what are you left with? To put it in the vernacular, the universe created itself out of nothing. Now is that even a logical statement? Is that a logical or scientific premise to suggest that something can create itself out of absolutely nothing? But what are you left with? When you reject God as the first cause, what are you left with? You're left with this kind of nonsense. And it's not a function of how smart you are. You can be a world-class physicist and still be engaged in some very absurd kind of thinking. Well, you can posit that matter is eternal. And that's the only other option, isn't it? And that was the assumption for quite a long time until we got the theory of what? What's the current cosmological theory? The Big Bang Theory. So prior to that, what was the default assumption about the universe? It's always been there. It really helps you to realize that God will not be mocked, because Wiki says, wisdom only comes from me, and no matter how smart these guys are, if they reject the wisdom of God, they don't have wisdom. Yeah, it's not true wisdom, is it? And part of what we've been laboring in this discussion about naturalism is that if you start from the assumption that there is no God, then what do you end up with? Fairytale. Foolishness. You have nothing, right? You really have nothing to work with. But aren't they giving, quote-unquote, the universe the attributes of God, in essence? Saying it's eternal, it's... Yeah, if you say it's eternal, then... Self-creating, self-generating, I mean, I don't know, but it seems like it would be a theology of its own. Based on that, they're giving it the attributes of... Yes, as we said last week, there is... there is a philosophy that underlies science. And that's what we're doing, we're trying to pull the curtain back so we can see what's there. And what we're seeing is that when you start with an assumption of naturalism, you have to say stuff like, either the universe created itself, or it's always been there. Now as we delve into this a little more, let's look at scientific investigation. It's merely observational. merely observational. So again, I'm not trying to dismiss the scientific enterprise as something valuable. We made the point early on that the basis for doing scientific investigation is scriptural. That in order to take dominion over the earth, we need to know something about it, so we need to study it. and that we have examples in God's Word of how he points us to do that very thing. But science in and of itself is merely observational. Notice that it cannot offer any moral judgments about anything it observes. Science can tell us what is, but it cannot tell us what should be. There's a big difference between science being able to tell us what is versus telling us what should be. So that kind of leads into the next point. Technology is morally neutral. I brought a prop for this. Here's my prop. What's that? A hammer. That's a form of technology, right? Is this hammer good or bad? It depends on what? It depends on how you use it, right? Yeah, if I use it to help you fix your roof, then I've done a good thing. If I use it to smash your finger, I've probably done a bad thing. But it's not the tool, right? So the point is that science as a form of investigation or as a form of developing new technology is divorced from morality. We still have to answer the question of what should we do. Science can tell us what can we do. Science can tell us what I can do with this hammer. But it can't tell us what we should do with it, right? There's no difference. Remember when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail? I'm actually very fond of that quote. That takes us into a whole different topic of discussion. Actually a topic that my sister and I were discussing on the way to church this morning, the topic of paradigms. And that is if you're stuck in a certain way of thinking, then you're going to approach things according to how you think, right? Alright, so technology is morally neutral. And I'm pretty convinced of that. I have not been able to think of an example that would present an exception to that statement. There are plenty of things that we do with technology that are immoral, but there's a big difference between how we use it and the technology itself. So, for example, cloning. Is there anything inherently immoral with the technology that allows us to clone? Is there a moral problem if we're cloning cows or sheep? I don't see that. Is there a moral problem if we're cloning people? I think that's a problem. So that could take us into a whole discussion about medical ethics, and that's one of the things that, you know, as we push the boundaries of what medical science is able to do, we're starting to have to ask those kinds of questions. Here are the things that we can do, But is that something we should do? Now next, the nature of science is that it can never be a source of knowledge about things like meaning, morality, or spiritual reality. It can help us observe and learn about the world around us, but it can't be a source of meaning. It can't tell us why we should value human life. It can't tell us why we should be good stewards of the environment. It can tell us how to do those things, but not why. What would you say about the heavens, the earth, the Lord and God? We've talked a little bit about natural revelation. So, you know, Paul uses that in his epistle to the Romans to do what? Yeah, the creation testifies to a creator, basically. That there is a God who created the world that we live in. Whether it's the planet that we live in, the sun, the moon, the stars, and so on. So the creation tells us there is a creator, therefore no one has an excuse and says, oh, I didn't know there was a God. So that excuse is demolished by what we call natural revelation. But natural revelation is not sufficient, is it? Otherwise, why would we need this? What does the book tell us? What does divine revelation tell us that natural revelation cannot tell us? The spiritual reality. There is a God and you're not Him. Yes. Yeah, something more about the nature of God, something about our own nature, it gives us a history, doesn't it? I mean, the Bible is really a history book. It starts at the beginning of creation, it goes all the way to the end of time. So it includes future history that's not yet unfolded. But it's a history book, and what does it reveal in that history? God's plan. God's plan, the way that he deals with his people, right? The provision that he has made after the fall for the salvation of sinners. And we can't get that by looking at the mountains or studying the plants. So yes, natural revelation is scriptural. Our proper response should be the worship of God and not the worship of the creation. What does the idolater do? The idolater worships the plants or the mountains or what have you, or the stars, the moon. Now in the absence of an intelligent guiding purpose, we have to try to explain the universe in terms of random effects. In other words, blind causality. And if that's the way things are, again, we're forced to confront the fact that meaning is impossible. How can you assign any meaning to any experience or any event if everything just happened spontaneously, randomly, without any intelligence, without any guiding, the purpose behind it, without any specific direction. Now what ends up happening? If you bump into a scientist on the street and ask him about the question of meaning, is he likely to agree that there is no meaning at all? They think that meaning is found in themselves and they determine what is meaningful to them. Yeah, so we do something to kind of bring that meaning into the experience of life, right? It's up to us to determine what that is. Is there any good reason for being able to do that, philosophically? Yeah, he's going to be seeking some kind of meaning, right? There's that natural law that Paul says that God has placed in us. We have a conscience. We have the law that's written on our hearts that tells us something about right and wrong. How do we end up explaining those kinds of things if we deny God as being part of that process? And setting that premise allows man to go wherever he wants to go in making those philosophical judgments. Yeah, it's self-determinism, isn't it? And it goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve decided they wanted to determine truth for themselves, rather than relying on the truth that God had revealed to them. All truth is God's truth. But it's important for us to hear directly from God. because we can't determine all the truth that we need to know just by looking at the world around us. And we can't determine all the truth that we need to know merely by looking on the inside. Because what's wrong with that? We just mentioned that. Our heart is deceitful above all things. Yeah, our heart is deceitful. In other words, we are kind of willfully disregarding the fact that we have a fallen nature. We want to escape the reality of our fallen condition and elevate ourselves to the point of saying, we're smart enough to be able to determine truth. So, in the absence of meaning that's given to us by God, we try to make up our own meaning. I don't think there are too many people who would just right out tell you a life is totally meaningless. Because, as Donna said, how can you live that way? If you really believe that, what's really left for you? Suicide. Yeah, suicide is about the only thing left. Let's just get it over with because it doesn't mean anything anyways. Let's just put an end to the suffering that life brings to us. You remember, life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing. That's Shakespeare. I believe so. Or Alfred E. Newman. That kind of captures the nihilistic worldview, doesn't it? There's nothing to it. There's no meaning. There's no purpose. And as I mentioned last week or so, if you really follow the trail where it leads, you end up with a philosophy of despair. I think that's one reason that you find people that are not Christians that do great philanthropic things. They donate money and they dig wells in Africa and they do all this sort of stuff because they're trying to find some meaning in their existence. and they think it's going to be an outward good that they do in this life. Since there's nothing else beyond that, then they need to do all the good they can while they're here. It illustrates how our default setting as fallen creatures is works. Righteousness of works. The idea that I'm basically good on the inside and I'm going to demonstrate that by doing these philanthropic kind of things. And then if there is a God out there, how am I going to be justified before Him? Don't say I did all these things. Yeah, I'm basically a good person, so God should be OK with that. I did my best. I mean, God's virtues are true and eternal, so when they see love, when they see true care, and when they see true giving, they're like, well, there is something there. I know there's something there. I'm never going to say that there's really a God, but yeah, I'll be nice to my fellow man. That seems like a nice Kantian or whatever thing to do. You pick your philosopher that says that's OK, they'll believe it. We're grasping for that meaning, but we're doing it from the starting point of having denied the God of the Bible. And so it all ends up being empty in the end. But it isn't always lived out in people doing, you know, good things, quote-unquote. A lot of people just end up not having any restraint on their behavior either, because again, there's no reason to. There's no meaning if there is no God, if there is no eternal consequence of any kind for what you're doing, then why not live for yourself? Why not live strictly for what gratifies you? And I think unfortunately we're seeing more and more of that. This is where I'm going to invoke Paul again. Remember we looked at the passage from 1 Corinthians 15 as a starting point for our discussion of apologetics. I'm going to refer to it again because there's a verse down towards the end of that passage Where Paul says, again arguing for the resurrection and saying, you know, if Christ is not raised we are still in our sins and so forth. And his conclusion is this, if the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die. In other words, if there is no God, then let's just go for the gusto. You know, hedonism should be our default setting, the pleasure principle, get as much as we can, because this is it. There's nothing afterwards, there's no meaning to this life except what you can get out of it. And that ties into what you're saying, that it's a philosophy of selfishness, and it's just about what I can do, what I can get. Alright, moving on. In the scientific realm, consensus counts for nothing. Consensus counts for nothing in the scientific realm. But that's changed. How so? Well, now all scientists agree that global warming is caused by man. And that's what I'm saying, that they will appeal to a consensus of belief as a basis for what they say is true. And I'm refuting that by saying that consensus means absolutely nothing. You can do as many surveys as you want to and say that 9 out of 10 scientists agree the moon is made out of green cheese. That doesn't mean the moon is made out of green cheese. That doesn't change reality. But it certainly has an impact, does it not? You know, you read the newspapers, scientists say, da-da-da-da. And that moves people. I understand what you're saying philosophically, but practically speaking in the culture, the experts love whatever. It moves people because the people think that the scientists have some scientific basis for making that statement, that they've done studies or there's some documentation behind it. We just don't think of scientists coming out and giving their opinion of something and expecting it to be taken as true. We don't. I mean, the newer generation, I guess, might. But we think there's some substance behind their... Yes, and so what we're doing is we're assigning authority to what they're saying. Yeah. And that's the danger. Yeah. I think it's interesting that while they may have observed, just like, say, the purpose Yeah, we're going to talk about that a little more as we go through the discussion. And two of them said, no, God said go, so let's get on with it. Yeah, that's a good illustration. One thing you have to remember is that hundreds of years ago, everybody thought the world was flat. Everybody believed tomatoes were poisonous. Everybody believed crazy things that were later found out were not true. Well, I was just thinking of something a little more recent. If we go back a little over 100 years ago, the prevailing paradigm in science was Newtonian physics. until some guy named Albert came along and said, no, it doesn't work that way. So again, the idea is that there have been plenty of periods in history where scientists agreed that this is the way things are, but that doesn't mean that their belief corresponded to reality. Maybe in part, but not in whole. Well, in global warming, Al Gore is not a scientist. No, he's not. And everybody believed him. Yeah, there's a lot that's wrong with global warming. We'll have an interesting conversation around that subject in a couple of weeks. His ex-wife. Okay, so consensus counts for nothing. Scientists are not immune to the tendency to engage in groupthink. Groupthink. It's a compound word. It's that herd mentality, isn't it? When we're in a group, Think about how much courage and conviction does it take if you're the one person in the group who disagrees with what everybody else thinks. It's easier... Well, the Stanglia scientists were trying to shut out anybody that had a different view of global warming. And we'll talk about why that's problematic. I just thought of a good movie, it's a classic movie called 12 Angry Men that illustrates that group dynamic of how one person in the group, in this case, the one dissenter, he was saying, well, I'm not saying he's not guilty, I'm just saying I'm not sure. And then the more they talked and the more they worked it out, what ended up happening? Yeah. The jury ended up acquitting this guy. Because everybody else was, to use a phrase that was popularized about 20 years ago, they were in a rush to judgment. And Jeff mentioned this last week, he pointed this out. I'll mention it again here. Part of what we see when we look at the scientific world is that the scientific theories are not monolithic. They may try to present a united front, but behind the scenes there may be a great deal of disagreement about things like the mechanism of evolution. And yet we find this expression being used that those things are settled science. Well, if it's settled, how come there's still disagreement? Even within the scientific community. Now, kind of to Jim's point next, any attempt to silence dissenting opinions is patently anti-scientific. The scientific process advances based on questioning, based on skepticism, based on checking, based on doing new experiments, based on doing new observations, and looking for those things that disagree or don't quite fit with the theory. That's where we learn something. If all the data we collect agrees with the theory, frankly, that's kind of boring. What we're interested in are those outliers. That one that we go, hmm, what happened there? There's something unusual. And then trying to understand why. Because that's how we learn and how we progress. I made the point here that even absurd ideas have the potential to strengthen good ideas. Because eventually the truth is going to wash out, right? The only time you need to cut off the sense is when you are wrong and you don't want anybody to figure it out. Or they're at least threatened. They may not know they're wrong, but they at least feel threatened. They're not willing to consider that they may be wrong, right? Because they have a commitment to that particular belief. And there's an agenda. There's an agenda that they're pursuing in the case of global warming. They want to manipulate and control how we live our lives. Yeah, and so we have to look beyond just the scientific process. You know, what's behind it? There was a documentary that the BBC did a few years ago, and it's on YouTube if you want to go look it up. I'll try to remember to mention it again, but it's called The Great Global Warming Swindle. If you go Google that or go to YouTube and look that up, you'll be able to find that. And one of the things they talk about in that documentary is they say, look, follow the money trail. One of the guys in the interview said, and I don't remember exactly how he put it, but I'll just kind of give you the gist of what he said. It was something like, if I say that I want to do a study on the breeding behavior of squirrels, I may have some difficulty getting some funding for that. But if I say that I want to do a study on how climate change is affecting the breeding behavior of squirrels, I'm more likely to get some money for that. You laugh about that, but that's true. We have to remember that even academia is driven by money, by the pursuit of grants, by research, by writing papers, It's amazing as somebody who's had kind of an insider's view, how much ridiculous stuff is being done in the name of research. that's one of the things that Ben Sine talks about in his documentary expelled is how within the academic community there is a Yeah, it's based on this, this is the way things are. Okay, so it tends to be biased against any dissent for certain things, particularly evolution and particularly climate change. You notice how in the press there's a tendency to try to stigmatize anybody who disagrees with the climate change dogma by calling them skeptics. Climate change skeptics. That's what they're getting at, right? They're trying to use that not in a scientific way, but in a pejorative way. There was a letter to the editor yesterday, I think it was yesterday's paper, that in essence said, why do you refuse to believe what's true about global warming? You know, it was kind of that thing. Yeah, come on, get on board, what's the problem? Why are you resisting? It's like the board, resistance is futile. So, again, if there is an effort to squelch dissent in some scientific realm, that's not scientific. That's not the way science works. You know, we hear so much about, in academia, the idea of what? Freedom. Freedom of research, you know, being able to research and publish, and freedom of saying, here's what I believe. There's a very strong element of conformity that exists within academia, particularly around evolution and global warming. JR, there's a great book, Thomas Kuhn's Structures and Scientific Revolutions, that lays out, he coined the phrase paradigm shift, and chronicles This is a long history of science. This is the way it works. You have a theory, then most people get on board with the theory, and then you have these little bits and pieces of conflicting data along the way. But you have to get to a point where there is a critical mass of conflicting data before people begin to change their belief. There's an example I can think of from about 20 years ago. where a doctor was doing some research and proposed the theory that ulcers are caused by bacteria. And what did the medical community do? They stand up and cheer for him and say, three cheers, pat him on the back and throw a ticker tape parade. Now they scoffed at him. That was more a form of ridicule, wasn't it? Until what? At some point, the tide finally turned, but you have to get to that point where there's a critical mass to overturn the prevailing paradigm in favor of the new one. Because everybody knows ulcers are caused by stress. I mean, that's what we were taught in medical school, so it must be true, right? That's what the experts say. Scientists want you to believe that they provide an objective view of reality and fact. Neutrality is a myth. Neutrality is a myth. As Greg Bonson says, when you're talking to the unbeliever, understand that they're not neutral and that you shouldn't be either. Don't try to pretend to be neutral in order to argue for one side or the other. There is no neutrality. And then facts do not speak for themselves. If the facts spoke for themselves, there wouldn't be any disagreement, would there? We could all look at the facts and say, oh, there it is. I'll paraphrase Ken Ham at this point. He says everybody has the same facts. The argument is over how we interpret the facts. And the interpretation is based on what? Your worldview, right? Where you start in terms of your assumptions about the nature of reality. That's true about the Bible too. My interpretation is different than yours. You can read something an atheist says where he will criticize the Bible and say that it proves that God is the greatest murderer of all time. I wouldn't want to be him. But he's looking at it from his point of view. He's not able to see from God's point of view. And again, part of it may go back to what we mentioned about the nature of man. If you believe that man is basically good, then for God to bring judgment against somebody who doesn't deserve it, yeah, that would be wrong. But God is not unjust, is He? In fact, He says, I can do whatever I want to with my creation. Here's another one for those of you who are CSI fans. One episode I was watching I nearly fell out of my chair because this seems so unlike Gil Grissom to say something like this. He said we have to reserve judgment until we get all the facts. What's wrong with that? Now keep in mind, and for those of you who are not CSI fans, Gil Grissom is this character who is a crime scene investigator. Okay, so a crime happens and the CSI's come in and they start collecting evidence and look around and take pictures and their job is to do what? Recreate. Recreate, yeah. To figure out what happened here, right? So they're in the business of doing that. But what's wrong with this statement? You can never have all the facts. Either you can never have all the facts or what? They're not facts. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on the facts. Well, you never reserve judgment. Your judgment starts to point as you get more and more. Both good points. And one of the things that they do on the show, which is interesting, is the first time they walk into a crime scene, it's usually somebody like Gil, who's the supervisor, who will say to one of the other CSIs, OK, Nick, what do you think happened here? So immediately, they start trying to build a story based on what they are able to see at first glance. And then what happens over time? You get more facts in, you get eyewitness testimony, you get the DNA evidence, you get the trace evidence, you get the fingerprint results back, and all those things start to come in, and then you're able to see where your original theory didn't quite fit, and so you revise it so that it fits the data. But the other point is, to be frank, is that how do you ever know when you've got all the facts? Or when you have enough of the facts to draw the right conclusion? That's part of the problem with the scientific enterprise, isn't it? You don't know what you don't know. So talk a little more about bias. We see what we expect to see and we tend to ignore what we don't expect to see. How many of you have ever been looking for something in the house only to discover it was right in front of you all the time and you didn't see it. And you ask yourself, how come I couldn't see that? And the answer is because you didn't expect to see it. One of the few things I got out of my Psych 101 class, other than an A, which I desperately needed at that point, was this idea that expectation influences perception. Now, perception is what happens in your brain. Right? It's the way your brain interprets the signals that are coming in from your senses. And this is a universal principle. This is one of the things that should cause us to have a little bit of skepticism about our senses. Because what we expect to see, we tend to see, and what we don't expect to see, we have a tendency to ignore. And we can ignore some very convincing evidence And this happens unconsciously. So again, the idea is that none of us are unbiased. And the idea that scientists are unbiased and objective in what they're doing, it's not true. It can't be true. Because there's bias built into our human nature. Here's an example. Two scientists look at a fossilized dinosaur bone with preserved marrow. This was, how long ago was this discovery? It was a few years ago. I think 2005. Ok, so about 7 years or so ago. They found, I believe it was a T-Rex bone, wasn't it a leg bone? And they found that it still had some preserved marrow in the bone. So that's our facts, that's our objective data. How are we going to interpret that? One scientist scratches his head in amazement that soft tissue can be preserved for millions and millions of years. The other scientist sees clear evidence of recent burial and rapid fossilization. Same bone, same facts, completely different interpretation. Which one do you think has a stronger case, by the way? Yeah, I'm going to go with number two. Well, because of this worldview bias, scientists tend to make the facts fit the data. There's a very strong tendency to make the facts fit the data. And that's pointing to the fact that there's a belief that comes before we go get the data, And as we've discussed along the way, the facts and the data don't generally change anybody's mind. I've mentioned a couple different times the expression that Greg Bonson used for this. He called it rescuing devices. So somebody looks at that T-Rex bone with preserved marrow and says, well, we were wrong about fossilization. We assumed that there wouldn't be any way to preserve soft tissue over 80 million years, so obviously we were wrong about that, so we're going to have to revise our theory. Instead of admitting what? That it hadn't been buried for that long. They're not going to admit that possibility, so they have to have a rescuing device that gets them out of that fix. There's a professor named Clotaire Rapai, whose work I've studied in conjunction with things like corporate culture and corporate behavior. And he talks about rational alibis. And basically the idea behind rational alibis is that he says, we decide what we want to believe ahead of time, and then build a system to support that belief. So I'm giving you examples from different sources to point out the universality of this tendency. Now science can't even begin to explore the boundaries of its own ignorance. How could you possibly know what you don't know? And if that's true, then the most humble people in the world should be scientists. They should understand how little they really know. I had a friend at work who had a funny expression, he was Chinese. He used to say, you get a bachelor's degree, you think you know everything. You get a master's degree, you think maybe I don't know so much. You get a PhD, you realize nobody knows nothing. Was that Confucius? I don't know if that was Confucius, but it is a pearl of Chinese wisdom. So there's some truth there that the more you learn, the more you realize you don't know. And the further you go in school, the more you realize nobody else knows anything either. Now here's something for you to watch out for. We'll take some time as we try to wind down today to give you some things to look out for. So, for example, when you're reading scientific articles, notice how often you see these kinds of qualifiers. May, might, possibly, could, Notice how often you see statements like scientists or experts say, or scientists or experts believe, or scientists think, or scientists expect, or experts suggest. And all that just amounts to speculation. Right? That's just scientific speculation, or unscientific speculation. Here are a couple of examples from the news. Maybe you saw this one already. Is global warming fueling Colorado wildfires? The headline is always something very dramatic. They like to ask these questions that the answer is intended to lead you to the conclusion they want you to take. Of course global warming is fueling Colorado wildfires, right? What could make more sense than that? Here's one of the statements from that article. Some studies do suggest that climate change is already affecting Western wildfires. Well, let's qualify that a little bit more. So is that the basis for suggesting that global warming had anything to do with the Waldo Canyon fire? That's pretty flimsy. Here's another one. The U.S. summer is what global warming looks like. Now as you hear the hysteria in the news about this has been the warmest winter and the warmest spring ever on record, etc, etc, notice that they are confining their discussion to the continental United States. So that's an example of what? Very selective use of the data to try to lead you to the conclusion they want you to take. Which is, oh boy, it's getting hotter, we've got to do something, we've got to do something now. Most people buy into that. My hairdresser specifically said, oh man, this global warming is really happening. I know, I mean it's hot, so how can you argue with that? Right? She said she read it in the paper. Well, there you go. That's true. If it's in the paper, it must be true. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. Here's a short quote from that article. The vast majority of mainstream climate scientists disagree with the skeptics. Quote, this is what global warming is like, and we'll see more of this as we go into the future. How do you know? How do you know? And what's the answer to that? Answer your own question. We don't know, right? Here's another one. Again, it's apocalyptic, right? Are western forests doomed to burn away? And this was more of an editorial than a scientific article. This is how the guy closed the article, and this was published in Scientific American, reprinted on Yahoo News, which is my primary source for these sort of things. He says, we may gain forests in other parts of the world that might happen to Africa's savannas where the species causing these transitions first evolved. What's he saying? What is the species he's referring to? You're saying it's our fault, right? But again, this is speculation to say we may lose forests in the west because they're all going to burn to the ground because it's so hot and dry. But it may grow somewhere else. Okay, so how is that different from me saying the moon may be made out of green cheese? Qualitatively, I don't think it's any different. Now this next one kind of ties into what we'll talk about with respect to climate change. Because so much of the hysteria about climate change depends upon what? It's what they observe year to year. No. Some fossil fuels have been put in the atmosphere. You mean the polar ice caps are melting, oceans are rising? All that bad stuff is happening, we know that. Now it's based on prediction. That's what I want you to think about here. So science goes off the rails in the area of prediction. And among other things, prediction depends upon conclusions about cause and effect relationships We have to build a model based on here are the causes and this is what it's going to do. Those may not be supported by the facts. And again, climate change is a good example of that. The assumption is that what is the primary driver of climate change? Vehicle emissions. What is the substance? CO2. Carbon dioxide, right? That's the bad stuff. EPA has issued an endangerment finding on CO2, so it must be bad. I don't think it's bad for the plants, is it? And the way they talk about carbon dioxide, you think it's like 40% of the atmosphere, and it's a fraction of a percent. But the assumption is what? That carbon dioxide is the primary driver of climate change. And so we build a model around that assumption and then say, here's what carbon dioxide is going to do in the future based on the emissions we're producing today and what we expect to have in the future. And then here's the effect that it's going to have on climate. Why would you trust that? So why are you calling it climate change instead of global warming? I'm trying to adhere to the current terminology. If you missed it, global warming is not the way to refer to it anymore, it's climate change. And the reason why is because markets aren't willing to believe it if you call it climate change and not global warming. They're confused rescuing devices because the data show it actually is cooling over the past 10 years. Yeah, if you look at the last 15 years, the trend is basically flat or slightly down. Okay, so first of all, there has been no measurable global warming in the last 15 years. Okay, so that's a problem. So how do you get out of that? Well, the rescuing device is called climate change. And Nathan Randall made an interesting point to me a few weeks ago about this. One of the great things about calling it climate change is the fact that the climate always changes. So anything that happens you can say, oh, climate change. We had a big snow event, it must be climate change. It was really dry and hot, it must be climate change. Or we had a big rainstorm, it must be climate change. Well, wasn't God following them around on all their conventions and having massive snow and all kinds of stuff? A lot of these global warming conventions were getting massive snow events. Yeah. The irony is when they have one of their convocations for global warming that they get this massive snow storm and people can't even get there. As if God has a little sense of humor about that. They may be moving away from the term global warming also, because when you say global warming, we automatically think of Al Gore. And it's coming up to be such a joke that they don't want to associate climate change with global warming. Yeah, there may be something to that. The great thing about climate change is you have your bets, because no matter what happens, you can always say it was climate change. And everybody deserves climate change. So if it was a really hot day, you say, oh man, it must be climate change. Or if it was a really cold day, you say, wow, it must be climate change. Instead of just attributing that to the natural variation that occurs in the climate. Don? I've heard it said too that it's pretty arrogant to think that we, as humans, are going to have any measurable effect at all on the environment. Exactly. As opposed to what? What's ignored? What's notably ignored when they develop these climate change models? Yeah, that big bright thing up there in the sky. And there's actually a very credible theory about how sunspots affect the climate cycles that we observe on Earth. All right, so assumptions, I mean, predictions are based on many assumptions. They're based on drastically oversimplified models of very complex systems that we're only barely beginning to understand. And here's just an example for you to illustrate what happens with models. When you develop a model to predict something that's going to happen in the future, your level of precision goes down rapidly as time goes by. So let me illustrate that with something you can very easily relate to. If you look at the weather forecast for tomorrow, you've got a pretty high level of confidence that the temperature is going to be within a degree or two of the forecast and it might rain or not depending on what they say and what the winds are going to do and so on. So you have a fairly high level of confidence in tomorrow's forecast. But how much confidence would you have in a forecast that tries to predict what's going to happen 30 days from now? When we get down to the level of trying to predict what's going to happen on a specific day and time, it's like, oh, we can't do that. Or if you saw that, you would understandably not trusted. Or maybe if you look at several different sources for the weather forecast, like TV, internet, and so on, maybe you've got something on your fancy iPhone or iPad that you look at that tells you the daily weather, and you notice that, what, they don't all agree. So why should we put so much stock in these models that are being used to try to predict what happens 50 years or 100 years or 500 years from now, whatever? So the point here is that if a model is no good at predicting the short term, we shouldn't trust it to predict the long term. And the climate models that were developed back in the 90s did not predict 15 years of no temperature change. If they're no good in the first 15 years, why should we believe that they have any credibility to predict what's going to happen in 100 years? We should laugh them off the stage. Scientists are also beginning to realize there may be some things they can never discover. You know, we talked a little bit last week about the discovery of the latest subatomic particle. And while that may answer some questions, what happens as we peel back each layer of our knowledge of the natural world? It becomes more mysterious, doesn't it? And we realize, you know, we thought we knew what was going on when we were talking about the atom, and then we looked at subatomic particles, and then we realized, well, protons, neutrons, and electrons are not the only things out there. So we said, well, what makes up those? And so then we come up with quarks. And so at each level we are learning something new. How do we ever know we've arrived at the truth? We may get to a point where there's really nothing else we can learn from the scientific endeavor in those kinds of things. Now here at the end I've left you some thoughts on how we can refute naturalism. The first one goes right to the statement that Stephen Hawking said. Stephen Hawking appealed to spontaneous creation. There's a Latin expression that says, ex nihilo, nihil fit, which means out of nothing, nothing comes. Nothing produces nothing. We talked a little last week about how rejecting God as the first cause is inherently unscientific. The law of causality points to the necessity of a first cause. We talked in this lesson about how if we have nothing but science, then we have no basis for things like morality or purpose. There's no ultimate good. There's no basis for human rights or justice or any of those kinds of things. It's all just whatever we make up. We've talked about how naturalism cannot support its own starting assumptions. If you look at last week's notes, we listed five or six critical assumptions that naturalism makes, and there's no way by the scientific method to prove any of those. Those all exist in a realm that cannot be touched by science. In fact, the irony is that naturalism says that realm doesn't even exist. There is no metaphysical realm. Another obvious one is that Naturalism can't prove the non-existence of God. So if you're having a conversation with an atheist, it might be interesting to point out that what they believe, they believe on faith. They'll say, well, there's not enough proof to prove the existence of God. That's not the same thing as saying there's proof that proves the non-existence of God. And atheism, by the way, is a conscious rejection of the existence of God. Agnosticism says, well, I don't know, maybe. So it's ignorance. Yeah, they claim that they just, they can't draw a conclusion based on the evidence that's available. But their behavior indicates that they're really believing there is no God. They're saying I don't have enough evidence, but really they always fall in line with as if there was no God. Oh, that's true. Yeah, in other words, if you're an agnostic, the safe thing to do would be what? To believe there was a God. Yeah, to hedge your bets and believe that there's a God rather than going the other way towards atheism and say, well, probably not. Not really hedging your bets at all by doing that. That's true. Well, atheism is a reaction to religion and God, it's not a belief. Because if there were no Christians or religion, what would they believe? And I think that's kind of what Paul is pointing to in the first chapter of Romans when he says that although they knew God, they didn't honor Him as God or give thanks to Him as God, but they did what? They suppressed the truth of His existence. Another one we could point to is that science cannot explain the miraculous events that occur, like the creation of the universe out of nothing. It cannot explain the origin of life. We talked a little bit last week about how many different convoluted ways scientists try to explain where life came from. One of the most bizarre is one called panspermia. that life came from somewhere else, maybe on a comet or an asteroid or some aliens were just out bopping around the universe and decided to drop some microbes on this sterile planet to see what would happen. There are scientists that really believe that sort of thing. Because they say that's the only possible solution, right? They say that's all we're left with. That's what it boils down to. If you deny that there was a creator, then you have to create that rescuing device to come up with an explanation. Boy, there's that infinite regress again. But at least we postponed having to deal with it a little bit. We bought ourselves some time by pushing it to another planet. We've also mentioned this, that if the universe is governed by purely random things, why should we expect to see any kind of order? Isn't that kind of interesting that we have so much order and structure? 20th century astronomy as we study the universe with more powerful telescopes we see this unbelievably complex structure of the galaxies. They're not just randomly scattered around. How do you explain any of that from a macro scale all the way down to the most microscopic level? We've talked about if materialism is true, in other words, life is just molecules in motion, molecules bumping into each other, then part of what that implies is that there's no such thing as freedom of thought. You may have the illusion that you can think for yourself, but whatever you're thinking is just a response to what's going on in your environment. And if we understood all the causal factors in that, we could actually predict what your thoughts would be based on what stimulus you're exposed to. There's at least one prominent evolutionist who acknowledged this, that there's no freedom of thought or no free will if you adhere to that worldview. Well, one of the nice things about that is that if that's true, then none of us can be accountable for anything that we do. Because our choices are just a response to the environment that's doing whatever it's doing, randomly. So those are some hints on how you can begin to think about, you know, what kind of questions can you ask? How can you begin to explore what someone thinks if they adhere to this naturalistic view of things? Questions or comments before we wrap up today? Alright, so the plan is for next week we'll spend our time talking specifically about evolution. We've got the groundwork that we've done these last two weeks to set that up. Dan told me right before we started we have a missionary next week, so we'll have a missionary. Ah, okay. So it will be two weeks when we pick back up. Alright, let's pray. Father, thank you again for the time that we have together today. We pray that you would be with us as we enter a time of worship, that you would sanctify each of us, that our worship and our prayers, our praises will be pleasing to you through Christ. We also pray that you would empower us by your spirit to hear and receive the word as Jim brings it to us this morning. We pray these things in Christ's name. Amen.