In a world where 36% of children are born without fathers, and half of marriages end in divorce, here's one father who cares about the future of the next generation. This is Generations with Kevin Swanson. Folks, welcome to Generations. My name is Kevin Swanson. I'm Executive Director of Christian Home Educators. I'm a pastor, but the reason I'm with you today, I'm a father of five. My daughter, Emily, is in the studio with us. We homeschool our children out here on the plains of eastern Colorado, and we enjoy doing that because we want to do it on a biblical worldview. We also look at the world through the eyes of a biblical worldview. A lot of interesting things are happening in the world today. Here, the Vatican has vowed to excommunicate scientists who engage in embryonic stem cell research. Now the response from the high priests and high priestesses of the scientific laboratory was nothing short of precious. Dave, I don't know if you read these things, incredible. A certain professor, Godly, apparently Italian professor, compared the Vatican to the Taliban and he said, I can bear excommunication. I was raised as a Catholic. I share Catholic values, but I am able to make my own judgment on some issues and I do not need to be told by the church what to do or think. Okay, okay. So if God isn't going to tell you what to do or think, then exactly what can God tell you? What can anybody tell you if they can't tell you what to do or think? That kind of limits what God can tell you, huh? Well, if he can't tell you what to do, and he can't tell you what to think, then you're kind of running out of things for God to say. Then what good is God? Yeah, and exactly what does the Catholic Church do day in and day out? What does the Christian Church do day in and day out? And here's an Italian senator, Paola Benetti. Paola? Paola, yeah. I'm serious. It's Paola. Italian Senator Paola Benetti. And she happens to be a member of Opus Dei, so she's a conservative Catholic. She disagrees with the church on this one. She says, I am upset and stunned. It is a mistake to give out the idea that God is angry with man because he is not in agreement with him. Wow. That's incredible, Dave. Why should God be upset with somebody who happens to disagree with him? Evidently, she spent way too much time in the university. She's become a thoroughgoing humanist, hasn't she? It's nice that she gives God the right to his own opinion, though. It's just that God should not take this up against anybody. Because everybody has the right to their opinion, right? God has his right to his opinion, and I have my right to my opinion, the church has its right to its opinion, and nobody, nobody, not even God, has the right to tell us what is the final and absolute word. Actually, come to think of it, God did get a little upset at points with Pharaoh. They're still teaching about Judgment Day in the Catholic Church, aren't they? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Well, here's the real question, folks. Does God have the right to speak with absolute truth or not? Now, the Church has been soft on this point. The Church has absorbed much of the Renaissance humanist thinking and the Enlightenment thinking, folks, and the Church is soft on this point. But humanism has never been soft on it. Humanism has been very, very firm on this since the 1200s. Does God get the right to speak with absolute truth? No, He doesn't. God cannot give us the foundation of truth and ethics. That's the worldview of the humanist. It has corrupted the church. And Dave, this steady replacement of God's epistemological and ethical authority by human tradition, that is, by autonomy in both the Catholic and Protestant traditions since the Renaissance and the Humanist Enlightenment, and the infallibility of scientific empiricism has taken its toll. The church is irrelevant today. Utterly irrelevant. What do you do when you read a story like this, Dave? I think you just laugh, or maybe you cry a little bit. Unless we bring God back into center in epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics, whether it be in Catholic or Protestant doctrine, these religious leaders are just a bunch of fat fellows dressed up in expensive robes, and they're admired. Yes, they're admired by people who want a religious experience, but if all they're giving us is a little Jesus and Mary, but there's practically nothing in terms of a valid biblical epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, then they're just wasting our time. The church is getting their Jesus from the Bible, but they get their epistemology and metaphysics and ethics from Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Sartre. They don't get it from the Bible. Dave, this is worthless Christianity. These guys are good Catholics. This professor and this Italian senator, they're good Catholics. They've got the message. They can have their Jesus and their Mary, But when it comes down to their epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, they're getting it from Marx, Kant, or Aquinas. Let's face it, there's a lot of people who want to go to Jesus as a little salve for their wounds of sin and the pain and the suffering in their lives, but they really don't want to love God with all their heart, with all their soul, and particularly not with their mind. All right, we have a lot more to cover on this day's program. Here's a letter from one of our listeners. He says, I am a biology student in Cornell University and I'm a fan of your show, which I accessed through the web. I think it is wonderful that in an age of socialism, atheism, globalism, and social alienation, you champion the family, small government, faith, and American values. All right, so far so good. Now here's the however. However, I am saddened by your simplistic and mocking approach to the science of evolution. Have you been mocking? I don't know. Have you? Probably. I study biology and plan a career in the medical profession. I'm also a researcher who studies the evolution of the eye of primates. I'm a born-again Christian, yet my faith is in no way conflicting with my passion for science. It was because of faith that I decided to devote my life to science and medicine. One cannot investigate. Biology without evolution. It is to biology what elements are to chemistry, what Christ is to the Bible. The truth of evolution is so self-evident in all aspects of biology that I have never met a single biologist who would dispute it. I would be surprised if such a man exists. Well, they probably don't exist at Cornell. They can't get hired there. They don't get hired at Cornell. I agree with the Vatican astronomer who stated that creationism is a form of paganism. It is a relic of primitive nature worship which uses religion to explain away why the sun is bright and the grass is green. Christianity is damaged by such primitive superstition, embarrassment, nonsense, etc, etc, etc. Dave, we have had more criticism on our doubts concerning the reigning orthodoxy of this evolution thing and science. than anything else in this program. And actually, nobody has really challenged our perspective on the facts, our interpretation of the facts, our self-conscious presuppositional framework. We haven't seen people critique any of this. Rather, we get this simplistic, you know, nonsense, embarrassment, etc., etc., etc., etc. And of course, science or evolution is science. It's a science. Listen to the letter. It's simplistic. He doesn't know anybody, any biologist who wouldn't teach this. And yet, he doesn't say, what does God teach? Yeah, yeah. Now, of course, the first thing we could do is come back and say, okay, here's my list of 6,473 biology professors who have PhDs and astronomers and etc., etc., who believe in a young Earth. I mean, you know, and all these creationist societies have created their huge lists of these guys with PhDs, really, really smart guys who apparently have lots and lots of degrees on the end of their name, who believe in a young earth. So, I mean, we come back with that, but that's a really, really poor way of arguing. Again, we need to talk the facts. We need to talk the definition of science. We need to look at our presuppositional frameworks and ask whether or not they comport with the data. Does the framework comport with the data? That's the question. And we repeat this again and again and again, yet we continue to get letters like this. And I want to encourage people to enter into meaningful conversations with reasonably intelligent individuals who are willing to listen. And I think, I guess I'm reasonably intelligent, Dave. I've got a scientific degree and I worked in engineering science for 12-15 years up through management and so forth. I would say I'm reasonably intelligent, and Dave, I think I'm willing to listen. I read this letter on the air. But again, there's nothing that we can really deal with here. There's some ad hominems. There's, well, you guys are just a bunch of pagans. This is, you know, embarrassing, etc., etc., etc., but it's really not helpful. It doesn't really help us engage in an intelligent conversation. Is this, and this is my question here, is this the technique of the modern high priests of evolutionary science. Is this their technique? Is this the way they think and the way they debate? If that's the case, then I think they're abandoning rationality. Well, yes, Kevin, this is the technique. If you can't beat them with argument with reason, why not just make fun of them? Look, they're very simple people. They don't have the fear of the Lord, so they don't have the beginning of knowledge and wisdom. They believe that one day a frog turned into a prince, but it's worse than that. They believe that one day a rock turned into a prince. That sounds like a fairytale to me, but now you're mocking again. There you go again, you're mocking. But listen to how they talk. Once upon a time, I'm sorry, billions and billions of years ago, same thing. And billions and billions of years ago, a rock turned into a person. Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to engage in an intelligent conversation on the issue of evolution again on this program. The gods of the copybook headings are going to limp up to explain it once more on this program. And we want to invite input. We want people to engage in intelligent conversation concerning our facts, our interpretation of the facts. and whether or not our presuppositional framework comports with our interpretation. We'll be back in just a moment. My name is Kevin Swanson. Dave Buhner, also in studio. Fasten your seatbelt. Hang on to your hat. Generations will be right back. Deeply embedded on the front lines of the war of the worldviews, here's your host, Kevin Swanson. Folks, we're back. This is Kevin Swanson, the program is Generations. And my response to this particular gentleman that wrote to me from Cornell University began with my main beef with Darwinism and Deism, which is not just their view of the facts and their interpretation of the facts, but it is with their presuppositional framework. That's my beef. They want to push us. Deism and Darwinism both want to push us towards a closed universe where they lock God out of the picture as the creative originator and the providential sustainer of every square inch of our universe. You see the reason why they want to push God out of the system is because they don't want to fear him. They don't want to see his presence. They don't want to see his hand. Just last night, Dave, we were visiting a family and we were looking at their dog. It was just a Labrador Retriever puppy. We were so incredibly impressed. This guy was a scientist. I was a scientist. We're both Christians. And we were talking about how he designs automated equipment. And we were looking at this dog in incredible complexity. And the way that it's moved, its muscles moved, its legs moved, the way it responded to him when he called it. We were in awe as we studied this thing. The evolutionist looks at the Labrador Retriever and he wonders at the mechanisms of pure chance in millions of years. Dave, we just stood there in fear of Almighty God. And that doesn't happen in the Cornell biology classes. Ladies and gentlemen, that does not happen in the biology classes at Cornell University and the vast majority of universities across America. They do not stand in awe of the Creator. And their science is predicated on not fearing God. Dave, we need to talk about science. What is science? Again, we've brought this up before again and again. Is evolution science? This guy said evolution is science. Evolution is science. But it's not even close. Science is observable, reproducible. It works with probabilities and the observation of cause and effect relationships. And that does not happen with evolution. Yeah, it's not even history. I mean, history isn't science, alright? History is somebody's observation and the recording of those observations from hundreds of years ago. And what do we have? We have somebody's understanding of what happened, somebody's recording of what happened, and then we've got to believe the person that recorded what happened. Evolution is not science, it's not even history. You have no human eyewitnesses that recorded what happened when, so you have no history, you have no science, you have advanced guesswork. And it's presupposition-laden guesswork. We're going to get into that in just a moment. But what's wrong with evolution? What's wrong with evolution's perceptions of the facts? The facts do not comport to the theory. The facts do not comport to the theory. The theory itself is a theory. It's not even a theory. It's a hypothesis because it's not been proven. We have not established that you could even ever see chance mechanisms develop a life form out of a rock. We've never perceived that. It's never been observed in the laboratory. Not even once. Even if you had it happen in the laboratory one time, that doesn't prove that that's the way it happened at the beginning. Moreover, the facts do not comport to the theory. We would expect billions of fossils that should make up transitional forms, and they are missing. Billions upon billions of fossils are missing in the fossil record. Moreover, it challenges all of our own experience. The limits of all human rationality that a rock could turn into a human being by pure chance. That disorder produces order, that inorganic material produces the organic, the unintelligent produces the intelligent, and the amoral becomes moral by pure and absolute chance. That is a challenge to one's belief system that I think you just cannot accept. it doesn't comport one little bit with what we see and experience if you are basing your theory on empirical experience. Again, does the theory comport with the presuppositional framework? Ladies and gentlemen, I suggest to you that it does not. If reproduction quality and ease favors a specie. If reproduction quantity and ease favors a specie, why would we ever evolve past cell division to genitalian copulation? And here's another question. How do dependent organs develop simultaneously? What good would half a heart be or no lungs or no kidneys? the environment has to change with every small change in the development of the eye, for example, or in the change from reptile to bird, you got the changeover from a two-way lung to a one-way lung, and that's got to happen in half an hour or the creature dies. Now, we've already admitted, and there are a lot of scientists out there, evolutionary scientists out there, that have admitted that this gradualistic survival of the fittest mechanism is stupid. It doesn't work. So now what we have is really smart scientists who step up their guesswork with this thing called punctuated equilibrium. This is a theory of evolution that holds that evolutionary change tends to be characterized by long periods of stability or equilibrium punctuated by episodes of very fast development. So what you get is higher levels of complexity and order produced by occasional bursts of energy running through systems. That sounds like creation to me, Dave. It sounds more and more like creation. It's not a mechanism because we're not told how higher levels of complexity are achieved. We're just told it's a fairy tale. Trust us. higher levels of complexity just happen. It just happens. We don't know how it happens, it just happens. Sort of like a frog suddenly turns into a prince by some incredible fast development or input of energy into a system. Inevitably what you have here Dave are incorrigible presuppositions. And I say incorrigible because the word incorrigible means they cannot be changed. these guys have presuppositions in their framework and they interpret the data by means of their presuppositional framework now unfortunately most scientists are not honest with their presuppositional framework that is they're not going to put it on the table and say this is what I presuppose before I go into the laboratory and before I try to interpret the data scientists hate to say that they have presuppositions they're bringing into the laboratory and yet they do Everybody has a presuppositional framework by which they interpret the world around them. Ladies and gentlemen, it's called a worldview. There are three orders of presupposition. The first order deals with basic metaphysical questions and epistemological questions, such as, is there a God? All right. A presupposition would be something like this. A first order presupposition would go something like this. There is no God. Man's mind is sufficient to explain the physical universe independent of God. We only need the Bible or God's revelation for spiritual things. That's a presupposition. We do not need the Bible before we begin to engage in activities like doing physical things, like science, history, psychological counseling, and copulation. we don't need the Bible to deal with what we do in the physical world. That's a presupposition. Yet, there are many scientists that maintain another first order presupposition, and that is the order and regularity has to be assumed to allow for any kind of scientific induction. Now we realize it's hard to get even this without a God who both creates and orders the universe, but we're going to assume order and regularity. There isn't a scientist out there that doesn't engage in the scientific method without assuming, first of all, that there is order and regularity, because ladies and gentlemen, you can't establish probabilities, you can't establish induction, without first assuming order and regularity in the universe, such that what happens today is going to be what happens tomorrow. Alright, those are first-order presuppositions. The second-order presuppositions go like this. God could not have created the world with the appearance of age. That is, and of course you'd have to say, preface it by saying, if there is a God, and if he is the creator and the source of all things, our reality, our metaphysics about us, so assume that. If you've assumed that first-order presupposition, now you've got to deal with a second-order presupposition. Could God have created the world with the appearance of age? Could Jesus have created a bunch of bread and fishes for 5,000 people and those bread and those fish have appeared to have some age on them before they were actually created and given to the people to eat? Can God create the world with the appearance of age? Now there are a lot of scientists out there saying God could never have done anything like that. Well that's their presupposition. Some scientists also, on a second-order presupposition, assume uniform radioactive decay rates over thousands or billions of years in their dating methods. That is, they say, we must always assume uniformity in the laying down of geologic layers. In other words, there has never been a worldwide catastrophe of any kind. So again, we assume a uniformity, a uniformitarianism when we go out and study geology, biology, and astronomy. That's a second-order presupposition. Please be clear. Before you get into the laboratory, tell me what your first and second-order presuppositions are. There are third-order presuppositions as well. For example, the assumption that the construct of the atom, as explained by Bohr and Einstein, is accurate. The assumption that every technological development is a good one, and that we are actually better off in the long run because of what is happening in microbiology, or computer science, or atomic research. Again, these are third-order presuppositions. We've got all of these presuppositions. Now, scientists could be mistaken on any of these levels. And if they are, if they are, then they are doing biology wrongly. They are doing astronomy wrongly. Because their presuppositional framework is bad. Since about 1880, we have been lured into trusting science explicitly. especially scientists that have thoroughly abandoned a God-centered worldview. And if you are lured into trusting science explicitly, that's dangerous. Is science the basis for truth? Or is the Bible the basis for science? What can science tell us about origins? What can science tell us about teleology, about our purpose for living, about what we're supposed to do? Are we supposed to abandon truth? Are we supposed to say it's hopeless, so forget about ultimate, absolute truth? Should we go to relativism and have public schools, have universities like Cornell become dangerous places for children and adults? Folks, we're going to talk about these things on this program, in succeeding programs, but I want to also talk about this at my house in just a couple of weeks. We want to talk about this Friday night on July 21st. We're going to have spaghetti that night and we want to invite any of you listening to come on over and talk about what we should give our children in terms of an education, in terms of science. What should we teach our children as the basis for truth? We'll give you some directions if you call ahead of time. Be sure to RSVP because we want to know how many people are coming in. We live right between Colorado Springs and Denver in Colorado. If you're flying in, you want to fly into Colorado Springs Airport or the Denver International Airport. And I want to invite people who disagree with me to come on down and talk about this as rational people. July 21st, Friday night, we'll give you directions again if you call 303-520-8814. Again, it's 303-520-8814. Let's interact on this particular subject. It's critical for our families, for our children, and I think for all of us. Folks, you can interact with the program by emailing me at host at kevinswanson.com and you can hear the program anytime, anywhere in the world at kevinswanson.com. This is Kevin Swanson and I want to invite you back again next time as we lay down a vision for the next generation.