All right, we're in this series on apologetics, answering the questions of unbelievers. And we've looked at how do we know the Bible's an unusual book. We are now progressing through the question, how do we know there's a God? That is a legitimate question. And the answer is not to scream at the guy and go, atheist, atheist. The answer is to say, well, let's talk about that. Legitimate question. And we've looked at some of the angles that we have used from logic Now, why have we been working with logic rather than scripture? Well, because the scriptural position is really pretty easy. It just assumes the existence of God. It doesn't spend a lot of time trying to prove God's existence. Unless you want to count fire from heaven on Mount Carmel, that would be pretty good. Now, part of my thinking here is that since we've already address the question, how do we know the Bible is an unusual book? You can just build from that right into what the Bible says about God if you choose to. If you choose to take a more logical route, which is the one we've been demonstrating here, you can do that as well. And I've justified that by saying that man is created in the image of God and to an extent, to a recognizable, a visible extent, the way our minds work should lead us to God. Now, we have this other problem that we're sinful. We're depraved and our minds don't work perfectly. And our minds are really good at coming up with evil ideas and evil conclusions. So we need to balance those two truths. But I think there is a place for these logical arguments. We've looked at the argument from cause and effect. The universe is a cause that requires an effect. And we've been looking at what's called the teleological argument, the argument from design, evidences of design. And as I've said, Evolutionists would say, we've answered that one. And I mentioned Dawkins' work, The Blind Watchmaker, which is a theory for how evolution looks like design, but isn't. It's just a series of accidents, but it sure looks like design. So to the evolutionist's mind, they would say, we've answered that argument. It's not a legitimate argument anymore. I've taken exception to that. So we have spent several weeks talking about what I see as significant problems with evolution. I'm not intending to disprove it. I'm intending to just ask questions that I've been asking all my life of evolutionists, and they've never given me an answer to. And it seems to me that if your model is accurate, it ought to account for the data. That's how the scientific method works. So for the last several weeks, we've been dealing not so much with the Bible. Somebody actually commented on that last week. Oh, we're going to look at something in the Bible? Cool. The last few weeks, because of the nature of this material, we've not really been looking at the Bible as much as we've been talking about science. And those of you who've been in this class for a long period of time know that this is a Bible-oriented class. We do a lot of Bible exposition in here. And the last few weeks has been kind of an exception to that. And I'm a little nervous about visitors coming in and assuming that, hey, we don't talk about the Bible in our Sunday school class. Because in fact, this is sort of a deviation from how we usually operate here. Now, we've been looking then at difficulties with evolution, and we've looked at the three main bases of evolution, the three main elements of evolution, mutations, natural selection, and time. And I've pointed out problems with each of those. Last time, the last couple of weeks, we've been looking at the time question. And I have kind of surprised some of you by saying, look, there are evangelicals who believe in the geological time scales in the billions of years. They recognize the authority of scripture and they also believe in the billions of years. And I have been softer than you might think on them. I did that in order to make a point that good people disagree about this. But I don't want you to walk away from that with the impression that I'm kind of up in the air about this question. I'm not. I am absolutely convinced of young earth creationism. And we're going to talk a little bit more about why today. I think these guys are wrong. I don't think they're heretics. That is the distinction I'm trying to make. I don't think they're going to hell because they believe that. I don't think they have rejected the fundamentals of the faith. But they are, in my opinion, just completely wrong. And I've talked about some problems in particular with the dating methods that have yielded these long dates. One is the circular dating, and the second we spent a fair amount of time on is this idea of selective dating. You pick the dating methods that point to the time span you want. And it's possible to pick more than one method that will bring you to 6 billion or 4 billion years. There are also methods that will bring you, as I said last time, to 1,000 years. And we know that's wrong. We know it's wrong. And what that means is that the uniformitarian assumption that underlies all of these dating methods is not reliable. These processes do not occur at uniform rates. Even, and we talked about radiometric dating, the decay of radioactive elements into stable elements. There is even considerable difficulty with making that assumption. One, you don't know how much of the daughter element there was to start with. Two, you don't know if the system was closed during those supposedly billions of years. Did anything get into the substance, the sample, during that time? And did anything leach out? You just don't know those things. And in fact, there is a group of scientists investigating whether even the rate of radioactive decay is consistent. And as I said last week, since that usually happens over hundreds of thousands or even millions of years, I'm going to say to them, good luck trying to prove that. Getting the range of observation you need is a bit of a difficult problem. But even the question of, is the rate consistent, is up for grabs. There's one more concept I want to deal with. as sort of an umbrella concept to evolution. And then we're going to stop talking about science and start talking about the Bible again. We've talked about these three bases or elements of evolution, mutations, natural selection, and time. There is another concept that kind of is an umbrella concept over all of these things that needs to be considered. And that is what's called the second law of thermodynamics. You all have heard of it and you know how it works. You probably know a lay version of how it works. Everything runs down. That's the lay version of the second law. Technically, the law says that in a closed system, entropy increases. Where there's no input, there's no output, there's just a closed system. Entropy tends to increase. Disorder tends to increase. And you can observe this all the time. Look at your flower garden. It tends to move from order to disorder. Your house, and I'm not talking just about the stuff in it, I'm talking about the structure itself, tends to move from order to disorder, and so we have to do maintenance on the house. Your car, the day you bought it, began a process of trying desperately to get to the junkyard as quickly as possible. All of the universe runs this way. Now, there is a charge out there by the evolutionists that fundamentalists, and by the way, when they use the word fundamentalist, they're not using it in the historic sense. They're using it in the sense of anybody who believes in creation to them as a fundamentalist. They would say that fundamentalists talk a lot about the second law, but they don't understand it. And I saw a case where Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard microbiologist or whatever he was, he was asked that question about the second law. And he said, you know, fundamentalists talk a lot about the second law, but they don't understand it. So they don't understand how it works. The second law applies only to closed systems. And I thought, that's funny, I'm a fundamentalist and I knew that. And he says, the earth is not a closed system. You get a constant influx of energy from the sun. So the earth does not apply, does not, the second law does not apply to the earth as a system. Well, I got two responses to that. One is, then how did people on the earth observe it to come up with it in the first place? But my second response and the meatier one is, he's being disingenuous and he knows it. He's a smart boy. Well, he's dead now, but he was a smart boy and he knew that he was being disingenuous. Because while I would agree that the earth is not a closed system, he's the one insisting that the universe is a closed system. I'm the one saying there's an outside source of energy for the universe. He's the one who says, no, you can't do that. The universe is a closed system. And he is, evolution is postulating that the universe is moving from disorder to order. And that is a violation of the second law. What's interesting to me is that the second law can apply in open systems as well. Let me illustrate that. Let's suppose we bought ourselves as a class, we took up a collection and we bought a Ferrari. And let's suppose that we could take this room, this isn't physically possible, but suppose we could take this room and absolutely seal it so that it is a closed system, no energy in or out. It would require a lot of insulation, but let's assume we could do that. And we park the Ferrari right up here in the middle of the platform and we go away for a hundred years. Now, that is a closed system. We come back in a hundred years. Will the Ferrari start? Okay, who was the crew working at the car care yesterday? You know about cars. Any of you guys here? Would the Ferrari start? No? Why not? What would be wrong with the Ferrari? The fuel would not probably be combustible anymore. Anything else? Battery would not crank the engine. Anything else? All of the rubber, the belts, the hoses, the tires would be shot. Closed system, it tended toward disorder. Now, suppose that instead of a closed system, we had an open system. We park it out in the parking lot, in the direct sunlight for a hundred years. would it be in better shape or worse shape at the end of a hundred years much worse shape and then that any of you been to the the ford museum at the dearborn michigan they got that the reagan uh... limousine they got the kennedy limousine they got up that teddy roosevelt limousine they got the oscar mayer wiener mobile they got great stuff up there it's worth a drive to detroit just to see this place it really is well what's the theory there you put the cars inside the more you can close the system, the better they'll endure over time. We park it out in the parking lot and not only is the paint going to be shot, but the glass is going to be broken, the tires are going to be missing, the seats are going to be missing, that thing will have been stripped clean. If it's even still there, because not only do you have the sun beating down on it, you have people who are also open systems coming in and acting as agents So I would argue that you might expect an open system like the Earth to decay even more rapidly than a closed one. That's not the second law, it's something else. But it's an interesting observation. Well now, so far... Any questions about this so far before I get to the positive side? You're probably just tired of evolution by now, right? And ready to move on? No? It's one thing to just sit around and criticize. It's another thing to offer an alternative. And you see this in politics. The party out of power, and this is true of everybody, liberals, conservatives, okay, let's be honest here. Democrats, Republicans, Greens, Reform, everybody else. The party out of power sits around and whines a lot. But you can legitimately criticize them for not presenting a testable alternative. What would you do to solve this problem? Well, the same thing occurs in science. It's one thing to sit around and just gripe about the options. It's another thing to do science and to come up with an alternative. Fortunately, I'm not a scientist, so I don't have to do that. The scientists have to do that. I'll leave that to them. But I would like to offer my modest proposal, and this is not in the form of a parody, okay, my modest proposal. You have, what are the data that you're trying to account for? Well, you've got layers upon layers of rock containing millions of life forms, all of them thoroughly dead because they're encased in rock. You have a number of dating methods which point to numbers all over the place. which tells you that these processes do not happen uniformly over time. They happen in spurts and fits and spurts as the punctuated equilibrium guys say. Now, is there any kind of biblical picture that would present you with a scenario like that? Well, when you see layers of soil or rock What's the first assumption you make? What's the easiest way to get layers of soil or rock? Sedimentation. And that requires... Well, liquid of some sort. Water being the most abundant liquid on the planet, that's our best guess. Not likely to be olive oil. Water. You see those layers of rock literally everywhere on the planet. Literally everywhere. In addition, In those layers of rock, you find, as I said, these organisms, these fossils, all kinds of fossils. But the really intriguing thing about that to me is that you find marine fossils literally everywhere on the face of the earth. I have stood in Kentucky, just south of Cincinnati, in an open field and picked up hundreds of marine fossils literally lying on the surface of the ground. Any of you been to Colorado? Fort Collins, just west of Fort Collins, north of Denver, is the big Thompson River Canyon where they had a big flood back in the, what was it, the 60s? At Thompson River Canyon, you drive the road down through there and you see rock strata on both sides and at times you see rock strata. I remember driving through there and turning to my friends and saying, at one point, there was a whole lot of shaking going on here. Not only do you have evidence of immersion of the whole planet. Not necessarily simultaneously, but evidence of immersion all over the planet. That's one reason I'm a Baptist. But you find evidence that that immersion occurred in a saltwater environment. Marine fossils everywhere. Well, if you're going to get saltwater to every square inch of the planet. The most efficient way to do that is to do it all at once, right? Given that water tends to seek its own level, if you're going to cover... I've got to back off of that. I was going to say, if you're going to cover the Rocky Mountains, you're going to cover the whole earth. But in fact, the Rocky Mountains could have been upthrust after the flood, theoretically, or during the flood. But if you're going to cover every square inch of the earth in water, And given at the time, we don't know what the exact topography altitude business was. But if you're going to cover it all, it would seem to be most efficient to cover it all at once. Now, Ken Ham, my old buddy, says, if there had been a worldwide flood, what would you expect to find? Billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth. And what do you find? billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth. The evidence is literally at your feet everywhere you go on this planet. Does that prove that there was a worldwide flood? No. But the model accounts for all the data. And there are some little oddities like polystrate fossils. fossil organisms that cross boundary lines between strata. Now, if those strata were laid down over millions of years, then the head of the fish is 10 million years older than the tail. And that's not believable. Well, okay, it's a later incursion. It was deposited there later. But there's no cracks. There's no evidence of cleavage. There's just fish right there. To my mind, the flood model accounts for the data far better than the evolutionary model. Now, I'll temper that by saying this. My friend at Bob Jones, Bill Lovegrove, Dr. Bill Lovegrove, who is Tim's older brother and teaches on the science faculty there, once made the comment to me in passing, you know, I think that a lot of creationists rely on the flood for more than they need to. And I never had a chance to follow that up with him. And I'd love to know what he meant by that, what else there might be involved. But to my mind, the biblical picture is absolutely defensible. And what I find interesting is that in my lifetime, we have seen, in a sense, a microcosm of that event demonstrate that it's doable. And that is the Mount St. Helens eruption in Washington State. Now, that wasn't a flood. It was a volcanic explosion. But that volcanic explosion laid down layers of ash in days that included multiple life forms, polystrate fossils, tree trunks running up through layers of ash. Fossils I have in my possession. I don't know that I could put my hands on it. I think it's out in the shed somewhere. A fossil that's less than 100 years old. It occurred in a local flood. There was rock mud layers laid down. And this thing is a fossil. It is calcified. So we have seen that this kind of stuff can happen over a fairly brief period of time. By the way, stalactites and stalagmites, same thing. We've demonstrated that they can grow in weeks. So my conclusion is that the flood model accounts for it way better than the evolutionary model. And that's, to my mind, the end of our discussion on the argument from design. It is, to my mind, still a functioning viable argument because the evolutionists have not, in fact, constructed a mechanism which would give the appearance of design without having design. That means I'm done with the argument from design. Any comments, questions? My observation is that most of the street-level evolutionists I deal with are incredibly ignorant. They haven't read or heard anything. They don't know anything. They've just been fed the line. And you start asking them some fairly simple questions, like the kinds of things we've been talking about, they got no answers. I was dealing, I think I told this story, dealing with this engineer on the airplane coming into Greenville. This guy was an electrical engineer, had a graduate degree in science. And I asked him, which of the four physical mechanisms, forces, gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuke, weak nuke, which of those caused the condense, not condensation, the contraction of the particles after the Big Bang into clouds of gas? How did the contraction happen? All these things are flying apart from one another. There's got to be a physical force. You know, if God didn't do it, right, there's got to be a physical force. Which of those four forces did it? And he had to admit to me that none of those four forces could have. And he said to me, I've never thought of that before. And I didn't say this to him, but I thought you're an engineer. The whole point of engineers is that you can't leave any loose ends flying around or somebody is going to get killed. You got to account for everything. That's the way an engineer thinks. Never occurred to him to even think about it. And this is a guy with graduate-level training in science. So it's not at all unusual to run into people that you can... It's really not a fair fight, okay? It's really not. Even though you're not a scientist, most of you, it's not a fair fight. There are a few simple questions you can ask that they simply have never heard, they've never been challenged, because this is orthodoxy to them. And from the beginning of this series, I have said I am not interested in making you a more brutal fighter. I'm not interested in making you better at arguing, because in the end, it is grace that wins the lost. And we're in the business of answering their questions and asking some questions of our own. But if you win the argument, and that guy won't dare talk to you again, You have failed as a believer. Your job is to form that relationship and disciple this guy and to be an example of grace to him. One of the things that has become more and more clear to my mind in our current culture is that everybody out there is unhappy. Even in the political realm, you go to some of the far left or far right, either side. You go out there and look at those blogs. You go to moveon.org or Democratic Underground or some of these. And they are just miserable. And I'm not taking a political position here, OK? It's not my business to do so in church. But Ronald Reagan is often credited for showing up at a miserable time when Jimmy Carter was essentially wringing his hands and talking about national malaise. And Reagan walked onto the stage and said, you know what? I'm confident things can be better. We can do better. And it wasn't about, you nasty Carter. It was about, come with me. We're going to do something great. And he was elected in a landslide because people want to be happy. They want to have peace and joy in their lives. And too often we're interested in winning the argument instead of painting a much broader picture of, why don't you come walk with me through the flowers? It's great over here. So as I say, I'm not interested in giving you ammunition. I'm interested in giving you some answers that you can calmly share and then say, now let me tell you about what God did for me. And let me tell you about peace and joy and grace. You know what? God doesn't love you because you're right. God loves you because he loves you. And he can love the wrong people too. So we need to repeat that point a lot. I got a couple more arguments against evolution. We finished the argument on design. I mentioned that I was going to talk about the cultural and moral arguments. They won't take long. And so we'll get to that next time. Dr. Newts. And she said, you're not one of those crackpots, are you? Yeah, marine fossils at the top of the highest mountain, local flood. There is a principle in science called Occam's razor. And that is that the simplest explanation is probably the correct one. Any of you are familiar with Rube Goldberg cartoons? What's that mousetrap game? You know, you build this complicated thing where the ball goes through and a regular mousetrap is much simpler. The simplest explanation is probably the right one. when you get marine fossils and water scalloping at 8,000 or 10,000 feet. There has to be a simple explanation. Okay, yes ma'am, one last comment. You got eight different conditions. Yeah, yeah, Occam's razor, it's a great principle. All right, let's have a word of prayer and we'll be dismissed. Thank you, Father, for the time we've had together today. We pray that you would prosper these thoughts in the minds of the hearers. We pray that you would work grace in each of us so that we might be more concerned with your name than with ours in the days to come. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.