South Wales schools, and the top three questions that were being asked were these. How can I know that God exists? It's a good question, isn't it? You see, if the evolutionary story is true, and the universe made itself, then no wonder young people wonder, how do I know God exists? And the second one was, how can I believe in a good God when there is so much suffering? You know, that's a really good question. Has anyone here ever been asked that question? Anybody? Yes? It's a good question, isn't it? And it's a question that deserves a good answer. And the third question was, does evolution prove that God doesn't exist? So these issues are fundamentally important right from young people all the way through. And that's why our ministry, Creation Ministries International, exists, to encourage Christians to have confidence in the Word of God and to provide them with answers to these kinds of challenges and questions. So the Bible says that we are to always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have, but to do this with gentleness and respect. Now, when I was a young man, I couldn't actually do this. I don't mean to generalise and respect this. I mean, I didn't have answers to these kinds of questions. And the reason I didn't have answers to these questions was that I grew up believing that God used evolution to create. Now, I thought that was a kind of logical thing to do because it meant I could still have my faith as a Christian and I could pursue my studies in science. But my faith didn't make any sense to me, so the sorts of questions we had up before were the very questions that I had and that I could not adequately answer. And so I became very ineffective as a Christian in sharing my faith. In fact, I didn't share my faith. I kept my head under the parrot. If you'd known me in my university years, you would not have known that I was a Christian. So, for me, this was a major challenge. I was not prepared to give an answer. It was after my university studies that I discovered that I really could have confidence in the Word of God right from the very beginning. and that started my real journey of reading and preparing and understanding these things. So that's why I do what I do now, and that is encouraging people to have confidence in God's Word from the beginning. Now over in the hall on the other side there we have lots of books and DVDs and things as was mentioned, and all those resources are there to help you get equipped with answers to your questions. But of all of them, I suppose the most effective and important is this one, the Creation Magazine. Now the Creation Magazine comes out four times every year and I'll tell you more about it later on, but a lot of the illustrations I'm going to use this evening actually come from the Creation Magazine. I think I'm going to try and change microphones because this is a little bit hard to hear, so if you'll just forgive me a minute. If we could just bring this one up, that would be good. Okay, how's that? I think that will be a lot easier to use right up there. We won't get so much of that interference. Okay, so Creation Magazine is a great resource and as I mentioned a lot of the illustrations I'm going to use tonight will come from Creation Magazine. But we also have a website and this is what the front page looks like. There's a new feature article there on the website. Every day of the week we encourage people to go and have a look at it. read the article and get equipped and so on. If you have any questions at all, there's a search window up here on this top right hand corner, so just type keywords into that and it gives you access to over 9,000 different articles and items of interest, all aimed at encouraging you in your faith. Now for those of you a bit younger here, you'll notice we can be followed on Facebook and YouTube and Twitter. In fact, I heard the other day that Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are all going to combine together to form a massive new social networking site. Apparently they're going to call it YouTwitFace. I think. Maybe not. Well, a really good thing about our website, apart from all the fabulous resources that it's got, is that it has a very easy web address to remember. Now I've heard that if you say something at the same time as seeing it, it helps to cement it. So I want you to say the web address when it comes up on the screen, right? So if you want to find out anything about creation, you simply go to creation.com. Very good. Now we also have a free email newsletter service which we send out if anything happens that we believe our subscribers need to hear about. and I'm sure you're all aware of the Noah movie that was released a little while ago. Who's seen the Noah movie here tonight? Yep, one or two of you. Well, now that you've seen the movie, make sure you read the book, right, because the book is much, much more accurate. So we sent out this copy of Infobites that drew people's attention to an article on our website that talked about the Noah movie and also a couple of other things here as well. So if you would like to receive our free email newsletter service, we're going to give you an opportunity for you to give us your email address in a moment. And the way that works is like this, we have some volunteers who have come along tonight, given up their time because they too are passionate about this ministry, and they're going to hand around a clipboard which will have a form on it that looks like this. Just put your name and your email address there. If you include your postcode, then if something's happening in your area, then we can let you know about it. Now, we don't spam your inbox, and of course, you can always unsubscribe any time if you wish. So, while those clipboards are going around, I'll just ask Chris and his... Yeah, you guys can come down the front, maybe, and then hand those clipboards out. That'd be great. So, while they're doing that, I'm going to talk tonight on the subject, going where the evidence leads. You know, it's often said that Christians believe in the absence of any evidence. And often an atheist will say something like, I'm logical, I'm rational, I go where the evidence leads, meaning that they go where the scientific establishment tells them this story about origins, naturalistic origins. Well, you know folks, I actually think that we should go where the evidence leads. Because if you believe something contrary to the evidence, it's like having blind faith. So I want to ask this question tonight. Is your faith supported by evidence? And I want to use two pictures tonight that depict two different approaches to this. This first one shows this little girl taking a very tentative step into a pond or a lake or something there. You know, she can see that the ground is just there underneath her feet, but it still requires a little step of faith, you know, she might use something different. But all the evidence tells her that she's going to be perfectly stable. And this image I want to use to depict a leap of faith. Now you just hope that this young guy has checked that there are no rocks underneath and that the water's deep enough and so on. And a leap of faith is believing something in sight of the evidence, or perhaps even contrary to the evidence. Now I had the great privilege of working for some 30 years in the design of Australia's national satellites, and I'm sure you've seen all those little grey dishes around on rooftops, you know the things on there? Yep, now they're pointing up at things that this particular satellite and one that's co-located with it, receiving things like Foxtel, Ostar, ABC, SBS, the commercial TV networks and so on. Now I want to make sure that you appreciate that I have no accountability whatsoever for what comes over the satellites, right? But I did have a lot to do with the design of the satellites themselves. So the sort of science that I've been involved in is what you could call operational science. Now that's the kind of science which gives us all these amazing gadgets like communications satellites and mobile phones and advances in medical research and so on. But the interesting thing is that operational science depends upon observable, repeatable experiments. So a scientist could conduct an experiment somewhere and then someone else in another country or wherever could repeat that experiment to verify the results, perhaps demonstrate that maybe there was something done that wasn't correct, or maybe progress that field of knowledge in science a little further. And friends, that is how real science develops and progresses. That's how we get all these amazing things that we just use every day. Observable, repeatable experiments. But there's another kind of science we hear a lot about. It's what you could call historical science. Now in historical science, the scientist looks at evidence in the present, like this guy looking at that fossil in the rock, and he tries to make up a story about the past to explain what he's observing in the present. Now, something interesting happens when a scientist makes up a story about the origins of something. And what happens is that, and you can think about it, it's inevitable, he engages his belief system about origins. So, if this guy, looking at this fossil here at the rock, believes the evolution of the story, the unguided random processes, millions and millions of years and so on, when he looks at that little fossil he might wonder to himself, Where does this little creature fit in the long, slow process from that first primordial cell all the way up to complex organisms like you and me? He might even ask himself, for instance, how many millions of years ago did it live? So can you see that what he believes about its origin influences how he interprets the data? But let's imagine that, in fact, this guy is a Bible-believing Christian. When he looks at that little fossil in the rock, he might well think to himself, you know, this little fossil was likely caused as a result of Noah's flood which probably deposited pretty much all of the fossil record that we see around the world today. Now that is a radically different interpretation of exactly the same piece of evidence. So friends, we don't actually differ about the evidence. We all have the same fossils and rocks and trees and stars and living systems, but our interpretation of the evidence, particularly with regards to origins, depends upon what we believe. Now what this means is that evolution is actually a belief system. It's a belief about the past. So evolution is a religion. Now most evolutionists would recoil at that suggestion and say, no, no, no, we go by the evidence, but I'm suggesting that in fact it's very true. Evolution is a religion, so really what we're talking about is the conflict of two different religions. So just summarising that then, operational science is about the present, it's about observable and repeatable experiments. Historical science on the other hand is about the unobservable, unrepeatable past. Let me give you an illustration of what I mean by this. We hear a great deal about the age of things, the age of fossils and the age of rocks and so on. Do you know scientists can't measure age? What they measure are the physical and chemical properties of their samples, but not age. Age is always calculated. Let me give you an illustration. Come with me on a bit of a thought experiment and let's imagine that you've just walked around the corner of your house into the backyard and there, under a dripping tap, is a bucket partly filled with water. Now because you're a bit of a scientific type, you can't help yourself, you measure the volume of water in the bucket and the rate at which the tap is dripping and then you ask yourself that all important question, how long has the bucket been under the tap? Now let's say that you find that the bucket has 6 litres of water in it and it's dripping at the rate of half a litre every hour. So how long do you think that bucket has been under the tap? 6 litres of water, half a litre per hour. Who wants to have a go? How long has the bucket been under the tap? Any takers? 12 hours? Who thinks 12 hours? A few people? Sounds reasonable. Alright, now let's just think about it a minute because you have just chanced upon the scene. You did not see the bucket placed under the tap, right? You're doing your science in the present, like all science is done. So to get 12 hours, you have to make a number of assumptions. What assumptions do you have to make to get 12 hours? That the bucket was empty when it went under the tap. You see, what if the bucket was already partly filled? You'd get the wrong answer, wouldn't you? But you have no way of knowing because you weren't there when the bucket was put under the tap. What else was assumed? Anything? I'm sorry? Evaporation you mean, out of the bucket? Yes, that's right. You don't know when the tap started dripping. In fact, somebody might have turned the tap on hard and then just turned it off carelessly, left it dripping just seconds before you came round the corner. So you're completely the wrong answer, wouldn't you? There's all sorts of ways you can get water into or out of this bucket before you even turn up. So you can only get an answer to your question by making a lot of assumptions. Now let's imagine that in your backyard, you must have a very important backyard because you have your own resident historian, and this historian is faithfully recording all the events in your backyard. Now they give you the historical record and they tell you that at 1.05pm today the bucket was placed under the tap, and then at 1.50pm you came around the corner. So now you ask the question, how long has the bucket been under the tap? 45 minutes. But you might say, well, now hang on a minute, I'm a scientist and I've done all these measurements and calculations and you're just a historian. I mean, you know, what do historians know? So, you might want to reject that, OK? But who's right? The scientist or the historian? Who thinks the historian's got the right answer? Who thinks the scientist has got the right answer? You see, it's the historian, isn't it, because he's the eyewitness of what actually happened. I'm assuming here that he's a reliable historian. So we can reach a couple of conclusions here. The first one is that age cannot be measured. Ages are always calculated, but they are calculated based on assumptions. And the worst part is that you can't go back in the past to test your assumptions, because we've only got the present. All science is done in the present. See, the only way that we can determine an accurate age is through a reliable historical record. Now, I discovered something interesting the other day, that my mother was present at my birth. It might have been a similar experience for the rest of you. And thankfully my parents had the foresight to register my birth. So I now have a piece of paper which has my birth date written on it. So I know how old I am. That's a historical record. That's the only way that I know how old I am. There's no scientific experiment you can perform on my body to determine my birth date. Not that I would let you anyway. So, science studies repeatable things, but history studies unrepeatable things. So how do we get to the truth about our origins? We can't observe them, obviously, they happened once in the past and we weren't there. You see, what we really need to know the truth about our origins is an eyewitness account from someone who obviously was there, who knows everything, who loves us, who would not deceive us, and who has written down everything we need to know about our origins. And friends, we've got exactly that in this book, the Bible. You see, the Bible is like a history book of the universe. Of course, it's more than just that, but it is at least that. And when we open the Bible, we discover the very first thing it says is, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Isn't it remarkable that the very opening sentence in the Bible places the biblical record of creation in complete conflict with what our culture believes, that the universe made itself for millions and millions of years and so on? But is that a reasonable statement, God created the heavens and the earth? Well, if we make some observations in the world around us, what do we see? Now here's an old rusty car, if you look at that old vehicle you know that at some time in the past it was a brand new shiny vehicle fresh off the production line of the factory. It's now running down and getting worse and worse but it must have had a beginning. Do you know it's exactly the same as the universe? It too must have had a beginning because the universe is winding down. Stars are burning up their matter in the form of energy which is then being dissipated out into the universe. Ultimately scientists tell us that the whole of the universe will run down into what's called a heat death. Now, the fact is the universe has not yet run down, so that means it must have had a beginning. It cannot have been around eternally. So, if the universe has a beginning, then that means it must have been made, because everything which has a beginning must have had a cause. Now the story that we get today is this big bang story, and it goes something like this. There was a quantum fluctuation some 13.8 billion years ago when nothing became absolutely everything, initially in the form of a hot plasma gas which condensed into hydrogen, then collapsed into stars which started to burn using nuclear reactions for their fuel. They finally burnt themselves out, collapsed, Some became supernovas and produced more complex molecules and so on. Finally we ended up with this swirling cloud of dust and gas and in the centre of that the sun condensed out and then some other planets around it. and we got more and more complex molecules and then finally on planet Earth we ended up with this double helix molecule with all of these coded instructions on it for making every living thing. So that if you like is a possible summary of the Big Bang story of our origins. But, I don't know about you, but every time I've seen an explosion take place, it hasn't led to a lot of structure and order forming. In fact, someone who was a bit tongue-in-cheek said this, now students, hydrogen is a gas which, if left long enough, turns into people. But friends, that's not what we observe, is it? You see, every time I've ever seen photographs of or seen the aftermath of an explosion, there's just a random debris field, isn't there, strewn everywhere. You don't get structure and order forming. This building, for instance, didn't happen as a result of an explosion in a brick pit. It happened because somebody designed it and the raw materials came here and it was carefully constructed. So this next picture, I should just warn you, is not my daughter's bedroom, and I'm sure that nobody in this room would ever have experienced anything like this. Is that true? No? Well, there you go. Well, if the idea of an explosion producing structure and order was true, then all you'd have to do is ask the young lady to leave the room, create a huge explosion, and then, hey presto, it would end up looking like this. But of course that's not what happens, is it? We know that in order to get a room looking like that, it would probably require firstly some discipline, then a measure of intelligence and some hard work to arrange things in a structured way. But then some people say, ah yes, but you see, Whilst you see things running down on planet earth, the sun shines its heat and energy onto the earth and that external source of energy is what causes things to arrange themselves into all the detail and intricate things we see in the world today. Well, let's explore that idea just briefly. Here's an example of how you can take the energy from the chemical bonds in petrol, ignite the petrol, but in a very carefully and intelligently designed environment inside this engine, you can convert the energy from the fuel into mechanical energy which will propel a motor vehicle along. But it requires an intelligently designed environment to harness the raw energy. Now if you took that same fuel and tipped it all over the car and ignited it, you'd get a very different result, right? And this is an example of an uncontrolled application of raw energy in an unintelligent, undesigned environment. So just good old sun thermal energy incident on the earth does not solve the problem of where the detail, intricacy and complexity of the universe came from. In fact, Professor Paul Davies said this, the Big Bang represents the instantaneous suspension of physical laws, the sudden abrupt flash of lawlessness that allows something to come out of nothing. It represents a true miracle. So friends, I think it's a huge leap of faith to believe that the universe made itself, but in fact it's just a tiny little step of faith to believe that the universe was made. Now, I want to show you a picture of my home. This is where I live. I hope you also live here with me. I had an audience a little while ago where I did wonder, but hey. Now, it was in the discipline of geology that this idea of the millions and millions of years of Earth history first arose. And it worked something like this. People looked at structures like this one, Grand Canyon, and they assumed that they had to interpret the evidence in the light of things that they could see happening today. So there's a little catch-cry that said, the present is the key to the past. It has a technical name. It's called the philosophy of uniform materialism. So when you look at something like Grand Canyon, you see all these layers and layers of rock, so the story goes that each layer is laid down by some kind of a catastrophe or flood or whatever, and then another layer on top of that, and then another one, and another one, and so on and so forth, and we build up all these layers of rock, and in the case of the Grand Canyon, along comes the Colorado River and carves out this massive canyon. I mean it must have taken millions and millions of years to produce that structure. But let's have a closer look at those layers, and here we see what's called the Coconino Sandstone, which is the light layer on the top, and underneath is this darker layer called the Hermit Shale. Now that traditional uniformitarian approach would have us believe that there is a 10 million year gap between the Hermit Shale and the Coconino Sandstone. 10 million years. Now if that was true, that means the Hermit Shire's surface there, which you can see is dead flat and very sharply defined, must have lain exposed like that for 10 million years. But wouldn't you expect to find some evidence of elapsed time? For instance, you'd expect evidence of vegetation, tree roots, animal burrows, and certainly the next time it rained, there would be some evidence of erosion. I mean, after all, look at the massive erosion that is represented by the Grand Canyon itself. Friends, for the hundreds of kilometres that that contact is exposed in Grand Canyon, there's absolutely no evidence of erosion. It's sharply defined and dead flat. In fact what it really says to us is that those layers were laid down rapidly one after the other with very little, if any, elapsed time between them. So have we ever seen anything like that happen rapidly? Well in fact we have. Back in 1980 there was an eruption of Mount St Helens in Washington State in the US. Now Mount St Helens is a moderate volcano, as volcanoes go, but it caused significant geological change in the area around the base of the mountain, including the formation of this structure which is called Little Grand Canyon. Now it's called that because it's 140th the size of the real Grand Canyon. and that means it's about 40 metres deep there and you can see in the walls of the canyon these different layers and down in the bottom of the canyon there is a little river flowing along. Now if you applied that present is the key to the past philosophy to interpreting Little Grand Canyon, And if for some reason you'd never heard about Mount St Helens, you would assume that each of those layers was laid down slowly, one after the other, year after year and so on and so forth. So it must have taken a long period to lay down all of that material. And then that little river must have come along and slowly carved out that huge canyon, 140th the size of the Grand Canyon. Well, None of that material was actually there before 1980. So it can't be any older today than 35 years. So friends, how do we know that? Well, we observe it to happen. Remember what science was about? Observation. And in the case of the canyon, there was a mudflow that came through that whole area about two years later in 1992, and that mudflow carved out a little grand canyon, 140th the size of the real Grand Canyon. So how long do you think it would take a mudflow to carve out a canyon 140th the size of the Grand Canyon? I think it would have taken at least six months to grind out a canyon that big. At least six months? No one? One or two? Okay, everyone else must think it's less. So Ebenezer would have been between one month and six months. Any more? Who never puts their hand up if asked a question in church? You know friends, it actually took one day, just one day, to carve out a structure one-fourth the size of the Grand Canyon. And how do we know? Because it was observed to happen. You see, that's real science. So this idea that the present is the key to the past actually doesn't work, because it denies the possibility that there might have been a past catastrophic event. And you know the Bible tells us that there was just such a thing, the global flood of Noah. We read in Genesis All the springs of the Great Deep burst forth and the floodgates of the heavens were opened and it says, the waters rose and increased greatly on the earth and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. This was a global watery catastrophe, the like of which had never been seen before or since. Now some people say, but Noah's flood was just a local flood. But look at this, it says, all the high mountains under the entire heavens. Friends, that could only be true if it was a global flood. Can you imagine a local flood covering all the high mountains? I mean, it's not possible, is it? It doesn't make any sense at all. But you know the evidence in the geological record around us supports this record that we read in Genesis 6, 7 and 8 of the flood of Noah. Here we see a beach, a factory on the New South Wales coast here. You can see these layers of sedimentary rock and then there's a layer of volcanic ash and then more sedimentary rock and then more volcanic ash and then more sedimentary rock. What it speaks of is a tremendous disastrous process of flooding of sediments being laid down and then volcanic eruptions and more sediment and more eruptions and so on. It all speaks of a rapid and disastrous process, including structures like this. This is a tree trunk running through multiple layers of rock called a polystrate fossil. This is a quote from a secular professor of geology, Derek Agar, who said, we cannot escape the conclusion that sedimentation was at times very rapid indeed. And I'm sure you've all seen structures like this one, all these layers of rock that can be seen clearly defined here, but bent over in such an amazing way. Now has anybody here ever tried to bend a rock? What happens? It just shatters, doesn't it? So how on earth do you bend all these layers of rock without them shattering? Well friends, I believe those rocks were saturated with water, they were still soft and plastic, and the Bible says that the subsidence of the flood, the mountains rose up, the valleys sank down, that would have caused tremendous lateral forces and vertical forces, folding, buckling of these still moist and wet sedimentary layers. Exactly consistent with what you would expect to find if the Bible's account of a global catastrophe was actually true. You know, the Bible gives us a timeline of history, and we can trace the genealogies all the way from Adam through to Abraham, from Abraham to King David, and then via the line of Mary and the line of Joseph to Jesus. There's about 4,000 years represented on that page. From the time of Jesus to the present day, it's about 2,000 years. So, according to the Bible, we stand here today about 6,000 years after the creation. 6,000 years, I mean, wow, doesn't that seem incredible? I mean, we're just so used to hearing about the millions and millions of years, you know, it seems. Wow, is there any evidence for such a thing? Well friends, there actually is a great deal of it. It's just that we don't hear about it very often. For instance, we know that the river systems around the world today are dumping about 20 billion tonnes of mud and sediment onto the ocean floors every year. Now some of that gets sucked up and away, but there's a net rate at which it is increasing. So, knowing how fast it's increasing and how much is there, we can make an estimate of the upper limit of how long it would have taken. And it turns out that all that sediment would have got there in just 12 million years. Now friends, that's a disastrous result for the evolutionary story because evolution tells us there should have been at least 3,500 million years for the age of the oceans, right? Not just 12. But of course it seems as though it's too long for the Bible's record of just thousands of years. But when we go into the historical, the eyewitness account of all history in the Bible, we discover there was a global catastrophic flood, and that would have dumped billions of tonnes of mud and sediments onto the ocean floor. You know today that there are about 7 billion people in the earth. Interestingly, if you start with six people, Shem, Ham and Japheth and their wives, four and a half thousand years ago at the time of the Flood, and let that population rate grow just under half a percent, you end up with about seven billion people. So, at face value, it's consistent with the population of the world today. But friends, if mankind had been on the face of the earth for a hundred thousand years, or a million years as some people think, where are all the people? We should be shoulder to shoulder on every square metre of the planet's surface, including the ocean basins. But of course, that's not the case. You see, there are actually hundreds of ways that we can place an upper limit on the age of the Earth, and I'd recommend this article to you on our website if you want to read further into this very important subject. It's at creation.com forward slash age. So friends, I think it's only a massive leap of faith to believe that the Earth is billions of years old, whereas in fact it's just a tiny step of faith to believe that it's only thousands of years old. And why? Because that's where the evidence leads. But what about this question of the origin of first life? Do you know the evolutionary story and its random processes and so on? tells us that at some stage or other there must have been a point when inanimate chemicals somehow or other arranged themselves into the first living self-replicating cell. And Professor Paul Davies says, nobody knows how a mixture of lifeless chemicals spontaneously organised themselves into the first living cell. You know, even if you get all the bits and pieces together, that would be pretty amazing. But it's even more amazing when you realise that the operations of the cells in our body all happen under stored program control, where the program is written on the DNA that we find in every single cell. So Davies goes on and says, how did stupid atoms spontaneously write their own software? If you could take a living cell and enlarge it to be the size of a city like Sydney, you would find an incredibly bewildering and complex network of transport systems for instance, communication networks, power supplies, factories producing component parts to be delivered to other parts of the cell and so on. Inside the cell of these are the power plants, if you like, the organelles called mitochondria. And inside the mitochondria are these membranes called cristae, and embedded in those are thousands and thousands of these little machines called the ACP synthase enzyme. ATP stands for adenosine triphosphate. It's like the energy currency in your cell. Your cells can't fulfil any functions at all without using ATP. You can't even blink an eye or move a muscle in your body without ATP being required. Now, this ACP synthase enzyme is an amazing little machine. It actually works on a rotary motor, like a little outboard motor here, and we've prepared an animated clip of how this little machine actually works and what it looks like. So using electron microscopes we were able to image the actual proteins themselves. So I want to play this animation to you. that shows how this extraordinary little machine works. And remember, there are thousands of them inside every cell in your body. This animated sequence shows the ATP synthase enzyme in operation. The animation is based on an incredible series of scientific discoveries. Under the cover ATP, or adenosine triphosphate, is the energy currency of the cell. ATP is produced by a time-relatable rotary motor rotating at up to 7,000 rpm. Pigs are so small that 100,000 of which get side-by-side in a millimetre. A current of protons drives the motor, unlike man-made electric motors which use electricity. This portion of the enzyme is where adenosine diphosphate is combined with a phosphate ion in the presence of a catalyst to produce ACP, which has been released, making way for the next cycle. A top view of the enzyme shows the sequential operation. Almost every biochemical process in your body requires ACP. Such a nanomachine exhibits all the characteristics of super-insertion design. Antipathy is vital for life, and many of these motors need a controller person who himself could exist, an illusionary impossibility. This is an amazing little gadget. You realise there are thousands of them in every single cell, and just imagine how that first cell came to be. Somehow or other all those little component parts had to assemble themselves, lots of them, and then they all had to gather together along with some other biological bits and pieces to form that first living self-replicating cell. You know, Professor Sir Fred Hoyle, who is not a Christian, said this very wisely. The probability of the formation of just one of the many proteins on which life depends is comparable to that of the solar system packed full of blind people randomly shuffling Rubik's cubes and all arriving at the solution at the same time. Have you thought about what that might look like? It's bizarre, isn't it? No one in their right mind would ever think such a thing was possible by chance. Back in the middle 1800s, Louis Pasteur formulated what is now called the law of biogenesis, which says that life only originates from life. We never observe inanimate chemicals forming living cells or any kind of self-replicating system. So it's actually a massive leap of faith to believe that life arose through time and chance alone, but friends, just a tiny little step of faith to believe that life was created. But you know, if you want to make something that's complex, like a living cell or like this building for instance, you must have information. You've got to have plans and instructions. And that's exactly the same with living things. You need information to specify them. Just imagine, for instance, this single-celled bacterium. You can imagine all the instructions for assembling it being written down in a large book, like an encyclopaedia volume. But if you wanted to make something more complicated, like a horse, you'd need a lot more information. Now you need instructions about making bones, muscles, hearts, eyes, lungs, etc. You need many, many more books full of information. So the challenge for the evolutionary story about our origins is where does all this extra information come from? There has to be some natural process by which you can write encyclopaedia-type volumes full of instructions. All of those instructions reside on this incredible molecule called the DNA molecule. Do you know there's so much information on the human DNA that you could fill a thousand encyclopaedia-sized books just with the coded instructions written in every cell in your body to make you. So where does all this novel genetic information come from? Now the evolutionists have proposed a number of mechanisms, and Charles Darwin believed that the processes of natural selection is how simple things became more complex. over millions and millions of years. But let's have a look at how natural selection actually works. So I want you to imagine with me that these two creatures are actually little dogs that have medium length hair. And let's imagine that the length of their hair is determined by just two genes. So these little guys have got a short haired gene and a long haired gene, so each of them has medium length hair. Now we can get a number of different kinds of puppies from these two. The first little guy, he gets the short haired gene from each of his parents, so he's a very short haired little dog. These next two are like their parents, they get the long-haired and short-haired gene each, so they have medium-length hair. But this last little bloke is the jackpot, and he gets the long-haired gene from each of his parents, so he's a very hairy little dog. Now, let's imagine this population of dogs moves to a cold country with lots of ice and snow and sleet. These short and medium-length haired dogs will be selected against, and that's the process of natural selection. But before long, all you'll have left are these much warmer, hairy little dogs. Now if these two should happen to fall in love, they're going to produce a whole bunch of puppies, but guess what? Every single one of them will have long hair. But can you see what's actually happened? You see there's been a loss of genetic information for making short to medium length hair. So natural selection actually reduces inflammation. It filters the inflammation. So you end up with less than what you had before. So it's a downhill process. But wait a minute, evolution requires an uphill process. Remember to go from simple to complex, you've got to write more and more genetic information, not reduce it. So natural selection clearly doesn't cut it. So evolutionists thought, well maybe what happens is mutations. Now mutations are an abrupt change in the code of instructions on DNA for making things, but can mutations add information? Carl Sagan said this, mutations occur at random and are almost always harmful. It is rare that a precision machine is improved by a random change in the instructions for making it. And if you think about it, that's intuitively obvious, isn't it? If I were to take this simple sentence and make some careless copying mistakes, have I added information? Well, of course not. In fact, errors almost always delete or corrupt information. And you certainly can't produce encyclopedic quantities of novel genetic information by making lots and lots of copying mistakes. So here's an interesting example, this little rooster has had the instructions for making feathers switched off. Now that came about through a mutation. Now if you're the chook farmer you'd think this was a brilliant mutation because now you don't have to pluck the chooks, right? But if you're the little chook you might have a different view. But the important point here is that that mutation has not added any novel genetic information, in fact it's deleted some. By the way, this is called the TNR mutant, that's a technical term, and it stands for the Totally Naked Rooster. I kid you not, that's exactly what it means. So mutations don't cut it either. So does anybody know what the third proposed mechanism is for generating novel genetic information to go from simple to complex? Well friends, there isn't one. There is no mechanism by which you can write genetic information. perhaps the highest profile anti-Christian pro-evolutionist in the world today. And the question was, Professor Dawkins, can you give an example of a genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which can be seen to increase the information in the genome? Now, friends, it's interesting to see how Professor Dawkins replies, because surely there must be heaps and heaps and heaps of such examples which he could allude to. So let's watch how he responds. Professor Wilkins, can you give an example of a genetic mutation or evolution process which can be seen to increase the incubation of the genome? I think that silence is very chilling. You see, why can't you just produce any number of examples for the simple reason that none have been observed? Now, remember what science was about? It was about observation, wasn't it? Observable, repeatable experiments. Now, Richard Dawkins was asked this question, has evolution been observed? And he answered, evolution has been observed, it's just that it hasn't been observed while it's happening. Well, I suspect a rather better answer comes from Professor Paul Davies, and he says, there is no known law of physics able to create information from nothing. You see, to be able to get novel genetic information, we actually require a brand new law of physics, which just has not been discovered. So, friends, I think it's a huge leap of faith to believe that natural processes produce net uphill genetic changes, but it's just a tiny step of faith to believe that natural processes produce net downhill genetic changes. You know, the Bible says in Romans that the whole of creation is in bondage to decay, everything's running down, and, friends, that's exactly what we observe in the world today. You know, the Bible says that we are to demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God. And friends, I'd like to suggest to you this evening that belief in evolution is probably the greatest such pretension. You know, for the simple reason that if the evolutionary story is true, then there probably is no God because the universe made itself. No wonder people struggle with how they can come to know God. In the book of Hebrews it says this, without faith it is impossible to please God. Anyone who comes to God must believe that he exists. Well, if evolution is true, then maybe God doesn't exist. So can you see that belief in evolution in our culture is perhaps the greatest barrier to people coming to faith? You see, that's why our ministry exists, to try and equip you with answers to the questions that you will be getting, questions you may have yourself, but also to help other people see that this evolutionary story, in fact, is not supported by the evidence. I mentioned at the beginning our creation magazine. I'll tell you a little more about it now. The magazine comes out four times a year. It's written for lay people, so you don't have to be a scientist to understand it. And we get more testimonies from people whose lives have been impacted by the Creation magazine than any other of our resources. It's like our number one witnessing weapon. This lady wrote to us and said, you have given me a wonderful tool with which to encourage me as a believer in Christ, to teach my children the truth of creation and to witness to my unbelieving friends. Isn't that important? She taught her children, our young people today, you guys are being assailed by this evolutionary indoctrination, I think that's the right word, more than any other generation before you. Repeating this story over and over again, the universe made itself, which, if you like, in fine print says, there is no God. And this guy wrote to us and said, at first I shunned the belief of my parents, but after living on my own for two years, with the aid of a copy of your magazine, which I was given one day, note that, I realised that I was the one who was wrong and asked for salvation. So we encourage folks to give the magazine away. It's a great way of getting conversations around to things that really do matter. Perhaps I could just ask who here subscribes to Creation Magazine already? Anyone? No? No one? Well, that's a great opportunity for you to get hold of this fantastic resource. Let me tell you about how to do that. A one-year subscription costs $28. A three-year subscription is $75. That's discounted annually. But if you subscribe tonight and pay for your subscription, then for a one-year sub, you will get a free back issue, so you've got something to read and then hopefully to give away. For a three year subscription you'll get not only a free back issue, but also one of our $15 DVDs for free, just as an incentive for you to get hold of this resource. Now, the magazine is now also available in digital form, so you can add a digital subscription to your print subscription for just a small amount extra. And the advantage of digital is that it's available on up to five different devices. So, if you have a computer at home, a PC, a smartphone, one of these i-thingies, then you can download the magazine via that means. If you're a grandparent here today, that's a fabulous way of getting a subscription into the hands of your grandchildren or parents into the hands of your children. Or, if you want to give subscriptions to your friends, that's another way of doing it. Take out a digital sub and then send them the email so they can link into it. Now in a moment we're going to hand around the clipboards again and on them will be a form that looks like this. So to subscribe obviously you'll need to give us your name, address and your contact details so we know where to send it. We will need to identify whether you want a one or a three year subscription, whether you want to add a digital sub to your print and then tick the appropriate box over here on the right hand side. tear off that little coupon and make sure you take it to our book tables on the other side of the courtyard here and we'll make sure that you get your free gift. Now friends, we're not trying to just sell magazines here. What I'm trying to do is to connect you with a vital resource that will equip you for effective evangelism and also for strengthening you in your faith. So all those boards go around. I want to tell you quickly about just a couple of our other resources. If you purchase just one book tonight, I'd recommend this one, the Creation Answers book. It consists of 20 short chapters that answer one of the most asked questions that Christians and non-Christians alike have. Things like, how do I know there's a God? Where did all the water go after the flood? And so on. And that classic question that comes time and again, where did Cain get his wife if he wasn't able? Anyway, moving quickly along, we've taken that book and we've bundled it with another book called Refuting Evolution and a DVD explaining why this issue matters. And we call that our Intro Pack. And an Intro Pack is discounted so that if you get one of those it's like buying two of those things and getting the third one for free. We have a number of small booklets, Stones and Bones, looks at the evidence in geology and in the fossil record. and how did we get our Bible and is it the Word of God? It's so important we know how to answer that question. How can we be confident that the Bible is God's Word? Maybe some other book, the Koran, might be the correct holy book. We need, as Christians, to have an answer to that question. Great little booklet. If you're sharing your faith with someone who might be sceptical, I'd recommend this book, Christianity for Sceptics, or perhaps you're here tonight and you're sceptical about all of this, I'd recommend you get hold of this book. It's a great read. We have some materials for children as well. There's a children's pack, five hard-covered books for just over half price, and for primary age kids, days one to seven. If you're not much into reading, we've got some excellent DVDs there. Rapid Rocks talks about geology happening rapidly. Programming of Life has got that little clip that I ran, plus some others, showing the amazing operation of the inner workings of the cell. And we have this pack, we call it the Core Issues Pack, eight DVDs that address the most critical aspects of this whole origins debate, and it's for less than half price. Have you seen those documentaries with David Attenborough and the BBC things that he puts out? Somebody asked Attenborough once, why don't you give credit to Almighty God? And this is how he answered. When creationists talk about God creating they always instance hummingbirds or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, a worm that's going to make him blind. And I ask him, are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child's eyeball? Because that doesn't seem to me to coincide with a God who's full of mercy. Hey, that's a pretty good point, isn't it? You see, Attenborough looks around him and he sees a world full of beauty and structure and order, but he also sees suffering and death. By the way, he's wrong about the life cycle of that little worm. It can live in other places than the eyeball of the little boy. But you see, he rejects God because he says, I don't want to have anything to do with a God that just creates us so he can watch us live and then suffer and die. What kind of God is that? But you see, God isn't like that, is he? The Bible tells us God is a God of love, of compassion, mercy, faithfulness. He's not vindictive or cruel like that sort of picture would suggest. The problem is, of course, that Attenborough rejects the History Book of the Universe, and that History Book of the Universe tells us that the Earth began in a perfect condition, with absolutely no death, no suffering, no disease, no sin. But into that perfect world has come an intrusion of death and disease and suffering, and friends, that centre one is the world that we live in today. It's a broken world. The Bible also tells us there is coming a new heaven and a new earth. Now, if we allow belief in the millions and millions of years, as I did when I was a young man, into our thinking, it's like taking that top left-hand corner out of the picture. But can you see what's happened now? This means, if this is the case, that God created the world full of death, disease and suffering. And hence the question that I had right at the beginning, how can a good God allow bad things? And this was the difficulty that I had as a young man because I allowed that fundamentally atheistic worldview to mix with my Christian worldview. But you know, it's even worse than that because the new heaven and the new earth, the Bible tells us, is going to be a restoration. A restoration to what? More suffering and death? You see, if we believe in the millions of years, there's actually no hope for the future either. So friends, that's why it's so tremendously important that we put this top left-hand corner back into our understanding. Friends, that is what we read about in the book of Genesis, right in the opening chapters. And that, in fact, is why we can describe the Gospel message like this. There was a perfect creation. Man rebelled and brought death into the world. Jesus came, paid the price for our sin by sacrificing Himself on the cross, but He rose from the dead, declaring that He is indeed God's Son and He defeats the dead, so that by faith anybody can experience what the Bible calls the new birth. We can become born again as a child of God. But friends, that whole Gospel message rests on this foundation stone down here, the creation account that we read in the book of Genesis. And so when we declare Christ to the world, we need to remember that we're not just talking about some itinerant Jewish preacher who lived 2,000 years ago, but instead we are talking, number one, about the creator of the universe, the perfect sinless Son of God who paid the price for our rebellion, a price that we could not pay, that He declared that He was the Way, the Truth and the Life and that no one can come to the Father except through Him. And the reason is that Jesus alone paid the price for all mankind's sin. The Bible says that he is seated at the right hand of God the Father interceding for each and every one of us. He is the soon coming King. And friends, he is that bridegroom seated at that wedding feast to which we have all been invited. So friends, if you're here today and you're already a believer and you've not known what to do about this whole issue of origins, I want to encourage you to get hold of the resources in the room over there, get hold of the magazine, get onto the website, get yourself equipped. If perhaps you're here tonight and you're not a believer, and you've just come along at the invitation of a friend perhaps, I would encourage you to take that step of faith. You see, it's all about what you believe, not trying to make yourself good enough to be acceptable to God, because that isn't possible. The Bible says that if we believe in our heart that Jesus rose from the dead and confessed with our mouth that he is Lord, that we will be saved, that we'll experience what I called before the new birth. And it's a miracle, you know, God places his own Holy Spirit into the heart of every single believer. That guarantees us an eternal destiny, but better than that even, it means that we can walk and talk every day in relationship with our Creator God through the indwelling presence of His own Holy Spirit. So friends, I'd encourage you to take that step of faith today. In fact, if you would like, I'd be delighted to meet with you afterwards and introduce you to the Creator of the universe, your Saviour, Jesus. So friends, just in closing, what was that web address again? Creation.com, that's it. So I want to encourage you to go where the evidence leads, because it all points to the truth of God's Word. So I want to thank you very much for your attention tonight and I'm just wondering maybe a few minutes for some questions. Okay, so has anyone got any questions that they would like to ask? I always say that I don't profess to know everything, but I'll do my best to answer your questions and if I don't know, hopefully I can direct you towards some resources. So are there any questions tonight or anything that I've covered or other aspects of this whole creation evolution issue? Yes sir? Question being asked. Okay, that's an excellent question. So the question was, if the universe is in fact only a few thousand years old, how do we account for distant starlight? Because the stars are supposed to be millions of light years away. How could their light have reached us in just 6,000 years? And this is an issue that has been a stumbling block for a long time for a lot of people. and some people have in fact used it as something of an excuse to not believe the Bible. But I want to suggest to you tonight that it's not a good excuse at all because there are very good answers to it. Firstly, Arthur's book, Chapter 5, addresses this whole question of distant starlight. But the question is like this, the distances that we measure to remote galaxies appear to be real, they're vast, hundreds of millions of light years and so on. How could light have travelled that far if the Bible timescales are correct? So is there some sort of an explanation which is consistent with a recent creation? Well, the first thing I'd like to point out is that a light year is a measure of distance and not time. And I'm not trying to split hairs here because it's actually very important that we understand that distinction. So what does the universe look like according to the Bible? Well, the Bible says that on day four God created the sun, moon and the stars. And there's a little phrase in there, there's this one, and it was so. And we see it there in Genesis 1.15. And that little phrase implies that that act of creation was completed. We find it occurring in a couple of other places in Genesis 1. We also read in a number of different places in the scriptures that God stretched out the heavens. And we read that in the Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Job and various other places. And so the picture we get is that on the fourth day of creation, as God creates the sun, moon and stars, He stretches out the heavens to their vast extent and it was all completed, it was done. And we also learn that, or it implies, that there is a finite number of stars which we see in the psalms. Now, there's something rather interesting in this universe of ours that we don't intuitively experience, and that is that time is not a constant throughout the universe, and this is really the key to understanding this whole distance starlight issue. The distances are likely real because the magnitude of the heavens displays God's glory. We know from Einstein's equations and from observation that the speed of light is a constant for an observer, but that leaves the third dimension of time. Now it turns out that if you have an atomic clock at the top of a high mountain, that clock actually runs faster than an identical clock at sea level. It's not much difference, if you're up 2,000 metres you gain about 5 microseconds a year. So if you were hoping that maybe this was the key to a long life then I'd hate to disappoint you, it's not going to make much difference. But the point is that gravity does actually distort time and that's an experimentally verified fact and it's predicted through Einstein's equations. We also know that speed will dilate time. In fact when we came here tonight we used a sat-nav to find this address and the sat-nav system works off a constellation of satellites called the GPS satellites. They're about 20,000 kilometres above the Earth's surface and due to both gravitational time dilation and relativistic effects, the clocks on the GPS satellites gain about 38 microseconds every single day. Now, if you don't correct for that difference in time, that time dilation, then your position error would increase at the rate of about 400 metres every hour. So, in other words, within a matter of moments, your whole sat-nav thing would be completely useless. So the next time you get annoyed at your little sat-nav, be polite because it does some pretty fancy calculations. So the third aspect is that Einstein's equations predict that if you expanded space, if you stretched out space, then you would also dilate time. So there are at least three different mechanisms for time dilation and we read that as God stretches out the heavens on day four, we would have a situation where if you had a clock at the outer edge of the cosmos, it would be running many, many times faster than an earthbound clock. So it would be a bit like this. Here we have on day four as God stretches out the heavens, the clock at the edge of the cosmos would be running very, very fast. On the earth it would be running at just normal speed. But then after creation week, when presumably that stretching out has now ended, then the clocks would be running at approximately the same speed. By the way, we'll never know because it will take millions of light years for the light to reach us to be able to prove that, but it seems a reasonable supposition. So just by way of an animation this is what it might have been like. So as God starts to stretch out the heavens, clocks in the outer edge of the cosmos go very, very fast. Here we are in the Milky Way galaxy at or near the centre of the universe and there's Earth. So 6,000 years later and that rapid acceleration has ended, the clocks are running at about the same rate. So what we have then is an explanation for this light travel time problem that is consistent with not only Einstein's equations, but most importantly consistent with what the Bible says. So think of it a bit like this. Here's the time dilation. You can imagine a plane of earth because it doesn't accelerate anywhere. The clock's here at the normal rate, that's our reference point. Something not too far away from the Earth would accelerate a little bit, so the clocks would tick a bit faster, but in the average of the cosmos the clocks would tick very, very fast. So if you had this situation for instance, you have here the large Magellanic Cloud in which there was a supernova remnant back in 1987, and that's 170,000 light years away from us here in our Milky Way Galaxy and there's our solar system. But 2.5 million light years away is the Andromeda Galaxy. So let's look at these Earth clocks on day 4. Let's imagine that just 4 hours passed on the Earth. It could have been that 170,000 years passed in the Large Magellanic Cloud and in fact 2.5 million years in the Andromeda Galaxy. So that means that there has been enough time for the light from these sources to reach the earth inside of one earth day. So that when Adam opens his eyes on day six and looks up at the stars, what he sees is fundamentally what we see today when we look at the stars. So I think this is a very elegant solution. Basically the key of it is time dilation. There are a number of different models that look at explaining how the time dilation would have occurred, but the point is that they are consistent with Einstein's equations, but most importantly consistent with what the Bible tells us. But there's one other little extra bit that I'd like to add in. Oh, by the way, we have some material on that, this DVD, Starlight Time and the New Physics is good. But just imagine that this is our galaxy, we're looking edge-on. Here is the Sun, it's about 28,000 light-years from the centre. You can imagine surrounding the Sun a sphere with a radius of now 6,000 light-years and it's growing at one light-year per year. So, that's the limit of light travel time since Creation Week 6,000 years ago. So, everything that we see inside that sphere has happened since the Creation Week. But everything outside that sphere actually happened on Day 4. So, I think that gives a new dimension to what the psalmist says. The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows His handiwork. You see, when we look at those stars, what we're actually looking at, for the most part, is what God actually made on Day 4. So the stars really do show forth God's handiwork of creation. Thank you for that question, that was excellent. Do we have maybe one more?