(19) Creation & Evolution

All right, well, this morning we're going to be talking about creation versus evolution. We have some definitions to go over first. That would be the wrong handout for me to grab. We could talk about something else. Now I've got my pages out of order. There we go.

Empirical evidence. Does anybody ever use the word empirical in their day-to-day life? I find that a lot of people don't. But just in case, empirical evidence is evidence that is based on observation, experiments, and experience rather than pure theory. So the idea is it's something that you can probably touch, taste, feel, observe, test. So that's empirical evidence rather than the theoretical. For example, The theory of relativity is something Einstein is known for. E equals mc squared, okay, which recently some theoretician, mathematician, science folks have questioned, but that's neither here nor there. The idea is that empirical evidence is something that you can touch and mess with. We're going to talk about that a little later on.

Biblical creation, or sometimes this is called creationism. It's the account given, or believing in the account given in Genesis 1 and 2 describing God's calling into existence the universe and its contents, including living creatures in a specific order. Biblical creation is taking into account the origins of the universe and life as described in the Bible. Thus the word biblical rather than generic creation, which I'm not exactly sure how you define generic creation. You have to have a source for where you're getting your information. Similarly, this is one that's been in the media quite regularly for the, I don't know, the last five or six years. Intelligent design. Has everybody heard of intelligent design? No mysteries there? Okay. I really am against intelligent design. I get really irritated when people talk about intelligent design.

Because it's an attempt to throw out godless science without specifically embracing the literal sixth day of creation account in Genesis. It's like, we believe in a higher being who started something, but then they just stay vague. We want to teach that something besides evolution happened in the schools, but we can't say what. Because if we say what, then you're getting into specifics and you might exclude someone else. So it really lacks the decisiveness of biblical creation or some exacting theory. If you say, let's invite everybody in, then we've got to start teaching about all kinds of stories of how creation or the universe began. And so intelligent design is a bit too generic for me. I'm a little negative on it. Sorry, I expounded on more than just a definition there.

Microevolution. Has anybody heard of microevolution? Okay, microevolution is the concept of small adaptations for a species of animals that does not lead to new species, but a variation on a species of animals. Okay, for example, dogs have been bred by humans for various purposes. I don't know if you guys have ever been to the caves or seen the caves' dogs. They have Tila, which is a Leon burger. It's huge. And they've got Arrow, which is just this little tiny puppy dog, and they're dogs. but they're radically different, but they were bred by humans. It's not like you have dogs having baby cats.

So microevolution is the idea of variations within a type of animal, but not switching to new kinds of animals. Macroevolution, which is the next word on here, is large-scale evolution. That's going from tiny unicellular or monocellular, tiny organisms that slowly evolved into humans and plants dogs and cats and all the other things, okay? Now, when you hear people talk about evolution, most often they're referring to macroevolution. But when you're discussing evolution with other people, it's important that you clarify at times.

Because if you boldly and blatantly say, I don't believe in evolution, then they can point to variations within species as you go north and south of the equator, or various things like that, where, okay, yeah, there's slight changes in a butterfly. But the butterfly doesn't turn into a bird or a pterodactyl or something else. So the idea is to differentiate between the types of evolution because we can observe one type and we can't prove the other type based on various other things. And the last definition I've got here is the flying spaghetti monster theory, and we have some slides for this. Sorry. That's my own personal flying spaghetti monster, Abby.

This is actually a fake or faux theory that someone introduced by the name of Bobby Henderson, I guess that's the guy's name. He views faith as being, or faith-based origins, as being completely ignorant or stupid or dumb. So he and a group of people have offered up $250,000 to anyone who can disprove that Jesus or can prove, I should say, that Jesus is not the son of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Which is obviously mockery and ridiculous, but the idea is...

There's the famous Sistine Chapel painting, and somebody got creative with the Flying Spaghetti Monster there. Okay, so the idea... Wow, alrighty, that's enough of that. So anyways, you can You may come in contact now, since sometime last year, I think it was June or so last year, the flying spaghetti monster theory was introduced to mock Christianity and the intelligent design idea.

You may come in contact with that, not because somebody is actually a literal proponent of it, but mostly because they want to make fun of a theologically oriented answer. Alright, now before we jump into looking at the secular view, I wanted to talk about various Christian views. You'll notice on the header here I have various Christian views, and Christian is in quotes. You can actually find non-Christians that hold similar views than this. I'm going to approach this from a biblical perspective, from a Christian perspective and not something like a Muslim or someone else may have.

The first one I have on here is the Long Earth Approach. By the way, I know that some of you have been to the Rocky Mountain Creation Fellowship, is that right, RMCF? Meetings, and so some of this will be old news. Some of you have been doing this so much longer than I've been alive, so I hope to not cover too much material that you've already had, but I also understand that some of you may have been exposed to this.

Long Earth Approach, this is a theory that the Earth is billions of years old, but that billions of years took place between Genesis chapter 1 verse 1 and verse 5. So the Earth is as old as the scientists are saying it is, but they're trying to accommodate what the science supposedly says with the data and scripture. They do a little dance to make sure that everybody's happy. As long as everybody's okay, I'm okay.

So the pro is that they can compensate for the projected age issues between modern science and scripture, but the negative side of it is this theory requires many years to transpire before the first day of creation. So a day is what scripture uses to define a 24-hour time period. There was a day, there was a first day, God says, but before there was a first day there were billions of years.

Now, I don't understand how that fits logically. To me that seems a little stretchy of normal interpretation, but that's one approach that you might come in contact with. I have a friend in Texas who holds that view. I disagree, but that's okay. He's still a believer. I know he believes in Christ, but it's hard for me to embrace that because it requires some stretching of your interpretation. The next one here, this is one that, have you heard of Hugh Ross? I believe he's a proponent of this view. Anyone heard of Hugh Ross?

Lots of hands there, okay. This theory attempts to place millions or billions of years in the place of each day as recorded in Genesis chapter 1. This one is one that I've heard way more than the long earth approach. Okay? The idea is that you have, for each of the six days of creation, you have millions or billions of years. And so therefore, Genesis is being figurative. You know, 24 hours, there was day and night. Yeah, sorta, kinda. Okay? That's really problematic, because how many of you have read Genesis chapter 1? Hopefully all of you or most of you have. And do you remember the sequence of events, roughly, of how things happened? Okay.

That really doesn't fit in with the evolutionary timescale, because the way that the animals evolved according to the evolutionary timescale, assuming that what I was taught in school has not been modified, totally does not sync up with the sequence of Scripture. God creates things in an order that doesn't mesh up. It doesn't logically flow with the scientific sequence. So when you go allegorical and you try to twist these things to make a mesh, you end up having some synchronization issues that are pretty severe.

Those first two are figurative approaches. Now we're going to talk about the third approach, which is the literal approach. This is the view of Holly Hills. The six-day creation theory. Sometimes you hear it's seven days, but remember the seventh day God took a break. He decided to rest. So this is the literal interpretation of Genesis chapter 1. It says that God spoke in his authority as God and created the earth in six days in the sequence that scripture records.

The pros is that it interprets the scriptures literally. It says that days are a known 24-hour period of time, but the con, substantially, if you can call it that, is that it requires the believer to seriously question modern projections for the age of the universe. In fact, it's not just seriously questioning it, it's absolutely rejecting it. This may cause weird looks, your credibility to be questioned, or possibly getting accused of wearing a foil hat when you're at home. The idea is that as soon as you are holding a literal view of Genesis, you're saying something that's pretty substantially different, and that's that you're walking in faith of a book that is thousands of years old. And they're using modern science. So they're just not compatible right off. You get these two ideas. One has a source in scripture, and one has a source in stuff that we've discovered to date.

I think that one of the biggest problems with the allegorical interpretation is that it requires you to compromise, and you start saying, okay, well, I'm interpreting Genesis chapter 1 allegorically. The problem is, is that where do you know that you should interpret something allegorically? Does anybody remember, if you took a hermeneutics class, we had a hermeneutics Sunday school class a while back, Tom? Okay, I'm going to repeat that for the recording.

If plain sense makes sense, don't seek any other sense. The idea is that if when you're reading something there's no textual indicator that it's allegorical, okay, it was like. They were flying as. They were doing something. That tells you, oh, okay, we're getting something that is a description, it's a metaphor, but it's not a literal statement. Nothing starting in Genesis chapter 1 verse 1 says, we're getting allegorical now. It says, in the beginning God, and then it goes on. There's nothing allegorical about that, that in the text indicates that we should jump to some kind of variation on the text.

So, because you've now made that compromise, you get into other issues of how do you look at, as you're reading on, how do I know that Adam and Eve really fell? It says they fell, but I've just been interpreting allegorically leading right up to this. And, how do I know that Adam and Eve were really the first human beings? If God says they came out of the dust, but evolution says they came out of the proverbial primordial sludge, those things don't sync up, so then I have to continue to be allegorical, but then how do I account for the sin nature?

So there becomes As you interpret through these things allegorically, there become some serious issues dealing with, okay, my interpretation is inconsistent. When Jesus quotes in the New Testament, or Paul quotes in the New Testament, these first chapters in Genesis, literally, then I'm at odds with other parts of Scripture.

So my whole foundation becomes shaky at the very best. So it's important that you when you're dealing with other believers who are talking allegorically, that there's some understanding of, hey, when you get allegorical, you can have some really interesting side effects of that. Are there any questions about that before I jump on? I'll take silences now.

Now, there are various arguments against a scientific billions of years approach Some of them that had been used, that I grew up hearing or using, were problematic. And I want to discuss that because as you're discussing evolution with other people, you may be used to using various arguments and they're problematic, they're false, or they're not commonly held anymore.

And it's important that we as believers, when we make an argument against something, are using current and accurate information. The first example of this, or I guess I want to say first, science adapts to the known data set, okay? As science gathers more information, they have to take their theories and fit it to the new framework. They go, okay, well, we've got new data here, and what we thought was the case has changed. Remember, in the last couple weeks, my dad's been teaching about the scientific approach, and there were instances where, you know, okay, The people got the Nobel Prize for disproving what was currently held as a law. Science had stepped past just saying this is a theory and instituted a law and then later on somebody came and disproved the law. So science is required to keep expanding its data and then assimilating that data and synthesizing it into what is the theory or the view that's held.

It's important that as you make arguments you take that into account People are going to say, oh, that's been disproven or I disagree or whatever is going on there. You need to be aware of the scenario. Let's talk about two of those. Oh, yes. I think one of the points is there's a need to be aware of it but recognizing that the reason for the need is because you're talking about science where truth changes. Yeah, there's a need to recognize that truth changes in science and you need to be aware of it as you're discussing things. The first example of one of these arguments, and Hal mentioned this briefly when he gave his testimony, hopefully you were here. Actually, I found it really cool.

The moon has only 10,000 years roughly worth of dust instead of 44 feet that would be built up if the universe was older. Has anybody heard that argument or seen it or read it? The problem with this is that as soon as they discovered that the moon does not have 44 feet of dust on it, they adjusted their theory.

The scientists said, okay, obviously our assessment of things was incorrect. What was wrong with our formula? And they adjusted the formula, and then the argument disappeared from their side of things, because you say, oh, well, you're using an antiquated argument. You're using antiquated data. And they just set it aside. As the new information was gathered, they adjusted things, and the argument became void, so to speak. It was like, oh, well, that's not an issue anymore, and I don't know mathematical formulas.

It accumulates more slowly, or there was a catastrophic event that stirred the dust because the moon got whacked, or whatever took place. As the meteorites hit the moon's surface, the dust gets redistributed out into outer space, whatever takes place there. But the idea is that the argument is no longer a valid argument, given that science continues to expand its knowledge and adjust the theories.

Second one that's common is if the solar system was millions of years old, the Sun, which is shrinking at five feet an hour, would have engulfed the Earth only 20 million years ago. That's pretty radical. If the Sun keeps getting bigger and bigger, going backwards in time, because it's shrinking at five feet an hour, it would have engulfed the Earth.

Often what has been quoted is actually a report that was never published. The authors of it put all the work together, did a little bit more research, discovered their research was wrong, and pulled the report. But often, up to a certain point, there were Christian books that were quoting the unpublished report erroneously. Now, I want to make this clear. There's a URL or a link that I've got in the handout here, answering Genesis there. You'll probably want to check that out for your own reading. It's really useful.

The sun is shrinking, but it's shrinking at a different rate. So it's one of those things where if you're talking about various arguments, New data was discovered, new theories were put together, and it's just something you need to be aware of as you come in contact with these things. Basically, other arguments exist that bring into question the assumptions that are there. One of the things that's interesting more recently has been discovery that it appears that the speed of light is changing, which is kind of funny. Fortunately for us, our eyes don't have any issues with this.

But the idea is that the speed of light seems to be slowing down. I don't know what to do with that too much, other than it's quite possible to say that when God started the universe, light was really hollin' hiney. And so when God set things up, it was just really going, so the star's light hits the earth, and we got stars starting out. And then it starts slowing down. So when we look at our Estimations of age of the universe based on the speed of light.

All of those calculations have been recalculated and reformulated to compensate for this new theory, because obviously they still have more data to collect. So all of these things are adjusting. But it's an interesting thing to look at. Okay, we've got new information that leads to these things.

You know, one of the things when you try to extrapolate back billions of years, or millions of light years away, or any of those kinds of things, you know, we can't go back there and see, how did we do on our formula? Yeah. And we can't, you know, go out here to some galaxy far, far away. We can't go out there and, you know, take some pictures and say, hey, it works out. There's no way to check a lot of that stuff. So, we're extrapolating way into the unknown, and maybe unverified.

For those people listening via the recording, when we go back in time or out into outer space, we have to extrapolate because there's no way we can prove those things, which becomes problematic because it's impossible to absolutely prove empirically, based on our measuring and our testing, that these things take place.

Another thing to talk about briefly when we are talking about arguments that are useful is statistical probability. Everybody loves statistics. We all love statistics, especially polls and surveys. Like 59% of people think that 48% of statistics are useless, or various things like that. Statistical probability, or mathematical probability in this case, would be the chance that evolution or life were to be able to start from non-life. What are the chances that all the molecules and everything would come together?

It's such an astronomical number. you know, one in so many zeros, you just go, seriously? Somebody believes that? It's one of those things that is ridiculous, and I wish I had the number, but I thought of it this morning when I was driving to church, which meant I didn't have any time to look it up. But anyways, the number is astronomical. The chance of a tornado flying through an old airplane junkyard and reassembling a working airplane is actually higher than the chance of life coming from nothing. So you look at those statistics and you go, something about this doesn't line up.

One of the things I've always said to my friends who would take an evolutionary perspective where life came from nothing is, I said, would you be freaked out if you went into your cupboard and suddenly there was a chinchilla in your glass? Do you know what a chinchilla is? It's kind of a gray, furry, squirrely sort of a thing.

You'd freak out. Why? Because life doesn't just show up out of nowhere. If you go into a science lab and you completely sterilize a jar, put the lid on, know it's sterilized, put it in a container, you'd be weirded out if you came later on and there was life. You could look at bacteria and organisms in there. Hey, where did that come from? It was completely sterile.

That doesn't happen. Those things don't happen. Why? Because life doesn't come out of nowhere. We're still trying to figure out how to create life scientifically and they've done all kinds of experiments. It's almost kind of like Dr. Frankenstein, you know, just charge the bolts. We can't create life. It doesn't just happen. They're working on it. They're getting close apparently, but I don't know. I guess we'll have to wait and see if we can generate life.

So anyways, there are arguments against something from nothing or various other things. My dad talked about various arguments in the past about matter being going towards disorder rather than order, things like that. But I just want to say, you know, there are valid arguments, which we're not going to spend a lot of time on, and there are some invalid arguments. Make sure that the ones that you're aware of and use are useful. Okay, the next thing I really, or I'm sorry, the thing I want to point out here next is mutually exclusive frameworks.

Okay, we have two different groups, we'll say generically. That's overgeneralization if we really wanted to get analytical about it. But there's two groups. and they have the same set of data, and they both come up with answers that are consistent with their own frameworks and systems. So when a scientist gets more information, he adjusts his formulas and theories and he fits it in, and we have answers. The creationist gets more data, he looks at what does scripture say, he looks at the information that's there, and he is able to fit in the data. There are two mutually exclusive frameworks or systems it's important to realize that they're different systems.

Because often there's this idea that there's just this nice little walkway between them. Like, if I'm a Christian, I'll just find this atheist and we'll just spend enough time and I'm just going to walk him over to Jesus. We'll just logic him over into Jesus when the truth of the matter is that it takes, Scripture says it takes the Holy Spirit bringing them over into the body of Christ.

There's a big chasm there. Can anybody tell me what that chasm is? It's the next heading. Faith, okay? There's a big chasm there. Because they're walking in faith, and we're walking in faith. And let's discuss their walking in faith. If you're holding an atheist or agnostic view even, you're having faith in something. What are you having faith in? I'm sorry, what? And they're not being a God, but instead of God, what have you put in the place of God for your knowledge? Yourself or mankind's knowledge. This is where it gets really critical.

You're able to communicate to them that they're walking by faith, and they're going to say, No, I'm not! And then you can say, Okay, let's take you down the steps of helping you realize that you're walking in faith. I had a conversation with a friend in Texas. who was actually from Michigan, but we were both down in Texas for work, had a conversation with him, and at first he disagreed with Faith, and I was able to walk him through these simple two steps that I've got here. It was a Texas two-step. And he agreed with me. Sorry, I just came out of nowhere.

The first thing you might want to do when you're discussing this with people is ask... Let's assume that they've rejected the idea that they're walking by faith, because otherwise you don't need to go through this step. Ask the person if they believe in unicorns. Jessica used to have a really funny card that she got from a youth leader that said real men wear unicorn nightshirts or something like that. It showed a man wearing a nightshirt with a unicorn on it. It was really bizarre. I hope he doesn't believe in unicorns. So you can ask a person if they believe in unicorns.

They're going to say yes or no, because it's a binary question. They have to answer yes or no. Or they can try to be ambiguous, but we're not going to let them do that, okay? Whether yes or no, ask them to prove empirically. There's that word again. Ask them to prove via evidence by sight or sound or taste.

I don't know what a unicorn tastes like. Probably similar to a horse, maybe. I don't know. Empirically and universally. that a unicorn exists or does not exist. Can they do that? Can they say absolutely that a unicorn exists or not? I would say no, they can't prove that because they have not been all throughout the universe and seen all of the planets and all of the galaxies and been all over the earth even. We just had a bunch of species discovered like three weeks ago down in the Caribbean in the Bahamas. We don't even know the Earth. How can they say something absolute about the universe? They can't.

So how are they making statements? They're making statements by faith. The second question that you might ask beyond whether or not there are or are not unicorns is ask them to prove that there are or are not unicorns in the past, certainly, and if there are or will be unicorns in the future, or will or will not be unicorns in the future. Can you say yes or no? Well, the answer is no. They can't prove that empirically, absolutely, with any certainty. Why? Because they cannot be everywhere at all times.

God can. We are putting our faith in God's claim and ability to be in all places at all times. In fact, outside of the time-space continuum, in their card, or play the superiority card, where they go, oh, well, you're walking by faith, and I have reason. Reason starts in faith. You've got to start out at zero as a human being because you don't have all knowledge at all times. If you had all knowledge at all times, there would be no debate because we'd all have all knowledge at all times, but we don't. So we walk by faith.

You mentioned some weeks ago that math, that science used daily, is based on assumptions in which we have faith and are unable to verify. For those of you listening on the recording, math is based on assumptions. It's an internal system. It's a self-consistent system in mathematics, but we assume that it works and we walk in faith that mathematics are consistent.

My faith was really weak in mathematics in the ninth grade. I didn't do so well, but that's another story. So taking somebody through those set of questions allows us to help them come to the realization that they are walking by faith and I think that's pretty critical because that allows there to be an even playing field in the sense of a debate. If you start in the middle of the debate, let's say we start talking about some scientific observation and then, oh, well, you guys totally screwed up the calculation of dust on the moon or something like that, we've actually missed the real issue because at that point in time you've skipped the assessment that we're walking by faith. And if they don't believe that they're walking by faith, then you're going to talk past one another, back and forth. You're going to say, well, I have this argument, and I have this argument, and we go, pshew, pshew, pshew. And none of our shots hit, so to speak. They don't hit their target because we're talking past one another.

So it's important that you do that. The last thing I want to go over here, and we've got some time, so there should be some time for question and answers. is false or unsubstantiated arguments against creationism to watch out for. These are tactics that I have experienced in my own life and I've seen other people use to supposedly disassemble Christianity and dismiss it and then move on to whatever they were going to do next. The first one, and this one is probably more common in the lay world, the less than scientific world. These are the teenagers who are out chewing gum, listening to their iPods, and watching MTV or something, rather than some of the more intellectual ones. Davis, I'm sure you've experienced this more recently than I have, but I had friends who were like, yeah, whatever, everybody's just got an opinion.

Okay, this is an attempted scapegoat. It's a quick dismissal, but it invariably removes facts or experience from the equation. Well, we all have different experiences, we all have different thoughts, and we can't know what's true. Okay, that just totally dismisses the argument without actually addressing the argument.

If Jessica said to me, Randy, don't wear that this morning. Those shorts don't go with that tuxedo jacket. I'd say, well, everybody wears different clothes. You wouldn't do that. You'd go, Randy, they're going to laugh at you. And I'd say, well, I'd like them to laugh at me. But the truth of the matter is that there is a quick dismissal with a statement like that, but it doesn't address the issue. If somebody does that, Tell them you're going to wear funny clothes. Tell them you're going to do something goofy like that, and they're going to go, ha ha ha ha. Yeah, and say, okay, but it didn't deal with the issue. Never mind, I won't go there. My brain comes up with things that I shouldn't say.

The second one, and this one is a classic one. You can't prove God exists. That's like the flying spaghetti monster. A quarter of a million dollars if you can prove that Jesus was not the son of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It begs the question. It's a non... It's a non-issue. Now, unfortunately, the Flying Spaghetti Monster was in reaction to some Kent Coven.

Anybody heard of him before? He was supposed to be a Christian guy. He's in some serious issues with the IRS at present for having a false ministry. But, anyways, part of his false ministry was a creationistic view, but He offered a quarter of a million dollars to anyone who could prove without a shadow of a doubt that evolution took place, or that Big Bang theory of evolution was what took place.

And it was like, come on. It was a false argument that led to a false reward that nobody got, and the IRS probably wants it anyways. So when you use an argument like, you can't prove God exists, It begs the question. It's a circular type of a question, not if you use it, if someone else uses it. That's like, will you prove evolution happened?

Okay, we're here right now. Like we said, we can't go out into the universe infinitely at all times and all places. We're walking by faith given the knowledge that we have. So let's discuss the knowledge that we have instead of pulling out the big guns that actually missed the point or beg the question.

The third question Our statement here is, your view is unscientific and goes against volumes of information collected. This one's classic. This one is one of my favorites that people would ask me about. By saying, you're being unscientific and you're ignoring volumes of information and thousands of scientists out there in the world. First of all, this statement belays the fact that they're having faith in faith in what they know so far. The believer has access to the exact same data.

What did we talk about the frameworks a little bit earlier? There's two different frameworks, generically. The believer just takes the data and puts it in his framework that fits in a context of God creating it. And the non-believer, assuming they're taking an agnostic or atheistic position, is going to take the data and try to explain it naturally. And those systems are self-contained. We're not ignoring any data, we're simply interpreting it in a different fashion that fits in our framework.

The other thing, and this is probably an important and yet interesting side note here, has everybody read Dilbert before, the cartoon Dilbert? I find it amusing at times. Scott Adams is actually the author or creator of Dilbert, and he wrote a brief essay on his website about how intelligent design view versus the evolutionary view, neither side had credible arguments against the other one because they were both trying to shoot past one another.

They were setting up scarecrow arguments and then knocking down the scarecrow rather than dealing with the issue that we have faith here. So he's an atheist. He doesn't believe in Christianity, but he sure as heck was irritated. He said he went out to see if the scientists had all supported one another in such a way that they could prove more accurately that evolution had taken place. And he said they're all kind of pointing at one another and backing each other up, but not with substantial evidence to prove any of the views.

It was just like, well, this is our view, we hold it together, and I'll back you if you back me. That's like the televangelists on TBN having each other on each other's show to raise funds for each other's show. Okay, we all love each other and our money, but is it real? Scientists, you know, they back each other up, but is it real?

The question is still there and being begged simply because this is an issue of faith. That being said, that covers kind of the ground. I definitely approach this from more of a debate standpoint because when you're having a discussion with somebody intellectually, it's probably going to turn into a discussion of two views more than other conversations you might have.

That being said, are there any other questions? Things that I missed? Things you'd like to point out? Things I'm completely wrong on and should be stoned for heresy? No hands up for that one, that's good. Okay, Marilyn? Well, I talked about too that we're brief there, the speed of light changing basically invalidates many of the previous formulas. I'm sorry, for those of you listening on the recording, Marilyn asked, what are some valid arguments, and I talked about two.

The speed of light changing invalidates some of the formulas and mathematical conclusions that were drawn based on, was it astrophysics, I think they call that, or something, where we're looking at light. If light was moving at a constant speed, then our calculation is that for the star's light to reach the Earth, it would take so many light years. Well, if light's speed is changing, then suddenly we have to figure out if that curve in the speed of light change is constant, first of all, and if it's constant, you know, the curve in the speed change, what is the effect of that? Again, based on assumptions and faith that our projections of the speed of time's changing are consistent.

You know, is the Earth 10 million years old? 10 billion years old? 10,000 years old? 6,000 years old? 4,000 years old? These are all numbers that are thrown around at times, but they can't say, oh, based on astrophysics, we figured out that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, because that's how long it would take the light from that star to reach our planet.

Not if the speed of light is changing. If it fluctuates, then we're really kind of hosed, because we have no idea how fast or slow it's fluctuating, and because it's a recent discovery, we can't get old light back. So you have some issues there where all we can do is move forward. We can take the data we have now and move forward with it and hope that, you know, in a couple million years when we've collected enough data, we can give you some kind of numbers. Well, we've statistically calculated. You can't order three billion-year-old wipes from Amazon? No. I think they should carry that, though. That is totally on eBay. So that would be one of the arguments.

The other one I talked about briefly is statistical probability. I think that's probably one of the biggest arguments that's kind of pro-faith oriented, at least. It's simply to say, listen, you know, statistically, you're asking me to have faith in man's guess as to how this happened, which is so unprobable, versus my faith in God, who has set up the universe according to scripture in this way, and I've got a God who's all-powerful, who I can go to, or I can go be by myself and hope that Somebody else is really good at math and scientific empirical evidence evaluation. Otherwise, we're just sitting talking about a bunch of theories in faith. What am I going to put my faith in?

Exactly, and that goes along the line of statistical probability. What are the chances that from zero we could get to a complex human body? One of the arguments that I've heard, and of course Evolutionists try to take an answer that's based on their framework, so it becomes problematic. It's your framework versus my framework. They're self-contained.

The eyeball. How many times did the eyeball have to evolve? Specifically, it's known that our eyeballs... I went to the eye doctor a couple of weeks ago. They put stuff in my eyes to make it not work. We want to see if it doesn't work when we put this in there. Whose idea was that? But anyways, I went to the eye doctor.

Your brain is actually synthesizing much of what you see. Your eye has actually got a lot of holes in what it receives, and your brain synthesizes to fill in those holes. The evolution of that seems just amazing to me, how that is even probable. My eye is so good that it is able to memorize the parts that it can see, and the parts that it has holes in, it's automatically synthesizing and placing in so that my brain, the field of vision, puts together a picture of you sitting in the pews right now as you are.

And I'm not imagining you in your underwear. Sorry, I don't know if that's appropriate in church, but it's one of those public speaking jokes. Anyways, Art, what did you have to say? We've heard so much in recent years of the phenomena of virus Okay. Art's question is, how long does it take these viruses to form? They keep evolving and changing, but I'm glad the viruses aren't turning into other things. They're staying as viruses, fortunately, which is good. It'd be really bad if all the viruses suddenly turned into three-year-olds.

Having one at home, that would be disastrous. Much worse than diseases and stuff like that, man. We'd be like, oh! Anyways, if my daughter ever listens to this recording, I love you. That was just a joke. Anything else? Any other comments or thoughts? I think we're getting close to being out of time here. All right. Well, I'm going to take that as a no, too.

Let's go ahead and let's go before the Lord and then if there's other questions we can do those. Heavenly Father, thank you for this time we've had together. Thank you that while we do walk in faith, we have faith in a God who's true and all-powerful and a God who can do something rather than our limited knowledge and our limited experience and our limited ability to even perceive things and know things. Lord, we ask that you would just allow us to be a light to the world as we go out and come in contact with non-believers. We pray for divine appointments, Lord, that you would bring us together with people who need to know you and need to know your truth. We praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.