Defense of the Faith - Creation & Evolution - Biological

As I mentioned, the creation and evolution question, we'll be looking at biological aspects of things this week and then physical aspects of things next week. Things like comets and the sun and things of that sort. Some of the things for us to take a look at, of course the Bible in Genesis chapter 1, It says, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. It describes creation in six days. In Exodus, for in six days God created the heavens and the earth. On the seventh day God rested, not because He was tired, but because He ceased from His creation work.

Genesis 1.31, God saw all that He made, and behold, it was very good. There was evening and morning the sixth day. That was the end.

There is in Colossians, and you have this in the first slide here, Colossians 2.8, see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to traditions of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. The word captive is a word that means to be captured by pirates or thugs. So it's an intense word.

Colossians 4, 5, and 6, bless you, talks about knowing how to respond. So Colossians 4, 5, and 6, conduct yourselves with wisdom towards outsiders, making the most of the opportunity. Let your speech always be with grace, as though seasoned with salt, so that you will know how you should respond to each person.

Okay. When we come to this question of Evolution it's presented in pretty much by mandate. It's presented in public schools, you know Typical university classrooms, etc Evolution is simply the fact and one of the things we've been talking about Of late is that people make their assumptions scientists make their assumptions and in reality The assumptions are made and then we do our investigation. But evolution is assumed at the outset, not proven by the facts. We've also made the point that the optimal realm of science is dealing with things in the present where it is repeatable and we can have access to the inputs and the outputs. That's the optimal realm of science. That's what your cars are based on. That's what your cell phones and watches and your microwave and all those things are based on is repeatable, present science. That's where science is best. If I find a fossil of some animal that lived in the past.

What am I observing? Am I observing the past? I'm observing in the present and I can never go back to the past to check it out, right? Never go back to the past to check it out. So let's back up a little bit here. So is the skeptic Secretly a believer. We have this as a slide up at the top here. Does the skeptic believe in things for which there's no evidence and even believe in miracles without a God? And I'm going to say the answer to that is yes. Believes in miracles without a God. Can the skeptic go back in time to verify any dates, processes, or events from millions of years ago?

Not ever. No one, not ever. No one can go back and verify it. So, let's take a look here. Here is the optimal realm of science where we're dealing with things that are present, things that are repeatable, and we can check it out. Let's take it for instance. Suppose I came to you and I said, you know, water freezes at 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Would you just believe it? No, hopefully you wouldn't. But you could check me out on it, couldn't you? As a matter of fact, everybody in the room, take a thermometer, put it in water, stick it in the freezer, and kind of check it once in a while and see the temperature, and you'd say, Vern, no, all of you would say, Vern, no, it does not freeze at 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

Because it's presently observable, it's repeatable, other people can check it. That's the nature of the optimum realm of science, where you can repeat things, you can have other people check it, and you can verify things again and again and again. So now, we go into the past. Into the past, we have the advantage of there can be human records, sometimes multiple human records of the same event.

We do have a disadvantage, however, And that's, again, we can't go back in time and check and verify things. So can we go back and ask the signers of the Declaration of Independence any questions? Can we ask them any questions? Can't do that, right? We can look in the present at the record of past events, but we can't go back in time and ask them questions and verify and watch the guys sign it, right? Can't do that. We can't go back in time.

So there is, in that respect, a less than optimal realm of study. It doesn't mean it's invalid, it's just not optimum. And then finally, we can presently observe evidence in the past where there is no historical record. This is what fossils are, this is what the rock layers are. In the past, we can never go back in the past to verify them, we can only observe things in the present. Does anything in nature come with a date stamp? You know, here's this fossil, and we're celebrating his birthday, right? And his birthday is 500 million years ago, for example. There's no date stamp on it, right?

So what are we doing? We're observing things in the present, and when we go back in time, we make assumptions and extrapolate, but those assumptions can never be verified. Never be verified scientifically. It is far less than optimal. That's not optimum science. Optimum science is we can repeat it. Other people can check it out. and you can do it again and again. That's the optimal realm. Here, for example, is trilobite. I've dug these up. They're quite common in western Utah, in the Wheeler Formation there. They're supposedly dating from about 500 million years ago. And you can find lots of them.

None of them come with a date stamp. So the 500 million years has arrived at by assumptions that can never be verified. So, we're going to allow for the moment, however, that we're not going to argue, for now, over any billions of years or millions of years. We're just going to assume, for the sake of investigation here, that that's not a subject we're going to argue about at the moment. We're going to assume that they've got something valid there. Assuming those ages of time, let's look at what's supposedly known about ancient life on this planet, right?

So we'll only look at a sampling because obviously we're gonna get things done here by about 10 o'clock But I think you'll see it's actually good enough to get a lot of good information one of the things is the origin of life the beginning of life the first living cell is something that can never be observed, right? We can't go back in time and see how life originated.

We can never do that. Even with master's degree, that's what the MS is, Master of Science, and PhD, a doctorate, degree scientists with multi-million dollar laboratories, nobody has ever observed non-living matter turning into a living cell. It's never happened. Even with the most ideal circumstances, that's never happened.

In 1953, the Miller-Urey experiment produced over 20 different amino acids by having this little contraption. It's been reproduced a number of different times. Are amino acids life? No. Amino acids are far from life. That was back when I was about that old, right? And so they've been doing this experiment and doing this experiment and they come up with amino acids and they can do it again and again.

It still doesn't create life. The skeptic believes that life evolved from a single-celled organism that came about by chance alone. without any scientists or multi-million dollar laboratories, and without any, as in none, scientific evidence that this can take place. So, in order to demonstrate that life could come, could have come from non-living material, it would not be sufficient to produce a living cell.

Why? Because the cell that was produced from non-living material would also have to be sustainable. It would have to be not just a cell that came together and then fell apart again. So it would have to be sustainable and it would have to be reproducible. But not even a living cell has been generated. Much less one that's sustainable and reproducible. Is reproduction simple? Is reproduction simple?

The answer is no. The more we study it, the more complex it becomes. Even if you did achieve it in the laboratory, would that mean that that's how it happened in nature? No, it would not. So even if you proved it was feasible, it still would not be proof that that's how it happened.

One of the other things, and this gets us to page two, one of the other things that happens in the fossil record, and by the way, my background is I was originally majoring in geology and I got to a lot of this stuff and I just couldn't believe it, so I switched to civil engineering.

But some of the early fossils are during what's called the Cambrian period. different dates, but approximately 600 million years ago. All of a sudden you have what's called the Cambrian Explosion. A huge number of complex life forms suddenly showing up. Now, the first multicellular life forms that show up in the fossil record revealed a wide variety of complex creatures, representing every phyla that existed then and now.

Chi Chi, on your last page, this taxonomy, because I was talking with Nancy about this, and she says, I have no idea what you're talking about with phylons, genus and species and order and all that. And so what you have here on the last part is the kingdom. And that's animal or plant. That's all it is. Is it an animal or a plant? And then you go kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. The species is down to the specific individual kind.

I'll call it that. And you can use the little word play here, word combination, to help memorize it. Kings play chess on fine-grained sand. You know, that's kind of weird, but that's what it takes, so you can remember something like that to remember the order of these different names. So anyway, if that's helpful, you can use that. So, because we'll be occasionally referring to genus and species and things of that sort. So, what would happen then is we look at, all of a sudden we have things that are created, they're complex. And let me give you a for instance.

I talked about the trilobites. Trilobites have compound eyes, that is a whole bunch of different lenses focusing in different directions that show up instantly in the fossil record. Here is a close-up of one of the compound eyes on a trilobite. Very, very complex. Compound eyes, and it has to have a brain that interprets that. I wouldn't want to have that many eyes, right? So this is a very complex compound eye. It has a pair of these compound eyes where they're looking in all these different directions. And they have the neural capacity, the nerve capacity, to bring that together, and the brain to interpret that. Very complex.

How does that suddenly just show up? It doesn't by chance. It doesn't by chance. So the evolution of these creatures without any fossil evidence, because trilobites just show up in the record, without any fossil evidence is faith in miracles without a god. Compound eyes that just show up. Instantly.

Here is a drawing showing all the different complex creatures in one view that just suddenly showed up without any fossil record showing a transition. Fossils are the only historical evidence that evolution, if it occurred, actually happened. Anything else is all by assumptions. But are fossils a perfect historical evidence? Are they a perfect historical evidence? Okay, why are they not a perfect historical evidence? They're the only historical evidence, but why are they not perfect?

Yeah, one is the transitional forms as we'll see are frequently missing. Okay, that's one. The other is we can only observe them in the present, and what we usually have is bones or exoskeleton tissue, typically a minimal amount. We can't tell, for example, is this actually related to that? We can't tell. We can look at similar forms, but that's all we've got.

Okay, here's another picture of the Cambrian Explosion. Suddenly, complex life forms showing up in the fossil record. So here are some of the better Cambrian fossil sites. The Wheeler Formation in Utah, I've been there, dug up those fossils. Burgess Shale in Canada, Shengxiang Shale in China, and the Marble Canyon in Canada in the last couple of years. That was the most recent discovery. Those are some places and some very good preservation.

In some cases, 500 million year old fossil materials still soft. I figured that one out. Yes. Yes. Yeah, they're water creatures and they go along in this kind of motion. And they've got eyes on top, so they'd sit on the bottom and have eyes on top and see what's going on. Now, the transition from water, where life is assumed to have originated, onto land. I'm going to... Skip ahead here.

Here's the coelacanth. That's how that's pronounced. Fossil coelacanths have been found dating from 400 million to about 70 million years ago. From 70 million years ago until the present, we have no fossil coelacanths. Therefore, it was assumed in decades past that they had gone extinct. But in here, the worldwide location spread throughout the world even up in the middle of Greenland, these fossil coelacanths have been found. Since 1938, when they said, surprise, here's a living coelacanth, why don't we have fossils for the last 70 million years of these creatures?

A good question. They've been caught or seen underwater at depths of 450 to 600 feet. Now, that's significant because It used to be thought that a coelacanth, having thick, it's called lobe-finned, thick fins, you would have some ability for them to be able to walk on land, right? Problem, they're not a good transitional form because they don't live in the shallows. They live 450 to 600 feet down, okay?

They're not a good transitional form. So the coelacanths have been set aside given that discovery. So here's a fossil coelacanth. It's not a good candidate. So people have been looking since then for another good candidate. And in 2006, they thought they found one. Here is the picture of the supposed transition. What you have is this portion of it in your handout.

And this Tiktaalik is the name of the creature. And as a matter of fact, they got so excited about it that one of the paleontologists wrote a song about the Tiktaalik. I mean, he just was really enthralled with this as a nice transitional form between water and land. Richard Dawkins and the greatest show on Earth, The Evidence Revolution, released about September 2009. wrote, this is just a perfect transitional fossil. And we've got it, we've found it, it's been the last few years, we've found this great transitional fossil.

So here's the quote. Problem. It was less than six months later, January 2010, after he published that, that they found footprints of some kind of land going creature from 18 million years earlier. Even if that's the case, just this week there was a human jaw fossil that was found that dated mankind to 200 million years earlier than previously thought. When you've got a moving target like that, actually putting this into some structured form, that makes logical sense becomes nearly impossible with the constant changing structure of the narrative. Well, and that's a problem multiple times over, that we find some earlier fossil, an earlier fossil, and they have to erase the books.

The professor of physical anthropology at the college that I went to Mr. Cave, by the way. He was a caveman. Anyway, he was a professor of physical anthropology and the skulls that he lined up for human evolution are radically different from what is being considered the lineup for human evolution now. So you're right, there's a problem with it constantly moving because subsequent discoveries are being made.

These footprints were found in Poland, reported in Nature, January 2010. 18 million years older than the Tiktaalik fossil, and even with this negating it, January of last year, National Geographic goes and puts in this big article about how Tiktaalik is a transitional form, even though it's been, you know, disproven.

Now, rodent to bat evolution, and I'm not even talking rodents of unusual size, okay? All right. In the past, we presented the supposed evolution of rodents to bats and talked about that. Now, think about it. Where does a rodent live? And we're talking about like a mouse or... Where does it live? It lives on the ground, okay? Lives on the ground. And how does it get around? On its feet, okay? So a bat, of course, there's a variety of different bats, how do bats get around? They fly and they're not on the ground, they're on the ceiling, right?

Or hanging from a tree or something of that sort. Furthermore, with all the different, there's about 1,250 species of bats, 1,050 of those 1,250 use some kind of echolocation, okay? Rodents don't do that, right? Rodents don't do that. And here's what's really amazing. The genetic structure of a bat, the portion of the genetics that defines its echolocation ability, is nearly identical to that in whales. In whales. Echolocation in whales. The genetic structure between bats and whales is amazingly similar.

Are they related? Are they evolved from a common ancestor? Somewhere back there, they would say, right? So, really extraordinary. Evolution from rodents to bats would mean that the bodies and brains of bats evolved to allow multiple new capacities. No fossils support this. No fossils support this. Belief in evolution of these creatures without any fossil evidence is faith in miracles without a god. To have a rodent that crawls on the ground transition into a bat that flies, and we're going to go over some of the techniques that that bat uses. Do they use DNA to prove anything? Or do they try to use DNA? Yes, they will. that I had the same DNA minus one thing, I'm the same as a gorilla. I didn't. Let's address that. I've heard that too.

And what they do, that's, they will tell you something like, well, you've got, you know, almost entirely, you know, identical, yeah, DNA and they'll drop it by a few percent. What they do in order to arrive at that statistic is they pick the areas they want to compare. It's not a straight across comparison. The actual similar DNA that you have compared to a chimpanzee or a gorilla, the actual similar DNA is more like about 60% similar and otherwise different.

Another problem is chromosomes. What happens when a human being has the wrong number of chromosomes? Is that a benefit? Is that no biggie? It's a problem. when a human being has the wrong number of chromosomes. The most common chromosome count problem for humans is Down syndrome. And what is that? One extra. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, so 46. The primates have 24.

So that's one huge difference right there. But when they come up with that statistic that you're just really genetically very similar to a chimp or an ape, what they do is they pick the segments that they're comparing. And the thing is, you'll have different animals, and that's something that we really haven't brought up in here, but chromosome count. We're going to take a look at, like for the rodents and the bats, different chromosome count.

Not the same at all. Here's a flying fox. Notice one of the megabats weighs in at about as much as three and a half pounds. A wingspan about the same as my arm span. And then you have little tiny bats, about two and a half grams, and this is a bumblebee bat. Two grams, so a penny is about two and a half grams. So that's kind of amazing.

Now, fossil evidence in the origin of bats. The phylogenetic and geographic origins of bats, Chiroptera, is the technical name for the order, remain unknown. The fossils showing the transition from rodents to bats are not there. Yes? One of the things that I've observed over the years is that there's this idea that we have an agenda to get from rodent to bat.

And so because you have that agenda, you then create a narrative. And then because you have a narrative, then you're able to fill in the plot line. It's fiction writing for all intents and purposes, but what is a literal evolutionary need for that transition where biologically the mouse really needs to spend more time in the air? develops micro-wings that have no functional purpose. What's the narrative?

Think about this. Suppose you got a mouse that has bat instincts and even maybe has echolocation, but he doesn't have wings yet. Is that survivable? It's going to be a problem. It's going to be a problem. You have to have everything together or it's not survivable. The flying ability, the echolocation, the instinct, it all has to go together.

Here's Nature, February 14, 2008. These same authors, the same ones as above, find a fossil bat, supposedly 52.5 million years old, 2 million years older than a previous find, and that oldest bat looks like a bat. And you have a copy of it there in your handout. That's the oldest one found at Green River Formation in Wyoming, 2008.

Near New Braunfels, Texas, which is where Ralph Volker was in the Air Force, it's home to the world's largest colony of bats, estimated to have 20 to 40 million bats at that one cave. When the bats leave and enter the cave, they all, millions of them at once, make echolocation sounds. And you know, with all of them making that echolocation sound, to them it would be like a din, just incredible. They can tell their own echolocation sound from all the rest. They can tell their own from all the rest.

Now, let's go through the typical way, and this is on your handout in the middle of page 3, the typical way that a bat goes about finding its prey. About a second before the bat is going to eat, say a moth, it's going to catch, about a second before, it's been putting out these echolocation sounds at about 50 milliseconds. 50 thousandths of a second, repeatedly putting out that sound, and it can tell the difference between its sound and all the rest of the millions of bats around it. It can filter out and tell its own sound, bouncing back from the moth, starting about a second before it's going to eat it. It continues with those echolocation sounds, and it begins, as soon as it senses it, to change its course.

It's continuing to make those echolocation sounds, then it's tracking and zeroing in on the moth. And by the way, what's the moth doing in the middle of this time? Is the moth just sitting there? No, moths have developed this gyrating motion to try to get away from the bats, right?

So here's the moth doing this gyrating, but the bats got it all calculated. with the gyration motion, and then finally, it intensifies its rate when it gets very close, intensifies the rate at which it's putting out the echolocation sounds, and zooms in and grabs the moth, eats it, and then begins tracking for the next one. Now, that is amazing, and especially in view of all the other bats around it are making similar echolocation sounds, and it can tell its own. Okay.

So Richard Dawkins, I've got dozens of his books, Richard Dawkins writes about bats a number of times in his books, and one of them is The Greatest Show on Earth, that's his supposed best evidence for evolution. The Blind Watchmaker is another one that he writes about bats.

What he does not tell anyone at any time in any of his books is that there are no fossils to support the evolution of bats. He'll talk about the evolution. He'll talk about bats and all the details about how they echolocate. He will not tell you that there are no fossils to support the evolution from rodents to bats. I've never seen it, I'd look for it. He never brings it up. Turtles. Lack of clear transitional fossils for turtles. So the debate is out there, how did turtles evolve? Of course they evolved, right? But how did they evolve? Well, there's no transitional fossils, so who knows? How about snake fossils? I've learned not to put pictures of snakes up here.

So anyway, just recently, University of Alberta, okay, this was announced just about a month and a half ago. University of Alberta discovered a snake fossil that they dated about 65 million years earlier than what had previously been the earliest snake fossil. So it's kind of Randy's point, you know, now we've got this leap back in time. as well as a gap where we have no snake fossils for tens of millions of years. But suddenly we've got this oldest snake, and you know what the snake looks like? A snake. Okay, so it doesn't illuminate snake evolution at all.

Of course, you may not care. Page 174, and I have this also on a subsequent sheet. This is on looking at page 4. on your handout. Page 174, the greatest show on earth, atheist scientist Richard Dawkins writes, as the giraffe's neck slowly lengthened over evolutionary time. Okay, so that's what he looked at is an okapi evolving into a giraffe. By the way, okapis and giraffes have different number of chromosomes too. I didn't bring that up. There are no clear and undisputed fossils to support this supposed lengthening over evolutionary time. And Richard Dawkins never tells his readers that.

So he's talking about something that's just a fiction. He's made it up. He's telling them as if it's scientific fact. There is no fossil evidence to support it. He also does something else. I'll let you decide whether it's deceptive. He shows a picture of a giraffe and he shows a picture of an okapi. You have that on the top of the page on page four. Problem. You see that?

He says the okapi evolved into a giraffe. He changed the scale on the okapi. That's the size of an okapi compared to a giraffe. I'll let you decide whether that's deceptive. Also, he neglected to mention that there are no clear undisputed transitional fossils between the Okapi-like predecessor and the giraffe. There is nothing in the way of fossil evidence to support it. Zero. Nada. Nothing at all.

And they've got radically different chromosome count. We have one species of giraffe, right? That's it. Hello. And what you can see in the present is the okapi and the giraffe have a different number of chromosomes. Yeah, okapi has the same number of chromosomes we do. The giraffe has, you know, that's 46. The giraffe has like 64. You know, different number. And like I say, a different chromosome count just by itself is a problem.

Yes? Well, the other element, the giraffe, by virtue of the length of its neck, has a blood pressure issue when it dips down into the water. Yeah. That has a sponge in the front of its head that actually starts to absorb the blood once it reaches a certain angle of its neck. Yeah.

The giraffe and the okapi too, by the way, both have a system to control blood pressure because otherwise the giraffe, when it leaned down, would have brain hemorrhage because of the blood pressure from its shoulders all the way down to its head when it leaned down to get water. Brain hemorrhage. And then when it put its head up, it would faint. because of lack of blood supply. And so it has particular construction in its circulatory system in order to be able to maintain the same blood pressure with having its head down and having its head up. It basically is not survivable without that particular feature to its circulatory system. Now here we have 338 species of hummingbirds. That study was done by the University of California at Berkeley and reported about April of last year.

So they are thought to have evolved from pterosaurs. That's the flying dinosaur. Pterosaurs go from about 10 inches to about 30 feet wingspan. So the smaller pterosaurs are thought to be the predecessors to the hummingbirds. Hummingbirds, however, are radically different creatures. They can fly forwards, backwards, upside down, do a barrel roll, and hover in space. Pterosaurs don't do that. The smallest hummingbird is the bee hummingbird. Again, we compare a penny at two and a half grams. This is 1.6 to 1.9 grams for the bee hummingbird. Bee hummingbird typical rate of flapping its wings about 80 times a second.

It just looks like a blur. to us, they have to, because of their high metabolic rate, they have to eat from about 1,500 flours a day. But at night time, they have to shut down their system and their heart beats about once every 30 seconds. and their body cools down they get their metabolic rate way low because otherwise if they didn't lower their metabolic rate at night they would starve to death before morning so they have to lower it and with that combination you have to have everything in place or it's not survivable the ability to shut down at night is not something that where the name of the pterosaurs had.

The ability to go forward, backwards, upside down, and do a barrel roll is not something that the pterosaurs did. So you have to have all these, this new combination of behaviors and metabolic rate and the ability to shut down at night and all of that together, it's not survivable. Yes? This is a random question, so you may not have an answer on it.

Do we have an understanding of their glycemic and hormonal Because at least from a human perspective, we have a hormonal cycle that's part of our sugar intake. And they live off sugar. That adapts and hormonally their bodies can function. They live off sugar.

Hummingbirds have about 25% of their diet is random insect. you know, catching nerds. They'll be going, this flower to that one to that one, they'll catch an insect and bang, they'll eat that and then move on in order to get some protein. Because all that the sugar provides, you know, is just energy. So in order to have something to construct and reconstruct their system, about 25% of their diet is looked at as, you know, random insect catches. So there are no clear, undisputable fossils to support the idea that hummingbirds evolved from pterosaurs, but that's the theory. Now, let's talk about human evolution, which of course, you know how that's gone.

Here's an example of a living person who has more ape-like characteristics. Note the sloped forehead. This guy, by the way, is a Christian. Russian boxer, Nikolai Valuev. Sloped forehead, heavy brow ridges. It is within modern human genetic and environmental and dietary and medical capacity to have radically different structure than we do. But this guy has a wife and kids. Lives in the modern world and has made his living as a professional boxer Now there's another word.

It's new since I think less than less than 10 years ago Denise Evans, okay, so that's how you pronounce that I like Denise Evans right Denise Evans and As a one-time presented that Neanderthals were another species related to humans that became extinct Neander, it's actually Neanderthal and it's from the Neander Valley in Germany and back in the 1800s they first discovered those and more of those have been discovered.

Denisovans, on the other hand, discovered just less than a decade ago and there were various theories about, you know, are they related to us and how are they related and that sort of thing and they were thought to be a different species. Well, So here's a couple of reconstructions. But with the discovery of Denisovans in 2008, there was a question as to how they were related to modern human beings.

And so guess what? They've found some DNA from a Neanderthal and DNA from Denisovan. And it turns out they're us, okay? They're people. DNA testing in recent years, both of them interbred with humans. And modern humans, in particular parts of the world, have as much as 2 or 3% Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA. Now, those DNA links for the Denisovans were dated at 40,000 years ago. Again, we're not arguing the time scale now. The connection with the Neanderthals is about 80,000 years ago.

Now, something else. Again, this is part of the appendix. We won't get to it. But in the appendix, page 6, we have an article, Cavemen in the Bible, which you might find interesting. I think it explains a few things. And you actually have some examples in the book of Genesis of people using caves as a place to live. That was Lot and his daughters. Or caves as a place to bury the dead. And that was Abraham when he bought the cave of Machpelah.

So the big picture on supposed human and primate ancestor fossils Here's one of the key things to remember about all time past 99% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct Okay, so in the past there was a great deal more variety than what we have now It's possible just by taking those to look at something that appears like evolution It appears like evolution, but it's not really. The fossils that have been found follow two patterns. There are quite a number of past variations in what was just human. And we can find modern human beings that have characteristics that say, well, that's more primitive.

Andre the Giant, if you remember the Princess Bride, right? He was the Giant and the Princess Bride, and he died about 22 years ago. But nonetheless, more of a primate-looking fellow, but he was a full human being. And then there were also quite a few variations in what were primates.

There are a great number of extinct primates. in the past, and so people are trying to show evolution, try to line those various extinct primates up to show some kind of evolution. The reality is, you've got human beings with lots of capacity for variation, and you've got a whole bunch of different kinds of primates, many of which are extinct now, and you can try to line those up.

But the idea that you go from some primate into a human being has not been demonstrated. Not been demonstrated. So you can line them up like that, but the reality is there are human beings and there are primates and there's no evidence that they're related. And again, you've got the chromosome problem, which you can't go back with fossils very easily and always check. Okay, here's an example.

Lucy, discovered 40 years ago in Ethiopia. Donald Johanson was the fellow who found it. So this is what they found. So they put it together, and what you see in white is assumption, right? Take the various parts, put them together, and what you see in white is assumption. And so then, they'll even take that further and put flesh and skin on it.

But realize, what you really found was this. So then, how can you tell that was related to something else that looks similar? Well, the truth is, you can't. There's not enough evidence to work with. So lots of assumption gets built into putting something like this together. And that's fairly typical of the finds that we come across.

Okay, another phrase that will show up repeatedly is more complex than previously thought. It shows up again and again and again. I did an internet search just a couple days ago and came up with 89,400 hits to the phrase more complex than previously thought. And one of them, here just this last week, bird migration much more complex than previously thought, new study reveals.

And so what happens is things are studied. We find more and more and more complexity, greater and greater complexity. And so you look at it about the time I was that age. DNA was that was the announcement of DNA. Well, the more we look at it, the more complex it is. Ever heard the term junk DNA? What we're finding out is there isn't any junk DNA, right? That it's all useful. If we call it junk DNA, it means we just haven't figured out what it does yet or how it works, right?

So what we're finding out as we study is more and more complexity all the time. The ongoing discovery of greater and greater complexity would seem to make it harder and harder to believe in a chance development of all this biological complexity. Now, so skepticism requires that one has faith many times over, often where there is no evidence to support it. Do you believe that bats evolved from rodents?

Good, that's faith, because there's no evidence for it. That's faith. So it's not a matter of science versus faith, but one of faith with no God versus faith in God. And the skeptic believes in multiple miracles without a God and without revelation or evidence, but the Christian believes in multiple miracles by God as revealed by him in his written word. But they're both faith. Some people just like their miracles without a God.

That's all. Alright, we've run out of time. Thoughts? Questions? Ponderings? Is there more than this, sir? It should have six pages in the handout. Oh, this is from... When we have Lord's Table, which is over there, then our table gets used for that. Yep. No, no, I wouldn't match up. That's from a previous week. So, other thoughts, questions? Yeah, Stan?

So it's kind of interesting you're saying that it's more complex than what it appears because NASA tries to keep things simple so that we can understand it with our brain and compare it to the complexities that we wouldn't understand. So the situation of what people call global warming today, they try to simplify that by saying You know, it's all caused by CO2 or man or whatever. It's like everything else. There's a lot of complexity to it, like the sun and the solar system and all these other events that are, you know, end times as well. They moved over to global cooling. Yeah.

Well, and so next week we'll be taking a look at physical things. things having to do, for example, with comets and asteroids and the sun, and what's the history of the sun, and looking at Mercury and Venus and Earth and the Moon and looking at those kinds of things. So we're going to change our scale and shift over from the biological things into the physical things, because here with the biology, we didn't debate ages or time frames or anything of the sort. When we get into the astronomical and physical realm, we've got some challenges to that age, and so we'll want to take a look at that. I was asked fairly recently, how come things look old? I said, actually, they don't. It's assumed that things are old and then the various calculations are made, but we'll go over several different things where old doesn't work Okay, old doesn't work. All right.

Let's yeah Species that ever lived are now extinct Yes quite a few but there were there were a great many more and in round numbers, about a hundred times more. I'd have to recheck that. I think it's like a million species or something. There used to be about a hundred times more species than are present currently.

Yeah, and I think with Adam, one of the things you've got to look at is he really only dealt with land animals. That's part one. And part two is the Bible does not say that all the species are fixed and are from the beginning. So there is a capacity for micro evolution, small scale evolution. that the Bible would allow for. Let's put it that way.

Yes. of the species genus family just in like a dog and sort of genus would be a what? Well, that's what Canis Major. So you have a human being, which is the example I give, is Homo sapiens, and we're the only living species within that genus. So Homo sapiens is the genus? Homo is the genus, and sapiens would be the species name. And the way it's done is that the genus name is capitalized and the species name is not. So what would the family be? Let's see. Yeah, and of course, then what you're talking about is there are family names. However, It isn't necessarily a given that they're necessarily related, per se, but we have categories for the family names, too.

Okay, we've run out of time. Lord, we thank you, just as we look at things here, that there is a good basis for us to believe you when you say that you created the world as described in Scripture. and that it is a reasonable faith and we can have confidence in what you've written and what you've done. And we thank you for that. And we just thank you for this time together. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.