353: John Bilello - Darwin or God? (Psa. 19)

Automatically transcribed. Accuracy is good but not perfect, and words are sometimes wrong. Trust the audio over the text.

1. 0:03

   Welcome to good Chris selfie and talks. I’m Levi. I’m Chris. I’m Jason. And I’m Brian, thank you for joining us this week on this podcast. We select one talk a week to help us get the Bible in our Daily News feed. Each week we post a talk that we previewed from suggestions sent in by listeners from around the world. Then we record a short intro beforehand as a personalized recommendation to you on why we are sharing the talk. And now let’s talk more about this week’s talk. Hey everyone, this is Jason Hensley. This week we are going to be listening to a talk by Brother John Bolello.

2. 0:48

   I believe it was given at the LA Ecclesia and I’m not totally sure the date. However, when you listen to the talk, you’ll notice that there’s a few things that he says that makes it sound like we’re looking at probably the late 90s. Now you might be wondering, why are we listening to a talk about science from the late 90s?

3. 1:08

   You know, that’s almost 30 years ago, so surely the science is outdated. And I would agree with the sentiment that there are some things that are outdated here. So when you listen to this, you have to listen with a discerning mind. But at the same time, I think a number of the things that Brother John brings out are still really helpful to consider.

4. 1:30

   He talks about his colleagues at the University of Michigan and how a number of his colleagues believe in God. And he makes a really helpful distinction, I think, between the direction that science goes in the belief in God and the direction that liberal arts tend to go in the belief in God. And I found that in my own work that it really does tend to be the liberal arts focus that seeks to remove God and inspiration from texts like the Bible.

5. 2:03

   So I think there’s helpful, foundational kind of stuff that he goes through in this talk. Some of the immediate things that he talks about, like he’ll reference, you know, an article that just came out or something like that. Well, we can recognize that the article is old, but I think really a lot of his foundational points and a lot of the main ideas that he brings out are really helpful to consider.

6. 2:29

   So this is Brother John Bilello with his talk entitled Darwin or God-given likely at the Los Angeles Ecclesia, probably sometime in the late 1990s. Enjoy. Some of you attended last year when we did the Bible and Science seminar in Simi Hills. I talked about the Bible and physics. I’m not going to talk about that at all tonight. I’m going to concentrate tonight’s talk on evolution and on Darwin and on some of the issues arising thereof. And it’s been kind of progressively aware that in many ways, the way evolution gets taught in high school is usually about 20 years behind what’s what scientists are doing who are working in the field.

7. 3:19

   There’s also a common sort of mythology that scientists do not believe in God. I don’t think that’s true either. At the university, many of the people I work with in the physics department and in the material science department not only believe in God but are quite faithful. And several people are very orthodox. Jews, for example, every day do their daily readings, every day do their prayers, and are very dedicated to God’s word. And they do not accept a Darwin as a answer to creation. And it is not unusual at all to get into debates, but most often with the philosophers.

8. 4:03

   Scientists themselves have a great deal of reason and, and particularly in physics over the recent years, there have been so many different discoveries in the universe and in relation to the structure of matter that people have been really wondering about it. I picked this passage and I’m going to read you several more passages because I want you to realize that God has written to us in two ways.

9. 4:32

   The first is through the Word of God in the Scriptures, which He has confirmed through His prophets and His holy men, and God has confirmed that word through Jesus Christ. The second way is through nature itself. God is the author of nature, and when we read this in Psalm 19 verse one, the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament or the earth show it his handiwork.

10. 4:58

    I think we ought to take that quite at face value, that the evidence of God is everywhere around us in nature, in the in the marvelous design in which God has created life and the universe itself and the laws which govern it. And these are not accidents. And so that it’s perfectly legitimate to to look into these things and to presume that we, we understand that these things are not just accident.

11. 5:25

    They’re not just there by some fantastic roll of the dice. They’re there because God has designed it. In fact, in a recent book, one Jewish physicist said, I like this phrase. He said that the God is the author of physics, the laws of physics. In a sense, God was the first physicist and the laws which govern creation were done that way.

12. 5:51

    I want to show you something interesting. A couple of weeks ago when I was up in the Bay Area, I picked up the San Francisco Chronicle, which is obviously not a paper I would usually read. And this, this paper had published this, this report based on a scientific survey, and I’ll read it to you. Scientists have been accused of playing God when they clone sheep and of naysaying God when they insist that evolution be taught in school.

13. 6:20

    But a new study indicates that many scientists believe in God by the most mainstream, uppercase definition of that concept repeating verbatim a famous survey first conducted in 1916. Edward Larson of the University of Georgia has found that the depth of religious faith among scientists has not budged, regardless of whatever scientific and technical advances this century has wrought. Then, as now, that’s about That’s 80 years ago more. About 40% of responding biologists, physicists and mathematicians said they believed in a God who, by the survey strict definition, actively communicates with humankind and to whom one may pray in expectation of receiving an answer.

14. 7:07

    Luba, A devout atheist, had predicted that disbelief in God would grow as education spread, and Larson decided to use the psychologist’s exact methods to see if that prediction held. He polled the same number of researchers as had Luba and used the same source for picking his subjects. The directory American Men and Women of Science, a compendium of research, is success successful enough to win awards and be cited regularly in scientific literature.

15. 7:39

    He followed Luba’s survey format to the letter with the same introduction and the same questions written in the same stilted language, even in closing the same type of envelope. More than 600 of about 1000 scientists answers the questionnaire, and it was similar to Luba’s response rate 80 years ago. And this is a very strict definition.

16. 8:00

    I believe if you asked scientists a simple question, just that they believe in God is the creator of the universe, probably 85 or 90% would say yes. This strict definition of a God who answers prayer and everything is, is, I think much more complicated. But nevertheless, this person, Luber, psychologist, 80 years ago took a survey and he expected that within 25 to 40 years, no one would believe in God.

17. 8:25

    And it turns out the very people who he hoped to to use as proof still have this great faith and this this book. American men and women of science should go look it up in the library for yourself. And if you look up Bolello, I think I’m in there. It may be a relative, I’m not sure. Take, take a look and you’ll be.

18. 8:45

    It’s kind of interesting. So this idea that scientists don’t believe in God, I don’t think it’s true and I think it’s too often cited. In fact, in another survey about 10 years ago at Yale University among students, it was found that the physics students believed in God by more than three to 1 and the divinity students were split about half half, Which I think is kind of interesting and shows you what may be somewhat wrong with with the way religion is being presented to to people that if the people who was responsible in in the community at wide for that word do not have deep faith, then how can you have the congregations to be faithful?

19. 9:27

    I want you to look at a few other quotes that are that I think are relevant to Psalm 14 and one if you if you would follow me and it will all be up on the screen. So if you don’t have to really go looking back, but you might want to note a few of these verses.

20. 9:45

    The fool said in his heart, there is no God. They are corrupt. They have done abominable works. There is none to do with good. The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men to see if there were any that did understand and seek God. And that that’s important that if we understand we believe in God, then we have to seek him out. There’s a responsibility on us to do something about it. And a lot of people, that’s why they don’t want to believe, because if they believe, they have to do something about it. And I think it is interesting that he said that those who say there is no God of fools, and by and large most scientists are not fools.

21. 10:20

    They, they try very hard to seek truth. They, they have all the same foibles and mistakes and evils and immoralities, everybody else in the community. But with respect to seeking evidence, they’re pretty careful about it. And if, if the, if the evidence were zero, I can assure you most of my colleagues would not, would not profess to believe in God.

22. 10:40

    I have gotten over my lifetime very little Flack from colleagues in physics in in terms of of my beliefs, but I usually get it from the liberal arts people and the philosophers who say how can a scientist believe? And I think it’s because they don’t first hand seek out their own information. We read this quote already, which is well worth remembering because it is the evidence of nature besides the word that should lead people to God.

23. 11:08

    When we see around us the marvelous things of God’s creation, we should be impelled to do something about it. Another interesting quote is this one in Numbers. Because God has created this universe and this planet and us for a purpose. He hasn’t created it in vain. He didn’t create it just by pure accident, but there is a purpose behind this creation and that purpose He says is as truly as I live. And if you took take the whole context of Numbers, it’s it’s God who’s speaking He says as truly as I live, all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord. So I think what it doesn’t take much imagination to realize that that equally must hold for the universe. God has not created the universe in vain. He’s created it for a purpose and it in the ultimate purpose is to fill it with his glory.

24. 12:02

    And so we have a choice to partake in that. And another very interesting verse is in Jeremiah the prophet Jeremiah chapter 31. And I think that’s worth looking at also. I put it in the NIV and I’m going to read it. That’s the new English version. I mean the New International version. I’m going to read it in the King James or authorized Version also. So if you turn with with me to Jeremiah chapter 31. Now here the prophet Jeremiah was speaking in the last days of the Commonwealth of Israel when the Babylonians were at the doorstep literally, and we’re going to carry the nation into captivity.

25. 12:49

    And he makes these comments about God and his relationship with Israel. And in verse 35 he says, Thus sayeth the Lord, which giveth the sun for the light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night, which divided the sea. When the ways there are roar, The Lord of hosts is his name. If those ordinances depart from before me, sayeth the Lord, then the seed of Israel shall cease from being a nation before me forever.

26. 13:24

    Thus sayeth the Lord, If the heaven above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all they have done, sayeth the Lord. And so God uses the laws of the universe. He appoints the Son to sign by The Who decrees. And another word for this, it uses the word ordinances in the NIV and other versions have used the word laws. Who has set the laws of the moon and the stars? And basically what Scott’s saying is I have set the laws of gravitation and I have set the laws of physics. And those laws are very firm.

27. 14:06

    I wrote them. And if those laws could change, then I will change my promises. So far from not using science, God cites science as a proof of the steadfastness of His own word. And I think so. I think that’s that’s quite remarkable. And I don’t think it ought to be ignored. And gravity is a very fixed law. And I want to make this point because when we talk about evolution, we’re not talking about a law. We are talking about a theory.

28. 14:36

    And no one ever talks about the theory of gravity. That would be ridiculous. I mean, if I throw this thing up, it’s going to come down and it’s going to come down here and everywhere on this planet. It’s only $0.25, so I won’t worry about. But that’s a law. Now when it comes to evolution asset theory.

29. 14:56

    And 150 years later, we’re still calling it a theory. And yet when Newton wrote the laws of gravity, they already knew from Galileo’s experiments that they worked. And they work everywhere and find what’s remarkable is he says if you if you look at, he says they shine by night if you lookout into the stars. The same laws of physics are obeyed that astronomers see, no matter how far they look into the universe. The same laws of physics seem to be obeyed everywhere where telescopes have been shown.

30. 15:28

    And and that’s, that’s quite remarkable. Whereas a theory is something that people still are not sure of. And any critical experiments to prove the theory of evolution have never ever been done. I’ll talk more about that in a little while. So I think we have to make that differentiation when we’re talking about science. There’s two kinds of science.

31. 15:49

    There’s science that’s provable by theory, experiment, and confirmation. And then there’s science, which is in its formative stages, where there’s a theory evolved, but definitive proof is lacking. And the very fact that scientists still call the theory of evolution a theory is the clue that definitive proof has never been made. So I, I might want to get that point across.

32. 16:16

    And I want you all sort of remember that because you, you, it gets thrown at you and often gets thrown at you at, at the junior levels. And I, my own children went through high school and I know my oldest boy got in a tremendous argument with his biology teacher. And of course, she said, she said that Andy is a tough one to argue with. He is the most, you know, you know, verbal type person. And finally, she called me up and she says, you know, I’m having a lot of trouble with your son. I just can’t get through to him about evolution. I said, well, what was he telling you? And she told me.

33. 16:50

    And I said, oh, yeah, well, that’s pretty good. I agree with him. She says, what? So he said she said. She said, I, I don’t understand this. You’re a scientist. How Can you believe that? That’s the old cliche. I says, you’re a teacher. How can you teach what you’re teaching? I said, just because the state standard curriculum. I mean, when I went to high school, I had to happen to have a good Orthodox Jew as a teacher, and the way he taught biology was here’s the theory of evolution, please learn it for the state exams.

34. 17:18

    It’s mostly baloney now. I don’t think a teacher can get away with that today. They probably lose their job. But be aware that the very fact that something is called a theory means it has not been proven. And I don’t know anyone who would have the audacity to say the law of Darwin so that that’s important point to remember.

35. 17:39

    But God says the laws of physics are so firm that he would base his promises on it. This is in the King James, which we just read. He repeats it again in chapter 33, verse 7. And you see the difference with God is not drawing upon theories here. He’s talking about the laws of the universe, the laws that govern the physical universe. And here in chapter 33, again, I’m reading this in the authorized version 33 and seven Jeremiah, just a page or two over.

36. 18:16

    I will cause the captivity of Judah and the captivity of Israel to return, and we’ll build them as the first. So God is talking about the days when he would bring the Jews back to his land. And he says that that is going to happen. And then he goes down verse 19. And this is really critical because we know the Jews have come back to the land. We’ve seen that, you know, that’s happened twice and it’s happened in 1948 and they have been replanted as a nation. And he says here verse 19, Jeremiah 33 And the word of the Lord came unto Jeremiah saying, Thus saith the Lord, if he can break my covenant or law of the day and my covenant of the night, that there should not be day and night in their season, then may also my covenant be broken with David, my servant, that he should not have a son to reign upon his throne. And with the Levites, the priests, my ministers, he’s talking about Jesus Christ because that’s the seed of David that he’s talking about.

37. 19:24

    And he’s saying, I will bring a Messiah. And it’s so firm. It’s as firm as the laws, the covenants that I’ve made to control day and night, the revolution of the planets, the motion of the the moon around earth, the revolution of the earth around the sun and the motion of the planets. He says though that’s how firm it is. And then he says, as the host of heaven cannot be numbered, neither the sand of the sea measured, so will I multiply the seed of David my servant, and the Levites that minister unto me.

38. 19:54

    Now that’s that’s quite a remarkable verse, verse 22, because in the year when that was written, Jeremiah wrote about 5 1/2 centuries before Christ. You could look up at the night sky and you can count the number of stars. There were about 2000 of them and the Babylonians and the Chinese astronomers catalogued them. Now, if you look up in the night sky with your naked eye, maybe in Los Angeles, you can’t see anything but smog. I’m not really sure.

39. 20:23

    But in my backyard in Michigan, there’s there’s no smog. If it’s not raining, I can actually see the night sky. And and if you see it, you can see they’re very clearly marked. What is remarkable is that as men, men have built telescopes, the further and further they look in space, the number of stars, the number of galaxies, just multiply and multiply and multiply. And they, in fact, there are so many of them, there probably are more than the sand in the seashore. I if anyone’s ever heard Carl Sagan and go billions and billions.

40. 20:55

    And that’s just because the number is so large you can’t write it down. If I were to write down the number of stars that are visible so far with known telescopes and I put A1 down and I stopped putting zeros, we would be here for several weeks and I would not finish doing it.

41. 21:14

    That’s how many there are. OK, that’s homework. Do this for homework. Go back, put it down, try to find out how many there are. So when it says this, how did they know this 2500 years ago? Unless God inspired Jeremiah to write it correctly that he just opened the tech the Keck telescope in Hawaii and on Mauna Kea on the mountain top there on the the Big Island about a year and a half ago.

42. 21:37

    They were able to look further into space than they’d ever seen. And still space was covered with endless stars. So this is this perspective could not have been achieved by Jeremiah because if he looked out at the night side, he would have been able to count them and he would have known they weren’t as the stars.

43. 21:55

    So this, this is this is very firm and convincing proof. And God uses this to confirm his captivity. Now I want to show this relationship to evolution because I think everyone’s seen something like this and I think we’ve seen this before and I’ve used this before, but this is kind of the classical picture that evolutionists give.

44. 22:26

    First a small ape like creature stands on 2 feet and then they get bigger and the brain cavity gets bigger and then they need to shave and then maybe they get to find a few smaller one. They get a little bit bigger, bigger and finally they end up looking something like us. OK, And this is the standard picture. And if you go to the American Natural History Museum in Washington, DC, the Smithsonian, you see a horse, similar thing. You’ll see a little small horse and then the horse gets bigger and gets bigger and then it can make it a little small and it’s when finally it ends up being Arabian horse and so on. And in New York, they had a similar exhibit on the horse at the Museum of Natural History in Central Park. But a number of scientists, myself included, protested to them some years back.

45. 23:12

    But this was a a phony exhibit. And in fact, it was because the fossils that made-up the sequence were not dateable chronologically. And so you could find a bunch of different forms of different sides and brain cavity and say, oh, they must have progressively get bigger. But just think about it a minute.

46. 23:35

    You could do the same thing for the dog. I could take a Chihuahua and say, OK, here’s a Chihuahua and then a Cocker spaniel and this one and I get a Saint Bernard. Look, see how dogs are getting bigger and bigger and bigger and it boils down to that. Some of the scientific evidence, I’m not saying well, but some of the scientific evidence which has been cited over and over again are at that level of fudging it. The British Museum in England has had actually had a scandal recently because they found out that bones dated earlier had been moved around so that they fit into the sequence that met their preconceived notion.

47. 24:11

    So this is this kind of picture which you see all the time. Please don’t accept this as proof. This is a model. This is the way they would like it to be. As far as a continuous proof of this, all dated accurately. There is not a single sequence anywhere in the world that matches this and you will not see it. And I want to show, I’ll show you more on this in a few minutes.

48. 24:36

    The other thing that’s quite interesting is that Homo sapiens, which is what we are, seem to appear quite suddenly and they dated to 40,000 years ago. But I’m not, I’m not, I won’t, I’m not going to push dates, but it appears quite suddenly and don’t seem to have any direct relationship to previous species.

49. 24:57

    And that’s kind of mysterious. In fact, one biologist wrote a book recently called The Mystery of Modern Man because they have not been able to link us to directly to previous species. And so I think that’s that’s kind of something to be a little bit careful about the way this is done. And, and, and, and just assume just because you see a model like this in a book, this is a standard reference book where you see it in an encyclopedia or even in a museum that that constitutes proof. It doesn’t.

50. 25:27

    Second thing is that dating anything beyond a few 10s of thousands of years by any physical method is almost impossible. The way these things are dated are from the layer they’re founded in a couple of cases I have tried to. One of the things I do is I’m I’m a diffractionist. I do X-ray work and I tried to get a museum to give me a sample of one of these fossils to do X-ray fluorescence. Now, the one thing I can do with that is I can find how much radioactive element there is and how much potassium isotope they are and you can get some estimate of how long it might have been existing.

51. 26:07

    They wouldn’t give me a sample. You, I couldn’t prove that it was 4,000,000 years old, but I certainly could prove it was older than 4050 thousand years old. And the reason they wouldn’t give me a sample, oh, I I should mention this is the, the ones that were found in East Africa from the Leakeys. They will not give any of these out for radioactive analysis or other kinds of analysis because I think they have a copyright on it and they write books about this and they make money. All right, fine.

52. 26:34

    But don’t go around making extreme claims either if you’re not willing to openly let other scientists look at what you’re doing. I couldn’t get away with that on my job. But this is the level. Imagine Newton saying, OK, I got the laws of physics, here’s what they are, but I don’t want anyone else to run a test on them. Please don’t send the rocket up or flip a coin. Can you imagine some other scientists trying to do science that way?

53. 26:57

    I can’t. The same objective standards of evidence are not always held when it comes to biology, and I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because they don’t have any other way of doing it. But my most fun at dealing with biology is to read what biologists are writing.

54. 27:19

    Anyone here ever hear of Stephen J Ghoul? OK. Stephen J Ghoul is professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard University. And as we like to say in Michigan, Harvard is the Michigan of the East, OK? In fact, you can buy AT shirt in our bookstore that says that Harvard, the Michigan of the East. Actually, I think Michigan’s a better university. We could beat them.

55. 27:44

    And that’s one school I know we can beat in football. Anyway, Ghoul is very well known. He’s written a lot of books and he’s a, he’s probably the leading current generation biologist. Now, when Darwin wrote his Origin of Species, there were only a limited number of fossils around. And at that time, no one had ever proved that one species came from another. You know, the classical one where the, the, the, the fish is in the sea.

56. 28:17

    And then finally the fish gets something looks like little legs, and then the fish walks on land and then he gets beat. That’s sort of the standard kind is it’s so standard that cartoonists often use it as a joke. All right, you know that there is no such fossil ever been found of what I call an intermediate between two species. Now that’s not to say evolution doesn’t occur on short term. In fact, maybe the word evolution shouldn’t be used there.

57. 28:42

    Maybe the word adaptability can be used. For example, it’s been shown that among butterflies and among moths that certain colorings favour survival and famous. 1 is where a white moth was attracted to industrial town in England in the 19th century. And as that town used more and more coal and got grayer and sodier and sodier, the white moths were easy prey and the darker grayer species of moth would survive being eaten by birds and other other things that were their enemies. And so by and by white moths started fading away and you ended up with mostly the dark moths. But that’s not evolution, that’s adaptability. Evolution would be if the moth becomes a Pussycat, that’s evolution.

58. 29:28

    That’s an origin of species. OK, now this has never been proved in the Darwinian sense. Darwin’s own answer to this was we got to keep looking. We don’t have enough fossils. Well, 150 years later there are 10s of thousands more fossils and yet no one has ever found an intermediary between two different species, part fish, part man, you know, part part mammal, part amphibian, whatever.

59. 30:00

    Never ever been found. Interesting. I want you to look at a verse in the New Testament, First Corinthians 15 and I don’t think you will ever find one and they are look, believe me, they are looking and looking and looking and looking and looking. But first Corinthians 15 and I like you to look at this this verse verse 38 and for connection 39 is the verse I want to focus on.

60. 30:35

    But God give it to the body as it it pleased them into every seed. His own body, all flesh, is not the same flesh, but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds. And he shows clearly the different types of species and says they’re separate, they’re different.

61. 31:01

    The evolutionary biologist says we’ve all come from 1:00. It’s just never, it’s just not true there. If it is true, the evidence is totally lacking. And I think we we ought to bear that in mind. And I think that’s, that’s an important point. The evidence for intermediate species between two different branches just does not exist. Evolution within a species we see all the time, OK, the adaptability of the moth is, is clear that happens. And survival of the fittest within a species group that happens.

62. 31:37

    But that’s not the same as creation. And I don’t think very dangerous thing. I always tell my students, if you’ve got the several data points, you know, don’t extrapolate your data beyond where you’ve actually got information. What biologists do is they have a data point here, they have a data point here and they extrapolate it back 5 billion years. That’s not that’s not kosher as we say, OK. I mean, if you have data here and here, you’re only entitled to know what happened between them unless you have some very, very powerful other evidence.

63. 32:10

    I want to show you something I mentioned Stephen Jay Gould. What is the mechanism for creation if it is not God and it is not the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection? OK, what is the mechanism? Well, Gould and looking at thousands of fossils has come to the conclusion that slow evolution has never been evidenced.

64. 32:36

    And I’m going to read you from his own book. This is this is Book of Life edited by Stephen Ghoul. And you can buy this. It’s a it’s a relatively recent book, 1995. He’s talking about the explosion of fossils in the Cambrian period. And let’s not worry about what the Cambrian period is, but let let’s read what he cites as how this all came about.

65. 32:58

    The Cambrian has always been a mystery, a highway starting in a desert. In other words, before the Cambrian, there seemed to be no life forms at all. And then all of a sudden they explode. Now we have pathways converging to feed it, and it turns out to be a broader Rd. than we knew. Yet it is no gradual story at that, no gradual story that discoveries revealed, but a revolutionary episode crammed with new animals, some big, some small, some with skeletons, some without.

66. 33:33

    Can we account for the sudden appearance of so many fundamentally different kinds of animals, the basic phyla? And why did the variety of animals within each file a rocket so steeply upward? Scientists would like to know. And then excites the model that is being proposed. What happens when animals flood into empty ecological space is a sequence well known in life’s history.

67. 33:59

    Not only individuals, but all species begin to climb at a geometric rate. 124816X7. Get at Vermigi puts it new species are basically accidents that happen as populations of individuals adapt to local environment. This is the new model. OK, Darwin was gradual change, he says. There is no gradual change. The new model is accidents. So all life got here by accident and all new species covered by accident.

68. 34:35

    Now, if that’s a model, you know, if, if I, if I were working in a profession that put that forward as a model, I’d change my profession. I’ll tell you the truth. I mean, I couldn’t, I couldn’t imagine doing that with anything in physics or engineering. I mean, if any of you are working engineer as a physicist, Can you imagine going into your boss and say, well, I can explain it all, It’s an accident. I mean, you wouldn’t last long.

69. 35:01

    Why is that? Why this why this is the by the way, this is the leading evolutionary biologist. Imagine what the lesser people are saying. Now when I point this out to my colleagues, you know what reaction I get among the physicists? They go, those guys are terrible scientists anyway. What do you expect? When I talk to the biologist, they go, well, we don’t have any other model.

70. 35:26

    This is on this book. It’s 1993. The edition I have, it’s pages 56 and 57. It’s in the library. OK, so somebody tells you that they got a model for evolution, say the model is accident. It’s not Darwin, it’s not original. This is what they’re selling. Let me show you some other things. This is by another biologist who in this book is called The Great Evolution Mystery.

71. 35:59

    He’s got a whole list of things that are problems why evolution doesn’t seem to work, and he’s got this whole list of different problems. And here it is, the suddenness with which major changes in pattern occurred and virtual absence of any fossil remains from the period in which they were alleged to be evolving. And let me explain what that means. Suppose that you need an eye to see, and you have to develop this Organism, this eye, in order to focus. Now, Can you imagine taking 50 million years to develop the eye that was that was actually brought up by Darwin and he we, we brought it up.

72. 36:43

    He said, if very complex organs, if we can’t really explain this, this is a problem with my theory. Now people forgot about that and people like Richard Dawkins and others have written about it and they’ve looked at this species. So here’s a hair formed eye in this one. Here’s Part 1 in this one. And we can, we can show that there’s all different stages of eye development.

73. 37:02

    That doesn’t prove evolution. That only proves that also from my mind, that proves the designer had different designs in mind. Now what this biologist looked at this, He says what happens the very first time we find a specie that has to see with an eye? It’s got a completely formed eyeball. In fact, even more remarkable, no one has ever found a species with one eye. OK, think about that.

74. 37:33

    If you evolve and you evolve and it’s kind of random and it’s all accident, suppose it’s his model. Why don’t we have somebody with one eyeball in the middle? Except on science fiction TV, the very first mammals that are developed, the very first fish, the very first things that have eyes at all have not only good eyes, different levels of sophistication, obviously, but they all see, and they see in three dimensions. And if that were not true, no one would ever be able to catch their prey, right?

75. 38:02

    No one in Southern California would be able to drive. I mean, that’s really serious right? Now, What accounts for that? How can you account for that by accident, that the minute the eye is there, it works. It functions at season 3 dimension. It has a lens and it can focus that lens and it can see over a wide range of optical differences.

76. 38:25

    Now, did that all happen overnight? According to Darwin, it it should have taken millions of years to occur. But what did you do in between when you couldn’t see or you couldn’t see perfectly? How would you have survived? And, and you pretty soon you come to the realization that this is something that really ought to bother biologists, not just this one guy who wrote this book, because even going back to Darwin, he pointed out that complexity was a problem. What’s a big problem?

77. 38:53

    Because 1/2 formed eyeball is useless and there is no such evidence of half formed eyeballs. OK, let’s take a look at another thing. Suddenness of new forms radiating into numerous variants. And that’s the other thing. Once an accident occurs, it seems to explode. You get all kinds of different variations in it right away, and they all seem to adapt. Now, I think that’s very important because if this were not true, if you had this suddenness, were not true, you would find that something evolved and then it couldn’t survive and it would just decay and would never flourish. But it seems once something new is, is evidenced it, it immediately seems to survive and grow. And that’s kind of remarkable suddenness of extinctions. Well, we don’t have to dwell on all of these in in detail, but when things disappear, they completely disappear. They don’t seem to phase out over millions of years either, and that’s always been a troubling thing. Repeated occurrences of changes calling for new or less coordinated innovations.

78. 40:06

    That’s probably what I said about the eye, but it’s about a lot of other things. Can you imagine evolving a heart that only beats once in a while? Or lung power that isn’t sufficient. To take care of the air capacity or any other organ that you need the liver or the kidney to filter with your kidneys, what if they didn’t work perfectly?

79. 40:28

    I mean, this idea of a coordinated innovation, Do you know how many different, how many different changes you need to make? The eye function, It’s about 10 billion different changes. You need to have the lens work system work perfectly. You need to have the recording system with all those little ends that sense the light.

80. 40:58

    You need color coordination. You need to store the images. Think of how wonderful the brain is. You not only have the eye not only takes in the data, it keeps sending pictures to your brain. Many of us can remember an image we saw years ago, right that. So that information is all there and it had to be there. You think about an animal who has to see that information. He’s got to now recognize his enemy. He’s got to recognize his prey.

81. 41:25

    All those images need the storage capacity, so the eye cannot work independent of a lot of changes in the brain in order to handle all that information and store it and use it. And all of that had to evolve like that because if the animal doesn’t store the information about its enemy, it doesn’t use its eye very long, it gets eaten, it becomes dinner.

82. 41:49

    So all of those things have to occur at the same time. Or let’s, let’s take another case. Coordinated innovation goes further than that. It’s coordination between two very separate things. OK, we, we, we all know, I’ll give you a couple examples, a simple example. You all know about the birds and the bees, right? Do you all know that trees and plant things have boy and girl? Did you know that?

83. 42:15

    Now I won’t ask you what’s the difference because I really am afraid the answer I might get. But I tell you, tell you many years ago I had a holly Bush and that’s the thing, you know, with the little red berries on it. And I when I bought this house, there were two holly bushes and they weren’t doing well.

84. 42:33

    So I called my father-in-law, who was an expert in horticulture, and I said to him, my holly bushes look terrible. And he, he says to me, well, the trouble is there’s no boy holly bushes around. And they’re rather depressed and sad. And I thought, he’s pulling my leg. A girl holly Bush and a boy holly Bush. How do you tell the difference?

85. 42:53

    So he came over the house and he bought a horticultural book. And you know, there is a difference. And I’m not going to tell you what the difference is. You know, you have to lift up the leaf to look. But the, the, the boy holly Bush doesn’t have berries. OK, the girl one does. So he planted a couple of boy holly bushes and within five to six weeks, the other ones, they weren’t being cross pollinated. And so the, the, the, the Bush was really not getting all its energies up and it wasn’t, wasn’t functioning correctly. How did this happen?

86. 43:26

    Can you imagine? Let’s evolve a girl holly Bush and OK, a million years later we’ll have the boy holly Bush. Those all had to happen at the same time. But let’s go a little further. You have flowers, you have all these flowers and you have all this, this, the sense of this, this around you. How many of you, you realize that flowers in many, many species, many trees are pollinated by bees, right? So the bees have to go and they have to take the nectar. That’s why I asked if you know about the birds and the bees, and then they have to go to other ones and they bring the pollen around with them, right?

87. 44:00

    What happened before there were bees? We wait 50 million years for the bees to come along. Of course not. Both of those things have to occur at the same time. They have to be coordinated. And that’s what he’s talking about. There are, there are literally in this book, if you get a chance to read the Great Evolution Mystery, there are literally thousands upon thousands of things in nature that if they were not coordinated, they couldn’t occur. And so it’s not just one thing by accident. You need lots and lots of accidents and they all have to occur at the same time.

88. 44:42

    To me, that means somebody had to be planning it. To a biologist, the answer is, oh, we don’t know. It’s an accident. OK. I don’t have enough faith to believe in accidents. I like the Bible explanation a lot better. OK, let’s see what else we have here. No new phyla have appeared and no new classes or orders.

89. 45:04

    That’s just what I read you from First Corinthians 15. Everything that’s been found in nature of the various phyla, fishes are still fishes. Men are still men. You know, trees are sort of, you know, fowls are still fat. They all remain the same. There’s a lot of hand waving, right? Birds are supposed to come from dinosaurs. OK.

90. 45:23

    And then two weeks later, I read an article that maybe that’s not true. Maybe dinosaurs came from birds. OK, And I’m serious. Those both appeared about the same time. OK, convergent and parallel existence of long term. I, I, we can go on before appearance of organs, before they are needed. OK, all of these that overshoot. Oh yeah, this is this is interesting because, you know, I showed you that model about how things get bigger and bigger and brain cap capacity gets bigger.

91. 45:53

    But that’s not necessarily true. And the the woolly mammoth is a classic example. The woolly mammoths are many much bigger brains appear to have been much larger in size and stronger than present day elephants. But they’re gone and the weaker ones have survived. That’s not easy to understand. That’s not so much for about from creation, but the underpinning of the model of natural selection. Natural selection doesn’t always work. Sometimes a weaker species survives OK by the way they choose to adapt themselves.

92. 46:28

    This is the another sort of classical 1A puzzle of how organs, once evolved, come to be lost or be degenerate. Biologists have long argued about what’s the use of the appendix. I. I brought this up to someone and he said, well, without that, a lot of doctors wouldn’t be earning all this money from appendicitis. And so, But, you know, that might be a joke. But in fact, there’s no no one’s ever figured out the reason for this.

93. 46:59

    Let me see how many more we got. I’ll just Oh yes, this is again another the failure some organisms to evolve at all the people at Johns Hopkins Stanley, who’s a who’s a similar type person from Ghoul, they’ve been working on and off for the last 2025 years on this. He he has shown that some organisms never seem to evolve. For example, a clam today the fossil would look identical to a clam that you might find in a level 500 million years old. No change whatsoever.

94. 47:37

    In fact, many, many shellfish have never ever evolved or changed at all. And that’s, that’s kind of strange. Why did some get triggered and some don’t? What what is the mechanism that some species evolve and others never, never change? The answer from biologists is we don’t know. And so you have you have this kind of thing.

95. 47:59

    Maybe the normal kind of thinking about evolution is everything gets bigger, better, smarter. But in fact, in the real evidence in fossils and in nature is that is almost never true.

96. 48:12

    There is no, there is not a direct link. If you want to read this book, it’s by Taylor and it’s called The Great Evolution Mystery, OK. And I’ve found that one of the best ways to really get an insight into what the thinking is among biologists and evolutionists is to actually read their own writings. Because the idea that everything is all figured out and they have all the answers, this is not at all true. It just is not does not appear in the in the literature that way.

97. 48:41

    I told you about this sort of standard thing about the fish getting legs and then walking out of sea. There was this cartoon some years back and that now defunct British publication Punch. But there’s 22 spacemen and they’re standing on a beach and they’re watching 2 scuba divers coming out. And they say, wait, we may just have landed at a significant moment in this planet’s evolution. So the idea this is sort of the common fiction that that man evolved from the sea.

98. 49:13

    But the real fact of the matter is that it is worth poking fun at because there is not one single piece, piece of evidence to prove it. OK, I’ll stop at this point and I promise to leave some time for questions. And I and on the on the topic and the nature of the universe, just small questions, OK. And I’ll be glad to answer them.

99. 49:36

    And if I don’t get questions, I usually give a quiz. So help me out. Yeah. Ben. Oh, I think the earth is very old. I I don’t know exactly, but it’s, it’s pretty old. The, the, if you look at Genesis 1. And I think it’s dangerous to get into dating things that we don’t have totally firm evidence. But but the earth is very, very old. He says in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

100. 50:08

     And so God did. That was the first thing he did. Then he said the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the water. So when God set up to create the present order of things, he, he was already building on what he had earlier created.

101. 50:26

     And whatever was here before, it probably messed up and he started all over again. But I, I think, you know, I think the Earth has been used for other purposes in the past. I think the evidence of it is pretty obvious. We’re not the only thing God has ever created. And I think it would be pretty ego egocentric of us to think we were. Yeah.

102. 50:54

     The Big Bang theory. What’s the latest Big Bang Theory? There was a Big Bang in the universe. Well, you notice you just said The Big Bang theory and there were about 20 different Big Bang theories. And it doesn’t have too much to do with with evolution. Yeah. The, the, the interesting thing about The Big Bang theory is whatever model you take, it’s an admission by scientists that they must have at one time or other been a creation until, until, you know, until this century, actually, until about 40 years ago, most scientists believe the universe was forever and it always existed and they didn’t believe there was ever a creation. So The Big Bang and whatever model you, you put, is it admission by scientists that there was a time when the universe had to be created?

103. 51:49

     As far as the specific Big Bang Theory, I I wouldn’t even begin to argue about a theory because I’m, you know, I’m not, I don’t think any of them are, are, are solvable right now.

104. 52:03

     Yep, right. I mean, the way the scripture is presented, Oh, I, I, I, I don’t think that science has a, a good model for creation. I mean, if, if you go by what Ghoul was saying, he they take it, he takes it to be an accident.

105. 52:46

     Yeah. OK, that’s it. That’s a fairpoint. And someone, someone who believes in Darwin, says we need more and more evidence. OK, They’ve had 150 years to look for this evidence. And in fact, the evidence has contradicted the original model. OK, This is exactly what Ghoul says. So we do not see gradual changes, period.

106. 53:28

     We don’t see it. So Darwin’s a middle original model, in fact is almost universally accepted as being wrong today. All right. And So what it what has come about is that people like Ghoul and others are now calling a being called Neo Darwinist a new Darwinist because they don’t want to admit that there was any design or creation. So they have this new model of accidents. So I would say that the first point is that the Darwinism as a theory has already been proven wrong. Just to correct what you said, the the theory of gradual change evolving better and better has been proven wrong by the very evidence.

107. 54:05

     OK. Second point, that doesn’t prove the creation. And you’re, you’re absolutely right. At some point you have to accept faith. The the difference, I would say, in the way I would believe faith is that the Scripture says that faith is the substance of things hoped for. So the Bible has confirmed its word in other ways, through prophecy, through history, through its moral presence, through other things that we can say make sense and are good and in themselves give me confidence that that’s the word of God.

108. 54:36

     So if I, if I, if I have a, a model of something and I find that this fits, that fits, that fits. And I look at prophecy and I look at the moral teachings and I look at what the Jesus Christ has presented and everything, then I, I feel much more comfortable. And when I said earlier, I said, I, I don’t, I don’t have enough faith to believe in Darwin, but I do have enough faith to believe in what the scriptures is teaching.

109. 55:00

     And that’s the way I would look at it. At some point when we have not actually been there and witnessed it, faith does take over. But faith isn’t doesn’t have to be blind. And I think that’s the difference. So I think the evidence that the Bible presents comes at many different levels and to me is logical.

110. 55:22

     But it to for me to say to you while I was there and I saw the creation, well, obviously I can’t do that. At some point we have to have that faith. Now that’s important because none of us have ever seen the resurrection either. So we we have to at some point to have faith in God that the two things he did do, create and give eternal life are going to actually happen.

111. 55:42

     It’s got to be based on everything else is in between in the scriptures and see if that model makes us comfortable. Fair enough. OK, yeah. We, I, I think what I would like to see taught in the classroom and what I finally convinced my son’s high school to do is to give me an hour to talk to the class.

112. 56:08

     They never did that again for the other, for Peter. And I’m sure in Sunny Hills they wouldn’t, wouldn’t not be near the building. I think they ought to at least let young people know that it is a theory, that there are other competing ideas, and that that creation by design and by a God, and I don’t think you have to shove anything down their throat specifically, is also something that ought to be considered.

113. 56:34

     I’d be happy enough if they do that. I don’t think they have to teach that. I certainly don’t want to teach in creation science and young Earth and all that, because I don’t think that’s right either. But I think they ought to at least be honest to young people and say this is a model. The model has a lot of experimental problems. There’s a lot of evidence lacking. Scientists themselves are not fully convinced of it. And there is another alternative taught through faith by by most major religions, not just Christians, by the way, the Quran and others teach, teach also God’s creation. And they ought to at least spend 20 minutes telling children, you know, that there is more than one way to look at this. I’d be happy if they do that.

114. 57:12

     I’ve been arguing. I’ll tell you something else that happened. Any of you get Scientific American. OK, then I’ll talk. I won’t. I won’t bring it up, but if you haven’t read the article, this, this, there’s no point. I I may publish something on this in commercial on the tidings in the next couple of months.

115. 57:33

     OK, Yeah. So what do you think about that? Well, yeah, I read something about that too, but that that was a speculation. Frankly, it wouldn’t surprise me if there was life elsewhere in the universe. I would. I would think that God is a God of creation if he’s going to fill the earth with his glory, fill the universe with his glory.

116. 58:04

     So I just don’t know about it and I don’t know what he’s done. The main problem of finding and proving life within our own solar system is that anything we send out there, you know, might contaminate it. And all we’ll bring back is something we are we put there ourselves. But I personally think that that God has no other intelligent life in this, you know, in this, in this solar, you know, this whole solar system. We’re we’re quarantined.

117. 58:37

     I mean, would you let anyone else near us? I mean, you got to realize that the, the Earth and our solar system is like on the fringe of the Galaxy. We’re not in the densely populated star part of the Galaxy. I mean, if, if you know, if this is the galactic center over here somewhere like over, if I can get this thing to work. If we, this is the galactic center, we’re way out here at the fringe and we’re a long way from the galactic center and, and, and, and we’re in a very, very sparsely populated part of the universe.

118. 59:08

     I think, I don’t think it’s entirely an accident. I mean, I, I wouldn’t let anywhere near this race. Yeah, sure. I’m not a geologist, though. I may I may, I may not be able to answer it.

119. 59:41

     Oh, I, that, that one, I can’t answer for you. They did a chemical analysis on it and it was very similar to some stuff that was sent back from data recording from the, the, the probe that they landed on Mars, the Viking probe. So there was a, there was a great deal of similarity and they think that maybe a meteorite, a very large one, hit Mars, knocked something in the orbit and we got some of that debris. But I, I think to be careful, you know? They they did say, if I remember the article I read that there was a high probability.

120. 1:00:13

     I don’t think they could have dent. Well, if it was in the LA Times then what can I say? Was it in the New York Times too?

121. 1:00:26

     I I’m getting the signal to I think I’m going to be pulled off anyway. Thanks. Thanks a lot. It’s been a pleasure to to visit and if anyone wants to stick around until they throw me out, I’ll be glad to talk to you more. Thanks a lot. Thank you for listening to the good Chris Adelphian Talks podcast.

122. 1:00:55

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123. 1:01:12

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124. 1:01:45

     God bless and talk to you next week.