Christian Evidences

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All right, good morning. It’s the first bell, so I’m going to go ahead and get started because there’s a lot to talk about today. Warning, I’m going to be a little boring today. Jeremy may have told you that I was going to fill in for his class this week. My name is Timothy King. If you guys haven’t ever met me, I usually teach upstairs in the third grade class, so this is a little bit of a jump for me teaching the adults class. But we’ll try to keep it fun.
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Today we’re going to continue this series on Christian evidences. Talked about several subjects already, but we’re going to kind of continue Jeremy’s theme last week of the intersection of faith and science. And we’ll be specifically talking this week about earth science, ecology, and space science, cosmology. And we’ll be looking at it, specifically looking at the design of the universe and how that speaks to the world.
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an intelligent design as you can speak with various people that will help them maybe understand just the unique parameters by which this universe has been made. And so that’s kind of the idea of this lesson today.
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I will also say that I know a lot of people have a lot to share on this subject, as you probably have your own faith journey on a lot of these things, and I will just ask that try to keep the comments down to a minimum. We’ve got a lot to cover over the next 45 minutes, so I’d love to have people to share, but let’s try to keep it at the end and we’ll see if we have time to do that. So let’s move along.
Ever since the Enlightenment period of the 1600s through the 1700s, men have sought to
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to test everything through empirical methods. They would observe something in nature and come up with an idea of what it was doing and then form some experiments, maybe some lab experiments and various tests to see if it works the same way every time. And then if it does, then they’ve formed a law. And thus the scientific method was born. People like, Francis Bacon
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various guys like Rene Descartes and other scientific philosophers kind of helped boost this method. And since then, science has exploded with all sorts of hundreds and thousands of different laws and principles by which the universe and the Earth work. And further, many scientific applications make use of those laws to build all the technology we have today. We have hundreds and thousands of various inventions just within the last year that.
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pioneers would never have even dreamed about having. And so the question is, what place does this highly advanced society have for faith?
Well, the same nagging questions, the same insistent questions plague man today, as they did many, many centuries ago.
Why is it that we are here? How do we explain the existence of this universe? Why is there something?
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rather than nothing. And scientists try to explain that through various methods, but they run into problems as they do that, as we’ll soon discuss. So the answer to those questions have lots of theories besides the Fay Theory, but there’s really two answers that you can answer that question with. Either, one, life came from nothing. Life came spontaneously from non-life. That’s a…
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term that scientists call abiogenesis. And it’s actually really a new, old idea for generations. Men thought that spontaneous generation was a possibility. They believed that maggots would all of a sudden appear in food that’s left out overnight, and they just appeared from nothing. And then of course scientists did some tests and said, oh, you know, that’s not true. There’s something that’s creating those gnat and maggots flies and such.
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But now it’s kind of, now with various theories like the Big Bang and evolution, we’ve kind of come full circle with the same idea of, okay, well, maybe under certain parameters, maybe life can come from non-life. Well, we talk more about that. But then there’s a second option that we have, which is the option that we’ve held for most of history. Life was made by something or someone. So for the universal truth for most of history was that
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A god or gods or goddesses helped create the universe. And obviously we believe in a god creating the universe. And you all are here and obviously you believe in that. And maybe you have good reasons like these various evidences we’re going to talk about. Or maybe it’s just a gut feeling. But maybe as we go through some of these evidences, maybe we can learn something new that you haven’t thought of before as to why we think that there’s a god that created this universe.
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and we can share that with others.
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Okay, so I’m going to take you guys on a journey through the cosmos. So I ask you to buckle in, have your flight manuals, the Bible ready. As we open up our text, we’re going to talk about the various things in this universe and the great design it has.
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We’re gonna start in Psalm 19. I’m gonna just kind of read through these in sequence. The heavens declare the glory of God. The glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of His hands. When I consider your heavens, the moon and the stars, and the which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them? Human beings that you care for them? For since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities
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His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without an excuse. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and by faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible. Obviously, this is a collection and kind of a medley of verses here that we’ve got.
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But I think they are some of the main anchor verses in the Bible for the creation narrative as we see it. And we can add more to this list, but these are the ones that are some of my favorites. And this basically says, who created the universe? God created it. And he created it out of what is not visible. And he does not necessarily explain all the different details of the process of how that was done. He just says,
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He made it. And we have to kind of take that on faith. That’s what Hebrew says. So there’s gotta be a certain amount of faith. But that’s not to say that he didn’t give us evidence to show us why. Like Roman says, his invisible qualities have been seen in nature, and the heavens and the skies proclaim his glory. So there are evidences, and we can go even further in all of those details.
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So as we talk about intelligent design, maybe there’s a slightly alternative to this. And this has kind of come up recently in many decades and grown more in popularity as we’ve kind of seen science fiction intersecting with science. And it’s the idea that maybe alien life supplanted Earth with all the life that we have today. It’s an idea called panspermia, the idea that life was seeded from another civilization outside our planet.
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And Richard Dawkins, who’s kind of a famous skeptic atheist who’s, you know, been, who’s no friend of Christianity by any means, but he was debating someone and it says it could be in some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved probably by some door, one of you means, to a very, very high level of technology and designed a form of life that they seeded perhaps on this planet. And that is a possibility and an intriguing possibility. So we see a lot of “probabilities” and “possibilities”, bottom line is we’re not sure.
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You know, and so the problem is evolution is really, really hard , and the probabilities just aren’t there to support it. And so these kinds of ideas are taking hold. Now, when we are teaching people about this kind of thing, you can almost say, well, who’s to say that said intelligent being couldn’t be God? You know, that’s a really good segue into that kind of idea.
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But you can see that very even the strongest skeptics have a hard time with some of the evolution ideas.
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So let’s go through this kind of thought experiment. What if we were the intelligent beings that were having to find a new planet to seed life form? What if, you know, fast forward a couple millennia, we, our society has evolved, for lack of a better term, into a society likened to that of Star Wars, the Empire, you know, or the Empire of Star Wars, and I’m sorry.
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May 4th was last week, so I just kind of had to add this in there. So a little nerdiness on myself. I’m an engineer. But anyways, what if we had come to that point where we have all this great technology and maybe had this resource we could do something? How would we come up with, say like we repented of our sins of destroying planets like the Empire did, and now we’re focusing our energies into building new ones. So.
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So we’re trying to find a new place for a civilization to go to. What would that, what would that planet that we search for look like? Well might I submit to you that that planet has to look something like the earth, because it turns out that earth is so uniquely designed to support life that this has got very unique parameters. Now I’m not so arrogant to say that maybe life can’t survive outside our known parameters, but we have to go start with what we know.
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and not what our imagination can conceive. So let’s talk about some of these parameters. So if we’re going to find a new planet for a civilization to live, the planet has to exist in what scientists call the Goldilocks Zone. In the middle of a fairy tale saying, it was not too hot, not too cold, it was just right. And NASA defines the Goldilocks Zone as a place, a planet that can host liquid water.
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32 degrees to 212 degrees. That’s a rough, but it’s really a generous estimate because we know sterilization temperatures happen about 160 degrees, and that’s because covalent bonds that make up all living cells have to occur in the range of 50 degrees to 130 degrees Fahrenheit. If it gets hotter than that, those covalent bonds break apart and kill the cell. And if it’s lower than that, then those bonds don’t actually mate.
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And so that leaves us a pretty razor thin region by which life can occur. And as we have studied modern climate models, if we look at what it would look like if our Earth was, say, 1% closer orbit around our heat source, the sun, which gives us all this warmth. If we were within 1% closer to the sun, modern climate models suggest that our polarized caps would start to melt.
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If we were 5% closer to the sun, then all ice on Earth could no longer survive. So we would see, and that’s a big problem because a lot of the solar energy is reflected about two-thirds, I mean about one-third of all solar energy is reflected by the ice on Earth. So it kind of lowers the temperature a little bit. So we have a very unique set of orbits that are required to support that. Also our orbit has to be fairly circular, so at different times of year, as we’re rotating around the sun, we don’t get too much further or too much closer. And so that is a pretty unique parameter between how warm the Earth is.
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As we’re talking about going around the sun, we can’t just orbit around any sun. Our planet has to orbit around a fairly constant output sun. Some of the different types of stars, our sun is a yellow star, but different types of stars like blue stars or red stars have varying levels of energy output at different times that happen as different kinds of metals start to degrade and we see strong energy fluctuations from those stars. Our sun has a
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very, very mild energy fluctuation every 11 years, about 0.1%. The temperature on the surface will be a reflection of a four-time factor of four energy output from the sun. And if that temperature were to raise at 10% higher, then potentially all the oceans on the Earth would evaporate. So that sun has to be very constant output all the time, which is exactly what we have. Also…
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As we rotate around the sun, we encounter a little bit of angular momentum, which causes a spin around our axis. Now the Earth, that spin is pretty unique. So our Earth spins one time a day, once every 24 hours. And with the current circumference of the Earth, that means that around the equator, your rate of speed is about 1,000 miles per hour. Now what that also…
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the speed around the poles is how fast it’s about zero miles per hour because it’s basically spinning in place. Now what that causes is a pretty strong pressure differential and all that moving water and air has to go somewhere. It goes to the place where there’s not as much pressure and then we see these winds and currents and jet streams which is why we have all the weather that we have on Earth. We have pretty strong winds at certain times when we have storms.
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We had pretty strong winds last night where I was living. But we can see winds like the May 3rd tornado around 300 miles per hour. Or during hurricanes, we’ve seen 150, 200 miles per hour winds. And that can be pretty damaging. But imagine what would happen if the Earth was rotating much faster. You’re going to see faster winds, faster storms. Saturn rotates around its axis about once every eight hours. They see winds of 1,000 miles per hour.
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May 3rd, tornado would look like a warm summer breeze, if that was the case. And so that rotation is pretty unique and just right. And the moon is pretty important in that. The moon actually, the tidal forces from the moon actually slow down the rotation of the Earth because of the gravitational pull. And scientists have said that if there was no moon around the Earth, we would probably be rotating about four times faster. So we’re going to see four times the pressure
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way, way higher.
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So the Earth is more than just air to breathe. There’s, I’m sorry, we’re talking about the atmosphere. And the atmosphere is more than just air to breathe. The atmosphere is pretty important, especially for protection of solar radiation. It also helps maintain temperature as we go through day and night cooling and heating cycles. But it also is important for
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absorbing about 25% of the sun’s radiation is absorbed or reflected by the atmosphere, and especially in the range of ultraviolet rays by that ozone layer, which is really, really harmful to living cells. Also it is estimated about 50 to 70 tons of space debris hit the earth every single day. And because of our atmosphere, about 99% of that.
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is burned up into dust before it reaches the Earth, which is protecting life on Earth. So atmosphere is very important.
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One other thing, one other characteristic about the Earth is it’s got a unique axis tilt. That axial tilt is about 22 degrees, off its axis, and because of that, we have seasons of life, as different parts of the Earth are now getting more direct sunlight during different parts of the year while we’re orbiting around the sun. And what that means is it takes the heating load off of the equator and…
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moves it to other parts of the Earth. If the Earth was straight vertical, that means the equator would be getting direct sunlight all year long and it would just turn into a gigantic desert. But because we have that axial tilt, now we’re distributing that heating load to other parts of other latitudes at other times of the year, which is pulling that heating load off the equator and allows a wider distribution of life on other parts of this planet. And that’s a pretty important characteristic of Earth’s climate.
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So I’m gonna stop there for a second and take a break and say, have you guys ever heard of the organization called SETI? I think it’s called Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. I don’t know if they’re a government organization or if they’re just a third party. I don’t know if they receive government funding. They do work with NASA a little bit. But it’s an organization that sets up all kinds of radios and…
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antennas all over the place and they are listening all over outer space for signals that they would deem as intelligence. Trying to look for extraterrestrial signals from outer space. Now what do they define as intelligence? That’s a good question. How do you define intelligence? Well by their own definitions you need two things. You need order and you need purpose.
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So order and purpose. So they’re looking for very unique signals that don’t necessarily occur naturally. They’re not looking for wideband signals that can occur from background radiation and various star stellar events that can occur in outer space. They’re looking for very narrowband signals, maybe modulation on top of that narrowband signal such that it would not occur naturally. And they’re looking for order and purpose in there.
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As we’re looking at these various aspects of how the Earth and the solar system are designed and their unique parameters, do we see order and purpose in the way this is all put together? And does that order and purpose provide evidence for an intelligent hand involved in its creation? Let’s keep going. So when talking about.
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planets and places that can retain life, size does matter. NASA has got several missions that are going on looking for extraterrestrial life. It’s become a big obsession with NASA at this point. And one of the things that they’re, one of the missions they’ve got going on is Kepler Space Telescope.
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And their parameters that they’re looking for are very narrow range. They’re looking for terrestrial planets that can handle, that are pretty close to the same size of the Earth. Why is that? Well, if the planet they’re looking at is more than two times the size of the Earth, then that planet’s going to have much, much larger gravity than what we have, which means it’s going to be pulling more helium and hydrogen into its atmosphere.
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and will quickly rise and become a gas giant, like Neptune or Saturn or Jupiter, and those are not friendly to life at all. If the planet is less than 20% the size of the Earth, then the gravity is too small. It becomes like Mercury or Mars, and there’s not enough atmosphere to host life, not air, breathe, and all the other requirements for atmosphere that are supporting that. So they’re looking for a very narrow window that’s around the size of the Earth.
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We already kind of talked about the moon a little bit, the importance it has on the Earth’s rotation. But the moon is also a powerful ally in our survival, not only for that, but also for helping changes in weather, mixing with warm and cold waters in the oceans to help maintain temperature regulation, and also feeding various ecosystems through tides as they come up.
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and go down. So the moon is pretty important for our ecosystem and for life on this planet. And just so happens we have one.
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So scientists have estimated there’s about 100 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. And a lot of people look at that and say, man, 100 billion stars in the galaxy. Surely just one of them, just one of them has got to be able to hold life. I mean, the chances, you know, you got to think there’s got to be some chance. Well, there’s been some NASA scientists that have looked at that too. They call, they have.
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done studies called what is the galactic habitable zone? And it just so happens that we are in it. If there is 100 billion stars in the galaxy, but most of those are inside the core, this stellar bulge, that’s a lot of where those stars are, and the gravity and radiation effects of those stars in the close proximity, we’re gonna say that stars, if they were just averaged the same distance in that small area.
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then they’re going to be about as close to our sun as, say, Jupiter or Pluto. That’s how close those stars are. So massive gravitational effects between different stars that would totally mess up the orbits of any planets that surround them and cause major death and not support life at all. Also, the galactic arms are the other place where most of the stars in the galaxy are. And those also have very harmful radiation effects and close proximity that would cause
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major problems for life. And so they have estimated that about 95% of the galaxy would be uninhabitable due to those effects of gravitation and radiation from the close proximity of stars. We’re in a very low density area inside our galaxy as we rotate around the center. One of the greatest evidences of intentional design that I see in Earth is something that is just really pretty cool. I don’t know if any of you have heard about this, but the Earth,
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As we’re traveling around the sun, the sun is just a gigantic nuclear explosion happening all day long. And with those nuclear explosions, you have various metals and such that cause massive explosions and storms on those stars that will cause what they call a coronal mass ejection. Coronal mass ejection is a massive, is when the sun spews out a massive amount of radioactive particles into outer space.
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And when those hit the earth, you are getting hit with radiation levels, mostly in beta and alpha particles, on levels likened to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster that happened back in the 1980s. So enough REMs would hit the earth that you would see levels that would cause a person to die within about five minutes. So why do we not have radiation burns and all kinds of…
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all kinds of cancer on this planet. Well, it turns out the Earth has a pretty intriguing way of how it deals with that. The Earth has a liquid iron and a solid iron core, which creates a little bit of a magnetic field. It’s also something that only occurs on planets that are within that kind of sweet spot. But because of that magnetic field, you’re seeing, that’s why you see your compasses pointing north all the time, and not all planets have this.
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Especially colder planets, their cores are frozen, and other rocky planets on the Earth, on the, in our solar system don’t have them. It’s just the gas giants that have magnetic fields. But because of that, it is channeling those ionized particles that are hitting the Earth, or away from the Earth, towards our poles, and most of those are hitting, are skimming across the atmosphere at the polar regions, which is why you see
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auroras and upper latitudes and lower latitudes. And so we have something of a force field around our planet that keeps radiation from hitting us all the time. It also channels other kind of galactic radiation that happens all over the place.
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So those are some just basic things. Stephen Hawking, who is no believer, but a pretty smart guy, wrote lots of books, died a couple years ago, I think. Theoretical physicist. And he was written, wrote in one of his books. The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers, saying like the parameters within the universe and all the details within them.
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seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life. And so even those who are non-believers have to admit we have pretty specific design in the way our universe has been built.
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So having discussed some of the important characteristics required for the planet to support life, let me segue into saying that was the easy part. That was the easy part.
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To get life, that is way, way harder. To get life from non-life. Let’s talk a little bit about that. So here’s the Bible’s account of where the life came from. So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm according to their kinds and every winged bird according to its kind, and God saw that it was good. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground.
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according to the kind God saw that it was good. How many are your works, Lord? In wisdom, you made them all. The earth is full of your creatures, Psalm 104, 24. And so, again, we see Bible’s account, God made it.
It’s always important whenever you’re teaching someone to look at what the Bible actually says. A lot of non-believers may.
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kind of have an idea of what the Bible says, but maybe they don’t really know what it actually says. A lot of people have some idea of the Bible, but it may really be a caricature of the Bible as portrayed in popular culture, and maybe twisted around by various skeptics and people who aren’t friendly to faith and that kind of stuff. So it’s important to actually study what it actually says and work with people who are struggling with those ideas. So let’s talk about
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some of the things with regard to life. So before we get into the origins of life, we really have to ask four main questions that are very hard questions to answer. How did life get from non-life? That’s the first problem.
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Is there any form of life that is simple?
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How do you get complex organisms from non-complex organisms? Also a very difficult problem. And how does intelligence come from non-intelligence? The fact that we’re even sitting here talking about this suggests that we have an intelligent mind to even process these things. Where does that come from?
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or is it an illusion? So let’s talk about some ingredients for life. You’ve got to have carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, sulfur, nitrogen, phosphorus. And we talked about these substances have to be in a very unique temperature range to be able to bond appropriately together. And it turns out Earth has a lot of these elements in abundance. A lot of planets don’t have these elements in abundance. Maybe one or two of them, but not all of them.
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Earth has a lot of these in abundance as far as we’ve been able to discover.
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So what is life? Let’s ask that question. That’s the study in science that studies life is biology. And they will, most biologists will tell you, well, all life is built from cells. And they would be right, all life is built from cells. Definition of a living cell has to have four properties, four main properties for a cell. I didn’t know this even until I started studying it several years ago. The cell has to be,
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Let’s have complex organization. Specifically, it must have DNA. We’ll talk a little bit more about that in a second. The cell has to be able to metabolize, take in food, and turn it into energy to sustain that cell’s life.
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It’s got to be able to reproduce. How does a cell manage to learn how to replicate itself? So a cell’s got to be able to reproduce and build new cells. And the cell has to be able to respond to stimulus from an external environment. Obviously, most cells have to have mechanisms to go find more food and take in energy. So they have some stimulus mechanisms. There’s some other characteristics of cells. They have to have to.
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have regulation, be able to regulate their temperatures and energy output, and then they also have to be able to grow and develop, as we see in most complex life forms. So cells are made of thousands and thousands of components, not every cell is the same, a lot of cells are almost apples and oranges and components, but let’s see here, there.
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They have nucleus, chromosome, cytoplasm. I don’t know what most of these things are. I’m not a microbiologist. There’s membranes, there’s ribosomes, there’s nucleoids, other types of things from different types of cells. Golgi complex, I’m pretty sure that was discovered by some guy named Frederick Golgi trying to provide a name to something he didn’t understand or something. I’m just kidding, I don’t know. Don’t tell a microbiologist that.
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So enzymes are the building blocks of cells. These enzymes are created from proteins, and proteins are built from amino acids. We’ll talk more about those. And those have to be combined in specific ways, and as they’re combined, they’ll create things like ribonucleic acid, RNA, and also more complex.
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structures called DNA, the oxynucleic acid, which is extremely complex sequences of proteins and enzymes which have encyclopedias worth of genetic information.
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So as you look at this picture, you can see on the left side, it’s a picture of a window from a cathedral, York Minster, and obviously it was designed very complex, has a beautiful shape and organization, and was obviously created by a very talented architect. And as we see the picture on the right, we see a cross section of one strand of beta DNA.
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And you can see it has even more complexity, even more structure, and obviously looks like it was designed.
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I apologize, this isn’t the greatest backdrop to see all the details, but we’re doing the best we can. So, how do we get these strands of DNA? Well, it all starts out complex. So, basic, the most basic building blocks of DNA are what we call amino acids. There’s several different types of amino acids in the universe and the world that we see. One of them is glucose. There are various covalent bonds of various atoms like oxygen, hydrogen, carbon.
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and they have to be bonded in specific orders to make different elements. They have run experiments in a soup mixture of various chemicals and tried to shock it with lightning to provide some kind of evidence that these bonds can form. And they have had some success building some amino acids like these kinds of particles. But that was the very basics.
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Those amino acids also have to be bonded in very specific orders to build what we call proteins. And if there’s any difference in the way that was bonded together, that protein won’t work or falls apart. And there have been no examples of any random experiments showing any ability for proteins to bond spontaneously under shocks of lightning. And so that’s a very difficult one to deal with. And I kind of have some reservations about the…
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amino acids experiments because they use seawater as a base, which may already have amino acids in it. And I was a little skeptical on their experiments. So that’s also the basics. So we got amino acids, proteins, and then proteins are the building blocks of these long strands of genetic information called RNA and DNA. And those also have to be bonded in very, very specific orders where they are completely wrong. You got to be able to do that.
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Ribonucleic acid, which is just half the complexity of a DNA strand and obviously very, very detailed in the way, entire encyclopedias of information. And that’s about all the knowledge I have on that. It’s just very, very detailed in the way it comes together and the probabilities of these things happening by chance is just astronomical.
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So there are many difficulties in Darwin’s theory of evolution. The general premise of evolution is that given enough time, given an infinite amount of time, the probability of something happening seems more reasonable. Unfortunately, we don’t have an infinite amount of time. Considering the scientists, by their own standards of how old the universe is, by their own standards
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when the Earth came into being and when the Earth was actually in a temperature and state that would have been livable, you have a very minute amount of time for evolution to occur, a very small period of window. And the idea is that all of these, all of these, once you do have a cell, then you have to have that cell turn into something greater and more complex through what they call.
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genetic mutations, which they have seen in bacteria cells and other kinds of cells, and also natural selection, selecting which cells are the best suited for the environment. Problem is when we look at genetic mutations, what we often see, especially in complex organisms, is those organisms are no longer fit for survival. There are various defects, birth defects that occur, say like Down syndrome, which is a result.
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of a genetic mutation and those people who have that obviously have to be helped a lot through life as they’re very difficult. And we see a lot of these problems in other animals’ life as well. Also genetic mutations don’t really create anything new. It’s really a replication of genetic information or something being left out. And so because of those, you can’t really get…
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say from a skin cell to an eye cell, because that’s totally different genetic information. And there’s been lots of experiments that have been done on various types of bacteria cells to show that this really doesn’t create anything new.
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Also another problem is there, according to evolution, this should suggest that there are many lesser complex ancestors in the fossil record, and the fossil artifacts really don’t support that. What we see in the fossil record is a giant explosion of all diversity of organisms happening in a relatively short time, like the Cambrian explosion. And incidentally, that’s kind of what the Bible teaches, is everything happened in a very small amount of time.
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So one of the other great things I wanted to point out is natural selection suggests the world would be dog eat dog. Only the strong survive, and those that are weak will be destroyed. But what we see as we look at nature is we see this great synergy of creation, synergy meaning
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different things working together for their mutual benefit, like a team of horses being able to haul more weight than a single combined than a single or the same group of horses being able to support by their individual combined. So there’s some, a lot of examples of synergy in nature. One of the greatest ones is our mutual give and take between animal life and plant life. Plant provides most of the oxygen we have on earth for us to breathe.
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And we also provide carbon dioxide, we being humans and animals, that’s required for those plant life. Also, humans and also provide, animals provide fertilizer and there’s also fruit and other things that we give and take. Also, there’s other more complex examples of synergy, like trees dropping seeds for squirrels and rodents to eat and they bury some of them which grow into new trees. So that’s obviously a design characteristic.
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Insects pollinating all kinds of plant life plants really can’t survive without insects and also lower life forms providing decomposition Man, we’re already five minutes left to go man. I gotta move so There’s great synergy and creation so that suggests that world is not dog eat dog nature works together for their mutual benefits Also scientists may use theories like evolution and
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Big Bang as ways of explaining how the universe was made. But those theories can no way account for the beauty we see in creation, the idea that we have such beautiful things around us that have no real natural purpose other than for our pleasure. And the Bible says in 1 Timothy 6, put your hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. And so.
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There’s many things that have been put on this planet for our own enjoyment.
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So some concluding thoughts. I want to give you some quotes by some famous scientists. One of the most famous scientists is Sir Isaac Newton. He was one of the most influential scientists in all of history, created his grand unification of physics, and invented calculus, which most people have a hard time even spelling calculus, let alone doing it. He invented calculus to support his unification of physics.
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Gravity explains the motion of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion. Isaac Newton was a very strong believer. He actually wrote more about Bible and theology than he did about science. So very strong believer.
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Sir Francis Bacon, also a big proponent in the Enlightenment area, invented the scientific method. God has in fact written two books, not just one. Of course we are all familiar with the first book he wrote, namely scripture, but he’s also written a second book called Creation. We do well to study both. For a long time I wanted to become a theologian. Now however, behold, how through my effort, God is being celebrated in astronomy. That’s Johannes Kepler, astronomer.
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One of the guys that NASA named their Kepler mission after, which they’re using to search for extraterrestrial life. I’m sure he wouldn’t be happy about that. But Joanne’s Kepler was obviously a very strong believer as well.
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So I’d like to stop there and just say, all of these examples don’t really in and of themselves point to necessarily the Bible as the reason we have all of this creation around us. It really simply points out in a very simple means that straight naturalism cannot account for all the intricacy of seemingly perfect design we have in creation. The probabilities are so infinitesimally small that it nearly takes blind faith to accept that this happened just by chance.
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But one of the strong rejections of faith is that it requires a belief in a supernatural being and a belief in miracles. The challenge here is using some of these examples, we get a person to see, hey, I get it, that it’s hard to believe in miracles. We’ve never seen one necessarily in our lifetime. But if you look around at nature and the universe and the heavenly bodies that surround us, you’re kind of living in a miracle. Amen. And that’s a good way of…
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kind of pointing at the unique pointing someone into faith. Now we could go on and on about all the intricacies about the world’s design and the detail and balance which supports it, but it may not really work at convincing someone by itself. I think it’s important to point out, but I find it interesting and unique that
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The Bible doesn’t attempt to address all the details of how the earth came into being. It simply says, God spoke to them into being, let there be light, and it was so. Very unique to ancient literature, unlike other pagan religions, which tried to suggest that the world was created from gods and goddesses’ struggles with each other and fighting. And they set up all these shrines that are involved in creation. But God did not ask us to build any shrines or idols pointing to him.
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is commanded to his followers is that he wants creation and specifically the greatest creation humanity to point to who he is and show the world who he is. And so this beautiful and completely unique plan is to set up to allow people who are followers of God to represent who God is by their actions, their attitudes, and their love for all people. And this indeed becomes one of the most powerful testimonies of faith.
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And God obviously gave us the ultimate example of that great behavior and actions and attitudes through the person of Jesus Christ. And we will be one of the greatest forces for the gospel when we remember that in conjunction with these ideas. So that’s all I’ve got. So you guys can feel free to share, but we’re gonna have to stop there, obviously. So.