Everyone lives by faith. The question is: is your faith reasonable?
The irrational faith of evolution. This week on Creation Magazine LIVE!
Welcome to Creation Magazine LIVE! My name is Richard Fangrad.
and I'm Calvin Smith. Now this week on Creation Magazine LIVE our topic
is: The irrational faith of evolution. Last year we did an episode called, "Everyone
lives by faith". We outlined 4 different kinds of faith. And if you missed the TV broadcast
you can view it online at CREATION.com/cml5-23. We're basically going to continue that topic,
diving more deeply into the kind of faith required for evolution.
Right. let's start by reviewing the 4 kinds of faith. And, by the way, there are other ways
to organize all the different kinds of faith, we've just gone with these 4 kinds just for simplicity's sake, you
may be able to think of other variations. So, the highest level of faith could called
"Biblical Faith". Right. Ephesians 2:8-9 describes this kind of faith.
It says, "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing;
it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast." So Biblical faith
doesn't originate with us, it's "not your own doing", it is "not the result
of works". Saving faith is a gift from God. Right, the next kind (or 'level') of faith (and
this is the kind that everyone has), is 'Warranted Faith' or 'Human faith'. It's a faith
warranted by evidence or experience. For example, you have a warranted faith when you go
to a restaurant and eat the food they put in front of you, and you have faith that it's not going to
kill you. That's what that kind of faith we're talking about here. Warranted faith.
We could mention that this kind of faith is related to apologetics: so giving a reasoned
defence for biblical truths. But, apologetics goes beyond Human faith. It involves actively
collecting evidence to show that the statements made by God, and the events recorded in the
Bible are logical and true. You could call that "Reasonable faith". It's a slightly
different category of faith that isn't included in the 4 that we're discussing on today.
'Blind faith' is the next kind of faith. Blind faith is a leap into the dark. There's
no evidence or experience to warrant this kind of faith. Now Christians are often caricatured
as having this kind of faith. Most non-Christians think that we check our brains at the church door
and ignore logic and reason, and that's what Christianity is all about. Not true,
of course, but there you have the third kind of faith.
And the fourth (and we could say that this is the 'lowest' level of faith), is "Irrational
faith". It's defined as, "having faith in something in spite of evidence against
it." It goes a step further than blind faith. With Blind faith evidence is ignored. But with
Irrational faith you are aware of evidence, not blind to it, and believe the opposite
of what the evidence points to. Right. In the previous episode we mentioned Mark
Twain, the famous author who wrote, "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." That's
Irrational faith. You know something, yet you believe the opposite. For example, if you're
at the edge of a cliff, you know that thin air is not going to support the weight of a human,
yet you step off anyways believing that somehow you're not going to fall to your death.
That's crazy... and yet that kind of faith that is the most accurate way to describe the faith
required for evolution. In the previous episode we gave a couple of examples to verify this.
And we're going to get into more in the next half hour. These are examples where
scientific observations point one way, and the evolutionist believes the opposite. That's right.
One of them is the origin of life. Often called abiogenesis or chemical evolution, evolutionists
believe with all their hearts that life arose from chemicals, that were not alive. But science,
on the other hand, has never once shown this to be the case. If fact, there is massive
scientific evidences to confirm one of the most fundamental axioms of biology: that all
life comes from pre-existing life. Exactly, this goes back to experiments by Francesco
Redi, an Italian physician, who proved that maggots come from living flies and not from
lifeless meat, as was widely believed at the time (that was in the mid-1600'). It was
a serious setback to the belief in spontaneous generation. But later, when bacteria were
discovered, spontaneous generation believers thought microorganisms might arise from non-life.
And, of course, that notion was disproved in 1864 by the great scientist, and creationist,
Louis Pasteur, who demonstrated that bacteria can only come from living bacteria. And we'll continue with more on that when we get back after a short break.
Did you know that the DNA code is itself governed
by another code known as the epigenetic code? This physical and chemical code determines
which genes are switched on. Changes in this code can greatly alter an organism without
altering one letter of its DNA. For instance, scientists have managed to change the coat
colour in mice by feeding them a diet that switches off certain genes.
Epigenetics poses new problems for evolution. For instance, a group of animals with a camouflaged
coat colour might be favoured in a particular environment, but if this coat colour is due
to epigenetics and not the actual DNA code, then the non-camouflaged animals would be
selected against in vain. When the epigenetic modification is reset by a diet change, natural
selection is sent back to square one. The field of epigenetics, therefore, creates
problems for evolution and strongly points to a master programmer who invented the DNA and epigenetic codes.
To find out more from Creation Ministries International visit our website CREATION.com.
Well if you've just tuned in, this week we are talking about the irrational
faith of evolution. Irrational faith, all right. Continuing with Pasteur's discoveries: When
he reported on his results before the French Academy he confidently declared that, "Never
will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow of this simple
experiment. There is no known circumstance in which it can be confirmed that microscopic
beings came into the world without germs, without parents similar to themselves."
Now Pasteur never dreamed that the widely discredited evolutionary ideas (at the time) of Charles
Darwin, who lived at the same time, and just a few year earlier had published his famous "Origin
of Species", would one day become widely accepted by the scientific community, reviving
the notion of spontaneous generation. Some people say that Pasteur's spontaneous
generation has nothing to do with chemical evolution. Well that's not true. And knowledgeable evolutionists
know it. In his book, "The Origins of Life", evolutionist Cyril Ponnamperuma
said this; "It is, perhaps,
ironic that we tell beginning students in biology about Pasteur's experiments as the
triumph of reason over mysticism yet we are coming back to spontaneous generation, albeit
in a more refined and scientific sense, namely to chemical evolution."
OK, so what do we have here? Science says, life begets life. That life does not come from non-life.
Yet what do evolutionists believe? They believe the opposite of that. That's irrational
faith. Famous evolutionist George Wald, who won the Nobel Peace prize in Science said this;
"When it comes to the origin of life on this earth, there are only two possibilities:
creation or spontaneous generation. There is no third way. Spontaneous generation was
disproved one hundred years ago, but that leads us to only one other conclusion: that
of supernatural creation. We cannot accept that on philosophical grounds; therefore,
we choose to believe the impossible: that life arose by chance."
Right, its philosophical grounds not scientific grounds that they're rejecting this. Its irrational.
Evolutionists try hard to get around the science, with things like the Miller/Urey experiment,
back in 1952. But that only produced amino acids, and they were the wrong kinds of amino
acids anyway, it didn't come anywhere close to producing life. Today there's still no observational
support that life could come from non-life. There are some interesting recent experiments
where intelligent designers have made changes to existing life or taken parts of existing
life to make different life, but there's no science to overturn the law of biogenesis.
This is an area where science, all the evidence, points one way, but evolutionists believe
the opposite. It's anti-scientific and it is firmly in the category of "Irrational
faith". Now on the other hand, for the Christians, science
confirms that life cannot arise through the natural laws that God put in place to govern
the universe. The most logical and reasonable conclusion is that something above natural
laws, something supernatural must have been involved to create life. And that's a reasonable
faith. Let's look at another example. The famous
discoveries by paleontologist Dr Mary Schweitzer of various kinds of dinosaur soft tissue.
Remember, the evolutionary/millions of years history of the universe places the earliest
dinosaurs at about 233 million years ago...that's a long time ago... and the most recently living dinosaurs at
about 65 million years ago. But no one was there to verify that those things happened
at those times. So it's just a belief about the past.
The Bible, on the other hand, is a record about the past, recorded, in many cases, by
people who were there. And ultimately kept free from error by the Holy Spirit anyway. A straightforward
interpretation of the text, just drawing the meaning from the words that are there, not
trying to twist it to mean something else, reveals that God created recently, not billions
or even millions of years ago. Yes Dr Schweitzer's discoveries back in the
90's of T-rex blood cells in a T-rex leg bone shocked evolutionists. Bible-believers,
on the other hand, were provided with yet one more evidence that supports Biblical history,
that dinosaurs were created recently, and died recently. Died recently as well yes...
These discoveries are a huge threat to evolution, or anyone who believes the 'millions of
years' timeframe, because everyone knows that biological structures like blood cells,
blood vessels and soft tissue and meat and skin and things like that don't last millions of years. Animals that die
in the wild for example or are hit by vehicles on the side of the road, they rot away in weeks or months. So finding blood
cells in unfossilised dinosaur bones, and they were unfossilized, is a major problem if you believe in millions of
years. Right. For details on this find you can read our
report on it at creation.com/dino-blood. And when we get back we'll talk about more soft tissue
found in dinosaurs since this discovery.
The Genesis Account is the "Rolls Royce" of creation books. It's a thorough, verse-by-verse analysis of the first 11 chapters of Genesis,
revealing what the text means. Unlike most commentaries it includes the additional
step of providing cutting-edge scientific support for the history recorded in Genesis
because its author, Dr Jonathan Sarfati, is a PhD scientist.
Since science confirms the truths in God's Word, if both are properly interpreted, this
nearly 800-page book makes a fantastic reference tool for pastors or anyone wanting to know
what Genesis really means. Order your copy at creation.com.
On this week's episode we are talking about the irrational faith of evolution, how belief
in the evolutionary history of the universe beginning with a big bang and billions of
years later you end up with people is not a reasonable faith, it's not a warranted
faith, it's not even a blind faith, it's at the extreme end of the faith spectrum.
it's a belief that goes in the opposite direction to that which is suggested by evidence.
The evolutionary belief that dinosaurs died millions of years ago is an irrational belief.
It goes against science, against what scientists observe. After Dr Schweitzer, we mentioned earlier, published papers
revealing what she found evolutionists attempted to discredit the findings, saying that they
weren't blood cells. But they were tested in a variety of ways, they really are blood
cells. Then in 2005 she found more blood cells along with soft tissue and different kinds
of dinosaur proteins. It just gets better and better! What she found even shocked her because she
believes dinosaurs died millions of years ago. She said this, "It was totally shocking.
I didn't believe it until we'd done it 17 times. The tests. That's great! But it's not surprising that a
new scientific discovery shocked her because the science opposes her beliefs. In fact,
"shocking" discoveries are going to be the norm for anyone who believes falsehoods
about the true history of the universe. And it wasn't just Dr Schweitzer who was
shocked. Other evolutionists were even more shocked, to the point where she actually had
problems getting papers published. She said, "I had one reviewer tell me that he didn't
care what the data said, he knew that what I was finding wasn't possible,' says Schweitzer.
'I wrote back and said, "Well, what data would convince you?" And he said, 'None.'" That's pretty scientific eh? ...la la la la la... It's kind of like that.
That illustrates a fascinating part of the origins debate: that it isn't about the
data. I mean it has to do with the data, but at a foundational level, look at this example,
the debate is between different beliefs about history. This reviewer believes that
dinosaurs died millions of years ago and his belief causes him to reject scientific observations.
That's fascinating. And it's irrational!
Yes it is! And it's kind of ironic too because Creationists of course are often
accused of rejecting science. But we don't reject science. There isn't a single scientific
observation that creationists reject. What we reject the false 'millions of years' history
that the scientific observations are often wrapped in.
This discovery is a good example. We don't reject the observations: dinosaur soft tissue,
blood cells, protein, etc. We reject the interpretation that these things are 70 million years old.
For more details on Dr Schweitzer's amazing research see this article creation.com/schweit and there's a lot of good stuff there...
But there's even more! Dinosaur DNA was found and reported on again by Dr Schweitzer
and her team. They detected DNA in three independent ways. Amazingly, one of the chemical tests
and another test using specific antibodies detected DNA still in its double-stranded
form. So it was quite well preserved, since short strands of DNA less than about 10 bp,
or "base pairs", don't form stable duplexes-the DNA structure that these tests detected.
One test involved using what's called a "stain" to check if the DNA still has
an intact double helix structure. The stain will lodge itself into the groove in the double
helical structure like you can see here, and that was confirmed. Again, the first possible response by long-agers
is "contamination" from bacteria, for example, or that it's only biofilm. But
the DNA wasn't found everywhere. It was only in certain internal regions of the 'cells'.
That's unlike biofilm taken from other sources and exposed to the same DNA-detecting pattern.
Biofilm is any group of microorganisms where cells stick to each other and often stick
to some other surface. Yes that's biofilm. But it also rules out bacteria, because in more
complex cells (such as us and dinosaurs), the DNA is stored in a small part of the cell-the
nucleus of course. In addition to that, Schweitzer's team detected
a special protein called "histone H4". Not only can this protein not last for millions
of years, but this is a specific protein for DNA. In more complex organisms, the histones
are tiny spools around which the DNA is wrapped. But histones aren't found in bacteria.
So, there are more details; you can read about them at creation.com/dino-dna and the original
papers are referenced in our article. The bottom line is: intact dinosaur DNA has been
discovered. How long could it last under ideal conditions? We'll give you the answer when we get back.
Have the fish in New York's Hudson River
evolved into 'super mutants'? A large proportion of the river's Atlantic tomcod
fish have developed resistance to certain poisons, and the mass media has heralded this
as a dramatic example of evolution in action! However, far from supporting microbes-to-man
evolution, these mutant fish have actually devolved, not evolved! That's because the
fish have become resistant through a loss of genetic information.
Non-resistant fish have special proteins in their cells that allow the poisons to bind.
However, due to a genetic mutation, the proteins of resistant fish cannot bind the poisons
as readily. So, 'corrupted' proteins have made the fish resistant. And in the poison-rich
environment of the Hudson River, it's no wonder that the mutated gene facilitating
resistance has quickly spread through the tomcod population.
It is misleading to call these changes 'evolution', because evolution requires the addition of
new genetic information, but these resistant fish have only demonstrated information loss.
To find out more from Creation Ministries International visit our website Creation.com.
All right our subject this week is, the irrational faith of evolution. Scientific observations strongly
favour the Biblical creation account, that God created recently, in six literal days, and there was
a global flood. Yes but evolutionists have to believe in a 'millions
of years', evolutionary history in spite of the evidence against it and that's irrational
faith but they have to cling to it. So, dinosaur DNA has been discovered. That is
shocking to evolutionists. Their first response of course was to question the data. But it's been confirmed
that scientists really are finding dinosaur DNA so, some brave scientists took it upon themselves to investigate the question
how long could dinosaur DNA last? That's the big question...
A paper on DNA by evolutionists from December 2012 shows that it might be able to last as
much as 400 times longer in bone. But even there, there is no way that DNA could last
since the evolutionary time of dinosaur extinction. Their figures of the time until complete disintegration
of DNA (which is no intact bonds) is the following; 22,000 years at 25 degrees C, 131,000 years at 15 degrees C, 882,000
years at 5 degrees C; and even if it could somehow be kept continually below freezing point at
-5 degrees C, it could survive only 6.83 million years -and that's about a tenth of the assumed
evolutionary age of dinosaurs. It just doesn't work. According to the evolutionary history dinosaurs
died about 65 million years ago. Science says, no they didn't. What are you going to go
with? The history or the science? I feel like asking evolutionists, "Do you think we should throw out all of forensic
science, or just when dealing with dinosaurs?" We might also mention that science supports
the history recorded in Scripture. Fun stuff. I love being a Christian. It makes so much
sense! That's right. Christianity makes sense of
the world around us. If you begin your thinking with what God says in the Bible these kinds
of discoveries aren't a problem. It's reasonable to have faith in what the Bible
says. Let's look at another one: mutations. Genetic
mutations are changes to the genetic code. The genetic code is like software that
tells the hardware what to do. Right well Bill Gates, the computer genius behind Microsoft
actually said, "DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever
created." And he's right. Scientists are continually discovering more and more complexity
to the genetic code to the point where comparing it to a computer code is actually far too simplistic.
It's actually mind-bogglingly complex.
All living things have this complex code within their cells that governs how the cells operate.
Mutations are errors in that code that originate primarily as the DNA is copied. Every time
there is cell division, when the DNA makes a copy of itself, there's about 3 errors are
produced. We start life as a single cell inside mom,
with a single copy of our DNA. Then that single cell divides, eventually becoming the trillions
of cells we are today. Some of the mutations that occur during all this copying are passed
on to the next generation so that each new generation starts life off with more mutations
than the previous generation. Decades ago scientists were concerned, or alarmed really, that
the rate at which mutations accumulate in the human population from generation to generation
might be as high as one in every single generation. They were concerned because is the mutation
rates were that high, the human race would be doomed to extinction, it's just a matter
of time. These mutations are destroying the complex
code that governs how your body works. So soon the code isn't going to work anymore!
Great advances are being made in the study of genetics, it's an extremely fast moving field of science. New discoveries happen all the
time. So what are the leading human population geneticists saying today about mutations rates?
Well, it's not 1 mutation per generation, it's not 2 and it's not 5. It's around 100-300. Now here's
what that would look like. Imagine that this is Adam and Eve, or a couple that lived long
ago. Everyone in the next generation would have about 100 more mutations when they start
life than their parents had when they started life. The next generation would start life
off with about 200 more mutations. The third generation, 300. So, how does this really relate
to our subject today? Evolutionists believe that humans have been
evolving, going back to an ape-like ancestor about a million years ago. But science reveals
that the human genome is deteriorating far too quickly. The notion that humans have been
evolving for millions of years is a scientific impossibility.
Exactly, so here is yet one more example where science points one direction and evolutionists believe
exactly the opposite. That's right. Again, that kind of faith is an irrational
faith. It's a belief that is held to despite powerful, cutting-edge science against it.
Is this scientific discovery a problem for those who take the Bible's history by faith?
Not at all. There have only been less than 200 generations from Adam to us, about 6000
years, not millions of years, and this data from genetics fits very well with biblical
history. Actually, the more scientists study mutations
the more support they reveal for biblical creation. Now if you're interested in more information
go to creation.com/mutations that will take you to a page on our website with many articles
summarizing the latest research on mutations supports the Bible. We'll be right back...
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This week on Creation Magazine LIVE: The irrational
faith of evolution. We were just talking about how some new discoveries in genetics powerfully
refute the belief that humans have been evolving for millions of years. Now some of you might be
asking, "So, how do evolutionists get around this? What's their response?
Yes, Dr John Sanford is the scientist who summarized much of this data in his amazing book "Genetic
Entropy and the Mystery of the Human Genome". He himself is a geneticist, but not in the
field of human population genetics. His book summarizes research from the leading human
population geneticists, and they see the problem. Well they sure do because they write articles with titles like,
"Why have we not died 100 times over?" They've gone through the data and their
answer is basically silence. Or, "Well, that's an interesting problem, isn't it?"
The bottom line is: there's no answer, for evolutionists! This data doesn't fit with
evolution. Christianity makes some incredible claims
that cause many not to investigate Christianity because they think the truth claims the Bible
makes are too far-fetched. But just because something sounds far-fetched doesn't mean
it's not true. You shouldn't use that as a criteria for rejecting what the Bible says. For example, would you believe that you're
moving at more than 1 million miles per hour right now? You know it sounds pretty far- fetched doesn't it. But it's
true. If you take the rotational speed of the Earth, at the equator, that's about
1666 kph, add the speed of the earth revolving around the sun, the speed of the solar system
revolving around the center of our galaxy, then add the speed that the Milky Way moves
through space within the cluster of galaxies that it's a member of, and this cluster
moves through space towards yet another larger cluster of galaxies off in the direction of
the constellation Virgo. Altogether, you are hurtling through space at about 4.4 million
KPH (or 2.7 million MPH) and you just feel like you are sitting still. Yes that seems far-fetched but it's true.
Referring to the incredible, and sometimes complex claims made by the Bible, C. S. Lewis
the famous writer of the Narnia series and other books, he wrote this; "If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it
easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing
religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he
has no facts to bother about." You know God created life. That might sound far-fetched,
but it's true, and science supports that conclusion: that the natural laws that we can investigate
are insufficient to account for the origin of life. Evolution makes more incredible claims than
the Bible. It says that life can originate via the natural laws. But science says, those natural laws say "no".
And the criteria that well just because something sounds far-fetched means we shouldn't investigate it, if you investigate the claims of the Bible they hold up.
If you investigate the claims of evolution on the other hand, it doesn't work. Exactly.
You know the information that we put together here on the show Creation Magazine LIVE! is from the magazine,
Creation Magazine that's been published for over 35 years now by Creation Ministries International.
You can go to our website creation.com/free-mag and get yourself a free copy, and next week on Creation Magazine LIVE: Making
sense of ape-man claims. We'll see you then.
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