Answering Evolution & Islam - Dr. Greg Bahnsen

How can we as Christians respond to the challenge of the evolutionary hypothesis? Before I answer that question, just to make sure you know what I'm talking about in this lecture, I'll be dealing with what is called macroevolution rather than micro evolution. That is, I'm talking about species transformation, the evolution of living organisms through their progeny, whereby one species becomes another species. I'm not talking about alteration of form or function within a species. Micro evolution. And on this question of specie transformation, the diversity that we see in the world round about us needs to be accounted for. It is rather remarkable. Tigers and whales and goats and eagles. We have carrots and cockroaches and roses and roosters and grapes and giraffes and gorillas and germs. The plethora of living things is just incredible. We have to ask, how did such a profuse variety of species come about? The idea that they came about naturally by means of gradual transformation from simpler forms, each having its place in a complex but common genetic tree stemming from a primordial blob of life was proposed prior to the work of Charles Darwin. But it's usually the name of Darwin that we think of in terms of that particular answer to the question, where did the diversity of things come from? The point is, diversity of life forms all came in a naturalistic process from a common blob or came supernaturally from a common God. And those who hold to the evolutionary view therefore feel that they have refuted the Bible, indeed refuted the Bible at a crucial point. Its doctrine of origins, its doctrine of creation. So the theory of evolution, I believe, has become the academic icon of our culture, which provides the basis for repudiating the Bible. The Bible just doesn't carry credibility with people anymore because they've been convinced that the theory of evolution has been established. So now what should we as Christians trying to be true to our presuppositions? What should we do to answer the evolutionary challenge? Well, let me be with some embarrassment of the evolutionists, okay? Evolutionist says, hey, we all know it's a matter of science. We all came from a primordial blob. Through gradual development over the generations, life forms being sustained because they fit into the environment better than other life forms. Survival of the fist, gradual transformation, and then fixity of species being determined by natural selection. Well, I would begin by pointing out this is not the only way to approach, but I begin by pointing out that it's not just religious people that have opposed this idea and opposed it in a scholarly way. The Mathematical probability that random mutations produce complex living organization organisms from simpler chemical forms is in fact infinitesimally small, even given billions of years. See, mutations are almost always harmful to an organism in its natural environment. It turns out that a number of mathematicians in the year 1967 at a conference and published their academic papers. They were published by two editors, Moorhead and Kaplan, under the title Mathematical Challenges to the Neo Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution. And in that book, one of the articles was written by Eden Murray entitled Inadequacies of Neo Darwinian Evolution is a Scientific Theory. Okay, we're not talking about religious inadequacy. We're not talking about people going to Genesis and beating the evolutionists over the hand of their Bibles. We're talking about mathematicians saying, now let's just take what you're telling us and study it mathematically. Remember, internal critique. Answer the fool according to his folly. But Eden Murray concludes, it is our contention that if random, if the word random is given a serious and crucial interpretation. From a probabilistic point of view, the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws. All of you should be laughing. Like, what an admission. The mathematicians say, mathematicians are applying probability theory to this. And they say, now, if this is supposed to be random, there is no theistic evolution. If this is supposed to be random, and you give a serious interpretation to the randomness postulate, there's not nearly enough time, even in billions of years for this to have happened. And so apparently any scientific theory of evolution would rely on discovering new natural laws. You know, if it had been a fundamentalist Christian making that comment without the verification in proofs for math, everybody would dismiss it. This is pretty embarrassing. The fool answered by fools like him. Or think about what Michael Denton pointed out in this 1986 book, Evolution A Theory in Crisis. By the way, that title alone is politically incorrect, right? Most people, well, it turns out when you talk about evolution, you really have, I think, probably only three classes of people you talk to. One, a very, very, very narrow slice of the eggheads in the university, and only a slice of those have any idea what the state of the debate is. And I'm going to quote one of them in just a minute, who knows very well the state of the debate. It's shocking what he admits here, but then you have people who are living out the theory of evolution, in a sense, professionally. It's like it's their job to apply this We've got to hold on tenaciously to this as a worldview because my way of doing sociology, my way of doing history or economics depends upon the theory of evolution. And to these people, they just assume the first group, they all know what they're talking about and evolution is well founded. And if you go and you try to talk to them about the problem, what they'll usually say is, well, they answer those things over in the biology department and then you got another class of people and they're your garden variety next door neighbor types, the milkman. And for him, since everybody at the university says evolution is well founded, they just say, well, I don't know what the answers are, but somebody that's a scholar does. So you have the vast majority of people in your culture relying upon the opinion of the university, professional professors of whom only a narrow slice even know what's going on in the debate. And when you talk to those people, they're not the ones who say, oh yeah, this is well established and all that. Evolution is in crisis today among those who know what's happening. But you know, they don't come out and say that to their colleagues. They don't say, by the way, maybe you better revise your notes in sociology and history because I'm not really sure now what to say about this. It is the reigning dogma in our culture, but the king has no clothes. Michael Denton, 1986. Evolution the theory in Crisis. Denton points out that to get a cell by chance would require at least 100 functional proteins to appear simultaneously in one place. More than 100 actually, but at least 100. Okay, so if you're going to get a cell, one cell, one cell ain't a whole lot. But to get one cell is going to require over 100 proteins by chance to get together in one place. Now, the independent pro. Any particular protein appearing, the independent probability is going to be, he says, hardly more than 10 to the minus 20th power. I need to review for a minute. Right? Y' all remember what 10 to the minus 20th is? That means one over 10 with 20 zeros followed. Okay, one over 10. Or is it one? Anyway, you got 20 zeros that you can add to it. If you go to Las Vegas and you gamble and somebody offers you the probability of 1 in 10, you're probably a fool to say, oh yeah, I'd like to play this game. 1 to 10 is bad arts, especially if you're putting anything important down. You got me? So that's one zero. Now if you have one over 10 with a second zero, you've got one in 100. If one in 10 is bad odds, how many of you are going to put your money down on 1 in 100? And of course, that's made even worse if you had another zero. One in a thousand. One chance in a thousand. The probability, according to Denton, of one protein arising by chance, he says, is hardly more than 10 to the minus 20th. Now you've got 20 zeros down there, one chance at all those zeros, But that's only one protein. You need 100 proteins for one cell. And so he said the maximum combined probability would be 10 to the -2,000th power. 1 with 10 and 2,000. 0. I mean, that's a number that just boggles the mind. That's for one cell. Other scientists, Hoyle and rick Rusman in 1981 in their book Evolution from Space, calculated there are about 2,000 enzymes. So the chance of obtaining them all at a random trial is only one part in 10 to the 40,000th power. These are not religious people who have written these things. Now, what do you think? The unbeliever is open minded, objective, wants to follow the evidence wherever it leads him. Right. That's why unbelievers hold to the theory of evolution, even though the chances are astronomically small that you could get even one living cell by chance. This is what unbelievers tell other unbelievers. Let's think for a minute about the fossil record. The fossil record. If the theory of evolution by gradual mutation and natural selection were true, the fossil record should show any number of connecting links between life. Because there are so many life forms and there are so many fossils, we really shouldn't have any difficulty finding missing links between the various forms of life. But to the embarrassment of the evolutionists, life appears abruptly in the fossil record and appears in complex forms. And the forms of life we find show gaps systematically between the various kinds of life forms. So you get life abruptly, you get complex life, and you get gaps between the various kinds of life forms. That's what the fossil record shows us. You need to be aware that we have at this time hundreds of millions of fossils, hundreds of millions of fossils. And in the hundreds of millions of fossils, there is not 1. It's NADA 0. Not one provides an intermediary form, what we call a missing link. And in particular, there are no fossil traces of a transformation from an ape, one creature, to man. Now, I realize that popular opinion has it that the fossils show all these developments, but there is not any fossil Trace of a transformation from an ape like creature to man. You might think, well then quite obviously evolutionists, who are those who are paleontologists, those who study the fossil record would be the most inclined to be giving up the theory of evolution. But the leading academician promoting evolution in our culture today is Stephen J. Gould. G O U L D. He knows the fossil record. He knows it very well. He knows the dirty little secret. The fossil record doesn't support Darwinian gradualism. And so in 1977, the leading advocate of evolution in our culture wrote an article in the journal paleobiology. This is volume three and page 145. Because you're not going to believe what I'm going to read, you're going to have to go. He couldn't have said that. He did. The title of the article is Punctuated Equilibrium. Punctuated Equilibrium. According to Gould, the fossil record doesn't support evolution as it's interpreted in a gradualist, Darwinian fashion. But we know evolution took place. So the fossil record must prove to us that evolution took place with punctuated periods of equilibrium. So that according to him, when evolutionary change happens, it doesn't happen gradually, mutation by mutation over thousands of years. It rather happens very fast. You have a sudden burst of evolutionary activity and then long periods of equilibrium. And that equilibrium, those periods of equilibrium, the equilibria, as he said, are punctuated then by real fast periods of evolutionary change. Now, what causes things to change so fast? Well, we don't know. Something does. And so it turns out that the fossil record would be expected to show what. Since you don't have a long period of evolutionary development, you'd have fossils laid down during that equilibrium period, not during the period of punctuated very fast evolutionary change. It's unlikely you'd get fossils during that short punctuated period. Therefore the fossil record is exactly what we expect. Evolution were true. As I tell people, a little bit tongue in cheek when I lecture on the subject, that amounts to saying the proof of my theory in the first fossil record is that there would be no proof of the fossil record. See, I've made my theory immune to verification or falsification by the nature of the theory itself. So when I go out and the fossil record looks like special creation, then what I'm saying is, well, that's really punctuated equilibrium. Let's stand back just for a minute for the sake of the fool and saint. See if I understand what you're saying. What you are saying is that there were really different periods of evolution, but they were very Short periods. And there were bursts of creative energy and change in these different periods, right? And then there are gaps between these bursts of creative evolutionary change. Right? Now, if you recall, the Genesis story says there were periods of creative burst separated by a gap of a day. But the point is, God at the beginning of each day did this work of creation, then there was a gap, did this work of creation, then there was a gap, and so forth. Isn't that. I mean, it's just interesting, you know, just interesting to point out that what you are really doing is getting back to the anatomy of a creationist view of origins. But you don't want it to be a personal supernatural God who does it. And what do you prefer in the place of a supernatural God who gives these bursts, these punctuated bursts of creative energy? Nature or yes, better. We don't know. We would rather have in our worldview, I don't know, it just happened, punctuated than to say God punctuated it because day by day he created things. And so in Paleobiology 1977, page 145, Stephen Jay Gould explains to us why gradualism has been preferred. The general preference that so many of us hold for gradualism is a metaphysical stance embedded in the history of Western cultures. It is not a high order empirical observation induced from the objective study of nature. Nail him to the wall. But praise God, as we've been saying that for years. And here's the leading advocate now admitting it's not because we've studied nature objectively. It's not a high order empirical observation because we don't prefer evolution because we've studied nature empirically. It's our preference metaphysical in character embedded in the history of Western culture. He said, hey, the wave of future is secularism. That's why our metaphysic is secular. When our metaphysic is secular, then we hold to impersonal forces being the source of life, gradually developing the way that I'm describing. And then he says, you shouldn't have the idea that this is an empirical observational study of nature that led us to this. This is a philosophical pre commitment. Already in 1874, John Tyndall had said the basis of the doctrine of evolution consist not in an experimental demonstration, but in its general harmony with scientific thoughts. The basis for the doctrine of evolution doesn't come from experimentation. It comes from. This is our concept of science. Louis Vannur, in the Advocate 1984, he was the president of the Biological Society of Strasbourg, wrote evolution is a fairy tale for grownups. This theory has helped Nothing in the progress of science. It is utterly useless. Here's the president of the Biological Society of Strasbourg, a man who became the director of research at the French center of Scientific Research. He says, this is just a fairy tale. It doesn't help anything. It's useless. You see what I mean? Only a narrow slice of people in this world have any idea of the state of the argument. If you ask your next door neighbor, your next door neighbor most likely is going to say, oh yeah, we know evolution's been proven and it's proven scientifically. The difficulty is the scientific evidence is strong against the gradualist theory of evolution. Let me talk about bit more about that. A natural clock. That's a metaphor for trying to date how old the Earth is from certain indicators in nature itself. Natural clock. Natural clocks show us that there has not been enough time in Earth's history to accommodate the theory of evolution. The dairy double evolution requires that there be between 15 and 25 billion years here. Of course, the mathematicians have already blown that apart. I started with that. But just looking at natural clocks, it takes roughly a thousand years to produce an inch of topsoil by erosion by the forces of wind and rain. And so the topsoil on the Earth's crust, if we'd been here 15 to 25 billion years, should be a rather thick layer, shouldn't it? As a matter of fact, around the Earth, the topsoil depth is between 6 and 9 inches. People will say, oh, well, then it must have washed into the ocean. Well, if it's washed into the ocean, then the sediment on the floor of the ocean should be mine miles east. The sediment on the floor of the Ocean is about 0.56 of a mile thick on average, Given the present rate at which meteor dust is settling on the Earth's surface. Meteor dust settles on the Earth from collision with the Earth's atmosphere, and meteors collide with our oxygenated atmosphere, then they disintegrate and the dust dissipates and it settles on the Earth. You've heard of gravity, right? Given the present rate at which meteor dust settles on the Earth's surface, if the Earth is billions of years old, then the dust from meteors should now be about 50ft thick. You can go outside and ask yourself whether that's what you observe. There's only enough salt in the ocean to explain thousands of years of mineral erosion in the ocean. The Earth's decaying magnetic field would have passed away already if the Earth had been here billions of years. What I'm saying Is choose your clock. Whichever one you look at, there's not enough time for evolution to have taken place. Look at the fossil record. The fossils don't support the gradualist theory, and evolutionists have to kind of sneak around that and revise their theory to accommodate it so that all evidence supports their theory, because no evidence could be found anyway. Look at the mathematical probabilities of life arising from non life. The mathematical probabilities of evolution taking place. If the random was postulate is given a serious interpretation, why does anybody hold to the theory of evolution? Theory of evolution has other problems too. According to it, things developed gradually over many years and those life forms which were most adept to the environment survived, and those which, being different life forms, were not as adept for survival died out. That's what we're told. That means that evolution, positive evolution, natural selection, evolution would be preferable, would prefer those life forms which multiply or reproduce readily early in life and with great security. I don't know if you are familiar with the term differential reproduction, but the Darwinian hypothesis has been pretty much redefined to this day. It amounts to the claim of differential reproduction. Some life forms leave more progeny than other life forms. And if you leave more progeny, more children, and that kind of life form, that version of the cockroach, is more likely to last under the natural environment in which it finds itself. Well, if that is true, then one has to wonder why anything evolved beyond the bacterial stage. Because bacterial bacteria multiply readily early in their lifespan and with great protection. It's not hard to get bacteria to grow. I mean, children in elementary school do it in a petri dish. That's real easy. Why then do we have fish that swim upstream? Why do we have advanced animals, reptiles and mammals that mate in the most awkward of ways? Why do we have any kind of copulation as a form of reproduction at all? When I'm out speaking more popularly to audiences, especially if we have young people in the audience. One of the ways in which I like to show the absurdity of the theory of evolution is by saying, can you really imagine that you as a human being and you know how your mother and father had babies, right? You know how human beings copulate in order to have offspring? Can you really imagine that originally you were a life form that was a blob like amoebas, and how did they reproduce? How does. By what division? Cell division. Right, okay. And we're supposed to believe that somehow there's a pathway from cell division as a way of having offspring to copulation? As a way of having offspring and all of that by chance over billions of years. Well, that. I mean, I don't believe you can account for the development of life forms at all in this way. But let's just play with this. Let's give the fool his folly for a moment and see what happens if whatever you want to call it, the amoeba level, if life at that level reproduced by cell division, and then there were other mutations and developments and finally you get fish in the sea and then reptiles on the land and mammals and so forth. The point is, somewhere along the line you have the development of genitalia in the life of forms, okay? In the living organisms, why did genitalia develop when they weren't being used for reproduction? And not only that, the genitalia that evolved by chance and for no apparent advantage in the environment, so they weren't being used for reproduction. The genitalia that evolved were of male and female forms. I'm not sure why that would be. But it's even worse because as you know, there's a limit to the fertility of the female, to the male too. But we usually think of female menopause. So what is the length of time that most human women, women are able to get pregnant? What is the length of time before they start having their period periods and they go through menopause? Anybody? 35 years. 35, 40 years. I'm going to be generous, I'm going to say 100. Most women would shudder. But nevertheless, I will say it's a hundred. Now you have to remember that if you evolve these life forms from the amoeba level, cell division, reproduction, and these life forms have genitalia that are going to be any good for reproduction. You're going to need to get a male form and a female form together in the same 100 year generation, aren't you? I don't have to rehearse the obvious, right? You get a male human, humanoid form and no female out there, he's not going to give her any babies, there's no her there. If you get a female who shows up and she lives around for 100 years and there's no male to mate with, she's not going to have babies. So again, I'm just being a philosopher. Who am I? You know, I like playing silent. I'm just so ignorant. Let me ask you about this. Now, what you're telling me is we started out as amoeba, we were reproducing as amoeba pretty well cell division, but then mutations started up and somehow over billions and billions of years, we got a male humanoid and a female humanoid in the same narrow window of 100 years. I was being generous and they knew how to make babies and they did. So give me a break. Evolution is a fairy tale for grown ups. It's worse than what I just described because according to the theory of evolution, which is based upon differential reproduction, there shouldn't have been any advantage for the development of genitalia anyway. There should have been any advantage to copy. You notice what happens to life forms once they become more complex. They leave less children behind. Bacteria are very cocooned, let me tell you. Moose, mooses are not. You may think dogs are, but dogs are nothing in comparison to bacteria. And human beings are even less. And yet we're supposed to believe that we get to moose or Mises or mooses, whatever, we get them and we get frogs and we get dogs and we get human beings by differential reproduction. See, the theory is at war with itself. Nothing should have evolved beyond the bacterial stage. And then there's the difficulty of how is it, if life forms are preserved, the various life forms are preserved by reproduction methods, that some life forms, some flowers for instance, have evolved in such a way that there's only one species of insect that can pollinate them? See, that just should never have happened because the flowers that are going to be most likely to leave more offspring are going to be those that can have many insects pollinate them. Doesn't that make sense to you? And yet there are some flowers, many more than I could give you examples of right now. But many flowers that are pollinated by only one kind of product, only one that doesn't make any sense given the theory of evolution. In fact, one of the flowers gives off the smell of rotting carrion. And that's a defense mechanism. Most insects won't even go close to it. There's only one kind of insect, I wish I could remember what it is. There's only one kind of insect that is drawn to carrion. And so it goes to this flower thinking it's going on carrion and it carries the pollen from flower to flower. Now what is the advantage of developing such a horrendous smell if it cuts down the chances of your being pollinated? Differential reproduction, this theory is just. Has got all kinds of difficulties. Well then there's also the difficulty that according to it, I'm still doing my internal fatigue. According to wit, life forms, the gradually. And the reason why certain life forms are preserved is because of their advantage in the environment. But if the development is gradual and the preserving of a change is determined by advantageous or it's fitting into the environment, then we have to ask ourselves, why do life forms stick around in a disadvantageous environment and then change so they adapt to it? You know, that isn't what we find when we study animal behavior. You put animals in an environment that is not conducive to their life, they don't stick around to evolve for 100 million years. You know what they do? They migrate. They migrate to the environment where their style of life, their particular type of coating or a fur, whatever is going to fit into that particular environment. Evolution would have us believe, silly though it may be, that sometimes life forms just stuck around and said, well, you know, we're not really going to fit into this environment. I guess we'll have to die out. No, life forms migrate to a more favorable environment. So it's not as though the environment determines which ones will survive. Life forms look for the environment where they will survive. So the theory turns in on itself. Then again, it's supposed to be a gradual development. How do you like this? You know how we do it. How's the theory looking? Well, I'm not saying this out of pride. I've learned most of this from other people. So it's not me personally. But you know what, my opponent has been on the mat for a long time here. He's bleeding profusely. None of the. Still pounding on them. I got some more I want to tell you. Gradual development of the life form. Well, we're supposed to believe that by mutation after mutation after mutation we have the gradual development of the eye, right? But remember that when you have a mutation, the change in the life form that the mutation brings about will only stick. I can be metaphorical. Will only hang around for more generations if that particular change is advantageous to the environment. And so we have to believe that the eye gradually evolved in every stage of the gradual change was advantageous to the organism in its environment. Well, so I'll just put it to you. What's the advantage of a one third developed eye? We see that. You see, you can't account for. I mean, you may be able to account for some kind of mutation that's on the road to being an eye. I don't think you can. I've never seen anybody write it up in a convincing way. But you have to account for how every stage along the way before it's an eye became advantageous. I got a better one for you. A good SAP, a heart that's double the problem for the guy on the mat. It's not just that you have a heart. You won't have a living form if you don't have lungs to support the heart and vice versa. And so now we have to believe that hearts evolved gradually, lungs evolved gradually, neither one of which makes any sense. And we're supposed to believe that hearts and lungs evolved simultaneously. Well, you need kidneys too. So it's really increase the magnitude of the problem, you know, a hundred times more. I'm not doing this because I just want to smirk and feel proud about my Christian position. I'm doing this because I want you to be fully convinced of what the Bible says. People who disagree with the Bible are made fools. You get enough fools together, they'll all complement each other. No, Joe, haven't we got a wonderful theory here. Theory is absolute garbage. Intellectually, it's contrary to what we know. Let's talk about reptiles becoming birds. We're supposed to believe that happened, you know, somehow the reptile, or some form of reptile began to develop looser skin. The looser skin lost its scales, developed feathers, and enabled this new life form to fly. Yeah, right. Remember, every change along the way is only preserved in differential reproduction because of its advantage in the environment. You should study sometime. And really, if you want to know the wonder of God's wisdom and power in the creation of the world, study in a very, very detailed way the development of a bird's feather. The flight feather of a bird is wondrous. The way in which the various barbs of it, each one of which is so soft, can't do anything, and yet they are so interlaced that they become imperial, impervious, therefore can support the bird on the air. But we have to believe that the loose sagging skin of the reptile developed the intricate pattern of interweaving of the various barbs of the flight feather of a bird and that every step along the way was somehow advantageous. Well, at some point the loose skin of the reptile would not enable it to fly. Right, because loose skin is not impervious to air. Well then, if the advantage of developing a flight wing is that you can fly, get away from predators and so forth, what advantage was the loose skin of the reptile before it was impervious to air? How did we get from the loose skin to the. The delicate feather of the. Just doesn't make any sense. But it's much worse if you look at the lungs of a bird, the respiratory, the avian respiratory, System is unique in all the living organisms of the world, all those that have lungs anyway. By contrast, think of your own lungs. I'll give you an amateur's account of this. As you know, when you breathe air in, it comes into your lungs. Your lungs are made up of various chambers, brachial trees that break down into smaller and smaller tubes until we finally get to the end. Now, when air comes into your lungs and then goes down to the bottom of the brachial tree, it's got to get out as well, right? How does it get out? Well, it turns around at the end of the brachial tree and comes back out. So again, this is amateur, but I'm going to call that the two way lung model. That's because air flows two ways in our lungs, in and then back out through the same channel. Birds are the only creatures we know that have a one way respiratory system. They do not have air come into their lungs, make a U turn and come back out. They have air, it's a complicated sort of thing, but they have air that comes in, filters through a kind of web and then goes out. Now we're supposed to believe on the evolutionary hypothesis that we have a slow, gradual development of what, two way lungs into one way lungs over a long, long period of time. The only problem with that is that you've got to eventually put an end to the two way and have the one way lung system function. Now, how long can most creatures last without air? What do we know? 3, 4 minutes I think is the upper limit for any creature. I guess maybe it would be longer if you think about whales, but as we know, birds don't last very long breathing four minutes. Just let's be generous and say it's five. That means we have got to have a changeover from the two way system of the reptile's lung to the one way system of the avian lung in a five minute period. If you don't have that, the creature that we're talking about dies. There are other problems too with this idea of gradual development, where every step along the way is supposed to be advantageous. I brought with me in my notes today a particular illustration that's so gross that I can't memorize it. I have to read this too. I want to read to you about the. Metamorphosis of a particular parasite called the liver fluke. And I believe I'm reading from Michael Denton here. He says, consider the life cycle of the liver fluke. Remember, every stage along the way, every change is supposed to be advantageous according to the environment which the life form finds itself. The adult lives. The liver flu adult lives in the intestines of a sheep. After the age eggs are laid, they pass with the feces of the sheep onto the ground. The eggs then hatch, giving rise to small ciliated larvae which can swim about in water. If the larvae are lucky, they find a pond snail. They must do this to survive, for the snail is the vehicle for the next stage in the life cycle of the liver fluke. Having having found a snail, the larvae find its way into the pulmonary chamber or lung of the snail. Here it loses its cilia and its size increases. At this stage it is known as a sporocyst. While in this condition, it buds off germinal cells into its body cavity, which develop into a second type of larvae known as radii. These are oval in shape, possessing a mouth and stomach and a pair of protuberances which they use to move about. The redii eventually leave the sporocyst, entering the tissue of the snail, after which they develop into yet another larval form known as the cercariae, which appear superficially to resemble a tadpole. Using their long tails, these tadpole like larvae work their way through and eventually out of the snail and onto blades of grass, where each larva sheds its tail and encases itself in a sheath. Eventually, they are eaten by a sheep. Inside the sheep they find their way to the liver, where they develop sexual organs and mature into the adult state. They finally leave the sheep's liver and migrate to the the intestine where they mate and so complete their extraordinary life cycle. Lovely, huh? And then, Denton. In the case of many of the more dramatic invertebrate metamorphosis, not even the vaguest attempts have been made to provide hypothetical scenarios explaining how such an astonishing sequence of transformations couldn't have come about gradually. Gradually and as a result of succession of small beneficial mutations. Well, should we let him up off the map? I'm sorry, I'm not done. The fool wants to talk about these things, then I'm going to answer them. According to his folly, 1953 saw the publication of two momentous scientific reports which thereafter received very wide acceptance. But ironically, much different in effect, in 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick published their article about the double helix model for DNA. First, DNA is the key to life's diversity. Hereditary information is transmitted across generations by means of a code that's resident in the specific sequence of certain constituents of the DNA molecule. In the same Year, Stanley Miller offered experimental support for the first step toward confirming the theory of prebiotic evolution. See, if you're an evolutionist, you have to hold not only that the liver fluke develops gradually and so forth, that the eye and the lung and the heart and so forth all develop gradually. Take care of all these other problems. You also have to explain where life came from. And the answer is prebiotic pre life evolution, the chemical stage of evolution. And Miller offered what he thought was experimental support for the first step toward confirming prebiotic evolution. Both of these in 1953. One was a discovery about life's structure, the other was a discovery allegedly about life's origin. Little did the scholarly world at that point stop to recognize or appreciate the tension that was implicit in the two new insights. Because any secular theory of evolution requires an account of prebiotic evolution. Where chemical evolution causes life to originate without supernatural intervention, there must be a preamble to biological evolution. It's plausible. Is it plausible that unassisted matter and energy organize themselves into living systems? Is that plausible? Now, Stanley Miller, using an electric discharge apparatus, identified several racemic protein forming amino acids. Subsequent simulation paradigm experiments for an environment that was thought to be similar to the primitive Earth's precursor to the first living cells, yielded some detectable amounts of most of the major kinds of biochemical substances. Presto. It seems like we're on the verge of being able to develop a prebiotic theory of evolution. But since 1953, most all of the hope of doing that has been really deflated. Current laboratory and theoretical research has reached an absolute impasse on this matter. And that according to Dean Kenyon, who in 1969 wrote the book Biochemical Predestination, he said, it's not going to work. There's an enormous gap between the simplest living cells, which by themselves have an amazing structural biochemical complexity, and even the most complex protocell model systems which have been produced in laboratories. Moreover, he points out, what's the pathway for prebiotic synthesis of the relevant organic substances. Moreover, the experimental conditions in the studies of prebiotic evolution have been so artificially simplified as to be irrelevant to the processes on the primitive Earth. I have other details here about polypeptides and the presence of oxygen and so forth. The assumption that the early Earth was anoxic without oxygen has been pretty much discredited. And so if you have to have an oxygen less environment for these chemicals to get together and do this, the fact that there was oxygen on the early Earth, from all that we can tell, indicates there couldn't have been prebiotic evolution, he points out, there's no explanation even remotely possible or plausible, even after prodigious years of effort for the optical isomer preferences that are found universally in living matter. That is, an isomer is two things that have the same number of atoms of same elements, but in a different structural arrangement. And in all living matter, there's an isomer preference for L amino acids rather than D. Amin amino proteins or D sugars. What accounts for that? If it's all by chance, why is it that all living things, we have the same number of molecules and so forth? It's an isomer, but it's always of the L, not the D version. And what's the origin of genetic biologically relevant information in biopolymers? He asked. No experimental system yet devised gives the slightest clue as to how these biologically meaningful sequences of subunits might have come about in prebiotic polynucleotides or polypeptides. What we're talking about is the sequencing, minimal sequencing units in DNA. How did that come about? And if you don't have the sequence, if you don't have information, as it were, stamped into the DNA of that form, it won't work for replication. So the scientists are just, you know, this kind of blow your mind. Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley and Roger Olson, in a book, the Mystery of Life's origin, published in 1984, 1984, pointed out that based on geochemical assessments, both the atmosphere and the various water basins of the primitive Earth contained destructive interactions which have vastly diminished, if not altogether consumed, all the essential precursor chemicals. Moreover, the soup would have been too diluted for direct polymerization to have occurred. Moreover, no geologic evidence indicates that any organic soup, even the smallest organic pond, ever existed on this planet. They point out faulty assumptions about the anoxic condition of the early Earth atmosphere. They point out that the experiments that have been done have got to be disqualified by illegitimate interference, that is information interference from the investigator. In the laboratory situation, they say the notion that the Earth was an open system with energy and mass flow to take care of the second law of thermodynamics still cannot adequately account for the configurational entropy work necessary for coding the early chemicals so that it would be valuable for the reproduction of life. Well, on and on and on it goes. And I'm only talking about an amateur scratching the surface of the scientific evidence. This is all out there available. Stanley Miller was the one that encouraged all of us to say, well, since we're not doing so well in the laboratory, Maybe we'll find that there has been a chemical development of life in outer space. So in 1974 he stated, we are confident that the basic process of chemical evolution is correct. So confident that it seems inevitable that a similar process has taken place on many other planets in the solar system. And on the evening of the first Mars landing in 1976, NASA's chief biologist Harold Klein asserted that if there been had theories of origins were correct, corroborative evidence for them would be found on Mars. Your science at its best, making a prediction, finding if the prediction is true. Guess what? No life on Mars. Likewise in the Voyager 1 Flybys of Jupiter and Saturn, no evidence to suggest life generator conditions. And that's equal to attention to one one of the moons of Saturn, Titan, which might be more hospitable to life. But then it was found that the atmosphere of Titan was cold and dead. Indeed, it had a terrible atmosphere. 85% nitrogen, nearly 15% argon, less than 1% methane. Okay, so where is the the grand evidence for evolution? We've been disappointed in space, disappointed in the laboratory, disappointed with the mathematicians, disappointed when it comes to the development of the pathways for diversity in life forms. The theory of evolution has been held tenaciously by people, will be held tenaciously by the many of the unbelievers to whom you speak. But if you'll stop and do an internal critique of it, all the evidence points away from it, does not support it. And yet this is a reigning dogma in the scientific field. Listen to Julian Huxley, 1959. The evolution of life is no longer a theory, it is a fact. Dedicated evolutionists are very intolerant people, certainly as intolerant as religious fundamentalists. Those who question their sacred cow are coincidentally blocked from graduate school admission and success in graduate school. I can tell you story after story of just the few graduate students I know. Those who question their sacred cow are not invited to present papers at their colloquial. Their books are not reviewed, they're not hired at the university. Is that all by accident? Scientific evidence contrary to evolution may not be taught, nor may alternative theories be presented in most public schools in America today. I was slated to be one of the expert witnesses in the Louisiana case of equal treatment. It never finally got adjudicated. The judge just said you cannot teach alternative theories that would be religious in motivation. In 1981, the British Natural History Museum presented an exhibit on Darwin's theory and it labeled it in part of the text, one possible explanation. It admitted that the concept of Natural selection quote is not strictly scientific since it hasn't been empirically demonstrated. And just those two expressions. One possible explanation that is not strictly scientific, that caused sufficient anger and political pressure that the museum had to remove any acknowledgement of problems in Darwinianism. So much for the myth of neutrality. So much for the myth of the autonomous man following the evidence wherever it goes. Philip Johnson writes in his book Darwin on trial, 1991. What first drew my attention to the question was the way the rules of argument seemed to be structured to make it impossible to question whether evolution is really true. So what is the theory of evolution when all is said and done? Theory of evolution tells us that the fittest mutations of a biological form are going to be the most fit. No, no, it tells us they're going to survive. Right. The fittest versions of a biological form are going to survive. Well, then how do you test that hypothesis? How can you tell which proved to be the most fit? Let me give you an example. Perhaps we have two versions of a wolf, you know, and the mutational difference between them is one version of the the wolf has stronger hind quarters, stronger back legs. Now, you might at the outset think, well, that's going to make that wolf more fit for survival. Why? Because it's going to get to the kill more often first. It's not going to be the part of the flock of wolves that doesn't get fed enough and so forth. It's going to leave more offspring. On and on it goes. Well, the problem, though, is that because biological forms have a delicate balance within them, other things have to be considered. It's also possible that the mutated hindquarters, the stronger back legs, are going to put too great of a strain upon the heart, which has not grown to accommodate that kind of muscular strength in the legs. So that over time, when you do an analysis, that particular kind of wolf may tend to die earlier from heart attacks. And so knowing that these are possibilities is very plausible. By the way, it could go either way. Stronger hindquarters means you get the food first. Stronger hindquarters means that over time, that kind of wolf dies from heart attacks. So in order to test the hypothesis of survival of the fittest, you have to be able to identify which forms are the fittest. And then you say, by prediction, these should be expected to survive. Let's wait and see. But it turns out the only way you can identify those which are the fittest is to what? Wait and see. And so the theory which Darwin gave to the world as its Great hope. The survival of the fittest turns out to be nothing more but a tautology. All Darwin taught us is that those creatures that survive are the ones that will survive. Now, I'm not playing any debate tricks with you here. Again, unbelievers have published this stuff in philosophy journals for years. The theory is simply not a scientific theory. It's a way of looking at the world and it's not defended by scientific evidence. Gould already admitted that. Philosophers have known this for years. All the evidence that is listed in favor of evolution is evidence that it's interpreted by the theory of ev. And so it turns out that the theory of evolution doesn't explain how different species came about in the first place at all. It only tells us the ones that came about came about. They had more progeny than others. Moreover, natural selection upon analysis proves not just to be a convenient way of speaking. Evolutionists cannot get away from talking about personal attributes and what they call nature. When Christians or anti evolutionists do a cross examination of some of the arguments and evidence for evolution, they'll often ask questions about how can you expect nature to have been so creative as to do these various things? They'll say, how could blind random chance you've done this and the comeback is maybe nature's more creative than you thought. They talk about natural selection. Well, as you know, blind forces don't select anything, do they? I find it fascinating that when I was studying logic early on as a student in college many years ago, the illustration that I was given of what's called the fake fallacy of reification is talking about what nature does. Reification is turning a set of unconnected events into a personal form. It reifies, makes a substance out of something that is not a substance. When Bill Clinton was elected president, people said, the winds of change are blowing through our culture. We know the winds of change is a reification of the events which are different from previous events. There are no winds of change. So that's a way of speaking when it's taken seriously and used in an argument. It's the fallacy of reification. You're treating an abstract personification as though it were a concrete substance. And yet evolutionists are found to repeat itself. Talk about what nature does, the creativity, the selection that takes place there. Moreover, whenever evolutionists want to explain their theory, you will find they always use analogies to things like animal breeders. The problem with the analogy should be obvious. There is no animal breeder for the whole world. Unless of course, you're a Christian, you're a Creationist. And that's what they're trying to get away from. The notion of a purposeless natural process which by chance developed mutations that gradually changed life forms that fit in, adapted more to the environment, is a theory that has been thoroughly discredited philosophically and scientifically. Why then does your next door neighbor hold to it? Why then do the professors at the university? At this point it's usually helpful to go into the history of the theory of evolution for people to realize the theory of evolution didn't arise with Charles Darwin, didn't arise with scientists at all. The theory of evolution arose with the philosopher Anaximander. One of the earliest Ionian philosophers was an evolutionist. We have other Greek philosophers that were evolutionists. The notion of gradual change as accounting for the world in which we live was already in the philosophical world thanks to Hegel. Before Darwin wrote Karl Marx, who took Hegel and turned him on his head, teaching Dio dialectical materialism rather than idealism, sought to dedicate his book Das Ka Pa't all to a man working in England at the same time he was there. His name was Charles Darwin. Evolutionary hypothesis did not arise from science. Science only gave it a cosmetic of respectability. Theory of evolution was refuted within 18 months of Darwin's book being published. But Darwin had captured the wave of where culture wanted to go. Darwin's bulldog Huxley openly admitted as we studied the natural world, we always came up against a barrier that had written upon it, no further exploration. By order of Moses, Darwin gave us a way around the barrier. That's what he said. So the theory of evolution, what is our refutation of it? First of all, people need to know and be embarrassed by answering the fool according to his following it's not good science. Secondly, it's not science at all. It's philosophy and it's desire motivated speculation. It's speculation that is held onto. It's a worldview that's held onto a perspective on how things happen in the world. Held onto because it's the way in which we get around the doctrine of special creation by a personal God. Well, Dr. Bronson, is there any internal critique that can be made of the theory of evolution now that we know that it's a worldview, that it's a philosophy, that it's not good science at all? I'm going to give you a very quick one before we take a break. The theory of evolution as a worldview tells us once there was disorder and we don't know why, but the disorder became ordered and this ordered matter was inorganic, and we don't know why, but the inorganic matter became living. And then this living matter, which was all made up of identical forms, began to diversify. And then from these diversified living forms, for reasons we can't explain, they became varied, although unintelligent. But then the unintelligent life forms became intelligent and articulate. And then for reasons we can't explain, the intelligent articulate life forms became language using, but not moral. And then the language using life forms for reasons we can't explain became intelligent, articulate, moral men. And after I finished that, that is that at every step a huge leap of faith from nothing to something that looks like creation out of nothing. To me. It's just we don't want to say God did it, nature did it, did it on its own. Where did the big bang come from? I want to know what went bang in the big Bang. You know what you're told that all of energy was condensed down to a mathematical point without dimensions. It sounds like nothing to me. And nothing went bang. And then we had the development of the world. Isn't that incredible? It's aping the Christian story, but not giving credit to the creator. Anyway, once there was something then, I mean, once there was nothing, then there was something, then the something began to develop. We don't know where life came from, but then it became alive. And we don't know where diversity came from, but then it diversified. We don't know where intelligence came from, but then it became intelligent, then it became linguistic, then it became moral, and now we have man. Do you know what the theory of evolution has going against it philosophically? It just requires far too much faith. Far too much faith. I guess that's my problem as a Christian thinker. You see, I just had this Sunday school simplistic notion that an all powerful, all knowing God can create the world. And that makes sense out of my experience. What, what doesn't make sense out of my experience is this idea of we can't tell you why, but from nothing to something, something to life, life to diversity, diversity to intelligence, intelligence to language, language to morality. But at every major step from a quality becoming its opposite. Matter is not intelligent in itself. And yet we're to believe that matter materially evolved into intelligence. Opposites become, I mean things develop from their opposites and without any explanation. Well, that's not a rational worldview at all. When all is said and done, it's just a worldview held on incredible faith and contradictory faith. And that is the end of the story evolution is a worldview that makes no sense and cannot make sense out of life. Let's take a break. Okay. All right. We continue in this, our last class session of the course on apologetics, and I come to my final illustration of the practice of apologetics. We turn from philosophical attacks and scientific attacks. And I want to look at now a religious attack on Christianity. And I do hope that you'll all grant that. When I chose an illustration in the first category, I chose the toughest one, the one that's been the reigning problem in philosophy over the last 30, 40 years. I think the scientific illustration I chose was not, you know, I didn't take one of the loopy ones out there. I took the one that's supposed to be have all these credentials against Christianity. And again, I think purposely chosen as my illustration of the religious domain what most people think is the toughest religion to answer, and that's Islam. How can a Christian following the presuppositional approach give an answer to Islam? The Islamic world comprises approximately a billion Muslims, being about one out of five people people in the world today. As a Muslim, it's projected that within 25 years the Arab world will double in size. The missionary outreach to the Muslim world is very, very meager. In 1987, there were estimated only about 300 Protestant missionaries, missionaries working in the predominant Arab areas of the world. By Contrast, there are 4,500 North American missionaries alone working in the United States and Canada. So this is a very meager field, there's no question about it. In the United States, Islam is the fourth largest religious denomination. There are over 6 million believers. The fourth largest. It trails behind only Roman Catholics, Southern Baptists and United Methodists. There are very large Muslim populations in most European countries. And in England, many old churches are being turned into to mosque. Some of the most important events, news events over the last 25 years have occurred in areas or have involved countries where Islam is the dominant religion. One thinks of the 1972 Munich Olympics where Israeli athletes were killed by Muslim terrorists. 1973, the oil crisis, the Arab Israeli War, 1979, the Iranian Revolution and the embassy kidnapping. In 1981, Egypt's President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Islamic fundamentalists. In 1983, American Marines were killed in Lebanon by a Muslim terrorist. In 1990 and 91, we engaged, engaged as the United States in what's now called the Gulf War. In 1991, 1992, Algerian people in a democratic election voted for the Muslim fundamentalist party to rule over them. In 1993 here in New York City, the World Trade center was bombed by Muslim extremists. I'm only bringing this up to the. You have some idea that we as Christians had better get busy dealing with Islam. There aren't many people doing it. It is a rising, if nothing else just, population bomb. But it's also a rising geopolitical bomb, to use the metaphor. In this world. Why do Muslims oppose Christianity? Why are they so angry? Why is the United States the Great Satan according to Islamic fundamentalists? In a speech that was given at Princeton University University by one of the leading American experts on Arab culture, Bernard Lewis speech was given in 1989. It was the Jefferson Lecture of that year, and it was reprinted in the Atlantic monthly in the September 1990 issue. The title that was the Roots of Muslim Rage. And I just can hardly believe what I find unbelieving scholars telling us about this matter because as a Christian, I could hardly have asked for a better analysis of what's going on. Lewis tells us that though it is jarring to Americans to hear the expression enemy of God, to Muslims, it's very familiar and it's a very noble concept. He explains that leaders of a widespread and widening religious revival in Islam sought out and identified their enemies as the enemies of God. Suddenly, or so it seemed, America has become the arch enemy, the incarnation of all evil, the diabolic opponent of all that is good. And specifically for Muslims, surely they have specific complaints, such as our backing Israel. But Lewis believes that probably that only is a paltry part of the rage Arabs feel toward us. What is the source of that rage? He says, and I quote, it is Western capitalism and democracy that provide an authentic and attractive alternative to traditional ways of thought in life. Fundamentalist leaders are not mistaken in seeing in Western civilization the greatest challenge to the way of life that they wish to retain or restore for their people. It's a way of life that they hate, and it's the way of life that they see embodied here in American culture. Their way of life, he says, mandates Islamic rule over the world. He says, alone among great religious leaders, Muhammad, and I quote him, was not only a prophet and a teacher, but also a ruler and a soldier. Hence his struggle involved a state and its armed forces. To put it simply, troops fight for God. If you're a Muslim, anybody who is not a Muslim is an enemy of God. Ergo, it's all right to destroy them violently. To Arabs, what is truly evil and unacceptable is the domination of infidels over true believers. Islam was never prepared either in theory or in practice, to accord full equality to those who held other beliefs and practiced other forms of worship. Their belief is the word true belief. Intolerance for other beliefs is made even worse, according to Lewis, by the Arab sense of being overtaken and overwhelmed by those who consider them their inferiors, those who are enemies of God, who are spreading modernism and secularism. The real rage, he says, burns within the arrow. And I quote, this is no less than a clash of civilizations. And that clash stems he from an ancient rival against our Judeo Christian heritage, our secular present, and worldwide expansion of both. Now, the time is not going to allow a full description of what's going on or analysis of what's going on. But on the one hand, I'm telling you, Islam is growing and becoming a geopolitical political threat. On the other hand, the rage of the Muslim against the Western world, even by secular scholars, is identified as a worldview difference. They have a completely different ethic. They have a completely different approach to culture. For instance, there's no tolerance for those who disagree, no tolerance for those who are inferior to them. The Christianness is properly practiced and understood would suggest that people are to be left free to hear the gospel, consider its merits, and make a choice to follow Jesus. Right? Muslim doesn't agree with that. You shouldn't have that freedom to follow Jesus. And if you choose to follow Jesus, Muslims believe that they have the right, under certain circumstances, circumstances anyway, to kill you. Now, they should offer the way of Islam to you, but if you resist, you have the right to be. They have the right to kill you. This is not politically correct to make this observation. When I publicly dealt with Muslims, many of whom are kind and want to engage in the kind of tolerant discussion that we promote in America, they will openly deny this. And then I open the Qur' an and read it for them. Their religious revelation endorses the skewing of apologetics in favor of violence. And so one of the first things you should be aware of when you engage in Muslim apologetics is that your opponent is not necessarily committed to an apologetical resolution of this problem. Now, am I saying that so that you'll be careful? You know, don't be in a place where you're unprotected and you're talking to the Muslim? No. Although maybe in some cases you should. I know I was real comfortable when I was debating a Muslim out in Southern California. A number of Arabs were in the audience chanting when I was trying to talk. I thought to myself, well, this really doesn't promote Reasoned discourse. Does it kind of like we're going to physically make it impossible for you to be heard? Or maybe they were just trying to be true believers and make sure they didn't hear me. But the point is I was counting the number of them out in the audience and they can just me and a couple of other. Anyway, my point is not that you need so much to be concerned about your own physical safety. You need to be aware of the fact that you're now dealing with a worldview which itself is not rational. Not rational. As you understand, rational Muslims will say their worldview is true and therefore true reason will follow it. But it's not rational in the sense that when all is said and done, we need to be able to prove it and to give counter evidence and so forth. Islam in history has never been spread by apologetical arguments. Even if it is possible. There are some apologists for Islam and for the Koran today to be sure, but even if it is possible to provide that sort of thing, it has not been the preferred way of spreading the this worldview. I think you all know how it's been spread. It's been spread by the sword. So maybe we want to establish first of all when we're talking to our historic neighbors that as we have these discussions, we need to be committed to the merits of the case and follow reason and evidence. Because. Because if you can get them to be committed to that, you've already got them. To do what? To revise their worldview. Because their worldview says that is not the thing of paramount significance. Let's take this a step further. Where does their worldview come from? Well, we all know the pillar of Islam is that Allah is the one true God and Muhammad is his prophet. And where has Muhammad prophesied for a little one true God? Most Christians. Well, I don't know. I hope most Christians would be able to answer immediately the Koran. What most Christians are not aware is that according to Islam, the hadith is equally infallible and inspired. The hadith is a series of sayings from Muhammad and events in Muhammad's life that have been written down to help us interpret the Quran. So you are going to, if you're going to be accurate, have to take a second step and find out the source of this particular Muslim's authority. Keep asking why do you believe what you do? Ask him, do you believe the hadith is an infallible help in interpreting the Quran or not? Now let's. That's hope for argument's sake, you have Somebody who says yes. Any educated Muslim should say yes. Well, then you need to have read the Hadith. And if you read the Hadith, you're going to read stories that are absolutely phenomenal. Adam, the first man was 90ft tall. According to the Hadith, when you fall asleep while you're praying, Satan urinates in your ears. The sex of a child, whether it be a boy or a girl, all depends upon which of the two partners in the sex act reach climax first. Now, this is all infallible revelation. Remember, it may be one thing if you had folklore and all these things were being said said, but this is supposed to have come from the God Allah. And so to do an internal critique of Islam, I suggest that you get in contact with the Hadith and have a few of these stories available to talk to people. There is incredible superstition and magic in views of war and and sex to be found in this book. You want to bring that out not because ridicule is the way to refute your opponent, but you have to bring it out to find out if your opponent really is committed to the inspiration of Muslim sources. Say, now do you really believe this is inspiring? I'm trying to get a read on your worldview. Do you believe in apologetical arguments? And do you believe the sources of inspired information are in fact God's unerring word? Early embarrassment, if it's not done just for the sake of poking fun or ridiculing. Early embarrassment is very legitimate in an apologetic debate. But then the third step is of course that all Muslims believe rather they can give an apologetic for it or not, whether the Hadith interprets it infallibly or not. All Muslims believe that Muhammad has revealed the word of Allah in the Quran. Christians who deal with Muslims are not going to be effective if they have not read the Quran. You got to do your homework, that's all I can tell you. After all, would you think somebody's effective in refuting the Bible if they said, I've never read it? If you're going to do a comparison of worldviews, comparing your whole enchilada to the meal being offered by the Muslim, then you better know his worldview in the same way that I need to know religious. Excuse me, I need to know philosophy of language better than the secularist and I need to know the theory of evolution better than the scientist. So I need to know Islam better than the Muslim in my speech. So I'm going to share with you some of the things that I've learned in studying the Quran. First, about the Quran itself. Muhammad admitted he was unsure if of the source of his revelations. Indeed at the outset he was quite concerned that demons were speaking to him. Maybe when we get done, you might think that's a hypothesis to reconsider. But his wife convinced him that it was not demons and that he ought to share with the world these religious revelations. Urgent early on in his life because Muhammad saw himself as standing against Arab polytheism and idolatry. He wanted to make common cause with Jews and Christians who are also against polytheistic idolatry. And that's why you'll find portions of the Koran that read very favorably about Jews and Christians. Those portions are when Muhammad would get his revelations, alleged revelations, at a time in his life when he was trying to make common cause. But by the time he ended the Koran he had become a determined enemy of Jews and Christians and was even endorsing that after you offered them the convening articles of peace, you may kill them if they will not submit. Let's do an internal critique of the Qur' an now. And ask about its historical accuracy. You'll notice if you read the Koran that it embellishes biblical stories greatly. Contrary to Exodus 1, 7, 10 that tells us of the numerous Jewish population population in Egypt. Surah 26 of the Qur' an says the Jews were scanty at that time and Surah 2 says they returned to Egypt. Surah 21 tells us that all of Noah's family were saved from the flood. But then the 11th Surah says that Noah's son, one of them drowned in the flood. Now this is supposed to be an infallible book from an all knowing God. And yet you have these kind of historical contradictions and problems that have to be dealt with. Surah 28 says that Pharaoh's wife adopted Moses rather than Pharaoh's daughter adopting Moses. Surah 19 says that Mary, the mother of Jesus was the sister of Aaron. You understand that mistake. Muhammad was an uneducated man. He did not have good sources. Who was the sister of Moses? Miriam. And he made the mistake of running together conflating Mary Miriam. And so he turns the mother of Jesus into the sister of Moses. According to the third Surah, Zacharias was speechless for only three days, contrary to the Gospel of Luke chapter 1 where Zach was speechless for nine months. But perhaps the greatest contradiction to be noted is that Sarah 4 teaches that Jesus was not crucified. So there are numerous historical gaps and contradictions within the and there are historical contradictions between the Koran and the historical claims of the Bible. Now somebody might think at this point, well, they don't have to be bothered by that because after all, they think the Quran is God's word. Well, they also think the Bible is God's word, at least the books of Moses, the Psalms of David and the Gospel of Jesus. This leads now to a further level of internal criticism. What is the Quran? Well, according to the Koran itself, it is the inscription of an eternal book. In Surah 2, this eternal book is continuous with the Bible. It is the drawing out of what Allah has already said previously in the Bible and it is the confirmation of the previous revelations of Allah. Surat4 asserts that there are no contradictions in this eternal book. The Quran teaches that Allah never abrogates what he has said previously. It's an eternal book. It's continuous with previous revelation. No abrogation is allowed. There are no contradictions within it. Sura 42:1 13 teach that Muslims are not to be divided against Moses and Jesus. It's a command, an unabrogatable eternal command of Allah not to be divided against Moses and Jesus. But then when you read the theology of the Koran, you find out Jews and very prominently one, there is an utter repudiation of the doctrine of the Trinity considered idolatrous and polytheistic. You're not to be divided against Moses and Jesus, but what they taught about God is repudiated. Moreover, and actually the specific application of this repudiation of the Trinity, the Koran openly categorically denies that God can have a son. Don't say that God has a son according to the Quran. What a blasphemous notion. Or that he would be born of a virgin. What's that a reference to the Christians who claim that Jesus is the Son of God born of a virgin. Well now let's just ask, can you coherently put this worldview together? Can you coherently have a worldview that says Allah never changes his mind? There are no contradictions. This is the confirmation of previous revelation. But even though the Bible says Jesus is the Son of God and was crucified, the Quran says he was not crucified, he was not the Son of God, and indeed it denies the Trinity. Furthermore, and this comes out if you listen to the tapes of my debate with the Islamic scholar, if you read the law of Moses and the Psalms of David and especially the Gospel of Jesus, you read that God will never be at peace with sinners apart from blood atonement, apart from substitution and the Penalty of sin being exacted. And there is not the slightest, the slightest indication in the Qur' an that that is how we are right with Allah. Indeed, the mercy of Allah presented in the Quran is predicated on your good works. Allah is merciful in that he acknowledges your good works, that they outweigh your evil deeds, and then will reward you with eternal life. As a passing comment, I won't pursue this. The concept of eternal life in the Koran is far different from the concept of eternal life in the Bible. In the Koran, those who are granted eternal life, especially the men, really have it made in the shame. They will lie around on golden couches and have girls with large dark eyes, feed them fruit and grapes and satisfy their every desire. Now I'm not saying philosophically it's impossible that that can be the way things are all set up and that's what God's going to do. But part of our apologetic, I said, is just telling the old, old story of Jesus and his love, just laying out the, the Christian story. And I think it's apologetically powerful to simply set our story over against their story. You say, well, here's their version of God in His holiness, their version of salvation, not calling for atonement, how holy is Allah? Therefore their version of salvation by good works, which we're not able to do because that's what's made Allah angry with us in the first place. And then their version of the reward of good works set over against the Christian conception of heaven or the new heavens and the new earth. The theology of the Koran openly conflicts therefore with the theology of the Bible. But if the Qur' an is the continuation and confirmation of previous revelation, with every right now to do a further internal critique and ask the Muslim, don't we have to expect, according to the teaching of Moses, that any new prophets will only prophesy and speak what is continuous with there are no contradictions. Remember, they'll only say what does not abrogate previous revelation. Well yes, of course, but previous revelation in the world law of Moses tells us that a prophet mustn't do the very things that you admit Muhammad did. Mohammed disagrees with the Gospels of Jesus, the Psalms of David and the law of Moses. So once again their worldview can be internally destroyed. Just by going in, you stand on the unbeliever's position and say, where does this take us? It takes us, us to Moses who teaches us that the Qur' an should not conflict with previous revelation, but at the same time it openly conflicts on historical Details on theological details, indeed on crucial worldview notions. It's a completely different worldview. But there's one more internal criticism that needs to be made. And this comes closer to the kind of philosophical precept, suppositional refutation that I think many of you have been looking for. I think I've done enough to destroy Islam as a worldview by criticizing internally the Qur'. An. But it turns out that the Quran also says something about Allah which is going to make the Quran itself impossible. Surah 42:11. No human language can positively describe God. No human language is adequate to describe Allah. Why? Because Allah is so different, so incomparable, that he's utterly transcendent. Muslim theologians have labeled this the doctrine of Tanza T A N Z I H Tanza. Allah is so transcendent, so incomparable, so unlike anything in this changing world of our human experience that no human language can positively describe God. Well, if no human language can possibly describe Allah, then what is the Quran? The Quran is supposed to be be in human language, a revelation of Allah. But the revelation itself says such a revelation could not be possible. So level upon level upon level upon level of reputation is actually very easy if you're familiar with Muslim sources and you're familiar particularly with the Qur' an itself. Islam does not represent a viable alternative to the Christian worldview. It cannot deal with the problem of sin and redemption. It cannot deal with its own internal contradictions. It cannot be endorsed on its own terms because it conflicts with the previous revelation of God in the Bible. And that really should be the end of the story. But there's one P.S. muslims are not willing to abide by this reputation. So they've got one answer they finally give. And I've already hinted at it earlier in our class, but I'll rehearse it quickly here as we come to a close tonight. What they say is, well, yes, the Koran does conflict with your verse version of the Bible. But you see, the reason for that is that your version of the Bible is corrupted. Now that claim would be worthy of investigation and apologetical refutation if that claim were advanced on the strength of evidence. If the followers of the Koran were to give a second some reason to believe this, apart from what arbitrary special pleading in my checklist of things we do in apologetics, what do we not allow? Arbitrariness, Prejudicial conjecture? So if their argument is the Bible has been corrupted so that what you read today is nothing like what it originally said when Moses and David and Jesus gave us these words. If their argument is the Bible is hopelessly corrupted because it conflicts with the Koran, then what are they doing? Their first reasoning in a circle? They're saying, my worldview is true because it claims to be true. So your worldview must be false. The Bible must be corrupted, even though there is not the slightest shred of evidence of that. The Muslim scholar that I debated at the college tried to offer evidence of that by saying, look at all these textual variants. 200,000, I think he said, textual variants in the New Testament alone. And anybody who's done any reading about textual criticism knows that the vast majority of those variants all amount to inversion of a letter or a misspelling and so forth. They don't affect the sense of the text. Of all those who have done the statistics. I haven't done it, I'm resting on them. Have come to the conclusion that we have the original text of the New Testament in full agreement or reconstruction in over 98% of all of the words and lines of the New Testament. And yet he will throw that out to kind of cloud the issue for people. See 200,000 variants. Should it surprise you then, that we think that the Bible has been corrupted and that it really originally agreed with the Koran? Well, what we want to ask for is, could you give me an illustration, just a little bit of illustration of the textual corruption that led to Jesus not being crucified turned into Jesus being crucified. You see, that's not a textual corruption at all. That's a whole scale rewriting. And for that whole scale rewriting, we don't have the slightest evidence in the history of the New Testament manuscripts. And so what this is, is an arbitrary and a prejudicial conjecture that is given as a rescuing device for their book, the Quran. Now, why would Muslims be willing to do that? From a scholarly standpoint, it's really silly. I mean, no one can say you've got anything to stand on just because you think think the Bible's been corrupted. We need evidence of that. I'm going to suggest that the reason Muslims feel comfortable in doing that is because they know very well that's what they did in the third caliphate. All of the variants on the Koran were called in upon pain of death. And so what we have is a major recension of the Quranic text so that it would become uniform. By the way, it wasn't perfectly done even then. But just for argument's sake, if they want to say the Quran is the Qur' an is The Quran, everywhere through history, we say, well, yeah, upon pain of death, anybody who has a variance is going to lose it and maybe life as well. So perhaps because Muslims themselves and played fast and loose with the actual manuscript evidence, it isn't hard for them to presume that we would have done so as well. But against all of these presumptions, the only thing we have to go by are the facts available to us, and the facts available to us do not support their prejudicial conjecture about the biblical text. If Islam is supposed to be the best alternative as a religious challenge for the Christianity and the Christian worldview, I hope that our short remarks, sadly, all too short that our short remarks have shown that in fact it's not a cogent worldview at all. It doesn't have an adequate doctrine of authority, does not have an adequate doctrine of reality, an adequate doctrine of how we know what we know, how we should live our lives, because everything that it's predicated on is contradictory. You can go right within the Koran and destroy all the furniture of Islamic theology. We'll see if we can bring this course to a close as the minutes finally ebb away from us here. I am very appreciative of the way in which you've given me your attention and been so understanding of my weaknesses and so forth, the need for breaks and so forth, and you've hung in there, no matter what you're I do hope that there's enough coherence from beginning to end that as you leave tonight, you feel something of a revolution and a correction of your own inconsistencies and apologetical approach. The conception of apologetics that I've set out for you, which is based on First Peter 3:15, says you need to understand that Christ is the Lord, and if you'll set him apart as the Lord in your thinking, in your heart, then you'll be prepared to give an answer to anyone who asks a reason of it. As Paul says in 2 Corinthians 10:5 if you bring every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, if you be committed to your worldview, its infallibility, its ultimate authority, then every high thing that is raised up against God, every reasoning that is imagined against God, can be cast down, because all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are deposited in Christ. So make sure that you are not robbed. Make sure that your strength, the riches of your position are not taken away from you by vain philosophy, deceptive and pointless philosophy. The after the traditions of men, after the elementary presuppositions of the world and not after Christ. The best way, and ultimately the only effective way, to defend the faith is to do so within the circle of the faith itself, by comparing our ultimate authority and our worldview against all other commerce philosophy would teach us the same thing. If you understood modern issues and epistemology, it turns out the only way you can deal effectively with other philosophies of life is to do an internal critique of them and recognize they have their privileged views, their privileged beliefs, which are at the very center of their wealth. When apologists through the history of the Christian church have not taken these things into account, they have always ended up saying yes to the the world. We agree with you in your starting point, but we disagree with where you end up. And that has meant that apologetics has compromised the authority of Christ and the purity of the Gospel throughout history. I hope that the revolutionary approach that Dr. Van Till has taught us, though it has its foreshadows in Calvin and others, that this revolutionary approach knows as presuppositional apologetics, has really captured your attention. I hope that you'll remember the four steps, the procedure that we use, and the summary of the questions and issues that you want to be throwing at people, and that you remember that it's always the whole enchilada that we're defending. And if you want to know how that's done, just notice that the most avid philosophical attack on the faith today is reduced to foolishness that about religious language and meaningfulness. Notice the most avid scientific attack that we know today from the theory of evolution is just preposterous from a scholarly standpoint and reduces to philosophical nonsense. It too is foolishness. Remember that the most competitive, the most credible competitor to Christian faith in the eyes of many people, Islam, is easily reduced to nonsense and historical errors and internal contradictions within their own revelation. To put it very simply, where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? I hope as you go home and throughout the rest of your lives this will be left ringing in your ears. Hasn't God made foolish the wisdom of this world? Let's praise God that he given us a faith so worthy of defense right now. Our Heavenly Father, we do thank you for the time you've given us in this class. And we pray that the diligence that we've given to it and the attention that we have paid in taking our notes will in fact pay off in our lives. Pay off in more godly living, more faithful reasoning, more effective witnessing for you. We pray that you would help us all to realize the outlook of the Apostle Paul, to have that same confidence and the ability to drive it home that you have made foolish the wisdom of this world. Our Heavenly Father, we would thank you as we leave this class because we know from the things we have studied that we did not come to this position because we were smarter than other men. We did not come to this position because we were more righteous than other men. We did not come to this position because we were more inclined to be believers than other men. We've come to this position not simply because the credentials of it are so strong, but because you've opened our blinded eyes and taken away the darkness of our hearts and enlightened us to see the truth as it is in Jesus. Help us to hold to the simplicity of that faith. Help us to be effective in promoting it in the world that men might come to know that they only have two options, the option of life and death, light and darkness. Help us to promote all that you have taught on your final authority. Don't let us make the mistake of thinking that anything stands above you and can judge you. Help us to not make the mistake of putting the Lord our God to the test, Lord. Help us to assume the truth of what you have taught us and then apply it to this world. We do pray that you would make good use of our efforts to bring them into yourself that the light of the gospel might take away more of the darkness of this world. Help us, Lord Jesus, to be good ambassadors for you and not misrepresent what you have said and not put you in the dock while man in his autonomy is yet at the bench. Help us truly to be disciples who bow to you. Help us to know that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. We pray that you would accomplish all these things for your glory. In your own name we pray.