Dr Greg Bahnsen - Practical Apologetics: Evolution (Part 3)

Lecture proving the existence of God. And I had some preparatory remarks that I wanted to make before we got into the proof itself. I have a couple more of those remarks and then we'll get on with how we can show objectively the truth of God's existence. To understand what I'm doing when I prove God's existence, however, and this ties in with something that came up in earlier questions today when Marty was lecturing, you need to understand that an argument need not be accepted by everyone for it to be conclusive. An argument need not be accepted by everyone to be conclusive. What I'm getting at here, to put it another way, is there's a difference between proof and persuasion. You can prove something even though you've not persuaded your opponent. And I know many well meaning Christians engaged in apologetics, and especially those who want to do it in a presuppositional way, can get misled. Because when they talk to people and they give what seems to be a really good argument or a reputation, when the person you're talking to doesn't cry uncle, you say, oh, I must have done something wrong. Well, that's not necessarily true. You may have done everything right, but your opponent does not want to give in. Believe it or not, people are not completely rational. There are other things that affect the behavior and the attitudes and the verbal responses of people besides whether they see the truth or not, or whether they want to see the truth or not. The Bible tells us that people are spiritually blind and they have hard hearts. And so you could hold up the truth in front of somebody who was spiritually blind and you might. None of us ever do a perfect job, but hypothetically, you could do it perfectly. Absolute fidelity to the word of God. And if the person remains blind, they're not going to say, oh, you're right, I guess God must change the hearts of people. And as you were already instructed, it's not our job to convert people. The Holy Spirit does conversion our job. The way I like to put it is it's our job to close their mouths and it's the Holy Spirit's job to open their hearts. If you can show that they have nothing to say against the faith or that what they're offering can be reduced to absurdity. You've done your job, you have defended the faith, you've been loyal to your Lord, faithful to his word, you close the mouth of the opponent. But whether the Holy Spirit opens the heart so that the light might get in and bring a new life to them or not is really in God's sovereign disposition. And so you must not judge your apologetical efforts on the basis of how many notches you have on your belt. Another conversion this afternoon. I'm doing pretty well, sadly. I mean, I'm overplaying that. I trust no Christian really goes home with this hey, I've got another notch on the belt attitude. I mean explicitly but subtly. That comes out when we think, you know, if I could just do a really good job, then another person would come to the Lord and listen. I hope that God has blessed my ministry in apologetics. When I see people like Marty lecturing, I believe that I'm doing something right. I'm proud of him and others like him. But the fact of the matter is, none of that's me. You know, I'm not smarter than other people or more spiritual than other people. It's not anything that's in me. It's God's grace that changes any of us. And that's why presuppositionalists of all people ought to be the most humble when they defend the faith. Because when I reduce my opponent to absurdity, this grant that I can do that or have done that occasionally when I reduced him to absurdity, I don't stand over him, you know, like some kind of warrior, and say, ah, you know, see, I, you know, macho Dr. Bonson, I have to tell him while he's laying on the ground bleeding, I've been there, too. And the only thing that you know raises you up on your feet, or to use the biblical figure of speech, the only thing that gives you new life is the love and grace of God. And the only reason I hurt you is because I want you to know how good God is. All of us are fools until Jesus changes us. And then the world thinks we've really become fools by following Jesus. But in First Corinthians, chapter one, Paul tells us that what the world calls foolishness is the wisdom and the power of God. And you know what God does with this foolishness of the world? He destroys the wisdom of the world. And so in apologetics, by God's grace, if you are faithful to the Lord, you can reduce your opponent to foolishness, to absurdity. But when you do it, you do it for the sake of his coming to a new life. Yet the giving of that life is not your work. God does that just like he attends your argument with success. And so all the praise and the glory goes to him. I'm going to prove God's existence to you. I mean that in no arrogant way. I mean that as a philosopher, I'm going to give you what I think is a proof that God exists and it's an objective proof. It has nothing to do with what people like or dislike, what their desires are, the subjective background, anything like that. I'm talking about proof theory now. And I'm going to show that in order to prove anything, you would have to first believe in God. Let me expand on that preparatory remark just a little bit by giving real quick background on proof theory. If I were writing an article or book, I probably wouldn't reduce it to just four, but I think I can help you. There are essentially four four ways to approach proving things. Okay, four ways. We have different schools of thought associated with those four ways of proving things too. And so you might think of them as the rationalist approach, the empiricist approach. I'm going to come back to this, the pragmatist approach. And then the fourth one I'll talk about when we get to it, which is what I'm going to be doing now. First of all, the rationalist approach. The word rationalism in English is very ambiguous or equivocal. It is used in, I'd say a dozen, but even that is not correct. A couple dozen, three dozen different ways. In the history of philosophy you can find rationalism, rational rationalist use. But when we speak of the rationalist approach to proof, what we mean is something is proven when it uses clear and distinct ideas in a logical fashion. If you can come up with a logical presentation of what are considered self evident or clear distinct concepts, then you have proven it. And in the history of philosophy you have a school of thought known as continental rationalism, represented by men like Descartes and Spinoza and Leibniz. And all three of these men, interestingly thought that they were using logically sound and conceptually clear ideas that were self evident. So that whatever conclusions they came to based on those self evident and logical processes of reasoning, anybody who was rational would have to accept. Now, I can't do the whole history of philosophy with you, but the really ironic thing, sadly, is that for all of the clearness and distinctness of their ideas, and for all of their logical soundness, Descartes, Spinoz and Leibniz came up with radically different philosophies. That kind of tips you off that maybe it's not so self evident after all. Descartes was a dualist. He thought all of reality is divided into two kinds of things, mind or matter. Essentially, Spinoza was a pantheist he thought mind and matter were just two different ways of looking at the very same thing. Leibniz was what we call an atomist. In fact, he was a spiritual atomist. I don't know of any other one in the history of philosophy anywhere. He believed all reality is made up of an infinite number of bits of something, but they are not bits of matter, they are bits of energy or mind, what she called monads. Okay, you may want to know more about that. You can get my History of Philosophy series and so forth. But here's the interesting thing. Rationalist says, okay, we're going to start with self evident ideas and use logic and we're going to come to conclusions. And they come to radically different conclusions. So you have obviously an unreliable approach here because of the disagreement and the ultimate subjectivism of what's considered self evident. The second approach to proof theory in terms of our simplistic analysis is called empiricism. E M P I R I C I S I S M. Empiricism. Empiricism. Did I put too many syllables in there? Hey, I didn't say I could spell. E M P I R I C I S M. Sorry about that. Empiricism. Or the empiricist says, well, let me put it this way. A rationalist says, if you want to know if something's true, stop and think about it. Stop and reflect on it. You know, I'm trying to be real simple. That is, it's not so much going out and researching something. Stop and think about. Are your concepts clear, self evident and logical? The empiricist says, go look and see. The empiricist says, we know things through our senses or if you will, by observation. Most people who have not gone to college or have studied philosophy, at least in our culture, I have to be careful. Most people in American culture would think that they are probably empiricists. Seeing is believing. So if you're going to prove something to me, you're going to have to put it in so I can see it, taste it, touch it, smell it, hear it, whatever. The problem with empiricism are basically problems in what we call cognitive psychology. Problems in cognitive psychology. John Locke was an empiricist, the father of what's known as British empiricism. John Locke struggled with the psychology of knowing things or learning. The psychology of learning if everything is based upon some kind of sensation or observation. And Locke finally came to the conclusion that he couldn't really know things in the world or know that the world outside of himself was real. He also thought, well, everybody's going to give me a break on this, and, you know, I can slide by on it. But Locke essentially locked us all up into our own sensations. If all I know are my sensations, then how can I be sure that there's an external world that corresponds to my sensations? Because, remember, I never know the external world. I only know my sensations of the external world. And so George Barclay worked on that and came up with an interesting solution that you don't want to know about, but it was called subjective idealism. Berkeley said, something exists if it's perceived to, which people said, well, that's kind of silly then. Therefore, the socks in my drawer right now at home don't exist because no one's perceiving them. Barclay, being a devout Christian, by the way, had an answer to that. I don't consider this really all that noble. But his answer was, well, God's looking at everything all the time, so the socks still do exist. But as a human view of psychology, or the psychology of knowing, that's not very adequate. Then David Hume got hold of this and he totally destroyed it, because he said, if all we know are the things we observe, then we don't know there's a world of causation out there, because no one ever sees causation. I realize you're sitting there saying, women, I see it all the time. Haven't you watched a game of billiards or pool? We see the cue ball goes across the table, hits another ball, causes it to move, and that's what my lecture is going to be on. So I'll come back to it, but trust me, you don't see causation. You see succession. You see one event and another event and you draw the connection. You mentally. You do not see causation. Moreover, you don't see your own personal identity. Are you the same person who was born or birthed by your mother? Everyone chuckles because you say, oh, hey, come on, Dr. Bonson, common sense. There are things you can take for granted. Well, you know what? That's one thing I like about philosophy. It's a vicious department. And so though we might all want to get along and say, yeah, we all know that we were birthed by our mothers. The philosopher is going to say, yeah, but your theory of knowledge, if that's true, then that should be an excellent specimen of how your theory of knowledge works, because we all know that one's true. So test your theory by that. Try testing your theory of personal identity. Back to this baby that your mother gave birth to. Has anyone ever seen the continuity of personal identity through time? Forget somebody else. I mean, that's problematic enough. How about yourself? You look at that little picture of you and you're so adorable. You say, that's the same person. It's the same person. Did you see continuity through time? Did you observe continuity? Did you feel continuity through time? The answer is no, you didn't. And so Hume said, we don't know causation, we don't know personal identity. He went on to give a number of other things. And I am not kidding you. Every graduate, well, some undergraduate students in good departments, every graduate student that has to read Hume will verify for you. He says, right in his writings. He gets to the place where he's so frustrated, where he says, well, then we can't know anything. And, and at that point he says, I want to go play backgammon with my friends. That's the best the unbelieving world could do. In empiricism. Empiricism, which starts out seeming so reasonable, seeing is believing, ends up telling us we can't know anything at all. So empiricism leads to problems in cognitive psychology and proves to be self defeating and leads to skepticism and David Hume playing backgammon rather than writing another book. So the rationalist approach is unreliable. The empiricist approach reduces the skepticism. And this led finally, well, not finally, but after a while in the history of epistemology to what's known as pragmatism. The pragmatist says, I'm not going to answer the problems that the rationalist was trying to answer, and I'm not going to answer the problems of empiricism. I'm going to ignore them as utterly irrelevant. And I can give you, I think you probably have, but I can give you some sympathy for the pragmatist, because essentially the pragmatist says, while you philosophers, you know, are diddling away trying to answer all these intellectual questions, we're still living our lives. This hasn't kept anybody from knowing. Step out of the way of the train, you know, plant in the spring, harvest in the fall sort of thing. We live our lives anyway. So the pragmatist says, forget those traditional problems of philosophy. The only thing that matters is adjusting to your environment and being successful at life. Pragmatist says, truth has nothing to do with being rational or having evidence. Truth is simply a matter of what works. And again, I'm bringing this down to a real elementary level. I'm being over simple but it'll put you on the right track. The pragmatist says truth isn't a matter of evidence and it isn't a matter of logic. It's a matter of what gets you by. Truth is what works. And so if you seek the proper end and you're successful in reaching it, then you've got the truth. If the hypothesis that you're following doesn't get you to that end, if you haven't solved your problems, if you haven't been successful, then it isn't true. And I hope that some of you are budding philosophers and you don't have to be spoon fed this. You're sitting there saying, well, that all assumes you know what the proper end is. Successful at what? What are we supposed to do? And in an article that we don't have available, you can't read today. But if you want to pursue this, I go through in terms of modern publications and academic theories, different versions of what the pragmatist's goal is supposed to be. Is it the preservation of the race? Is it the individual's adjustment to his environment? You have to know what you're supposed to be here for. And by the way, I would say this is a Christian to the pragmatist. Well, whatever you do, you want to make sure that you live your life in such a way that on the day of final judgment God finds you acceptable. Because you see, if you live 40, 50, 60 years and you seem to have done real well in your biological or economic or social environment, but then you go to hell forever, I'd say that's pretty counter utilitarian. It wasn't very useful, was it? So the pragmatist needs to not only know what the proper end in life is, the pragmatist must also know whether there's a heaven or hell, God and so forth. And. But that puts him right back into the traditional problems of philosophy. You can't decide whether you're being successful if you're going to be short sighted and just say success is just in the short run, let me get through this life. Or maybe what, a year or a month or a day or a minute, who knows, what are we supposed to be living for? You can't make pragmatic judgments. You can make arbitrary pragmatic judgments, but you've already, you know that's got to be tossed up. You can't make pragmatic judgments without the traditional questions being answered, it turns out. And so pragmatism, when all is said and done, is really A refusal to look at the tough question. Pragmatism is intellectual adolescence. I realize a lot of pragmatists out there, you know, would be insulted by that kind of language. But what I mean is this. The pragmatist is like, don't take this wrong. It's like elementary students such as yourself listening to a week or two of these lectures on all these tough questions and then saying, oh, forget it. The only thing that matters is whether I get through. If I'm living my life and I'm happy and so forth, then that's truth. Truth is what works. And that's really an avoiding of the tough questions rather than an answering of the tough questions. Okay? So I'm not going to try to prove that God exists rationally, that is, in terms of clear and distinct ideas, logically, you know, carried out. I'm not going to try to prove that God exists empirically. Like, we can go to the pantry and open up and see if there's a box of crackers there and say, oh, lo and behold, God exists. Y' all remember the Russian cosmonaut went up in space a number of years ago and came back and he said he knew there was no God because he went out and spent. Mason didn't see him. That really happened. Am I telling the truth, Gary? That really happened. I know this sounds so stupid, but empiricists will expect you. If you're going to prove anything, you're going to have to give some observational evidence of it and say, God's not the sort of thing you can prove observationally. Well, then he doesn't exist. I'm not going to try to satisfy the empiricist. And I'm not going to try to prove that God exists pragmatically by saying, hey, your life will go better. You know, it's kind of like things go better with Coke, right? Well, but if you have God, things go even better than with Coke. No, I'm not going to be a pragmatist in my approach. Okay, so how am I going to prove God's existence? You may think Gary may be worrying. I'm using up all my time. You may think all this is just preparatory. If you see what I'm getting at. I've really almost got to the place where the proof can be over. I'll take a few minutes to do it. The only way you can prove something ultimate, like the existence of gans and dental age. That's not a word we've been using. But now we're going to Use it. For the sake of shorthand, I could define transcendental proof over and over and over again every time I want to use it. But then I'd really ran out of time in my lectures, so I'm going to define the word, explain the concept, and then use it. A transcendental proof asks, what are the preconditions of intelligibility? That is, what are the transcendentals? That's an archaic philosophical word. I realize when we say what are the transcendentals? We're saying, what must be true for something to make sense? What are the preconditions of intelligibility? The preconditions. What sorts of things would we have to think are true in order for something to make sense, to be intelligible? Remember our checklist? I went over that. Are these considerations arbitrary? Are they inconsistent? What are the consequences? And then finally, and this is where apologetics gets, you know, in high gear, what are the preconditions of intelligibility? Right. What are the transcendental? A transcendental proof argues from the impossibility of the contrary, saying you have an ultimate presupposition. I have an ultimate presupposition. And the problem with yours is, or the contrary of mine, is that if what you say is true, we couldn't prove anything. Nothing would be intelligible, nothing would make sense on your presupposition. And so you prove your presupposition by the impossibility of the contrary. You say, my presupposition provides the transcendental, the preconditions of intelligibility. In the debate that I'm hoping that you all now will order, and you've heard me summarize already, the particular form of transcendental argument that I used with Dr. Stein was the transcendentals of logic. There are other kinds, and that's what I'm going to give you here in just a moment. Basically, I said, Dr. Stein, doing a debate presupposes the laws of logic. You have to have something by which you evaluate arguments or lines of reasoning. But now, what would have to be true for there to be laws of logic? To answer that, you have to say, well, what are laws of logic? Are laws of logic like marbles? You know, can you trip on them on the ground? Could you accidentally swallow a law of logic? No, it's not a material thing at all. A law of logic is abstract. It's immaterial. Not only is it abstract, it's universally applicable and it's absolute. It admits of no exceptions. And so what I want to know, Dr. Stein, is given your worldview, could there be anything that is abstract, universal and absolute? And of course, being an atheist, there can't. He's a materialist. There's. That is, to put it simply for him, only marbles exist. And things like marbles, things you can touch that are hard or they don't have to necessarily be hard, but they're perceivable through the senses. The smell of a rose exists, but that's because there's something that's not so much hard and nevertheless you can have a sense experience of. But the laws of logic. You can't smell the laws of logic. Some people think there's smelly, but you can't smell the laws of logic. You can't taste the laws of logic. You can't trip over them. Couldn't buy them in the store if you wanted to. You can buy books on logic, but books on logic are not the laws of logic, just like books on mathematics are not numbers. I know every year I have to do this with these people. Can you see a number? The intelligent people are saying no. And the people who know, they don't know the answer are sitting there in cold fear. Don't call on me, Class. Is that the number three? Well, then it must be another number. Must be the number four. The number five, right? No, the trick in that question. It's the alumni of LPC that got it right. You cheated. The trick here is that I ask you, is that the number that is the numeral 3, that is a transcription of a number, but you can't see the number three. If that were the number three, guess what? There ain't no more threeness. I just destroyed threeness. Oh, no. Go to the store and something costs $1.30, you say, I'm sorry, there aren't any more threes. Books on math are not books that show you math. They're transcriptions and discussions of. But you can't see numbers and you can't see the laws of logic and so forth. So let's get back to Dr. Stein again. You understand? I'm saying, what are the preconditions of intelligibility? Debate presupposes laws of logic. Laws of logic presuppose that there are abstract, universal and abstract entities. I said abstract, absolute entities. You don't believe there are such things because you're a materialist. Therefore your worldview destroys the possibility of logic, in which case your worldview destroys the possibility of debate. Since you came to the debate. Therefore you must have been assuming a Christian worldview when you came. And so, as you know, I argued that your coming to the debate means that I win. The very effort to argue already assumes what I'm trying to prove. That's what's known as an argument from the impossibility of the contrary, or an argument that is transcendental. So now my summary is proof theory, you know, elementary simplistic summary. Prove things rationally, empirically, pragmatically, or transcendentally. I would call that presuppositional proof. But there's literature out there where other people use the word presupposition and don't mean it in this way. And that's very sad. That's another lecture. So I'm going to call it transcendental proof, proving from the impossibility of the contrary. Now I'm going to prove God's existence. It won't take too long. Really. Getting set up for this is the most important part. It turns out that none of us can know anything from our experience unless we assume the uniformity of nature. That's the pedestrian way of putting it. If I were in a philosophy hall, I probably would not say that because that's kind of ambiguous and so forth. But you know what I'm talking about. I'm saying the world that we experience demonstrates continuity or uniformity. You can pretty much expect that the experiences you've. In fact, you can so much expect that the experiences you have will be repeated in the future. That if you have what appears to be a similar experience and you don't have the same effect or consequence, you will automatically think there's been a change somehow. Okay, so stubbing the toe. Use that example. Most of you will try to avoid stubbing your toe at night if you're walking around in a dark house or college room or something like that. Why is that? Well, because you've had experiences, if you're smart. One experience in the past for those who are a bit slow, two or three for the really dumb. 10, 11, 12. But you've had experience. You've had experiences in the past with stubbing your toe, and you didn't like that. That hurt. But notice you automatically. Without getting a Ph.D. in philosophy, you, you will now assume that if I stub my toe in the future, it hurts. And so you try to avoid that uniformity of nature. Now, it wouldn't have to be that way. Stop and think about it maybe the second time you stub your toe. Or maybe the universe is organized in such A way that every third time that you stub your toe, it's the thrill of a lifetime. Whoa, I need some more of that. But we don't think that way, do we? Stubbing your toe wouldn't have to be painful. It wouldn't have to be. But it so happens that you've learned that it is. And you assume what? That since it was in the past, it will be in the future. Now, that little simple illustration, because we had some humor built into it, may mislead you into thinking that I'm just diddling here. Everything you know about assumes the uniformity of nature. Everything you know. Your name. If I were to call you by name and say that who you are, hey, Bill. That you, you'd say? Yes. What did you assume? You assumed that this name that picked you out or indexed you, as we say in the past, still indexes you or names you today. In fact, when you use language, you assume the uniformity of nature, don't you? You've learned what zucchini means in the past, right? Living doorstop? No, you've learned what zucchini means. And so when you use zucchini in a sentence, the word zucchini, you're assuming it's going to have the same kind of effect or consequences, communicate the same meaning as it did previously. The laws of mathematics assume the uniformity of nature, too. I know that sounds strange because math is supposed to be something that doesn't touch the physical world so much, but think about it. Last week, you girls, when you baked the cake. I take that back. What a sexist remark. You boys or girls who bake the cake? Sexist or not, I only want the girls who bake the cake. You guys can keep your cakes. When you baked the cake, you had a certain recipe you followed, okay? And you assume that since that recipe baked the cake previously, when I put these things together, it's going to make a cake again. Wouldn't you be shocked if it turned into an alligator? We know the world's not that way. Everything we know assumes the uniformity of nature. And so let our worldviews, in order to show that God, the Christian God, is the starting point for all reasoning and all argumentation. Since everybody who reasons with you will assume the uniformity of nature is also called the causal principle or the inductive principle. So if I fall back into that, you know what I'm getting at? Inductive means you can induce from particular experiences a generalization about the future. The inductive principle principle or the causal principle. The uniformity of nature is assumed in all reasoning and argumentation. And so I want to set atheism and Christian theism as worldviews side by side and ask now which of these worldviews provides the preconditions for rationality, the preconditions for intelligible experience, the preconditions for science? You know, Marty made a really good point earlier when he said people may say that they don't expect uniformity, but they put millions of dollars into a space program and they build these rockets and they get ready on the countdown. You don't see them sitting there thinking, boy, what a crap shoot this universe is. I wonder if it's going to go up. People don't do that. The intelligibility of the scientific endeavor just assumes this world is uniform. And so let's go back and ask and reconsider an argument with respect now to causality. Is there causation in this world? Is there causation? You know, when you talk to the unbeliever, I guarantee you're going to have to educate him because you're going to say, everybody knows there's causation. That's not unique to you Christians. Remember what Van Till said, Everybody counts. Not everybody can account for counting. So you want to say, oh, we know that everybody uses the causal principle. In fact, we encourage you to use it. That's the only way to get by in this world. We want you to account for the causal principle. Why do you assume the future will be like the past? The causal principle is one of those general principles by which inferences are drawn and the particular data of sensation can be organized into law like expectations, so that we might now live successfully in the world. Causation is not mere succession of events. If causation were mere succession, then I could tell you why eggs fry when you put them on the griddle at the griddle line. It's because the, the alarm clock went off that morning. Isn't that what you were going to say? The alarm went off 6 o'. Clock. I got up, took my shower, went to the kitchen, cracked the eggs on the hot griddle. They fried. It must be the alarm clock that caused the eggs to fry. Somebody says, no, no, no, Dr. Barson, the fact that it preceded doesn't mean that it caused it. That's just succession of events. Mere succession. Event A, alarm clock ringing, Event B, eggs frying. Those two things are not necessarily connected. That's what David Hume said. He said causation is not just succession of events. It's necessary succession of events. Now can we see succession of events? I'm not going to get real advanced on because I could argue you don't even see succession because succession assumes temporal understanding and no one sees temporality, but that's way too advanced. Let's just say we do see succession. I see this cracking of the eggs, hot griddle. I see it frying. I see succession of events. But do I see any necessary connection between the two? I'm granting we see a temporal succession. I mean temporarily. I'm granting we do see a temporal succession. We don't see a necessary connection. David Hume granted that. Now let me go one better here. Time's running out. I'm almost done. Anyway, I wanted to go through an article by Bertrand Russell. Now you're going to be reading something by Bertrand Russell entitled why I'm Not a Christian. So no one can suspect me here of sneaking in somebody that's really sympathetic to religion or to Christianity. So that's why he's saying this thing. Bertrand Russell hated Christianity. I'm passing out one article. There's a whole book of articles by Russell entitled, taking the title from that why I'm Not a Christian. He has whether religion has made positive contributions to civilization and on and on and on. He hated religion and he hated Christianity in particular. And so in his Problems of philosophy, published in 1967, Russell has a chapter entitled On Induction. Now, you all know what induction is. It's this principle that our experience in the past is a reliable guide to how things will happen in the future. And in the article he goes through various ways you could rationally or not in terms of the school of rationalism, but how you could intellectually justify the principle of induction. And I just want to hear want you to hear his conclusion. He says the inductive principle is incapable of being proved by an appeal to experience. Somebody says, oh, I know why the sun will rise tomorrow. I know why the eggs will frighten try. I know why. And you'll say, why? Well, because I've experienced it. And Russell will think you cannot prove the inductive principle by appealing to experience. Experience. I'm now reading again. Experience might conceivably confirm the inductive principle as regards the cases that have been already examined. Okay, all those past experiences might be confirmed by experience. But as regards unexamined cases, future cases, or it doesn't even have to be future. If eggs fry on a hot griddle in America, do they do that in China too? You say, well, we assume that they do he says, yeah, but you haven't examined those cases. But as regards unexamined cases, it is the inductive principle alone that can justify any inference from what has been examined to what has not been examined. It's a crucial sentence and it's also what puts the news right around his unbelieving neck. Because he says, if you appeal to experience to prove eggs fry in China or eggs will fry next Tuesday, he says, you're assuming the inductive principle. And so experience does not justify the inductive principle. It's the inductive principle that allows you to use experience and draw conclusions about unexamined cases. All arguments which on the basis of experience, argue as to the future or the unexperienced parts of the past or present, assume the inductive principle. Hence, we can never use experience to prove the inductive principle without begging the question. Uh oh. Bertrand Russell, expert in 20th century logic, says if we use the inductive principle, we're begging the question, which is the logical fallacy. Thus, we must either accept the inductive principle on the ground of its intrinsic evidence or forego all justification of our expectations about the future. He says there's two options. Of course, being an unbeliever, he's excluding the third option, which is we know that nature is uniform because God, the personal God, who created the heavens and the earth and sovereignly controls everything that happens right down to the hairs of our head. That God makes the future like the past and amenable to our knowledge so that we can get to know it, subdue it to his glory. But Russell says no. It's either the intrinsic evidence for it or there is no justification whatsoever. Well, if there's no justification, that is to say, believing in the inductive principle is irrational or arbitrary. Remember that. Here's a man talking about the most basic principle of science and he says, we're going to be rational. Here's a man who hates the living and true God is going to give you all kinds of arguments against them. And he says, but when all said and done, that principle that is the foundation for all of our reasoning is arbitrary. He begins with an irrational starting point and from that point on says, I'm going to strictly be rational. He says, or we have to accept it on its intrinsic evidence. By the way, this is cute, especially for somebody who was as technically probably efficient as Bertrand Russell was in philosophy. Intrinsic evidence is just a real slimy euphemistic way of saying what is accepted on its own evidence, self evidently it's intrinsic evidence. And so he says, the general principles of science, such as the belief in the reign of law and the belief that every event must have a cause, are as completely dependent upon the inductive principle as. As are the beliefs of daily life. All such general principles are believed because mankind has found innumerable instances of their truth and no instances of their falsehood. But this affords no evidence for their truth in the future unless the inductive principle is assumed. So what we have here is the unbeliever himself giving us all the evidence we need that only the Christian worldview provides the preconditions of intelligibility. For science, for reasoning, for language. It is the most reasonable thing in the world to believe in God. It is entirely unreasonable not to believe in God. Why is that? Because God's existence is the precondition for all reasoning. I'm going to read that again. In fact, I wouldn't mind using my last three minutes just to read it over and over again. I want this to sink in. Now, I set all of this up by talking to you about proof, theory, about how subjective considerations are irrelevant, on and on and on. I am simply talking about objective matters pertaining to intelligibility or reason. And how I prove God's existence now is by showing that it's entirely unreasonable not to believe in God. Which is to say, it's entirely reasonable to believe in God, because God's existence is the precondition for all reasoning. Anytime the unbeliever wants to reason with you, he's lost. Later in the week you may ask me about, okay, what about people who finally get the point? No laws of logic on the non Christian worldview, no inductive principle on the non Christian worldview, no moral absolutes on the non Christian worldview, no dignity for man on the non Christian worldview, no freedom of the mind on the non Christian worldview. All of which are assumed in the reasoning or arguing or debating process. And so the unbeliever says, well, Dan, fine, I won't believe in God. And so I just won't reason or debate with you. Well, if you want to know the apologetical answer, it is. Okay, fine. Well then you can see that we're right and you're wrong. Because you see, the fact that you won't cry uncle doesn't mean that I don't have you in a hammerlock. Remember what I said? Proof and persuasion are two different things. And your job is not to make him cry uncle. It'd be wonderful if he did. But believe me, if he does, it won't be because your arguments are so sterling. It's because the Holy Spirit's so strong you shut his mouth. The Holy Spirit, by God's grace, will open his heart. So I'm not claiming that a profession of God's existence is necessary to engage in reasoning. I'm rather claiming that the atheistic worldview cannot provide a cogent reason for what we necessarily assume in all reasoning. That is, atheism cannot make sense out of our reasoning and must be dismissed as just another version of intellectual arbitrariness. Atheists are living by habitual conditioning. They are living by, on their worldview, blind faith regarding the rationality of the universe. When I debated Dr. Stein at the University of California at one point, I said, and the audience nodded in agreement. They laughed and clapped and so forth. I said, you know, the problem with atheism is you just have to live by so much faith. And I just don't have that much faith. All right. Thus far in our lectures we have already looked at a number of particular apologetical problems. We've looked at the problem of whether you can trust the text of Scripture, whether the Jesus of history, if there ever was a Jesus of history. We've looked at the question of God's existence, matter of faith and reason and other things like that. So I don't want to say that we're now going to begin some illustrations because there's been plenty of illustrative material and I hope you'll go back in your notes and pick that out and remember where it is. But up to this point I've been trying to teach you and to apply illustratively this four point checklist. When someone's arguing with you, these are the things you want to look for. Are they being arbitrary? Are there inconsistencies in what they're saying? What are the consequences of their argument? And what are the preconditions of intelligibility? My argument for God's existence came from the preconditions of intelligibility. That's what we are doing at as we went through there. But now I'm just going to start taking as blocks of material different problems that people will throw at you in terms of being a Christian. And for this particular lecture session, I want to deal with the problem of evolution. People will tell you that you can't believe the Bible because the people who have mouths at work will tell you you can't trust the Bible because it teaches creation. But we know now from science that man came about through the evolutionary process, or they will tell you, if they're willing to assume that God started that process. They'll say, the Bible teaches God created man in six days and that he was supervising the whole process, and that man's not related to. To any animal origins, but rather God, as the Bible says, formed him out of the dust of the ground and breathed into him the breath of life. So that man is a special creation of God rather than, if you will, a natural consequence of an evolutionary process, whichever approach they take. Another one is the Bible teaches that man was created in six days, and we now know that it was billions and billions of years. And so evolution proves to be, for many people, a stumbling block for Christian faith. And you know that this has been from a cultural standpoint, probably up to our generation, when moral issues have taken the forefront in this debate. The biggest cultural opposition to Christianity in the 20th century has come from the evolutionary debate. Everyone knows the famous Scopes trial and so forth and so on. So it just makes sense that if I'm going to try to teach you apologetics and to illustrate a method of defending the faith, that I would take this biggest, most ballyhooed, entertaining way of opposing Christianity. Now, the evolutionary debate hasn't simply been a matter of, well, you Christians have what you believe, then here's our evidence against it. And everyone go out there and do the comparison and make up your own mind. Those who hold to an evolutionary view of man's origin have been very aggressive. They've been evangelistic in the first place, using the classroom as their pulpit, so forth, but they've also engaged in a great deal of, how can we put it, they are trying to control the educational process as well and make sure they screen out arguments against their particular sacred cow. Now, I bring that up, in a sense, we're going to come back to it, but I bring that up at the beginning because you need to be suspicious of anybody who says, I don't want to hear the contrary evidence. The irony is, I heard all through my educational career, I've read over and over again, I've heard the slurs, you see it on TV and sliver. Those who have faith are supposed to be acting that way. You know, it's us Christians who are supposed to be unwilling to hear the other side over and over again. People will say, the reason I don't want to send my child to a Christian high school or to a Christian college is I want them to. To hear both sides of the issue. Yeah, right. Like they're going to hear the Christian side when they go to a secular school. Well, the fact of the matter is, and I've taught in Christian schools and in Christian high schools and I've been an administrator such programs, I'll tell you heart and soul, we're the only ones in Orange county that told both sides. In fact, more than both. I taught a history of philosophy course to my high school seniors and so forth. I had them read what the other side had to say because you see that there's nothing to fear from exposure. Granted, you may have some people out there that are real clever, sophistic debaters with false worldviews and so forth, and they may mislead people. But in the end, if you are patient, if you'll do the analysis and be critical in your thinking, the truth has nothing to fear from exposure to the other point of view. Why then is it that evolutionists today are acting like supposedly the fundamentalists did back in the days of the Scopes trial? You have any doubt that's true? Tell you. Well, I can tell you more than one story. I don't have that much time, but one that affects my own life. The state of Louisiana passed the law a number of years ago, in the mid-80s, if I have the dating right, that called for equal treatment of evolution and abrupt appearance views of man's origin, or creationist views. Abrupt appearance, meaning man did not come about through a process, a natural process, but just appeared and it was called abrupt appearance in order to strip away any appearance of religious language and the connotations and the hanging on of religion. I'm not too happy about that, mind you. But nevertheless, we have a law here that says the evidence for evolution must be balanced with the evidence against and the other worldviews that compete with evolution. And of course, the aclu, ever mindful of the rights and liberties of people, jumped in immediately and challenged that law so that it would not be implemented. Implemented. And that went to the courts. And then a long protracted process of taking depositions and preparing for a day in court transpired. And in that, I'm not even sure how it came about, but I got a call one day at school. Someone said, I need to know more about your, you know, your religious convictions and your educational background, because a number of people have said that you would be good for our expert witness in philosophy on this particular matter. And so I eventually agreed to do it. Now, I want to tell you my hesitation, my hesitation is that the defense in this trial, which amounts to the state of Louisiana. Actually, the defense wanted to take the approach that the teaching of non evolutionary origins and the teaching of evolutionary origins is not religious. They wanted to say it's all just secular science. That's all there is to it. And I said, well, that's not really true. The teaching of origins, in fact, the teaching of anything foundational to man's reasoning and science is religious. They said, yeah, but people won't understand that. They'll think that we're asking for religion in the classroom. And I said, you've got religion in the classroom, that's the point. Yes, but we can't use that language. So I ended up having. The reason why I agreed to do it is my point is evolution and creation science are on an equal footing in terms of their theoretical nature. If you don't want to use the language of religious, then I'll find other ways of putting it. But the point is evolution is not scientific and all the others are religious. Whatever you want to call the Christian view, the evolutionary view is that as well. Call it religious, call it a matter of fact fundamental conviction, a matter of worldview, on and on and on. So that's why I was willing to go into it, although I wasn't real happy with that particular strategy of calling it all secular. Nevertheless, we went into this. I had a long deposition I gave in downtown Los Angeles one day, about eight hours with the aclu, a couple of lawyers, and they came in, boy, and their guns were loaded. About 10:30 in the morning, one of the lawyers asked for the court stenographer to stop. What he meant is, I want to say something and have a discussion off the record. And you'll understand why he wanted it off the record in just a second. So she stopped and he turned to me and he said, I have to be real honest with you, Greg. I have never heard anything like this. He said, I have no idea what this say. And essentially my argument was this, what sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. And I had just spent a little over two hours showing him that evolution is not a scientific theory. And that's what I want to tell you today as well. And after I give this lecture, I've done this in places where people have heard it too, or three times. And then finally, like after the third time, they go, now I've got it. So I'm hoping it won't take you that long to get it. But it is hard for this to sink in because it's part of the air we breathe culturally. Now, people think evolution is a matter of the facts of science disproving the truth of the Bible. And nothing could be further from the truth. Evolution is not even a scientific theory. Yes, I know it's taught in science classrooms. Yes, I know that it's pervasively labeled a scientific theory. And by the way, just so you don't be misled, I realize many pop publications on this will point out that evolution, you know, is fact. It's only a theory. That's not the point I'm making here. I'm saying that it is a theory, but it's not a scientific theory. It does not have scientific corporations credentials. Evolution is a philosophy. If you'd like to follow up on this, I just thought of this. I'm not a perpetual commercial, please don't take me this way. But if you get our catalog, you may want to get a photocopy of my article on worshiping the creature rather than the creator comes from the Journal of Christian Reconstruction from a number of years ago. And in the article I basically just wanted to trace for people the ideological and cultural context to Charles Darwin's work, the Origin of Species. And I make the point there. Darwin did not. I mean, if you know the history of philosophy, Darwin didn't give anything new to the world at all. He only put a scientific veneer on views that were being propagated long before Darwin. And we're going to talk about that veneer being very thin and inadequate. But nevertheless, evolution is not a scientific theory. Evolution is a philosophy. It is a worldview actually. And so in the end, the way to refute evolution is to compare the two worldviews. And once we get to that point in this lecture, I hope you'll see how really easy it is. The biggest thing for an apologist, the biggest thing to get across. Just like in my last lecture, the most important thing was to set it up right, you know, to close all the exits where people want to run out and to get rid of all the misconceptions so we can finally get down and narrow in on what the real issue is. And then bing, bing, bing, it's pretty easy. And same way with evolution, the main thing you've got to get across to people is that evolution has no scientific credentials, it has no evidence. One and two, it doesn't even have the traits of a scientific theory that goes against everything they've heard. And so you may have to do this, you may have to shoot this bear over and over and over again with the same gun. You know what I mean by that? The Temptation is for Christians when they have good arguments. Sometimes they see this bear running at them. They have a gun that has good bullets in it and they shoot it and the bear is still standing. And so then they say, oh, I guess the gun wasn't good and the bullets weren't good. Got to go to something else. No, some bears take more than one bullet to put down, so shoot again and shoot again. After you make this point, people will hear it go in one ear, out the other, as we say, and they'll go right on talking like, well, we've got the facts of science and you've got this Sunday school faith commitment in God the Creator. You'll say, no, that's not the nature of the debate here. You got to make that point. And here's how I'm going to make that point. I'm going to begin by talking about some of the problems in the evolutionary theory. And I'll trust that some of you, anyway who are interested will read the more technical article on the cultural and philosophical or ideological background to the theory of evolution. But you can show people that they're really committed to something that has no scientific creature credentials. Just you don't have to use these evidences, but bring up a few of the problems in the theory of evolution. I'm going to begin with this one. Back in 1967, a book was published entitled Mathematical Challenges to the Neo Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution. Very technical book. It's not, you know, easy reading. Mathematical Challenges to the Neo Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution. That was not published by a religious house. It was not written by Christians, much less evangelical believers. It was not even written by people who are committed to creationism. It was written by people who were trying to be honest with their assumptions. The editors are Moorhead and Kaplan. And in the book a particular author, Eden Murray, wrote an article entitled Inadequacies of Neo Darwinian Evolution is a scientific theory. So don't think of some sectarian, prejudicial, biased, emotional Dr. Bonson who is saying these sorts of things. Here's this person who's not even a creationist, and I'm going to quote for you. Eden Murray says, it is our contention that if the word random is given a serious and crucial interpretation from a probabilistic point of view, okay? That's the condition if, when you use the word random, you are interpreting that according to probability theory in a serious way. And I wish I had five more hours with you so I can give you some background. This is really exciting. Probability theory attempts to give statistical and predictable meanings to words like random chance, and so on forth. And so this is the condition of this comment. Murray says it's our contention if random is understood in 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. Why is that? What's the mathematical problem? Evolution. Well, if you believe that it happened randomly, then you've got to look at what are the probabilities of things coming together. You know, all this kind of chance permutations, certain things end up being amenable to the environment and surviving other things not, and so forth. It would take evolution to say that the world has been around between 15 and 25 billion years. How do you like that for a margin of error? 15 or 25 billion years. But the mathematical folks here did all of the probabilistic work and they said the problem is on the randomness postulate. You would need hundreds more years than what any evolutionist tells you is credible for the, for the age of this earth. And that's why, to put it tongue in cheek, you would need new natural laws to prove evolution. Mathematics, the theory of probability understood mathematically, has made it impossible to believe in the theory of evolution. Now, that was in 1967. That was long before most of you graduated from high school or college. You tell me, those of you who have gone to a secular school, everybody's willing to cry uncle now, right? Theory of evolution has just been slaughtered by the mathematicians. Now, you probably hadn't even heard that, had you? Michael Denton, in his book Evolution A Theory in Crisis, published in 1986, gives us some idea of part of the mathematical problem. He says to get a set cell by chance according to the randomness postulate, would require at least 100 functional proteins to appear simultaneously in one place. 100 functional proteins to appear at the same time at the same place to get one cell by chance. And he says the probability for each could hardly be more than 10 to the -20th power. Class. Who can remind us what 10 to the minus 20th is is? What's another notation for it? One over what, 10? And then how many zeros am I going to add? You know, that's one whale of a big number. I want you to, you know, internalize this. Let me give some existential punch to this for you. When you go to Las Vegas. And you're betting your hard earned fortune, you go to the blackjack table and you hope that Your probability is 1 and 3, Doing pretty good. If those are the probabilities that you're going to pull a winning hand. One in 10, if that's really what it came down to. Only a fool would play blackjack. One in 100. By the way, we're only up to this zero right now. One in 100. It would be absolute suicide. You're not going to play blackjack if the chances of winning are 1 in 100. You don't put the money down on the table and say, okay, 99 times out of 100, you're going to take the money. I hope it comes up my time. One in 1,000, 10,000, on and on and on. Danton points out that for one cell, one cell, only one cell to appear, the probability could hardly be more than 10 to the -20th power for each of the 100 functional proteins. For each of them, that's the probability for one cell functional protein. But you need 100 functional proteins at least to have a cell that's alive. So that means I have to add another 10 times that. That is 10 to the minus 2000th power. Anybody in Las Vegas going to gamble on that one? Now, I hope you see what I'm. Evolution requires you to believe that that happened. Fred Hoyle, in his book Evolution from space, published in 1981, said that there are about 2,000 enzymes, so that the chance of obtaining them all, obtaining all 2,000 enzymes in a random trial is only one part in ten to the minus 40,000th power. And yet people believe in the theory of evolution. What do you think is fueling that belief? Is it because of the sterling scientific credentials? It's just so likely that that happened. That's what I meant when I said earlier. I said in my debate with the atheists, the problem with atheism is it requires such a great faith. I just don't have that much faith to be an atheist. If you look at the fossil record, life appears in the fossil record abruptly, which is very distressing to the evolutionists. Not only does it appear abruptly, it appears in complex forms in the fossil record record. And there are gaps, sadly for evolutionary theory, systematic gaps between various living kinds in the fossil record. Now, listen to me. We have hundreds of millions of fossils in the museums around the world, hundreds of millions of fossils, and not one of those fossil traces, not one of them provides an intermediary form or what was commonly called a missing link between these various living strata, not one in particular. There are no fossil traces of a transition from ape like Creature to man. In 1970, Lord Zuckerman admitted that in his book beyond the Ivory Tower, the ivory tower being those scientists who still believe in evolution. Paleontology is a great enemy of evolution. A great enemy. And so it turns out. By the way, one of the men who was giving a deposition contrary to me in that ACLU situation in the Louisiana case was Stephen J. Gould. Gould is perhaps the most famous paleontologist in our country, maybe in the world today. Teaches at Harvard. Stephen Jay Gould understands that the fossil record is an embarrassment to evolution. So he's come up with a new theory of evolution. You're going to love this. He calls it punctuated equilibrium. Punctuated equilibrium. Here's the problem. The fossil record shows equilibrium, shows continuity. It does not suggest that what you have is the development of one simple form, and then it gets more complex and more complex and more complex and evolved from one kind to another kind and then into a higher kind and so forth. And so Gould says, well, then I guess evolution must have taken place in short spurts rather than over the long haul. And if evolution took place in short spurts, if you'll grant me that hypothesis, then there would not be enough time to leave fossil remains during the evolutionary hot periods. And therefore the fossil record itself would be just what we find it to be, punctuated with these life forms. Some of you should be chuckling at that. And so let me boil this down as a philosopher for you now, like Columbo, I just have one more question here, Dr. Gold. What you're telling me, then, is that the evidence for evidence, evolution, is that there can't be any evidence for evolution, is that right? That's exactly what he's saying. He's saying evolution must have taken place in such a way that it couldn't leave evidence in the fossil traces. There you have it. Does that look like a scientific approach, or has somebody got his mind made up before he got to the fields where the fossils were found? Natural clocks show that there has not been enough time in Earth's history to accommodate any of the theories of evolution that are popular. I've already told you that evolutionists ask for 15 to 25 billion years for the life of the Earth. Now then, it takes about 1,000 years to produce an inch of topsoil by means of wind and rain, what we call erosion. Over 1,000 years, erosion will produce one inch of topsoil. So the topsoil on the Earth's crust should be a very thick layer. Remember, we're supposed to have been here 15 to 25 billion years. You know what the average topsoil depth is around the Earth? Six to nine inches. There's not enough topsoil to account for Earth being here that long. So people say, oh well, that's because it's been washing into the ocean. We would have that topsoil, but it washed into the ocean. Well then we should be able to measure the sediment on the ocean floor, shouldn't we? In fact, the sediment on the ocean's floor should be miles deep. If the Earth is that old, the average depth of ocean sediment is pointing 0.56 of a mile. Just not enough. Given the present rate at which meteor dust from collisions with the Earth's atmosphere is settling on the Earth's surface. I know that's going to make you feel kind of yucky, but dust is constantly settling on the Earth. As meteors hit the atmosphere of the Earth, they disintegrate and all that then dissipates through space and gently comes down and is all over our bodies. That's why you have to shower every day. Anyway, at the rate which meteor dust is settling on the Earth's surface, if the Earth is billions of years old, there should be by mathematical calculation about 50ft of dust on the Earth everywhere right now. You know how deep the moon dust was when they got up there, which is a much better place to find prove this than on the Earth where we have winds and so forth. A quarter of an inch. A quarter of an inch. You see what I'm getting at? It's not as though evolution's got all these great pieces of evidence and we need to be embarrassed. There are so many counter pieces of evidence against evolution. It's just incredible. And I have others here, but I'm going to skip them because I want to get on to my real point. Evolution is not believed by your professor or by your roommate or your next door neighbor. Because of its sterling scientific credentials. Evolution is a silly scientific theory. I know that sounds like I'm trying to be pugnacious or call names. What I mean that, believe me, I mean that in the philosophical sense. It's philosophical silliness to believe in evolution. And that's what I want to demonstrate to you in terms of comparing worldviews. I want you to compare what makes sense out of the human eye, the evolutionary theory or the theory of special creation, or what makes sense out of the fact that mammals have hearts and lungs and kidneys, by the way, that work together. You're saying if you don't know much about Evolutionary theory, you may wonder why that's such an embarrassment to evolutionists. Evolutionists maintain that organisms develop gradually over time. But we know from the functioning of the human body, not to mention cattle and all sorts of others, that it won't do any good for a human being to have a heart if the human being doesn't have lungs. And it won't do any good for the human being to have a heart, doesn't have a kidney either, or kidneys. So you need heart, kidneys and lungs all working in tandem. Right. But the evolutionary theory says hearts must gradually develop, kidneys must gradually develop, lungs must gradually develop. And unless it's late in the afternoon and you're just getting tired, you should be sitting there saying, well, of course it's a huge problem. How could you have hearts gradually develop if you don't already have lungs and kidneys waiting for them? But how could you have hearts and lungs wait? I mean, yeah, and kidneys waiting for them. They've got to be gradually developing, too. And even if you believe they gradually develop together, which by the way, is a silly picture, imagine that, you know, these little, you know, proto hearts and proto kidneys and proto lungs, well, we're going to grow up someday and work together. No, it doesn't work. The fact that they gradually develop rather than appearing simultaneously in full mature form makes it impossible for the organism to live any longer. Evolution kills off all of its guinea pigs. The evolutionary theory simply cannot deal with that, cannot deal with the function of the human eye or its development. Because, you see, every change in a living organism is preserved according to evolution because of its favorable interaction with the environment. That is, it provides some advantage for life. I'm going to ask you. Human eye is to develop over a billion years, take the first step from the creature that had no eyes. The first step is not going to look much like an eye, but that first step is only going to be preserved if it is favorable to interaction with its environment. And so what is a proto eye worth, do you think, to an organism? I can tell you it's worth exactly nothing. Not even a quasi developed or halfway developed eye is beneficial to the organism. A fully functioning eye is real helpful. You can see, you know, the dinosaurs coming and run away and things like that. That's helpful, sure. But it's a real strange development, this eye. You know, how the eye works. That's another reason why Christians ought to study science. And it used to be a motivation for studying science. You'll really glorify God. It's absolutely Remarkable, the way the eye works. But forgetting just the organism of the eye itself. The eye is wired, to use computer analogy, is wired to the back of the brain. You would not expect that on the evolutionary theory. It should be wired to the front of the brain. That would be the quickest and easiest way to do it. It's wired to the back and it's backward wired. And as you know, the image that comes in is upside down and the brain has to make it reversed. Now, what is it about all of that that was favorable to the organism? Again, the human eye is a great embarrassment. So is sex. Those of you who are alumni of this institute know how I enjoy using that. Because everybody wants to know about sex, right? So I'll ask you real quickly because I know my time's running out. Where do babies come from? Don't tell me. We'll all be embarrassed. I know you know that human babies come through what we call the process of copulation. You also know that we supposedly evolved out of a puddle of slime. To put it bluntly and way back billions and billions of years ago, our grandparents were nothing but little amoebas. And the little amoebas didn't copulate. How do most organisms short of sentient creatures do carrots copulate? No. That surprised some of you? That worries me. Amoebas and other sorts of things multiply by cell division, don't they? Then when you finally get mobile and sentient creatures, then they learn about the birds and the bees from their parents and they make babies, Right? Okay, that's real simple. You don't need a PhD to understand that. Evolution says we started out as non copulating amoebas and we ended up, you know, with all this stuff that we do today to make babies. Okay, I want you to explain that to me. What is it that led to the changeover from cell division to copulation in the process of reproduction, and this is especially a juicy one, explain to me how that happened gradually. I'd like to know what the value of a partially developed genital is. You see what I'm getting at? I'm not really trying to be a comedian that this theory is silly. Anybody? Think about it. If you didn't go into the classroom with this solemn presentation from a PhD you'd look at this just like the child. I don't think the king has any clothes on. You couldn't possibly believe that. But they do. They do. Compare the worldviews. Compare them. Tell me. Oh, I erased it, so it's not there. Now tell me. If this sounds arbitrary to you, according to evolutionary theory, there was once nothing but disorder. And then the world as we know it, because it was packed into an infinitesimal point, it became ordered and exploded. But the explosion created an ordered realm, if you will, that was inorganic. Okay, so we went from disorder to order. Now you have the right to ask everybody who studies philosophy, you get, this is the one ticket you get to say why. Could you explain that to me, please? Why did disorder become order? We don't know. Trust us on that one. Okay, so it's early in the morning, you're saying, okay, okay. But now this ordered inorganic world at some point began to live. So how did the non living become living? This is contrary to every pattern of reasoning that you'll see in the scientific process and in logic too. You can't get more in your product than what you had in the cause. And if there wasn't life to begin with, unless you think life, life is just a more complex form of non life. By the way, there are real conceptual problems with that. Life is just the complex version of non life. It's like bricks don't live. But if, you know, if you put them together just right, like they're living again. I'm giving you the comedian's version of it, but that is what the evolution is telling you. It was inorganic and then one day it got so complex that it started living. Yeah, right. By the way, how did it get that complex? What caused it? Well, we don't know. Well, that which was living, Remember, we just have soup right now. The little puddle of slime, it's living. But what's living is all identical in its life forms. The evolutionist says now we must start getting diversity. And now the living identical slim soup becomes varied, unintelligent forms of life, varied kinds of amoebas and other sorts of things. What caused the identical living soup to start diversifying into life forms? Well, we don't know. Well, those varied life forms were unintelligent. And eventually something developed that was intelligent and articulate. What caused all those various life forms to jump from non intelligent to intelligent, from inarticulate to articulate? Well, we don't know. And then this language using life form, which did not have any traces of morality previously, started having moral notions, thinking and not terms of just what is the case, but what ought to be the case? Where did those moral notions come from? Well, we don't know. Evolutionists have tried in the past, always to their embarrassment, to explain the evolution of morality. It doesn't work, but usually, well, we just don't know. So we're supposed to believe step by step by step by step that there were huge, unexplained, irrational changes that brought about the inorganic, then the organic, then the diversified, then the intelligent, then the moral forms of life that we now call man. I've sometimes said you have to be careful with this remark, that it not be taken in the wrong way. But I've sometimes said that the best reputation of the theory of evolution is just repeating it. If you really tell people this is what the evolutionists are saying now. The reason I say that is because when people encountered the theory of evolution, it's always in little pieces, a little slice allegedly of evolution. And then evolutionists love to cheat on you. You have to be careful, not just here, but everywhere. Unbelievers will like to change the subject and then equivocate on the word. Evolutionists, when you ask them forever will often give you evidence of change within a particular life form. You know the famous moths that are light colored, and then when soot is all over the trees because of the factories and so forth, they're easier to find by their predators. And so it turns out that they get darker wings so they can blend in with the trees. Just about every book you read will give you that. It has flaws in it too. But nevertheless, that is not the kind of evidence. That's not the little slice that I'm talking about here because that's not even a slice relevant to the theory of macroevolution. No one doubts that there are changes. All of you are human beings. But look at all the different colored eyes, all the different colors of hair, height, weight, body, build, that sort of thing. Yeah, there are changes within life forms. We want to know if there are changes between life forms. Evolutionists never give you that, but what they do give you is a little slice of something. What I'm saying is. No, just tell the whole story for us, you know. You know, daddy, tonight for bed, could you please read the whole book for us? And then you say you expect me to believe this fairy tale? No rational person could believe this. And now we come to the startling conclusion. J. Tyndall in 1874 wrote these words, the famous professor at Harvard trying to reconcile Christianity and evolution. And he said, the basis of the doctrine of evolution consists not in. Before I read what it is, have I set it up. He's telling you the basis for the doctrine of evolution. Here's why you should believe in evolution. The basis of the doctrine of Evolution consists not in an experimental demonstration, but in its general harmony with scientific thought. That was his way of saying what I began this lecture with. Evolution is not a scientific theory. It's that it harmonizes with the whole spirit of science. And of course, here science is understood as a secular, you know, procedure for interacting with and learning about the world. Or let's go to Stephen Jay Gould, our famous punctuated equilibria guy, in his article where he presented this theory entitled Punctuated equilibria. It appeared in Paleo Bio Biology in 1977, page 145. I am not making this up. The most famous paleontologist in this nation defending the theory of evolution says, and I quote, the general preference that so many of us hold for gradualism, that is to say, evolutionary development of man. For gradualism is a metaphysical stance. Metaphysics is a development, is a division, pardon me, of philosophy that studies the nature of reality. So I'm just going to use the word philosophical when I reread this because I don't want to lose you. The general preference that so many of us hold for gradualism is a philosophical stance embedded in the history of Western cultures. It is not a high order empirical observation induced from the objective study of nature. The most famous defender of evolution in our country today says, we don't believe this because we've studied nature. This is a philosophical commitment on our part. Do you believe me now? No wonder it's not a scientific thing. Science would make this seem ridiculous. Tell the whole story, Daddy. And everybody goes, yeah, right. And so the answer is, well, we never meant for evolution to be taken as an empirical theory. Evolution is a philosophical theory. Louis Bonoir in the Advocate, March 1984. Benoir was the president of the Biological Society of Strasbourg, the director of the Strasbourg Zoological Museum, the director of research at the French center of Scientific Research, and I quote, evolution is a fairy tale for grownups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless. Well, but you know that it's useful, don't you? It's not useful for science, but it's very useful for religious purposes, for religious prejudices. Because as Darwin's bulldog once said, when we come up against Moses telling us we can go no further by order of the Creator, we need to break down the sign and proceed on. The value of the theory of evolution is it enables us to dispute the biblical view of man's origins. And you know what? If you take away the first three chapters of the Bible, if you think about it, you've really taken everything away. And that has always been what gives evolution credibility. It is the first refuge of those who don't want to be stuck faced with what the Bible says. And so we've got to find another way to explain man's origins. Now, time is very short. I'm going to say one more thing. Darwin held that the way in which evolution works. I told you this was a philosophy of life long before Darwin. He gave it a scientific veneer. What people didn't understand is how does evolution work? There were people who were committed to gradualism, but they said, scientifically, how does it work? And Darwin said, well, it's by the survival of the fittest. Organisms change and, and those which change and are the most fit for survival, then they survive and they produce more changes and so forth. And the unfit ones drop off along the way. And that was supposed to be the mechanism, you see, that drives evolution forward, survival of the fittest. And sadly, it wasn't Christians who pointed this out. It was analytical philosophers, people who are unbelievers, and in some cases violently against Christianity, who pointed out the theory of evol.