Dr Greg Bahnsen - Taking it to the Streets: Worldviews in Collision (Part 5)

Let's review what we've learned so far. Apologetics is not going to be accomplished if you are willing to settle for a subjective testimony to what Jesus has done in your heart. Apologetics will not be accomplished if you are going to be a relativist and say, well, it's true for me, but it might not be true for you. And apologetics is not going to be done if you eclecticism and just make Jesus one more of the many religious teachers in this world. Apologetics is the defense of the objective truth of Christianity as the exclusive revelation of God and way to be made right with God. Not everybody believes those things, and I tried to teach you last night that those who do not believe what we are teaching are walking worldviews. We have our worldview provided to us by God in his revelation. And unbelievers have their worldviews too. They have a view of reality. They have a view of how we know what we know. They have a view of how we should live our lives. And according to the Bible, the worldview of the unbeliever reduces to foolishness. We should answer the fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceits. We want to disarm our opponents so they're not able to keep shooting these bullets, these objections or criticisms at us. We want to demonstrate that the Christian worldview, make sense out of life, can give answers to man's questions. Those who disagree with it undermine themselves. They really are standing on a foundation that doesn't allow them to know anything. They have contradictions within their philosophy of life or their worldview. We began this morning by looking at a set of examples of those kind of contradictions. And now, as we begin to look at various kinds of worldviews, we've examined atheism. Atheism, according to the Bible, is motivated by moral considerations. The intellectual quality of atheism is foolish, and the atheist project can never be successfully carried out. Men know in their heart of hearts the living and true God. They profess with their mouth that they do not. They try to fight against it, but in their heart of hearts, they know. And that's why atheists are able to balance their checkbook. They're able to drive their car, they're able to make advances in science and so forth, and. But they can never make sense out of what they are doing. Only Christianity can provide the preconditions of intelligibility. Only Christianity, the Christian worldview gives us a basis for ethics, a basis for logic, a basis for human rationality. Human dignity and human freedom. Only the Christian worldview provides these preconditions. We've seen. Atheism then reduces to absurdity. But it's not just atheism. It's also religious forms of unbelief that reduce to absurdity. And in most cases, as I've indicated, the problem with non Christian religions is simply that they are arbitrary. They do not comport with the necessity of divine self revelation. If God doesn't reveal himself, no man has the right to imagine or define what God is like. Christianity provides that revelation. Other religions do not. And those that do try to provide a personal revelation from God will all turn out to be Christian cults or heresies. They are aping Christianity. They are arbitrary. But now let me add real quickly before we move on to another subject. It's not just the arbitrariness of other religions that faults them as intellectually adequate. It's not just that they have no basis to stand. That's a tough problem. If people can be arbitrary, then people can believe anything they want. And the person you're talking to can't object to your Christianity because you can be arbitrary if they can be arbitrary. But the problem with non Christian religions is more than arbitrariness. The problem with non Christian religions is that they are as self contradictory as atheism is as well. In a sense, when you deal with a person that's unbeliever and has another religion, you can treat them the same way you treat the atheist. And what did we do with the atheist? We let the atheist tell us what does he believe about reality? How does he know what he knows? How should we live our lives? And then you start showing that what he's given you doesn't hold together. He has conflicts in his basic presuppositions and so forth. And the very same thing can be done with non Christian religions. Not only will you point out that they have no reason to say what they are saying because they don't have a divine self revelation, but you can say, look at what you are telling me, look at your theology and see how it doesn't hold. I want to illustrate that real briefly. Let's imagine that in the airport when I'm going home, I run into a Hare Krishna. Hare Krishna is kind of like a denominational subdivision of Hinduism. To put it briefly, the Hare Krishnas, they sell the Bhagavad Gita. But you'll always know, you always know that you're dealing with a Hare Krishna because the Bhagavad Gita they sell is the Bhagavad Gita. As it is. The as it is tips you off that this is that version of Hinduism known as Hare Krishna. Now I sit down and I talk to this advocate of Hare Krishna and I basically let him hang himself. I let him tell me what he believes. And so I'm gonna. I'm run through Hinduism real quickly for you. If you're not familiar with this, I hope it's not too quick. But some of you will know these things because you've heard about them in New age theology and so forth. Hindus teach us that all of reality is one, that all pluralities and all distinctions within the world are illusion. Ultimately, reality is. So it turns out that you and I are not really distinct persons. It appears that way. That's the illusion that we live through in this life. But basically, we are one. You are me, and he is she, and we are all together. You know, whatever it is, we are all one, as the Beatles said. And not only that, we're one with the natural world. There's no distinction between humanity and the trees and the rivers and the seas and the sky and so forth. Ultimately, everything is one. There are no distinctions. So the Hare Krishna explains to me, we're all one. And that's why there's so much trouble in this world. Because we don't live like we're one. We live selfishly and individually and so forth, and we rape the planet and we don't take care of nature and so forth. And we're selfish toward one another and on and on and on and on. And so I want to know what the answer to this is. The Hare Krishna will tell me that I'm going through this life of illusion believing that there are distinctions between things. What they call Maya means illusion. I'm living a life of Maya right now. But if I could finally become enlightened to the oneness of all things, then I would eventually get off of the wheel of life and I would enter nirvana. What is the wheel of life? The wheel of life is reincarnation. You see, I live a life right now that is selfish. And so I build up bad karma for myself. Karma is like the cosmic law of cause and effect. When you live a good life, you build up good karma. When you live a bad life, you build up bad karma. And it's going to be visited upon you. Now, if I live a life of bad karma, when I die, then I'm going to have to come back and run through this again. And if I was a bad person. I'm going to come back in a lower form. Maybe I'll be an aardvark on my second trip around. Or maybe it's my millionth trip around. Who knows? But if I live a good life and if I practice the yoga and I have meditation techniques that enable me to rise to the level of enlightenment. I can finally get off of this wretched wheel of life. And someday, then I will have attained that enlightenment that allows my not to come back in another form, but be like as the Bhagavad Gita says, that drop of water that falls into the shoreless ocean. I will be splurged back into the oneness of all things. And there'll be no distinction between me and anything. That's what we're all aiming for, to finally reach nirvana. Now, I'm going to resist the temptation to tell the person who's advocating Hare Krishna that this doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun to me. I have to be honest. Maybe it's just my Western upbringing, but I'm far more attracted, if attracted at all, to the Muslim view of heaven that has beautiful women waiting on the men and, you know, satisfying their every need. I mean, now, that may sound tempting, but this idea of the little drop of water, you know, falling into the shoreless ocean. I'm saying, wow, what's left? But now, listen, all of that's not fair. And I don't want to teach you to do bad philosophy. That. I mean, if that's the way reality is, that's the way reality is. And the fact that I'm not attracted to it. So I want to talk to him about what he has taught me. I'm going to say. Now, let me get this clear. Do I understand you right? You're saying that my problem is the reason I'm living a life of illusion right now. And I keep coming back for more of this pain is because I don't realize that all of reality is one. I've not been enlightened to the oneness of all things. I keep living as though there's the distinction between you and me. My wallet, your wallet. I keep drawing these distinctions. And that's my problem here. He says, that's right. I mean, he's getting kind of enthusiastic. He thinks maybe he has a convert on the way. Yeah, you understand? And so if. If I want to go to Nirvana, then I've got to do meditation and so forth. And finally I'll reach enlightenment and. And I'll know that there are no true Distinctions between things, that everything is one, but I'm not there yet. But if I do the meditation and the yoga and all the rest, then maybe I can finally get to nirvana. Is that right? That's right. And I say, well, but you see, from what you have just taught me, anybody, I'm looking for faces that understand. You see how the two sides of the contradiction are coming back around, going to hit right now. You see, from what you just taught me is that there are no distinctions, but there's a distinction between where I am and where nirvana is. Then on the basis of your theology, I don't need to do the yoga, the meditation, because I'm in nirvana, because there can't be any differences between one thing and another. Hindu theology openly contradicts itself. It teaches, on one hand all distinctions are illusion, but then says people are not in nirvana yet. Well, if all distinctions are an illusion, we're all in nirvana already. And so it's not just that the Hindu is arbitrary. His theology is contradictory. Just like the atheist who says it's different strokes for different folks. But child molestation is wicked. You can't have those two together. And Hindus can't have the idea that all is one. And yet we're not in the oneness of all yet. If we're not in the oneness of all yet, then there's something besides the one, and that makes a two. And therefore not all is one anymore. Is that enough? Okay, but now the, the Hindu person, he has an answer for this. He thinks he's going to say, oh, there you go with your Western logic and rationality. If you thought in Eastern terms, you wouldn't worry about the contradictions in what I am teaching you. Whoa. I say, now wait a minute, wait a minute. You mean to say that you allow contradictions in your theology? He says, yes, and it's only a Western mentality that worries about those things. Reality is beyond rationality. And so don't worry about the contradictions. Just be a true believer. Do the meditation, enter into nirvana. Now, what am I going to do when a guy tells me that we're allowed to contradict ourselves? When a guy says, I reject logic, contradictions are no problem in my system. Well, I'm going to tell him, if you reject logic, then you don't. We go on, what do you mean by think about it? Analyze what underlies this. If he says he rejects logic, what he's saying is contradictions are acceptable. The two things that contradict each other can both be true. And if that's the case then if he says he rejects logic, I can contradict his claim. And just because he rejects logic, he has no objection to that. If he rejects logic, then he can't complain when I contradict him. And so whenever you have somebody who says oh, I don't have to follow logic, then you say oh, then I guess you do. No, I don't. Well that's what I mean. If you don't, then you do. Because if you reject logic, then you can contradict yourself. There's no escape from rationality. One must be logical, one cannot be arbitrary. And that's why one of the major reasons why intellectually I continue to be a Christian because there is no worldview out there. That is one. Well, there's no worldview out there that somehow escapes the criticism of arbitrariness and self contradiction. Atheism does secular religiosity does. The major religions of the world do. And even those that ape Christianity finally contradict themselves because they won't follow the scriptures and they teach something contrary to them. Now up to this point, now we're coming to a major break. I'm changing to a different mode here again. Up to this point we've been talking about worldviews, we've been talking about philosophies of life. And I've been trying to show you that the, the unbeliever's worldview, whether it's religious or atheistic, always reduces to absurdity. But someone is bound to say, I think, well, Dr. Bronson, wait a minute, you can get into all this philosophical stuff, but when all is said and done, there is hard evidence against Christianity. One can no longer believe the Christian worldview. One can no longer believe what the Bible teaches us because science has shown that, that evolution is true. And so what you, I'm going to take this as a major example but of a broader approach to attacking Christianity. That broader approach says don't this philosophical stuff, the facts show that you're wrong. And so I'd like to take a few moments to talk about evolution as an example of a factual refutation of Christianity and demonstrate how you can deal with that approach as well. I would suggest that when you have people in your family, your neighbors, your colleagues at work, your friends who are attacking Christianity and they are doing so because they say evolution has been proven to be true, that it would do you well to spend a little bit of time clearing the intellectual debris. Because when people say evolution has been proven to be true, they demonstrate that they've been listening to a lot of rhetoric, a lot of propaganda, a lot of public relations poise, but they really don't know the state of the debate. And before I go any further, I have to tell you, most people who put together the educational programs in this country don't know the state of the debate. And those people that cover these sorts of things, the sound bites you get on the evening news and the specials that are put together, don't know the state of the debate either. And that's why there is a general mentality in our country today that says evolution that's been, I mean, scientifically shown. There's really no argument over that anymore. Well, there's a great deal of argument over that. And as a matter of fact, people who know the state of the debate and evolution, well, I'll tell you what they say at the end of my lecture here. It may surprise you have the hard facts of science driven out Christianity because evolution has been shown to be true. I'm going to begin with just a few. You don't have to master all of these, but you might want to pick up one or two illustrations that you can share with people. Evolution faces major problems as a theoretical, as a scientific explanation for the origin of man. And the first major problem is just the mathematical improbability of evolution. The mathematical probability of random mutation producing copying organisms from simpler chemical forms is infinitesimally small, even given billions of years for the random mutations to take place. Let me state that again. The mathematical probability that random mutation produce complex living organisms from simpler chemical forms is infinitesimally small, even given billions of years. Let me quote for you a 1967 article, 25 years. 1967 article written by Eden Murray entitled Inadequacies of Neo Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory. This was published by Moorhead and Kaplan in a book, Mathematical Challenges to the Neo Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution. We're not here dealing with a religious publishing house. We're not dealing here with somebody who's a creationist trying to grind an axe and prove a point. We're dealing with somebody who's just looking at the math that's involved in the evolutionary theory. Eden Murray concluded, quote page 109. It is our contention that if 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. Want me to translate that into layman's language? Eden Murray says, given the Laws of science. We now know if random is taken seriously, that is, you can't, you know, rigged the system, it truly is a random hypostulate, then the likelihood of evolution taking place, well, what they say is it's highly implausible and that you will not adequately have the theory of evolution until new scientific laws are discovered. Now that's in 1967. Somebody just says, look, mathematically the idea of chance evolution is almost impossible. Michael Denson in his 1986 book Evolution theory in Crisis, how to get a cell by chance. To get one cell by chance would require at least 100 functional proteins to appear simultaneously in one place. 100 functioning proteins must simultaneous. It doesn't do any good to have 50 in China and 50 in California. They all got to get together, right? You got to get 100 functional proteins to appear simultaneously in one place. And he says that the independent probability for each one of those proteins coming into existence by chance, he says, could hardly be more than 10 to the -20th power. Now, many of you haven't been in high school for a while, and I need to remind you what 10 to the minus 20th is all about. First of all, when you have a minus component there, that means you have one over a certain number. Okay? 10 to the minus 20th means there's one chance in 10th power. Now, what is 10 to the 20th power? Well, you write 10 and then 20 zeros following it. That's a big number, all right. A million is a big number, isn't it? What's a million? Million is 10 to what power? To the sixth power. Now, what if you have 10 million? Then you have the seventh power, right? And if you want to get beyond 10 million, you want 100 million, then a thousand million or a billion. Then you have two more zeros, and we're still only up to what, the 8th or 9th power. And he says the independent probability for one protein appearing by chance is 1 in 10 to the 20th power. I don't even know what that number is. Billions upon billions. Trillions. And that's only for one of these. You actually have to get a hundred of them if you're going to have a cell. And so now you've got to add two more zeros. It's going to be 10 to the minus 2000th power. Again, the math involved in this tells you what an asinine pollution is. No one would believe this unless they were a true believer. Unless they had faith they had taken a leap and left their senses rationally. How many of you are going to go to Las Vegas and say, oh yeah, I'll take a 1 in 10 to the 6th power chance. I'm going to put my house on the line. One in a million. I believe it's going to come up for me. One in a billion. It's going to one in a trillion. And here we have trillions and trillions. And evolutionists believe it happened by chance. The 1981 book, Evolution from Space, written by Hoyle and Wickerisman, we read that there are about 2,000 enzymes. And so the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in ten to the forty thousandth power. Now, I mean, is there a blackboard big enough to have 40,000 zeros? 1 chance in all of that range? And people believe this. You need. When people say, well, everyone knows evolution is true, you say, well, the mathematical problems with evolution are overwhelming. And they've been published by people who are not religious, not Christians and so forth. This has been around for a quarter of a century and still people have this dogma of evolution taught in the schools and people have this mentality. Well, we all know that it's true. There are all sorts of problems in the evolutionary theory. Let me give you another. Life appears abruptly and in complex forms in the fossil record. There are gaps that appear between the life forms in the fossil record which are systematic. You know how many fossils we have to examine in all the different museums and laboratories in the world? There are hundreds of millions of fossils that are extant, that is, that are available to us for scientific research. Hundreds of millions, a million fossils we study, hundreds of millions of fossils are there. And there is in that entire range of hundreds of millions of fossils, not one, listen to me. Not one intermediary link between the various life forms. The old language of missing link, maybe you understand that. No missing links. And yet we've got abundant evidence from the fossil record. In particular, there are no fossil traces of a transformation from an ape like creature to man. None. The only ones that have ever been brought up have all been exposed as hoaxes. Now your unbelieving friend may not know that, and this is not a matter just for beating somebody over the head, but you may need to do some intellectual debris clearing here. You may need to point out to the unbeliever that evolution has gotten a lot of good press, but there's not a lot of good evidence for it. There are mathematical problems, there are fossil problems with evolution, moreover, problems with how much time is available for evolution. Natural clocks show that there has not been enough time in Earth's history to accommodate any of the theories of evolution that are now with us. Those theories of evolution require between 15 and and 25 billion years for evolution to have taken place. But we have natural clocks that tell us something about the history of the Earth, how long it's been here. And none of them will give you a number anywhere close to 15 billion. Let me give you an example. It takes about 1,000 years to produce one inch of topsoil by erosion. That is, the factors of wind and rain will produce one inch of topsoil in about a thousand years. If the Earth has been here for 15 billion years, the topsoil on Earth's crust should be a very, very thick layer. But as a matter of fact, we know this, that the topsoil around the world right now is only an average of 6 to 9 inches deep. Deep. And so where's the topsoil from billions of years of erosion? Ah, but the evolutionist says maybe it washed into the ocean. Well, if all that top, remember, we're talking about a lot of topsoil. If all that topsoil washed into the ocean, then the sediment on the ocean floor should be miles deep. The sediment on the ocean's floor is an average of 0.56 of a mile. That is to say, a little over half a mile deep on average. But it should be miles deep if all this topsoil washed into the ocean. Moreover, given the present rate at which meteor dust from collision with the Earth's atmosphere is settling on the Earth's surface, if the Earth is billions of years old, there should be at least 50ft of dust on the Earth's surface. Now, these are not things that are getting into the soft area of what you believe about God or how do you feel about human life and so forth. These are measurable. We know the present rate of the Earth's decay spinning on its axis. If the Earth has been here for 15 billion years, the Earth would have come to a stop by now. Or the Earth's original spin on its axis would have had to be so great to account for what it is right now that nothing could have ever stayed on the surface of the Earth at its original creation. These are measurable things. There's problems with believing then that the Earth has been here for 15 billion years or more. There's only enough salt in the ocean to explain thousands of years of mineral erosion. Well, so there's problem after problem after problem in the theory of evolution. There's no credible explanation in the theory of evolution. For the development of human sexual differentiation. This is always kind of fun to talk to the evolutionist about. Somebody believe evolution, say, well, you know the facts. The birds and the bees, you know where babies come from. Now, on your theory, originally, everything was a primal soup. And I don't know how this came about, but some living cell began. Let's just say we start with the amoeba. That's giving a lot to the evolutionist. I mean, you could kill him in terms of the mathematical problems. So, okay, I'll give you the amoeba. Here you have this simple one cell organism, right? How do amoebas reproduce? Cell division, right? Okay. Now that's at one end of the evolutionary timeline. At the other end, 1993, how do human beings reproduce? You know the facts of life through copulation, right? Now, what is required for copulation? I don't want to gross anybody out, but you got to have a boy and a girl, right? But it's more than that. You have to have. We'll just talk about the female side of this. You must have a female that is a child. And the childbearing range of a female's. The childbearing range for a female is not the entirety of her life, right? For how long is a woman able to give birth to a child or to conceive a child? Well, let's say that the onset of puberty is 13 years old. And let's say that at 53, the woman comes to menopause. So what do you have there, 40 years? I'm going to show you how generous I am. Let's just say it's 100 years. Women don't get horrified, but let's just pretend that a female humanoid, what we know today as females, can get pregnant for a span of 100 years. Okay? Now obviously in order for the female to get pregnant, you've got to have not only the development of female genitalia, but male genitalia. And within this 100 year window of opportunity, you have to have a boy and a girl know what to do to make a baby. Now, I'm just rehearsing the basics for you. Let's put it all together. Here's the evolutionary theory. You tell me if you find this credible. Billions of years ago, we have one celled organisms reproducing by cell division. And now at this end of this billions of years, we have human boys and girls copulating to make babies. And evolution is going to explain to us that this happened by gradual development and every change within the organism being advantageous to it in its environment. Well, I'm going to tell you, I don't buy for a minute that the partial development of genitalia is an advantage to any organism. If you don't have female form and male form developing immediately, I think probably you've just wasted your time. That is not going to give any advantage for survival. Okay, but let's put that aside. We're being generous to the evolutionists. The evolutionist says over a billion year period we are supposed to believe that there's a 100 year window of opportunity where two amazing things happen. You got a female form of the proto human and a male form of the proto human and they made a baby. Do you see what I'm talking about? This is absurd. It is academically absurd. 100 years out of billions of years we're going to have what we can't explain. The development of diverse sexual forms and the knowledge of copulation to make a baby. Because if they don't do it, then we're gonna have to start all over again, aren't we? It's ridiculous. Or how about the eye? The human eye? You know much about the human eye and how it works. The eye is a phenomenal organism in and of itself. But the way in which the eye connects to the brain stem is even more remarkable because it turns out that the eye reverses connections to the brain stem. The left hand field of vision is interpreted the right hand side of the stem and vice versa. Now why would evolution have complication? Anybody know? Well, let's go back a few more steps. How would an eye develop gradually? I actually have read a textbook, a college textbook that's evolutionary in its orientation. Trying to give a short account. It begins by saying we don't really know. But it would be something like this. Don't you love it when they do science like that? We don't really know, but imagine it was like this. Well, you can write fairy tales by imagination. Why do we call that science? But here's the fairy tale. What you have is an organism that for some reason on the surface of its skin or whatever becomes indented. Why? Don't know. Nevertheless, you have a little bit of a cup that develops there. I'm going to pretend the eye developed on the hand here so it's easier to explain. Okay, so you have a little bit of a couple that develops there and you know what happens. Eventually that covers over with a clear kind of material. Why? Well, we don't know. But you have an indentation covered over and then of all Things that clear coating is light. Why, we don't know. But nevertheless, it becomes light sensitive and it develops nerve endings that respond to the light sensitivity so that it contracts and opens according to the amount of light that is there. Well, that's remarkable, isn't it? And then, of course, it has to get connected to the brain stem in some way and. And again, the complication of the wiring of the eye to the brain is something that we don't understand, but that's really how it happened. But now remember, every step along the way is supposed to be advantageous to the organism. Can anybody tell me what made the organism that had the little indentation more suited for survival than others, or with the clear coating over it or the light sensitivity? I mean, this again is preposterous for anybody to consider this science. The this is not science. This is faith, isn't it? This is somebody being committed to a particular conclusion and holding on no matter what. The evidence, is indeed evolution, as it has been demonstrated within my own lifetime, from a philosophical is not a scientific theory at all. Now, it's getting close to lunch, and I know you're going to be tired, but I've just said something that's got to make you kind of whip your head around and say, well, what? Science requires testability. And as it turns out, the Darwinian and the neo Darwinian theories of evolution are not testable. Why is that? Because the mechanism that was proposed by Charles Darwin and his followers to explain how we get from simple organisms to the diverse life forms, tigers and whales and giraffes and human beings and rodents and roses and all the rest. The mechanism that explains how we get from the early life forms to this diverse set of life forms is called the survival of the fittest or natural selection. Nature. Notice the metaphors here. Nature selects those organisms to survive that are best adapted to the environment. Those which are the fittest organisms, therefore, are the ones that survive. So you have different kind of life forms out there that are produced by accident, by randomness, and the ones that are best fitted to survive do so. Nature selects the fittest to survive. The problem with the survival of the fittest dogma is that there's no way to test it. Somebody says, well, why is that? In order to identify one class with another, you have to first be able to independently identify the two classes. If you want to say class A is the same as class B, then you have to be able to identify class A without considering class B, independently identify class B, and then stand back and say, oh, Lo and behold, the members of class A are all members of class B. Okay? So I have an outrageous theory I want to propose for you. I want to propose that all the best cooks in the world are NBA basketball stars. All the best cooks in the world are NBA basketball stars. You say, Dr. Bonson, that's ridiculous. We can disprove that. And so what you do is you bring me an example of one of the people that's one of the best cooks of the world. And I say, okay, so here's this person. This person's not an NBA basketball star. And you say, exactly. Say, well, then he's not one of the best cooks of the world. And how do I know that? Because if he was one of the best cooks of the world, he'd be an NBA basketball star. Now, you all know well enough that I'm cheating, don't you? And what I've done here is I'm saying I'm going to identify these classes. I'm going to find the members of these classes by referring to both of the classes. But if you do that, it makes no sense to stand back then and say, this class independently identified is equal to this class independently identified. If I keep throwing out all of your examples because they don't fit into this class over here, I'm not independently identifying this class on this side. Am I going too fast? If somebody says, well, I've got an NBA basketball star here, but he's not a particularly good cook, I'll say, well, if he's not a particularly good cook, then he's not an NBA basketball star. Have not independently identified the best cooks and the NBA basketball stars. They are defined by one another. And so when I stand back and then I say, all the best cooks in the world are NBA basketball stars, you say, well, of course they are by definition. Because that's what you mean by best cook. That's what you mean by NBA basketball star. What does this have to do with evolution? How do we independently identify the fittest for survival and those that actually survive? How do we independently identify the two? So then we can have a real test of this scientifically to see if the two classes happen to be identical. I give you a proposal. We have a number of different kinds of wolves. And one particular kind of wolf has very strong hind quarters, well developed back legs. And somebody might say, well, that makes this wolf more fit for survival because this wolf will get to the kill first, will never hungry, can outrun the opponent better than the other wolves, so forth and so on and so we think we identified the fitness of this wolf, and now we just stand back to see if the wolf actually survives. But you know, what really happens in the process of science, if it turns out that the development of the hindquarters of the wolf makes it faster on the run, but that puts a strain on the heart of the wolf, so that it's more prone to heart attacks, that wolf doesn't survive. And so then we go back and we say, oh, well, that wolf wasn't really the fittest. But how did we find out that wolf was not the fittest? Is because we waited to see if it survived, didn't we? And so the survival of the fittest comes down to really the view that the survivors are the ones that survive. Because it's only by survival that you get to qualify to be fit. That's like saying it's only by being an NBA basketball star that you get to qualify as one of the best cooks in the world. This is intellectual nonsense. It's a waste of time. But it has dominated American culture for about a century now. The survival of the fittest is notific theory. It's a statement of a view of the world that nature lets those survive which are the best suited to survive. But there is no way on earth that that can be scientifically proven. It's a philosophical presupposition. And when we come back from lunch, I'll finish up my lecture on evolution. I want to press this further and point out then that though people think the facts of evolution stand against Christianity, it is now becoming very evident that evolution itself is only another philosophy. It is not a scientific theory at all. Have a good lunch.