they start with a 25-minute presentation I think doctor Hoeven I'll give 25 minutes then ten minutes ten minutes four minutes four minutes then we're gonna have a five minute break and then question and answer and how the question and answer is going to work is that they're passing out written forms so the questions will be written and then chosen and then read to the debaters and the format for the question and answer is the person who the question is directed to gets two minutes and the other person gets one minute to respond no again if you do cheer or yell for your favorite you're going to be taking up their time so please be quiet while they're talking let them get their presentations out and let's all be respectful and have a good time tonight and the creation versus evolution debate and just by who's passing out the questions the papers where they at okay well I'm sure they're in good hands and they'll be passed out during the debate and again five minute break before the question-and-answer let's begin with dr. Sherman [Applause] how we doing Wow hope the fire marshals not here oh man I don't know it's just sort of a psychic hunch I have I got the feeling there's slightly more believers than non-believers here I know just a show of hands how many of you believe in a God a personal guide like the judeo-christian guy okay well oh look at the time and I believe there was a Laker game on tonight last night well I am Michael Shermer the director of the skeptic Society the publisher of skeptic magazine we were handing out some prop again I mean literature earlier if you didn't get any we do have a table in the back my associates Matt and David are back they are happy to to help you out there I am really glad to see so many people it's a beautiful night you don't have to be here you could be out enjoying the great outdoors but we appreciate that obviously there's great interest in the subject a subject we deal a lot with it skeptic we deal with it because it's a hugely popular American subject only in America with a few other scattered places and tiny bit in New Zealand is creationism even a subject of debate but here it is we are in America this is a subject near and dear to many people's hearts so we deal a lot with this basically skepticism science are the same that is a skeptic is not a position that you take it's not a noun I'm not a skeptic like I'm a thing oh you're one of those skeptics you don't believe anything I believe lots of things like for example evolution it's not a position that you take it's just an approach to claims for example when I investigated the Holocaust deniers they thought well we're skeptics we're skeptic the Holocaust and he's a skeptic so we have a brother-in-arms but in fact I ended up being skeptical of the skeptic so skepticism is just an approach you can be a skeptic of a claim you can be a skeptic of the skeptics well we're after here is to look for natural explanations for a phenomenon for example it's entirely possible that aliens landed on farmer bob's field and pucker Brush Kansas and carved out skeptic calm as a promotional gimmick for our organization however I think it's more likely that we assumed that this was created by Photoshop that is before we say something is out of this world we have to first make sure that it's not in this world so for example it's possible that our governor was successful in his campaign because aliens backed him and by the way that's Danny DeVito as Cruz Bustamante was very clever I should know apparently I've been tracking these alien images for about twenty years this is the first alien I've ever seen that's been working out with biceps and triceps Arnold's got the aliens pumping iron and by now you don't mind the informality of it's a little warm in here hey few bodies so they got the air cranked up if you're hot I guess this is as good as it's gonna get so now when we talk about evolution creation the first thing we need to decide or that you need to decide if you're open to the question which creationism are you going to embrace here is a useful continuum I've been debating creationists for nearly 20 years of all stripes there's flat earthers Geo centrist young earth creationists old earth creationists gap creationists gracious that believe there was a gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 to allow for geological time day age creation isn't that the days of Genesis represent geological epochs therefore allowing for an Old Earth progressive creationism evolutionary creationism these are creationists who believe that God operates through the laws of nature theistic evolution which is largely part of the the intelligent design movement finally down to the end of just materialistic evolutionists so you need to ask yourself which one is Kent Hovind part of which which creationism are you interested in hearing about which one will be presented tonight there's a bunch of different ones and they all have different arguments and interestingly they disagree amongst themselves you can go to for example Answers in Genesis which is a very conservative Christian creationist organization that disagrees with most of what my debate opponent will say tonight so there is great diversity here you have to choose pick and choose and read and figure out which part of the creationism you want to embrace if at all now first of all we have to recognize that in fact most people embrace evolution 96 million American Christians accept evolution in a 2001 Gallup poll 37 percent of all Americans agreed with the statement that human beings developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life and that God guided the process since 90% of Americans roughly are Christians i means 96 million American Christians believe in evolution now it's not that that makes it right but that at least if you are a Christian who wonders whether it's OK to accept the theory of evolution obviously it's quite ok in fact a billion skepta a billion Catholics who are sometimes skeptics accept evolution the Pope himself john paul ii in 1996 in cyclicals said new knowledge has led to the recognition that the theory of evolution is more than a hypothesis it is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge the convergence this is an important statement the convergence neither sought nor fabricated this isn't a conspiracy on the part of scientists it just happened this way of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory I'm gonna play this up quite a bit tonight this convergence from independent lines of inquiry independent of each other these guys aren't meeting on the weekends to say look we got to get our story straight cuz that can't hold is out there you know it's stumping the debate circuit they arrived at it independently the Pope by the way in 96 is responding to an earlier earlier cyclic alon the 1950s in which that Pope said it's possible evolution may be true we should be open to science and not just reject it and this Pope said it is indeed true in fact even our ex-president Jimmy Carter an evangelical Christian calls himself a born-again Christian when a couple of months ago the state of Georgia required that textbook biology textbooks in public high schools have a little sticker in them warning the students about evolution as a Christian President Carter said a trained engineer and a scientist and a professor at Emory University I'm embarrassed by superintendent Kathy Cox's attempts to censor and distort the education of Georgia's students the existing and long-standing use of the word evolution in our state's textbook has not adversely affected Georgians belief in the omnipotence of God as creator of the universe there can be no incompatibility between Christian faith and proven facts concerning geology biology and astronomy there's no need to teach that the Stars can fall out of the sky and land on a flat earth in order to defend our religious faith okay the problem with all creationists argument and this is probably the most important slide I'll put up tonight is that it is nothing more than a God of the gaps argument that is wherever there's a gap that scientists seemingly can't explain or if you can find a quote where it makes it sound like they seemingly can't explain that must mean that's where the miracle happened that's where God intervened or if you're an intelligent design creationists you don't use the word God you use the word in intelligent designer whatever you want to call it that's where the miracle intervened it reminds me of Sidney Harris's famous cartoon my favorite where the one scientist writes up there and the step step two then a miracle occurs and he says I think you should be more explicit here in step two I can't emphasize enough how important this point is this is the central point that to simply say look I don't think you guys can explain this problem whatever it is therefore that's where a miracle happened God did it it did it even if that's the case it doesn't explain anything it just says poof a miracle happened well put a filler hear a word filler we'll say God did it did it miracle did it whatever it doesn't explain anything even if Kent Hovind won every single debate he ever did even if every scientist in America said you know what I think God designed the whole thing and I think I think biology proves it wouldn't change anything with the way science is done because this has nothing to do with science science is the search for how that happened what happened in step 2 if it did it don't you want to know how it did it if God did it don't you want to know how she did it for example we know evolution is very fairly simple thing it's pattern of descent with modification whatever causes changes in gene frequencies so if we just take any particular phylogenetic tree a descent of organisms across time here's the ceratopsians evolutionists scientists offer an explanation for how this diversity this biodiversity occurs through genetic frequency changes and and population genetics and mutations and so on and so forth whether that's right or not is a separate question in a way if it's not right well then you figure out how it happened but to simply say well well God did it or it did it well aren't you curious how it did it I mean did it create this general type and then natural selection created all the varieties did God create each species and then nature created the subspecies did God create the families and then nature created the genus and species or did God create every single level living single organism one at a time throughout all of history or did he set it up at the beginning and then it just sort of ran like a clock and created it these are interesting questions but we're never given answers to these because they don't have answers to these things because that's how science is done science wants to know how it's done so evolutionary theory is the best explanation we have for this it is provisionally true true with a small T we're not after somebody mentioned truth earlier truth with a capital T doesn't belong in science is provisionally true why it gives a coherent explanation of what we know it's Concilium independent lines of inquiry jump to the same conclusion that's that convergence the Pope talked about again it's not that these guys are meeting on the weekends who we got to get our story straight I'm gonna say it happened six million years ago what are you gonna say seven million years ago well Hoeven might be in on this you know he might find out about this I'll say six point five you say six point five and we'll be safe that's not how it works and even if it did work that way if they were that consistent then I'd be suspicious something was up in fact there's always error variance in the estimates given by scientists finally it predicts new findings which so far have been confirmed and I'll show you a bunch of these empirically so for example there's a Concilium saan estimating the age of the earth right it's not a perfect number but there's a little bit of error variance there from independent lines of inquiry potassium-argon dating radioactive decay dating carbon-14 dating the age of the moon the age of the solar system the age of the universe these are all different scientists that publish in different journals that go to different conferences they don't know each other they don't communicate they are all arriving at the same kind of sequence of that long evolutionary history of a very old earth 4.6 billion years roughly and a roughly the same age of the moon slightly less the age of the universe looks like it's about thirteen point four billion years but this number varies because new data comes in and so again you get this this jumping together this convergence from different lines of inquiry and you see that throughout the science of evolution for example fossils show intermediate stages which is what we would predict so such for example the evolution of whales this is a favorite tactic of creationist sell me one transitional fossil just one transitional fossil and I remember this particular slide here came out in the journal science one night came out the same week I was debating Duane Gish so to show me one transitional fossil so I put this up and well here's three he said okay now we have one two three four gaps in the fossil records don't be for transitional fossils pretty sneaky that's pretty good right in other words there's an infinite number of gaps that I will always as a creationist demand that you present there's no amount of evidence you could present that would disconfirm my theory of creation that's not science right that's not how it's done you can do it you can call it theology whatever it's just not science and we're supposed to be doing science here you see this also in the evolution of the skulls whale skulls with pakicetus 50 million years ago 80 of Cetus 25 million years ago in modern beluga whales common descent common anatomical structures you can see the sequence you can see how the structures change over time and in fact there's almost an embarrassment of riches there are so many fossils I'm I'm just staggered that creationists hang on to this show me just one transitional fossils there are so many it's just staggering this is just a nice little picture of Stephen Jay Gould when he was a very young man at the Harvard paleontological collection these are just fossils this is just fossil mollusks right there's just drawer after drawer after drawer after drawer last week two weeks ago I was at Donald Johansson's lab at Arizona State University the guy discovered Lucy I'll show you in a moment he just had drawer after drawer after drawer of hominids and we were laying them all out I took my 12 year old daughters that she could kind of see all the cool stuff and meet Lucy she met Lucy and there she had not the Lucy and and I just made a little joke yeah but you don't have any transitional fossils in and you know we all had a good laugh because you know just table after table is just spread out with these things there's so many it's an embarrassment of riches the sequence you usually get here's a problem that most people get into that don't understand the theory of evolution they see it as this kind of progressive linear ladder march from small to large simple to complex in a line where one leads to another leads to another and so on is the most famous slide ever done from time life it's been parodied so many times I have a couple of dozen of these slides I like this one and in particular this one with homo European Union Asst [Music] it's a very American characterization of course I suppose a new one would have the fringe crawling on their bellies or something in fact evolution is a richly branching Bush in which we have an evolution from a common ancestor of course you you know that we didn't come from chimpanzees and gorillas how how did we come from them they're still alive we didn't come from them we come from chimps over here gorillas over here a common ancestor about 8 million years ago what's interesting about this slide is that is that back in the late 60s and early 70s everybody believed that the common ancestor here was like between 15 and 30 million years old and Vince suruc at UC Berkeley based on early biochemical comparisons across species said no no I'm predicting that the fossils are going to show that is in fact closer to 7 or 6 or 5 to 6 6 to 7 million years ago the common ancestor and he proved to be right it took almost 25 years for paleontology to catch up with biochemistry but here's an example of where these guys are not in some back dark room meeting to get their story straight about the age of things they conciliate there's a Concilium sit turns out that the fossils match the biochemical and genetic tests and this you have this richly branching Bush here transitional fossils there's tons of them it looks more and more like a lot of these different species such as sock Ellen throw peas to dances six to seven million years ago this was found in 1991 Australian Pittacus Africanness three to four million years ago stray oh this is Kenneth Probus platy ops which is discovered 1992 3.5 million years ago the famous Lucy 3.2 million years ago that the beauty of Lucy is that you can really you can sit there and hold in your hand and if you're in Don Johnson's lab you can a chimp pelvis and hip socket a Lucy pelvis and hip socket in a modern one you can you can see the beautiful transition there from quadrupedal ism to bipedalism and this is not the only one don't think Lucy's the only fossil they got they got dozens of these australopithecine now Homo habilis 1.9 million years ago homo Georgia cus from Georgia in Russia 1.8 million years ago discovered in 92 sorry 2001 Homo erectus 1.5 million years ago Homo neanderthalensis half a million years ago Neanderthals and us we live simultaneously over the last hundred thousand years what happened to those guys that's them on the right that's us on the left what happened to them thirty forty thousand years ago gone interesting subject not for tonight but it's an interesting subject what happened to those guys and most recently just discovered by Tim white and published last year Homo sapiens I'd Allah - it looks like the best evidence we have now every single one of us from everywhere on the planet comes from a single population of hominids Out of Africa it's these guys 160,000 years ago that's the best evidence we have today that's incredible diversity of humans we have around the globe all evolved in this relatively short period of time very rapid changes additional tests we would expect modern organisms to show a variety of structures from simple to complex reflecting evolutionary history for example the eye has evolved numerous times with varying complexity and again it's not a single intelligently designed structure that works across the board which you would expect an all-powerful intelligent designer to create in fact what you see are these these sort of oddities of nature that evolved with whatever was available in the environment with whatever they had to work with these our eyes have evolved independently dozens of times in fact you would also expect biological structures if evolution were true to see show history not intelligent design but history take our own I just take the structure of the retina with the rods and cones on top amacrine cells bipolar cells and ganglion cells but it's upside down this is the weirdest thing it's upside down the light comes in this direction and doesn't get to the rock only about 10% of the photons get all the way back to the light-sensitive rods and cones what was in thinking when he made this thing right I mean he wasn't thinking because there is no intelligent designer from top down it's a designer from the bottom up a tinkerer using with whatever materials are available we would expect organisms that share most of their DNA to look a lot alike in fact they do and to behave alike in fact they do chimpanzees are very tribal you may have noticed from recent current events and politics we're very tribal right there's a whole series of these similarities across species is there enough time for evolution to work you bet not only of every as every human come from a single population out of Africa 160,000 years ago every single dog alive today comes from a single population of wolves only 15,000 years ago of course this is some part partly directed evolutionary change of course but it shows how rapid DNA sequences can be manipulated as a test of evolutionary theory I would love to see a creationist just once come up with a fossil bed that shows trilobite sand in the same bedding plane hominids you never see trilobite with hominids now creationists will say something like well there was this hydrodynamic sorting in the flood and all the stupid beasties died and fell through in the flood and drowned early and the smarter ones climbed to the higher hill something like not one smart trilobite managed to make it up with the hominid now one trilobite was in the pocket of the hominid and he managed to survive not one of course with evolution we would predict that this is what you would find these sequential bedding planes with different fossils in the beds and that is what you find but it but in any case it's a testable hypothesis it's an experiment you can run instead of reading gracious literature go out and start digging and if you find something like this that would be the kind of evidence that would overturn the theory of evolution we also see hump homologies that is common anatomical structures due to common ancestry most of you have seen these things the similarity between the whale arm and the human arm similarities between Whale structures and even hummingbird structures similar ladies between our arm and whale arms if if heed God created the whale flipper why did he use a mammalian arm structure for it why didn't he just make it like a fish flipper the fish flipper works great why have marine mammals swim like this whereas fish swim like this swimming like this is really more efficient it's a better way it's the original way if God created fish this way why not marine mammals this way marine mammals swim this way because that's how land mammals run that's how their spines move as they propel themselves forward bestial structures are also very telling for example we have discovered now a snake and ancestral snake here with hind legs why would snakes have hind legs and why would snakes today as well as whales show these vestige of legs these legs are absolutely worthless today they don't do anything why would an intelligent designer designed this really clumsy unintelligent historical looking thing unless you want to impute to God or to Satan that he's just testing our faith by throwing those things in there to see if that'll confuse you with the facts okay other than that this is a sign of history and evolutionary sequence not intelligent design so a fundamental question than wrapping it up I think I got two minutes here is the universe designed back in the 18th century when Darwin was studying the answers were yes by William Paley a watch must have a watchmaker to which David Hume encounter to this old argument no actually nature resembles a mindless organism I think this is not quite right in fact I think a better question is the universe naturally or intelligent these plee design it's obviously designed to a certain extent right but it's it's historically designed it looks kind of clumsily designed so to the answer of you know where did this come from for for creationists they offer a supernatural explanation right here a miracle happened I think you need to be more explicit in step two there in a way this is no different than a Gary Larson cartoon God makes the snake boy these things are a cinch I really failed to see honestly how this is any different than any creationists argument I have ever heard a miracle happened that's it natural isms answer evolution our descent with modification of course is slightly different we see a sequence historical sequence Darwin wasn't the last but ok so finally then how do we get these complex structures out of here oh my time is up all right let me just wrap up here than just one final comment if humans were designed by God or intelligent designer this is what we would look like instead and I'll go through the details of that in a second instead if humans were designed by evolution this is what the case would be and as you know guys this is the way it is unfortunately thank you very much [Applause] Thank You dr. Hovind will now give his opening presentation and after that will be the rebuttal time ten minutes of rebuttal and then 10 minutes rebuttal [Applause] well thank you so much it is an honor to be here in California again my name is Kent Hovind I taught high school science 15 years and now I travel and do seminars on creation evolution and dinosaurs this is not my wife it's just a picture ever I've three kids got them all married off and the dog died so I made it I'm home free and I have two grandkids in any moment now I'm gonna have number three and then in about five months I have number four so we're collecting grandkids I'm a founder of dinosaur adventure land in Pensacola Florida Science Center theme park in Museum based on creation instead of evolution we've had thousands of visitors over 33,000 so far in the first two years we've been open we teach a lot of classes on science we are not against science we have a home school I mean have a creation boot camp in September teach people how to be a good creationist to go out and fight against these guys who believe in evolution so we need more people doing that my goals are to present the truth and expose error I'm not against any particular theory I'm against lies if you have a theory great if you're gonna use lies to support it that's not great so my goals are to strengthen the faith of believers to win the loss to Christ and to win Michael Shermer to Christ [Applause] he is not the enemy he does work for him but he is not the enemy okay let's uh let's define a few terms here tonight science is knowledge it comes from the word to know okay knowledge gained by observations experimentation testing study etc okay so I'm try to limit the definition of science like we heard tonight they want to limit it to the natural world if it's not natural it's not science okay well let's just follow that logic to its logical conclusion the operation of the world can be understood by scientific discoveries in the world that does not mean you can explain the origin of the world by looking in the world okay example the operation of a computer can be understood by science it all takes place in the computer there's nothing magic about a computer there's not a little man running around in there changing the numbers on the screen okay it is an it is a natural explanation that you can find in the computer for how the computer works there is not a natural explanation in the computer for how the computer originated you had to go outside the computer somebody outside the computer built a computer okay somebody outside beyond above greater than smarter than the computer had to build a computer and just because you can explain the operation of a machine does not mean you can explain the origin of the machine with the same set of rules so religion is a set of beliefs concerning the cause nature and purpose of the universe I'm gonna define a few positions here I take the position that the Bible is literally true and scientifically accurate the earth was created in six literal 24-hour days about 6,000 years ago now if that's true I call our ministry creation science evangelism I think the scientific evidence supports the creation view a good test for science is does it give does it make predictions okay based on the idea that the earth was created in six days six thousand years ago there are some predictions we can make the Bible says clearly he did it all in six days well let's make a few predictions I predict the universe will show evidence of order and intelligent design I predict there will be thousands if not millions of symbiotic relationships all the plants and animals were created within a few days of each other and there are millions of these then depend on different things for different reasons symbiotic relationships I think defy and evolutionary explanation I predict there'll be limits to the variations that life-forms are able to produce the Bible says they bring forth after their kind you may get a big dog or a little dog or a wolf or a coyote or a dog but you're gonna get the same kind of animal now somebody might decide to call it a new species okay I'm not using the word species it's the same kind of animal there are limits to the variations any farmer that raises anything from corn to cows will tell you there are limits sure there's varieties but they're limited okay lots of her dogs in the world might have a common ancestor a dog okay I predict based on that does not prove dogs came from a rock 4.6 billion years ago by the way okay I predict there will be a purpose to life we were designed for a purpose I think I know what it is based on the assumption we can make some predictions that there'll be not material things in the world like love sense of justice mercy innate knowledge of right and wrong or conscience and absolute truth those things can be found they do exist I predict there'll be a way to find the will of the Creator such as messengers speaking for him or maybe even a book telling us how he created it and why I predicted me an afterlife where we face the Creator to give an accounting for everything who ever said or thought or done that's gonna be a fearful day then I believe before the flood came the Bible teaches people lived over 900 years that's what the Bible says 912 is the average age from those before the flood I believe that now what predictions can we make based on that teaching well I predict there will be legends of a creation event in cultures all over the world I predict there'll be a golden age legend where people lived a long time and it's interesting almost all ancient cultures have stories about their what they called the Golden Age when people live to be nearly a thousand I predict there'll be skeletons found showing people with signs of great age such as bigger brow Ridge or bigger jaws I predict there'll be biological problems today like wisdom teeth for 40 or 50 percent of the population indicating man used to be bigger and now we're smaller so wisdom teeth are getting crowded into the jaw in some people they can't make it in I predict since we are a copy off a copy of a copy off a copy of a copy off a copy off a copy of the original there are likely to be a few biological problems with this generation but that's that's no reflection on the original the fact that this copy this gene code has been copied and copied and copied but in companies from Adam is it's amazing wings sit here and talk about it okay it must have been really good in the original I predict there'll be a universal longing for things to be restored to the Garden of Eden and that's what we find everyplace just about every culture has some kind of legendre story about a heaven where you get to go now what difference does it make if you believe in creation or evolution well if evolution is true how do we tell right from wrong where's the standard how do we tell right from wrong do we decide right from wrong based on what Osama bin Laden thinks should we decide right from wrong based on what Bill Clinton thinks should we decide right from wrong based on what the majority thinks how is there is there a standard someplace how do we tell right from wrong if evolution is true now if evolution is true death brought man into the world and death is a wonderful thing death is the hero of the plot see an order for evolution to work one animal has to evolve a little better than the rest the rest of them have to die or else that newly improved Jane gets swamped in the population doesn't do anything death is the ultimate hero of the plot for evolution the Bible teaches clearly the man brought death into the world by one man sin came into the world and death by sin since by man came death Bible talks about man destroyed God's creation I predict according to the Bible I read the Bible says there was a flood a completely worldwide Universal flood that destroyed the world 4,400 years ago and dropped everybody's property value to zero based on that belief that I can make a few predictions I predict there will be hundreds of layers of strata rock layers and mud layers strata sometimes continent-wide layers of strata I predict there will be billions of fossils including coal and oil found in those layers I predict there will be huge canyons in Delta showing evidence of rapid erosion because of the flood teaching I predict there'll be legends of this world wide flood found in cultures all over the world and sure enough there are nearly 300 of these flood legends found from around the world I predict they'll be petrified trees in the vertical position running through many of these layers and sure enough there are thousands of them and here we have people trying to teach you that each of these layers is a different age would you please explain to me how we get a tree petrified connecting all these layers I don't how long dead trees to end up around here in California before they fall down but in Florida you get maybe five or six years if you're gonna have a tree stand there for millions of years while the layers form around it I'd like to see that okay anybody telling you those layers are different ages has has a problem in his thinking okay I like science I'm not against science and I do is resent though people trying to assume that evolution is part of science evolution is not part of science evolution is a religion it's mixed in with science I understand but that doesn't make a part of science beer is often sold at football games beer has nothing to do with football and beer does not become athletic by association with football okay so an evolution does not become science because it stirred into a science book okay evolutions our religion now let's define a few terms the word evolution has at least six different meanings or levels or stages first would have to be cosmic evolution the origin of time space matter secondly that have to be chemical evolution according to the Big Bang Theory the Big Bang produced hydrogen ok then how did we get all these elements you want me to believe that uranium evolved from hydrogen that's oh yeah fusion happens in you know in stars well you got two problems now number one you can't fuse past iron number two you got a chicken and an egg problem did the elements come before the stars to see the star the elements make up the stars and the stars make up the elephants which one came first they got a real chicken and an egg problem it comes to chemical evolution thirdly there have to be stellar evolution somehow the stars have to evolve we've never seen one form we see stars blow up all the time called Nova's or supernovas and yet there's enough stars out there that are now known the current last estimate was 70 sextillion stars in the universe that we've observed which means about 11 trillion per person those are the ones we know about we don't know about the ones so we don't know about okay fourthly there's gonna have to be organic evolution the origin of life somehow life has to get started from nonliving material the evolutionist is still left 200 years behind the times in science they still believe nonliving material conspan taneous regenerate that's been proven wrong several hundred years ago francisco redi Louis Pasteur now if you want to believe that that's fine I don't care what you believe but don't call it science they'll say I read dr. schirmer's book about how they're doing experiments now trying to do this okay we do all the experiments you are but meanwhile it hasn't been done okay nobody's made life and if a bunch of intelligent people do get together and make life that would prove it takes intelligence to make life okay number five we have what's called macro evolution that's where you change from one kind of animal to another nobody's ever seen a dog produce a non dog now if you want to believe a dog came from a non dog you believe whatever you want but don't call it science number one and don't make me pay to teach it to all the kids in school like it's science that's your religion you teach that in a private school at your expense okay number six we have what's called micro evolution I object to the term I think it's a lousy term but they use it so I'll explain it micro evolution tells us there are variations within the kinds big dogs little dogs straight hair curly hair I agree that happens the first five though are purely religious nobody's ever observed any of these so when I talk about evolution tonight I am NOT talking about variations within the kind speciation I'm not talking about that I'm not sure who's deciding when we have a new species anyway somebody decided a dog in a wolf or a different species okay but a five-year-old knows they're the same kind of animal okay a horse and a zebra are different species but they're still the same kind of animal four-wheel drive genuine leather upholstery okay so the evolution theory teaches twenty billion years ago or sometime in the past like that there was a big bang where nothing exploded and then 4.6 billion years ago the earth cooled down and then it rained on the rocks for millions of years and turn them into soup and the soup came alive three billion years ago this is what the books teach okay that's the Big Bang Theory eighteen or twenty billion years ago Big Bang 4.6 billion years ago the earth cooled down earth planet earth cooled and a rocky surface was created this is what all the textbooks teach okay then as the earth formed it was hot and as large pools of bubbling lava but it slowly cooled down and then boys and girls millions of years of torrential rains created great oceans and swirling in the waters of the oceans is a bubbling broth of complex chemicals progress from a complex chemical soup to a living organism is very slow sure is it don't even happen that's how slow it is this guy said the first self-replicating systems must have emerged in this organic soup so their theory would say twenty billion years ago Big Bang 4.6 billion years ago the earth cooled down it rained on the rocks for millions a year turned him into soup and the soup came alive three billion years ago and so there's grandpa right there now there is no question there's a wide variety of dogs in the world the question is does that variation we see tell us there's an infinite there is infinite varieties available no I don't think the dogs came from Iraq 4.6 billion years ago okay so the first five are purely religious number six is science but they try to skip the first four all the time I see this all the time in textbooks they try to skip those now evolution number five for the first five anyway I think is the dumbest and most dangerous idea in the history of the world it didn't happen there's no evidence for it let's see Marxism evolution leads straight to Hitler Stalin Pol Pot abortion communism Marxism rejection of logic and to hell if you don't trust Christ no Michael Shermer is the editor of skeptic magazine he he is absolutely correct to be skeptical of some of the dumb things people believe out there there are some weirdos on this world folks okay you got some here in California and they believe some strange things and I think what he does exposing that the illogical stuff that people teach is great I wish he would apply that same logic to his own theory of evolution he's skeptical of everything except the evolution theory for some reason he's not skeptical of that that blows my mind no mister find some terms in a skeptic magazine a article here Michael Shermer wrote a longest 28 2003 Bright's come out of the closet as many as you are aware if you're aware there's a movement to introduce a new me me a new name for our society our group the evolutionists instead of calling us non-believers infidels heretics skeptics humanists secular humanists introducing introduced at the atheist Alliance international conference last year in Florida they came across the idea to call themselves the brights we are the brights then he goes through the illustration in his book about how that the gays you know picked that term gay so people wouldn't call them queers are or something else and it's now it's a it's a better term and they've got now gotten political clout because of the less aggressive term okay what is it bright he says a bright is a person whose worldview is naturalistic now let's define some terms he says bright is a good word I mean cheerful and lively showing ability to think to learn that's good but now I'm officially out of the other closet in print he's a bright ok well the word people used to be called homo sapiens in the most recent books are calling us Homo sapiens avian the word sapien means wise where the wise wise man we're bright well the Bible says - professing themselves to be wise they became fools okay and if you think your great-great-great great-great-great great-great grandpa was a rock I think you're a fool okay well we can help you though we're here to help let's define some terms stupid lacking normal intelligence foolish silly a stupid idea evolution is not even a good theory it is stupid okay people are welcome to believe whatever they want but I think it ought to be illegal it's certainly silly and unfair to make all taxpayers two-port this one religion in our public school system and evolution is nothing but a religion okay in his magazine he said my real purpose was to understand Gish and the creationists so that I can understand how they can reject the well confirmed Theory called evolution well Michael we're not rejecting science we're rejecting the idea that you're stretching this observation of you know varieties of dogs to mean a dog came from Iraq we aren't we aren't rejecting science and evolution is not a well confirmed theory you gotta define what you're talking about here no I'm not anti evolution I'm not an evolution denier like he says in his book numerous times I'm for truth and against error if evidence exists for a theory show me but don't use lies to support a theory by the way Kent is Welsh for bright little bit tributing Texas has laws requiring textbooks to be accurate so does Florida so does Wisconsin so does Alabama so does California fact textbook shall be factually accurate that's all I want is accuracy in textbooks okay Minnesota says a teacher shall not deliberately suppress or distort subject matter evolution is a dying religion surviving only on text dollars it's dead folks it didn't happen no the evolution theory is positively anti science there's not a shred of real evidence to support the theory other than oft-repeated lies now if you have evidence for evolution I really want to see it but I heard some things in the last 25 minutes that doctor Shermer said that he ought to know I'm sure he knows are simply lies they've been proven wrong years ago the idea of vestigial structures here's the evidence they use for evolution they got pages and pages of this stuff this guy says evolution is a fact not Theory well he compete that's a mantra they say that over and over and over pretty soon students start to believe it well it's a fact I heard it I heard it in school over and over it's got to be true what do you mean by evolution first of all if you mean we all came from a rock no that's not a fact if you mean dogs and wolves have a common ancestor I would agree with that that would be a fact that's we have to define the term so here's some of the evidence they use in textbooks to support their theory if I had a theory that the moon is made of green cheese that's a dumb theory but there is no law against dumb theories fortunately okay but then suppose I said NASA proved it when they went there in 1973 on a secret mission and found the moon is made of green cheese well now see it's okay to have a dumb theory but it's wrong to lie about my evidence just to get people to believe me and I think it's real seriously wrong to accept tax dollars to get paid while I lie to support my theory and that's what happens in this university okay they say we've got evidence from fossils heard that several times what dr. Sherman was speaking fossils I think stop and think about it no fossil no fossil could possibly count as evidence for evolution no fossils count you can't prove those bones had any kids let alone different kids and he talked about drawers after drawers of all these mollusks at Harvard well that's wonderful none of them show any evolution though what they show is drawers after drawers after doors of dead Thanks proving a flood in the days of Noah now evolution is based on two faulty assumptions number one they assume mutations will make something new and better and number two natural selection will make it survive and take over the population by the way evolution is a religion of death that's how things get ahead things have to die it's true mutations happen but they don't cause any evolution Darwin said it's truly wonderful fact that all animals and all plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other Darwin observed 14 kinds of finches on the Galapagos Islands and he correctly concluded they had a common ancestor a bird but then he incorrectly concluded that that was enough evidence to prove that birds are related to bananas which is what he says in his book right here and what dr. Shermer believes in was something you believe now if you want to believe birds are related to bananas I don't care what you believe but don't call it science admit it's a religion and go start yourself a private school and teach anybody else that wants to come pay and learn it okay but get it out of the tax-funded school system it's a lie there's no proof any animals are related to different kinds of animals okay mutations do not produce any kind of evolution anybody that studies the subject will tell you that mutations scramble information that's already existing here's a five legged Bowl there's no new information added a short legged sheep again no new information it's a loss of information there's a two-headed turtle that's a mutant it's not ninja buddy's mutant he's gonna freeze first winner cuz nobody makes a double neck turtleneck sweater okay no scrambling up existing gene code will not give you something totally new that's all mutations do is scramble up things this textbook says normal fruit flies have two wings this mutant has for this rare mutation like most mutations is harmful what it says now beneficial mutations are the raw material for natural selection excuse me why don't they give an example of a beneficial mutation why did they show us a bad one and there are millions of those happen all the time but they told us the good ones is how it works show me a good one you know why they didn't show us a good mutation nobody's ever seen one one guy said oh yeah people in Africa they get sickle-cell anemia are less likely to get malaria well that's brilliant that's like saying if you cut off your legs you can't get athlete's foot both sickle-cell and malaria are negative you think that process is going to turn a rock to a human in 4.6 billion years is that that's the one they always bring out well if you think that's gonna do it I have I admire your faith I don't admire your intelligence but I do admire your faith okay natural selection selects it doesn't create anything it's a selection process creation is thought of it first natural selection is not a creative force it can't create anything its selects that's all it does it can't create a thing okay if you worked in a factory that produced cars and your job was to select the good ones to go with you and select the bad ones to go out and be fixed or you know scrapped how long would it take that selection process of getting good cars to to change the car to an airplane it'll never happen see the selection is never gonna change the animal to something else is just gonna make sure you get a good species of whatever it is whether it's cows or corn okay you may get a big dog or a little dog but you get a dog every single time and I have five-year-olds when I do this test almost always they get it all so here we have a dog a wolf a coyote in a banana which one is not like the others yeah the banana Bible says they bring forth after their kind not species kind okay and that's all we've ever observed variations happen but they have limits farmers been trying to get bigger pigs for a long time but they never get a pig as big as Texas Roach has become resistant to pesticides but they will never become resistant to a sledgehammer okay they always still produce the same kind of plant or animal no new information is created it's always scrambling existing information that's all we observe now science is what we can see and study and test if you want to believe it goes beyond that that's fine I don't care what you believe but it's not science no new information is added okay the gene pool of the new variety is always more limited they can take them herd of dogs or a flock of dogs or whatever you want to call them in and select the gene code to get a little tiny dog or a great big dog they have the genetic variety in the original gene code you can select for a slice of the gene code and get a particular trait that you want okay long tail feathers on a bird can't fly anymore but you get really long tail feathers okay good but you didn't create anything you selected part of the gene pool that was already existing somebody kept breeding dogs till they got a chihuahua all that time and money to make a dog that is a hundred percent useless how long would the two always last in the real world hmm yeah go ahead make my day genetic information is lost it's not added there's no new real evolution would require increase in genetic complexity you got to take the gene pool of a rock which is nothing and develop the gene pool of every living thing on earth today talk about a genetic bottleneck take a look at the gene code of Iraq sometime okay there's a lot of kinds of corn in the world okay they probably had a common ancestor corn you never get a hamster or tomato or whale to grow on your corn stalks oh okay sure there's a lot of varieties out there they call it divergent evolution oh it's not divergent evolution it's still a dog okay they show the kids five kinds of dogs and say all see that's divergent evolution no it's a variety of dog it's proof what the Bible says they bring forth after their kind there's a lot of varieties of horses out there big horses and little horses we had the world's smallest horse visit our Museum my granddaughter liked riding it I guess but they cross breed horses they get sources donkeys Leone's Zedong's and Sheba's they crossbreed Oh every which way because they're the same kind of animal there's a herd of zebras running around so there's no question there's a lot of variation available the question is does it go any farther now if dr. Schurman wants to believe this variation we observe which is science can be extended extrapolated to mean infinite variation he's welcome to believe that he just left science and why he's not skeptical of his own belief I don't understand he's skeptical of a lot of things he ought to be skeptical of turn your turn your focus on your own belief Mike I want to help here that's what I'm here for okay thank you thank you had a little report of some people behaving badly let's respect our neighbors and enjoy the debate dr. Shermer will have ten minutes for rebuttal what dr. Hovind just [Applause] Wow you're the only guy can't die now they give a two-hour lecture 25 minutes that's pretty good shouldn't have that beer before oh well I'm having a good time all right he brought the beer up okay so Kent Hovind is announced at the beginning that his purpose here is to win over non-believers to Christ and and me even made the slide I was impressed Thanks even got my name right was in South Dakota two nights ago and a guy was passing out literature about why people shouldn't believe my lecture and he said Michael Sherman is gonna tell you things you shouldn't believe I said well okay where is this guy Shermer any rate I was actually once a evangelical born-again Christian that was I accepted Christ in 1971 and I went to Pepperdine University to major in theology and I took this very seriously I was really really a believer I did I and by even Evangel evangelical I mean we evangelized we went door to door this was literally Amway with Bibles you know we were selling God that's what how you define an evangelical Christian and I went door-to-door and told people about this stuff and then for a long story short I wrote a book about this stuff but I found out you had to get a PhD in theology you had to study Greek Latin Hebrew and Aramaic and I could barely get through Spanish so I thought all right has a switch majors here didn't get a job so I switched to the sciences because I was good at math and science and I discovered there that the answers are not final they are provisional they're provisionally true this is what we know now furthermore it might change and that's okay really it's okay in fact it's a good thing and best of all you get to participate in the process and I thought wow what a great deal I get to think I actually have to think for myself I get to try to find out some of the answers they aren't answers aren't out there for me to just read from some other authority but I actually have to try to think it through myself for me at least personally and religion is the most personal of beliefs that was far more enlightening and transcendent spiritual than anything I had experienced in seven years of being a born-again Christian and even today even though I've been to Chartres Cathedral in France it's one of the most spiritual places you can go on earth but to me to stand in the 100-inch telescope dome at the top of Mount Wilson is equally if not more spiritual so science has at least the discoveries of science science isn't a religion but the discoveries can be felt in a transcendent way so I don't really see that there's any conflict here you don't have to pick between the two now in terms of what religion does right it does things that science doesn't do for the most part and so again even if it turned out every scientist on the planet was religious believe in God was an evangelical Christian take your pick it wouldn't change what they do when they're doing science right they would still have something you have to go to work the next day and and do science science has nothing to do with religion in terms of some of other claims here Oh dr. Hovind asked about my position on the afterlife well I'm for it really I am I hope it's true and if it's there I hope I'm going don't you I mean right this would be great but what I want to be true and what is actually true are two different things and that's the problem with religious faith is that you don't know if it's actually true it's true for you to psychologically which is fine for a lot of things but that's not science a lot of things are like that politics are like that a lot of social attitudes are like that but that's not science it's just something completely different I can't said that the Bible is literally true really gosh in Genesis the first chapter Adam and Eve are created at the same time in the second chapter Adams created first then some other things happen he names the animals he gets a little lonely he wants to be you know the next Bachelor real reality show he says to God you know I need a companion God says okay I'll take that extra rib and here's your companion all right so you know of course obviously the Bible is not literally true we have two creation stories they can't literally be true and of course thoughtful theologians say well of course they're not literally true these are two different explanations of the same phenomenon fine but it's not literally true and in any case can't mentioned good and evil morality where is the standards for right and wrong if evolution is true if there is no God where do we get these right and wrongs well if we're supposed to take the Bible literally and since gay marriages is a hot topic these days you've heard all about Leviticus and Deuteronomy where it says a man shall not lie with another man all right okay but literally if we're supposed to really turn to this is our source of morality what about the next chapter we're disobedient children are supposed to be stoned to death oh well you know we don't accept that today you know because we're more enlightened really I thought it was literally true I thought all of it was true what about the next chapter in which women when you marry if you do not show the signs of your virginity on the sheets the next morning after your honeymoon night you're to be taken to the elders and stoned to death that's in there you can't believe this stuff is in there if you actually read this Old Testament you know wow this is incredible this is in the Bible yeah it is so if you're supposed to take it literally what do you make of that stuff course there's myths and legends from all cultures some of them are similar because it turns out all cultures that live on bodies of water that flood have flood myths cultures that don't live on bodies of water don't have flood these are geographically determined now Kent said that evolutions our religion look if evolution is a religion everything's a religion then nothing's our religion religion as a word has to mean something if you say that evolutions our religion it doesn't mean anything evolution is not a world view in the sense of offering moral homilies and purpose and meaning in life you as a person who takes a scientific worldview like me you may construct your own personal meanings and purpose and discover your own right and wrongs through a variety of ways I wrote a book about this called the science of good and evil but the the actual science of evolution has nothing to do with any of that the people that do evolutionary biology they don't do morality and theology and God and what's the purpose and meaning of my life when they're doing science these are two different things turns out 39 percent of all American scientists believe in God so how do they do this if according to him they can't be doing this well they do how do they do that all right so these are two different things in terms of the science of cosmic evolution where the Big Bang come from and so on so these are you know big subjects a lot of data an incredible a lot of data when I was in college the Big Bang was not accepted it was kind of a toss-up between the Big Bang and the steady-state and so on finally so much evidence came forth that hardly anybody supported the steady state theory now pretty much everybody supports the Big Bang not because they have to or else they're gonna have to become Christians or something has nothing to do with religion they are simply concluding that because there's so much data in support of it despite of all the skeptics over the decades that said we don't believe the Big Bang finally they were all converted to so-called believers in the Big Bang simply because there was so much evidence for it I'm always amused when creationists bring up this evolution leads to communism leads to abortion leads to atheism and sex drugs and rock and roll and rape and nastiness and so on I can assure you if you study history at all long before Darwin people were nasty to one another and they had Wars and rape was not uncommon and thieves and so on and so forth criminals there's nothing new about people doing nasty things to one another that's what we do it's part of our nature we're all so nice to one another but it has nothing to do with a particular theory an Astra being taught in public schools well that's a political issue whether schools should be public or all private or what should be taught what gets taught is in fact whatever is accepted amongst the experts the experts accept the theory of evolution simply because the evidence is so overwhelming as for the brights I don't call myself a bright mainly because I guess the natural implication is if you weren't a bright you'd be a dim and well I let his own definitions that he put up account for that Bibles telling us that people are fools who don't believe so I guess you're calling me a fool okay if that's what you think that's fine finally as for increase in information in the genome and so on we have so many examples of this it's incredible lots of examples of gene duplication chromosomal aberrations that lead to increases in complexity across various organisms and I'll tell you more about that in my final four minutes thank you okay thank you well now dr. Holden dr. Hoeven will give ten minutes of rebuttal to the opening comments by dr. Sherman [Applause] all right well thank you so much I'd like to comment on several things that he said he mentioned there as evidence for evolution from homology from vestigial structures to human eyes a poor design I can't don't think I'll be able to cover all that but you get my video series on my website dr. dine or comm and watch the whole thing this textbook says the appendix is vestigial this is ludicrous okay they lie the appendix is not vestigial you do need your appendix okay the appendix is part of your immune system it's true you can live without it you can also live without both your legs and both your arms and both your eyes that doesn't prove you don't need them okay if your pendeks is taken out you have a much better chance of getting quite a few diseases and something else in the immune system has to work harder it's like losing a finger you can still have a grip but now the rest of the fingers have to work harder if somebody tells you the appendix is vestigial they are either confused about their Anatomy or they're lying to you but it's not true this textbook says the whale has a mystical pelvis this is one that he brought up earlier about the whale having a vestigial pelvis now hold on a minute National Center for Science education is funded by Andrew Carnegie's grant for he loved the evolution theory the National Center for Science education of all of them refused to debate me two weeks ago when I was at Berkeley they teach the people that cows evolved to whales bossy to blowhole hmm well here's their evidence whales have a vestigial pelvis and leg bone that serve no purpose just imagine the hind limb bones that have no function the textbook says imagine whales walking around it's true here's the bones they're talking about right there you can see a mature Los Angeles Museum right down the road here those are the bones yes just imagine the whale walking around this textbook says the whales pelvis is located far from the vertebra and has no apparent function hmm the whales pelvis is evidence of its evolution from four-legged land dwelling mammals this is a lie those bones are anchor points that special muscles attach to and without those special bones and those special muscles the whales cannot reproduce male and female whales have different bones in that region for just support different muscles for different reasons this has nothing to do with walking on land it has to do with getting baby whales okay so the people that are writing this in the textbooks are either ignorant of whale Anatomy or they're lying trying to push their theory I hope they're just ignorant that we can fix if they're lying they ought to get a different job picking features or changing tires they got no business taking tax dollars to lie to the kids coming through their class says these bones resemble those of other mammals but there are weakly developed in the whale and have no apparent function this is a college biology book this guy ought to be fired he doesn't understand his whale anatomy they're teaching this stuff like it's some kind of fact is this a university to get educated or you just getting indoctrinated in a theory okay they say am below Cetus pictured here is mostly imagination the dark bones are the only ones actually found ambulocetus is not a missing link ambulocetus is just a few fragments of bone how about them the BJ's tall vertebrate history dover publisher said the basilar source is not an intermediate he said the Archaea seat archaeal seats could not possibly have been ancestral to any of the modern whales pakicetus shown here all they found was one piece of a skull a small piece of jaw and a few teeth that's enough to know it used to be a whale you've got to be kidding I hear you are skeptic magazine why aren't you skeptical of a claim like that no pelvic bones were found and little is known about the tail but the authors are certain the feet were enormous as such ambulocetus represents a critical intermediate this is pure propaganda okay we could talk all day about the whale anatomy he mentioned about the snake I happen to have a fifteen and a half foot Python snake skin in my Museum in Pensacola Florida if you look at the south end of that Python you will see it has two little bitty claws those claws are attached to little tiny bones going up inside the snake's body that's a fact okay they have them textbook says these are rudimentary hind legs of a python snake he mentioned that earlier that the snake pelvis is evidence for evolution look those little claws and those little bones have nothing to do with walking on land the snakes use those claws in mating okay they don't have any arms right and they can't talk they can't talk and say screwed over honey okay this has nothing to do with walking on land so the people that are saying the snake has a vestigial leg are ignorant of snake anatomy or are lying trying to push a theory off okay but it's not true they use those bones and those little muscles this textbook says humans have a tail bone that is of no apparent use says the vestigial tail bone in humans is homologous to the functional tail of other primates thus vestigial structures can be viewed as evidence for evolution you can rewind the tape and see that's what he said in his opening comments one of the evidences for evolution is vestigial structures I would like to point out your honor vestigial structures is losing something not gaining something how can that be evidence for evolution how did you get it to begin with secondly the tail bone is not vestige or one guy told me he said different Berkeley he said I think the tailbone is vestigial I said well I taught biology and Anatomy I happen to know there are nine little muscles that attach to the tailbone without which you cannot perform some valuable functions I won't tell you what they all are but trust me you need those muscles get your Grey's Anatomy now if you believe the tailbone is vestigial then I will pay to have yours removed and over this textbook says the coccyx is a small bone at the end of human vertebral column it has no present function is thought to be the remainder of bones that once occupied the long tail of a tree living ancestor either these authors are ignorant of Anatomy or they're lying I don't see another option okay if you know of one please let me know but it's not true that they're vestigial and even if there were vestigial structures that is the opposite he mentioned that the human eye is poor design because the blood vessels are in front of the rods and cones well the fact of the matter is we live in the air okay air is a poor insulator for UV light your body's last defense against ultraviolet light is the layer of blood vessels in front of the retina to protect the rods and cones from UV light some people say octopus one atheist I debated in New York said octopus have a much better eye because their blood vessels are behind the retina ours are wired backwards it's poor design I said well sir octopus live in the water okay water blocks UV light they don't need their blood vessels in front so if you want to swap eyes with an octopus you just go ahead but you're gonna be blind in a few days we're designed for living in the air and they're designed for living in the water and I think the eye is incredibly designed at 51 mine are starting to fade a little bit but hey that's expected okay that's an example we used to be much better things were getting worse that's the second law of thermodynamics things are falling apart let's see he mentioned that he when he got through Pepperdine he went to off to graduate school and decided he got to think to me that implies that if you don't believe in evolution you you're not thinking I happen to resent that I happen to think a lot and I enjoy thinking and I enjoy the object of science I like studying I think what happens though is you get to get indoctrinated when you come to university like this you get to be told what to believe you don't really get to think because if you wrote a paper suppose the teacher stood up ten years ago in the Soviet Union where my daughter-in-law is from teacher gets up in class and says hey students I don't believe in communism anymore capitalism is a much better system what would happen that teacher would be shoveling snow in Siberia if they survived and if a teacher gets up in this University tomorrow or Monday and says kids I don't believe in evolution anymore I think creation is true they will go to academic Siberia there have been hundreds of teachers fired lost their jobs lost their government grants precisely because they didn't bow down and kiss the feet of the sacred cow of evolution evolutions our religion nothing more there's no scientific evidence to back it up if you think there is some I really really would like to see it he mentioned that the Pope accepts evolution that's because the Pope has never been to my seminar [Applause] and I don't care what the Pope believes on any subject okay okay what does the Bible say and what his science teaches he mentioned in his opening comments that Answers in Genesis Ken Ham disagrees with me on most subjects that is absolutely not true I know Ken Ham well I've met with him several times talked to him numerous times he and I disagree on a couple of little things we agree on 99% of the things and the other 1% he's wrong I'm right it's real simple but I sell his books and support his ministry and I think you're simply wrong if you think there's a vast disagreement they're just little minor stuff it's not doesn't matter nothing he said this arguments only going on in America and New Zealand well that's not true first of all I've spoken in 32 countries now this arguments going on everyplace there are creationist organizations all over the place and even if it was only gone on in America it still does that's that's no evidence for one side or the other the argument ought to be going on everyone I'm throughout this university would allow something like this to happen I wonder how many teachers they have how many courses did they offer here on biblical creationism just to give give the kids the other side go check your library you'll find thousands of books about evolution I bet you won't find five on creation from the creation perspective you may find some evolutionist wrote a book about creation blasting it for some reason coach it folks is this an education to get bigoted educator do you get indoctrinated in places like this I just I'm sick and tired of them lying to support their theory don't tell me about the vestigial structures what evidence do you have to show us evolution not homology similar bone structures in the arms they mentioned earlier yeah that proves a common designer the Honda Prelude in the Honda Accord have quite a few interchangeable parts doesn't prove they both came from a skateboard they have a common designer okay so all the evidence I've seen he's presented tonight is either a mistaken or can be interpreted for creation so I stand my ground I still believe the Bible's right thank you [Applause] okay we're now to the closing arguments where each man gets four minutes and get your questions ready what I think would work well is at the end of dr. Hogan's closing comments that pass them into the aisle and someone will get them and then we'll take a five-minute break and do question and answer so get your questions written and and then we throw the chairs okay good only get four minutes okay so this is an important concept to understand about explaining how things evolved this was put forth in Darwin's time what it's called the problem of incipient stages what good is half of a wing you can certainly see what a fully developed wing is what's the functional pathway to get to the end if by Darwinian evolution you have to go step by step gradually well the answer is is that it didn't come out with that end purpose in mind because evolution doesn't look ahead in fact each of these particular structures had some other function along the way in the end then they end up with a final function which is different than the specific functions for each of those structures so for example legs obviously their primary purpose is for walking if they can also serve for grabbing your honey during lovemaking well then that's also a fine but that's a secondary function for which they were adopted for later uses and and who could disagree with that and so let's say that the legs in snakes become a functional later it costs a lot of energy to support the structure blood vessels nerves and so on to run legs so it's simply more efficient to lose them and still use them for a secondary function later along the way such as mating okay so that's how that happens this explains a lot of things there's a lot of good research on that in closing the naturalistic way of explaining how the world works is used because it works it gives us something to do when we're doing science doing supernaturalism which is what can joven does and most creationists do doesn't do anything it doesn't give you anything again all you've heard tonight are I can't figure out how the evolutionists can explain this I disagree with it I don't think they've come up with an answer therefore God did it that's not an answer that doesn't give us anything to do if you're gonna do science if you want to say look this this is important to me because I happen to believe in my religion I need to believe this particular tenant that the Bible is literally true that's fine but that's not science the reason I told you that other people don't accept that is simply to show that that's not a particularly popular view in fact I think it's a fairly narrow of you the reason people believe in God and I wrote a book on this is primarily having to do with emotional psychological cultural social family reasons the number one predictor of anybody's religiosity is their parents religiosity where they were born and what their influences were and then peer groups teachers and so on has nothing to do with boy I lined up the evidence and I saw it was true and therefore I believed it almost nobody arrives at their belief so that really the same thing with political and social attitudes scientists of course are people in they're biased as well but science has a really important built-in self-correcting machinery that drives it toward error correction and the elimination of bias at least it's better than any other social system as flawed as it may be science is not a religion it's not even a noun it's not a thing it's a way of asking questions and answering them about the natural world it's not anything more than that it's not religion it's a way of thinking it's a verb think of science as a way to approach the world and answer claims and test answers and test questions and so on in that sense science is the best thing ever developed for understanding how the world works thank you okay we have a new idea on the questions when dr. Hovind is done with his closing arguments past him to the aisle and the people at the end of aisles pass them down the aisles are jam-packed like you said there's no fire marshal here good thing but do that when he wraps up his closing arguments then we'll have a five-minute break and we'll do question and answer for about 45 minutes getting as many questions in as we can all right yes sir thank you sir all right there must be a misunderstanding here I don't believe I ever said tonight that science is a religion I said evolution is a religion evolution is not part of science that's the point I think you're missing that dr. Sherman and I'll just reiterate that I'm not against science science okay so I'm not against nice no Bible says in Romans chapter 1 because that which may be known of God is manifest in them for God had showed it unto them for the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made even his eternal power and Godhead so they are without excuse you will have no excuse when you stand before God say well I believed in evolution because of the evidence now somebody might have led you to believe that just like some people lead their followers to believe if you blow yourself up and kill you know an Israeli you get to go to heaven again 72 wives okay well you've been misled all right Bible says there without excuse verse 21 because when they knew God they glorified him not as God neither we're thankful but became vain in their imaginations and their foolish heart was darkened professing themselves to be wise or in the Greek that's the breaks they became fools and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God to an image made like to corruptible man and birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things that's evolution God gave them up I'd be a horrible thing if God gives up on you to uncleanness through their our lusts of their own hearts to dishonour their own bodies between themselves who changed the truth of God into a lie and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator yep got to go meet Lucy it was blessed forever amen for this God this cause God gave them up to vile affections for even their women to change the natural use into that which is against nature and likewise also the men leaving the natural use of the woman burned in their lust one toward another men with men working that which is unseemly and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet Romans 1 tells us why God's gonna have to judge this world they knew God spent seven years witnessing for him and then turned their back they glorified him not as God they became vain that means self-centered in their imagination they profess themselves to be wise they became fools God brought them down to idols and beasts God gave them up slippery slope happens to civilizations APIs donations happens to individuals can happen to you thank know Bible says The Fool has said in his heart there is no God Wayne Strickland picked out his tombstone calls himself an atheist well Bible says the fool said in his heart there is no God I like Ray Comfort so book his Crewe's video on here tonight God doesn't believe in atheists I don't either question am i closing I didn't leave my gorgeous wife and traveled out here because I want to beat somebody in a debate I want to see somebody get converted okay all of you are gonna die if you die where you going you ought to think about it cuz you're gonna be dead for a really long time I don't care how long you live if you're gonna be dead longer than that so it's real simple God made this world he owns it he makes the rules we are guilty of breaking his rules if you don't like his rules and you're gonna deny he exists for that reason okay but you're gonna face him anyway he told us clearly thou shalt not bear false witness don't lie all of us have lied he told us don't steal we've all stolen we're guilty folks the Bible says God is angry with the wicked every day I don't do this travel around and speak at universities and seminars and stuff cuz I'm in it for the money or in it because I like being gone folks there's a war going on you've some of your kids are being taught things in this university that simply are lies somebody's trying to brainwash you against the obvious there's a creator there's a designer so if you died today where would you go you're gonna be dead if you're not saved you're gonna be punished or Jesus can take your place thirty five years ago I asked the Lord to forgive my take my place and I'm going to heaven it's not because I'm good it's because I'm forgiving you can have the same thing that's why I came thank you so much first question is for dr. Shermer how did life originate what is your best explanation and you believe life originated from non-life and if so why write an entire chemistry class in how much do I get two minutes miss okay first of all origins of life questions are not evolution evolution is a theory that deals with how life changes when it already exists the origins of life is really a chemical question is it with chemistry not biology but that but that aside we have some reasonably good theories although they need a lot more work as is a fairly new science of how inorganic molecules become organic molecules there's a very fine model right now that has a lot of support that clay substrates at the bottom of oceans may serve as nice mediums for which simple molecules can bind and be held in their bindings into more complex molecules and how even protein chains can be formed and crude cells can be formed and so on that's how you get started in the in the process so it's a very gradual slow process we know that that it can be done just by the input of energy either ultraviolet radiation or a spark of electricity these sorts of things these experiments are rather crude no there's not a little creature crawling out of the test tube of course but there are at least these early rudiments of life the beginnings of it these basic structures protein train chain structures monomers become polymers all this happens just by the input of energy doesn't require a top-down designer in fact it's a bottom-up process that's just built into the laws of nature dr. Hogan I think the complexity of life is so great that there just simply had to be a designer it's not possible to happen piece by piece all the experiments so far in the laboratory to try to produce life Miller Yuriy have have really made the problem more complex in this picture here they show they're using methane ammonia water vapor and hydrogen notice they exclude oxygen they call they call it a reducing atmosphere because they know if there's any oxygen it'll it'll oxidize whatever tries to get together all they've been able to do so far is get a few little amino acids which is kind of like getting a few letters of the alphabet by randomly dropping toothpicks okay that can happen I agree you could drop toothpicks and make letters of the alphabet but that would not explain how you get an entire book and the difference from a few amino acids to one living cell is like the difference between the alphabet and a whole book it's just orders of magnitude no if he wants to believe that he can believe that but again he's left science and gone to religion and if he says evolution only deals with after life is here then he's he doesn't have a coherent theory because he needs to have something all the way back to the beginning in my opinion so that was it already yeah watch my video number four on the table back there okay question for dr. Hovind what is your strongest piece of evidence for creation I think the evidence for creation would be the absolute impossibility of the contrary if we were walking down the highway or walking down the road and we saw swimming pool in somebody's backyard and you can see the waves splashing out the top a little bit and I said I think that pool only has water in the top foot the rest is air underneath without even going to examine it we would you person would say that's silly it's impossible that there not be water all the way to the bottom that's the nature of things okay it is impossible that there not be a designer everything is just so incredibly complex there had to be a creator if you're walking through the woods and you find a painting hanging on a tree you automatically conclude there was a painter even if you don't see any footprints you don't see the person who made it there had to be a painter if you're walking through the woods and you find a building you don't see any footprints you don't see any people you still conclude there was a builder and if you see a creation and you conclude there was a creator so I think two things I would say the design in nature is impossible to explain without a designer and the idea of creation is true because of the impossibility of the contrary it is impossible that there not be a creator for something like this rebuttal yeah I think that says it all it gets right back to my first slide I think you should be more explicit here in step two then a miracle occurs kent hovind's answer to what's the best piece of evidence you have for the creation is the impossibility of the contrary so all Z's got is I don't believe your explanation therefore the default is my explanation that's not an answer that's not that doesn't say anything that's not any positive evidence in support of a position the first law of thermodynamics does matter and energy is neither created nor destroyed how do you account for the origin of matter and energy and is your answer scientific that'd be me yes operators are standing by for my tape enough well this is standard doesn't evolution violate the second law of thermodynamics no of course it doesn't because if you have input into a system of energy such as the Sun then you get a reversal of entropy that is you get energy input you get an increase in complexity and so forth as long as the energy keeps coming in once the energy dissipates then the you get an increase in entropy so then okay but what about the whole universe and then we're gonna end up back at these kind of ultimate questions well then where did the universe come from and where did the energy that created the Big Bang come from and so on and so forth and then we're back into questions that are sort of only quasi scientific or kind of metaphysical which we can speculate on but that isn't really a part of science we with science have to work on what we have the second law of thermodynamics I'm amazed anybody ever brings that up anymore that's just kind of an on a non-issue for for us anymore okay I disagree strongly I think the second law is very valid argument against evolution the second law tells us basically everything's falling apart okay the Bible teaches that clearly everything is waxing old like a garment here here sue at 20 here she is at 90 here she is at 3,000 okay now the evolutionists will say you can overcome the second law by adding energy this is ludicrous adding energy is destructive unless there's something to utilize the energy the Japanese added a whole bunch of energy to Pearl Harbor one day they didn't organize anything okay we returned the favor a few years later and added energy to a couple of their cities and didn't organize a thing for adding energy is destructive unless there's something to use the energy it's true the Sun adds energy to the earth but it's going to destroy the roof on your house not build it the sun's energy is going to destroy your entire house it's going to destroy the upholstery on your car it's gonna destroy the roof on your car it's gonna destroy the paint job on your car there's only one thing that can use the sun's energy by the way the moon gets the same energy we do okay it doesn't make anything up there the sun's energy is added to the earth and and chlorophyll is able to capture it and use it so it's a silly argument to say all you got to do is add energy and that'll fix it that is simply silly not true a question for dr. Hovind dr. Shermer held up the example of Lucy's pelvic bone what is a response to Lucy being a common ancestor between men and a I give a 30 minute answer to that on video number two on the table back there and by the way he mentioned something earlier about you know all I had was a religion and he said what's not we need a better answer for step two okay well all you have as a religion also but see I'm not asking for my religion to be paid for by taxpayers you are so the burden of proofs on you not me okay Lucy's Lucy was nothing but a three-foot tall creature probably some type of chimpanzee kind of animal Charles Oxnard studied every single bone of Lucy and said it's not a missing link he did it was called a computer I'm a computer multivariate analysis I would point out though from a much bigger picture no fossils count as evidence for evolution none you can't prove this critter quit turn it on you can't prove Lucy had any kids and why would you think a bone you found in the dirt can do something animals today cannot do which is produce something other than their kind no fossils count as a bigger picture and even if Lucy is something unusual in form of a chimpanzee three feet tall with a little unusual feature that still doesn't prove it's evolving to something else it could have been a creature that went extinct so this kind of evidence would not hold up for three seconds in a court of law but see the problem is evolution doesn't have to be proven in a court of law it only has to be made believable to a bunch of students who have an academic where the teacher has an academic and psychological advantage over the students that's why evolution if people believe that the guys who study Lucy say look this is not a missing link charles oxnard i'll show you the reference here you can check it out for yourself studied every single bone and said Lucy there we go the various australopithecines are indeed more different from both African Apes and humans in most features than the latter are from each other it's not a missing link no fossils count to begin with and even in Lucy's not a good fossil to demonstrate evolution ok taxpayers here we go ok back to the taxpayers business look what what makes it into public science course textbooks is the best science of the day whatever that happens to be there's nobody can spare toriel II trying to plant it in there because they're anti-religious or anything like that if the science isn't good it is taken out of the textbooks and this happens all the time including within the biological sciences and evolutionary theory things change all the time as new evidence comes in the reason you don't see creationist stuff in science textbooks is because they're not producing any science if you want to be taught as a science you actually have to do the science and there's no science done they don't write any science textbooks they don't publish any scientific papers also they do is go through science textbooks and science papers and pick out what they think are errors and say that's our science that's not science you actually have to produce something produce evidence of a creator for example and they don't have that thank you okay dr. Shermer you say there is evidence for the big bang can you give us your strongest evidence that it occurred oh I was told there'd be no math in this debate oh well okay so this really has nothing to do with evolution this is a whole different theory and the larger problem here is that can't joven and so many people have a misinterpretation of what science is they think of it as the physics lab experiment as the model of what science is so much of science is inference so much of it is inferring from different pieces of data sequences so much of the historical sciences are not anything at all like a physics experiment so when you say well the earth is only six thousand years old or whatever well look this is gonna throw out all of cosmology astronomy chemistry biochemistry geology historical geology paleontology archaeology don't think this has to do with evolutionary theory all of science is completely wrong if he's right there's no point of having any science he sees he's pro science he's completely anti science because if he's right it all goes out the window so in terms of the Big Bang well there's a whole series of the pieces of evidence that have to do with how explosions occur what kinds of you would expect to find the most of if this explosion occurred and we do find them again I said the Big Bang was debated for many decades and lots of people didn't accept it a lot of hard core scientific skeptics didn't believe it and tell that the evidence amounted so much that it just became inevitable to accept it well the sky is falling is what he's trying to say folks if we believe in creation everything's gonna fall apart I mean all the sciences have to be thrown out that's ludicrous all the branches of science were started by creationists the evolution theory has done nothing for the advancement of science that's not why we put a man on the moon that's not why you can do open heart surgery evolution is a useless theory even if it's true it is absolutely useless as far as science goes you don't have to believe in creation or evolution to study science you can learn about the biceps the triceps the deltoids all the different muscles of the body and never get into origins it doesn't matter no doctor doing surgery cares cares at all about evolution while he's cutting somebody's heart out to replace it it's a useless theory and then and then there is no advancement in modern science from this evolution theory the Big Bang Theory I think is a great hindrance to and many other theories about evolution are a great hindrance to science there's all kinds of evidence against the Big Bang the counter rotation of at least two planets Venus and Uranus at least eight of the ninety-one known moons are spinning backwards somehow galaxies are spinning backwards three planets have moons going both directions at the same time this can't happen with Big Bang you study some physics on that one thank you [Applause] okay dr. Hoeven you admitted that roaches become resistant to pesticides please defend your stance that this is not a beneficial mutation for their kind roaches become resistant to pesticides because some some of the roaches in that population already had a resistance when they dug up some of the guys who tried to find the Northwest Passage we can shut it down I don't have a slide ready for this they were guys that froze to death trying to find the Northwest Passage up in Canada years ago when they dug up and did an autopsy on them they find some of them were resistant to penicillin well that's interesting penicillin hadn't been invented yet see there are some people who already have a resistance to certain things in their system so let's say you got a thousand roaches and five of them have a resistance to a certain pesticide because of whatever reason okay you put that pesticide down it kills all but those five those five then become the grandparents of everybody else so the new roach population and now you get a whole population of no resistant roaches that happens it is still a roach it is only something already in the gene code that was selected you selected for that particular thing to survive in this case artificial selection instead of natural selection that is not a process that's adding information and it's not a process is going to turn a rock to a human in 20 billion years it's not gonna happen okay well I'm not a big expert on cockroaches although I like the hammer part but these are fine examples of what we would call micro evolution the question is how do we go from micro evolution to macro evolution one of the difficulties almost everybody has with this concept is that we evolved to consider ourselves on in terms of time frames of years or decades and it's hard to conceive of thousands of years or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years it just seems you know impossible it's counterintuitive yet there it is and the evidence and so it makes it hard to grasp we see the changes we see the dogs changing in course of 15 thousand years humans in the course of 150 thousand years with all the variety we have today there it is it's in the genes it's in the fossils it's it's corroborated across all these different independent lines of inquiry it's it's the power of genetic variation and selection which is a bottom-up designer now this was a question directed to you what would you say is the creationist strongest argument for the existence of God oh okay this is like on your your application to graduate school and says what's your weak point I always put like chocolate I study too hard I actually think that the best arguments creationists have today for inferring design in nature are probably those of William demske maybe with the irreducible complexity of complex structures like the flagellum and so on we have terrific answers for these this little debate has been going on for about six years now but I think those are the best arguments for inferring design which has nothing to do with inferring God in fact they purposely say that that's not what they're trying to infer although it's pretty obvious they are but still in terms of what's the best arguments for God herself I guess it would it would just be that it does look like the universe is designed and in fact let's just say it it is designed it's a kind of a jury rigged bottom-up designer but that is a kind of design so when people intuitively say you know it just looks designed why don't we just say well yeah that's right because it is in a way not a top-down intelligent designer a bottom-up tinkerer a designer designed nonetheless so the inference in a way is correct I think it's interesting evolutionists argue against design using arguments they designed think about that one this is the book he's referring to Michael V's book Darwin's black box excellent book showing how complex living systems cannot evolve piece by piece there are too many interconnecting parts they depend on each other he uses the illustration of a mousetrap with five basic parts you have to have at least those five parts you remove anymore it ceases to function your car has thousands of parts somebody can live without run without some it simply cannot run without the hair on the bacteria for instance has a little tiny motor that attaches to the bacteria that allows that thing to swim around that motor so tiny eight million of them would fit on the cross section of a human hair the motor turns a hundred thousand rpm forwards or backwards now if you want to leave that happened by chance you're welcome to believe that but that's an incredibly complex little motor and really micro miniaturized anybody's done any work with computers knows this smaller you try to make it the more problems you start to have and that's why the cost goes up for a laptop instead of a desktop so no I think there's evidence of design every place even out of the micro level okay dinosaurs what are your opinion on dinosaurs dr. Hoeven and where do they phone to the creation versus evolution argument that happens to be my favorite topic I have dinosaur Adventureland my website is dr. Dino my phone number is four seven nine Dino I have dinosaurs on my tie I'm sick and tired of the evolutionists using dinosaurs to teach kids that they live millions of years ago the fact of the matter is that they were called dragons all through history the word dinosaur was just made up in 1841 these creatures have always lived with man there are thousands and thousands of legends and cave drawings and artwork and a video number three on the table back there covers all that dinosaurs have lived with man all through history they simply call them dragons the Bible says before the flood came the people lived to be nine hundred years old well reptiles never stop growing even today they don't stop growing most species don't so in the pre-flood conditions the reptiles would grow to be gigantic they were dinosaurs living with Adam and Eve then Noah took them on the ark probably babies just be sure to get a pink one and a blue one and after the flood people killed him and all through history there are stories of people killing dragons and there could be a few still alive today there have been thousands of sightings like Loch Ness monster Lake Champlain monster a dead one washed up on the beach in California 1925 a dead plesiosaur fish fishermen watched it get killed there are pictures on my website I have them here but don't have time to get him up because I have 7,000 slides so if you'd start asking the questions in the same order that I have the answer it'd be a lot faster we need to have live internet just Google ready to go okay there's my answer why why do you suppose fish died in the flood and explained that all these ocean swimming dinosaurs died in the flood just all of a sudden couldn't swim are we supposed to believe this where in the geological record have you ever seen a dinosaur and a human together you never have this is an empirical test this young lady is shaking her head yes you have seen a dinosaur any human together good come see me later okay this would be a falsifiable test of evolution if you could actually find a dinosaur or a trilobite or whatever and a hominid fossil in the same bed that would do it that would be a huge point against evolutionary theory has never been found [Applause] hey dr. Shermer regarding bird evolution is there any living or fossil evidence that a lake became a wing and a scale became a feather yeah good question there's actually a fair amount of good evidence now for the evolution of birds from dinosaurs and the transition from scales to feathers and the transition from walking limbs to flying limbs it operates in principle with the slide I put up with the each part has a particular function that serve some other purpose that in the end got co-opted for a different purpose and the wing is a classic example almost surely was once a thermodynamic regulator a heat regulator which then gets co-opted to use for something else later therefore a half a wing has some purpose in terms of the fossil record it's pretty good now we actually have quite a few transitional fossils from dinosaurs to birds and there's a number of paleontologists that think today the birds are the dinosaurs are still living not as dragons the Bible by the way where are the unicorns that are referred to in the Bible where where are those either in the fossil record or today to see one of those another one of those interesting tests that continues to get failed so in terms of the paleontological record it's pretty good we have to remember that most beasties that die get eaten they don't fossilize hardly any fossilized so it's an amazing fact that we have so many fossils that we do it's an embarrassment of riches okay I disagree strongly every one of the so-called evidences for dinosaurs turning to birds have been proven wrong archaea Raptor was listed as a proof for evolution a missing link mm-hmm National Geographic breaking news we found the missing link a couple of months later oops we got some Chinese guy glued a tail a bird tail on a reptile and sold it for 80 thousand dollars in the Smithsonian bought it as a Chinese smuggler to brought it in great embarrassment to modern paleontology from USA Today we'd go all day about that the tail was added by an entrepreneurial Chinese farmer yep which one you want to talk about our Kyo Raptor the little Dino fuzz they call it we got plenty of stuff on that video number 4 photo kini though it's Dino fuzz it's not Dino fuss at all it's just simply a simply chemical reaction that takes place as it things fossilized and it's been proven over and over there's considerable considerable body of evidence that these fossil traces known as Dino fuzz have nothing to do with feathers Allan fiduciaries and he believes in evolution so you mistaken about that thank you [Applause] question for dr. Hovind how do you account for most people's belief that the earth is 4.6 billion years old carbon dating radioactive dating potassium-argon dating go ahead and put the screen up there while I've got it here this is the California's Nessie washed up on the beach california i told you about earlier had a neck 20 feet long everybody said it was a plesiosaur right up here in california as far as carbon dating that's anybody believes carbon dating works doesn't understand the problems associated with it and it's not true to say the majority of people believe in evolution or believe the earth is billions of years old the majority of Americans do not believe he earth is billions of years old as far as carbon dating when it was first invented 1947 to 53 welder Libby invented at University of Chicago got a Nobel Prize for it and moved to Stanford in 1949 the lower leg of a mammoth carbon dated 15,000 years old but the skin was 21,000 from the same animal talk about a slow birth 1963 living mollusk shells dated 2300 years old it's not getting any better that's 14 years of practice with carbon dating 1970 they said if a carbon date supports our theories we put it in the main text if it is not entirely contradict and we put it in a footnote if it's completely out of date we just drop it 1971 freshly killed seal dated 13 hundred years old 1975 one part of a mammoth is 40,000 years old and other parts for 26,000 it's not working 1981 it's not working it has never worked 1984 living snails carbon date 27,000 years old one atheist said well yeah we know why that one didn't work okay then how do you know any of them do work how if you know some of them don't work how could you possibly prove any of the carbon dates are working you can't I mean in a court of law they'd laugh at you for bringing in carbon 18 1992 two mammoths found side-by-side one carbon dates 22,000 years old another one carbon dates 16 thousand years old this is not an exact science folks 1996 up at Berkeley University they used to advance to different dating techniques they found these bones are 53,000 to 27,000 that's a 96 percent error this is not science this is fairy tale stuff it gets worse with potassium-argon dating you need video 7 for that one I wrote a book called denying history it's about the Holocaust deniers here's their reasoning you know those Holocaust historians used to say that there were 21 death camps now they're saying that there's only six see they're wrong there was no Holocaust Holocaust the story is used to say they gas people at Dachau now they're saying they didn't gas people at Dachau see they didn't gas anybody anywhere this is the same line of reasoning that the evolution deniers use as the Holocaust deniers in fact of course everybody makes mistakes errors and fakes have nothing to do with the large body of knowledge to tell us what's actually true about history and the past the fakes by the way and all these errors were exposed not by creationists but by scientists because scientists have integrity and the science itself has a built-in self-correcting machinery that drives it toward better and more accurate facts okay this is a little bit of a long one bacteria appears to be the most efficient reproducing organism on the planet what is your best evidence that for the origin of meiosis male-female reproduction well bacteria are the dominant form of life on Earth and in terms of how they evolved reproductive methods has to do with really the going back to the beginnings of how monomers turn into polymers how polymers tend to turn into long protein chains how long protein chains turn into something like RNA RNA starts to replicate into DNA and so on and so on into a complex reproductive system as we see in bacteria today we have a fairly good understanding of this in two ways one through the vast variety of complexity of life today where you have from simple to complex organisms and you can see the historical sequence in the different kinds of reproductive methods that there are and from simple to complex how they range that's part one of its historical science the same way that astronomers know how stars evolve by looking at different stars alive if you will today at different stages the second way is looking at the actual cells themselves and the structures within them these complex eukaryote cells that were composed of are actually composed of these very simpler prokaryote cells which we just call these little structures like mitochondria and so forth that that were once themselves free-floating cells that through this symbiotic process of cooperation then coalesced into these larger structures and so these two ways show us again historical sciences are by necessary inferential from which we have to infer from several lines of evidence we now know this again through these independent lines of inquiry that converge to this same conclusion okay that's a fairy tale if I ever heard one because it's here it must have happened that's like you know the motor slowly evolved to fit into the car you know they're like this this is a misunderstanding and a gross oversimplification of how complex bacteria are bacteria are really complex people say don't bacteria become resistant to drugs that's proof for evolution well that's based on a misunderstanding okay dr. Spector points out it's based on a misunderstanding for the mutations that cause antibiotic resistance still involved information loss for example to destroy a bacterium the antibiotic streptomycin attaches to a part of the bacterial cell called ribosomes mutations sometimes cause a structural deformity in ribosomes since the antibiotic cannot connect with the miss shape and ribosome the bacterium is resistant but even though this mutation turns out to be beneficial for the moment it still constitutes a loss of information no evolution has taken place the bacteria are not stronger in fact under normal conditions with no antibiotic present they are weaker example would be if somebody's going through town handcuffing everybody hauling them off to kill them and you don't have any arms they can't handcuff you so you survived the purge well it might be beneficial for the moment but it's still a loss of information and put you back in the population with armed people and you're gonna have you at a disadvantage so no bacteria this is so incredibly designed not evolve question for dr. Hovind please explain the claim that 97% of the DNA between humans and chimp are similar can you give me ten seconds to get the slides up and then I got two minutes okay DNA between humans and chimps is similar this claim that the DNA is 97% similar is simply false okay it's about 95 percent according to the most it used to say ninety eight point six in the textbooks here we go here at this textbook says 96 percent similar between orangutangs in humans 98% similar between chimpanzees and humans proving a common ancestor 15 million years ago actually Barney Maddox was the leading genome researcher on this project he said concerning the genetic differences the genetic difference between human and his nearest relative the chimpanzee is at least 1 point 6 percent that doesn't sound like much but calculated out that's a gap of 48 million nucleotides and a change of only 3 nucleotides is fatal to an animal there is no possibility of a change now they've discovered instead of 98% similar it's only 95 percent so there are millions and millions of millions of differences now if somebody wants to believe that proves common ancestor they can believe whatever they want but that's not common sense I think it proves a common designer that's why they're similar structures and many things the Honda Prelude the Honda Accord are very similar because they both evolved my skateboard by the same logic so the the idea that the vector that the DNA code is supposed to prove some kind of evolutionary relationship is ludicrous okay the DNA code is so incredibly complex to begin with I can point out that Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Word have millions of exact lines of code I mean they're identical I can click spellcheck in word and I can click spellcheck in PowerPoint to get the same results that proves this all evolved from Morse code over billions of years well whether the DNA sequence similarity is 98.6 or ninety five point two or ninety seven is in a way irrelevant the number keeps changing because that's how science works it keeps refining and testing and changing and so on it's one of the beauties of Sciences there's no final absolute truths you're not gonna read in Genesis what the number is it's done through DNA the DNA sequencing themselves is only one measure of commonality between us and the other great apes and then us and the monkeys and us and other mammals and so on that's just one measure there's a whole bunch of half a dozen different biochemical measures of similarity and differences then of course there's all the anatomical and physiological comparisons then there's the fossil comparisons again I can't hammer this point home strong enough it's this convergence of evidence from different lines of inquiry that leads us to these conclusions when Vince cirrage first put forth that idea that we are more closely related to chimps because he had this one one particular biochemical test people thought he was crazy but it is now supported simply because there's so much evidence from other lines of inquiry Thanks [Applause] okay last two-minute question for you humans need eleven systems in their body to survive circulatory muscular nervous skeletal etc 11 was at 11 yes 11 which evolved first which evolved last which evolved in between or do they all appear at once instantly this isn't even quite the right question because it infers that that all systems had to be in place for the thing that we call a human to be a human but that's not how evolution works it's not the 747 out of the junk pile of parts that's not how it happens it's this long slow gradual tinkering process circulatory systems muscular systems and so on all mammals have these and all organisms going all the way back hundreds of millions of years have these various systems of different kinds it's why we have these kind of poorly designed good enough to get by systems that we have because they're they're from these common ancestors from long before our legs the veins in our legs are okay it would be nice if there were more valves and they were a little stronger because with bipedalism you have more blood pressure from top to bottom than if you're a Quadra pet but we began as a quadruped ed so we're stuck with the veins and valves that we have that have been slightly modified and improved an intelligent designer would have made him much better than they actually are same thing with lower back discs if we were designed to be bipeds it would be great if our the discs were much thicker and denser and didn't wear out so so quickly yet especially if you live 900 years your back would never make it but but we weren't designed by an intelligent designer we used to be quadrupeds there was far less pressure on the lower spine than there is now that's what I mean by this bottom up tinker it works fairly well we get by fairly well but not in any kind of incredible omniscient perfectly designed structure which is what you would expect from a top-down designer what you actually see is perfect evidence of a bottom-up tinker called evolution well I think much of the problem here is total misunderstanding in first place we are not poorly designed I think where it's an amazing design I think just one single cell in your body is more complex than the space shuttle and the average human has 50 trillion cells so it's ludicrous to say that we this all just came about by chance and we're poorly designed secondly poor design is allows the argument for evolution is that when you especially when you consider as I said earlier we are a copy off of a copy off of a copy off of a copy off of a copy off a copy of atom it's amazing we're sitting here talking about it you can make a picnic a piece of paper copied on the copy machine now take your copy and make a copy take that copy and make a copy do that about a thousand times and see if you can still read it get a computer program any computer program make a copy it onto a disk then copy to another disk then copy to another disk do that a thousand times see if it'll still run that's the DNA code that we have folks it's incredibly complex I think the only reason anybody would say this happened by chance and there was no designers because they don't want to find that designer the atheist can't find God for the same reason a thief can't find a policeman okay last question for dr. Hovind why do you believe creation science is not taught in the public schools well first place it is taught in thousands of public schools there there has never been a law against teaching creation science there were two schools two states that passed laws to require creation be taught Arkansas Louisiana the court struck both of those down wisely I suppose because if you passed a law that said teachers are required to breathe they would strike that down to okay you can't require somebody breathe and you can't require they teach creation they never said you couldn't teach creation and quite quite the opposite is true the courts have rules consistently you can teach it if you want but it cannot be required I cover that in all the court cases on video number five back there on the table so there are thousands teachers that do teach creation I teach creation I go into public schools quite often and teach we have public schools come visit our dinosaur Adventureland we teach them creation it's not a problem there's no law against it and I'm not against teaching evolution in schools either as I said earlier I'm against teaching lies in schools don't tell them you have a vestigial tail bone or the snake has a vestigial pelvis or the whale has the vestigial pelvis don't lie to the kids I mentioned in Arkansas House representatives committee considering a built in Arkansas to not buy textbooks with lies in it we went through 30-some lies in the textbooks and I send one of the representatives said is it true all these things are lies I said yes I went for 45 minutes these are lies one evolutionist got up afterwards and said well this is an anti evolution bill the representative said evolutions not mentioned in this bill this bill just says don't lie to the kids and this evolutionist ACLU lawyer at the there said well all these things are used to support the evolution theory well duh that's all you've got to support your theory is lies get a new theory that's the way science works be skeptical when you got to use lies to support your theory you ought to be skeptical of that Michael come on now could you write article on that all right let's be skeptical sure let's do it okay sure let's hear your new theory Kent Hovind what is the theory you have to offer to replace the scientific theory of evolution the answer is no theory there is no theory I've got it for the reason it's not taught the reason it's not taught in science classes is because it's not science there's nothing to teach if you got anything out of tonight you heard there's nothing to teach all you would do is say God did it okay what do you want to do for the rest of the hour and for the rest of the semester there's nothing to teach there's no science if you want to teach it in Bible classes fine religion classes theology class is fine but there's nothing to teach there's nothing to do there is no science that's why it's not taught well this concludes our debate let's give a round of applause [Applause]
