Dr Ben Carson Creation Week - General Conference SDA Church

thank you very much it's a real pleasure to be here I have really enjoyed everything I I wish that Rick Aguilera as the message could be on television for everybody to see it's a very very impressive but I've decided to entitle my talk this evening frontal lobes now you know if you if you look at all the animals that were created the ones with the biggest frontal lobes are us human beings everybody else has these they're relatively small frontal lobes wire are so big because that's the part of the brain that allows you to engage in rational thought processing we are the only creatures who have the ability to extract information from the past and the present project it into a plan and thereby fashion your own future and that's because we were made in the image of God now you know this whole creation evolution controversy has been raging on really since the beginning because what is Satan's plan to get rid of God to disparage God to mischaracterize God and what is creation creation is God's signature that he created the world and that he created us you know this past spring I was involved in a little bit of controversy at one of the universities Emory University in Atlanta Georgia I was invited to be the commencement speaker and some of the biology professors heard that I was coming and they became quite agitated they were very upset the petition did you know that this man believes in creation how can someone who believes in creation give a commencement address at a university they thought that was just ridiculous interestingly enough as some of you might know Emory University has its roots as a Methodist University head anyway you know they started a petition 500 people signed a petition and then a counter petition was started and over 2200 people signed that but you know the interesting thing is they said that I said that people who believe in evolution were unethical and that's not what I said at all what I said is that people who believe in God and who believe in a Bible can very easily explain from where they derive their ethical philosophies people who believed in survival of the fittest might have a more difficult time doing that because when you believe in survival of the fittest and you and another person are the only person there and you're hungry and you kill them and eat them well you know let's survival the fittest that's not necessarily the wrong thing to do and if you believe as we do and we get our ethical considerations from God that would not even be a consideration so there is a tendency sometimes for the politically correct crowd to reinterpret things according to their own philosophies you know political correctness and evolution is part of scientific political correctness you're not supposed to believe in God you know I remember one of the very interesting times I had is I was invited to be the keynote speaker for the National Society of science teachers 15,000 science at the Philadelphia Convention Center and I decided to talk about evolution and creation well you would be amazed at how many science teachers actually believe in creation many of them actually I got so many letters and emails who said you know it's what I believe too but I'm just afraid to say it and you know the politically correct crowd in academia is extremely domineering and intolerant of anybody who believes anything different than they do and if you're a young assistant professor at a major university and you're trying to be promoted and you indicate that you believe in creation you're in big trouble there's a very strong chance that you will not be promoted and in fact you may well be driven out of the university extraordinarily in time and you know that's one of the things about PC and it's one of the reasons that I rail against political correctness so much you know people just listen for things that they can be critical of I remember once I was talking to a an audience about the difference between a human brain and a dog's brain and a man got offended he said you can't talk about dogs like that you know people just you know they grab one two things and you know they start saying no no no I was talking to a group about how the fashion industry has gotten the young ladies to think they're supposed to be so skinny they look like the escaped from a concentration camp and a Jewish man got offended he said you can't mention concentration camps it's way too sensitive it would be as if I said something to you about slavery and I said you could talk about slavery all you want don't bother me but you know some people just seize up on things and then they can't hear anything else and you know they try to create a big deal out of it really that's what PC doesn't if you really stop and think about the founding of this nation many people came here from other parts of the world because they were trying to escape from people who told them what they could think and they could say and here we come reintroducing it through the back door and it's every bit as malignant as before well I've had an opportunity to to be involved in some public discussions with a lot of people in the scientific arena including the the father of artificial intelligence at MIT before group of students and you know he just couldn't understand how I could believe in God as a scientist we had quite an argument and he could not refute any of my arguments and finally he just said you're religious bigot and he walked away you know they resort to calling people names I was once in a public debate with Richard Dawkins who is probably the the world's foremost atheists and Daniel Dennett from Tufts University and we were having a debate about faith and science and those two were one-sided on my side was me ina and Francis Collins who is the director of the National Institutes of Health who started out his career by the way as an atheist and as he learned more and more about the human genome measures as you know he was one spearheaded the Human Genome Project he said wait a minute this was no accident you know as he looked at the sophistication of those codes I mean how many people would look at a computer and look at a computer program and say that it's just random as it just happened and and yet you know you take a program like C++ and you know a series of zeros and ones can create all kinds of sophisticated commands that a computer can execute well you know when you look at the genome you take a series of four repeating nucleic acids which create a template it tells you whether you have a man or giraffe or an algae or juice on fly and what kind of one of those it will be and it is infinitely more complex than the C++ program for a computer and that's what Francis Collins you recognized as he was becoming the leading authority in this and it became absolutely clear to him that evolution in that sense even if he does believe in a type of evolution he said it had to have a creator and interestingly enough Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins they were just outraged that Francis Collins and myself believed in God and they said you know you can't be a real scientist and believe in if you believe in God you believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster you know they were thrown out all these disparaging remarks and at the end of the discussion I said you've convinced me of one thing and that is I came from God and you came from a monkey at which time the audience exploded and that was the end of the conversation but but you know I also had an opportunity to have a debate publicly with Don Johanson the famous archaeologist who discovered Lucy he's an anthropologist this so-called missing link and you know he shows this all over the world this little skull with a protruding mandible and receding forehead and I said you know I'm a neurosurgeon and I operate on a lot of people who have you know the form skulls and things and you know eventually they die and they get buried and years later some like you comes along and finds their skull and said they found a missing link yeah no he did appreciate that but but I said you know why why is it just one of them why isn't there a whole colony of them how can you dig up this one little thing and then extrapolate and and that's what those who are creationists tend to do make these gigantic extrapolations without real evidence of what's going on but I think perhaps the most important evidence for the existence of God is what happens in our own lives our own personal experience with God there is there is nothing in any book or any university that compares with your own personal experience you know I remember some years ago I was I was asked if I would come to South Africa head up a team and attempt to separate type to vertical Craney Apogee's twins Siamese twins joined at the top of the head facing in opposite directions and there have been 13 attempts to separate twins like that before none of which had been successful so I knew it was going to be a great medical challenge what it's going to be you know a big social challenge to because the operation was going to be done at the Medical University of South Africa atma densa the major black Teaching Hospital always the stepchild throughout apartheid and a post apartheid period this was going to be their chance to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Cape Town Johannesburg all the other great universities and I wasn't ready for that social pressure and I said Lord you're gonna have to show me something here and as I studied the anatomy it became clear to me that the common drainage system that they share was narrow centrally and the traditional neurosurgical literature says you should decide which twin to give the drainage system to and then divide them over the course of a number of operations divided in time by several weeks to several months to allow them to develop collateral circulation well I felt impressed that we could do it in one operation if we concentrated on the area where the vessels were narrowing down because other vessels would dilate up around those as soon as you took them and when I explained that to the team they said you're the boss we'll do whatever you want to do and I remember going through that operating room two days before New Year's of 98 big sign over the operating room god bless Joseph and Luka banda and they were having song service and prayer service and I was thrilled I said we bring in a stereo system to play inspirational music 19 hours into the operation we were only three quarters of the way finished a part that remained was so complex the blood vessels were engorged it he's Dan tangled it looked impossible and I thought about the first set of twins that I was involved in and how we use 60 units of blood and the second set 80 units of blood and as I looked at that complex I said there's not enough blood in South Africa to get through this and we stopped the operation we went into conference I suggested maybe we could cover the area over with skin and then come back and they will have developed enough collaterals that we could now cut through those vessels and the doctors from South Africa and Zambia says a great idea I know it would work at Johns Hopkins but we don't have the ability to keep partially separated twins alive they'll die and now I really felt like I had the weight of the world on my shoulders I didn't have all my fancy equipment I had my surgical loops my scalpel and a prayer on my lips and I said Lord it's up to you and I went in there and started cutting between those blood vessels that were so thin you can see the anaesthetic bubbles coursing through just daring you to make a nick Enda and you know it's like trying to untangle a bowl of spaghetti and I just kind of zoned out I don't even remember what I was doing to be honest with you but all the other door surgeons afterwards said we couldn't believe what you were doing but when I made the final cut that separated those trends over the stereo system came the Hallelujah Chorus and everybody had goosebumps and when we finished that operation after 28 hours one of the twins popped his eyes open reached up for the endotracheal tube the other one did the same thing by the time we got to the ICU within two days they were extubated within two weeks they were crawling and today they're in a tenth-grade and interestingly enough the operation required three units of blood so that's what happens when God takes over and see I know that because I was there and I saw those vessels and I said oh my there is a way in the world and yet he did it and it's the first time twins like that have ever been separated and remained intact neurologically so you know it that kind of experience is very hard to find the textbook or any other place except in your own personal lives but we all have experiences like that and that's what faith is made of we have to think about those experiences that occur in our lives you know I remember another time when we had we had built the home that we thought was our final home in Howard County and then all the farmers around there started selling their property and putting all these developments in and we said oh gosh we need to move so so we bought a farm with lots of acreage that could never happen again but the problem was we couldn't sell her other house and I said Lord I pay my tithe and you know I do all this stuff so how come we can't sell this house every time we get a contract on it and it looked promising and then it would fall through for five years it stayed on the market for five years and it was during the time when the housing bubble was going on houses were being bought and sold like crazy the prices were escalating I had a very I have a very good friend he's a real-estate developer and he developed real estate all over the country and he was trying to find a piece of real estate for me to invest him that would be perfect but that I wouldn't have to invest any time in that would provide a good income and he looked for years and he couldn't find a perfect thing and then another friend told me about something called a 1031 exchange where if you sell a piece of property and you get excess profit from it and you can roll it over into another property within 45 days of the time that you sell it then you don't have to pay excessive taxes on it well wouldn't you know he found the perfect property just after I found out about the 1031 exchange and within 45 days the house hold for more than twice as much as we put on the market for before so there I was sitting there accusing God of not blessing me when in fact he was blessing me far beyond what I thought and you know it's those kinds of personal experiences that I think make all the difference in the world but why is it that people try so hard to get rid of God you know you go back to the very first chapter in the Bible and you know I I'm not a hard-and-fast person who says the earth is only 6,000 years old but I do believe in the six-day creation and because you know it says in the beginning God created heaven earth then say when he created them except for in the beginning so the earth could have been here for a long time before he started creating things on it but when he did start doing that he made it very specifically clear to us the evening and the morning or the next day because he knew that people will come along and try to say that I was millions and millions of years and then what else did he say in the very first chapter that each thing brought forth after its own kind because he knew people will come along and say you know this changed into that and this changed into that and this changes to that so at the very beginning of the Bible he puts that to rest and you know as was pointed out already tonight you know people try to disparage the Bible say that these things are not true these are fanciful tales and yet there's abundant evidence geological evidence that there was a worldwide flood going to the Andes Mountains and see all those fossils on the top of those months I mean these things when you talk to the evolutionists about them they always say the same thing well oh we don't understand everything and I just say I'm not sure you understand anything you know they they look at all those layers and then they find some fossils and one of the layers and they says this fossil is this many years old because it's in this layer so that means this fossils like a million years old and then later on they say well this layer is a million years old because this fossil which is a million years old isn't it you know that's like saying you know the sky can be red or blue and you say well the sky is blue and you say why is it blue because it's not red well why is it not red because it's blue you know has known this circular reasoning that's how they explain the age of all these things it's very circular reasoning and really it has no real scientific validity but the real linchpin of evolution is natural selection and of course that's a term coined by Charles Darwin how many people don't know this but Charles Darwin actually started out in a seminary to become a man of the cloth he had some experiences with God that didn't go his way like his ten year old daughter who died of pneumonia despite his plead but you know he goes off to the Galapagos Islands and he was a very keen observer I will give him credit and he noticed some things that you didn't seem to see anyplace else he particularly noticed the finches there who had these elongated thickened beaks and he said no other finches had beaks like this this is evidence of evolutionary change now what he didn't know is that there had been severe droughts in the Galapagos for three years the only finches that survived were the ones that had thick beaks that could break open the seedlings and extract a nutrition and they were able to breed and pass that trait on to the next but evolutionists say that those changes that you see just like you saw with all the dogs is definitive proof of evolution now I submit that changes can occur within a species but is that a sign of evolution or is it a sign of an intelligent creator who gave his creatures the ability to adapt to their environment so that he would have to start over every 50 years you know that sounds much more intelligent than anything else and no one has ever demonstrated one species changing to another species and you know this should be if it's true of continual evolving so we should be able to find intermediate species at any given point in time and we should be able to find how they line up you know Darwin said his whole theory depended on the fossil remains and he said we should be able to line up from a single-cell organism to man several miles long and just walk right down the fossil trail and see how everything evolved and he said the only reason they didn't have the fossils is because they were not geologically sophisticated enough but that we would be in 50 to 100 years well that was 150 years ago we still haven't found them where are they where are the fossil remains but when you ask the evolutionist about that they say mmm I don't know where they are they're somewhere there we just haven't found them yet you know that's a pretty lame excuse to be honest with you but you know the interesting thing about evolution about natural selection is that it claims that anything that isn't useful disappears so while a species is in the process of changing it clings on to those things that allow it to thrive and those things that are not useful disappear so if that's the case why do we have kidneys because kidney has many components you know the glomerulus and renal tubules and all kinds of epithelial surfaces all of which work together to be able to filter blood create urine it's a complex process none of those things in and of themselves have any purpose same thing with your eye you have an iris and a pupil on a cornea and vitreous you know retina rot cells and cone cells all of which are necessary for the eyelid function short ciliary nerves now without the other parts of them work so how did it get there did a did a cone cell which is sophisticated in and of itself just kind of sit around for a few million years waiting for a rod cell and then they sit around waiting for a retinal Network you know according to the theory it had to go and there was an eyeball overnight just like that because it wouldn't work in any other way and when you ask the evolutionists about that they say well we don't understand everything I say well I don't think you understand anything because because then you go to the brain I mean the human brain the most sophisticated organ system in the universe billions and billions of neurons hundreds of billions of interconnections it remembers every single thing you have ever seen every single thing you have ever heard can process more than two million bits of information in one second I mean it is unbelievable some people say well you don't you shouldn't learn this you shouldn't learn this because you'll overload your brain have you ever heard anybody say that what a bunch of nonsense that is do you know your brain and it's a conservative estimate could take in one new fact every second for over 3 million years before you begin to challenge its capacity so don't let anybody tell you that you can overload your brain and that's our brains in there degenerated state can you imagine what they were like before unbelievable because we're made in the image of God how many people here remember your birthday ok I think it's unanimous what did your brain have to do for you to respond to that question first of all the sound waves had to leave my lip strap to the air enter your external auditory meatus travel down to your tympanic membrane instead of a vibratory force which travel across the ossicles of the middle ear to the / around with a central vibratory force in the end of them which mechanically distorted the micro cilia converting mechanical energy to electrical energy travel across the cochlear nerve to the cochlear nucleus at the Ponto medullary junction from there to the superior olivary nucleus sitting violently of the brainstem that allow meniscus to the inferior colliculus and immediately clinically across the thalamic radiations to the posterior temporal lobes begin an auditory processing from there to the frontal lobes coming on attractive victors you're retrieving a memory from the immediate hippocampus strengthening memory buddies back to the frontal osa start the motor response at the pet cell level coming down the cortical spinal tract across the internal capsule into the cerebral peduncle descending down to the cervical medullary decussation into the spinal cord gray matter synapsing they're going out to the neuromuscular junctions stimulating an urban and muscle so you can raise your hand and and that's the simplified version what you're gonna have to see if you can get one of those rap singers to do that but you know but but if your brain can do that and you barely even had to think about it what is your brain capable of if you actually put your mind to something and someone wants to tell me that that came from a slime pit with a bunch of promiscuous bio chemicals give me a brick you know that makes that really stretches the limits or credulity well now what about the Big Bang Theory I find a Big Bang really quite fascinating I mean hey you have all these highfalutin scientists and they're saying that it was this gigantic explosion and everything came into perfect order now these are the same scientists who go around tiling the second law of thermodynamics which is entropy which says that things move toward a state of disorganization so now you're gonna have this big explosion and everything becomes perfectly organized and when you ask them about they said well we can explain this based on probability theory because if there's enough big explosions over a long enough period of time or billions and billions of years one of them will be the perfect explosion and and I say so what you're telling me is five blow a hurricane through a junkyard enough times over billions and billions of years eventually after 102 hurricanes you'll be a 747 fully loaded and ready to fly well but I mean it's even more ridiculous than that because our solar system not to mention the universe outside of that is extraordinarily well-organized to the point where we can predict seventy years away when a comet is coming now that type of organization to just come out of an explosion I mean you want to talk about fairy tales that is amazing and and then even if you want to use their own scientific theories you know you've got this mass betting and then it explodes in physics we have something we call angular momentum and it is preserved so it should be preserved in any orbit of anything that is affected by gravity around a planet which means everything has to traverse in the same direction well it doesn't there are many planets that have satellites and moons that go in opposite directions so that doesn't work with angular momentum and there are a whole series of things what about all the debris from the billions and billions of explosions that were not perfect where's that I mean we should been bombarded constantly by all this debris coming down we're not seeing it so you know there's there's a lot of things there that really require an enormous amount of faith and really what it boils down to is where do you want to put your faith in man or in god which one makes more sense and I constantly say you know I'm a person of limited faith I really don't have enough faith to believe that stuff that they say I mean that is really beyond belief in terms of the number of coincidences that have to occur in a number of things that have the violate even their own principles in order for it to work and then here's what's also fascinating this nation the United States of America one of the few nations in history to claim God in their founding documents we talked about in our Declaration of Independence certain animal rights given to us by our Creator every one of our coins every one of our bills says In God We Trust now I want you to think about something this nation has had a profound effect on the world before the United States of America came on the scene for a hundred years 200 years a thousand years three thousand years people did things the same way crops ready you put them on the cart hooked up your meals took him into town so the crop within 200 years of the advent of this nation which believed in God men were walking on the moon completely revolutionized and changed the world because a nation was willing to acknowledge God now as we are persistently making him unpopular politically incorrect to the point where I mean think about it we're in a Christmas season most of us think twice now before we say Merry Christmas to somebody this is where we have gone we are trying to push him out and look what's happening to our nation I mean the evidence is so clear it's clear in our own lives is clear in our communities it's clear in our nation it's clear in our world and the question is are we going to use those frontal lobes the reason he gave those to us is so that we could analyze all of this evidence which is so clearly placed in front of us you know think about the beautiful hours that we see how our flower is able to reproduce pollination how does pollination occurred bees and other creatures according to evolution plants came along before the bees so how do plants reproduce and what about animals and what about people and their reproduction you know it was a wonderful thing that God gave us you know men are attracted to women women are attracted to men although that's changing in the school society but anyway that was the way it was supposed to be okay it was a beautiful thing but according to evolutionary model you know we really came from an amoeba and amoebas they just like split and then there's two amoebas so it seems to me like according to the evolutionary model you do things that are efficient so rather than going out and looking for mate you would just divide and there to be two of you and that'd be pretty horrible in some cases but you know things are supposed to work in an efficient way so according to the evolutionary model we would be less pugilistic it will be much more logical we'd be much more creative we wouldn't be going around fighting each other and cutting off people's heads anymore because that stuff would have been extinguished and we would have evolved into something much better according to the creation model in which we have an adversary is very easy to explain why people act that way is because they have choice and because there is an adversary out there so again these are things where we're using that logic we're looking at the two different points of view how are things done and we are the ones who get to make the choice but I think the most powerful evidence is the fact that we are creative the fact that we are compassionate and the fact that we can manifest love where did that come from in the evolutionary model why is it somebody's drowning for the most part you're not just going to walk by you're going to try to throw them something if you can swim you're going to jump in and say that doesn't work an evolutionary model because evolutionary model says survival of the fittest you would just say do that and just keep walking now some people do do that but you know most people most people they see somebody struggling there's something inside of them that says help that makes no sense whatsoever in the evolutionary model so we should be extraordinarily thankful for the example that has been given to us for the fact that the creator of the universe think about that power think about the expanse of the universe it's it's mind-boggling whenever I start studying you know the cosmos and realize how tiny and insignificant we are and yet that he would send His only begotten Son to this place and all this magnitude that the individual who created all this was willing to be spat upon humiliated and crucified tormented because loved us that much that that could happen on our behalves and that we could manifest any doubt whatsoever would be pretty amazing but I think we have all the evidence that we need that we have a powerful a loving God who will do anything for us except force us thank you very much we have time for a few questions if you have questions for dr. Carson we'd like to entertain a question or two speaking to the issue of creation does anyone have a question they'd like to ask yes young man brilliant brilliant just in case you didn't hear that question that question was sometimes it's really hard when we're in school and I remember this being the case when I was in school dr. Carson we sit in science class and science promotes one way of thinking and yet we hear a presentation like we've heard tonight and we hear a completely different way of thinking what should we believe well first of all I think it's quite evident from what you've seen tonight it takes faith to believe in God it takes faith to believe in evolution I think it takes a lot more faith to believe in evolution than it does to believe in God but they both require faith and the fact of the matter is they're both religion and if we really were to put a litmus test on them and we said we can't teach religion in school we wouldn't be able to teach evolution either but the fact of the matter is we have to to look at things based on what makes sense and you know you look at the geological layers it makes perfectly good sense that that was done by worldwide flood you look at the fact that they're crustaceans on the top of the Andes Mountains it makes perfectly good sense that there was a flood and you know it's really a matter again of using the frontal lobes analyzing the stuff seeing how it compares with what God has said what man has says you don't find in consistencies with the way God said that you find a lot of inconsistencies with the way man had said it thank you very much yes one other question here well again interestingly enough this is a relatively modern science concept before Darwin came along it wasn't you know scientists like Sir Isaac Newton considered one of the most scientific minds ever inventor of calculus so many things strong belief in God big mission outreach Einstein when you think about genius over the word would you come up with Einstein he believed in God you know a lot of people believe in God but I personally believe that this theory that Darwin came up with was something that was encouraged by the adversary and it has become what is scientifically politically correct amazingly there are a significant number of scientists who do not believe it but they're afraid to say anything and one of the things that I'm hoping to do over the next few years going to the books coming up on my docket is called the organ of species not the Origin of Species the organ of species we're going to talk about the organs of the body and how they completely refute evolution on several other things as well so that people who are believers will have some some they can grasp onto that is done in a way that's not too technical because you know when you look at a lot of the creationist stuff they use technical terms to define technical situations and you don't know anymore than you knew when you started reading them so you know you have to break it all down so that people can have a really good understanding of it and I think when there's a lot of people who have a good understanding of it and they can put up a decent argument I think will begin to make some progress I see a young person with a hand right here final question for the evening what's your question Wow did you hear that question can you say it one more time nice and nice and strong so if that theory of evolution were true and people had to replicate by self-replication and splitting apart how would that happen anyway well the way that would happen is through evolving the systems that allow you to split apart those systems have not been developed they have not evolved which means it's not true let's give dr. Carson Hann with this presentation we bring to a close our celebration of creation and why do we have a celebration of creation because we believe that there's immense value and understanding our Creator our prayer for you is that you would develop a relationship with your Creator to know your Creator more deeply and through that creation and through that relationship find hope for the future and hope that will extend into eternity you

Channel: Guy Leite Jr

Views: 92,315

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Keywords: ben carson, adventist, general conference, SDA Church, Communication Department

Id: fQFCXEZPf38

Length: 48min 44sec (2924 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 11 2013