good evening I want to welcome you tonight I'll tell you a little bit about what to expect in just a minute but I want to get the most important thing for some of you out of the way the bathrooms are out the door and all the way to the left or the right so if you need if you need to use them you can do that we are so privileged here at Phoenix seminary to host this event my name is Steve Johnson I'm one of the executive vice presidents at Phoenix seminary and we are looking forward to an incredible evening and morning tonight and tomorrow if you're interested at all in what's going on at Phoenix seminary we have a table out in the for year you can go and find out whether you're a person interested in taking classes and we have classes for m.div students and for retirees so you want to go out and check that table and we would we'd love to give you something for more information about the the seminary we are absolutely overwhelmed with this response I got to tell you look around there's about a thousand people here tonight we were expecting a few hundred and the demand has been so great for the book which gave birth to this conference that we have a limited number of copies to sell tonight in tomorrow so they're going to be on a first-come first-served basis tonight and tomorrow morning at the price of $30 for checks and cash and if you're using a credit card it's thirty one dollars to to cover the to cover the fees if we happen to run out there's still good news you'll be able to sign up at one of the terminals at the guest services desk straight back in the foyer and you can prepay order we'll have them shipped the seminary so you don't have to pay for shipping and then we'll contact you with information how to come get them because there's so few copies we're going to try to limit the sales we will limit the sales to one per person and but if you order on prepay online and you wait a couple of weeks for them to come in you can order as many as you you would like at the at the 30 or 31 dollar price we we have a lot going on at Phoenix seminary over the next few weeks but first let me tell you that tonight very simply our schedule is 7:00 to 9:00 tonight 9:00 in the morning till noon tomorrow we'll have some breaks and some questions and answer periods it'll give you the opportunity to stretch and and do whatever you you need to do to to fill up with water etc also want to let you know again the book is available for you what else is coming up that Phoenix seminary is sponsoring our president's class the spring session is starting this coming Monday from 11:45 to 1 at Phoenix seminary which is a block and a half down the road at 7901 SJ and at 6 to 7:30 in the evening in the venue right across the campus here President Gerald L who say is working through the books of first second and third John and you might want to come and and walk through an expository study of those books we also have on Thursday morning a community Bible study taught by former sportscaster Gary bender and come at 9:30 for a fellowship and then we study from 10:00 to 11:00 and they're just getting ready to go into the book of Galatians so that's available to the entire community as well for those of you that are interested we're also hosting co-hosting with the spiritual formation of Arizona team a conference in February the 22nd through the 24th on spiritual formation in the church a lot of workshops a lot of plenary sessions and you can check at SF s AZ org to get more information and we'll be rolling these slides at the beginning and the end of all of our sessions so you'll be able to write this information down if you can't get it down now and we have a special event coming up on Thursday March 15th Sam Albury who happens to be a global speaker for Ravi Zacharias ministry and is also a pastor in a Maidenhead in England we'll be here for a will be at Phoenix seminary at the chapel for an evening in any evening in inner action with the with the community on the question of whether or not God is anti-gay if you want a google sam Albury you can you can learn more about him but this promises to be a really incredible evening as he takes us into the Word of God and tries to answer that question and then finally coming up on March 17 Saturday March 17th we're co-sponsoring with several churches around a valley a conference on unleashing God's Word and for those of you that happen to be pastors associate pastors or if you're just interested in communicating the word more effectively the president of Dallas seminary Mark Bailey the president of Denver seminary mark young the president of Phoenix seminary Darul del who say mark drew Solon's and several others will be leading sessions on that Saturday help you be more effective in communicating God's Word and now I'm just going to take a deep breath that's that's a lot well this evening we're here to deal with the istic evolution the debate about the biological origins continues to be hotly contested within the Christian Church and as you know prominent organizations around the world have insisted that we as Christians must yield to an unassailable scientific consensus in the favor of evolutionary theory and then modify traditional biblical ideas about the creation of life accordingly they promote a view known as theistic evolution or evolutionary creation they argue that God used albeit in an undetectable way evolutionary mechanisms to produce all forms of life this conference will contest that proposal our first guest this evening we have three this weekend we have dr. Stephen Meyer who is a PhD from the University of Cambridge we have dr. JP Moreland who's has his PhD from the University of Southern California and distinguished professor of philosophy at Biola Steve is the director Steve Myers the director of the Discovery Institute center of science and culture and our own dr. Wayne Grudem who is research professor at Phoenix seminary and biblical studies and theology we are really really really privileged to have them this evening and rather than applauding for them as they individually come up would you just welcome them with me this evening thank you as I said dr. Maier Stephen Meyer who has his PhD from the University of Cambridge is the directory of the Discovery Institute center of science and culture he's a foremost scientific scholar he's authored several books including the New York Times best-selling book Darwin's doubt his message this evening is why contemporary evolutionary theory fails to explain the origin a biological form in information and just before Steve comes up I would really appreciate it if you would join me in a word of Prayer as we commit this evening to the Lord Father we thank you this evening that you've brought us together around this topic Lord we pray that as a result of our time spent together this evening and tomorrow that God we would walk away understanding the deeper truths of your scripture with regards to creation and evolution and father I pray that your spirit would work in such a way that the speakers would be so clear that not one person would walk out without not only understanding but knowing how they have to wrestle with this particular issue so father we pray that your word would be clear we pray that your messengers would be clear and we would pray now that you would open our minds to receive that truth of your word we pray it in Jesus name Amen dr. Stephen Myers come and join us I think you have something going on up here [Applause] I'm gonna speak for about 40 minutes and then we'll have a 15-minute Q&A and then dr. Moreland will speak after me they'll be a little Q&A after his presentation and then dr. Grudem and there will be a joint Q&A to finish I'm really happy that we do have the questions and the answers it reminds me of something that happened to me when I was studying in Britain my first year in Cambridge I was a little intimidated by the whole surroundings and the there was a lecturer who came was a distinguished professor with expertise about the philosopher Immanuel Kant I had one course on Cantus and undergraduate and soon was in way over my head as I listened to this lecture and I apparently asked a question that revealed some ignorance on my part and I asked the professor if he could give me a a reference a source where I could read more about an aspect of Kant's work which I admitted not knowing anything about and when I acknowledged that there was an awkward uncomfortable silence in the room shuffling of feet the professor obliged me he gave me a source then afterwards my supervisor took me aside and he said he said Maya he said I know in the States you've learned that the only stupid question is the one you didn't ask it's different here he then gave me some sage counsel and said that in future he said if you have a question that reveals ignorant scum asked me privately and he said then he said everyone here is bluffing and if you're to succeed you must learn to Bluff too anyway we will have QA couple sessions and it will be American rules no stupid questions okay a little over a year ago I had a chance to go back to Britain to attend an event of scientific conference that was put on by the Royal Society of London and I'm hoping this will work that says Q&A that's not good oh and yeah so we're having a little problem of the slides here am i maybe to skip through these introductory slides to get there we go excellent okay Royal Society of London the Royal Society is arguably the world's most August scientific body goes back to Sir Isaac Newton Robert Boyle and the Royal Society in 2000 November of 2016 called a conference to discuss the status of current evolutionary theory the conference was called by leading evolutionary mainly evolutionary biologists who were as it happens very unhappy with the current status of evolutionary theory in particular the textbook theory of evolution known as neo-darwinism or modern Darwinism contemporary Darwinian theory the conference started with a professor who gave an opening talk on the explanatory deficits of the modern synthesis the modern synthesis is another name for neo-darwinism and he outlined a number of problems with the theory almost all of which had to do with the lack of creative power surrounding the famed natural selection random mutation mechanism some of these are scientific terms that may kind of flow over you but this was his list neo-darwinism doesn't explain the origin of phenotypic complexity a phenotype is the visible body form of an animal it doesn't explain the origin of anatomical novelty it does a nice job of explaining the small scale variations why the Galapagos finches for example might have a variation in this shape and size of their beak in response to varying weather patterns but it doesn't explain very well as many of the scientists there would acknowledge the large-scale innovations that produce birds in the first place does this small-scale variation but not large-scale innovation of anatomical novelty doesn't explain well the origin the abrupt appearance of major groups of animals in the fossil record what he called the origin of non gradual modes of transition abrupt appearance of fossils it also doesn't explain that there is there are non genetic factors involved in inheritance DNA turns out not to be the whole show and it also has problems with a number of other things that he enumerated all of these most of these things have to do with the lack of creative power of genuine innovative power of the mutation selection mechanism in a previous book gert professor Muller had cuttwood wrote he and his co-author said that neo-darwinism has no theory of the generative when I first came across this this was an MIT press book written in published in 2003 they have also had a table of all the unsolved problems of neo-darwinism one of which was the origin of biological form and I thought wait a minute I thought that's what Darwin resolved back in 1859 and as you get deeper and deeper into the mainstream literature in the field of evolutionary biology notice I didn't say books about intelligent design or something like I'm talking about the mainstream field of evolutionary biology the kinds of problems that Professor Muller and his co-author have highlighted are being acknowledged by more and more leading people in the field and so the conference at the world Society in November of 2016 was called to address these problems and it highlights I think a kind of extraordinary anomaly or irony and that is that at just the time that we have mainstream evolutionary biologists acknowledging that the driving the allegedly drive the supposed driving mechanism of evolutionary progress or innovation lacks creative power we have more and more people in the religious world in the Christian world especially intellectual thought leaders in the Christian world telling the rest of the folks in the Christian world that they need to accept our winni and evolution lest they bring intellectual disrepute upon the church lest they be out of sync with cutting-edge intellectual and scientific developments here's an example of one of the folks who is advocating what's known as theistic evolution the idea that somehow we must merge a theistic worldview or a biblical worldview or a Christian worldview or a judeo-christian worldview with the evolutionary worldview or the evolutionary contemporary versions of evolutionary theory this is Debra harsman very a very nice person a very sincere Christian but this is her view she says evolutionary creationists accept that natural selection other evolutionary mechanisms acting over long periods of time eventually result in major changes in body structures some people call this macro evolution macro evolution she then goes on to say that thus evolution is a natural mechanism by which God providentially achieves his creative processes or purposes rather or as he also puts it it's a gradual process of evolution was crafted and governed by God to create the diversity of life on earth and this is the irony I want to I want to highlight at just the time when leading evolutionary biologists are explicitly acknowledging that the neo-darwinian mechanism of mutation and selection lacks creative power we have an increasing number of Christians working in the sciences and Christian Science and faith organizations like the BioLogos since the and the faraday institute in the united kingdom urging folks in the church to accept evolutionary mechanisms as the means by which god creates those very same mechanism this that leading evolutionary biologists are saying hey it accounts for the errata the survival but not the arrival of the fittest it's one way one rather common quote no mutation and selection account for the survival but not the arrival of the fittest the small-scale variation yes the large-scale innovation no no genuine creativity in other words associated with the mechanism now it's understandable why many Christians even Christians working in the sciences would have come to this point of view we hear over and over again from science popularizers from spokespersons for official science education organizations or official organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of science that there is an overwhelming consensus in favor of contemporary Darwinian theory I had a chance in 2009 to testify before the Texas State Board of Education they were addressing a new science education standard that was being it was being debated at the Texas State Board and it was a standard that was encouraging teachers to inform students about the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories and competing ideas about contentious theories one of the advocates of a Darwin only approach to science education Eugenie Scott pictured here on the screen came and was interviewed in the Dallas Morning News before she testified to the same hearing and said you can't apply this strengths and weaknesses idea to the teaching of Darwinian theory because there are no weaknesses in the theory of evolution now I found that rather breathtaking I was there with a stack of 100 peer-reviewed scientific articles from mainstream biology journals that were acknowledging weaknesses in in these standard versions of evolutionary theory so I knew there were plenty of counter examples to what dr. Scott was claiming but these types of statements are made all the time and it's given the impression in our broader culture of a consensus that does not exist within evolutionary biology itself here's another example of one of these very dogmatic statements I particularly like this one it's from Richard Dawkins he says it's absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution that person is either ignorant stupid or insane and then he adds parenthetically or wicked but I'd prefer not to think about that I thought that was rather sporting of him not to consider that people who disagree with him are wicked in any case these types of so this was in the New York Times and they are these major cultural purveyors of opinion have been almost unanimous in their claim that contemporary evolutionary theory is without flaws and is accepted by an overwhelming majority of all reasonable and informed people especially scientifically informed people now that I think is covering up what's what's really going on in evolutionary biology in my book Darwin's doubt I described in the in the preface to the book what I framed is a huge disparity in fact I argued that there's never been such a great disparity between the statements in favor of the theory by leading popularizers on the one hand and the actual status of the theory as you learn about it in peer-reviewed relevant technical articles so let's get into this a little more this is a book that was published about a group of evolutionary biologists called the Altenburg 16 these are evolutionary biologists who are basically saying hey we need a new theory neo-darwinism is dead the mutation selection mechanism does not purchase any genuine novelty it's not creative we need some new mechanisms to supplement compliment extend or replace than the neo-darwinian that we all learn about in our high school biology college textbooks the subtitle kind of tells it all that author is saying look this the Darwin industry is way beyond what what the what the facts will support now this is obviously a theological context we're in a church and we're in a seminary where there are theological scholars and biblical scholars and we JP Moreland and dr. Goodman I and two other editors to scientific editors I put together this book in a way because we want to speak directly to the same group of people that the theistic evolutionists are speaking to the Bible scholars and theologians and church leaders who have been told and I would say in some cases bullied into thinking that they have to read the the Bible the biblical text through an evolutionary lens they have to read the Bible as if it were known by all reasonable people the contemporary evolutionary theory is true and indisputable and we want to dispute that and I speaking as a Christian layman but also a proponent of the theory of intelligent design want to relieve theologians of the sense of intellectual obligation that they must genuflect before this alleged consensus in favor of a theory which in fact is crumbling now I'm not denying that there are attempts to supplement the evolutionary mechanism with new mechanisms and the evolutionary biologists are all not they're not all rushing to embrace the theory of intelligent design that I hold but they are certainly raising very formidable questions about the standard theory that has been presented as the consensus view and the new views that are being presented as all show as I get more into the talk are themselves not solving the problems that have been raised there is not a consensus around any evolutionary mechanism that has genuine creative power so anyway what I'd like to do today now is in a sense liberate at least the the theological inclined folks in the audience from thinking that they need to reformulate their theological understanding in light of evolutionary theory and I want to show you why the equation of God's creative power with the mechanism of natural selection and random mutation is not credible it makes very little sense to say God used mechanism X to create when mechanism X demonstrably lacks creative power so let's get into that first of all let's talk a little bit about what theistic evolution is and then I want to I wanted to critique the evolution part of the istic evolution but it's very important to understand the term evolution first it can have multiple meanings so in the book we were very careful to point out that depending on which meaning of the term evolution you embrace the term theistic evolution or the concept of evolution theistic evolution can either be problematic or not for example there's a very innocuous meaning of evolution which just means change over time nearly no one disputes this some people and that's because there's such good observational evidence for this idea of change over time for one thing life today is very different than the life that's documented in the fossil record and so we can see that change has occurred that's a meaning that almost no one disputes secondly we see the small scale variations of the kind I described earlier with the Galapagos finches or the famed peppered moth example or the acquisition of antibiotic resistance in bacterial organisms these type of small-scale variation is well documented and well observed and virtually no one disputes it so if you want to say I believe in God and I believe in that kind of evolution you have no quarrel with any of the speakers tonight or any of the authors and contributors to our book a second meaning of evolution is slightly more contentious this is the idea that not only has there been change over time but the change has been continuous over a long period of time such that the history of life can be best depicted or represented is a great branching tree in which is in which the branches at the top of the tree represent all the forms of life we see today the giraffes and the heffalumps and the fish and the birds and whatever there are no heffalumps though I think that's Winnie the Pooh in any case but all those forms of life today have evolved or changed or transformed they've morphed and changed from one simple or very few simple organisms way back a long time ago this is the great Darwinian tree of life the idea that everything is connected by common ancestry in this theory or notion of evolution we might call this evolution number two all is what's known as the theory of universal common descent or universal common ancestry for those of us who are proponents of intelligent design that's not the thing that we mainly are challenging but in our book we do raise scientific challenges to the theory of universal common descent in the new book on theistic evolution you can have a look at that the most important and contentious idea of evolution though is the third meaning this is the cause of the change that is depicted in the Tree of Life or the alleged cause and that is the idea of natural selection acting on random variations or a particular type of variation known as a mutation a random change in the sequence of characters in the genetic molecule DNA now and according to modern forms of Darwinian theory modern neo-darwinism this mechanism of mutation acting on natural selection acting on random mutation is capable of producing all new forms of all the new forms of life that have arisen since the beginning of life on earth all those forms of life depicted by the Tree of Life and that mechanism is also sufficient to account for the appearance of design that biologists almost universally recognized in all forms of life Richard Dawkins is famously said biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose keyword appearance that's classical Darwinian thinking and classical modern Darwinian thinking things look designed think coiled nautilus structure of the eye the plumbing and electrical system of the heart the intricate molecular machines inside cells lots of appearance of design but that appearance is an illusion because there's an unguided undirected process known as natural selection acting on random mutations which can produce the appearance of design without being designed or guided in any way and that's the thing that is most at issue in the debate is they're an unguided undirected process that is truly creative that can produce all the new forms of life and the appearance of design that they manifest increasing number of leading neo-darwinism saying well our mechanism actually can't get that done we need some new mechanisms now I think it's important for folks again I'm these are the same quotes from Deborah Hersman about linking the idea of natural selection with God's creativity what I want now to do is to explain some of the challenges to scientific challenges to the creative power of natural selection so in a sense people will feel relieved of the intellectual obligation to read the biblical text or to alter theological doctrines in light of this alleged consensus here's some reasons why here's some reasons that increasingly scientists are doubting the creative power of the selected mutation mechanism the first concerns what is in some ways the most fundamental question in all of biology and that is the origin of genetic and other forms of biological information I used to ask my students if you want to give your if you want to give your computer a new function what do you have to give it code thank you I didn't mean to make you all pretend to be my students but yeah you need code right you need software you need instructions the same thing turns out to be true in life there are many events in the history of life where you get an abrupt appearance of brand-new forms of life emerging in the fossil record in the new book on theistic evolution we look at 17 different abrupt appearance events in one particular chapter written with the german paleontologist gunther back Beckley i wrote a book on one of those big events called the Cambrian explosion but to produce those new forms of life requires new types of cells and those new types of cells require new molecules called proteins and those proteins are built from instructions encoded in the DNA molecule so to build new forms of life you need new code you need new instructions just as is the case in our computer software world now all of this understanding kind of flows from the fame discovery by Watson and Crick in 1953 in which they elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule and then four years later had an amazing aha moment then this was mainly Crick four years later he formulated something known as the sequence hypothesis in which he realized that there were particular subunits of the DNA molecule depicted here that are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written language or like the zeros and ones in a section of machine code the picture here is of the double heat the fame DNA molecule with the double helix on the outside of the helix are molecules sugar and phosphate subunits on the inside our subunits chemical subunits known as nucleotides or nucleotide bases and these bases are functioning Crick argued like alphabetic characters they are storing instructions for directing the construction of the crucial proteins that make life possible and this was an amazing breakthrough moment in the history of biology in other words information is running the show inside life in art I'm from Seattle and my office is in Redmond we're also the great Microsoft company is and in Seattle we have the Microsoft company we've got all kinds of tech companies we also have the Boeing Company Microsoft makes code Boeing uses code to construct airplanes it's a process that's called computer assisted design and engineering or a CAD CAM so you have an engineer sitting at a console writing some code the code goes down a wire it's translated into another machine language that can be read by a menu fracturing apparatus and that code might be taken and used to say place rivets on the airplane wing in exactly the right place so you have digital information directing the construction of a mechanical system I don't have time to go into all the details of the science of this there's an animation on my website on Darwin's comm called journey inside the cell that explains how this process works it's absolutely fascinating but the long and the short of it is that inside living systems you have digital information directing the construction of protein machines machineries machinery made of proteins it's unbelievably sophisticated information in nanotechnology and that has raised as crucial question in the history of life which is where does the information come from we know what it does but we don't know where it comes from and every time a new form of life arises we now understand that such a form would have required a big infusion of new information where where would that information come from now that's the thing that the neo-darwinian mechanism one of the things that the neo-darwinian mechanism is having a very hard time explaining in the information science is a distinction is made between essentially a random or merely complex sequence like the one on the top of the screen you see and a sequence which is complex in that it's not repetitive like a mantra but it also performs a communication function or has a meaning can you see that there's a qualitative difference between the sequence on the top and the sequence on the bottom okay the kind of information that's present in the DNA molecule is like it is the kind that's present in this in the sequence on the bottom it's complex it's not simply repetitive but it performs a communication function it directs the construction of all those protein molecules now so that that's the kind of information that needs to be explained every time we get something new arising in life but according to the neo-darwinian story the neo-darwinian mechanism works in the fall way that once you have a functional section of DNA called a gene then little random changes will accumulate over time and those random changes will generate completely new genes that can build completely new proteins and protein machines the problem with that for anyone who's had any background and say computer science is as you begin to think about that you realize we'll wait a minute that means that essentially random changes in an already functional informational a functional sequence are going to over time accumulate and generate something functionally novel and also good functional and I many times we'll just ask computer scientists in the in the audience if you've got a section of code and you start introducing random changes to your zeros and ones are you likely to generate something a new operating system or program or are you gonna get bugs and glitches and the programmers usually laugh because they know that long before you get to something fundamentally new you're gonna destroy the function you had already okay now it turns out there's a reason for that and it's mathematical and that is that in any what's called a combinatorial system that might contain information where you could have different combinations of characters there are vastly more ways of going wrong than there are of going right for example in the English language for every word of 12 letters there are about 100 trillion ways of arranging those same letters that will not get you any points on the Scrabble board the ratio of the functional to the gibberish is very very very tiny okay now as the first big skeptics of the neo-darwinian theory starting to emerge in the in the mid to late 60s and they were they were mainly mathematicians physicists computer scientists and a lot of them came from MIT they had they had a conference in 1966 the Wistar Institute called mathematical challenges to neo-darwinism and it was based on this basic intuition that if you have a combinatorial system that contains information there's a whole lot more ways of arranging characters that are going to give you gibberish than are given and give you function or or meaning and one of the leaders of this this conference marie eden a professor of computer science at MIT in the 60s said no currently existing formal language can tolerate random changes in the symbol sequences in which which express its sentences meaning is almost invariably destroyed and that intuition he thought applied to biology as the biologists were telling them they're their engineering colleagues more and more about the wonderful information processing system and storage system in DNA and the cell the engineers who are in those conversations with their colleagues were saying but wait a minute if what you're saying is true about life that it's the DNA is literally containing information in a digital form it's gonna be subject to this same problem random changes they're gonna degrade its meaning its function long before you get to something new and useful so they ended up calling a conference about this explored you know there were two sides the biologists and the math people were far going back and forth they couldn't entirely solve the problem and I want you to understand the problem maybe in terms of something a little bit more familiar and then I'll bring you up to date on this this is a bike lock for dials how many possible ways of arranging that 10 characters on each dial 4 plus I don't know 10 plus 10 plus 10 plus 10 right trick question right it's 10 times 10 times 10 times 10 so it's 10,000 possible combinations that's why a bike lock works right if every combination allowed you to open the lock you wouldn't fool any thieves so you want to hide the combination in the big space of possibilities so the thief doesn't have enough time to find the combination right okay so imagine I've got a thief out beside the church who's found a nice bike that he wants to steal and his counters a lock like this is it more likely that the thief will succeed fail in solving the problem of finding the combination at random fail right everybody say fail I've just asked you another trick question what's tricky about my question we need to know something else don't we somebody said time we need to know how many opportunities the thief has to sample the combinations at random I'm a little bit prone to nerdiness and one time I actually made this calculation that if the thief has 15 our sampling the combination one every 10 seconds after about 15 hours the thief will sample more than 5,000 combinable combinations at which point it becomes more likely that he'll succeed than fail right so in that case well then the answer to my question is it's more likely the success is more likely so what's my illustration pointing out it's pointing out that if you want to assess the plausibility of a random search for functional information you need to know something about the size of the space that needs to be searched that is the number of possibilities that need to be searched and you also need to know something about how many opportunities there are to do the searching all right now let's let's change the thought experiment just a little bit let's imagine now this lock gotten the same thief out there more likely that the thief will succeed or fail now it is true it's more likely because here's the math I've done this as well if the thief lives to be a hundred years old samples one combination every 10 seconds takes no potty breaks never stops to eat has no dates the thief will sample only about 3% of the total combinations in a hundred years so in that case is overwhelmingly more likely that the thief will fail than it is that the thief will succeed now you're asking what on earth does this have to do with biology well remember is talking about the DNA molecule and how it built proteins okay proteins are long-chain like molecules that are made of subunits called amino acids and I've represented them with these snap-loc believes that Bach said ages two to four but I hope you won't defendant and there are happens that there are 20 or so protein forming amino acids different you can think of a different color bead 20 different kinds but to get a a protein to fold into a shape that will cause it to do a job you have to have just the right amino acid at most of these sites so that the forces between them will cause the protein to fold into a particular shape okay now that raises the question well how does the functioning protein get the right arrangement of amino acids so it folds into the right shape so it'll perform a function well that's where the DNA comes in the DNA has the instructions that cause the amino acids to the right amino acids to attach at the right site line up in the right way to get the fold in the function okay so information producing a functional molecule all right that's the awesome thing but here's the deal here's my question you can see that that's this is kind of a combinatorial system there's lots of different combinations of amino acids and lots of different combinations of those a C's GS and T's on the DNA so the question is in the case of is is the mutation selection case where we're relying on a random search to generate new functional information is that more like case one where the lock is small enough that you've got enough time to search with the four dials or is it more like case two where the lock is so long with so many combinations that the number to search is prohibitive is it more like the first case for the second case that's essentially what the the scientists at the Wistar Institute were debating back in 1966 okay well right on its face you'd want to say it's more like the second case because these molecules of protein molecules to get any kind of three-dimensional structure need at least 75 different amino acids but most proteins are on the order of several hundreds like the average is about 300 amino acids long so that would lead you to think oh the search is just going to be prohibitive except that unlike the bike lock case there is more than one arrangement that will fold into a functional protein out those billions of possibilities so didn't to really answer the question we need to know the ratio of the functional to the non functional Arrangements everyone following okay and this has actually been now established it wasn't known in 1966 1967 but in other words the question is for every folded protein like this that make that will do a job how many gibberish sequence are there that will I limp and not do anything and I have a colleague who worked 14 years at Cambridge University to experimentally decide this question his name is douglas axe he was a Caltech PhD at Caltech then did 12 14 years at Cambridge as a postdoctoral researcher and he asked this crucial question how common or rare are the functional sequences of amino acids among all the possible combinations of amino acids and his experimental research was based on a thing called site-directed mutagenesis determined a ratio of 1 over 10 to the 77th power so in other words we're not dealing with a for dialogue or 10 dialogue we're dealing with a well let's see I had a neat flu animation thing there a 77 dialogue is it spinning and not really anyway you got the idea for hibbett of well wait a minute I can't say for hibbett of yeah can i because what else do I need to know time how many opportunities are there to search the space well it turns out there's an answer to that there have only been 10 to the 40th organisms in the whole history of life on Earth you would get to shuffle new DNA every time an organism replicates so they've been 10 to the 40th of replication opportunities so that's 10 to the 40th opportunities to search the space of possibilities to try to come up with a new functional DNA molecule that could build a new functional protein that's a lot 10 to the 40 is a lot but it's tiny compared to 10 to the 77 you remember it from math when you get exponents you what do you do with the attribute subtract right so 10 to the 40 over 10 to the 77 is 1 over 10 to the 37 so what does that say that says in essence that if every replication event in the history of life on earth on this planet from the beginning of time till now had been too voted to seeking for a new DNA molecule capable of generating a new protein it would only search 110 trillion trillion trillionth of the possibilities my tonday like was $10 lakh example was 3% this is 1/10 trillion trillion trillionth which means it's overwhelmingly more likely that such a mechanism will fail to produce new genetic information than it is that it will succeed in the known time of life on earth just to shift the visual image imagine a great big haystack the size of the state of Arizona looking for a tiny needle hidden somewhere in the Grand Canyon not it's overwhelmingly more likely that such a search will fail and for that reason more and more evolutionary biologist molecular biologist protein scientists are saying not a plausible mechanism for generating new information okay now that is one of four major problems with evolutionary theory that we address in the new theistic evolution book I also discuss several these in the in the book the my book Darwin's doubt so the question is then well what did the evolutionary biologist doing in response to problems like this and some of these are even deeper turns out that the information in DNA is not even all the information you need you need higher levels of information to build new forms of animal life this is called the problem of epigenetic information that's needed to build not just proteins but new body plans and whole new or new organs and body plans well what's happening in evolutionary theory is that lots of new models mechanisms and theories are being proposed started back in the 70s with Stephen Jay Gould and the idea of punctuated equilibrium it continued with theories called self-organization at the conference last year in the at the Royal Society in London a lot of additional models were proposed but these models are themselves encountering the same problem they can't explain the origin of new information is a fascinating new model where the scientists as well what we're learning is that mutations aren't random there's some kind of pre-programmed adaptive capacity that allows organisms to respond to stressors from their environment and that's a really cool new insight into how biology works the only problem is the scientist James Shapiro from the University of Chicago doesn't explain where that pre-programmed adaptive capacity comes from he shows that the mutations aren't random there there there's a pre-programming that biases the mutations or the changes but that biasing is instantiated in other code whereas that code would come from he doesn't say so none of these new models are solving this fundamental problem the origin of information even people who were excited about the new conference the conference in 2016 at the Royal Society were disappointed at the outcome Susan Missouri who was one of the leaders in this Altenburg 16 group said the conference was characterized by a lack of momentum sness there wasn't a lot of new models or there were new there weren't new mechanisms proposed that would solve the problem and so for me this gets back to the the issue that we started with so strange to have leading evolutionary by our leading people in the Christian academic world urging the church to accept evolutionary theory as the hermeneutic the interpretive lens through which they understand theology when evolution evolutionary biology itself is in a state of crisis and so my question to those folks is why attempt to reconcile claims about the creative power of evolutionary mechanisms with a biblical understanding of divine creation if the scientific evidence increasingly cast doubt on the creative power of those mechanisms we now have some time for well let's say I got another I got another minute you may wonder I just cited Susan Missouri and characterized the results of the of the conference at the Royal Society and have described the state of affairs in evolutionary biology I've made an argument about this problem of the origin of information in the book Darwin's doubt and and and summarize that in our new book on theistic evolution you may wonder what leading people on the other side have said about that because I think it allows you to assess the strength of the argument I'm making this was the review of my book that have cured in science and it was written by a leading evolutionary biologist at the University of California Berkeley he said that Myers case depends upon the claim of the origin of new animal body plans requires vast amounts of new genetic information that's correct that's my argument in fact our present understanding of body plan building morphogenesis indicates that new phyla new animal forms were not made by new genes but largely emerged through the rewiring of gene regulatory networks of already existing genes here's my contention you don't need a PhD in biology to get a sense of where this debate is going a gene regulatory network is a network of different genes that are involved in building a whole new organ system each gene contains lots of new information professor Marshall says Myer is wrong you don't need new genetic information all you need is for the evolutionary process to rewire these networks of genes so that they'll produce new animal forms but genes contain information so to explain the origin of information he simply begs the question as to prior unexplained sources of information just as that model I told you about a minute ago does the theory of natural genetic engineering so this problem of the origin of information is unsolved and that's one of the reasons it seems very odd to us that we have leading people in the in the in the religious world in the Christian world saying hey other people you need to get on board and accept Darwinism or you're gonna be intellectually out-of-date the problem Darwinism is not solved nor has its subsequent models solved this crucial problem of the origin of form and information thank you very much we're gonna give you the opportunity both here and if you're watching by Facebook you'll be able to ask some questions over the next few minutes and we'll have a couple more q and A's yet this evening but if you'll notice we've put a couple of microphones up in the center of these two middle aisles and so if you have a question that you would like to ask just go ahead and go on up to the microphone and we will we'll recognize you in order and answer your question hello go ahead I'm just gonna take this off sorry hold on first I have a question have you ever been involved in any sort of scientific research yourself in a lab yes but in a different field in geophysics initially I'm a philosopher of biology and a theoretical biologist so I oversee a research program with many scientists who are doing lab work my role has typically been to synthesize that and to explain the research and to formulate the arguments that we're making on the basis of it so my conclusions are based on scientific research but I'm not a lab scientist myself at least not in my present manifestation okay um so before I go on I just wanted to mention that for the sake of my credibility I've been an undergraduate researcher for two years now in developmental biology I'm the only student at the University of Arizona who's fully funded by the National Institute of Health and I can say personally that the evidence I've seen working with the animals I do and the tissues that I do that the evidence for macro-evolution is astounding and my reasoning for that and I guess I have multiple questions for you but I'll try to make it simple my main question is for you how you would explain the existence of Hox genes and are you aware of what Hox genes are the couple chapters on that and my book Darwin's doubt okay yeah so I'm very curious as to what your explanation is for the existence of Hox genes and then one more thing I would like to argue is that how about we take that first and then I'll let you come back it on this next point okay okay all right so here's we can have a little conversation here I had to skip over some points but developmental biology is really critical to the case we're making against neo-darwinism and also the case that's coming out of evolutionary biology about the limitations of neo Darwinian theory and other evolutionary models there was some important research that was done in the 80s by two scientists who won a Nobel Prize Christian Newsline Villard and Eric V shells and it was precisely on the issue of developmental biology they studied the hapless fruit fly which folks in your field like to torture I think in order to get secrets of nature but what they discovered as they were trying to map the fruit fly they were basically reverse engineering the fruit fly genome and what they what they did is they knock out genes and then they'd see well what went wrong in the fruit flies development you knock out this one in the Wingo's wonky or knock out this one in the III it doesn't develop properly so by doing this kind of reverse engineering they were able to map the fruit fly genome they also made an incredible discovery and that is that the if the mutations that they induced were expressed early in the development of the organism that development just shut down that they did not get the fruit fly to develop properly now this is presents a profound problem for evolutionary theory because the kinds of mutations you would need to develop a whole new form of animal a new body plan would need to occur early because if they do if they occur late in development after cell differentiation has taken place the cells are only going to affect the cluster of cells in that particular region of the animal so to get the whole form to change globally or universally you've got to get the mutations to occur early but Newsline vole hard and Wiesel's discovered those are the very mutations that are in invariably deleterious or lethal and they called this problem the problem of embryonic lethal so the this now gets to your question about Hawks teams Hox genes are genes that are sort of master regular laters that will coordinate a number of different other genetic the expression of other genes during development but they don't occur at the very beginning development they curl a teranas already laid down so oftentimes people will cite Hox genes or mutations and Hox genes as a solution to the problem that I was raising earlier but in fact the Hox genes don't solve the fundamental problem which is getting the the you what you need is a beneficial body plan changing mutation to occur we get benefit we get body plan changing mutations that are deleterious we get mutations that occur late in development that don't affect body plans but we don't get early acting beneficial body plan mutations and that's what you need for a fundamental innovation to take place so that's my answer to your question about Hox genes but also one of the reasons that we would strongly dispute that the field of developmental biology is providing support for evolutionary theory rather than posing an even more severe question than I had time to talk about my main remarks I won't ask my other question but I will provide one counter-argument to what you just said real quick is and I guess my question now is how would you then explain the existence of these Hawks genes and every single species that humans are aware of I would explain them by design I think there are excellent regulators there switches that the Hawks tease have been likened to a conductor coordinating all the other instruments so I think that's elegant design to have an informational system that will coordinate the expression of other information I am an evolutionary creationist by the way so thank you what are you talking good question thank you thank you very much go ahead greetings thank you for coming to Arizona and all the work you do 80 I'm sorry gadelle it does not I don't need thanks to come to your nice climate so well thank you for all the work you do with the Discovery Institute yeah my question is the following in in kind of evolutionary theory it seems to me that there are several ideas or several pillars there's this idea of random mutation and natural selection but then there's also common descent right and so let's just say for the sake of argument random mutation natural selection can't do this it doesn't have the creative power to create new genes or your body plans or any of those things that doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't common descent and if you have a guided you know God changes the genes properly and does the miraculous thing of finding the exact right combination at the right moments you can have common descent right which is I think a lot of what theistic evolutionists believe they think oh yeah well okay random mutation natural selection can't do it but God did it and that's how you still get you know common descent yeah this is where we just get into some real the it's the definitional fuzziness of this debate okay you're right a lot of the theistic evolutionist have now are now backing off from claims about the sufficiency of mutation and selection and merely defending common descent in the the article of by Deb Kozma from which I quote she starts by claiming that the mutation selection mechanism is God's Way of creating but she provides no evidence for the creative power of that mechanism in her entire article but does argue for universal common descent but that's a really a different question so I acknowledge that that is kind of the rhetorical position of many theistic evolutionists in the book for reasons I did not have time to explain we do provide a critique of the theory of universal common descent I've almost for a very long time than skeptical about it it's not and I need to stimulate it's not something that for example proponents of intelligent design are specifically contesting that's not our big thing where our argument is is the was their agency involved detectable agency intelligence or was it undirected okay and one of the things we've been asking our colleagues in the theistic evolution or evolutionary creationist movement is what do you think is this directed or undirected when they start talking about God doing things that's a form of intelligent design but they also say they're opposed to intelligent design so we've been asking for clarification about what their actual view is on on that question of whether the evolutionary mechanism or process is directed or undirected but as to common descent there is a lot there are a lot more scientific reasons to dispute it or to contest it or doubt it sorry that our word then are commonly reported and in the new book on theistic evolution we have a very good section on that there's an an article just on the fossil record that I co-wrote with distinguished paleontologists from Germany Gunter Beckley and we write about the pattern of abrupt appearance in the fossil record which is really striking because it's very striking because it's very contrary to the continuous picture of the tree of life that we get in the textbooks what you get in the fossil record especially the higher taxonomic levels of phylum class order is abrupt appearance of major groups with no discernable connection to ancestral forms in the lower strata so I think it's it's an aspect of evolutionary theory about which there ought to be at least more critical thinking and an open-minded skepticism rather than just you know kind of arguing that every all reasonable people agree I think there are there are reasons to doubt common descent as well thank you also if I could follow up yeah is there a place that you can direct us to a resource where some plausible explanation for why there are certain animals that appear in the fossil record up here and certain ones that appear here and you know why there isn't a direct or is directly yeah I think I would recommend this check this chapter in the theistic evolution book by Beckley and unfortunately Maier it's it's and it's just the beginning for things that Beckley is writing he's really brilliant longtime curator at the struck art museum of natural history in Germany we first learned about him when he he emailed me in 2009 and said would you please contact me but please not by email not at the museum call me at home between the hours of whatever 7:00 and 9:00 I did and learned that his first thing was that he had a problem he was the public spokesman for the 200 year anniversary celebration for Darwin's birth and 150th anniversary of the Origin of Species he created a museum display where he had a scales of justice with the Origin of Species on one side and books by intelligent design proponents on the other and it was set up so that the one book by Darwin outweighed them all and he had a colleague who said well you know you're gonna you're gonna be asked questions about this in the media because you're our spokesman you better read the books by the ID people and he said I did and now I got a problem and he started to become persuaded by those books and and he's thinking deeply about the fossil record there's another fossil record problem it's called the waiting times problem turns out that in population genetics you can using population genetics you can quantify how much evolutionary change to take place in the given amount of time if you know certain parameters like the generation time and the mutation rate and the population size and the amount of change that's taking place in these abrupt appearance events is far beyond what you would expect given the amount of time available to the evolutionary process it exceeds the expected way or the amount of change the amount of time required to produce the amount of change observed exceeds the calculable waiting times using standard population genetics which is the mathematical expression of neo-darwinism itself so that's another deep problem the fossil record thank you thank you yeah over here sorry for the long answer it's fine I very much enjoyed your talk I think everybody did by the way I don't have any credentials or any grants I've were mainly disreputable so don't worry i I've read something that you wrote that I would enjoy hearing from you about the irreducible complexity the organelle or organelle I guess it's in the cell wall of plants that somehow they've evolved oh you're talking about probably Michael B he's work on the bacterial flagella motor and you know he wrote in a extraordinary book in 1996 describing these miniature machines the nanotechnology that we're discovering in cells sliding clamps rotary engines little turbines a robotic walking motor proteins the kinesin motor proteins there are a couple maybe two or three dozen classes of these different nano machines that are being discovered inside cells they have the property of having multiple components that need to be working in coordination for there to be any function at all and so B he has argued that this is another challenge a deep challenge to the mutation selection mechanism because natural selection selects for functional advantage if you have a system of multiple parts that produces no function until you get the entire ensemble of parts working and coordination then there's nothing to select at many of the intermediate stages on the way from non function to function at which and if there's nothing to select then there's nothing for natural selection to do and the evolutionary process terminates at that point and so he said you know these things that give extraordinary appearance of design because of their exquisite machinery involved really are not explained by the designer substituting mechanism of mutation and selection and he argues if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck maybe it actually is a duck maybe it actually is designed there's a the claim as been a that B he's been refuted by in with respect to this the flagellar motor is amazing it's a third roughly thirty part nano machine that has a rotor a state Oh rings bushing a driveshaft other amazing machines are things like the ATP synthase I have one of those animated on the website Darwin's doubt com but in any case people have claimed to refute Vee by saying well there was a simpler subsystem of the flagellar motor that can exist in isolation of the motor the rest of the motor as a whole it's got a little ten parts syringe like thing called a type 3 secretory system lots of problems with that it turns out when you do the genetic analysis on it the type 3 secretory system appears to be a devolution Airy breakdown product of the Aboriginal more complex system not an evolutionary precursor and in any case the 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 part all those intermediate stages are the intermediate steps are not functional so VG's argument I don't think really has been refuted despite claims to the contrary on the internet sorry for that quick answer and I think we'll take these and then I'm off the stage for JP sorry dr. Maier I've been following the Discovery Institute blog for a long time and the podcast but my question was when I was reading through Darwin's down most of what I saw was connected to the animal fossil record is there anything comparable in the plant fossil record where we see a emergence of plant phyla suddenly yeah it was it was what Darwin called his abominable mystery it's the sudden emergence of flowering plants in the Cretaceous it's equally dramatic it's one of this 17 separate abrupt appearance radiations or events that dr. Beckley and I described in the article in the theistic evolution book on a common descent in the fossil record so yes in plants but also birds mammals the first reptiles turtles I mean there's many many many different classes of organisms that come abruptly into the record and it's it's a kind of Stephen Jay Gould calls it the trade secret of paleontology I'm seeing a common theme here that people need to buy the book it's a behemoth so I warned you to make city nice doorstop - yeah if you had follow-up and then I should get off here yeah I just had the one observation when I was in college as a younger student I remember being told over and over again that grasses evolved during the Ice Age or close to it approximately 40 million years ago and then it was relatively recently we discovered that dinosaurs have been eating grass all along by studying fossilized dinosaur manure and okay all of a sudden they had to change the theory and rewrite everything but it's like that's just - oh I remember it yeah something that's just the understandable revision that takes place in the in the process of science but the there is a very systematic misrepresentation of the status of evolutionary theory in a lot of textbooks in a lot of popular sources when you get into the technical stuff you find a Oh the overwhelming pattern in the fossil record is sudden appearance and stasis it's not continuity as you first encounter when you see the pictures of the history of life I know I was just scratching my head over I encountered that and then all of a sudden these scientists and I'm a blanky lab biologist with an MS but it's like I saw them change their Theory all of a sudden and be very willing to rewrite everything but they are much more resistant to changing a theory another yeah if some of that is changing a good point and I you know maybe I'll take your question separately I hate to shut you off but we got JP yeah I need to get up so thank you very much and for the excellent question we do have a facebook question that we will that will address when the when the panel comes later on and you yeah we have a panel at the end so you'll be able to address your question I want to introduce and he's already coming up come on up this is dr. JP Moreland PhD from the University of Southern California go Trojans I'm a I'm a Trojan dad so what can I say he's the distinguished professor of philosophy at Biola University and grab this he is the author of contributor to or editor of over 90 books including one perhaps one of the most significant the soul how we know it's real and why it matters in the next few minutes he is going to help us understand how theistic evolution kicks Christianity out of the plausibility structure and robs us as Christians of confidence that the Bible is a source of knowledge dr. JP Morgan well good evening it's wonderful to be with you I can hear me now good as a professional philosopher my job in the book was to edit the section on philosophy and how theistic evolution fares with regard to a set of philosophical issues that art can be raised against the theory in I wrote two chapters in the book and in one of the chapters I not only addressed certain philosophical issues but I applied them the general things in the culture that we're facing today and that was what I was asked to speak on in our time together now that I don't like long titles but this is the titled theistic evolution kicks Christianity out of the plausibility structure and robs Christians of confidence that the Bible is a source of knowledge now I have absolutely no idea what that just said so I'm gonna talk on something else tonight no I do have at least some some intelligible understanding so let me just first of all ask what is a plausibility structure well it's it cultures have plausibility structures and what that means is that there will be a range of ideas in any culture that people would be willing to listen to a defense of even if they don't believe it but they might say you know I'm not I don't think that's true but I think it's plausible and I'd be willing to hear a case on its behalf and so for example somebody might think that humans are responsible for global warming but they would say I think it's plausible that that's not true and I'd be willing to hear a case on the other side of that one so that might be an issue in the plausibility structure by contrast that someone we're gonna hold a lecture at the Arizona State on evidence for a Flat Earth I don't think too many people would show up because that is just not inside the plausibility structure now what I'm going to argue is that theistic evolution actually places Christianity outside of the culture's plausibility structure so that people no longer consider the claims of Christianity to be plausible they won't they won't listen to it because it's not worth thinking about it's just not plausible and I'm going to try to also show that the istic evolution has contributed to Christians not having genuine confidence that the Bible is actually true and can be known to be true so let me start with a little background several years ago oz Guinness wrote a book called the gravedigger file and the book was about some human beings that were were sent by the devil to undermine the church and destroy it and the tactic they took was to feed the church ideas about things they could do that would accomplish short-term growth and success in the church but it would destroy the long-term health of the church over the long haul and so for example let's dumb down sermons but it'll pack people in because they won't have to think too hard and will emphasize feelings to the exclusion of the mind and people like that so the church is going to succeed but over the long run it will destroy the church because after about 10 years of this nobody will listen to Christianity any longer now that is what I think is happening today with evolutionary creationism I don't think it's intentional I think most of theistic evolutionists are good-hearted and and are sincere in what they're doing but this is an unforeseen consequence that that I'm observing so let me tell you why I think this is happening several years ago I spoke at a church in Seattle and I was coming home on Sunday morning and I made a beeline for the Seattle Times and I moved quickly to the editorial page and there on the front page of the Seattle Times was a page and a half editorial now that's a long editorial and it was syndicated so that means that this was shown all over in newspapers all over the country and the claim of the article is that we now live at the time this was written in the most divided period in the history of the United States since the Civil War I believe that division is gone has become greater but that's not relevant to my purpose what is relevant and I think he was right about this yes what the author said was the fundamental thing dividing the American people and I practically fell off my chair when I read it he said the fundamental thing that's dividing us is not politics you could have fooled me it's not gender it's not race it's not socioeconomic status the fundamental thing that is dividing us is worldview world view people's worldview what they believe is real what they believe is true what they think you can know and what they think you can only believe in and I think that he was fun he was right about that because these other divisions are actually tips of the iceberg which are expressions of the underlying struggle over worldview now today there are three worldviews that are struggling in the world of ideas for the minds and hearts of your neighbors and your children and the Institute's of power in the United States and Europe namely the universities and these in the school system and the three worldviews are historic Christianity I think that's one of the three that I would identify as as being viable the most dominant worldview is scientific naturalism which is basically the idea that the only way you can know reality is through the methods of the hard sciences and the only thing that's real is the physical universe and matter and forces and things of that sort the other worldview is what I call neo-marxist post-modernism this is behind the current social justice a diversity white privilege movement that doesn't come from Christianity it comes from neo Marxism and it is of you that there just is no objective reality or truth and and anybody who claims to know something is actually trying to gain power over other people so there is no such thing as knowledge now these other two worldviews don't like each other but they have something in common that is against the Christian worldview and here it is there is no such thing as knowledge of reality outside the hard sciences let me say that again there is no such thing as knowledge of reality outside the hard sciences now what that means is that our caste as Christians today is not to proclaim that Christianity is true that's still an issue but that's not the fundamental issue the fundamental issue is whether or not you can know that the core claims of Christianity are true the reason that's important it is is because it's knowledge not faith or leave that gives people the right to act in public it's because the dentist has a body of knowledge that he can get in my mouth and pull my molars if he came up and said you know I got to tell you I've got some deeply deeply held beliefs about molars and decay and I've actually put together some really cool music I sing and I pull my hands up without molars and stuff once a week yeah but I don't really know much about him he's not getting in my mouth it is knowledge that gives you authority to speak in act in public and it's knowledge not faith or belief that gives you confidence in what you believe thus if the only knowledge that's available is through the hard sciences then Christianity is no longer something that can be known to be true and it will eventually become placed outside the plausibility structure and people will have to choose to be Christians and remain Christians by a pure arbitrary act of blind faith now just to illustrate this I want to read to you something from a document that was written a fair time ago that was called the California framework that instructed public school administrators and teachers about the teaching of evolution especially when religious children came and disputed it now here's what the framework says that time some students may insist that certain conclusions of science cannot be true because of certain religious or philosophical beliefs that they hold it is appropriate for the teacher to express in this regard I understand that you may have personal reservations about accepting the scientific evidence but it is scientific knowledge about which there is no reasonable doubt among scientists in their field and it is my responsibility to teach it be as it as part of our common intellectual heritage now the issue is not evolution or creation here the issues about knowledge listen to the terms used in association with science certain conclusions evidence scientific knowledge no reasonable doubt our intellectual heritage science is treated as a cognitive field where you can know what's real and true based on solid objective evidence listen to the words used for religion beliefs well that's how the personal reservation is the personal reservations about this I don't know Mom and Dad don't like this and so what you have in the governing of the California school public schools is the precise thing that I'm saying they have already foreclosed on the knowledge question knowledge is limited to the hard sciences it cannot come in any theological or other sort of way and so as a result then of this worldview struggle the postmodern the The Naturalist and the Christian worldview struggle a new epistemology an epistemology is a theory of how we know things and what we can know and what we really just have to believe in but can't know to be true and that new epistemology that I've already mentioned is called scientism it's roughly the idea that the only thing you can know is what can be tested improved in the hard sciences or that the hard sciences provide vastly superior knowledge to any other field of study so I was years ago given your the Angela sztyc talk that a at a home group in a home and there were about 30 people that came probably about 1/3 non-christians a friend said I'm gonna bring my boss PhD in physics from Johns Hopkins he's been an engineer for 30 years and he hates Christianity and he's I'm gonna bring him and I said well thanks for tipping me off about it so he why while I see my friend come in I'm at the order table and he walks in with this I could tell it's his friends and they come and shake my hand and after we exchanged pleasantries he says right off to me said say I understand you're a philosopher a theologian and I said well you know I give him my best shot and he said yeah he said I used to be interested in that stuff myself when I was a teenager but when I matured intellectually I gave it up and I began to realize that if you can't test it and prove it in the laboratory empirically then it's nothing but a bunch of hot air and idle opinion that's scientism now I asked him if what he just said could be tested empirically in the lab and of course the answer was no and then he went on and kept talking for about two minutes and I finally said I gotta put my is exploding you said that the only thing if you can't prove it scientifically in the hard sciences it can't be known and you've uttered maybe 60 assertions in the last two minutes and I can't think of a single one of them that could be proven scientifically if I'm wrong which one was it but if I'm right then that means what you've been saying for the last two minutes has been by your own admission nothing but a bunch of hot air it was kind of a quick conversation then we moved on to the meeting but that actually that actually happened now given this I believe that many if not most theistic evolutionists not all but most of them accept some version of scientism Karl Giberson who's a physicist and a veteran of one of the leaders of the BioLogos movement he and I had a debate a few years ago and he said let me be clear when it comes to knowing reality by far our most superior knowledge of reality is what the hard scientists tell us is real now that means that when science and the theological or biblical claim come into conflict it turns out to be a monologue not a dialogue and as William Lane Craig told me whenever a scientist makes a statement that conflicts with what scripture seems to teach or theology teaches all the theologians wave a white flag need ID in the foxholes because as Steve pointed out they've been bullied into thinking that that science carries the authority and culture and their theology is and religious claims are more matters of personal faith now the this means then that theistic evolution becomes the grave digger of the church now how so by undergirding the belief in scientism remember how well when science and the Scriptures appear to be saying different things guess what's got to go it's got to be scripture and so by promoting scientism you end up getting a revisionist view of the Bible and the Bible is constantly being revised so that it comports nicely with the most recent scientific theories so that there's no conflict and we don't have to be embarrassed by the Bible first place this was done was in the early chapters of Genesis where theistic evolution has revised those early chapters of Genesis in ways that I find be very difficult to understand if you were trying to keep treat the text responsibly but once the revisionists camel's nose gets under the tent you can't keep them there and once the revisionism started in theistic evolution it's now spread when it comes to science we now have a revisionism among a vast number of fish stone scholars call physicalism it's the idea that neuroscience has pretty much proven there's no such thing as a soul so you're here brain and nervous system and guess what we now have discovered that the Bible is taught all along that there's no soul that you are just a physical object and and so we don't have to conflict with neuroscience in believing in an outdated useless notion that your body has within it something called the soul in ethics there has been revisionism about same-sex marriage and about homosexuality now the view is that this is genetically caused and thus people aren't responsible for that and so the Bible really doesn't teach against gay marriage or gay activity it really just teaches against promiscuous gay activity or perhaps gay activity associated with temple prostitution theology there's no hell a loving Jesus wouldn't ever conceive of the hell that's the Old Testament God and in therein it's a horrible notion and pluralism surely all different there are several different ways to God Christianity's my way but there are a lot of other ways to God as well and I would never be so intolerant and dogmatic as to assert that Christianity is the only way to God now can you imagine a lab instructor in a high school chemistry class saying be careful that's got hydrochloric acid in it and a student says hey would you stop legislating your chemistry on me that may be hydrochloric acid to you but it's lemonade to me come on man be tolerant we won't do that in science because we think that we can actually no claims in science but we will do that in religion because we nobody knows who's right when Oprah Winfrey used to have her show she held a whole hour on God whoever he she and her day is now she would never host the show on AIDS or some other disease because she's not a what she's not an expert what's an expert somebody who knows something if you are willing to speak authoritative ly about religion must mean you think there aren't any experts that means that you must believe nobody knows who she is and so it's all about your feelings and you can have your feelings and I have mine and there's none of this that's wrong now that is the result of scientism I've got a book coming out on scientism this fall that I think will take a very very very careful look at it now one other thing I'll mention is that the areas of the Bible that haven't been revised yet are still for Christians weakened in their rational authority because the idea is I'm gonna believe this but I'm gonna be a little bit tentative because who knows in 20 years this might be revised too so I don't want to be too dogmatic about this now the upshot of what I'm trying to suggest is that theistic evolution rather than helping people is helping them in the law in the short term but it's harming the church and it's harming our presentation of ourselves to the culture in the long run in the scientism is becoming the church's gravedigger now some people that are theistic evolutionists say that theistic evolution saved their faith and helped them tremendously in the end the argument is that when I was considering becoming a Christian I'm glad nobody strapped me with having to believe some kind of a creationist view and remember ideas not creationism I'm just telling you kind of how this works itself out and I'm glad I wasn't strapped with that and I believe in the resurrection and I believed in Jesus but there are some parts of the Bible that I think we've got to allegorize and treat metaphorically now I do think that that provides a short-term or a form of help and relief for people by the way if I were talking to somebody about Christ trying to lead them to Christ I wouldn't have them believe much of anything I wouldn't expect them to believe in the inerrancy the Bible or anything whatever about evolution at that point I keep the focus on Jesus Christ and who he was and lead them to Christ as best I can and then later on as they grow I would begin to introduce other ideas that I think would be a part of a biblical discipleship now and so I think that in the short term that might help people but in the long run this is just another example of what so many Christians see is compromised as kind of just belying up and giving up more territory when it's pretty clear to most people the Bible is not teaching that sort of thing and I think it robs people of confidence that the Scriptures can be trusted and it causes unbelievers to think that none of us really believes what we say we believe in the first place thank you very much once again we want to have to give you the opportunity to come to one of the two mics there in the center to ask a question and while we have some people doing that why don't we all just stand up and stretch our legs for a moment okay that's long enough because if we'll be here for 15 minutes if we draw it out so let's go ahead and we'll take the first question over here on this side yes sir thank you you you mentioned right at the end there the issue of a lover izing parts of Scripture yes beginning with the first part of Genesis yes of course that can happen in a lot of different contexts but on how how do you distinguish sort of superimposed feeling of an obligation to allegorize scripture from portions of Scripture such as talk of the wings of the Father that are obviously allegory yeah or metaphor on maybe a smaller scale um thank you your question presupposes something called epistemic Methodism and epistemic Methodism is the view that you have to know how to draw a line between two different things before you can recognize clear cases of them and so if I take a guy with a full head of hair and take one hair out as he bald no another here is he bald no looks like I could keep taking hairs one at a time out of his head and he'd never become bald well where do you draw the line between when he wasn't bald and when he was I don't need to know the answer to that before I can say I don't know but that dude's bald and that guy isn't and I think this is one of those cases I think what you do is start with clear cases and it seems it see as seemed to the vast majority of interpreters in the history of the church and who really took the Bible seriously that while the day the day issue from the very beginning was was considered to be something that was not that was that could have different meanings but the general Oh of the text was historical information and material and it could not be and there was a real Adam and Eve and that you can't treat that figuratively without destroying the the meaning of the text as Old Testament scholars who are committed to a scientific exegesis have regularly demonstrated and I think God having wings is it was pretty tough when you're dealing with a being that is infinite in order to have wings you have to have a boundary so the wings can stick to something God doesn't have a boundary so he couldn't in principle have wings so what I would do is take it on a case-by-case basis I would go from there to build principles of hermeneutical interpretation that then employ when you can allegorize and when you can't I would extend that to new cases that are a borderline cases that might cause me to have to revise the rule a little bit or it might be able to explain to borderline cases that's the way I think hermeneutics is developed and I don't think that you start that Enterprise by having to know where you draw the line thank you thank you this side yes would it be correct to sum up the theistic evolutionist worldview that one can only know God through signs and natural means and if so if that's if that's a correct summation of evolutionist worldview then I do see the danger in assuming that because me as a Christian you know I walk with Christ and being a Christian and being born again none of those things are scientifically provable it's a personal experience etc etc but I'm also reminded of romans 1 19 through 20 where it says for what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them or his invisible attributes namely his eternal power and by the times sake I let me just interrupt that's a good question actually mostly istic evolutionists who don't believe that they believe that there is a sense in which the heavens do reveal God's glory and that you can know God through personal experience or answers to prayer or through certain clear teachings and the scriptures that are pretty that are meant to be taken kind of straightforwardly and that Jesus rose from the dead what what is a difficulty though is that take Francis Collins for example he becomes pretty darn close to an intelligent design advocate when it comes to the cause of two issues and cosmology namely the exacts planation of the origin of the universe and the explanation for why the universe seems to be precisely fine-tuned so that life could appear in the first place and he says that the only rash the best rational explanation for those is that there is an intelligent creator designer god that set it up that way and we're saying a barely an amen why don't you allow us to just extend that into biology if the evidence warrants it and so the difficulty for in my opinion the theistic evolutionist is that while the sheer existence of the universe and its cosmological design can bear testimony to the glory of God it's very hard for me to see how the living world could do that for two reasons one it can be explained by purely natural processes and whatever God did has got to be in principle undetectable and so if you can't detect anything that God did it's very difficult to know how that's gonna give you a testimony his existence and glory the second problem is on a theistic evolutionary view God had all these different ways that he could have created the universe and guess the one he chose he chose a way to create life excuse me I mean life by means of a process that was filled with pain and horror and bloodshed and killing of animals and they pet that is very very hurtful to them and of all the ways he chose to create he chose the one that actually uses evil as a means towards creating if that process is the way that Almighty God chose to create he is not the God of glory in it as far as I can see that looks to me like kind of a monster someone else okay I won't trouble spicy what's the ontological status of randomness if you look in the Bible it seems like God God knows nothing of randomness if you look at our our science it seems like it knows nothing of design yeah I don't think I think it's very careful a very uh yet to be very careful when you read statements about Providence and this that and the other to take it too far and think that in that case there's a statement being made about whether there is such a thing as randomness or not so now randomness can be understood epistemological II or ontological II and I'll tell you what they mean in both senses the epistemological notion of randomness is two or more events that occur in a way that that appears to be by pure chance Fiat without any known explanation for why they appear that way and random sequences tend to fit a certain characterization they're they're simple and non repetitive and so so that's a pit that's primarily epistemological an auto logical understanding of randomness is the intersection of two events which in the chain of events leading up to them did not have a common antecedent let me say that again it's when two events intersect and you follow the causal chains that led up to those events occurring and they don't overlap anywhere I'll give you an example if a guy is walking a by a three-story building and he gets to a certain point and a can of paint falls off the roof and hits him in the head and if you chased the sequence of events that led up to him walking there and the sequence of events of the paint being put there where it was put and all that and if those don't have anything in common then it was a random it was ontologically random however if he's walking along and there's a tripwire and he he trips on the tripwire he stumbles forward and that causes the painting fall on him then those two events his stumbling across that area and the paint falling have a common ancestor that led to both of them now that is a sufficient characterization of ontological randomness I don't know that it's necessary there could be other characterizations how about one more run this time yes I agree last one yes thank you thank you I agree that we should not trivialize Scripture so I my question is how can we reconcile the idea of the heliocentric model that the Sun came first and then the earth came after the Sun with what scripture says that God created the earth and the land and the Seas and did those things and then after that he put the greater light in the lesser light in the in the expanse beneath the firmament which is supposed to be not gonna punt on that I'm gonna let Wayne answer it because that's more of an exegetical theological question I have my views on it but I'd rather kind of stick to philosophical sorts of questions since that's my role in the book of my expertise okay thank you yeah no no why don't you ask when wink is up all right I think just for times sake thank you and appreciate you being here thank you thank you dr. Moreland you're probably looking at your watch and going how in the world is our next speaker gonna be able to speak for 30 minutes and get us out by 9 o'clock well the good news is he won't be speaking for 30 minutes and because he's has the briefest session he'll get the longest introduction our third distinguished guest this evening is Phoenix seminary Zone dr. Wayne Grudem Wayne has a PhD from the University of Cambridge a doctorate of Divinity from Westminster Theological Seminary his research professor of theology and biblical studies at Phoenix seminary down the street is a former president of the evangelical theological Society he's a member of the translation Oversight Committee for the English standard version of the Bible and the general editor of the ESV Study Bible he's published over 20 books and in the few minutes that he's going to have this morning he's going to try to answer the question if we decide that God used evolution to create us what happens to Genesis 1 through 3 dr. Grudem [Applause] thank you Steve and thank you for your attendance tonight thank you dr. Meyer and dr. Moreland for your outstanding presentations you've both touched at points on the question of God and the relationship between God and evolutionary theory I'm going to deal with that much more explicitly now the question that many Christians have is is it possible to reconcile the teachings of the Bible with the claims of modern evolutionary theory and my answer is going to be no and I want to explain in detail why that's true if we decide that God used evolution to create us what happens to Genesis 1 2 3 so I'm going to revisit the question what is theistic evolution a quick elevator definition is God used Darwinian evolution to create all living things that's the quick answer if somebody asked me what my book is about it's about this theory that God used evolution to create living things but dr. Moreland dr. Meyer and I and the other two editors formulated our own definition after reading extensively in theistic evolution literature and this more precise definition that we use is this God created matter and after that he did not guide or intervene or act directly to cause any empirically detectable change in the natural behavior of matter until all living things had evolved by purely natural processes in other words God created matter and then he made perhaps some will say he sustained the matter in its existence and its way of operating but he didn't change the way anything in the natural world operated until all living things had evolved by by random mutation and natural selection implications if you believe that if you believe in theistic and that is this is the process that God used then you have to say that we have descended from earlier ape-like creatures by virtue of random mutation and natural selection and all living things have come about not through direct creation by the special activity of God but by random mutation from previous simpler life-forms now if you're beginning to think that there's some conflict between these ideas and what you read in Genesis 1 2 3 you're right and I want to specify that conflict in more detail in just a moment you also have to believe if you believe in theistic evolution that there was no original couple from whom all human beings have descended because modern genetics so scientists tell us modern genetic studies have concluded that we've descended from about 10,000 early human beings on the earth not just one first couple and the genetic differences among human beings on the earth require that many early human beings from which we've all descended and then you have to say either that Adam and Eve never existed and the BioLogos website the primary location of materials supporting theistic evolution and provoked from and promoting this among evangelical Christians the BioLogos website has some people aren't saying that Adam and Eve never existed and others say well we do have to admit that there's an Adam and Eve but if there was a literal Adam and Eve they were they were just two individuals that God picked out of these 10,000 early human beings on the earth and called one Adam and one even said well I'm going to have you represent the human race before I go on specify how that conflicts with Genesis in 12 points I just want to say a little word of caution or qualification what our book is not about we didn't want people to start out saying well what do you think about the age of the earth our book doesn't take a position on the age of the earth and we're not saying anything about whether we're not arguing that the supporters of theistic evolution are genuine Christians as far as we know those whom we've met and interacted with are genuine sincere Christians and dr. Moreland and dr. Meyer have both indicated that in their talks as well but we think they're mistaken rather the question with regard to the Bible is this we are claiming in the book that Genesis one two three is a historical narrative it's not allegory or myth or poetry it's historical narrative in the sense of reporting events that the author wants readers to believe actually happened not figurative or allegorical literature if we accept theistic evolution what happens to Genesis one two three here are 12 consequences number one Adam and Eve were not the first human beings and perhaps Adam and Eve never existed because there were these 10,000 human beings on the earth and God chose one called him Adam and the other and called him called her Eve so Adam and Eve weren't the first human beings number 2 Adam and Eve were not created without parents as Genesis portrays it but they were born from human parents that means Adam had a mother and a father human mother and a father Eve had a human mother and a father again that conflicts with the picture in Genesis number 3 God didn't act directly or especially to create Adam out of dust from the ground as Genesis portrays it number 4 God did not directly create Eve from a rib taken from Adam's side but Eve had she didn't come about by a rib from Adam side she had human parents a human mother and human father number 5 Adam and Eve were never sinless human beings because human beings were doing evil selfish things destructive things harmful to one another sinful things for many years before Adam and Eve ever came along and Adam and Eve like other human beings were sinful number 6 Adam and Eve didn't commit the first human sins for human beings were doing morally evil things long before Adam and Eve number seven human death did not begin as a result of Adam's sin for human beings existed long before Adam and Eve and they were always subject to death and you if you are familiar with the way the New Testament treats the subject of Adam and Eve sin you see there's a conflict with both Genesis and the book of Romans number eight not all human beings have descended from Adam and Eve for there were thousands of other human beings on the earth at the time that God chose two of them as Adam and Eve number nine God did not directly act in the natural world to create different kinds of fish birds and land animals because these evolved from natural processes without God changing the natural functioning of the materials in the world number 10 if you believe in theistic evolution God did not rest from his work of creation or stop any special creative activity after plants animals and human beings appeared on the earth the problem is Genesis says that God rested from the work that he had done number 11 god never created an originally very good natural world in the sense of a world that was a safe environment and free of thorns and thistles and similar harmful things and number 12 after Adam and Eve sinned God did not place any curse on the world that changed the workings of the natural world and made it more hostile to mankind but we see in Genesis 3 that because of Adam and Eve sin and God says to Adam cursed in there is the ground because of you and thorns and thistles that will bring forth for you implying that there weren't thorns and thistles and these harmful things to human beings on the earth before Adam's sin what's left of Genesis 1 2 3 I can't divulge private conversations but in talking with advocates of theistic evolution there's not very much left what do they say about Genesis 1 2 3 then well they see it as figurative or allegorical literature not factual history Francis Collins one of the most prominent scientists in the entire world and a professing evangelical Christian he's now the director of the National Institutes of Health he was formerly the director of the Human Genome Project maybe one of the most maybe the most prestigious scientific positions in the world for many years he founded the BioLogos foundation he authored this best-selling book the language of God what does he say about Genesis 1 2 3 it's poetry and allegory or Denis Alexander emeritus director of the faraday institute for science and religion at st. Edmund's College Cambridge University and I could mention the Genesis and ER is an evangelical Christian who spent many years of his life as an overseas missionary he's a trained biologist and he attends the same church that my wife Margaret and I attended Eden Baptist Church in Cambridge we were part of that church for several years when I was doing doctoral work in England it's a bible-believing Church much like Scottsdale Bible Church in its belief in the total truthfulness of Scripture former student of mine is the pastor there Dennis Alexander is an active member Dennis Alexander says Genesis one two three is figurative and theological literature John Walton professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College in Illinois and he was before that out of Moody Bible Institute professor for 20 years he says because he hopes to this same theistic evolution view he says that Genesis one two three is he doesn't see it as historical literature historical narrative he said this is just stories about archetypes what we would call an everyman story Genesis one two three talks about the nature of all people not the unique material origins of Adam and Eve and he says the Bible does not really offer any information about material human origins and so that's the view of Genesis one two three that he is teaching others on the BioLogos website dennis Lamoureux professor of science and religion at the University of Alberta in Canada says Adam never existed and Holy Scripture makes statements about how God created living organisms that in fact never happened and Peter ends who was formerly a professor at Westminster seminary where I did my seminary training in Philadelphia until 2008 he actually lost his position because of this view that he held but he said when you read about Adam and Eve in Genesis it's really not a story of Adam and Eve it's just it's a story about Israel and Adam and Eve are allegory or symbol for Israel and maybe Israel's history happened first and the Adam story was written to reflect that history Adam's stories are really an Israel story placed in primeval time in other words they're all saying at Genesis 1 2 3 is not historical narrative well tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. I'm going to argue that the entire Bible comes to support the truthfulness of the historical details in Genesis 1 2 3 I'm going to look at the details in the text of Genesis 1 2 3 and then how it's connected to the rest of the book of Genesis and its historical narrative and then how the New Testament treats it and then look at how 11 doctrines significant doctrines in the Christian faith are undermined or destroyed by theistic evolution and then I'm going to argue as a result of this that I don't think this is a minor issue but I don't but I think rather that theistic evolution should not be allowed as a legend alternative interpretation in evangelical churches colleges and seminaries thank you dr. Goodall might ask you to take one of the stools and dr. Meyer and dr. Moreland to come up I have a couple of questions from Facebook that we want to take first and then if you have a couple questions we'll take about 15 minutes and then we'll dismiss you and the first question is to dr. Meyer at the end of your at the end of your presentation you gave an example of a scientist a mainstream scientists who was interacting with your your particular view on the issues and was taking issue with it and the question here is can you give a couple of other examples of a so-called mainstream scientists taking seriously and giving up any solid interactions with a thesis of one of your recent books in quotes it's helpful to hear their responses such as the one you ended with better yeah yep Marshalls review was the most prominent of Darwin's doubt it was in science which is probably the leading scientific journal in the United States nature being the leading journal and be written after my first book signature in the cell there was a very extensive review of it by Francisco Ayala one of the leading evolutionary biologists of the West in recent years and it was actually published on the BioLogos website and it was a rather curious response to the first book in that the first book was about the evidence for design in the first living cell and the book concerned the question of the origin of the first life and ayala wrote in response he provided in response examples that he thought refuted design in the human genome which came much later something about the ahlu sequences and other allegedly non-functional sequences in the human genome and I'd later explained I responded to him in detail Ayala is a big figure in evolutionary biology and so there certainly was serious engagement there from him but it also was part of the reason that I decided to write Darwin's doubt because the response to the first book about the problems with chemical evolutionary theory we're not being met head-on by scientific critics they were not saying hey here's how undirected chemical processes could produce the information necessary to produce the first life they were citing the alleged creative powers of the mutation natural selection process a process that only ensues once you have life so they were really engaging a different debate which is about the sufficiency of the mechanisms of biological evolution and as I said somewhat whimsically in the preface of the next book that since I was accused of making an argument that I never made I finally decided just to make the argument that I was being accused of making because the information problem is as severe in the case of biological evolution as it is in the case of chemical evolution or nearly so and so any case I think the gravamen of the person's question this has anyone really taken you seriously or do you only have one example I think we've had a lot of critical engagement from the other side and I would say from the engagement itself from the critical responses you can see the weakness of the position of the other side if I Allah to answer my argument about the need for intelligent design to explain the information necessary to produce the first life cites a process that has nothing to do with the origin of the first life you can see without a PhD in biology that he's not addressed the argument in play in question and similarly if marshal in order to refute the argument that I make in Darwin's doubt about the need for intelligent design to explain the origin of the information necessary to build new animal forms and body plans sites prior unexplained sources of information he simply begged the question you don't need a PhD in biology to see that he's done that all you need is a little training and introductory in formal logic these are big important figures in there in the field of evolutionary biology I think they've swung and missed at our key argument great so that it's important to realize that our our view point does not imply that we should believe in God simply because the natural explanations fail that's that is one point but we also think that certain pieces of evidence are best explained by an intelligent agent cause for positive reasons there's actually ways of recognizing when something was the result of an agent or whether it was random and forensic scientists used some of this all the time and so our argument has a positive side to it as well as a negative side quick example my ex my expertise is philosophy of mind and I have done a lot of publishing in the scholarly journals and publishing houses on the origin of consciousness now the problem is that there is not nor will there ever be a physicalist explanation for the origin of consciousness and this is not because of the status of our knowledge right now so that in 50 years we'll come up with an explanation the difficulty is you can't get something from nothing and if there's no God and you start with a big bang don't ask what caused that and then the history of the universe is a history of material processes then all of a sudden just because of the rearrangement of brut matter into a new geometrical configuration eureka some totally brand-new kind of thing that never existed in the world before pops into existence and it has sensations and feelings and thoughts and beliefs and desires and can exercise volitional freedom that's getting something from nothing and but a theistic explanation provides a very rational explanation for the origin of consciousness because you either have in the beginning where the particles or in the beginning was the law Gauss if you start with consciousness there's no difficulty in explaining how it could appear subsequently you start with matter as its characterized by chemistry and physics and you will never have an explanation for the origin of consciousness so in summary not only do we argue that naturalistic theistic evolutionary think naturalistic evolutionary theory cannot explain nor can theistic evolutionary theory explained the origin of consciousness but a Christian worldview theistic explanation can and it's important for you to realize that that's two parts of the argument thank you we have a question oh oh there we'll go over here dr. dr. Grudem I was wondering if you could elaborate on your sixth point Adam and Eve did not commit the first human sins can you just explain where that rationale comes from well the theistic evolutionist is saying that there never was a different condition of the human race than what we see right now human beings evolved and here we are so you go back to the earliest history of the human race the evolutionists don't think that just all of a sudden a human man and a human woman appeared and then everybody descended from them it was some ape-like nearly human creatures began to develop complex vocal mechanisms for humans that would work for human speech and call those the talkers and then others began to develop balance so they could walk upright and others began to have larger brains so they could have human-like thoughts and then the the talkers married more talkers and reproduced more talkers and the walkers married more walkers and had more walkers and then the thinkers made more thinkers but then eventually they began to mingle with each other and this is happening thousands of places around the world or around wherever human beings were and so gradually then you get stalkers and walkers people can walk and talk but they can't think and then you get thinkers and talkers who can't walk and but then eventually and you multiply that by by a thousand characteristics that are uniquely human and so gradually the human race develops over time but then then then you have 10,000 human beings leading to the present human race but what's happening is these people are killing each other they're lying to each other they're stealing from each other they're doing all the evil things that human beings we do today because because what we have today in terms of human race this is what has evolved and therefore that's what what has always been does that make sense it's the nature red tooth and claw idea that evolution involves competition for survival sometimes vicious competition for survival and that was part of the process that produced the first human so he's some these think of evolutionists have aphoristic aliy stated that as humans didn't fall into sin they felt they didn't fall down into sin they fell up into consciousness thank you a question over here yeah I just wanted to say something in support of theistic evolution as a devout atheist a little over 30 years ago it was theistic evolution that got me to walk inside a church after about 20 years but the help of the enjoying of the holy spirit I came to believe in creation just as stated in the Bible that's got to do with my question since you can trace the genealogy back to Adam through you know the scriptures you you can at least put a date on Adam my question is in chapter 127 God creates man blesses him and all that rested on the seventh day chapter two he creates Adam are these two different men or are they the same men yeah we argue in the book that they're the chapter two is an expanded description of what happened in chapter one it's it's a they're the same event but one tells in more detail then why can't you date then the creation because there are gaps in the genealogies here's one example the angel says to Joseph Joseph son of David do not fear to take Mary is your wife Joseph son of David David was a thousand years ago but he can be called son of David there's you don't have to name everyone in the in the list in order to have son of and so those lists in the Bible are not necessarily all the people that ever lived they're just the ones that for some reason the biblical authors chose to tell us about it thank you over here hello dr. Grudem I have a question for you I can't see you with the lights in mind but hello hello my name is Andrew anyways my question is you know a lot of Christians have a problem with the six thousand year young earth view and so a lot of Christians have moved towards the older you I used to hold holders also but then I eventually became a evolutionary creationist or whatever but but I loosely hold to that you know arguments like dr. Meyer is making really our problem for me because I never came to a conclusion on it but with the Bible it's a little harder for me to you know stick to a historical Genesis account of creation a big part of it is because it seems like it's a six-day 24-hour period and so it makes it seem like to me that the earth is only supposed to be about 6,000 years old yeah and if we're to do service to the Bible and not try to explain it away or fit some kind of de-age theory into the days yeah it seems that we really should let me just go ahead for sake of time because we're just about at the end we do not take a position on the length of days in Genesis 1 or the age of the earth we give several views including one that the days are just 24 hours but there are millions of years between each one of them so it's just it's just an issue that I can't talk about tonight and I don't think we're going to get into because it doesn't relate to the question evolution I don't mean to diminish the importance of your question it's an important question but it's kind of taking us into an area where we decided not to take any position or talk about I guess the point was you were just saying the historical facts of Genesis 1 through 3 anytime but the historical facts and say to me it fits in but it's ok if we don't want to talk about that well Oracle fact the question is what historical what is it the what is the historical fact that is being discussed with the days is that is that helpful ok thanks thank you okay over here real quickly we can my question is for dr. Marlon and it's a question about clarifying the aim of the year argument that you gave or your arguments there seems to be two things that the theistic evolution could be doing one obviously wrong would be some sort of hermeneutic Concord ISM where they take the data of science and use it to just derive the meaning of Scripture and that seems like a flawed hermeneutic another thing they could be doing is what William Lane Craig causes the work of a systematic theologian where you take all the data and try to see what sort of account how do you put it together and I'm unclear as to how your which way your arguments were intended and how it aims at one and not the other my argument doesn't that distinction is blind to my argument doesn't make any difference my argument was about offsetting the claim that actually adopting theistic evolution is a salvation for people and it is actually a good thing because it keeps people from having to buy a frankly embarrassing and pretty falsified view that no science and their right minds believe and it's dark ages stuff and so what we want to do is find a way to not have to do that and my my answer my response to that argument was that it's exactly the opposite now I you take the gentleman that said that theistic evolution helped him when he got saved but then later on he saw that it wasn't consistent with a deeper understanding of Scripture and he gave it up I think is what it adopted a different view that was exactly the one of the points I made there may be a short-term benefit in the sense that if a person's coming to Christ and they're mature in the Lord I'm not going to expect them to sign you know the Talbot doctrinal statement I'm gonna focus on Jesus and if if he's a theistic evolutionist so I'm gonna say go for it do it I mean let's not worry about that's fines don't worry about it talk about it in six months that was the point of the argument to show the damaging results of this my argument was not the theistic evolution is false and my argument was was was not in any way to show that it was an attempt to show that is an extraordinarily serious dangerous issue that Christians should avoid at all costs unless there's just overwhelming compelling reasons to adopt it and I don't believe there are but that wasn't my role exactly is going is undermines right conviction that knowledge of God or knowledge of Scripture is true knowledge right and I have a corollary to that in my argument compliments JP's is not the same and that is that the scientific claims that are being made on behalf of theistic evolution are not themselves well grounded and should not constitute knowledge and therefore we should know theologians biblical scholars should not feel intimidated by those claims and one of there was a very nice forward to the book written by a philosopher of science and Britain and Steve fuller said that one of things he commended reader and commended the book for was that it gave readers the tools to evaluate the scientific claims of evolutionary theory for themselves so that they didn't feel that they needed to yield to Authority without critical evaluation so I'm saying it's the the claims that evolutionary theory is making that allegedly undermine the credibility of core Christian claims are not themselves well grounded jakey's argument is complimentary to that and he's saying that in addition we shouldn't just assume that the only way to know is science I'm saying their science is bad he's saying we shouldn't rely only on science as a source of knowledge great thank you you know we're gonna have to cut off the questions right now but let me encourage you to to stand up tomorrow during question-and-answer period and repeat your question to get up quickly and up or if you want to you can put your your question onto our Facebook page and we'll we'll log it for tomorrow we're gonna we're gonna say thank you for you being here so long and in so doing before we leave before we leave we're gonna have we're gonna end the evening in a little exercise of random selection dr. Grudem I'm gonna I'm going to show you that there are 1 2 3 4 5 sections here in the in the sanctuary and like I'd like you to choose one of them and what my wife is sitting in Section 3 oh the same section here that wasn't entirely ok 3 dr. Mayer I'm going to ask you to give me a letter from A to Z L L ok so this section row L and I need a number from 1 to 18 14 14 if you're sitting in the seat that is in this section and you're in row L and you're sitting in seat 14 are you there raise your hand there's numbers on the on the bottoms of your seats you might have to stand up and look at them okay who's good okay Christian would you grab one of these books as you know if we had everybody line up to sign to have that the three of these men sign these books it would take most of the better part of about four days to do so so we've had them pre-signed three books and we just want to give them to you randomly this evening so do we have fourteen c14 Rowell okay what's the one give us another number give us another number eight eight eight is is 8mt oh there there you go all right he gets the book okay dr. Grudem another another section by section five way over here there's nobody there yeah there there's quite a few people there all right we're gonna have okay seeds and and letter a letter from eight are a lot of pressure g g and two - all right someone there all right he's right here all right no one's there no one's there okay give it to the guy that's right in front of him he's close [Applause] okay one more section 2 2 2 is section 2 letter dr. Mayer B okay so you have your choice of lung two six or seven six six okay is that six that's you okay all right congratulations hey let's let's go ahead and stand up and if you'll allow me to I would love to close our evening and prayer just remind you that the book sales are out in the foyer if you're paying by credit card they're straight back at the guest services desk if you're paying by check or cash it's over to the north side of the foyer at the white table thank you so much for bearing with us this evening and and staying with us I feel like I've just had dinner I don't need to go home and eat now and it's been it's been a feast this evening father we thank you for the truth of your scripture and we thank you God that you have given the Christian community and us this evening men who have committed their lives to studying philosophy science and scripture to make sense of issues that for many of us is very very very very very difficult to understand and make sense of I walk out of here this evening Lord with a new appreciation for the challenge that that faces the Christian Church and of a much deeper appreciation for the amount of time and study and spiritual effort that's gone into the preparation of this book and these presentations this evening father bless these three men with rest this evening and we look forward to another day filled with with interaction scripture and truth tomorrow for your glory in Jesus name and all God's people said amen good night
