Testing Genesis with Advancing Science

well thank you it's great to be back in my hometown here of Vancouver I literally grew up just a few miles from here in East Vancouver and I'm the founder of reasons to believe and you can engage us on a variety of social media we actually have a 24/7 YouTube channel where you can watch our engagements and debates to your heart's content and if you got a smart phone you can text by name two three one nine nine six and that's your portal to get all kinds of free videos book chapters articles and much more and if you're like me you think of the best question to ask three or four hours after the event is all over so that's why we make ourselves available on both Facebook and Twitter and yes so far I'm able to answer all the questions I get in Facebook and Twitter so feel free to take advantage of that long after this evenings event is over but some of the free books were giving away you can get a free chapter about the creator and the cosmos now in its fourth edition and one thing about this book is kind of like the theme of tonight which is seeing Jobe in Psalms the more we learn about nature the more evidence we see for the supernatural handiwork of God and this is a book that I put through four editions over the course of 30 years so you can take advantage of that and we're giving away a free chapter of this book that we'll be talking about tonight go to reasons org slash Ross and our latest book always be ready where I make the point if you prepare good reasons for your hope and faith in Jesus Christ and are able to deliver those good reasons with gentleness respect and if your conscience you will see God doing supernatural miracles to bring people he's prepared in advance to hear and respond to your reasons and that's we're giving away the chapter I tell all my airplane stories of meeting people on airplanes and having a chance to lead several in the faith Christ while people are seated around us but tonight I'd like to talk about Genesis how many of you ever heard from someone who's not yet a believer I can't believe the Bible because science contradicts Genesis and have you ever heard that before I get it all the time when I begin to talk to strangers right there was one time I was in the hospital and I got visited by five chaplains for the chaplains were not Christians and I said well why are you not Christians they said well science contradicts the Bible and so have you ever talked to a scientist who believes the Bible is true and I said we don't think such a person exists well you can imagine what kind of conversation I had with them okay mm-hmm but what I want to share with you tonight is how advancing science gives us an increasingly stronger case for the inspiration and inerrancy of those chapters of the Bible that are the most subject for skepticism and the principle here is you're gonna have a hard time getting a skeptic to John chapter 3 if he can't get him past at Genesis chapter 1 and it's such that this has had an impact on leading Christian theologians and scientists who seek to reconcile Genesis and science but they do it by abandoning the historicity of the Bible that's a new trend going on and conservative seminaries across the country in the world saying well since we can't address the scientific objections we're going to treat Genesis as having nothing to do with history for example here's a quote with some of you may have heard of Dennis Alexander he speaks quite frequently here in Canada and his book creation revolution he writes those referring to people like me those who maintain the historical view of Genesis are embarrassing and bring the gospel into disrepute but here's a problem take those opening chapters of Genesis put them in front of somebody who's never really seriously considered the Bible before and say what do you think this is about and you know I was raised here in Vancouver I didn't really meet Christians welcome when I was growing up but I got a Gideon Bible when I was in the public school had sat through my shelf untouched for six years and I picked it up and it's like this early chapters of Genesis from my perspective the author couldn't have gone to a greater extent to try to persuade me it was actually history I mean the days are numbered you got the repeated phrase and it was so it was good as like the author's making every attempt possible given the language he was working with that this really is an historical account of actual events that took place in the history of the earth and so my response to people like Dennis Alexander is that the reason why they think that science contradicts what Genesis teaches is that they have failed to follow the biblical testing method now I don't know about you but I was educated here in Vancouver I was taught the scientific method in grade one I was taught it in grade two I was taught at all 12 years but none of my public school teachers told me where the scientific method came from but when I picked up the Bible a scientific method jumped right off the page in the very first page of the Bible and nine years later and I can to read up on the history of the Reformation I realized the origin of the scientific method was from the pages of the Bible and there's a reason why the Scientific Revolution exploded at a Reformation Europe people began to read the Bible for themselves they saw this biblical testing method they applied it to their science research and that was the birth of the Scientific Revolution and notice only in a Christian context do we have science not only having a spark but a revolution that continues to this day while I've been told that when you give a talk in a church you're supposed to only have three points I typically have 20 or 25 points but I'm gonna reduce it to just three points number one we're gonna look at the point of view for the creation days step one of the biblical testing method do not interpret into your first establish a frame of reference or the point of view and we're going to see how the Bible does at Liberty and the opening couple of sentence we're going to look at the meaning of the word day because that's a big subject of controversy amongst unbelievers and the biggest one of all is that people think if you go through the first page of the Bible you don't get an accurate description and order of events and so we're gonna put this to the test where we're gonna put it to the test through increasing scientific advance and basically want to demonstrate this for you over the past 60 years which is roughly the period of time I've been studying this you see an increasingly stronger scientific case for what is claimed in the opening chapters of the Bible so with that let's get to point 1 the point of view now Genesis 1:1 and I have found no matter where I travel in the world everybody knows Genesis 1:1 they may have never heard of John 3:16 but they know Genesis 1:1 in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and most people are aware too that there is no Hebrew word for universe but they have this phrase that heavens and the earth and so the frame of reference for Genesis 1:1 is the universe that God created but notice in the second verse it changes the frame of reference from the universe to the surface of the waters of planet Earth and when you're running to scientists who claim that Genesis teaches scientific nonsense it is teaching scientific nonsense if you get the wrong frame of reference if you claim the frame of reference is the universe all the way through then indeed Genesis 1 is teaching scientific nonsense but if you change the frame of reference from the universe to the surface of the earth below the cloud not above the clouds as you're gonna see you get a perfect fit with the established record of nature and if I can encourage you with this the Bible tells us that God has given us two books of Revelation the book of Scripture and the book of nature so if you came here this evening saying well I guess Hugh is the professional scientist I'll let him take care of the book of nature you're mistaken the Bible actually commands all of us to be scientists it also commands all of us to be theologians don't leave it up to your pastor to be the only one who's studying the book of scripture where all the study the book of Scripture but were all to study the book of nature and I could share this with you it's way too much fun to leave it up to the professionals join us in studying the book of Scripture and the book of nature but the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters and it was Galileo who said the biggest mistake you can make in Bible interpretation is to get the wrong frame of reference to get the wrong point of view so if you remember nothing from the talk tonight remember this the point of view for the six creation days as the surface of planet Earth not above the clouds but a blow the clouds here's a diagram that lays us out here we got the surface of the earth we got the oceans above it because in the beginning what does it say water covers the whole face of the earth but we got an atmosphere above that water this is the point of view not here not here but right here and that makes all the difference and how you interpret what's going on in the six days of creation now it also tells us there was darkness over the face of the deep now the universe was created in the beginning so light pervaded the universe but it was dark on a surface of the waters and I remember reading that at age 17 when I open up the Bible for the first time saying this must mean that the atmosphere here is not able to let light through now I had a little bit of an advantage I've been studying astronomy since I was 7 and I knew that all planets as big as Earth must begin with opaque atmospheres but here's what happened when I got to the book of Job I mean there's actually three other biblical texts that take you through the six creation days not just Genesis one but it's also you go through the six creation days in job 37 38 and 39 Psalm 104 and proverbs 8 and I went through the joke text this is what it says I made the clouds that's garment and wrapped it in thick darkness so whereas Genesis 1 implies that the atmosphere is opaque to light notice the job in the parallel account tells us explicitly it's dark because of the clouds because the clouds that kept the Seas dark now you've probably run into people who have questions about well what are these days of creation I had that same question when I read it at age 17 but you know what I notice is that this word day must have at least three distinct literal definitions because three are used right there in the text creation day one is contrasting days and nights that's day for the daylight hours creation day for its contrasting seasons days and years that's day is 24 hours but in Genesis 2:4 it uses the word day to refer to the entirety of creation history that's day as a long period of time now if you look at a lexicon and all Hebrew lexicons will make this point there are actually four literal definitions part of the daylight hours all the daylight hours one calendar day or a long but finite period of time so what persuaded me that these days of creation had to be six consecutive long time periods as I notice that there was an evening and a morning Brak the first six days which told me that each day had a definite start point and a definite end point and I thought there would be an evening in the morning for the seventh day but there isn't there is no evening a morning for the seventh day I said could of be were still in the seventh day and actually there are three Bible texts that tell us exactly that that we are in the seventh day Psalm 95 John 5 in Hebrews 4 either explicitly state or imply we're still in God's seventh day now part of my story is that I got into astronomy when I was 7 years of age in fact that was reading five books on astronomy and physics every week from the age of 7 onwards and by the time I was 10 and a half my parents got worried that I was being obsessive I don't know why they thought that but they wanted to broaden me a little bit and they knew they would have to broaden me with something else of a scientific so they bought our family this big thick book on evolutionary biology how was the only one in the family that read it but I went to my parents who said mom dad the numbers don't add up we have all the speciation before humanity and hardly and he afterwards can you explain why I said go ask your science teachers I asked my science teachers and they said well go ask those science professors you know at the University I talked to them and they didn't have a clue now when I picked up the Bible at age 17 it answered from me an enigma that have bothered me since I was 10 and a half the Bible tells us why there's all a speciation before humanity and hardly any afterwards for six days God creates that explains all the species of life we see before humanity on the seventh day he rests he stops from the work of creation which explains why we see hardly any speciation going on and the human era for six days God creates on the seventh day he rests it also helped me to understand why so many biologists are not believers and so many physicists and astronomers and chemists are because the vast majority biologists their research is focused on the human era when God's at rest and they'll say things like we see no scientific evidence for the supernatural handiwork of a creator well for obvious reasons they're looking on the wrong day whereas an astronomy because of the velocity of light all of our data is coming from deep time and so we're looking at the six days and we see the handiwork of God everywhere so explains why so many physical scientists are believers and so few life scientists are believers but you can read more about this in a book I wrote called a matter of days where I basically encourage you when you deal with something controversial not just this issue of days but say if you want to deal with divorce and remarriage or any other controversial issue you want to read all 66 books of the Bible you want to interpret the entirety of it consistently and literally and so that's what I try to do for you with the book a matter of days but let's look at my third point kind of focus the rest of my time of 0.3 do scientific discoveries increasingly verify or refute the description and order of the Genesis one creation events and they begin with verse 3 it says let there be light notice it doesn't say that God created the light he did that in the beginning when he created the heavens and the earth that phrase Shumway an arrests with the definite articles that means the entirety of physical reality including all matter energy space and time so the light was created in the beginning but it says in verse 3 let there be light this is when light appears for the first time on the surface of the earth this is when God transforms our atmosphere from opaque to translucent let there be light and that's a crucial feature for life so I interpret the text set let there be light was the moment when God created the first life on planet Earth and then we get into creation date - it's a shortest statement of all the creation days where it says let there be water above and water below now when I've spoken on to seminary audiences on this this generates a lot of controversy a lot of speculation and it's because of how cryptic the statement is about creation day - but notice why I said before there are three other parallel accounts that take you through the six days of creation the reason why Moses was so brief on creation day - the book a joke which predates the book of Genesis by four or five hundred years devotes an entire chapter and a half to creation day to all of job 37 the first half of jove 38 and so as you see in Genesis 1 let there be water above and water below referring to water in the oceans and lakes and water in the atmosphere above when you get into the book of Job it talks about how God designed this complex water cycle well there's multiple forms of liquid precipitation coming of the sky you may have noticed that as you came in the building here tonight and multiple forms of frozen precipitation if he came from North Man you probably notice that tonight as well and what you notice in the book of Job this is only 5 6 it actually mentions 16 different kinds of precipitation that God designed the fall from the sky and we need all 16 to sustain global civilization and so God blessed us with that and in our television documentary journey toward creation we actually give you some video clips that explain the miracles of God transforming our atmosphere from opaque to translucent and in such a way that we get this incredible water cycle that enables humans to inhabit the entire land area of the earth and then we get to creation day 3 it's less let dry ground appear now it talks about planet Earth being a water world and then we got continents now if I'm older than many of you here in the audience and when I was first reading this the predominant geophysical view of the earth as the continents have always been here so for example if we go back to the 1950s this is the textbook model for the history of the continents which is in direct contradiction to what Genesis was declaring and so I went to the geologists that I knew at the University of British Columbia and said how secure is this and they said we don't think it's all that secure this is just a guess in our part and then when I entered the University of British Columbia as an undergraduate I had an opportunity in my sophomore year to take a class from two of the three geophysicist that launched the discipline of plate tectonics all three of them were Canadians one at the University of Toronto and two here at the University of British Columbia so I signed up for that course I kind of got in there with some grad students because I really wanted to see what these two professors had to say and they presented this model based on the new discipline of plate tectonics they said we see a gradual growth of the continents with respect to time I remember talking to those two professors and saying how secure is as roughly six seven eight percent and they said well that's just a guess in our part we don't think it can be any higher than 10 percent I said could be it as low as 0% they said it could be this is own this is actually compatible what I'm reading in the Bible and incidentally this is before I became a Christian but taking that class in geophysics said you know what it really could be that the Bible got the geophysics right ok fast forward to the year 2000 is when geophysicist had developed a detailed history of the growth of the continental land masses as a result of plate and this is what it looked like where you get a few volcanic islands breaking the universal water and then plate tectonics gradually kicks in but then you get this period of very aggressive continental landmass growth but notice where it takes place when the earth is a little bit less than half of its present age where does genesis 1 for this event the beginning of creation day 3 a little bit less than halfway through the six-day account of creation so here we see that the timing is consistent and the description is too consistent fast-forward to March of 2018 little less than a year ago paper got published in the scientific literature in which they said we now have evidence that the growth of the commented land masses is tightly tied in with the oxygenation of the atmosphere and there are two major oxygenation events but the one that had the dramatic impact on the continents was the one that happened on what's called the first great oxygenation event and it's such that they published a new history of the growth of the continental land masses that looks like this where you have nothing but water for the first billion years and then very gradual plate tectonic activity then you get the sudden jump and the growth of the continents and very gradual growth thereafter basically making the point over the past 60 years the more we learned about the geophysical history the earth the tighter fit we got with the description we see in Genesis chapter 1 and this isn't the only example but if you want to read about this history in detail you can look at the blog that I wrote the June eleventh blog under today's new reason to belief at reasons org and I actually give you links to all the research papers so you can check it out for yourself but on creation day 3 God is not finished now that we got the continental land masses what does the text say let the land for liber8 with vegetation Let The Land produce vegetation and I think where some skeptics get tripped up on this as is Let The Land produce vegetation then it gives you three examples and using the English translation it says trees fruit and seeds but the Hebrew words for trees fruit and seed are much more generic than the English equivalent not at all surprising because Hebrew Biblical Hebrew is a very small vocabulary language there's only three thousand words if you don't count the names of people in cities English by contrast is the largest vocabulary in language that humanity has ever produced over four million words although my biochemist colleague fuzzy Rana tells me that half of those four million words are biochemical terms so but Let The Land produce vegetation now I've debated the executive director of the skeptic Society Michael Shermer and for different times in university campuses never on the subject of Genesis but from Michael's perspective it doesn't matter what the subject is he always goes straight to Genesis because like many atheists he sees that as the Achilles heel of the Christian faith and the card that he played the first couple of times had debated him as he said well the fossil record has land plants coming after the first animals in the oceans Genesis has it the opposite way where he got land plants first and the animals in the oceans second Hugh isn't that an outright contradiction how do you square that with your belief that the Bible has he inspired inerrant Word of God my response in that first debate was simply to make the point well Michael animals have bones and shells they're going to be preserved easily in the fossil record what plants the tissue is going to decay I'm not at all surprised that we don't have plant fossils given the different nature of the plant tissue now where that has changed with respect to time we go forward to 2009 a paperback published in the British Journal Nature if you know anything about nature the editors are atheist scientists except for a couple of them and but the paper that got published where they said we don't have a fossil evidence for early plants well we got the isotope evidence and so carbon-13 to carbon-12 isotope ratios and nitrogen 15 to 14 isotope ratios basically established that vegetation was just as abundant on the Khandava land masses for 200 million years before the first appearance of animals in the oceans as for the 200 million years thereafter but in 2011 a paper got published in the same journal where they said we not only have the isotope evidence we now actually have the fossils of early plants bit of an overstatement they didn't have complete fossils they had fossil parts but the biggest part they found was one millimeter in diameter again we're talking hundreds of millions of years that's all you're really gonna expect to find in the fossil record but it demonstrated that vegetation was as abundant on the condo the land masses for 600 million years before the first appearance of animals in the ocean so this is another demonstration how the more we learn about nature the more we learn about science the more evidence we uncover for the supernatural handiwork of the Creator and for the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible creation day four it says let there be the great lights now when did God create the great lights in the beginning God created the heavens in the earth that's when we see galaxies and stars appearing and the light of these stars in galaxies shows up on the surface of the earth but what it says in Genesis 1:14 let there be the great lights it's important to read what follows let there be the great lights so that they'll serve as signs to mark seasons days and years and I remember reading that at age 17 is who needs those signs and recognize every animal could must be have knowledge of the position of either the Sun Moon or stars in order to regulate their biological clocks the bacteria don't need that the plants don't need that but every animal species needs that let there be the great lights so the animals that God would treat on creation day 5 could actually use those the visibility those lights to mark that regulate their biological clocks while I talked about the first great oxygenation event this is it right here and that's when the continents suddenly jumped up and then the oxygen content dropped down to less of 1% and stayed there for about a billion 1/2 years but then you got the second great oxygenation event about 575 million years ago the oxygen suddenly jumped up from less than 1% to 8% we now understand what was responsible for that second great oxygenation event a geological phenomena called the SEC the great unconformity now what was published just months ago was a bunch of physicists performed an experiment where they took the Earth's atmosphere and they varied the oxygen content from less than 1% all the way up to 8% to see what would happen and they're rather stunned what they published was if it's less than 1% the atmosphere is extremely hazy so hazy there's no way you can see the objects that are responsible for the light but as the oxygen content increases the atmosphere becomes progressively less and less hazy now I'm going to demonstrate that with some slides that it took from that data and their paper so here we see Mount Engineer in Colorado with the haziness that is roughly equivalent to what you would have with an with less than 1% oxygen in the atmosphere and actually I exaggerated this a bit so you could slightly see the mountain you actually wouldn't build a seat at all this is a photo I took from all about half a kilometer away from the summit so I'm not very far away but as you increase the oxygen content this is the visibility of mount engineer as you gradually increase the oxygen content you see the haze gradually dissipates and if you look to the upper right you see that there's an object that appears in the sky okay the moon but and those first few slides I showed there is no way you could see the moon the Sun or the stars and if you want to read about this it's in a blog that I wrote in June 18th in today's new reason to believe and this is the oxygenation history of the earth as we go from God forming the earth all the way up to the present moment we actually see these oxygen events and what's interesting is that you got this sudden jump of oxygen that's the moment you see animals there is no time delay you go from no animals at all in fact all the way through this period all you got are microbes but that little oxygen that's all you can have on the face of your oxygen microbes and tiny vegetative plants on the continents but what do we see in creation day five that says let the waters teem with living creatures and what we see is the moment that oxygen jumps up to eight percent we have an explosion of animal life in the oceans they call it the Avalon explosion and the Cambrian explosion and what I want to share with you is some of the responses of the world's leading evolutionary biologists to these explosive appearances because there's no time delay the moment the option jumps up immediately it got these animals and you got them with a complete ecological balance amongst all the different species of animal life that's air here's a quote from a book written by Richard Dawkins how many of you ever heard of Richard Dawkins probably the most famous atheists alive today a british evolutionary biologists and this is what he says about the appearance of animals in the oceans he says the Cambrian strata of rocks vintage about 600 million years ago are the oldest ones in which we find most of the major and vertebrate groups and we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution the very first time they appear it is as though they were just planted there without any evolutionary history they suddenly appear like that you go from microbes to animals that are as big as two meters across and this is what Gregory gray wrote in the American zoologist he says the Cambrian explosion of body plants has perhaps a single most striking feature of a metazoan fossil record the rapidity with which phyla and classes appeared during the early Paleozoic coupled with much lower rates of appearance for a higher tax taxes since poses an outstanding problem for mackerel evolution has really an intractable problem for macro evolution which is what Kevin Peterson said in review he wrote on this explosive appearance of animal life in the ocean elucidating the materialistic basis for the Cameron explosion has become more elusive not less the more we know about the event itself and as we attend these science conferences our deal with issue indeed that's the case the more we learn about this appearance of animals the more intractable it becomes to interpret this from a non theistic perspective and you can read about this a much more detail in my book improbable planet and we're giving away a free chapter at reasons org slash Ross now genesis talks about not just one origin of life but three distinct origins of life because in creation day five we see for the second time only the hebrew word bara to create something brand new that never existed before first time you see it as Genesis 1:1 where God treats all of physical reality creation day five God speaks about creating animals that are not just physical but physical and soulish in other words of birds and mammals are not just physical animals there's something about them that's non-physical there's soulish features but we notice it says let the birds fly above and let see mammals frolic in the oceans and it uses this word bharata creates something brand-new and then we get into creation day six and the Bible doesn't ever address when God creates the first land mammals again in the debate I have of Michael Shermer he says notice it gets the sea mammals first in the land mammal second as a wait a minute you're missing something creation day five God is speaking about God creating Birds generically and sea mammals generically but it never addresses when God creates land mammals generically instead what you find on creation day six it uses three different words to describe the highly specialized land mammals that God created to enable humans to launch and sustain civilization the three are the short legged land mammals referring to the rodents you say what do we need them for well we humans have an Anatomy that's wonderfully designed to handle a hot climate we're tall bipedal or slim we got very little hair and we got this amazing perspiration system but we're terribly designed for a cold climate many of you may have come from other places besides of British Columbia fact people in California asked me Hugh how cold have you have ever seen it I said I've seen it cold enough that when I spit it explodes when it hits the ground that happens at 45 below okay but thanks to these rodents humans were able to domesticate them and be able to exploit them for furs and use their furs to be able to move from a hot climate zone and to all the climate zones of the world today thanks to organizations like PETA that's frowned upon today but know what's wonderful about these rodents God designed them with the DNA where their brain chemistry is identical to human brain chemistry not true the great apes so it's a way of arguing we can't be descended from a common ancestor with the great apes because our brains are most similar to bird brains and our brain chemistry is most similar to mice and rats not the great apes and thanks to that we're able to use these mice and rats to develop cures for dyslexia and dementia and Alzheimer's that's where the research is taking place because God and I believe God designed these animals in such a way to facilitate medical advance that's why we have so much DNA similarity with many of these animals but the other two different kinds are the long legged land mammals that are easy to tame referring to the herbivores and the long-legged land mammals that are difficult to tame referring to the carnivores and we just see in the book of Job when the stalks of both these animals in much more detail job says look to the birds they'll teach you look to the mammals they'll instruct you what he meant as they'll teach you spiritual essence says notice that they're designed with a capacity to form relationships with a higher species and they're designed to serve and please that higher species well guess what God designed us human beings likewise to relate to a higher being and to serve and pleased at higher being and notice that these animals will often run away from us instead of towards us they were designed to come to us but because of her sin and of our abuse they'd run away from us instead of towards us well likewise because of her sin we run away from God has said it towards him or he pretend he doesn't exist that's just several of the lessons that God teaches you want to read about it I have several chapters on that in this book hidden treasures in the book of Job and again we're giving away a free chapter and last of all that text talks about God creating human beings this is the third use of the word bharat it creates something brand-new that never existed before because was brand new about as human beings were the only species of life that's spiritual in nature on the face of the earth and so we're physical for soulish and were spiritual and so our spiritual capacity enables us to recognize the existence of God and desire to relate to him notice that your pets really don't get into philosophy or theology that's unique to the human species but notice with us human beings were all compelled to get into philosophy and theology that's the thing that amazes me when I debate atheist scientists it says how philosophical they get is in debate they're compelled to do that eternity is written on the heart of every human being they want to read more about this we have this book who was Adam but as we look at the book of nature and how it puts the book of Scripture to the test this is what I notice that age 18 having spent now a year going through the creation text in the Bible now once we understand that the creation days are epochs of time and the frame of reference is the surface of the earth below the cloud layers the science accuracy score we get for the creation days as 10 for 10 it gets a perfect score it also gets a perfect score on the initial conditions and at age 99 compared how well the Bible did with all the other creation stories we see in the cultures and religions of the world the one that plays second was the ANU militia the Babylonians it got 2 out of 14 right how did the other creation account score they all scored 0 and the Bible is the only one that got a perfect score and that was my first clue that this Bible was different than all the other holy books and that sent me on another years journey to go through the Bible to see if I could find any provable errors or contradictions I found none instead I found hundreds of places just like in Genesis 1 where the Bible predicted future scientific discoveries and was that consistent predictive power that persuaded me this book must be the inspired inerrant Word of God and was at age 19 I signed my name in the back of a Gideon Bible give me my life to Jesus Christ but again if you want to read more about these 11 chapters of Genesis by the way this is not a commentary I simply go through the first 11 chapters and basically deal with every place in the text where skeptics have said this can't be the Word of God and basically show you how to transform that skeptical attack and are the strongest evidence that the Bible is the inspired inerrant Word of God matter of fact you can actually go through a small group study that we've done on this where you can go through this in 8 20 minute DVDs and we designed it in such a way to stimulate discussion watch it for 20 minutes and then have an hour-and-a-half discussion on the content that you've reviewed and make sure you invite people who are not yet believers to be part of that discussion but here's the bottom line the more we learn about science the more reasons we gain to believe the Bible as the inspired inerrant authoritative Word of God and with that we'll segue to questions and we'll take a question on any topic you care to raise the one rule we have is if you ask a question and you've got four questions please take four separate turns that's one reason why we encourage you to text your question in because that basically forces you to take your four questions and make a four separate text messages so what that can we segue to the Q&A time all right why don't you guys stand up just for 60 seconds stretch out a little bit the eyes are all right cuz you're in store for the best part of the night so nobody go anywhere because with all these questions are coming in and the last 45 minutes half of my brain I've been trying to process what dr. Roz is saying the other half I'm just pondering the questions that you guys are sending it which is fantastic and obviously I've have like close to a hundred questions so we won't get to all of them all right but a lot of them are similar so we've been trying to group them together and I'm gonna do the Q and he's gonna do the A's all right so he'll take care of the answers I have an engine a degree that is I can you know maybe solve some math problem at most but the questions that you guys have here are great I'm gonna leave it to dr. Ross oh all right you guys feel good let's take a seat and we will fly through some of these questions which are fantastic so some of these are fun some buddies are just gonna be really fun and keep them coming all right so of course you covered already a lot of the objection to the book of Genesis largely comes to the definition of day right now in the hebrew word yom what one of the questions that came in is this what is the distance bracket years between each day and Genesis you could have touched on it maybe expand that level a little bit more yeah there's nothing in the biblical text that says they must be equivalent periods of time so the days could be different periods of time and if you compare with the established scientific record the first day is longer than the second day which is longer than the third day and basically the days get shorter as you go towards the sixth day the sixth day be in the order of 50 to 60 million years it's a mistake however to think we can give you an accurate date for the boundary of each day we can give you a rough date and that's simply because the science is not yet gotten to the point where we can provide you with precise dates but we can give you approximate dates but they basically tell us that days get shorter as you go from 1 through 6 that's good and some of these questions are coming in ties into that talking about the age of people in the Bible and those of you that have flipped through the Bible and studied it of maybe pondered how is it that possible that some humans in the bible prominent figures and I'll just quote this some of these questions directly how is it possible dr. ross that prominent figures in the genesis become hundreds of years old before they pass away or perhaps a better question is how do we scientifically explain human becoming a right age hundreds of years well I believe the chapter were giving away for free and navigating Genesis is chapter 13 the chapter that deals with that very question so you want the long answer go to chapter 13 very briefly we notice that humanity did not become globally inhabited until after Genesis chapter 11 and so with humanity in one locale they would have been living in sedimentary plains which means that they would have been isolated form igneous rocks today we have igneous rocks all over the earth we exploit them for building materials igneous rocks contain a lot of uranium and thorium and that alone was shorten your life span but the thing I write about in chapter 13 is research done by two astronomers who have noticed that 95% of the heavy nuclei fast-moving cosmic rays come from a single supernova event that occurred sometime less than a hundred thousand years ago and the most recent publication they said we've identified the supernova remnant as some modest Sarah's ring it's 15 degrees across in the sky and because of its broad extent that means that it erupted quite close to the earth while here's a scenario before that supernova rupture you wouldn't have these deadly cosmic rays after the supernova rupturing you would and so before the supernova eruption yet the potential for people living to be 900 years afterwards you wouldn't especially when you couple that with their protection from igneous rocks and the biblical text says they were vegetarian I'm not advocating a vegetarian diet because you're not going to live long enough for it to make any difference but now two questions notes are coming ahead have you are gonna live to be 900 years it's important that you restrict yourself to a vegetarian diet because you eat meat you accumulate heavy metals at a rate of about a hundred times greater the other thing you have to do is you have to change the telomerase activity so what north is that that's the shortening of your chromosomes all of us have chromosomes that gets shorter and shorter as we get older and older and that will eventually kill you at about a hundred and twenty years you say well couldn't God have been a little more generous well if he was we'd be dying earlier deaths from cancer because it's a shortening of our chromosomes that is a guard against the development of the malignant tumors in your body and so we're actually living as long as we possibly can given the environment in which we live than the days before the flood they had the potential that much longer because they had a very different environment and diet on the other hand what I write about navigating Genesis the generation were in today has the longest average life span of any generation of humanity who has ever lived including those days when people could potentially live to be 900 because what I show you in the book is what if there was no murder what would have happened to the population of humanity well it's such that you would have had 17 billion humans by the time Adam was seven hundred and twenty years of age assuming they were doing everything they could to prevent births you would still have 17 billion people well clearly that didn't happen the reason didn't happen is that ninety-five percent plus of the human population had their lives terminated by being murdered by their fellow man matter of fact one rationale for the flood as God was rescuing humanity from self extermination but wasn't for the flood we would have been gone that ties in well with my next question to do with the flood and eating meat what did the connect carnivorous animals eat on Noah's Ark during the great flood I guess everyone there that that's a good question right what did the Tigers eat on the in Noah's Ark well what it talks about the vegetarian diet is referring to human beings because you see in Genesis 9 God gives Noah and his descent as permission to eat meat it's a permission given to the human species so and what it tells us in Psalm 104 and Jove 38 is that God created the carnivores and fed the carnivores with prey and called it a good thing and an expression of his love and you know I noticed that people who think that a loving God wouldn't create carnivores they live in cities if you live out there where you actually see what is like with wild herbivores you realize they need the carnivores if you don't have carnivores the death rate of the herbivores skyrockets and especially their suffering and so carnivores are a good thing but it's because God designed the carnivores were the only herbivores they could kill were the weak the sick the dying and the injured they would leave the healthy ones alone we humans are different we can kill anything we want that's not true of the carnivores and so yeah the carnivores on board Noah's Ark they are eating meat and notice what God told Noah take onboard water and food for all the animals and so they weren't killing other animals on board Noah's Ark Noah made sure he had enough supply of meat in order to keep all the carnivores going during the entire thirteen month period at the flood yeah well I guess I'll have to stock up on my kids Noah's Ark replicas and the toy that I play with we'll have to add more food on to that heart with that explanation here's another question you mentioned earlier about Great Lakes and that about the different days when light was created and plants if the great lights were created after the vegetation how did the plants survive and what about photosynthesis okay I thought it was careful about this and might talk God created the great lights in the beginning when he created the universe the light of those great lights didn't show up on the surface of the earth until creation day one and they didn't become visible to animals on the surface of the earth until creation day four so the lights were there before the six creation days however they didn't become visible as distinct objects in the sky two creatures on the surface until the fourth day so that's a clarification and there's another question I just gonna jump to because it was again tied into that let me just swirl down to that real quick there [Music] maybe I'll jump to this one here on the on precipitation you mentioned all the different types of precipitation got created and how did this work before and after the flood of Noah well but you notice is when it talks about the rain the for of the flood he uses two different Hebrew words IDI and Matar to refer to the liquid precipitation falling on the face of the earth and usually it's translated as fog or mist and rain and but both words mean liquid drops of water falling from the sky one is referring to larger drops one is referring to smaller drops having grown up here in Vancouver we called it a mist if the liquid drops for less than 3/16 of an inch in diameter they're bigger than that we called it rain but in the area of mesopotamia it would have to be a very fine miss before they would use that particular hebrew word but the bottom line is there is no change in the water cycle from before the flood and after the flood and i think what helps us there are seven places of the Bible that tell us the laws of physics did not change and they will not change until the full number of humans that God intends to redeem have been redeemed Romans 8:23 we'll just make that plug again is it one of your books that does cover that in more detail as well one on Genesis 1 to 11 would that be covered and it does and with respect to the water cycle hidden treasures in the book of Job is the most detailed one all right hidden treasures make a note of that if you want to read more on it I found this in terms of the reference to Genesis 1:16 question is this in Genesis 1:16 it sounds as if the Bible is saying that God created the Sun and the moon on the fourth day how do you interpret that verse reconciling it with the hypothesis that the Sun went and stars were created before day 1 ok you need do this yeah you basically need to read the entirety of the passage on creation day 4 it starts in verse 14 let there be the great lights so they may serve as signs to mark seasons days and years and then it says so God made the Sun Moon and stars in other words it's a parenthetical note as you're probably aware there are no punctuation marks in the biblical hebrew but this is the first time God mentions the great lights and so he's basically saying by the way I made them basically making the point they were made before and so it takes you back to Genesis 1:1 it's also important to realize that are not verb tenses and Biblical Hebrew like you have in English and so it says so God made the Sun Moon and stars it's not saying they were made at that moment they could have been made any time in the past so again it's a parenthetical note I'm gonna take a slight departure from Genesis and sort of respond to a question that maybe many students especially those who are Christian and that find it challenging more on perhaps not none as you just ethically ethically but just on a personal level this question that comes in how should a Christian student who disagrees with some of the teaching Kling evolution necessary stand up for his or her conviction in their classroom so not necessarily addressing that but what would you perhaps say or encourage someone who has can bitching about what a Bible says and find that intention with what's being taught in a classroom what would you say to perhaps encourage or guide sure well a Bible tells us over to respect authority so I wouldn't advise a student jumping up in the middle of the professor's lecture and saying you are wrong rather what you need to do is go after the lecturer and say hey could I meet with you and the privacy of the professor's office you can start a dialogue going and so you want to engage with Christian demeanor so you don't want to be pugnacious or embarrass your your superiors find a way to appeal to them and if you want a good example look at the young man Daniel in the opening chapters of Daniel how he appealed to the authority over him and so I think there's a good example notice he was very courageous and standing up for his beliefs but he appealed in a very you know winsome way and we can do that and of course you can always look for opportunities to engage your fellow students but again do it outside of the class lecture no that's that's great so so great on on that note let's jump into a lot of question about young earth o earth alright so I'm gonna kind of like summarize them into this what do you think about the idea of a young earth is there enough evidence for this I'll just start with that and then if you follow up a questions on it well I mentioned the book a matter of days and what I do in that book is I lay out the biblical evidence for long creation days and the scientific evidence and I respond to the young earth arguments and basically my goal is to get the church pastors controversy it's not a Salvation issue but it is causing us a problem for evangelism and analogy I would uses what happened in the first century where he had a division between two groups of Christians do you have to be circumcised or not wasn't a Salvation issue but boy was deeply dividing the church and notice how pugnacious people were and so I'm seeing the same thing today and by the way you see that in every century of church history every century of church history there's a church splitting issue that's got nothing to do with salvation that's damaging the Gospel message and I argue that that's actually a piece of evidence I Center this with unbelieving scientists this is evidence that the Christian faith is true because these issues that are brought up are not rationally based this is evidence that there's a God out there opposed by a supernatural evil being and what's his best strategy get Christians fighting one another and when I share with my young earth friends and theistic evolution friends as we need to treat one another in charity with our disagreements because non-christians are watching us and if they see that we lack Christian demeanor and our own divisions they're not going to trust us but their issues so how we divide is really important and I predict this issue will eventually get resolved and when it is God's going to replace it with another church splitting issue has got nothing to do with salvation so that's a great response and I absolutely just again applaud that approach and that the heart around that I think the part of what reasons are or apologetics that we are prepared to give the reason for the hope that we have but doing so in in love and humility and on that note I watched you answer the question I'm not sure if this has come in here but on another divisive issues you know on predestination and a freewill Calvinism is an Armenian what would some if a quick thoughts just around that what would you say on that as well I'd say get the book beyond the cosmos well actually that's our strategy we write books that target a particular subset of the non-christian community each of our books targets a special kind of non-christian and basically we want Christians when they read our books be thinking of a non-christian they can give it to but one things I discovered doing door-to-door surveys is it about 15% of non-christians their big hang-up is predestination and freewill so it's important that we Christians address that and how we've addressed it is to make the point when you look at the Bible compared to other holy books the other holy books either teach divine predestination the Quran is a good example of that or they teach human free will Hinduism is a good example of that where the Bible is unique it teaches both if either eight verses in the Bible that teach divine predestination and human free will in the same sentence and what I've written about and beyond the cosmos is we already have physics research that tells us that the only way we can consistently interpret particle physics is if in addition to length width and height there are six very tiny space dimensions which means we're looking at a creator that created nine dimensions of space not just three and the space time theorems tell us that God must have access to a minimum of a second dimension of time now if you look at human free will and divine predestination and the context of a god that can move and operate in 11 space-time dimensions there are multiple ways that God can predetermine every one of your thoughts words and actions from before he created the universe and yet hold you individually responsible for every one of your words thoughts and actions as a free will being you're not going to resolve it in four space-time dimensions for what I've done them beyond the cosmos is show you three different ways you can resolve it in 11 space-time dimensions and by the way and won't hurt my feelings if you tell me all three are wrong all I'm doing is showing you these are three possible ways God could do it he's actually got millions of independent ways in which he could resolve that paradox but here is the apologetic got pay off all the world's holy books outside of the Bible teach doctrines about God that you can visualize within length width height and time the Bible is the only holy book that talks about God's attributes in a way that are impossible to visualize and length width height and time I mean the Trinity is another example you're not going to resolve that in four space-time dimensions that had a huge impact am i becoming a Christian realizing these other books have the signature of being crafted by a human being the Bible alone had the signature of being inspired by one that transcended our human space-time dimensions so I said this is the only book where it's really pursuing its good and that is beyond the cosmos beyond the coffee on the cosmos so make a note of that for just add to your list all right how many of you have got now on your list all right it's gonna you gotta go wait a dozen books on there let me just look take a look at that time here all right let's jump back again or two to Genesis whether you are the human be light beings before an Adam and Eve and while I hang on that that question there was another one here please explain your point of view about Adam and Eve the existent of pre ad Adamic creatures and if you consider that a couple gave origin to all other humans including Japanese and African or if different groups of people appeared simultaneously in different parts of the earth okay our position and reasons to believe is all of humanity is descended from one man and one woman that God specially created in the Garden of Eden and as far as the racial distinctions go the genetic difference between the races is really quite minor matter of fact you can get color differences in as little as four generations if you move them to the right geographical location the greatest genetic racial difference you'll see is between Bantu blacks and Zulu blacks in South Africa both of them differ from one another more than they differ from Caucasians or Asians and so I think we make a bigger deal about racial differences than we really should the genetic distinctives are really quite tiny and they're easy to develop through natural means and we've actually figured why live with the Africans we got the greatest diversity because they had the greatest marriage taboos so for example when David Livingstone went into the Congo in the 19th century he found a tribe where the men had an average height of 7 feet living just two miles from another tribe where the men had an average height of three and a half feet how did that happen they refused to intermarry and so they're able to preserve their genetic differences whereas the Europeans and the Asians didn't do that they were much more open to intermarriage what's happening now is racial distinctives are rapidly disappearing because the race day marriage taboos have basically disappeared for a line so we're all going to look the same in a few generations you go make a note of that now what was the rest of the question was something else whether there was a priya damage well there are about 12 species of bipedal primates that predated Adam and Eve but they're in the same category the chimpanzees orangutangs and the gorillas so they're not human they are bipedal and they're roughly similar to us in size for what you notices no technological advance the most advanced tool use you see is a single shaped rock they don't have axes and shovels no technological advanced and especially no symbolic capability we humans have amazing symbolic capabilities but I mean no non-human animal has ever come up with an alphabet or an arithmetic number system I've no non-human animal can even figure out what a stop sign means so even the simplest symbols they can't figure out or is even you know children that are a few months old they're already responding symbolically who want proof of that give an iPad to a five month old child and see what happens the symbolic capability is right there so we are different and I think one of the ways to really establish that with skeptics there's a set of research papers that have been published on field studies of mammals and what they discovered is any mammal with an adult body size bigger than three kilograms will go extinct before it evolves and since all of bipedal primates are much bigger than three kilograms they didn't evolve they're all special creations which raises the question why would God create all these species of bipedal primates before human beings you know who gave us the answer to that he and Tattersall one of the world's most for Mason anthropologists a lifelong atheist but he came to fuzz Rana or staff biochemist and said this doesn't fit my model but I think it beautifully fits yours and what he pointed out this these bipedal primates are unique to Africa Europe and Asia we have no evidence in North and South America or Australia and says the greatest was sub-sahara Africa they had 12 species says notice this when humans went into Australia they quickly drove to extinction 94% of all the large body burden mammal species and hence were stuck in the Stone Age and at a low population level contrast that was sub-saharan Africa where they had the full complement of bipedal primates the extinction rate was only 4% and notice in Europe Africa and Asia we have civilization being launched why because they had the animals that job speaks about as gifts of God gave us to launch civilization when humans came into North America they killed off the camels the horses the cows all the animals they needed to launch civilization and so they were stuck on the Stone Age until the Europeans brought the animals they needed including the cheap sir in Australia is that right that's right yeah you mentioned three kilograms was it three kilograms right does that kind of help explain the questions about the dinosaurs as well what happened to the dinosaurs how did they well where they fit in is Psalm 104 but that's one of the long that is the longest creation song and it tells us that God packs earth with as much life as possible and as diverse as possible you see the same statement in isaiah 45:18 how God expresses us through this creative activity which means that God's always gonna pack as much diversity as the conditions on earth will permit okay because of the conditions we see today the largest land animal you can have as an elephant if it's more massive than an elephant the elephant will injure itself you say well how come you can have dinosaurs which are much bigger they lived at a time when we had vast shallow seas over the continents and so you would have like 10 to 15 feet of water over most of North America's landmass that water provided adequate buoyancy that you could have a dinosaur that weighed a hundred tons which is such a creature would be impossible today as a testimony regardless of the physical habitat conditions God always packs it with a maximum and diversity and because of that maximum diversity and maximum biomass we have the maximum bio deposits that we can harvest to sustain our civilization yeah you know what's amazing the Earth's crust has got 76 plus quadrillion tons of bio deposits and so you can thank God for all those millions of generations of light before us because they provide us with the limestone the marble the coal the oil the natural gas that's great lots of information here already while still doing well with time I have a lot more questions here I'm gonna sort of take a few more minutes just to run through I want to give some of you an opportunity to ask dr. Ross's questions so some of you may think that you know like all these questions our our screen and really they're not I'm just like throwing them up here as it come and this man can answer everything just right off his head so if you do have a question that's right in your head like you just pressing you want to ask that perhaps you feel has not been addressed yet I'm gonna take the first three person that can come right up to the stairs here you have to be bold if you have a question you really feel like hey I love to get this answered so make your way up here I'm going to turn this mic over to you you can ask that a quick question and let dr. Ross answer that real quick here so anybody have a question come on come on up here just make sure that the camera can catch you what's your question for dr. Ross are you suggesting that Adam and Eve are a product of spontaneous biogenesis if so is there any scientific evidence to support this claim okay what I'm saying is that and a mini were specially created by God they're not the product of evolution there are special creation I'd also argue that must be the case for any mammal that's bigger than seven kilograms and maybe for all the mammals and birds that they're specially created and you know the Bible talks about God creating the min which is usually translated kinds and it defines six different kinds of howls as being separate men so evidently when it comes to the birds a special creation is the name of the game although when it comes to insects it's at the genus level not the species level so there's a little more flexibility from a biblical account if we're talking insects and genetically that makes sense as well so does that answer your question or is you have a more of a different kind of question I don't know okay I've answered okay good thank you and what's your question for so I heard in like Genesis one versus one and that between Genesis 1 verses 1 and Genesis 1 versus 2 there is like a shift of reference so would you agree with like the gap theory or do you have other views on it ok I do argue that there's a passage of time between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2 and between 1/2 and 1/3 but not because I believe in a gap theory it's because of the placement of the verbs and the sentences there and the verbs that are used in the form of the verbs that we can actually discern there must have been a passage of time and I cite the theological works of Jack Collins JC Collins and Rodney Whitefield who both given independent arguments why the exegetical analysis of those three verses means there has to be a passage of time between 1 1 and 1/2 and 1/2 and 1/3 the gap theory is usually the idea that there was an initial creation and then there was a recreation and most gap theories claim that God challenged Satan and he made a real mess of it and God says now I'll show you how to do it right a problem I have with that is Isaiah especially repeats over and over again only God can create and that's something he doesn't share with any other being so that was seen to eliminate at least those gap theories that would include Satan and I would argue the gap theory fails on exegetical grounds alone because all gap theories required translating Genesis 1 to the world became formless and void rather than the world was formless and void and that means you'd have to find a manuscript that instead of having the verb hai-yah by itself it's high outlaw and it was speculation and we might find manuscripts that have it as high a law while to this day we've yet to find a manuscript that has it that way so the world was formless and void there's no exegetical evidence for interpreting it the world became four formless and void you want to read more I have a chapter in the gap theory of navigating Genesis thank you one more question you seem very intelligent so I'm hoping you can answer my question so I know that God created the universe who created God okay that's a very good question one of the most that's probably the most frequent question I get if God created the universe who created God and you know as a father I got that question from both of my sons when there were three and a half years of age so it's not just theoretical physicists that asked that question almost everybody asks that question I'll give you the response I get from theoretical physicists like for example you got Sean Carol you've got Richard Dawkins both saying well God created the universe who created God they're making a catagory error the space-time theorems prove that there must be at being beyond space and time that created our universe of matter energy space and time time by definition is that dimension in which cause and effect phenomena occur where the effects are after the causes but the space-time theorems prove is that the Creator the universe is operating in at least two independent dimensions of time now any entity constrained to a single dimension at time which is true the entire universe and all the beings in the universe must have some ultimate creation event so if you want a powerful argument for creation anything constrained to a single dimension of time or time can't be stopped or reverse must have a beginning it must be created but notice that doesn't apply to the one that created time and so for example you could have God on a timeline over here that's infinitely long that never crosses or touches a timeline of a universe over here as such God would have no beginning no ending and would be uncreated now of all the holy books the Bible stands alone and saying that about God the Bible also stands alone and saying that God can arbitrarily compress time or expand time you see it in Psalm 90 a day of the Lord is like a thousand years a thousand years is like a day a thousand years is like three hours in the night while what I show and Beyond the cosmos how that's only possible for a being that has access to at least the equivalent of two dimensions of time and so we noticed long before physicists came up with a spacetime theorems the Bible was declaring that God had these transdimensional powers and if he's got those transdimensional powers he'd need not have a beginning or an ending or be created so and by the way when I shared that with both of my sons when there are three Knapp years of age they got it now I'll say one more thing now my wife says that I'm a compulsive scientist because when our sons were born I performed experiments on them and one of the experiments like performed on them was to test whether or not they were born thinking in two dimensions and so what I did as I would substitute two-dimensional cutouts of the three dimensional toys and I noticed when there were three in four months of age they couldn't tell the difference up at that time there were six or seven months of age I couldn't fool them anymore they had transitioned at 3-dimensional thinking and experiment I did in our church I taught a class on God's transdimensional powers to four-year-olds and I taught the same class to 50 year olds guess who got the four year-olds got it the 50-year olds were struggling but that but me too I mean the answer that is a four year olds are only three and a half years removed from transitioning from two-dimensional thinking the three dimensional thinking whereas the class of fifty year olds they had been in a three dimensional rut for forty nine and a half years and so it was much harder to get them out of that rut than it was little children that's great well we're gonna move now to our speed round all right so we have less than ten minutes left and there's a lot of questions here so I'm gonna just fire them and dr. Ross you have 45 seconds for each of this question so they're really just your thoughts your ebook yeah that's right pointed a book but this is your your quick thoughts and some of this I'm gonna start off with this biblical sense making biblical sense of manmade global warming what what is the Bible what are your thoughts on global warming well five seconds that's the book on writing right now and you get a little hint of it an improbable plan of chapter 15 but what I'm writing in the book is that God has given us a period of extreme climate stability in the midst of a long period of extreme climate instability you can climb the stability and there's an extreme climate instability we need to look at the past 9,500 years as a miraculous gift from God in many different ways in fact in the last couple of years we've added to the long list of miracles that are necessary to give us this period of extreme climate stability and it's because of that period of extreme climate stability billions of us can live here in planet Earth at one time and develop a technology where we can fulfill the Great Commission not millions of years but literally in decades that's good right next question speaking of books you mentioned question regarding other religions and texts before the Bible have any of them come closer to scientific evidence like the Bible the one that's come the closest is the innumerable ish and it didn't really come very close at all and only got two of the 14 right so there's nothing that compares of the Bible in terms of scientific accuracy not even close what is your opinion on life that is not on earth is there life extraterritorial out there your own life while I've been on record since the 1980s we will find the remains of life on every solar system body reason why Earth has been so packed with life for so long that when meteor strike the earth it exports microbes throughout the whole of the solar system in fact on the moon we had 20,000 kilograms of Earth's soil for every hundred square kilometers and one ton of her soil has a hundred quadrillion microbes in it in fact I spoke at NASA Houston a few years ago saying we need to go back to the moon because on the moon are the fossils of Earth's first life they don't exist here on earth because Earth's geology has destroyed them but the moon is no geology we can go there see who got the origin of life model rate the theists or the atheists and guess what they make up a hundred percent of the taxpayer base on that know what is the hardest question that you've ever received from an atheist atheist from an atheist well usually the hard questions are they'll say can you comment on this research paper was published a few hours ago and while I haven't read it so that's all my luck least let me look at the abstract before I answer your question fair enough a quick question here humans and dinosaurs on earth have been with the atte coexist at the same time your opinion that okay dinosaurs and humans did not coexist because dinosaurs could only be here when you got extensive shallow seas and there weren't extensive shallow seas during the human era if you want the scientific dates the dinosaurs existed between two hundred and fifty 1 million years ago and 66 million years ago and humans didn't show up until sometime during the last ice age a few tens of thousands of years ago so yeah they didn't overlap but their bones are everywhere you're doing very well by the way so if I last three how should we reconcile the theory of evolution with our Christian belief of Adam and Eve well we're in dialogue with both theistic evolutionists and atheists who are trying to claim that were descended from a population through common descent not from special creation with two individuals and I'm old enough to remember when they were claiming the ancestral population was over a million that was like 45 years ago and then about 30 years ago it said a hundred thousand when Francis Collins published his book he said ten thousand when Buzz Rana debated Dennis venema at Trinity international he went down to twelve hundred then we had a debate where it was eight hundred when a debated Deborah Hersman she said we can go as low as 132 and she's about 25 years younger than I am so I said Deborah let's plot a graph we have a million here a hundred thousand ten thousand twelve hundred eight hundred one hundred and thirty two where do you think is going to end up looks like is heading to the biblical two and if you look at the mitochondrial DNA and the y-chromosome DNA it's consistent with all of humanity being descended from one man and one woman now by theistic evolution friends will say it's also consistent with a small number it's consistent with both but it looks like the evidence is heading towards what the Bible has described very good there's there were a few questions again to do would cover a lot in Genesis there were some to do with eschatological question and I will end on one that's close to that someone had wrote written in and said that I enjoy your talk very much as well as a lot of interviews in one interview you mentioned that instead of wasting time in trying to predict the end of the world Christian should preach the gospel to accelerate the Lord's coming as it says in the Bible where in the Bible is discovered well where it is covered is that Jesus makes a promise to his disciples I will return when you complete the Great Commission so rather than we Christians waiting for the Lord to return we need to understand he's waiting for us to finish the job as soon as we finish the task of taking the good news of salvation to all the people groups of the world he will come back and I closed my book improbable planet with the point that evangelical Christians today have the finances the technology and the people to fulfill the Great Commission and less than 10 years all we lack is the motivation and that's one reason why I've written several books is to give people the motivation to go out there and share their faith that's why I wrote always be ready God's going to do amazing miracles in your life if you prepare good reasons and commit yourself to share them with gentleness respect and a clear conscience and it's fun to see God doing these miracles in your life and his faith building to see God deed doing these miracles in like get out of the stands and get on the playing field as for the action is that's where the fun is so I hope all of you who are followers of Christ let's do it lots of questions just uh before you go a couple of next steps for you this question you would be able to answer about the book so if someone had to I mean all your books are great you have a few volumes are available down here can you just again in 45 seconds talk about if there's one that someone is new and tonight you just all these things have intrigued you you were to ask dr. Ross if I had to pick one book to just start thinking about a which book would that be and is that available tonight you want to talk about the books well we picked three books and only three of our books for tonight one of them is navigating Genesis if you have a non-christian friend whose hang-up is the Bible that's the book to give him he got a non-christian friend who says if it was all-powerful all-loving God why is there evil and suffering why the universe is the way it is which makes the point that God designed the universe as a tool to eliminate evil and suffering quickly rather than slowly and then I would say improbable planet which makes the point that God only designed the universe so that we could exists he designed the universe so the billions of us could be redeemed that's where you really see the evidence for a loving a powerful God yeah that's great so and check out those books there's a website called reasons or go put that slide up again recent org so a lot of the resources are available there tomorrow at 10:00 was it 10:00 a.m. 5:00 5:00 p.m. tomorrow admissions test check that out and those of you that are part of this church or you haven't had a chance to connect so glad that you're out here tonight and we want to invite you back to something with that we run here called the Alpha of course so some of these questions are covered maybe not quite to that detail but the great thing about Alpha is that you get the teaching on the video we get a into a group so your questions can be asked in a small group setting and you get a meal all right when we feed you as well and all that is free and that happens every Tuesday so come here at Tuesday at this 6:30 this coming we love to have you here before you go who we do this can we pray for dr. Ross again just trusting that as he given his life decades of it we're trusting that there's gonna be decades ahead that he's gonna continue to make an impact for the kingdom of God so as a church which is so thankful for him so let us pray for you which I pray Heavenly Father we thank you so much for this mighty man of God we see again how they're with a sense of humility Lord that he serves you we thank you for the wisdom that you give to him and we continue to pray for open doors that those that would have questions would enter into dialogue and to be able to see a God of intelligent design and so we ask for your continued guidance wisdom grace over him in the name of Jesus and follow I pray for every person that's here tonight that we would purpose to seek more after you and tonight if you're here and you this is someone invited you here and you haven't thought so much about it but tonight if this has entreat you lord I just pray that as we seek after you that you would show yourself to be faithful you would show yourselves to be true you would show yourself to be real and father as those that have convinced Lord out of who you are I ask that you continue to allow your church or to grow in our faith not one that is blind but that one it's that's based on solid evidence of who you are that we would have to be prepared equipped to give the reasons for the hope that we have ultimately in you so we thank you Father for this night thank you for your presence that's here and we just ask that you keep us safe as we travel home and the things that you call this to you in the mighty name of Jesus we pray amen amen so good to have you here go downstairs check out the books hope to see this weekend an emissions test have a great night [Applause]

Channel: Reasons to Believe

Views: 44,059

Rating: 4.8931551 out of 5

Keywords: Reasons to Believe, Creationism

Id: SwNypNs0lW4

Length: 93min 50sec (5630 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 21 2019