Does God Exist?

Sermon Transcript

Does God exist? And there are three arguments for the existence of God that typically we bring forth to show that God does exist. We can't cover them all tonight. We got to go through some of this and get to Q&A. But we're going to look at a couple of them briefly. The first is from the beginning of the universe known as the cosmological argument. Now cosmological comes from the Greek word "cosmos" which means world or universe. and it says if the universe had a beginning, then it must have had a beginner.

The second argument is the argument from design. It's also known as the teleological argument. Telos is a Greek word meaning designer purpose, and it says if there's design in the universe and design in you, life, then there has to be a designer. We're going to see some of that evidence here in a minute.

The third argument, we don't have time to get into tonight, but it's the argument from morality known as the moral argument, and it says if there's one thing morally wrong, wrong, just one, like it's wrong to torture babies for fun, or it's wrong to murder innocent people, then there has to be a God. Why? Because if there is no standard beyond humanity that we're all obligated to obey, everything's just a matter of opinion. Just your opinion against say Hitler's opinion or some murderer's opinion.

In fact, flying over here yesterday, there was a guy sitting right next to me and I was going through the presentation that I was about, that I was going to do this morning and he kept looking at it and he finally said, "Hey, are you like a preacher or something?" And I said, "No." And I said, "But I speak at churches a lot, "I'm gonna speak at one." And we got talking and he left God a long time ago because he had some abuse in the church. And we got talking about this argument. And I kept saying, "What is wrong if there is no God?" And he said, "Well, it's wrong to harm people." I said, "Why is it wrong to harm people "if there is no God?" Who said? "You said, what if Hitler comes along He says it's my right to harm you. Is he wrong? How is he wrong? And he just couldn't articulate why it's wrong if there is no God, because nothing's wrong if there is no God. Everything's just a matter of opinion. Yet we all know deep in our hearts, it's not just a matter of opinion that you ought not torture babies for fun, or you ought not murder or rape somebody, right? So there is a standard out there and that is God.

But we don't have time for that. We gotta start in the beginning. Now you gotta admit it was worth coming here tonight just to see God do, did you see that? Some of you I said I've never seen God move. Oh really, check this out. Look at that. Hey, I need sound on this. Now this is the argument that says, well that many people say points back to the big. (explosion) Now I know some of you are going, Frank, you know, we're Christians in here and we don't believe in the Big Bang. You guys don't believe in the Big Bang? I believe in the Big Bang. I just know who banged it. (audience laughing) In fact, the evidence for the Big Bang is so good that even atheists are admitting it.

Atheistic scientists like Stephen Hawking was probably the top physicist in the world until he died about six years ago. He was an atheist and he said this, "Almost everyone now believes that the universe "and time itself had a beginning at the Big Bang." Now Hawking didn't think it was God, but what else could it be? In fact, we're going to see here in a minute the only reasonable explanation is someone like God. But he's admitting the data. And it wasn't just Hawking, but other cosmologists also point this out. This guy is Alexander Valenka, and he teaches at Tufts University. And he's an agnostic. He doesn't know whether God exists or not. But here's what he said after looking at the evidence. He said, "With the proof now in place, cosmologists," by the way, a cosmologist is not someone that puts on your makeup. A cosmologist studies the universe. Cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past eternal universe. There is now no escape. They have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.

Now, there's a couple interesting words here. The first interesting word to me anyway is the word "proof." It's unusual for scientists to use the word "proof." Why? Because science is tentative. New evidence can come in and overturn an existing theory. In fact, that's happened throughout history. I know you can't trust everything on Wikipedia, although did you hear that the Wikipedia guy, one of the developers, the creators of it, just became a Christian? Yeah, we're gonna have him on the podcast here in a couple weeks. His name is Larry Sanger. But anyway, there's a Wikipedia page that says that it goes through overturned scientific theories. And there's scores of these. You know, new data comes in. Oh, we were wrong. this is the right view. But you know what Valenkin says? He sees so much evidence pointing to the fact that there was a beginning and he's willing to call it a proof.

The other interesting word is the word problem. Why is it a problem that there's a cosmic beginning? Because if the universe literally had a beginning, if all of nature had a beginning, whatever created nature can't be made of nature. In other words, we can't have a natural cause here. We can only have a supernatural cause. Something beyond nature. Now, we're not going to go through the evidence for this here tonight. Why? Because I want to get to the evolution stuff. We don't have time, number one. Number two, it's all in the book. I don't have enough faith to be in Atheist chapter three. And it's not even controversial. Even the Atheist, sir, grant, yeah, the universe had a beginning. What is controversial is what caused the universe to have a beginning. Okay?

Now, I do want to show you one piece of philosophical evidence that I think shows beyond any doubt that the universe had a beginning. This is not going to change by any future scientific discovery. And the way to explain this is to look at a timeline. Let's look at the timeline there. Here's today right here. There's yesterday. There's day before yesterday. There's last week. Let's say we don't know how far back this timeline goes. Here's my question. Can this timeline be infinite into the past? No, why not? Why can't it be infinite into the past? What's that? Well, it doesn't, not necessarily for time. You're on the right track, but... What's that? Would run into the future? (audience laughing) Thank you, Dr. Strange. (audience laughing) I like that.

Now think about it, would today ever arrive if there were an infinite number of days before today? No, you would never get to today, why? Because if there's an infinite number of days before today, you'd always have to live another day before you got to this day, right? Yes, I know this can give you intellectual constipation. But just think about this, that if the past were infinite, today never would have arrived. But here we are, we're at today, so there can only be a finite number of days before today. This shows beyond any doubt that time had a beginning. And by the way, if time had a beginning, what could have caused time? Only something outside of time, something timeless.

Now, if you're timeless, do you have a beginning? No. Obviously not. You're eternal. If you're eternal, do you have a cause? No, so this answers the age-old question, "Who made God?" No one made God. He is the uncaused first cause. He is the uncreated creator, the unmoved mover, as Aristotle would say. So, if time had a beginning, and it did, the universe had a beginning. Now, let's just jump to the bottom line. If the universe had a beginning, then it must have had a beginner. The evidence leaves us with one of the following two options, Either no one created something out of nothing, which is the atheistic view, or someone created something out of nothing, which is the theistic view.

Now here's my only question. Which view is more reasonable? That no one created something out of nothing, or that someone created something out of nothing? What do you think? Yeah, number two. I was at Texas A&M once, and one atheist said, "I think number one is more reasonable." I said, "Number one." Let's look at number two for a second. Number two says, "Someone created something out of nothing." miracle, right? But at least you got a miracle worker. You got someone doing the miracle. Number one is a miracle with no miracle worker. That's clearly absurd. In fact, you realize that everyone believes in at least one miracle. Christians believe in more than one. We believe in this miracle and several others, but atheists believe in one miracle. They believe that no one created something out of nothing. Which of those miracles takes more faith, like blind faith. It's not the Christians that have all the faith. It's the atheists that have all the faith to believe that no one created something, everything, out of nothing.

In fact, here's what Leibniz, who was a philosopher a couple hundred years ago, asks atheists, "If there is no God, why is there something rather than nothing at all?" In other words, if there is no God, why does anything exist? Why do you exist? Why do I exist? Why does the universe exist? Why do natural laws exist? Why do the Dallas Cowboys exist? That's evidence that Satan is alive and well! Now, ladies and gentlemen, think about this. If space, time, and matter literally had a beginning out of nothing, the scientific evidence seems to show that. So does the philosophical evidence. What could have caused that? Well, if space, time, and matter had a beginning, whatever crossed it has to be outside of space-time and matter. In other words, the cause must be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful to create the universe out of nothing, personal in order to choose to create. Why? Because to go from a state of nothingness to a state of creation, someone had to make a choice and only persons can make choices. Also the cause would have to be intelligent to have a mind to make a choice.

Now ladies and gentlemen, when you think about a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal, intelligent cause, who do you think of? God. You say, "But how do you know it's the Christian God, Frank?" We don't. Yet. I mean, this could be Allah or some other theistic or theistic God. But if we were to look at the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus and we realize, We can't do that tonight, but if we realize that Jesus really did die and rise from the dead to prove He was God, then we can say that the same being that walked out of the tomb 1,992 years ago is the same being in whose divine nature created the universe out of nothing. We haven't gotten there yet, but from one argument we have six attributes that could be the God of of the Bible. You don't get all the way to Jesus with a scientific argument, but you have attributes. This is why we talked about this morning, remember we're talking about Romans? That things are known, what you know about God, you know through what has been made. Space, matter, and time were made. So whatever created space, matter, and time is outside of space, matter, and time. That's what we mean by God.

Now, there's an agnostic astronomer who way back in the '70s wrote a book called "God and the Astronomers." His name was Robert Jastrow. He was not a believer. He was an agnostic. He was the founder of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. But in his book, "God and the Astronomers," he goes through the evidence that we didn't have time to go through here. And it's very favorable to Christianity. And here's how he ends the book. This is the last line of the book. I just love this line. Remember, he's an agnostic. Here's what Jastro said. "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance. He's about to conquer the highest peak as he pulls himself over the final rock. He's greeted by a band of theologians who've been sitting there for centuries." Right? No doubt reading Genesis 1.1 again in God created the heavens and the earth. That's the best explanation for how we got here.

Alright now, the second argument or question we're going to investigate has to do with the design argument, the teleological argument. Remember we said there are three questions that Christians and atheists sometimes differ over. There are origin questions, where did the universe come from, where did first life come from, and where did subsequent life forms come from. Well what we're going to look at for just a second is the fact that the universe appears to be designed and so does life. Let me just spend a minute on the fact that the universe is designed. This is important because it shows from the very beginning that whatever created the universe was really intelligent and really specific. This is known as the fine-tuning of the universe.

What scientists have discovered in recent decades is that attributes about our universe from the very beginning are so precisely tweaked, they're exactly where they need to be. That if any one of these attributes of our universe were different slightly, the universe wouldn't exist, or if it did exist, it couldn't support life. The universe is balanced on a razor's edge. It's like there's a control room somewhere that has all the dials for the universe exactly where they need to be. And if you were to go into that control room and turn one dial just a hair the whole universe would evaporate. Dr. Strange. Let me just give you a couple of these attributes. One of these from an atheist, Stephen Hawking. Here's what he talked about regarding the extreme precision of the expansion rate at the very beginning of the universe. He said this, "If the expansion rate of the universe was different by one part in a thousand million million a second after the Big Bang, the universe would have collapsed back on its or never developed galaxies. If the expansion rate was that infinitesimally different from the very beginning, none of us would be here.

Now you can't make any sort of evolutionary explanation for this, you can't say, well, maybe it evolved to this point by chance, whatever that means, why? Because the value started right where it needed to be from the very beginning. The same being that created space, matter, and time appears to be the same being that fine-tuned the expansion rate to be precisely what it needed to be. Also, right now, the gravitational force, if it were altered by more than one part and ten to the 40th power compared to the strong nuclear force, we wouldn't exist. What's one part and ten to the 40th power? That's one part in one with 40 zeros following it. You say, "Frank, I can't get my head around that number." I know, neither can I. So let me give you an illustration as to the kind of precision we're talking about. One and ten to the 40th power is this. the entire North American continent from Central America all the way to Greenland, soon to be part of the USA, all right? And stack it in dimes all the way to the moon, 238,000 miles. And do that on a billion other North American continents from Central America to Greenland, all the way to the moon. Take all those dimes in all those piles, put them in one huge pile, mark one dime red, Place it in, blindfold the friend, throw him on the pile, ask him to pick one dime at random. The chance he would pick that one red dime is one chance in 10 to the 40th power. Is he going to pick that dime? No. It's zero. He's not going to pick that dime.

Look, there's only two possibilities. Either that value was designed or it wasn't. What makes more sense? put it right where it needs to be. If we're any different, we wouldn't be here. You say, "What about chance?" Ladies and gentlemen, is chance a cause? Does chance cause things? Who caused this? Chance, he was just here. No. Chance is not a cause. Chance is a word we use to describe mathematical possibilities. Chance doesn't do a thing. Chance doesn't cause You know what scientists mean when they use the word "chance"? What they mean is, we don't know. We don't know. This value was designed. Alright, so not only did the universe explode into being out of nothing, it's fine-tuned, it remains fine-tuned right to this second.

Now we're going to talk about life. And remember, there are two questions we want to investigate. The origin of the first life and then subsequent life forms. So what about evolution? Well before we get to evolution, we got to have life, right? Because evolution itself only apparently works on existing life. It doesn't tell you how the first life got here. So what we need to do is look at where life came from. And there's only two possibilities. God or nihilism. I love this quote from a couple of authors. They said this. We are either images of God or clever murderous monkeys fighting for control over the banana supply. There's no middle ground. That's it, right? We either made the image of God or we're not. And if we're not, we're just clever murderous monkeys working for control of the banana supply.

Now you may have heard macro evolutionary theory from the Goodyoo via the zoo, right? All these animals somehow have a common ancestor by natural forces, but we're not even getting to that first. We've got to talk about the origin of the first life. Like, where did the first life come from? Remember this morning when we talked about the difference between a natural cause and an intelligent cause? Remember when we were talking about the difference between Mount Rushmore and the Grand Canyon? The Grand Canyon is obviously naturally caused, but Mount Rushmore requires an intelligent cause. that same principle to look at the simplest life we know about. Here's an amoeba, a one-celled creature. What caused a one-celled creature? Well, here's an important observation. Notice it doesn't say made by God or made by natural forces on it, right? So how did the first life come into existence? Do you know there is nobody working in origin of life research right now who knows? Nobody. The problem is too hard. Nobody can figure out how non-life could give rise to life. And you say, well, maybe we'll figure it out someday. Maybe we will. But it looks like we don't just lack a natural explanation. It looks like we have positive evidence that life requires intelligence.

And in order to communicate this, let's go to your breakfast table. How many people in here like alphabet cereal? You guys remember alphabet cereal? Let's suppose you like alphabet cereal. You wanna have a bowl of alphabet cereal, you're a teenager, and you come downstairs one Saturday morning and you notice the box is knocked over on the kitchen table and the letters fell, take out the garbage, mom. (audience laughing) What are you gonna assume? The cat knocked the box over, earthquake shook the house? No, you're gonna say that that's intelligent design by an intelligent being, mom, right?

Or let's say you're walking along the beach and you see in the sand, John loves Christie. What are you gonna assume? The waves did that? Crabs came out of the water and made that message? No, John was playing hooky and he was down at the beach and he signed the sand, John loves Christie. Because John loves Christie is a message and messages always come from minds. Natural forces don't create messages. They come from minds. And what we're saying is, if take out the garbage mom or John loves Christie, requires an intelligent being, then why doesn't this require an intelligent being? This is DNA. A four letter genetic alphabet, every living thing has. You have DNA, I have DNA, a banana has DNA. And every living thing has this software program is what it is. All the letters are in the right order. This morning we talked about that every one of your 40 trillion cells has a software message that's 3.2 billion letters long. All the letters in the right order, unless there's a mutation every there. They're all in the right, who put them in the right order? Where does this come from?

In fact, even the evil Bill Gates, Mr. Vaccine himself, admitted he said DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created. The guy that created your software, most of your devices, is telling you that DNA is a software program. Where does software come from? Where do programs come from? They come from programmers. They don't come from natural forces. So here's the question. If DNA is like a message like take out the garbage mom, how much DNA is in say a one celled amoeba? It's supposed to be a simple form of life. The amount of DNA in an amoeba is about equivalent to a thousand volumes of an encyclopedia.

Oh wait, you guys don't know what encyclopedias are. Encyclopedias are these big books that you used to have to buy. they come to your door like 50 years ago before the internet and say, "Hey, you want to know anything about the world? You need to have these books." And they were about this thick, 26 of them, encyclopedia Britannica. Right? Now this is all online. Nobody sells these things anymore. But imagine a thousand of these. That's how much information is in a one-celled amoeba. And in a one-celled amoeba, you could line up several hundred in an inch. And there's that much DNA information in a one-celled amoeba. Now to believe that that resulted by natural forces is like believing that the Library of Congress resulted from an explosion in a printing shop. I don't have enough faith to believe that. There's a mind behind all this. The first life requires an intelligent cause.

Oh, by the way, who told me there's this much information in the... I mean, I'm not a biologist. How did I know this? You know what told me this? Richard Dawkins himself. This is in his book, Blind Watchmaker. He admits there's that much information in an amoeba. If there's that much information in an amoeba, why does he think it could come together by some sort of freakish accident? It can. We don't just lack a natural cause. This is positive evidence for an intelligent being. It's like when you're walking along the beach and you see John loves Christie. You don't just lack a natural explanation, that's positive evidence for an intelligent being. Are you guys with me?

In fact, the top philosophical atheist in the world of the last century, his name was Antony Flu, not Anthony, Antony from Britain. And he wrote more in support of atheism than probably anybody in the 20th century. He actually became a theist, not a Christian. Became a theist, said there's got to be a God because of this argument. Here's what he said. "It now seems to me that the findings of more than 50 years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design." Once you start seeing software programs in microscopic life, you go, "Man, there's a mind behind this." In fact, probably the most important book on this over the past several decades is a book written by Stephen Meyer called "Signature in the Cell." He also wrote the book "Darwin's Doubt." Steve is a brilliant guy, friend of mine. He is a PhD from Cambridge in the philosophy of science. If you really want to take a deep dive on this, you could get either of those two books, actually as a third book out now called "Return of the God Hypothesis," where he's basically saying even the atheist scientists are going, "Yeah, the theories we have to explain all this aren't working." There's evidence for some kind of designer. Some of them are even admitting this now.

In fact, here's the question that atheists avoid. If atheists could answer this question, they could shut up everybody who says that life requires intelligence, especially when it comes to DNA. If they could answer this question, they could shut everyone up. Here's the question, what natural laws produce messages? Do you know any natural, you know wind, rain, erosion, does ever create a message? The four natural forces, the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism and gravity. Do they create messages? No, they don't. Yet every living thing has its own distinct message. How is that possible? Remember, this is not God of the gaps reasoning. We're not arguing from what we don't know. We're arguing from what we do know. If every message requires a mind and we see a message in life, we should be saying a mind is behind it. We're just using the effects. Remember we talked about this earlier? Every effect we're trying to discover what caused it. If we see effects that look like they're messages and they are, what could have caused it? Only a mind. All right, so there is no natural explanation for the origin of the first life. However, the first life, any life appears to have positive evidence for intelligence. You still with me?

All right, the next question is, What about new life forms? The first life seems to require intelligence. What about new life forms? By the way, if they ever create life in the laboratory, you know what it's going to prove? It's going to prove intelligent design. Why? Because it's going to show it took a lot of intelligence to do it. It just doesn't happen. Anyway, what about new life forms? This is our third question. And Richard Dawkins was very honest here. He said, "Biology is the study of complicated things "that give the appearance of being designed for a purpose." Notice the word appearance. He said, "It gives the appearance "of being designed for a purpose." What if the appearance is really true? It's not just an appearance. What if these things really are designed? Well, he's already ruled that out. I don't know about you, but if it looks like a duck, talks like a duck, squawks like a duck, probably a duck, right? He's saying, well, it looks like it's designed, but it isn't.

Now, a guy that made a big contribution in recent years to this kind of research to show that living things are designed is a guy by the name of Dr. Michael Behe. 1996, he wrote a book called Darwin's Black Box. You see, in Darwin's day, the cell was a black box. They didn't know what was in a cell. They couldn't look into it. Now we can, and this guy looks into cells. Since then, he's written several other books. A few years ago, he wrote a book with this opening line. Check this line out. Since the turn of the millennium, in other words, since 2000, a raft of distinguished biologists have written books critically evaluating evolutionary theory. None of them think that Darwin's mechanism the main driver of life. None of them. Why? Because it doesn't work. Because that's what the evidence shows.

In fact, it's so bad that the Royal Society of London, or it's in London, the Royal Society is probably the oldest and most august scientific affiliation in the world. They convened a meeting eight years ago in 2016, November of 2016, and here these are mostly atheists. Here was the reason for the meeting. This was on their website. Developments in evolutionary biology and adjacent fields have produced calls for a revision of the standard theory of evolution, although the issues involved remain hotly contested. They got together to try and figure out a new evolutionary theory because the one that they believe now doesn't work and they know it doesn't work. And Stephen Meyer, the guy put up there, went to this meeting and we've had several conversations on our podcast about it. Even the Darwinists are admitting their theory is in trouble and yet you have some Yahoos in the church saying, "Maybe we ought to consider Darwinism. We couldn't be more behind the times if we're going to start believing in something that even the atheists are starting to say, "This doesn't work!"

So what is the evidence that subsequent life forms have been designed? Some of it we just saw. But I just want to use an acronym, LIFE. This will help you remember it. L stands for Limits to Change. I stands for Irreducible Complexity. We'll explain these as we go. We're not gonna get through all of them. I'm just posting them up here. F stands for the fossil record and E stands for epigenetic information. Now, let's just do a couple of these in the interest of time because I wanna get to your questions. Let's start with limits to change because this is the primary argument that atheists have for or Darwinists have for how new life forms came into existence. Again, macro-evolutionary theory. We're all on this tree of life, and we all share a common ancestor. And how did we get here? We got here through very tiny, successive adaptations where new life forms have been created over very long periods of time through what is called microevolution. And one of the analogies they give to show this is something called breeding. You know how breeders can make all sorts of dogs? They can make dogs as small as a chihuahua, as large as a great dane, right? There's a lot of variability in the canine genus. And what they try and say is if we can do breeding in a short period of time, why can't macroevolution happen over a long period of time?

But there's a big problem. Does anyone see the problem with it already? There's still dogs. And what else? Yeah, who's doing the, who's doing the breeding? Intelligent people are doing the breeding, right? This has nothing to do with evolution. In fact, breeding actually shows evolution doesn't work. Why? Because if intelligent breeding meets genetic limits, and it does, they can't get outside the genesis of dogs even using all of their intelligence, why should we expect non-intelligence to exceed them? You see the problem here? They're using an analogy that doesn't work. They're using an analogy that actually shows intelligent design. Not blind processes. Breeders aren't blind. And when breeders do try and breed these dogs or other animals, they always bump up to genetic limits. They can't traverse one animal into another kind of animal. They always stay dogs. So why should we expect some non-intelligent process to do this? In fact, macro-evolutionary changes, these micro-evolutionary changes, in fact, that's probably why it's for me to pause right here and say, "I do believe in evolution," but not the kind of evolution that people think who are atheists take place. There are two kinds of evolution. There's micro evolution, that's adaptation within a type, and then there's macro evolution, which is the goo-de-oo via the zoo. And the way they get to macro evolution is they add up all these small micro-evolutionary changes and say, "Aha, that gives you a new body plan. "It gives you a new kind of animal." But that doesn't show from the evidence.

In fact, there's probably not a better picture I've ever seen to explain what Darwin found on the Galapagos Islands. Here it is. Here's what Darwin found. He found that finches had different beak depths depending upon the weather. That's what he found. The proportion of big beak finches to smaller beak finches changed with the weather, why? Well, because if you had a bigger beak, that was more advantageous in a certain drier climate or wetter climate and vice versa. If you had a smaller beak, it was more advantageous if you were in another kind of climate. And so when the climate changed, the proportion of the large beak finches So the smaller beak finches changed. So, what does that prove? Does it, what does it prove? It's a micro-revolutionary change and all it's showing is that a certain beak size fares better under different weather conditions. But notice that the beaks of the finches didn't keep getting bigger and bigger until they became pelicans, they varied around a mean, around a range. And in a dry year, the bigger beaks, this is like a tongue twister, isn't it? In a dry year, the larger beaks were more advantageous, and in a wet year, The smaller beaks were.

But notice what is not explained by any of this. What is not explained? Where do finches come from to begin with? It doesn't explain where the finches came from. The finches already existed. He's just pointing out that different weather conditions will cause finches that already exist, some of them with different characteristics to do better than others. Whoop, tee, doo. In fact, we could put it this way. You start with finches and you end with finches, but the origin of finches is never explained. You notice that? The bigger question is, where do finches come from? Where do they come from to begin with? Not once do you have them. What happens to them when it rains? In fact, this is the best I've heard with regard to what does natural selection do. Natural selection can explain the survival of a species, but not the arrival of a species. Sure, once you got a finch, yeah, okay. Natural selection will weed out the bigger beak finches on a wet year, and it'll weed out the smaller beak finches on a dry year, okay. But you haven't explained where finches came from, have you? No, you haven't. So, as Christians, if we're reasonable, we ought to say micro-revolution, within a type we agree with. Macro-revolution across types? I don't see that. In fact, I see evidence against it. Why? Because we always bump up to limits. We can't traverse limits even using our minds. We can't do it.

Now let's do the next one. This is irreducible complexity. And this is what Michael Beehe introduced in 1996. What is irreducible complexity? Before I get to irreducible complexity, let me show you what Darwin said 160 years ago. Here's what he said. If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been performed by numerous successive slight changes, my theory would absolutely break down. Well, we found a lot about life that can't be changed in a successive slight, Darwinistic way. Like for example the bacterial flagellum. I don't know this you've heard about this. This thing propels bacterium and if you look at it it's a motor right? This has engineering components to it. It's got a hook, it's got a filament, it's got a propeller, it's got an L ring, a P ring, a P ring, a busheen, it's got a membrane, it's got an S ring, Biologists who study this stuff go, they put all these terms on it. They go, yeah, this is like an engine. Yeah, that's what it is. It's an engine. And by the way, this engine can't be put together in a gradual way and still have function, right? Like for example, this is irreducibly complex. In order to have a propel, a propulsion for a bacterium, You gotta have all those pieces in working order at the same time in order to have propulsion. You can't have any of these parts missing. If any of these parts are missing or they're not the right size, the thing doesn't work. It's kind of like your car. Your car is irreducibly complex. There are elements in your car that are necessary for that thing to run. And if you take one part out, the whole thing is just a 2000 pound paperweight, right? If you take the battery cable out, what happens to the car? Now you're going nowhere, right? If you take the driveshaft out, you're going nowhere. You have to have all the parts, all the pieces together. You can't modify a car and still have function as you're modifying it. Do you see the point? Like you could say, well, I got most of it. You could have 99% of a car and have no transportation. Now there are things on your car you might not need. You might not need mirrors and stuff to drive it, but there are things in there you do need. And if those parts were not there at the right time, in working order, in the right place, you're not going anywhere. This is known as irreducible complexity. You can't modify it and still have function.

In fact, if you wanna take a look at what this thing looks like, this bacterial flagellum, and this is just one out of scores of these things you can find inside your body that are irreducibly complex. This thing has a width of an E. coli bacterium cell of one, one thousandths of the width of a human hair, which means you can line up 12,500 of these in an inch. They have 240 distinct proteins. They have a microscopic outboard motor on its tail. Some run an incredible 100,000 RPMs. It takes only a quarter turn to stop, shift directions, and start spinning 100 RPMs in the opposite direction, 100,000 RPMs in the opposite direction, and it's irreducibly complex core. It must have been created all at once. Just like you can't create a car in stages and still drive to work as you're modifying it. The same thing is true here. In fact, this nature, nature, nature is so amazing that there is an entire field called biomimetics where we study nature to see if we could build something as good. We study nature. We study this stuff and go, "How can we create something like that that is as efficient?" A lot of times nature is better than we are. We can't do it using all of our intelligence. So this thing is irreducibly complex.

In fact, the guy who discovered DNA, Francis Crick, he looks a little creepy to me. Anyway, he used to say this, "Biologists must consistently keep in mind that what they see was not designed but rather evolved." Why did he say that? The guy that discovered the software program, he says, "I know it looks designed, but it's really evolved." How? Ladies and gentlemen, how do you get a software program evolved? How does that work? I mean, even if you took a software program. Suppose we took Microsoft PowerPoint here, running on this computer right now, and we began to modify it randomly. We started to modify the code randomly. Would we get more function or less? This thing would shut down. Why do we think we're gonna get more function by randomly modifying a code? And by the way, if we did get here by some sort of evolutionary process, How would the intermediate animal survive? Like to go from say reptile to bird, how is this thing gonna survive? Right, when it doesn't have scales, but it doesn't quite have feathers either. How is it gonna live? It's not. This thing would be scooped up by some predator in a heartbeat and there goes evolution. By the way, not only that, but in order to have this evolutionary process work, You'd have to have both transitionary forms, male and female, transitioning together, right? This makes no sense. It's a fairy tale for adults, ladies and gentlemen, is what this is, 'cause it doesn't work.

In fact, even to get one mutation, a successful mutation to build like a new protein, let me show you how unlikely this is, just by random processes. Everyone's familiar with a bike lock, right? How many different combinations are on this bike lock? Math majors, homeschoolers. Let's just go right to the homeschoolers, you know. How many homeschoolers? No, there's one more than that. Right, 10,000, right? There's 10,000, 'cause you got all the zeros and then all the way up to 9,999, right? Okay, how many possibilities are on this bike lock? (audience murmuring) Okay, this is 74 dials. So in scientific notation, we would call this 10 to the fourth, or one in 10 to the fourth. And in scientific notation, we would call this one in 10 to the 74th power. Okay? Now, Doug Axe at the Discovery Institute has done all the research on this, and he discovered that for a new protein, there's 10 to the 74th DNA sequences that won't work to one that will. You with me so far? Okay. Now there, just to give you a sense, there's only been 10 to the 17 seconds in Earth history. Even if you take an old Earth view, let's say the Earth is four billion years old, that's only 10 to the 17 seconds. This is one in 10 to the 74. By the way, how much bigger is 10 to the 18 than 10 to the 17? Home schoolers, I'm just going right to you right now. How much bigger is it? It's ten times bigger. You're adding a zero. You see this number right here? Seventeen, it means one with seventeen zeros. So ten to the eighteen is one with eighteen zeros. What's ten to the seventy-four? One with seventy-four zeros. That's how many ways won't work for every way that will work. In fact, there's only been 10 to the 40 organisms in Earth history. You won't get one new protein by unguided processes in trillions of Earth histories. See, I know that some people say, "Well, if you're given more time, you need to believe in the old Earth or whatever, you're given more time to evolution." No, you're not. I mean, you're given, it's just not enough time. It's not going to happen. Trillions of Earth histories. That's one protein, and you would need that to happen 250 times in a row to even have a shot at new life. This doesn't work mathematically. It doesn't work. You're never going to get a new protein by random processes. Protein itself is not life. Protein is just a building block to life.

This reminds me of dumb and dumber. You guys remember dumb and dumber? When Jim Carrey thought he had a chance with that girl, he said, "What are the odds you and me?" And she answered him, I think Jim Carrey's like the evolutionist now. Check this out. You mean not good like one out of a hundred? I'd say more like one out of a million. So you're telling me there's a chance. Yeah! I read you. I'm so like the evolutionist. One in 10 to the 74? So you're saying there's a chance? Come on.

Here's how Behe he concluded his book, or he says this in his book, the Darwin's Black Box. He said the result of these cumulative efforts to investigate the cell, to investigate life at the molecular level is a loud, clear, piercing cry of design. The result is so unambiguous and so significant that it must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements in the history of science, the discovery rivals those of Newton and Einstein.

Now, I don't have time to go through the rest of this 'cause I wanna get to your questions, but I do wanna show you one thing about the Cambrian explosion, about the fossil record. The fossil record is completely inconsistent with gradualism. It's completely inconsistent with Darwin. In fact, Darwin said one of the biggest challenges to my theory in 1859 is, why isn't the fossil record filled with all these intermediate forms? But he said, we'll investigate the fossil record and I think my theory will be vindicated. Vindicated, 160 something years later? Not true. Instead, you know what has happened? It looks like most of the major body plans started in a geological instant. 20 of the 28 phyla, the Banger Body Plan, started according to their dating, 530 or so million years ago. Just out of nowhere, no fossil precursors. And in fact, Jonathan Wells here of the Discovery Institute, he just passed away recently, but he explains how fast in the history of time life just erupted as if it was created rather than if it was evolved. Check this little clip out. They disappeared from the Earth. Then long after their extinction, everything changed in a geological instant. In a spectacular burst of creativity, the basic blueprints for most of the animal kingdom exploded into being. And for the first time, biologically complex structures like compound eyes, spinal cords, articulated limbs, and skeletons appeared on Earth. To understand the speed of the Cambrian explosion, imagine the history of life compressed into a single day. If we imagine the whole history of life on Earth taking place in one 24-hour period. The current standard estimates for the origin of life put it at about 3.8 billion years ago, let's say 4 billion. So if we start the clock then, our 24-hour clock, six hours, nothing but these simple single-celled organisms appear. The same sort that we saw in the beginning. 12 hours, same thing. 18 hours, same thing. Three quarters of the day has passed, and all we have are these simple single-celled organisms. Then at about the 21st hour in the space of about two minutes, boom, most of the major animal forms appear in the form that they currently have in the present. And many of them persist to the present, and we have them with us today. Less than two minutes out of a 24-hour period. That's how sudden the Cambrian explosion was. This is exactly opposite what macroevolution should show us. We should find thousands and thousands of intermediate skeletons, but we don't. We find they just appear fully formed. They come into existence fully formed and they go out of existence fully formed. Even Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard University, the late Stephen Jay Gould, who was an evolutionist said, "That's the trade secret of paleontology." These things pop into existence and they exit the fossil record fully formed. There's none of this evolutionary stuff going on, which is why he came up with his own theory of evolution called punctuated equilibria, which said that there were great leaps in evolution, that things just popped into existence fully formed. He had no mechanism by which to explain this, but he's trying to come up with an evolutionary explanation for what he sees in the fossils when the fossils look like things were created. Not evolved.