This sermon delves into the lost art of respectful debate amidst passionate disagreements, focusing on the criticism of the Bible in the modern world, particularly in the scientific realm. It explores the compatibility of modern science with a biblical worldview and the ongoing contest between scientific discoveries and biblical teachings. The speaker emphasizes the intricate connections between biblical principles and scientific concepts, highlighting the profound wisdom and foresight found in the Bible's verses.

To avoid conflicting points of view, intellectually rigorous yet genuinely respectful debate has become a lost art as our recent election cycle has emphatically demonstrated. We hope that this event serves as a demonstration of goodwill and communal engagement even in the midst of passionate disagreement. For two millennia, the Bible has served as one of the pillars upon which Western society was built and the primary means through which our value system has been derived. In recent centuries, however, criticism of the Bible has become more widespread in the Western world. One of the most vigorous contests has been waging in the scientific realm. Does modern science confirm a biblical worldview or have the discoveries of the last three to four centuries relegated the scriptures to a place on the historical bookshelf? Our debaters will be engaged in the discussion, but ultimately, it will be each and every one of you here tonight and those watching on the live stream who will have to answer that question for themselves. All of you are as much a part of tonight's proceedings as any of us will be up on stage. As such, we ask that you keep a few things in mind this evening. Good debates, by their nature, are frank or blunt in their exchange. Show of hands, how many of you have attended or are familiar with a formal debate? Okay, some of you. For those of you who've never experienced a formal debate before, it is likely that you will hear ideas expressed rather matter-of-factly that you disagree with very passionately. To keep an orally procedure tonight, we ask that you refrain from any verbal or gestural outbursts for the duration of tonight's event. Along a similar vein, this debate is meant to promote further dialogue between people of differing points of view within our community. Please do not applaud, cheer, or deride either of our speakers before, during, or after their respective presentations. You will be given designated times to applaud the speakers here tonight. That will be after opening statements for each of the speakers, closing statements for each of the speakers, and a time of mutual appreciation at the close of tonight's debate. Apart from that, we ask that you maintain your silence to keep things orderly and to allow everyone to focus on what is taking place up on stage. If you have the ability to, oh, I'm sorry, we covered that already. It's my first time here tonight, too, if you all are here for the first time. Some of us are doing it up here for the first time, too. Without further ado, let me introduce our debaters. Arguing in the affirmative will be Shane Eidelman. Mr. Eidelman is the founder and lead pastor of Westside Christian Fellowship in Leona Valley, California. He is the author of multiple books, including Answers for a Confused Church, One Nation Above God, and most recently, Desperate for More of God. His sermons, books, articles, and radio program have sparked change in the lives of many. He stresses, quote, truth, the foundational beliefs clearly outlined in scripture, must remain unmoved and unchanged. Times change, but truth does not. Entering from stage left, please welcome Pastor Shane Eidelman. Arguing in the negative will be Mr. Jay Nathus. Mr. Nathus is an aerospace engineer and software system safety specialist with the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation, or the shorter version, he's a spaceship inspector. His international technical papers and presentations have investigated the role communications play in the safety of complex software-driven rocket systems. Those investigations of the failure modes of minds and of social systems have recently set him to writing online, and ideally soon in print, about the importance of knowledge and truth for safety, ethics, and values. Jay holds a master's of science degree in safety science from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering and psychology from Rutgers University. Entering from stage right, please welcome Mr. Jay Nathus. The question these gentlemen will be debating tonight is whether or not a creationist model is consistent with the scientific observations of the natural world. In order to provide for the most meaningful experience possible for all of you, our debaters have agreed to examine this question specifically in light of the field of biology. With this in mind, both men understand that to wander off-topic into other areas such as ethics and morality, philosophy, ad hominem statements, in other words, statements against the person and not against the argument, etc., is in violation of the rules that both of them have agreed to prior to tonight's event. Limited excursions into other scientific fields will be acceptable so long as it reflects on the original question. However, if we hear, for example, a presentation about geology or astrophysics instead of one about biology, they will be in equal violation of the rules of engagement this evening. Should it be necessary, I will step in to make our debaters aware of any violations along these lines. The flow for tonight's event will proceed as follows. Each speaker will be given 15 minutes to make their opening statements, followed by a 10-minute rebuttal period. From there, we will move into cross-examinations, where our debaters will be given 10 minutes to ask questions of their opponent. A second rebuttal period of 5 minutes will then take place just before a 10-minute intermission. Following intermission, we will have audience question and answers for 30 minutes. And finally, 10-minute closing statements will round out this debate tonight. Courtesy notifications will be given to our debaters with 2 minutes remaining in each period to help them stay within time. And for the purposes of tonight, that will be either David or myself saying 2 minutes at the respective time during the presentation. If one of our debaters interrupts the other at any point during the debate, they will be given one warning upon the first violation and a loss of 1 minute during their following period for every subsequent violation. I will briefly elaborate on further rules and expectations immediately prior to the relevant portions of tonight's discussion. And with that, I turn the floor over to Mr. Nathus to give us his 15-minute opening statement. All right. Thank you, Luke. Thank you, everyone, for coming. And thank you to the SI50 Fellowship for sponsoring tonight's debate, and to Antelope Valley College for providing us this lovely venue. Tonight's question is this. Is a creationist model consistent with what we observe in the natural world with respect to biology? Now, there's a lot packed into that question, but the key term to me seems to be model. What we mean by a model in science is an explanation of the past that allows you to make testable predictions about the future. When you really understand something well, when you're kind of a consummate professional in an arena, you can do like Babe Ruth did in 1932 and call your shot, land it exactly where you meant to, or just be very, very lucky if you're a cub stan. There are two ways to test a model. You can either compare backwards against the evidence of history and look for any place where that model fails to explain some observation within its domain, or you can make some kind of prediction, you can call your shot, and see if your model can hit its target. That may seem kind of ruthless, because if your model fails at either of those tests, you have to revise your model. In science, you don't have another option. Science is very, very ruthless. You might hear tonight that evolution is a theory in crisis, or something to that effect. And the scientist's response to that is, good. A scientist's job is to keep their theories in crisis by continually testing them, pushing the boundaries, and seeing how much they can explain with each theory. So, you might be wondering now, how would I test a model like creationism or evolution, which seems to operate on a time scale way beyond any human life? And to answer that, I kind of have to go back to my own background in safety science. Safety, it turns out, is no accident. It's the result, oddly enough, of intelligent design. So we safety scientists end up having to look for ways to discern intelligent design in systems built by some very, very smart people. It turns out there are three unmistakable fingerprints in an intelligently designed system. These all have to be there for it to qualify as truly intelligently designed. They are freedom of design, freedom to make a lot of design choices, optimization of design, so you can fine-tune your design to its purpose, and preparation by design. Your designs should be ready for situations that the design couldn't have anticipated were coming. So, regarding freedom, the first of these tests, the first fingerprint of intelligent design, freedom is the ability to make large leaps in complexity all at once. It's the ability to add or remove features, like if you only have a phone and you need to get somewhere, you just add a miniature GPS receiver, a little subsystem, just plop it in there. If you have a car and you need more cargo space, add a roof rack or a trailer. You can make these big leaps if you're a free designer. If you're designing a human, just playing God for a moment, if you're designing your human and you're designing its DNA, so that it replicates and functions properly as a species, you would, of course, freely choose how many chromosomes to put in it, right? Well, interestingly enough, we observe that we have 46 chromosomes in 23 pairs. All the other great apes have 48 in 24 pairs. Now, at first glance, this looks like intelligent design, but things get really, really interesting when you get down to the DNA level. It turns out, if the human chromosomes were designed intelligently, the designer could add or delete a chromosome at will, but the deletion of any chromosome is fatal for a great ape. So evolution's prediction that we share a common ancestor could not be true if that were the case. Luckily, these days we can sequence DNA. We can look for that missing chromosome in our own. It turns out it's attached to the end of chromosome number 2. At some point, during or after we split off from the great apes, our chromosome, or great ape chromosome number 13, fused to the end of our chromosome number 2. We can see telomeres, the end bits of any stranded DNA, right in the middle of that stranded DNA, and we can see that it has two centromeres, the bits that hold them together and make that little, like a capital letter H shape when they're laid out. No intelligent designer would have done that unless they meant to deceive you, and not you specifically. Only molecular biologists would be deceived by this circumstance. It doesn't seem like an intelligent designer of anything but a deceitful designer. But that's not all. That's not nearly the only evidence against freedom of design in our DNA. It turns out there are these really invasive things called endogenous retroviruses, or ERVs. Now these are very, very species-specific things that can infect the creature, and they leave behind a piece of the virus's DNA with the rest of the DNA of any of its survivors. So if anyone survives an ERV and goes on to reproduce, their children will carry those genes, and their children's children, and on and on it goes. So biologists have learned to look for these sequences. They can tell you which order species broke off from each other. Here's the first shot I'm calling tonight. Why would the designer give us the entire genetic sequence and turn one letter off just to give us scurvy? That just doesn't make sense. We can also see this in when preparation goes wrong. If you remember the movie Shallow Howl, one guy has a tail. That's an example of something called an atavism. That's when an old segment of DNA gets turned back on at a sequence. Now if you were designing a dolphin, would you make it grow legs in the womb and then shed them before being born? Well that's exactly what happens. Two minutes. And in some cases, dolphins keep them because of an atavism. If we could just get an atavism and let us build our own vitamin C again, that would be great. So we can see evolution happening today in mosquitos under a London subway that are speciating, in Encinitas salamander down by Apple Valley, where they've taken two different evolutionary paths around the central California valley. They can integrate everywhere along those paths, but when they meet again in Apple Valley, they can't. Where is the species? The species is just an organizational tool. Keep that in mind throughout tonight's debate. So we've been asked tonight whether a creationist model is consistent with our observations. I've just given you a test that you can actually use when you're buying your next car. As you can see, a hip is intelligently designed too, using the same method. So these fingerprints of intelligent design are absent from the natural world in any pattern that would make it usable. And no amount of beauty can bring them back. More importantly, evolution is written into our DNA. And most importantly, evolution has made predictions and won't miss. So now I'm going to ask Shane to step up to the plate. Hit one out of the park for us. Predict something and make it come true. Batter up. I will attempt to answer that hopefully in a few minutes. First, I want to apologize. I was supposed to come out and shake your hand. And I was too worried about my phone being on for Michael's announcement. So it's off now. It's in airplane mode. And I do want to also thank Antelope Valley College and Jay and David. It's been actually a pleasure getting to know them. And one of the goals was to have an open dialogue and come together and discuss differences. The question is, is the Bible consistent with what we observe in the natural world from a biological standpoint? And I'm answering in the affirmative. I'm going to say absolutely yes, exclamation point. And let me read from the Bible. I think it's okay, right? That's what we're talking about. Psalm 19, the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork. Day unto day utters speech and night unto night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Basically, creation screams creation. When we look at the natural world, we see the evidence everywhere. But I think it's important to define two terms. Evolution is something of enormous proportion. The entire universe actually came from nothing. So if you could just for a minute close your eyes, think of nothing, and then in an instant, here is everything. And that is really the definition of evolution. If I'm wrong, Jay will correct me as we go. But also the definition of Christianity is the God of the Bible created the heavens and the earth, the uniformity, the consistency, the stability, and the harmony of the universe declares there is a creator. Two myths I want to just throw out there and get these out of the way. Myth number one, science and the Bible offer opposing views. We have this view that science is intellectual and here's faith, kind of weak-minded people, that you poor guys, you know, you got your faith, Christianity's a crutch, and we're the intellectual side. But we actually see science and the Bible confirm each other, not contradict. They confirm each other in many different areas. And I want to just throw out there a quote. I don't know if many of you know who Anthony Flew is. Well, before Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris made atheism popular, Anthony Flew was the world's most famous atheist. But in 2004, he shocked the world. He left atheism. He said, the integrated complexity of life itself, which is far more complex than the physical universe, can only be explained in terms of an intelligent source. This has been the number one atheist for many years. He went on to say that Christianity is the most persuasive argument. Myth number two, evolution is a fact. And actually, it's not a fact. I think Jay would agree that it's a theory. And a theory, the definition of a theory is this, a system of ideas given to explain something. So Darwin, Origins of Species, where atheism really got its boost there, he said, this is what I think. It's a theory. This is what I think happened. Now, this theory is now taught in our secular schools as a fact. And it's really not a fact. There's no factual evidence that supports evolution. It is a theory. It's a theory in crisis because many people are starting to see that this theory doesn't hold a lot of water in light of what we now know. The science, the science of biogenesis is this, living things come from other living things. That's a science. So we're talking about science. The science of biogenesis says that a living thing must come from another living thing. So it just contradicted itself like nothing came from something. We both believe in creation. Myself and Jay both believe in creation. Now, you might say, well, hold on. Hold on now. Where are you going with this? Well, let me explain the definition of creation. To bring something into existence. I believe that God created everything versus everything being created by chance. So that's a foundation. That's a framework. Let's talk about two areas of Scripture before my time is up. First, in the beginning, God created. We're talking about biology. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. In the beginning, you have time, space, and matter all at once. Science teaches that all three of those, science teaches that all three of those must be brought into existence simultaneously. If you have time but no matter, you have nothing. So time, space, and matter. In the beginning, God created the heavens. There's your space. And the earth, there's your matter. Time, space, and matter right at the beginning. We also observe science. And I should probably mention that. There's observational science, which we observe. We observe it, we see it. If I jump off that stage, it's going to hurt. I just observed gravity. But there's historical, or there's different natural, historical science that predicts on what they think happened. But I'm talking about observational science. It predicts that the mathematical equations and the fine tuning of the universe is absolutely impossible without a creator. If you look at the distance of the sun, some 32 million miles away. Don't quote me. I didn't check that. I'm just going off past memory. If it was just a little closer, we would be at a raging inferno. We wouldn't even be here. Just a little further, and it would be an iceberg. If you take gravity, you take a tape measure and you stretch it across the entire universe, if you move gravity just one inch, it cannot support life. Oxygen, nitrogen, argon, carbon dioxide levels, all to support life. It's just absolutely amazing. None of this can happen by chance. And let's read Richard Dawkins. Do you know who he is? Many of you don't. Some of you do. He is an evolutionary biologist at Oxford. the universe could so easily have remained lifeless and simple, just physics and chemistry, just a scattered dust of the cosmic explosion that gave birth, so something gave birth to time and space. The fact that it did not, the fact that life evolved out of literally nothing some 10 billion years ago is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice. And that's what atheism does. It uses words and theories to do it justice. And I've noticed it's interesting, and please understand my heart, I'm not trying to poke fun, I actually really enjoy David and Jay, it's just a good discussion, but when we ask the hard questions, where do we come from? I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. But if a Christian says, well, I'm not sure, or we actually give an answer, then we're viewed as foolish. But somebody can say, I don't know how that happened. And that's taken as credible. So just consider those things. I would also encourage you to visit a website entitled Descent from Darwin. You have 25 pages currently of PhDs from NASA, Langley Research Center, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, all the top universities, all these scientists stating this. We are skeptical of the claims for the ability of random mutations and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged. Now, you might say, well, that doesn't represent all the scientists. Of course it doesn't, but it's a growing number, and I know there are many scientists who don't speak out about creation because they're in fear of losing their job. When you come out and believe in creationism, you will lose your job. You're mocked and you are ridiculed even though the evidence supports it. So Christianity looks at the evidence, we compare it with science, and we confirm it with God's truth. It's interesting. We're not saying, you know, Jay, you're right, I mean, the Bible talks about the Earth being flat and being held up by a turtle. We rarely miss that one. We missed, yeah, we did predict a thousand stars in Isaiah. We missed that one. The human body is just full of nothing but water and space and some water. We missed that one. There's nothing. One of my challenges, I'll just throw it out there now so he can start thinking about it. I would like you to name me one scripture, one scripture where science disproves it, where the Bible is absolutely wrong in this area. Just one scripture, not even science and biology, any area that it is wrong. So I believe that the Bible confirms the science. The Earth free floats in space. Isaiah, the Earth is a sphere. Hebrews talks about tiny unseen particles that appear in the creation of life. Leviticus says wash with running water to prevent disease. Ironically, I think it was 150 years ago, doctors were going and operating on cadavers for research and then going in to deliver pregnant women, deliver their children, and they had this huge death rate skyrocketing. What's going on? Somebody actually read Leviticus that you should wash your hands with running water. These things are tested and tried. Job springs at the bottom of the ocean. Leviticus, life is in the blood. Genesis, our bodies are made from the Earth. There's 28 base and trace elements in the Earth. Who in the world is going to write that down that we came from the Earth? I mean to make it up and hit it on every point. Psalms talks about the second law of thermodynamics, the second law of thermodynamics. The first law of thermodynamics deals with the quantity of energy. The second law deals with the quality, what's happening to the energy. It's dying. The universe is dying. I was in a lot better shape 15 years ago. Something's not working here. We are dying. Your vehicles are dying. It supports that. And I love Jeremiah. He said the stars are innumerable. But the scientists kept her in 1600 and said we have 1,005. In the beginning, God created life. I get passionate on this one. If you haven't found this out yet. The preacher side takes over. I apologize. I've got a microphone and audience in the back. It's kind of hard not to do that. In the beginning, God created life. Then God said, let us make man in our image. So there's our Christianity supports the Trinity, the nature of God. It's the plurality of God, the Holy Spirit, the Trinity. Let us make man in our image according to our likeness. See, I have given you every herb that yields seed, which is on the face of the earth. And every tree whose fruit yields seed to you, it shall be food. So here we have created life. The oxy-ribonucleic acid. You know what that is? Oxy-rib DNA. DNA consists of 3.2 billion letters in the human DNA showing how to build life. If you get a chance, you have to check out this chart. Dr. Rainbow was gracious enough to let us borrow it tonight. 3.2 billion. This just blew my mind. I took this class on Friday night just to try to get some more information around all of this. This is in every cell of your body. Every cell, every DNA telling the amino acids what to do. Lysine, do here. Glutamine, do here. Lysine, go here. Do this. And it's a building block, doing this all day long, building, creating life. For all that to just happen is improbable. It just cannot happen. What about the eye? Look at what the eye does. It works much like a camera. And don't take my words for it. Here is Darwin on the eye. To suppose that the eye seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. Now, let me just bring this up. I see a lot of people do this, so I want to do this tonight. Sustain life. I will give you food. So if a creation, amoebo acid is being created, pre-mortal ooze, and something happens and we're being created, evolving, how does the earth know to, as we're evolving, how does the macronutrients and micronutrients of carbohydrates, fructose for sugar, for energy, and proteins, and how does the earth, and then here's water, of course, running water, you know, you need fresh water, how does the earth know to generate these things simultaneously so it would match the breakdown, the chemical breakdown of the body? Do this. The body actually, the body actually absorbs the life of the food is into the body. That's you eat living food to continue your life. So I believe that Psalms 129.13 is true. For you God formed my inner parts, you knit me together in my mother's womb. Think about this. The sperm meets the ovum. Life is a conception. The DNA of the mother, the DNA of the father. The heart starts to form the lungs, the kidney, the skeletal system begins to protect the organs such as the heart, the five senses, the taste, the smell, all these things are activated as life begins to form. It's absolutely amazing. So yes, the creationist model in the book of Genesis is consistent with what we observe in the natural world from a biological standpoint. In short, the Bible tells us what happened and it backed it up. That's it. Thank you. Please give our debaters a round of applause. We will now move into our first rebuttal period of 10 minute speech beginning with Mr. Nafus. This time is a period for our debaters to interact with their opponents opening statements. Mr. Nafus. Alright, thank you. Just a few corrections as we begin. The distance from Earth to the Sun averages 93 million miles. And interestingly, the habitable zone we've computed now is many millions of miles wide. So the Earth could have been anywhere in that range and still be just fine. There's no fine tuning there. And actually, the more powerful the star, the wider the habitable zone. You put quite a lot on the table there. It's almost hard to know where to begin. I can also point you to the next chapter in Darwin's book where he says that evolution of the eye is absurd. The very next chapter explains exactly how the eye was evolved. So he's using that question as a rhetorical device. Speaking of formation of things in the womb, did you know that humans actually grow an entire coat of hair while in the womb and then shed it? That is another one of these dolphins-with-lights things. It's an atavism. So, it's not exactly what you'd expect if the human embryo was designed to produce a human. It's what you'd expect if the human embryo was designed to produce than enough human to build up in complexity. Speaking of building up, Jay mentioned the second law of thermodynamics. It's important to remember, as any freshman engineer would know, that the second law of thermodynamics applies to closed systems. That is, that the complexity in a closed system always decreases. Now, the Earth's surface isn't a closed system. Uniquely, the fossil record tracks the input of energy into the Earth's system. We receive some billions upon billions of watts of energy every day from the sun. That takes a lot of energy to get life going. So, what we see in the fossil record, the first fossils are tiny little microbes, the very first traces of life. And then they build up to very simple and very slowly into more complex things with rigid bodies, and then into dinosaurs and all manner of other things, all of which are interestingly absent from the Bible, incidentally. Another thing that's absent from the Bible is any description of viruses. Now, viruses are an interesting case because they exist somewhere between life and non-life. But life itself doesn't have that capability. So, is it alive, is it not? There's an actual vigorous debate among biologists on that question. So, that theory is very much in crisis by design. That's why we award the best private prizes in science to those who prove theories wrong. So, complexity builds up by simple physics. If you add energy to a system, it will get more complex. Think of baking a cake. You take eggs and you add some flour and other little bits here and there, some chocolate chip cookies, if you're me, and then you add energy from the oven. That causes chemical changes in the eggs, causes chemical changes in structure. That's all you need. Turns out, scientists working on the problem of abiogenesis have already managed to synthesize, using nothing but heating, cooling, and stirring two of the four letters of your DNA. Does anyone want to bet against them getting together two pretty soon? I suspect not. If you've watched any of Lawrence Krauss' videos lately, because Lawrence Krauss has been working on a problem called weighing the universe. It seems like a very, very hard thing to do because he's trying to figure out how the universe will end. As he put it, it seemed like a good idea at the time, because what he's figured out is that we live in basically the worst of all possible universes, a flat one. Actually, oddly enough, when all the calculations are most of the way done, they're still working on some of them, that the total energy of the universe is actually zero. Who would have expected that going in? Cosmological theorists, it turns out, doesn't require any input from outside the system because quantum mechanics, it turns out, simply predicts that universes will form spontaneously, generating their own laws, and if you have a whole space, or whole, well, if you have nothingness, nothing weighs something. Who would have thought it? Turns out most of the mass there are just an awful lot of them, most of the mass is in stuff we can't see. Not that it's just not shining, it's not interacting with light. It's very, very strange stuff called dark matter and dark energy. These are emerging concepts in physics. They're still being looked for. Dark matter, right here on Earth. Through computer modelling, we've figured out that actually most of the space inside of a proton, inside of a proton, these tiny things inside each atom, is empty. But because of this massive empty space, that emptiness weighs something, so you are mostly made of nothing. And, weirdly enough, weirder still, from the computations we've seen so far, and from the observations we've been able to make, way above 99% of everything is not observable by us. It's either dark matter or dark energy. That extra 1% of the mass of the universe that is what's required to make it flat, and therefore generatable from nothing, is everything we see is in that less than 1%. We're a bit of debris floating through a gigantic ocean of dark matter and dark energy. So, that can all seem a little bleak because in the far future, in a flat universe, all of the galaxies are not only getting further away from us, but they're getting further away from us faster and faster every year. Two minutes. So, in the far future, in about 20 or 40 billion years, don't quote me on that, the rate of expansion will be so large that those galaxies will be moving faster than the speed of light. Inflationary physics allows this. So, future astronomers, way in the future, emerging on galaxies at that point in the history of the universe, will look out into the galaxy and see what scientists saw at the beginning of the 19th century. They'll look out and see one galaxy. That's it. The evidence for the Big Bang will disappear from the night sky on a long enough time scale. That's not the kind of universe you would expect from a creator who meant that universe for us. And Shane did issue one direct challenge. What disproves Genesis? Radioisotopic decay. see, creation at day one requires, or the creation, for the creation to have happened in one week would require one week to cover almost 10 billion years. Because we now know the universe is 13.782 billion years old. And that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Somewhere between those times a week passed. And if that's not good enough, then there are entire categories of life missing from the Ark story. There are coral reefs on mountains in Texas, that could not have formed in a flood. There's uncountable instances in the geological record, in the biological record, testifying, time, that the creation of God did not occur as written. That's all. Like I said, we can be rather frank and blunt from this point forward. No personal offense intended. We will now hear from Pastor Eilerton in his first rebuttal period. Well, let me set my timer because I'm a little worried to get shut down like this. Ten minutes, right? Well, a couple things I want to springboard off of. When we talk about innumerable, innumerable amount of stars, I don't think we know how many stars there are. They have actually reached, now I think they're predicting at 76 trillion. Get your mind around this. There's a billion, a trillion, quadrillion, quintrillion, and then sextillion. That's how many stars are out there. It's innumerable. The Bible is consistent there and all that just came out of nothing is really, to me, it's incomprehensible. So a few things. Before I forget, I do want to comment on the radiometric dating. We don't know how much radioactivity is in a rock in the first place when it's first formed. Additionally, there are many instances of very young rocks being dated very old. And you don't just take my advice for it, obviously, please, research it yourself. There was one, I recall, in a volcano where they actually took a rock, did radiometric dating, it was 100 years old, newly formed from a volcano, and the radiometric dating put it at 5.5 million years. That's pretty far off. So we can't gauge. My point is, science is ever-changing. It's either Hitchens or Dawkins or one of these brilliant men are actually now challenging Einstein in certain areas on his... Well, Einstein actually thought the universe was static. He said it was one of the biggest blunders of my career. See, we're testing science that is ever-changing. The Bible confirms and science catches up to the Bible. So these men now are challenging Einstein's theory on many different ways. One of the things they are challenging is the speed of light. That it might not be what we thought it was. Think about this, and silence daily. Theory that challenges Einstein's physics could be soon put to the test. The idea that speed of light could be variable was radical when first proposed, but becomes something physicists can actually test. If true, it would mean that the laws of nature were not always the same as what they are today. So we're using... This is billions of years away, but we don't know because when God creates something, when... Let's entertain me for a minute. If there was an Adam and Eve, and he was created in one second, did he live one second older than 30 years old? He obviously looked like a mature adult when God created. He created plants. What came first? The chicken or the egg? The chicken. We know these things because you can't have life come from non-existing life. And also I like what Jay said that he looks at freedom, fine-tuning, and preparation. I see that all over creation. Freedom. What to do? Fine-tuning. Preparation. On this area of preparation, the body is a self-healing organism. Your body will heal itself. The immune system, the repair system, the rebuilding system. Your body is designed to rebuild itself. But then something happens that we don't know somewhere in our DNA that the breakdown begins to happen. And we contributed to Romans 5.12. This is why we are falling apart. Just as through one man's sin entered the world, and death through sin thus death is spread to all men because all sin. So our explanation is what the Bible says that once sin entered, that's where death entered in. And when you talked about the deception in DNA, it could be the sin element entering in. Also, common DNA. A watermelon is 80% water. A jellyfish is 80% water. And a cloud is 80% water. But the last time I checked, they're not related. Also, common DNA just means a common creator. If I consume bananas like a chimpanzee, I drink water like a chimpanzee, and I absorb oxygen like a chimpanzee, you would think to see similar DNA that could absorb the oxygen, that could take the nutrients from the banana tree to glucose, store it in my liver, store it in my muscle for energy later. You would see similar DNA because it's a similar creator. That to me doesn't prove evolution in the least. Also, let me just read a few quotes. Would you like to hear from a Ph.D. from Cambridge? Stephen Meyer. He said that most biologists who specialize in origin of life research now reject chance as a possible explanation for the origin of the information in DNA. Francis Collins. Now this, this is pretty impressive. Francis Collins, the renowned genesis, pardon my language, I suffer from dyslexia sometimes. So genesis, you get that right? Okay. The renowned genesis, let's just see, he knows a lot of stuff about DNA. How's that? He's the head of the human genomic project. He's the head of it. He's the head of this, where all scientists come together, they study DNA. He is the head of that. Realize this. I have started this journey of intellectual exploration to confirm my atheism. That now lays in ruins as the argument from the moral law and many other issues force me to admit the plausibility of God or the God hypothesis. An atheist studied DNA and said that there's just too much information. There's too much information. Also, it's interesting, we're talking about science. Three fundamental, these are fundamental assumptions of science. Number one, the uniformity of nature is assumption of science. But atheism says there's no uniformity. We could be walking on the road tomorrow, gravity were to shift. There's no uniformity. There's nothing to gauge. It's just random mutation, natural selection occurring. Nothing is consistent. So that goes against that law of science. They also have the law of induction, which is consistency. We see consistency happening. But with atheism, with evolution, there's no consistency. It's just random. We can't explain anything. Anything can happen. I could turn into a fish at some point. Obviously, they don't believe that, I don't think, but that's where we're going. We can evolve and turn into certain things. The laws of logic. If it rains, you will get wet. Atheism, evolution throws out the laws of logic. So from a scientific perspective and a biblical perspective, they go together. They confirm so many different things. So with that said, I will give it back to Shane. Shane, you have three minutes left if you would like to use them. That's okay. Okay. All right. We will now move into our cross-examination period. A few remarks just to clarify the purpose and intent of cross-examination before we begin. This is strictly a time for questions and answers on our debater's behalf. The debater asking questions isn't allowed to rebut or otherwise make statements in response to their opponent's answers. Likewise, the debater being questioned isn't allowed to respond to their opponent with a question. The exception to this rule will be in the case of a clarifying question or a question of elaboration. The nature of this section favors the debater asking questions, so that person will be given limited authority to interrupt their opponent if they feel a given answer was sufficient, but it is otherwise taking too long. Abuse of this, however, will result in a penalty, referring back to the penalties that I described at the beginning of this debate. There is no set time for a given question and answer, so it is up to the discretion of our debaters to ask and answer questions as timely as possible, with the obvious understanding that some questions are bigger than others. With that said, gentlemen, this has been a good debate so far. I congratulate you both. I would, as a courtesy reminder, just say that there have been some things thrown out with respect to astronomy, astrophysics, geology, stuff like that, that we please keep our remarks aimed towards biology for the sake of your interactions here tonight. With that being said, we will begin with Mr. Mathis cross-examining Mr. Eibman for ten minutes. Okay. So, the first thing I would ask is can you actually make a prediction about some future biological observation from the Bible, other than the law of third dynamics that we are perishing, we are decaying. Is that what you're looking for? Can you be more specific? I'm looking for biology, specifically. That's a law of mechanics. But predict, not quite formal, predict that, for example, evolution can predict which strain of the flu virus you should get vaccinated against each year. Evolution can predict that the European black cat will speciate, because it's now developed a second migratory pattern to England, since they started feeding birds there in the 1960s. They're already diverging in shape. We've already seen that coyotes are becoming a thing out east, that the Encinitas salamander is a ringed species. Okay. Can the Bible predict anything to do with biology? Well, the Bible is full of prophetic things. You can look at the Bible archaeologically, scientifically, historically, and prophetically. Talking about biology that we're talking about, it's actually ironic because evolution would teach that we can't count on anything, because evolution at its core is random selection, I'm sorry, random mutation, things just happening, and natural selection, so I don't know how that could bank on anything, because everything could change, but to answer your question, as far as babies will be born, we will not develop fins, we will not become a certain creature, we will stay the way we are, the sun is coming up tomorrow, the gravitational pull, we confirm, we know that certain things will stay in existence until God decides to, what the Bible talks about is folding the universe up, and the sun is actually decaying, the universe is decaying, so those are the only types of predictions I would know, that things would remain consistent biologically until the time is over. Now how would you, how would you determine the age of the earth? The biology? Boom. If evolution is the case, then it requires quite a few billion years to operate. True, true. Well, a couple things come to mind, and with an audience this size, even in the Christian community, there is debate over the age of the earth. The reason, I believe, is because God doesn't say it's 6,005 years old, he doesn't say it's a million years old, he says in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. What we do is we look at the, the, uh, gene, uh, geom, geom, I'm sorry, genealogy, get there, from Adam, from Abraham, from, and we form a timeline there, say, that's where the 6,000 years comes from. That's why some Christians are early earth, younger, some are old earth, millions of billions of years. I just, because I don't have enough time, a good book I recommend would be, uh, The Battle for the Beginning from John MacArthur that breaks this down. Just a couple thoughts, uh, from my perspective, is, uh, we look at things we could see that God could do it, and it would look old. For example, there's a new island off the coast of Iceland, uh, in 1963, they reported the marvels of canyons, gullies, and other land features that typically, allegedly would take tens of thousands or millions of years to form. They were formed in less than a decade. Uh, you can look at Providence Canyon in Georgia. Uh, it's more than 1,100 acres. In the early 1800s, it was farmland. It was just flat. By 1940s, they had to remove buildings and towns because of the growing canyon. And what they would say took millions and millions of years, they see taking place here, this is called the Small Grand Canyon, uh, took 150 years. We see the sedimentary rock in the Grand Canyon. It is, it is actually bent, showing the, the, the proof for a flood, that the rock was actually curved and the flood took place. So when you look at the evidence, uh, we don't see any consistency with the biblical account in what, what we observe in science. Okay. Are you aware that in the Coconino Shale in the Grand Canyon, there are fossilized footprints and a fossil, indeed a fossilized desert that cannot have been created, created underwater because they show iron oxidation. This is a process that can only happen in the atmosphere, and yet it is evident in the Grand Canyon. Right, well, what we have when the flood happened is as the water, the deep was opening up, the tectonic plates, everything was, was, it's a cataclysmic event. The water rising, the water coming, you see this massive amount of sediment. That's why the fossil record, you have fossils standing up like, and oh, how can you explain that? You have all different kinds of fossils at every different level, millions and millions of fossils, so we see this cataclysmic event that happened because it's a mass burial. I think even David, you at lunch, uh, mentioned that yes, something cataclysmic happened. So it's a flood. Something did this. So it was a, it was a time of, of, and to fossilize something, the, the soil compresses the bones, as you know, oxygen, oxidation takes place. The water is, it crystallizes the bones or the, in this case, the footprints, and it sticks, and it shows for when they uncover it. So something cataclysmic has, has to happen. It's not just somebody stepping on mud, and then 100 years later there's a fossil there. Something has to cover the sediment, so it confirms a biblical account. At least it would if the, are you familiar that the next layer after that is sedimentary rock laid down by a river delta in the same area? Well, it goes back to, again, who do you, who do you ask? Because even scientists, atheists, scientists, evolutionary scientists, are divided on actually what this is, what it means, where did it come from. We see certain layers that are, of the fossil record. We see something happen at a, at a catastrophic rate. We see the tectonic plates opening, the mountain ranges. And actually it's interesting, the Grand Canyon where the river starts is actually, it's flowing uphill. So something massive had to take place in order for this to happen. So I would just look at the scientists who are making those statements because some would disagree on those. Scientists disagree quite a bit. The, that's the point of science. Speaking of disagreement, how do you resolve conflicts within the Bible? For example, in Matthew and Luke, the women ran to tell the disciples of the resurrection while Mark's account explicitly says that they told nobody. Well, two things. First I want to answer the science question. That science disagrees with itself, correct? Scientists will disagree with scientists. But it seems to me that to put trust into a system that is constantly disagreeing and finding fault in the other seems like shaky ground. It doesn't seem like a solid foundation to build something if all these scientists are finding, you know, problems with this or problems with that. On the gospel accounts, you're going to see a different interpretation based on eyewitnesses' accounts. If you see an accident right here... Two minutes. If you see an accident right here on Avenue K, and I see it, Luke sees it from different angles, we're going to give a different account. So I would have to actually look up that passage because I don't recall them saying they saw nothing. That would have to be scrutinized a little bit. Also, real quick, Mr. Mathis, this is not a relevant biological question. I appreciate the inquiry, but this is not a debate about Scripture. It's a matter of how you know things, how you correct your... Understudy is. Which inevitably arises. Now, just out of curiosity, what would the discovery of aliens do to your worldview? It's an interesting question. And perhaps what you're thinking is that what evidence could I provide that would change your mind? Well, there's YouTube clips right now saying the Earth is flat, George Bush took down the Twin Towers, and there are aliens here right now. So... You know, you have to be careful of who we read or what we look at. So, not saying this pridefully, but the concrete faith we have in the absolute truth of God's Word, nothing can shape that. So, I don't know what would hypothetically, what could be shown to us that would try to sway that. I don't know of anything that could be to sway my faith. I don't know. I think we need a little balance. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Nathus. We will now turn it over to Pastor Eidelman to question Mr. Nathus. Pastor Eidelman, your time begins. I do have just actually a few questions. I would like your... Well, first question, have you ever read the Bible through entirely? Several times. Several times, okay. So, that would lead to the next question. Can you name one verse, just one verse in the Bible that is in error from a biological or scientific standpoint? If this whole debate is centered around the inaccuracy and the misleading information in the Bible, where would that be? In Genesis 1, the very first, the account of creation itself is manifestly in conflict with everything we know about the dates of different rocks, which are established by knowable and testable physical processes. Our radioisotopic dating methods are extraordinarily precise to within limits. To address one thing you said earlier, those erroneous measurements come from measuring something below its margin of error. A lot of radioisotopic dating methods require millions of years just to be able to give a reliable result. Using what you'd see if you tried to discern what was inside an individual pixel on a TV screen, for example. Right. I'm just, one verse, because we look at Genesis, we see in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. He doesn't say 4,000 years ago or 3,000 there. I don't think that's specific on the actual date, but the fact that he did create. So where is the Bible, like I said, you know, Matthew talks about the world being flat. Leviticus talks about Hercules holding it up. I mean, where do we see any inconsistency from a biological standpoint? The creation of light before the creation of any light-creating objects? I think that counts. What was that again? The light? The creation of light. Day one? Yeah, before the creation of any light-creating objects. Stars. Right. Well, that's, I would think, kind of inconsistent with science as we observe it today because to produce light you need something, some light emitter. The Genesis account has that sequence exactly backwards. Well, but we also talked about day four that the greater light and the lesser light was to rule the night and rule the day. The beginning light was, many speculate, could have been God's, light is glory, bringing time, bringing space, bringing matter to existence. And then we have the unfolding of the greater light the unfolding. Pastor Ackerman, please keep it in the form of a question. Oh, perfect. It's okay. I can address the, thank you for reminding me of the greater light and the lesser light thing because that's another one. The people who wrote the Bible were plainly under the impression that the moon gave off light of its own. It doesn't. It's basically a mirror. It's reflecting the sunlight. That's why we have phases of the moon. What, is there a scripture to support that though? There's no scripture. Well, you just said the creation, the Genesis account was that God created the greater and lesser light, the sun and the moon. Right. The moon is not a light in itself. It's a lesser light because it reflects the sun. So, we'd be considered the sun reflecting the moon so it's a lesser light. Okay. I've also heard to elaborate on a bit more on your question of where the existences are. I once heard that the account of giant lizards in Job was the retelling of there being dinosaurs alongside humans. And we know that from the fossil record that was not the case. There's not a single human fossil in any rock strata with a dinosaur. Nor any rabbits in the Precambrian nor any fossil out of its evolutionary defined sequence. Okay. Well, I don't want to run out of time so let me ask this question. How can nothing come from something? By quantum mechanics it turns out. By what? By quantum mechanics. It turns out that empty space weighs something because there are virtual particles too small to be observed individually and existing for too short a time to observe them directly. But we can observe their mass because as Einstein predicts and as all of your GPS has attest relativity works. The theory of relativity is an operational principle. That's how your cell phones can tell the correct position. They account for relativity. Now, there being mass in empty space allows us to see gravitational lensing as a result of differences in those concentrations. You can see light bending around objects creating images of things behind other galaxies in exactly the proportion as if those empty spaces were filled with this tiny bit but detectable mass. So, something arises from nothing everywhere in this room in every atom in your body all the time. And these are testable, observable things. Right, right. So, just to clarify absolutely nothing we can't even really comprehend it I don't think unless we close and just nothing there's just nothing I don't even know if it has weight because there's nothing. So, nothing everything we see in the universe came from from this everything came from nothing. It's just kind of interesting. But let me just throw this out there do we have one more question? You have time but please remember to keep it in the form of a question. So, in other words if Jay in Jay's responses to you please do not offer your own interpretation you will have second rebuttals for that. That's good to know. That's good to know. Thank you. So, just answer and listen. How did the first person survive? We know sustained life requires food water oxygen How did the first person I mean my thought is amoeba pre-mortal however it was designed was it a little child? And I'm asking one question and I think it's needed to properly explain where I'm going. Did this little baby evolve and if it wasn't did it evolve into a human? How did it take care of itself? How did the plants and the herbs know to give the right type of food? How did that happen? That's a good question. The interesting part that underlies that whole question is that there's not actually any such thing as a species. Every species is transitional. You're a transition between your parents and your children for example. So, there was no such thing as a first person ever. It was a person or an organism that was just a little bit different from the one before it, a little bit different from the one before that. You could actually, if you had a time machine, lay out all of your ancestors along this front row. Picture them. Each maternal ancestor, just one after the other, lined up across the front. And you'd see they'd change ever so slightly and kind of go backwards in time. So, there was no first person, there was just a continuity from the form before or from the generation before. Okay. This will be my last question. Do I have time for one more? You have two and a half minutes so you have time for multiple questions. What is your thought when I read quotes from geneticists, PhDs, the person in charge of this project, a PhD from Cambridge. What are Anthony Flew, who was an atheist, the most popular atheist, that all of these people, when they look at the evidence, they can't hold on to the view of evolution. It's not me, it's not some weak minded, faith filled, you know, person. These are, by all means, they are... I'm glad you reminded me of that because it's two minutes. Did you know that Isaac Newton himself was one of the invokes intelligent design in Principia Mathematica, his apex signature work. He does that when he runs out of ideas for how to stabilize the planetary system. All of these scientists are expressing in their affirmation of intelligent design the limits of their knowledge because it's when you hit that limit and you just feel like you can't press any further like Newton did back in the 1600s, like Francis Collins did when he saw a waterfall frozen into three streams if I remember correctly from his account of his conversion experience. He's running into something he doesn't understand and doesn't have the energy to understand it anymore. So he chalks it up to God and lets that problem lie. It's a way of putting their minds at ease. It doesn't mean that there's not some information there to be discovered by later mathematicians like Laplace came along and solved the planetary stabilization problem that Newton, one of the smartest people who had ever lived, Principio was by far one of the greatest works ever produced by man. And not a very pleasant man, if you read history. But even in that work, the idea that a scientist has to be able to follow every line of thought all the way through in their time and in their place doesn't work. Laplace solved the problem of planetary stabilization in half an hour by inventing perturbation theory in addition to calculus, building on Newton's work. Got it? Tick-tock? Yes, you guys have been timely. We have ten seconds to spare. Thank you. We will now move into our five-minute second rebuttal period. This is a time designated for our speakers. They can interact with anything that's been said in the debate up to this point, but it's specifically set aside so that they may address any points that their opponent brought up during cross-examination that they were not otherwise able to deal with or answer in the form of a question. So we will begin our second rebuttals with Mr. Nathans. Okay, something I kind of neglected to address was that the definition of a theory is a bit more complete than Shannon put forward. A theory has to make testable predictions about some future observation. Otherwise, it's not really a theory. String theorists are derided for this all the time because there's no real prediction we can test from string theory yet. They're still working toward that. Shane also mentioned a distinction between historical and observational science. There's no such distinction. No scientist recognizes this. The observations you make aren't just that, the observations that you make. If they're about the past, they're informed by the distance between you and that observation in time. So you can count for the amount of error that can be built up there. And Shane also mentioned that all plants are food, according to the Bible, which doesn't seem to make sense in light of poison ivy. And the biggest point I would have to say is that nothing about evolution assumes that things happen randomly. Now, individual mutations, individual changes in DNA, can be appear to be random. That's why the infant mortality rate remains doggedly high, despite our best efforts. But the process of evolution is the non-random survival of those only semi-randomly varying replicators that we call living things. So randomness is not what produces the complexity of life. It's slow increments. For example, a sufficiently advanced geneticist, and I'm not one, admittedly, would be able to point to this chart and show you exactly which sequences on that chart are from which endogenous retrovirus at which stage in our evolutionary history. We can map the building of our complexity onto that very chart if we're a lot more cosmological than I am. Now, the, it was interesting also that Xing brought up Einstein's cosmological constant, which he called the biggest wonder of his career. Turns out, that cosmological constant is what I'm actually talking about when I say that an empty space weighs something. An empty space has mass, has energy, because that's where that energy is in the equation that balances the universe. That very wonder, what Einstein thought was a wonder, turned out to be, possibly, his greatest achievement, because current observations are bearing out that exactly that is in the equation just on the other side. Two heads subtracted. Xing also mentioned that the chicken came first, and I'm sorry to have to correct him again, the egg came first. Eggs evolved long before there were any chickens. So, using eggs as a reproductive strategy predates chickens by several hundred million years. The, let's see, I think that about exhausts what I had to say on this point, so I think I can leave it You have about 15 left, if you'd like to say anything else. I think, if I had to, I would return to the original tasks. You're looking for a combination in any system that you think might have been intelligently designed, of three choices, large steps and complexity made by a designer all at once. You're looking for the ability of that designer to optimize without leaving a whole bunch of junk behind, like we find in our DNA. Also on that board are the genes for creating flippers, as anyone who took thalidomide knows, or anyone who's heard of the thalidomide disaster knows. It can activate that sequence in our DNA. And we're looking for preparation. We're looking for ways that our biology is built to handle something in the future. So, if you look for those three things, test those against anything you find, and you'll be able to find the one that's most intelligently designed. Well said, sir. Seven seconds has passed. We will now move to Pastor Adelman's five-minute, second-rebuttal period. Pastor Adelman. All right. I'll hit start on my timer as well. There's quite a few here, things that I'd like to address. Number one, you mentioned the junk in the DNA. And, believe it or not, some time ago, there was a lot of sequencing here where biologists thought it was junk. It was, why is this here? It has no purpose. Now they found out that it wasn't junk. It's actually switches that turn on certain things in the DNA system. See, we're catching up. Science is catching up to what the Bible talks about. Also, just for clarification purposes, I didn't say all plants. I said that God formed the herbs of the earth and the trees so that man could consume this life-giving food. Also, when you mention that it's not random mutation, every single atheist I've ever read, including Darwin in his works, they talk about random mutation. That's what evolutionary theory is. It's something happening randomly by natural selection. So it is random mutation. In other words, if somebody didn't do it, the only other option is random. You can't have order without somebody who issues that order. So if there's no order, you have to have random mutation taking place. Also, maybe to correct you on the cosmological constant of Einstein, I don't think it was about that space has weight. He was actually giving the universe what is not static. He thought it was, and it's called the fudge factor. He threw the constant in there as a fudge factor because he didn't know what was happening. So it had nothing to do with the weight of space. Also, the fossil record. You've heard the missing link. I don't know why I didn't bring that up earlier, but we have no transitional fossils anywhere. They might mention there's one here in Europe or there's one here. There's no fossil records that are legitimate that shows a half man, half ape, half fish, half lizard. There's nothing. Darwin actually wrote 150 years ago in his book that we will soon see the day where we find scores of these transitional fossils. Here we are 150 years later, a fish is still a fish and a bird is still a bird and a man is still a man. There's no transitional fossil record anywhere. To me, it takes a lot more faith to believe in evolution. The majority of fossils are all mixed together. Some of them are even not laying down, but they're actually in a state where a cataclysmic event took place. That's why we believe in the flood. Do you know there's seashells on the Himalayas and in the Grand Canyon? Where did these seashells come from? So how is it beyond the scope of reason to believe that a flood did occur of the Biblical account when there's seashells on these mountains? Yes, tectonic plates break and it opens up and it forms a mountain range, but there was water in these areas. So I think if we look at all these different areas, and I would love to go into the moral law. I don't know if I can do that from a biological standpoint. From a biological standpoint, can I talk about the moral law? Or are we going to wait until... If you can wrap morality into biology, go for it. Morality is in our DNA. Morality is in our DNA. That's why some of these atheists and, Jay, I'm not trying to be, hear my heart out, so I'm not trying to come across arrogant or anything, but to simply discount these statements from these scientists and say, well, they hit a block wall. If my leaders were saying things like this, I would wake up. I would wake up and say, what am I missing? We have great men. What about the Darwin descent from Darwin? Page after page after page, PhDs from Stanford. All these different things discounting Darwinism. So the moral law, I think, will come up later, but for that, I will leave it at that. I know I have plenty of time, but... I will leave it at that. I will leave it at that. I will leave it at that. I will leave I will leave it at that. I will leave it at that. I will leave I will leave it at that. I will leave it at that. I will leave it at that. I will leave it at that. it at that. I will leave it at that. I will leave it at that. I will leave it at that. I will leave it at that. I will leave it at that. I will leave it at that. I will leave it at that. I will leave I will leave Okay, ladies and gentlemen, now we'll end our intermission time period if you have any questions. Please make sure that you are lined up at the microphone in front of the speaker that you wish to address. Again, if you have a question for Mr. Davis, please line up over here. If you have a question for Mr. Ottoman, please line up over here. There is no set time for you to ask your respective question. However, we will be enforcing strictly that you do not take any more time than is necessary. There's a lot of you. We ask that you be on point in asking your questions. This is to be respectful of everyone in the audience and to ensure that our data is as interactive as many of you as possible. Additionally, we also ask that if, while waiting, you hear a question that is the same or similar to yours that you consider referring to your seat for the same reasons. Our debater will proceed as follows. The address speaker will be given two minutes to respond to a given question, while Mr. Ottoman will be given one minute for the audience. This is your opportunity to ask one question, not two, not three, one. You are not allowed to pontificate, lecture, or otherwise debate. This feature you are addressing, violation of this expected conduct, will result in the termination of your microphone and you being asked to return to your seat or otherwise vacate the premises. Just to get the rules out of the way so that we are orderly in our question and answer setting, we will now turn it over to our first question for Mr. Nicholas. Hello, could you please explain the difference in the way that science and religion determine what is true and what is false and mutually exclusive? There is a process called the scientific method which takes motivated people doing their best to disprove the ideas that they themselves put forward. And in science you actually win points. You win the Nobel Prize potentially for proving yourself wrong. Now, as far as I know, I'm not an expert on religion in any sense. Religion doesn't function in that way. If I recall correctly from the Christian literature I've read, and literature from other religions for that matter, the goal of writers in religion is to prove their point, to build up a case for whatever their chosen idea is. Science works the other way around. It tries to tear down ideas. And only the ideas that survive that non-random, almost evolutionary process of non-random survival of essentially randomly varying ideas, because they're being generated by people, that ends up producing the scientific method, producing progress. All right, quick rebuttal, one minute. Here we go. Two things. Science is not morality. Science and morality are separate. And just the point that we're talking about, true, what is true, she asked the question what is true, implies that there is error. Good, there is evil. So where do we get the standard of truth and error? We get it from a law, some type of lawgiver that puts these things in place. If without the law or the lawgiver, the question wouldn't even be valid because there's no truth. There's nothing to base truth on because we don't have a gauge on which to base it. I mean, if we're all random mutation and natural selection, and we're just getting through life, there's no standard of good or evil or truth or error. So science is not about morality, in my opinion. Hello, and thank you for being here. My name is Steve Gill. I'm the co-chapter head of the Lake County Temple Los Angeles chapter. Question. If we can all agree that there is just one science, world number, scientific research analysis, formulating answers and hypotheses, if we can agree that there's just one science, why do we have thousands of gods? What makes your god right, and why do we have a Muslim man? What was the last part? A Muslim what? Why do we have a Muslim man? One science, thousands of gods. Why do we have more than one god if we're all worshipping the same god? Why is there a Muslim man? Pastor, I don't think you are not obliged to answer the Muslim man. It's irrelevant to this debate tonight. Okay, on the, did you say you're with the satanic temple? I am the co-chapter. Got it, okay. Okay, just want to clarify that. Thank you. If we believe, Christianity believes in one god, we believe he is relationally, so we don't believe in all these other gods. It's the only religion on the planet, I actually call it relationship with God, where God is relational. And you might say Muslims are relational. Well, it's more of what has God revealed in his will. He's not relational. So we view there is only one god. All paths will lead to God somehow, but not all paths lead to heaven. There's a big distinction there. So we view God as revealed in the Bible as one god because Jesus said he's the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father except through him. So he's either a liar, he's a lunatic, or he's the Lord Jesus Christ. You can't just say he's a good teacher. He said the way is narrow, and gravity is narrow. Mathematical equations are narrow. It's not a stretch of the imagination to believe that truth is very narrow. Okay? Okay. There's an interesting plot of where different religions are. If you're born in India, you're most likely to be a Hindu. If you're born in the US, you're most likely to be a Christian. If you're born in the Middle East, you're most likely to be a Muslim. Science doesn't work that way. The distribution of acceptance of science, or of achievement in science, doesn't follow a hereditary pattern that way. And that's specifically because science deals with objective truth, what you can reproduce, what you can prove. And, most importantly, what you can disprove. Yeah, that's why there are many, many religions, and only really one science. And anyone's welcome to challenge it. Okay. Ma'am, any questions? Horses and donkeys make mules. They're basically infertile at the outbreak. One thing's for certain, one that is actually equal to two mules, produce one offspring. Wolves and coyotes are natural enemies. Coyotes quickly make a lot of wolves around. This wolf, coyote wolf back east, you said. Correct. Coyotes and wolves are natural enemies. How do they get together? With a dog, produce viable offspring. They get together again, and on and on. And they know how to work both ways before crossing the road. Meaning the dog triggers, and the dog triggers on the dog. Ma'am, you asked me a question. Okay. How does this continue? Ma'am, you asked me a question. The evolution, how does it go on? Yes, ma'am. Okay. Here's how it works, or here's how scientists believe, or we think it works so far, the best theory we have for the evolution of the coy wolf, is early settlers in the eastern U.S. started clearing large areas of forest, turning them into plains. That's the natural habitat for coyotes. Coyotes noticed this new territory that they can invade and started moving eastward. At the same time, those same people were hunting wolves extensively on the northeast. So they started migrating west, trying to escape the invasive species that is humans. Humans brought with them dogs. Some of those dogs got loose. All it takes is that kind of pressure and those three genotypes that are close enough to, on rare occasion, breed and produce live offspring from any combination of those three to produce, over time, a viable population of coy wolves, which is what we're observing genetically. So it's most likely the interbreeding of coyotes and dogs first. Dogs kind of act as the intermediary between the wolf and the coyote. So the wolves, being genetically closer to dogs, would end up accepting a coyote-dog hybrid into their population if their numbers got low enough, like the near extinction of the eastern wolves induced by hunters. When your selection pressure is that high, when your population gets that small, it's kind of any port in the storm in mating terms. You look for anyone you can breed with, anyone close enough to you. My response is actually just very quick, that we don't agree with the evolutionary viewpoint. We agree that it's all one species. When God created, he created dogs, wolves, coyotes, all as one species, and that's what we see in the order of creation. So, that's my thoughts. Right, right, it's a good question. Did you happen to catch a lot of the quotes that I read? Okay, those are actually PhDs from Cambridge. They're biologists that feel the same way. And when we look at the complexity of life, when you see 3.2 billion letters on this graph here, one inch actually refers to a million of them, the sequencing, the things that would need to happen, the variables, the consistency, the order, when you see all of that, it's just absolutely incomprehensible that I can't see how all of that could come from absolutely nothing. It would be like saying, Home Depot dropped off a truck and this appeared. The theater. Now, we all know somebody did this, right? Well, that life is so complex that even scientists can't grasp the complexity. So, this theater is nothing compared to the complexity of life. So, that's what I mean by you just can't, the mathematical equations even, don't do it justice on the probability of life coming from nothing is incomprehensible. That's why I make that statement. No, I'm done. Well, if I got 50 seconds, let me add this. Your question too, when I have two minutes, why is God the only way, it's difficult. And I wanted to just let people know that I will be available afterwards and would love to spend some time with you, but it's hard to get everything out in two minutes and I do appreciate your question. Thank you. Okay. I'll remind everyone of the quote from Newton. When scientists run out of ideas, they invoke intelligent design. When something appears too complex for them, in any domain, they'll tend to invoke intelligent design because even a bad explanation feels better than no explanation at all. It's a simple fact of human nature. What your question was describing was something we call the God of the gaps argument. And it's interesting to notice a pattern in the history of science where every time science gets hold of a question, no matter how inadequate its first response is on the explanation for whatever phenomena in any domain of science, in any domain of reality, that explanation is only ever superseded by better explanations from better science. Religion never comes back into the equation. Good evening, gentlemen. My question to you is, given the observation that life is well-ordered, does this suggest that life comes from? It suggests very, as simply as I can put it, that a non-random process is at work. That non-random process, in this case, is evolution. The model provided by evolution explains not only the complexity of life, but the defects in that complexity. It explains both the positive and the negative observations in biology. That's perhaps as simply as I can put it, and I think that exhausts my need for a response, unless there's something that wasn't satisfactory to you. With one minute, and we're talking about design, correct? That's what the question was. Let me quote Bill Gates. He compares the information in DNA to software programming. It's more complex than anything humans could have ever developed. So you look at your iPhone, you say, well, of course somebody did this. Who in their right mind would think they didn't? That DNA, in your body, six foot long, in every single cell in your body, it just screams creator. We see design that is far more complex than what Microsoft, anything we even observe, it's far more complex than that. So we say, obviously, common sense would tell us there, because you mentioned reason. Part of science is reason. Reason tells me there's a designer because of the intricate nature of that design. You said something in the Bible, I think it was Hitcher that actually typed it, Genesis 30, you said 30 before you did it. Right, you actually said Genesis 30, that's a long chapter. No, no, no. I'll give you the specific question. But what's the specific question? Like the specific question. It talks about, I won't do it yet, so when he knows, I'm not doing it yet. Sir, this is not your time to have yourself asked a question. With the sheep. Well, I might refer you to Dr. Rainbow after the conference today on that one, because what's happening is the genetic displacement is taking place. They're looking at the sticks, and this goes into the power of the thoughts. As a man thinketh, so is he. And it is an interesting concept, but there's a lot of mysteries in the Bible I don't quite understand, and I'm not really concerned about the things I don't understand, I'm concerned about the things I do understand. So if the question is, could these sticks that were put, striped sticks, I believe it was, put in front of the sheep, they actually bred speckled sheep according to how the sticks were laid out. I believe that's where the passage goes to, so I would believe that that did happen. Genetically, I'm not well versed in that area to explain genetically how it happened, but maybe Jay even knows on that when he gives the one minute rebuttal. Sir, you asked a question. Sir, you asked a question. Thank you. Mr. Minkus? Okay. It's interesting to notice Shane's perspective on the question. He's not interested in the things in the Bible he doesn't understand, he's interested in the parts that he does. That's exactly the opposite of the way science works. The most exciting moment in any scientist's life is when they find a problem for which there's no textbook answer. They get to say, I don't know, and it's always followed by, let's find out. Sir? There's something wrong with understanding. I would be way out of my depth to speculate on where it comes from other than to speculate that it's got the same point of origin as the rest of matter. It would all have to arise either at the moment of the Big Bang or be generated in the nuclear furnaces of stars or some other mechanism hitherto unexplored. But that's a mystery that a lot of people will be very interested to learn once we're able to detect it directly and start probing its actual nature. Right now it's just the quantity that makes the equations work. It's necessary. Physics itself doesn't work without it at this point. But we can't observe it directly so far. Scientists are working on it and I suspect since it was discovered while I was in high school that by the time I'm retiring at the rate of increase of science or scientific knowledge that there might be an answer by the time I'm off this world. Well, I'm admittedly out of my depth to give a direct answer other than to say that science is working on it and someone will probably end up winning a Nobel Prize for finding your answer. And I would say we do have the answer. In the beginning God created time, space and matter. That's where the formation, the creation took place is when God said in the beginning and it's interesting, Big Bang, we believe God said bang, there it is. You have an enormous amount of energy that you can't even measure the amount of energy that needed to take place in order to form the universe. So to us, we look at that, the scriptural course and we say the creation from the creator to answer your question that's where the black matter came from when time, space and matter were first created. So the age-old question, who made God? And it was actually brought up to me a week ago that if we can ask the question or if we can state, well, nothing came from God why can't we say the universe came from nothing? If you can say God came from nothing but I think with that equation, that problem is you're talking about the creator and the creation. It's like comparing apples to oranges. So to answer your question, who created God we would say that God lives out time, space and matter. He is not a created being. He's always existed in eternity past, eternity future so God lives outside of time, space and matter. So He was not created. He's always existed. Now, I want to go back and because it's irrelevant to your question I'll freely admit that I don't know everything about God and I don't know everything about the Bible. If I did, that would be scary. We can agree that we probably don't know everything have every question ever answered that has ever been presented. I don't even think we know 1% of all the knowledge that is out there on how things have happened. So the quick answer is we believe that God is not a created being that He has always existed. He lives outside of time, space and matter. Now that boils it down. Pay attention to Shane's words there. God has always existed and yet is outside of time. There's no such thing as always if there's no time. So the infinite regression problem for God is frankly not my problem. There's no such infinite regression in universes. There's now a theory for an infinitely expansive multiverse. There's lots of different ideas out there. They're not testable yet, but they will be. And once those tests can be run, we'll know the answer. Until then, we can state that the universe, as far as our observational physics can discern, has zero total energy. There's no great amount of energy at the beginning of the universe. The Big Bang was quite hot, but it was also that temperature because of so much emulation of antimatter. There's a little bit of asymmetry there. That's a lot more physics, though. So we'll all have the same moment. Here in the framework of physics, that will explain everything together. All the people out there, you say that you were in time, you said you came out of time, and you do. And you do this thing. And I believe you're inclined that there is a period at the beginning, an important time that will be discovered and explained. If that's true, you can predict that this period will time to be explained. Do you think it's worth to define biology and the basis for what theory is? Yes. I can elaborate because yes wraps in a lot of things there. The history of science is one of continual aggregation of information, building upwards. We started with four ununified fundamental forces, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, gravity, and electromagnetism. And electricity and magnetism weren't unified originally either. So those were unified, then they became electromagnetism. Now there's the electroweak force, which is electromagnetism, and the weak force of electromagnetics. The grand unified theory is the kind of ultimate realization of science. It's a hypothetical at this point, but someone will win a Nobel Prize for that too, I'm sure. That'll give us all the physics. The emerging science of morality and of feelings and truth is being revealed to us more and more every day by MRI scans and brain scans of all manner and shape. So we're learning a lot more about that too. There are actually evolutionary routes to empathy. There are reasons we frown on psychopathology, for example. People who act without a moral center. And there are genetic reasons why they exist. It's a structural defect in the brain. If we could heal that, that would be the right thing to do. Because someone who's born a psychopath is kind of doomed to be one unless there's some medical intervention that can fix it. So at some point, in probably the very near future, we'll be able to do exactly that and start acting with a real clear and usable moral science. Could you sum up that question in one sentence? The bottom line question was, I remember you saying about the scientists being converted, is it possible that... Do you remember... Well, we would say from a biblical perspective that everything is tied together, body, soul and spirit. So if I have love, I have emotion, it's created with the DNA. God said in Genesis that He breathed out of the breath of life and He became a living being, a living nephesh, there in the Hebrew language, where that life took place. The soul, the mind, the intellect, the love, the nature of God. We actually take on the character of God because we're created in His image. Not a God, but created in His image. So you feel love and compassion and different things because biologically, emotionally, psychologically, it's all interwoven together, body, soul and spirit. Well, to answer your question, I really need more than two minutes, but the quick answer is this, this is a misconception on Christianity. We don't stand here and go, we're right, everybody else is wrong. We believe that God has identified truth. I'm the way, the truth, the life, nobody comes through me except, nobody goes through the Father except through me. Jesus said we believe that He proclaimed the truth, the word of God is truth. And we gravitate, we recognize that truth. So we're just simply acknowledging what God has already outlined. If we got into more scripture, it talks about His invisible attributes are clearly seen, though we are without excuse because creation does scream creator and we suppress that truth. So Christianity acknowledges the truth of who God said He was. So it's not some other religion coming up with something. We're acknowledging the truth of God. And that's where there's a lot of different religions is because they're all trying to find God where Christianity says God came down to us and is relational, if that helps answer your question. You know, that is a question that, it's probably the top question, why is Christianity right and everybody's wrong? And there seems to be an arrogance there. And really to me, it's arrogance that challenges God. And we look to His word, we look to the different things to gauge truth. And if you'll look at all, if you study all the different religions, I think the point is that they were created to worship something. Everybody on the planet was created to worship something, therefore then again confirming God. Whether you're Buddhist, whether you're Hindu, whether you're Muslim, Christian, whatever it is, we were created to worship God and we acknowledge the one true and living God. And that's why it's not, we're right, you're wrong. It's we're acknowledging God's truth and who He is. Okay, it's interesting in light of this creation to worship idea that ants appear to have their own ceremonial burial rituals. Religion is observable as not even just a uniquely human phenomenon. You can induce superstition in pigeons just by feeding them randomly. This is an observable trait. We can explain the diversity of religions using the theory of evolution. And a number of scientists much more versed in the subject than I am have done exactly that in way more than a minute's time. So I encourage you to check out their work. It's not by chance. And actually there's quite a lot of biological literature documenting exactly the evolutionary path of the bacterial flagellum. It's a simple propulsion system that is easy to evolve by non-random survival of randomly generating replicators or randomly varying replicators to be more precise. So there's another interesting case in a longitudinal study of evolution in E. coli bacteria where these several lines have been filtered every day since the 70s if I recall correctly. And one day, and I do mean one day as this was done every night and they were allowed to grow for a day in seven different test tube lines. One day, one of those lines developed the ability to metabolize the substrate, what was supposed to be just dead space, the material that suspended them and allowed them to move around in liquid. That ability was the result of two independent and not selected for what would look like useless mutations. Those accumulated over time and when they came together in the right generation at the right time they allowed that generation to start metabolizing the substrate. The other lines, as far as I can recall, I'm not an expert on that study, haven't done so yet. They might, but that would be the random variation of those non-randomly varying replicators. Yes. You know, you actually brought up a good point because if evolution is true then things would be designing randomly and then this would develop this and this would develop this. You're talking about something so minute that we can see through a microscope and it has this complexity of this rotor, this turning of the machine, a spindle, all these complexities for a little tiny organism to go inside the body, all these different complexities, it would have to happen all at once or it can't happen at all. In order for it to operate efficiently it has to be designed all at once. It can't design, it can't randomly mutate a portion of it and then another portion and then slowly mutate. This thing that you're talking about is if people go online and look at how complex it is and what it does in the body and moving around in different areas, it shows that it had to be created all at once or it wouldn't work efficiently. It wouldn't even work at all. Ladies and gentlemen, at this point we originally scheduled our question and answer session for 30 minutes. However, it appears that there are some members still online. So, I will ask our debaters if they would like to extend the time to another 15 minutes to get as many questions as possible. Mr. Nance, would you be okay with that? I think I'm alright. As long as the... Yes. Right, right. So, if you could sum up your question, what would it be? Why don't I... And get it wrong in the area of... Okay. Okay. Well, the short answer is when we look at the truth of God's Word, we're not divided on the essentials. That Christ is the only way, salvation through Him alone, the virgin birth, the crucifixion, the resurrection. Those are essentials of the Christian faith. And if anything goes outside of that, that's where the word heresy or heretical comes from because they go outside of the essentials of the Christian faith. And we're talking here about science differing on a lot of different things and Christianity differing on some things. But I don't... Maybe it's me, but I don't quite see the connection because they are allowed to make mistakes and backtrack and change certain things. And as we look at Christian doctrine, as long as the essentials that were set in place 2,000 years ago have never changed. But the non-essential things are where you'll see some division in the church itself. Women in leadership, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the power of the Holy Spirit, the elders ruling the church versus one pastor, versus... You're seeing all these areas where they split up in denomination. Baptist, Anabaptist, Methodist, Presbyterian. So they look at the non-essentials in a different way and that's where there's some division. But on the essentials, there's been unity for 2,000 years and that's the essentials of the Christian faith. Did I answer your question? Was there anything brief? Okay. Okay. It seems Shane has disregarded the fundamentals of the Protestant Reformation. Which was at its core an overthrow of the papal hierarchy. The overthrow of the idea that you needed a laying on of hands or intercession from one of Christ's appointed vicars on earth to get to Jesus. If you can overthrow that idea by pinning a note to a church door, that's a pretty fundamental shift I would think in the doctrine itself. Certainly in the practice of it. That's why you don't see Protestant confessionals. In science, the consequence for getting something wrong and proving that you got yourself, proving that your own theory was wrong is potentially a Nobel Prize. So the same corrective mechanism seems to be operating very differently in science and religion. He told us a little bit that his registerial was done wrong. He came back to us several hours later and we were coming to him and he had finally really understood four hours after he had passed. We were able to come to him before he passed. Are the two allowed? The last one is not allowed. How would you explain the miracle? Well, I'm first of all very sorry for your loss at that moment in your history. But secondly, I would have to notice its similarity to the very real problem of determining when someone has actually died. It's not nearly as clear cut as you might think. Biologically, there's a gray area between life and death. And mercifully, in your case, your relative was able to retain or to stay in that gray area long enough for you to get to him. This is also not incidentally the origin of vampire stories. That's why they staked the dead down in some areas because they were so terrified of revenants, people who came back from the dead but were not nearly so kind as your relative. This is actually fully explicable by biology. It's not a suspension of the natural order. It's a, I would have to say, fortunate and simultaneously unfortunate consequence of it. How do you explain it? The explanation comes from biology, from a more complete biological science than I have available to me as an engineer. I think I'm okay. I'm trying to tie that question into his Protestant Reformation comment and I don't think I can. So ask me a question about that, please. I would believe, I believe in miracles. I believe that God does that. I believe that God answers prayer. I believe that God raises people from the dead and sometimes He chooses to do that, sometimes He chooses not to do that. So I would be in full agreeance that God answered those prayers and allowed you to see your friend before you pass. I have no problem with that whatsoever. I mean a God who created all this can surely rewake and create and bring back. Thank you. So to sum it up, why doesn't God communicate with His people directly? Oh, directly. Okay. Has it started? Two minutes? Okay. Well, that's a common question and we actually as Christians believe that God communicates with us through His Son, Jesus Christ, who came 2,000 years ago. And people are like, well, that's fairytale. That doesn't matter. Do you have more? Yes, we do. We also believe that He has given us His Word and that's what I've still challenged Jay on. There's nothing from a biological standpoint, a scientific standpoint, an archaeological standpoint that discounts that. So we believe that God visits us and speaks to us in His Word through His Son. The conviction, the conviction that we feel is there's something there. This is why I can... If I was talking about Santa Claus and Easter bunnies, nobody would be upset. Probably nobody would be here. But when I talk about the name Jesus Christ and the power in that name and that every demonic realm must submit to that name, that's identity through the conviction. We feel that conviction. That's why a lot of people don't like what I'm saying and I'm quite aware of it. I'm a preacher and that's what happens. So we have conviction. We have the Word of God. And then we have creation. Creation screams Creator. And then why doesn't God just reveal Himself right now? Well, that would be forcing something onto somebody like putting a gun to my wife's head and saying, you marry me. Where's the left in that? So faith has to be activated. God, I see you. You've revealed yourself. I'm exercising faith. That's where true and genuine love comes, is from the exercise of faith in that area. Thirty seconds. Thirty seconds. The Protestant Reformation was actually the Protestant Church going back to truth, not running from it. Oh, there we go. I'll make a note of that. Well, it's pretty easy for me to explain God's silence. He's not there. He's not there. That's pretty much all I'd have to say on that point. To get through the rest of the questions. Okay. If you have any time concerns, if you're looking for question and answers, this will be our last question. Oh, one in each side? Okay. One at a time, please. Okay. Now, the question. If human beings were able to synchronize and have other time mechanisms, why would we do it? We get to define our own purpose. In my model of our evolved place in the cosmos, we don't have a purpose dictated to us from on high. We get that liberty ourselves. We reserve the right to choose our purpose according to our own will. So I would have to say that the why we are here thing is something you can ask yourself, answer yourself, and if you ascribe to a scientific worldview like I aspire to myself, you can test your answers and see if you got it right by your own well-being, how it responds to your answers to those questions. Because if you choose as your purpose something that reliably causes harm in those around you, you're likely to suffer as a result. So you can test your own self-assigned meaning to life by observing the responses of the world around you and hopefully converge on a solution that maximizes your own well-being and the well-being of those you care about. It's all I could really aspire to do for myself and I hope everyone else joins me in that endeavor. I think I can yield on that. Thank you. That will conclude questions for Mr. Davis, those of you who are online. Why are we here? That is probably gives more support for this topic than anything else. We have a purpose. We are here because God created us. He designed us. He wants a relationship with us. If you just stop and think about this for a minute, we came from nothing, we evolved, and we go back into the dirt without any purpose, anything whatsoever actually proves that there's a God out there because we feel this sense of purpose. And I'll even read Stephen Hawking at Lady Mitchell Hall many years ago. He said, The tragedy of scientific materialism is that we are not free. So what you said is freedom, you really don't have freedom. If random mutation, everything is random, we don't have that freedom. So he said, The tragedy of scientific materialism is that we are not free. We are totally determined. The only escape I have is since I don't know what is determined, I may as well not be. That's one of the top atheists giving an answer why there's no purpose in atheism. Okay, our final question and answer. So, Mr. Davis was able to talk to you today. What did you have? So you're talking old earth? Why is the old? Right. Well, yeah, that makes sense. Good question. Number one, evolutionists and biologists are looking at, they're using historical science. Oh, we look at this now, rock, the formation of Grand Canyon, this must have took billions of years to make. But we see, you mentioned Ken Ham and creation. When we look at the biblical account, in the first day, when God created the first day, the second day, the day and the night, the day and the night, he uses the word yom, Y-O-M, it can mean a season of time or it can mean an actual day. So I just, from the literal reading of scripture, to me, points to the fact that it could be within the scope of the 6,000 year period. And you can Google creationists with PhDs who agree with this. The reason is if God created, for example, everybody kind of laughs at that point, but it's true, where Adam, when he was created, was a second old. Did he look a second old? Or did he look 30 years old? So by observing Adam, they would not say he was a second year, he was a one second year old, he was 30 years old. Also, measuring the speed of light, if I could throw a baseball as hard as I could and get it over to that wall, and then I take another baseball and I roll it slowly, slowly, you're watching, well that must take, it must take 10 minutes for that ball to get over there, but I just threw it one second. So when God created, boom, the creation was created, it was done, so it's going to have the look of old, but still be very young. So that's why there's a distinction, a difference. However, it's not a point of debate or arguing, because the point is God created, that's the bottom line. Whether it's a million years or, which I agree to, the young earth, the point is that God created it, and it's interesting that we want to use certain things to get away from the actual question of the existence of God. Okay, on the question of the age of the earth and the age of rocks, these aren't guesses by science, these are computations built on reliable and testable models of radioactive decay in a huge variety of elements. All these different clocks overlap. They can test each other. We can test them on small scales with even the GPS in your phone. We can test them on large scales with rubidium strontium decay, which takes 45 billion years. An enormously long clock to be able to base our computations on. So, it's not very, very hard for me to imagine that scientists have converged on an answer for the age of the earth itself and for the age of the universe that are now to four decimal places knocking on the door of a fifth. This precision will increase. All right, thank you gentlemen, and thank you for all of you for coming out and fielding your questions. I will say that our speakers will be available for a limited, and I stress limited, period of time after this debate. They both perform on food. They're not going to be here in time in the air tonight, so I hope that you will, at the end of this debate, show your appreciation for that. If you have any specific questions you would like to ask in private, you may do so pointedly. With the conclusion of our question-and-answer segment, we will now move into the final portion of our debate, closing statements. Each speaker has ten minutes to offer a closing statement with regards to anything that has been presented in two minutes yet. We will begin with Mr. Nicholas to defend his closing statement, sir. All right, I would expand on the kind offer of dialogue after this show to say that at any Antelope Valley Freethinkers meeting you can come and challenge me directly. I'm pretty often there. So, to close as briefly as I can, as the cocktail hour presses, I would have to reiterate one key point, or a couple key points, just stick with me. Every transitional fossil, or every fossil, is a transitional fossil, just like you are a transition between your parents and your children. That holds true for every organism that has ever lived. They're just a transition between their parents and their children. So, say it with me now. All fossils are transitional fossils. The idea that there's no evidence of transitional fossils is an illusion. There being seashells in Texas, and even a coral reef 2,000 meters in the air in Texas, testifies that the biblical flood cannot have happened because the supposed mechanism by which that reef was created would have destroyed the very reef itself. Floods are fatal to coral, anywhere they occur on earth. The debris that's kicked up by a flood kills coral reliably. You can test this. And coral only grows at a maximum of about a foot per year. So, a 1,000 meter tall coral formation in Texas takes about 100,000 years at the very least to grow. That by itself knocks down any idea that there was ever a biblical flood. Now, you don't need to believe in the literal truth of a biblical flood to believe in a god. These are not mutually incompatible ideas. I happen to think there are other reasons that they are not compatible, but we can leave those aside for the purpose of tonight's debate. The question of morality being written into our DNA is one that's of great interest to evolutionary biologists, interestingly enough. Morality actually is in our DNA. It's... One of the questioners brought it up. The expression of morality, the mental processes that give us the foundation of morality come from our genetics. They have to. There's no other place for them to come from in the brain. And if you'll recall, the last time you read the Bible, I'm sure someone here has, other than me, certainly Shane, that when you read a passage like, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and you think that's a good moral guide, then you read another line of the Bible, thou shalt not suffer which to live, which caused incalculable human misery for five centuries in greater Europe. And you think, well, that's probably not a good idea. The guarantor of your morality is inside your own head, and it's there because evolution put it there. Social species don't live very well if their members don't behave morally. And that morality, interestingly enough, varies depending on your biology. Think about a snake, for example. Snake mothers abandon their children at the moment of birth. They lay the egg, they incubate it, and as soon as it hatches, they're out of there. Why? Because the hatchling is a perfectly capable hunter. Human mothers who abandon their children in the same way are probably not looked upon with the same reverence as snake mothers would be. They're certainly not considered pillars of morality. Why is that? Because human children require care after birth. They have to be raised into viable hunting adults. So your morality scales with your biology and is shaped, in fact, by knowable and testable aspects of your own biology. So, to one final point, and I think I can close with this. Science doesn't really have leaders. The only leader is what you can prove, what evidence you can produce for your position. If I could produce a single bit of evidence that overturned any assertion in any of Richard Dawkins' books, I would actually be bound, as a scientist, to present that to him, to present that to the scientific community at large, and if I'm right and he's wrong, I win. He gets no credit for having, in that particular argument, in that specific situation, for having reshaped our understanding of evolution in the 1970s with the publication of The Selfish Gene. Your argument in science has to stand on its own merits, and your credentials, your PhDs, no matter how many of them you can pin on your wall, won't save you when the evidence is against you. In science, that's how it works. That's why you see things, like I've seen at scientific meetings, where scientists can be very passionate on two sides of an argument, but when the evidence comes down, the one who's wrong concedes. They change their ideas, and they work to increase their understanding of the discovered reality. That's the fundamental process of science, in a nutshell. And I think, if I had one point, that would be the one I'd want to make tonight. So, thank you all for coming out. I'll relinquish the balance of my time. Thank you. Well, I'm going to take a little bit different direction in the closing statement. And I actually have a confession to make tonight that I didn't come here to really win an argument or try to espouse some view. I don't have an impressive pedigree. I barely graduated high school. I didn't last here more than a month. My writing and speech were embarrassing as a young adult. I was raised by an angry father. Became an alcoholic. Destroyed a lot of things in my life, including a marriage. I've aborted a child. I know the pain that people experience. But I came here really, the reason we put this on, is to tell you about a God that redeems and sets free and wants to have a relationship with you. Because the whole debate is pointless if we don't talk about this. Now, interesting though, how can we look at the same evidence? We look at the same evidence, correct? And come to different conclusions. That's what I'm going to end with. Here's what happens. Number one, and not to come across as trying to bash or put down anyone, I will actually put this on myself. The reason often that there is differences in evidence is because we are in rebellion to God. It's what we don't want to hear, but the natural man, the carnal man, I'm in rebellion with God. There's enmity, there's war with God. That's why this is not an issue of facts. This has nothing to do with facts. We are prejudiced to conclude I don't want there to be a God. I want to do what I want, to who I want, when I want, how I want. I'm the master of my own destiny. I'm the captive of my own ship. I don't want there to be a God. Here's the seduction. Here's the seduction. Don't worry, this just confirms what I'm talking about. When the heat's turned up, people do not want to hear the truth of God's word. So here's the seduction. The seduction of removing God is that then I can be God. So that's the seduction. Romans 2.16 says, God will judge the secret things in man's heart. So we have this. We feel there's this judgment coming. I have to remove the judge. So number one, man is in rebellion to God. That's why the gospel, the good news, condemns before it releases. It hurts before it heals, and it shows me my sin. That's why I need a savior. It shows me those things. So once we look at the scriptural course that we are in rebellion, and to me it ties right in with science because it confirms everything from a biological standpoint, which I'll get to in a minute. We can know God, relationship. We are made in His image. Did you catch the first part of Genesis? You are made in the image of God. No wonder we feel shame. No wonder we feel guilt. No wonder there's cutting and suicide and ODing and addiction because that relationship has been broken. No wonder. But God desires that relationship. This is not a cold, mechanical religion adopted by those who are weak-minded. We have experienced God. You know the song many use. We sing, Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I was lost, but now I'm found. I was blind, but now I see. But Shane, that's wonderful, but your experience doesn't prove anything. Hogwash. We experience gravity. We experience the laws of thermodynamics. Why can't we experience God? If I have an experience that lines up with scripture, that is validity. Experience. Experience. You can experience God. And then the third point. We need to be restored. That's the whole point. That's why DNA is leading to death. That's why there's sin, there's misery, there's evil, there's suffering. We need to be restored. Romans 3.23 says, All have sinned and come short of the glory of God. That's why I feel broken. Now it makes sense. Romans 6, For the wages of sin is death. That's why I feel condemned. Psalm 51, My sin is always before me. That's why I feel convicted. See, to me it makes sense. I experience this conviction. I experience this shame. I experience this guilt. So when God changed me and renewed my heart, and now there's a love for God. I have a love for these men. I have a love for people. Where does that come from? Because the old Shane Ottoman wants to put on some boxing gloves and drink a 12-pack of beer and close down schooners before it ends. But something has changed in my heart. Whatever that is, I don't know, but it's confirmed with scripture. Born again, being transformed by the renewing of your mind. Why can't we experience God? That's the question. We experience everything else. You can experience God. But it doesn't end there. The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ, our Lord. But God demonstrated His own love toward us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Wait a minute. When I was in my sin and debauchery and mocking God and spitting in His face, He still died for me? That's unconditional love. That's the good news of the Gospel. It reminds me of a mother who heard her son come in late at night and he was high, he was drunk. And the father heard the mom get up and he said, finally, she's going to tell him off. Kick him out of this house. And a couple of minutes went by and he went downstairs and saw the mom holding her son and caressing him and loving him while he's passed out. And he said, what are you doing? And the mom said, he would not let me love him while he's awake, so I will love him while he's asleep. That's the image of God. That's a God who loves unconditionally. That's why this is so hard. That is why there's truth, there's power in the name of Christ. Why are people from the satanic temple going to get up and walk out? I'll tell you why, because this isn't pixie dust and fairy tales. This is truth and they can't stand the truth. That's what this is. There is a broken relationship. So my last point, what must I do then, Shane? They've been asking that question for 2,000 years. The Bible says repent and be converted that your sins may be blotted out and times of refreshing will come from the presence of the Lord. I repent, I see my need for a Savior. I humble myself and God comes, He saves me and the times of refreshing, revival come from the presence of the Lord. I experience what the Bible says. It's experiential as well as scientific proof of the nature and character of God. Here's a headline that I read recently. Deathbed conversion, never. Christopher Hitchens was defiant until his last breath. His son wrote these words, I spent my father's final weeks and days at his bedside and watched him draw his final breath and die and I can assure you that there was no hint of any sort of conversion. In fact, we barely spoke about religion at all except for the joint expressions of frustration at the God botherers who made rounds in the ICU where dying people could be prayed upon by vulturous Christians. I know I've got two and a half minutes, so you don't need to give me the two minute mark. Let me leave you with this thought. To live your entire life fighting God, mocking God, rejecting God, and to trust your soul to the ever-changing theories of science and the winds of speculation, to me, is the greatest tragedy that man has ever known. A life of rebellion leads to an eternity of separation from God. In the end, the rebel gets his way. That's what this is about. The rebel gets his way, and I'm not going to go on here, but I want to encourage you. Who are you trusting in? Are you trusting in God? Or are you trusting in man? You have to ask yourself, why is this topic so irritating? Why do I hate what that guy's saying? Why? What is going on inside of me? It's that battle. It's that battle, and God desires a relationship with you, but He's not going to force it because then it wouldn't be love. We are created to choose Him or reject Him. And that, quite honestly, is the only reason I am here tonight, is to share what He's done in my own life and to share He can do that to anybody in this room. He can restore and rebuild your life. And I'll leave it at that. Thank you.