We've talked a bit about just the general approach to apologetics. We talked a bit about the secular worldview. And today, in this session, we're going to be talking about scientific and rational arguments. And this is what would be called evidentialist apologetics, because we're presenting hard, objective evidence.
And this session will be on the science and reason, and then the next session is going to be on more historical arguments. And again, this is the core of evidentialist apologetics. Now, the science is really important, because when we talked about you have to find points of contact.
For a person who's very secular, very, very often, they'll have an extremely high respect for science. So that's why it's really important, even if you're not a scientist, to have at least a few nuggets of truth that you can present. to a friend, a colleague, or a fellow student.
And what happens is what I'd recommend is you think about what topics that I'm going to address that make the most sense and really practice presenting at least one topic. That would be extremely helpful. Now, what is significant about the science is it's an issue that actually goes right back to ancient Greece.
Because if you look at Greek philosophy, For like 500 BC you had debates back then between people like Aristotle versus people like Democritus who were debating the issue of design versus chance. It's not a new discussion. The issue of whether we're simply here by the blind forces of nature or were we here because of an intelligent mind.
This is an ancient, ancient conversation. It doesn't go back to the Scopes Monkey Trial in the United States or to even Darwin far, far earlier. Also Paul talks about it because if you look at Romans Chapter 1, verses 18 to 20, Paul talks specifically about how when people look at nature, they see the attributes of God. They see evidence of his power and his wisdom. And it's self-evident.
And Paul says that it's so clear that to deny it, you have to suppress the truth. And that suppression can be through an individual suppressing the truth or for an entire culture. Like much of Western culture, As a culture has suppressed the truth of God by denying the clear evidence of design in nature.
And that gets into the issue of Darwin evolution, how it's essentially Darwin evolution is designed to suppress the evidence for design in biology. And we'll address that. But Paul talks about how God deliberately created the universe in such a way that people can see the evidence of a super intelligence very clearly. So that's basically what we're going to be talking about. And of course, when you get on the issue of science and Christianity, there's a real strong debate within the Christian circles of, is the world literally created in six days, about six to ten thousand years ago, or do the days represent long periods of time?
That is not a debate I'm going to deal with. What I will argue, though, is whatever position you take on that, it's really good within... the Christian community that we be respectful of each other's views because there's good reasons on both sides what people go one way or the other.
What I will argue is that even if you assume the old dating of modern science that the idea that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, the earth is about 4.5 billion years, even if you were to assume that, then it still doesn't change the fact that the universe looks designed. So I'll talk about that framework even if you look within the idea of an ancient earth, the evidence for design is still undeniable. And I won't get into that debate of whether it's old or not. Now, what happens is you have to appreciate that there's a lie in many cultures that says that science and faith are inherently in conflict.
That you either have to be a person of science, that you're rational, you're logical, you look at evidence, or you're a person of faith and you just accept things blindly. Embrace ideas more emotionally because you just want to believe them. And that's a complete lie.
Because if you look at the foundation of modern science, it was birthed by Christians. Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Boyle, the founders of modern science are Christian. It was their faith that allowed them to do science.
Because they do science, you have to believe that the world is orderly, that there's an order out there that you can understand. And you have to believe that we have the ability to understand that order. And that makes perfect sense.
If you're a Christian, you believe we're created in God's image, and we've been commissioned by God to understand the world. So Genesis talks about how God called us to steward creation, to take dominion over the earth, which means we're meant to understand science in order to advance culture. So the early Christians, it was their faith that allowed them to do science.
And that's why you don't see science being birthed in a lot of cultures that don't believe in a single God that has power, sovereign power over the world. If you believe in multiple gods, then you're not going to believe there's a single order to the universe. Or if you don't believe in God and our brains just evolve through chance, why would our brain evolve in such a way to understand the way electrons go around the nucleus and what's called quantum mechanics, or at least a physicist's brain to understand that?
Or why would our brains be able to understand the expansion of the universe or the incredible intricacies of how light works? That doesn't make sense. That gives you no survival advantage. It's only if we're creating God's image you'd expect us to be able to do science.
That's a key point. But also, the more science is advanced, the more the evidence for design in a designer becomes clear. So for instance, what scientists have found is that the universe is expanding.
And what that means, if you go back in time, that means the universe would contract back to a point, which means that all time, space, matter, and energy began. That's key. And there's even sophisticated... Theorem's out there like if you're into physics you may have heard of the Borde-Guth-Flancken theorem that says our universe had a beginning. Well what does that mean?
Well that means it had to have a beginner because nothing starts itself. You don't see coke cans just pop into existence out of nothing. So that means that our universe was started by some incredibly powerful entity that created all time, space, matter, and energy which means that that entity is outside of time and space and created everything in a burst of energy. That kind of sounds like Genesis doesn't it?
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. God said, let there be light. So we know from modern physics that the universe began, which means it had to have a beginner outside of time and space. Now, in addition, when people have studied the laws of physics, they found that everything in our universe, the laws of physics, seem to have been designed with life in mind.
So there's actually a famous physicist named Fred Hoyle, and he was an atheist. But Fred Hoyle studied the way... atoms are made in stars.
And what he found is that our universe contains lots and lots of carbon and oxygen. And it just so happens that's essential for life. Yet that would not have happened unless there were certain energy levels in atoms that were perfectly set to allow for these elements to be produced.
If it was just kind of random, we wouldn't expect to have, we probably would only have mainly hydrogen or helium or very, very heavy metals. But he said, That this really disturbs atheism because there is numerous cosmic coincidences that allowed for life and he says it looks like a super intellect has monkeyed with the laws of physics and chemistry So this atheist was realized that they look like there's intelligence behind our universe, but there's many other examples So for instance if you look at the force that holds the proton and the electron together That has to be not too strong or not too weak or you wouldn't have chemistry that we know of The force of gravity is even more extraordinary. If you imagine, for instance, you have a mixer board, and this mixer board controlled the universe that you were creating.
Each dial controlled some part of nature, the strength of gravity, the strength of the force between the proton and the electron, the entropy of the universe, etc., etc. All these dials have to be carefully set for a universe to support life, any type of life, not just our life, but any life. For instance, gravity has to be set with such precision that if it's only a tiny bit larger, a tiny bit smaller, there wouldn't be planets or stars and therefore no life. In fact, to get the precision right, it'd be kind of like a marksman is shooting a target, which is one centimeter by one centimeter, and that target is at the other end of our solar system. Hitting that target is the precision needed to set gravity in such a way that there would be life.
There's many, many more constants like that. In addition, if you look at our Earth, there are so many parameters and details about where we live that it had to be perfect for life to exist. The Earth has to be the right distance from the sun, the right tilt, the right rotation rate.
We have to have a magnetic shield to protect us from radiation. We have to have plate tectonics to recycle minerals. That's the motion of continents.
We've got to have a moon that's the right size and distance from the Earth to stabilize our orbit. We have to have a sun that's very stable that produces the right type of energy. And what's really amazing is the atmosphere has to allow the right type of energy to us. Like if it allowed, let's say, x-rays, that would be really, really bad.
If the atmosphere allowed, let's say, microwaves through, that would also be bad. But there's this little range of energy that the atmosphere allows through, a teeny little range. which is heat and light, which is exactly what we need. In addition, when the energy from the sun hits the earth, it's absorbed and it's readmitted as heat, and there's another window that allows the heat to escape.
So what happens is you've got the atmosphere is perfect to absorb just the right amount of heat to keep us warm, but not too much heat or else we would bake to death. Incredible fine tuning. Also, what's amazing is we have to be in the right part of our galaxy.
If we're too close to the center, we'd be wiped out by radiation. If we're too far out, our Earth wouldn't have the right materials that allow for technology and advancement and stability. So again, that's an incredible example of fine-tuning.
In addition, it's not just that there's countless parameters for our sun, our moon, our star that allows for life, but our planet seems to be designed for scientific investigation and technological development. So our atmosphere, which allows us to breathe, also is transparent so that we can view the stars. We're in a perfect place in our galaxy not just to live, but so that we can have a good view of our galaxy to do science, and also we don't have a lot of dust so that we can see the galaxies beyond us. Here's one of my favorites.
To have technology, you have to have fire. The amount of oxygen in our atmosphere is not just perfect for us to breathe, it's perfect to produce fire. Because if there was too little oxygen, we wouldn't be able to produce fire, so we couldn't have technology. If there was too much oxygen, we'd burn down all the forests, kind of like what happens in California. Now, another wonderful example is we have a magnetic shield that protects us, but that shield, that magnetism, also allows us to navigate the oceans.
We've got plate tectonics, which recycle materials on the Earth, but it also takes creatures at the bottom of the ocean and moves them to the top of mountains so that we can view them and understand them. Again, designed for scientific investigation. Also, again, one of my favorites, is that the wavelength of light is not just perfect for photosynthesis, for all the life-needing processes, but it's perfect for the optics of the eye.
Because if the wavelength were longer, our eye might have to be the size of our head, or the size of a building, in order to see with high resolution. But the wavelength is... of light is perfect to give us the highest possible resolution we can have based on the minimum size of your cones and rods which absorb light. So you see this convergence of factors that allow us to live and allow us to do scientific investigation. Now there's a really nice analogy.
Imagine that you are an explorer through space. You land on a planet and you happen to notice that there's this house on this planet. And this house happens to have the perfect set of oxygen for you, has running water, the right temperature, gravity is different from the planet, but the gravity inside the house is perfect.
There's food that you can eat. You probably wouldn't say, what an amazing coincidence. It was probably some meteorites that blew things apart and created a house for me.
No, you would know that an intelligent agent knew you were coming and prepared that house with you in mind. And that's the exact same thing with our universe, with our planet. planet with our star with our solar system that intelligence knew we were coming and designed everything with us in mind Very powerful now the next topic is going to be the issue of life Because this where it gets very controversial because there's any area of science Where people say that science and faith are in conflict people would say it's with biology In fact as I mentioned before Darwinian evolution the whole point of it Was basically to be a replacement for God.
Richard Dawkins talks about how evolution allowed us to be intellectually fulfilled atheists. Him to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. But the question is, where did life come from?
Because before you can even have evolution, you've got to have a cell that replicates, right? Without reproduction, there's no evolution. And the question becomes, did life come just through the blind forces of nature, or was it designed? Well, I can say with great confidence that it was designed, because the first cell that arrived on Earth could not have come about by blind natural processes, because nature has two driving tendencies. One tendency is to go from low entropy to high entropy, and that's like going from order...
to disorder. That's a crude analogy, but for the discussion we can use it. It's kind of like, is it easier to have a messy room or a neat room?
Obviously, it's easier to have a messy room, because it's much more disordered, many more ways that can happen. Also, nature tends to go from high energy to low energy. Water runs downhill, water doesn't run uphill. But life is both highly ordered, it's low entropy, and it's very high energy. There's lots of energy in those chemical bonds.
So it's a physical impossibility. for a natural process to take a bunch of simple chemicals on the earth and turn it into a cell because all natural processes move in the opposite direction. Either they go to high entropy or they go to low energy or both. In addition, even the simplest cell had to have DNA because DNA contains the operating system for the cell.
It has the information for how to replace parts. like proteins, because the proteins are always breaking apart, and it basically runs the metabolism. It controls how fast reactions take place.
So DNA is the operating system of a cell, and that has to be there, or else the cell would break apart and assemble chemicals very quickly. Yet DNA is encoded information. Have you ever looked at Morse code, how you have like dot, dot, dot, dash, dash, dash, dot, dot, dot is S-O-S?
Letters are encoded into dots and dashes? In the same way, the instructions for the cell are encoded into DNA, except it's not dots and dashes, it's four letters, A, C, T, and G. So what happens is when you see the information that must be in the cell, you know it has to be designed. Here's how.
Any of you ever get like a text message that's just a bunch of junk, like explanation point A, Z? If you get like a bunch of random letters, you know it was like a butt text. It was an accident. But if you get a text that says, don't tell anyone, but I cheated on the test, is there any chance that that was an accident? No.
Or if you have alphabet soup, and you go in and you notice that you have an alphabet soup bowl that your mother gave you, and you see the letters in the pasta have the sentence, I hope you feel better, get lots of rest, and drink lots of fluids. You would know that that can't be explained by the chemistry of the pasta. You would know that can't be explained by the physics of the boiling water. You would know that was designed by an intelligence. Now note, someone might tell you that doesn't believe in a designer, that you're just falling into the concerned parent of the gaps fallacy.
We just have to wait. Maybe one day we can explain that message with chemistry and physics, but is that possible? No, because information is only a product of the mind.
So the information you see in life, which is essential even for the simplest possible cell, you know points to a designer just as clearly. That's really key. Well, now that deals with the origin of life that shows design, but then let's talk about evolution.
What happens is this whole idea of evolution goes back to the ancient Greeks. In fact, if you look at the Apostle Paul in Romans, he's addressing the Epicureans because the Epicureans were basically people at his time period that didn't believe in design. And they actually had a primitive version of evolution with natural selection. So the idea of evolution with natural selection is something that goes back to the ancient Greeks And it's always a way to deny the evidence of a designer. So when Darwin came on the scene it was nothing new He was deeply shaped by the philosophies of his age the materialism the secularism He was shaped by tragedies in his life So what happened is his personal experience in his philosophical framework helped to shape his science Now, some of the science was very, very good.
So, for instance, Darwin saw that human breeders would take sheep, and they would breed them to have sheep with more wool. So, intelligent agency changed the sheep. But he asked the question, what would happen if it was a really, really cold winter?
Well, in a cold winter, the sheep with less fur would die. The sheep with more fur would survive. So, over time, the sheep would have more and more fur.
That's natural selection. So he was right. That's very scientific.
But what is not so clear is he said the small changes you see with sheep growing more fur or with, let's say, a finch beak growing thicker on the Galapagos Islands, he thought that could be extrapolated over long periods of time so you could get a fish become an amphibian or an amoeba become a man. Not literally amoeba, but you get the basic idea. So he thought that those small changes could accumulate over time to create large changes. And he thought all of life would fit within a tree of life, where you have the first cell, it became more advanced, it split off into different branches. One branch was animals, plants, fungi, bacteria.
You have these branches that split into the different phyla, things like everything from sea urchins to octopi and so forth. That's the tree of life. So everything's connected through this tree, and that's what explains the similarities in life.
Well, as it turns out, that idea is clearly false. In fact, I went to a meeting at the Royal Society of London, and that's one of the most prestigious scientific organizations in the world. And they had a session called New Trends in Evolutionary Biology. What happened is that the first speaker, who's a very well-respected... Secular scientists and evolutionary theorists basically said that Darwin's theory of evolution, the idea that these changes can accumulate, that you have these changes in gene frequencies, is true but very limited.
So you can explain things like bacterial resistance, where bacteria can resist antibiotics. You can explain things like how the moths in England can get darker or lighter, but you can't explain changes above the level of a genus. you can't explain a fish becoming amphibian. It's very, very limited. So he said there has to be new theories out there.
And the entire conference was trying to explain other ways that they could explain this problem, and nobody presented one concrete solution. So they basically acknowledged that the standard evolutionary model that you read in your textbooks can only explain very small changes, but they have nothing to replace it. That's where the science is, despite what the public is being told.
In addition, what we see is lots of evidence that you don't have evolution driving changes in life, but design. So if you look at the fossil record, and that's the record of dead species on the Earth, and even if you assume that the Earth is ancient, what you see in the fossil record is you have these sudden appearances of radical new architectures, radical new types of animals or plants that appear suddenly. You have what's called the Cambrian Explosion. And that's a period which is standardly dated about 550 million years ago, where you have some very simple animals beforehand, but then suddenly the first representatives of most of the basic animal architectures or body plans appear suddenly without ancestors going back to a common source. And that's a consistent pattern in the fossil record.
Radical new innovations appear suddenly, and once they appear, life does not change in the fossil record. Now, What can be very misleading is people talk about what are called transitional fossils. That's like the whale series, the human series, Lucy, all that sort of stuff.
What's important to realize is the term transitional fossil, missing link, is a bit misleading. What you do not have in the fossil record is an ancestor, a descendant, and a transition right in between. Great, great grand fossil, grand fossil, modern fossil.
The transitional fossils are more like toaster ovens. Now a toaster oven has both the features of a toaster and an oven, right? But if you were to change a toaster into an oven by a step-by-step process, you stopped halfway, would you have a toaster oven?
You'd have a mess. A toaster oven was designed to have features of a toaster and an oven. In the same way, there's very few even possible true transitions of the fossil record.
There's no examples. Of an ancestor-descendant series showing evolution and action, except for very small changes, you have tons and tons of toaster ovens. Most of the human fossils you hear about are toaster ovens. They're ape-like creatures that may share some human-like creature, but those similarities are scattered throughout life.
What's even more significant is the similarities in nature are completely inconsistent with an evolutionary tree. So like the eye of a human and the eye of an octopus are remarkably similar, but that's not because we share eight-legged ancestors. What you see is the similarities are scattered through life in the exact same way an engineer would use different features in different artifacts for a similar purpose.
Like cars, and then you've got automobiles and planes, are kind of like in a hierarchy, right? It's like a tree. You've got automobiles, you've got lots of planes and aircraft, you've got like... motorboats. So it's kind of like a tree, but then you might have a two-ray radio in a car and a two-way radio in a plane.
Is that similarity because of a common ancestor or because of a designer that used that similarity for a purpose? That's what you see in life. It looks like design at every level including the pattern. In addition, what happens is if you look at mutations, mutations are supposed to be able to explain the diversity of life.
So the idea is that you have some species, mutations happen which give you more variety, and then eventually enough mutations will allow, let's say, a fish to become an amphibian or an amphibian to become a reptile. The problem is no one has ever observed a single mutation that could help drive a major transformation. So the mutations which would help to change your body plan, that would change your basic architecture, all of them are harmful if they're expressed.
All the mutations we do see, like bacterial resistance, could never accumulate to create any major change. Here's an analogy. Any of you ever like to rearrange the furniture in your house? Maybe put some new wallpaper, a new carpet?
Will rearranging the furniture of your house ever turn your house into a cathedral or a shopping mall? No. To do that, you have to change at the very beginning of the construction process, right at the blueprint. That's where you have to make the change if you want to have a cathedral versus a townhouse. In the same way, when an animal develops, when the egg turns into an embryo, into an adult, that process is what...
But... is what ferments and establishes the basic architecture, the body plan, how many limbs you have. All mutations that affect that are harmful without exception, if they're expressed. So that means that all empirical evidence demonstrates that life cannot be explained through a blind, undirected evolutionary process, but it looks like an intelligent agent has been infusing the world with information to create new innovations.
So that's the issue of evolution. Now, that is a scientific argument. So we talked a little bit about the evidence from physics, the evidence from our planet. We talked about biology. Now we're going to switch gears and go from scientific arguments to rational arguments.
While the scientific arguments are basically hard evidence, facts, rational arguments are more reason. You're using logic to persuade a person of why Christianity is reasonable. These would be very influential with like a lawyer. Someone that would think very clearly and very linearly and very rationally.
And we already alluded to some of these, but a classic example of a rational argument is the moral argument. So when people, let's say an atheist says to you, I don't believe in God because there's just so much evil in the world. There's so many bad people that do bad things. The problem is if you don't believe in God, you can't believe in evil.
Because how do you decide right and wrong if there's no standard? If you believe that we just evolved, then every tendency, whether it's a tendency to oppress others, to be selfish, to be cruel, or a tendency to be altruistic, are simply the product of the blind forces of nature. They're not good, they're not bad, they're just what they are. When a tiger kills an antelope out of its instinct, that's not a crime scene. It's just nature.
It's what nature does. So the challenge is, without a creator, there can be no standard of right and wrong or how you should live. If you have a car that has a designer, what does the car come with?
A car manual. And that car manual tells you how to run the car. If you feel you don't want to be oppressed by this car manual and you want to put the water in the gas tank, you're free to, but the car will break down because you're violating the principles that were designed in the car.
In contrast, a rock on the beach doesn't have a... doesn't have a manual because it wasn't designed. It was just a product of the blind forces of nature.
It doesn't have a manual that says pull back in slingshot and release. So again, if you believe in God, it makes sense that God created us so he knows how we operate. So he gave us ideas of right and wrong and what's morally good and morally bad. What's good is what helps humans to flourish.
What's bad is what causes destruction and alienation. But if you don't believe in God, there is no morality, there is no right and wrong. The choice between a Mother Teresa and a Stalin is like the choice between crunchy peanut butter and smooth peanut butter for your sandwich. Now, this also gets into the issue of purpose. Because if we're not created by a God, we have no purpose.
We're simply an accident of nature, so everything about our life is an accident. Now, do you ever hear anyone who says, I'm going to create my own purpose in life? Well, you can do that.
But that's kind of like writing yourself a check for a million dollars. You may forget you wrote it and you find this check written out to you in a million dollars, and that might make you feel really, really good, right? But what happens when you try to cash the check?
Suddenly, you know there's nothing banking that check. It's worthless. And when we die, we all cash our checks when we step into eternity. So creating your own purpose is an illusion.
It's foolish. We can only have purpose if we're created by God for a purpose. That's significant. Also, we've already talked about, we've alluded previously to the idea that the idea of universalism, that all religions are equally valid, is illogical and irrational because all religions make contradictory claims. So for instance, you have some religions that say we should detach from the world, while Christianity says we should engage the world and enjoy it.
Some religions say that we should merge with the cosmic consciousness and lose our individuality. Christianity says that we maintain our individuality forever. Some religions have the idea of reincarnation and an endless cycle.
We have the idea of a resurrection at the end of history. Some believe that the path to freedom is to break free of an impersonal force like karma. We believe the path to redemption is a relationship that's restored with our creator. It's through forgiveness.
It's very relational. So all the core beliefs of different religions are contradictory, so to say they're all the same is irrational. That's an important point to make.
The other thing we've already talked about is there are many people that argue that there is no such thing as absolute truth. that everyone should believe what they want to believe. The problem with that is it doesn't work in the real world. What would happen if you had an engineer that said, I don't believe in absolute truth, so I'm going to build this bridge according to my own laws of physics that just feel right to me.
What's going to happen to that bridge? It's going to collapse. So everyone that does anything practical in the world knows that there are absolute truths that have to be obeyed or things go terribly wrong.
So again, that's an example of what are called rational apologetics. People like Revi Zacharias specialize in that. And it helps a lot for people that are very linear thinkers like lawyers.
Thank you very much.